Four Novels

THE title-page of Mr. Keenan’s novel, Trajan,¹ without being distinctly apologetic, may not unreasonably be taken to disclose the author’s consciousness of that characteristic of his work which will be most likely to invite criticism. If the reader become impatient, as he very likely will, at the frequent eddies which divert the stream of the narrative, he will please to remember that the author forewarned him, when he began his voyage, that the course was not clear. Mr. Keenan’s hero is a young American artist living in Paris at the height of the Second Empire, and critical of the times through his affiliation with the men who afterward were active in the scenes which followed Sedan. The other principal characters are the members of a rich, cultivated American family, and of a French family which for two generations had been domiciled in America, but had returned to its more natural French circumstance. The time of the story is the year between May, 1870, and May, 1871, with necessary references to the history of the several characters. The place is chiefly Paris and its neighborhood, with occasional brief transfers of action to America.

It will be easily seen how lurid a background was possible for the figures

that are to engage the reader’s attention ; but Mr. Keenan, if he had the purpose to make the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune a relief for the better display of his characters, was drawn into too intimate an interest in these historic movements, and thus has been hurried with all his fictitious apparatus into a confusion out of which his story is extricated with some difficulty. He has indeed protected his interests in part by making his principal characters important factors in the hurlyburly ; but for all that, his story is more than once lost, and is recovered by the reader only when he is somewhat out of breath from the chase.

To speak more plainly, the defect of this book lies in its excess. While many novels of the day are povertystricken for incidents, Trajan has enough and to spare. After all the wants of the characters are satisfied, one may, out of the abundance left over, find enough to furnish forth several booksful of heroes and heroines. It is always so. In time of drought we pray for rain. Down it comes in a deluge, and we long for a dry and thirsty land. There are some novelists who, when the story flags, invent a new character to divert the mind. Mr. Keenan invents a new incident, and does not trouble himself much about his characters. He leaves them to get along as they can, and if they are reasonably consistent, that is enough for him. Thus, while every part of the book is dramatic, the integral drama is weak and ineffective. Instead of a story, marching with cumulative effect to its close, there is a congeries of stories; none, perhaps, positively remote from the central one, yet by their partial independence of it disturbing the mind, and causing it to weary of the effort at attention.

The characters suffer from this overworking of incidents, for they are so busily employed in keeping things moving that they have no time to be greatly affected by the movements themselves. It would sound very well to say that the author had shown his power not by analyzing his characters, but by permitting them to work out their destiny. Unfortunately, he has forgotten very largely that the characters have any destiny other than that of external position. He rarely seems to apprehend that all this tremendous activity must have left its impress on the very nature of the persons themselves. Is it reasonable to suppose, for instance, that Theo should wind herself in such a net of duplicity as she wove, and not show some sign of moral deterioration? Yet she goes out of the story as smilingly and as airily as she enters it, and the touchstone of purity fails to detect her character; for Mrs. Arden, who has no reason to like her, seems oblivious to her real nature.

In truth, the author stands outside of his work, and orders everything; nothing seems to operate of its own natural power, and, to make the matter worse, he assumes the showman from time to time, after the manner of Thackeray. How little he troubles himself to have the characters work out their own salvation or damnation may be illustrated by a single slight instance. The hero, Trajan, has just been brought back, near the end of the book, from the border of the grave. The physician forbids that he should be excited, yet he insists upon knowing the facts of his rescue. Elliot Arden thereupon gives him the facts; not quietly and briefly, as the man for whom Arden is intended would, but with a deal of persiflage and a most unnecessary amount of detail. It is Mr. Keenan who wishes to tell a good story, not one of the characters acting in a rational way. Perhaps it is just as well that the characters are not especially reasonable beings, for they might not like the patronizing tone of their creator.

Mr. Keenan, to judge from this book, has given his days and nights to Thackeray. We do not know how willing he may be to give his hours to a rigid study of art, but we wish he would throw aside the costume of Thackeray in which he has dressed himself, — it is a misfit, — and attend to the real Thackeray, the artist of Henry Esmond. A genuine, humble study of that work of art ought to make him thoroughly dissatisfied with Trajan, and yet ready to believe that in his own way he might draw upon his evident power of invention to produce a vivid novel, in which characters and incidents should bear a just relation to each other, and all should be subject to laws of art.

To pass from the lawless, swashing Trajan to the mild civility of A Carpet Knight² reminds us how wide is the range included in the modern novel. It may be read to the sound of cannon, or to the thrumming of a mandolin, Harford Flemming has been indifferent to the joys of inventing a hero like Trajan, who saves the life of his friend as often as the exigency of the story demands, and is content with the substitutes for heroes which are furnished by Philadelphia drawing-rooms. Harford Flemming attempts a difficult feat, — nothing less than to reproduce society without recourse to extraordinary incidents, situations, or persons. A Carpet Knight is like one of the modern plays, where the spectator seems to be looking in upon just such a drawing-room as he may have left half an hour before ; to be overhearing the conversation of people with whom, or those just like them, he may presently be discussing the play itself. Has the reader afflicted with the use of eye-glasses ever idly looked into them as they caught a reflection of the room in which he sits ? He has seen his surroundings reproduced in petto, and composed into a more agreeable picture than he can make out by a glance at the objects themselves. Something thus is the charm of this book, — for a charm it has,—in its reproduction of refined manners and those slight shades of difference in personality which our modern conventional life affords. The story is slight, — we are bound to say that it is no more bewildering than the streets of the city in which its scenes are laid; but as he reads one grows lazily indifferent to the mere plot, and finds himself taking a cheerful interest in the several persons of the story. It is something to have a story of American society which is as amiable and smooth as much of our urban society is. In its way it reinforces one’s confidence in good manners. One is reminded that the ordinary amenities of life are not disregarded. He may know this well enough from his experience of life, but he will scarcely know it from current fiction ; and so, while A Carpet Knight will not stir his soul or take him into a highly analyzed circle of human beings, it will leave him with the comfortable feeling that he has passed an agreeable evening in society without the necessity of dressing his tired body and bracing his mind for the purpose.

One of the carpet knights who engage in the tournament of the ball-room took his yacht, when summer came, and was blown by the winds to the Bay of Fundy. Urquhart, the hero of Pilot Fortune,³ might easily have figured among the characters of Harford Flemming’s novel. He is a young fellow, of good birth and breeding, with plenty of money and a healthy appetite. He is off in his yacht, and is blown by a wind, which seems one of good fortune, into the harbor of a little fishing village on a Nova Scotian island. Here he finds a girl, to outward seeming a fisherman’s daughter, but who at once, by manner and conversation, shows herself to be of finer make. She lives with her aunt Ursula and an indolent, handsome fellow named Thomas, who appears to be the convenient man-of-all-work. She has a lover, a stalwart young fisherman, Stephen Ferguson, and his manly affection offers quite the only escape possible from the distasteful surroundings in which she lives; for her aunt is a severe-featured, unsympathetic woman, who bears a hard lot with set teeth and closed lips.

Milicent attracts Urquhart first as an idle fancy, then by a stronger fascination, and in a somewhat unguarded moment he offers himself to her. It is only after various adventures, all cleverly told and not forced in the telling, that this event comes about; and then a revelation follows, not from the lips of Milicent, who has fatally postponed, or been hindered in, the disclosure of facts which she knew, but by the appearance on the scene of Urquhart’s guardian, Mr. Raymond, who has hurried to the island in hopes of arresting a misalliance. This gentleman, coming face to face with the group, sees in Thomas a clever but unscrupulous Mr. Chaudron, who years before had swindled his neighbors in New York, and had fled to parts unknown with his sister and daughter. The sister is the aunt Ursula; the daughter, Milicent, who is witness of her father’s evil fame. The revelation brings out Urquhart’s weakness. He is only a carpet knight, and cannot face the world as champion of the girl. So he goes, and the faithful Stephen wins the prize.

It is almost a pity to give this barren outline, since some of the reader’s pleasure is in the gradual discovery of the plot, — some, but by no means all ; for the best of the book is in its fresh, breezy pictures of the island life, its well modeled characters, especially those of Milicent and her aunt, and its excellent proportions. The story is well constructed, and the situations are natural and fit to characters and plot. There are one or two weaknesses, to be sure. Urquhart is not unfamiliar with the name of Chaudron, but no intimation is given that the family on the island bears any other. That name, indeed, is never applied to Milicent; but one of commonplace mind is apt to ask whether a young man from New York, meeting a girl of evident good birth, though with a native wildness, postpones any direct address until he has the right to call her by her name. He does once or twice address her as Miss Milicent, but in the conversation which is given there is a careful avoidance in the main of any direct calling of names on either side. Again, is it at all likely that the most infatuated young man, especially if he turns out to be at bottom, and not at top, only a society man, would be so indifferent as Urquhart is to the young girl’s antecedents? Her very name is not a rustic one. Her air is that of one well born. He can hardly have expected to go off with her as one might carry away a swan from among geese, satisfied with the swan, and careless how it happened to be among geese.

These are defects in the probabilities of the story, and a little care might have removed them. Still, the book as a whole is not only interesting ; it is unhackneyed, and it brings within the resources of native fiction a substantially new subject. We may thank these ladies for discovering the possibilities in fiction of that commonplace person, the American forger who crosses the Canada frontier, and for rehabilitating the world-old story of the prince who finds the disguised princess, by using scenes so new to fiction as the Bay of Fundy and its shores.

Mr. Barrett Wendell has chosen to follow a more common practice. He has carried his hero across the water, and given him his romance in Italy. The Duchess Emilia ⁴ is a romance, —a Pythagorean romance. The lady who fills the title rôle was a wicked and beautiful Italian woman, who lived two or three generations before the time of the story. She was married to a Roman nobleman, but naturally loved his brother better. She compasses her husband’s death, and is ready for her lover ; but he, suffering a revulsion of feeling, flees from her, becomes penitent, enters the church, and in process of time becomes a cardinal, — Cardinal Giulio Colonna. Meanwhile, the duchess goes from bad to worse. No particulars are given, but she is plainly a very, very wicked woman. The cardinal grows in holiness in the same proportion, although the fire of passion for Emilia is only covered by the ashes of contrition.

At last the duchess dies, and then a strange thing happens. Her soul, her poor, wicked little soul, much inflamed and very ill prepared for a long voyage, takes flight, and in less than a night — not quite so quickly as by electricity, but making better time than by steam — is “ whirled about the rolling earth,” in Mr. Wendell’s realistic apprehension of spiritual movement. It is a bad night to be out in, but the soul stands it, and coming to the far-off fatherland of the hero of this romance, namely to New England, and presumably to Beacon Street in Boston, finds a wretched home — so the hero says — in the madman’s body that is his. It was an unreasonable choice on the part of the Duchess Emilia, for Richard Beverly, who had just given up being born, when she came so unceremoniously, was the son of two mad people, — his father afterward committed suicide ; and it would naturally require a good deal of sanity on the part of a New England young man to resist the probable tantrums of a wicked old Italian soul lodged in him. The first effect upon the unfortunate infant was to make him quiver and utter a loud cry, — “ louder and wilder than the cries of other children. And I drew breath with a struggle, as if I would fain lie still, but could not; and cried again, with a voice of fear that made the women start.”

This young man, who cannot call his soul his own, is thereby compelled to a most trying life. In early youth he is obliged to be unusually good, in order to give the soul a chance. Then he is impelled, he knows not why, to go to Italy. He is conscious of some great work to do, but what the work is he cannot tell. He finds it out in time, for upon reaching Rome he meets the old cardinal, and is attracted to him. The cardinal in turn is fascinated by the melancholy young man. The reason is that his soul, or rather the soul of the Duchess Emilia, who is living in the furnished lodging of Richard Beverly, looks out of his eyes, and the old cardinal cannot withstand the influence.

By degrees Beverly discovers his mission. It is to purify his lodger’s conscience by undoing the mischief done by her when she lived in the Colonna palace, and by arresting the action which in a new generation is in danger of repeating the old crime. The cardinal is to be sanctified, and is also to be made to break off the engagement between his niece Filippa and a rich Count Palchi, in order to her marrying her true lover, Luigi Orsini. Everything is brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and, his vicarious mission being accomplished, Beverly dies. His lodger, it is surmised, immediately transfers her residence to a heavenly mansion.

In carrying out this fantasy, Mr. Wendell has employed a simple ruse. He tells so much of the story as a person may need to tell in order to explain circumstances, but leaves most of the narrative to be developed in passages from Beverly’s journal. The transition is not always closely marked, and the assumption of a style of fifty years ago is indifferently borne out, while the occasional change from a falsetto tone to a natural one is more amusing than the author apparently intended. The basis of real action upon which the romance stands — we mean the relations between Beverly and the cardinal, Luigi and Filippa—is so outrageously improbable that it requires the most absorbing romance to justify it. Unfortunately, the romance is not absorbing. The whole manner of the author is fatal to that deep reality which is essential to genuine romance. He is not himself possessed by his story. He stands wholly outside of it. He has simply taken a fantastic motif and given it a mechanical elaboration. The result is that from beginning to end the reader perceives himself in presence of an affectation. He is unmoved by the intended pathos, because the author was never moved. His blood does not curdle at the proper places, because he knows that the red stains which he sees are only claret. This must be our warrant for making light of so serious an affair as the transmigration of Emilia’s soul.

The four novels which we have glanced at scarcely offer material enough for any but the slightest generalization. We think, however, that it is not unfair to see in them some signs that our American fiction is becoming steadily more venturesome and more varied. Mr. Keenan’s foray into the scenes of the Commune was a bold one, and if he

had not made up his mind to follow at the heels of Thackeray, he might have brought back worthier trophies. To treat of real Americans mixed in with real Parisians in a historic time offers a capital chance for an animated and dramatic novel. A Carpet Knight and Pilot Fortune both show that the cleverness and skill of the craft which we associate with current English fiction of the better, but not best, sort are not unknown here, where so much slovenly and careless work has been done by average workwomen. Mr. Wendell’s Emilia, again, though it cannot be called a success, reminds us of the possibilities of the romance, which have been overlooked in our close allegiance to realism. It is something that a writer should be willing to lay himself open to the rude scoffers. There will always be those who are stonily indifferent to high flights of fancy or imagination, and a writer of genuine romance may always expect to be derided. On the other hand, there is that in a fine romance which melts the mood and creates true sympathy. We would really much rather not scoff, and if Mr. Wendell will cultivate his natural voice, and sing us a song with as much purity of feeling as goes to this book of his, — for that is its one redeeming feature, — we promise to applaud with the heartiest.