Recent American Fiction

THE exigencies of magazine life call for serial novels, yet it is not impossible that as the publication of novels in separate monthly parts has ceased, so the fashion of printing works of fiction in successive numbers of a monthly or weekly magazine may pass away, for it is only a fashion. Now and then a novel, like The Pickwick Papers or Vanity Fair, is all the more enjoyable for being read at intervals, and the reader is helped by having his fiction doled out to him instead of putting himself under bonds to read his novel by piecemeal. We suspect even that this serial mode has some influence upon a writer, and that he looks after the articulation of his work more carefully than he would if it were to appear in the first instance as a book. Yet it is manifest that a work of art in literature ought to be quite independent of its mere mode of publication, and the final issue in book form certainly gives the reader a better opportunity for regarding it as a whole than when it was constantly interrupting itself.

At any rate, it is a pleasant task to take two books which were printed originally as serials in The Atlantic, and look at them afresh, freed from the arbitrary conditions of magazine life. It is only fair to say that Miss Murfree’s work¹ suffers little from piecemeal reading. The Despot of Broomsedge Cove is a series of minutely wrought pictures, and the interest which the reader feels in it springs from his pleasure in the vividness of portraiture. He has not many characters to remember, and each is so sharply defined that he has no difficulty in recognizing the components of the groups which in the author’s skillful handling are successively presented. The scenes which will linger longest in the memory are those that involve several persons, like those at the forge, at Eli Strobe’s, and that wonderful Rembrandt interior of the barn where the vigilantes meet. It is in such scenes that Miss Murfree shows her marvelous capacity for what, to borrow from another art, we must call her light and shade. Where only two persons are concerned, as in that graphic discovery of Rathburn by M’ria Bowles, there is the same power of grouping, of setting the figures in a frame of material objects, which evinces the painter’s art.

We must note that this pictorial skill is very far removed from merely decorative facility. Miss Murfree sees her characters as they are, and works from within outward. Her men and women, and for that matter her very children, are conceived clearly, but they are not conceived so much individually as in their relation to each other. Each is needed to bring out the qualities of the other, and the author’s insight discloses itself in the action of her characters, and not in independent analysis of those characters. Her painting faculty is disclosed in her careful regard of all the values which go to make up her pictures. These mountain folk are such because of the mountain, and it is impossible for her to detach them in her thought from the locality in which their action takes place ; hence when she transplants her figures into literature she takes up the soil in which their roots are struck. If she wishes to give us a good view of Clem, she is compelled to paint him at his anvil, with all the dusky shadows of the forge to help out his muscular form. The very individuality of Teck Jepson is intensified by the cabin in which he lives, but it is none the less brought into strong contrast by the antagonism, again and again expressed, to the groups of persons who make up the community.

This power for painting, this capacity for composition, is accompanied by a dramatic sense which is scarcely less developed. There are passages in this book which disclose the dramatic power, though in this respect we think it does not quite equal In the Clouds. If we were to single out one passage, it would not be that muscular one of the trial of Strength between Rathburn and Baintree in the mountain cabin, for the power there is of a somewhat spectacular sort; it would be that striking scene where Andy Longwood nerves his feeble arm to deal a blow at Clem Sanders. It would be hard to match this for restrained power. But for the most part this book deals less with action than with situations, and it is in the discovery of these that Miss Murfree shows her uncommon art in making her figures tell; in vivifying not persons alone, but the very surrounding of these persons.

The criticism frequently pronounced on this author’s writings — that she indulges in too detailed landscape effects ; that, as somebody has said, she works her moon too hard — may be referred to the impatience of readers at the arrest of action by the insertion of pauses and rests. There is no doubt that such rests, if used skillfully, enhance the dramatic effect; but it is also true that the power of composition, when expended on effects hard at the best to convey in words, may defeat its own end, and interrupt instead of heighten effects. Miss Murfree, it must be observed, does not often interrupt a swift movement; her pauses are between two separate movements, and she lingers over the setting of her picture when she is getting her figures into position. We recall one passage in which she uses the rest, so to speak, in a very effective manner. It is in the description of Marcella’s headlong ride to Jepson’s cabin, and we italicize the very noticeable sentence : —

“The moon was out again,—a chill glitter, and the earth very white ; and on the brow of the hill, speeding toward Jepson’s cabin, was visible a swift equestrian figure. A score of men, save one, were in the saddle. A wild halloo rang through the air, and then, with all the fervor of the chase kindling in their blood, they were in pursuit. When the moon was out, it showed rank after rank of the wild mountain men of the region ; when the moon was in, a mystic company of mounted shadows slipped noiselessly over the snow. Swift as they were, their speed would not avail. They did not gain on the fugitive.”

Here is a case where a landscape effect is used with consummate skill. It lifts the whole description into the region of poetry ; it is the touch of fancy lending a sudden brilliancy to a piece of line imagination. Again, let the reader turn to page 318, and note how admirably Miss Murfree uses sight and sound, at a critical juncture, to isolate the persons in the scene from the general action of the story. Clem and Rathburn have been talking together about Jepson, after that hero has left them and is returning to the vigilantes in the barn.

“ Rathburn was silent for a few moments, while Clem clatteringly completed the orderly arrangement of the tools about the forge. Then they both stood together in the road, after the great barn-like doors were closed.

“ The moon hung near the meridian ; the shadows had dwindled. There were wider avenues of frosty brilliance in the dense woods ; the full splendor of the night was climaxing. The stars were few, however, and very faint; the wide spaces of the indefinitely blue sky were a desert, save here and there a vague scintillation that one might hardly distinguish as sidereal glinting or some elusive twinkle of frost in the air. Midnight, doubtless, and a cock was crowing. A muffled resonance the sound had, intimating that the fowl was housed in lieu of camping out among the althea bushes, — in imminent danger of fox and mink, — according to the recent summertide wont of the mountain poultry. A faint blare of a horn from the dense coverts of the distance, and an elfin shout of hilarity, barely discernible, betokened a coon-hunt on some far-away mountain. Then there fell again the deep silence of the windless night. When it was suddenly broken by a sharp sound, the interruption smote with a jar the senses, lulled and quiescent in the muteness of the resting nature. As Rathburn lifted his bead, he discriminated the tones of raucous disputations voices rising vehemently, and anon sinkingdown. There was an unconscious inquiry, perchance, in his eyes as he turned them upon Clem Sanders, who replied with a guttural chuckle, ‘ Them boys at the barn a-quar’lin’ with Teck.’”

This too is admirable ; we listen with the two men. Their pause after closing the forge is a natural one, and we are with them in this momentary lull. We wait for something to happen. Clem scurries off, and Rathburn takes his way alone. Then come three pages in which his mind is read. Now the reader is not in a mood to study Rathhurn’s mind ; at any rate, he would rather have the lesson in a paragraph; the Very deliberateness of the author in this exciting hour serves to give a phantasmal character to the adventure, and to turn the whole affair into a mere figment of the brain. But it is in the interruptions of conversation that these pauses seem to us least artistic. Teck Jepson and Baintree are talking; they talk slowly enough, as is the habit of the mountaineers ; but of what use is it, when we are intent on these two figures, to be asked to take a landscape excursion between their sentences ?

“ ‘ Sech ez I do,’ said the valorous saint, ' air done afore the Lord ! An’ I ain’t keerin’ what men say ahint my back, so long ez they take powerful keerful heed o’ thar words afore my face; ef they don’t, I know how to make ’em wish they hed.’

“ Jake Baintree failed, apparently, to comprehend the spirit of this challenge. He looked absently at the red cow cropping the grass in the niches at the base of the cliff that towered above their heads, and then his restless eye followed the silver-tipped wings of a bird flying, in the sunshine, upward, upward, with open beak and a joyous matutinal cry, cleaving the mists with a glancing line of light, and seeming bound for some haven in the splendid placidity of the blue sky, so serene and so high. The dew exhaled incense. Far away a fawn bleated, where doubtless it lay with its dam in the thick coverts of the laurel. The balsam firs, all a-glitter, gave out a sense of strength and infinite freshness, and of all the finer values of respiration ; in such air it was a definite joy to be endowed with the sheer capacity to breathe. As his wandering glance came back, he caught Jepson’s eyes upon him, and he was vaguely embarrassed for the moment. He put one foot on the blade of the spade that he had in his hand, and, leaning upon the handle, he looked up, his inscrutable eyes narrowing and full of close and guarded thought.

“ ‘ What war ye a-layin’ off ter say ter me? Jes’ that ? ’ he demanded.”

Here the author has taken a journey, and dragged the reader with her. She does not say that Jake mentally took note in this fashion of what fell thus on his sight and hearing and the finer sensibility of scent and breathing. No ; he saw a red cow and a bird, he heard the bird and the bleat of a fawn, and he smelled the fir balsam and breathed the mountain air ; but by setting all this forth in elaborate phrase, the author performs a sort of transfusion of mind, and compels the reader to help her for the nonce occupy the dull clod.

We are aware that a single passage like this is quite capable of an individual value, and we weaken our argument by adducing it; but it is the frequent occurrence of such passages that forces upon the reader a sense of an overworked landscape. Does he remember these passages ? Does he even carry away an impression as if a mountain haze had been shot over the whole story ? Possibly this latter, but we think it most likely that he supposes there is a great deal more of this decoration than there really is. His more lasting impression will be of a singularly isolated life, set forth with so much imaginative power that the fierce passions, deep feelings, strong purposes, which have their field in this remote, contracted corner of the human world are lifted out of the plane of the commonplace and insignificant. To be a sheriff like Eli Strobe seems for the time, as always in the eyes of Marcella, the highest political honor; Teck Jepson becomes to us a fit companion for the Old Testament heroes whom he evokes from the shadows; and these rude mountaineers live in a world which is profoundly indifferent to the courses of empire, and not merely ignorant of cities and men.

How like, and yet how unlike, is the life which lies behind Mr. Hardy’s novel of Passe Bose ! ² From the Tennessee mountains to Aix; from Teck Jepson to Gui of Tours ; from the nineteenth century to the reign of Charlemagne. Yet when we put ourselves in intimate sympathy with the characters of this remarkable story, it is not difficult to see within what petty limits they revolve. Mr. Hardy’s art is different, indeed, from Miss Murfree’s. We are distinctly impressed by the scholar in this book ; not, we hasten to say, by the evidence of painstaking reproduction of mediæval forms and manners, but by that air which betrays a writer who comes to his art with a wide knowledge of its possibilities and with a consciousness of deliberate suiting of means to end. The richness and fullness of the book are due largely to this. Mr. Hardy writes not only out of a full mind, but out of a large apprehension of his art. It is long since we have had a book which is so bold in its independence of merely temporary fashions in novel-writing. Its boldness is the more remarkable because the author deliberately avails himself of the apparatus which is used commonly by the writers of melodramatic romances. Here are mysterious papers which pass from hand to hand, midnight encounters on dark towers, a figure riding past with bloody hand uplifted, cells with loose stones permitting unexpected exit, assassins, intrigues, and all the paraphernalia of a sensational novel; yet the reader never once loses sense of the dignity of literature which pervades the book. So fine is the art that without an effort one is transported into the realm of mediæval scenes, and is made to follow the fortunes of men and women with whom he has little in common externally without either feeling their remoteness or being aware that they have been translated into modern terms. This seems to us the singular merit of the book: that it is thoroughly human without a sacrifice of what appertains to the time and circumstance of the story ; that it is historically effective without recourse to laborious and wearisome details wherewith to establish its verisimilitude. The appeal is always to the higher spirit, and this poetic breath gives it life. Passe Rose flashes through the changing scenes like some bird of paradise through dark woods. Where a cheaper imagination would have made her of tinsel, this finer apprehension has made her of wrought gold ; and by the time he has finished the book the reader discovers that it is the purity of her nature, supposed, not obtruded upon notice, which transfigures the dancing-girl and lets the heroine shine through. It would be hard to find a book in recent literature which more triumphantly solves the vexed question of the relations of art to morality. Not once is the reader bidden to stand aside and see virtue superior to circumstance, but the constancy, the sweetness, and the high courage of this charming creature are combined with such an exquisite unconventionality as to make the figure at once brilliant pictorially and pervasive of the whole book with a delicate fragrance of nature. Mr. Hardy has shown himself in this book a genuine artist ; for his art is both in the structure of his story and in the fine fitness of his speech. He has subordinated to the uses of his art that sententious skill which marked his other books. Something of the vagueness which made The Wind of Destiny a struggle of shadows reappears, but seems to belong to the twilight tones of Passe Rose, and there is throughout that charm of style which makes the mere reading of some of the passages a pleasure to the ear.

The title of our article is something of a misnomer as applied to the next novel on our list. Mrs. Stoddard wrote some powerful novels a score or more of years ago ; they dropped out of sight, — the reader may, if he choose, lay down the magazine at this point, and write out a list of the novels of the year which have affected him powerfully, and then put the list aside for a quarter of a century, in order to see how many on his list will then have dropped out of sight, — and now are revived for a later generation of readers. We will confine our attention to one,³ since, with different plots and different scenes, the men and women in the three books are stamped with the same image and superscription.

To tell the story of Temple House is not to take the edge off the reader’s appetite. The house which gives its name to the story is an ancestral mansion in a New England seaport. In process of time it has been built about and walled in by the encroaching town, so that with its garden and few trees it has become isolated, but not more so than the persons who occupy it, and who have withdrawn themselves almost wholly from the scrutiny of their townsmen. These persons are Captain Argus Gates and his brother’s widow, Roxalana Gates. Temple Gates, the daughter of Roxalana and the prodigal George Gates, grows up in the inclosure, a tropical plant without the fostering warmth of tropical sunshine. In willful maidenhood she marries a young fellow named Drake, but on their wedding journey the husband is killed, and Temple, after her brief career of hotel worldliness, returns to the conventual dampness of Temple House, where her child is born and dies. A longshore-man, Mat Sutcliffe, living just outside the walls, is the devoted henchman of the family, and in the course of the story Argus and he rescue from death by drowning a wrecked West Indian named Sebastian Ford, who becomes an inmate of Temple House.

At the other end of the seaport, Kent, is another household, that of the Brandes, consisting of the father, a rich hypocrite, who becomes involved in financial difficulties ; an opium-eating mother, who goes mad, and finally is gotten out of the reader’s presence, to his great relief, and left to die unobserved in a madhouse ; a beautiful daughter, Virginia Brande; and an old half-Indian, halfnegro woman named Chloe. To this household enters Carfield, the villain of the story, and desires to possess himself of Virginia, a project which is abetted by Brande, who is financially at Carfield’s mercy. The story, in its ordinary acceptation, lies in the rescue of Virginia by the united forces of Temple House and the probable marriage of the girl to Captain Argus. Probable, we say, since, if the author had chosen to continue her tale, there is no telling what the destiny of any one character would be, for they live in a world which is very much at sixes and sevens.

Mathematicians have amused themselves with speculations as to the possibilities of life in a world where there is a fourth dimension of space. Mrs. Stoddard’s art aims at quite as difficult a problem, the exemplification of life in one where there is only a single dimension : her world has thickness, but no length or breadth. The density of the atmosphere through which the reader follows her characters is immeasurable. One feels now and then that the sun is shining, but no direct rays reach the landscape; only such light as makes its way through the circumjacent vapor. The singular thing about it is that the reader is convinced that if the cloud would only lift he would see figures of remarkable force, beauty, and symmetry. There they all are, these men and women in this New England seaport: they have names something like other human beings ; they have three meals a day; they smoke ; they read ; they talk, occasionally. One catches glimpses of various human proceedings, and feels that the author meant her persons to be real, yet the show goes on behind a thick glass screen : if we could only get this screen out of the way, we think we might get a clear view; every one is near enough, but there is this dense medium through which we see them and their actions.

We are aware that by this confusion of terms we are not clearing the mystery of the book at all, but we are trying to convey to the reader something of the impression made on our mind by this intense, provoking, startling, and nightmareish book. The Philistine in us is constantly on the point of jeering; the poor little prophet who occupies the hall bed-chamber of our mind is quite as often holding up his finger in warning. There are isolated passages in the book, especially in the purely descriptive portions, which arrest one by their compact beauty and strength. Here, for example, is a finely cut stone : —

“ Roxalana looked at Argus, and felt herself detected. She had kept Temple’s hair short, because thereby she looked so much the more like George. No way of wearing it could have made her look prettier; the jetty mass clasping her head suited her face, — as yet soulless, like a cameo Diana ; rings of it dropped over her forehead, the tips of her ears, round her neck, short and fine, like the young tendrils of a blossoming grapevine.”

We had occasion to comment on the use which Miss Murfree makes of nature as a background to the presence and action of her characters. Mrs. Stoddard has a clear poetic conception of the uses of nature for such design. The following passage shows her at her best, because the situation is one of intense thought in a moment of outward repose and stillness. Virginia Brande has received a note from Argus which calls upon her for a momentous decision. She seeks to reflect as she goes to bed for the night.

“ But the darkness proved oppressive ; besides, she wanted to read the note once more ; therefore she rose, relighted her lamp, put on a dressing-gown, and sat down in a severe manner to reflect. It was dreary to begin her theme with the sacrifice of inclination, but she did. The night grew colder, as if divesting itself of the heat and perturbation of the day. Its deepening solitude toned her mind to a lofty key ; thought and feeling, band in hand, like innocent and affectionate spirits, ascended to the throne where, as she believed, the Ruler of the universe was waiting to hear the petitions of souls against those fiats which the soul itself issues in favor of the subtle martyrdoms which decorate life with its crown and thorns. With the abnegation inherent in her character, and its narrowness, which prevented her from looking at final effects, she decided upon giving up Argus, although she felt acutely that her acts laid Stare her purpose of bringing him to the point, which, at last, his note declared. To the end would she live with her father ; their house should not be divided because of her conduct. With a loud, wild farewell sigh to Argus, she pulled aside the curtain to look into the wide air and feel the mercy of darkness. A band of stars rode high and clear above a company of moving clouds, spreading in the reflection of the moon, thin and white, like flakes of snow. Earth, a black, tranquil monster, was now passive beneath the beautiful illusions of moonlight. The life which by day forever enacted scenes of pain was invisible. Yet she must not call it pain nor evil, — its passing drama,— but necessary discipline and inscrutable wisdom. The sword that stabbed was rubbed with healing balm; the disappointment that seemed to blight contained the germ of development. Filled with the calm which she felt was that of another world, she drew the curtain, and was about to advance into the room, when a slight sound at the door arrested her ; the handle turned slowly and noiselessly. ”

Such passages as this, vigorous and touched with a gleam of poetic light, compensate the reader for his labor in groping among the shadows of the book after the substantial personages who cast them. There is a drama going on, but its movements are made known by hints and gestures. The passion for concealment of meaning which has seized upon novelists of late had its hold on Mrs. Stoddard long ago, and the whole book is a studied effort to avoid the commonplace, while the figures and incidents are all matters of fact. This Argus Gates, the central character of the book, with his immovable features, represents to perfection Mrs. Stoddard’s attempt to read the riddle of life and expound it in terms of another riddle. It is as if the sphinx, sitting stonily by the wayside, were to receive a morning call from another sphinx, equally impenetrable. The reader finds himself in this queer company, and is fascinated by his companions, but is obliged to admit, when he has finished the book, that the answers to all the conundrums are simply more conundrums. His main satisfaction is in going back and recalling the occasional splendid passages and what may be named as the one stroke of humor, when Chloe bursts out, after a fresh illustration of Virginia’s sacrifice of herself for her mother : —

“ ‘ I ’se most tired of this world, especially when I see men and women as I have this last five minutes. It’s no use, though.' continued Chloe ; ‘ Missey Virginia will have to help missis out of the grave when Gabriel blows the trump, I ’ll bet while Mr. Brande is walking, ’spectable like, in long clothes, all by hisself, to judgment.' ”

A few more such touches as this would not only have relieved the reader, but would, we suspect, have helped the author to be a little more human, a little less the mouthpiece of a random psychology. As we have intimated, the book is too deep for us, and we leave it with a single further quotation, since it comes as near as any passage to giving, we suppose, the key to the intellectual and emotional scheme of the author : —

“'Yes,’ said Roxalana, a dark red rising in her swarthy face, a steely illumination breaking through her eyes, I am convinced by my years that friendship, love, the singular emotion which rises like a wall of rock, or fire, or ice, and hides, protects, and separates two souls, man and woman, from all other men and women, have little to do with our circumstances, acts, and duties ; they come from the nameless spirit in our consciousness, whose face we never see and whose will we never understand.’ ”

Our interest in American fiction is independent of time, yet there is always a quickening of the pulse when we are contemplating, not the revival of past achievements, but the promise of the future which lies in some slight present performance. The author of Janus ⁴ has been before the public once or twice, but this novel is a more deliberate effort in art than he has heretofore made. We will not sketch the plot, which is one of character working through incident, rather than of incident revealing character, except to say that the leading person, a young musical genius, is awakened temporarily to a sense of the power which resides in pure love, only to fall back and have his life blackened by the insidious encroachment on his nature of the power of evil resident in a false woman and responded to by his own weakness. There is a little stiffness in some of the drawing, as in the case of Alexis, and not enough is made of Johann Steins ; but the book must be taken as a sketch, and with the limitations of a sketch conceded it is a strong piece of work. The mutations of Moritz Reisse’s nature are not only truthful, they are portrayed with naturalness and without too much recourse to comment by the author. Nadine, the temptress, is well conceived and self-consistent; tlie only fault one can find is rather a grave one, to be sure. The reader is scarcely bewitched by her, and has to take her power over Moritz too much on faith ; but the depth of her intrigue is made very distinct; she is thoroughly explained. and explained by the course of the story. We are especially pleased by the reserve which the author shows in dealing with the more specifically musical parts of the book. We are so accustomed to a moony treatment of music, and musicians in fiction that it is a relief to find the subject used as an art, and not as a sentiment. Throughout, Mr. Stevenson has worked with restraint, and the result, though somewhat dry in technique, certainly gives us ground to hope that, with more thorough mastery of his materials, he will show both strength and ease in his art; that he will draw more boldly because he has taken such pains at the start to draw precisely.