Recent American Fiction

THERE is a harmless recreation, in which some like to indulge, of taking a leap of half a century or more in their lives, that they may then enjoy an imaginative retrospect. How will these days, through which we are passing, look to us and our children? they ask. We shall remember when Longfellow and Emerson died and were buried; can it be possible that we were then reading the works of men and women who now have an enduring fame, and did not recognize how surely they were in the succession of literature ?

Such paulo-post future reflections are good for something if they render us cautious in our condemnation, and readier to entertain the living hospitably. Yet we gain little by attempting to borrow of the future in measuring the stature of a growing man, and we can only register our decisions to-day with the hope that we may not be compelled to record a reversal of judgment to-morrow. The perspective of time is not essential to the perception of the values of a book, yet it is certain that we do gain immensely in our confidence when we can see our contemporaries in the fading distance.

If Miss Woolson’s great-uncle had written Anne ¹ instead of Precaution, or if we were living among the grandchildren of Miss Woolson’s contemporaries, how much more positively we could speak of the promise which this novel held, and what delicate criticism we could insinuate by comparing it with the author’s later work ! See, we might say, how the admirable candor with which Miss Woolson depicted her characters remains, and yet how much she has gained in compactness and force ! She wrote Anne somewhat as one might paint a panorama, but now her pictures are just as faithful to life, while they have an artistic consistency and purpose.

It would be pleasant to go on praising Miss Woolson’s unwritten novel, but the effect might be unwittingly to disparage the actual work before us, and it is only by comparison with what the author may yet do that we are disposed to lessen our estimate of its performance. Comparing it with her previous sketches, we see a substantial advance, and the display of powers which short stories could not so well discover. For all that, Anne inevitably suggests, a series of shorter stories. The reader who may chance to have followed the fortunes of the young lady who fills the title-rôle, as they were disclosed in the monthly numbers of a magazine, must have felt a series of surprises that the story did not end. From time to time the lines appeared to converge, only to open again, so that when the end really came one might have been forgiven if he thought there might possibly be a new turn of the wheel next month.

It is true that in real life the story has no end, but neither has it a beginning. One purpose of art is to present that completeness which is only implied in the series, and in the case of Anne, although we are given the development of a character under varying circumstances, and find a certain rest at length in the return of the heroine to the island home from which she set forth, we cannot resist the impression that what we get is the result of accident, and not of will. The author herself appears to set an undue estimate upon the minor antics of invention. The amusing character of Jeanne-Armande seems to have been elaborated chiefly to make her whimsical love of mystification serve as a sudden protection to Anne in an emergency. The ingenious detection of the murderer, who comes upon the stage in the last turn of the novel, does credit to the novelist’s power of detailed invention ; but the effect of it is to withdraw the reader’s mind from the evolution of the novel, and to interest him in the scenes entirely independent of the heroine and the stake which she has.

We think this interest in invention is a snare to Miss Woolson, and yet it hints at a power which may possibly give her singular success. One is tempted to ask if heredity has not something to do with it. Cooper enjoys a marked distinction among American novelists through his inventive faculty. That and an imagination which dealt in large, impressive figures and scenes insure him a continuous life among younger readers; for it is they who, amidst all the change of fashion in story-telling, hold by the narrative proper. Now the faculty of invention in situation is but meagrely shown in current American fiction of the better sort. Let any one take the fine novels of Mr. James and Mr. Howells, for example, and attempt to write out the argument; it becomes resolved into the action of psychological forces, but the arena is found to be a drawing-room car, or a picnic, or a moonlight encounter in some ruin. But Miss Woolson has a fertility of invention which makes it possible for her to carry her heroine through a few months of existence with a succession of adventures which must have made Miss Douglas’s hair turn prematurely gray.

It is this dexterity which makes Anne a long novel but not a strong one. The signs which look to more eminent success are happily to be found in the work. The characterization is indeed sometimes forgotten in the care to unfold circumstance, and thus we get the impression that most of the people are the sport of the wind which happens to be blowing; but there are some wellstudied and well defined personages.

Père Michaux is one, so is Tita ; and indeed the Northern life with which the story opens is admirably given. Miss Vanhorn is cleverly drawn, as are all the characters which have a humorous individuality. But these are the easiest characters for a novelist to sketch. It is the people who do not at once betray themselves and have no superficial marks that test the novelist’s power, and these in Anne are the least forcible. The fullness with which Miss Woolson delineates Heathcote and Dexter and Mrs. Lorrington and Rachel Bannert does not yield an adequate result in distinctness of impression.

It is here that we detect what may be called the immaturity of the book. There is an absence of a strong controlling, determining purpose, which really moulds circumstance, even when circumstance seems most supreme. Anne herself, the central figure of the book, falls to pieces. Her constancy to Heathcote does not appear to hold the book together, nor her constancy to Rast, nor her constancy to a virtuous resolution. She attains success at last, but it is by a succession of accidents, and then she gets a piece of damaged goods of a husband for all her pains. There are many acute observations, the result of a watchful mind; there are many witty strokes; the reader is not suffered to lose his interest long at a time, but after he has laid the book aside he reflects that there is not a great deal to reflect about. The mill which has been grinding so industriously, and with machinery so carefully watched, has turned out insufficient grist.

We fall back, therefore, on our anticipations, and congratulate ourselves that Miss Woolson is likely to grow not less clever, but more close in her design; that the experience of writing this book will serve her in good stead, enabling her to conceive character by its profounder qualities, to enlarge her ethical conceptions so that they shall not be confined to individual development, but shall comprehend the movement of life in a drama, while her sweetness of sense, her ingenuity, her power of realizing scenes, and her heartiness and delightful freedom from morbidness of fancy will remain to remind her readers that Anne was an unusual book, but interesting chiefly as marking a stage in the author’s development.

How wide the chord is which subtends the novelist’s arc may be quickly seen if one passes from Anne to the two books which come almost together from Mr. Lathrop’s pen. Our readers have had already the opportunity to pass their own judgment upon An Echo of Passion,² but during the appearance of that novel in The Atlantic there came out a longer story, of earlier construction, we surmise. In the Distance ³ is called, on the title-page, a novel, and the author, in localizing the story under Mount Monadnoc, and identifying some of his characters with a theological school, slightly veiled under a pseudonym, would appear to be availing himself of realistic aid in making his story a rescript of contemporaneous life. Yet a little consideration shows the novel to be dominated by romantic ideas; the characters, in their relation to each other and to the scenery, are distinguished not by the matter of fact, but by the ideal; and the development of the thought is through an atmospheric medium, which effectually withdraws the reader from the ordinary incidents of life.

At the very outset the story assumes a subtle and mysterious relation subsisting between human life and nature ; the successive scenes in the little drama are enacted with distinct reference to this relation, and it is not the author’s fault if the reader fails to add to the dramatis personœ a mountain, a sandy waste, and an old house, which has heart-shaped apertures in the outer door. A certain formidableness confronts the reader ; he has an uneasy sense that he must read carefully in order to understand the innuendoes of the story, and he fears that he may not give sufficient value to an old stump or a particular view of the mountain ; that he may miss some essential feature of the hero’s mind, as he might miss an important link in a chain of evidence.

All this implies great care on the part of the author, and our only objection is that his care has been an anxious care, and the reader is made to share in the apprehension that the story may break down. It does not break down ; it moves toward a sure conclusion, but it does not move firmly and swiftly. One is almost tempted to believe that the author conceived a spiritual plot, and then cast about for some physical correspondence ; for his characters, even to the most ordinary inn-keeper, have a certain ghostliness of behavior.

Nor does it appear as if the characters were studied from life. We know of no author whom Mr. Lathrop has followed in composing this work, but he could scarcely have reproduced more cleverly, if he had purposed it, the effect which the singular Sylvester Judd used to produce, or does, at any rate, now upon the modern reader of his books. There is the same curious reverberation of nature ; the characters have a quaint way of being souls in ill-fitting New England dress; the essential in life is studiously sought, and a gravity of manner, even when joking is going on, conveys the impression that life, even in a romance, is a very meaning thing.

Mr. Lathrop is, however, a finer writer than Mr. Judd, who had an astonishing power only at intervals and by accident. In the Distance is, in many ways, an unusual book. If the reader is made to feel the significance of trivial incidents and words, he is for all that led by a style which is full of fancy and suggestiveness. For instance, when a mysterious girl is asked if a certain man is her husband, we are told that she “ shook her head with a dark smile, in which a hidden scorn lurked, like the bitter dregs in wine.” The reader stops to think; he does not remember to have seen that particular smile, yet the description is seen to be intelligible and poetic. Again and again one is surprised by some charm of manner, some delicate fancy, but, when all is said, we suspect the chief value of the book to lie in its singularly apt reflection of the ideal period of youth in New England. We add New England simply to emphasize the serious and conscientious element which is so large an ingredient in the book, and is accepted as characteristic of New England. The enormous importance which youth attaches to its own personal affairs was never better expressed than in this story. Mr. Lathrop has succeeded perfectly in portraying the soul of the theological student and of the young lady who is his contemporary ; he has not done quite so well by the gay young civil engineer, who is not nearly so gay as he was meant to be, and whose Mephistophelian character is too lightly assumed. A stronger sense of humor would save Mr. Lathrop from going so near the edge in his serious writing, and would make his readers follow him more confidently. There are occasional expressions which may be called slightly humorous, but the humor which gives light and warmth to the author’s conception is wanting.

Is it rash to guess that the immaturity of the young people in this book is a somewhat unconscious testimony to the date of the composition ? If the book had not been printed and were to be discovered in manuscript a century hence, we are quite sure that the historical critics of the day would place it, upon internal evidence, in the early period of Mr. Lathrop’s career, and would seek, in their speculative wisdom, to account for the positive advance in his next work, An Echo of Passion. At any rate, the contemporaneous critic, though he reads the two books in the month in which they were both published, has no hesitation in calling the latter work much the more mature of the two. It deals, it is true, with more mature characters, but then the author’s hand is firmer, and the story moves forward in a singularly swift and unhesitating way. Not only this, but the half-fanciful profundity of In the Distance is replaced here by a real depth of insight. The quaint mannerisms of the earlier book have been followed by imaginative beauty of a high order. One will not lightly read or soon forget the passage in which the effect of the wood-thrush’s note is given :

“ The note was that of a wood thrush. Its lonely, exquisite refrain made the listeners think of a shattered ray of sunlight falling pensively into the recesses of greenery whence the notes issued; and a blending of sorrow, or it may be of longing, streamed into the light mood of the previous moment.”

There are passages also of strong dramatic power, which move one by the very slightness of the means employed ; and the conversations, while charged with meaning, are not of the teasing character of those in the former book, because they come from a more real and intense feeling. But the strength of the work is in its masterly development of the central motif; its unhesitating disclosure of the subtle self-deceit of Fenn, making the lie tell itself through the story ; its fine rendering of the noble wife and of the half-willing temptress, whom we may honorably love and admire if we do not happen to be in Fenn’s situation. The ebb and flow of the passion, its apparent checks yet real accumulation of power, are true to nature, and the whole story is remarkable for the skill with which very natural and probable incidents are made to present a spiritual conflict. The force of the narrative is sufficient to sweep away the slight fancy which is conveyed in the title, and made to serve as a light overture. That fancy is a reminiscence of the earlier days in which Mr. Lathrop wrote In the Distance; we look to see his fancy steadily fade before the stronger light of an imagination which kindles An Echo of Passion into a positive flame.

We have the advantage, in Mr. Lathrop’s case, of that view from the side of posterity which was denied us when considering Miss Woolson’s Anne, for In the Distance serves to give us the necessary perspective. That was a romance; this is a novel, and in its closeness to real life it easily dispenses with the mystic and fantastic lenses through which we were invited to look when examining the persons and scenes of In the Distance. Anne and An Echo of Passion make one well content with the promise of recent American fiction; we are almost persuaded that we have something better than promise even in them.