Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/683

 ary habit; allegory has an ancient and honorable history and is always in order, yet we are all aware of the slight appeal that merely allegorical characters make to those powers of sympathy and awe wherewith we follow human story. In much modern work we cannot miss the central abstraction behind the closely described human physiognomy, even though external definiteness is secured by details of costume, and by the use of such names as John P. Smith and Mary A. Jones, instead of Cowardice or Charity.

The proportion of novels in which one finds the purely artistic impulse to study character closely, and to interpret it for its own sake, is lamentably small; the range of personified ideas is large, and widely diversified. Barbara Worth represents a topographical conception, typifying the large and generous nature of a certain section of western country; the central personage in Marie Corelli’s latest novel is revealed, in all the glare of fireworks and foot-lights, as a personification of the author’s desire to give evidence as to the immortality of the human soul, surely not in need of any such spectacular demonstration as this; while son and mother, in Mr. Hamlin Garland’s last book, stand as embodied question and affirmative answer in regard to the truth of that extremest form of materialism, spiritualistic belief. In all this work is apparent an insistent desire to impress upon the public some idea or conviction of more or less importance; but much of it gives small proof of patient observation and of thoughtful endeavor to discern the laws of life; and the few novels in which we find that combination of the individual and the typical which brings the greatest effect of reality in character presentation stand out with startling distinctness.

Some of the personifications in this class of fiction, wherein individual pre-possession overmasters study and observation, achieve a certain vividness; more often they fade into the background with the swiftness wherewith an angry mood vanishes. The central woman figure in Mr. Phillips’s last novel is a mere bundle of complaints, an enumeration of his grievances against modern womankind, and the character throughout lacks imaginative wholeness, is not created. Feathertop here proves but a scare-crow indeed. The harsh lines of the treatment, the dull anger with which the list of qualities that he resented is checked off, the journalistic quality of the style, make up a volume which impresses one as having neither charm nor power.

Rough, inartistic in method, but of honest purpose is The Nine Tenths, presenting certain phases of the wrongs of the workingmen. Mr. Joe, after his awakening, becomes the embodiment of the right attitude toward the submerged, and might be named Sympathy. Throughout, deep concern with down-trodden humankind gives the book vitality and value. In modern fiction, as in old allegory, figures which present ideals are more convincing, usually, than those which embody grievances; the Red Cross Knight is far more real than Duessa; and Mr. Joe is not only better worth doing than the heroine of The Conflict, but better done.

Mother is a personification of all the

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