Two American Novels

THE failure of a piece of fiction which attempts much is another word, sometimes, for success. Mr. Hardy hangs out a sign from Spinoza over the door to his house of entertainment,¹ which reads: “ They who believe that they can speak, or keep silence, in a word, act, in virtue of a free decision of the soul, dream with their eyes open.” It is from this text that he preaches his romance, and the application is in the words of his hero, at the end of the book: —

“ All we think and feel is but this world of movement, of mass and atom unable to control their own motions, and steeped in a sea so tremulously responsive that your faintest breath breaks on infinite shores. You do not dare to move?. . . You cannot help it! Nothing moves of itself since the dance began ; nothing swerves but by collision. Others thou shalt drive, and they thee ; but thyself never. I, myself, capable for an instant of unifying the past and the present, am but one of these atoms, swept on by its own inertia, and disappearing as it came, a portent and a wonder. Do you know what effect all this produces upon me ? To create a faith so necessary in a Being so transcendent, that the inventions of men become puerilities.”

If we seem to place the philosophy of this romance in the foreground, it is because the author himself, by his method, incites one to question his meaning. There are, so to speak, eight principal persons in the book, arranged in five pairs: these are the atoms that move in the dance ; it is upon them that the wind of destiny blows ; and the author, while he invites his readers to follow the movements of his characters, is a chorus that finds expression through pantomime. In other words, the author is so impressed by the profound meaning which underlies his story that, without direct intimation, he conveys to the reader something of the same impression, and keeps him in a questioning mood. At first one asks, What is the story ? But at last it dawns upon him that there is no story, properly speaking, and he finds himself asking, What is the meaning of the book ? He is present at a drama of souls, and the dress in which they act their parts, the scenery with which the play is set, all the paraphernalia of the stage, are of little consequence. It is the indestructible personality, under the countless influences of life, that one must follow; and when the author of the drama is called for, one discovers that it is no less a person than God himself.

Now the value of any romance undoubtedly depends upon the psychological truth which is at the base, and the more the writer is penetrated by this truth, the more confidently will he guide the movements of its exponents; he must see the end from the beginning, he must look into the depths. But given this profound perception, this strong conception, there yet remains the necessity for a constructive art which shall reproduce the truth in characters and action that seem free and spontaneous. Mr. Hardy has undertaken to interpret, through the means of a romance, one of the deepest riddles of life, but unfortunately all his characters are conscious of this riddle. He has not succeeded in showing us people whose action upon each other is apparently selfdetermined, but really governed by Destiny ; he has disclosed those moments in the lives of his characters when they are themselves aware of the uncontrollable forces. The consequence is that the reader feels oppressed by the atmosphere of the book ; it is charged too highly with impending elements, and the simplest action or word has a sort of undeveloped dynamic potency.

It is possible that if Mr. Hardy had essayed to write a novel, that is, if he had resolved to use the ordinary events of a workaday world for the machinery of his philosophic thought, the necessity of sharply defined incident, action, and dialogue might have imposed healthful restrictions upon his tendency to subtlety. As it is, there is little ballast of realism. The dialogue is helpful to the spiritual plot, but it is not often in the language of the people ; it is allusive, superintendent, epigrammatic. The history of the persons engaged in the story is learned indirectly and by parenthesis. The action is of the kind which makes little account of time: the lovers meet, and their fate is instantaneously settled ; a row on the river, a walk in the woods, and all is done.

These characteristics belong to the romance, and not to the novel ; they serve the purpose of a writer who is intent upon the spiritual commerce of his personages, and is not disturbed by any difficulty which his readers may find in the geographical distribution of the scenes; Dinant does well enough for a localization of the foreign scenes, but when the persons remove their domicile, the change may be to England as much as to America, so far as any identification of places goes. It is interesting thus to see how much better the earlier portion of the book is than the latter. The background of foreign life serves an admirable pictorial purpose; and the romantic scenes projected from it have thereby a greater solidity and value. The background of native life, on the other hand is only a faint landscape ; there are no striking subordinate figures, there is no suggestion of common life, and, as a consequence, the scenes projected from this background have a certain unreality fatal to the highest romantic effects. The most significant romances are those which rise out of a familiar, common experience, and have their spiritual force heightened by the contrast.

It is clearly as a romance that Mr. Hardy’s book will be judged. It will be read with great pleasure simply as an artistic relief from the somewhat ignoble realism which prevails in fiction. It will be read also, in spite of the structural faults which we have noted, for the peculiarly noble air which pervades it, the extreme beauty of many of its passages, the revelation of life flashed occasionally as from a diamond of light, and perhaps more than all for the verysubtle charm which hangs over the whole movement of the story. The early pages are exquisite with this grace, and one never wholly loses the sense of what we can almost call the perfume of the book. But distillation of high potencies of life is a delicate business, and therefore, with all our admiration for what Mr. Hardy intended to do, we are still obliged to confess his book a noble failure as a piece of art.

There could hardly be a greater contrast in fictitious writing than that suggested by a comparison of Mr. Hardy’s book with Mr. Stockton’s first novel.² The Wind of Destiny is a serious work, and deals with great problems of human life ; the form of fiction is used because it gives the author wider scope and freer power than biography, for instance, or history, would permit. The Late Mrs. Null is also fiction, but unadulterated by any serious purpose whatsoever. It is too much to say that the book marks a new departure in fictitious literature, although Mr. Stockton’s peculiar style is already finding imitators, but it has an individuality which separates it in kind from current novels. It is not easy to say in a word in what this individuality consists, but any one who has read Mr, Stockton’s ingenious short stories will understand us when we speak of his novel as a many-jointed short story. There is the same caprice, the same unexpected turn, the same drollery of situation rather than of language, and the same absence of sentiment and moral purpose. The book is delightfully unmoral. The characters go their several ways, undetermined by any noble ends or high designs ; they behave like ordinary mortals in a world which is not troubled by the strainings of conscience ; there are dilemmas, but they are not the dilemmas of a moral universe ; there is a logic, but it is the logic of circumstance, and rewards and punishments are served out by a justice so blind as not to know her left hand from her right.

The gravity and matter-of-fact air with which Mr. Stockton relates his tale heighten the effect of the whim that governs in the conduct of his characters. He introduces a negro girl, whom, with the slightest irony in the world, he dubs good little Peggy; and this inimitable creature has a way of inventing facts with incredible agility, and reporting them with entire seriousness. She plays an insignificant part in the story, though she is a sort of Ariel done in charcoal, but she stands really as a type of Mr. Stockton’s genius. Good little Peggy manufactures a situation out of the slightest possible material, uses it for her own purposes as if it were one of the commonplaces of life, and goes her way with a clear consciousness of virtue. Everybody believes her for the time, because her manner carries conviction. So we follow the ins and outs of the late Mrs. Null and her fellowcharacters with scarcely any incredulity or sense of the absurdity of their relation to each other, chiefly because Mr. Stockton, with his innocent air, never seems to be aware of any incongruity in their conduct.

The drollery, as we have said, is a structural drollery, and not often one of language. Yet the quaintness which runs through all of this writer’s work begins to show itself very soon when he sets about any mere piece of description, and the particularity of any enumeration of details is pretty sure to end in a quip and quirk. It is, however, when dealing with negro life that Mr. Stockton shows himself at his best. He fairly revels in this side-show of the world’s circus, and takes an almost childish delight in the exhibition of negro character and life. We suspect that the figure in the book which will linger longest in the reader’s mind is that of Aunt Patsy, and the description of the Jerusalem Jump, with Aunt Patsy’s exit from the world upon the occasion, is one of the most carefully written, as it is one of the most effective, passages in the book. It is not strange that Mr. Stockton should feel at home with the negroes. They offer him precisely that happy-go-lucky type of character which suits the world of his imagination. They save him the necessity of invention, and he can abandon with them that extreme gravity of demeanor which he is obliged to assume in order to give an air of reasonableness to his white characters.

We are disposed to think that the book will suffer at the hands of many by being read as novels are apt to be read, at, one or two sittings. It should have appeared as a serial, since the amusement which one extracts from it is largely due to the turns which the story takes, and not to any continuity of narrative. The improbability of situations and persons cannot be covered for any length of time by any mere reasonableness of manner, and one who sees through the thin disguise of Mrs. Null’s marriage long before the revelation comes is apt to get a little impatient at mere ingenuity, and not to be quite appeased by the indefinite promise of further complications. In other words, the book is so ineffective as a novel that the hardened novel-reader might easily undervalue its wit and casual quaintness, whereas, if he helped himself to a little at a time, he would be likely to enjoy the queer bits as if he were reading so many short stories. So habituated is the author to this form of fiction that he sets about a new story within a dozen pages of the end of the book, and, instead of producing a climax to his story, furnishes a sort of annex.

We recall only one other instance in literature where genuine humor is so entirely wanting in its obverse, pathos. The extremely slight expression of this quality in the account of Aunt Patsy’s death, and the hurried manner in which the somewhat pivotal scene of the finding of the shoes is passed over, serve to render the absence of it elsewhere more noticeable. Every one feels that the author’s instinct is right, and that there would be an incongruity in the display of much feeling. But it is not pathos alone that is wanting; all sentiment is left out. Lawrence Croft, the principal lover, is laid up with a sprained ankle, and has recourse to some novels sent in to his by Mrs. Null. " These books Lawrence looked over with indifferent interest, hoping to find one among them that was not a love story, but he was disappointed. They were all based upon, and most of them permeated with, the tender passion, and Lawrence was not in the mood for reading about that sort of thing. A person afflicted with a disease is not apt to find agreeable occupation in reading hospital reports upon his particular ailment.” So when the author of The Late Mrs. Null finds himself under the necessity of bringing his two lovers to a final understanding, he does it in a gingerly fashion, and with a certain reluctant air that seems to be almost a protect against the indecorum into which he is forced. Mark Twain is equally wanting in pathos, if we except his True Story, but Mr. Stockton’s humor has a reserve and a quality of ingenuousness which are his own. It is idle business trying to analyze the peculiar nature of this writer’s charm, and one may be needlessly acute, but we suspect that in this case, as in many others, we owe something to the deficiencies of Mr. Stockton’s intellectual make-up, and that one reason why we enjoy his novel is that he is not a novelist. Humor which lurks so slyly in incident even more than in phrase can dispense with many of the conventionalities of the novelist’s art, and we are too glad to get what Mr. Stockton alone has, to quarrel with him for not giving what plenty of other writers can produce.