WHEN Contemporary American fiction brings on the scene, as it so often does, the successful business man, one might imagine in brackets, somewhere near the beginning of the piece, the Elizabethan stage-direction, 'Alarums. Excursions.' I speak as a foreign reader, liable to mistake the proportions of things; but surely, among the novelists of the last dozen years in the United States, a good many betray, to say the least, a disconcerting uneasiness on this subject, and there are certainly someand not insignificant-who impeach the business man in quite violent terms.

As I tried to recall any such disturbance in English fiction, I could think of nothing nearer than those oldfashioned Sunday-school tracts about the grocer who sands his sugar or the milkman who waters his milk, - irrelevant instances, of course. For it was not the petty trader, but the higher commercial class, which I saw assailed in the United States; and besides, to make out anything of a parallel, I must be able to quote, instead of obscure pamphleteers, representative British writers, corresponding to such Americans as Norris, Phillips, Churchill, Sinclair, Herrick, Whitlock, Merwin, Dreiser, for instance, which seemed to be impossible. But if there was no English parallel worth mentioning, how was one to explain it? Must commercial practice be more questionable in the United States, since the Amer

ican novelists were more given to questioning it? What was to prevent one from inferring, on the other hand, that conscience was more sensitive there? Or were there not other possible explanations, less discordant than either of these with the maxim that human nature is everywhere much the same?

The following notes on some English and American novels of the last and the present century started from this moral question, but they are not confined entirely to it. They deal with the business man who is in a large or at least a large-ish way the financier, manufacturer, wholesale merchant as distinguished from the small shopkeeper, publican, and so forth, who have as a rule been rather differently treated by the novelists. One could not say, for instance, about the humble sort that they were at any time more neglected in fiction than in society; but this would be a true statement about both the English and the American business man of the larger kind.

In the United States, even though fortunes on the present huge scale are post-bellum growths, our friend must have ceased long before 1875 to be an obscure or infrequent figure; yet he was practically left out by the American novelists until that date, when Silas Lapham appeared. And although he (or at least his shadow) gained admittance less recently into the. older and roomier establishment of English

fiction, he was still confined even after 1875 to a modest corner of it, which by no means corresponded to his contemporary position in the world outside.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century England was sufficiently commercialized to lend some color to Napoleon's sneer about her shopkeeping; yet at the end of it our friend still appears in novels somewhat rarely, more rarely in the foreground of them, and still more rarely as himself. Let the reader search the nineteenth-century classics from Scott to Meredith for one tolerable portrait of the business man as such, not merely, that is, as a husband or father or personage in 'society' or something else extraneous, but enveloped in his particular business, so that we understand it and see him forming and formed by it, even as we see the squires, clergymen, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, sailors, farmers, shopkeepers, of the same novelists through the medium of their respective occupations. I do not think the search will be successful.

If any such portraits exist, one might expect to find a specimen in Dickens. For Dickens introduces the business man oftener than any other English novelist does; he was free from the common absorbing interest in the uncommercial upper class, and he had some little business experience and training of his own. Now Dickens nowhere comes nearer to our mark than in Dombey & Son. Here is a novel called after a mercantile house, as Zola called one of his after a department store; Dickens even emphasizes the reference by describing the book in full, on the title-page, as 'Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.' It is not an insignificant firm which is thus set before us as the subject of the book; Dombey & Son is a 'great house' with 'dealings in almost all parts of the

world,' and when it failed, 'there was a buzz and whisper on 'Change of a great failure.'

A good deal of the action passes on its premises, 'within the liberties of the City of London'; we are often admitted there, and Mr. Dombey himself was no idler who never visited them; he was 'in and out all day.' Finally, it is a gradual manipulation of the affairs of Dombey & Son by the manager, Carker, which produces the catastrophe of the plot. Yet, in spite of all these circumstances, the commercial side of the drama and of its personages remains practically a blank.

There are indeed some signs of the author's having 'documented' himself about his subject. We hear a good deal about the furniture of Dombey & Son's office, about its position in the street, the situation of the various rooms, what could be seen from the windows; we are told the names, characters, and personal appearances of most of the members of the staff; we see them at their desks, and hear their general remarks; but of the real work of the firm we learn little more than the office-boy, Walter, was able to report to the dealer in nautical instruments. ""Let's hear something about the firm," said Solomon Gills. "Oh, there's not much to be told about the firm, uncle. . . . It's a precious dark set of offices." "No banker's books or cheque books or such tokens of wealth rolling in?" Walter becomes hazy, and the reader's curiosity on the financial point fares scarcely better than Uncle Solomon's. Vague hints are given here and there that Carker is running schemes of his own instead of looking after the interests of the firm, and that is all. There are stages in the story when it seems as if something clear and definite must be given; when the reader is impatient to get at least one glimpse into the state of Dombey &

Son's ledgers; when Balzac, I think, would have drawn masterly narrative effects from the matter; but it remains wrapped in mystery, and Dickens glides past every opportunity of explaining it, with rhetorical phrases which at last become extravagant in their inadequacy and may perhaps console the reader by exciting his mirth. We do not even get a very clear idea of the general nature of Dombey & Son's trade, though we do hear that 'the firm had dealt largely in hides but never in hearts.'

Dickens did not always evade the business side in so conspicuous or (artistically speaking) so unfortunate a manner as this; but he was always evasive about it. Sometimes this was artistically right; at other times, of little consequence; but, apart from that question, what precise information do we, as a matter of fact, possess about - not the office, or the personal appearance, or the social character, butthe business of those 'German Merchants,' the Cheeryble Brothers, or about the business of Jonas Chuzzlewit with his promising 'business precept, "Do other men for they would do you," or indeed about that of any of Dickens's commercial characters above the shopkeeping level?

Without illustrating the point further I will assume that the instance of Dombey & Son is typical not only of Dickens but of the Victorian novelists in general, and, it may be added, of the post-Victorian as well. For the novelists of the present day in England, although in some few cases (where American influence has possibly been felt) they describe commercial affairs a little more closely than their predecessors did,- Tono Bungay, is a notable instance, continue on the whole the tradition of silence or vagueness about the business part of the business man.

In what part, then, in what lay part (commercially speaking) or what undress, do the English novelists present our commercial friend?

They are not concerned with the way in which he makes his money; the point of interest for them is how he spends it, and especially how he spends it on 'society.' His surprising advance during the nineteenth century across the old class-divisions supplies them with their most frequent theme, and locally at least the results of this advance were important enough to justify their interest. The traditional order of the national procession,-landed gentry, professions, trade, -settled by centuries of custom and almost by the Constitution of the realm, was sadly upset by the development of modern industry, the reduction of agricultural profits and other causes. Never before was the ascent of our friend in the social scale so rapid or widespread, and never perhaps did real life put on the old comedy of the 'bourgeois gentilhomme' with more frequency or vigor than during this period in England.

The business man's accession to external equality equality in wealth and the power which it commanded inspired him too often with an ambition for complete identity with the gentry. He might push or pay his way into their company, but his natural habits, ideas, and manners were seldom those of the uncommercial leisured class, and he was driven in the vain pursuit of his ambition to dissemble the differences by imitation and pretense. An early story of Maria Edgeworth's, The Manufacturers, published in 1804, contains in brief most of the criticisms passed by her successors on this misguided proceeding.

Two cousins, William and Charles Darlay, inherit a prosperous cotton factory from their uncle. William has no higher ambition than to stay in busi

ness, but Charles considers 'tradesmen and manufacturers as a caste disgraceful to polite society.' He proposes to an unattractive 'old coquette' of good family, who accepts him on condition of his adopting her name, giving up all connection with the 'odious factory' and also with his relatives, who, as she says, are 'not at all in her line,' and buying a seat in the country. Transformed into 'Charles Germaine, Esq., of Germaine Park,' he soon tastes disappointment. "The country gentlemen at first stared, and then laughed, and at last unanimously agreed over their bottle that he was not born for the situation in life in which he now appeared. They remarked and ridiculed the ostentation with which he displayed every luxury in the house; his habit of naming the price of everything to enforce its claim to admiration; his affected contempt for economy; his anxiety to connect himself with persons of rank, joined to his ignorance of the genealogy of nobility, and the strange mistakes he made between old and new titles.' Happening to confuse 'one of the proudest gentlemen in the county with a merchant of the same name,' Charles was called out and nearly killed. He says to his wife one day: "It is very extraordinary that your relations show us so little civility, my dear." "All things considered,' she replies, ""I scarcely know how to blame them." Mr. Germaine bowed, by way of thanking his lady for the compliment; she besought him not to bow so much like a man behind a counter, if he could possibly help it.' In the end, his fortune gives out; she dies of a nervous fever, and the prodigal, bankrupt and cured of his folly, resumes his own name and returns to the factory.

William, whose prosperity and happiness have meanwhile been steadily increasing, receives him with open

arms, and points the moral by observing, ""We have no connexions with fine people. We preserve our independence by confining ourselves to our station in life, and by never desiring to quit it, nor to ape those who are called our betters.

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The lack of self-respect, the supposition that friendship and esteem are purchasable, that a sow's ear filled with gold is not only as good as or better than a silk purse, but may be made to pass for one, and Charles's ostentation and pretentiousness, complete the usual portrait of his kind in English fiction. Pretentiousness is the trait which perhaps comes in for the most satire, the commercial parvenu's sham fine manners, sham pedigrees, sham family portraits, sham libraries ordered by the yard. As Margaret, the daughter of the poor clergyman in North and South, 'Gormans! Are those the Gormans who made their fortune in trade in Southampton? Oh, I am so glad we don't visit them! I don't like shoppy people. I think we are far better off knowing only cottagers and laborers and people without pre

says,

tence.

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Lord Melbourne, the early counselor of Queen Victoria, expressed this common feeling in much the same language. 'I don't like the middle classes,' he remarked (ministers might still venture to say such things). "The middle classes are . . . all affectation and conceit and pretence and concealment.'

Pretentiousness being a common human fault, it may be asked why it should be ascribed particularly to our friend? The fact that the parvenu, who is particularly exposed to the temptation, happens to be, in England and elsewhere, most often of commercial origin may be called an accident. But the possibility that the ascription rests on grounds belonging more nearly to commerce itself, and that it is not