A LITERARY EMOTIONAL GAMUT

Books That will Help Any Intelligent Novel-Reader to Experience a Pleasant Variety of Emotions

Henry Brinsley

A FRIEND of mine, who is a don at a great university, occasionally sends me little gems culled from examination papers, which, written under extreme nervous stress, have at times a startling vividness. Here is one from a Radcliffe junior that, perhaps unreasonably, charms me whenever I try to visualize the picture it phrases: "George Eliot held our hand firmly grasped upon eternal truth, and with the other, ran the whole gamut of the emotions." I find myself trying to assume the same posture, for during the past month I have read several books that ran through most of the said gamut, and I should like to grasp a bit of truth that would enable me to synthesize my impressions.

Some words of Mr. H. G. Wells may help, culled from his volume on "Social Forces in England and America," a most stimulating, slap-dash book. Mr. Wells is not a philosopher in the classic sense. He never gives you the beautifully clarified result of tranquil thinking as does Mr. Santayana, last of the philosophers with the "great manner"; rather, he spares you more of the processes of his interesting, electric mind, urged on by what seems to me a kind of philosophic prickly-heat, and throws everything out indiscriminately in a half digested, and therefore unbeautiful, but none the less stimulating stream of words. The French make a quaint little distinction between la verite and la vraie verite: Mr. Wells deals, by choice, with the former, and if his truths are not eternal ones, they are sufficiently workable for current purposes. Here are two of his dicta on "The Contemporary Novel": "The distinctive value of the novel among written works of art is in characterization, and the charm of a well-conceived character lies, not in knowing its destiny, but in watching its proceedings." "I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value . . . of the novel, and of the novelist in modern life comes in." In a third dictum he puts down as true, something that ought to be, but isn't (in his hurry, Mr. Wells often confuses his desires with actuality). "Among readers, women and girls and young men, at least, will insist upon having their novels significant and real."

MR. JOSEPH CONRAD'S "Chance," significant and real as all of his work, is a "difficult" novel, but it will repay more than the average trouble. The difficulty is due to his method. In the first place, he demands an ample leisure—he will allow little in his characters or his situation to "get by" him; his firm, slow style reminds me of a dog chewing a bone to the very marrow, and pausing to Fletcherize each mouthful. Again, with inadequate reason, he interposes between reader and drama two literary personalities. The writer of the book as listener, and a narrator who is but a minor actor, and the mental effort to pierce through these two is often needlessly exacting. The latter has an astoundingly brilliant gift of analyzing womankind, but I feel that the brilliant analysis could have transpired without so much "apparatus." These points aside, however, we have a wonderful series of characterizations. Mr. and Mrs. Fyne are among the clearest cut little cameos of modern fiction; the venomous governess, Franklin, the First Officer; Charles Powell, the Second; de Barral, the convicted financier; all are curiously more vivid, visually, than Flora de Barral and Captain Anthony, the real protagonists. But the situation between these two, with their unconsummated marriage, is handled with a sureness of touch that slowly invests them with the spiritual realities of character in a finer, deeper sense. There is a grave, classical undercurrent to Mr. Conrad's work.

Books Reviewed

SOCIAL FORCES IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

By H. G. Wells

Harper & Brothers, New York $2.00

CHANGE By Joseph Conrad

Doubleday, Page & Co.. New York $1.35

THE STORY OF LOUIE By Oliver Onions

George H. Doran Co., New York S1.25

THE GREFN VAN By Leona Dalrymple

The Reilly & Britton Co.. New York $1.35

THE FORTUNATE YOUTH By William J. Locke

John Lane Co., New York $1.35

This uncurrent well-nigh compels one to forget the absence of lightness of touch, the surface play of humor and beauty which, if added to his other gifts, would make him without question the most compelling of modern novelists.

THE same quality of insight, the same keen interest in characterization actuates Mr. Oliver Onions, in "The Story of Louie," and he has drawn a set of figures as sharply definite as Mr. Conrad's, in a book equally significant and real. This, although it avoids the superficial "difficulties" of Mr. Conrad's work, lacks the beauty of design, the Aristotelian quality of form that underlies "Chance." In his dependence on the fortuitous, Mr. Onions, oddly enough, is more of a realist than Mr. Conrad and, in so far, less of an artist.

But he is pleasantly easy to read; his style is neat, rapid, detailed, objective, and fringed with humor. Louie's career is an interesting one, and affords us sufficient material for "the study and judgment of character" to satisfy even Mr. Wells. The daughter of a prize-fighter and a peer's sister, she early leaves the maternal nest (from which the prize-fighter was early divorced), and experiments in life. The result of a single, unique experiment, in which she is the aggressor, .is a child, whose advent in no wise swerves her from her gallant desire to live really and independently in her spinsterhood. She eventually drifts to her father, a delightful old figure (quite unlike Mr. Shaw's Cashel Byron), and eventually falls in love—her real tragedy. Falling in love is, of course, a mysterious affair, but if not in life, at least in art, we should be able to account for it; the reason, to be sure, if not often to be found in the beloved object, must be developed from the temperament, the spiritual need of the lover. Here Mr. Onions cheats us, for here Louie is least clear—she would be the same Louie if she hadn't done it, although the ending of the book would have been less abruptly dramatic. But as a very good novel is often far from being a great one, it is ungracious to cavil when one has been so satisfactorily entertained.

ROMANCE ought to be just as "real" as realism—indeed, high romance, like "The Three Musketeers," has often an effect of more intense reality than even the grim photography of "Nana." There is nothing intrinsically unreal in "Prince Otto," and the "significance," however playful, is that of the inevitable ineffectuality of two such personages as Otto and Seraphina; one generally vacillating, the other ambitiously selfish, both sentimentalists, and compact of charm. But "romance," like "The Green Van," is neither real nor significant, and you may scan it in vain for anything approaching a study of character. "This," says the prospectus, "is the $10,000 Prize Novel, by Leona Dalrymple, which was selected by the judges, Miss Ida M. Tarbell, Mr. S. S. McClure, Mr. Geo. N. Madison, as the best of over five hundred manuscripts submitted in the Great Novel Contest." I do not, for a moment, question the decision of these eminent judges: I merely feel that the other five hundred manuscripts must have been peculiarly "fierce." Miss Dalrymple, I admit, has a pretty style, and a light, if restricted wit, but the plot is, oh, so jejeune! Honestly, I don't believe there is a Miss Dalrymple. I believe Mr. McCutcheon sketched out the scenario in detail, and got some one with a belter sense of style than his own— from, say, the next stenographer's office—to fill it out and mother it.

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BUT with "The Fortunate Youth," we have a really-truly romance of a wholly charming kind. Mr. Locke starts out with a little ragamuffin in a factory, who runs away from a stepfather, and a harridan of a mother, obsessed with the idea that he is the son of a great princess, and is urged on by a high destiny. A bookish lad, of startling beauty, he becomes an artist's model, then a poor actor, and finally, penniless, but decently clothed, and fainting on a great lady's lawn, he is taken up and nursed by her to a great career. The marvelous Marquis de Sabran, rescued by the Countess Wanda, if a more accomplished adventurer, has far less charm and far less beauty than has Paul Savelli. And Paul, when at last he brushes aside the web of falsities in which he has perforce enmeshed himself, wins to as great a personage as did Vassia Kazan (dear old Oneida, what names!). Here again, there is nothing intrinsically unreal in "The Fortunate Youth." Given extraordinary personal beauty (among the English, where it counts for more than with us), a brilliant, sound mind, and a generous, lovable character—and the moral of that is, as the Duchess said to Alice, that if it isn't true it ought to be: which is a test of all romance. One might compare a simple, lightly lyrical Fairy Tale of real life, like this, with a complicated, heavily mechanical one, like "T. Tembarom," but it would be a wasteful exercise of what Poe calls the "mad pride of intellectuality."