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
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.