The East and the West in Recent Fiction

SINCE we have learned to be content with something less than the continental in American fiction, we may think it a piece of good luck that the season brings us two such characteristic works from the separate shores of the continent as Mr. Howells’s story of A Woman’s Reason and Mr. Harte’s novel In the Carquinez Woods. Both writers pay due respect to the oceans which they face. Mr. Howells imports an English lord for duty in the neighborhood of Boston, and Mr. Harte touches in a Chinaman as a slight piece of local color. In the realism of A Woman’s Reason there is all the suggestion of a high-strung Atlantic civilization ; in Mr. Harte’s scenepainting one may see a sketch of that melodramatic California which he has annexed to the republic of letters. The geographical influences in the two books might easily be made, after the fashion of some physicists, to account for the variations in the heroes and heroines, but the reader who does not wish to be too learned will probably accept the characters as the work of the literary creators.

We have called A Woman’s Reason¹ a story, in spite of the announcement of the title-page. It is the first time that Mr. Howells has allowed the story element to get the upper hand of him. Dr. Breen’s Practice was not an argument against the invasion of the medical profession by women. A Modern Instance was not a tract upon the divorce laws, though some seem so to have regarded it. But A Woman’s Reason is an interesting contribution to the discussion of self-help by women, in the form of a narrative of Miss Helen Harkness’s experience from the time when she lost her father, her lover, and her money until she recovered her lover and was relieved from the predicament in which she found herself. Not until she has sounded the gamut from decorating pottery to serving behind the counter in a photograph saloon is her lover allowed to come to her rescue. He is kept away by an ingenious series of disasters, but the reader awaits his final return with a calm confidence in the uprightness of the story-teller.

The play of plot upon character and of character upon plot which constitutes a novel is not wanting, but it is subordinate, and with this change of design Mr. Howells may easily gain more readers without increasing the worthiness of his art. It is entertaining to follow Miss Harkness through her perplexities, and one discovers common sense in a variety of new and piquant forms ; but it may be questioned if enough light has been cast upon a social problem to compensate for the loss of a piece of higher art. Miss Harkness is rather a variation of a type than a distinct addition to the portrait gallery which Mr. Howells has been collecting. Her waywardness is relieved a little by the pretty touch which makes her a day-dreamer, and her character is redeemed by the instant response to an appeal for integrity and the one moment of constancy ; but that is the way with most of Mr. Howells’s young women. Caprice and a charming negation of logic are the every-day dress of their characters; they keep the purple and fine linen of high thoughts and noble enterprise for great occasions only. We own we like them, these pretty creatures who italicize their sentences and turn sharp corners in their minds, and we know that in emergencies they may be depended upon. Perhaps we ought to ask for nothing more. But, with the memory of Florida and Marcia, we look wistfully for faces a little more enduring, a little more expressive of every-day capacity for greatness.

Yet how thoroughly enjoyable this story is to any one who knows the originals ! We are not certain that a familiar acquaintance with Boston and Cambridgeport and the Beverly shore can be dispensed with in a satisfactory appreciation of the characters and situations. Only he who has seen and known all this in the flesh can really enjoy the felicities of the spiritual reproduction ; and this is what makes us half afraid that Mr. Howells’s success as an artist depends upon his realism, whereas the reverse should be true, that one reading his books might recognize the originals when he saw them. But why fret ourselves over this ? We have the entertaining dialogue, which is natural and not hopelessly brilliant and epigrammatic ; the gentle satire; the playful contrast of English and American habits of thought; the humorous studies of life in Kimball and Giffen and Mr. Everton ; the careful, graphic, and repressed narrative of Fenton’s adventures. There is more variety of situation than commonly occurs in Mr. Howells’s fiction, and it would almost seem as if he had gone back temporarily to possess himself of some of the ordinary trappings of fiction, to which he had been indifferent in his previous succession of novels ; so that we are justified in the confidence which we always like to feel regarding the work of contemporary writers that movement is progress.

It is like passing from playing on the violin to hoisting a mainsail when we lay down A Woman’s Reason and take up In the Carquinez Woods.² Mr. Harte’s characters, whatever their other deficiencies, never lack brawn. They are apt to change their costume with the agility of Harlequin and Columbine, but they are equally vigorous and confident in every new disguise. We must say for this little novel at the outset that it is more consistent and less careless than any of Mr. Harte’s fuller narratives, and has a more involved movement than any of his short stories. It carries forward into the region of the novel those excellencies which made his short stories famous, and while the melodramatic element remains, there is a more studied attempt to make use of the common virtues of humanity.

It is the women of a novel which determine its truthfulness. The very subtlety of the sex makes any delineation a test of the writer’s truthfulness in art; for while a writer who is a law to himself will make this subtlety an excuse for drawing characters which transgress all known laws, an artist will employ the same subtlety to bring into distincter light the obedience to law which underlies subtlety. To compare for a moment the character of Helen Harkness, which we have just been considering, with that of Teresa, the central figure in this novel of Mr. Harte’s: the variableness of the girl who dismisses her lover in a freak, and who turns impulsively from one form of self-support to another, has a superficial quality; the reader is not left in doubt as to the real gravitation of her heart, or the inflexible honesty of her nature. On the other hand, Teresa appears before the reader as a vulgar heroine of a shooting affray, a woman of dance halls and many lovers : “ The daring Teresa ! the reckless Teresa ! audacious as a woman, invincible as a boy; dancing, flirting, fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting Teresa ! ” The hero is a man of half-Indian blood, with all the best qualities of the Indian, and with a delicacy and refinement of nature which Mr. Harte insists upon at every turn. He is in love with a village coquette, a daughter of the Baptist minister, who is an offensive hypocrite. The young lady throws over the half Indian, after playing with him, and he turns to Teresa, who has already become passionately in love with him, but whom he has disregarded in his preoccupation with the coquette.

There is certainly nothing impossible in a man transferring his affections under these circumstances, and Mr. Harte has paved the way for the half Indian by allowing Teresa to develop somewhat similar qualities, and to show how much more akin she is to the man than the heartless minister’s daughter. The inconsistency lies deeper. The transformation of Teresa from a coarse rowdy into a gentle, delicate, suffering woman may be a miracle wrought by love, and so we suppose Mr. Harte inteuds it to be, but no account seems to be taken of nature ; the change is wrought in obedience to the demands of the story. It is a shallow and not a profound reading of human nature which discovers the woman beneath the courtesan, and treats the courtesanship as a mask which can be dropped easily at will and leave no signs of itself behind. If one can read Mr. Harte’s stories long enough he may be beguiled into belief in a world where the virtues and vices play at cross-tag, and one is puzzled to know which is “ it,” and then such a story as this will have the charm of an ingenious play among people who put on and off their characters with a dexterous facility. The hypocrites have the hardest time. No chance is given them, and they remain sternly consistent to the end. One of the cleverest bits in this novel is the scene where the Baptist minister, — who by the bye is made to have service and to receive the Bishop, — in talking with some of the roughs with whom he wishes to be hail fellow well met, boasts of an oath in which he had indulged. “There was something so unutterably vile in the reverend gentleman’s utterance and emphasis of this oath that the two men, albeit both easy and facile blasphemers, felt shocked ; as the purest of actresses is apt to overdo the rakishness of a gay Lothario, Father Wynn’s immaculate conception of an imprecation was something terrible.”

The natural setting of the story is very striking. The Carquinez Woods are dealt with in a strong, imaginative way, and one enters them at different points in the narrative with a positive sense of leaving towns and houses behind. The wolves and the fire also have a vivid and lurid presentation which show Mr. Harte at his best; for there is no mistaking the strength of his hand when he is dealing with nature, physical or human, in its coarser fibre. Gentleness and serenity have a meagre representation in his pictures of life, and it is noticeable that the quality of tenderness is assigned by him to men rather than to women. His world is a world of men, where some are gentler than others. The women who play their parts are usually the disturbing element, not the healing ; they are apt to be masqueraders, rather than constituent parts of society. Can it be that the Pacific slope is after all accurately portrayed in Mr. Harte’s fiction ? The constancy which he shows to a few types is evidence of his own faith. Still we may be permitted to believe that his California is largely his own discovery, and thus we may give him credit for a breadth of imagination which disdains the aid of a minute realism. His novel of In the Carquinez Woods is so remote from the customary fiction of the day that it attracts one by its very rebound. It keeps a connection with certain liberal romance of earlier days ; we are not sure that it may not contain some prophecy of the fiction that is to come. At any rate, we hope the coming novelist, if he is heir to the grace and distinct naturalness of Mr. Howells, will have something of the large, vigorous, imaginative vividness which are the undeniable properties of Mr. Harte’s fiction.