"A By-Way in Fiction" is an essay by Agnes Repplier in which she reviews and reflects upon Henry Fuller's debut work, *The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, together with Frequent Allusions to the Prorege of Arcopia*, presenting it as a welcome relief from the weighty, thesis-driven novels that dominated the literary landscape of the time. Repplier opens by describing the exhaustion of the habitual novel-reader, burdened by fiction preoccupied with theological doubt, moral scruples, and earnest social purpose. Against this backdrop, she holds up Fuller's small book as a rare and genuine pleasure: a work of Italian sunshine and cultivated idleness, innocent of plot, free of dramatic incident, and animated instead by wit, aesthetic appreciation, and a deep affection for the leisured life. The book, she explains, is not a story in any conventional sense but a series of loosely connected episodes following a wandering aesthete, the Chevalier Pensieri-Vani, through various Italian settings including Pisa, Venice, Ravenna, and Ostia. Repplier devotes considerable attention to the novel's most memorable creation, the Prorege of Arcopia, a magnificently self-possessed fictional dignitary who moves through the narrative with autocratic composure and exquisite courtesy. The Prorege's disquisitions on leisure, civilization, and the virtues of an ordered, agricultural, unprogressive society provide the book's intellectual substance. Repplier quotes him at length and with evident delight, particularly his arguments against the cult of busyness, urban industrialism, and democratic equality, all presented with serene conviction to his baffled young American companion, Occident, a native of the fictional Shelby County who serves primarily as a foil and appreciative audience for the Prorege's polished conservatism. Repplier identifies the finest episodes in the book as the Pisan chapters, the search for the elusive Madonna Incognita, and above all the excursion to Ostia, from which she quotes at length. In the Ostia passage, the little party of friends visits a humble church tended by a gaunt, malaria-weakened young priest, and the Princess Altissimi sings for him while Pensieri-Vani plays a small cabinet organ, restoring in the lonely cleric a sense of connection to humanity. Repplier presents this scene as the finest in the book, a moment of quiet grace that demonstrates Fuller's capacity for delicate, sympathetic observation. She also notes the book's weaknesses without sparing Fuller entirely. The Pisan episode in which the Chevalier and Hors-Concours attempt to engineer the triumph of an operatic debutante through elaborate patronage is praised as an effective satire on well-meaning interference, but Repplier finds the character of the English Duke of Avon and Severn a false note, too cynical and harsh for the book's prevailing tone of tolerant good humor. The battle over the Aldine editions she finds less thrilling than expected, and the Contessa's practical jokes on the Prorege stretch credulity. Occident, the American, is described as lacking vitality rather than proportion, a convenient listener rather than a fully realized character. Repplier also reflects on a recurring tension in the Chevalier's temperament, his moments of envious longing for the fierce, purposeful energy of earlier ages. Standing before Etruscan tombs or the monuments of the Gaetani family, Pensieri-Vani is briefly ashamed of his own refined passivity and the weak tea of modern humanitarian sentiment. Repplier reads these passages as a sign of some unresolved restlessness in Fuller himself, though she notes that no such ambivalence troubles the unshakeable Prorege. The essay closes with a summary of the characters' fates: Occident marries and returns to Shelby County to be a good citizen, Hors-Concours takes the Princess Altissimi as his wife, the Prorege retreats to his blessed Arcopia, and Pensieri-Vani alone remains in Italy, contented and self-sufficient. Repplier frames the book throughout as a quiet, civilized alternative to the dominant fiction of the day, recommending it to readers willing to linger in a world where beauty, leisure, and cultivation are treated not as evasions but as genuine achievements of the human spirit.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1889 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Literary History