Literature and Fiction

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THE present commercial prominence of fiction cannot help affecting the ungentle reader’s judgment of its value ; and even the gentle reader needs to guard pretty carefully against the elaborate machinery of approbation which is now brought to bear upon him. Even when he has declined the predigested capsule of opinion offered by the preliminary announcement, and has weathered the brief enthusiasm of the press on the story’s first appearance, he must still live down the subsequent bulletins summing its praises received and copies sold. Yet, though everything is now to be praised, it remains his duty at least to distinguish between different sorts of praiseworthiness. Making the best of the fact that fiction now leads the market, he must still consider that only in exceptional hands is it a high literary form, and that the difference between good and bad is often a subtle and difficult matter to determine. The novelreading public (if it can be spoken of as a whole) does not care for subtle distinctions. At the same time it has a general intention of doing the right thing, and likes to feel that its amusement is a literary amusement. When it is given to understand that Richard Carvel is the successful rival of The Virginians, or that D’ri and I is the greatest literary achievement of the year, it is delighted to feel that it is getting a peep into the mysterious heaven of literature without the least craning of the neck.

The marvelous record recently established by the advance sale of Miss Johnston’s Audrey¹ is not, in itself, a proof of the book’s literary merit. But it happens, fortunately, to be literature as well as an absorbing story. Its merit is, to be sure, capable of reduction to pretty simple terms. The narrative is adorned with carefully studied local color, and is conscientiously dated as to language and personage. But it is not to be approached as historical fiction : it is pure romance. Considering it from this point of view, we shall be content to find no striking departure from romantic tradition in its plot or in the general conception of its characters. Many of the happenings are, viewed in the light of experience, improbable ; but Experience is a creature of unamiable limitations, and in the nature of things hardly sib to the Muse of romance. Of the characters, Darden and MacLean, rather than Haward and Audrey, are differentiated from the accepted romantic types. We are familiar with this figure of the man of the world whose experience of fashionable follies and vices assumes, when tinged with an elegant regret, the air of a philosophy : “ To the eye, at least, the figure was not shrunken. It was that of a man still young, and of a handsome face and much distinction of bearing. The dress was perfect in its quiet elegance ; the air of the man composed, — a trifle sad, a trifle mocking. Haward snapped his fingers at the reflection. ‘ The portrait of a gentleman,’ he said, and passed on.”

Long ago, too, we met certain near relatives of the engaging wood-nymph Audrey. They also could be converted into fine ladies at a moment’s notice ; they also could win first the inclination and finally the worship of weary, mocking, chivalrous gentlemen like Mr. Marmaduke Haward. But it is altogether unlikely that Miss Johnston would claim novelty in these particulars, or even attach great importance to it. In much less conventionalized fields of art than romance mere inventiveness counts for little ; a real proof of creative power is to do supremely well what everybody else is doing fairly well. However surfeited one may fancy himself with the property, persons, and situations of romance, he will hardly gainsay that in Audrey they have once more been given the breath of life. Plenty of people are turning out romances just now because there is a market for them. Miss Johnston is plainly under her own spell, and speaking in her natural voice. The only world of which she has to tell us is all a glamour and a dream, an enchanting world, and, for the moment at least, a true one.

It should be said that the volume is unusually attractive to the eye and to the hand. Mr. Yohn’s illustrations in color are strong, delicate, and consistent. Familiar as the frontispiece figure of Audrey has become, it is not yet cloying. The paper is extremely good, and the cloth used in binding was especially manufactured for the book.

In the meantime the breath of life is not essential to one sort of success in the field of romance. Here, for example, is The Colonials,² advertised to have “ gone into the fourth printing after the fourth week of publication.” The persons could not imaginably present certificates of birth either in the world of fact or in the world of dreams, and the action is of the flimsiest. But the pseudo-historical microbe is present, against which no form of inoculation has yet been discovered; and, a less sentimental but really more drawing consideration, more things happen to the square chapter than in any other story now going, unless indeed in that miracle of ingenuity and commonplace, D’ri and I. Inventiveness, whatever it may not be, is certainly a marketable article.

Simple-minded persons who take refuge from the fancied clash of realism and romanticism in the truth, obvious to their experience, that the world of dream and the world of fact are altogether inseparable except in fiction, will take pleasure in The Second Generation.³ Its element of purpose will not disturb them. Whatever part the thesis involved, “ the sins of the fathers,” may play in the mind of the author, they will hardly think it a paramount reason for the existence of the story. The scene is laid mainly in Chicago. The central figure is a young Hoosier who has come to Chicago with two objects, — to make his way into literature by way of journalism, and to bring about the downfall of an ex-demagogue, now a corrupt financier. This second object has been enjoined upon him by his dying father, whose desire for personal revenge has been unfortunately mingled with the desire to disarm an enemy of society. The son feels the dubiousness of his mission, but is unable to shirk it. The complications which follow are painful enough, but in spite of one serious slip, the hero remains a hero, and his problem is worked out to a wholesome end.

One of the characters is a cheerful young reporter, who has some interesting things to say about his work : “ I remember that Professor Edwards, at the University, used to laugh when the men under him abused the newspapers. All the young fellows who teach English think the tip is to abuse the papers. They hunt out all those icy constructions that the best of us will slip on now and then, and say, ‘ Took at the horrible writing ! ’ Of course lots of it is horrible. But Edwards was square. One day, when I was talking with him, I told him I was going into the newspaper business, and he laughed. ‘ How about that style we ’ve been nursing along ? ’ he said. ‘ Are n’t you afraid the shock will kill it ? ’ I told him I thought I ’d have to stand it, anyway. ‘ Well,’ he said, ‘ maybe the heroic treatment will do it good. You remember how the Spartans used to leave their babies out over-night on the mountain sides naked ? Some of them died, but the best lived, and so the Spartans were a sturdy set, on the whole. Perhaps,’ he said, ‘ the newspapers are the mountains of literature.’ ”

It is pretty evident that the author himself has profited by this heroic treatment. The story is compact and simple, not a doctored morsel to roll under the tongue, but a frank-flavored bit of the life which, it happens, this writer best knows and relishes.

Mr. Norris’s latest story ⁴ is a more pretentious sort of work. It boasts a good deal of preliminary apparatus, — a note explaining that this is the first of a trilogy, duly billed as The Epic of the Wheat, a list of personæ, and a map of the region in which the action takes place. Photographs of a California wheat-field and a patent reaper and a tintype or two of the leading persons would have left still less for the imagination to do. But the author is a confessed realist, and his style, as well as his method, bears the Gallic hall-mark : “ His smoothshaven jowl stood out big and tremulous on either side of his face ; the roll of fat on the nape of his neck, sprinkled with sparse, stiff hairs, bulged out with greater prominence. His great stomach, covered with a light brown linen vest, stamped with innumerable interlocked horseshoes, protruded far in advance, enormous, aggressive.” This Mr. S. Behrmanis eventually, in accordance with that poetic justice which even the realist cannot always resist, smothered to death in the hold of a wheat steamer. By that time the reader has learned so much about S. Behrman’s person that (and this time the poetic justice reacts, perhaps, against the story-teller) he is more pleased to be personally rid of an obnoxious animal than to have that story-world rid of the villain whose machinations have caused most of its troubles.

Hilma Tree we first know as a physically attractive animal, subtly colored after the manner of D’ Annunzio’s creatures : “ Under her chin and under her ears the flesh was as white and smooth as floss satin, shading delicately to a faint delicate brown on her nape at the roots of her hair. Her throat rounded to meet her chin and cheek, with a soft swell of the skin, tinted pale amber in the shadows, but blending by barely perceptible gradations to the sweet warm flush of her cheek. The color on her temples was just touched with a certain blueness where the flesh was thin over the fine veining underneath. Her eyes were light brown . . . the lids — just a fraction of a shade darker than the hue of her face — were edged with lashes that were almost black.” So much for the lust of the eye; presently we find the mystic Vanamee, many years after the death of his betrothed, recalling her in terms of another sense. He dwells habitually upon that " faint mingling of many odors, the smell of the roses that lingered in her hair, of the lilies that exhaled from her neck, of the heliotrope that disengaged itself from her hands and arms, and of the hyacinths of which her little feet were redolent.” This is the sort of romantic vulgarity of which only the realist of the French school is capable. The world has pretty much stopped demanding that the Great American Novel shall be cast in an altogether new mould, but may still require it to be free from the method and manner of distinctly alien literatures. There are certain racial prescriptions of taste and style which cannot safely be ignored. Whatever is true of his manner, Mr. Norris’s persons are certainly indigenous, and give the book its power. Presley and Vanamee one might have met elsewhere, but the Derricks, Annixter, and, above all, Hilma Tree, — what is the value to creative fiction of world-movements and commercial problems compared with such breathing human nature as this ?

The House with the Green Shutters ⁵ has been very widely read and praised. It is frankly of the earth earthy, a rude awakening from the agreeable trance of sentiment which Scotch life seemed to be in A Doctor of the Old School and in Auld Licht Idyls. There are four persons connected with The House: the son becomes a drunkard, murders the father (who would have deserved to be put out of the way if he had not been clearly insane), and poisons himself; the mother and the daughter, who are afflicted respectively with cancer and phthisis, presently make use of the poison which the son has left — " and then there were none.”

It is amazing, but they can. We read of them often in the newspapers, and without particular emotion; not, probably, because we have become hardened, but because some reliable instinct assures us that these events are, after all, not tragically real. They have, brutal as the fact seems, no determinable meaning; they are to truth as we know it what nightmares are to waking experience. One of these ugly common nightmares Mr. Douglas has made the theme of his first story. Three of the inmates of the House with the Green Shutters are hopelessly weak, and the fourth is a monomaniac. This is not the material of art. It will be useful to the reporter rather than to the story-teller who hopes to have his work last; Mr. Douglas has done a clever and ruthless bit of reporting. It should be said that he has been promptly hailed as the Scottish Thomas Hardy, and even (not to give too much leeway to posterity) as the Scottish Balzac.

If moral insignificance disqualifies, how far may physical disability be regarded as a tragic motive ? In The House with the Green Shutters, disease is simply a modifying detail. In Sir Richard Calmady ⁶ an abnormal physical condition is established at the outset as the basis of the psychological action. Congenital cripples do not ordinarily brood over their misfortune, it is said. Lord Byron’s case is to the contrary ; and Sir Richard, with an infinitely greater deformity, has a similarly sensitive organization. The legitimate doubt would perhaps be not as to the possibility of the case, but as to whether its exceptionalness does not prejudice its value for the purposes of fiction. The situation is developed with irresistible power and consistency. After the opening chapters, which are comparatively lacking in directness and simplicity, attention has no choice up to the last of the seven hundred pages. In spite of its insistence the theme does not become tiresome, and in spite of his self-absorption, the impression of Sir Richard’s character is increasingly one of power. Even in that supreme and terrible moment when he determines to wrest what pleasure he may out of the world in which a man’s happiness is denied him, one feels that he is, according to his lights, escaping and not courting futility. It is a deliberate Satanic turning against injustice, mistaken but sincere, and so, though pitiful, not quite pitiable.

There are many interesting minor characters : kind old Lord Fallowfield, the airy Ludovic Quayle, the sympathetic and uncompromising Dr. Knott, and the rest. Apart from these, and very near the level of Sir Richard himself, are the three remarkable women of the story. To present that unveiled figure of a wanton, Helen de Vallorbes, without appearing to incur responsibility for the spectacle, was a somewhat appalling tour deforce. Perhaps it could have been achieved only by a woman; one cannot help feeling how much more dubious the attempt would have been, for example, in Mr. Hardy’s hands. But then, Lucas Malet, with all her realism of detail and prophetic decrying of the vanities, perceives the glory as well as the sombreness of life. Matters are permitted to turn out pretty well for the unfortunate hero, after all, so that one does not feel that the sound and fury of his earlier manhood has signified nothing. Moreover, it is a comforting if unessential circumstance that in the end he is not only victorious over himself, but humanly happy. Even without that satisfactory outcome for him, we should have had the atonement of Lady Calmady’s magnificent presence, herself a vindication of life : a very noble woman, and an incurable idealist.

Sir Richard Calmady is the latest novel of a practiced novel-writer, while Mrs. Wharton’s The Valley of Decision ⁷ is the first novel of a writer of matured power, whose product, remarkable in quality, has hitherto been small and entirely in the field of the short story. Yet the greater ease, as well as the greater unevenness of Lucas Malet’s style, may be set down, not so much to the fact that she has written much, as to a radical difference in temperament and in aim. She is, one feels, comparatively unconscious of her manner of speech, so passionately absorbed is she in the problem which is to be solved, or, at least, to be presented in every possible light. Mrs. Wharton, on the other hand, is plainly concerned with her vehicle, and it is not at all probable that she will outgrow her concern ; for her art is, for better or worse, a matter of greater moment to her than her audience is. Moreover, she is intellectually, rather than passionately, sympathetic with life, and the plane of action which most interests her is correspondingly remote from problems of temperament or pathology. The crises and the catastrophe of Odo Valsecca’s life are upon the plane of the intellect and of the major morals.

Nothing better attests the consistency with which the author has held to this plane than her treatment of the sex relation, so all-important to a book like Sir Richard Calmady. What that relation was in eighteenth-century Italy might be gathered from this story alone. But the question is not up for discussion. It is therefore given no emphasis whatever ; there were other conditions of the day, conditions of mind and of spirit, from which we are not to be distracted. The institution of the cicisbeo is mentioned without horror, and Odo’s affairs of gallantry, according to the code of the time social rather than moral peccadillos, are recorded with the merest lifting of the brows. A Tito Melema would be not perhaps beyond Mrs. Wharton’s powers, but contrary to her sense of fitness, since a pure art shrinks from the error of measuring one age by the foot rule of another.

The book has much to do with that twofold struggle between the spirit of scientific inquiry and the dogmatism of the church, and between the spirit of political freethinking and the conservatism of the people. But it is by no means a historical thesis in the garb of fiction. Pure and restrained as it is in method, free as it is from picturesqueness of phrase or obviously dramatic effect, its interest is a directly human interest. The new spirit of inquiry is made concrete in the person of Odo Valsecca, and the struggle is focused in the little duchy of Pianura, to which he falls heir. He is defeated on all sides ; the woman he loves becomes the victim of the popular fury against himself ; and he is driven into exile. So much might have happened, simply in the name of the cause for which he stands, to any simple, noble nature reared like his, swept into the whirlpool of contemporary speculation, and, like so many of the doomed followers of Voltaire and Rousseau, unable to see that special conditions, not abstract theory, determine the forms of thought and of government. But Odo Valsecca is not a mere type. Many of the lesser personages are of interest, but it is the personality of the young Duke himself which dominates the story. Though the writer’s total theme is of extreme complexity, her narrative never ceases to concern itself with this central figure, and when we part with him the story is done. The perfection of that parting scene is unmarred by mere pathos, and to one who has followed and grown attached to the man, it is very real and moving.

“ Before dawn the Duke left the palace. The high emotions of the night had ebbed. He saw himself now, in the ironic light of morning, as a fugitive too harmless to be worth pursuing. His enemies had let him keep his sword because they had no cause to fear it. Alone he passed through the gardens of the palace, and out into the desert darkness of the streets. Skirting the wall of the Benedictine convent where Fulvia had lodged, he gained a street leading to the market-place. In the pallor of the waning night the ancient monuments of his race stood up mournful and deserted as a line of tombs. The city seemed a graveyard and he the ineffectual ghost of its dead past. . . . He reached the gates and gave the watchword. The gates were guarded, as he had been advised ; but the captain of the watch let him pass without show of hesitation or curiosity. Though he had made no effort at disguise he went forth unrecognized, and the city closed her doors on him as carelessly as on any passing wanderer. . . . He tethered his horse to a gate-post, and walked across the rough cobble-stones to the chapel. ... The place laid its tranquillizing hush on him, and he knelt on the step beneath the altar. Something stirred in him as he knelt there, — a prayer, yet not a prayer, — a reaching out, obscure and inarticulate, toward all that had survived of his early hopes and faiths, a loosening of old founts of pity, a longing to be somehow, somewhere reunited to his old belief in life.

“ How long he knelt he knew not; but when he looked up the chapel was full of a pale light, and in the first shaft of the sunrise the face of St. Francis shone out on him. . . . He went forth into the daybreak and rode away toward Piedmont.”

H. W. Boynton.