Four New Novels

MISS WILKINS’S MADELON.

IT has sometimes been lamented, half whimsically, that there is no training-school for novelists, as there is for painters and sculptors ; yet if the novelist has to master his art by untutored practice, he may have this resort, at least, that, the writing of short stories offers a species of apprenticeship in the craft. Not that the short story may not be a worthy end in itself ; sometimes the artist in this form reaches perfection here, and needs no larger canvas. But if one has it in him to draw his figures life-size, the short story may well serve for preliminary studies. Miss Wilkins has shown indisputably that her power in delineating life comes largely from the faculty of holding in a firm grasp the secret of a mastering impulse or principle. She has illustrated this in a large number of sharply defined personalities, drawn, so to speak, as individual figures, or in small groups occupied with quick incidents. With the growth of power the same kind of handling is apparent when she essays more considerable pieces, and carries the action over a longer time under a greater range of circumstances. She still has the unfaltering grasp impelled by clear insight, and the steady movement along direct lines. The concentration of power in her short stories is very great; it is even more noticeable in her longer tales. We had occasion to express our respect for her art when Pembroke appeared, and our admiration is not lessened by the new illustration of her artistic force in Madelon.¹

The heroine, Madelon herself, displays just this tenacious grip of an idea that we have recognized as the central fact in Miss Wilkins’s art; so does Lot Gordon, the hero ; so does Burr in a somewhat less degree ; so does Burr’s mother; and the same set, to use an expressive word, is what gives backbone to the otherwise invertebrate Dorothy Fair. Minor characters, like Richard, display a similar disposition, and at the close of the book the whole community is in peril of being swept into a Niagara of wrongheadedness. We think the culmination of Madelon is genuinely in the mere hint that is given of an impending disaster arrested by the suicide of the hero.

The book is, in fact, a most artistic portrayal of the idée fixe of the psychologist. We have no wish to enter the domain of the pathologist, yet we would point out to the reader how much of Mias Wilkins’s skill seems to lie in stopping just short of insanity in her characters. A little more, and every mother’s son and daughter of them would be in the madhouse. Well, is not that the logical outcome of what is characteristic in New England country life, and is it not a tribute to Miss Wilkins’s genius that she should have caught this temper and transferred it in all its fascination to the pages of her books ? Heretofore, the type illustrated has been the New Englander of purest strain, such as may be seen in several instances in this tale ; but in creating the Hautvilles Miss Wilkins has shown a not unfamiliar type, the English crossed by the French and Indian, and she has been unerring in her rendering of the rich, vibrant nature thus produced. But these, too, must have the dominant passion, and thus, though the author of their being takes a new clay in her hands, she fashions it again after her own image.

In the working out of her tragedy — for tragedy it certainly is — Miss Wilkins has shown dexterity in avoiding the grotesque while coming pretty near it at times, and there are fewer of those sudden gleams of beauty which gave relief in Pembroke. We suspect the explanation may lie in the somewhat artificial character of the central moment of the drama. The stab which she gives Lot Gordon when she mistakes him for Burr comes upon the reader almost before he is ready, and at once the whole story is pitched in a high key. There is scarcely a lowering of that key to the last. It is as if the author did not dare once relax, lest the note should not be recovered. The intensity thus is in the author almost more than it is in the tragedy itself, and for this reason the reader may take a somewhat more curious and less absorbing interest in the acting than might otherwise be the case. Yet if he comes upon few passages of clear beauty such as he had learned to hope for in this writer after reading Pembroke, he is impressed again by the extraordinary concentration of language of which Miss Wilkins is capable, and gives the highest praise to an art which makes language have the cold splendor of a winter sunset.

MR. FREDERIC’S THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE.

The practiced novel-reader enters upon Mr. Frederic’s new story² with keen anticipation of pleasure, so carefully sketched is the prelusive scene, and so confidently does the author move forward. This feeling that he is in the hands of a master of fiction remains with him pretty much all through the First Part, which relates the experiences of a young Methodist minister and his wife, disappointed in their hopes of a flourishing parish, and shoved aside into a mean living in a large country town having a considerable Irish population. The description of the Conference in the opening chapter is graphic and quietly humorous, and the setting of the youngcouple in Octavius is so managed as to convey at once a good notion of a petty parish, in which the minister finds himself subjected to the ignoble tyranny of ignorant trustees. This minister, Theron Ware, with his ambition and his immaturity, is partially introduced; at least so the reader comes to think afterward, for on looking back, at the end of the story, he is reminded of the rather slight intimations given of Theron’s native character before it is brought to the test. The novel, one premises from the title, has for its main purpose the disclosure of the history of a human soul.

Not long after the Wares have set up their home in Octavius, the minister chances upon the dying of a poor workman who has met with an accident. He follows the rude litter on which the injured man is borne into a shanty, and finds himself presently in the company of a Romish priest and a young Irish girl. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By HAROLD FREDERIC. Chicago : Stone & Kimball. 1896.

“ The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light. One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The young woman plucked Theron’s sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed now outward to the street-door. He found himself bowing with the others to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest’s white fingers ; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostril, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece of cotton batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the Asperges me, Domine, and Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus, with its soft Continental vowels and liquid r’s. It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the Confiteor vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more sonorous, and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the other’s prayers the last moment came.

“ Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides ; no other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the girl’s Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great names,—beatum Michaelem Archangelum, beatum Joannem Baptistam, sanctos apostolos Petrum et Paulum, — invoked with such proud confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.”

The sharp contrast between Theron Ware’s poverty-stricken surroundings and the richness of this Catholic world is set forth all the more admirably that the reader is not for a moment deluded into thinking he is to be invited to witness anything like conversion from the one faith to the other. Not this way does Theron Ware’s damnation lie. The young minister simply is suddenly thrown out of his groove and dislocated from his habitual mode. The accident brings him into friendly relations with the priest and the Irish girl, who is the emancipated daughter of an honest and plain irishman grown rich in his industry, and wont to humor the girl in any fancies she may choose to take up. One other personage is grouped with the priest and the girl, an apparently cynical Dr. Ledsmar; and these three, by a sort of tacit agreement, amuse themselves with the innocent young parson. One of the felicities of the book is the skillful manner in which the reader’s mind is drawn off from this view of the case until the dénouement, and his attention fixed upon Theron Ware as he subjects himself to the criticism of the three.

The real plotter against Theron’s simplicity is the girl, Celia Madden, and it is in the relation between the two that the artificiality of the story appears. It is not impossible to concede the psychological facts of Theron Ware’s slumping, —we can find no other single word to express the change from a conventionally good man into a noxious reptile, — but we question the naturalness of the means as elaborated by Mr. Frederic. He has conceived a man of some intellectual and emotional readiness, with a meagre education and very limited knowledge of the world ; inoffensively virtuous through lack of opportunity for vice, but with no genuine foundation for his character. He has intended to make him not merely amiable, but rather attractive in his untried ingenuousness. “ You impressed us,” says Celia Madden, who acts as the recorder in Theron’s damnation at the last, "as an innocent, simple, genuine young character, full of mother’s milk. It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature, your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general naïveté of mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you were going to be a real acquisition.” All this is well said, and one must bear in mind that Mr. Frederic had a difficult task to perform in delineating a character which should seem all this to persons with the angle of vision which the priest, Celia Madden, and Dr. Ledsmar had, and should at the same time be normal and ordinary enough to his wife and neighbors, while the reader was slowly to penetrate the real consciousness of the man. It is a task performed with unusual skill, and with a pardonable amount of open analysis ; but in performing his task Mr. Frederic found it necessary to make Celia Madden play the part of fictitious temptress to this very feeble St. Anthony, and it is here that one feels the distortion of nature. It was well enough to present Celia Madden as rich, handsome, clever-mouthed, free with bravado; but to invest her with all the furnishings of her sybaritic apartment, to represent her as using the blandishments of dress upon poor Theron (effecting a change, by the way, in a period of time which would be brief for a variety actress), to make her try the effect of a sort of musical cathartic upon the minister s rigidly conventional conscience,— this portion of the story strikes one as very artificial and out of key. Nevertheless, one returns with the feeling that the scheme of the book is sound ; that in the separate characters of the group of three as seen by the reader there is a latent quality which would account for their attitude toward the young minister; for the story in its unconscious intention is a damnation also of these three. Our contention is that in the halfsketch of Dr. Ledsmar there is too much left for us to guess, and that the part Celia has to play is illustrated by abnormal incidents ; the priest alone is satisfactorily characterized.

There is one minor character, Celia’s brother Michael, who deserves high praise. His outline is admirably drawn, and the scene in which he holds the mirror up to Theron Ware’s face is most effective. As to the debt-raisers, Soulsby and Sister Soulsby, given the rather unbelievable premise of their past career, they are cleverly drawn and highly entertaining. The Methodist scenes throughout are very vivid, and though highly accented do not impress one as caricatures, a statement not so surely made of Sister Soulsby. Most readers, we think, will say that the master stroke is in the last page, where Theron is shown, after his recovery from the shame of his exposure to himself, as just the same man he was in the beginning. It would be hard to laid a sadder book, if one were looking for a pitiless illumination of a whited sepulchre. Nevertheless, we set it aside with the conviction that Mr. Frederic has overreached himself, for he leaves in the reader’s mind an instinctive revolt against the fairness of the record. On this showing, indeed, Theron Ware damns himself, and his three accusers seem to get off scot-free ; but in the higher court of human reason one feels that the upright judge would question more thoroughly the credibility of some of the evidence, as not agreeing wholly with the facts of human nature.

MRS. BURNETT’S A LADY OF QUALITY.

There is no doubt that what with the analysts and the realists, we are bound to be schooled by the writers of fiction in the habits of the human being as he disports himself behind the hedge of his outward demeanor. As the stories of adventure yet told, the novelist retreats farther into the field of the human spirit, and plies his Roentgen rays to discover that which is hidden from ordinary observation. Here is Mr. Frederic winding about in the soul of a poor Methodist parson, and now Mrs. Burnett,³ rejecting herself into the early part of the eighteenth century, asks us to follow her in her exploration of the walled-up cellar of a lady of quality’s soul. She has a superficial advantage in the literary masquerade she adopts. It is hard for the reader to believe heartily in the maxim that human nature is the same in all ages, and he is likely to be in a docile mood when he is bidden see an Englishwoman of two hundred years ago perform feats of character which he would regard as quite impossible in the creatures whom he passes on bicycles to-day. A superficial advantage, we say ; for after all, when one strips off the supposed Bickerstaffian language and gets to the actual facts, there are certain bald incongruities which send one back with a doubt whether either language or behavior is true to the time depicted. Indeed, one might search the literature dominated by Steele and Addison very diligently without discovering any piece of writing so violent as this narrative, or so lavish in its decorative qualities; and this anachronism of style tempts one, as we have intimated, into a doubt if Mrs. Burnett has possessed herself truthfully of the spirit of the period. The book certainly is not imitative as Henry Esmond is, and one begins to wonder why the author should have taken pains to make the manner of her tale antique in an obvious fashion, when her main object after all was to tell a story which no possible author of that time could have told.

Be this as it may, we are more concerned to inquire, not so much whether a Bickerstaff could have told the story as whether the story could have happened, not by the laws of probability, but by the laws of everlasting right and wrong which form the immutable standards for a novelist who desires her work to be imperishable. The opening scenes of the book are powerful. A baronet, Sir Jeoffry Wildairs, compacted of all the rude vices that could be crowded into an English country gentleman of the time, brutally abandons his timid wife who is in the pains of childbirth. She had already given him several daughters, two of whom survive, and now still another is born, and nearly smothered at birth by the wild young mother in her own death-agony. But Clorinda, as this infant is named, is an exception to the progeny. From the first drawing of breath she proves an extraordinarily vigorous creature. Her father, enraged that he has no son, absolutely neglects her, and she emerges into his notice only when, at the age of six, after an education chiefly in the stables, she discovers in him, whom she had never seen, the man who has set up ownership in a fiery horse she regards as her special property. She flies at him with a riding-crop and pours out a volley of oaths, at first to his amazement and then to his delight, as he recognizes in this infuriated little vixen his own child.

Mrs. Burnett does not spare the colors in painting the manners and morals of her heroine in her tender years. She does not flinch from reporting her oaths and describing her ribaldry, though she saves the reader the actual words of the pothouse songs which the child sings. Clorinda, who has demonstrated her power of will by subduing with brute force men, women, dogs, and horses, and has her father entirely under her thumb, is rendered masculine to the eye by being dressed in boy’s clothes until she is fifteen, when presto ! the willful little dame is transformed into a superb-looking girl, and provides herself with a chaperon and a brand-new set of manners and graces. The record of her life as a hoiden of the most atrocious sort being closed, she opens a new chapter as a toast and woman of society. Her father’s companions are a set of debauchees well on in life, the only exception being a Sir John Oxon, no less a rake, but young, handsome, and universally triumphant. Clorinda, perceiving his designs upon her, at once brings her chaperon forward as bodyguard, and for the novelist’s purpose all goes on smoothly. She holds her ground, and only by the slightest possible movement of the eyelids does the novelist communicate to the alert reader a notion of what goes on out of sight. Sir John, who is a spendthrift, suddenly turns his back on Clorinda, and becomes betrothed to a girl with a fortune. Thereupon Clorinda accepts the hand of an elderly earl, who makes her an honest husband ; and after his death, when she is still but a girl in years, she has a year in seclusion, then comes forward as a dazzling belle, and wins the love and worship of a noble duke who is as splendid in all manly qualities as she is beautiful in womanly. It is difficult, by the way, in a mere argument of the story, to refrain from splashes of color ; for the reader of the story never is allowed to forget how queenly Clorinda is, how dissolute Sir John is, and how magnificent is the duke. But on the eve of her marriage Clorinda has a private meeting in her house with Sir John, who forces himself upon her with the vindictive purpose of reasserting his property in her and compelling her submission. The weapon be holds is a lock of her hair which he had cut from her head, unknown to her, in one of their secret meetings. The weapon she snatches up is a loaded whip, and, with all the fury of her masculine girlhood surging out of her, she strikes him dead.

In a scene intended to be ghastly, and not without a repressed horror, Clorinda calmly receives her friends, with the dead man under the divan, and then at midnight carries the body into a subterranean cellar which she has workmen wall up. The early part of the eighteenth century serves her purpose quite well for the disposition of the remains and the concealment of the traces of her crime, though we would make a timid parenthetical remark that in that period, in great houses like Clorinda’s, fine gentlemen were not in the habit of letting themselves out of the front door as Sir John Oxon is supposed to do. Clorinda then marries the duke and lives happily thereafter, her chief occupation, besides gracing the world, being to look after the victims of Sir John Oxon’s lust, — and they seem to turn up at every corner, — and reinstate them or give them decent burial. At the close of the book, Clorinda’s sister Anne, who has been her companion since Sir John Oxon appeared on the scene, and is a plain, saintly woman, is on her death-bed. The reader has had intimations from the novelist that sister Anne knew more than she told, but Clorinda has been less observant. It is to her, therefore, a terrible revelation when she finds through Anne’s confession that this sister had been a witness throughout; that from the hour of the midnight meetings to the time when Clorinda carried the man she had killed into the subterranean cellar, Anne had been aware of each step in her sister’s career. But Anne’s shamefaced love for Sir John and her spaniel-like devotion to her sister had kept her lips sealed. Clorinda, overwhelmed by the disclosure of this fathomless love, looks with awe upon Anne, whom she had heretofore treated with a somewhat patronizing affection, and is ready to obey her as she would her confessor.

“ ‘ Anne, Anne,’ she whispered, ‘ must he know, my Gerald ? Must I — must I tell him all? If so I must, I will — upon my knees.’

“ The doves came flying downward from the blue, and lighted on the windowstone and cooed. Anne’s answer was as low as her soft breath, and her still eyes were filled with what she saw, but which another could not.

“ ’Nay,’ she breathed. ‘ Tell him not. What need — wait, and let God tell him — who understands.’ ”

And so the duchess never told her husband, least of all her children, who gave promise of exceeding their parents in nobility and beauty ; and on the tablet over the resting-place of the ducal pair were inscribed the lines (early eighteenth century) : —

“ Here sleeps by her husband the purest and noblest lady God e’er loved; yet the high and gentle deeds of her chaste, sweet life sleep not, but live and grow, and so will do so long as earth is earth.”

Far be it from us to intimate either that Mrs. Burnett is ironical in this conclusion, or that we demand of her a treatment which would visit some sure even if slow retribution on Clorinda for the murder of her lover. A stern Calvinist would doubtless shift in his mind the scene of her damnation to a later world, if she missed condign punishment in this. A Greek would have transferred the reward of her guilt to her children. Neither would have let her escape. Mrs. Burnett, not unlike her fellow novelist, Thomas Hardy, in his redoubtable case of Tess versus the Almighty, settles the whole question of responsibility for Clorinda by letting her explain to Anne that she merely took up the riding-whip and flew into a passion, and it was God who saw to it that the butt of the whip struck the exact spot on Sir John Oxon’s temple which would let the most life out with the least amount of recriminating blood. Moreover, in arguing the case for Clorinda, Mrs. Burnett puts in the very natural plea that she was made so ; in fact, she made her herself, and knows.

It is hard to be patient with the sophistry of such a novel, and harder still when the author bridges over chasms so lightly. She is positive enough when she allows her heroine to excuse herself on the ground of her imperfect early education, but precisely this imperfection does not seem to trouble her in the least when she wishes to make a queen out of a baggage. Nor can the pious scenery at the end make the reader accept sister Anne’s absolution as definitely closing the case against reference to any further tribunal. There are many striking scenes in the book and a great deal of brave language, but the artificiality of the morality of the tale eats into its literary virtue, and one feels that he has had an unpleasant time of it for nothing.

MR. PARKER’S THE SEATS OE THE MIGHTY.

An historical romance which is concerned with adventure rather than with problems of moral history is the spirited one which we do not need to detail, since readers of The Atlantic have already enjoyed a year of it in the magazine.⁴ Mr. Parker, for some reason, has changed Robert Stobo into Robert Moray, and he has taken the opportunity, as a conscientious workman, to give a final revision to his story now that it takes on the permanent form of a book ; but the story itself remains, with its fine spirit, its keen edge of adventure, its delicate touch of the deeper things of life. We do not ask for the documents which Mr. Parker has chosen to produce in the way of contemporaneous prints to give versimilitude to his use of historic names and places, and the innocent reader who takes up the book for the first time need not fear that he is to be given a historic narrative mildly flavored with imagination. Mr. Parker has shown, we think, the right mode of dealing with history in his romance. He has chosen a great critical moment, one of the great moments of history, and has set his persons in the drama made for him, where they are not puppets, but probable minor characters; and then he has interested himself in these people, well knowing that they cannot move freely without now and then giving to and receiving from the actual historic personages. Thus, though his own creatures might have been in the eyes of the world subordinate, they are for the purposes of his story principal, and he does not make the mistake of trying to give them reality simply through their association with actual characters. Yet we do not believe a reader who has once come to know Doltaire, Mathilde, Alixe, and Robert Moray himself will ever read the narrative of the great conflict between France and England without seeing these figures moving about on the scene of action. It is a generous book, and warms the blood.