I

Thomas Hardy is a realist in a sense true of no English novelist of anything like equal rank preceding him: his literary genealogy is French, for his "Jude The Obscure" has no English prototype, except the earlier work of George Moore, whose inspiration is even more definitely Paris. To study Hardy's development for a period of about twenty-five years from "Under the Greenwood Tree" to "Jude," is to review, as they are expressed in the work of one great English novelist, the literary ideals before and after Zola. Few will cavil at the inclusion in our study of a living author like Hardy. His work ranks with the most influential of our time; so much may be seen already. His writing of fiction, moreover, or at least of Novels, seems to be finished. And like Meredith, he is a man of genius and, strictly speaking, a finer artist than the elder author. For quality, then, and significance of accomplishment, Hardy may well be examined with the masters whose record is rounded out by death. He offers a fine example of the logic of modern realism, as it has been applied by a first-class mind to the art of fiction. In Meredith, on the contrary, is shown a sort of synthesis of the realistic and poetic-philosophic interpretation. Hardy is for this reason easier to understand and explain; Meredith refuses classification.

The elements of strength in Thomas Hardy can be made out clearly; they are not elusive. Wisely, he has chosen to do a very definite thing and, with rare perseverance and skill, he has done it. He selected as setting the south-western part of England—Wessex, is the ancient name he gave it—that embraces Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well as one of philosophic fatalism.

It has not the cold removedness of the stoic: it has pity in it, even love. But it is deeply sad, sometimes bitter. In Hardy's presentation of Nature (a remark applying to some extent to a younger novelist who shows his influence, Phillpotts), she is displayed as an ironic expression, with even malignant moods, of a supreme cosmic indifference to the petty fate of that animalcule, man. And this, in spite of a curious power she possesses of consoling him and of charming him by blandishments that cheat the loneliness of his soul. There is no purer example of tragedy in modern literature than Mr. Hardy's strongest, most mature stories. A mind deeply serious and honest, interprets the human case in this wise and conceives that the underlying pitilessness can most graphically be conveyed in a setting like that of Egdon Heath, where the great silent forces of Nature somberly interblend with the forces set in motion by the human will, both futile to produce happiness. Even the attempt to be virtuous fails in "Jude": as the attempt to be happy does in "Tess." That sardonic, final thought in the last-named book will not out of our ears: Fate had played its last little jest with poor Tess.

But there are mitigations, many and welcome. Hardy has the most delightful humor. His peasants and simple middle-class folk are as distinctive and enjoyable as anything since Shakspere. He also has a more sophisticated, cutting humor—tipped with irony and tart to the taste—which he uses in those stories or scenes where urbanites mingle with his country folk. But his humorous triumphs are bucolic. And for another source of keenest pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work. Whether for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master. His mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is inscrutably dark and mysterious. He knows, none better, of the comfort to be got even from the sad when its beauty is made palpitating. No one before him, not Meredith himself, has so interfused Nature with man as to bring out the thought of man's ancient origin in the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on his allegiance. This gives a rare savor to his handling of what with most novelists is often mere background. Egdon Heath was mentioned; the setting in "The Return of the Native" is not background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its influence upon the fate of the other characters. So with "The Woodlanders" and still other stories. Take away this subtle and vital relation of man to Nature, and the whole organism collapses. Environment with Hardy is atmosphere, influence, often fate itself. Being a scientist in the cast of his intellect, although by temperament a poet, he believes in environment as the shaping power conceived of by Taine and Zola. It is this use of Nature as a power upon people of deep, strong, simple character, showing the sweep of forces far more potent than the conventions of the polite world, which distinguishes Hardy's fiction. Fate with him being so largely that impersonal thing, environment; allied with temperament (for which he is not responsible), and with opportunity—another element of luck—it follows logically that man is the sport of the gods. Hardy is unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws. Indeed curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, "the Dynasts," the culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a plan of the universe which may be beneficial.

To name another quality that gives distinction to Hardy's work: his fiction is notably well-built, and he is a resourceful technician. Often, the way he seizes a plot and gives it proportionate progress to an end that is inevitable, exhibits a well-nigh perfect art. Hardy's novels, for architectural excellence, are really wonderful and will richly repay careful study in this respect. It has been suggested that because his original profession was that of an architect, his constructive ability may have been carried over to another craft. This may be fantastic; but the fact remains that for the handling of material in such a manner as to eliminate the unnecessary, and move steadily toward the climax, while ever imitating though not reproducing, the unartificial gait of life, Hardy has no superior in English fiction and very few beyond it. These ameliorations of humor and pity, these virtues of style and architectural handling make the reading of Thomas Hardy a literary experience, and very far from an undiluted course in Pessimism. A sane, vigorous, masculine mind is at work in all his fiction up to its very latest. Yet it were idle to deny the main trend of his teaching. It will be well to trace with some care the change which has crept gradually over his view of the world. As his development of thought is studied in the successive novels he produced between 1871 and 1898, it may appear that there is little fundamental change in outlook: the tragic note, and the dark theory of existence, explicit in "Tess" and "Jude," is more or less implicit in "Desperate Remedies." But change there is, to be found in the deepening of the feeling, the pushing of a theory to its logical extreme. This opening tale, read in the light of what he was to do, strikes one as un-Hardy-like in its rather complex plot, with its melodramatic tinge of incident.

The second book, "Under the Greenwood Tree," is a blithe, bright woodland comedy and it would have been convenient for a cut-and-dried theory of Hardy's growth from lightness to gravity, had it come first. It is, rather, a happy interlude, hardly representative of his main interest, save for its clear-cut characterizations of country life and its idyllic flavor. The novel that trod on its heels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," maugre its innocently Delia Cruscan title,—it sounds like a typical effort of "The Duchess,"—has the tragic end which light-minded readers have come to dread in this author. He showed his hand thus comparatively early and henceforth was to have the courage of his convictions in depicting human fate as he saw it—not as the reader wished it.

In considering the books that subsequently appeared, to strengthen Hardy's place with those who know fine fiction, they are seen to have his genuine hall-mark, just in proportion as they are Wessex through and through: in the interplay of character and environment there, we get his deepest expression as artist and interpreter. The really great novels are "Far From the Madding Crowd," "The Return of the Native," "The Mayor of Casterbridge" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles": when he shifts the scene to London, as in "The Hand of Ethelberta" or introduces sophisticated types as in the dull "Laodicean," it means comparative failure. Mother soil (he is by birth a Dorchester man and lives there still) gives him idiosyncrasy, flavor, strength. That the best, most representative work of Hardy is to be seen in two novels of his middle career, "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "The Return of the Native" rather than in the later stories, "Tess" and "Jude," can be established, I think, purely on the ground of art, without dragging cheap charges of immorality into the discussion. In the last analysis, questions of art always become a question of ethics: the separation is arbitrary and unnatural. That "Tess" is the book into which the author has most intensely put his mature belief, may be true: it is quiveringly alive, vital as only that is which comes from the deeps of a man's being. But Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects from a stern necessitarian. Tess need not be a murderess; therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal. He is fatalistic, yes; but in general he royally disdains the cheap tricks of plot whereby excitement is furnished at the expense of credulity and verisimilitude. In Tess's end, there s a suspicion of sensation for its own sake—a suggestion of savage joy in shocking sensibilities. Of course, the result is most powerful; but the superior power of the novel is not here so much as in its splendid sympathy and truth. He has made this woman's life-history deeply affecting and is right in claiming that she is a pure soul, judged by intention.

The heart feels that she is sinned against rather than sinning and in the spectacle of her fall finds food for thought "too deep for tears." At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Tess's piteous plight,—the fact that fate has proved too strong for a soul so high in its capacity for unselfish and noble love,—is based upon Hardy's assumption that she could not help it. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, you must accept his premise, or call Tess (whom you may still love) morally weak. It is this reservation which will lead many to place the book, as a work of art, and notwithstanding its noble proportions and compelling power, below such a masterpiece as "The Return of the Native." That it is on the whole a sane and wholesome work, however, may be affirmed by one who finds Hardy's last novel "Jude the Obscure" neither. For there is a profound difference between two such creations. In the former, there is a piquant sense of the pathos and the awesomeness of life, but not of its unrelieved ugliness and disgust; an impression which is received from the latter. Not only is "Jude" "a tragedy of unfulfilled aim" as the author calls it; so is "Tess"; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be an eye-witness of the foul and brutal: he is asked to see a drama develop beside a pig-sty. It is therefore, intensely unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any work of art. It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense; that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble with it.

And intellectually, it would seem to be the result of a bad quarter of an hour of the author: a megrim of the soul. Elements of greatness it has; a fine motive, too; to display the impossibilities for evolution on the part of an aspiring soul hampered by circumstances and weak where most humanity is Weak, in the exercise of sex-passion. A not dissimilar theme as it is worked out by Daudet in "Le Petite Chose" is beautiful in its pathos; in "Jude" there is something shuddering about the arbitrary piling-up of horror; the modesty of nature is overstept; it is not a truly proportioned view of life, one feels; if life were really so bad as that, no one would be willing to live it, much less exhibit the cheerfulness which is characteristic of the majority of human beings. It is a fair guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of a novelist of genius. Its harsh reception by critics in England and America was referred to by the author privately as an example of the "crass Philistinism" of criticism in those lands: Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book understood, appreciated. I imagine, however, that whatever the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon view, it comes close to the ultimate decision to be passed upon this work.

One of the striking things about these Novels is the sense that they convey of the largeness of life. The action moves on a narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the incidents in the main small and unexciting. Yet the tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought home in the most impressive way. This is because all have spiritual value; if the survey be not wide, it sinks deep to the psychic center; and what matters vision that circles the globe, if it lacks grasp, penetration, uplift? These, Hardy has. When one calls his peasants Shaksperian, one is trying to express the strength and savor, the rich earthy quality like fresh loam that pertains to these quaint figures, so evidently observed on the ground, and lovingly lifted over into literature. Their speech bewrays them and is an index of their slow, shrewd minds.

Nor is his serious characterization less fine and representative than his humorous; especially his women. It is puzzling to say whether Hardy's comic men, or his subtly drawn, sympathetically visualized women are to be named first in his praise: for power in both, and for the handling of nature, he will be long remembered. Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess and the rest, they take hold on the very heart-strings and are known as we know our very own. It is not that they are good or bad,—generally they are both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human. They mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad lines of character. And it is natural to add, while thinking of Hardy's women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists, he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on woman's involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in previous study of sex relations. And he has not hesitated to depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the spirit to noblest heights. And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called weak because of the generous movement of her blood. No one can despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense, understanding pity. Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the fiction-makers before him. There is no finer handling of sex-love with due regard to its dual nature,—love that grows in earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven—than Marty's oft-quoted beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief rings again in the defense of that good fellowship—that camaraderie—which can grow into "the only love which is as strong as death—beside which the passion usually so-called by the name is evanescent as steam." A glimpse like that of Hardy's mind separates him at once from Maupassant's view of the world. The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as they have that of all the writers born into the speech and nourished on its racial ideals.

Another reason for giving the stories of the middle period, such as "The Return of the Native," preference over those that are later, lies in the fact that the former have no definite, aggressive theme; whereas "Tess" announces an intention on the title page, "Jude," in a foreword. Whatever view of life may be expressed in "The Mayor of Casterbridge," for example, is imbedded, as it should be, in the course of the story. This tendency towards didacticism is a common thing in the cases of modern writers of fiction; it spoiled a great novelist in the case of Tolstoy, with compensatory gains in another direction; of those of English stock, one thinks of Eliot, Howells, Mrs. Ward and many another. But however natural this may be in an age like ours, the art of the literary product is, as a rule, injured by the habit of using fiction as a jumping-board for theory. In some instances, dullness has resulted. Eliot has not escaped scot-free. With Hardy, he is, to my taste, never dull. Repellent as "Jude" may be, it is never that. But a hardness of manner and an unpleasant bias are more than likely to follow this aim, to the fiction's detriment.

It is a great temptation to deflect from the purpose of this work in order to discuss Hardy's short stories, for a master in this kind he is. A sketch like "The Three Strangers" is as truly a masterpiece as Stevenson's "A Lodging for The Night." It must suffice to say of his work in the tale that it enables the author to give further assurance of his power of atmospheric handling, his stippling in of a character by a few strokes, his skill in dramatic scene, his knowledge of Wessex types, and especially, his subdued but permeating pessimism. There is nothing in his writings more quietly, deeply hopeless than most of the tales in the collection "Life's Little Ironies." One shrinks away from the truth and terror of them while lured by their charm. The short stories increase one's admiration for the artist, but the full, more virile message conies from the Novels. It is matter for regret that "Jude the Obscure," unless the signs fail, is to be his last testament in fiction. For such a man to cease from fiction at scarce sixty can but be deplored. The remark takes on added pertinency because the novelist has essayed in lieu of fiction the poetic drama, a form in which he has less ease and authority.

Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate is concerned: but always a poet at heart (he began with verse), he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity, so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so pathetic in its doom. There is something noble always in the tragic largeness of Hardy's best fiction. His grim determinism is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome, he is consoled by contact with "the pure, eternal course of things"; whose august flow comforts Arnold. Because of his art, the representative character of his thought, reflecting in prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius, Thomas Hardy is sure to hold his place in the English fiction of the closing years of the nineteenth century and is to-day the most distinguished living novelist using that speech and one of the few to be recognized and honored abroad. No writer of fiction between 1875 and 1900 has more definitely had a strong influence upon the English Novel as to content, scope and choice of subject. If his convictions have led him to excess, they will be forgiven and forgotten in the light of the serene mastery shed by the half dozen great works he has contributed to English literature.

II

Once in a while—a century or so, maybe,—comes an artist who refuses to be classified. Rules fail to explain him: he makes new rules in the end. He seems too big for any formula. He impresses by the might of his personality, teaching the world what it should have known before, that the personal is the life-blood of all and any art. Some such effect is made upon the critic by George Meredith, who so recently has closed his eyes to the shows of earth. One can find in him almost all the tendencies of English fiction. He is realist and romanticist, frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and above all, Poet. Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn: he puts on when he will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the elect. And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that it is more than worth the pains. Perhaps the lesson of it all is that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, is a phenomenon transcending school, movement or period. George Meredith is not, if we weigh words, the greatest English novelist to-day—for both Hardy and Stevenson are his superiors as artists; but he is the greatest man who has written fiction.

Although he was alive but yesterday, the novel frequently awarded first position among his works, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," was published a good half century ago. Go back to it, get its meaning, then read the latest fiction he wrote—(he ceased to produce fiction more than a decade before his death) and you appear to be in contact with the same personality in the substantials of story-making and of life-view. The only notable change is to be found in the final group of three stories, "One of Our Conquerors," "Lord Ormont and His Aminta" and "The Amazing Marriage." The note of social protest is louder here, the revolt against conventions more pronounced. Otherwise, the author of "Feverel" is the author of "The Amazing Marriage." Much has occurred in the Novel during the forty years between the two works: realism has traveled to an extreme, neo-idealism come by way of reaction, romanticism bloomed again, the Novel of ingenious construction, the Novel of humanitarian meaning, the Novel of thesis and problem and the Novel that foretells the future like an astrologer, all these types and yet others have been practised; but Meredith has kept tranquilly on the tenor of his large way, uninfluenced, except as he has expressed all these complexities in his own work. He is in literary evolution, a sport. Critics who have tried to show how his predecessors and contemporaries have influenced him, have come out lamely from the attempt. He has been sensitive not to individual writers, but to that imponderable yet potent thing, the time-tendency in literature. He throws back to much in the past, while in the van of modern thought. What, to illustrate, could be more of the present intellectually than his remarkable sonnet-sequence, "Modern Love"? And are not his women, as a type, the noblest example of the New Woman of our day—socially, economically, intellectually emancipated, without losing their distinctive feminine quality? And yet, in "The Shaving of Shagpat," an early work, we go back t the Arabian Nights for a model. The satiric romance, "Harry Richmond," often reminds of the leisured episode method of the eighteenth century; and while reading the unique "Evan Harrington" we think at times of Aristophanes.

Nor is much light thrown on Meredith's path in turning to his personal history. Little is known of this author's ancestry and education; his environment has been so simple, his life in its exteriors so uneventful, that we return to the work itself with the feeling that the key to the secret room must be here if anywhere. It is known that he was educated in youth in Germany, which is interesting in reference to the problem of his style. And there is more to be said concerning his parentage than the smug propriety of print has revealed while he lived. We know, too, that his marriage with the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock proved unhappy, and that for many years he has resided, almost a recluse, with his daughter, in the idyllic retirement of Surrey. The privacy of Boxhill has been respected; next to never has Meredith spoken in any public way and seldom visited London. When he was, at Tennyson's death, made the President of the British Society of Authors, the honor sought the man. The rest is silence; what has appeared since his death has been of too conflicting a nature for credence. We await a trustworthy biography.

The appeal then must be to the books themselves. Exclusive of short story, sketch and tale, they include a dozen novels of generous girth—for Meredith is old-fashioned in his demand for elbow-room. They are preeminently novels of character and more than any novelist of the day the view of the world embodied in them is that of the intellect. This does not mean that they are wanting in emotional force or interest: merely, that in George Meredith's fiction men and women live the life of thought as it is acted upon by practical issues. Character seen in action is always his prepossession; plot is naught save as it exhibits this. The souls of men and women are his quarry, and the test of a civilization the degree in which it has developed the mind for an enlightened control over the emotions and the bodily appetites. Neither does this mean, as with Henry James, the disappearance of plot: a healthy objectivity of narrative framework is preserved; if anything the earlier books—"Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming" and the duo "Sandra Belloni" and "Vittoria"—have more of story interest than the later novels. Meredith has never feared the use of the episode, in this suggesting the older methods of Fielding and Smollett. Yet the episodic in his hands has ever its use for psychologic envisagement. Love, too, plays a large role in his fiction; indeed, in the wider platonic sense, it is constantly present, although he is the last man to be called a writer of love-stories. And no man has permitted himself greater freedom in stepping outside the story in order to explain his meaning, comment upon character and scene, rhapsodize upon Life, or directly harangue the reader. And this broad marginal reservation of space, however much it is deplored in viewing his work as novel-making, adds a peculiar tonic and is a characteristic we could ill spare. It brings us back to the feeling that he is a great man using the fiction form for purposes broader than that of telling a story.

Because of this ample personal testimony in his books it should be easy to state his Lebensanschauung, unless the opacity of his manner blocks the way or he indulges in self-contradiction in the manner of a Nietzsche. Such is not the case. What is the philosophy unfolded in his representative books?

It will be convenient to choose a few of those typical for illustration. The essence of Meredith is to be discovered in such works as "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Harry Richmond," "The Egoist," "Diana of the Crossways." If you know these, you understand him. "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" might well be added because of its teaching; but the others will serve, with the understanding that so many-sided a writer has in other works given further noble proof of his powers. If I allowed personal preference to be my sole guide, "Rhoda Fleming" would be prominent in the list; and many place "Beauchamp's Career" high, if not first among his works;—a novel teeming with his views, particularly valuable for its treatment of English politics and certainly containing some of his most striking characterization, in particular, one of his noblest women. Still, those named will fairly reflect the novelist and speak for all.

"Richard Feverel," which had been preceded by a book of poems, the fantasia "The Shaving of Shagpat" and an historical novelette "Farina," was the first book that announced the arrival of a great novelist. It is at once a romance of the modern type, a love-story and a problem book; the tri-statement makes it Meredithian. It deals with the tragic union of Richard and Lucy, in a setting that shifts from sheer idyllic, through worldly and realistic to a culmination of dramatic grief. It contains, in measure heaped up and running over, the poetry, the comedy and the philosophy, the sense of Life's riddle, for which the author is renowned. But its intellectual appeal of theme—aside from the incidental wisdom that stars its pages—is found in the study of the problem of education. Richard's father would shape his career according to a preconceived idea based on parental love and guided by an anxious, fussy consulting of the oracles. The attempt to stretch the son upon a pedagogic procustean bed fails disastrously, wrecking his own happiness, and that of his sweet girl-wife. Love is stronger than aught else and we are offered the spectacle of ruined lives hovered over by the best intentions. The hovel is an illustration of the author's general teaching that a human being must have reasonable liberty of action for self-development. The heart must be allowed fair-play, though its guidance by the intellect is desirable.

It has been objected that this moving romance ends in unnecessary tragedy; that the catastrophe is not inevitable. But it may be doubted if the mistake of Sir Austin Feverel could be so clearly indicated had not the chance bullet of the duel killed the young wife when reconciliation with her husband appeared probable. But a book so vital in spirit, with such lyric interludes, lofty heights of wisdom, homeric humor, dramatic moments and profound emotions, can well afford lapses from perfect form, awkwardnesses of art. There are places where philosophy checks movement or manner obscures thought; but one overlooks all such, remembering Richard and Lucy meeting by the river; Richard's lonesome night walk when he learns he is a father; the marvelous parting from Bella Mount; father and son confronted with Richard's separation from the girl-wife; the final piteous passing of Lucy. These are among the great moments of English fiction.

One gets a sense of Meredith's resources of breadth and variety next in taking up "Evan Harrington." Here is a satiric character sketch where before was romance; for broad comedy in the older and larger sense it has no peer among modern novels. The purpose is plain: to show the evolution of a young middle-class Englishman, a tailor's son, through worldly experience with polite society into true democracy. After the disillusionment of "high life," after much yeasty juvenile foolishness and false ideals, Evan comes back to his father's shop with his lesson learned: it is possible (in modern England) to be both tailor and gentleman.

In placing this picture before the spectator, an incomparable view of genteel society with contrasted touches of low life is offered. For pure comedy that is of the midriff as well as of the brain, the inn scene with the astonishing Raikes as central figure is unsurpassed in all Meredith, and only Dickens has done the like. And to correspond in the fashionable world, there is Harrington's sister, the Countess de Saldar, who is only second to Becky Sharp for saliency and delight. Some find these comic figures overdrawn, even impossible; but they stand the test applied to Dickens: they abide in affectionate memory, vivid evocations made for our lasting joy. As with "Feverel," the book is a piece of life first, a lesson second; but the underlying thesis is present, not to the injury of one who reads for story's sake.

An extraordinary further example of resourcefulness, with a complete change of key, is "The Adventures of Harry Richmond." The ostensible business of the book is to depict the growth from boyhood to manhood and through sundry experiences of love, with the resulting effect upon his character, of the young man whose name gives it title. It may be noted that a favorite task with Meredith is this, to trace the development of a personality from immaturity to a maturity gained by the hard knocks of the master-educator, Love. But the figure really dominant is not Harry nor any one of his sweethearts, but that of his father, Roy Richmond. I must believe that English fiction offers nothing more original than he. He is an indescribable compound of brilliant swashbuckler, splendid gentleman and winning Goodheart. Barry Lyndon, Tarascon, Don Quixote and Septimus go into his making—and yet he is not explained;—an absolute original. The scene where, in a German park on an occasion of great pomp, he impersonates the statue of a Prince, is one of the author's triumphs—never less delightful at a re-reading.

But has this amazing creation a meaning, or is Roy merely one of the results of the sportive play of a man of genius? He is something more, we feel, when, at the end of the romance, he gives his life for the woman who has so faithfully loved him and believed in his royal pretensions. He perishes in a fire, because in saving her he would not save himself. It is as if the author said: "Behold, a man by nature histrionic and Bohemian, and do not make the mistake to think him incapable of nobility. Romantic in his faults, so too he is romantic in his virtues." "And back of this kindly treatment of the lovable rascal (who was so ideal a father to the little Richmond!) does there not lurk the thought that the pseudo-romantic attitude toward Life is full of danger—in truth, out of the question in modern society?"

"The Egoist" has long been a test volume with Meredithians. If you like it you are of the cult; if not, merely an amateur. It is inevitable to quote Stevenson who, when he had read it several times, declared that at the sixth reading he would begin to realize its greatness. Stevenson was a doughty admirer of Meredith, finding the elder "the only man of genius of my acquaintance," and regarding "Rhoda Fleming" as a book to send one back to Shakspere.

That "The Egoist" is typical—in a sense, most typical of the fictions,—is very true. That, on the other hand, it is Meredith's best novel may be boldly denied, since it is hardly a novel at all. It is a wonderful analytic study of the core of self that is in humanity, Willoughby, incarnation of a self-centeredness glossed over to others and to himself by fine gentleman manners and instincts, is revealed stroke after stroke until, in the supreme test of his alliance with Clara Middleton, he is flayed alive for the reader's benefit. In this power of exposure, by the subtlest, most unrelenting analysis, of the very penetralia of the human soul it has no counterpart; beside it, most of the psychology of fiction seems child's play. And the truth of it is overwhelming. No wonder Stevenson speaks of its "serviceable exposure of myself." Every honest man who reads it, winces at its infallible touching of a moral sore-spot. The inescapable ego in us all was never before portrayed by such a master.

But because it is a study that lacks the breadth, variety, movement and objectivity of the Novel proper, "The Egoist" is for the confirmed Meredith lover, not for the beginner: to take it first is perchance to go no further. Readers have been lost to him by this course. The immense gain in depth and delicacy acquired by English fiction since Richardson is well illustrated by a comparison of the latter's "Sir Charles Grandison" with Meredith's "The Egoist." One is a portrait for the time, the other for all time. Both, superficially viewed, are the same type: a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense. But O the difference! Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all making the worship of the ego hateful.

It is interesting that "Diana of the Crossways" was the book first to attract American readers. It has some of the author's eccentricities at their worst. But it was in one respect an excellent choice: the heroine is thoroughly representative of the author and of the age; possibly this country is sympathetic to her for the reason that she seems indigenous. Diana furnishes a text for a dissertation on Meredith's limning of the sex, and of his conception of the mental relation of the sexes. She is a modern woman, not so much that she is superior in goodness to the ideal of woman established in the mid-Victorian period by Thackeray and Dickens, as that she is bigger and broader. She is the result of the process of social readjustment. Her story is that of a woman soul experiencing a succession of unions and through them learning the higher love. First, the marriage de convenance of an unawakened girl; then, a marriage wherein admiration, ambition and flattered pride play their parts; finally, the marriage with Redbourne, a union based on tried friendship, comradeship, respect, warming into passion that, like the sudden up-leap of flame on the altar, lifts the spirit onto ideal heights. Diana is an imperfect, sinning, aspiring, splendid creature. And in the narrative that surrounds her, we get Meredith's theory of the place of intellect in woman, and in the development of society. He has an intense conviction that the human mind should be so trained that woman can never fall back upon so-called instinct; he ruthlessly attacks her "intuition," so often lauded and made to cover a multitude of sins. When he remarks that she will be the last thing to be civilized by man, the satire is directed against man rather than against woman herself, since it is man who desires to keep her a creature of the so-called intuitions. A mighty champion of the sex, he never tires telling it that intellectual training is the sure way to all the equalities. This conviction makes him a stalwart enemy of sentimentalism, which is so fiercely satirized in "Sandra Belloni" in the persons of the Pole family. His works abound in passages in which this view is displayed, flashed before the reader in diamond-like epigram and aphorism. Not that he despises the emotions: those who know him thoroughly will recognize the absurdity of such a charge. Only he insists that they be regulated and used aright by the master, brain. The mishaps of his women come usually from the haphazard abeyance of feeling or from an unthinking bowing down to the arbitrary dictations of society. This insistence upon the application of reason (the reasoning process dictated by an age of science) to social situations, has led this writer to advise the setting aside of the marriage bond in certain circumstances. In both "Lord Ormont and his Aminta" and "One of our Conquerors" he advocates a greater freedom in this relation, to anticipate what time may bring to pass. It is enough here to say that this extreme view does not represent Meredith's best fiction nor his most fruitful period of production.

Perhaps the most original thing about Meredith as a novelist is the daring way in which he has made an alliance between romance and the intellect which was supposed, in an older conception, to be its archenemy. He gives to Romance, that creature of the emotions, the corrective and tonic of the intellect "To preserve Romance," he declares, "we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts ... in days of a growing activity of the head." Let us say once again that Romance means a certain use of material as the result of an attitude toward Life; this attitude may be temporary, a mood; or steady, a conviction. It is the latter with George Meredith; and be it understood, his material is always realistic, it is his interpretation that is superbly idealistic. The occasional crabbedness of his manner and his fiery admiration for Italy are not the only points in which he reminds one of Browning. He is one with him in his belief in soul, his conception of life is an arena for its trying-out; one with him also in the robust acceptance of earth and earth's worth, evil and all, for enjoyment and as salutary experience. This is no fanciful parallel between Meredith and a man who has been called (with their peculiarities of style in mind) the Meredith of Poetry, as Meredith has been called the Browning of Prose.

Thus, back of whatever may be the external story—the Italian struggle for unity in "Vittoria," English radicalism in "Beauchamp's Career," a seduction melodrama in "Rhoda Fleming"—there is always with Meredith a steady interpretation of life, a principle of belief. It is his crowning distinction that he can make an intellectual appeal quite aside from the particular story he is telling;—and it is also apparent that this is his most vulnerable point as novelist. We get more from him just because he shoots beyond the fiction target. He is that rare thing in English novel-making, a notable thinker. Of all nineteenth century novelists he leads for intellectual stimulation. With fifty faults of manner and matter, irritating, even outrageous in his eccentricities, he can at his best startle with a brilliance that is alone of its kind. It is because we hail him as philosopher, wit and poet that he fails comparatively as artist. He shows throughout his work a sublime carelessness of workmanship on the structural side of his craft; but in those essentials, dialogue, character and scene, he rises to the peaks of his profession.

Probably more readers are offended by his mannerisms of style than by any other defect; and they are undeniable. The opening chapter of "Diana" is a hard thing to get by; the same may be said of the similar chapter in "Beauchamp's Career." In "One of our Conquerors," early and late, the manner is such as to lose for him even tried adherents. Is the trouble one of thought or expression? And is it honest or an affectation? Meredith in some books—and in all books more or less—adopts a strangely indirect, over-elaborated, far-fetched and fantastic style, which those who love him are fain to deplore. The author's learning gets in his way and leads him into recondite allusions; besides this, he has that quality of mind which is stimulated into finding analogies on every side, so that image is piled on image and side-paths of thought open up in the heat of this mental activity. Part of the difficulty arises from surplusage of imagination. Sometimes it is used in the service of comment (often satirical); again in a kind of Greek chorus to the drama, greatly to its injury; or in pure description, where it is hardly less offensive. Thus in "The Egoist" we read: "Willoughby shadowed a deep droop on the bend of his neck before Clara," and reflection shows that all this absurdly acrobatic phrase means is that the hero bowed to the lady. An utterly simple occurrence and thus described! It is all the more strange and aggravating in that it comes from a man who on hundreds of occasions writes English as pungent, sonorous and sweet as any writer in the history of the native literature. This is true both of dialogue and narrative. He is the most quotable of authors; his Pilgrim's Scrip is stuffed full of precious sayings, expressing many moods of emotion and interpreting the world under its varied aspects of romance, beauty, wit and drama. "Strength is the brute form of truth." There is a French conciseness in such a sentence and immense mental suggestiveness. Both his scenic and character phrasing are memorable, as where the dyspeptic philosopher in "Feverel" is described after dinner as "languidly twinkling stomachic contentment." And what a scene is that where Master Gammon replies to Mrs. Sumfit's anxious query concerning his lingering at table with appetite apparently unappeasable:

"'When do you think you will have done, Master Gammon?'

"'When I feels my buttons, Ma'am.'"

Or hear John Thrasher in "Harry Richmond" dilate on Language:

'There's cockney, and there's country, and there's school. Mix the three, strain and throw away the sediment. Now yon's my view.'

Has any philologist said all that could be said, so succinctly? His lyric outbursts in the face of Nature or better yet, where as in the moonlight meeting of the lovers at Wllming Weir in "Sandra Belloni," nature is interspersed with human passion in a glorious union of music, picture and impassioned sentiment,—these await the pleasure of the enthralled seeker in every book. To encounter such passages (perhaps in a mood of protest over some almost insufferable defect) is to find the reward rich indeed. Let the cause of obscurity be what it may, we need not doubt that with Meredith style is the man, a perfectly honest way of expressing his personality. It is not impossible that his unconventional education and the early influence of German upon him, may come into the consideration. But in the main his peculiarity is congenital.

Meredith lacked self-criticism as a writer. But it is quite inaccurate to speak of obscure thought: it is language, the medium, which makes the trouble when there is any. His thought, allowing for the fantasticality of his humor in certain moods, is never muddled or unorganized: it is sane, consistent and worthy of attention. To say this, is still to regret the stylistic vagaries.

One other defect must be mentioned: the characters talk like Meredith, instead of in their own persons. This is not true uniformly, of course, but it does mar the truth of his presentation. Young girls show wit and wisdom quite out of keeping; those in humble life—a bargeman, perhaps, or a prize-fighter—speak as they would not in reality. Illusion is by so much disturbed. It would appear in such cases that the thinker temporarily dominated the creative artist.

When all is said, pro and con, there remains a towering personality; a writer of unique quality; a man so stimulating and surprising as he is, that we almost prefer him to the perfect artist he never could be. No English maker of novels can give us a fuller sense of life, a keener realization of the dignity of man. It is natural to wish for more than we have—to desire that Meredith had possessed the power of complete control of his material and himself, had revised his work to better advantage. But perhaps it is more commonsensible to be thankful for him as he is.

As to influence, it would seem modest to assert that Meredith is as bracingly wholesome morally as he is intellectually stimulating. In a private letter to a friend who was praising his finest book, he whimsically mourns the fact that he must write for a living and hence feel like disowning so many of his children when in cold blood he scrutinizes his offspring. The letter in its entirety (it is unpublished) is proof, were any needed, that he had a high artistic ideal which kept him nobly dissatisfied with his endeavor. There is in him neither pose nor complacent self-satisfaction. To an American, whom he was bidding good-by at his own gate, he said: "If I had my books to do over again, I should try harder to make sure their influence was good." His aims, ethical and artistic, throughout his work, can be relied upon as high and noble. His faults are as honest as he himself, the inherent defects of his genius. No writer of our day stands more sturdily for the idea that, whereas art is precious, personality is more precious still; without which art is a tinkling cymbal and with which even a defective art can conquer Time, like a garment not all-seemly, that yet cannot hide an heroic figure.



CHAPTER XIII

STEVENSON

It is too early yet to be sure that Robert Louis Stevenson will make a more cogent appeal for a place in English letters as a writer of fiction than as an essayist. But had he never written essays likely to rank him with the few masters of that delightful fireside form, he would still have an indisputable claim as novelist. The claim in fact is a double one; it is founded, first, on his art and power as a maker of romance, but also upon his historical service to English fiction, as the man most instrumental in purifying the muddy current of realism in the late nineteenth century by a wholesome infusion,—the romantic view of life. It is already easier to estimate his importance and get the significance of his work than it was when he died in 1894—stricken down on the piazza of his house at Vailima, a Scotchman doomed to fall in a far-away, alien place.

We are better able now to separate that personal charm felt from direct contact with the man, which almost hypnotized those who knew him, from the more abiding charm which is in his writings: the revelation of a character the most attractive of his generation. Rarely, if ever before, have the qualities of artistry and fraternal fellowship been united in a man of letters to such a degree; most often they are found apart, the gods choosing to award their favors less lavishly.

Because of this union of art and life, Stevenson's romances killed two birds with one stone; boys loved his adventuresomeness, the wholesome sensationalism of his stories with something doing on every page, while amateurs of art responded to his felicity of phrase, his finished technique, the exhibition of craftsmanship conquering difficulty and danger. Artist, lover of life, insistent truth-teller, Calvinist, Bohemian, believer in joy, all these cohabit in his hooks. In early masterpieces like "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker" it is the lover of life who conducts us, telling the story for story's sake:

"My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

Such is the goddess that beckons on. The creed implicit in such work deems that life is stirring and worth while, and that it is a weakness to repine and waste time, to be too subjective when so much on earth is objectively alluring. This is only a part of Stevenson, of course, but it was that phase of him vastly liked of the public and doubtless doing most to give him vogue.

But in later work like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" we get quite another thing: the skilled story-maker is still giving us thrilling fiction, to be sure, but here it is the Scotchman of acute conscience, writing a spiritual allegory with the healthy instinct which insists that the lesson shall be dramatized. So, too, in a late fiction like "Ebb Tide," apparently as picaresque and harum-scarum as "Treasure Island," it is nevertheless the moralist who is at work beneath the brilliantly picturesque surface of the narrative, contrasting types subtly, showing the gradings in moral disintegration. In the past-mastership of the finest Scotch novels, "Kidnapped" and its sequel "David Balfour," "The Master of Ballantrae" and the beautiful torso, "Weir of Hermiston," we get the psychologic romance, which means a shift of interest;—character comes first, story is secondary to it. Here is the maturest Stevenson, the fiction most expressive of his genius, and naturally the inspiration is native, he looks back, as he so often did in his poetry, to the distant gray little island which was Motherland to him, home of his youth and of his kindred, the earth where he was fain to lie when his time came. Stevenson, to the end, could always return to sheer story, as in "St. Ives," but in doing so, is a little below his best: that kind did not call on his complete powers: in such fiction deep did not answer unto deep.

In 1883, when "Treasure Island" appeared, the public was gasping for the oxygen that a story with outdoor movement and action could supply: there was enough and to spare of invertebrate subtleties, strained metaphysics and coarse naturalistic studies. A sublimated dime novel like "Treasure Island" came at the psychologic moment; the year before "The New Arabian Nights" had offered the same sort of pabulum, but had been practically overlooked. Readers were only too glad to turn from people with a past to people of the past, or to people of the present whose ways were ways of pleasantness. Stevenson substituted a lively, normal interest in life for plotlessness and a surfeit of the flesh. The public rose to the bait as the trout to a particularly inviting fly. Once more reverting to the good old appeal of Scott—incident, action and derring-do—he added the attraction of his personal touch, and what was so gallantly preferred was greedily grasped.

Although, as has been said, Stevenson passed from the primitive romance of the Shilling Shocker to the romance of character, his interest in character study was keen from the first: the most plot-cunning and external of his yarns have that illuminative exposure of human beings—in flashes at least—which mark him off from the bluff, robust manner of a Dumas and lend an attraction far greater than that of mere tangle of events. This gets fullest expression in the Scotch romances.

"The Master of Ballantrae," for one illustration; the interplay of motive and act as it affects a group of human beings is so conducted that plot becomes a mere framework, within which we are permitted to see a typical tragedy of kinship. This receives curious corroboration in the fact that when, towards the close of the story, the scene shifts to America and the main motive—the unfolding of the fraternal fortunes of the tragic brothers, is made minor to a series of gruesome adventures (however entertaining and well done) the reader, even if uncritical, has an uneasy sense of disharmony: and rightly, since the strict character romance has changed to the romance of action.

It has been stated that the finer qualities of Stevenson are called out by the psychological romance on native soil. He did some brilliant and engaging work of foreign setting and motive. "The Island Nights' Entertainments" is as good in its way as the earlier "New Arabian Nights"—far superior to it, indeed, for finesse and the deft command of exotic material. Judged as art, "The Bottle Imp" and "The Beach of Falesa" are among the triumphs of ethnic interpretation, let alone their more external charms of story. And another masterpiece of foreign setting, "A Lodging for The Night," is further proof of Stevenson's ability to use other than Scotch motives for the materials of his art. "Ebb-Tide," again, grim as it is, must always be singled out as a marvel of tone and proportion, yet seems born out of an existence utterly removed as to conditions and incentives from the land of his birth. But when, in his own words:

"The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again."

then, as if vitalized by mother-earth, Stevenson shows a breadth, a vigor, a racy idiosyncrasy, that best justify a comparison with Scott. It means a quality that is easier felt than expressed; of the very warp and woof of his work. If the elder novelist seems greater in scope, spontaneity and substance, the younger surpasses him in the elegancies and niceties of his art. And it is only a just recognition of the difference of Time as well as of personality to say that the psychology of Stevenson is far more profound and searching. Nor may it be denied that Sir Walter nods, that there are flat, uninteresting stretches in his heroic panorama, while of Stevenson at the worst, we may confidently assert that he is never tedious. He fails in the comparison if anywhere in largeness of personality, not in the perfectness of the art of his fiction. In the technical demands of his profession he is never wanting. He always has a story to tell, tells it with the skill which means constructive development and a sense of situation; he creates characters who live, interest and do not easily fade from memory: he has exceptional power in so filling in backgrounds as to produce the illusion of atmosphere; and finally, he has, whether in dialogue or description, a wonderfully supple instrument of expression. If the style of his essays is at times mannered, the charge can not be made against his representative fiction: "Prince Otto" stands alone in this respect, and that captivating, comparatively early romance, confessedly written under the influence of Meredith, is a delicious literary experiment rather than a deeply-felt piece of life. Perhaps the central gift of all is that for character—is it, in truth, not the central gift for any weaver of fiction? So we thought in studying Dickens. Stevenson's creations wear the habit of life, yet with more than life's grace of carriage; they are seen picturesquely without, but also psychologically within. In a marvelous portrayal like that of John Silver in "Treasure Island" the result is a composite of what we see and what we shudderingly guess: eye and mind are satisfied alike. Even in a mere sketch, such as that of the blind beggar at the opening of the same romance, with the tap-tap of his stick to announce his coming, we get a remarkable example of effect secured by an economy of details; that tap-tapping gets on your nerves, you never forget it. It seems like the memory of a childhood terror on the novelist's part. Throughout his fiction this chemic union of fact and the higher fact that is of the imagination marks his work. The smell of the heather is in our nostrils as we watch Allan's flight, and looking on at the fight in the round-house, there is a physical impression of the stuffiness of the place; you smell as well as see it. Or for quite another key, take the night duel in "The Master of Ballantrae." You cannot think of it without feeling the bite of the bleak air; once more the twinkle of the candles makes the scene flicker before you ere it vanish into memory-land. Again, how you know that sea-coast site in the opening of "The Pavilion on the Links"—shiver at the "sly innuendoes of the place"! Think how much the map in "Treasure Island" adds to the credibility of the thing. It is the believableness of Stevenson's atmospheres that prepare the reader for any marvels enacted in them. Gross, present-day, matter-of-fact London makes Dr. Jekyll and his worser half of flesh-and-blood credence. Few novelists of any race have beaten this wandering Scot in the power of representing character and envisaging it: and there can hardly be successful characterization without this allied power of creating atmosphere.

Nothing is falser than to find him imitative in his representative work. There may be a suspicion of made-to-order journalism in "The Black Arrow," and the exception of "Prince Otto," which none the less we love for its gallant spirit and smiling grace, has been noted. But of the Scotch romances nothing farther from the truth could be said. They stand or fall by themselves: they have no model—save that of sound art and a normal conception of human life. Rarely does this man fall below his own high level or fail to set his private remarque upon his labor. It is in a way unfortunate that Stevenson, early in his career, so frankly confessed to practising for his craft by the use of the best models: it has led to the silly misinterpretation which sees in all his literary effort nothing but the skilful echo. Such judgments remind us that criticism, which is intended to be a picture of another, is in reality a picture of oneself. In his lehrjahre Stevenson "slogged at his trade," beyond peradventure; but no man came to be more individually and independently himself.

It has been spoken against him, too, that he could not draw women: here again he is quoted in his own despite and we see the possible disadvantage of a great writer's correspondence being given to the world—though not for more worlds than one would we miss the Letters. It is quite true that he is chary of petticoats in his earlier work: but when he reached "David Balfour" he drew an entrancing heroine; and the contrasted types of young girl and middle-aged woman in "Weir of Hermiston" offer eloquent testimonial to his increasing power in depicting the Eternal Feminine. At the same time, it may be acknowledged that the gallery of female portraits is not like Scott's for number and variety, nor like Thackeray's for distinction and charm—thick-hung with a delightful company whose eyes laugh level with our own, or, above us on the wall, look down with a starry challenge to our souls. But those whom Stevenson has hung there are not to be coldly recalled.

Stevenson's work offers itself remarkably as a test for the thought that all worthily modern romanticism must not lack in reality, in true observation, for success in its most daring flights. Gone forever is that abuse of the romantic which substitutes effective lying for the vision which sees broadly enough to find beauty. The latter-day realist will be found in the end to have permanently contributed this, a welcome legacy to our time, after its excesses and absurdities are forgotten. Realism has taught romanticism to tell the truth, if it would succeed. Stevenson is splendidly real, he loves to visualize fact, to be true both to the appearances of things and the thoughts of the mind. He is aware that life is more than food—that it is a subjective state quite as much as an objective reality. He refers to himself more than once, half humorously, as a fellow whose forte lay in transcribing what was before him, to be seen and felt, tasted and heard. This extremely modern denotement was a marked feature of his genius, often overlooked. He had a desire to know all manner of men; he had the noble curiosity of Montaigne; this it was, along with his human sympathy, that led him to rough it in emigrant voyages and railroad trips across the plains. It was this characteristic, unless I err, the lack of which in "Prince Otto" gives it a certain rococo air: he was consciously fooling in it, and felt the need of a solidly mundane footing. Truth to human nature in general, and that lesser truth which means accurate photography—his books give us both; the modern novelist, even a romancer like Stevenson, is not permitted to slight a landscape, an idiom nor a point of psychology: this one is never untrue to the trust. There is in the very nature of his language a proof of his strong hunger for the actual, the verifiable. No man of his generation has quite such a grip on the vernacular: his speech rejoices to disport itself in root flavors; the only younger writer who equals him in this relish for reality of expression is Kipling. Further back it reminds of Defoe or Swift, at their best, Stevenson cannot abide the stock phrases with which most of us make shift to express our thoughts instead of using first-hand effects. There is, with all its music and suavity, something of the masculinity of the Old English in the following brief descriptive passage from "Ebb-Tide":

There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the East; then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and silver; and then coals of fire. These glimmered awhile on the sea line, and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out; and still the night and the stars reigned undisturbed. It was as though a spark should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole East glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with the daylight. The isle—the undiscovered, the scarce believed in—now lay before them and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate.

Stevenson's similes, instead of illustrating concrete things by others less concrete, often reverse the process, as in the following: "The isle at this hour, with its smooth floor of sand, the pillared roof overhead and the pendant illumination of the lamps, wore an air of unreality, like a deserted theater or a public garden at midnight." Every image gets its foothold in some tap-root of reality.

The place of Robert Louis Stevenson is not explained by emphasizing the perfection of his technique. Artist he is, but more: a vigorous modern mind with a definite and enheartening view of things, a philosophy at once broad and convincing. He is a psychologist intensely interested in the great questions—which, of course, means the moral questions. Read the quaint Fable in which two of the characters in "Treasure Island" hold converse upon themselves, the story in which they participate and the author who made them. It is as if Stevenson stood aside a moment from the proper objectivity of the fictionist, to tell us in his own person that all his story-making was but an allegory of life, its joy, its mystery, its duty, its triumph and its doom. Although he is too much the artist to intrude philosophic comments upon human fate into his fiction, after the fashion of Thackeray or Meredith, the comment is there, implicit in his fiction, even as it is explicit in his essays, which are for this reason a sort of complement of his fiction: a sort of philosophical marginal note upon the stories. Stevenson was that type of modern mind which, no longer finding it possible to hold fast by the older, complacent cock-sureness with regard to the theologian's heaven, is still unshaken in its conviction that life is beneficent, the obligation of duty imperative, the meaning of existence spiritual. Puzzlingly protean in his expressional moods (his conversations in especial), he was constant in this intellectual, or temperamental, attitude: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," represents his feeling, and the strongest poem he ever wrote, "If This Were Faith," voices his deepest conviction. Meanwhile, the superficies of life offered a hundred consolations, a hundred pleasures, and Stevenson would have his fellowmen enjoy them in innocence, in kindness and good cheer. In fine, as a thinker he was a modernized Calvinist; as an artist he saw life in terms of action and pleasure, and by perfecting himself in the art of communicating his view of life, he was able, in a term of years all too short, to leave a series of books which, as we settle down to them in the twentieth century, and try to judge them as literature, have all the semblance of fine art. In any case, they will have been influential in the shaping of English fiction and will be referred to with respect by future historians of literature. It is hard to believe that the desiccation of Time will so dry them that they will not always exhale a rich fragrance of personality, and tremble with a convincing movement of life.



CHAPTER XIV

THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION

I

To exclude the living, as we must, in an estimate of the American contribution to the development we have been tracing, is especially unjust. Yet the principle must be applied. The injustice lies in the fact that an important part of the contribution falls on the hither side of 1870 and has to do with authors still active. The modern realistic movement in English fiction has been affected to some degree by the work, has responded to the influence of the two Americans, Howells and James. What has been accomplished during the last forty years has been largely under their leadership. Mr. Howells, true to his own definition, has practised the more truthful handling of material in depicting chosen aspects of the native life. Mr. James, becoming more interested in British types, has, after a great deal of analysis of his own countrymen, passed by the bridge of the international Novel to a complete absorption in transatlantic studies, making his peculiar application of the realistic formula to the inner life of the spirit: a curious compound, a cosmopolitan Puritan, an urbane student of souls. His share in the British product is perhaps appreciable; but from the native point of view, at least, it would seem as if his earlier work were, and would remain, most representative both because of its motives and methods. Early or late, he has beyond question pointed out the way to many followers in the psychologic path: his influence, perhaps less obvious than Howells', is none the less undisputable. The development in the hands of writers younger than these veterans has been rich, varied, often noteworthy in quality. But of all this it is too soon to speak.

With regard to the fictional evolution on American soil, it is clear that four great writers, excluding the living, separate themselves from the crowd: Irving, Cooper, Poe and Hawthorne. Moreover, two of these, Irving and Poe, are not novelists at all, but masters of the sketch or short story. It will be best, however, for our purpose to give them all some attention, for whatever the form of fiction they used, they are all influential in the development of the Novel.

Other authors of single great books may occur to the student, perhaps clamoring for admission to a company so select. Yet he is likely always to come back and draw a dividing line here. Bret Harte, for instance, is dead, and in the short story of western flavor he was a pioneer of mark, the founder of a genre: probably no other writer is so significant in his field. But here again, although he essayed full-length fiction, it was not his forte. So, too, were it not that Mark Twain still cheers the land of the living with his wise fun, there would be for the critic the question, is he a novelist, humorist or essayist. Is "Roughing It" more typical of his genius than "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn"? How shall we characterize "Puddin' Head Wilson"? Under what category shall we place "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur" and "Joan of Arc"? The query reminds us once more that literature means personality as well as literary forms and that personality is more important than are they. And again we turn away regretfully (remembering that this is an attempt to study not fiction in all its manifestations, but the Novel) from the charming short stories—little classics in their kind—bequeathed by Aldrich, and are almost sorry that our judgment demands that we place him first as a poet. We think, too, of that book so unique in influence, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," nor forget that, besides producing it, Mrs. Stowe, in such a work as "Old Town Folks," started the long line of studies of New England rustic life which, not confined to that section, have become so welcome a phase of later American art in fiction. Among younger authors called untimely from their labors, it is hard to resist the temptation to linger over such a figure as that of Frank Norris, whose vital way of handling realistic material with epic breath in his unfinished trilogy, gave so great promise for his future.

It may be conceded that nothing is more worth mention in American fiction of the past generation than the extraordinary cultivation of the short-story, which Mr. Brander Matthews dignifies and unifies by a hyphen, in order to express his conviction that it is an essentially new art form, to study which is a fascinating quest, but aside from our main intention.

II

Having due regard then for perspective, and trying not to confuse historical importance with the more vital interest which implies permanent claims, it seems pretty safe to come back to Irving and Poe, to Cooper and Hawthorne. Even as in the sketch and tale Irving stands alone with such a masterpiece as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; and Poe equally by himself with his tales of psychological horror and mystery, so in longer fiction, Cooper and Hawthorne have made as distinct contributions in the domain of Romance. Their service is as definite for the day of the Romantic spirit, as is that of Howells and James for the modern day of realism so-called. It is not hard to see that Irving even in his fiction is essentially an essayist; that with him story was not the main thing, but that atmosphere, character and style were,—the personal comment upon life. One reads a sketch like "The Stout Gentleman," in every way a typical work, for anything but incident or plot. The Hudson River idyls, it may be granted, have somewhat more of story interest, but Irving seized them, ready-made for his use, because of their value for the picturesque evocation of the Past. He always showed a keen sense of the pictorial and dramatic in legend and history, as the "Alhambra" witnesses quite as truly as the sketches. "Bracebridge Hall" and "The Sketch Book," whatever of the fictional they may contain, are the work of the essayist primarily, and Washington Irving will always, in a critical view, be described as a master of the English essay. No other maker of American literature affords so good an example of the inter-colation of essay and fiction: he recalls the organic relation between the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers and the eighteenth century Novel proper of a generation later.

His service to all later writers of fiction was large in that he taught them the use of promising native material that awaited the story-maker. His own use of it, the Hudson, the environs of Manhattan, was of course romantic, in the main. When in an occasional story he is unpleasant in detail or tragic in trend he seems less characteristic—so definitely was he a romanticist, seeking beauty and wishing to throw over life the kindly glamour of imaginative art. It is worth noting, however, that he looked forward rather than back, towards the coming realism, not to the incurable pseudo-romanticism of the late eighteenth century, in his instinct to base his happenings upon the bedrock of truth—the external truth of scene and character and the inner truth of human psychology.

Admirably a modern artist in this respect, his old-fashionedness, so often dilated upon, can easily be overstated. He not only left charming work in the tale, but helped others who came after to use their tools, furthering their art by the study of a good model.

Nothing was more inevitable then that Cooper when he began fiction in mid-manhood should have written the romance: it was the dominant form in England because of Scott. But that he should have realized the unused resources of America and produced a long series of adventure stories, taking a pioneer as his hero and illustrating the western life of settlement in his career, the settlement that was to reclaim a wilderness for a mighty civilization—that was a thing less to be expected, a truly epic achievement. The Leather Stocking Series was in the strictest sense an original performance—the significance of Fenimore Cooper is not likely to be exaggerated; it is quite independent of the question of his present hold upon mature readers, his faults of technique and the truth of his pictures. To have grasped such an opportunity and so to have used it as to become a great man-of-letters at a time when literature was more a private employ than the interest of the general—surely it indicates genuine personality, and has the mark of creative power. To which we may add, that Cooper is still vital in his appeal, as the statistics of our public libraries show.

Moreover, incorrigible romancer that he was, he is a man of the nineteenth century, as was Irving, in the way he instinctively chose near-at-hand native material: he knew the Mohawk Valley by long residence; he knew the Indian and the trapper there; and he depicted these types in a setting that was to him the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, we have in him an illustration of the modern writer who knows he must found his message firmly upon reality. For both Leather-stocking and Chingachgook are true in the broad sense, albeit the white trapper's dialect may be uncertain and the red man exhibit a dignity that seems Roman rather than aboriginal. The Daniel Boone of history must have had, we feel, the nobler qualities of Bumpo; how otherwise did he do what it was his destiny to do? In the same way, the Indian of Cooper is the red man in his pristine home before the day of fire-water and Agency methods. It may be that what to us to-day seems a too glorified picture is nearer the fact than we are in a position easily to realize. Cooper worked in the older method of primary colors, of vivid, even violent contrasts: his was not the school of subtleties. His women, for example, strike us as somewhat mechanical; there is a sameness about them that means the failure to differentiate: the Ibsenian psychology of the sex was still to come. But this does not alter the obvious excellencies of the work. Cooper carried his romanticism in presenting the heroic aspects of the life he knew best into other fields where he walked with hardly less success: the revolutionary story illustrated by "The Spy," and the sea-tale of which a fine example is "The Pilot." He had a sure instinct for those elements of fiction which make for romance, and the change of time and place affects him only in so far as it affects his familiarity with his materials. His experience in the United States Navy gave him a sure hand in the sea novels: and in a book like "The Spy" he was near enough to the scenes and characters to be studies practically contemporary. He had the born romanticist's natural affection for the appeal of the past and the stock elements can be counted upon in all his best fiction: salient personalities, the march of events, exciting situations, and ever that arch-romantic lure, the one trick up the sleeve to pique anticipation. Hence, in spite of descriptions that seem over-long, a heavy-footed manner that lacks suppleness and variety, and undeniable carelessness of construction, he is still loved of the young and seen to be a natural raconteur, an improviser of the Dumas-Scott lineage and, even tested by the later tests, a noble writer of romance, a man whom Balzac and Goethe read with admiration: unquestionably influential outside his own land in that romantic mood of expression which, during the first half of the nineteenth century, was so widespread and fruitful.

III

It is the plainer with every year that Poe's contribution to American fiction, and indeed to that of the nineteenth century, ignoring national boundaries, stands by itself. Whatever his sources—and no writer appears to derive less from the past—he practically created on native soil the tale of fantasy, sensational plot, and morbid impressionism. His cold aloofness, his lack of spiritual import, unfitted him perhaps for the broader work of the novelist who would present humanity in its three dimensions with the light and shade belonging to Life itself. Confining himself to the tale which he believed could be more artistic because it was briefer and so the natural mold for a mono-mood, he had the genius so to handle color, music and suggestion in an atmosphere intense in its subjectivity, that confessed masterpieces were the issue. Whether in the objective detail of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," with its subtle illusion of realism, or in the nuances and delicatest tonality of "Ligeia," he has left specimens of the different degrees of romance which have not been surpassed, conquering in all but that highest style of romantic writing where the romance lies in an emphasis upon the noblest traits of mankind. He is, it is not too much to say, well-nigh as important to the growth of modern fiction outside the Novel form as he is to that of poetry, though possibly less unique on his prose side. His fascination is that of art and intellect: his material and the mastery wherewith he handles it conjoin to make his particular brand of magic. While some one story of Hoffman or Bulwer Lytton or Stevenson may be preferred, no one author of our time has produced an equal number of successes in the same key. It is instructive to compare him with Hawthorne because of a superficial resemblance with an underlying fundamental distinction. One phase of the Concord romancer's art results in stories which seem perhaps as somber, strange and morbid as those of Poe: "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "Rapacinni's Daughter," "The Birth Mark." They stand, of course, for but one side of his power, of which "The Great Stone Face" and "The Snow Image" are the brighter and sweeter. Thus Hawthorne's is a broader and more diversified accomplishment in the form of the tale. But the likeness has to do with subject-matter, not with the spirit of the work. The gloomiest of Hawthorne's short stories are spiritually sound and sweet: Poe's, on the contrary, might be described as unmoral; they seem written by one disdaining all the touchstones of life, living in a land of eyrie where there is no moral law. He would no more than Lamb indict his very dreams. In the case of Hawthorne there is allegorical meaning, the lesson is never far to seek: a basis of common spiritual responsibility is always below one's feet. And this is quite as true of the long romances as of the tales. The result is that there is spiritual tonic in Hawthorne's fiction, while something almost miasmatic rises from Poe, dropping a kind of veil between us and the salutary realities of existence. If Poe be fully as gifted, he is, for this reason, less sanely endowed. It may be conceded that he is not always as shudderingly sardonic and removed from human sympathy as in "The Cask of Amontillado" or "The Black Cat"; yet it is no exaggeration to affirm that he is nowhere more typical, more himself. On the contrary, in a tale like "The Birth Mark," what were otherwise the horror and ultra-realism of it, is tempered by and merged in the suggestion that no man shall with impunity tamper with Nature nor set the delight of the eyes above the treasures of the soul. The poor wife dies, because her husband cares more to remove a slight physical defect than he does for her health and life. So it cannot be said of the somber work in the tale of these two sons of genius that,

"A common grayness silvers everything,"

since the gifts are so differently exercised and the artistic product of totally dissimilar texture. Moreover, Poe is quite incapable of the lovely naivete of "The Snow Image," or the sun-kissed atmosphere of the wonder-book. Humor, except in the satiric vein, is hardly more germane to the genius of Hawthorne than to that of Poe; its occasional exercise is seldom if ever happy.

Although most literary comparisons are futile because of the disparateness of the things compared, the present one seems legitimate in the cases of Poe and Hawthorne, superficially so alike in their short-story work.

IV

In the romances in which he is, by common consent, our greatest practitioner, to be placed first indeed of all who have written fiction of whatever kind on American soil, Hawthorne never forsakes—subtle, spiritual, elusive, even intangible as he may seem—the firm underfooting of mother earth. His themes are richly human, his psychologic truth (the most modern note of realism) unerring in its accuracy and insight. As part of his romantic endowment, he prefers to place plot and personages in the dim backward of Time, gaining thus in perspective and ampleness of atmosphere. He has told us as much in the preface to "The House of The Seven Gables," that wonderful study in subdued tone-colors. That pronunciamento of a great artist (from which in an earlier chapter quotation has been made) should not be overlooked by one who essays to get a hint of his secret. He is always exclusively engaged with questions of conscience and character; like George Meredith, his only interest is in soul-growth. This is as true in the "Marble Faun" with its thought of the value of sin in the spiritual life, or in "The Blithedale Romance," wherein poor Zenobia learns how infinitely hard it is for a woman to oppose the laws of society, as it is in the more obvious lesson of "The Scarlet Letter." In this respect the four romances are all of a piece: they testify to their spiritual parentage. "The Scarlet Letter," if the greatest, is only so for the reason that the theme is deepest, most fundamental, and the by-gone New England setting most sympathetic to the author's loving interest. Plainly an allegory, it yet escapes the danger of becoming therefore poor fiction, by being first of all a study of veritable men and women, not lay-figures to carry out an argument. The eyes of the imagination can always see Esther Prynne and Dimmesdale, honest but weak man of God, the evil Chillingworth and little Pearl who is all child, unearthly though she be, a symbol at once of lost innocence and a hope of renewed purity. No pale abstractions these; no folk in fiction are more believed in: they are of our own kindred with whom we suffer or fondly rejoice. In a story so metaphysical as "The House of The Seven Gables," full justice to which has hardly been done (it was Hawthorne's favorite), while the background offered by the historic old mansion is of intention low-toned and dim, there is no obscurity, though plenty of innuendo and suggestion. The romance is a noble specimen of that use of the vague which never falls into the confusion of indeterminate ideas. The theme is startlingly clear: a sin is shown working through generations and only to find expiation in the fresh health of the younger descendants: life built on a lie must totter to its fall. And the shell of all this spiritual seething—the gabled Salem house—may at last be purified and renovated for a posterity which, because it is not paralyzed by the dark past, can also start anew with hope and health, while every room of the old home is swept through and cleansed by the wholesome winds of heaven.