The Naulahka and the Wrecker

Two collaborations, each the work of a seasoned pen joined to one newly cut; each a story of adventure, a tale of the West and of the tropics, a romance of dollars and cents, showing our American civilization in humorous relief against a phase of existence which is its very antipode, — it would seem as if The Naulahka ¹ and The Wrecker ² had been written. in competition, two against two, like a duel in which the seconds take part. We leave it to readers who are skilled in the detection of style and brushstroke to point out, if they can, the part of one and the other author in each book ; to discover where Mr. Osborne’s performance dovetails into Mr. Stevenson’s, or whether Mr. Kipling did really, as has been somewhat obviously surmised, reserve for himself the Indian scenes of The Naulahka, and leave the Western ones to his talented American collaborator, whose early death cut short so much promise. We will only remark that The Wrecker hangs somewhat loosely together, while in form and tone The Naulahka is as compact and individual as if written by one person at a single sitting ; and further, that while in the latter volume some of the traits which we have been wont to consider most characteristic of Mr. Kipling’s writing are conspicuously absent, yet the book is fairly up to the level of his performance, whereas The Wrecker would by no means rank with Mr. Stevenson’s happiest pages, although it is full of things which, if not the direct product of his pen, are evidently there by the inspiration of his spirit. Mr. Kipling has repelled a certain number of readers, and attracted many more, by a cynicism which, for all its youth, is far from being ignorant or ineffective ; but if there is any cynicism in The Naulahka, it is of the most benign and good-humored description, while the Bohemianism and unconventionality of tone which have frightened a few of Mr. Stevenson’s readers, and grappled others to his side, have become in The Wrecker bitter and morbid in tone, — likable still, but to be regretted.

A collaboration, however, is a thing apart, bearing so little relation to the individual work of one or another of its makers that it is hardly apropos of the two books before us to discuss the talents and respective achievement of Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Kipling. But the memory of pleasant hours beguiles us to a backward glance at that heterogeneous little set of volumes in which Mr. Stevenson has carried us hither and yon, as his fancy pleased, — books which have now been long enough with us to show how well they stand the test of reperusal, — and at that compact yet varied collection of short stories with which Mr. Kipling astonished literature a short time ago. In both cases we find talent and youth, activity of invention, excellent powers of narration, and above all the gift of style, a certain originality and force in the use of words, a readiness in hitting the verbal nail precisely on the head. But what a difference, after all, between that youth of delays and dreams, that growing, searching, romancing youth, which we find in Mr. Stevenson’s books and that precocity which enabled Mr. Kipling, on emerging from his cradle, to give points to the French in literary form and the successful treatment of decadent phases! And how different, with all their half-similarity in effectiveness, the styles of the two authors : Mr. Kipling’s, brief, clean, polished, and hard as a nut, with a certain stamp of mannerism on it from the first; Mr. Stevenson’s, equally telling, but plastic and free throughout, and never more than an individuality. Mr. Kipling handles the short story to perfection ; holds it, if anything, with too firm a grip. He is a thorough nouvelliste, with the world and society to draw from ; with all the literary material at hand to be found in a society new to many of its readers, yet ancient and gone to decay, — a society presenting all the complexity and interest afforded by an intermingling of civilizations. It is an excellent field, and Mr. Kipling knows well how to work it to literary uses. It is astonishing what a variety of scenes he has depicted, all sketched from the same life, presenting various phases which supplement and in a sense emphasize each other. Mr. Stevenson is a poet and buccaneer of letters, doing many things well, but no one thing long. He has now and then forced his invention a little, in revolt against realism on the one hand, and fine writing on the other ; but behind his invention lie a deep hill spring of imagination and a charm not easily forgotten.

This charm and imagination have placed Treasure Island and Kidnapped apart as rare and delightful books of adventure. They are not lacking in The Wrecker, but it would require a larger amount of them than is to be found in its pages to leaven so inchoate a mass, or to sweeten a scene so irredeemably unpleasant as that; of the massacre of the ship’s crew. How the book came to be written we learn from the prologue : it was the upshot of a voyage in the South Seas, of watching storms and listening to sailors’ yarns, joined to a thread of homesickness and recollection of a different life, and to the deliberate purpose of making a new sort of detective story. Its superiority to the ancient detective story is not in morality. It would not do for a Sunday-school prize. Never in a dime novel, seldom in any line of fiction, has evil been so unblushingly rewarded. Speculation and humbug have their hard times, but they weather them successfully ; the murderer is made heir to a property, and the receiver of his secret the captain of a ship. And none of these circumstances are left to act themselves out in an inscrutable manner ; they are all abetted and cheered with a cynical joy by the authors. Perhaps one reason for this distribution of rewards and diplomas, unusual, as we have said, in fiction, particularly in tales for the young, is that there are no virtues to speak of in competition; only courage and friendship, which take their chance with the vices and come in for a share in their honors.

In fact, it is such a willfully naughty book that it ought to be very jolly, instead of which it is a trifle depressing in tone. But it is extremely readable and full of good things, among them a very fine description of a storm at sea. The joining of piratical romance to the prose of every-day business life in America is effected happily enough by means of that curious versatility or aimlessness of the American character by which one man, in the course of an ordinary lifetime, goes through seven or more professional ages, being in turn broker, preacher, editor of a paper, inventor of a machine, and head of a college. No aspect of our life is more diverting than this to Europeans. It is hardly stretching a point to throw in, as the authors of The Wrecker have done, a little piracy and adventure ; and if a home-truth should be carefully looked for amid all this immorality, it might be found in the similarity of the commercial scenes to the smuggling and wrecking ones.

The two heroes are amusingly conceived and contrasted. They meet in the Paris studios, where Dodd has assimilated intellectually all the technique without apparently producing any great works, while Pinkerton is as unaffected by the whole atmosphere as if he had carried a supply of Sierra air with him. It is Pinkerton who takes the lead in a business partnership in San Francisco, who becomes an embodied advertisement, embarks upon the shadiest schemes with impetuous honesty of purpose, and tramples unwittingly upon the artistic sense and intellectual conscience of his friend. Pinkerton marries a little teacher, herself an American type, hit off in a few words as “ a well-enough-looking mouse, with a large limpid eye, very good manners, and a flow of the most correct expressions I have ever heard upon the human lip.” As a record of the impressions de voyage of Messrs. Stevenson and Osborne, the San Francisco scenes are very diverting, particularly the account of the business, which was a real-estate and advertising agency, and a dozen things besides. Pinkerton slept in the office “ stretched on a patent sofa which sometimes collapsed, his slumbers still further menaced by an imminent clock with an alarm.” There was a tremendous correspondence and accumulation of work, “ but the far greater proportion of our time was consumed by visitors,” who blankly turned the crank of the agricultural machine for five minutes at a time, “ simulating (to nobody’s deception) business interest.” Among these bits of traveler’s observation we have enjoyed coming across an account of a meeting with Charles Warren Stoddard, mentioned not by name, but by description which is unmistakable, and of which we cannot forbear quoting a few lines: “ Doubtless you have read his book. You know already how he tramped and starved, and had so fine a profit of living, in his days among the islands ; and meeting him, as I did, one artist with another, after months of offices and picnics, you can imagine with what charm he would speak, and with what pleasure I would hear. It was in such talks, which we were both eager to repeat, that I first heard the name and first fell under the spell of the islands.”

It takes a number of books to fasten one book securely in the memory of the general public, so “ doubtless ” many readers have forgotten A Prodigal in Tahiti, which made its first appearance in the pages of The Atlantic, and the unique charm of that delicious volume of South Sea Idyls, which contained a sort of foretaste of the flavor which we get in Mr. Stevenson’s books. There is too little of this flavor in The Wrecker, but more than in The Wrong Box, and for the sake of it we are willing to be wrought to a pitch of curiosity to which the climax is a poor satisfaction, and to be harrowed by scenes more physically unpleasant than those of Treasure Island, but lacking their weirdness and terrors of imagination.

The Naulahka is not a great imaginative work, but is one of the happiest and finest jests we have had for a long time, a superb bit of gasconading. The question of the relation of a jest to actual life is a very nice one. Much of the food for laughter supplied to us on the Anglo-Saxon stage, for instance, contains so little reference to the facts of existence that it is pointless and inane, and calculated only to divert the infant mind, or one able to divest itself wholly of experience. On the other hand, if the jest runs too close to life, it is apt to be a little bitter, as on the French stage, where point is seldom lacking, and the extravagance is seldom without an appeal to observation. The Naulahka sails triumphantly between these rocks. Its wildest romance has a sound of probability ; its allusions are all local, and its extravagances delightful accretions upon a nucleus of fact. The town history of Topaz, and its aspect on the plane of reality and in the mirror of Tarvin’s imagination, is one of the prettiest bits of humorous idealism. The angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection, but the whole scale of the reflection is somehow vaster, and the gain in truth looks immense. And Tarvin himself is a creation, an American Don Quixote, at once a mock hero and a real one. His love for Kate, his love for Topaz, and his eye for business are all blended in the most delightful way. The Topaz affection compels our sympathy so strongly that we almost lose sight of the proportions, and feel it to be the one important dénoûment that Topaz should come out all right, and that the Three C’s should make a great railway centre of that modest town. If anything could reconcile us to disappointment on this score, it would be the aptness and strength of the actual climax in which Kate’s conscience, apparently defeated in its high purposes and overcome in its scruples by the long fidelity of love, remains in the end the sole victor, and the innocent cause of the defeat of Topaz.

It is by no means common to find a book so purely entertaining as The Naulahka, or one in which the humor is at once so obvious and so fine. We could pardon it many literary sins for the amusement, extracted from it, but as a matter of fact there are none to forgive ; while it is not a book with a literary atmosphere, it is extremely well done, deft in construction, light yet firm of touch, and abounding in felicities of phrase. Tarvin in the East is as roundly diverting as Tartavin ; he carries his West with him in speech and habit of thought, and it adjusts itself so perfectly to the new medium that we are left with an undefined impression that Indian guile and romance and Western enterprise and exaggeration are somehow akin, and that the true missionary is a speculator who is a member of a state legislature and can tell a good story. Not that Tarvin would for a moment usurp Kate’s prerogative, for he is one of those described by the author’s remark that “men to whom life is a joke find comfort in women to whom it is a prayer.” He has many points of resemblance with Major Kirkland’s admirable national type, Zury ; but Zury is real, while Tarvin remains from choice on the other side of the fence, in the land of romance.