it was in the year 1906, and in the novel richard baldock, that he revealed his power. this book, which will make its first american appearance in the autumn of 1918, contains a story so absorbing that it is only in the retrospect that one realizes the vitality of its characters and the delicacy of its art. there are no heroes and no villains. every person has the taint that we all inherited from adam, and every person has some reflection of the grace of god. there is no one who does not say something foolish or ill-considered; and there is no one who does not say something wise. in other words there are no types, like "heavies," "juveniles," and "ingenues." as is the case in nearly all the novels by its author, we are constantly revising our opinions of the characters; and we revise them, not because the characters are untrue, but because we learn to know them better. human nature is consistent only in its inconsistency. it is forever fluid and dynamic; and although no individual has[20] ever understood another, and least of all himself, increasing knowledge helps to make us certain of our uncertainty. no man will play the part his friends have written for him. one reason why shakespeare was a first-rate and jonson a second-rate dramatist is because jonson created humours and shakespeare created individuals. among all shakespeare's personages, hamlet is the most interesting to readers and the most baffling to commentators; because the latter try to adjust him to a theory of madness, weak will, or what not. is not the fact that he has never been understood by any one and never will be, the strongest proof of his reality? some think he lacked backbone; others insist he was all backbone; some think he was mad; others that he only pretended to be mad; while america's greatest shakespearean scholar said he was neither mad nor pretended to be. a young gentleman of hamlet's copious temperament, placed as he was amid natural and supernatural forces, might easily at times seem to illustrate any one of the above appraisals. indeed i suppose the sanest and most resolute among us seem at times to lack either resolution or sanity or both.
the more complex a character, the less de[21]pendable he is. and everybody has some complexity. even quiet horatio, beloved of hamlet for his steady self-control, tried to commit suicide.
every fine novel and every fine drama must of course illustrate the law of causation—the principle of sufficient reason. but characters that run in grooves are not human. in richard baldock, we have, as we so often have in the work of archibald marshall, strife between father and son—a kind of civil war. this war, like many others, is begotten of misunderstanding. there is not only the inevitable divergence between the older and the younger generation, there is the divergence between two powerful individualities. we at first sympathize wholly with the son. we say to ourselves that if any man is foolish enough to sacrifice all his joy in life to a narrow creed, why, after all, that is his affair; it is only when he attempts to impose this cheerless and barren austerity on others, that we raise the flag of revolt. at the deathbed of the young mother, one of the most memorable scenes in our author's books, we are quite certain that we shall never forgive the inflexible bigot; this hatred for him is nourished when he attempts to crush the son as he[22] did crush his wife. yet, as the story develops, and we see more deeply into the hearts of all the characters, we understand how the chasm between father and son is finally crossed. it is crossed by the only durable bridge in the world—the bridge of love, which beareth all things.
tolerance—when based not on indifference, but on sympathy—is tolerant even of intolerance.
