A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 4

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 to a great deal besides in the story,
which is imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist's affair
is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world, the
appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature
employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go through life
without seeing one, and some of us contract such a prejudice against
miracles that when they are performed for us we suspect a trick. When
I suffered from this suspicion in "The Right of Way" I was the more
vexed because I felt that I was in the hands of a connoisseur of
character who had no need of miracles.
I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as far as I
have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasures for
me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure down cold,
but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more than that of
him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well as social,
sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy
woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book,
which is historical of the present rather than the past, he gives one a
realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country but in the city,
at least so far as they affect each other psychologically in society, and

makes one feel their interesting temperamental difference from
Americans. His Montrealers are still Englishmen in their strenuous
individuality; but in the frank expression of character, of eccentricity,
Charley Steele is like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when
people were not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when
they wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second life
he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied spirit might
have, if it could be made known to us in the circumstances of another
world. He has, indeed, made almost as clean a break with his past as if
he had really been drowned in the river. When, after the term of
oblivion, in which he knows nothing of his past self, he is restored to
his identity by a famous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit
to his brother, the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors
of his past, work out his redemption in his new life; and the author
solves it for him by appointing him to a life of unselfish labor,
illumined by actions of positive beneficence. It is something like the
solution which Goethe imagines for Faust, and perhaps no other is
imaginable. In contriving it, Mr. Parker indulges the weaker brethren
with an abundance of accident and a luxury of catastrophe, which the
reader interested in the psychology of the story may take as little
account of as he likes. Without so much of them he might have made a
sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The Scarlet
Letter"; with them he has made a most picturesque romantic novel. His
work, as I began by saying, or hinting, is the work of a poet, in
conception, and I wish that in some details of diction it were as elect as
the author's verse is. But one must not expect everything; and in what it
is, "The Right of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on the side of
literature, while it more than meets a reasonable expectation on the side
of psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch in contemporary
noveling, and mounts far above the average best toward the day of
better things which I hope it is not rash to image dawning.
II.
I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories by
another poet. "The Ruling Passion," Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his book,
which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker's novel through

kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the
prevalence of psychologism over determinism in