No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism,now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it atits worst just because he was so much better than it was at itsworst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and becausehe could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and thepowers which charm, though they could not avail to save it fromfinal contempt.He saves himself in his latest novel, because,though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect ispsychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, andwhich gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it givesromanticism whatever will survive it.In "The Right of Way" Mr.
Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, wherethere is nothing but the happening of things, and where this oneor that one is important or unimportant according as things arehappening to him or not, but has in himself no claim upon thereader's attention.Once more the novel begins to rise to itshigher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters oftheir fate.His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromisingmaterial for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well bechosen.One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, whosaid so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality isthe devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pureintellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and doesthe effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength.
Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically heis from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger ofremaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much maybe despaired that it might almost be called hopeless.I confessthat in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, thisconsciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur,all but failed to interest me.A little of him and his monoclewent such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of himby the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged withmurder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; andI do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele inhis drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang ofdrunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river wherethey have thrown him, and where his former client finds him.
From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though Ifound myself more than once in the world where things happen ofthemselves and do not happen from the temperaments of itsinhabitants.In a better and wiser world, the homicide would notperhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of theadvocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as oneconsents to a great deal besides in the story, which isimaginably the survival of a former method.The artist's affairis to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world,the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle.
