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 it. In the situations
and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from
sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but
saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul
in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe
that I like best among these charming things the two sketches--they are
hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight,"
though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is
because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find
in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greater
evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his
material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it.
That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most
liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the
chorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in
fact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has
felt rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than
intentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that account,
and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for being frankly,
however uninsistently, moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the
poetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht of
sympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages the
foresters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canada
seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives
there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their
picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new
world customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his
oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now faded
economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large
possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about
them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and
such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a likeness of them, which
if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution.