Summer Fiction

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

MOST people work pretty hard in summer, but subscribe to a theory of idleness; for whatever contrary practice one may fall into under stress of special conditions, in summer it is one’s real business to be idle, and one’s solemn duty to be gay. Corollary to this melancholy proposition are the theories of the summer girl, of summer music, and of summer reading. There are, of course, books which especially fit the unforced holiday mood; as a class they will be light, free, somewhat detached from problems and from passions, a little pleasant, a little commonplace, perhaps. They fit a mood rather than a season; but it may be partly a sign of the season as well as of a natural reaction, that few of the novels which have been published during the past few months belong to the dread historical genus. The truth is, not even pure romance looks its best in the strong light of midsummer; its glamour belongs to the fireside and the softly shaded lamp. In August all this cut-and-thrust business is out of place: it lowers the spirits in the very act of raising the temperature. What we want is life, but the cool life of sanity, well below the fever heat; we resent the artificial stimulation, grateful enough at another season, offered by the licensed victualers of romance. There is no better time to take one’s Jane Austen than while the dog-star burns.

The books which are here recommended for summer reading have this in common: they are not artificial and they are not, with one possible exception, over-intense. They may be counted upon, as a showman may say, to reach the sympathy without tickling the sensibilities, and to stir the brain agreeably without getting upon the nerves.

If he desires the quality of pure effervescence, the reader cannot do better than to take the earliest opportunity of acquaintance with The Lady Paramount.¹ He will not find that the level of The Cardinal’s Snuff-box has been quite reached; but that was not to be expected. It may seem, in spite of our premise, that the conception of this story is a little artificial. In the earlier tale the unlikeliness of the situation was reduced to a minimum without being waived or, a worse error, deprecated. In The Lady Paramount a certain loss of delicacy is perceptible, of a distinction dependent on subtleties of sentiment and phrase, a distinction more nearly resembling Sterne’s than any other writer’s. For one thing the motive is in all respects lighter and broader than that of The Cardinal’s Snuff-box, though the properties are similar. There is the same Anglo-Italian atmosphere, there are the same delicate descriptions and glancing dialogue. “It was gay June weather, in a deep green English park : a park in the south of England, near the sea, where parks are deepest and greenest, and June weather, when it isn’t grave, is gayest. Blackbirds were dropping their liquid notes, thrushes were singing, hidden in the trees. Here and there, in spaces inclosed by hurdles, sheep browsed or drowsed, still faintly a-blush from the shearing. The may was in bloom, the tardy may, and the laburnum. The sun shone ardently, and the air was quick with the fragrant respouses of the earth.” In this key the story begins and ends. Susanna, with her piquancy, strength, and beauty, is the younger sister of Mr. Harland’s earlier heroine ; she and her anticipated move in a similar artfully interrupted solitude for two. But the total effect of the later story is quite different, mainly because at all junctures an unaccountable low-comedy element insists upon thrusting itself forward. It does not matter to the discriminating listener how melodious a serenade may be progressing under one window if somebody is bellowing a ragtime ditty under the next. The affected clown Adrian could very happily be spared from the delightful group at Craford New Manor : altogether delightful except for their compromising toleration of that facetious person. And for the Protestant taste, at least, unable as it is entirely to sink the man in the office, that serving of the mass by Adrian must mar the brief scene in the chapel, the effect of which is otherwise so perfect. Mr. Harland’s heroines are a charming type, sparkling and feminine, thoroughly modern, but by no means the latest novelty in womanhood.

It is a little hard to say how they differ from Penelope and Mrs. Wiggin’s other vivacious adventuresses. But there is a difference. It may arise partly from the fact that Mr. Harland, being a man, is in love with his own sweet ladies, while Mrs. Wiggin is, through no fault of her own, simply able to see that men might be in love with hers. Certainly her heroines do not lack the quality of sex; if they lack anything of its charm, it is because their femininity is altogether unabashed. A mere man is not sure that he enjoys this humorous exposure of the feminine point of view. He admires the idea of a neat reticence veiling the operations of the feminine mind and heart. It is right for man to blurt, but too free speech in woman connotes a certain baldness, and the glory of a woman is otherwise conditioned. The adventures of the Goose Girl at Barbury Green ² are of the playful Penelope sort, and her comments on life rural and urban have a familiar pungency, not to say impudence. “ There is nothing on earth so feminine as a hen, ” says the Goose Girl unblushingly. We feel that she deserves the rebuke Celia once bestowed upon Rosalind. Rosalind knew how to be flippant at times, but she did not make a business of it.

Having said this, I might well hesitate to name the one among all heroines recently invented, the first sight of whom induces love as a matter of course: the “Virgie ” of that very charming story, The Master of Caxton.³ Virgie is undeniably flippant, often to the point of bad taste, sometimes to the point of barbarity even. But her superiority over the Goose Girl, and over the Lady Paramount as well, is that she is real; not an alias or a fancy, but, with all her faults, an incarnation of the actual human femininity in which, as a rule, the hen and the heroine are equally deficient. What she is speaks eloquently in her favor no matter what her tongue may testify. But how do we know her for what she is ? Where do we get this sense of the richness and fineness of a nature which we have many reasons to disapprove of? I suppose we can pretend to answer the question only by conceding the fact that in some indefinable way we feel her to have been created and not invented at all. It is not altogether clear whether her creator grasped her significance or not; whether the comparatively colorless interlocutress, Cassandra Dale, plays the part of foil by design or by accident. Never mind : here is the one vital figure to accept and give thanks for. There are other interesting figures. Mr. PeytonCall appears at the outset to be a conventional exemplar of patrician indolence, but we are not long in discovering that his lassitude is a rôle and not a true thing. The Dale boys are of strong individuality, especially Bud, like the lilies for beauty and idleness, and a thorough good fellow. The whole story is worthy of gratitude ; a clean, simple, straightforward tale.

So is The Virginian,⁴ — and something more. Mr. Wister may be said to have given us a final apotheosis of the cowboy: a type which the author laments in his preface as already obsolete. The Virginian is a figure of splendor, and of splendor all the more irresistible because our recognition of it does not depend upon what the author says about him, though he has a good deal to say. Strong and shrewd, and gentle in all senses except the sense of formal breeding, the Virginian wins his successes fairly by force of character. His early career as we know it at the beginning of the story gives no decided promise of success. He ran away at fourteen, and during the ten years following picked up very little book education. When he falls under the sway of the little schoolmistress and is inspired to read, he retains his practical acuteness, and judges by his own canons. “I have read that play Othello, ” he writes. “No man should write down such a thing. Do you know if it is true ? I have seen one worse affair down in Arizona. He killed his little child as well as his wife, but such things should not be put down in fine language for the public. I have read Romeo and Juliet. That is beautiful language, but Romeo is no man. I like his friend Mercutio that gets killed. He is a man. If he had got Juliet there would have been no foolishness and trouble.” This is the respectable judgment of a man of action, reared in what Mr. Wister calls “the great playground for young men, ” not holding himself above any of its work or play, and satisfied to refine upon its standards rather than to change them. Some of the cowboy play is decidedly rough, not to say vicious, as the East knows sufficiently well. The Virginian’s biographer frankly makes allowance, as in his comment upon a scene in a Rocky Mountain saloon: “ Youth untamed sat here for an idle moment, spending easily its hard-earned wages. City saloons rose into my vision, and I instantly preferred this Rocky Mountain place. More of death it undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents. And death is a thing much cleaner than vice. Moreover, it was by no means vice that was written upon these wild and manly faces. Even where baseness was visible, baseness was not uppermost. Daring, laughter, endurance, — these were what I saw upon the countenances of the cowboys. And this very first day of my knowledge of them marks a date with me. For something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous ; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took on heroic stature.”

Nothing draws one more strongly to the Virginian, the type of this nobility, than his savage health, moral as well as physical. There are, indeed, certain acknowledged facts of his early experience which might be cited to the contrary. “He told me of a Thanksgiving visit to town that he had made with Steve, ” says the narrator, long after we have learned to trust the Virginian. “‘We was just colts then,’ he said. He dwelt on their coltish doings, their adventures sought and wrought in the perfect fellowship of youth. ‘ For Steve and me most always hunted in couples back in them gamesome years, ’ he explained. And he fell into the elemental talk of sex; such talk as would be an elk’s or tiger’s; and spoken so by him, simply and naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality, it was without offense. But it would be offense should I repeat it.” The Virginian’s code was the code of his fellows. But he was incapable of meanness; he had never, we are sure, harmed a weaker than himself, as he had never (according to an ill-advised phrase to the mother of his betrothed) “killed for pleasure or profit.”

If his schoolmistress, Molly Wood, lacks this superb aboriginal simplicity, her New England blood and training are at fault. She cannot quite free herself from conventional qualms, but is essentially fine-grained and sound, fit to be grafted upon this wild offshoot of a good Southern stock. And the great triumphs of her love, first over social, and second over moral fastidiousness, give one the impression of a richer if not more charming personality than Bud Dale’s Virgie.

The Wyoming in which the action of Owen Wister’s story takes place has much in common with the California of Bret Harte. Substituting cattle for gold, the conditions are very similar: a society of men, a society untrammeled and unaided by the machinery of civilization. But Owen Wister’s interpretation of that life is very different from his predecessor’s. In his last book,⁵ as the title indicates, Bret Harte returned to the trail which he himself had blazed, and which the feet of his successors had turned into one of the thoroughfares of American fiction. There could in the nature of things be only one Luck of Roaring Camp; but the tales here collected retain much of the old flavor, and even renew our acquaintance with ancient favorites, notably Colonel Starbottle and Mr. Hamlin.

Bret Harte’s treatment of the character of Jack Hamlin suggests very well his limitations as an interpreter of Western life. He was interested in the people who live in the far West, and in the things which happen there, as a connoisseur in the materials of fiction rather than as a passionate student. We do not, of course, ask for statistics, or a complete philosophy, or a long face, from the creative artist. Mr. Wister offers none of these things. Yet he contrives in the very act of pleasing us to make us think; Bret Harte was content to make us wonder. He was not greatly concerned, therefore, that his reading of that life should be profoundly significant; it must be picturesque. Mr. Jack Hamlin is a rascal under a film of smooth manners. Part of his attraction consists in our knowledge of his rascality, a lure a good many centuries older than Jack Hamlin or Jack Sheppard. Owen Wister’s Virginian is a gentleman under a coat of roughness. This also is an immemorial type of hero. So far as they are individuals, it is proper that one should get as much pleasure out of one type as out of the other. But the reader can hardly yield to Jack Hamlin and the Virginian the immunities of the individual. If the phenomena of the West really interest him, he will find himself considering the claims of each in turn to be taken as representative of the frontier phase of civilization. And weighed in such a mood, Mr. Jack Hamlin, with all his fascinations, is found wanting; one must be lightly pleased with him, or not at all. The Virginian (who may never become as famous as Mr. Hamlin) is far more edifying. For all of that young vigorous integrity which Mr. Wister takes to be the sound base of the frontiersman’s character is embodied in this healthy, jesting, deeply loving, victorious cowboy of his.

The Desert and the Sown,⁶ unlike most of its predecessors by the same hand, can hardly be called a Western story. Part of the action takes place in the West, it is true, but the central figure is Eastern born and bred, and his problem would have been no problem at all to the Virginian. Under gross provocation, and then mainly by accident, he kills a man. Human law cannot touch him, but he feels himself under the ban of a higher ruling. He therefore chooses to disappear, though desertion of his young wife and child is involved, and to devote himself to a lifelong penance of solitude. No frontiersman would have brooded over the killing of a man under such circumstances ; but this Adam Bogardus, with his inherited rigidity of mind, cannot get away from the fact that according to the code of the East, the only code for him, he is, technically, a criminal. So he suffers, like Hamlet, a bitter penalty for having fallen upon a day for the urgencies of which moral refinement could only disqualify him. With his painful fidelity to his vow, his reluctance to accept favors from the son to whom fortune at last makes him known, and his final renunciation of his tardily restored family, Bogardus comes very near being a tragic figure. We may turn with some relief to a story of far less complication, though a story of the Old World.

Bread and Wine⁷ reminds one strongly of some of the peasant idyls of George Sand’s. The peasant, hardy as his life is, has almost nothing in common with the frontiersman; his limitations are more difficult to make picturesque, and his virtues are hardly spectacular enough for the purposes of fiction. His qualities are idyllic rather than heroic. Mrs. King’s style is sympathetic and restrained, exactly fitted for the treatment of this simple episode in the married life of her two peasants of Graubünden. It is pleasant to find America producing so delicate an example of the genre which the Latins are wont to manage so much better than we. For a taste of the sweetness and purity of its style, we may quote the concluding sentence of the tale: “By this time the twilight sky had deepened and darkened all about the stars so that the eye could see how many and large and bright they were; and night, like an unspoken benediction, came down upon Sertig Dörfli.”

To speak of The Rescue ⁸ in this connection would be incongruous if it were not for the simplicity and clarity of manner which it possesses in common with the story of which we have just spoken. Its theme is unusual, and by no means simple; a theme possible only for the student of a sophisticated, not to say decadent society. Henry James might have hit upon it, though his treatment of it would have been more deliberately subtle, and one is not sure that matters would have been allowed to turn out as well as they do. Not that Miss Sedgwick employs the living happy ever after solution; the most sanguine handling could hardly have brought that about. The conclusion is sombre, though it is as favorable as it can well be under the conditions. No special considerations whatever can make the marriage of a man of thirty to a woman of forty-seven a comfortable consummation. It must be in an even stronger sense than usual a beginning rather than an end. But to have brought about such a beginning, so that the fact seems to have some degree of propriety and even palatability, is a rare feat. Perhaps feat is not the word to use, for unusual as the relation between Damier and Madame Vicaud is, it cannot have seemed to the author abnormal or even improbable; and in the end, I think it does not seem so to the reader. The conception of Claire, one may have two minds about. Bad daughters do sometimes come of good mothers, and the paternity in this case was as bad as it well could have been. But Claire comes dishearteningly near being the totally depraved nature which Shakespeare and experience teach us does not exist. We see in the end that she does not quite achieve this; and we even come to suspect that without the counter-irritant of her mother’s intolerable virtue and refinement, her own heart and manners might have developed naturally to a point of respectability at least.

Damier escapes being inconsiderable by virtue of his extreme sensitiveness and the invincible ardor of his feeling for Madame Vicaud. One feels, nevertheless, that in spite of her disadvantage in years and experience, she brings more heart to their union than her young lover is capable of. Their likeness in point of intensity, almost as much as their disparity in years, suggests that as we leave them Madame Vicaud has been rescued, not from trouble altogether, but from futility.

There is a temptation to enlarge a little upon the literary quality of the story. The Virginian would not have cared for it; he probably would have failed to understand Damier, even if he had not classed him with Romeo.

“ She pressed his hand, still smiling at him, and then, resuming her sewing, ‘ Sit near me, ’ she said, ‘ so I can see that you are not fancying that I am harsh with you! ’

“ At such moments he could see in her eyes, that caressed one, made sweetest amends to one, touches of what must once have been enchanting roguishness.

“‘ But I am still going to risk your harshness,’ he said. . . . ‘ I don’t want to justify man’s ways to man; and yet ordinary human nature, with its almost inevitable self-regarding instinct, its climb toward happiness, its ugly struggle for successful attainment of it, is more successful than cruel toward unhappiness. . . . And then you must remember — I must, for how often I have struggled with these thoughts — that misfortune is a mask, a disguise. One can’t be recognized and known when one wears it; one can’t show one’s self; if one could there would perhaps be responses.’ ”

Perhaps it would have been fairer not to quote this. It is like attempting to show the flawlessness of a crystal by knocking off a chip at random. The crystal is marred, and the fragment itself appears insignificant.

H. W. Boynton.