FullReads

VIII.

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.”