第4章

I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group ofstories by another poet. "The Ruling Passion," Dr. Henry Van Dykecalls his book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr.

Parker's novel through kinship of Canadian landscape andcharacter, and through the prevalence of psychologism overdeterminism in it.In the situations and incidents studied withsentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes withgreater and sometimes with less ease, but saves itself, theappeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in thereader, and not from brute event to his sensation.I believethat I like best among these charming things the twosketches--they are hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "TheKeeper of the Dight," though if I were asked to say why, I shouldbe puzzled.Perhaps it is because I find in the two pieces nameda greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke'sdelightful volume, and greater evidence that he has himself sothoroughly and finally mastered his material that he is no longerin danger of being unduly affected by it.That is a danger whichin his very quality of lyrical poet he is most liable to, for heis above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus usuallycomments is the drama next his heart.The pieces, in fact, areso many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has feltrather than reasoned his way to.It is implicational rather thanintentional.It is none the worse but all the better on thataccount, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse forbeing frankly, however uninsistently, moralized.A humor,delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays throughthem, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything humantransfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen fromtheir native woods and waters.Canada seems the home ofprimitive character; the seventeenth century survives there amongthe habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesquesuperstitions, their old world traditions and their new worldcustoms.It is the land not only of the habitant, but of hisoversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now fadedeconomically, but still lingering socially in the scene of hislarge possessions.Their personality imparts a charm to the manybooks about them which at present there seems to be no end to themaking of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us alikeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized byreservation, not by attribution.