Chapter XXI: Fiction Writers

THE COMMUNITY NOVEL—MONTGOMERY—KEITH—MCCLUNG—LE ROSSIGNOL.
INSTITUTIONAL FICTION—PACKARD—SULLIVAN—DUNCAN—WALLACE AND
OTHERS. REALISTIC ROMANCE—SERVICE—CODY—STEAD, ETC. HISTORICAL
FICTION—SNIDER—ANISON NORTH—TESKEY—MCKISHNIE—COONEY.
IMAGINATIVE FICTION—PICKTHALL—MACKAY. MISCELLANEOUS TYPES—
MCKISHNIE—SULLIVAN—HÉMON—SIME. THE NEW REALISM—SALVERSON—DE
LA ROCHE—CORNELL, ETC.
1. _The Community Novel._

Until the ‘nineties’ the production of Canadian fiction had been spasmodic and scattered, but the success of Gilbert Parker, Marshall Saunders, and other Canadian writers who gained a hearing first in lands alien to their own, and whose work came back to Canada ‘with an alienated majesty,’ proved that Canada was rich in literary material. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in fiction writing in Canada. The new writers were influenced not only by the example of their compatriots but by that of the fiction writers of Great Britain and the United States. They began to realize that life around them was as interesting as Barrie’s Thrums or Bret Harte’s California. There was, too, a growing reading public ready to appreciate stories that presented the adventure, the humor, and the pathos of the daily life of themselves, their neighbors, or their fellow-Canadians in other parts of the country and sometimes of other racial origins.

Hence arose the Community Novel or type of story. One of the earlier examples is Adeline M. Teskey’s _Where the Sugar Maple Grows_ (1901). In telling of the origin of this book, Miss Teskey wrote that when reading Ian MacLaren’s _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_ she said within herself, ‘I know just as interesting people in Canada.’ Her sketches of village characters, depicted with a homely but effective simplicity of style, showed that she was right. A delightfully humorous novel of Cranfordian flavor, _The Specimen Spinster_, by Kate Westlake Yeigh, (1906), essayed a larger canvas instead of the smaller etchings and gave an insight into the social relationships of the rural village.

The year 1908 may be said to mark the real beginning of the Second Renaissance in Canadian fiction, for in that year there were published three novels of the Community type—_Anne of Green Gables_, by L. M. Montgomery; _Duncan Polite_, by Marian Keith; _Sowing Seeds in Danny_, by Nellie L. McClung. There appeared also a charming collection of short tales, _Little Stories of Quebec_, by James Le Rossignol. This date is still further significant as the year in which Marjorie Pickthall published her first important short story, _La Tristesse_, in _The Atlantic Monthly_, although her work differs greatly in setting and artistic method from the fiction of the Community type.

L. M. Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and spent her childhood in Cavendish, a seashore farming settlement which figures as ‘Avonlea’ in her stories. That her life has been spent chiefly within the limits of the little island province and the bounds of an Ontario country parish does not narrow her outlook although she confines herself to themes bounded by rural experiences, for her forte is the portrayal of what she has seen and knows. She has imaginative and creative gifts, but she uses these in enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the pathos that lies about our daily paths.

_Anne of Green Gables_, her first novel, has an interesting history. Upon being asked for a short serial story for a Sunday School weekly, she cast about for a plot idea. A faded note book entry suggested: ‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy; a girl is sent to them.’ The writing of a serial was started, but time did not allow the author to complete it for the purpose intended. As she brooded over the theme it began to expand and the result was a book which may be confidently labelled a ‘Canadian classic.’

In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; wise beyond her years, outspoken and daring: not always good but always lovable. Her longing for a real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in her being established as a member of the Green Gables family. It is Anne who dominates the whole story. There are other characters, quaint too, and well-drawn, but the introduction of Anne into the community—Anne, so unconventional so imaginative, and so altogether different from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood—proves to be the invasion of a peculiar ferment, and the incidents which discover the process of fermentation are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking.

_Anne of Avonlea_ follows the career of the orphan heroine and deals with two eventful years of school teaching. Miss Montgomery understands children thoroughly and makes her child characters of all types perfectly natural and lifelike. The same creative faculty which gave us in Anne an entirely new shadow-child shows itself in the portrayal of the mischievous but lovable Davy Keith, his demure twin sister Dora, the imaginative Paul Irving, and the many individualities of the pupils of Avonlea School.

Plot interest is not a strong feature of this or of any of L. M. Montgomery’s novels. There are, nevertheless, several threads of action which bind together the series of incidents and secure continuity and unity. The nature descriptions reveal at once the author’s intimacy with nature and her poetic attitude of mind.

Here is a typical passage:—

A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind
blowing up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long, red road,
winding through fields and woods, now looping itself about a
corner of thick set spruce, now threading a plantation of young
maples with great feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now
dipping down into a hollow where a brook flashed out of the
woods and into them again, now basking in the open sunshine
between ribbons of goldenrod and of myriads of crickets.

_Chronicles of Avonlea_, a volume of short stories, contains some of her most finished work, showing that perfect art that conceals all art, and abounding in a strong vein of simple humour that is found in all her work.

_The Story Girl_ and _The Golden Road_ are written with even less attention to a central plot than the earlier ‘Anne’ books. They are somewhat loosely connected series of incidents in which the same characters take part. But the community type of fiction does not demand thrilling plots. Other writers can write plot stories, but most other writers do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.

_Kilmeny of the Orchard_ is in a sense but an expanded short story. It is a prose love idyll and does not, perhaps, bulk very large when compared with the other books. It is really one of the extended ‘chronicles’ of Avonlea.

The story of Anne Shirley continues through several volumes—_Anne of the Island_ pictures her college days; _Anne’s House of Dreams_ sees her established as mistress of her own home; while _Rilla of Ingleside_ carries over the history into the second generation, Rilla being the daughter of Anne. There is no new development of method or treatment in these. In _Emily of New Moon_ (1923) Miss Montgomery created a new child character, with a new environment, new conditions, and a new group of minor personages, yet in effect it is of the same type and in the same literary field as her previous novels. The chief difference to be observed is that she employs a more analytic psychological method in depicting her heroine—a method that tends to produce an adult’s story of youth. In a way it marks an advance in literary technique but is not as yet entirely divorced from that minute objective observation which makes equal appeal to the young in years and the young in heart.

The particular type of rural community which is the background of Marian Keith’s stories may be duplicated in many parts of Canada and is quite common in older Ontario—a community originally settled by Scottish Presbyterians and afterwards leavened with just enough English and Irish to throw into relief the chief characteristics of each nationality.

One cannot escape the fact of a marked similarity to the work of J. M. Barrie in his tales of Thrums. There is, however, this difference: Barrie is more restrained in his emotions, more abbreviated and less poetic in his descriptions, more pawky and less boisterous in his humor; in fine, Barrie is Scotch, Marian Keith is Scottish-Canadian.

As in most novels of the community type, the interest lies in incident and characterization. The noblest character of all her stories, the best drawn, is the grand old mystic Highlander, ‘Duncan Polite,’ the spiritual watchman of Glenoro. The incidents of this story are woven mainly around the path of the young minister, while the other Glenoro novels centre about the personages of chief interest in a rural community—_Silver Maple_, the school teacher; _Treasure Valley_, the young doctor. _The End of the Rainbow_ and _The Bells of St. Stephens_ are studies of town life. _Lizbeth of the Dale_ and _In Orchard Glen_ are character studies of a boy and a girl respectively. The same qualities prevail in all these. _Little Miss Melody_ builds an engaging picture of the community of Cherry Hill around a fresh and original young girl character. The keynote of Marian Keith’s stories is ‘service.’ Her work as a whole gives a faithful picture of the social and religious life of a certain type of rural Canadian settlement, and Canadian town.

Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in _Sowing Seeds in Danny_ was a little western town, with certain elements of the usual population crossing its pages. The poor immigrant girl, the young English gentleman learning to farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson, the hard-working washerwoman and her family of nine children. The fortunes of Pearlie Watson are the theme of a sequel, _The Second Chance_, in which the setting in a rural settlement, while _The Black Creek Stopping House_ is a collection of short stories. Later the career of Pearl Watson is continued in _Purple Springs_, but this novel shades into a sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human interest and news quality with a ready-made style to correspond has caught the public interest in Mrs. McClung’s work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method.

2. _The Institutional Novel._

From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. We saw that R. E. Knowles in _St. Cuthbert’s_ made the Scottish Presbyterian Church the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the life of the railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’ rather than a local or community life. This has been excellently portrayed by Frank L. Packard in his collection of short stories, _On the Iron at Big Cloud_: Alan Sullivan’s _The Passing of Oul-I-But_ contains some splendid stories of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.

Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts and savage seas of Newfoundland and the hard, cruel, tempest-battered life of the Newfoundland fisherman. When _The Way of the Sea_ was published (1904), Frank T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the sea has ever probed so deeply and so faithfully into its mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity to his subject appears not only in his truthful description of the life and way of the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation of the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose stern creed was born out of a never-ceasing struggle for existence.

Norman Duncan, although he produced several novels, of which _Dr. Luke of the Labrador_ is the most artistically constructed, is essentially a writer of short stories. Indeed, some of his novels were made simply by piecing together, with connecting material, stories that had first appeared in magazine form. As a short story writer he exhibits the finest and most desirable qualities—substantial character foundation, economy of language, sufficiency of emotional causation, and a breadth of human sympathy. His _Battles Royal Down North_ and _Harbor Tales Down North_ are two collections of a high order of excellence. His power to portray action makes his juvenile books—such as _Billy Topsail and Company_—very acceptable to the youthful mind.

Frederick William Wallace writes chiefly of Nova Scotia sailors and deep sea fishermen. He is more objective in his treatment of themes than is Duncan. While Wallace’s gift may be said to lie in his skill in producing vivid visualizations of seamanship, Duncan’s lies in realizing seamen. Wallace observes and describes the life of the sailor and the fisherman; Duncan realizes and interprets the soul. Consequently in _Blue Water_ (1920), _The Shacklocker_ (a collection of short stories), and _The Viking Blood_, have much more plot and action to them than have Norman Duncan’s novels and short stories; but they are not so intimate and convincing in character analysis, neither are they so careful nor so finished in their technique—the two styles are quite in harmony with the differing methods of treatment.

Commercial life in its sociological relationships falls under our definition of an ‘institutional’ aspect of national life. Here must be placed Alan Sullivan’s _The Inner Door_ which reveals inside conditions and labor problems in connection with the operation of a large rubber factory; also his story of the somewhat spectacular development of a chain of allied industries at a strategic point for power and for raw material—told in _The Rapids_.

There are, in this period, some notable examples of Incidental Literature. Louis Hémon, a native of France, lived but a short time in Canada, yet wrote, in _Maria Chapdelaine_, (English translations by W. H. Blake and by Sir Andrew Macphail), a chastely poetic novel of French Canadian life. Miss J. G. Sime in _Our Little Life_ presents, if we view it from one angle, a meticulous study of the life of a Montreal seamstress, with her pathetically frustrate love story; but more than all that, _Our Little Life_ is an observation of the life of the Canadian people by an English mind. The literary artistry of both these works is indisputable. Some criticism has been aimed at both on the score of inaccuracy of minor facts. Whether or not there are such minor inaccuracies, there still remains the grand result that the color, the atmosphere, the outward semblance, are portrayed as they have scarce ever been before; that the inmost soul of the characters is understandingly and consistently revealed.

Education in its institutional aspect appears in many novels only incidentally. As a dominant motive or a circumscribing setting its development is comparatively recent. _Miriam of Queen’s_, by Lilian Vaux Mackinnon (1921), shows the molding influence of university life; _The Hickory Stick_, by Nina Moore Jamieson (1921), emphasises the place and importance of the rural school in rural life and problems; the great school novels of English literature find a modified echo in the boarding school stories of Ethel Hume Bennett and Gordon Hill Grahame—_Judy of York Hill_ (1922), by the former, in which dialogue, action and atmosphere contribute effectively in conveying a picture of a girls’ school; _Larry, or the Avenging Terrors_ (1923), by the latter, a boys’ boarding school story of lively incident.

3. _The Realistic Romance._

The rapid expansion of the far West and such spectacular events as the ‘Klondike rush,’ gave a sort of feverish color to a life that previously had appeared one of toil, hardship, and stony endurance. Viewed imaginatively, that life now presented its hectic side, and the far West and the high North were exploited as literary fields of thrill, adventure, and excitement. Thus the second decade of this century saw the rise in Canada of the Realistic Romance. At its best this class of novel resembles the Community type but is speeded up with a more exciting and more complicated plot; at its worst it is lurid melodrama with realism interpreted as the portrayal of the sordid and seamy side of life. Very few of the realistic romances exhibit any distinction of manner and style. They are not concerned with the niceties of the art of telling a story but with the ability to keep the reader constantly keyed up to a high emotional tensity.

_The Trail of ’98_, by Robert W. Service (1910), is a story of the Yukon, with the spectacular elements of gold-rush days fully emphasised. The qualities of Service’s poetry are accentuated in his fiction. In the same year H. A. Cody began his career as a novelist with another Yukon tale, _The Frontiersman_. It is a story of love, adventure, and missionary experience. _Rod of the Lone Patrol_ followed in 1912, adding a new fictional element which has been much exploited—the doings of the North West Mounted Police. Cody produced a long series of adventure novels with a variety of settings.

Other writers of the Realistic Romance speedily developed different aspects of Western life or staged their romances in different regions of the Great West or the Far North. We have room only for brief mention of some of the best known writers in this class.

Robert Stead’s novels are chiefly of the prairie farm and ranch—_The Bail Jumper_ (1914), _The Homesteader_, _The Cowpuncher_, _Dennison Grant_, _Neighbors_. He is effective in reproducing the atmosphere of the prairie, the details of farm and ranch life, and characteristic bits of scenery; his stories are stronger in incident and action than they are in characterization.

Robert Watson began fairly well with _My Brave and Gallant Gentleman_ (1918), a romance of England and British Columbia, that had touches of Borrow and Stevenson, but his later efforts have tended to cast themselves into more stereotyped forms. Robert A. Hood produced two adventure-romances of British Columbia, _The Chivalry of Keith Leicester_ and _The Quest of Alistair_. Douglas Durkin exploited Manitoba in _The Lobstick Trail_. ‘Luke Allan’ (Lacey Amy) wrote several stories of cowboy life of which _Blue Pete: Half Breed_ was significant because of the originality and individuality of its leading character.

John Murray Gibbon’s earlier fiction—in _Drums Afar_ and _Hearts and Faces_—was English in its setting and concerned with psychological problems and studies of Oxford life. In transferring to an American literary habitat, he entered the ranks of the Realistic Romancers. His novel, _The Conquering Hero_, was a lively, melodramatic story of the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia ranches; while in _Pagan Love_ (1923), he combined a startling mystery with an element of satire on the modern philosophy of business success.

Theodore Goodridge Roberts, younger brother of Charles G. D. Roberts, is essentially a story teller and much of his fiction shows the influence of Weyman and the historical romanticists of the latter years of the nineteenth century. His _Brothers in Peril_ (1905), _A Captain of Raleigh’s_ (1911), and _The Harbor Master_ (1914) are stories of romantic adventure of very early days in Newfoundland, while _Jess of the River_, _Rayton_ and _Forest Fugitives_ have a setting in rural New Brunswick.

4. _Historical Fiction._

The influences that produced the Community Novel gave to the Historical Fiction of this period a closer up view. Instead of the far-off days of the French regime, the historical field of vision became that of but a century or so past and writers essayed to revivify the times and personages of the War of 1812 or the Rebellion of 1837. A noteworthy example is C. H. J. Snider’s stories of the naval engagements on the Great Lakes, _In the Wake of the Eighteen-Twelvers_. With fine recreative imagination he enables us to live through incidents of daring, gallantry, and romance of these stirring battles. ‘Anison North’ in _The Forging of the Pikes_ gives a realistic picture of Toronto of ’37, of the battle of Montgomery’s Tavern, and a pen-portrait of the rebel leader, Mackenzie. She lets us see ‘both sides of the story’ of the conditions that were responsible for the Rebellion.

A minor species of the Historical Novel is found in the novel of pioneer life which seeks to put into a permanent record pioneer experiences and conditions of sometimes considerably less than a century ago. Adeline M. Teskey did this for the Niagara Peninsula and the building of the first Welland Canal with _In Candlelight Days_ (1914). Archie McKishnie told of the conflict of the ‘bushwhacker,’ who delighted in the freedom of the woods and streams, with the incoming tide of settlement in _Love of the Wild_, drawing upon the historic figure of Colonel Talbot for some of his characterization. Anison North blends a colorful picture of the enjoyment of outdoor life with a pioneer line fence feud in her _Carmichael_. In _Kinsmen_ Percival J. Cooney relates a strange story of Scottish feudalism—an example of the clan system with its autocratic laird—which actually existed in Canada.

Few Canadian writers have found leisure to follow the example of Gilbert Parker in writing Historical Fiction in Old World settings, but this has quite recently been done in a highly distinctive style in novels appearing over the signature—‘E. Barrington.’ _The Ladies_, semi-historical stories of the eighteenth century; _The Chaste Diana_, a story of Polly Peacham of ‘Beggar’s Opera’ fame; _The Divine Lady_ (1924) tells the love-story of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton.

5. _Imaginative Fiction._

In one sense all fiction is imaginative. There is, however, a species in which pure imagination plays a much greater part than in the Community Novel, in Historical Fiction, or in the other types discussed in this chapter. Marjorie Pickthall’s work is the highest example of this. She wrote, not with the reproductive imagination nor with fancy, but with the faculty defined by Matthew Arnold as imaginative reason. Into the texture of her fiction she wove poetic imagination and poetic significance derived from her clear, absolute, and sympathetic understanding of the human heart and of the hidden springs and the meaning of existence, from her superior and inclusive sympathetic intelligence. Thus she was enabled to write stories of the most varied settings and of the most wildly differing characters with equal convincingness.

_Little Hearts_ (1915), is an engaging tale of the days of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ with its conflict chiefly between loyalty to the Crown, and fidelity to the spirit of humanity. It pictures ‘little hearts,’ men of small fortunes, and small (as the world sees it) ambitions, in their pathetic existence, more pathetic because of finely brave in the midst of many both petty and heroic vicissitudes of fortune, of mean victory and noble defeat. The novel preaches no didactic moral but it silently teaches Christ’s philosophy of struggle and defeat—‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’ It impresses unforgettably how little after all are the greatest hearts, and how little we lose or gain in any defeat or triumph which is merely earthly defeat or triumph.

_The Bridge_ (1922), has the same theme, with the pain and cruelty of love, of unfulfilled seeking, and the final triumph of a soul that saved itself by losing itself in inward self-knowledge and self-sacrifice. It is set against a background of the tremendous beauty of the Great Lakes, scenes of storm on land and water. Technically, it is farther from perfection than _Little Hearts_; it has less structural unity, less smoothness of style. At times the emotional situations seem overdrawn; nor are atmosphere and setting definitively localized.

The collection of short stories—_Angel’s Shoes_ (1922)—embodies examples of Miss Pickthall’s perfect artistry as a short story writer. These stories are clear, vivid, colorful, and of almost the highest type of creative imagination. They may lack, occasionally, a warmth of humanity that is present in the work of other writers of poorer craftsmanship.

Less distinctive but belonging to the few Canadian novels of this class is _The Window Gazer_, by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, a romance of a man who ‘fell in love with his wife.’ Blended with the characteristics of the novel of pure imagination there are here slight touches of the Realistic Romance and the Community Novel. A somewhat curious literary phenomena is found in _Mists of the Morning_ by this same writer, which began in the style of the Imaginative Novel and ended as a Realistic Romance.

6. _Some Miscellaneous Types._

To the ranks of the Animal Romancers this period has added at least one writer who approaches the subject in a new way. The attitude was apparent in the nature passages of _Gaff Linkum_ (1907) and became more a quality of Archie McKishnie’s work as he continued to write short stories and novels of animal life. We find it crystallized in _Openway_ (1923). Roberts is the intellectual animal psychologist; Thompson Seton, the literary scientist; W. A. Fraser, the objective story teller; but Archie McKishnie impresses us with the sense of his comradeship with the creatures of the marsh, the wood, and the stream. He is their interpreter but not as an outside observer. He lives with them, loves them, protects them. Thus when he writes animal stories he rises to his best literary style and achieves a beauty and smoothness that is not always found in his other writing.

The detective story is represented by a series of ‘underground’ stories by Arthur Stringer; a typical example is _The Wire Tappers_. The setting is a large American city, and rapidity of action is the desired and supplied element. More Canadian in setting and atmosphere are Victor Lauriston’s _The Twenty-First Burr_ and Hopkins Moorhouse’s _The Gauntlet of Alceste_, both well-constructed according to the requirements of this type of fiction, concealing the mystery motive skilfully up to a surprising climactic finish.

The religions and philosophies of the Orient find a slight reflection in some Canadian poetry. In fiction, the stories and novels of L. Adams Beck—_The Ninth Vibration_, _The Key of Dreams_, _The Perfume of the Rainbow_, _The Treasure of Ho_—are chiefly Oriental in themes and settings, and mark the author as an interpreter of the mysteries of the East, with an unusual beauty and originality of style.

Arthur Stringer’s trilogy of the prairie—_The Prairie Wife_, _The Prairie Mother_, _The Prairie Child_—is remarkable as a study in feminine psychology and the reactions of problems of prairie life upon a feminine mind in its domestic and personal associations. The first volume in the trilogy is the most impressive because of its spontaneity, its subtle touches of color and atmosphere. The modern double-triangle element dominates and rather detracts from the originality and individuality of the latter volumes, but the series is significant as an advance from the realistic romance toward a newer realism.

7. _The New Realism._

It was but natural that a reaction should set in against the realistic romance with its insufficiency of motivation and its lack of fidelity to real life. Rather remarkably this arrives in another ten-year cycle and a group of novels published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method and treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We distinguish this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New Realism’ in Canadian fiction. The strongest of these novels undoubtedly is _The Viking Heart_ by Laura Goodman Salverson. It might be called the epic of the Icelander in Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants in 1870 and following their struggles, hardships, and gradual rise of fortunes to the present day. There is no plot but such as grows out of the record of the lives of the characters. There is no melodrama, but there is the tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste, simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the price of country’—the realization of citizenship through toil, tears, blood, and sacrifice.

The other novels in this group are: _Possession_, by Mazo de la Roche, with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; _Lantern Marsh_, by Beaumont Cornell, following a farm boy through his struggles for an education; _Cattle_, by Onoto Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of a man whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a form of wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured in terms of cattle; _The Child’s House_, by Marjory MacMurchy, which enters into the heart and mind of a growing little girl.

The importance of this movement is that it has cast aside superficialities, that these writers have somehow been able to ‘see things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of life from their real beginnings—four of the five novels named are actually rooted in ‘the soil’ as their setting and their underlying spiritual foundation. With this foundation of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a clearer and more finished expression. Some of these novels have melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on the whole, the effect of this new movement has been to produce novels that have a definite structural unity, that are largely free from irrelevant and insignificant detail, that are written with an economy and aptness of language, and that have more definiteness and depth to their basic themes.