Once more the novel begins to rise to its
higher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters of
their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising
material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well be
chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who
said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is
the devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure
intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does
the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength.
Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he
is from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger of
remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much may
be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless. I confess
that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this
consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur,
all but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle
went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him
by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged with
murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and
I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in
his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of
drunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where
they have thrown him, and where his former client finds him.
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