A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 7

air of good society seems to blow away and
let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better than the
good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers. They
are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of the
medical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only by his
reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that can
excuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of good
principles and generous instincts.

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic
fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs. Hunter,
who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow to
work her way to authority in the household of Kitty's uncle, where she
displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kith
and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather, she is
a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; but she is
limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She is bold up to a
point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, but not to all lengths;
and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep him from changing
his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has not quite the
courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not do it, and it is in
this point she becomes so aesthetically successful. The guilt of the
uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt of those which
have been committed; and the author does a good thing morally as well
as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still something of a problem to his
reader. In most things she is almost too plain a case; she is sly, and
vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that a murderess should be;
but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes and remains a mystery, and
the reader does not get rid of her as he would if she had really done the
deed. In the inferior exigencies she strikes fearlessly; and when the man
who has divorced her looms up in her horizon with doom in his
presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not the less successful
because she disgusts him; he agrees to let her alone so long as she does
no mischief; she has, at least, made him unwilling to feel himself her
persecutor, and that is enough for her.
Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am not
sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of
course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has not
met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she has
the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious; she is
cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an
outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she
becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured
herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at her
making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am not

sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him, but
as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content
because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more
entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which
you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go
so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as
those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art,
however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary
Fairthorne's character. She is really a good girl, and saved from the
unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by those
limitations of temper which I have already hinted.
V.
It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that of the
half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and the young
American whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither
the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them. It is
far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is true to
humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki and
Bigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is of as
palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door. If I
have ever read any record of young married