Recent American Fiction
THE discovery of Europe by Americans is making good headway, and we have to chronicle three books which, in their separate spheres, illustrate very well the enterprise of Americans, and the facility with which our countrymen
possess themselves of the country. It can no longer be said that our explorers have only coasted along the shores and held parley with the natives: they have pushed into the interior, and traced some streams to near their source; they have discovered some ruins, and have begun to speculate a little upon the origin of the native races, and to describe their manners and customs in detail. For the better acquaintance and more scientific study of life, colonies have been formed, and some adventurous students have adopted the mode, and to a certain extent become naturalized in the land. It is none the less true, and a fact not to be regretted, that in literature as in society men change the sky they live under, but not the natures which they carry.
Mr. Julian Hawthorne, by virtue of a patient endurance of England, has given us not only a novel1 wholly English in its circumstance, but one which deals with a historic England. He has chosen the period of the first quarter of the present century, and by so doing has rid himself quite completely of all temptation to insert any Americanism. The England of that day and the United States were farther apart in their mutual influence than they had been before or have been since. There is nothing, therefore, in the form of the book to give the slightest hint of any other than an English nativity; and yet one may amuse himself by detecting, now and then, a note which suggests that the writer is viewing England, and is not himself of the soil. To be sure, the very attitude of a historical romancer is necessarily a little outside of his subject; and perhaps this helps to confirm the illusion we are entertaining, — that the American, however long he may remain away from his native soil, never quite loses the native accent.
Be this as it may, we doubt if an Englishman would detect the subtle presence of America in the book any more readily than an American. Mr. Hawthorne has the artist’s rather than the historical student’s faculty, and he has helped himself to the tone and color of the life which he depicts with a quickness of perception and a deftness of touch which make mere historical treatment seem lumbering and ineffective, He has not, it would appear, given himself the trouble which Thackeray took to preserve the vraisemblance of an earlier period, but he has not been betrayed into too great anxiety for historical effect. He has allowed his story to move on its way unencumbered by an excess of antiquarian baggage, and the result is a freedom which constantly makes the reader forget that he is reading a story, and persuades him that he is listening to a veritable narrative.
It certainly is an admirable art which does this, and Mr. Hawthorne has secured his success by asking the reader’s interest in the persons of his drama, and not in the stage properties among which they move. The principal characters are not many, and they are all involved in the plot of the story. A young man, who figures as a very self-conscious and self-analytic poet; an old man of singularly marked features, who yet moves about apparently unrecognized in a circle to which he returns, after a sudden disappearance under a cloud a score of years or more before; a rascally banker ; a cold-blooded solicitor; a young woman of a somewhat heavy cast, but very vigorous in nature ; a young woman of brilliant parts and passionate caprice, — these are not singularly new to fiction, and when one reviews the story he almost fails to discover why he became so much interested in the movement of these characters.
Mr. Hawthorne would have us believe that Sir Francis Bendibow, the rascally banker, and Mr. Charles Grantley, the old man of marked features, were associated in business when young men ; that Mr. Grantley discovered Sir Francis to be a gambler of the deepest dye, who had misappropriated the funds of the bank ; that, in order to shield Sir Francis, Charles Grantley placed all his money in his partner’s hands to make good the loss of the bank, left his wife and young daughter in the gambler’s care, and fled to India, to begin life over again, — his expectation being that his own name would thus be stained, and his partner’s cleared. Ilis return fills Sir Francis with dismay. The wife of Grantley had died. The daughter had been married to a French marquis, and had now come back a widow, bent on making mischief generally. She is Perdita, the young woman of brilliant parts, and no actual recognition ever takes place between her and her father, who continues his course of generosity by leaving all his fortune to the other young woman, if she will accept it, and as an alternative, if she refuse, to his daughter. He is killed by Sir Francis, who fears that he will divulge the secret which he carries ; and it is in the Dust which all these and more events raise that his actions smell sweet and blossom.
Where the plot is so intricate as it is in this book, it is not easy to make a brief statement serve as explanation, nor is it quite fair to attempt this; but the point we would emphasize is the nonsensical nature of the self-sacrifice which Mr. Grantley makes, and upon which the whole development of the novel turns. Self-sacrifice is a fine thing, but it must be allowed a justifiable motive. To shield a villain, when every indication points to the villainy being ingrained, one does not part with his good name, and at the same time bestow upon his daughter the inheritance of felony. He does not leave his daughter to be piously brought up by the villain who has wronged him, and go off to India to make his fortune, and bring it back for the benefit of another young woman, his landlady’s daughter.
There comes, through this misapplication of morality, to be a certain air of unreality about the monetary transactions of the book. This great banking house, a rival of Childs’, is built on the bottomless pit of a gambling hell; the poet receives a check for eleven hundred and fifty pounds—which we hope, in passing, was not drawn on Bendibow Brothers — ten days after his great Southeyan poem of Iduna is published. Nothing in the book is more unreal than these eleven hundred and fifty pounds : an English publisher makes his accounts more exact than that ; there should be some odd shillings, pence, and halfpence. The twenty thousand pounds which Mr. Grantley leaves dance about from hand to hand, with the alacrity of counterfeit coin ; and finally, when the hero has got into a pecuniary scrape, where his own and his wife’s integrity have placed him, he is pulled out by a lucky five thousand pounds, left him by a nebulous ducal uncle. Money, indeed, in this book, has an air of legerdemain about it, which makes it curiously volatile. We begin to want a little of it.
In one respect we may commend the author, that he has shown a reserve in using his heroine’s capacity for second sight. She employs it twice quite effectively, but we are very glad she does not use it again. As a delicate piece of machinery in a novel, such a contrivance may work well, but only when carefully handled. In spite of the central fault of the book, there is so much cleverness about it, so much good writing, and so many skillful touches that one cannot help admiring the author’s faculty. No one who throws so much vitality into his work can be blamed for writing novels as often as he wants to.
Mr. James, as is well known, is the most brilliant of the discoverers of Europe, yet he has been quite as much interested in watching the movements of his fellow explorers. Indeed, his close familiarity with them and the Europeans among whom they pass has made him at times a little negligent of his country, and too much disposed, perhaps, to confine his portrayal of the American type to those varieties which have been seen in Europe. Thus, in his narrative of the Siege of London 2 by a persistent and victorious young Western woman, he has fallen a little into that vague and indolent geographical spirit which so amusingly characterizes the English people whom he banters. Mrs. Headway, who constituted the entire force which laid siege to London, was an indefinitely married lady of the Southwest. There is something rather fine in the largeness of Mrs. Headway’s previous district “ I’m very well known in the West,” she says, when making an attack upon one of the outposts, “ I ’m known from Chicago to San Francisco, if not personally (in all cases), at least by reputation.” San Diego was the scene of her latest movements. It was there that Mr. Littlemore, the American gentleman, who presents the most formidable obstacle to her successful siege, knew her, when he was himself looking after his silver mine. “ She thought it a disadvantage, of old,” Mr. James tells his readers, “ to live in Arizona, in Dakotah, in the newly admitted States ; ” and the severe and virtuous American, who has not been abroad and even doubts if Europe be quite proper, is strongly moved to ask geographical questions of Mr. James.
It is, however, no very difficult task to bound Mrs. Headway. On the contrary, although Mr. James is reticent as to her exact history, and there is a somewhat legendary air about her early exploits, he manages to impress the reader with her limitations, and to indicate very shrewdly the limitations, in another way, of the young English baronet who is the citadel which she has made up her mind to capture, and finally does capture by strategy. The story, as we have intimated, is of an American adventuress who, in her excessive power of adaptation, reaches an admirably simulated respectability, and, having fascinated Sir Arthur Demesne, finally turns his defences against himself. As a piece of warfare, Mrs. Headway’s siege is conducted with admirable address. The reader is puzzled to know how a young woman, whose reported conversation, though entertaining, is undeniably the expression of a hard, vulgar person, will succeed in making capture of the Englishman, who, if slow-witted, has at any rate the sensibilities of a gentleman. Time, of so much consequence in most sieges, seems here a dangerous element, and one would suspect that Sir Arthur’s wits would catch up at last with his instincts. So they would, but Mrs. Headway uses against him the very weapons upon which Sir Arthur must rely. He has an honor which has been wrought out of somewhat poor material in a long series of generations, until now it has a nobility of temper, and thus far Sir Arthur Demesne has used it effectively. At the critical moment Mrs. Headway deftly wrests it from him, and points its blade another way.
It is hardly worth while to look for any very deep meaning in this brilliant little story. As a sketch of superficial manners it is vivacious and very intelligible. The humor in the study of the young diplomatist is capital, and one may take a grim satisfaction in seeing the very cautious Mr. Littlemore defeated by his own caution, and left to all the dissatisfaction which a too tardy resolution must have brought him.
In the Pension Beaurepas, already known to the readers of The Atlantic, Mr. James has made us acquainted with two foreign Americans, who enable us to enter a little more easily into the perplexities of native Europeans, when they try to form their impressions of Americans from the specimens thrown up on their shores. Mrs. Church, the American mother, who has tried to efface her nationality with a wash of European culture of a severe order, and Miss Aurora Church, her daughter, who attempts a feeble revolt into the condition of free-born American girls, are individuals, but scarcely types. They amuse us as much as they must puzzle our European inquirers, and belong in the international museum of literature as examples of climatic and other effects upon the American genus, when undergoing voluntary or involuntary exile. The shade of distinction between Miss Ruck, the genuine American girl, and Miss Church, who makes desperate efforts at recovering her nationality, is a very nice one, and, with the help of a pretty vigorous treatment of Miss Ruck, is made clear and decisive.
Miss Church reappears as one of the half dozen people who cross to America and make report in The Point of View of the impression created upon them by American life. Mr. James’s subtlety never appeared to better advantage than in this clever bundle of letters. When one considers that he has undertaken to make Americans, who have been Europeanized, return to America and report on the country, either to Europeans or to those of their own special kind, one sees what a feat is accomplished. These letters are so agile, so true to every wind of doctrine that blows, so prospective, retrospective, and introspective, that the reader is lost in admiration. They are instantaneous mental photographs, and among the freshest of Mr. James’s witty decisions upon his country men and women. He even abandons himself, in Marcellus Cockerel, to a certain luxury of praise of things American, which has hardly a trace of irony, and shows, better than anything in the book, Mr. James’s power of dramatic assumption. One generally feels that, however elaborately the various characters are dressed, the voice is always the voice of Mr. James, and that the blessing intended for the character falls upon the head of the spirited wit who has planned the disguise ; but there is a downright quality about Mr. Cockerel’s speech, a vehemence of American assertion, which invests him with a singular individuality. We do not recall another instance where Mr. James has so entirely withdrawn himself from view.
Mr. James has in various instances made such good occupation of French territory that one is a little surprised to find an American author, hitherto unknown in polite literature, who has been also very much at home in France, and yet appears not to have made the acquaintance of his compatriot. Indeed, the American colony is conspicuously absent from the circle into which Mr. Hardy introduces us in his novel, But Yet a Woman.3 None the less, it is clear that Mr. Hardy also has made his voyage of discovery, and has penetrated the interior. So completely has he adopted the French life that one might almost fancy one was reading in this book the translation of a report, made by a Frenchman himself, of the society in which he lived. This is, however, but a momentary fancy, due to the confidence with which Mr. Hardy moves among scenes wholly foreign from America. When one comes to look at the book more closely, one recognizes qualities which one would fain believe to be of home origin. In a negative way, the book is free from anything like a posture. The absence of attitudinizing is in itself a sign of quiet power, and the reader has not gone far into the narrative before he commits himself with confidence to a master who, he perceives, has entered the heart, and not merely the manners, of his characters.
The story of the book, in its main outline, is the gradual supremacy which love asserts over the heart of a woman. The incidents, which are not various, are selected from those which pertain to the life of a French maiden, living with a bookish uncle, and looking forward to conventual vows, who is thrown into the society of a young physician, the son of her uncle’s friend, and through the relation is turned aside from her first purpose. The woman in her asserts itself, not in violent or conflicting emotions, but attains to a domination, as the sun rises above the mists. There is no struggle between a human love and a divine call, but there is an expansion and elevation of the human love ; so that, in the transfiguration of the woman, the religious purpose remains as a constituent part of the nature.
It is here that we think Mr. Hardy has shown a temper alien from French thought and more akin to American. There is a freedom and breadth in the treatment of Rénée which removes the question involved from the region of conventional morality, and gives one the sense that a higher court is appealed to. With equal power, a subtle change is made to go on in the young physician, Roger, by which a nature, whose tendency rather than determination is toward a merely physical apprehension of life, becomes enriched and idealized in Rénée’s love. It must not be supposed from this that the reader is invited to a theological discussion, or presented with a disguised tract. No : Mr. Hardy is an artist, and he has treated his theme in an artistic manner ; but he is also an artist who recognizes the play of deep and moving passions in human society, which are not based on merely physical laws. The attraction of Rénée and Roger to each other is the attraction of natures which, in their separate movements, are capable of high thought, and act upon each other not in the ignorance, but in the activity, of these thoughts. There is an imagination which pictures scenes, outward show, appearances, and confesses only so much of cause as lies immediately behind the changes produced; and there is an imagination of a more penetrative kind, which is constantly opening to the reader glimpses of a deeper life, and suggesting that the actions of men and women have a more substantial base than the conventions of society.
To the calm, fine nature of Rénée, which opens as a flower opens, there is opposed the more striking and masterly character of Stéphanie, a woman of restless nature, of large ambition, and yet capable of being dominated by the highest qualities of womanhood. If Rénée was yet a woman, when all was told, and could lay aside the réligieuse as one lays aside a garment no longer needed, Stephanie was yet a woman also in the expression of the highest power of selfsacrifice. She might have had the love of Roger, or, more exactly, she might have robbed Rénée of that love; and in the exercise of her restraint there is the expression of a truly great character. It is long since we have seen the finer qualities of womanhood so generously and so subtly displayed as in these two figures, each needed to complement the other. It is possible to be said that Mr. Hardy has rather the light than the fire of love in his novel, but at least this result is not reached by the use of a cold analysis ; it is rather the outcome of thoughtfulness in the artist, who feels deeply the life of his creations, and is perhaps less concerned with the effect which they may produce upon others than with the working out of their several destinies.
It is true also that Mr. Hardy’s hand is not wholly that of a practiced artist. He has told a story, he has put into action well - distinguished characters, and he has inspired his work with a fine motive, but he has written rather cautiously than in the confidence of one who knows his instruments thoroughly. The evil genius of the book, for example, though studied with care, does not always seem to move of his own accord. One feels the author give him a little push, now and then. The hold which he has upon Stéphanie is not very clearly explained; the mystery is more annoying than moving, and one begins to suspect that the author had not quite made up his mind what the influence was, or that he feared, by making it plain, to throw Stéphanie’s fine nature off the track.
The incidents of the book, the story of Stéphanie’s dealings with the Comte de Chambord and the journey in Spain, with the graphic sketch of Antonio, are all necessary to the elaboration of the plot, and add positively to its richness. The minor characters are delicately touched, especially Father Le Blanc, and the flavor of the story given by the reflection and comment is always fine and gracious. It is a positive pleasure to take up a book so penetrated as this is by pure and noble thought, and marked by so high a respect of the author for his work. Mr. Hardy has, as it were, gone to France as artists of the brush have gone. Like them, he has studied with French masters, and his first work, like theirs, is of French subjects. But, not always like them, he carried a nature which has not been translated into the French idiom; and it is fair to believe, it certainly is reasonable to hope, that this success, for it is a success, may be followed by the treatment of subjects nearer home. We do not complain, however, of the foreign air; there is no doubt that a work of imagination gains by the distance thus given ; but we have a little regret that Mr. Hardy will miss an audience which turns more easily to scenes where it can supply the lower standards of familiarity, and we have a strong regret that a large audience may thus miss a noble pleasure.