It was in the year 1906, and in the novel _Richard Baldock_, that he
revealed his power. This book, which will make its first American
appearance in the autumn of 1918, contains a story so absorbing that
it is only in the retrospect that one realizes the vitality of its
characters and the delicacy of its art. There are no heroes and no
villains. Every person has the taint that we all inherited from Adam,
and every person has some reflection of the grace of God. There is no
one who does not say something foolish or ill-considered; and there
is no one who does not say something wise. In other words there are
no types, like "heavies," "juveniles," and "ingenues." As is the case
in nearly all the novels by its author, we are constantly revising
our opinions of the characters; and we revise them, not because the
characters are untrue, but because we learn to know them better. Human
nature is consistent only in its inconsistency. It is forever fluid and
dynamic; and although no individual has ever understood another, and
least of all himself, increasing knowledge helps to make us certain of
our uncertainty. No man will play the part his friends have written
for him. One reason why Shakespeare was a first-rate and Jonson a
second-rate dramatist is because Jonson created humours and Shakespeare
created individuals. Among all Shakespeare's personages, Hamlet is the
most interesting to readers and the most baffling to commentators;
because the latter try to adjust him to a theory of madness, weak will,
or what not. Is not the fact that he has never been understood by any
one and never will be, the strongest proof of his reality? Some think
he lacked backbone; others insist he was all backbone; some think he
was mad; others that he only pretended to be mad; while America's
greatest Shakespearean scholar said he was neither mad nor pretended
to be. A young gentleman of Hamlet's copious temperament, placed as he
was amid natural and supernatural forces, might easily at times seem to
illustrate any one of the above appraisals. Indeed I suppose the sanest
and most resolute among us seem at times to lack either resolution or
sanity or both.
The more complex a character, the less dependable he is. And everybody
has some complexity. Even quiet Horatio, beloved of Hamlet for his
steady self-control, tried to commit suicide.
Every fine novel and every fine drama must of course illustrate the law
of causation--the principle of sufficient reason. But characters that
run in grooves are not human. In _Richard Baldock_, we have, as we so
often have in the work of Archibald Marshall, strife between father and
son--a kind of civil war. This war, like many others, is begotten of
misunderstanding. There is not only the inevitable divergence between
the older and the younger generation, there is the divergence between
two powerful individualities. We at first sympathize wholly with the
son. We say to ourselves that if any man is foolish enough to sacrifice
all his joy in life to a narrow creed, why, after all, that is his
affair; it is only when he attempts to impose this cheerless and barren
austerity on others, that we raise the flag of revolt. At the deathbed
of the young mother, one of the most memorable scenes in our author's
books, we are quite certain that we shall never forgive the inflexible
bigot; this hatred for him is nourished when he attempts to crush the
son as he did crush his wife. Yet, as the story develops, and we see
more deeply into the hearts of all the characters, we understand how
the chasm between father and son is finally crossed. It is crossed by
the only durable bridge in the world--the bridge of love, which beareth
all things.
Tolerance--when based not on indifference, but on sympathy--is tolerant
even of intolerance.
V
In 1907 appeared one of the most characteristic of Mr. Marshall's
novels, _Exton Manor_, which he began to write the day after he
finished _Richard Baldock_. It was naturally impossible for any
well-read reviewer to miss the likeness to Anthony Trollope. If
I believed in the transmigration of souls, I should believe that
Archibald Marshall was a reincarnation of Trollope, and William De
Morgan a reincarnation of Dickens. In an interesting preface written
for the American edition, Mr. Marshall manfully says that he has not
only tried to follow Anthony Trollope, "but the whole body of English
novelists of his date, who introduced you to a large number of people,
and left you with the feeling that you knew them all intimately, and
would have found yourself welcome in their society. That particular
note of intimacy seems to be lacking in the fiction of the present day,
and I should like to have it back."
This instantly raises the question of Victorianism, to some a
stumbling-block, to some foolishness. For my part, if I did not
believe that the best Victorian fiction was superior to contemporary
work, I should not be so hearty an admirer of Archibald Marshall.
Indeed the best Victorian novels surpass our best twentieth century
novels in the one respect where we chiefly plume ourselves on our
claim to attention--I mean in the matter of sincerity. We talk about
sincerity all the time, but we protest too much; the essence of
sincerity is present perhaps more often in art, as it is in life,
where its profession is least urgent. Henry James, in the fragment
of autobiography called _The Middle Years_, wisely though oracularly
remarked, "Phenomena may be interesting, thank goodness, without being
phenomena of elegant expression or of any other form of restless
smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it plays up from
deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a message and
we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on its again
and yet again consistently acquitting itself. So it keeps in tune,
and, as the French adage says, _c'est le ton qui fait la chanson_. The
mid-Victorian London was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast
appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible."
On a summer day in 1914, I had the pleasure of a ten-mile drive over
the hills with one of the wisest old men in America--Andrew D. White.
I remember his saying that one of the most fortunate things that could
happen to America would be a general ambition on the part of the more
educated classes to look forward as to a goal in life to making a
permanent home in the country. He said that in America men who make
a little money move into the city as soon as possible; whereas in
England, whenever a man makes a competence in the city he usually
establishes a home in the country. No one can read the novels of Mr.
Marshall without feeling that his books are so to speak based on this
ideal; he repeatedly insists that life in the country is the true life
for thoughtful men and women, and that the most delectable season for
the solid enjoyment of it is the winter. Nay, he takes the position--a
position also occupied by one of our ablest American novelists, Dorothy
Canfield--that the most favourable locality for studying human nature
is the small country village. He says, "Life in such a community as is
depicted in _Exton Manor_ is just as typical of English social habits
as it was in Trollope's day. The tendency of those who have hitherto
worked on the land to drift into the towns is not shared by the more
leisured classes. Their tendency is all the other way--to forsake the
towns for the country--and improved methods of communication keep
them more in touch with the world than they would have been fifty
years ago. But in spite of this increased dependency upon the outside
world, English country life is still intensely local in its personal
interests, and quite legitimately so, for it must be remembered that,
if the man who lives in a fairly populous country village comes across
fewer people than the man who lives in a town, he knows all about those
whom he does come across, and his acquaintances represent a far greater
variety of type and class than is met with where types and classes
tend to stratify. You have, in fact, in a typical country parish, a
microcosm of English social life, and there is, ready to the hand
of the realistic novelist, material from which he can draw as much
interest and variety as he is able to make use of."
In another important question which concerns the art of the novelist,
I might applaud Mr. Marshall's dictum more unreservedly if I did not
happen to know of a gigantic witness against him. In forestalling
gossipy identification of his leading characters in _Exton Manor_,
he says, "It is not a novelist's business to draw portraits, but to
create living figures, and the nearer he gets to the first the farther
off will he be from the second." This certainly sounds well; but
unfortunately for its universal application, practically all of the
characters in _Anna Karenina_ are accurate portraits.