Recent American Fiction

Miss FLETCHER, the authoress of Kismet, Mirage, and The Head of Medusa, reappears after long silence with a story of signal power and great finish.¹ If the world were less busy, a work of fiction like Vestigia could not fail to attract considerable attention. As matters are, the general public may fail to discover how much of genius, of thought and feeling, of charmingly natural art, has gone to the making of this excellent novel ; but the few who retain an unaffected taste for good literature cannot afford to overlook it. We have in the first place a tale composed of simple but dramatic elements; we have next a faculty of character - drawing which is absolutely without flaw ; and along with these we are vouchsafed a poetic sentiment that finds expression in terms never overstrained, never for an instant passing the line which divides the enduring style from the ephemeral. Then, too, there are many brief summaries of experience or observation which attain to the value of apothegms ; yet one is not made to feel that these have been sought for. The oppressive influence of George Eliot, traceable in so many writers who have tried to gain the fame of profundity by an involved and painfully philosophic statement, has not invaded the work of Miss Fletcher. “The view other people take of the less admirable consequences of our actions being apt to strike one as morbid ; ” “ A woman loves what she can evoke, but what she marries in a man is not his best, but his average self; ” “ A woman betrays and remembers, where a man betrays and forgets,” — these are not forced utterances, but they are for that reason extremely forcible. Miss Fletcher illuminates her page with flashes of this kind, but she does not allow her wisdom to assume the form of a wearying glare. Instead of the cold, electric light of modern omniscience, she turns upon us the glance of a kindly but keen and penetrating woman’s eye. But the main charm about this book is its delightful simplicity, its truth, its reality. One does not suspect that the writer ever thought of her audience. It is only that Dino and Italia underwent this or that experience — that they loved, suffered, and came out at last with a prospect of happiness ; while the other people concerned remained simply themselves, and went on about their affairs, more or less affected by the drama that was enacting. But with what warmth, what power, what grace, all this is told ! Old Sor Drea, the father of Italia, and Italia’s friend Lucia, the ancient dressmaker, who wore a look " of decent disappointment with life,” are drawn with the finest completeness and gusto. Their speech is full of graphic phrases like this of Drea’s : “ I spoke too soon, and forgot to listen. My words were like so many kittens, that are born in such a hurry they ’re born blind.” Nor would it be easy to point to any instance of a girlish, unsophisticated heroine more engaging than Italia. The plot is simple. Dino, the young lover, being a member of a secret society, is appointed to attempt a dangerous and probably fatal task for the revolutionists ; yet, while under this deadly obligation, he cannot refrain from declaring his love to Italia, and then there comes a struggle between love and duty. He cannot go back, cannot retrace his vestigia : accordingly, there ensue misunderstandings, separation, and suspense. But these elements are handled without exaggeration, and the success of Miss Fletcher in analyzing Dino’s mental state under the impending crisis, and putting it before us in the form of an unlabored picture, pays a high tribute to her skill. The book makes no pretension to greatness, and the construction is weak in some places. The lesson, also, which it suggests — that having once taken a step in life we must go straight on — is rather vaguely set forth. One reads Vestigia, however, not for any lesson, but for its charm of characterization and its facile yet firmtouched art.

The Bread-Winners² has been fortunate in the curiosity as to its authorship which, with a good deal of artfulness, was created at the beginning of its serial publication ; but it enjoys the further advantage of containing material almost new to American fiction. As a “ social study ” it can hardly, we think, lay claim to much value, being in this respect rather fragmentary and onesided. One of the author’s objects is apparently to show that the discontented workmen in this country are in the main idle, ignorant, and dissipated, like those in the brotherhood called the BreadWinners, which gives the book its name, and that these occasionally entice into their ranks an honest, efficient artisan like Sam Sleeny ; also that, while they do not fairly represent the laboring classes, they are able to contaminate them, and are undermining the social Structure. No doubt there is much truth in the portraits here given of Bowersox, Offitt, and their fellows ; but there is hardly less doubt that among the actual laborers who occupy themselves with problems of improvement in their condition a great many hard-working, intelligent, serious men are to be found; and of this kind of toilers no representative appears in the story. Neither is there any hint in it of a destructive tendency from the opposite side,— that of excessive monopoly and of the corruption which is frequently one of the results of great wealth. For these reasons the author’s presentation of the case may be regarded as somewhat inadequate ; but his sketches of local politicians, their mean motives and petty wiles, though briefly done, are accurate and spirited. We are shown how easily Mr. Metzger, the market-man, controlled ward politics as against the gentle and upright reformer, Arthur Farnham, to whom he supplied steaks ; and the way in which a small position in the public library becomes the source of political combination and bargain is amusingly exhibited. Equally good is the willingness of Pennybaker, who describes himself as “ open and square, like a bottle of bitters,” to coöperate with Farnham, after being “ frozen out ” by his other colleagues. But the most vital contribution to the social study, if not the central figure in the whole composition, is the carpenter’s daughter, Maud Matchin. To the gallery of national types — thus far a very limited one — she forms a distinct and significant addition. Those who have noticed the type will recognize at once the veracity of this representation ; and those who are not familiar with it will understand, from the decision with which she is modeled, that Maud is no make-believe creature. A beautiful, hard, sordid, and commonplace girl, whose mind is warped by wild desires for social advancement, she is the exponent as well as the victim of a badly regulated education in the public schools. In this instance, the author has suggested unflinchingly, and with a great deal of discernment, one of the most curious and perplexing phenomena in that condition of things which is known as American civilization. Maud is not a pleasant person to contemplate, but she is alarmingly real ; and her destiny, in marrying a falsely acquitted murderer, very likely intimates only a tithe of the evil which the development of that sort of character is accomplishing in this country. Against the discouraging and possibly exaggerated background in which these coarser personages move the author sets his hero, Farnham, and his heroine, Alice Belding, with her worldly, well-disposed, but somewhat blunt-minded mother, surrounded by a group of outlined figures who stand for society in one of our lake-towns. It may be said in passing that the tone and characteristics of a town or “ city ” of that description are conveyed by this novelist almost to perfection, — a thing which, so far as we remember, no one has even attempted to do before. It would seem that we are expected to receive Arthur Farnham as a gentleman suffering from his misplaced situation in a municipality containing, chiefly, semibarbarians ; but, owing to some fault in the author’s conception or execution, it is hard to feel any very strong sympathy with this bland hero. He is rich, amiable, efficient, but in no way especially fine or admirable. Impressed by the beauty, the purity, and the well-balanced womanliness of Alice Belding, he is also exposed to the absurd infatuation of Maud; and at the instant when she offers herself to him in marriage he kisses her, following the action with a brutally brief assurance that he does not love her. Mr. Temple, who began life on a Mississippi steamboat, and has risen to be the owner of iron-mills, the appreciator of trotting-horses and good sherry, as well as a very profane talker, somehow appeals to one as a much more manly and respectable individual than Farnham. As a foil to Maud Matchin, the author has given us Alice Belding, who in herself is unquestionably charming ; but he interposes a certain sensuousness in his treatment of her, which stands in the way of an unalloyed pleasure in contemplating her perfections. As a social study we have said that this story is inadequate. As a novel, although it displays in details the impress of a practiced hand, it is by no means satisfactory : we should rather incline to describe it as a massive study for a novel. The plot is vitiated by an inherent weakness, which becomes manifest in the falling-off that affects the process and the interest of the final chapters. The scene of Offitt’s murder hardly rises above the plane of a reporter’s bald narration ; and however good this mode of description may be for a newspaper, it is not art. It may be said of the author that, although his lines are true, his graver cuts too deep at all points : the effect produced is not modulated enough. As an artist, he says too much, and suggests too little, in proportion ; but although he has a great deal to learn before he can create a thorough work of art, he has concentrated in this story an amount of knowledge, of observation and reflection, that many artists may envy.

Mr. Fawcett in his recent novel³ undertakes to pluck for us the consummate flower of fashionable existence in what is now recognized as “ the metropolis,” at the same time that he analyzes the growth and shows us some of the roots of the plant. It can hardly escape notice that Mr. Fawcett, like the author of The Bread-Winners, betrays a kind of patrician abhorrence for the low life which he describes ; yet he is able to handle it with more genuine artistic sympathy than his nameless competitor, and the view he takes is broader. To the one, all beings included in the humbler class are essentially the same ; to the other, discriminations are apparent. Mr. Fawcett takes the case of a girl whose early years are passed in distressing poverty, except for one brief episode of attendance at a fashionable school. She is the child of an Englishman of gentle lineage and a hard, penurious, cheap American woman, who had won her husband by a transient, aggressive beauty. There is something very pathetic and engaging about the figure of this inoffensive, unsuccessful father, who is sketched with a charming touch; and the girl’s relations with him are rendered with delicate appreciation. When his last hopes had failed, " He never spoke of his future. He never spoke of hers. She understood why. Each always met the other with a smile. There was something beautiful in their reciprocal deceit. They heard the dead leaves crackle under their footsteps, but they strove to talk as if the boughs were in bud.” In this passage we catch the note of a genuine poetry. The father, Twining, offers one of the few portraitures of a gentleman which have been vouchsafed to American fiction ; and the way in which the girl Claire’s aspirations lead her on, through many obstacles, to a position of temporary triumph in the circle towards which she has tended from the beginning is detailed with force and nicety. The author does not neglect, moreover, to contrast with the squalor and vulgarity of Greenpoint and with the heroine’s dismally real mother the more glowing and successful but equally hopeless vulgarity of Claire’s friends, the Bergemanns, and their associates. Opposed to these we have Thurston, the cultivated man of the world, and the talkative, nervous, au fait, kind-hearted Mrs. Diggs, both representing the older and more conservative element. Indeed, the number of types that Mr. Fawcett has presented within the compass of this one story, and presented well, attests a wide range of observation.

Yet it is curious to notice that, with all this variety, the cleverness of his . general idea, and the dramatic skill bestowed upon its working-out, the novelist distinctly fails in the tone he adopts when treating that phase of life which is the goal of Claire’s ambition. Take, for instance, his account of a dinner at Delmonico’s: “ Rare music stole to the guests while they feasted; the board was literally pavilioned in flowers ; the wines and the viands were marvels of rarity and cost; beside the plate of each lady lay a fan studded with her monogram in precious stones. . . . The host had very carefully chosen his guests from among the autocrats and arbiters of fashion. Claire and Hollister were the only persons who did not represent aristocracy at its sovereign height.” In other places Mr. Fawcett describes dresses with a minuteness and a professional pride suggestive of the man-milliner, or dwells, for an effect of luxury, on the fact that one “ butler ” takes a gentleman’s hat, while another receives his overcoat. Details of this sort are obtruded. The author gloats over them, and the result is necessarily vulgar ; but it is his manner of speaking about them that is most at fault. He everywhere shows a taste for gaudy and florid expression, which is a part of this defective manner ; elaborating trifles of statement in overloaded and forced phrases, as, Mrs. Diggs had been jocundly candid, and that was all. No baleful sarcasms had pulsed beneath her vivacious prophecies.” In art, as in conversation, it is a mistake to insist loudly upon the point one is making ; but Mr. Fawcett is constantly searching for means to do this very thing. He is so determined to make us see Claire’s selfishness towards her amiable husband that we are simply annoyed, and are deprived of the pathos which belongs by right to the situation. Claire herself is very well studied, and, notwithstanding this too glaring method of presentation, is almost as much a success of fiction as Maud Matchin. The story is healthy, and ends with happiness and sunshine. Mr. Fawcett’s faults spring from too great an enthusiasm for his subject — too much interest, rather than too little ; and when he shall have tempered this with a better sense of proportion and emphasis, the fact of his being so thorough a believer in the value of what he is depicting will be to his advantage in using the equipment of technical resources, already considerable, which he possesses.

Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s industry is manifest in the fact that his latest novel⁴ is the third which he has published within eighteen months. It is evident, also, whatever else may he said about them, that these books have been written with a good deal of care. The style of Beatrix Randolph is neither strongly characteristic nor of a kind that wins much praise; but it denotes, although sometimes slipshod, a business-like attention to the work in hand. In this respect, as well as in the novelty of its plot and the arrangement of details, the new book recalls Mrs. Gainsborough’s Diamonds, although falling below the mark of that excellent performance. The narrator’s mood is here one of great good spirits, indeed of hilarity, as if he had enjoyed the joke of arraying before us such an airy tissue of improbabilities as he has woven ; and he discourses with humorous cynicism upon the persons and events involved in it, saying with brilliant ease all that he has to tell. For his heroine only he shows enthusiasm. “ Her body was in such fine harmony with her spirit that you could see a stirring thought turn to roses in her cheeks, or conjure diamonds to her lovely eyes. . . . She explained, without uttering a word, why the grass in spring is so deliciously green, the sky of so tender a blue.” It is quite natural that she should be such a marvel, for she has a voice and a skill in singing which surpass anything in the world. By these means she is able, with only a month’s notice, to take the place of the most celebrated diva of the time, Marana, and to personate her through a winter’s engagement on the operatic stage in New York. The real Marana at length discovers the imposture, and comes over to unmask it; but on hearing Beatrix sing once, she gracefully retires forever from her profession. That these events should have happened in actual life, and that the public should not have detected the truth, is clearly impossible; but it required skill to fashion the realistic unreality so that we should accept it at all. Naturally, one does not look to these pages for depth, or pathos, or deep insight, nor can one expect from them striking sketches of the world as it is. The villain of the piece is a puppet, the impressario is vulgar without being entertaining, and the lover is a stick ; but the father of Beatrix, an “ex-Virginian,” is modeled with considerable truth and effectiveness. He is a type, and a rather amusing one. Another personage, Wallie Dinsmore, is so attractively sketched amid his characteristic surroundings that one parts with him reluctantly. In general there is a freshness about the atmosphere of the book, which suggests that Mr. Hawthorne’s return to his native country has benefited him. He has been quick to catch some of the local traits of New York, and to avail himself of opportunities which it affords. Mr. Hawthorne has imagination enough and to spare, as well as nimble observation ; and although his unduly fantastic strain continues in the invention of this story, it is encouraging to find that he has for a time freed himself from those gratuitously wild and forced conceits which have often overlaid his natural strength with an appearance of weakness.

Much less ambitious than any of these longer productions, the short stories⁵ which Miss Jewett has added to her former charming group reflect sundry quiet phases of American life with far greater precision. It is one of the difficulties of writing sustained fiction in this country that, society being in a state of flux, indeterminate and shifting, and there being no recognized theory as to its rules, structure, and movement, each novelist has to make his own theory. Thus every work of art becomes partly also an essay, giving the author’s opinion as to how the society under his notice is framed; and as the whole matter is in dispute, it is hard for him or for any one to decide how near he is to the truth. Short stories, being less complex, escape that problem, and in few are the advantages of immunity so well employed as in Miss Jewett’s. One can scarcely imagine anything that should approach more closely to real occurrences than these do. People are introduced, sitting in their quiet New England houses, or going about their small affairs, or living along-shore, with as little preparation or grouping as if we had come unawares upon the originals themselves ; a single incident suffices for the machinery ; and everything proceeds so exactly as it would in fact that when the quaint, veracious talk, the hopes and fears and little quarrels or joys centring upon that incident, have all been detailed, the story comes to a close because it could not go on without, becoming a different story. This method would never do for a novel ; and yet it includes a vast deal of refined art, little “ composition ” as there may seem to be about it. The modest sketches and studies which it produces are based on long and sensitive observation ; they require delicate and ingenious imagination. Miss Jewett connects in the mind of an old maid a bit of twisted stick, grotesquely like a man’s stunted figure, with her discarded lover, come back in mature years; when the renewed episode of sentiment has again faded away, the old maid feels lighter hearted because the wind had swept the suggestive stick from her window-sill. A Landless Farmer tells the tale of a humble New England Lear, who, after surrendering his farm to one of his daughters, is painfully neglected and snubbed until his wandering son comes home to his rescue. Finally, when the daughter is going away, she strips the house of nearly everything, and is scorned by her brother for even rummaging in the pork-barrel. “ Well, I’m glad, I ’min sure,” says the magnanimous farmerLear. “ I should n’t want any child of mine to be without pork.” The scale is small, the detail prosaic ; but the effects are pathetic and humorous and true. An Only Son is the best piece in the volume : its motive of suspense and emotion is a good one, and the reserve, the utter absence of exaggeration, in the author’s treatment intimate a purity of feeling like Bjornson’s. But it is in the conversation of her people that Miss Jewett s nicest faculty appears. They talk idiomatically, with just a hint of dialect, which is hardly dialect and does not become a stumbling-block. They express ideas of an exact fidelity to their quaint bringing-up. And all this is brought before one so gently and incidentally, that to read Miss Jewett is like listening to the casual reminiscences of a lady, say, in a fire-lit study; until the half-seen speaker gives place to the figures she calls up, and we find that there is a little drama going on. She has not sought the broader effects necessary to the novel ; but it is a thing to hope for that we may have novelists who shall use on a large scale, with stronger and more stirring situations, the same thoroughness and unstrained command of materials which in her work are so engaging.