[L. H. Myers' trilogy, The Root and the Flower,] addressed avowedly to readers in the modern predicament, states its theme of the moral sensibility on the spiritual plane, and the twin theme of character-discrimination on the social plane—in terms conscientiously removed as far as possible from the social, economic, political, and religious predicament of his audience. The action takes place in sixteenth-century India and its movement is governed by various intrigues concerning the succession to the throne of Akbar, the great emperor, with the intention that the significance of the work will be all the more clearly felt in the Western twentieth century because divorced from false issues and local spiritual vulgarity.

I do not think that the device works except against its purpose, and its use raises one of the great problems of the novel: the use of external action and the form it ought to take. It is in this case easier to recognize the nub of discussion because the action fails. The clear result of Mr. Myers' device is that his action counts chiefly as a frame. What happens, what is done, what eventuates, matters only as it helps us to envisage, to see as of concrete origin, what the characters think and feel and say apart from the action that may or may not have inspired them. I do not think Mr. Myers realizes the burden he has chosen for his prose to carry: which is the burden of making a great proportion of his words tell in and for themselves as separable, quotable, self-complete items of expression. Put the other way round, which are roundness in appearance, solidity of impact, the illusion of objectivity, and—here the greatest advantage—the releasing or precipitating force of psychological form. This last is emphatically the great advantage of plot in works like The Root and the Flower which mean to mirror or represent the ultimate conflicts of the spirit in relation both to God and the world; and the advantage consists in this, that the words released or precipitated by the crises of the plot will, however ordinary in themselves, gather from the plot an extraordinary or maximum force of meaning which will in turn suffuse and heighten qualities of meaning differently arrived at—e.g., "The rest is silence."

It is the system of the Divine Comedy as it is the melodrama in Hamlet which precipitates and actualizes the great lines and passages we keep for value. Plot is the idiom, the special qualifying twist of action, and the writer who does not use it to the maximum tolerable degree fails to use the one dependable objective principle of composition. Mr. Myers in this case, in my judgment, has made that failure; his book has plot, but only for convenience in arranging movement and to provide the ornament of intrigue; it is all subplot and no major plot. Without a plot he depends for composition and forward stress upon the momentum of his theme, and for suspense and crisis upon the elaboration of debate. Which is to say that he depends upon the presentation of detail only thematically related, upon what, in short, is academically called style. The result is—to choose a few aspects from many—that the characters are superbly characterized, but never presented; their conflicts are profoundly envisaged, but seldom felt or understood; their debates and meditations are ably summarized and beautifully quoted, but seldom dramatized. The whole work seems somehow at the remove of comment, a chorus of apothegm. It is a novel everywhere acutely and nobly about its theme without ever becoming its representative equivalent. I do not say that if Mr. Myers had resorted to a fundamental invigorating and predicting plot, he would necessarily have achieved a deeper intention. Plot offers privations some cannot endure. I say only that plot would have offered a dependable opportunity to dramatize and enact, here not offered nor otherwise won.