A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 3

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT
FICTION.
by William Dean Howells

It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a
cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite
quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may
usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is
sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menace of reaction; in
reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose
heart from it. A few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction
to the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward and

upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there was a
counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled it back to that
lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and the word "novel" is
again the synonym of all that is morally false and mentally despicable.
Yet that this, too, is partly apparent, I think can be shown from some
phases of actual fiction which happen to be its very latest phases, and
which are of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as
surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we
may call "psychologism" has been present in the romanticism of the
last four or five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples
which it is the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with.
I.
No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now
decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst
just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he
was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its
intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though
they could not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself in
his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its
prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of
realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it
gives romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr.
Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is
nothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one is
important or unimportant according as things are happening to him or
not, but has in himself no claim upon the reader's attention. Once more
the novel begins to rise to its higher function, and to teach that men are
somehow masters of their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as
unpromising material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well
be chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who said
so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is the devil, and
on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure intellectual. He
apprehends all things from the mind, and does the effects even of
goodness from the pride of mental strength. Add to these conditions of
his personality that pathologically he is from time to time a drunkard,

with always the danger of remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure
of which so much may be despaired that it might almost be called
hopeless. I confess that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer,
this consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur, all
but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle went such a
great way with me that I thought I had enough of him by the end of the
trial, where he gets off a man charged with murder, and then cruelly
snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and I do not quite know how I kept
on to the point where Steele in his