Far-Away Stories
William J. Locke
Paperback
(Independently published, July 11, 2019)
AT the end of “Far-Away Stories” Mr. Locke provides, by request, a note on Septimus and Marcus Ordeyne and other well-known characters of his, in war-time. They are shadows, he says: “But shadows are not cast by nothingness... These shadows of things unseen are real. In fable lies essential truth." In true fable — yes. The really important question about Messrs. Locke and Tarkington and romances of their sort is whether they are true fabulists or clever fabricators. Do they believe in fairies? Is faith in the simple human virtues their real clue? Do they deal in types rather than characters because they can’t manage anything better, or because type rather than character is proper to romantic fable? We may give the generous answer. These men believe in themselves and in their job. Whether they altogether understand what it is they believe in and what their job is, may be another matter. In fable lies essential truth, but truth in a singularly elementary and emotional form. Let the fabulist beware how he confounds it with the richer if sterner truth which is the hard-won guerdon of creative realism.The fables in Mr. Locke’s book are gleaned from the past of many years, all but one having been “written in calm days far-away from the present convulsion of the world.” This makes their - uniformity of temper and method the more striking. They are not markedly original in plot: what good fable is? To accept and slightly adapt some fairly familiar “situation,” with the aid of tolerably familiar types, is the right game. Here are the pair of maiden — ladies, sisters, whose delicate and absurd self-sufficiency is broken into by the advent of a beautiful youth (cast up by the sea) for whom they suffer love and jealousy and so have their brief moment of life before he passes on, as youth and fortune decree. Here is a wicked old paterfamilias who at last awakes to his faults, reforms, and becomes a generous parent and a doting grand-daddy. Here is an unhappy little princess whose adventuress-mother is about to sell her to an infamous Jew-financier when the penniless young Englishman carries her off to safety and a cottage. And here are four tales of blind people whose disability merely gives them color and saliency as figures of romance. The substance of “An Old-World Episode” has been embodied in more than one short story of recent years, but never more skillfully than here. It is the tale of the two mates, the one blind, the other horribly disfigured, whose happiness is menaced by the operation that is to restore the blind one's vision. Mr. Locke's handling well illustrates his instinct for the acceptable way out. Your naturalist would show the wife helplessly loathing the horror to which she is legally bound. Your creative realist or high romancer would show her triumphing over the physical revulsion in the name of a spiritual union. Neither would be a tolerable “ending” for the reader of romance. His standards are those of the popular theatre; one has only to refer to these standards to see how impossible any solution must be which permits the physical revelation. Our fabulist finds a “pleasant” way out by letting the wife recover her sight for an instant, so that she may see her child, and having her then deliberately destroy it that she may not see her husband. We quite frankly admit that she has only to see him to abhor an attitude that doubtless represents the survival of the ancient and elementary identification between the physically ugly and the spiritually foul.