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If only books were like hats and gowns it would simplify matters a good deal. I could say: “Ostrich feathers are being much used,” or “Egotism is usually the center of the design.” But although there is an observable tendency to buy books like clothes, because some novel or other is all the rage, the tendency grows weaker from year to year, I think; and if in the title of this chapter I use the word “mode” it is phrasemaking.
Phrasemaking has its excuse in convenience, but it must be abandoned in the discussion of some of the fiction I am going to talk about. Among these books just one is a first novel. Because it has this distinction, because of its human quality, and because it borders a theme of great significance, I want to speak at once of Marjorie Barkley McClure’s High Fires. Mrs. McClure, the daughter of a Detroit clergyman, has laid her story principally in that city, in the period from 1905 to about the present. Angus Stevenson is a minister of the gospel who sticks by the letter of a somewhat rigid, old-fashioned creed. His sons and his daughter are young people of today. They cannot see why they should not do what other boys and girls of their age are doing. But their father will not for one moment countenance such things as dancing and card-playing and Sunday baseball.
The struggle is tempered and made human by Angus Stevenson’s goodness. He loves his children; especially is his daughter the apple of his eye. But he cannot sacrifice one inch of his principles. They are just as effectual in one direction as another. He voluntarily reduces his own salary when it seems to him that the act is called for. If he is intolerant, he is Christ-like.
Of several crises, the one that cuts into him most deeply is his daughter’s falling in love with a young man whom Angus Stevenson is constrained to regard as an atheist and an infidel. I have said that he loves his children; I should add that even when they are most rebellious against their father, they love him no less. The intensity and depth of Mrs. McClure’s portrait of Angus Stevenson fully realizes the feeling on all sides. You are made to see and to acknowledge the claim to justice of conflicting creeds, the rare courage and noble faith and life-long devotion of the father, the right to happiness and a certain self-fulfillment of the children. I know scarcely a novel of this year in which the human element is so strong; none in which it is stronger; none in which the lessons of a right feeling are more clearly conveyed or are more capable of a direct application in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Mrs. McClure’s novel is of interest, too, for its evidence that religion is quickening in the American mind. I am using “religion” in the sense of personal faith, which is at the present hour having a difficult time with established creeds, on the one hand, and life’s machinery of motion on the other. There were evidences before High Fires was published, in the huge sale of a new life of Christ and in the fundamentalist-liberal controversy in the churches, that something deeply disquieting was coming to the surface. Almost simultaneously with the publication of High Fires, a first novel by Lyon Montross, Half Gods, by means of the highly realistic presentation of American small town life, tried to disclose the trouble. Mr. Montross’s story implied what is probably true: the wine of a strong belief in anything is no longer fermented in most of us; we half-worship, or, at best, only worship half-heartedly.
Now the business of a novelist, or his art, is, as Joseph Conrad said, “a form of imagined life clearer than reality.” It is to show you something more plainly than life shows it you; a good novel is a beacon, not a bonfire. Thus in the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning (the most ambitious work she has so far done), the heroine, after a life of vicissitudes, comes to realize that she is, in the Scriptural phrase of the title, but a “handmaid of the Lord.” Veronica is a sensitive girl brought up in depressing though scarcely unusual circumstances. She marries a man whose business career takes her to a social height, both in America and, for a time, in England. Her church, which should mean so much to her constantly, affects her life only at intervals. When the crash comes she finds herself separated from her husband by his struggle to keep afloat. She goes back to her home town. It seems as though she were back where she had started, with little difference except in the perplexity of an uncomprehended experience. So it is that finally she comes to a measure of understanding, to an unquiet peace. She sees that things will go on, though not in her way nor in any way of her choosing. A Handmaid of the Lord, like High Fires and Half Gods, does something to get at the trouble that is in us.
To show what is, including what is wrong, is the novelist’s object; to show what came right is also sometimes possible. Dealing with the subject of religion, it has taken that very able novelist, Compton Mackenzie, three books in sequence to show the history of Mark Lidderdale. The Altar Steps gave the young man’s background and the story of his life up to his ordination in the Church of England. In The Parson’s Progress we see him as a priest of the English Church constantly beset by doubts and difficulties. These are by no means solved when the third novel of the trilogy, The Heavenly Ladder, opens; but they find their solution as it ends. Mark, as a convert in Rome, finds a happiness that Mr. Mackenzie has expressed with the utmost simplicity and with a restrained but lofty fervor.
With a simplicity different but equally honest, Ralph Connor writes his novels of men in a newer country. “Imagine,” he said, when asked to tell briefly about his new book, “a man of vitality and power who has given and taken heavy blows in the struggle of human life, who finds himself cornered by forces he cannot subdue. Suddenly he realizes that his back is against the wall, that no further retreat is possible. Spiritually, mentally, physically there is a last stand to be made—a hold on the essentials of life to be groped for and seized. It is this last stand, this fighting chance that I have made the theme of Treading the Winepress.” The scenes of the story are laid in Nova Scotia.
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If there is no single preoccupation common to the new fiction of other authors, readers will be highly content to find thoroughly characteristic new work by such favorites as Joseph C. Lincoln, Hugh Walpole, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand W. Sinclair, Susan Ertz, Robert Hichens, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
Both Joseph C. Lincoln and Hugh Walpole—and different as they are—seem to me to have surpassed themselves. Mr. Lincoln’s Rugged Water is not basically different from his other Cape Cod novels. Perhaps in the loose chronology of his stories it is more nearly contemporaneous with Cap’n Eri than with his more recent books. It is a story of a Coast Guard Station in the days when the Coast Guard was the Life Saving Service. The chief character is Calvin Homer, Number One man of the crew, brave, honest, and shy of women. In temporary command of the Station, he does gallant rescue work which should place him in line for promotion to Keeper of the Station. But in the same storm, Benoni Bartlett, of a nearby Station, stands out more conspicuously as the sole survivor of a brave crew. Benoni is made Keeper over Homer.
These two men, Benoni Bartlett and Homer; Myra Fuller, to whom Homer became engaged before he quite knew what was happening; Norma Bartlett, daughter of the former Keeper and the young woman with whom Homer eventually discovers himself to be in love, are the main persons of the novel. It is difficult to regard them as Mr. Lincoln’s real subject, for the life of the Station and the drama of shipwreck asserts itself constantly in pages that teem with humor and with other qualities of human nature less easy of superficial exhibition.
In other words, the largeness of what he is essentially dealing with has seized upon Mr. Lincoln, and without the sacrifice of his lesser drama, or any of the picturesqueness that has made him so beloved, he has caught something of the loneliness of the Station, the whisper and thunder of the surf, the struggle of men in an “overmatched littleness” under a black sky in the tempest of waters. To me, these captures make Rugged Water the best novel he has written.
As for Mr. Walpole in The Old Ladies, my verdict, arrived at on different grounds, is equally affirmative and emphatic. Here is a short novel to stand beside Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. There is bleakness as well as sunniness about the story; no haze; no sentimentality, though sentiment a-plenty and a deep, clear feeling. Three women, Lucy Amorest, May Beringer, and Agatha Payne, all seventy, live together in the top of a “rain-bitten” old house in Polchester. All are very poor. Lucy has a cousin who may leave her money, and a son in America from whom she has not heard for a couple of years. May Beringer, close to penury, is a weak, stupid, kind creature always terrified of life. Agatha Payne is sensual and strong. There has never, in my knowledge, been a picture more honest or more terribly pathetic of what old age sometimes means. Mr. Walpole has not evaded an inch of the truth or the tragedy; and the measured happiness accorded at last to Lucy Amorest comes not in the least as a concession toward a “happy ending” but solely as a reprieve of pity for her—and for the reader also.
The stories in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Temperamental People represent her most recent work and have a unity as interesting as their wide range. Each shows the force of temperament—that quality in people which makes the drama of life. But who are the temperamental people? A queen, a cowboy, a famous singer, a wife, a great sculptor and a business man’s secretary are some of them. People as diverse as life; but all of them have temperament, and each story is a revelation of human emotion in action. As one of the characters says (it is the opening of the story of the sculptor, “Cynara”): “I suppose once in every creative life there comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but from without there comes the onrush of true greatness.” These records of that moment and that hour are among the best things Mrs. Rinehart has done.
The title of Arnold Bennett’s new collection, Elsie and the Child and Other Stories, should be notice enough to the thousands who revelled in Riceyman Steps that the new book is one they may not miss. Yes, it is Elsie, the humble but lovable heroine of Clerkenwell, who figures again in this volume. It will be remembered that at the close of Riceyman Steps, Elsie, about to marry Joe, weakly consented to go to work as a servant for Mrs. Raste, while Joe (it was arranged) should resume his rôle as Dr. Raste’s handy man. This was due to the pleading of young Miss Raste; Elsie was never one to resist children. And so “Elsie and the Child” begins approximately where Riceyman Steps left off. It is a novelette in length, a most satisfactory morsel left over from the novel’s feast. With the very first page the feeling of Riceyman Steps in its more blissful moments is restored to the reader. The dozen shorter tales in the book are all from Mr. Bennett’s most recent work.
Bertrand W. Sinclair’s The Inverted Pyramid is work of such proportions and of a sufficient dignity to take him quite out of the group of “Western” writers. This is not to rate down the cowboy story, but it is to recognize that such work as Mr. Sinclair’s is something far more consequential. The inverted pyramid of the title is the social structure of a family set up by entailed wealth. Hawk’s Nest, on Big Dent, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, is the home of the Norquay family, founded in 1809 by a roving pioneer fur trader who obtained the immense tract of land from the Indians for a pittance. He held it intact and it has come down unspoiled to the fifth generation of Norquays—Dorothy, Roderick, Phil and Grove. Luck and ability has aggregated a huge fortune from the natural resources of the estate, which Roderick’s grandfather converted into a corporation, seventy per cent. of income going to the oldest son, the rest being divided among the others.
In the fifth generation various destinies open before the three brothers. Money, in the sense of finance (money plus power); love; the call of adventure; the quest of romance exert themselves on the three. The very structure of the family, however, makes it quite impossible that the destinies of one should not react in an exceptional degree upon the others. The responsibility for the maintenance of family standing, financial, social, moral, is interlocking. The old question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was never asked under a colder compulsion to return an affirmative answer: yes, because he is a fellow director on the board.
I have said nothing about the daughter, Dorothy, and will only say that her rôle in the novel is important. It is enough, I think, to indicate the largeness and the serious character of The Inverted Pyramid, and to hail it as a sign that Mr. Sinclair will give us other books as good or even better, to stand with this, his finest so far.
Susan Ertz’s Nina is at once more brilliant and more profound than her Madame Claire (a novel which sells better today than when it was first published). Nina is the study of a girl whose love, once given, cannot be revoked by any act or will of her own. Brought up by her aunt, Nina Wadsworth falls in love with Morton Caldwell, adopted as a boy by that same aunt. Morton is extraordinarily handsome, good-hearted, and hopelessly susceptible to women. Tony Fielding has the qualities of fidelity and devotion which Morton lacks. Henri Bouvier, the son of a French family in England, is a playmate in childhood. Miss Ertz deals directly only with Nina and Morton after their marriage; what has gone before is cleverly reflected in the scenes put before the reader. As in Madame Claire, a delightful feature is the points of view from which the story is told. Much of it is seen through the eyes of Henri, grown to manhood, French in his ideas, sophisticated, and almost equally sympathetic and discreet. His comments, both spoken and unspoken, are delicious. They do much to enliven a situation at bottom profoundly tragic by reason of Morton’s limitations as a husband and Nina’s tenacious love.
The novel is as unusual as it is competent, and the unusualness springs from the author’s competence. And when I say competence, I am not thinking only of the writing, which is admirable, but of the wisdom in human nature which underlies the tale. Every woman will be charmed with this novel because it is veracious in its feminine psychology, as most novels by men are not—and as most novels by women would be if women could avoid sentimentality as cleanly as Miss Ertz does. Yes, women will be engrossed by Nina because they will find in it those accents and indications which are their tests of the reality of men and women in intimate relation to each other, especially in the relations of love and marriage.
The depths of feminine psychology have been delicately sounded many times by Robert Hichens, whose new novel, After the Verdict, is of great length and painstaking detail. Here also we have an extremely dramatic story. Clive Baratrie, as the story opens, is on trial for the murder of Mrs. Sabine, a woman older than himself with whom he had a prolonged affair that began when Clive was a patient in her nursing home after the war. The young man is engaged to marry Vivian Denys, a girl of his own age, a splendid, fresh, outdoor person and one of the best tennis players in England. Miss Denys has stuck to Clive through his ordeal, and after his acquittal they are married. Clive’s mother, who lives to see him acquitted and for some time afterward, is the only other person of first importance in the 500-odd pages.
Is Clive guilty or innocent? He has been acquitted, true. And if innocent, of what avail to him? Must not his whole life be lived under the dark shadow of the crime? Must he not suffer as surely one way as the other? One goes four-fifths of the way through this novel in a state of tortured suspense. One does not know what to think as to Clive’s guilt or innocence, nor is there a definite clue in his uncertain behavior. The fact, when revealed, stuns by its impact. Mr. Hichens tells me that he had long had it in mind to study a man resting under the cloud of a murder charge; but he had another and greater thing in mind. “I wanted,” he says, “to show that in such a marriage as Clive’s and Vivian’s an absolute sincerity must exist between the two people.” But it is the studies of the women in After the Verdict which will impress and entrance the reader.
SUSAN ERTZ
Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose popular novels have been of a light character, has also been led to a study of a woman capable of ordering her world and ruling it. The title of her new novel, A White Stone, is from the second half of the seventeenth verse in the Book of Revelation: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” To Joyce Evers, the white stone at first was her diamond engagement ring. Later it is the great rock on the mountain where she takes her woes for quieting and consolation. It is long before she finds the unseen, intangible white stone of the mystical passage. A homely little girl, she had been the center of a marvelous romance when Duval, one of the world’s great pianists, asked her to marry him. In the chapters which show the gradual increase in Joyce of that power which is to be her salvation, Ruth Comfort Mitchell has done much abler work than in any story of hers before. Two somewhat unusual characters—Hannah Hills Blade, a novelist, and Chung, a Chinese servant—do a good deal to differentiate A White Stone from the run of novels. Chung is picturesque and is an excellent example of a certain fresh invention which is felt throughout the book. There is a strongly-written love story.
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In an interesting article on the work of Concha Espina,[60] Mr. James Fletcher Smith speaks of Dulce Nombre as “such a notable novel that it cried for instant translation.” The translation has been accomplished and under the title, The Red Beacon, this impressive story is now available to English readers. (The Spanish title is the name of the heroine, simply—Dulce Nombre de Maria, Sweet Name of Mary, which was shortened by use to Sweet Name.)
Who is Concha Espina? The question does us no credit, but our general lack of information about European writers makes a brief answer necessary. Concha Espina was born at Santander, Spain, in 1877. She is therefore of the Northern seaboard and the mountain country. The Red Beacon, for instance, is laid in the Cantabrian Mountains. Concha Espina’s title to be considered the foremost living woman novelist of her country seems to be undisputed. Possibly her two finest works are The Red Beacon and an earlier novel, La Esfinga Maragata (The Maragatan Sphinx; it was brought out in English as Mariflor). Although she has lived for some years in Madrid, Concha Espina remains unmistakably a Northerner. She married very young and went to South America (Chile) where affairs went badly and where she began writing as a newspaper correspondent to earn money.
The Red Beacon is a dramatic and somewhat tragic story of the people of her native region. Dulce Nombre, the heroine, is the daughter of a miller and the godchild of an hidalgo or nobleman, Nicolas Hornedo. Nicolas’s interest serves to educate her above her own station but not up to his; yet when she falls in love with a countryman, a lad named Manuel, Nicolas, distressed, aids a rich man in buying the young fellow off and getting him out of the country. The rich man, much older than Dulce Nombre, succeeds in getting her in marriage. His hope is that she will come to love him, but she does not. The marriage is the beginning of a long ordeal for the girl, an ordeal of waiting which nothing can hasten nor prevent. The story proceeds with well-sustained interest to a crisis supervening some years later, when with her husband’s death Dulce Nombre is again confronted with a difficult choice and a situation provocative of final despair. But happiness is in her destiny; Concha Espina shows us how it is realized at last.
A story written with an intimate knowledge of the heroine and with great, though restrained, feeling. It will be of more than ordinary interest to watch its reception by American readers.
NEW AND VARIED FICTION
A Conqueror Passes, by Larry Barretto. An after the war story—perhaps the best of them all—showing the reactions in business and social life of the returned soldier, restless, discontented, missing the excitement and tension of war. Told without either hysterics or despairing cynicism. A noteworthy book and a first novel by a writer who deserves close attention.
The Book of Blanche, by Dorothy Richardson. The love story, half earthly, half spiritual, of a beautiful violinist and a hospital surgeon; unique for its word pictures of the psychic phenomena of anæsthesia, and introducing a new American novelist of brilliance.
Blue Blood, by Owen Johnson. The story of a reckless society girl who sold herself to save her father’s honor—then waited in suspense for the order to deliver herself.
Pandora Lifts the Lid, by Christopher Morley and Don Marquis. An extravagant, light romance which opens with the kidnapping of six daughters of the rich from a girl’s seminary on Long Island and continues with a dashing yacht.
Semi-Attached, by Anne Parrish. A more serious novel than A Pocketful of Poses, but told with the same lively sense of the humorous moments in life. The story of a delightful girl who had to be converted to the idea of marriage.
The Show-Off, by William Almon Wolff, from the play by George Kelly. Aubrey Piper, the show-off, with his wing collar and bow tie, flower in his button-hole and patent leather shoes, is a character who will appeal universally because we all know him and laugh at him in everyday life. A realistic American novel, a satire that is full of humor and pathos.
Rôles, by Elizabeth Alexander. What happened when a discontented wealthy young wife changed places with her double, a hard-working actress—the kind of story one reads at a sitting, anxious to find out “how it will all come out,” and very much surprised by the dénouement. Witty.
Deep in the Hearts of Men, by Mary E. Waller. A story of the deeper human interests, especially of a man’s coming into spiritual light out of darkness, its scenes laid chiefly in a New Hampshire manufacturing town and the coal fields of West Virginia.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Stephen McKenna. A novel of English inner political circles after the war, in which some of the characters of the author’s famous novel, Sonia, make their final appearance.
Humdrum House? by Maximilian Foster. An exciting mystery story with both serious and farcical complications. You won’t, however, for a considerable time know which is which!
The Brute, by W. Douglas Newton. A mystery-adventure story of rapid movement with scenes in South America and a beautiful and wealthy English girl as the heroine. By a novelist who writes with more than ordinary skill in characterization.
The Thirteenth Letter, by Natalie Sumner Lincoln. Opens with a strange midnight marriage followed soon by a mysterious murder, and centers around the disappearance of a famous diamond worth $250,000. The author is an experienced hand in stories of this type, and the final solution depends upon a remarkable cipher.
The Laughing Rider, by Laurie Yorke Erskine. William O’Brien Argent, otherwise Smiling Billy Argent, is the central figure of this romantic adventure story which runs from the Texas plains to the Canadian Northwest.
A City Out of the Sea, by Alfred Stanford. The story of Michael Ballard, who is a lawyer for the people of New York’s waterfront, and who is attached to them because he finds them “hard and fair and wild.” His growth through certain violent episodes until the love of a beautiful woman matures his personality and power as an artist is the theme. The novel is the work of a young writer whose work is stamped with distinction. The story suggests Jack London, but is written with more finesse if with no less power.
Cuddy of the White Tops, by Earl Chapin May. An exhilarating tale of a college boy who discovers, on his father’s death, that the family fortune is all invested in a circus. He quits college and takes charge of the show—and finds he has a three-ring performance on his hands. Good love story.
After Harvest, by Charles Fielding Marsh. An English love story of the wind-swept Norfolk country, contrasting with, but of the same type as, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex stories. In Priscilla, John Thirtle of Brent Fen Farm, and the shepherd, Reuben Gladden, the author exhibits something common to all humanity and clearly expressed in the simple lives and deep passions of country folk.
Many Waters, by Elinor Chipp. A love story of present-day New England which begins when Marian Pritchard, Mark Wetherell, and Donald Callender are playmates. Marian, however, and Mark as well have a great ordeal to undergo before achieving mutual happiness.
The Quenchless Light, by Agnes C. Laut. A novel based on the lives of the Christian Apostles, vividly written, and of the general type of Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and F. Marion Crawford’s Via Crucis.
Low Bridge and Punk Pungs, by Sam Hellman. Mirth-provoking stories for bridge fiends and mah-jongg fans by the newest popular American humorist. With pictures by Tony Sarg.