III

Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only—why must I die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life. But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan Lande—now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire—where we see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the love of his fellows.It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog, a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who, in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through race suicide.)But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist or royalist—your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of silence—a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.IIIBut if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to draw a moral.There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is surprised to note her development. He admires her—too much so for our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of FredericMoreau; he displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes him seem an idler on the scene.When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words. Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows out his brains. A passive rôle is Sanine's in the composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translatinginto Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though, naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's, whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his genius.The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef, unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the courageous manner—and artistic, too—with which the Russian pursues the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter,the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness. Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will never bend the bow of Balzac.Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the teacher, are extremely attractive.Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande—who is evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like candles.As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party, and pastorals done in a way whichwould have extorted the admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement—related with blasting irony—and drinking festivals which are masterly in their sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions, landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises, revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression.The end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is a time for tears; though I cannot quitebelieve in this doctor, who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions or their causes.Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right, ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born. Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and crowded, themotivation subtly managed. As is the case with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the "chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch, and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death. Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may eatroast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful to the last—they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.There is a nihilistic doctor—the most viable character of all about whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy—a particularly fascinating actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by a young painter (a Sanine type,i. e., Max Stirnerism in action), while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet it compels reflection and rereading. Why?Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation where sanityand cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith."CHAPTER VA NOTE ON HENRY JAMESIIn company with other distinguished men who have passed away during the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected. Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter; but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs. Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the future.James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray,and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James disliked Sentimental Education—like other great critics he had his blind side—yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formalchanges introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not to mention that of Jane Austen.Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not. These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocationreveal magic in their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All the rest is life.As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose. Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot be resolved except in theterms of his own matchless art. His meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose. However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a metaphysician and moralist—the writings of Henry James, the elder, are far from negligible—the brother of the greatest American psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Châteaubriand, the final test of noble prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting." The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, cheap historical vapidities,and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor, the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected. In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the fault—or virtue—of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his deep-veined humanity may be felt by thosewho read him aright. His Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry James is a faithful Secretary to Society—the phrase is Balzac's—to the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.IIBefore me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me, truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English critic—and how many others?—to perform variations on the theme of Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamentalPuritan—one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans. He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great "immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr. Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncannycombination—Henry and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr. Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire; and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs incompetentlyhandled by men of the lowest class of intelligence." But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but, after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The soul is immortal certainly—if you've got one, but most people haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through, but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers—a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the way, will loom larger inthe future despite his impersonality and microscopic manner.The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait. Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the spiritual antennæ which he puts forth so tentatively always touch real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He peeps into the glowing core ofemotion, but seldom describes it. His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious, of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly, Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered" surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity, is as clairvoyant as James.Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness. However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy" (George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in the blue he weaves a web ofgold and lace, and it is marvellously spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human, emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity. There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues. His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not "the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of omission has dispensed withthe entire banal apparatus of fiction as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique melodramatics, set developments and dénouements, mastodonic structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality. Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him sympathetically one recalls the saying ofMaurice Barrès: "For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two egos—the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its "secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the tasteless.CHAPTER VIGEORGE SANDThou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called George Sand!—Mrs. Browning.IWho reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex, and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin didn't exactly practise what she preached andGeorge Sand did. For her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her reputation was worldwide.We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently published by Vladimir Karénine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme. Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable. She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents. More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own intellectual processes.Mme. Karénine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading—The Devil's Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her autobiography—the rest is a burden tothe spirit. Her facility astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene, flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais. Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs d'œuvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality," he said—not a bad definition—and "she is stupid, heavy, and a chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot. Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised by all her associates.Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau—he might have added Byron, also—she is false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern. She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferableartist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and—wrote. Nietzsche, like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Père Didon said that her books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral? What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality. As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the Ibsen plays or Æsop's fables.Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned—there is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained, all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent as last year's mist.Mme. Karénine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject; indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude and, if criticallyshe is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose delectation! A "cold devil"—à la Félicien Rops. I doubt this. Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness. Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the Sargossian seas of British prudery.In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful grandmother. She had the featherbedtemperament, and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and the idol of the literary world.How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues—save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings.IIGeorge Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men; with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping withone eye open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight days, and Mérimée is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish Prosper at once grew frigid.A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en compote." And she was incorrigibly naïve—they called it "Idealism" in those days—witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can reread him.But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man. He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same. George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage—and the wisdom—to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. SolangeSand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her mother—truly a Gallic triangle—but she so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clésinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme. Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.Clésinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her husband, François-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband five hundred thousand francs.)But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copioussoul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised. She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.IIISince the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering with their family duties. But they continued, did these same refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices. Theyloved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our days, Sand's is positivelyidyllic. She is one parent of the Woman movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to do—and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males, other tales.She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert thekitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was always æsthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her fiction. Her Indianas, Lélias, and the other romantic insurgents against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.IVGeorge Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'œil sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Hernose was thick and not overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never wholly yielded to her. Mérimée despised her in his chilly fashion. Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset—who, when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and, with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some fashionable boulevard café—seems to have loved her romantically, the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is credited with is impossible.There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello—who was jilted when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux, Félicien Mallefille, Chopin, Mérimée, Manceau, and the platonic friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence on the grumbling giant ofCroisset was tonic. It was she who should have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period, notwithstanding Mme. Karénine's denial? She denies the Leroux affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has been corroborated since by Mme. Karénine. What a loss for inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper, matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, thecritic who describes her as having the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch, arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the candied thunder of Sand herself.De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians, did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly called—Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.CHAPTER VIITHE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIWhen the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed that he could do the "big bow-wow strain," but to Jane Austen must be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship, there was then no question upon the critical map of the so-called "great American novel." Sir Walter Scott—to whom such authors of historical novels as Châteaubriand and his Martyrs, the Salammbô of Flaubert, and that well-nigh perfect fiction, The History of Henry Esmond, by Thackeray, yield precedence—might have achieved the impossible: the writing of a library, epitomising the social history of "These States"—as Walt Whitman would say. After Scott no name but Balzac's occurs to the memory; Balzac, who laid all France under his microscope (and France is all of a piece, not the checker-board of nationalities we call America). Even the mighty Tolstoy would have balked the job. And if these giants would have failed, what may be said of their successors? The idea of a great American novel is an "absolute," and nature abhors an absolute, despite the belief of some metaphysiciansto the contrary. Yet the notion still obtains and inquests are held from time to time, and the opinions of contemporary novelists are taken toll of; as if each man and woman could give aught else but their own side of the matter, that side which is rightfully enough personal and provincial. The question is, after all, an affair for critics, and the great American novel will be in the plural; thousands perhaps. America is a chord of many nations, and to find the key-note we must play much and varied music.While a novelist may be cosmopolitan at his own risk, a critic should be ever so.Considerthe names of such widely contrasted critical temperaments as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, De Gourmont, Matthew Arnold, Brandes, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Henry James, Gosse, and W. C. Brownell; all cosmopolitan as well as national. The sublime tenuities of Henry James, like the black music of Michael Artzibashef, are questions largely temperamental. But the Russian is all Slavic, and no one would maintain that Mr. James shows a like ingrained nationalism. Nevertheless, he is American, though dealing only with a certain side of American life, the cosmopolitan phase. At his peril an American novelist sails eastward to describe the history of his countrymen abroad. With the critic we come upon a different territory. He may go gadding after new mud-gods (the newest god invented byman is always the greatest), for the time being, and return to his native heath mentally refreshed and broadened by his foreign outing. Not so the maker of fiction. Once he cuts loose his balloon he is in danger of not getting home again.Mr. James is a splendid case for us; he began in America and landed in England, there to stay. Our other felicitous example of cosmopolitanism is Henry Blake Fuller, the author of The Chevalier Pensieri Vani and The Châtelaine de la Trinité, who was so widely read in the nineties. After those charming excursions into a rapidly vanishing Europe Mr. Fuller reversed the proceeding of James; he returned to America and composed two novels of high artistic significance, The Cliff Dwellers and With the Procession, which, while they continued the realistic tradition of William Dean Howells, were also the forerunners of a new movement in America. It is not necessary to dwell now on The Last Refuge, or on that masterly book of spiritual parodies, The Puppet-Booth. But Mr. Fuller did not write the great American novel. Neither did Mr. Howells, nor Mr. James. Who has? No one. Is there such a thing? Without existing it might be described in Celtic fashion, this mythical work, as pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of argument that if it were written by some unknown monster of genius, it would, like Lewis Carroll's Snark, turn into a Boojum.Henry James has said that no one is compelled to admire any particular sort of writing; that the province of fiction is all life, and he has also wisely remarked that "when you have no taste you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste," and may we add, when you have no discretion you perpetrate the shocking fiction with which America is deluged at this hour. We are told that the new writers have altered the old canons of bad taste, but "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." A liquorish sentimentality is the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.) Be sentimental and you will succeed! We agree with Dostoievsky that in fiction, as well as in life, there are no general principles, only special cases. But these cases, could they not be typical? even if there are not types, only individuals. And are men and women so inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life? Have the motion-pictures hopelessly deranged our critical values? I know that in America charity covers a multitude of mediocrities, nevertheless, I am loath to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched contemporary fiction is meant in earnest.Well, chacun à ses dégoûts! The "thrilling" detective story, the romantic sonorities of the ice cream-soda woman novelist?—with a triple-barrelled name, as Rudyard Kipling put it once upon a time—or that church of HeavenlyEnnui, the historical novel—what a cemetery of ideas, all of them! An outsider must be puzzle-pated by this tumult of tasteless writing and worse observation. However, history in fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows, brilliant, lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings; but where Thackeray succeeded multitudes have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust, we possess in abundance; thus far it has cultivated with success its own parochial garden—which is as it should be. The United States of Fiction. America is Cosmopolis.IIAs to the Puritanism of our present novels one may dare to say in the teeth of youthful protestants that it is non-existent. The pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as literary artists are rare, the result has not been reassuring. Zola seems prudish after some experiments of the younger crowd. How badly they pull off the trick. How coarse and hard and heavy their touch. Most of these productions read like stupid translations from a dull French original. They are not immoral, only vulgar. As old Flaubert used to say: such books are false, nature is not like that. How keenly he saw through the humbug of "free love"—a romantic tradition of George Sand's epoch—may be noted in his comment thatEmma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Ah! that much-despised, stupid, venerable institution, marriage! How it has been flouted since the days of Rousseau—the father of false romanticism and that stupefying legend, the "equality" of mankind. (O! the beautiful word, "equality," invented for the delectation of rudimentary minds.) A century and more fiction has played with the theme of concubinage. If the Nacquet divorce bill had been introduced a decade or so before it was in France, what would have become of the theatre of Dumas fils, or later, of the misunderstood woman in Ibsen's plays? All such tribal taboos make or unmake literature.So, merely as a suggestion to ambitious youngsters, let the novelist of the future in search of a novelty describe a happy marriage, children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble, a wife who votes, yet loves her home, her family, and knows how to cook. What a realistic bombshell he would hurl into the camp of sentimental socialists and them that believe a wedding certificate is like Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin—a document daily shrinking in happiness. Absurdities make martyrs, but of all the absurd and ineffectual martyrdoms that of running off with another's wife is usually the crowning one. "I don't call this very popular pie," said the little boy in Richard Grant White's story; and the man in the case is usually the first to complain of his bargain in pastry.However, categories are virtually an avowal of mental impuissance, and all marriages are not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality there are many mansions. When too late you may sport with the shade—not in the shade—of Amaryllis, and perhaps elbow epigrams as a lean consolation. That is your own affair. Paul Verlaine has told us that "j'ai vécu énormément," though his living enormously did not prove that he was happy. Far from it. But he had at least the courage to relate his terrors. American novelists may agree with Dostoievsky that "everything in the world always ends in meanness"; or with Doctor Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. An affair of temperament. But don't mix the values. Don't confuse intellectual substances. Don't smear a fact with treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't preach. Impiety is an indiscretion, yet, don't be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane Austen and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern English novel, to many modern instances, fiction has thrived best on naked truth. All the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling, and sentimentalism. Didn't Mr. Roundabout declare in one of his famous papers that "Figs are sweet, but fictions are sweeter"? In our land we can't get the latter sweet enough. Altruism, Brotherhood of Man Uplifting. These are the shibboleths of the "nouvelles couches sociales." Prodigious!IIIJ.-K. Huysmans declared that in the land of books there are no schools; no idealism, realism, symbolism; only good writers and bad. Whistler said the same about painting and painters. Setting aside the technical viewpoint of such dicta, we fancy that our "best sellers" do not preoccupy themselves with the "mere writing" of their fictions, but they have developed a formidable faculty of preaching. Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal charm, that delineates manners, or stirs the pulse of tragedy—not melodrama, is vanishing from publishers' lists. Are there not as many charming men and women perambulating the rind of the planet as there were in the days when Jane Austen, or Howells, or Turgenev wrote? We refuse to believe there are not; but there is little opportunity, in a word, no market, for the display of these qualities. The novel with a purpose, generally an unpleasant purpose, has usurped the rule of the novel of character and manners. Boanerges, not Balzac, now occupies the pasteboard pulpit of fiction.I quoted Henry James to the effect that all life is the province of the novelist. Nevertheless, the still small garden wherein is reared the tender solitary flower does but ill represent the vaster, complicated forest of common humanity.The ivory tower of the cultivated egoist is not to be unduly admired; rather Zola's La Terre with its foul facts than a palace of morbid art. Withal, the didactic side of our fiction is overdone. I set it down to the humbug about the "masses" being opposed to the "classes." Truly a false antithesis. As if the French bourgeois were not a product of the revolution (poor bourgeois, always abused by the novelist). As if a poor man suddenly enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest taskmaster to his own class. Consider the new-rich. What a study they afford the students of manners. A new generation has arisen. Its taste, intelligence, and culture; its canned manners, canned music—preferably pseudo-African—canned art, canned food, canned literature; its devotion to the mediocre—what a field for our aspiring young "secretaries to society."Cheap prophylactics, political and religious—for religion is fast being butchered to make the sensational evangelists' holiday—are in vogue. They affect our fiction-mongers, who burn to avenge wrongs, write novels about the "downtrodden masses," and sermons on social evils—evils that have always existed, always will exist. Like the knife-grinder, story they have none to tell. Why write fiction, or what they are pleased to call fiction? Why not join the brave brigade of agitators and pamphleteers? The lay preachers are carryingoff the sweepstakes. For them Mr. Howells is a superannuated writer. Would there were more like him in continence of speech, wholesomeness of judgment, nobility of ideals, and in the shrewd perception of character.Fiction, too, is a fine art, though this patent fact has escaped the juvenile Paul Prys, who are mainly endeavouring to arouse class against mass. It's an old dodge, this equality theory, as old as Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. When all fruit fails, welcome envy and malicious slandering. When you have nothing else to write about, attack your neighbour, especially if he hath a much-coveted vineyard. Max Stirner, least understood of social philosophers, wrote, "Mind your own business," and he forged on the anvil of experience a mighty leading motive for the conduct of life. But our busy little penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter the "masses." Mr. Bryan a few years ago told us that we were all middle class. What is middle class? In Carlyle's day it was a "gig-man"; in ours is it the owner of a "flivver"? But in the case of Snob vs. Mob, Snob always wins.This twaddle about "democratic art" is the bane of our literature. There is only good art. Whether it deals with such "democratic" subjects as L'Assommoir or Germinie Lacerteux, or such "aristocratic" themes as those of D'Annunzio and Paul Bourget, it is the art thereofthat determines the product. I hold no brief for the sterile fiction that is enrolled under the banner of "Art for Art." I go so far as to believe that a novelist with a beautiful style often allows that style to get in the way of human nature. Stained-glass windows have their use, but they falsify the daylight. A decorative style may suit pseudo-mediæval romances, but for twentieth-century realism it is sadly amiss. Nor is the arterio-sclerotic school of psychological analysis to be altogether commended. It has been well-nigh done to death by Stendhal, Meredith, James, and Bourget; and it is as cold as a star. Flaubert urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving something that the other fellow can prove precisely the opposite. In either case selection plays the rôle.The chief argument against the novel "with a purpose"—as the jargon goes—is its lack of validity either as a document or as art. A novel may be anything, but it must not be polemical. Zola has been, still is, the evil genius of many talented chaps who "sling ink," not to make a genuine book, but to create a sensation. Such writers lack patience, art, and direction. They always keep one eye on the box-office. Indeed, the young men and women of the day, who are squandering upon paper their golden genius, painfully resemble in their productions the dime novels once published by the lamented Beadle or the lucubrationsin the Saturday weeklies of long ago. But in those publications there was more virility. The heroes then were not well-dressed namby-pambies; the villains were villainous; the detectives detected real crimes, and were not weavers of metaphysical abstractions like your latter-day miracle-workers of an impossible Scotland Yard; and the girls were girls, neither neurasthenic, nor did they outgolf all creation. The "new" novelists still deal with the same raw material of melodrama. Their handling of love-episodes has much of the blaring-brass quality of old-fashioned Italian opera. They loudly twang the strings of sloppy sentiment, which evoke not music, but mush and moonshine. And these are our "motion-masters" to-day.

Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only—why must I die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life. But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.

He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan Lande—now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire—where we see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the love of his fellows.

It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog, a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who, in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through race suicide.)

But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist or royalist—your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of silence—a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.

But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to draw a moral.

There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is surprised to note her development. He admires her—too much so for our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of FredericMoreau; he displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes him seem an idler on the scene.

When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words. Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows out his brains. A passive rôle is Sanine's in the composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.

A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translatinginto Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.

Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though, naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's, whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his genius.

The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef, unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the courageous manner—and artistic, too—with which the Russian pursues the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter,the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness. Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will never bend the bow of Balzac.

Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the teacher, are extremely attractive.

Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande—who is evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like candles.

As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party, and pastorals done in a way whichwould have extorted the admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement—related with blasting irony—and drinking festivals which are masterly in their sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions, landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises, revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.

Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.

I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression.The end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.

This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is a time for tears; though I cannot quitebelieve in this doctor, who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions or their causes.

Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right, ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born. Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]

Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and crowded, themotivation subtly managed. As is the case with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the "chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch, and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.

There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death. Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may eatroast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful to the last—they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.

There is a nihilistic doctor—the most viable character of all about whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy—a particularly fascinating actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by a young painter (a Sanine type,i. e., Max Stirnerism in action), while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet it compels reflection and rereading. Why?

Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation where sanityand cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith."

In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected. Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter; but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs. Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the future.

James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray,and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.

As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James disliked Sentimental Education—like other great critics he had his blind side—yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formalchanges introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not to mention that of Jane Austen.

Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not. These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocationreveal magic in their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All the rest is life.

As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose. Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot be resolved except in theterms of his own matchless art. His meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose. However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a metaphysician and moralist—the writings of Henry James, the elder, are far from negligible—the brother of the greatest American psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Châteaubriand, the final test of noble prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting." The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, cheap historical vapidities,and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor, the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected. In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the fault—or virtue—of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his deep-veined humanity may be felt by thosewho read him aright. His Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry James is a faithful Secretary to Society—the phrase is Balzac's—to the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.

Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me, truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English critic—and how many others?—to perform variations on the theme of Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamentalPuritan—one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans. He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great "immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.

Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr. Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncannycombination—Henry and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr. Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire; and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.

Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs incompetentlyhandled by men of the lowest class of intelligence." But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but, after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The soul is immortal certainly—if you've got one, but most people haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through, but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers—a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the way, will loom larger inthe future despite his impersonality and microscopic manner.

The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait. Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the spiritual antennæ which he puts forth so tentatively always touch real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He peeps into the glowing core ofemotion, but seldom describes it. His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious, of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly, Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered" surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity, is as clairvoyant as James.

Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness. However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy" (George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in the blue he weaves a web ofgold and lace, and it is marvellously spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.

Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human, emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity. There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues. His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not "the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of omission has dispensed withthe entire banal apparatus of fiction as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique melodramatics, set developments and dénouements, mastodonic structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality. Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him sympathetically one recalls the saying ofMaurice Barrès: "For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two egos—the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its "secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the tasteless.

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called George Sand!—Mrs. Browning.

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called George Sand!

—Mrs. Browning.

Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex, and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin didn't exactly practise what she preached andGeorge Sand did. For her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her reputation was worldwide.

We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently published by Vladimir Karénine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme. Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable. She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents. More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own intellectual processes.

Mme. Karénine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading—The Devil's Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her autobiography—the rest is a burden tothe spirit. Her facility astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene, flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais. Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs d'œuvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality," he said—not a bad definition—and "she is stupid, heavy, and a chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot. Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised by all her associates.

Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau—he might have added Byron, also—she is false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern. She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferableartist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and—wrote. Nietzsche, like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Père Didon said that her books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral? What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality. As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the Ibsen plays or Æsop's fables.

Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned—there is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained, all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent as last year's mist.

Mme. Karénine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject; indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude and, if criticallyshe is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose delectation! A "cold devil"—à la Félicien Rops. I doubt this. Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness. Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the Sargossian seas of British prudery.

In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful grandmother. She had the featherbedtemperament, and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and the idol of the literary world.

How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues—save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings.

George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men; with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping withone eye open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight days, and Mérimée is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish Prosper at once grew frigid.

A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en compote." And she was incorrigibly naïve—they called it "Idealism" in those days—witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can reread him.

But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man. He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same. George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage—and the wisdom—to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.

The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. SolangeSand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her mother—truly a Gallic triangle—but she so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clésinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme. Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.

Clésinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her husband, François-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband five hundred thousand francs.)

But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copioussoul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised. She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.

Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering with their family duties. But they continued, did these same refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices. Theyloved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our days, Sand's is positivelyidyllic. She is one parent of the Woman movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to do—and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males, other tales.

She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert thekitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was always æsthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her fiction. Her Indianas, Lélias, and the other romantic insurgents against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.

George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'œil sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Hernose was thick and not overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never wholly yielded to her. Mérimée despised her in his chilly fashion. Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset—who, when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and, with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some fashionable boulevard café—seems to have loved her romantically, the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is credited with is impossible.

There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello—who was jilted when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux, Félicien Mallefille, Chopin, Mérimée, Manceau, and the platonic friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence on the grumbling giant ofCroisset was tonic. It was she who should have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period, notwithstanding Mme. Karénine's denial? She denies the Leroux affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?

Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has been corroborated since by Mme. Karénine. What a loss for inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper, matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.

Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, thecritic who describes her as having the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.

Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch, arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the candied thunder of Sand herself.

De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians, did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly called—Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.

When the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed that he could do the "big bow-wow strain," but to Jane Austen must be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship, there was then no question upon the critical map of the so-called "great American novel." Sir Walter Scott—to whom such authors of historical novels as Châteaubriand and his Martyrs, the Salammbô of Flaubert, and that well-nigh perfect fiction, The History of Henry Esmond, by Thackeray, yield precedence—might have achieved the impossible: the writing of a library, epitomising the social history of "These States"—as Walt Whitman would say. After Scott no name but Balzac's occurs to the memory; Balzac, who laid all France under his microscope (and France is all of a piece, not the checker-board of nationalities we call America). Even the mighty Tolstoy would have balked the job. And if these giants would have failed, what may be said of their successors? The idea of a great American novel is an "absolute," and nature abhors an absolute, despite the belief of some metaphysiciansto the contrary. Yet the notion still obtains and inquests are held from time to time, and the opinions of contemporary novelists are taken toll of; as if each man and woman could give aught else but their own side of the matter, that side which is rightfully enough personal and provincial. The question is, after all, an affair for critics, and the great American novel will be in the plural; thousands perhaps. America is a chord of many nations, and to find the key-note we must play much and varied music.

While a novelist may be cosmopolitan at his own risk, a critic should be ever so.Considerthe names of such widely contrasted critical temperaments as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, De Gourmont, Matthew Arnold, Brandes, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Henry James, Gosse, and W. C. Brownell; all cosmopolitan as well as national. The sublime tenuities of Henry James, like the black music of Michael Artzibashef, are questions largely temperamental. But the Russian is all Slavic, and no one would maintain that Mr. James shows a like ingrained nationalism. Nevertheless, he is American, though dealing only with a certain side of American life, the cosmopolitan phase. At his peril an American novelist sails eastward to describe the history of his countrymen abroad. With the critic we come upon a different territory. He may go gadding after new mud-gods (the newest god invented byman is always the greatest), for the time being, and return to his native heath mentally refreshed and broadened by his foreign outing. Not so the maker of fiction. Once he cuts loose his balloon he is in danger of not getting home again.

Mr. James is a splendid case for us; he began in America and landed in England, there to stay. Our other felicitous example of cosmopolitanism is Henry Blake Fuller, the author of The Chevalier Pensieri Vani and The Châtelaine de la Trinité, who was so widely read in the nineties. After those charming excursions into a rapidly vanishing Europe Mr. Fuller reversed the proceeding of James; he returned to America and composed two novels of high artistic significance, The Cliff Dwellers and With the Procession, which, while they continued the realistic tradition of William Dean Howells, were also the forerunners of a new movement in America. It is not necessary to dwell now on The Last Refuge, or on that masterly book of spiritual parodies, The Puppet-Booth. But Mr. Fuller did not write the great American novel. Neither did Mr. Howells, nor Mr. James. Who has? No one. Is there such a thing? Without existing it might be described in Celtic fashion, this mythical work, as pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of argument that if it were written by some unknown monster of genius, it would, like Lewis Carroll's Snark, turn into a Boojum.

Henry James has said that no one is compelled to admire any particular sort of writing; that the province of fiction is all life, and he has also wisely remarked that "when you have no taste you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste," and may we add, when you have no discretion you perpetrate the shocking fiction with which America is deluged at this hour. We are told that the new writers have altered the old canons of bad taste, but "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." A liquorish sentimentality is the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.) Be sentimental and you will succeed! We agree with Dostoievsky that in fiction, as well as in life, there are no general principles, only special cases. But these cases, could they not be typical? even if there are not types, only individuals. And are men and women so inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life? Have the motion-pictures hopelessly deranged our critical values? I know that in America charity covers a multitude of mediocrities, nevertheless, I am loath to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched contemporary fiction is meant in earnest.

Well, chacun à ses dégoûts! The "thrilling" detective story, the romantic sonorities of the ice cream-soda woman novelist?—with a triple-barrelled name, as Rudyard Kipling put it once upon a time—or that church of HeavenlyEnnui, the historical novel—what a cemetery of ideas, all of them! An outsider must be puzzle-pated by this tumult of tasteless writing and worse observation. However, history in fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows, brilliant, lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings; but where Thackeray succeeded multitudes have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust, we possess in abundance; thus far it has cultivated with success its own parochial garden—which is as it should be. The United States of Fiction. America is Cosmopolis.

As to the Puritanism of our present novels one may dare to say in the teeth of youthful protestants that it is non-existent. The pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as literary artists are rare, the result has not been reassuring. Zola seems prudish after some experiments of the younger crowd. How badly they pull off the trick. How coarse and hard and heavy their touch. Most of these productions read like stupid translations from a dull French original. They are not immoral, only vulgar. As old Flaubert used to say: such books are false, nature is not like that. How keenly he saw through the humbug of "free love"—a romantic tradition of George Sand's epoch—may be noted in his comment thatEmma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Ah! that much-despised, stupid, venerable institution, marriage! How it has been flouted since the days of Rousseau—the father of false romanticism and that stupefying legend, the "equality" of mankind. (O! the beautiful word, "equality," invented for the delectation of rudimentary minds.) A century and more fiction has played with the theme of concubinage. If the Nacquet divorce bill had been introduced a decade or so before it was in France, what would have become of the theatre of Dumas fils, or later, of the misunderstood woman in Ibsen's plays? All such tribal taboos make or unmake literature.

So, merely as a suggestion to ambitious youngsters, let the novelist of the future in search of a novelty describe a happy marriage, children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble, a wife who votes, yet loves her home, her family, and knows how to cook. What a realistic bombshell he would hurl into the camp of sentimental socialists and them that believe a wedding certificate is like Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin—a document daily shrinking in happiness. Absurdities make martyrs, but of all the absurd and ineffectual martyrdoms that of running off with another's wife is usually the crowning one. "I don't call this very popular pie," said the little boy in Richard Grant White's story; and the man in the case is usually the first to complain of his bargain in pastry.

However, categories are virtually an avowal of mental impuissance, and all marriages are not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality there are many mansions. When too late you may sport with the shade—not in the shade—of Amaryllis, and perhaps elbow epigrams as a lean consolation. That is your own affair. Paul Verlaine has told us that "j'ai vécu énormément," though his living enormously did not prove that he was happy. Far from it. But he had at least the courage to relate his terrors. American novelists may agree with Dostoievsky that "everything in the world always ends in meanness"; or with Doctor Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds. An affair of temperament. But don't mix the values. Don't confuse intellectual substances. Don't smear a fact with treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't preach. Impiety is an indiscretion, yet, don't be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane Austen and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern English novel, to many modern instances, fiction has thrived best on naked truth. All the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling, and sentimentalism. Didn't Mr. Roundabout declare in one of his famous papers that "Figs are sweet, but fictions are sweeter"? In our land we can't get the latter sweet enough. Altruism, Brotherhood of Man Uplifting. These are the shibboleths of the "nouvelles couches sociales." Prodigious!

J.-K. Huysmans declared that in the land of books there are no schools; no idealism, realism, symbolism; only good writers and bad. Whistler said the same about painting and painters. Setting aside the technical viewpoint of such dicta, we fancy that our "best sellers" do not preoccupy themselves with the "mere writing" of their fictions, but they have developed a formidable faculty of preaching. Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal charm, that delineates manners, or stirs the pulse of tragedy—not melodrama, is vanishing from publishers' lists. Are there not as many charming men and women perambulating the rind of the planet as there were in the days when Jane Austen, or Howells, or Turgenev wrote? We refuse to believe there are not; but there is little opportunity, in a word, no market, for the display of these qualities. The novel with a purpose, generally an unpleasant purpose, has usurped the rule of the novel of character and manners. Boanerges, not Balzac, now occupies the pasteboard pulpit of fiction.

I quoted Henry James to the effect that all life is the province of the novelist. Nevertheless, the still small garden wherein is reared the tender solitary flower does but ill represent the vaster, complicated forest of common humanity.The ivory tower of the cultivated egoist is not to be unduly admired; rather Zola's La Terre with its foul facts than a palace of morbid art. Withal, the didactic side of our fiction is overdone. I set it down to the humbug about the "masses" being opposed to the "classes." Truly a false antithesis. As if the French bourgeois were not a product of the revolution (poor bourgeois, always abused by the novelist). As if a poor man suddenly enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest taskmaster to his own class. Consider the new-rich. What a study they afford the students of manners. A new generation has arisen. Its taste, intelligence, and culture; its canned manners, canned music—preferably pseudo-African—canned art, canned food, canned literature; its devotion to the mediocre—what a field for our aspiring young "secretaries to society."

Cheap prophylactics, political and religious—for religion is fast being butchered to make the sensational evangelists' holiday—are in vogue. They affect our fiction-mongers, who burn to avenge wrongs, write novels about the "downtrodden masses," and sermons on social evils—evils that have always existed, always will exist. Like the knife-grinder, story they have none to tell. Why write fiction, or what they are pleased to call fiction? Why not join the brave brigade of agitators and pamphleteers? The lay preachers are carryingoff the sweepstakes. For them Mr. Howells is a superannuated writer. Would there were more like him in continence of speech, wholesomeness of judgment, nobility of ideals, and in the shrewd perception of character.

Fiction, too, is a fine art, though this patent fact has escaped the juvenile Paul Prys, who are mainly endeavouring to arouse class against mass. It's an old dodge, this equality theory, as old as Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. When all fruit fails, welcome envy and malicious slandering. When you have nothing else to write about, attack your neighbour, especially if he hath a much-coveted vineyard. Max Stirner, least understood of social philosophers, wrote, "Mind your own business," and he forged on the anvil of experience a mighty leading motive for the conduct of life. But our busy little penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter the "masses." Mr. Bryan a few years ago told us that we were all middle class. What is middle class? In Carlyle's day it was a "gig-man"; in ours is it the owner of a "flivver"? But in the case of Snob vs. Mob, Snob always wins.

This twaddle about "democratic art" is the bane of our literature. There is only good art. Whether it deals with such "democratic" subjects as L'Assommoir or Germinie Lacerteux, or such "aristocratic" themes as those of D'Annunzio and Paul Bourget, it is the art thereofthat determines the product. I hold no brief for the sterile fiction that is enrolled under the banner of "Art for Art." I go so far as to believe that a novelist with a beautiful style often allows that style to get in the way of human nature. Stained-glass windows have their use, but they falsify the daylight. A decorative style may suit pseudo-mediæval romances, but for twentieth-century realism it is sadly amiss. Nor is the arterio-sclerotic school of psychological analysis to be altogether commended. It has been well-nigh done to death by Stendhal, Meredith, James, and Bourget; and it is as cold as a star. Flaubert urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving something that the other fellow can prove precisely the opposite. In either case selection plays the rôle.

The chief argument against the novel "with a purpose"—as the jargon goes—is its lack of validity either as a document or as art. A novel may be anything, but it must not be polemical. Zola has been, still is, the evil genius of many talented chaps who "sling ink," not to make a genuine book, but to create a sensation. Such writers lack patience, art, and direction. They always keep one eye on the box-office. Indeed, the young men and women of the day, who are squandering upon paper their golden genius, painfully resemble in their productions the dime novels once published by the lamented Beadle or the lucubrationsin the Saturday weeklies of long ago. But in those publications there was more virility. The heroes then were not well-dressed namby-pambies; the villains were villainous; the detectives detected real crimes, and were not weavers of metaphysical abstractions like your latter-day miracle-workers of an impossible Scotland Yard; and the girls were girls, neither neurasthenic, nor did they outgolf all creation. The "new" novelists still deal with the same raw material of melodrama. Their handling of love-episodes has much of the blaring-brass quality of old-fashioned Italian opera. They loudly twang the strings of sloppy sentiment, which evoke not music, but mush and moonshine. And these are our "motion-masters" to-day.

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