Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/686

 character-delineation, and also in the critical thought revealed in plot, in characters, and in abstract discussion. There is too much impressionism, too much improvised and sketchy allusion in the indictment of the medical profession of the country; and even those inclined to believe many of the conclusions, would be glad to have a more thorough and convincing presentation, and of more of the grounds for such conclusions.

There may be, in view of the large sales of the book there must be, people to whom the hero of The Following of a Star seems a fully-created character, instead of an embodied abstraction. I had thought, however, that the days had passed when we could thrill over the type of hero whose dark hair falls over a pallid brow, and who talks of his approaching lonely grave in Africa. Presumably all graves are lonely! To call him effeminate would shame the valiant modern woman, yet in all his lonely perfections he is undoubtedly the creation of an over-feminine mind. Feminine taste is apparent, too, in the scenic background, which is worked up with deep sense of the value of rich stuffs, and also in the belittling use, for personal decoration, of the great Christmas symbols, the star, the frankincense, the myrrh.

There is no more pathetic evidence of a crying lack in our time than the enormous and unwarranted popularity of this kind of unhealthy fiction. Our wealth-ridden, progress-ridden, science-ridden world refuses after all to be satisfied with mere physical well-being. It is wistfully eager for expression of faith in things spiritual; yet long dominance of materialistic ideas has apparently made us lose all sense of values. We are in desperate need of novelists and of poets to point out the possibilities of enlarging inner life, but we need virile voices to drown the gushing sentimentality of work like this. The commercial spirituality, the fundamental materialism of the book, are all too apparent, despite its suave religious vocabulary; and its great vogue is another proof of the way in which our spiritual ideals have become hopelessly entangled with our pursuit of wealth. All the joys of the other world, and of this world also, are heaped upon the hero’s head, and his suffering self-abnegation only intensifies his enjoyment of extreme wealth in the happiness ever after, for his destination proves to be not that lonely grave, but a luxuriously-cushioned, flower-decorated motor. The book is fundamentally unsound, from the point of view of artistic truth, and will hardly appeal to those who care for honest work in fiction, or for disinterested faith.

As a contrast stands out a book which makes a special plea in behalf of the inner life, Mr. Norman Duncan's Measure of a Man, to which the sting of frost and snow, the keen breath of the north winds, give added vitality. It is a rough and ready tale of one valiant man, fighting single-handed the battle of the spirit among men who have sunk below the level of the brute. It is perhaps over-didactic, and it lacks the depth and the tragic sense of ironic values that some of the author's short stories possess, notably that incomparably good tale, The Wayfarer, but it is wholesome, and full of masculine energy.

If many of the characters in recent fiction seem over-didactic, too much the embodiment of desire or of protest, too little the result of disinterested observation and study, another class presents itself in which the opposite is true, and we find a maximum of observ