A Few Spring Novels

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THE flood of spring fiction,¹ like other spring floods, has been formidable in proportion to the length and severity of the winter; but the river in which we stagger will at least not ignite.

Out of a score or more of smartly attired volumes the most important among the native American products is the Deliverance, by Miss Ellen Glasgow, — and even this is hardly up to the high level of the author’s previous work. It is neither as broad and sane, nor as masterly in its grasp of complex and chaotic social conditions, as the Voice of the People ; nor has it all the solemn unity and concentrated pathos of the Battle Ground. Nevertheless, it is a searching and a striking book ; and, like its predecessors, it is especially interesting for the strong light it sheds on what, after a lapse of forty years, is only now beginning dimly to be perceived as one of the most momentous consequences to our whole country of the war of secession,— the death, namely, and by violence, — or, at least, the mortal hurt,— of a comparatively ripe white civilization in the Southern United States.

The scene of the Deliverance is laid in Virginia. The time is about twenty years after the close of the civil war.

The pitiful relics of the proud old race which had reigned for generations at Blake Hall, going their ways of careless magnificence, and adored, in the main, by the ever increasing swarms of their childish dependents, are now reduced to dire penury, and living a life of grinding toil, on the produce of a small fragment of the ancestral tobacco fields, in the house which was once the overseer’s; while the overseer, Bill Fletcher, a hoary reprobate, who had stolen, hit by bit, all that was left of the Blake possessions after the fall of the Confederacy, is installed in their place at the Hall.

The hero of the tale is Christopher Blake, the youngest child of the fallen family, and the intrigue turns upon the conflict in his warped mind between a steadfast purpose of revenge upon the usurper and his love for the usurper’s granddaughter. The details of the story are necessarily painful. The father of the Blake children had fallen early in the war. The mother, blind, paralyzed, and with memory much impaired, but stately and overbearing still, is actually kept in ignorance, through the pious mendacity of her children and one or two devoted old servants, of the fact that they are no longer living at the Hall, and even that the Southern Confederacy is no more. If this deluded lady, and her brother,— a ruined Confederate officer, — horribly maimed and mutilated, but of an exceeding sweet and gallant spirit, and, on the other hand, the coarse monster installed at Blake Hall, seem collectively a trifle overdrawn, it cannot be said that either is an impossible, or even an improbable figure: while that is indeed a keen observer, and a skilled artist as well, who can thus draw the hero of the Deliverance as he first appeared to Fletcher’s lawyer, when the latter came to Christopher as the bearer of a peculiarly insulting proposition : —

“ He perceived, at once, a certain coarseness of finish which, despite the deep-seated veneration for an idle ancestry, is found most often in the descendants of a long line of generous livers. A moment later, he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes, beneath the thick fair hair, the coating of dust and sweat over the high-bred curve from brow to nose, and the fullness of the jaw, which bore, with a suggestion of sheer brutality, upon the general impression of a fine, racial type. Taken from the mouth up, the face might have passed as a pure, fleshly copy of the antique ideal; seen downward, it became almost repelling in its massive power.”

The plan of reprisals over which Christopher Blake brooded throughout his growing years was a ruthless, not to say a revolting one. How he achieved his grim purpose, and then, when suddenly awakened to a sense of its moral enormity, what he voluntarily underwent by way of expiation, may best be read in the book itself. The title of the tale foreshadows a hopeful conclusion, and we gladly accept its augury. Nevertheless, it is, as I have said, the haunting thought of a civilization untimely slain, which the Deliverance, no less than the Battle Ground, leaves uppermost in our minds.

A civilization — any civilization —is a blossom of time, long prepared, and slowly perfected. A revolution tears the flower from its delicate stem, and grinds it into the dust. The revolution may have been, by all historic law, a righteous one ; the flower not worth, upon the whole, the lavish cost, to humanity, of its culture. The doomed order may have served its purpose, and deserved its fate. That is not now the point; but simply the fact that something fair must needs perish even in a so-called holy war, — which it will take uncounted years of peace to recreate.

One of the most memorable passages in that very stimulating and instructive book, Trevelyan’s History of the American Revolution, is that in which the author turns aside from his lively narrative of the sequence of events in 1776, to describe the modest affluence and quiet beauty which had, by that time, come to characterize a good many of the rural homes in New York and New Jersey, so soon to be laid waste by the hireling troops of his most sapient Majesty George III. The Whig historian paints a wistful and beguiling picture of what the mere outward aspect of life on the Atlantic seaboard might have been by this time if the American Revolution had never taken place. It is the race-ideal of the English home : “ All things in order stored. A haunt of ancient peace,” — a vision of mild manners, healthful growth, moderate standards, and mellow surroundings. He can hardly be consoled for those lost amenities, and neither, for the moment, can I. Yet even there,—in what used, in those far days, to be called the Middle States, — and though that favored region was, and remained until the long conflict was over, a chief theatre of military operations, the decivilizing consequences, to a young community, of seven years of war were hardly as marked as in the North, where manufactures were completely paralyzed, and exhausted men had to wring their scant living out of a harder soil and under less kindly skies. I myself can perfectly remember, as a child, hearing very old people describe the harrowing poverty, and profound depression among the farming population of New England, of the years immediately following the war of Independence. The men of the Revolution had indeed won, while the men of the Confederacy had lost; but there are moments in the history, both of individuals and nations, when victory, if less galling, seems almost move barren and disappointing than defeat. And so we come back to Miss Glasgow, and her Southerners of the old social order, and the good things which undeniably passed away with them.

One of the best of these I take to have been the most beautiful use of our mother tongue, in every-day speech, that America has yet known. From father to son, for generations, the well-born Virginian or Marylander went to William and Mary College, as a matter of course, and lightly forgot, in his after life of landed proprietor and sportsman, a good deal of what he learned there ; but seldom the trick of that sub-scholarly English, easy, racy, and felicitous, which was so much more excellent than the speaker himself knew. The wives and daughters of these men used their language instinctively, but with a touch of added refinement, which enhanced its charm. Happily there are localities and there are clans in which the tradition of that pure speech and the soft intonations that accompanied it yet live, and many a fondly guarded chest of old letters ad Familiares to attest the truth of what I say. When a Southerner of the ancient type stood up, of fell purpose, to make a speech, or sat down to write a book, he frequently became stilted and self-conscious; but his unstudied utterance was both noble and simple; and most admirable of all in that it was unstudied. The unconscious use of grammatical niceties is one of the most infallible marks of race. I have known a white-haired Tuscan woman, bearing the suggestive name of Massima, who went out charring at two lire a day, and who gracefully apologized for pointing out to her employer that the latter had used an expression which was not Dantesque. And a very dear old Parisienne — who had herself come down to taking pensionnaires for practice in French, said once to me : “ Ma belle-mère était toute grande dame. She used the past subjunctive without thinking.” Now the best of us in New England, and especially in Boston, can use with precision our equivalent of the past subjunctive ; but I fear we seldom do it without a lurking consciousness of literary merit, and a modest anticipation of applause.

There is, however, great danger that what we typify by the past subjunctive may soon become more completely a thing of the past among us than even its name implies ; and one of its worst foes is the lavish, not to say shameless, employment in print of that rude, shapeless, inchoate utterance which can be represented to the eye only by bad spelling and worse grammar, and which has no legitimate claim whatsoever to the honorable name of dialect. Even Miss Glasgow’s pages are disfigured by too much of what that fine purist, Theodore Winthrop, used to call “ black babble.” But her own English is very nearly impeccable, — which is more than can be said for the unquestionably clever author of Henderson, or the unterrified author of An Evans of Suffolk.

Yet it is hardly fair to bracket these two books, for Henderson is a great deal the better performance of the two, and a decided advance upon its predecessor, Sally of Missouri. The author can indeed use that as a qualifying adverb, make the nicest of her people preface their most serious remarks by some such simian aggregation of consonants as “ mh-hm,” and write nonsense, in her own person, about “ the dying day, trailing off in a shining halation,” and the “sudden break” in a woman’s “plastic strength.” Nevertheless, her tale is tersely and dramatically told. The young surgeon who figures as its hero is an uncommonly fine fellow, who passionately does his professional best to save the husband of the woman whom he loves; and may be said to deserve, in a general way, and under the code prevailing in fiction, that a big oak tree, uprooted by a Missouri hurricane, should fall upon the patient he has loyally healed, in the last chapter of the book but one.

Miss Young, it appears, has herself been a medical student, and a brilliant one. “ There ’s only one little mistake in that whole thing! ” was the admiring comment of a successful surgeon on the strong chapter entitled the Life on the Table, which first appeared, I think, in this magazine. But let her make her next story a little less pathological. A romance ought not to reek of chloroform.

Miss Anna Farquhar, having previously tried her hand at social satire in Her Boston Experiences, and Her Washington Experiences, returns to the attack of the former city in An Evans of Suffolk, but can hardly be said to have effected a serious breach in its venerable defenses. This book is clever too, — in a vain, jaunty, trivial sort of way, with a cleverness that might be better employed. We can hardly be expected seriously to believe that a respectable Bostonian, returning to his native town after a long sojourn in Paris, and being gravely reminded by somebody’s maiden aunt that her ancestors commanded his at the battle of Bunker Hill, is so prostrated by amusement at the idea as to drop upon the main stairway of a Beacon Street house, in the midst of an evening reception, and laugh until a lady’s maid has to be summoned to replace his missing buttons ! As a bit of burlesque, upon the other hand, this incident fails to amuse. It would appear that, after all, and for whatever reason, the ways of old Boston are not easy to burlesque. Surely there is, even yet, and though we live, as one may say, after the deluge, a character and a cachet about society there, as marked as in that of the old-time South ; yet I cannot at this moment recall a single really good Boston novel. The Bostonians of Mr. Henry James was written a long while ago ; and though the author had, as a matter of course, full knowledge of his theme, and could never have committed those violations of probability and sins against good taste into which most of his followers have fallen, his purpose was a little too obviously and exclusively one of persiflage. The Rev. Bolton King, in Let Not Man Put Asunder, caught a better likeness, but was not quite fair, upon the whole, to the morals of the Puritan city; while Alice Brown, in her able and thoughtful story of Margaret Warrener, did not pretend to go outside the circumscribed limits of Boston’s rather colorless Bohemia. The true comedy — and it should be in the fullest sense of the term high comedy — of the three hills, and the westward flats, and the reclaimed fens, is yet to be written.

The Anglo-Germans are also here, — bearing what the department stores call their “Easter gifts.” The tricksy but ever fascinating Elizabeth, who, though still reveling in the joy of a semi-transparent incognita, takes unquestioned precedence both by social and literary law, is at her best and brightest in the new book, — a narrative of the adventures, comic and sad, that befell her in the Baltic island of Rügen. She would seem to have discharged, once for all, — in that rather caustic tale, the Benefactress, — all her accumulated spleen against the petty ways of the German female, and the oppressive ways of the German official, and she now offers herself most amiably to be the reader’s guide upon an entirely novel kind of summer tour. Her temper is, for the moment, perfectly sunny ; her wit spontaneous, unflagging, irresistible. Under the spell of her careless and yet graphic word-painting, we behold great breadths of dancing waves and the solemn glory of ancient beech woods ; we see acres of salt meadow all silvery with plumed cotton-grass, and fairly scent the exhilarating breeze that blows across them. And then, the attendants who minister to my lady’s whims, — and the few other tourists whom she meets upon her eccentric way, — Cousin Charlotte, the feminists, and her ineffable spouse; Mrs. Harvey-Brown, the bishop’s lady from England, with her simple-minded son “Brosy,” — how demurely, how inimitably, with what infectious and yet not unkindly gayety all these are depicted !

“‘ Why Brosy ? ’ I took courage to inquire.

“ ‘ It is short for Ambrose,’he answered.

“’He was christened after Ambrose/ said his mother, ‘ one of the Early Fathers, as no doubt you know.’

“ But I did not know, because she spoke in German, for the sake, I suppose, of making things easier for me, and she called the Early Fathers friihzeitige Väter, so how could I know ? ' Friihzeitige Vater,’ I repeated dully. ’Who are they ? ’

“ The bishop’s wife took the kindest view of it. ' Perhaps you do not have them in the Lutheran Church,’ she said ; but she did not speak to me again at all, turning her back on me, quite, this time, and wholly concentrating her attention upon Charlotte.

“’My mother,’Ambrose explained in subdued tones, ‘meant to say Kirchenväter.’ ”

Later on in their acquaintance, Mrs. Harvey-Brown confesses that she had been much disappointed in the Germans.

“ ‘ How sensible English people are compared to them ! ’

“ ' Do you think so ? '

“ ' Why, of course ! In everything.’

“ ' But are you not judging the whole nation by a few ? ’

“ ' Oh, one can always tell. What could be more supremely senseless, for instance,’— and she waved a hand over the bay, — ' than calling the Baltic the Ostsee ? ’

“‘Well, but why shouldn’t they, if they want to ? ’

“ ' But, dear Frau X., it is so foolish. East sea? Of what is it the east ? One is always east of something, but one does n’t talk about it! The name has no meaning whatever. Now Baltic exactly describes it.’ ”

On another occasion, when Mrs. Harvey-Brown sniffs insolence in a waiter, she inquires of the long-suffering Ambrose whether he does not think they had better " tell him who father is ; ” and this parochial use of the word father gives the reader a momentary pause. Not for the first time since the auspicious beginning of our acquaintance with Elizabeth do we catch, amid her Teutonic accessories and her studied Anglican allusions, the strangely familiar gleam of an echterAmericanism. “Besides,”observes the inimitable Charlotte, when explaining how she, too, happened to be in remote Rügen, “ I was run down.” He who can tell us why she did not say “ pulled down ” will prove, by the same token, that he “knows what Rameses knows.”

In Violett, by the Baroness von Hutten (Violett is a boy’s name, with a presumable accent on the final syllable), we have a pathetic and original donnée, and much of the peculiar grace of narration which characterized Our Lady of the Beeches. The new book is a musical novel, and not exempt from the touch of morbid sentimentalism which no musical novel wholly escapes. But the professional people, in particular, who figure in its pages, are drawn with a vigor and verisimilitude which argue personal acquaintance ; — the rather cruel Bohemia where they play their parts is invested with no false glamour ; and the tragic end of the sad little story is too inevitable and too simply told to appear melodramatic.

As though to reprove all puling pessimism and warn the good American never to despair even of his rude province in the republic of letters, there comes quietly to us, from somewhere in the Middle West, a very modest and attractive little book, aptly entitled the Day before Yesterday. It is not so much a child’s book — though the right sort of child would revel in it— as a book about children, — a family chronicle, humorous and yet reverent, written in sweetest English and with flawless taste. And what a family life it is which these fond recollections reflect! — simple, refined, honorable, and pious ; — the life of plain but thoroughbred village folk, with brave traditions in this world and stout hope for the next; — infinitely amusing, infinitely affecting! The locality is not very exactly defined. We only know that it was west of Ohio, east of the Mississippi, and within easy reach of the great prairies, that this immaculate race, with ancestors in Virginian churchyards, and cousins in New England colleges, had laid already, in the first half of the last century, the foundations of a home, the very moral of what Sir George Trevelyan dreamed the American home might have been — if only it had remained English; the type — thank God ! for it is more to the purpose now — of many in that vast midland, which has come, in the course of human events, to hold the balance of our national destinies.

Thus far, our novelists of the vernal season have all been women. The sex is doing its level best to monopolize the great industry of fiction-spinning, and has less to dread this year than usual, it may be, from its male competitors. We find no very distinguished name among these last except that of Lafcadio Hearn, who has collected in Kwaidan : or Stories and Studies of Strange Things, a series of Japanese ghost stories, dainty, wistful, beautiful; — all softly permeated by that amiable view of death which we must go to the far East to find in its perfection ; and rendered into English with all the sympathetic insight and airy lightness of diction of which the Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tokyo has, many times before, grven us admirable examples. After the ghost stories proper come three Insect Studies, from Japanese and Chinese sources: on Butterflies, on Mosquitoes, and on Ants. The first of these contains a few exquisite English versions of Japanese hokku, or seventeen-syllable poems. The last, in gravely calling our attention to that very complete solution of some of the more perplexing of our social and sexual problems, which was long since reached in the formic societies, furnishes one of the most delicate and delightful pieces of satire one has met for many a day. And we may profess and proclaim what we will touching the theoretic obligation of national neutrality, — there is no disguising the quickened throb of sympathy which we all feel, just now, with the gallant little David of the farthest Orient, and the good fight he has made, so far, against the Russian Goliath.

For the rest, we have the inevitable deluge of dialect, falsely so-called : — the genial crudities of a nautical Yankee commonly called Cap’n Eri; a regrettable attempt to repeat, in the depressing memorials of one Mrs. M’Lerie, the fortuitous triumphs of Wee Macgreegor ; a number of dark and bloody studies in socialistic fiction, à la Tolstoi, and à la Gorki; a book for boys, by George Cary Eggleston, entitled Running the River, brisk and, presumably, wholesome, of which the moral is, frankly, that the young American should be up and making money ere he loses the dew of his youth.

Finally, we have two books by men not yet widely known, but from whom we are led, by their present performance, to look for something excellent in the future. These are, Said the Fisherman, by Marmaduke Pickthall, and the Great Adventurer, by Robert Shackleford.

The story of Said, comprising, first the Book of his Luck, and second, the Book of his Fate, is an Arabian tale, and, considered merely as a literary essay, it is already a work of remarkable maturity and finish. Its inspiration is, of course, drawn from the same inexhaustible source as that of Vathek, and Hadji Baba, and the Shaving of Shagpat. The Thousand and One Nights can still supply material for endless wonder-tales; but while those which I have named are all classics, in their way, the story of Said, which is neither an intentional satire like the histories of Shagpat and Hadji, nor a mere opium-fed fantasia, like Beckford’s famous novel, is perhaps more intimately and entirely Oriental than either. It is more so even than Kim, because it is more purely objective, and the author effaces his own personality, as Kipling never can. Said is a drama of modern life, introducing recent and well-known historic incidents. The spirit, the motive, and the moral of it — for it has a very distinct moral — are all purely and simply Mohammedan ; while the scenery of the ever picturesque East is laid in by the hand of a rare artist. One may open the book at random, and find upon almost any page a tiny vignette, as accurately drawn, as gemlike in the brilliancy of its color, as this : —

“ It was the fourth hour of the day, and not until the flush of evening have men leisure to go forth and drink the sweet air of the garden. A stone bridge of a single lofty arch, which bestrode the wady lower down, looked at fragments of its likeness in the eddies and seemed nodding to sleep. The vast blue cope of the firmament paled everywhere toward the horizon in pearly haze. Abundance of leafage compassed the place on every side, but at one point, through a gap in the branches, the old wall of the city was visible, the white cube of an upper chamber peeping over it, with a bulging lattice and a single minaret cleaving the soft distance.”

It would be unreasonable to expect Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall ever to write much better than he has done in Said; but one must earnestly hope that he will soon — and yet not too soon ! — write more.

Precisely as far as the typical West from the traditional East is the scene of the Great Adventurer removed from that of Said the Fisherman. The Adventurer also may be described — in the journalistic sense — as an “ inspired ” book ; inspired in this instance by the fiery example of the late lamented Frank Norris. It was inevitable that the daring author of the Octopus and the Pit should find followers ; and Mr. Shackleford seems an earnest, virile, and not altogether unworthy one. His Adventurer — Newbury Linn — is the founder of a stupendous trust, or, rather, a combination of many trusts, aiming at nothing less than the commercial sovereignty of the civilized world. The story is developed with a certain hard strength. The author betrays a curious apparent indifference to what may be called — by comparison at least with the colossal iniquity which he aims to signalize — the minor morals. We miss altogether from his dry pages the poetry, the passion, the strong lift of humanistic enthusiasm, which redeemed and dignified the very meanest episodes in Mr. Norris’s unfinished tragedy. Yet the inveterate idealism of the American asserts itself at the last, bringing the too trite story of Newbury Linn to a novel and impressive end. The failure of his great scheme, when on the very brink of success, is due, not so much to the counter-combination which was desperately planned for its defeat, as to a species of moral arrest, — the sudden, but decisive recoil of a curiously belated conscience in the breast of the Adventurer himself. Then resolutely, deliberately, of his own free act and purpose, he undertakes to dissolve the vast alliance which had been consolidated by his own Satanic ingenuity. He demolishes what he had reared, undoes the work of his life, and releases, by his own fiat, the myriad spirits confined in the prison of his tyranny. Prosit.

H. W. P.