Stockton's Novels and Stories

When one is reading some of Mr. Stockton’s ingenious and serious stories,¹ The Great Stone of Sardis, for examples, or The Water-Devil, or The Great War Syndicate, one is tempted to speculate what would have happened had the author of these tales been caught early and shut up in the shop, say, of an electrical engineer, and had his mind turned in the direction of mechanical inventions. His seriousness is never more effective than when he is carefully explaining some of those contrivances, upon the successful working of which his story depends. Perhaps a reader trained in electrical science would detect the suppressed factor, but the ordinary reader is more likely to grow a little impatient, and wonder why Mr. Stockton is explaining so patiently his invention or his mechanism ; he is quite ready to accept the results of so plainly an accomplished mechanic, and wishes he would hurry on with his story. In truth, Mr. Stockton is really an exceedingly clever juggler, who rolls up his sleeves, places his apparatus under a calcium light, puts on an innocent face, deprecates the slightest appearance of deception, and then performs his extraordinary feats. There is a nimbleness of movement, an imperturbable air, and the thing is done.

The supreme quality which Mr. Stockton possesses as a novelist is his inventiveness. He is an Edison amongst the patient students and gropers after the dramatic truths of human life. As one surveys the eighteen volumes which gather the greater part, but by no means the whole of his product in fiction, one is amazed at the fertility of invention brought to light, and the careless ease with which each piece of work is thrown off. One might think his Adventures of Captain Horn had exhausted the capacity of the story-teller dealing with hid treasures, but Mrs. Cliff’s Yacht follows in its wake, and one gets, not the leavings of the former story, but a fresh turn of absorbing interest. Mr. Stockton has hinted at the author’s predicament who has struck twelve once, and vainly hopes to be heard when he strikes eleven, in his witty story of “ His Wife’s Deceased Sister; ” but he himself followed the inimitable tale of The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine with The Dusantes, and seems to delight in explaining one mystery by another.

Inventiveness is so dominant a note that human character itself is presented as a cleverly put together toy. The persons in these stories are usually matter of fact in their manner, but the springs which work the characters are often marvels of ingenuity. Thus, when Mr. Stockton first proposed to himself to write novels in distinction from stories, he sought in each of the leading cases a central character, set, so to speak, like an alarm clock, to go off, when the striking time came, with a great whir. His Mrs. Null is carefully constructed thus to go through all the motions of a human being, yet to have a concealed mechanism which is the ultimate explanation of her conduct. So, too, Mr. Horace Stratford, in The Hundredth Man, has a whim upon which the whole structure of the book is nicely balanced, like a rocking stone ; and in The Girl at Cobhurst, Miss Panney is like the linchpin to a very ramshackle sort of vehicle, — pull it out, and the whole wagon falls to pieces.

Perhaps this is the explanation why so many of Mr. Stockton’s stories are autobiographic in form. When the narrator is himself the hero, he is bound to a certain modesty of behavior, and the low key in which his narrative is pitched allows of more extravagant incident, because the sincerity of the narrator cannot easily be called in question. The soberness, almost melancholy, with which the brother-in-law of J. George Watts tells of The Remarkable Wreck of the “ Thomas Hyke ” is like a seal set to the verity of the tale. Defoe seeks to give authenticity to one of his fictions by calling one or two witnesses into court who are just as fictitious as his hero. Mr. Stockton uses a better art when he makes his narrator’s manner corroborate his invention. But it is easier to conceal an invention than both the inventor and the invention, and so, when he has some highly improbable tale to tell, Mr. Stockton is apt to resort to this device. The story-teller was himself a part of the story, and how can you disbelieve the story when the teller is so careful in his narrative, so manifestly unwilling to pass beyond the bounds of the actual fact ? If you have not to account for the inventor, if he is the sober reality on which everything leans, then you have removed the greatest obstacle to confidence. Mr. Stockton realizes to the full the advantage which accrues from a trustworthy narrator, and he makes his narrator trustworthy by abdicating his own place as invisible story-teller, and giving it to one who was himself an actor in the story.

That human life is treated as a piece of mechanism, a stray bit of a Chinese puzzle, appears not merely from the deliberateness with which each part is fitted into its place, but from the entire absence of the emotional element, except as it is supplied now and then by the inventor to lubricate his machinery a little. Mr. Stockton is rarely more droll than when he lets his lovers disport themselves as lovers. It sometimes seems as if he looked up lover’s words in the dictionary. At times, he hastens over the critical passages with a shamefaced alacrity ; at others, he makes his lovers go through the motions with praiseworthy carefulness, almost as if he were rehearsing them for some real scene. Love-making is for the most part merely one of the incidents in a merry career, and one of the great charms of Mr. Stockton’s stories is that entertainment is furnished without any undue excitation of the nerves. Even the murders that are committed occasionally in his books are like those one encounters in the Arabian Nights, — necessary parts of the plot, but bringing no discomfort to any one. There is often a tremendous clatter and banging in tempestuous scenes, but likely as not the mind carries away as the permanent effect some highly amusing byplay; as when, in the story of Mrs. Cliff’s Yacht, we hear above the roar of battle the torrent of virtuous oaths delivered with stunning effect by Miss Willy Croup.

The one exception to the mechanical theory of inspiration of character in these stories is found in Mr. Stockton’s use of the negro. Once in a while, to be sure, his negro is a sort of jack-in-thebox, as good little Peggy in The Late Mrs. Null, who takes a very deliberate part in pulling the strings ; but for the most part Mr. Stockton seems to assume that nature has been so munificent in endowing the negro with incalculable motives and springs of conduct, that he need only stand by, admiring, and faithfully record these whimsical inventions. The very fidelity with which he attends to this business results in far greater successes than any he wins by his own motion. In this same story of The Late Mrs. Null he has a character — Aunt Patsy — so vivid, so truthful, and so appealing to the imagination that one familiar with the great company of Mr. Stockton’s characters can find no other so triumphant in its art.

It is, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of a view of human life which concerns itself but little with the great moments of emotion, that there are frequent failures in proportion. The elaborate fiction, for example, of Mr. Stull as the real proprietor of Vatoldis, but concealed behind the screen of social dignity, leads Mr. Stockton into a great deal of humorous but rather wearisome detail; and in The Girl at Cobhurst, the highly specialized cook seems to be boosted into an important part in the evolution of the story. Yet the delicacy, the refinement of mind, which give almost an old-fashioned air, — Mr. Stockton’s “ madam,” in his conversations, is a courtly bow, — are conspicuous by the entire absence of the burlesque. If Mr. Stockton hurries over the emotional, there is not the slightest taint of cynicism, nor any approach to the vulgarity of making fun of the secrets of the heart. Grotesquerie there is in abundance, and dry drolling; but both artistic restraint and a fine reserve of nature render the work always humane and sweet.

Where, indeed, in our literature shall we find such a body of honest humor, with its exaggeration deep in the nature of things, and not in the distortion of the surface ? The salt which seasons it, and may be relied on to keep it wholesome, is the unfailing good humor and charity of the author. The world, as he sees it, is a world peopled with tricksy sprites and amusing goblins. When he was telling tales for children, these gnomes and fairies and brownies were very much in evidence. He does not bring them into evidence in his stories for maturer readers, except occasionally, as in The Griffin and the Minor Canon; but they have simply retired into the recesses of the human spirit. They do their work still in initiating all manner of caprices and whimsical outbreaks ; but they are concealed, and this story-teller, who knows of their superabundant activity, goes about with a grave face the better to keep their secret.