Past and Present
DR. GAY concludes for us, in this issue, his appraisal of the historical novels which have been returning to favor this autumn. His earlier review appeared in the November Atlantic.
PAST AND PRESENT
HAVING completed her stirring trilogy of novels relating to Lincoln, Honoré W. Morrow now turns for inspiration to the life of another great American.Black Daniel (Morrow, $2.50) narrates the story of Daniel Webster’s courtship of the young woman who became his Second wife. It will be remembered that Webster first married Grace Fletcher, a New England schoolteacher, who died twenty-one years later, and that in something over a year he married Caroline Le Roy.
The theme of the novel is the influence of a woman upon the career of a statesman, for when Webster first meets Miss Le Roy he has firmly resolved to retire from public life. The deaths of his first wife and his beloved brother, Ezekiel, uniting with disgust at malicious gossip concerning his relations with a woman, make him think with longing of his farm at Marshfield. But the fascinating Miss Le Roy, after snubbing him at their first meeting, ends by accomplishing what all the persuasions of his friends and admirers could not. To satisfy her ambition for him he returns to the Senate, and the story ends with the historic day of the Reply to Hayne.
The strongest feature of the novel is the ease and naturalness with which the past is evoked. A score of famous persons walk through the pages and talk like human beings. Webster himself has none of the altitudinous chill one is accustomed to associate with his name. I found it hard to like Caroline or to be certain of her motives, and felt that to connect the later successes of Webster with her influence seemed a little sentimental. But the sense of life is in the book; it has humor and charm; it revivifies stirring scenes of the past.
Edna Berber’s American Beauty (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) sketches, with her usual speed and gusto, the transition of a New England locality from its Anglo-Saxon settlement to its ownership by Polish peasants. The history of a Connecticut farm, and of the Oakeses who first developed it, is traced in the lives of Orrange Oakes, his wife Judith, and their daughter Tamar, from 1700, through their descendants of the same names a hundred years later, to the marriage of the youngest Tamar to a Pole, Ondia Olszak; and ends with the latest of the line, an Orrange Olszak, owner of the old homestead and apparently destined to marry Candace Baldwin, scion of another old family of the district. It is the melting pot from a new point of view, the suggestion being that the old New England blood may be replenished from the strength of the peasant, as the impoverished farms from his plodding but indomitable labor.
Whatever we may think of the theme, we must admire the energy and vividness of the telling, even though Miss Ferber paints with a palette knife and her adjectival ardor seems at times a bit overdone. The old-world charm of rural Connecticut cannot be conveyed with a punch. But the way in which the characters, especially the second Judith, Polcia, Ondia, Big Bella, and Temmie, are etched in colors, even if the colors seem more Polish than Puritan, makes a gripping story, in which humor, the zest of life, and moments of pathos or of horror are blended with great skill. We may find it hard to believe that Temmie would ever marry Ondia, or, if married, could be happy with him. Evidently, however, we are to believe that the blood of the Oakeses ran strongly in her and her son Orrange; and the Oakeses had never been afraid of life. Indeed, in all her work Miss Ferber’s motto might well be: ‘It takes life to love life.’
One approaches A Calendar of Sin (Cape & Smith, $5.00) with awe, for it is a book of over twelve hundred large pages — fully the equivalent of eighteen hundred ordinary pages. Divided into chapters corresponding to years between 1867 and 1914, it further records the lapse of time within each year by notations of date. In her Preface the author, Evelyn Scott, announces her intention of including ‘no mere adumbration of the financial drama of America . . . but a detailed relation of the public events,’as well as ‘to allow love and hunger equal expression.’ It is evident that this last purpose interested her most as she proceeded, for the story is mainly concerned with the lives of several families who came into contact or collision chiefly through love.
I doubt if ever have the interrelations and ramifications of a group of families been narrated with such skill and such convincing realism. But, unless the reader has an unusually good memory for genealogy, he will be wise to read with pencil in hand and construct the various family trees as he goes along. To do so is no burden and may prevent some irritations.
It is a piece of social history of really astonishing scope and insight. It exhibits the post-Civil War generations as they never could — as they never dared — exhibit themselves, during a period when the country was absorbed in financial development and the Victorian hush concerning sex lay like a pall over the people, breeding all sorts of morbidities and abnormalities in love, sin being accounted virtue and what passed for virtue being really sin.
But most readers will be content to read the book as a powerful and absorbing story of average families, whose children fall in love and marry well or badly; whose fathers work blindly for wealth that comes or goes; whose mothers equally blindly work for the good of their children and may work them ill; whose sons run away and whose daughters get into trouble through ignorance or passion; and all this set against a background, economic, political, social, which their brain tells them is important but which their feelings instinctively ignore. Poor Linda, jealous of Patience Poole on the day of McKinley’s assassination, remembers that she lost her first lover on the day of Grant’s funeral. Because it is so essentially true, nothing is more admirable than this absorption of each character in his own concerns. Here is a book to read slowly and thoughtfully, for it is full of wisdom.
R. M. GAY