A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 9

sources of the cataclysm which swept away a legal government
and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not paint the blacks all
good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery made them on
both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victory to the
blacks--if he suffers the daughter of the black wife to have pity on her
father's daughter by his white wife, and while her own child lies dead
from a shot fired in the revolt, gives her husband's skill to save the life
of her sister's child--it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or ethics
are false. Those who would question either must allow, at least, that the
negroes have had the greater practice in forgiveness, and that there are
many probabilities to favor his interpretation of the fact. No one who
reads the book can deny that the case is presented with great power, or
fail to recognize in the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality
against which no series of hangings and burnings will finally avail.
VII.
In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universal
implication which will distinguish itself to the observer from the
psychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not as apt as I
should like--evident in some of the interesting books under notice here.
I have tried to say that it is none the less a work of art for that reason,

and I can praise the art of another novel, in which the same sort of
psychologism prevails, though I must confess it a fiction of the rankest
tendenciousness. "Lay Down Your Arms" is the name of the English
version of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die Waffen Nieder,"
which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on the continent
of Europe. Its success there has been very great, and I wish its success
on the continent of America could be so great that it might replace in
the hands of our millions the baleful books which have lately been
glorifying bloodshed in the private and public wars of the past, if not
present. The wars which "Lay Down Your Arms" deals with are not
quite immediate, and yet they are not so far off historically, either.
They are the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of
1866, and the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose
personal relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian
lady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of soldiers, and
when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with her own, whom
she first marries, makes love to her just before the outbreak of the war
first named, she is as much in love with his soldiership as with himself.
But when the call to arms comes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of
war as she has never known before. He is killed in one of the battles of
Italy, and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beau
sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fights
through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from love of
fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that he quits the
army and goes with his family to live in Paris. There the third war
overtakes him, and in the siege, this Austrian, who has fought the
Prussians to the death, is arrested by the communards as a Prussian spy
and shot.
The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of the
intense passion of grief which fills it. Neither does it convey a due
impression of the character in the different persons which, amidst the
heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth and impartiality as
pervade the effects of "War and Peace." I do not rank it with that work,
but in its sincerity and veracity it easily ranks above any other novel
treating of war which I know, and it ought to do for the German
peoples what the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in at

least one generation. Will it do anything for the Anglo-Saxon peoples?
Probably not till we have pacified the Philippines and South Africa. We
Americans are still apparently in love with fighting, though the English
are apparently not so much so; and as it is always well to face the facts,
I will transfer to my page some facts of fighting from this graphic book,
which the read may apply to the actualities in the Philippines, with a
little imagination. They are taken from a letter written to the heroine by
her second husband after one of the Austrian defeats. "The people
poured boiling water and oil