



Produced by Anthony J. Adam.









A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION.

by

William Dean Howells



It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a
cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite
quarter.  It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence
may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide
which is sure, sooner or later, to come.  In reform, it is the menace
of reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take
heart as we must lose heart from it.  A  few years ago, when a movement
which carried fiction to the  highest place in literature was
apparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be no
return or descent, there was  a counter-current in it which stayed it
at last, and pulled it back  to that lamentable level where fiction is
now sunk, and the word "novel" is again the synonym of all that is
morally false and  mentally despicable.  Yet that this, too, is partly
apparent, I  think can be shown from some phases of actual fiction
which  happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of a
significance  as hopeful as it is interesting.  Quite as surely as
romanticism  lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call
"psychologism" has been present in the romanticism of the last  four or
five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it is
the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with.



I.

No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now
decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst
just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he
was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its
intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though they
could not avail to save it from final contempt.  He saves himself in
his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its
prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of
realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it
gives romanticism whatever will survive it.  In "The Right of Way" Mr.
Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is
nothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one is
important or unimportant according as things are happening to him or
not, but has in himself no claim upon the reader's attention.  Once
more the novel begins to rise to its higher function, and to teach that
men are somehow masters of their fate.  His Charley Steele is, indeed,
as unpromising material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could
well be chosen.  One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who
said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is the
devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure
intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does the
effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength.  Add to
these conditions of his personality that pathologically he is from time
to time a drunkard, with always the danger of remaining a drunkard, and
you have a figure of which so much may be despaired that it might
almost be called hopeless.  I confess that in the beginning this
brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this consciencelessly powerful advocate, at
once mocker and poseur, all but failed to interest me.  A little of him
and his monocle went such a great way with me that I thought I had
enough of him by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged
with murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and
I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in his
drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of drunken
lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where they have
thrown him, and where his former client finds him.  From that point I
could not forsake him to the end, though I found myself more than once
in the world where things happen of themselves and do not happen from
the temperaments of its inhabitants.  In a better and wiser world, the
homicide would not perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life
of the advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one
consents