Illinois Life in Fiction
IT is natural that an author who wrote a series of carefully built novels, and then, having trained himself by this means for historical work, devoted himself for several years to investigations in the history of American society in general, should wish to protect himself from the charge of having deserted history for fiction again, by pleading that " it is a very little one ; ” but we suspect that Mr. Eggleston’s reason for dubbing his book a story1 grows out of his artistic conscience. He is quite aware that in taking a single incident for his theme and working that out, he has not made a novel, and that the slight studies in life and character which accompany the story are purposely sketched with few lines in order not to disturb the main effect. Certainly, taken as a story, The Graysons is a distinct success, and the student of the processes of fiction has a positive pleasure in noting how the story is an expansion of an anecdote, and offers the germ of a novel.
By following the order of construction as it seems to have been developed in the author’s mind, the unity and completeness of the story are demonstrated most agreeably. The anecdote, stripped of its unessential accessories, reports the clever and effective manner in which Abraham Lincoln, when an obscure country lawyer, saved the life of a man charged with murder by convicting of perjury the principal witness for the prosecution, and by a sudden blaze of light thrown upon this witness eliciting from him a confession that he was himself the murderer. The witness maintained that he was twenty feet distant from the prisoner and the murdered man, on the night of the affair ; that he recognized both men, and even the kind of pistol used in the murder, and all this by the light of the moon. Lincoln, after snarling the witness in a web of minor inconsistencies, suddenly showed by the almanac that the moon did not rise for several hours after the time of the murder.
With this anecdote in his mind, Mr. Eggleston proceeded to ask himself several questions : Why was the prisoner supposed to be likely to kill the man ? What was the nature of any unfriendliness that may have existed between them ? Why did the real criminal commit the murder ? What sort of a man was the one killed ? How did Lincoln happen to be the prisoner’s counsel ? Then, What was the relation of the prisoner to the community about him ? What was his own family ? Was he in love, and did the girl have anything to do with the affair ? It was plain to him, as it would be to any observant writer, that if the prisoner were to be proved innocent, he must from the first have the general sympathy of the reader; but that if the trial were to be real to the reader, the difficulty of proving the man’s innocence must be considerable, and the secret of the real fact be kept to the last. Finally, the essential moral of the tale must lie in the effect upon the character and destiny of the principal figure.
With these problems before him, Mr. Eggleston considered the material at his disposal. He had a local society with which he was thoroughly familiar, and whose characteristics he had already displayed minutely and at length in his previous novels. For the purposes of his story he could assume a reasonable knowledge on the part of his readers. He was not obliged to build out of a great variety of particulars a general framework for his characters. He could use details only as they were needed for special scenes, and it was not necessary to delay over an elaborate presentation of his masses. For single figures he was already largely provided by his anecdote. He had a young man of good impulses and quick temper, who might in anger kill a man, and thus would invite the sudden and unthinking suspicion of a community, among whom there would doubtless be some special enemies, and also one or two friends not easily shaken in their confidence in character by untoward circumstance. He had a sneak in the real murderer, and as for the murdered man, it was easy to see that it was required to make of him a mean man and a calculating one. Then the prisoner must have his character in formation ; so he was to be provided with a widowed mother, with a sister and a sweetheart. The sweetheart belonged, however, to his character before he was under trial, and was at the bottom of his quarrel with the murdered man; she must change with him, if she was to match him after his innocence was proved. It was better to have her as she was, or to make her a little inconstant, and to furnish the foil of constancy in the prisoner’s sister and her lover.
But these are all subordinate characters, whose action rarely is to be diverted from direct relation to the prisoner and his fortunes. One other figure was needed, the one who solved the problem of the trial, and so in a measure came the closest to the central figure of the story. By a simple suggestion that the prisoner’s mother had once befriended Lincoln when he was a poor boy, Mr. Eggleston easily introduces the historic person who had not yet become historic. Here also he is helped immensely by his readers’ familiarity with the person of his character. They know the Illinois of forty years ago by Mr. Eggleston’s novels and kindred books, but they know Lincoln by the multifarious lights which have been cast on this American and very modern knight. It is to Mr. Eggleston’s credit as a literary artist that he recognizes this general acquaintance with Lincoln, and thus merely reminds the reader of well-known characteristics, and proceeds to use the person with a clear perception of his probable relations to all the parties in the contest, and with a subtle development of traits which became more conspicuous when larger opportunities gave room for sharper expression. It is also to his credit that he is not misled into making Lincoln a too prominent character. On the contrary, he seems to have perceived intuitively that Lincoln would borrow from his future in the reader’s mind, and that it was the author’s business, therefore, to tone down the lights, lest an exact, portraiture should seem exaggerated ; that is to say, had Mr. Eggleston found himself with his little anecdote minus the great fame of the lawyer who saves the prisoner, he would have built up this figure in his story more elaborately, with a view to giving him his proper proportions in the company of which he was so important a member. It is this unstudied repression of Lincoln, so that the prisoner shall be and remain undeniably the main person in the book, which marks Mr. Eggleston as instinctively an artist in letters. He has undertaken to tell a story of life and death, and he will not be diverted from his course by any adventitious circumstance.
How well Mr. Eggleston has succeeded in telling his story we shall not attempt to advise our readers, but if we have found a pleasure in tracing the evolution of the story in his mind, we can assure them that they may trust themselves to the story-teller ; for, whatever may have been the process of conception, the result is a straightforward story, with cumulative interest, with dramatic and never histrionic situations, with much play of humor and shrewd reflection, — the latter under the author’s breath, as it were, and as it should be, — and with that genuine interest in the great movements of human nature which lifts even a casual story like this into dignity, and the absence of which degrades many an elaborate novel into a mere clatter of human noise.
It is impossible to read another piece of fiction, the scenes of which are also laid in Illinois at the same time, among the same class, and even with one character in common in one instance, without instituting comparisons. It happened to us to read The McVeys 2 immediately after finishing The Graysons, and the two books partly confirm each other, and also partly suggest, interesting reflections by the substantial difference between them. If Mr. Eggleston needed to have his picture of Illinois life established as correct, Mr. Kirkland has been an unintentional witness in his favor; or, to put it conversely, after reading The Graysons we feel The McVeys to be faithful to nature. As the wellknown figure of Lincoln helped us to feel at home with him and his neighbors in the one book, so in the other, when we catch a momentary glimpse of the great American along with Douglas and Davis, we feel a certain assurance that Zury Prouder, in whose cart we are driving, is just as real as these historic persons.
It is not Mr. Kirkland’s fault if Zury has not actuality for us. He had already given his hero’s biography in full in the novel which bears the quaint and significant name 3 ; and even though the reader of The McVeys may not have read the novel of Zury, he seems to recognize Zury Prouder, when he appears on the scene, almost as surely as do the characters in the book who have also stepped out of Zury. In calling his second novel An Episode, Mr. Kirkland seems to ask for a suspension of judgment on its merits as a piece of art. Do not take this book by itself, he says in effect; read it in connection with the book already published, and (for aught we know) with one to come. It is necessary to do so if we are to regard it as a novel at all, and if we are to accept the action of one of the chief characters, when she marries, as anything more than a caprice. There is no reasonable explanation in the book itself for the relation which Anne bears to Zury. We can scarcely blame the author for this. He was reluctant to explain it in Zury itself, and left to the reader the disagreeable business of imagining the explanation.
The McVeys really is a series of sketches of Illinois life, in which a few figures occur again and again. The hero of the book is a young boy, who has a turn for mechanics, and by dint of his own energy and of judicious pushing from others becomes engine-driver on one of the early railroads in Illinois. He becomes involved in an intrigue with a handsome, coarse woman, the wife of the conductor on his train, and then suddenly wakes to a healthy passion for a girl of finer qualitics. The intrigue, by a series of natural but loosely connected events, results in the malicious destruction of the train which Phil McVey, the hero, is driving, and in his death. There is, properly speaking, no climax to the story. The reader resents the notion that the catastrophe is in consequence of Phil’s moral misbehavior. At the best, one can only say that if he had not misbehaved, he might have received a warning in time to put him on his guard. Nor do we think that Mr. Kirkland wishes the reader to regard the accident as a nemesis. At any rate, if he is bent on showing the sure though subtle retribution which waits on misconduct, his deus ex machina is a very capricious divinity, which gives Zury and Anne a chromo and flays Phil alive.
We have said that The McVeys is a series of sketches of life in Illinois. It represents the period when the pioneers are old men, and the material prosperity of the present day is within sight, and it reproduces with photographic accuracy and photographic blindness the superficies of life. The conversation, barring an occasional strain after epigrammatic point, is homely and natural; the incidents, though often trivial, are characteristic ; there is now and then a witty success scored ; the aims of the several characters are well within the range of possibility. In a word, Mr. Kirkland, in describing the life concerned, makes himself for the time one of the persons in that life. It is easy to see that he takes a very strong interest in his characters ; and while this interest gives vitality to his work, it also blinds him, we think, to the perception of true proportions. He is so nearsighted that things large and small look alike to him, and when he describes any scene, or incident, or conversation, he reports his observation as if he never had seen or heard of anything like it before.
This exaggeration of his material is not a conscious one, apparently, and, as we have intimated, it betrays itself not in undue emphasis or in the attempt to select striking scenes; on the contrary, there is a studied use of the commonplace, and even the railroad accident is treated in a matter-offact manner. No ; the disproportion is not in the relation of one part of the story to another, nor in the relation of all the characters and scenes to actual life in Illinois, but in the relation which the whole story bears to the universal; in the conception, in other words, of human life as it lies in the mind of the author, and finds expression in this production. What is this but saying that Mr. Kirkland’s realism is not the realism of art, but the realism of nature ? According as one sees human life behind his eye or before his eye will be the result in his work. In The McVeys, man goes on all fours. He is very close to the soil. His very religion is a coarse, sensuous reflection of his mundane experience. His horizon is just as far as his eye can see, and no farther. If supernatural terms occur in his speech, the thought behind them is wholly natural.
Well, we fancy some one saying, that was the actual condition of things in the Illinois which is mirrored in The McVeys, and the book bears, therefore, the very stamp of fidelity, of truthfulness. It is here that we take issue with the apologist. There is a heaven above as well as an earth beneath; the greatest artists, whether realists or idealists, confess this in their work. By some sign, more or less sure, they set their bit of portraiture of human life in relation with the universal. Look, for instance, at two familiar examples in modern art. The peasants in Millet’s Angelus are as close to the soil in all the accidents of their life as are Zury, and Phil and Anne and Margaret. There is not a note in the picture which does not find its response in nature, yet by a touch the artist has made these two poor creatures free, not of Normandy, but of the world. Again, read that powerful bit of one of the most realistic of modern novelists, The Father, by Björnson. With what perfect ease Björnson has translated a Norwegian local life into a universal human one! If one needed to go to a fuller and more elaborate instance, Arne might well be set against The McVeys as an illustration of what the realism of art signifies as contrasted with the realism of nature.
We do not need to go so far afield. The very book which we have just laid down, The Graysons, affords a most instructive comparison. It is not a question of degree in art which we are considering. but of kind. Mr. Eggleston is not a great artist in letters, but he is a true artist. Mr. Kirkland shows often a more nervous power in his reproduction of single incidents and forms of speech, but he lacks that instinctive sense of the relations of his subject which constitutes an artist, and inevitably affects the outcome of thought and observation. To make our meaning plain, we instance the use which these two writers have made of the figure of Lincoln. It is not that in The Graysons Lincoln is an important figure, and that in The McVeys he scarcely more than crosses the path. The difference is in the impression made upon the mind of the reader as to the secret of the man who was one day to be a world-figure. Both of these writers take Lincoln at the same moment of his life ; both have the advantage of the existence already of a general conception of Lincoln; each gives a quick sketch of the Lincoln of the day, and each mentally sees the Lincoln of the future. We are not sure but Mr. Kirkland is more graphic in his portraiture of the man whom Zury saw, and this description of Lincoln’s conduct of a railroad case is extremely effective : —
“ ‘ But let us look into this a little ’ [says Lincoln]. ' I find, on reference to my notes, that the first point dwelt upon by Judge Douglas was this.' And he stated the point in question with great fairness, and added, ‘ But all this has nothing to do with the merits of this case.' He proceeded to show why the case should turn on another question entirely, and then set the irrelevant matter aside by a gesture representing the picking up of a mass of stuff, and depositing it on the table at his left hand. Another and another point he treated in the same manner; always calling the attention of the jury to the ever-growing dimensions of the heap on his left. From time to time he would come to a matter which, as he was willing to concede, did have some bearing on the rights of the dispute; and this he would make believe to place at his right hand. When he had gone through the entire speech in this fashion, he (in pantomime) pushed off to the floor the whole pile of irrelevant trash, and turning his attention to the few things which he had minuted as being truly applicable, he demolished them as best he might, and stated his own case in rebuttal.”
Mr. Kirkland also uses in a pleasant fashion that kindly trait in Lincoln’s character which would lead him to make over his fee to the unhappy wife of his client, as Mr. Eggleston also emphasizes the same trait. It is not easy to show, except by full citations, the difference between the two authors in their treatment of this figure, as resulting from their conception of a great man who was to have Illinois for a pedestal only, but we quote a single passage from The Graysons to illustrate our point: —
“ The tall, awkward young lawyer only drew his brow to a frown, and said nothing ; but turned and went into the tavern with his saddle-bags on his arm, and walking stiffly from being so long cramped in riding. Passing through the cool bar-room with its moist odors of mixed drinks, he crossed the hall into the rag-carpeted sitting-room beyond.
“ ' Oh, Abra’m, I’m that glad to see you ! ’ But here the old lady’s feelings overcame her, and she could not go on.
“ ' Howdy, Mrs. Grayson. It’s too bad about Tom. How did he come to do it ? ’
“ 'Lawsy, honey, he didn’t do it.’
“ ' You think he did n’t ? ’
“ 'I know he did n’t. He says so himself. I 've been a-waitin’ here all the mornin’ to see you, an’ git you to defend him.’
“ The lawyer sat down on the wooden settee by Mrs. Grayson, and after a little time of silence said : —
“ ' You ’d better get some older man, like Blackman.’
“ 'Tom won’t have Blackman ; he won’t have nobody but Abe Lincoln, he says.’
“ 'But they say the evidence is all against him ; and if that’s the case, an inexperienced man like me could n’t do any good.’
“ Mrs. Grayson looked at him piteously, as she detected his reluctance.
“ 'Abra’m, he’s all the boy I’ve got left. Ef you ’ll defend him, I ’ll give you my farm, an’ make out the deed before you begin. An’ that’s all I’ve got.’
“ 'Farm be hanged!’ said Lincoln. ' Do you think I don’t remember your goodness to me when I was a little wretch, with my toes sticking out of my ragged shoes ? I would n’t take a copper from you. But you 're Tom’s mother, and of course you think he did n’t do it. Now, what if the evidence proves that he did ? ’
“ Barbara had been sitting in one corner of the room, and Lincoln had not observed her in the obscurity produced by the shade of the green slat curtains. She got up and came forward. ' Abra’m, do you remember me ? '
“ ' Is this little Barby ? ’ he said, scanning her face. ‘ You 're a young woman now, I declare.’
“ There was a simple tenderness in his voice that showed how deeply he felt the trouble that had befallen the Graysons.
“ ‘ Well, I want to say, Abra’m, ’ Barbara went on, ‘ that after talking to Tom, we believe that he does n’t know anything about the shooting. Now, you’d better go and see him for yourself.’
“ ‘ Well, I ’ll tell you what, aunt Marthy,’ said he, relapsing into the familiar form of address he had been accustomed to use toward Mrs. Grayson in his boyhood. ‘ I ’ll go over and see Tom, and if he is innocent, as you and Barby think, we ’ll manage to save him, or know the reason why. But I must see him alone, and he must n’t know about my talk with you.’ ’’
We should he glad if our space permitted us to copy the scene with Tom in the prison, as well as the examination by Lincoln of Dave Sovine in the courtroom. Mr. Eggleston’s power is shown in the hints which he gives to the reader’s imagination, and almost as much in what he does not say as in what he does say. Throughout the scenes in which Lincoln figures, the quality of the man pervades the narrative, and the reader perceives not a great advocate in embryo, but a great man in obscurity. Comparisons proverbially are odious, and we do not wish to insist upon points of likeness and unlikeness between these two books. We have tried to give in some detail our reasons for judging that one book is a work of art, and as such has a penetrating power, interprets life, and goes to swell the tale of humanity; that the other is a perishable photograph, which may remind one of a phase of life, but, whether taken by itself or in connection with its companion volume, has no power to reveal actual life. There is material in The McVeys for a work of art, but the creative mind which can make, not something out of nothing, but something out of some things, is wanting.