Recent Fiction

To a looker-on at life Chicago suggests an admirable background for fictitious art. Its individuality is so marked as to fuse the complexities of life into a certain singleness of character, so that the novelist is helped in his effort to secure a unity of effect in persons and scenes. Moreover, this individuality implies so headlong a rush that the novelist, even when dealing with persons presenting no very dramatic opportunities, could scarcely fail to have them swept along to some crisis. All this, supposing the writer himself caught in the stream of activity, however native to him might be a more reflective habit of mind. We are tempted into this bit of speculation by taking up Mr. Fuller’s The CliffDwellers,¹ after knowing the author through his half-whimsical studies of life as seen through the lorgnette of a traveler. In his previous books Mr. Fuller had shown himself, if we may say so, a character - fancier; he had sauntered through such slight scenes as he constructed with an amused air which covered much insight and not a little shrewd, even profound observation of life. What would he do, we asked ourselves, when he stepped from under the protection of foreign forms, and essayed to reproduce in miniature a life which was frankly young and American ? The introduction to The Cliff-Dwellers raises very high expectations. One feels the touch of an artist in every line. The bright conceit which lies in the title, and finds its humorous amplification in this sketch of one of the lofty buildings in the heart of the business world of Chicago, does not conceal the artistic possibilities which present themselves in this conception of a microcosm; and the ease with which the author thus outlines the scene of his drama gives the reader a confidence in the story to come. This confidence does not depart at once ; indeed, it is reinforced from time to time by the felicity with which scenes are managed, and especially by the keen, epigrammatic sentences which disclose how well the author has penetrated to the heart of his subject. Yet, little by little, disappointment creeps in, and the reader at last lays the book down with regret, not at having finished it, but at having been invited to hear a symphony, we will say, and compelled to listen to the tuning of instruments.

There is a curious failure of the author to make good his promises. The frontispiece of the book offers to the eye the person of Cecilia Ingles : and on the last page, as the several characters who survive appear at the opera-house, the hero and heroine of the story see in one of the boxes a tall, brownish man, a Mr. Ingles, who owns the Clifton, the lofty building which forms the main scene of the story. The heroine asks who a certain lady is who is by him.

“ She indicated a radiant, magnificent young creature, splendid, like all her mates, with the new and eager splendor of a long-awaited opportunity. This newcomer had nodded smilingly to many persons on entering, —to her neighbors on either side, to a large dinner party that filled three boxes across the house. She seemed pleased to have so many persons to bow to so publicly; and everybody whom she favored seemed equally glad of an opportunity to return her attention.

“ Ogden looked at her, and turned his eyes away.

‘“I — I have never seen her before,’ he said. I don’t know who she is,’ he appeared to imply.

“But he knew perfectly well who she was. He knew that she was Cecilia Ingles, and his heart was constricted by the sight of her. It is for such a woman that one man builds a Clifton, and that a hundred others are martyred in it.”

No one who has not read the book would perceive the subtle stroke with which every line in this little closing scene is drawn, and no one who has read the book but will resent the implication that it contains the secret spring of the whole story. Cecilia Ingles, sketched by the artist before the story opens, and introduced to sight by the author as he closes the story, flits now and then by name across the page. She leaves Ogden’s drawing-room just before be enters, in what might be called the middle passage of the book, so far as the hero’s career is concerned; and the references to her which sparsely mark the movements of the story are light, unmeaning at the moment, but intended, one perceives when he has read all, to be full of significance. The subtlety scarcely justifies itself. When one discovers, as we have pointed out, that Mr. Fuller has been poising his whole story on this shadow of a balancing pole, one demands that the incidents and characters shall have some real relation to so important a figure, and it requires all his sympathy with the author to make him satisfied with any such "moral ” as he may formulate in the words, Woman, ambitious to possess power, place, riches, compels man to turn all his faculties into a splendid machine capable of producing the result she aims at, or drives him into dishonor to secure honor for her.

This, we apprehend, is roughly the argument of The Cliff-Dwellers, and is symbolized by Cecilia Ingles, the Fata Morgana of the tale ; and we repeat that Mr. Fuller, by thus removing the spring of the story out of the reader’s sight, has weakened his own construction. He has been compelled to bring in the furies by the hair of their heads. Ogden, wrought up to a nervous passion, brains the man who has wronged him, and the reader is left by the very calm author entirely ignorant of the consequences of the act. He does not know whether McDowell was or was not killed, and Ogden goes his way unmolested. All the violence is huddled together, but after all it seems scarcely more than an every-day incident in life. The marriages, with the exception of the last, half-expiatory one, are almost humorously without preliminary notice, and at last one is almost driven to the conclusion that the author intended his novel to emulate architecturally the Clifton itself, — an aggregation of stories, with an elevator for the central column. But after he has given up the book as a story he may take very great pleasure in certain passages, especially those which give the story-teller room for the play of his penetrating wit ; and as an illustration we commend the conversation which takes place in Walworth’s library the last evening of Winthrop Floyd’s stay in Chicago, when Fairchild — an interesting personage lightly sketched in, like most of the characters — hints at the ideal which hovers before the Chicagoan. "Does it seem unreasonable,” this man asks thoughtfully, “ that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also he the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis ? ” Perhaps — Mr. Fuller’s subtlety is contagious— the extremely subordinate part played by Mr. Fairchild and his Sentiment in the story typifies the author’s sense of the tremendous overweight of that dominance of the material which is the theme of the novel.

If one cannot get all the contrasts he wants in one book, he should call in the aid of another ; and after one has found the atmosphere of the Clifton a little too highly oxygenized, let him regale himself with such whiffs of the Gulf as he will find in Miss King’s Balcony Stories.² A baker’s dozen of sketches, or tales, follow upon a prelude which seeks to account for the title of the book. “ In those long-moon countries ” (of the South), the author says, “ life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano.” By other graceful phrases Miss King manages to put her readers into the proper mood for reading her stories ; for the fiction of the balcony ceases to trouble writer or reader after it has once done its work of pitching the note of the book. For the most part, these sketches are mere hints of stories ; sometimes one has but the fringe, and no garment at all, but now and then the story-teller rises to dramatic power as in Grandmother’s Grandmother, or passes into pathetic beauty as in The Little Convent Girl and A Crippled Hope, or discloses a fine irony as in The Old Lady’s Restoration ; but always the stories conform to one artistic type, and that a very noticeable one, because it has the note of personality without being insistently individual. Miss King, in a word, moves among her people and scenes as one who has drawn from like sources of life, and simply has this apart from her characters, that she is gifted with the power of giving them independent existence. With a careless ease born of familiarity with her material, she seems to take this or that bit of stuff, and, running her needle lightly through it, embroider some half-disclosed design, send some thread of color across a commonplace fact, and turn what would have been a disregarded scrap into a revelation of beauty. Her dexterity possibly betrays her occasionally into indirectness, and now and then into so elaborate a piece of artifice as A Delicate Affair: but the reader can forgive these errancies with the thought that they are simply fancies which have strayed somewhat beyond bounds, since Miss King’s fancies are of the Straying kind.

We are never so out of conceit with pictures intended to illustrate stories as when the writer is so much of a painter as to convey, without direct intention, strong impressions of the characters presented. Mrs. Catherwood, for example, has made the heroine of her tale The White Islander ³ so impressive by the setting which she has given her that the reader who finds her twice offered to his attention as an isolated figure by the draughtsman has a sense of being defrauded. Why thrust this piece of figure-drawing between him and the printed page, when she is stealing out of the woods into his imagination; when he catches glimpses of her, strong, supple, yet exceedingly womanly, as she passes in and out among savages and in tempestuous hours ? The book which contains this splendid creature of the woods and human love is a small one, and Mrs. Catherwood has shown her fine sense of proportion by concentrating the action in a few brief stirring scenes, and giving the growth of feeling between the hero and heroine in an intermediate passage, full of simple, outdoor serenity. The contrasts in the book are striking, and every touch shows how well the author has her material in hand. At. the outset the reader witnesses a barbaric massacre of the English at Fort Miehilimackinae by Indians, and the escape of one, Alexander Henry, through the aid first of an Indian girl, Pani, then of a chief, Wawatam, and Iris midnight row in the blackness of a tempest to the island of Mackinac. On this island Wawatam has his lodge, where are his grandmother, an old Indian ; his adopted son, a one-eyed, half-witted boy ; and Marie, a French orphan, whom Wawatam means to marry. The story, for the rest, is carried forward on this island, and Henry, faithful to Wawatam, holds back the passion for the girl which rises in his heart, and finally is betrayed by Wawatam, who lias been rendered furiously jealous by Pani. herself jealous of Marie, and still more infuriated by Marie’s refusal to marry him. I’he culmination is reached when Henry is to be roasted alive, and is saved at the last by the intervention of Marie, a French trader, and the neighboring priest.

This summary no doubt suggests to many a conventional melodrama, and so far as the outside machinery of the story is concerned there is to be discovered no special originality ; the reader calmly assists at the heaping of brushwood about the stake in full assurance of the final deliverance. The mould may be broken and cast aside with the trumpery of numberless other plots of stories, but the form which Mrs. Catherwood’s genius has filled with beauty is imperishable. As we said, she has shown a fine art in the contrasts which serve to heighten scenes, and characters. On the one hand, Henry is the antithesis of Wawatam, Marie of Pani ; Marie, again, is brought into relief by the background of the grandmother and George ; the scenes of violence and of angry nature find their contrast in the rich beauty of the wooded scenes and the suggestion of sunshine and fragrance, and the subtle charm of nature which breathes through the serener portions is indescribably set off against the superstition and incantation of savagery, — the whole, meanwhile, blended by a large, fusing imagination.

To the noticeable group of Southern writers of fiction it is a pleasure to add a new name. Mis King has written enough to make her Balcony Stories a confirmation of her power ; Mrs. Chopin’s Bayou Folk ⁴ is, we believe, her first collection, though most, if not all of the stories which compose it have appeared in periodicals. It sometimes happens, however, that a distinctive power is not fully recognized until scattered illustrations of it are brought into a collective whole. In this case the reader perceives that Mrs. Chopin has taken for her territory the Louisiana Acadie; that she has chosen to treat of a folk that, despite long residence among no very distant kinsmen, has retained and perpetuated its own native characteristics. The exiles from Acadie who were transplanted to Puritan New England appear to have been merged in the people ; those who found a more congenial resting-place amongst co-religionists and a folk of the same Latin race seem to have been more persistent in the preservation of a type. At any rate, Mrs. Chopin shows us a most interesting group in her several stories. Her reproduction of their speech is not too elaborate, and the reader who at once shuts up a book in which he discovers broken or otherwise damaged English would do well to open this again ; for the writer is discreet enough to give suggestions of the soft, harmonious tongue to which the Bayou folk have reduced English speech, and not to make contributions to philology. What he will find, both in speech and manner, is a sensitiveness to passion, a keen feeling for honor, a domesticity, an indolence which has a rustic grace, and a shiftlessness which laughs at its penalties.

One in search of the pleasure which stories may bring need not suspect from this that he has fallen upon a writer who is afflicted with a purpose to add to our stock of knowledge concerning obscure varieties of the human race. Mrs. Chopin simply deals with what is familiar to her, and happens to be somewhat new in literature. She deals with it as an artist, and the entire ease with which she uses her material is born not less of an instinct for story-telling than of familiarity with the stuff out of which she weaves her stories. The first story is the longest in the book, but, like the shortest, is an episode, as it were. All of the stories are very simple in structure, but the simplicity is that which belongs to clearness of perception, not to meagreness of imagination. Now and then she strikes a passionate note, and the naturalness and ease with which she does it impress one as characteristic of power awaiting opportunity. Add to this that a pervasive humor warms the several narratives, that the persons who appear bring themselves, and are not introduced by the author, and we have said enough, we think, to intimate that in this writer we have a genuine and delightful addition to the ranks of our story-tellers. It is something that she comes from the South. It is a good deal more that she is not confined to locality. Art makes her free of literature.