f unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers
his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in.
Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off
alone.

Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to
a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one
hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to
withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and
upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his
lights. If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither
has he listened to the voice of the mob. The sounds which have reached
him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to
better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in
some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil
existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that
clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they
think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill.

In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in
some mounting aspiration opposed to a static regime, whether the passion
for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement
of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political
malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the
shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only
conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised
already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the
abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in
politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance,
his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if
satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no
more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to
the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the
_Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon
the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the
_Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting
marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the
friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning.
In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who