Effusions of Fancy

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

“ LET US leave it to the Reviewers,” wrote Miss Austen something like a century ago, “ to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. . . . From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers, and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. ' I am no novel-reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine that I often read novels ; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant.”

If Miss Austen had been born a century later, she would have had less cause for her spirited sally. There are still people who extend the left hand to fiction, and give it, somewhat ostentatiously, a seat below salt; but they are few, and it is noticed that their attention to the high discourse of the upper table is subject to lapses. The present tendency is, indeed, toward the other extreme. A frank arrogance is manifested by the universal guest; he takes the head of the board as by right, and if there is anything which under-placed preachers, historians, politicians, or philosophers can tell him, he would be charmed to know the reason why. No ? Then he will himself make shift to expound the world and the fullness thereof. He is at least sure of an audience; and this is the beginning of wisdom.

I.

It may be surmised that there would be a whimsical twist to Miss Austen’s smiling approbation of this development. Her own work, yes, it had “genius, wit, and taste " to recommend it; but it was not founded upon a theory, it did not aim to supplant the pulpit, the platform, the laboratory, or the easy-chair; it aimed simply to give delight by interpreting human life as one person saw it. Luckily there are still persons who attempt to do just this, and of the many more who never dream of it, not a few build better than they know. Nevertheless, the groaning of the press must still be echoed at times by the patient reader. It is so hard to determine what is best in this astonishing output of new fiction. It is hard even to determine what " the general public ” considers best. A story may be marketed by the hundred thousand copies, and yet be unknown to most intelligent readers. A great number of persons are helplessly exposed to any book which is pertinaciously advertised or conspicuously placed in shop-windows, or which happens to have been recommended by a neighbor or a second cousin.

Gordon Keith¹ stands on record as one of the “ best-selling books ” of the year, but an analysis of the “ public ” which has bought and enjoyed it is still to be made. There is, to be sure, a good name on the title-page, but recent experience has sufficiently warned us not to be over-hasty in imputing excellence to fiction which happens to be attractively labeled. The latest books of Mr. Stockton ² and Mr. Harris ³ have been not a little disappointing, though less disappointing than this story of Mr. Page’s. In his own vein of stately and gentle sentiment, the vein, for example, of The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock, Mr. Page has had few equals. Gordon Keith is labored, sensational, and dull, and can hardly hope for more than the momentary attention due an experiment in a new field by a master in an old one. It cannot be said that the experiment has been successful, unless from the commercial point of view.

Several other new books by Southern writers are likely to achieve something more than a success of commercialism or of curiosity. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come ⁴ has been made familiar to many readers through its serial publication. According to the prevailing fashion, and a good old fashion it is, the tale begins with the boyhood of the hero. The first half of it, indeed, constitutes an excellent boy’s story. The boy himself is worth knowing, and the account of his adventures is given simply and directly, with sympathy, yet without sentimentalism. There is much description in the early chapters, as is natural, for the boy is at that time only a part of the wilderness. These passages do not impress one as having been composed for their own sake, but seem really essential to the story. Here, for example, is a picture of daybreak in the mountains: " Meanwhile, the lake of dull red behind the jagged lines of rose and crimson that streaked the east began to glow and look angry. A sheen of fiery vapor shot upward and spread swiftly over the miracle of mist that had been wrought in the night. An ocean of it, and white and thick as snow-dust, it filled valley, chasm, and ravine with mystery and silence up to the dark jutting points and dark waving lines of range after range that looked like breakers, surged up by some strange new law from an under - sea of foam; motionless, it swept down the valleys, poured swift torrents through high gaps in the hills, and one long noiseless cataract over a lesser range — all silent, all motionless, like a great white sea stilled in the fury of a storm.”

The story of the boy’s birth and childhood, of his budding ambitions, of his sturdy growth and steady rise in the face of great difficulties, is the oldest story in the world, but Mr. Fox has made it new again. With his arrival at the threshold of manhood comes the outbreak of the Rebellion, and the comparative abeyance of the personal motive. The war episodes are less carefully subordinated to the human theme than they were, not long ago, in Mr. Cable’s Cavalier, or in Miss Roseboro’s Joyous Heart. There are moments when the reader misgives that he has been betrayed once more into perusing a mere historical novel. Fortunately General Grant and the others do eventually retreat into the background, leaving the hero to emerge once more into private life and significance. There is no cause for wonder in the fact that most Southern stories seem fated to deal, directly or indirectly, with the civil war. Only when, as in the recent case of The Vagabond,⁵ the thing is done feebly and sensationally, is one tempted to wish that the old tune of the Blue and the Gray might cease to reverberate under the quiet porticoes of fiction.

Among Southern novelists Mr. Allen is of the few who have not based their work upon the memory of past belligerence. His new story,⁶ like its predecessors, is laid in modern Kentucky. The present commentator is embarrassed in giving his opinion of it by the fact that with regard to a former product of the author’s craft he stood in a perhaps calculably trifling minority. For A Kentucky Cardinal he had sincere admiration, but he must confess frankly that The Choir Invisible seemed to him not only artificial, but unwholesome. There is a literature of immorality which we know how to take; it bears its character upon its forehead. Not seldom it is able to command, at least, the respect due to outspoken virility. But a literature of strained idealism tinctured with subtle prurience of the imagination is not even virile ; it is certainly not of our race. Tom Jones is immoral, let us say, but it is rather among the fine sentiments and boasted pruderies of Paul et Virginie that one finds the imagination grown corrupt and emasculate.

The quality here suggested is less prominent in the present story than it was in The Choir Invisible; but it is not absent. In other respects we find little or no advance made over the earlier work. The heroine of The Mettle of the Pasture is an unqualified prig. The adventuress, who happens to he the grandmother of the heroine, enjoys the distinction, not uncommon among her kind, of being a leopardess. She coils, she glides, she " sits up with lithe grace.” When she looked out of a window, “ she sat down and raised the blind a few inches in order to peep out.” When she was angry “ she sat perfectly still; and in the parlor there might have been heard at intervals the sharp scratching of her finger-nails against the wood of her chair.” Nothing is to be said against the hero except that he fails to be interesting; perhaps our attitude toward him is compromised by his devotion to the heroine. Most of the minor characters are of considerable interest ; and it is remarkable that, with a main theme so incapable of arousing our concern, there should be much spirited and easy by-play. The Judge, Barbee, Marguerite, the Hardages, are all excellent material for romantic comedy. We are depressed by the duty of holding our faces firm and grave for the sake of a principal motive which we take to be halftragic in intention. We should have so thoroughly enjoyed meeting these good people if their creator had not seen fit to keep certain buskined puppets in the foreground. We cannot fairly demand that every novelist shall be hearty and forthright in matter or manner. To certain tastes there is a charm in the heavy perfume of housed orchids ; most of us prefer the growth of the breezy open.

There is no doubt that Mr. Allen possesses, what is by no means common among novelists of this day, a keen sense of the dignity of his art; but, by a natural paradox, this very seriousness of purpose may lead him to attempt work of a kind which is beyond his powers. It is a pity that an assured success in a pure style should be sacrificed for a dreamed-of achievement in the grand style. We may hope that the writer in question will yet produce more in that form of prose idyl which won him an audience.

II.

The Call of the Wild ⁷ is a story altogether untouched by bookishness. A bookish writer might, beginning with the title, have called it An Instance of Atavism, or A Reversion to Type. A bookish reader might conceivably read it as a sort of allegory with a broad human application ; but its face value as a singleminded study of animal nature really seems to be sufficiently considerable. The author, too, must be allowed to stand upon his own feet, though one understands why he should have been called the American Kipling. His work has dealt hitherto with primitive human nature ; this is a study of primitive dog nature. No modern writer of fiction, unless it be Kipling, has preserved so clearly the distinction between animal virtue and human virtue. The farther Buck reverts from the artificial status of a manbounded domestic creature to the natural condition of the " dominant primordial beast,” the more strongly (if unwillingly) we admire him. There is something magnificent in the spectacle of his gradual detachment from the tame, beaten-in virtues of uncounted forefathers, his increasing ability to hold his own among unwonted conditions, and his final triumph over the most dreaded powers of the wilderness : " He was a Killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided; alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being.

. . . But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed. . . . His cunning was wolf cunning and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence ; and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal, living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility. . . . Every part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity. He saw the movement, or heard the sound, and responded in less time than another dog required to compass the mere seeing or hearing. He perceived and determined and responded in the same instant. His muscles, were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy, and pour forth generously over the world.” The making and the achievement of such a hero constitute, not a pretty story at all, but a very powerful one.

Here entereth a new figure in an ancient habit. It is a tale not guiltless of historical import, and rendered in a style of bookish origin, yet essentially what it professes to be, a romance.1 Long Will is, it seems, the poet Langland : appears also a short stout person called Chaucer; a young King ; one Wat Tyler ; a mayor, an archbishop, priests, soldiers, conspirators, peasants, etc. ; and, more noteworthily, fair Calote, daughter to Long Will, and young Stephen Fitzwarine, courtier, peddler, lover, and member of The Brotherhood. The romancer has chosen a precarious means of expression, and has made very successful use of it. There have been many unhappy experiments in the archaic style of late, and a few happy ones, such as, for instance, William Morris’s Story of the Glittering Plain, and Mr. Hewlett’s best work. Miss Converse has contrived a manner suggestive of the ancient English speech, yet not obscure or crabbed to the modern ear. Its key and its cadences, once determined, are consistently maintained throughout. One may give a taste of its quality in the opening sentences of the Prologue : —

“ There were a many singers on the hill-top. They twittered in the gorse ; they whistled from the old hawthorn tree, amid the white may; they sprang to heaven, shaking off melody in their flight; and one, russet-clad, lay at his length against the green slope, murmuring English in his throat.

“ ‘ ’T was in a May morning,’ he said, ' ’T was in a May morning,’ — and he loitered over the words and drew out the ‘ morwening ’ very long and sweet. Then, because there was a singing mote of a lark in the misty blue above him, his own song dropped back into his breast, and he waited.”

Both in form and in substance the narrative is distinguished by purity and grace. It is likely to be read with pleasure by persons to whom contact with the cut-and-thrust romance is calamity.

III.

Miss Austen, whose own work was so subtly penetrated with humor, might have wondered at the distinction which we are inclined to draw between fiction which is serious and fiction which is humorous. To her mind humor was doubtless a quality rather than a feat, a characteristic of comedy rather than a mainspring of farce. Several volumes of short stories are now before us which represent, in varying degrees, both the quality and the craft of humor. The reviewer may be allowed to express his pleasure in them, though beyond this expression he can in this place offer only a few brief notes upon them. Miss Daskam’s latest volume⁸ contains a series of sketches in pure romantic comedy. They are free from the stigma of excessive cleverness, and from the tendency to gird and fling which this department had fancied to be growing upon the author. There is, indeed, much sweetness in them, as well as much power, and greater repose of manner than this writer has attained heretofore.

Until very recently Mr. Guy Wetmore Carryl was known mainly as a writer of witty verses. He now proves himself to be a humorist in the better sense of the word. Several of the stories in the present collection ⁹ bear a superficial resemblance to certain Parisian tales of Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith ; but many of them are beyond the range of that genial chronicler. Several times, indeed, a distinctly sombre note is struck, and once, in the tale called Papa Labesse, even tragedy is attained. Why is it that there is such inexhaustible interest for us in pictures of the cafés, the boulevards, the Bohemian haunts, of Paris ? Who can imagine a group of Anglo-American pens busied in a similar way with Berlin life ? To his interpretation of the French temperament, Mr. Carryl could bring little new light. But this is a limitation of theme ; the stories are delightfully told, and they are full of human interest.

The humor of Cheerful Americans ¹⁰ belongs plainly to the lesser order, though it is a farce which does not always roar. Many of these stories have to do with a somewhat conventional type of American tourist, but they are undeniably amusing, and that is what they evidently wish to be. The Lightning Conductor¹¹ might, according to the modern mode, be classified as " farce-comedy.” The general situation is farcical, but its treatment is not so broad as to destroy one’s interest in the development of the tale. It is altogether the best automobile story of which we have knowledge, and might (herein its weakness lies for the hasty reader) serve almost as a guide-book for highway travel from Paris to Sicily. It is, in short, a spirited story of love, motors, and sight-seeing, and ought, consequently, to appeal to at least three classes of people. Moreover, one may fairly say that it has wit and taste, though not genius, to recommend it.

Two other books of pleasant humor ¹² have chanced to come to hand recently through unofficial channels. They were, in fact, like The Lightning Conductor, privately recommended by persons who do not pretend to weigh what they enjoy. We hasten to pass on the knowledge of them to others who may not have chanced to come upon them in the course of the day’s journey. They are Irish tales of the old-fashioned, rollicking sort, and comfortingly assure us that there is still a cheerful aspect of Hibernian life. It may be a sign of callousness, but we are glad to know that the Ireland of Miss Barlow and Mr. Moore is, after all, not the only Ireland extant. We have listened with proper sympathy to the somewhat lugubrious chronicles of life among the dwellers in the bog, and we need not now feel guilty at sharing in the merriment which still exists among the squires and the gentry, as it did in the palmy days of Charles Lever and Samuel Lover. Even the peasants, who here figure mainly in the background, appear to be a fairly cheerful, though not pampered class. Most of the stories manage to be horsy, and at the same time to treat profitably of the loves of certain attractive young persons. There is abundance of amusing description and dialogue, and with much that is too subtly humorous to be profitably detached from the context, an occasional scene of broad fun which reminds one of the good old horse-play of Humphry Clinker or Handy Andy:—

“ There is probably not in the United Kingdom a worse-planned entrance gate than Robert Trinder’s. You come at it obliquely on the side of a crooked hill, squeeze between its low pillars with an inch to spare each side, and immediately drop down a yet steeper hill, which lasts for the best part of a quarter of a mile. The jingle went swooping and jerking down into the unknown, till, through the portholes on either side of the driver’s legs, I saw Lisangle House. It had looked decidedly better in large red letters at the top of old Robert’s note paper than it did at the top of his lawn, being no more than a square yellow box of a house, that had been made a fool of by being promiscuously trimmed with battlements. Just as my jingle tilted me in backwards against the flight of steps, I heard through the open door a loud and piercing yell; following on it came the thunder of many feet, and the next instant a hound bolted down the steps with a large plucked turkey in its mouth. Close in its wake fled a brace of puppies, and behind them, variously armed, pursued what appeared to be the staff of Lisangle House. They went past me in full cry, leaving a general impression of dirty aprons, flying hair, and onions, and I feel sure that there were bare feet somewhere in itMy carman leaped from his perch and joined in the chase, and the whole party swept from my astonished gaze around or into a clump of bushes. At this juncture I was not sorry to hear Robert Trinder’s voice greeting me as if nothing unusual were coming.”

Miss Austen would very likely have discovered neither wit nor taste in this description. Perhaps there is nothing of the sort to be discovered there; one person, at least, must cheerfully confess that he rejoices in it all.

H. W. Boynton.