Half a Dozen Story-Books

WE are familiar with the ingenious liar who persists in his tale till he convinces himself; by somewhat the same process of keeping a straight face while narrating the most humorously improbable stories, Mr. Stockton, after imposing his fiction on the public, has at last succeeded in imposing on himself. There is a difference between making believe very hard and making one’s self believe. The author of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine converted a farcical tale into genuine comedy by force of his unlaughing humor; he has taken a Count of Monte Cristo invention, and, by force of direct, plain narrative, dispossessed the reader of the sense of extravagance, and made him realize to himself the actual emotions of ordinary men and women when placed in extraordinary situations. It would be unkind to give the argument of The Adventures of Captain Horn,¹ for the turns which the story takes are so dexterous that the pleasure of reading is much like that which awaits the traveler in Norwegian fiords ; precipitous walls shut one in, when, presto ! a few turns of the screw, and the steamer is in a broad, open sea, making straight for another invisible passage out. That the story could be told by one who had read it, and made enthralling to a group of listeners, means that the great strength lies in the successive situations; yet the raconteur would probably feel that he had failed in conveying the real charm of the story, since he would find it difficult to convey his impression of the capital discrimination in the main characters, each of whom is humorous in the modern and the ancient acceptation of the term. It is likely that Mr. Stockton, knowing that he was handling material in which the possibilities of a riotous imagination are great, exercised more than his ordinary self-control, and pitched most of his scenes in a low key, in order to protect himself as well as the reader: and therefore it is, as we have said, that he came to have that kind of belief in his tale which in a measure awed him, and stole from him any disposition to treat his people with undue levity.

There is one short, striking passage which confirms this notion. It is enough to premise that Captain Horn, at the head of his small shipwrecked company, has come into the knowledge, by actual sight, of a stupendous hoard of wealth secreted by the Incas of Peru in early historic days. There comes a time when he is compelled to make up his mind how much he can safely bear away.

“ The captain was a man,” says Mr. Stockton, “ who, since he had come to an age of maturity, had been in the habit of turning his mind this way and that as he would turn the helm of his vessel, and of holding it to the course he had determined upon, no matter how strong the wind or wave, how dense the fog, or how black the night. But never had he stood to his helm as he now stood to a resolve. ‘ I will bring away a couple of bags,’ said he, ‘ to put in my trunk, and then, I swear to myself, I will not think another minute about carrying away any more of that gold than what is packed in these guano bags.’ ”

Accordingly, when he had filled his bags, he replaced the covering of the cavern, and sealed it as hermetically as possible. Then follows the eloquent passage to which we have referred: “ It was like leaving behind a kingdom and a throne, the command of armies and vast navies, the domination of power, of human happenings ; but he came away.”

It is this conception of the moral force underlying his subject which stays Mr. Stockton from playing with his theme, though his innate and irrepressible humor saves him from mere nervous intensity. It is curious to see how, by throwing the weight upon character, in this tale, rather than, as Dumas does, upon incident, our author is enabled to deal with most extravagant passages of adventure, and yet keep his imagination well within bounds. Nor should one omit as a factor in the success a most skillful joiner work, by which the parts are ingeniously fitted together, so that one is never called on to take an unreasonably long step. Once only, so far as we can see, has Mr. Stockton failed to make a natural connection. It was a simple matter for Edna, after her marriage, to remain Miss Markham to Ralph and Mrs. Cliff, but what precaution could she take against being publicly recognized as the captain’s wife by Mok, and especially by Cheditafa? There is no evidence that she guarded this point, carefully as she guarded all others.

Mr. Stockton, by sheer force of his peculiar genius, succeeds in portraying his neighbors under circumstances of the most romantic and improbable character, preserving their natural modes whether among savages or among civilized folk. Mr. Fuller also deals with every-day people, but he takes them, as most find them, under no extraordinary circumstances, and he is interested in their behavior when they are subject to one of those great currents of human endeavor which are so common as to attract notice only when one concentrates attention upon some single chip which is borne along on the stream. As in his previous novel, The Cliff Dwellers, the scene of this new story ² is laid in Chicago, and, like that, opens with a passage in which the keynote is cleverly struck. The title discloses the main theme to be exploited, and as the reader watches the old carryall conveying the Marshall family from the railway station through the choked streets, and listens to the rambling conversation of its occupants, he learns quickly to discriminate the speakers, and to forecast with no great difficulty the general direction which the story will take, as the Marshall family, its elders rich and homely, the younger set ambitious of social success, makes its way out of humble surroundings into such glory as overhangs the upper seats in the Chicago world.

The raconteur. In this case, would find it hard to tell over again the story, or to find very interested listeners, for the novelist simply has selected ordinary incidents in the social and business life of his characters as material for disclosing their several natures and the modes by which they work out their little destinies. It is an old story, this of social success hardening the susceptible nature of a young girl; of a ruling authority in society keeping for private delectation a bit of her old, indestructible self ; of wealth sometimes expanding, sometimes contracting, the lines of life; and of the machine which keeps all the wheels in motion, finally itself getting out of repair and stopping short. Mr. Fuller has shown a deft touch in the handling of his material; he has fancy, and he has, above all, an artistic sense which forbids him to bear on too hard; the individualizing of his several figures is produced by a number of little touches, and the reader becomes well acquainted with each. There is no violence for the sake of producing tragic effects, and the skeleton which needs to be brought out of the family closet is not shown under a lime-light. All is dexterous, felicitous even, and the author goes about his work with a half-mocking smile, as one who could, if he would, open some very unpleasant chambers, but is too fastidious for this. It is impossible not to recognize an airy facility in this writer’s work, and to admire the sketch of a large, elemental plan; yet when all is said, is there imagination in it ? Rather, is there not a graceful fancy hinting at imaginative possibilities? For the reserve shown let us be thankful, for the care which he takes not to build too substantial structures out of fragile material ; yet all this lower success makes us impatient to see work from his hand which will not suggest so palpably the dilettante in novel-writing.

We are not disposed to waste similar regrets over Mrs. Burton Harrison’s work. Her latest book which we have seen, An Errant Wooing,³ continues the effect which her previous books produced, that of an agreeable entertainment over the manners and customs of the polite world, here or abroad, without any serious attempt at an artistic whole. In this tale, the easy admixture of travel scenes adds to the liveliness of the narrative and also to the discursiveness of the plan, so that one is looking at a moving panorama rather than at a composed picture. The reader is not greatly concerned as to which of the men Paulina is finally to marry; for if his attention is at any time seriously bent on this problem, he is pretty sure to be called away in a moment by some bit of adventure or amusing excursion which interests him quite as much. In brief, the attractiveness of the book is in its introduction to a well-bred society, where mere frivolousness is as much out of place as too much self-sacrifice, and one travels about, and bides in English country houses, and has his little laugh at the humors of the several situations without any disposition to quarrel with his company or to find them oppressively clever. The mild suspense in which he is kept is something of an illusion, which he accepts good naturedly out of politeness to the author; and he is quite willing to travel with the show, though he knows very well that it is only a question of time, as the saying is, when the company will be disbanded.

No such idle entertainment occupies Mrs. Humphry Ward. Her business is to lay out the dead souls of Bessie Costrell⁴ and her kinsfolk. John Bolderfield, a miserly laborer, had, after fiftysix years of toil, accumulated a hoard which would suffice, as he reckoned, to keep his little soul and body together, after he should have done one more piece of work in another village ; but when the time to leave his lodgings came, he was in great perplexity of mind what to do with his strong-box. He yielded finally to the blandishment of his niece, Bessie Costrell, who was vain and eager to make an impression on her neighbors, and the box was deposited with her and her husband, Isaac, a grim leader in the little Independent chapel of the village. Then John Bolderfield went away, and there came a day when Bessie, who had suddenly come into possession of a small legacy, and on the strength of it had run into debt, was tempted to break into John’s box. From taking little to taking more, her miserable career slid along; she drank and spent her money lavishly. Then, one night, just as the neighbors were beginning to notice the singular coins of an early mintage which Bessie was dispensing, she was surprised at the box by a vicious son of her husband, who filled his pockets with what remained of the hoard, and left her bleeding on the stairs. The neighbors, with darkening suspicion, began to ferret out Bessie’s misdoing ; Isaac Costrell, filled with righteous vindictiveness, turned upon her; and John Bolderfield came back to tlie village, after a long sickness, gloating over bis hoard and the luxury it was to bring him, only to find bis lifelong dream quenched in utter darkness. The end of all was that the wretched Bessie took her own life, and the two men lived on, each in his narrow way.

“ Yet in truth,” says Mrs. Ward at the end of this dismal tale, “ during the years that followed, whenever he was not under the influence of recurrent attacks of melancholia, Isaac did again derive much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasements of religion. No human life would be possible if there were not forces in and around man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches that he himself makes. Misery provokes pity ; despair throws itself on a divine tenderness. And for those who have the ‘ grace ’ of faith, in the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this various world, — in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the tremulous yet undying hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them, —in these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be ‘ the falls of princes,’ or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie Costrell to her end.”

A flourish at the end of a story does not compensate for the story itself, and Mrs. Ward innocently points out in this passage the prime defect of the tragedy she has recorded. She has, indeed, in one or two places touched the incidents with the revelation of character, and thus dignified a miserable scene ; but for the most part she has simply told a revolting story, apparently overlooking the fact that all she tells is properly only a prelude to the tragedy. The real tragedy is in the lives of John Bolderfield after he loses his treasure, and Isaac Costrell after his wife kills herself, unforgiven ; and no fine writing about these two men in the last paragraph of the book can make up for the unpleasant details which lead up to it. When Mrs. Ward says, “ There speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate,” she reminds her impatient readers that it is the absence of this voice in her book, or at best but its very faint sound, which makes her story scarcely more than a very well written newspaper-dreadful. One cannot help thinking what a different thing George Eliot would have made of this incident, touching it here and there with humor, humanizing it throughout, and making Mrs. Ward’s excellent final sentence underlie the whole instead of serving as a tag.

There is a pleasure in turning from a piece of unrelieved human misery to an unpretentious narrative of life, where the burden which rests on the story is not a crime, but a blunder. Mr. Bliss Perry has given the clever name of The Plated City⁵ to a novel which has to do with the people of a Connecticut manufacturing town, chiefly concerned in the production of plated ware. One is reminded from time to time how thin is the genteel covering to the social world of Bartonvale. The central motive of the story, however, is the racial instinct which in the Anglo-American mind precludes any social equality with a person having a taint of the negro in him or her. The notion that the mother of Tom Beaulieu, the favorite ball-player of Bartonvale, and his half-sister Esther, was a quadroon, though never clearly demonstrated, and finally passing over into the notion that she was a New Orleans creole, is at the bottom of the woes of Tom and the social exclusion of Esther.

It turns out that Tom is the nephew of the magnate of the place, and Esther has the love of the most interesting and most impervious young man of the town, so that the racial difficulty is gradually eliminated from the story, but it furnishes, nevertheless, the immediate cause of the important situations.

It is not quite certain that Mr. Perry has succeeded in making his purpose in the story clear. Possibly he would have us consider how interwoven are the threads of life, carefully as we may try to keep them apart; possibly he intended a mild satire on a society which stood on no important ancestral basis, yet insisted strenuously on keeping itself clear of the skirts of a supposititious quadroon. Perhaps — but this is almost an audacious hypothesis — he was content simply to tell a slightly involved story, and tied a number of knots for the purpose of untying them. What one discovers is a fairly well constructed tale, with natural characters and occasional passages of quickened movement; the ballplaying scene in New York where Tom is defeated by his friends, and the strike when Dr. Atwood chivalrously takes Esther under his protection, being noticeable. What one misses is the convergence of the lines of the story toward some definite end of consequence ; for though the death of Dr. Atwood has in it a pathos, and the visit of Norman Lewis to Newgate has a moment or two of moving power, neither is exactly a culminating point, since the reader has not been greatly impressed by Dr. Atwood’s devotion to Mrs. Thayer, and the notion of Norman Lewis’s inward struggle comes rather unexpectedly when the reader has been taught to regard him as securely fixed on his own base, and has been carefully trained to see in Esther a most beautiful and winning girl. To speak plainly, the author seems to have intended that the cloud of race prejudice should hang heavily over the story, giving a notion of dignity to the actions of those who contemned it, but he has so diverted the attention and confused the issue that one is not greatly disturbed by the cloud, and sees it dissipated with no sense of any victorious energy scattering it.

In her volume of tales of New England life,⁶ Miss Brown has kept away from plated cities or any composite society. Her village of Tiverton and the neighboring market town of Sudleigh furnish scene enough for the play of her country folk, and in the varying fortunes of the figures she brings forward there is room for a wide gamut of emotional notes. In her first sketch. Number Five, she introduces the reader to a few of the village worthies in a careless, happy fashion, and in her last, Strollers in Tiverton, she gives free vent to a mood which now and again is present in the dozen stories which make up the rest of the volume, — a mood which is the stirring of gypsy blood in the veins. There is a character, Dilly Joyce, who is a potential witch, and it is clear that Miss Brown’s heart goes out to her as to scarcely any other of her creations ; yet not in Dilly Joyce alone, nor in Molly McNeil or Nance Pete, does she betray her love of freedom and sunshine and the wind of heaven, but throughout the book there is a motion, a light, joyous tread, which gives Meadow-Grass a subtle attraction not to be found, we venture to say, in any other collection of New England tales. Mrs. Stowe sometimes catches the spirit, but there is a carelessness about her work which does not heighten the art. Miss Jewett never quite parts with that air of fine breeding which gives grace and beauty to her work, and makes her characters the objects of a compassion born of fuller knowledge than they possess of themselves. Mrs. Slosson has caught at the grotesque side of New England life and interprets it with a poetic charity. Miss Wilkins has the genius which concentrates the very essence of the life in her marvelously pointed sketches. Mr. Robinson has fixed one or two types of outdoor human life with precision and a hearty sympathy with traditional masculine rusticity. But it has remained for Miss Brown to enter this same general field of New England country life, and without producing any new variety of tale, or scarcely any new character, to use familiar material, and yet illumine it with a new light. We cannot define it any more closely than by saynig that the genuine humor which pervades the best of her work is closely identified with a love of sunshine, of growing things, and of movement in nature and the corresponding changes of light and shade in the human soul. There is a little story in this volume, Farmer Eli’s Vacation, which is a masterpiece. The emotion which may exist under an impassive exterior is brought to light with a grace, a restraint of words and dignity of art, yet with a naturalness of narrative, that leave nothing to be desired. Nor will one readily forget the inimitable stories already printed in The Atlantic, Heartsease, and Joint Owners in Spain. Now and then, as in Bankrupt, and At Sudleigh Fair, Miss Brown possibly forces a note too much, and seems to fall back a little on conventional resources ; but the entire effect of the book is of a natural beauty, springing spontaneously and finding most apt expression. Above all, as we have intimated, there is a true wildwood flavor, a rusticity which is not a mere foil to civility.