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+*****The Project Gutenberg Etext of*****  A Psychological 
+Counter-Current in Recent Fiction by William Dean Howells 
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+A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction 
+
+by William Dean Howells 
+
+November, 1996 [Etext #726]
+
+
+*****The Project Gutenberg Etext of*****  A Psychological
+Counter-Current in Recent Fiction by William Dean Howells 
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+
+
+A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION. 
+
+by William Dean Howells 
+
+
+
+It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a
+cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the 
+opposite quarter.  It is so divinable, if not so perceptible,
+that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the
+turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later, to come.  In
+reform, it is the menace of reaction; in reaction, it is the
+promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from
+it.  A  few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction to
+the  highest place in literature was apparently of such onward
+and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there
+was  a counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled
+it back  to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and
+the word "novel" is again the synonym of all that is morally
+false and  mentally despicable.  Yet that this, too, is partly
+apparent, I  think can be shown from some phases of actual
+fiction which  happen to be its very latest phases, and which are
+of a significance  as hopeful as it is interesting.  Quite as
+surely as romanticism  lurked at the heart of realism, something
+that we may call  "psychologism" has been present in the
+romanticism of the last  four or five years, and has now begun to
+evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the
+duty of criticism to deal with. 
+
+
+I.
+
+No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism,
+now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at
+its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its
+worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because
+he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the
+powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from
+final contempt.  He saves himself in his latest novel, because,
+though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is
+psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and
+which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives
+romanticism whatever will survive it.  In "The Right of Way" Mr.
+Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where
+there is nothing but the happening of things, and where this one
+or that one is important or unimportant according as things are
+happening to him or not, but has in himself no claim upon the
+reader's attention.  Once more the novel begins to rise to its
+higher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters of
+their fate.  His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising
+material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well be
+chosen.  One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who
+said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is
+the devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure
+intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does
+the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength. 
+Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he
+is from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger of
+remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much may
+be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless.  I confess
+that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this
+consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur,
+all but failed to interest me.  A little of him and his monocle
+went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him
+by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged with
+murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and
+I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in
+his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of
+drunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where
+they have thrown him, and where his former client finds him. 
+From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though I
+found myself more than once in the world where things happen of
+themselves and do not happen from the temperaments of its
+inhabitants.  In a better and wiser world, the homicide would not
+perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the
+advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one
+consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is
+imaginably the survival of a former method.  The artist's affair
+is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world,
+the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle. 
+Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go
+through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a
+prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we
+suspect a trick.  When I suffered from this suspicion in "The
+Right of Way" I was the more vexed because I felt that I was in
+the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no need of
+miracles.
+
+I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as
+far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the
+principal pleasures for me.  He may not have his habitant, his
+seigneur or his cure down cold, but he makes me believe that he
+has, and I can ask no more than that of him.  In like manner, he
+makes the ambient, physical as well as social, sensible around
+me:  the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and
+fields, the little frozen villages of Canada.  In this book,
+which is historical of the present rather than the past, he gives
+one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country
+but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other
+psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting
+temperamental difference from Americans.  His Montrealers are
+still Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the
+frank expression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is
+like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were
+not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when they
+wished to be their poetry rather than to read it.  In his second
+life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied
+spirit might have, if it could be made known to us in the
+circumstances of another world.  He has, indeed, made almost as
+clean a break with his past as if he had really been drowned in
+the river.  When, after the term of oblivion, in which he knows
+nothing of his past self, he is restored to his identity by a
+famous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit to his
+brother, the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors
+of his past, work out his redemption in his new life; and the
+author solves it for him by appointing him to a life of unselfish
+labor, illumined by actions of positive beneficence.  It is
+something like the solution which Goethe imagines for Faust, and
+perhaps no other is imaginable.  In contriving it, Mr. Parker
+indulges the weaker brethren with an abundance of accident and a
+luxury of catastrophe, which the reader interested in the
+psychology of the story may take as little account of as he
+likes.  Without so much of them he might have made a
+sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The
+Scarlet Letter"; with them he has made a most picturesque
+romantic novel.  His work, as I began by saying, or hinting, is
+the work of a poet, in conception, and I wish that in some
+details of diction it were as elect as the author's verse is. 
+But one must not expect everything; and in what it is, "The Right
+of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on the side of literature,
+while it more than meets a reasonable expectation on the side of
+psychological interest.  Distinctly it marks an epoch in
+contemporary noveling, and mounts far above the average best
+toward the day of better things which I hope it is not rash to
+image dawning.
+
+II. 
+
+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.
+
+ 
+V. 
+
+It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to
+that of the half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and
+the young American whom she marries in one of those marriages
+which neither the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last
+till death parts them.  It is far, and all is very strange under
+that remote sky; but what is true to humanity anywhere is true
+everywhere; and the story of Yuki and Bigelow, as the Japanese
+author tells it in very choice English, is of as palpitant
+actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door.  If I
+have ever read any record of young married love that was so
+frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it.  Yet, Yuki,
+though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves
+him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help
+her brother through college in America.  When this brother comes
+back to Japan--he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty
+idyl--he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his
+sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and
+dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of
+the young wife and husband.  There is enough incident, but of the
+kind that is characterized and does not characterize.  The charm,
+the delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. 
+Her father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the
+same sort of marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his
+wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English
+constancy which is not always so evident as in his case qualifies
+the daughter's nature.  Her mother was, of course, constant, and
+Yuki, though an outcast from her own people--the conventions seen
+to be as imperative in Tokyo as in Philadelphia--because of her
+half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in what makes her
+loveliest.  There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art
+of this pretty novelette--it is hardly of the dimensions of a
+novel--which is like no other art except in the simplicity which
+is native to the best art everywhere.  Yuki herself is of a
+surpassing lovableness.  Nothing but the irresistible charm of
+the American girl could, I should think keep the young men who
+read Mrs. Watana's book from going out and marrying Japanese
+girls.  They are safe from this, however, for the reason
+suggested, and therefore it can be safely commended at least to
+young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in the art of
+imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a long while. 
+It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and
+its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to note
+them.  In fact, I have forgotten them.
+
+ 
+VI. 
+
+I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of
+an author who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us
+as the Japanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not
+our interest.  Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary
+quality in acquiring literary quantity, and though his book, "The
+Marrow of Tradition," is of the same strong material as his
+earlier books, it is less simple throughout, and therefore less
+excellent in manner.  At his worst, he is no worse than the
+higher average of the ordinary novelist, but he ought always to
+be very much better, for he began better, and he is of that race
+which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if it will
+not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown.  He is
+fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap
+graces and poses of the jouster.  He does, indeed, cast them all
+from him when he gets down to his work, and in the dramatic
+climaxes and closes of his story he shortens his weapons and
+deals his blows so absolutely without flourish that I have
+nothing but admiration for him.  "The Marrow of Tradition," like
+everything else he has written, has to do with the relations of
+the blacks and whites, and in that republic of letters where all
+men are free and equal he stands up for his own people with a
+courage which has more justice than mercy in it.  The book is, in
+fact, bitter, bitter.  There is no reason in history why it
+should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it
+would be better if it was not so bitter.  I am not saying that he
+is so inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor
+foibles may be, he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans
+may well be proud of; but while he recognizes pretty well all the
+facts in the case, he is too clearly of a judgment that is made
+up.  One cannot blame him for that; what would one be one's self? 
+If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was
+the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the
+bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago,
+what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity
+the argument of his fiction?
+
+Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel,
+and shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a
+legal government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not
+paint the blacks all good, or the whites all bad.  He paints them
+as slavery made them on both sides, and if in the very end he
+gives the moral victory to the blacks--if he suffers the daughter
+of the black wife to have pity on her father's daughter by his
+white wife, and while her own child lies dead from a shot fired
+in the revolt, gives her husband's skill to save the life of her
+sister's child--it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or
+ethics are false.  Those who would question either must allow, at
+least, that the negroes have had the greater practice in
+forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor his
+interpretation of the fact.  No one who reads the book can deny
+that the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize
+in the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against
+which no series of hangings and burnings will finally avail.
+
+ 
+VII. 
+
+In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universal
+implication which will distinguish itself to the observer from
+the psychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not as
+apt as I should like--evident in some of the interesting books
+under notice here.  I have tried to say that it is none the less
+a work of art for that reason, and I can praise the art of
+another novel, in which the same sort of psychologism prevails,
+though I must confess it a fiction of the rankest
+tendenciousness.  "Lay Down Your Arms" is the name of the English
+version of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die Waffen Nieder,"
+which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on the
+continent of Europe.  Its success there has been very great, and
+I wish its success on the continent of America could be so great
+that it might replace in the hands of our millions the baleful
+books which have lately been glorifying bloodshed in the private
+and public wars of the past, if not present.  The wars which "Lay
+Down Your Arms" deals with are not quite immediate, and yet they
+are not so far off historically, either.  They are the
+Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and
+the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose personal
+relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian
+lady of high birth.  She is the daughter and the sister of
+soldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with
+her own, whom she first marries, makes love to her just before
+the outbreak of the war first named, she is as much in love with
+his soldiership as with himself.  But when the call to arms
+comes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of war as she has
+never known before.  He is killed in one of the battles of Italy,
+and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beau
+sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fights
+through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from
+love of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that
+he quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris. 
+There the third war overtakes him, and in the siege, this
+Austrian, who has fought the Prussians to the death, is arrested
+by the communards as a Prussian spy and shot.
+
+The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of
+the intense passion of grief which fills it.  Neither does it
+convey a due impression of the character in the different persons
+which, amidst the heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth
+and impartiality as pervade the effects of "War and Peace."  I do
+not rank it with that work, but in its sincerity and veracity it
+easily ranks above any other novel treating of war which I know,
+and it ought to do for the German peoples what the novels of
+Erckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in at least one generation. 
+Will it do anything for the Anglo-Saxon peoples?  Probably not
+till we have pacified the Philippines and South Africa.  We
+Americans are still apparently in love with fighting, though the
+English are apparently not so much so; and as it is always well
+to face the facts, I will transfer to my page some facts of
+fighting from this graphic book, which the read may apply to the
+actualities in the Philippines, with a little imagination.  They
+are taken from a letter written to the heroine by her second
+husband after one of the Austrian defeats.  "The people poured
+boiling water and oil on the Prussians from the windows of the
+houses at ----....  The village is ours--no, it is the enemy's,
+now ours again--and yet once more the enemy's; but it is no
+longer a village, but a smoking mass of ruins of houses....One
+family has remained behind...an old married couple and their
+daughter, the latter in childbed.  The husband is serving in our
+regiment....  Poor devil! he got there just in time to see the
+mother and child die; a shell had exploded under their bed....  I
+saw a breastwork there which was formed of corpses.  The
+defenders had heaped all the slain who were lying near, in order,
+from that rampart, to fire over at their assailants.  I shall
+surely never forget that wall in my life.  A man who formed one
+of its bricks was still alive, and was waving his arm....  What
+is happening there?  The execution party is drawn out.  Has a spy
+been caught?  Seventeen this time.  There they come, in four
+ranks, each one of four men, surrounded by a square of soldiers. 
+The condemned men step out, with their heads down.  Behind comes
+a cart with a corpse in it, and bound to the corpse the dead
+man's son, a boy of twelve, also condemned....  Steep, rocky
+heights; Jaegers, nimble as cats, climbing up them....  Some of
+them, who are hit by the enemy's shot, suddenly stretch out both
+their arms, let their muskets fall, and, with their heads falling
+backwards, drop off the height, step by step, from one rocky
+point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces.  I saw a
+horseman at some distance, obliquely behind me, at whose side a
+shell burst.  His horse swerved aside and came against the tail
+of mind, then shot past me.  The man sat still in the saddle, but
+a fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open and torn out
+all the intestines.  The upper part of his body was held to the
+lower only by the spine.  From the ribs to the thighs nothing but
+one great, bleeding cavity.  A short distance farther he fell to
+the ground, one foot still clinging in the stirrup, and the
+galloping horse dragging him on over the stony soil....  Another
+street fight in the little town of Saar....  In the middle of the
+square stands a high pillar of the Virgin.  The mother of God
+holds her child in one arm, and stretches the other out in
+blessing....  Here the fight was prolonged, man to man.  They
+were hacking at me, I laying about me on all sides....  A
+Prussian dragoon, strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a
+pretty, dandified lieutenant--how many girls are, perhaps, mad
+after him?) out of his saddle and split his skull at the feet of
+the Virgin's pillar.  The gentle saint looked on unmoved. 
+Another of the enemy's dragoons--a Goliath, too--seized, just
+before me almost, my right-hand man, and bent him backwards in
+his saddle so powerfully that he broke his back--I myself heard
+it crack.  To this the Madonna gave her blessing also."
+
+ 
+VIII. 
+
+It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like
+the facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are
+imagined rather below than above the real horror of war, and
+represent them inadequately.  The incidents of another book, the
+last on my list, are of the warfare which goes on in times of
+peace, and which will go on as long as there are human passions,
+and mankind are divided into men and women, and saints and
+sinners.  Of all the books on my list, "Let Not Man Put Asunder"
+is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the author's
+intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest.  The story
+is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the
+wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author,
+who cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel
+their reality.  But he does make us feel this in most cases, the
+important cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting
+us is so great that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our
+sensation, or to question the validity of our emotions.   The
+action, which is positively of to-day, or yesterday at the
+furthest, passes in Boston and England, among people of such
+great fortune and high rank and transcendent fashion that the
+proudest reader cannot complain of their social quality.  As to
+their moral quality, one might have thought the less said the
+better, if the author had not said so much that is pertinent and
+impressive.  It is from first to last a book with a conscience in
+it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience.  It is so very
+nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is with
+a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of
+surprise at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not
+shortcomings that impair its supreme effect.  This, I take it, is
+the intimation of a mystical authority in marriage against which
+divorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and by
+virtue of which it claims eternally its own the lovers united in
+it; though they seem to become haters, it cannot release them to
+happiness in a new union through any human law.
+
+If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly
+dramatic) no more than this, he would have established his right
+to be taken seriously, but he has done very much more, and has
+made us acquainted with types and characters which we do not
+readily forget, and with characters much more real than their
+ambient.  For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassalls
+live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the
+Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwell
+are of a baroniality difficult of verification.  Their honor,
+their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their
+social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary
+experience.  The social Boston of the novel is more like; its
+difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely
+suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in
+which it is not the greater Boston.  Petrina Faneuil, the
+heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed
+away, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so much
+regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy
+Boston, the decadent Boston.  It is, of course, a Boston much
+worse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginably
+bad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high ideals
+is to a level lower than that of people who have never had them. 
+As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it, she is
+so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I
+am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book,
+though it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the
+dramatic episodes:  "Whatever religious instinct had been in the
+family had spent itself at least two generations before her time. 
+She was a pagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful
+pagan.... But she was none the less a Puritan.  Certain of her
+ways of thought and habits of life, had survived the beliefs
+which had given them birth, as an effect will often outlive its
+cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious one, a pagan with a
+New England conscience."
+
+This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of
+Petrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are
+mighty well, too.  "She had inherited a countenance whose
+expression was like the light which lingers in the sky long after
+sunset--the light of some ancestral fire gone out.  If in her
+face there were prayers, they had been said by Pepperells and
+Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts churchyards.  If in her
+voice there were tears, they had been shed by those who would
+weep no more.  She mirrored the emotions she had never felt; and
+all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritual aspirations
+which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintive echo
+they had given to this woman's tone, and the light of petition
+they had left burning in her eyes."
+
+No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of "Let
+Not Man Put Asunder" can think subtly as well as say clearly, and
+the book abounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature
+in its lighter aspects.  Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face,
+is a most amusing creature, with all her tragedy, and she is on
+the whole the most perfectly characterized personality in the
+story.  The author gives you a real sense of her beauty, her
+grace, her being always charmingly in a hurry and always late.
+The greatest scene is hers: the scene in which she meets her
+divorced husband with his second wife.  One may suspect some of
+the other scenes, but one must accept that scene as one of
+genuine dramatic worth.  Too much of the drama in the book is
+theatre rather than drama, and yet the author's gift is
+essentially dramatic.  He knows how to tell a story on his stage
+that holds you to the fall of the curtain, and makes you almost
+patient of the muted violins and the limelight of the closing
+scene.  Such things, you say, do not happen in Brookline, Mass.,
+whatever happens in London or in English country houses; and yet
+the people have at one time or other convinced you of their
+verity.  Of the things that are not natural, you feel like saying
+that they are supernatural rather than unnatural, and you own
+that at its worst the book is worth while in a time when most
+novels are not worth while.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes
+
+"The Right of Way." A Novel.  By Gilbert Parker. Harper & Brothers.
+
+"The Ruling Passion. Tales of nature and human nature."  By Henry
+Van Dyke. Charles Scribner's Sons.
+
+"Spoils and Stratagems Stories of love and politics."  By Wm.
+Allen White. Charles Scribner's Sons.
+
+"Foma Gordyeeff."  By Maxim Gorky. Translated from the Russian by
+Isabel F. Hapgood. Charles Scribner's Sons.
+
+"Circumstances."  By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. The Century Company.
+
+"A Japanese Nightingale."  By Onoto Watana. Harper & Brothers.
+
+"The Marrow of Tradition."  By Charles W. Chesnutt. Houghton,
+Mifflin & Co.
+
+"Lay Down Your Arms. The autobiography of Martha von Tilling."  
+By Bertha von Suttner. Authorized Translation. By T. Holmes.
+Longmans, Green & Co.
+
+"Let Not Man Put Asunder."  By Basil King. Harper & Brothers.
+
+
+
+
+
+****End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Psychological 
+Counter-Current in Recent Fiction by William Dean Howells 
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