FICTION.
A JOURNEY TO NATIJEE.t
THE narrator of this experience in regeneration—in which the personages introduced are, so the author• tells us, freely drawn from life—is a Wall Street broker aged forty-four, who had been communing with the money market for eight • The CoUeeted Papers of John Woginkr as Public /aterealienal Lon.. Edited by L. Oppgenhelm. liCatimsrtriditeijat. AblUowniver;rityNPorestw net.] t A. Joarmmq to years, was suddenly threatened with a complete nervous breakdown, and was "scared to life" by his doctor, who gave him the choice between a year in the wilderness or death in six months. He took the former alternative, lived in a hovel —mostly on canned food—with he small boy in a remote rural district for twelve months, and came back cured. The book is a diary recording his gradual reconcilement with he new life and the curative process it exercised on a nature sophisticated by excitement and excess. Not that the narrator was a rake or a rogue. He was, or rather we should say Le would have us believe he had been, a somewhat cynical and selfish man of the world, who had consoled himself for the loss of his wife so easily that he had boarded out Lie only child in a shabby-genteel private home school, while he lived luxuriously in his fiat, dined habitually off "steak cl la Bordeloise, or a bird, with several entries and a pint of dry wine "; and indulged in late, and occasionally riotous, suppers. He filled his days with work and his nights with pleasure. Then came the bolt from the blue, and he found himself condemned to shun all these delights, including the society of ladies who wrote him scented notes on mauve- coloured paper, for the companionship of his neglected child in the heart of the country—not, mind you, the country as we think of it in this island, bet an unkempt, sparsely populated region, with no educated neighbours or amenities. To make matters worse, he was neither an artist nor a natural historian. He was not even a eportsman or a fisherman. Ho ought to have expired of ennui, monotony, and discomfort in a week, but be did nothing of the kind. How it all came about is set forth very plausibly and attractively but for one serious draw- back. We only know him really af ter his breakdown, which is the starting-point of the narrative, and from that start he is credited with an amount of humanity and philosophy and a literary squipmentwbich make it well-nigh incredible the t he should ever have lived the inhuman, artificial, and thoroughly selfish life of which we get occasional retrospective glimpses. The fact is, or so it seems to us, that this is a composite portrait—that the anther has identified himself with the narrator, and mixed up his own views of life with those of the imaginary narrator. It is an extremely clever piece of impersonation, but it rather suggests the philosopher playing at being a man of the world with a past than the man of the world adapting himself to the rigorous exigencies of the present. The narrator does his beet to alienate our sympathies at the outset by his bard egotism and his complacent references to his life of strenuous luxury. But before we know where we are he reveals un- expected qualities of tenderness and thoughtfulness. Rusti- cation, which ought to have been a sentence of death to one so constituted, turns the money.getter into a philosopher, the de-reeve into a fond father, the egoist into all altruist, There is the same perplexing dualism in the character of the doctor, who is introduced to us as "a delightful megatherium of an extinct species," and is described later on as an "old Deciding, an epicure, a connoisseur, and a social lion," with fastidious tastes and a luxurious wardrobe. He is at the same time the good genius of the plot, and admirably equipped in every way for dealing faithfully and efficiently with the neurotic products of advanced civilization. We may fake the phrase about his belonging to an extinct species as an explosion of petulance on the part of the narrator in a moment of discontent, but the dualism remains. The doctor ie really not in the least extinct ; he is turned sixty, but exuberantly vigorous, with a capacity for accommodating himself to every environment. He " radiates health instead of prescribing it appeals adroitly to the best instincts of his patients, and entirely belies his character for Sybaritism by his conduct and conversation. He is a tremendous talker, but ho talks and writes very well. This is from a letter of his to the narrator, who had "begged for some news very much as a morphine patient begs for his drug " " • News,' he replied, •there is nothing new in the news. Every- thing seethes and roils and jostles and bursts just as it did when you were here. Men are running over each other ruthlessly, and dropping out of sight as usual. I don't know whether you remember Calhoun—he snapped his E string at concert pitch last week. He is pretty well forgotten by this time. He was so loaded with the events of the universe that his mind snapped. He was one of the modern idiots who try to piny the rile of Atlas with nothing but their sensibilities.... This univeree of oars is con- structed an the stop-over plan, and there is no use in kicking against it. This through-train business dews.% at. all agree with the tropical swing of things, which provides cloisters and still
nights for forgetting. By Jove, old fellow, there wouldn't have been any Renaissance if there hadn't been Dark Ages first, and there wouldn't have been any Pilgrines Progress if somebody hadn't impounded Bunyan. I have never read it, but I understand it's a great work. Go to, every man can be his own Buddha, inas- much as be has a Bo-tree in his soul—if be will only sit down under it at times and be mum and get acquainted with himself..."
As for never having read Bunyan, we simply do not believe it. The doctor had Dante and Isaiah and Shakespeare and Bourget at his fingers' ends, and preached and poetized on the slightest provocation. When he saw the bursting burrs of a chestnut shaken down by the October wind shining amid the dead leaves, he observed softly " We have caught the atoms at their Orphie hymn." Here, again, we seem to find evidenee of the central personality of the author pervading that of his characters, so that they become separate mouthpieces rather than independent individualities. Exception must be made, however, in favour of the rustics, notably Gabe Hotchkiss with his "animal equanimity," strong fibre, and luck of temperament :— " Ton felt that he was not one of those fellows who have a stock of words on hand and are continually looking for an opportunity to which they can fit them. His mind, or whatever it was that occupied the place of that sue, always took the straight line between a thing and a word. He would no more be original or smart than he would be liberal or imaginative. His oompanion- ship was therefore a kind of mental water-cure. I could sit and watch him saw wood for an hour, and our conversation would, as Henry James somewhere put it, ' be ruffled delightfully by the passing airs of the unsaid.' I remarked to him while thus employed, 'This will he a bad season for potatoes, Gabe.' Ile stopped a moment, expectorated, and then came at it as the crew flies, 'Gosh to hemlock, that's so,' and then the wood-sawing went on. I noticed that irony and repartee took on, in Gabes presence, a curious analogy to water on a duck's back, and you cannot imagine bow depleting and soothing all this is to get whore everything is trite and simple, and has been said a thousand times before, and is none the less valuable on that account. It has occurred to me that as heaven is always regarded as a pees of rest, perhaps it may he is place where everybody gives over trying to be 'smart.' Isn't there some kind of intimation of this in the communications that are said to come from the ethos aide?"
The "Gretchen" episode, in which the narrater, as he advances from the introspective stage of convalescence to that in which he is able to take a sentimental interest in some one else, more than half loses his heart to the old farmer's niece, is delicately handled. Nothing becomes the ex-stockbroker better than the magnanimity with which he treats his mag- nanimous rival, a young wheelwright whose mind matches his goodly exterior. And as may bo gathered from the extracts given above, the digressions and dissertations which retard and decorate the leisurely progress of the narrative make very good and suggestive reading when they are not die. figured by preciosity. One of the happiest touches in the book is the delightful account of the confidential relations set up with the narrator by the birds and beasts when they discover that lie wants neither to kill nor to classify them. In fine, we feel that we have insisted perhaps unduly on the inconsistencies and weaknesses of a book which, while it occasionally irritates and perplexes, exercises a good deal of intermittent charm on the captious reviewer.
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