Vagabond Adventures
By . Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.
IT is given to so few people to have run away from home in very early life, to have adopted the profession of negro-minstrelsy in fulfilment of the ambition of every boy for some sort of histrionic eminence, to have abandoned this art for the purpose of going through college, and then, after much travel in Europe and a course of study at Heidelberg University upon less money than most of us would like to starve upon at home, to have settled quietly down to writing for the magazines, that Mr. Keeler has at least one reason for making this curious and entertaining little book. The story was worth telling, even if he could have imparted to it no charm of narration and suggested no pleasant or useful reflections to his reader. But he has made it lively and agreeable in style, and he has addressed himself so skilfully to the reader’s good sense as well as interest, that we believe the public will find it, as we do, a novelty in literature, and something very much better than a novelty. There is the flavor in it of the picaresque novel, without the final unpleasant tang of that species of fiction ; and the author has so objectively studied his hero, that even where the latter falls into unpoetizable squalor, and has things happen him that you wish had not happened, you do not refer your repugnance to the historian, who, you fell, sees these things in the same light you do. On reflection, too, you are glad that he treats his subject so unsparingly, for a book has no business to be merely literature ; and such a book as this especially ought to teach something, — ought to disenchant youth with adventure, and show Poverty in her true colors, that people may use every honest effort to avoid her. That lean nymph is so apt in literature to take the imagination of the young, that it is well for once to see her as she is in real life: Mr. Keeler, who has walked up and down with her, like Constance with grief, and has the same reason to be fond of her, paints anything but a seducing picture of her. He keeps a surprising cheerfulness of temper throughout, but he does not pretend that his intimacy with poverty is ever enviable ; and indeed there never was but one man had the heart voluntarily to perpetuate such a thing, and he was a saint, and not a literary man.
There is something quite touching in the first of these vagabond adventures, that is to say, in the account of the boy who ran away from home ; but the author does not directly appeal to sympathy for him. So strange facts have rarely been so simply told, and with such strict regard to the truth of local color and the integrity of the hero’s character, who never thinks or does anything beyond his years. Those of our readers who remember Mr. Keeler’s Atlantic papers, “Three Years as a Negro Minstrel” and “ The Tour of Europe for $ 181 in Currency,” are as well qualified as ourselves to pronounce them very interesting in substance and agreeable in manner: he has somewhat enlarged them, as they now stand, and they will bear a second reading singularly well. We think that the first two parts of the book are better in every way than the last : they are better in style, and in fact they are more curious ; for the poverty-stricken traveller and student is not so novel in literature, whilst the runaway boy and negro-minstrel, surviving to write of himself, is absolutely new. The minstrelsy paper is peculiarly entertaining to us people of the audience, who are always longing to know what the actors are like behind the scenes, and who have here the chance to see our delightful old friends with their burnt-cork off. It is immensely gratifying to find so much human nature in them, — yes, so much more human nature than falls to the lot of most other men ; and we ought all to be obliged to Mr. Keeler for the sincerity and good taste in which he has presented them. That company on the Floating Palace is one that it is charming to know through him ; and the whole paper has now an historical value, for negro-minstrelsy, that sole growth of drama from American life, is now almost wholly passed away, and was waning even before slavery perished. Something else pleased us in this paper: perhaps it may he roughly described as confirmation of our belief that the truly American novel, when it comes to be written, will be a story of personal adventure after the fashion of Gil Blas, and many of the earlier English fictions.
No one should be a prophet who can possibly avoid it, and so far we have kept ourselves pretty free from prediction. It is well for Mr. Keeler to have here grouped together these singular facts of his life, but it will be no surprising fortune if he shall come after a while to regard his work as crude in some ways : at least, he has given such evidence of growth since his first book as to make us hope this. But with these haunting reminiscences once fairly uttered, and, as far as he is concerned, dismissed to the limbo of all known facts and accomplished purposes, he can turn to more imaginative tasks with an expectation of success which will be fulfilled in proportion as he remembers (what he ought to know better than any one) that, truth is stranger than fiction, and not only this, but is better even in the airiest regions of the ideal, and that the only condition of making life like ours tolerable in literature is to paint it exactly as it is.