Recent American Fiction

ME. CABLE’S novels differ essentially from his short stories, and disclose in what phase of his work this author takes the liveliest interest. He has a quick apprehension of the physiognomy both of persons and places ; he watches eagerly the dramatic exhibition of life; he is concerned with the development of character. All this is discernible in his short stories, but when he is permitted the breadth and freedom of the novel he discloses the fact that over and above all this he is absorbed in the contemplation of the struggle which is going on in the world between the forces of good and evil. In this he shows his kinship with the great moralists who have used the novel as a microcosm which should reflect their couception of the macrocosm. Thus the Grandissimes showed how profoundly Mr. Cable had studied the question of slavery and races, and thus Dr. Sevier¹ hints very directly at studies in poverty as a social problem.

In art, however, a humane or religious sentiment must possess a work; it must not interrupt it. The Grandissimes was a strong book in its intention, but the author had not so mastered his great theme that he was able to present it through a culminating process of persons and events, and the consequence is that one enjoys only a series of massive fragments. Dr. Sevier again illustrates the same tendency of this writer to forget the limitations of his mimic art, and to confound his characters with real persons. The attentive reader imagines for the greater part of the book that he is engaged in tracing the fortunes of John Richling and his wife. He is willing, indeed, to concede, in deference to the title of the work, that the main theme is Dr. Sevier’s relation to this struggling couple ; but he discovers before the book is done that Mr. Cable’s Own interest is not so much in these people, either as people or us representatives of certain motives, as it is in the working out of certain problems which vex him regarding poverty and labor. It is not wholly clear what he thinks, beyond the general proposition that the question of poverty is, in the last analysis, one of personal relations, and not of merely social organization ; but it is evident that his own novel does not absorb his thought, and he has not succeeded in making the persons and the action clearly carry the moral which lay in his own mind. Indeed, he has forced the situation, we think, and produced results in the case of John Richling which who circumstances and the character of Riehling lead one to doubt. Is it quite reasonable to Suppose that the repeated success which Riehling is shown to have attained had no accumulative effect upon his fortunes ? In the final success with the German baker, the question of credentials comes up anew to perplex John and the doctor. Mr. Cable seems to forget that he has told us how again and again John had secured a situation, shown himself capable of filling it, and then had lost it through no fault of his own, but by circumstances beyond his control. Now these cases of temporary success certainly should have afforded basis enough for credentials. But no; it was necessary to keep up the fiction in order to remind the reader what he might easily forget,— that John’s origin is a mystery.

The truth is that Mr. Cable desired a character of essentially noble qualities, who had thrown away, in marrying out of his class and section, the advantages to which he had been born and bred, and was now to fight the battle of life single-handed and with scarcely a weapon. The fact of his being a disguised gentleman was enough for the novelist’s purposes, and he seems rather to have despised the ordinary means resorted to in such cases to hold the reader’s interest. The fact is disclosed chiefly by innuendo, and made perfectly apparent only at the close of the book, where it has no climacteric significance. The mere incidents of Richling’s separation from his family are held to be of no importance to the reader, and the fact itself might have been revealed to him at any time, instead of being hinted at in pantomime.

The disposition to couvey a meaning by hints and nods seems to be taking firmer hold of Mr. Cable, and we are sorry for it. The shrug, the posture, and gesture generally, belong to the stage, and not to literature. It is only by rare use of this mode of expression that an author can hope to make it effective. When he insists upon it, and tries to make it effective, the mind tires of the effort to reproduce the exact significance. For example, Mr. Cable undoubtedly intended to give some subtle clue to the nature of Mary Richling when he invested her laugh with so much meaning, but the reader has an uncomfortable feeling that he does not quite understand it. He is as puzzled as he is to know the precise point of humor in Narcisse’s visits to the postoffice, over winch the author keeps up a subdued hilarity.

Somewhat the same criticism might be applied to the extraordinary pains which Mr. Cable is at to reproduce the exact forms of speech of his several characters. When Ristofalo is introduced, the author announces, " His English was well pronounced, but did not escape a pretty Italian accent, too delicate for the printer’s art.” We accept the statement with a feeling of relief that there is not to be added a new variation to Mr. Cable’s odd collection of dialects; but our relief is a short one, for on the next page the printer’s art is called in to contribute to a clear perception of Ristofalo’s linguistic peculiarities. There are no insuperable difficulties in reading the lingo which all but the native Americans indulge in. The phonetic sentences even of the German baker yield an intelligible meaning, but we doubt if all this contortion of speech carries as much as Mr. Cable seems to suppose. Its value, to use a technical phrase, is exaggerated, and one comes to feel that he is listening to a mimic. Mimicry has its place, but when it becomes so very considerable an element in art there is a loss in the beauty of the art itself. The very refinement of this feature serves to weaken one’s perception of real character, and to confine attention to facial expression.

That Mr. Cable can tell a story well is illustrated by his narrative of Mary Richling’s adventures in breaking through the lines and returning to New Orleans. The effect of this episode — for it has only a trifling structural value in the book — is to revive the reader’s interest when it has begun to flag. The whole adventure is told with great skill and power. It makes us regret more than ever that Mr. Cable should not esteem more highly the dramatic quality of his work. If he allows himself to disregard this, he will be giving us tracts instead of great novels ; and however forcible his tracts may be, their influence will be inconsiderable beside the possible long life and subtle power of a great work of art. That he has the making of a great humane novelist in him we firmly believe. He has a great gift by nature ; he is for the time, however, perplexed by the conflict of two persons in him. If he ever succeeds in so adjusting his ethical nature to his artistic that the one shall be thoroughly interfused with the other, and his men and women, working out their destiny, shall keep within the bounds of a fit artistic order, we may expect a literary result noble and enduring.

It is pretty clear that we are entering upon a period in our literature when the war for the Union is to play a highly interesting part. Until lately we have lacked the requisite historical perspective; and while there has been plenty of cheap use of martial material, there has been wanting that temper and knowledge, both in authors and readers, which would permit the scenes of the war to form a background in front of which the story of life is drawn out. Dr. Mitchell has indeed boldly mingled the lives of his characters and the struggle for national life in a story ² which need not be rehearsed here, since it has been already printed in the pages of this magazine. The story was well adapted to serial publication, since it depended for its value upon the slow building of characters, and the reader who followed the fortunes of Dr. Wendell had the opportunity of dwelling upon the successive phases of the man’s nature, and thus of appreciating more fully the value of the subtle influences which were at work. Dr. Mitchell has written a graceful story, in which Philadelphia social life is brightly and clearly reproduced; but he has done more than this. He has succeeded in the very difficult task of tracing through simple outward manifestations the gradual disintegration of an inherently selfish and cowardly nature. Nemo repente fuit tarpissimus, but it is no easy matter to show this without a good deal of morbid anatomy. Dr. Mitchell has avoided the easy mode of the analyst, and without the aid of any extraordinary incidents he has revealed Dr. Wendell’s paltering with his conscience, so that the moral is involved in the story, but clear as noonday to the reader. It is by such books that the novel may prove its right to the office of censor morum, while it continues to be an agreeable companion ; for we doubt if any homily upon honesty could be more effective than this perfectly natural portraiture of a weak man.

The character of Ann Wendell is not so well drawn. One cannot help feeling that Dr. Mitchell drew upon an imagination which had been educated among books and conventional types when he sought to construct a New England gentlewoman. The hard and angular virtues which are customarily supposed to be indigenous to New England have enjoyed a modification in the transplantation to Philadelphia, but the plant is a potted one, after all. The persons native to the region have a more idiomatic rendering, and one comes to have a thorough enjoyment of the society of these well-bred people.

Mr. Craddock has used the war more deliberately as an artistic value. He has taken an old battle-field as the chief scene of his tale, and invested it not only with circumstance bearing directly upon the development of his story, but with a peculiar spiritual significance. The very title ³ of his story recurs from time to time as a melancholy refrain, and there is an almost too palpable appeal to the reader’s imagination in the reiterated recital of mundane properties which are charged with a preternatural significance. The key in which the entire book is pitched is one of too great intensity for the actual story which is the core of the novel, and the writer is so much under the influence of his imagination that he has managed to stifle most of his characters. They talk, as it were, with bated breath, and seem always in danger of being blown up by the premature explosion of the materials of the story. One longs for a good breeze to clear away the heavy murkiness which hangs over everything.

The plot of the novel turns upon the attempt of the villain Brennett to get possession of a piece of real estate, by playing upon the fears of the girl whose title to the property is possibly barred by the existence of a certain John Fortescue, who was said to have been killed upon the battle-field in an act of distinguished bravery. In furtherance of his plans he persuades a dissolute fellow, who knew Fortescue well, and has a gift of mimicry, to personate the missing man. Meanwhile a love affair is carried on between the daughter of General Vayne, who owns the plantation adjoining the battle-field, and a Captain Estwicke, who proves to be a sou of Fortescue, and whose change of name involves a domestic tragedy.

The secrets of the plot are tolerably open, although the key to the character of Estwicke is not fairly in the reader’s hands until the end of the book. There is a curious offense against probability in the silence of the young lawyer who is acting for the girl whose property is at stake, and the whole machinery by which the fraudulent Fortescue is made to serve the purpose of the plot creaks somewhat under the action of the story, but Mr. Craddock shows a good deal of ingenuity in his invention. The ingenuity is indeed so apparent, and the scenic properties of the battle-field are so persistently used, that the reader is forced to the conclusion that the whole story was invented for the sake of using the fanciful sights and sounds connected with Fort Despair. The imagination which reconstructed out of natural forces the shadowy simulacra of a great battle was a forcible one, but the artistic effect is marred by reversing the position of the real and imaginary. The weird ceases to be in the background ; it is brought to the front, and thus irritates criticism.

In spite of structural offenses, the book impresses one as the work of a man of strong, vivid imagination. His representation of character, where the character is, so to speak, in a state of nature, is uncommonly vigorous. We do not care much for the villain and his accomplices, but the moody Estwicke and the chivalric Vayne are capitally delineated. The women, too, are excellently discriminated, though they play a very subordinate part in the story. Antoinette, though not the heroine, is better drawn than Marcia. There are, besides, special scenes in the book which show a strong hand. Such is the gambling adventure, in an early chapter. It has very little to do with the development of the plot, but we suspect it will remain longest in the reader’s mind; and it has a value, not understood when first read, as explaining the mind of Captain Estwicke. The pictures of rough Tennessee life are also good, although one is constantly afraid that the author is about to press the pathos too far. The temptation to exaggerate, not the actual feeling of rough men and women, but the expression of that feeling in terms which belong to more analytic minds, is one which seems to be a sore one to this author. We have dwelt at more length upon the defects of the book than upon its fine qualities, because we feel extremely jealous for the success of a writer who gives promise of being a new and distinct force in our literature.

It is not the subjects offered by Southern writers which interest us so much as the manifestation of a power which seemed to be dying out of our literature. We welcome the work of Mr. Cable and Mr. Craddock because it is large, imaginative, and constantly responsive to the elemental movements of human nature ; and we should not be greatly surprised if the historian of our literature, a few generations hence, should take note of an enlargement of American letters at this time through the agency of a new South. Perhaps the political historian will make a similar statement. At any rate, there are elements in Southern life which, when expressed through literature, are complementary to elements Ii Northern life. The North refines through a keen analysis. The South enriches through a generous imagination. The spirit which informs the delicate, but fragile, creations of Northern literary art of the present day is a fine successor to a metaphysical temper which has for generations been making subtle distinctions in theology and philosophy. The breadth which characterizes the best Southern writing, the large, free handling, the confident imagination, are legitimate results of the careless yet masterful and hospitable life which has pervaded that section. We have had our laugh at the florid, coarse-flavored literature which has not yet disappeared at the South, but we are witnessing now the rise of a school which shows us the worth of generous nature when it has been schooled and ordered.

The marked separation between the North and the South which has permitted so wide a deviation in literary types is not exactly paralleled by longitudinal distinctions. For all that, Mr. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town ⁴ is so curious a product of Western life that it would not be difficult to predicate a further sectional variation by means of it. The chief trouble would be to find another Western story to place with it. If it must be accounted for at all, it is safer to refer it to the impression which must be made on a sensitive nature by the growth of a transplanted creed in a rude soil. This, at least, appears to be the explanation which the narrator of the story makes to himself. He has described a community which feeds its higher life with a faith no longer held as an inspiration, but as a warning ; the people, meanwhile, have been dislocated from the conditions which brought them into healthy association with the world. They are engaged in a sordid struggle for existence ; they have lost their ideals, and the world seems to mock at them. A more dreary waste than the country town which Mr. Howe describes could not well be imagined. It appears to have no traditions even of beauty, and certainly no anticipations of hope. It is degraded spiritually and mentally, and nature itself seems to take on the prevailing gray hue, and to shut in upon the narrowing circle of life.

The circumstances of this life are recorded with a pitiless fidelity. The author declares in his preface, and the reader has no difficulty in taking him literally at his word : “ I do not think a line of it was written while the sun was shining, but in almost every chapter there are recollections of the midnight bell. No one can possibly find more fault with it than I have found myself. A hundred times I have been on the point of burning the manuscript, and never attempting it again; for I was always tired while working at it, and always dissatisfied after concluding an evening’s work.”

“ Always tired while working at it.” Never was a franker or more suggestive confession made by an author. The book carries evidence of fatigue on every page, but it is not merely physical fatigue, it is the fatigue of the spirit, which is fascinated by its work, and subtly assimilated to it. The author and the town are made out of the same materials ; and since the story is told in the first person, one never knows whether the town has impressed itself on the author, or the author has created the town. It has been asserted that the book is a remarkable piece of realism, but a more distinct characteristic is the subjective treatment of realism. One feels that he is always in a damp, unwholesome sort of town. The author himself is greatly pleased with his figure of a cave in which the hero is wandering and waking the hollow echoes. The isolation of the town is something phenomenal. The book contains no hint of its geographical position, and scarcely a reference to any known landmarks. It is a Western town, — that is all we know ; and while certain features of Western life are recognizable, the strength of the book is not in the report of these features, but in the author’s imaginative presentation of persons and scenes. He uses a merciless frankness of speech, and there is a remarkable candor in his manner ; it is only when the reader has separated himself from the fascination of the style that he perceives how completely the whole book is spun from the brain of the writer. Mr. Howe has made the earth and the air, even, of his Western town. Nature is as cheerless as human life, and the book is a nightmare without the customary self-conviction of the nightmare.

The book is singularly composed of original and conventional elements. If Mr. Howe is indebted to any writer, it is to Dickens. The teller of the story and Agnes, and to a certain extent Big Adam, are copies, but the Rev. John Westlocke and Lytle Biggs and The. Meek and his family are genuine creations. Mr. Biggs’s cynical philosophy makes one’s tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, and the author’s melancholy power of language appears nowhere so masterly as in the monologues of this extraordinary creation. Hear him, for example, as he philosophizes upon life and death, after the death of his sister : —

“ Taking a man, for example, when it is first known that he is to have an existence his mother cries, and his father says he would n’t have had it happen for the world, or for fifty thousand dollars, although he may not have a dollar he can truthfully call his own. After a season of piling his clothes all in one place at night on the part of the coming man’s father, and grief and suffering on the part of his mother, he is finally born, and the women of the neighborhood come in to see which one

of his parents he resembles, although it should be known beforehand that he will be like the uglier one in face and disposition. This may ALWAYS be depended upon ; it NEVER fails. When he is a month old, or on the first regular bill-day after his birth, his father quarrels with the doctor for bringing him into the world at all, and pays the price in great anger and under protest, vowing that he will never again give the old quack opportunity to rob him. When he is three or four months old, his father and mother quarrel as to whether he shall he named for her people or for his folks. This settled, he is attacked with colic, followed in rapid succession by the numerous distressing complaints which nobody ever escaped. After this comes his boyhood, which he always remembers as being particularly disagreeable, as he never gets enough to eat, and is constantly being found fault with and whipped. At last he is started to school, where a man who is a tyrant because he is not a lawyer (or a woman who is cross because she is not married) endures him during the hours of the day when the outside is most attractive. From this he runs away, and serves an apprenticeship with the world, making so many mistakes and doing so many foolish things that he is crestfallen the remainder of his life. Then he marries the wrong woman, and has the experience of his father over again, meanwhile working like a slave to get something ahead. But he does not succeed, as he has a faculty of doing that which he ought not to do, although he strives very earnestly to become a great man, and make his father ashamed of himself; and after a life of misery, a boy comes out of his front door on a morning after a stormy and windy night, and hangs crape on the knob. If there is a newspaper in the town where he lives, he is given a magnificent column, to induce the relatives to buy large numbers of extra copies to send away. The next day a hearse and six gentlemen in black clothes and white cotton gloves appear at his front gate. The neighbors come straggling in to see what the mourners will do, and an hour after that a surly sexton, who is wondering who will pay him, begins to rattle clods on his coffin ; whereupon the carriages on the outer edge begin to drive hurriedly away, as if too much time had been spent with him already, and in a few minutes he is an inhabitant of the silent city whose residents quietly wait to be gathered as brands for the burning. If he happened to be possessed of an extra farm, or a store, or ready money, his afflicted relatives prove that he had been crazy several years before his death, that they may divide his effects to suit themselves, and which they afterwards spend in ribald and riotous living. The principal merit of this brief sketch, as the newspaper writers say, is its entire truthfulness. ' Deceased ’ — he inclined his head toward the coffin — ' had an experience like that I have mentioned, except that she was a woman. Peace to her dust.’ He spoke of his sister as ' Deceased,’ as though that had been her name, instead of Maggie, or Jennie, or whatever it really was. ' Now that she is Up There,’ Mr. Biggs continued, after a short silence, waving his right hand toward the ceiling, ' I do not care if I mention that Deceased had an unhappy disposition. She had that tendency when a very little girl (being an angel now, she will recognize what I am saying as the truth, and commend me for it), and was unusually disagreeable to those around her. Whether her complaint was poor health, or disappointed hopes, I do not know ; but as a man who believes that it is best to tell the truth at all hazards, I confess to you she died friendless. If there is not secret joy in this house that she is dead, then my philosophy avails me nothing, and I am as a ship on an unknown sea, without rudder or compass.’ ”

The story itself, so far as it relates to the fortunes of Jo Erring and his wife, whom the author apparently intends as the hero and heroine, issues in dreary melodrama ; and although a good deal of care has been expended upon Jo Erring, the reader longs for some fine stroke of common sense to set the wretched being right. The book is whimsically inarticulate. There is no real spinal column to it, and no clear moral. The author has presented the lives of a number of people who have to do with each other, and has uncovered some concealed relationships, but the book is a number of stories rather than one story with episodes and digressions. The humor is of a somewhat acrid sort, but is undeniably present, and altogether the critic, glad as he may be to escape from a book which seems to turn the very moon to green cheese, finds himself recurring to it and unable to escape its grim fascination.

The Western town, with its suggestion, not of the frontier, but of a place left in the wake, finds a strong contrast in that picture of California life which Mrs. Jackson has given us in Ramona.⁵ Instead of the barren, dreary existence so pitilessly exposed by Mr. Howe, we have the mellowness of a long-continued pastoral form of civilization as witnessed in the remains of Mexican occupation of California. The contrast extends to the treatment, for Mrs. Jackson shows a ripeness of art and a richness of color which make one feel that he has come unexpectedly upon a Murillo in literature.

The story is not a new one. A girl, brought up as a foster sister to a boy whose mother is coldly just to the alien and passionately devoted to the child of the house, is secretly loved by the generous youth, but returns the love only as a sister. Then comes a stranger, who shows her what her power of love is. The alliance is held disgraceful by the mother, who obeys a sense of family pride when she has no obedience to give to family love. The lovers flee, are married, pass through a terrible experience which ends in the violent death of the man, and the widow is rescued in dire extremity by her foster brother, who has gone in search of her after his mother’s death, and now recovers her to ease and quiet, finally marrying her, or that part of her which has not died with her husband.

We do not say that this is a commonplace story ; only that the outline is one which could be substantially recovered from modern fiction. The interest is in the use which Mrs. Jackson has made of material never before appropriated for such a purpose. Her heroine is a girl half Indian, half Scotch. Her dragon mother is a Mexican Señnora; the son, a Mexican gentleman ; the lover, a full-blooded Indian. The scene is laid in California, and until near the close of the book no American is directly introduced. The minor personages are Franciscans and priests, Mexican, Indian, and half-breed servants. It will tax the credulity of the reader to tell him that the story, wrought from such materials, is one of the most artistic creations of American literature. Nevertheless, the most jaded novel-reader and Indiophobist may be trusted to finish the book, if once induced to enter upon a reading. We will answer for it that as such a reader glides upon the smooth, gentle current of the earlier chapters he will forget his prejudices, and be borne quickly along by the hastening current.

The brief outline of the story given above may be enriched without a betrayal of the reader’s interests, for the worth of the book is not in any surprise or unexpected dénoúment. The scene opens in an old Mexican estate in Southern California, where the chief characters are the Senora Moreno, her son Felipe, and her adopted daughter Ramona Ortegna. It is sheep-shearing time, and the Señora wishes to arrange matters so that the band of Indian shearers may come just when the old Franciscan, Father Salvierderra, makes his infrequent visit; for the Señora is a fervent daughter of the church. She is also a woman of iron will and subtle diplomacy. She wins her way, rarely by the direct exercise of power, but by her skill in seeming to follow the lead of her son. Her design is effected, and the Indians and the monk arrive together. At the head of the band is Alessandro, who comes suddenly and noiselessly upon Ramona, engaged in washing an altar cloth by the brookside. This man, handsome, alert, and silent, is overpowered in a moment by the beauty and grace of the girl. An accident which befalls Felipe upon the first day of the shearing brings the two together. Felipe, who has just recovered from an illness, is exerting himself beyond his strength in packing the fleeces, and suddenly faints upon the roof of the shed, falling helpless in a most perilous position. Alessandro rescues him, and still further saves his life by singing to him when the sufferer is delirious, and so quieting him as to cause him to fall into a slumber which is the turning point of the sickness. Meanwhile, Juan Canito, the head shepherd of the Moreno estate, breaks his leg, and the result is that Alessandro, instead of going away with his band as soon as the shearing is over, remains in charge, and proves to be the most helpful nurse to Felipe, upon whom he tries hygienic means familiar enough to the Indian.

It is not long after the beginning of these scenes that Alessandro learns in a fragmentary fashion that Ramona has Indian blood in her. It gives him a confidence which otherwise he would not have dared to assume. As a matter of fact, Ramona was the child of Angus Phail, a Scotchman, who had been cruelly thrown aside by the sister of Señora Moreno, and an unknown Indian woman whom he had taken to wife in his sullen despair. Upon the death of the mother Angus had brought the child, in fierce revenge, to the childless Señora Ortegna, who now conquered him by her contrition, received the child as her own, and on her own death bequeathed her to Señora Moreno. This iron woman hated the child because of all the reminiscences which she called up, but treated her with a hard, unloving justice.

The crisis of the lovers’ affairs comes when Senora Moreno chances upon them locked in each other’s arms, at the very moment of betrothal. She vents her rage upon both, for she sees in such a union, whether true or false, a disgrace upon a proud Mexican house thus brought into alliance with an Indian. She drives Ramona to her room, locks her in, and determines to crush the girl’s will. Alessandro has sought Felipe, and been advised to go away for four days, He goes, but three weeks pass before he comes back. Then he appears, hollow-cheeked and broken-hearted, for his home-going has been to find his father dead, the village of which his father was head destroyed, the people ruthlessly driven away by the Americans, who have, under form of law, made themselves masters of all the fields which the Indian had patiently tilled. Alessandro, his fleet horse taken from him, has ridden and crawled back to Ramona, meaning to release her from her promise, for he is now a beggar. Ramona. who has been wasting in the silence of Alessandro’s absence, has a presentiment of his approach, and steals out by night to meet him. She gives herself unreservedly to her lover; his people are her people, and she will share his wanderings. Together they flee that night, escaping by means of Ramona’s horse. They hide in a remote cañon till danger of pursuit seems over, and at last, by watchful marches, reach San Diego, where they are married.

Now begins a series of pathetic misfortunes. As fast as they become established in one place the covetous Americans appear, take possession of the land, and the unhappy Indians move to remoter quarters. Alessandro, proud, passionate, burning with indignation at the wrongs which he and his people have endured, at last loses his reason. In one of his hours of aberration, he rides away with an American’s horse, leaving his own sorry nag in the inclosure. He returns home to his wife and child, but scarcely has he reached them before the owner, in mad haste following him, rushes in and shoots him dead. Ramona, seizing her child, flees in horror to the nearest Indian village. It is there that Felipe, who has at last found a clue to her hiding-place, discovers her. He is accompanied by a rude Tennessee woman who has befriended Ramona, and this woman, by her skill and simple remedies, delivers Ramona from dementia; so that finally, restored to reason and strength, the girl and her child return with Felipe to the old Mexican estate. Señora Moreno is dead, and Ramona’s life, which has known such strange vicissitudes, passes now into a gentle peace. Felipe, hemmed in by Americans, finally sells his estate and removes to Mexico. The patient waiting is rewarded by a union with Ramona, and it is one of the graces of this noble story that the finale is so admirably wrought as to leave on the reader’s mind none of that dissatisfaction which second marriages in fiction are so apt to produce.

Now that we have filled in the outline more fully, we are almost sorry to have done it, for we have been unable to give any idea of the exceeding beauty of description and portraiture with which Mrs. Jackson has invested the narrative. There is a succession of lovely pictures, and the whole tale is romantic in an honorable sense, filling one with compassion and tender regard. The characters are admirably modeled, and the picturesque element is so marked as to serve as a relief to the otherwise overcharged seutiment. Mrs. Jackson has shown rare power in identifying herself as an artist with the life which she has essayed to portray, and she has placed herself so completely on the side of her characters in viewing the relations which they hold with the Americans that it is impossible for the reader to do otherwise, and he makes no protest, even though he knows that it is his own countrymen with whom he is indignant.

It should be said, however, that the story never loses its balance to become a plea. On the contrary, the artistic conception is so firmly held that the wrongs suffered by the Indians envelope and inclose Alessandro and Ramona almost as some dire fate; and though the reader is moved to indignation, his interest is never withdrawn from the story. The result is that the wrongs sink deeper into the mind than if they had been the subject of the most eloquent diatribe. It is as an artist that Mrs. Jackson has written, and she has seen instinctively that her hero needed to be distinguished. By differentiating him from the Mexican she has softened the asperity with which the American might otherwise regard him. We see in him, besides the type of the wronged Indian, not an ordinary example. His own people recognize Alessandro’s superiority to them ; every one who meets him is struck by his lofty nature, and the reader has no difficulty in giving him his admiration. All this is necessary to the best evolution of the story, and it does not lessen the injustice done by the whites ; but the exceptional character of Alessandro will be taken by some as an explanation of the subjection of his people. Had they all been like him, they will say, they would have held their ground more surely. The impatience of the Anglo-Saxon at the presence of the Indian is not lessened by the story, because he is convinced that to be made presentable the Indian hero has been sublimated; but his sense of justice ought to be touched by the very evidence here given of qualities which appeal to humanity.

It is by a sudden wheel that we turn about from this far Western romance to occupy ourselves with the political fortunes of an ambitious Bostonian. Mr. Crawford, whose stories hitherto have admitted Americans only as foreigners, now makes a somewhat daring plunge into that aspect of American life⁶ which is most finely differentiated from European life. An American millionaire is a variation of a familiar type ; an American gentleman scarcely offers a shade of distinction from an English gentleman ; an American lady has furnished a great variety of studies as seen against the background of European society ; but an American politician is so autochthonous an individual that the most courageous foreign observer might hesitate before abandoning caricature as the easiest and safest form of portraiture. Not that we are in haste to expatriate Mr. Crawford. His ingenuous footnotes in his earlier volumes shall not be used as evidence against him. On the contrary, the admirable spirit which he shows in this latest volume makes us welcome him more cordially than ever into the ranks of American writers, and we are willing to give him in his subjects the freedom of this continent in addition to that of Asia and Europe, where he has been naturalized.

All the same we think his first essay in a distinctly American subject was an over-bold one. If there is any one topic upon which every American feels that he can pass an examination, it is the political nature of the nation, and he will recognize any slip of the tongue in treating of it quite as quickly as a Bostonian will detect a Philadelphian by his speech. Mr. Crawford may tell us charming stories about Roman singers, and we will accept every noble improbability without a skeptical thought; but let him tell us of political addresses in Boston Music Hall, political bargains between demagogues and moneyed men, political contests over senatorial elections, and we are on the alert, ready to challenge every assertion and to specialize every generalization.

The hero of An American Politician is a young Bostonian of social position, who leaves the ranks of his party and becomes a Democrat. He is honorable and ambitious. He has the mind of a reformer, and all those qualities of will and temper which make him a fit hero for a romance. The crisis of his fortune is in his failure to secure what Mr. Crawford calls the junior senatorship of Massachusetts ; but his political views are more distinctly pronounced in two speeches, — one delivered, near the beginning of the story, in Boston Music Hall, and the other at the close of the book, in the Senate at Washington, to which he has finally been elected. Mr. Crawford has not shirked his difficulties, but has given a tolerably full summary of each speech. The first is devoted to the civil service and what he calls the navigation act. The last is a plea for the paramount value of the Union over political parties. There is an approach to practical discussion in the Music Hall speech, though it is a little hard to imagine a reformer holding a vast audience by such elementary statements. But the speech in the Senate •—which, by the way, a senator could not have delivered on the occasion, since the occasion was one in which the House only could take action — is about as improbable and unnecessary a speech as it would be possible for an American citizen to conceive. It would hardly have been printed in the Congressional Globe. Mr. Crawford, we fear, has been reading American newspapers, and has been aghast at the fury into which they have lashed themselves. We can imagine that to an outsider it must have looked as if there were a terrible storm raging, but an ordinary attention to the familiar duties of the day relieves the citizen of any extreme anxiety.

There is also a dark and mysterious conclave in London of Americans, who calmly write and receive a few telegrams which settle momentous questions. This is all Mr. Crawford’s invention, and answers to Ram Lal and the insane Jew and other creations of his vivid imagination. As part of the machinery of his story it serves a purpose, though a somewhat inscrutable one ; as a revelation of American political life it will chiefly be valuable to the marines.

It must not be supposed that there is no love-story in all this. That is the most rational and lively part of the book. We accept again the English girl and English young man, without much question ; but the distinctively American characters and the pictures of American social life need to be seen from across the Atlantic to take on a perfectly natural air. Old Miss Schenectady, an example of Boston high breeding, discloses her nationality by a free use of the phrase “ I expect,” and by addressing her servant in the following terms : — “ Sarah, I think you could tell Miss Josephine that Mr. Surbiton is in the parlor, could not you ? ”

Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham have one dialect in which they converse with their English friends, and another, more relaxed one, in which they talk to each other. Paul Revere’s church is incidentally mentioned as one of the Boston sights, and the General Court gets an offhand and slightly novel definition.

These little slips are entertaining, and they hurt no one. The cheerfulness of the love passages is not greatly marred by Mr. Crawford’s political anxiety, and we can promise our readers a lively story, with a good deal of go to it, and that unfailing heartiness which is so great a charm in Mr. Crawford’s art. Nevertheless, for his own sake we trust that in selecting distinctive American subjects for his always readable novels he will write of that which he sees from the inside as well as the outside. There is no better observer of national or local characteristics than one who is native to them, but has absented himself for a time, and then has come back to a fresh survey. The country life is not repeated for us more surely than by those who were born in the country, but have been city exiles; the keenest critics of English politics are those Englishmen who have studied American institutions on the spot, and we have much to hope for from those Americans who, with their fortunes bound up in their country, have yet availed themselves of the opportunity of comparison with foreign modes of life and thought.

We do not like to leave our half dozen novels without reminding the reader what significance they have as indications of the wider scope of American fictitious art. We have simply taken the recent novels which are best worth attention ; yet no two cover the same field, and the reader of them travels in their company from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf, visits the valley of the Mississippi, crosses the great plain, rests in California, and comes back to a study which connects the Old World and the New. The journey is worth taking, if only for the renewed confidence which it affords the student of human nature in the superb and varied resources of American life.