His worst work, I daresay, is in some of his fiction—for example, in “The Forester’s Daughter.” But my own favorite among his books is “The Shadow World,” a record of his communings with the gaseous precipitates of the departed. He takes great pains at the start to assure us that he is a man of alert intelligence and without prejudices or superstitions. He has no patience, it appears, with those idiots who swallow the buffooneries of spiritualist mediums too greedily. For him the scientific method—the method which examines all evidence cynically and keeps on doubting until the accumulated proof, piled mountain-high, sweeps down in an overwhelming avalanche.... Thus he proceeds to the haunted chamber and begins his dalliance with the banshees. They touch him with clammy, spectral hands; they wring music for him out of locked pianos; they throw heavy tables about the room; they give him messages from the golden shore and make him the butt of their coarse, transcendental humor. Through it all he sits tightly and solemnly, his mind open and his verdict up his sleeve. He is belligerently agnostic, and calls attention to it proudly.... Then, in the end, he gives himself away. One of his fellow “scientists,” more frankly credulous, expresses the belief that real scientists will soon prove the existence of spooks. “I hope they will,” says the agnostic Mr. Garland....
Well, let us not laugh. The believing mind is a curious thing. It must absorb its endless rations of balderdash, or perish.... “A Son of the Middle Border” is less amusing, but a good deal more respectable. It is an honest book. There is some bragging in it, of course, but not too much. It tells an interesting story. It radiates hard effort and earnest purpose.... But what a devastating exposure of a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters!
Henry Sydnor Harrison is thoroughly American to this extent: that his work is a bad imitation of something English. Find me a second-rate American in any of the arts and I’ll find you his master and prototype among third, fourth or fifth-rate Englishmen. In the present case the model is obviously W. J. Locke. But between master and disciple there is a great gap. Locke, at his high points, is a man of very palpable merit. He has humor. He has ingenuity. He has a keen eye for the pathos that so often lies in the absurd. I can discover no sign of any of these things in Harrison’s 100,000 word Christmas cards. They are simply sentimental bosh—huge gum-drops for fat women to snuffle over. Locke’s grotesque and often extremely amusing characters are missing; in place of them there are the heroic cripples, silent lovers, maudlin war veterans and angelic grandams of the old-time Sunday-school books. The people of “V. V.’s Eyes” are preposterous and the thesis is too silly to be stated in plain words. No sane person would believe it if it were put into an affidavit. “Queed” is simply Locke diluted with vast drafts from “Laddie” and “Pollyanna.” Queed, himself, long before the end, becomes a marionette without a toe on the ground; his Charlotte is incredible from the start. “Angela’s Business” touches the bottom of the tear-jug; it would be impossible to imagine a more vapid story. Harrison, in fact, grows more mawkish book by book. He is touched, I should say, by the delusion that he has a mission to make life sweeter, to preach the Finer Things, to radiate Gladness. What! More Gladness? Another volt or two, and all civilized adults will join the Italians and Jugo-Slavs in their headlong hegira. A few more amperes, and the land will be abandoned to the Jews, the ex-Confederates and the Bolsheviki.