It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like the
facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are imagined
rather below than above the real horror of war, and represent them
inadequately. The incidents of another book, the last on my list, are
of the warfare which goes on in times of peace, and which will go on as
long as there are human passions, and mankind are divided into men and
women, and saints and sinners. Of all the books on my list, "Let Not
Man Put Asunder" is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the
author's intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. The
story is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the
wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author, who
cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel their
reality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the important
cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting us is so great
that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our sensation, or to
question the validity of our emotions. The action, which is
positively of to-day, or yesterday at the furthest, passes in Boston
and England, among people of such great fortune and high rank and
transcendent fashion that the proudest reader cannot complain of their
social quality. As to their moral quality, one might have thought the
less said the better, if the author had not said so much that is
pertinent and impressive. It is from first to last a book with a
conscience in it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It is
so very nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is
with a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of surprise
at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not shortcomings that
impair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is the intimation of a
mystical authority in marriage against which divorce sins in vain,
which no recreancy can subvert, and by virtue of which it claims
eternally its own the lovers united in it; though they seem to become
haters, it cannot release them to happiness in a new union through any
human law.
If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly dramatic)
no more than this, he would have established his right to be taken
seriously, but he has done very much more, and has made us acquainted
with types and characters which we do not readily forget, and with
characters much more real than their ambient. For instance, the Old
Cambridge in which the Vassalls live is not the Old Cambridge of fact,
but the Vassalls are the Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls
in which they dwell are of a baroniality difficult of verification.
Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though
their social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary
experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its
difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely
suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in which
it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, is
derivatively of the older Boston which has passed away, and actually of
the newer Boston which will not be so much regretted when it passes,
the fast Boston, the almost rowdy Boston, the decadent Boston. It is,
of course, a Boston much worse in the report than in the fact, but it
is not unimaginably bad to the student who notes that the lapse from
any high ideals is to a level lower than that of people who have never
had them. As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it,
she is so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I
am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book, though
it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the dramatic
episodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the family had
spent itself at least two generations before her time. She was a
pagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan.... But she was
none the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits of
life, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effect
will often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious
one, a pagan with a New England conscience."
This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of
Petrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are mighty
well, too. "She had inherited a countenance whose expression was like
the light which lingers in the sky long after sunset--the light of some
ancestral fire gone out. If in her face there were prayers, they had
been said by Pepperells and Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts
churchyards. If in her voice there were tears, they had been shed by
those who would weep no more. She mirrored the emotions she had never
felt; and all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritual
aspirations which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintive
echo they had given to this woman's tone, and the light of petition
they had left burning in her eyes."
No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of "Let Not Man
Put Asunder" can think subtly as well as say clearly, and the book
abounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature in its lighter
aspects. Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face, is a most amusing
creature, with all her tragedy, and she is on the whole the most
perfectly characterized personality in the story. The author gives you
a real sense of her beauty, her grace, her being always charmingly in a
hurry and always late. The greatest scene is hers: the scene in which
she meets her divorced husband with his second wife. One may suspect
some of the other scenes, but one must accept that scene as one of
genuine dramatic worth. Too much of the drama in the book is theatre
rather than drama, and yet the author's gift is essentially dramatic.
He knows how to tell a story on his stage that holds you to the fall of
the curtain, and makes you almost patient of the muted violins and the
limelight of the closing scene. Such things, you say, do not happen in
Brookline, Mass., whatever happens in London or in English country
houses; and yet the people have at one time or other convinced you of
their verity. Of the things that are not natural, you feel like saying
that they are supernatural rather than unnatural, and you own that at
its worst the book is worth while in a time when most novels are not
worth while.