Poganuc People, and Other Novels

THE early crop of native American novels for 1878 is of rather more than usual interest. The first fact to be noted about them, and the most unusual, that many of them have a distinctness of character which almost amounts individuality. In place of careful and refined but timid and insignificant studies in Old World styles, we have several unquestionably bold attempts, and more or less piquant and animating failures.

Mrs. Champney’s Bourbon Lilies¹ is not a failure in any sense. It is a particularly graceful and finished little story, showing much tenderness of feeling and liveliness of mind; but the scenery and characters are almost exclusively French, and its proper place is with the interesting studies of Miss Peard and Mr. Hamerton, — not among American books at all. We have also a somewhat mysterious and awful history, entitled Seola,² purporting to be derived from the oldest manuscript in the world, and to record, for our instruction, the coquetries of the wife and daughter of Japhet with Lucifer and the lesser rebel angels, who are supposed to have relieved the restlessness from which they suffered before they became thoroughly wonted to Tophet by disturbing the peace of human families. They did, in fact, according to our author, accomplish a good deal of mischief; but the flood proved a heroic remedy,—a sort of water-cure, — and set all straight again; and he goes into minute and not very savory details of that, exceedingly moist and unpleasant occasion. Those who have an active theological interest in the Noachian deluge will, no doubt, read this anonymous volume with serious attention, but the average reader will be apt, to prefer something more modern and realistic. With these two exceptions, the themes of the new books are all American, the mode of treatment unconventional, and the experiments in construction and freaks of phraseology of a sort for which our European tutors in fiction, whom we have hitherto feared so much, and whose excellence in their own line it really seems so hopeless for us to try to emulate, will cheerfully disclaim all responsibility. Perhaps it is better so; we have been pottering at copies a good while. It may be time for us to break wholly away from the models which we shall hardly approach much nearer than now, and set our native and moderately developed wits atwork on the undeniably raw material which lies all about us. For the finest copy can have but a trifling intrinsic value, while an original design may be even ludicrously faulty, and yet promise excellent things.

And it so happens that among the novelists of the new year we find three, at least, who have already proved themselves, in a remarkable degree, original and national. If Hawthorne’s peerless name could be substituted for the least familiar of these three, we might safely say our three most original. Mrs. Stowe gives us Poganuc People;³ Bret Harte, The Story of a Mine; and William M. Baker, the eccentric and almost forgotten author of A New Timothy, published a decade or more ago in Harper’s Magazine, comes briskly to the front with a racy and wonderfully ill-written tale entitled A Year Worth Living, and relating to a place and people of which, as he justly reminds us on his title-page, we can ill afford, and particularly at present, to remain ignorant.

The tale of Poganuc is thin and quiet, the slow trickling of a stream which flowed abundantly and, properly speaking, exhausted itself in Oldtown Folks; a series of sober and unromantie, though sometimes mildly affecting reminiscences, which Mrs. Stowe’s long literary experience enables her to relate pleasantly and without effort. These are authentic reminiscences, and have a historical, quite distinct from their literary, value. The old New England rural life can hardly be too fully and minutely illustrated for those who came too late to behold it, for the significance of that life in the fast-culminating story of this nation is inestimable. Mrs. Stowe knew it thoroughly, and has fathomed its philosophy and felt its dumb, dark poetry as few others ever have. In the austere courts of that “prison of Puritanism ” whose futile outer walls it makes Mr. Matthew Arnold so ill to look upon, there grew up and blossomed between the flags a few sweet and pallid flowers, of which the very species is likely to be trampled out of existence under the tread of vulgar feet, now that those courts are wide open both for ingress and egress. The first Unitarians, who broke jail three quarters of a century ago, kept reverently enough the seeds of these wan flowers, but were not always successful in their culture upon open ground. And so, not to insist too long upon our metaphor, we are fain to depend for the knowledge which we crave upon pressed and dried specimens like Mrs. Stowe’s, and to be thankful even for the Poganuc sketches, which are but the last, uncolored leavings of a large and loving collection.

Whether the dialect supposed to have been spoken by the rude forefathers of the New England hamlets be as worthy of preservation in books as their manners and customs and spiritual experiences is a more doubtful matter. So far as it was a genuine dialect, and a reservoir of old English forms and words, — as to some extent it certainly was, —* it is interesting. So far as it consisted merely, and still consists among the unrefined, of a wanton distortion of sounds and a hardy disobedience to grammar, it is wholly base, and the sooner it passes out of both ear and mind the better. Ruskin was nearer the truth than usual when he said, long ago, “Provincial dialect is not vulgar; but. cockney dialect, the corruption by blunted sense of a finer language continually heard, is so, in a deep degree.” Now if Mrs. Stowe is right, in supposing the difference to have been as wide, one hundred years ago, as she represents, between the speech of the professional and that of the agricultural classes in a considerable country place, then there was unquestionably, as Ruskin says, a deep vulgarity in the talk of the farmers; for they mingled freely with their betters in that primitive society, and had constant opportunities of hearing a purer language. And in truth the effect of the close juxtaposition of these two styles, in the pages of this or any novel, is actually one of vulgarity; while any fun there may once have been in it is long since worn out.

But perhaps; Mrs. Stowe is wrong, and mistakes late knowledge for early recollection, as people are rather apt. to do. We should be more inclined to think so, were it not that the sincere and reflective author of Gemini,⁴ the latest of the No Name novels, gives exactly the same account of the difference at present existing between the talk of these two kinds of people in a remote district of New Hampshire, where the mode of living is to all intents and purposes from fifty to a hundred years behind that of the sea-board. And this is perhaps the best place in which to give a word of hearty praise to Gemini, —an extremely simple and sorrowful little story, evidently by a new author, but bearing a stamp of quiet veracity which is allied more nearly than we sometimes think to the highest art. It is the humblest of tragedies, and has nothing to do with “terror,” and little with passion; but it does purify the heart by “pity,” as we read. The style reveals, on every page, that deep and ample but hardly conscious culture, still oftenest attained in solitary places by those who go much to books for their own sake only, and not because the demands of conversation or the customs of a social clique require it.

Mr. Bret Harte’s Story of a Mine ⁵ is one more advertisement, of his wasted powers. One perfect and extremely brilliant gift he had: the eye to see, the hand to portray picturesquely and dramatically, the immensely entertaining and improper life of the Pacific States. It was surely his evil genius which lured him away from a field where he was winning a unique fame, and induced him to try his hand at social and political satire. So long as he remained among semi-barbarians, his own reaction was towards civilization, and he stood just far enough aloof from his grotesque subjects to give his humor free play. Planted in a sophisticated community, he frets and sickens for the piquant criminality of the mines, and can produce nothing better than a bad imitation of Dickens at his worst. The Story of a Mine is so sharply and evenly divided between his two styles that it might as well be two books, or even much better. The first or Californian part has all the author’s old fascination, and flashes merrily with his peculiar wit in short, sharp dialogues like the following: —

“ ' Had we not better wait for the inquest, and swear out a warrant?’ said the secretary cautiously. [The body of a murdered man had been found near the entrance to the mine.]

“ ‘ How many men have we? ’

“ ‘ Five.’

“ ‘ Then,’ said the president, summing up the revised statutes of the State of California in one strong sentence, ‘ we don’t want no d—d warrant! ’ ”

But when the scene of this lively and not too improbable tale shifts to Washington, it drops into a chasm of inanity. There is a foolish and spiritless attempt at satire of evils so grave that they sternly demand at least a manly treatment. Great ignorance of civic affairs is shown, combined with a languid and indiscriminating spite against those who administer them. The caricature of Charles Sumner is in the worst taste, — recognizable, and therefore unpardonable. The echo of the wordy and futile tirades of Dickens against chancery and the circumlocution office is distressingly exact, and all the final working out of the odd story, which began so brightly, is low; and what is worse, in the sense in which a blunder is worse than a crime, it is not amusing.

But Bret Harte in his own province — be it repeated — is yet masterly; and the author of A Year Worth Living⁶ has a province too, into which he dashes with lusty good-will, if not always with the highest literary wisdom. On the whole, there is perhaps nothing of which it more imports us here at the North to improve our understanding than the native type and prevailing dispositions of our Southern countrymen, and the state of society — slavery quite apart—which climate and situation tend to induce among them. Slavery apart, because slavery, while it lasted, was so fruitful a source of fanatical intolerance and partisan passion; because it has actually been long enough eliminated for society at the South to have fairly begun to shape itself to its absence; and because, while we do not care to be too much intimidated by the rather stentorian order of our Southern brethren to let bygones be bygones, we honestly think that the best thing both they and we can do is to forget the peculiar institution as early and completely as possible, and try to comprehend one another as we are. And Mr. Baker has some very special qualifications for assisting such a mutual understanding. He appears to have known the South intimately and affectionately up to the time of the war, and to possess that sort of easy conscience about the abstract morality of slavery which seems to be the inalienable right of those who have grown up in its presence. His story is that of a young clergyman of Southern birth, who was educated at the North, but returned to take charge of a Presbyterian parish in one of the larger Gulf cities, apparently Galveston. The “ year worth living” was crowded with rich and quaint experiences, and culminated in a frightful epidemic of yellow fever, during which the complacent young divine, whose early blunders are rehearsed with the sort of good-humored indulgence which a man is apt to bestow upon his own, is put upon his real mettle and shows himself a hero. The time of action is before the war, but slavery, as we have said, is mentioned only incidentally and indifferently. The author lays his greatest stress on the fundamental effect upon character of the Southern conditions of soil and climate, —on the strong passions, the rank eccentricities, the insouciant temper, the lavish charity, the fervors of piety, and the transports of crime which belong of right to a semitropical community; and he depicts their workings with no little force. He has a keen eye for human oddities, and impresses into his often laughable pages a good many who have no proper connection with the story. There is plenty of love in the book, and Mr. Baker gives us in the two sisters, Irene and Zenobia Buttolph, two types of Southern womanhood which a little more delicacy of execution would have made admirable studies. Zenobia is meant to be such a one as almost all who have seen much of well-born Southern ladies must have known: quiet and queenly, with a noble moral sense, an evenly-diffused intelligence rendering her peerless in all the every-day sovereignties and probable contingencies of life, and the courage of high breeding at great crises, — a lovely, powerful, and worshipful nature. Irene, her sister, is the reverse of all this: handsome, hasty, giddy, shallow, capable of no patience and much cruelty; of the true fire-eating type, in short, which naturally expresses animosity by spitting on its foe. Irene is naïvely and respectfully described by the author as a “ brilliant woman,” and she is evidently his sincere ideal of the type. He quotes her wit, which is the merest pertness; her learning, which is but a flourish of ignorance which any grammar-school girl at the North could confute. Her strangely defective education she shares, however, with all the men in the story, gentlemen and others, except the clergyman, and this is possibly one of the most truthful strokes in the whole effective picture. Zenobia belongs to that class of elect ladies who are above education; and there are a few such women, while there are no such men, this being one intellectual difference between the sexes. It is apparently lack of mental training in the author himself which, more than anything else, mars the effect of his really striking book. There is a coarseness and carelessness of workmanship, an utter lawlessness of arrangement or nonarrangement., which contrast strangely with its virile originality. One would hardly believe, without seeing, that a writer who could describe, as Mr. Baker does, the scenes on the sugar plantation, the night on the bayou-boat, the slowly deepening horror of the fever, could calmly perpetrate such English as follows: “ The colder the one was, so much the warmer the other.” “ The only hope left him was a steady purpose not to stay a fool if God would show him how ” (which suggests a truly satanic spirit of rebellion). “There was a sort of physical magnetism which drew the two together; a supply and demand, each of what he did not himself possess in the other.” “ Mr. Fan thorp had possession now of and was laughing with Irene at the piano.” “ An unopened bottle stood beside him, and to one side of him was an artificial mound of stones,” etc. As an offset to these little enormities, we would gladly quote the droll scene in which Mr. Fanthorp, the lawyer, amiably discusses with Mr. Venable, the minister, the best means of getting satisfaction of the latter for having given him the lie; and the highly histrionic one in the same chapter, where Irene insults her father’s mistress, the beautiful slave girl Ipbigenia. But we have not space for these things, and they deserve to be sought in their place.

On the whole, Mr. Baker’s book is fully as well worth reading as his hero’s year was worth living, and we insist on it the more because the tale has a steady Presbyterian squint, which is likely to rentier it specially invisible to the walleyed radicalism of Boston. But another new book lies before us which is still better worth reading. It is a novel of American army life, by Frederic Whittaker, the biographer of the unfortunate General Custer. We almost blush to say that the name of this fresh and animated romance is The Cadet Button.⁷ Why so charming a tale should have received so pitiable a title, or why it need have been so coarsely printed and so tawdrily bound by Sheldon & Co., the former publishers of The Galaxy, are mysteries. The title seems especially obnoxious and unfair to the book, and yet the button plays a most essential part in a story which is compactly and ingeniously constructed, — the best made American novel, as we think, of this or many seasons. It would seem as if the superb West Point training, which the author has apparently enjoyed, although he does not write himself U. S. A., had assisted him in shunning the incoherence of plan and diffuseness of style which spoil for permanent significance the work of so many of our cleverest writers. This tale is so full of romantic and varied action that no room is left in it for dreamy philosophy or morbid analysis. The characters are numerous and sustained with great spirit; not subtly studied, to be sure, but clearly and vigorously outlined, if also with a certain military rapidity and roughness. Mr. Whittaker’s classification of womankind is almost as broad and artless as Mr. Baker’s. Like a true knight of the plains, he divides all women, old and young, fair and plain, gentle and simple, int o those who do behave well in hardship and danger, and those who do not. On the whole, it is not an unwholesome division; quite as good, at all events, as the one, more approved among ourselves, into women who do and do not paint sphinxes and study Greek.

But the chief value and timeliness of Mr. Whittaker’s book he in the fine and just picture which it presents of the esprit de corps of the American regular army; of the strict honor, simple bravery, patience under poverty and exile, and somewhat scornful superiority to sordid conditions which have characterized its officers as a class. We have had no other school, North or South, which so regularly and effectually as West Point has made its pupils gentlemen in the plainest, soundest, and proudest sense of that term; and it is very well worth while to have our memories refreshed about this matter now that the army and the nursery of the army are being made the object of insidious attack by unscrupulous civilians. In connection with the strange story of the Indian half-breed, MacDearmid, Mr. Whittaker also gives us a few grave and dispassionate considerations upon the Indian problem. He by no means displays the sanguinary impatience of the red man’s existence so often attributed to army men, and sometimes, it must be acknowledged, rather ostentatiously professed by them; but he displays a thorough and practical knowledge of what the Indian really is, and of how barbarism and so-called civilization have conspired to embrute him. It seems a pity, by the way, that Mr. Whittaker should have confessed, in his preface, that MacDearmid is a real character. If he had not felt bound to do this, he might have finished his story after some fashion; while, at present, the Unexplained fate of the half-breed and his victim, Juliet Brinton, constitute the greatest flaw in the art of an otherwise well-rounded romance.

We come finally to the two earliest of Harper’s new series of American novels,⁸ and shall speak first of number two, because we happen to have something more to say of number one than the mere ability of it would demand. Justine’s Lovers opens rather flatly and feebly, but it is none the less an exceedingly clever novelette. The first page is much the worst; the last. — wonder of wonders in these fiction-deluged days! — gracefully conveys a slight but genuine surprise. Of all the books which we have enumerated, this, which is in some respects the least ambitious, contains the cleverest characterization, the keenest insight into human motives, and the most delicate discrimination of human varieties. Mrs. Vane, Mr. Barty, the Starkenburghs, father and son, are drawn admirably, with full comprehension, and yet a most lady-like refinement of touch. It is, in fact, a noticeably well-bred book. We tremble when the scene is shifted to Washington, but even the seemingly compulsory search for a place under government cannot make Justine vulgar. We respect the author so unfeignedly that we feel as if it would be almost impertinent to hint that she is telling her own experience; but we may at least affirm that she has contrived to inform her tale with an intense reality, and that it fixes our attention and absorbs our sympathies very much as the true story of an extremely engaging young woman would be apt to do, if heard from her own lips. We detect ourselves in applying this earnest and ingenuous narrative to the present administration, and wondering how Secretary Sherman will like it, before we remember that there is really nothing to fix the date of its incidents, and that it may not be photography which we are considering, but only very life-like free-hand drawing. There are several indications of reserved power in these open pages, and the possibility of a certain kind of poetic excellence in the scraps of poetry, principally paraphrases from the Psalms, which are sparingly introduced in the brief passages of more intimate confession. We give a very free versification of the Thirteenth Psalm: —

If, as all the newspapers say, Esther Pennefather has power, let us hope that it is of the powers destined soon to pass away. Here is a story so unnatural and unwholesome that any word, even of censure, which might arrest it for an instant on its way to oblivion ought possibly to be withheld. Unfortunately it cannot be wholly overlooked, because it has a weird sort of ability, and because the preposterous motif of it arises logically enough out of the acceptance of certain theories which are curiously popular for the moment, and ardently urged by writers of established reputation. What sort of a world this might possibly become if women had their own way in it altogether, and men generally were reduced to the ranks, the reader is invited to observe in the pages of this malarious and suffocating tale. The pleasing plot of it is as follows: A woman of divine beauty, uncertain age, and immeasurable “magnetism ” has a girls’ school, and all the sub-teachers and prominent pupils are madly in love with this phenomenal preceptress, and cruelly jealous of one another. Their agonies are in fact depicted with no little effect. The lady principal’s name is Miriam Snow. She is without heart herself, but finds an amiable pleasure in alternately flattering and torturing her victims, and playing them off against one another. One of the pupils, Emily Wise, dies of love for her teacher, complicated with phthisis. The heroine. Esther Pennefather, distinguishes herself yet more. She encounters a low fellow who informs her that he has a secret which, if divulged, would be distressing and dishonorable to Miss Snow. It relates to a forgery committed many years before by a mythical brother of that fiendish enchantress, and the cad coolly requests Esther to marry him out of hand as the sole condition of his continuing to keep the secret. Esther, we are emphatically informed, had “the blood of an honorable old family in her veins,” though it is not quite easy to reconcile this statement with the fact that neither she, nor Miss Snow, nor Miss Wise, nor any of the other lunatics of the first half of the story appear to have had fathers, mothers, guardians, or family ties. However, being of this mysterious but aristocratic extraction, Esther revolts a little from the thought of such a union, but consents to it rather than that her idol should be annoyed, and is married after a fortnight’s engagement. Miss Snow, who is also “high-born,” cuts Esther’s acquaintance directly, for having married beneath her; and the bride is conveyed to the frouzy house of her father-in-law, in the low quarter of a distant town, where we are pathetically told how her fastidious soul was revolted by the coarse manners of her new connections. She is nevertheless upheld by the reflection that she has sacrificed herself for what she blasphemously calls “ love ” (love for the school-mistress, be it understood!), and after a few years of angelic endurance of an ungrammatical family circle and an inartistic domicile, barely to mention a husband whom her scorn and aversion drove quite naturally into the worst dissipations, this extraordinary heroine is made perfect by suffering, and departs, by a conventional apotheosis, to a heaven where no rude man shall enter evermore. An appropriate pendant to this ingenious narrative is the story of Elsie Doepfner, — an exceptionally saintly sister of Esther’s vulgar husband, — who also, in her tender years, becomes violently enamored of another girl, much superior to her in station, named Rachel. Rachel has a proud and pious mother, and a proud, beautiful, and vicious sister. The sister offends the mother, and the mother shuts her up in one of the chambers of their stately mansion and keeps her a prisoner there for years. Rachel resolves to be even with her mother for this outrage, and as soon as she comes of age displays her filial indignation and secures revenge by eloping with a relative of the family who is also a married man. Elsie thereupon forsakes her home and family, and devotes herself to the task of discovering and “ saving ” her early friend; and she is said to have accomplished her mission, although we are not informed from what she saved her. One would say that the mischief in Rachel’s case came near being irremediable. On the whole, however, there is something refreshing about the positive criminality of Rachel. It is not entirely aimless, abnormal, and imbecile, like the raptures and the torments which the other women of the book undergo for the impassioned love of one another.

To do the author of Esther Pennefather justice, she seems to be too young or too really unsophisticated to have any adequate idea of the deep infamy involved in a girl’s marrying, or rather prostituting herself, from any such motive as she ascribes to her heroine. The book certainly shows unusual literary aptitude. There is a remarkable affluence of incident, a dramatic power in certain scenes and a feverish intensity of feeling in others, which help to tide the reader over the sickliness of the theme, and carry him on to the melodramatic end. But the feeling is like the strong recoil of affections forcibly turned back from their natural and righteous channels, and the mental acumen is of the one-sided and somewhat hysterical order, too apt to flourish in that modern substitute for the nunnery, the female college.

We have a strong suspicion that the name which appears on the queer cover of Esther Pennefather is but the literary disguise of some artium magistra late come with first honors from one of the institutions aforesaid; one who, having cherished an unrequited affection for some professor in “reform” costume, has beguiled the ennui of her first postgraduate year by this, not quite harmless production. If it be so, we would recommend, in all good faith and good feeling, as an alterative for her morbid imagination, a faithful course of morning housework and evening “ hops,” and a second literary experiment ten years hence, when she shall have made acquaintance with the actual world.