第11章

It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, likethe facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they areimagined rather below than above the real horror of war, andrepresent them inadequately.The incidents of another book, thelast on my list, are of the warfare which goes on in times ofpeace, and which will go on as long as there are human passions,and mankind are divided into men and women, and saints andsinners.Of all the books on my list, "Let Not Man Put Asunder"is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the author'sintellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest.The storyis of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond thewont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author,who cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feeltheir reality.But he does make us feel this in most cases, theimportant cases, and in the other cases his power of interestingus is so great that we do not stop to examine the grounds of oursensation, or to question the validity of our emotions. Theaction, which is positively of to-day, or yesterday at thefurthest, passes in Boston and England, among people of suchgreat fortune and high rank and transcendent fashion that theproudest reader cannot complain of their social quality.As totheir moral quality, one might have thought the less said thebetter, if the author had not said so much that is pertinent andimpressive.It is from first to last a book with a conscience init, and its highest appeal is to the conscience.It is so verynearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is witha kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind ofsurprise at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are notshortcomings that impair its supreme effect.This, I take it, isthe intimation of a mystical authority in marriage against whichdivorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and byvirtue of which it claims eternally its own the lovers united init; though they seem to become haters, it cannot release them tohappiness in a new union through any human law.

If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainlydramatic) no more than this, he would have established his rightto be taken seriously, but he has done very much more, and hasmade us acquainted with types and characters which we do notreadily forget, and with characters much more real than theirambient.For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassallslive is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are theVassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwellare of a baroniality difficult of verification.Their honor,their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though theirsocial state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionaryexperience.The social Boston of the novel is more like; itsdifference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finelysuggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness inwhich it is not the greater Boston.Petrina Faneuil, theheroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passedaway, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so muchregretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdyBoston, the decadent Boston.It is, of course, a Boston muchworse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginablybad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high idealsis to a level lower than that of people who have never had them.