If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell's very interesting novel of
"Circumstance" do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky and
those Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are always
human with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society.
They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it is
when they give way to the natural man, and especially the natural
woman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne
begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds
Kitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in a
way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is
delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, she
is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in
that moment of nature the thick 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.