I.

No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism,
now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at
its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its
worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because
he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the
powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from
final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel, because,
though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is
psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and
which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives
romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr.
Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where
there is nothing but the happening of things, and where this one
or that one is important or unimportant according as things are
happening to him or not, but has in himself no claim upon the
reader's attention. Once more the novel begins to rise to its
higher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters of
their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising
material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well be
chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who
said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is
the devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure
intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does
the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength.
Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he
is from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger of
remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much may
be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless. I confess