A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction

by William Dean Howells

I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories by another poet. "The Ruling Passion," Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker's novel through kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the prevalence of psychologism over determinism in it. In the situations and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe that I like best among these charming things the two sketches—they are hardly stories—"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight," though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greater evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it. That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in fact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has felt rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than intentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that account, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for being frankly, however uninsistently, moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new world customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now faded economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution.

III.

Mr. William Allen White's method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke's. If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for it seems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating, so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is a picture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, and the photograph itself, though it may include, does not represent everything. Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproach the true painters of manners by calling them photographic, but I doubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censure of his conscientious work, and I am sure that now he would count it honor. He cannot be the admirable artist he is without knowing that it is the inwardness as well as the outwardness of men that he photographs, and if the reader does not know it, the worse for the reader. He is not the sort of reader who will rise from this book humiliated and fortified, as any reader worthy of it will.

The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story, "The Man on Horseback," which, when I read it a few years ago in the magazine where it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect in its way that I should not have known how to better it. Of course, this is a good deal for a critic to say; it is something like abdicating his office; but I repeat it. It takes rather more courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it, for people do not much expect it of him, or altogether like it in him; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every moment honest. He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the other stories, "A Victory for the People," "A Triumph's Evidence," "The Mercy of Death," and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;" and where he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think it is because of his unconscious political bias, rather than anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to any sort of movement, and whose unfaithfulness does not necessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully good as the portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only from a little kindness. His story might have been called "The Man on Foot," by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or any of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the author's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort which gives his life to the man who is down.

Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most men in the struggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally, almost as few as can be on top materially; and probably nothing will more surprise the saints at the judgment day than to find themselves in such a small minority. But probably not the saints alone will be saved, and it is some such hope that Mr. White has constantly in mind when making his constant appeal to conscience. It is, of course, a dramatic, not a didactic appeal. He preaches so little and is so effectively reticent that I could almost with he had left out the preface of his book, good as it is. Yes, just because it is so good I could wish he had left it out. It is a perfect justification of his purpose and methods, but they are their own justification with all who can think about them, and the others are themselves not worth thinking about. The stories are so bravely faithful to human nature in that political aspect which is but one phase of our whole average life that they are magnificently above all need of excusing or defending. They form a substantial body of political fiction, such as we have so long sighed for, and such as some of us will still go on sighing for quite as if it had not been supplied. Some others will be aware that it has been supplied in a form as artistically fine as the material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort of humanity is coarse and common except to those who themselves are so.

The meaning that animates the stories is that our political opportunity is trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed and falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers the strongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim Gorky's wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of "Foma Gordyeeff" accuses conditions which we can only imagine with difficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strange book one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient of such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma's willingness to rot through vice into imbecility is as wise as anything else there. It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings, but we are no longer among the damned; with the worst there is a purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition of Dan Gregg then seems not the worst that could befall him; he might again have been governor.

IV.

If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell's very interesting novel of "Circumstance" do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky and those Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are always human with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society. They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it is when they give way to the natural man, and especially the natural woman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds Kitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in a way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, she is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in that moment of nature the thick air of good society seems to blow away and let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better than the good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers. They are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of the medical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only by his reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that can excuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of good principles and generous instincts.

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs. Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow to work her way to authority in the household of Kitty's uncle, where she displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kith and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather, she is a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; but she is limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She is bold up to a point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, but not to all lengths; and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep him from changing his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has not quite the courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not do it, and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful. The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt of those which have been committed; and the author does a good thing morally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still something of a problem to his reader. In most things she is almost too plain a case; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that a murderess should be; but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes and remains a mystery, and the reader does not get rid of her as he would if she had really done the deed. In the inferior exigencies she strikes fearlessly; and when the man who has divorced her looms up in her horizon with doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees to let her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least, made him unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is enough for her.

Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am not sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has not met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she has the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious; she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at her making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am not sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's character. She is really a good girl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by those limitations of temper which I have already hinted.