The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

Ray went home ill at ease with himself. He spent a bad night, and he / seemed to have sunk away only a moment from his troubles, when a knock / at his door brought him up again into the midst of them. He realized / them before he realized the knock sufficiently to call out, "Who's / there?"

"Oh! " said Mr. Brandreth's voice without; "you're not up yet! Can I come / in?"

"Certainly," said Ray, and he leaned forward and slid back the bolt of / his door: it was one advantage of a room so small that he could do this / without getting out of bed.

Mr. Brandreth seemed to beam with one radiance from his silk hat, his / collar, his boots, his scarf, his shining eyes and smooth-shaven / friendly face, as he entered.

"Of course," he said, "you haven't seen the _Metropolis_ yet?"

"No; what is the matter with the _Metropolis_?"

Mr. Brandreth, with his perfectly fitted gloves on, and his natty cane / dangling from his wrist, unfolded the supplement of the newspaper, and / accurately folded it again to the lines of the first three columns of / the page. Then he handed it to Ray, and delicately turned away and / looked out of the window.

Ray glanced at the space defined, and saw that it was occupied by a / review of _A Modern Romeo_. There were lengths of large open type for / the reviewer's introduction and comments and conclusion, and embedded / among these, in closer and finer print, extracts from the novel, where / Ray saw his own language transfigured and glorified.

The critic struck in the beginning a note which he sounded throughout; a / cry of relief, of exultation, at what was apparently the beginning of a / new order of things in fiction. He hailed the unknown writer of _A / Modern Romeo_ as the champion of the imaginative and the ideal against / the photographic and the commonplace, and he expressed a pious joy in / the novel as a bold advance in the path that was to lead forever away / from the slough of realism. But he put on a philosophic air in making / the reader observe that it was not absolutely a new departure, a break, / a schism; it was a natural and scientific evolution, it was a / development of the spiritual from the material; the essential part of / realism was there, but freed from the grossness, the dulness of realism / as we had hitherto known it, and imbued with a fresh life. He called / attention to the firmness and fineness with which the situation was / portrayed and the characters studied before the imagination began to / deal with them; and then he asked the reader to notice how, when this / foundation had once been laid, it was made to serve as a / "star-ypointing pyramid" from which the author's fancy took its bold / flight through realms untravelled by the photographic and the / commonplace. He praised the style of the book, which he said / corresponded to the dual nature of the conception, and recalled / Thackeray in the treatment of persons and things, and Hawthorne in the / handling of motives and ideas. There was, in fact, so much subtlety in / the author's dealing with these, that one might almost suspect a / feminine touch, but for the free and virile strength shown in the / passages of passion and action.

The reviewer quoted several of such passages, and Ray followed with a / novel intensity of interest the words he already knew by heart. The / whole episode of throwing the cousin over the cliff was reprinted; but / the parts which the reviewer gave the largest room and the loudest / praise were those embodying the incidents of the hypnotic trance and the / tragical close of the story. Here, he said, was a piece of the most / palpitant actuality, and he applauded it as an instance of how the / imagination might deal with actuality. Nothing in the whole range of / commonplace, photographic, realistic fiction was of such striking effect / as this employment of a scientific discovery in the region of the ideal. / He contended that whatever lingering doubt people might have of the / usefulness of hypnotism as a remedial agent, there could be no question / of the splendid success with which the writer of this remarkable novel / had turned it to account in poetic fiction of a very high grade. He did / not say the highest grade; the book had many obvious faults. It was / evidently the first book of a young writer, whose experience of life had / apparently been limited to a narrow and comparatively obscure field. It / was in a certain sense provincial, even parochial; but perhaps the very / want of an extended horizon had concentrated the author's thoughts the / more penetratingly on the life immediately at hand. What was important / was that he had seen this life with the vision of an idealist, and had / discerned its poetic uses with the sense of the born artist, and had set / it in

/ "The light that never was on sea or land."

Much more followed to like effect, and the reviewer closed with a / promise to look with interest for the future performance of a writer who / had already given much more than the promise of mastery; who had given / proofs of it. His novel might not be the great American novel which we / had so long been expecting, but it was a most notable achievement in the / right direction. The author was the prophet of better things; he was a / Moses, who, if we followed him, would lead us up from the flesh-pots of / Realism toward the promised land of the Ideal.

From time to time Ray made a little apologetic show of not meaning to do / more than glance the review over, but Mr. Brandreth insisted upon his / taking his time and reading it all; he wanted to talk to him about it. / He began to talk before Ray finished; in fact he agonized him with / question and comment, all through; and when Ray laid the paper down at / last, he came and sat on the edge of his bed.