Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

A good husband’s dominion lies beyond the boundary line of the home. He is supreme in the office, the shop or at the plow handles. His province is to provide revenue and to fill the flour barrel. He must receive his reward in the golden coin of kisses and in the exercise of the high privilege of paying all bills, obeying all commands, and acknowledging his eternal loyalty and devotion to the flounced and powdered governor. It is only in her absence from home that he becomes great and seizes the opportunity to exercise his veto power. Instantly all dusting and sweeping cease until he leaves the house for a stroll; all romping and frolicking and sliding down the banisters come to a standstill; all practicing on the piano is suspended; and the changing of sheets and pillowslips and putting rooms in order except once a week, are abolished as nuisances. The acting governor reforms everything but his appetite. He taps the exchequer and every meal must be a banquet at the peril of the cook’s tenure of office. His reign is brief but glorious, and business is dispatched in a hurry with the view of the early return of the slippered and skirted governor. His old cronies flock into his touseled and disordered bedroom every night to share his limitless liberty and his boundless bonhomie. And often the jubilant uproar is punctuated with the popping of corks and the clinking of glasses, while the ceaseless rattle of poker chips emphasizes the ancient proverb that

“When the cat’s away,
The mice will play.”

And so each little domestic commonwealth has its lights and shadows, its ups and downs, and its seasons of mal-administration. But when the real governor again assumes the reins of power, a good husband, if he has been guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors in office during her absence, repents in sackcloth and ashes, and a good wife, after a curtain lecture and a cry, always exercises the pardoning power and restores the lieutenant governor to his former prestige and favor with the powers that be, and again “all goes merry as a marriage bell.”

Wandering in strange and unknown pastures of romance.
]

A good husband has his faults and foibles, and sometimes falls from grace; but he is the salt of the earth when properly managed.

A mean husband is either a Nero or a zero; he either dethrones his wife in the home and stabs his helpless and innocent little ones with curses and cruelty, or starves them with cold neglect. He rules with sneers instead of smiles—with blows instead of blessings, or strangles laughter and love in his home with drunkenness and debauchery. How many wives walk the floor every night waiting for footsteps they dread to hear! How many children shiver in their rags and watch for brutal and improvident fathers. God pity the home of the man who staggers out of the path of righteousness.

A good man goes out into the world and bears the burdens of life with a willing heart. If virtue sanctifies his home and peace and contentment laugh and sing around his hearthstone, there is no anguish he will not endure for the happiness of his children, there is no agony he will not suffer for the sake of his wife, no sin of hers he will not condone save one, and that is disloyalty.

Many a fortune has been lost in the lottery of love by drawing the wrong ticket. Many a sweet home has been broken up and many a guiltless man has been butted to death by the billy goat of Ananias as a penalty for unwittingly wandering in strange and unknown pastures of Romance.

The Commercial Traveler.

Commercial travelers are the Eden builders of the world; they are the evangels of human happiness; they carry heavens of pure delight in their sample cases.

There are heavens of music in the rustle of their silks, heavens of the beautiful in their laces and lawns, heavens of rapture in their spring bonnets and jewels.

They are the tidal waves of commerce, the rolling billows of progress, the trade winds of civilization. They touch all shores and never cease to blow.

Many a castle builder presses their fragrant havanas to his lips and his dreams turn to curling castles in the air. Many a dreamer sips their mellow wines and lo! a thousand fairies with jeweled wings flutter in his veins and flit among the flowers in the garden of his dreams.

Wherever the commercial travelers swarm there is honey in the gum and the flowers of prosperity are in bloom. They carry the pollen-dust of business on their wings and the honey of wealth in their grips. And whenever they cease to hum about a town it is a sure sign that prosperity is a withered blossom there and that there are weevils in the gum.

The garden spider weaves her web among the honeysuckles and spins as she weaves without distaff or loom. She stretches her radial warp of silvery filaments and then lays on her woof. From the center outward she glides in one continuous spiral, and as she crosses each radius of the warp she touches it deftly with her foot as if to weld the viscid fiber.

And thus her shining net grows until it hangs suspended in the air, half visible, half vanishing, like some phantom wheel of moonbeams.

The commercial travelers are the spiders of enterprise, spinning and weaving without distaff or loom, swinging from town to town, from city to city, from continent to continent; and they are weaving the golden web of commerce around the world, drawing the nations closer together in the warp and woof of universal love and the universal brotherhood of man.

THE GATE IN THE GROUND.

BY ROBERT LOVEMAN.

At the end of the lane of joy and pain,
We come to the little gate,
The king and the clown, and the court go down,
Through its portals soon or late;
The peasant, the peer, the sage and the seer,
Depart when the hour comes round,
With a kiss and a sigh, and a last good-bye,
Through the little lone gate in the ground.

’Tis fixed by fate, we must pass through the gate,
The dear little gate in the ground,
At the end of our ways of nights and days,
It is marked by a grassy mound;
We bend o’er the bier, with a sob and a tear,
From the still lips comes no sound,—
We never can know, where God’s gardens grow,
’Till we pass through the gate in the ground.

Lyrical and Satirical

CONDUCTED BY VERMOUTH.

THE RURAL SHEET.

The rural paper is a peach without a single doubt,
It is patent on the inside, patent medicine without;
Yet it giveth information both select and wide of reach
From a card of thanks for kindness to a double column preach;
It tells about the infant at the home of Bill and wife,
And it gives a thrilling storiette replete with love and strife;
It says the roads are passable though slightly out of shape,
An obituary notice names survivors wearing crepe;
It has a bristling column full of legislative news,
And when you have the cold or croup it tells you what to use;
Its special news to farmers is both choice and up-to-date
And it recommends the tablets that will keep your liver straight;
It is warmly Democratic and agin the robber class,
And although it hates the railroads it will sometimes use a pass;
The editor’s a pungent cuss and calls a spade a spade,
And he takes subscriptions right along in any kind of trade;
The paper is a weekly, but be careful how you spell,
And “drop around to see us when you’ve anything to sell.”

JIU-JITSU.

If newspaper stories relative to this strange and recently introduced Japanese science are to be credited, Munchausen is henceforth the standard Sunday school literature and the Arabian Nights prosy historical narrative.

A squad or so of New York policemen were recently compelled to rescue a Bowery mob from extinction at the hands of a burly young Jap, weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds, while an American, after a few lessons, has solved the long delayed problem of the domestication of the hind leg of a mule.

These things being true—and they are conclusively backed by advertisements in magazines and insinuating approvals from the White House, whose occupant in chief now never uses more than one finger on the most strenuous opponent,—how many presumably settled social institutions are longer secure? What, for instance, of the historic traditions hovering around the revered institutions of mother-in-law and cook lady? And what of the cherished monthly anticipation of the horrific bill collector, the eleemosynary insurance agent and the sad-faced representative of a worthy charity? Consider the epochal iconoclasm involved in the passage of these time-honored social, domestic and civic pests!

On the other hand, however, reflect upon the counter possibilities of the parties enumerated becoming wise to jiu-jitsu before you! Authorities state that the initiated can strangle a victim as readily by a gentle pressure about the waist as by a strangle hold about the throat and that the lower extremities may be hopelessly disarranged by a finger gently exerted midway the spine. With casual instruction _sub rosa_, a man’s wife might economically elect the tender and twining embrace as an effective substitute for the divorce court, or might at pleasure convert him into a permanent invalid while affecting to innocently scratch his back.

That biblical narrative which has disturbed the faith of many of the credulously reverent, wherein the ant inquires insinuatingly of the elephant if he fully realizes the thoughtlessness of his disposition to overcrowd or shove, in this sidelight of modern criticism, receives a luminous and comforting ray of explanation and reassurance. The erring faith of many honest but superficial doubters is further bolstered by the reputed but till now little appreciated attitude of the elephant in preferring to pass the observation as facetious.

Great is jiu-jitsu but greater still the higher criticism!

LAWSON OF BAWSON.

Who is it that’s yearning the people to save?
Lawson of Bawson.
Who murders the system and then digs its grave?
Lawson of Bawson.
Who is it hates lyin’ and fakin’ and sich?
Who can’t stand the plutocrats ’cause they are rich?
Who leads simple life at a Hetty Green pitch?
Lawson of Bawson.

Who is it that’s sporting the sportiest vest?
Lawson of Bawson.
And also disporting the chestiest chest?
Lawson of Bawson.
And who affects sparklers of forty-horse ray?
And puts up a thousand to buy a bouquet?
And who’d probably talk if he’d something to say?
Lawson of Bawson.

A HEART TO HEART WHISPER TO OTHER MILLIONAIRES.

The crusade of a few iconoclastic and revolutionary vulgarians to endow libraries, cheap schoolhouses and retreats for cripples, old maids and other unmentionables, should encounter our organized and unanimous resistance. The conservatives and respectables among us are called upon to sweep back the tide of delusion threatening our decent and time-honored prerogative of making wills and having them broken for the benefit of unknown collateral relatives, lawyers, chorus girls and other common law tenements.

It is no less incumbent upon us as Americans and plutocrats to thwart the disposition of meddlesome and impertinent persons of questioning in print the wisdom of the Almighty in constituting us trustees without bond for the great indigent and financial unwashed. Aside from the blasphemous character of such delusions, expressed misgivings do nobody good and actually mislead the public into a complete misconception of the profound contumely of riches.

Those foolishly inclined to consider our lot a bed of roses, hyacinths and Lawson pinks, will please reflect upon the dread uncertainty of not knowing at what moment “one” may be precipitated overboard from a yacht or be hurled to a violent finish from the back of a vicious polo pony or perchance dislocate the spine on the palace stair or the inlaid floor, or superinduce apoplexy by overindulgence in golf or bridge! And reflect for a moment upon the hazard of the auto from infants and common pedestrians getting tangled in the machinery! And how about being written up in the putrid press and being called a congenital money maker with pictures of some exceedingly primitive people called parents! And how about being compelled to worry along without means to buy new hair, new lungs and new stomachs? And how about irritating irregularities in the water supply when the stock is famishing and how about the Sunday school class coming in late after a peevish week in rebates?

Fellow plutocrats, aristocrats and autocrats, let us steel—ourselves—yea, to callousness against the crime of being misunderstood by the molten masses and betrayed from within by the two-faced Tom Lawson!

HER SPECIALTY.

There’s a prejudice extensive ’gainst the Russian and his ways,
For the ruler or his people there is very little praise;
In the hurried march of progress they are badly out of date
(By the way, they’ve information on this subject just of late);
But with all their backward learning, yea, their sodden ignorance,
In one respect the Russians lead us all a merry dance
In a single branch of knowledge they can put us all to shame,
They can give us every face-card and then skin us at the game.
A high official undertakes a pleasant social drive
And it constitutes the last time he is ever seen alive;
In fact, the mere narration rather fills us with a dread,
For it is his last appearance, whether in the flesh or dead.
There’s a missile thrown, a loud report, and when the smoke is gone
There are not sufficient fragments left to pin a medal on;
There’s a gentle human drizzle, lasting frequently a day,
And they hold a tweedledeum o’er the dissipated spray.
To her style in execution as to neatness or dispatch,
There’s no other Christian nation that can hold a decent match.

HOW LONG?

To the patriotically inclined, the callousness of the public conscience to reforms freely demanded by the popular welfare is indeed alarming.

Consider for example the supine indifference of the country at large over the ignominious defeat in Kansas of a great moral measure to enact the ten commandments into law! And that it was accomplished in the teeth of a united support of a large, active and pious Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian lobby!

And who does not recall the humiliating failure of the Georgia patriot to have passed a bill to protect the long neglected interests of bull bats, turtles and other game birds hitherto and still entirely ignored by that presumably enlightened commonwealth?

And while there was a low and sullen popular rumble in Tennessee against a shameless lobby of centralized bachelors that by bribes, imprecations and cajoleries smothered a _pro bono publico_ measure to tax their immunity from the strenuous life, public sentiment is once more callous and numb.

As a climax in corporate effrontery, however, as well as an extreme illustration of popular lethargy, a Missouri bill to prohibit the criminal practice of tipping waiters in hotels, restaurants and cafés was ingloriously snowed under and that, too, in the face of the lynx-eyed young governor. A cunning realization by the beef trust of the impossibility of getting its unrighteous commodity before the eating public with such a regulation in vogue, is no doubt responsible for this grave popular misfortune.

Hence the inquiry, what of the times when the public continues indifferent and when those who alone have the courage to essay the people’s relief from the thrall of mammon and general unrighteousness are to be derided as freaks or purchased, and nothing done about it!

A CUBAN SKETCH

By Harvey H. Hannah.

“Anita, my child, the Alcalde declared last night at the market place that the Americans would come to-day. I want you to braid fresh flowers in your hair as your mother used to do, then take my hand, child, and lead me down by the Plaza de Jesus, close by the fountain, that we may await the coming of our friends.”

“But, father, my dress is all torn and ragged, and you are old and blind; they will not expect such as we are to welcome them. They are soldiers, father, and I am afraid of soldiers since the Spanish guards beat you down at the Palace gate when you asked for alms.”

“Yes, I know, little one, they are soldiers, but they are American soldiers, American volunteers who have come to liberate Cuba; then let us hurry, child, and reach the Plaza before it is crowded.”

The old man was a Cuban reconcentrado, lame and blind and homeless, the miserable creature of Spanish cruelty. The child that led him was his grandchild, whose father was killed at “Royal Blanco,” defending the Cuban flag. She was a typical little creole beauty, with face as sweet as a poet’s dream, yet sorrow and poverty made her beauty pathetic. Leading the old blind man, she entered the crowded Plaza, and whispering to him, said: “Father, we are near the fountain, now, and your seat on the stone bench is vacant.”

“Yes, my Anita,” said the old man, making the sign of the cross, “I hear the gurgling of the water which the blessed Virgin gives to us poor people to drink; now let me sit down and we will wait. There seem to be many people on the Plaza to-day and from their voices they must indeed be happy.”

“Oh! yes, father,” said the child, “I have never seen so many people since General Wilder’s army was here; and all the ladies are dressed in white and carry wreaths of flowers on their arms; and so many, father, have little flags in their hands. I’ve never seen such flags before; they are striped with red and white, and one corner is blue like the sky, all full of silver stars. They are beautiful! and must mean something good for our poor Cuba.”

“Yes, Anita,” said the old man, as a strange light lit up his face, “it’s the flag of liberty, the American stars and stripes. Oh! that I could only see them; but what is the cheering, child? What is the cause of the people’s huzzas? Are the soldiers coming?”

“No, father, no,” said the little one; “but General Gomez is taking down the yellow flag of Spain from the City Hall and putting up your liberty flag—the one of the stars and stripes—in its place.”

“God be praised,” muttered the old man on the stone bench, feebly making the sign of the Cross. He leaned back as if he had fallen asleep, but it was a sleep from which no mortal could awake him. The old patriot’s heart had when he ceased to beat, with happiness, knew that his unhappy land was free.

Anita, thinking that he had fallen asleep, tried to arouse him, and cried out to him, “Father, don’t go to sleep—don’t you hear the music? And listen to the people’s cheer! Let us join in their cry, ‘Viva los Americanos!’ Oh, father, here they come! Look! look! all dressed in blue with that beautiful flag waving over them. See the ladies throw their wreaths of flowers on the ground before them! Wake up, dear father; please wake up. I will take the roses out of my hair and throw them, too.” And holding the hand of the old dead man on the rock bench at the fountain, little Anita threw her only rosebud to our Volunteers in Blue.

One soldier in the ranks saw the child and picked up the flower. It brought to him memories of one back in Tennessee. The next day the city officials reported the death and burial of an old pauper, with many others, but the world never knew that the old man’s heart stopped beating with happiness over his country’s freedom, and none inquired what had become of the dark-eyed child who held his hand. Anita was all alone in the street, but the Tennessean who picked up her rosebud watched after her, and she soon became the pet of the American camp. New dresses, new shoes, new friends, made in her a great change, and she was soon the idol of the boys in blue.

But again Anita stands at the fountain in the Plaza de Jesus all alone. The Tennessee Volunteers have been ordered home, they have done everything in their power to leave the child comfortable and in tender hands, but she follows them to the Plaza. Tears fill the eyes of the boys as they tell her good-bye; the flowers seem to wither in her hair, the smiles die on her lips, the old sorrow comes back in her eyes, her soldier friends are gone, the liberty flag is gone; the old rock bench by the fountain is empty; she is all alone on the Plaza to-night—poor little Anita. How much like Anita is Cuba, and how much like Cuba is Anita.

WITHIN A VALLEY NARROW.

BY INGRAM CROCKETT.

Within a valley narrow
I heard the vireo sing,
And many a white-crowned sparrow,
In silvery whispering.

The blue-eyed grass was gleaming
Upon a bank of green,
And drowsy winds were dreaming
The tulip trees between.

Above a pool unwrinkled,
Their faces fair to see
The sunlight o’er them sprinkled,
Leaned purple fleur-de-lis.

And with a grace entrancing,
Above the avens low,
White butterflies were dancing
In bright adagio.

And while for them a cricket
His silver strings did smite,
From out a wild-grape thicket
Was thrust a hand of white.

And thro’ the leaves uplifted,
I saw, a moment’s space,
Where dogwood blossoms drifted—
A dryad’s laughing face.

LEISURE HOURS

For Conference Between the Magazine and its Readers.

Let us be mutually helpful. In this, the initial number of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE, one of the dominant thoughts in our minds is that of friendly reciprocity. You would not have subscribed to this periodical, we take it, were you not friendly to it and to its editor.

We wish not merely to amuse you, but to help you; and we wish you to help us, that, through us, you may help your own people, your own state and section and the whole country. To this end we invite, for the use of this department, communications on all subjects of unusual interest and importance, such as:

Prose and poetry of sentiment, fact and fancy.

Forgotten or unpublished bits of history and tradition.

Anecdotes of famous men and women, and of quaint and curious occurrences.

The best short stories and tales you have heard or read, if unusual or unfamiliar.

Suggestions for the special benefit of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE, how it may be improved, what it should contain, what it should omit.

Write us these things that all may profit by something of transcendent interest to each.

Also ask questions of interest and importance on any subject. If we can answer them, we will do so; and if we can’t answer them, we will invite our readers to do so.

Address all such communications to Leisure Hours Department of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE.

What a mine of hidden wealth there is in the unrecorded legends of the South and the Southwest! What tales of the cavaliers of the Old Dominion, of the mountaineers, of those modern argonauts who braved in the wilderness more and greater dangers than did the fabled followers of Jason, and whose descendants are now enjoying the golden fleece which eluded their grasp! What of Oglethorpe, and Boone and Crockett, Whitefield and Doak, Jackson and Sam Houston, Lafitte and Bowie and Burr; of Lost Island, Barrancas and the Everglades; of the Creoles and Acadians, and the thousand and one thrilling tales of the treacherous red man! All these, and more, offer to the present and the future story teller an inexhaustible supply of the purest ore for transmuting, fusing genius.

And what gems of prose and poetry lie unnoticed in the literature of the South! While other sections have given wide and constant publicity to their writers and their writers’ productions (and it was their duty to do so), the poets and the masters of prose of the South of former days lie in forgotten graves and the dust of the library gathers thick upon their unopened volumes.

What does the present generation know of Timrod, the “sweetest singer of America?” What of Sims, pronounced by Poe to be the greatest writer of romantic fiction since the time of Cooper? These are but two out of the galaxy of unnumbered stars in the Southern firmament, and they are mentioned merely to give point to the fact that suitable homage is not being rendered to the lights of other days.

For many years has Governor Taylor desired to establish a magazine that should be not only a medium by which to reach an audience as widespread as the country itself, but which should also be a vehicle of Southern expression, for the exploitation and advancement of Southern literature, for the preservation of old time Southern ideals, and for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the material resources and advantages of this section of our country—this primarily. And, secondarily, to breathe abroad a catholic spirit of patriotism, uncramped by a scintilla of sectionalism (opprobriously so termed), of envy, or of ill will to any one; but to carry to every home and to each individual therein personally a message of peace, of harmony and of happiness.

BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE, like its editor, stands for the South and for the sunshine that smiles on its beauty and ripens the fruit of its rich and fertile soil. Every fair and precious possession of this section will find representation and appreciation in these pages, and every uplift of purpose, every outspreading of energy now working toward the development of the South will receive the encouragement of this publication.

What the past holds in precious memory, great achievement and pure ideals shall be cherished and held. But in a special sense BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE is working in the present and for the future. The record of the last decade in the South has become the wonder of the industrial and commercial world, but if the spiritual and intellectual development does not keep pace with this material growth, the figures which record our wealth and prosperity will be but the handwriting on the wall, warning us of downfall and ruin.

It is, therefore, the purpose of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE to offer each month, stories, poems and articles mined from the rich vein of Southern sentiment and of Southern life; and these riches will be offered to an audience as numerous and appreciative as any to which a Southern writer can appeal.

A momentous change impends in the citizenship of the South, perhaps in character, certainly in number. For the South is vibrant with energy, its commercial interests have never before throbbed with such activity; and never before has the need of intelligent labor been quite so urgent. The negro, indeed, is here, and for certain kinds of work is the best toiler in the world, if he be properly handled. For field labor, for forest work, for outdoor rough work of every description, for numerous kinds of inside work and for porterage and drayage, he is unequalled, provided he be not given authority over others, or an official position of any kind. In such event he becomes spoiled, foolish and useless.

To skilled labor in factories and mills the negro is not adapted, as a rule, and is inefficient; and the manufacturing industries of the South are growing apace. Extraordinary efforts are, therefore, being made to divert to the states south of Mason and Dixon’s line a part of the enormous flood of immigrants which for many years has been directed toward the West and the Northwest.

And these aliens are coming South in ever increasing streams. Railroads transport them; land agents urge them; commercial organizations invite them, and farms and factories employ them—and what will be the result? Let us see!

Until this horde of foreigners began to debouch upon the fertile soil of Dixie, this section possessed the purest Anglo-Saxon blood, not only in America, but in the world. In the area south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, there were, and still are, fewer foreign-born inhabitants than are found in the single state of Connecticut.

How will the South be affected by the new trend? Can it preserve its old ideals and the purity of its blood, while utilizing the new elements in the building up of its material welfare?

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.

THE CLANSMAN: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. By Thomas
Dixon, Jr. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. Price, $1.50.

BETHANY: A Story of the Old South. By Thomas E. Watson. D. Appleton &
Co., New York. Price, $1.50.

In considering these two books, it is impossible to avoid comparing and contrasting them with each other. Both aim at historical study as well as romantic presentation, and both are conceived from the Southerner’s view-point of the great Civil War. Both writers are famous platform figures, and neither, it may be conceded, is equipped by taste, temperament, or training, for purely literary work. Both Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson have interests more absorbing than the production of artistic fiction, and the novels of neither can fairly be judged by the higher critical standards. One feels in reading the fiction of Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson that it is but the vehicle of a purpose other than literary, and furthermore, that that purpose must be the presentation of truth. And here it is that the gap between the two authors begins to widen, for Mr. Dixon’s self-conscious rhetoric and platform appeal give the lie even to unimpeachable history, while Mr. Watson’s narration has the very accent of truth in its homely simplicity and utter absence of pose.

“The Clansman” opens upon the political ferment at Washington just before Lincoln’s assassination, and Lincoln, Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens, and other prominent men of that period are depicted in somewhat daring detail of characterization and narration. With the revolution of the national policy which followed Lincoln’s death, the scene is shifted to South Carolina, where the horrors of reconstruction and the heroic work of the Ku Klux Klan are painted in Mr. Dixon’s most highly colored rhetoric. We have no disposition to belittle the tragedy of that period in the South, and there is no doubt that the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan did save the Southern people from much indignity and degradation, but the manner of Mr. Dixon’s narration has not the dignity of truth, and, however true his individual instances may be, the effect of the story is not that of truth. The note of heroic determination and impressive mystery which dignified the mummery of the Ku Klux Klan into a power to save Southern civilization and protect Southern womanhood, Mr. Dixon misses entirely, and his treatment, like a tawdry bit of gilding, vulgarizes what it touches.

“Mr. Dixon, in literature, has repeated his successes of the pulpit and platform,” his publishers’ note informs us, and it is so far true that he has repeated in his novels the methods of his platform and pulpit successes. But save in the commercial sense, it cannot be said that Mr. Dixon’s work in fiction is a success, and it stands justified only by a prevailing bad taste and his own and his publishers’ pocket-book.

“A Story of the Old South”—we may be pardoned for a slightly tired feeling on reading those words on the title page of “Bethany,” but the first chapter is reassuring in its sturdy presentation of middle class Georgia life, simple, unpretentious, plain, and absolutely uncolored with the grandeur, so familiar in “befo’ the wah” fiction. It is refreshing to read such passages as these:

“We Hortons were a family of middle class farmers. We had never been anything else. We never expected to be anything else. Our condition was good enough for us. We had plenty of land. We had always had it.... Yes; we had prospered; and had always been independent. We were not rich, you understand: just comfortable; with good farms, fat stock, and likely niggers We owed no debts; we had a few hundred of dollars in pocket, ready for an emergency—such as a request for a loan to some friend who might have got into a temporary ‘tight’ by betting on the wrong horse, or by trying to make four queens beat a straight flush....

“So far as we came into touch with the outside world at all, we were indebted to Bethany—a little, one-horse hamlet, where we worshiped and got the mail. Bethany had a granite depot on the Georgia railroad. Bethany had a post office. Bethany had a dry-goods store and two doggeries. Anyone who wished to run a horse race, fight chickens, play poker, or throw ‘chuck-a-luck,’ could do so at Bethany.

“The mansion in which we lived was a very modest affair. It did not, in the least, resemble a Grecian temple which had been sent into exile and which was striving, unsuccessfully, to look at ease among corn-cribs, cow-pens, horse-stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, negro cabins, and worm-fenced cotton fields. It did not perch upon the top of the highest hill for miles around, and browbeat the whole community with its arrogant self-assertion. No; ours was just a plain house and none too large, not built out of bricks brought over from England, but of timbers torn from the heart of the long-leaf Georgia pine.”

In this vein Mr. Watson proceeds to give a picture of the plain Georgian and his environment, which has all the charm of personal reminiscence and the weight of historic truth. One feels in reading these simple annals of the Hortons of Georgia that just so they must have lived and not otherwise, and the last paragraph of the first chapter describes for us the effect of Mr. Watson’s portrayal:

“It all rises before me complete as a picture, vivid as a flash of lightning—a plain, unpretentious, comfortable, happy Southern home of the old regime—and like a castle among the clouds it is gone forever, even while I gaze; just as the republic of our fathers, of which that old home was a typical part, is gone, forever gone.”

In Georgia, perhaps, this sturdy middle class exercised a more potent and pervading influence over social and political life than was the case in other Southern states, and its flavor and quality are reproduced to the life by Mr. Watson. As we read his record we see what was perhaps the most practical realization of the democratic ideal of society which this democracy has yet produced—a community of Anglo-Saxon blood, rugged manhood, gentle womanhood, simple habits and neighborly fraternity. Mr. Watson gives us the picture of this period with no reservation or exaggeration,—its beauties and its blots, its virtues and its vices, its development and its limitation, and throughout his work there is a rare mingling of impartial honesty and the sympathetic touch of close and intimate knowledge and association.

The political agitation of the two years previous to the war in Georgia is reproduced carefully and effectively by Mr. Watson, and the Toombs and Stephens struggle set forth clearly and skilfully. The pen portraits of these great Georgians are sharply and strongly outlined, and may be regarded as of historic interest and importance. A spicy and forcible chapter is that describing a political barbecue at Bethany at which Toombs and Stephens spoke, and of which the festivities were further marked by an eye-gouging affair between two drunken patriots. We see in Mr. Watson’s narrative the various currents of Southern sentiment and their irresistible convergence into the tide of secession, and the Southern attitude is strongly justified as a logical result of the Northern breach of contract in refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave laws. “As to the right of secession,” says Mr. Watson, “no one denied it.... With Adams, Webster, and Calhoun harmonized in favor of secession, it did seem that the principle must be sound.”

The second part of Mr. Watson’s book, and not the more interesting, treats of the war and a rather shadowy love affair, pitched in the key of the sentimental songs of that period, with their faded flowers, mocking-birds, and pathetic partings. The story of the war is told briefly, with no prejudice or passion, from the gallant days of hope and victory to the last sad struggle against the inevitable. There is no swagger of tone, no attempt at glamour in these war pictures, but a faithful and forcible presentation of what that time meant to the common soldier and the South. Indeed, the whole book has a historic value as a truthful study of an interesting period of Southern and national life, and with no pretense of literary art, it has a distinct charm of simple narration and vivid reminiscence.

THE LAW OF THE LAND. By EMERSON HOUGH, Author of “The Mississippi
Bubble,” etc. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.

There is no lack of excitement in Mr. Hough’s latest novel—intrigue, mystery, villainy, a negro uprising, a Mississippi overflow—these succeed each other rapidly and bewilderingly, and there is “something doing” in every chapter. The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,—“the richest region on the face of the whole earth,” “the heart of the only American part of America”—and the race question in its intensest and most picturesque form is the theme of the book. From a dramatic and artistic standpoint, the theme and the setting are well chosen, and in the description of the negro gathering in the forest at the call of the savage drum and the half-hinted horrors of the revenge of the whites, there is the unmistakable thrill of literary power and skill.

The conventional hero is a railroad claim agent, rather an original role for a Southern hero of romance, and a thoroughly good fellow he is, but the masterpiece of characterization is that of Colonel Calvin Blount of the Big House,—rough, brave, chivalrous, lordly, ruling over his wide acres with the imperious will and open-handed generosity of a feudal baron. His trial for murder in a lynching case is the culminating point of the book, and Eddring’s speech in his defense presents the author’s solution of the race problem in the South. “The law of the land” must be transgressed sometimes in the letter that it may be kept in the spirit, and Colonel Blount is acquitted of the murder which he committed in view of the horrors which negro rule would bring to Southern civilization. There is nothing new or profound in Mr. Hough’s treatment of the race problem, but in presenting it as it exists in the lower South in its most extreme form, he has availed himself of excellent material for dramatic romance. To the average American the life to which Mr. Hough introduces us in “The Law of the Land” will seem as strange and foreign as a glimpse into the jungles of Africa, but it is real, if exceptional, and Mr. Hough’s vivid picture may disturb the academic theories of New England to some extent. Had the author spared us the treatise on the race problem as embodied in Eddring’s defense of Colonel Blount, the novel would have been lightened by so much dead weight of argument and rhetoric. As it is, “The Law of the Land,” leaving out the tinselly plot on which the heroine’s identity and fortune depend, is a good story of dramatic power, picturesque description, and strong characterization.

THE MASTER-WORD. A Story of the South To-day. By L. H. HAMMOND. The
Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.

This, the first novel, of a Southern woman, bears no mark of immaturity, feminine weakness, or sectional prejudice. The style is notably compact and finished, the handling strong and restrained, and the grasp of philosophic breadth and impartiality. Mrs. Hammond is something more than the clever woman who, in such numbers, is pervading the literature of the day—she is clearly a woman who can think closely and deeply, and her literary work has a real solidity of substance and significance. She has given us in “The Master-Word” a strong and original story, direct from her own thought, experience and observation, though it does not prove always humanly convincing or artistically satisfactory.

“The Master-Word” is a problem novel in a double sense, for though the race question is the theme with which it is chiefly concerned, the sex question figures also in a subordinate way. Both problems are solved by the writer with the master-word, Love, not Law—Love that suffers, sacrifices, and conquers, not Law that judges, condemns and punishes. This idea is wrought out with psychical insight and vigorous reasoning, and as a thesis is eminently satisfactory, but the story which is the medium of its illustration does not always ring true, and moreover is weakest at the crucial points.

Margaret, the young wife of Philip Lawton, a prosperous and aristocratic lawyer and farmer of Tennessee, discovers suddenly the fact of her husband’s criminal relations with a mulatto woman and his fatherhood of the latter’s child, a girl about the age of Margaret’s own daughter. She refuses to forgive and their estranged relations continue till he is stricken with pneumonia. At his deathbed the love she thought dead revives, and she forgives, as she realizes that the master-word is Love, not Law. This scene, by the way, is strongly reminiscent of the concluding chapter of “The Mettle of the Pasture,” where the dying husband delivers himself of his stagy and unnatural monologue.

After Philip’s death, Margaret, as a sort of reparation in Philip’s name, conceives the idea of taking his illegitimate negro child, deserted by its mother, under her protection and care, so the little quadroon girl is brought to the Lawton home and placed in charge of Aunt Dilsey, the old mammy, who proclaims it her grandchild. There Viry is reared, playing with the Lawton children, sharing much of their life, but recognized as a “nigger” and treated on that basis. She is sent, as she grows older, to a negro college, where she learns rapidly, and finally comes back to the Lawtons and Aunt Dilsey, dissatisfied and embittered, frankly hating the race with which she is classed, but attached by the strongest affection to Bess Lawton, her half-sister. She becomes a teacher in a negro school, but holds herself aloof from the negroes, and grows more bitter and desperate. Bruce Carleton, the lover of Bess, is the object of her secret passion, and the savage, bestial strain in her make-up comes out in her plan to attract him and hold him in what to him would be a purely sensual tie. Finding out that Bess really loves him, however, she renounces her purpose, and, hopeless of happiness, tries to commit suicide. Then comes the culminating point of the book in the disclosure to Viry by Margaret of the secret of the former’s birth. Margaret lays bare her own suffering and her husband’s sin and makes a powerful appeal to the girl to accept her maimed and burdened life and make it in some measure an atonement and a redemption. Viry’s heart is reached at last, and she, too, bows to the master-word, Love, which means for her a life of service and loneliness. The race line must not be obliterated—this is made plain, and Mrs. Hammond’s argument is notably strong and unhackneyed. Margaret’s reply to Viry, when the latter, “the red blood burning in her face,” throws up to her the existence of three million mulattos as a proof that instinct is not against the union of black and white, is the most convincing and complete answer to that plea that has yet been presented.

It seems to us unfortunate that Mrs. Hammond should have chosen to base her story on an incident at once so repulsive and so untrue as that of Philip Lawton’s criminal connection with the degraded mulatto. For, under the conditions described and set forth by the author, the case of Philip is so absolutely untypical and strikingly exceptional that its use as the foundation stone of so serious a story seems an amazing blunder of judgment, taste and ethics. Then, again, it is hardly conceivable that a woman of Margaret’s training and temperament, would have found her duty in bringing her husband’s negro child into her own household in constant contact with herself and her children. The step seems forced and unnatural in the highest degree, and no less so appears the wife’s disclosure of her husband’s shame after so many years to the quadroon girl. Nature, womanhood, taste, all revolt against such a situation. Reality is sacrificed to theory, and Margaret becomes the author’s creature, not her creation; her spokesman, not a natural woman. Viry, too, is not quite genuine to our perceptions, and can certainly not be regarded as a typical product of her blood and environment. At best her story is an extreme case, put in its most extreme terms.

The phosphate region of Middle Tennessee is the scene of the story, and its peculiar conditions of labor and the twists and turns of local politics are presented with a keen and trenchant touch. The young people of the book are an extremely natural and agreeable set, and the love affair of Bess and Bruce is as fresh and wholesome as the fine country air that pervades the book. Bruce is really a wonder for a woman’s hero, being neither cad nor prig, but merely a straight and likable young fellow with human faults and failings. Aunt Dilsey is at once a photograph, a phonograph, and a sympathetic sketch of the old-time negro mammy.

There is a looseness of construction, a prolixity of trifling incident, at certain portions of the book which at times weaken its interest, and it is evident that purely artistic ideals were not its chief inspiration. Still, when all is said, its merits far outweigh its faults, and it is well worth the serious criticism it will receive. It testifies strongly to the writer’s brain and skill and arouses interest in her future work.

THE SECRET WOMAN. By EDEN PHILLPOTTS. The Macmillan Company, New York.
Price, $1.50.

The comparison to Hardy has become a commonplace of any criticism of Mr. Phillpotts’ literary output, and the comparison carries an inevitable distinction and disparagement. The distinction is that Mr. Phillpotts is the one writer worthy to be called a disciple of the Wessex chronicler, and the disparagement is in the differentiation at once apparent in the similarity. Primitive nature, physical and human, is Mr. Phillpotts’ theme as it is Mr. Hardy’s, and the primal passions in rustic life are the elements of both novelists’ tragedy and comedy. But though one man may want and try to make from the same material the same things as wrought by another, it is out of his power to do so, and Mr. Phillpotts’ work lacks the strength and seriousness of Mr. Hardy’s. In the first place, the colorless irony of the older writer, epitomized so perfectly in his title, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” is lacking entirely in Mr. Phillpotts, and the latter’s florid descriptions and psychologic analyses fail of the Hardy effect because of this lack. The personal note of Mr. Hardy, ironic, accentless, incisive, is the salt to his magnificent dish of natural elements, without which their strength and freshness would pall upon the taste. And as a literary artist, too, Mr. Phillpotts falls below his master. Despite the wealth of natural description with which he burdens so heavily his narratives, there is nothing that touches the Hardy landscapes in power and artistic truth. The wonderful and haunting picture of the moor in “The Return of the Native” is Hardy at highwater mark, it is true, but there is nothing in the Phillpotts gallery that can even be compared to it.

“The Secret Woman” is a story of human frailty, passion, crime, and soul struggle, set in the rocks and glades of Dartmoor. An illicit love between a married man and a beautiful and pagan-hearted girl is the basis of the plot, and the murder of the man by his wife in a fit of jealous rage is the first act of the tragedy. A touch worthy of Hardy occurs in the interview between husband and wife just after the latter’s discovery of the man’s unfaithfulness, when a sudden gust of wind and rain drowns the wife’s voice as she offers pardon, thus through the blow of blind fate sealing the husband’s doom. The murder is witnessed by the two sons, but is kept secret, though it divides the brothers and fills the mother’s life with a never-dying repentance. The figure of the murderess, Anne Redvers, and the study of her character and soul development, are the most elaborate and striking work of the book, but it is Salome, “the secret woman,” and her intrigue with the dead man, unknown and unsuspected, that furnish the motive for the drama. In striking contrast are the two women, one dark, stern, conscientious, softening and mellowing through sorrow and repentance into sympathy and forgiveness, the other fair, conscienceless, self-indulgent, swayed but by emotion and passion.

Jesse, one of the sons of the murdered man, loves this girl, his father’s paramour, and she becomes his betrothed, driven to this step by poverty, though she never intends to marry him. This intolerable situation is finally ended by his confession to Salome of his mother’s crime which has darkened his soul, and this is followed by Salome’s reckless disclosure of her love and sin to Anne Redvers, whom she denounces as a murderess. Anne goes to prison gladly, Jesse kills himself, and Salome lives on, constant to her dead lover and incapable of repentance. Truly Mr. Phillpotts has not spared us a possible horror.

We have, of course, the rustic comedy beneath the tragedy—the artless peasants, their quaint talk and ancient superstitions; and the figure of Joseph Westaway, the shiftless, tender-hearted incompetent, bravely and unreasonably optimistic amid crowding misfortunes, is very nearly a masterpiece of portraiture.

In this terrible drama, Mr. Phillpotts offers us in succession the various theories of materialism, Old Testament theology, pagan indifference, and simple, unquestioning faith in a divine power. Each is presented with admirable impartiality, its play upon the story being merely an aid to the desired dramatic effect. At the last, the struggle is between Anne and Salome, and the former who has found peace in Christian faith and atonement, makes her appeal to Salome to seek comfort and salvation by the same road. Finally Salome promises to take the sacrament, but as she kneels at the sacred table, her heart is unchanged—

“A man’s voice suddenly ended the silence and—echoes from a far past—his words fell upon her ear strangely. All solemnity has perished from them. The Commandments tinkled like a child’s little prayer at bedtime.... Light rained down and quenched the candles and touched the petals of exotic flowers. The air of the sanctuary was sweet with them; but Salome’s thoughts harboured in the dust.”

AMERICA, ASIA AND THE PACIFIC. By WOLF VON SCHIERBRAND, PH.D. Henry
Holt & Co., New York.

The interest of the ancient and of the mediæval world centered around the Mediterranean. Recall the names of the states that fought for and obtained the trade of that sea and you have the history of civilization. Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Venice, Spain, one after another, played the leading role. With the discovery of the new world the scene shifted to the Atlantic and England shouldered her way to the limelight. Now, it seems, another new world and a richer has been discovered. It happens also to be the oldest world and the last act of the drama is to be played on the Pacific, the widest stage of all. Before the whole world as audience, the nations are contending for the prize—the trade of China. Which one is to get it?

Mr. von Schierbrand contributes to the solution of this question a very entertaining and instructive volume. From his standpoint, which is a most interesting one, the importance of the trade of the Far East to ourselves is not to be overestimated. The wonderful productive energy of the United States makes the need of new markets imperative. Four hundred millions of Chinese can furnish us such markets. Basing our figures on the precedent of Japan, China, if she would, could buy of the world $35,000,000,000 more. Her mineral wealth, still undeveloped, is greater than that of North America.