"MANHOOD vs. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT"

New Novels by Theodore Dreiser, W. L. Comfort, Mary J. H. Skrine, Hugh Walpole and Sir Gilbert Parker

Henry Brinsley

THEODORE DREISER is the one novelist who has his finger upon the pulse of our national life, tie writes about social phases which are typically American and which can be found only in America, superimposing a charm of style upon the thrill of narrative." Thus far, the publishers of Mr. Dreiser's new novel, "The Titan," the second volume of "A Triology of Desire." And the cryptic antithesis between "Manhood" and "The Artistic Temperament" heads the advertisements as a challenge. When a child nothing thrilled me more than the blazing bill-posters announcing Mr. Barnum's perennial advent; and each year I stood awed before the great canvas paintings of the lady weaving necklaces of apocalyptic pythons and the wild pygmies tearing up giant banyans by the roots. Anticipation and reality were always of course poignantly disparate, but every child loyal to the circus idea bravely kept the disappointment to himself.

Even now, hardened reader that I am, I have much the shme experience with publishers' announcements and the books behind them.

The former are always as splendidly alluring—especially in the case of "The Titan"— the latter often so different a matter.

"THE TITAN" carries on the career of Frank Cowperwood where "The Financier," the first of the trilogy, left off. We have him now aged thirty-six, rich, just freed from the Philadelphia penitentiary, about to divorce his wife and marry his mistress, and about to plunge into the financial intrigues of Chicago. The book, a very long one, consists of two series of events quite regularly, even mechanically dovetailed. First a succession of financial coups whereby Cowper-

wood, working with other financiers, and politicians of varying types from governors to saloonkeepers, judges to shysters, gains control of several great local interests from gas to traction; second, a succession of astonishing erotic successes which involve nearly every woman he sets his eye on, from the hitherto blameless wives and daughters of the richer class of his business associates to stenographers, shop girls, and heaven knows whom.

It's an immense canvas and an amazing programme Mr. Dreiser sets before himself,—as if he wished to rewrite and dovetail together the most grandiose of Mr. Thomas Lawson's literary works and Maupassant's "Bel Ami." But there is this notable difference. Mr. Lawson at his best, despite excesses of diction (I will not say of temperament), has a style at once flexible, dramatic, and vitalizing, whereas Mr. Dreiser's style is singularly inflexible, matter-offact, and uncreative. And Maupassant carries into "Bel Ami," most gratuitous of phallic masterpieces, his ever damnable, and thrillingly reassuring, literary distinction, a note of which Mr. Dreiser is unconsciously innocent.

In using the term "uncreative" I mean simply this: Although Mr. Dreiser has an exceptional gift of external portraiture, in that with a few brisk, admirably chosen, extraordinarily vivid strokes he can put a major or minor person before you, he can do it only visually, he can satisfy only the eye. You may know to the dot what anyone in the book looks like, just as you know precisely what everyone does, but—and here the work is uncreative—you have not the inner, spiritual or mental portrait of a single personage, you do not know what he or she really

is like. The result is that although you may be interested in what these people do —if you are interested in the technique of vast political-commercial "deals" and in the, fortunately, superficial conduct of gross amorous indulgences—you are not at all fundamentally interested in the personages themselves. Therefore that "study and judgment of conduct" which Mr. Wells demands, is impossible, and the book contributes nothing to the philosophy or un-

derstanding of life, the only justification of a book of this kind. Herein is its failure, and if this failure be called a "splendid" one, that will be because of the size of the canvas and the superb scope of the artist's ambition, not the quality of his workmanship.

ADEQUATELY to criticise Mr. Comfort's new volume, "Midstream," would be to make a "study and judgment of conduct" in sober truth; would be, indeed to criticise Mr. Comfort's own character and personality. One avoids such a procedure with a living author, although he himself would seem to invite it, for the book is a merciless autobiography of Mr. Comfort up to his present "midstream" age of thirty-five: his early consciousness of monetary and social stress, his strayings in what might be called the Garden of Desire, his struggles with John Barleycorn (recalling Mr. London's), his adventures in the Spanish-American war, his long, grim apprenticeship as a man of letters, and finally his achieved philosophy.

Theoretically the book is important, quite apart from its quivering interest to the author himself: any honest and detailed revelation of self has a high value as a human document, and even when partially honest and incomplete it may have a high literary value. Mr. Comfort's book has every advantage of crystalline honesty and intended completeness—he spares himself little—but he is neither a splendid ruffian of a geniu? like Cellini, nor a great, clear-headed senti mentalist like Rousseau. The matter is on a somewhat lower plane, and, unfortunately, despite some admirable passages, the book is, as a whole, badly written. The style is moautobwgraphical notonously unrhythmical—a series of short, harshly nervous units—"inflexible," to use the technical term, the style of a half-trained writer (or, sometimes, of a genius) who will needlessly sacrifice many valuable qualities to rhere vividness and force. Furthermore, it is exceptionally incoherent. There is a hurried impatience of connections, relations, sequences, developments of thoughts and events that betrays a radical weakness, if only one of professional training.

Finally of the personality that emerges, I would say only that it is somewhat less robust and engaging than the companion portrait which Mr. London recently gave us, but that it will thoroughly repay scrutiny, and in the end will evoke a real if puzzled sympathy.

AND now for two books, a little one and a big one, that appeal less to our raw "Manhood" and more to our "Artistic Temperament," as works of fine art, even novels, may legitimately do. The first, "Bedesman 4," by Miss Mary J. H. Skrine, is perhaps too easily disposed of by calling it "charming." It's the story of a poor little chap, David Bold, who by his unconscious gift of the "historical imagination," attracts the notice of an old Oxford scholar. David is given his chance, becomes a Bedesman of Sir Humphrey Nicholas' Foundation, finally goes to Oxford, and ends a gentleman and a scholar, a Fellow of his College, and a promising historian. Merely a brief romance, woven round a lovable personality, in a manner that is delicate, just, and informed with charm,—a loosely woven affair, perhaps, but one that will beguile _a quiet hour or two very happily.

"THE Duchess of Wrexe" is a much bigger book, even more successfully done. The author, Mr. Hugh Walpole, has, indeed, achieved something exceptionally difficult and worth while: a long, well planned, well knit novel of manners, which, through a group of convincingly real and varied characters, gives, at the same time, a vivid picture of a whole social period. The period is the end of the Victorian era—the transition from an outworn, autocratic conventionalism to the democratic freedom of individualism. The group of people circles about the old, bedridden Duchess, whom her four elderly children venerate and fear and her two grandchildren revolt from and detest.

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There is no discussion, philosophical, social, or political of the warring interests of the different generations, such as Mrs. Humphrey Ward would have freighted the book with,—of the warring emotional and intellectual interests which make the book, as I said, the picture of the period itself. But the picture is even more brilliantly achieved through the inevitable reactions of the characters on one another and the pungent implications of each event. Really, it's a very moving book, fine and sure in its workmanship, and I should call it a very big one, did it not lack just one vital quality—humor, that touch of comedy which, illuminated by wit, leaves Thackeray still the unrivaled master of this form. But don't for a moment take this to imply that the book is dull, for it isn't.

TF YOU'RE looking for something dull, try "You I Never Know Your Luck." Sir Gilbert Parker didn't know his, in this instance, and drew a blank, a mistake which so well trained an author can probably remedy in his next novel.