Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

RECENT NOVELS.--The great stream that swells day by day in the form of prose fiction is simply appalling. It is not only the genius of to-day that has seized on this vehicle of thought and feeling, but the amateur pen-driver plunges in without hesitation. Every male citizen of these United States is born to hold office and edit a newspaper. Every female born under the stars and stripes comes into the world prepared to write a novel. No study, no preparation whatever is needed. When the Irishman was asked if he could play upon the French horn, he responded, "Shure, it looks aisy;" and a love story looks so easy that every little girl is ready to produce one.

Of the pile before us we of course seize first on that under the name of Julian Hawthorne. The admiration felt by all for the father, to say nothing of the love that yet lingers in memory for the man, makes the name of Hawthorne sacred. It brings to mind the noble, handsome, Caesarian head of the master, that was made winning by the shy, gentle, and affectionate manner--so little understood by the many, so fascinating to the few. Then lived our greatest genius in the world of fiction. When one realizes the nature of the material upon which he had to work, the cold, barren soil of New England, the hard, unsympathetic characters, with no background of romance on which to build, the mighty power of the magician looms up before us. The touch of his pen wrought such strange wonders that the very hardness of the groundwork seemed to play into his hand, and from the _Twice-Told Tales_ to that grandest of all tragedies in the English language, _The Scarlet Letter_, one is held spellbound.

Well, it is not belittling Julian to say that it is a misfortune that he should be the son of his father. We read his charming stories by the light of a past that can never again be renewed, and all the time the memory of the mighty master dwarfs the work of the son. In this way I read aloud to my dear invalid _A Dream and a Forgetting_. Had there been any other name upon the title-page than Hawthorne, we should have been charmed with the book that Belford, Clarke & Co. have gotten up so beautifully. As it was, we could not help looking for the sunlight through rifts that, alas! can never come again. It is singular to note, however, the Hawthornish traits that yet linger in the son. The same boldness that made the elder Hawthorne accept and use without hesitation the most unpromising characters, and make them not only acceptable but attractive, belongs to the younger. It is this which drives him not only to depict Fairfax Boardwine, but to make his hero such a weak, selfish creature. After all, he is only a foil to Mary Gault, and the true work in the artist lies in the clear yet delicate prominence he gives to his heroine.

The charm the elder Hawthorne threw over the rocky land of New England is evident in the _Pot of Gold_, by Edward Richard Shaw (Belford, Clarke & Co.). Here is the barren, sandy coast, with a few rough fishermen, the cold, heaving sea, enlightened by no love, but made attractive by the shadowy play of adventure found in piratical ships, that come and go as if they were phantoms of a half-forgotten past. With all the dim, misty character of the piratical craft, the author gives us the coast and its atmosphere, the rough, ignorant characters of its inhabitants, in a way to prove that he is an artist and has made good use of his study. To the average reader, as well as the more cultured, this book is very attractive.

Edgar Saltus, whose immature book, _The Truth about Tristrem Varick_, won him wide mention as the author of a grotesque bit of immorality, comes to the front again in _Eden_, a novel published by Belford, Clarke & Co. There is the marked progress in this volume we prophesied in the young author. He has great ability, marred by certain affectations, that will in time, we hope, disappear. Mr. Saltus has been roughly assaulted by the critics. He probably deserved all that he got. We can say to him, as the fond parent said to his son after the youth had been kicked in the face by a mule, "He will not be so handsome hereafter, but he will have more sense."

Mr. Saltus builds his novels on the French methods. His narrative and conversations find expression in short epigrammatic sentences. To the average reader this is easy and delightful, for there is a sense of wisdom that to such is quite captivating. To the more cultured it has the effect of an old-fashioned corduroy road over a swamp. It simply jolts one, and the knowledge that the short sticks and logs cover a quagmire is not comforting. The characters are nearly all alike; and their conversation so much so, that to a listener to one who reads aloud, omitting the names, it seems to be one person dealing out worldly wisdom in short, jerky sentences. As a specimen of style we quote:

"Then, Miss Menemon, you must know the penalty which is paid for
success." He straightened himself, the awkwardness had left him,
and he seemed taller than when he entered the room. "Yes," he
continued, "the door to success is very low, and the greater is he
that bends the most. Let a man succeed in any one thing, and
whatever may be the factors with which that success is achieved,
Envy will call a host of enemies into being as swiftly as Cadmus
summoned his soldiery. And these enemies will come not alone from
the outer world, but from the ranks of his nearest friends. Ruin a
man's home, he may forget it. But excel him, do him a favor, show
yourself in any light his superior, then indeed is the affront
great. Mediocrity is unforgiving. We pretend to admire greatness,
but we isolate it and call that isolation Fame. It is above us; we
cannot touch it; but mud is plentiful and that we can throw. And if
no mud be at hand, we can loose that active abstraction, malice,
which subsists on men and things. No; had I an enemy I could wish
him no greater penance than success--success prompt, vertiginous,
immense! To the world, as I have found it, success is a crime, and
its atonement, not death, but torture. Truly, Miss Menemon,
humanity is not admirable. Men mean well enough, no doubt; but
nature is against them. Libel is the tribute that failure pays to
success. If I am slandered, it is because I have succeeded. But
what is said of my father is wholly true. He did make shoes, God
bless him! and very good shoes they were. Pardon me for not having
said so before."

Again, here is another character speaking, and it seems a continuation of what we have quoted. It is not; there are nearly a hundred pages between the two, and a world-wide difference in sex. Now read:

"Before I met you I thought myself in love. Oh, but I did, though.
And it was not until after I had known you that I found that which
I had taken for love was not love at all. How did I know? Well--you
see, because that is not love which goes. And that went. It was for
the man I cared, not the individual. At the time I did not
understand, nor did I until you came. Truly I don't see why I
should speak of this. Every girl, I fancy, experiences the same
thing. But when you came life seemed larger. You brought with you
new currents. Do you know what I thought? People said I married you
for money. I married you because--what do you suppose, now? Because
I loved you? But at that time I told myself I had done with love.
No, it was not so much for that as because I was ambitious for us
both. It was because I thought Wall Street too small for such as
you. It was because I discerned in you that power which coerces
men. It was because I believed in the future; it was because I
trusted you. Yes, it was for that, and yet this afternoon--"

The advance made in this brilliant book, for such it is with all its faults, from that grotesquely immoral work called _The Truth about Tristrem Varick_, justifies our expressed faith in the ability of Edgar Saltus. This novel is clearly highly dramatic and intensely interesting. There is the making of a foremost master of fiction in the young man when he shall have shaken off his affectations.

_His Way and Her Will_, by Fannie Aymar Mathews (Belford, Clarke & Co.).--This is a vivid picture of our supposed New York social life, as seen by certain writers of fiction through the plate-glass window of a fashionable _modiste_ in an atmosphere heavy with the cheap scents of a barber-shop. We are introduced to most elegant people of high birth and culture through many generations. The villain is a villain because he is the son of a lowborn and base stonemason.

We have two sorts of fiction affected mainly by our American novelists. One is of the English sort, not Braddon, but Trollope and Miss Austen, where the interest, of a mild sort, turns on the social law of caste. "The hero and the heroine paddle about in the shallow sea of affection, never out of sight of the church-steeple," and it is a poor plebeian girl beloved by a lord, or a noble lady, rich and well-born, who is sought for by a lover of base origin. The other, or French method, is to have the characters tossed upon an awful ocean of passion, where the rag of chastity is torn in shreds by the lurid storm.

The novel before us is of the English class. As we have no aristocracy, one is created. It is, of course, one of birth. The old Knickerbockers and the Puritans of the Mayflower furnish the lofty pedigree, and chivalrous gentlemen and silken dames appear in or come out of elegant drawing-rooms, and love and make love in a most refined and lofty sort.

The stories are not only imaginary, but the foundations for the same are of the stuff dreams are made of. There is no such social life in this land of ours. The aristocracy we have here is one of wealth, and of necessity is without culture. Money-getting, in its best aspect, is a mere instinct. As we have to get our living from the hard crust of earth on which we are born, nature has given us the instincts necessary to that living, and a man gathers the good things about him very much as swine seek shelter and make a bed before a viewless coming storm. As we cultivate the animal we destroy the instinct; hence it is that when a man ceases to accumulate and goes to spending he loses the power of accumulation.

We do not mean to say by this that a man may not, through an exercise of his reason, accumulate property also. The goose that flies a thousand miles on a line due north is emulated by the mariner, who, by the use of a compass, will sail with the same accuracy. But the goose carries its own stomach, and the sailor a rich cargo of silks and velvets. The rule, or rather, the law, is that when reason takes the place of instinct, the instinct is lost. The man who from natural impulse and motive makes his money is unable to enjoy what he has made. He is a mere animal, and of these animals is our aristocracy made.

When, therefore, we apply to American life the characters, motives, and manners of European social existence, we make an egregious blunder. The aristocracy of Europe, mainly of England, is not one of wealth alone, for many commoners are richer than their lords. Nor is it of pedigree, for the great majority of them are without such. It is the power of a hereditary class. It dominates not only the social but the political structure as well. The lords we look up to and dwell upon, so fascinated, are the masters, and, relieved from the necessary toil for an existence, have time and means to be cultured.

It is a class with the prestige of power. Take this away, and a lord would be no more than the ring-master of a circus, and not half so amusing as the clown.

Our social aristocrats play at being such, and are ring-masters and clowns, admired by the ignorant and laughed at by all.

Again, there is no class in the United States that has the leisure necessary to learn. We have no idle class. We have a continuous stream of would-be aristocrats, but they come and go so rapidly that no time is given for the cultivation of manner, nor can there be the repose necessary to aristocratic ways. The duration of family life on Murray Hill, or any other fashionable locality in New York or elsewhere, is that of the penitentiary or the car-horse--about five years. All the families change in that time. Whence they come they carefully conceal; whither they go no one cares to learn. There are enormous fortunes made in a day, that disappear in a night.

All the while the money-getting and -losing continue. There is no pause. The masculine element of such society is made up of men who carry the anxieties of their work into parlors and ball-rooms. The late dinners and later parties are frequented by fathers and brothers who know that at counting-rooms and offices they must be every morning by ten o'clock, to worry all day with an anxiety that kills. These noble scions of male American aristocracy carry protested notes on their dyspeptic countenances, and the female specimens their bills for jewelry and gorgeous wearing apparel. The surface of the whole creation is not even good veneer, but the thinnest sort of a scratched varnish.

What absurd fictions, then, are our society novels!

We have in reality our social life, and it is of the best and highest. The millions of homes over the land have their comedies and tragedies well worth putting to record, but they are American, not European. Why cannot our gifted authors, such as Miss Mathews, for example, turn to these and give us a fiction worthy the name? The book she has given us, with all its defects, is entertaining. From title-page to close the interest in the plot and characters holds the reader who does not look too narrowly into the probability.

Of the same sort of work is the volume entitled _That Girl from Texas_, by Jeannette H. Walworth (Belford, Clarke & Co.), an amusing story under a bad name. The idea is not so original, as Sancho Panza remarked, but what we might have met it before. The "Fair Barbarian" who invades England and crops out in English novels, much to our discredit, and the like character from the far West who assaults fashionable life East, are getting to be somewhat monotonous. Society is shocked in both localities by the rough ways of the maiden; but as she is ever beautiful, rich, and shrewd, she plays a leading role and comes out victor in the end. If "Elmira does not stab that deep-dyed villain, the Count," she circumvents him in the most adroit and unexpected manner, so that virtue triumphs and vice is exposed and punished.

We cannot comprehend why it is that when a sprig of English nobility seeks our shores, he should always be a cad or an idiot, and in many instances blooming specimens of both. Time was when this specimen proved a fraud, and the so-called lord turned out a lackey. But now his ancestors are the real lace, but his intellect, morals, and manners are at a heavy discount.

Nor is it understandable why the newly rich of the far West are such ignorant boors, while the same articles at the East are refined and intellectual. We observe that the difference between the two is to have the Western man spell his words as they are pronounced, while all the correct spelling is given to the Eastern gentleman. This is scarcely fair to the citizen of means from a Texan ranch or a Nevada mine. But the dramatic effect is good, so we must not complain.

Allowing for these slight defects, _That Girl from Texas_ is a well-told story, and, like the preceding, _His Way and Her Will_, is a healthy book. There is nothing in either to shock even the sense of propriety, let alone morals, and both give evidence of a talent for story-telling that if properly cultivated will make the fair authors famous.

Some years since Theophile Gautier published a strange story of transformation in which the soul of the lover was passed to the body of a husband, and the inner life of the husband transferred to the body of the lover. Morbidly-inclined readers are referred to this ingenious but disgusting work for entertainment. The author of _The Princess Daphne_, too modest to put his or her name upon the title-page (Belford, Clarke & Co.), to accommodate morbid readers unacquainted with French, has translated Gautier's plot and adapted it to American taste by making the transferee female instead of the coarser sex. "Whether it was worth while to go through so much for so little," as Sam Weller's school-boy remarked when he got done with the alphabet, "is a matter of taste." We think, in the case of _The Princess Daphne_, that it was not.

THE QUEEN OF THE BLOCK.

BY ALEXANDER L. KINKEAD.