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Paul Hermes.

"O ETHER divine!" cried Prometheus; but he was chained supine on the rock, and forced to see the sky. We who walk erect at will are apt to confine our attention to the things of earth. There are two landscapes, two firmaments, always visible to us; but it is as if, by some secret compact, the upper and finer one were reserved apart for birds and poets, or for the forlorn face that here and there turns upward in search of some better justice or fairer hope than has been found on earth. Now and then we find a person who has the habit of looking at the night skies, and mayhap knows the constellations, so that the stars are not accidental sparks to him any longer, but old friends, any one of whose faces would be missed if it were withdrawn. But who looks upward by day and sees the clouds?

There are ways of enticing people, or reminding ourselves, to appreciate this neglected side (the upper side) of landscape. It is no sin to improve upon Nature, or at least upon our physical endowments for apprehending her beauty. The camera obscura is one such contrivance. Fix a suitable lens in the front of any old box, with a dark curtain under which to thrust the head, and the "divine ether," with its cloudcuckoo-town of shifting scenery, will

stoop to our infirmity, and mimic itself in little but with all its glorious light and color below our face. The Claude Lorraine glass is another simple instrument of magical effect. The great landscape that seemed too vast to look at, in its sweep of valley and woods and hills and sky, comes into the compass of the hand, with the lights and shades and hues all there, but mellowed and softened; it is beautiful as ever, but it all floats on the facet of a crystal; the big giant has eaten of Alice's cake in Wonderland, and becomes a heavenly child; the finite eye has captured the infinite distance by a pretty trick. The poet Gray, it is said, used always to carry a common lens in his pocket when he "walked abroad," in whose surface to see the landscape imaged; thus, we may suppose, to bring it nearer the compass of an elegy or an ode.

But this present screed was entered upon in order to recommend to all readers of The Atlantic and lovers of nature the use of still another bit of artifice for aiding the natural eye to see the supernatural beauties and wonders of sky-and-cloud scenery. I mean the ordinary smoked glasses of the optician's shop. They should not be colored glasses at all, but just sufficiently clouded with a colorless smoke-tint to

tone down the intensity of the brightest light. The test should be that one can gaze fixedly at a bright, sunlit white cloud floating in noonday blue, without trying the eye. I do not believe (though I am no optician) that the ordinary ha bitual use of such glasses is to be recommended, except where the eye imperatively demands protection. They are rather for special emergencies, such as a dusty wind-storm in the city, to keep the awning-posts and paving-blocks out of one's eyes; or on the snow slopes of a mountain, to blunt the intolerable glare; or in a railroad car, to fend off cinders blundering in through an open window; and especially for this æsthetical use of which I speak. One feels, on using them for the first time, that he never before has properly seen a cloud; for the reason that never before has he been able to look steadily right into the face and eyes of a brilliant noonday sky.

In this way, with the shield of the soft-toned glasses before the eyes, one no longer gives a general look at the heavens now and then, with a hasty glance, as to know whether it is necessary to take an umbrella; but he seats himself before it, as before the surf, or before a play at the theatre, to watch deliberately what goes on. Nor does he any longer look at an individual cloud that is pointed out for some grotesque shape, or some remarkable color; but he sees the whole field, the complex groupings of forms and tints, the marchings and countermarchings of the sky battalions. One might as well suppose he knew the wonders of forest scenery when he had only looked at single trees, as to imagine he had seen the clouds when he had only glanced hastily at an occasional cloud. There are wonderful mountains among them, with sheer precipices, and shadowy caves, and Alpine erags; dark towers, such as Childe Roland blew his blast before; minarets and domes, with mysterious arabesque of Oriental tracery; serene ocean shores,

where the gray sand glimmers through shoaling blue, and the round-breasted galleons sail smoothly over.

It is great to sit in a lawn-chair, of a summer Sunday afternoon, and gaze undazzled into the upper sky. A light breeze taps the pear-tree leaves softly, as a mother might pat together the palms of her child. The organ snores sleepily in the distant church; even the choir sounds musical, heard faintly and occasionally, as if it were a far-off memory of better music. The blue of the zenith is intense with light that would be unbearable to the unshielded eye, and as the Cleopatra's barges of slow clouds sail softly across, with their round, bellying sails of snow and pearl, it only makes the azure more deeply and darkly" blue. By and by the color, or the very depth and boundlessness of it, seems to inundate one's brain, as the blue, deep sea-tide lifts through a coral reef, and all the little ocean-creatures stretch out their delicate hands and feed confidingly in the lucid clearness. So do delicate brain-fancies float and feed tranquilly in this inflooding tide of the blue heavens.

Nor is all this without its possibility of solid scientific usefulness, O dear specialist, that inclinest to flout such skyey contemplations! Why do those clouds float there so buoyantly; and what makes the cirrus take on those feathery forms? Do not tell me it is the wind, unless I am to believe there be winds celestial, very different from winds terrestrial. Those filmy tufts, those lightest dabs, drawn out in wavy brush-lines, as if with a pencil dipped in sublimated wool, or in the quintessence of dissolved cobweb,- is it by electricity, or magnetism? Or have some of those puffy-cheeked cherubs, seen so commonly tilting about the mediæval skies by the old masters, but not any more seen with the naked eye, have some of these bodiless baby-heads blown them at one another, for a game?

THERE is little doubt that the success of a very small group of American novelists of the day is having its legitimate outcome in an access of novelwriting, and that our descendants will devote a chapter in their literary histories to the rise of the American school of fiction as surely as we now group the dissimilar poets who had their day in the middle of this century. It is worth while, therefore, to make an occasional survey of current novels that shall exclude the books of those writers who have won their spurs. We still have plenty of stories of the old conventional type, but we also have books that represent a more or less conscious departure from ancient models,—that have, we will say, a literary as well as a fictitious being; and it is these novels and romances which interest us most, whether they

are better or worse than the books which we used to read.

I.

Mr. Arlo Bates may object to being called a new novelist, since twice before, at least, he has appeared with a book; but his recent novel, A Wheel of Fire, is a good starting point for his reputa1 A Wheel of Fire. By ARLO BATES. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1885.

tion. When Lear returns slowly to sane consciousness, under the gentle restorative of Cordelia's presence, the distance between him with the overpowering sense of misery and her whose beauteous love he recognizes is the distance between hell and heaven.

"You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead."

In Mr. Bates's novel the heroine is bound upon the wheel of fire, but it is the more terrible wheel of the anticipation of madness, culminating in the fatal attack. Miss Wainwright and her brother are the children of a mother who was incurably insane. At the opening of the story, the brother, escaping from mild confinement at a retreat, makes his way back to the homestead where his sister is living, is found by her in an exhausted condition outside of the house, is brought within, and lies for weeks in a state of fever, with outbreaks of delirium. He is under the constant care of a young physician from the retreat, but finally dies by his own hand in an unguarded moment.

Meanwhile Miss Wainwright's cousin, Miss Elsie Dimmont, is visiting her, and a young lawyer, Sherlock Lincoln, who

has partial charge of the Wainwright property, makes a fourth in the partie carrée of the novel. There are two or three subordinate characters, who are well distinguished, including among the number an admirably individualized dog, but the action of the story is carried forward by the four. These early divide into their natural pairings: the somewhat coarse-fibred but resolute doctor with the self-willed and flirting cousin, and the fine-tempered, chivalric lawyer with the heroine of unkind fate. From first to last the reader is never allowed to lose sight of the theme of the novel. The chapter headings, ingeniously taken like the title from Shakespeare, contain hints of the tragic course of events, and the absence of any incidents or episodes to withdraw the mind from the central action intensifies the feeling with which the reader moves through the tale, hardly daring to believe in the final escape of the heroine, yet occasionally buoyed with hope that the worst may not prove true. We wish to say emphatically that in point of construction A Wheel of Fire is an uncommon piece of work. The men and women in it are real, without relying for their reality upon an indefinite number of minute touches; they are clearly conceived in the author's mind, and set before the reader with strong lines. The incidents are simple and unstrained. The few slight conventional scenes, like the breaking of the old glass, are not made to carry too much. The conversations, barring an occasional feeble smartness, are natural and bear the narrative along; and the main thread of the story, that is, the development of the heroine's tendency to insanity, is skillfully and powerfully led. The reliefs, through the flirtation of Elsie Dimmont and the doctor, and the characters of Hannah and Peter, are just enough to heighten the effect of the central image, and the reader is filled with the pity for the victim which the author himself seems to feel.

Why is it, then, that with all this fine workmanship before him a healthyminded reader recoils from the book as from something false, not merely as from something painful? The turning point of the story is when Damaris Wainwright, who has wisely resolved within herself not to marry because of the taint of insanity in her blood, yields to the assaults made upon her resolution by her lover, and persuades herself that she may consult only her own intense longing for the consolation of love. Mr. Bates has not disguised the falsity of her position. "She abandoned," he says, "all attempt to justify her change of mind. That was done with; the matter was settled for once and all, and her elation was in no small degree due to the delightful sense of having reached a certainty. But woe to the woman who closes the court of conscience in a question, no matter how insignificant, pertaining to love. Practically there was no end to Damaris' struggle with self, although she had for the moment won a joyous tranquillity. To accept as a condition of happiness a consciousness that the temple of justice in the heart is barred is with sensitive and upright natures to assume an impossibility, and poor Damaris, dazzled and won for the moment by Fenton's smooth subtleties of speech, was never more pathetically pitiful than in this hour of insecure bliss."

While, however, the moment of yielding is the critical moment in the life of the heroine, and so the turning point in the story, there is no real struggle and no victory. The will of Damaris makes after all only a feeble resistance from the beginning; thenceforth it is swept along, and acquires such a momentum that the discovery of an outside confirmation of her own internal fear makes scarcely a perceptible difference in her intention. It is too late! she cries; she feels the destiny that awaits her, and simply moves unresistingly toward the catastrophe.

The objection which we make to the book as a piece of art is that the author, having set before us two human beings of educated conscience, fine sense of honor, and strong will, having given them eyes to see the fatal consequences of their act, permits them to be overcome by the very destiny they have feared, a destiny which is involved not in some external force, but in physical conditions of their own nature. Now, great art does not make this mistake. Lear goes mad; his madness lay always coiled in his self-willed passion, ready to spring out on occasion, but Shakespeare gave him occasion enough. It was the blow struck at his pride by outrageous daughters that let loose the demon, and it was the power of love in Cordelia that tamed the wild beast and dispossessed the old man of his devil. Shakespeare would never have let physical weakness so surmount spiritual sense, and crowned necessity instead of free will. It may be said that Mr. Bates's conception is that of the Greeks; but the Greek Necessity was a recognized divinity which was absolute and apart from man, acting, indeed, through him, but permitting no moral choice in the man himself.

No; it is all wrong. It might have been a commonplace story which Mr. Bates would have told, if he had gifted Damaris Wainwright with the persistent power of self-denial and restraint, and had made Sherlock Lincoln chivalrously regardful of the woman, despite his own loss, but that would have involved no degradation of love. This story does involve it, and the painful scene at the close is repulsive, not merely because we see a beautiful woman transformed into a maniac, but because of the underlying thought of the story, which tells us, Thus must it have been. We cry out against that "must." We refuse to accept a logic which is based solely on physical processes. And so we say that the fine workmanship of the story is

wasted work. Inevitable insanity forms no foundation for a work of art, for it is not the final word of nature. Reason, not unreason, lies at the core of life, and a picture of life which denies this is false.

II.

The realistic treatment in fiction is pretty sure to provoke some extremist on the romantic side to see what he can do with thaumaturgic methods. By putting his story into the mouth of a Jewish musician, the author of As it was Written has gone far to set free the probabilities. Almost any flight of fancy becomes credible when the flyer is a musician, and a Jew to boot, for one instantly is able to take advantage of the supernatural element as a part of the ordinary furniture of the mind. So far, then, the author does well, and we begin to follow the Jewish musician into the world of improbability with a cheerful abandonment of the mere understanding, the meanest faculty, as De Quincey contemptuously says, in the human mind. This musician, Ernest Neuman, while taking the air one May evening at the eastern extremity of Fifty-First Street in New York, hears Gounod's Ave Maria sung by a soprano voice somewhere in the neighborhood. Entranced by the beauty of the voice and the passion of the air, he suddenly is aware of the presence at his side of a pale lady, whose pallor is not that of ill health, but of a luminous white soul.

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