Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical--we are dead in earnest--it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.
It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is evidenced for everybody in the contrast between _The Blue Envelope_ and its successor from her pen, _The Golden Block_.
_The Golden Block_ is part of the life story of a business woman, Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman--a much better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most skillful thing in that admirable story _The Golden Block_ is the way in which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of course the surest way to promote _their_ happiness is to succeed herself.