In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universalimplication which will distinguish itself to the observer fromthe psychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not asapt as I should like--evident in some of the interesting booksunder notice here.I have tried to say that it is none the lessa work of art for that reason, and I can praise the art ofanother novel, in which the same sort of psychologism prevails,though I must confess it a fiction of the rankesttendenciousness."Lay Down Your Arms" is the name of the Englishversion of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die Waffen Nieder,"which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on thecontinent of Europe.Its success there has been very great, andI wish its success on the continent of America could be so greatthat it might replace in the hands of our millions the balefulbooks which have lately been glorifying bloodshed in the privateand public wars of the past, if not present.The wars which "LayDown Your Arms" deals with are not quite immediate, and yet theyare not so far off historically, either.They are theFranco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, andthe Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose personalrelation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrianlady of high birth.She is the daughter and the sister ofsoldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank withher own, whom she first marries, makes love to her just beforethe outbreak of the war first named, she is as much in love withhis soldiership as with himself.But when the call to armscomes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of war as she hasnever known before.He is killed in one of the battles of Italy,and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beausabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fightsthrough that second war from a sense of duty rather than fromlove of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence thathe quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris.
There the third war overtakes him, and in the siege, thisAustrian, who has fought the Prussians to the death, is arrestedby the communards as a Prussian spy and shot.
The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion ofthe intense passion of grief which fills it.Neither does itconvey a due impression of the character in the different personswhich, amidst the heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truthand impartiality as pervade the effects of "War and Peace."I donot rank it with that work, but in its sincerity and veracity iteasily ranks above any other novel treating of war which I know,and it ought to do for the German peoples what the novels ofErckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in at least one generation.
