"Posson Jone," "Jean-ah Poquelin," and Madame Delphine, which, despite its length and its separate publication, is a short story belonging to the Old Creole Days group, are among the most perfect of American short stories and mark the highest reach of Cable's art.
The Grandissimes, his first long romance, appeared in 1880. Never was work of art painted on broader canvas or with elements more varied and picturesque. Though centering in a little nook among the bayous, it contains all Louisiana. Everywhere perspectives down a long past: glimpses of the explorers, family histories, old forgotten wrongs, vendettas, survivals from a feudal past, wild traditions, superstitions. Grandissime and Fusilier, young men of the D'Iberville exploring party, get lost in the swamps. "When they had lain down to die and had only succeeded in falling to sleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and beauty, and fell sick of love." The love of this Indian queen begins the romance. Both eager to possess her, they can settle the matter only with dice. Fusilier wins and becomes the founder of a proud line, semibarbarous in its haughtiness and beauty, the Capulets to De Grapion's Montagues. The culmination comes a century later when the old feudal régime in Louisiana was closed by Napoleon and the remnants of the warring families were united according to the approved Montague-Capulet formula.
But the theme of the book is wider than this quarrel of families, wider than the conflict of two irreconcilable civilizations and the passing of the outworn. In a vague way it centers in the episode of Bras Coupé, the African king who refused to be a slave and held firm until his haughty soul was crushed out with inconceivable brutality. The cumulative and soul-withering power of an ancient wrong, the curse of a dying man which works its awful way until the pure love of innocent lovers removes it—it is The House of the Seven Gables transferred to the barbarous swamps of the Atchafalaya.
The strangeness of the book grows upon one as one reads. It is a book of lurid pictures—the torture and death of Bras Coupé, the murder of the négresse Clemence, which in sheer horror and brutal, unsparing realism surpasses anything in Uncle Tom's Cabin, anything indeed in the Russian realists. It is a book too with a monotone of fear: the nameless dread that comes of holding down a race by force, or as Joel C. Harris has phrased it, "that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder and rapine and pillage"; the superstitious thrill when at dead of night throbs up from a neighboring slave yard "the monotonous chant and machine-like time-beat of the African dance"; the horror of finding morning after morning on one's pillow voodoo warnings and ghastly death charms placed seemingly by supernatural hands. No one has ever surpassed Cable in making felt this uncanny side of the negro. His characterization of the voodoo quadroon woman Palmyre with her high Latin, Jaloff-African ancestry, her "barbaric and magnetic beauty that startled the beholder like the unexpected drawing out of a jeweled sword," her physical perfection—lithe of body as a tigress and as cruel, witching and alluring, yet a thing of horror, "a creature that one would want to find chained"—it fingers at one's heart and makes one fear.
And with all this strangeness, this flash after flash of vivid characterization, a style to match. "Victor Hugo," one exclaims often as one reads. Let us quote, say from chapter five. The stars are Cable's:
There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determination to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissimes.
"My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse; "it is useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we will try another plan. Thank you," he added, as she handed his coat back to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new plan, Madame De Grapion—the precious little heroine!—before the myrtles offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith tradition) than herself.
Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very day Numa Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, received from Governor De Vaudreuil a cadetship.
"Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we shall see! Ha! we shall see!"
"We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family. "Will Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?"
* * * * *Bang! Bang!
Alas, Madame De Grapion!
It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a braver little widow.
It is French, too, in its sudden turns, its fragmentary paragraphs, its sly humor, its swift summings-up with an epigram:
"Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we'll return to our senses."
"Now I'll put on my feathers again," says the plucked bird.
But as one reads on one realizes more and more that this style comes from no mere imitation of a master: it is Creole; it is the style that is the counterpart of the Creole temperament. It is verisimilitude; it is interpretation.
Thus far the strength of the book; there are weaknesses as great. Cable failed, as Harte failed, as most of the masters of the short story have failed, in constructive power. The magnificent thesis of the romance is not worked out; it is barely suggested rather than made to dominate the piece. Moreover, the interest does not accumulate and culminate at the end. It is a rich mass of materials rather than a finished romance. The emphasis is laid upon characters, episodes, conditions, atmosphere, to the neglect of construction. From it Cable might have woven a series of perfect short stories: some parts indeed, like the tale of Bras Coupé, are complete short stories as they stand. The book is a gallery rather than a single work of art.
Dr. Sevier, 1885, marks the beginning of Cable's later style, the beginning of the decline in his art. The year before he had taken up his permanent residence in Massachusetts and now as a literary celebrity, with Boston not far, he became self-conscious and timid. His art had matured in isolation; there had been an elemental quality about it that had come from his very narrowness and lack of formal education. In the classic New England atmosphere the Gallic element, the naïve simplicity, the elfin charm that had made his early writings like no others, faded out of his art. It was as if Burns after the Kilmarnock edition had studied poetry at Oxford and then had settled in literary London. Doctor Sevier is not a romance at all; it is a realistic novel of the Howells type, a study of the Civil War period as it had passed under Cable's own eyes, with no plot and no culminating love interest. It is a running chronicle of ten years in the lives of John and Mary Richling, tedious at times, impeded with problem discussion and philosophizing. Its strength lies in its characterization: the Italian Ristofalo and his Irish wife are set off to the life; but why should the creator of Madame Delphine and Posson Jone and Palmyre turn to Irish and Italian characterization? The story, too, has the same defects as The Grandissimes: it lacks proportion and balance. With a large canvas Cable becomes always awkward and ineffective. With Bonaventure, graphic as parts of it unquestionably are, one positively loses patience. Its plan is chaotic. At the end, where should come the climax of the plot, are inserted three long chapters telling with minute and terrifying realism the incidents of a flood in the canebrakes. It is magnificent, yet it is "lumber." It is introduced apparently to furnish background for the death of the "Cajun," but the "Cajun" is only an incidental figure in the book. To deserve such "limelight" he should have been the central character who had been hunted with increasing interest up to the end and his crime and his punishment should have been the central theme.
With Madame Delphine (1881) had closed the first and the great period in Cable's literary career. The second period was a period of miscellany: journalized articles on the history and the characteristics of the Creoles, on New Orleans and its life, on Louisiana, its history and traditions, on phases of social reform. Necessary as this work may have been, one feels inclined to deplore it. When one has discovered new provinces in the realm of gold one does not well, it would seem, to lay aside his magic flute and prepare guide books to the region.
The New England atmosphere brought to life a native area in Cable. His mother had been of New England ancestry. Moral wrestlings, questions of reform, problems of conscience, were a part of his birthright. One feels it even in his earliest work: he had seen, we feel, the problem of The Grandissimes before he had found the story. After his removal to Northampton, Massachusetts, it may be said that reform work became his real profession. Not that we criticize his choice, for life ever is greater than mere art; we record it simply because it explains. He formed home culture clubs for the education and the esthetic culture of wage-earners, and conducted a magazine in the interest of the work; he interested himself actively in the cause of the negro; so actively, indeed, that after his Silent South and The Negro Question and the problem novel John March, Southerner, the South practically disowned him.
His third period begins, perhaps, with his novel Strong Hearts in 1899. The pen that so long had been dipped in controversy and journalism and philanthropic propaganda again essayed fiction, but it was too late. The old witchery was gone. His later novels, all his fiction indeed after Madame Delphine, with the exception perhaps of parts of Bonaventure, read as if written by a disciple of the earlier Cable. The verve, the sly humor, the Gallic finesse, the Creole strangeness and charm, have disappeared. There is a tightening in the throat as one reads the last page of Madame Delphine, there is a flutter of the heart as one reads the love story of Honoré and Aurora, but nothing grips one as he reads The Cavalier. A pretty little story, undoubtedly, but is it possible that the author of it once wrote "Posson Jone" and "Jean-ah Poquelin"? And Gideon's Band, a romance with an attempt to win back the old witchery of style—it was all in vain. Why say more?
Cable as a short story writer, a maker of miniatures with marvelous skill of touch, was most successful perhaps with dainty femininities of the old régime. Once, twice, thrice the light of romance glowed upon his page. Then he became a reformer, a journalist, a man with a problem. But he who gave to American literature Madame Delphine and Old Creole Days need not fear the verdict of coming days. Already have these works become classics.
The old Spanish régime in America furnished the theme of Lewis Wallace's (1827–1905) first romance, The Fair God, published the year "'Sieur George" appeared in Scribner's. He had returned from the Mexican War interested in Aztec antiquities. After the Civil War, in which he took a prominent part, he began in the intervals of his law practice to write a military romance centering about Cortez and the conquest, and in 1873, through the efforts of Whitelaw Reid, succeeded in having it published in Boston. It was not, however, until 1884, after the enormous popularity of Ben Hur, that it was discovered by the reading public. It is really better in workmanship and proportions than its more highly colored and vastly more exploited companion; it moves strongly, its battle scenes have a resonance and excitement about them that make them comparable even with Scott's, but its tendency is to sentiment and melodrama: it is a blending of Prescott and Bulwer-Lytton.
A far more distinctive study of old Spanish days is to be found in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, undoubtedly the strongest romance of the period. Mrs. Jackson was a daughter of Professor Nathan W. Fiske of Amherst, Massachusetts, and until the last decade of her life was a resident of her native New England. Not until she was thirty-five and had been bereft of husband and children did she attempt literature. Her first form of expression was poetry, the short, sharp cry of desolation, narrowly personal and feminine. Then she wrote travel sketches and juveniles and moral essays, and then an outpouring of fiction intense and sentimental. During the seventies and the early eighties her work was in all the magazines. So versatile and abundant was she that at one time Dr. Holland seriously contemplated an issue of Scribner's made up wholly of her contributions.
To almost nothing of her work, save that at the very last, did she sign her own name. She had an aversion to publicity that became really a mannerism. Her early work she signed variously or not at all, then for a time she settled upon the initials "H. H." It is no secret now that she wrote the much-speculated-upon novels Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's Strange History in the No-Name Series, and that the Saxe Holm Stories, which furnished the literary mystery of the seventies, were from her pen. They are love stories of the Lamplighter school of fiction, sentimental, over-intense, moralizing. General and colorless as most of them are, they here and there display a rare power of characterization and a sharply drawn study of background and conditions. Parts of "Farmer Bassett's Romance," with its analysis of the "pagan element" in New England character, are worthy of Mary E. Wilkins. The stories, however, belong with the old rather than the new, and have been forgotten.
It is impossible to understand "H. H." without taking into account her New Englandism. She was a daughter of the Brahmins, in many ways a counterpart of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—intensely conscientious, emotional, eager in the reform of abuses, brilliant, impetuous. While visiting California in the mid seventies she came in contact with the Indian problem and with characteristic impulsiveness set out to arouse the nation. After six months of intense work in the Lenox library of New York she published her Century of Dishonor, a bitter arraignment of the national Indian policy, and at her own expense sent a copy to every member of Congress. As a result she was appointed one of two commissioners to examine and report upon "the condition and need of the Mission Indians of California." Her report was thorough and businesslike, but it accomplished little.
Then she conceived the purpose of enlarging her area of appeal by the publication of a story—on the title page it stands Ramona. A Story. The problem preceded plot and materials and background. "You have never fully realized," she wrote only a few weeks before her death, "how for the last four years my whole heart has been full of the Indian cause—how I have felt, as the Quakers say, 'a concern' to work for it. My Century of Dishonor and Ramona are the only things I have done of which I am glad now."[116] And earlier than that she had written: "I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should 'tell' on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it; I knew I had no background—no local color."[117]
Ramona was conceived of, therefore, as a tract, as a piece of propaganda, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Loveliness. It was written with passion, flaming hot from a woman's heart—not many have been the romances written in heat. In this one respect it may be likened to Mrs. Stowe's great work, but to call it, as so often it has been called, "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Indian," is to speak with inaptness. The book is a romance, and only a romance; its whole appeal is the appeal of romance. She had found at last her background, but it was a background that dominated and destroyed her problem. Unconsciously she surrendered herself to the charm of it until to-day the book is no more a problem novel than is the House of the Seven Gables, which also makes use of the excesses and crimes of a system.
No background could be more fitted for romance: southern California with its "delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer"; the old Spanish régime, "half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free handed," "when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land, and its old name, 'New Spain,' was an ever-present link and stimulus";[118] and over it all like a soft, old-world atmosphere the Romish church with its mystery and its medieval splendor. "It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still."[118]
It had been the plan of the author first to elicit strongly the reader's sympathy for Ramona and the Indian Alessandro, then to harrow him with the persecutions wreaked upon them because they were Indians. But the purpose fails from the start. Ramona's Indian blood is not convincing to the reader. Until the story is well under way no one of the characters except the Señora and the priest, not even Ramona herself, suspects that she is not a daughter of the old Spanish house of Ortegna. There was small trace of the Indian about her: her beauty was by no means Indian—steel blue eyes and "just enough olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it swarthy." She had been reared as a member of the patriarchal household of the Morenos, and in education and habit of life was as much Spanish as her foster brother Felipe. And Alessandro—even the author explains that Ramona "looked at him with no thought of his being an Indian—a thought there had surely been no need of her having, since his skin was not a shade darker than Felipe's." He is an Indian, we must admit, and yet an Indian who looks like a Spaniard, an Indian who has been educated carefully in the Mission like a priest, an Indian who can sing Latin hymns with marvelous sweetness and play the violin like a master, an Indian with all the characteristics of a courtly señor, more nobly Spanish in soul than even Felipe himself, the heir of the great Moreno estate—the imagination refuses to accept either of the two characters as Indians. Uncle Tom's Cabin was worked out with the blackest of negroes; its central figure was a typical slave, who died at the end a victim of the system, but as one reads Ramona one thinks of Indians only as incidental figures in the background.
It is a romance of the days of the passing of the haughty old Spanish régime. A maiden of inferior birth, or, in terms of the ordinary continental romance, a maiden whose mother was of the peasant class, is brought up side by side and on a perfect equality with the heir of the noble house. He falls in love with her, but he tells of his love neither to her nor to his proud Castilian mother, who alone in the family knows the secret of the girl's birth. Then the maiden clandestinely marries, out of her caste as all but the Señora supposes, a peasant, as her mother had been a peasant, and is driven out of the home with harshness. A tenderly reared maiden, married to poverty, forced to live for a period in squalor, bereaved at last of her husband, rescued by her old lover when she is at the lowest point of her misery, and taken back to the old home where the implacable mother has died, and there wooed until she surrenders her new future to the high-born foster brother, who, even though he has learned of her peasant strain, has never ceased to love her—that is the romance. The Indians, even Alessandro, are felt to be only incidental parts of the story. The center of the romance is the slow, faithful, thwarted, but finally triumphing, love of Felipe. The thing that really grips is not the incidental wrongs and sufferings of the Indians, but the relentlessly drawn picture of the old Señora and the last chapter where the two lovers, united at last, have left behind them the old land, no longer theirs—its deserted and melancholy Missions, its valleys and long pastures which ring now with the shouts of a conquering race, and turn their faces southward into a new world and a new and more joyous life. Then it was that Ramona blossomed into her full beauty. "A loyal and loving heart indeed it was—loyal, loving, serene. Few husbands so blest as the Señor Felipe Moreno. Sons and daughters came to bear his name. The daughters were all beautiful; but the most beautiful of them all, and, it was said, the most beloved by both father and mother, was the eldest one: the one who bore the mother's name, and was only step-daughter to the Señor—Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian." And so the romance ends, as romance should end, with all trouble and uncertainty a mere cloud in the far past.
Ramona is a bombshell that all unknowingly to its creator turned out to be not a bombshell at all, but an exquisite work of art. The intensity and the passion, which came from the viewing of abuses and the desire to work reform, wove themselves into the very substance of it. It is a blending of realism and romanticism and ethic earnestness into a rounded romance. More and more is it evident that aside from this and perhaps two or three sonnets, nothing else that its author wrote is of permanent value. Ramona, however, is alone enough to give her a place in American literature, a place indeed with the two or three best writers of American romance.
The French occupation of the northern area of the continent has also proved a rich literary field. It seems, as Howells has observed, that the French have touched America "with romance wherever they have touched it at all as soldiers, priests, exiles, or mere adventurers." The bare history of their adventures is, as Parkman has recorded it, romance. Cooper caught a glimpse of the richness of the field, and a grand-niece of his, Constance Fenimore Woolson, made a new discovery of it during the "local color" period that followed the advent of Bret Harte. Her collection of stories, Castle Nowhere, 1875, pictured with graphic realism the life of the rude settlements along the upper lakes, but once or twice she dipped her pen into pure romance and became a pioneer. Her sketch, "The Old Agency," which deals with the ancient building at Mackinac with its memories of the Jesuits, and her strong story "St. Clair Flats" reveal what she might have done had she not turned her attention to other regions.
The field that she abandoned was taken later by Mary Hartwell Catherwood, a native of Ohio, the first woman novelist of the period to be born west of the Alleghenies. She was, moreover, the first woman of any prominence in American literary ranks to acquire a college education, graduating not in the East, as one might suppose, but from a new college in the new West. The fact is significant. After a brief period of teaching in Illinois, she became a newspaper writer and a general literary worker, and she published her first book, A Woman in Armor, as early as 1875. Juveniles, marketable stories, sketches, critiques, flowed from her pen for nearly twenty years, and yet in 1888 she had settled upon no fixed style or field of work and she was completely unknown to the reading public. She seems to have been trying the literary currents of the time. Her first experiment, not to mention her juveniles, was her Craque-O'-Doom, 1881, an E. P. Roe-like novel of the He Fell in Love with His Wife type, but it made no impression. "Don't you know," she makes one of her characters say in words that are an explanation, "that the key of the times is not sentiment but practical common sense? Just after the war when the country was wrought to a high pitch of nerves, current literature overflowed with self-sacrifice. According to that showing—and current literature ought to be a good reflection of the times—everybody was running around trying to outdo his neighbor in the broken heart and self-renunciation business." Next she assayed to enter the "practical sense" school, and her "Serena," Atlantic, 1882, with its unsparingly realistic picture of a death and funeral in an Ohio farmhouse, shows that she might have made herself the Miss Jewett or the Miss Wilkins of her native region. But minute studies of contemporary life failed to satisfy the demands within her. She awoke at last to her true vocation over a volume of Parkman, let us suppose over the sixth and the sixteenth chapters of The Old Régime in Canada. From the glowing pages of this master of narrative she caught a full breath of romance and for the first time she realized her powers.
The Romance of Dollard, which appeared in the Century in 1888, and the other romances that swiftly followed, are no more like the earlier work of the author than if they had been written by another hand. It was as if a new and brilliant writer had suddenly appeared. The suddenness, however, was only a seeming suddenness: the romances were in reality the culmination of a long and careful period of apprenticeship. Her style, to be sure, had been influenced by Parkman: one cannot read a page without feeling that. There is the same incisive, nervous manner; the same impetuous rush and vigor as if the wild Northern winds were filling the paragraphs; the same short and breathless sentences in descriptions of action, packed with excitement and dramatic force. Yet there is vastly more than Parkman in her work. There is a wealth of poetry and spiritual force in it, a healthy sentiment, a skilful selecting and blending of romantic elements, and a Hardy-like power to catch the spirit of a locality so as to make it almost a personality in the tragedy. This background of wilderness, this monotone of the savage North, is never absent. At the beginning of every story and every chapter is struck, as it were, the dominating key. Here is the opening paragraph of "The Windigo":
The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie's River called the Sault could be heard at all hours through the settlement on the rising shore and into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance of winter locked it up. At August dusk, when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became very distinct.
These rapids with their mournful cry become a character in the story; they dominate every page until at the end they rescue the hero, bearing in his arms the frightful "windigo," in a page of action that stirs the blood. The Canadian wilds of the coureurs de bois, the roar of swollen rivers, the sudden storms that lash the forests, the terror and the mystery of night in the savage woods, and evermore the river, the black St. Lawrence—one feels them like a presence. Like Cable, too, she can make her reader share the superstitious thrill of the region. Her windigos and loup-garous lay hold on one like a hand out of the dark.
Amid this wild landscape a wild social order—savage Indians, explorers, voyageurs, flaming Jesuits, habitants, grands seigneurs, soldiers of fortune—Frontenac, Tonty, Dollard, La Salle, Bigot, Montcalm, and perhaps the lost dauphin, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—and in the heart of it all and the moving force of it all, beautiful women, exiles from France, exquisite maidens educated in convents, charmingly innocent, lithe Indian girls, Indian queens, robust daughters of habitants. Swords flash in duel and battle, love rules utterly even such stormy souls as La Salle's, plots with roots that extend even across the ocean into France are worked out in secret fastness—with such material and such background romantic combinations are endless.
The strength of Mrs. Catherwood's work lies in its tensity and excitement, its vigor of narrative, its picturesque setting, its power of characterization. From this very element of strength comes a weakness. Romance must tread ever near the verge of the impossible, and at times she pushes her situations too far and falls over into the realm of melodrama. In The White Islander, for instance, the Indians have the hero burning at the stake when suddenly Marie, the French "white islander" who loves him, leaps into the circle of flames, declaring that she will die with him. Then realizing there is no hope of saving the two, the Jesuit father unites them in marriage, side by side at the stake, while the flames are crackling, but the moment he pronounces them man and wife the yells of the rescuing party resound from the near forest and they are saved.
There is another weakness, one that lies far deeper, one indeed that applies to the whole school of historical novelists that so flourished in the nineties. The author had a passion for "documenting" her romances. She studied her sources as carefully as if she were to write a history; she used all the known facts that could be found; then she supplemented these known facts copiously from her imagination. For her Romance of Dollard she got Parkman to write an introduction commending its historical accuracy; she strewed the chapters with corroborating footnotes; and she tried in all ways to give the impression that it was a genuine piece of history. But there is no evidence that Dollard ever married, and there is not a scrap even of tradition that his bride died with him at the battle of the Long Saut. To make an historical personage like Dollard or La Salle or Tonty the leading, speaking character in a romance is to falsify the facts. Historical romance is not history; it is pure fiction, true only to the spirit of the age and the place represented and to the fundamentals of human character and the ways of the human soul. It should be worked out always with non-historical characters.
Of Mrs. Catherwood's romances the best is The Lady of Fort St. John, made so perhaps on account of the unique character Rossignol. Her strongest work, however, lies in her shorter stories. It was a peculiarity of the whole period that nearly all of its writers of fiction should have been restricted in their powers of creation to the small effort rather than to the large. It was the age of cameos rather than canvases. Her volume, The Chase of St. Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World, and her Mackinac and Lake Stories, which deal with the mixed populations dwelling on the islands of the Great Lakes, show her at her highest level. Her versatility, however, was remarkable. Her Spirit of an Illinois Town, a realistic story of a typical boom town, has in it the very soul of the new West, and her The Days of Jeanne d'Arc, written after much observation of the Vosges and Lorraine peasants in France and a year of work in the best libraries, is as brilliant a piece of historical work as was produced during the period.
Whatever her failings as a romancer she must be reckoned with always as perhaps the earliest American pioneer of that later school of historical fiction writers that so flourished in the nineties. After her stirring tales had appeared, Alice of Old Vincennes, and Monsieur Beaucaire, and The Seats of the Mighty, and all the others, were foregone conclusions.
The latest field in America for romance was that created by the Civil War. The patriarchal life of the great Southern plantations had in it a peculiar picturesqueness, especially when viewed through the fading smoke of the conflict that destroyed it. An old aristocracy had been overthrown by Northern invaders—field enough for romance. It had been a peculiar aristocracy—a "democratic aristocracy," as it was fond of explaining itself, "not of blood but of influence and of influence exerted among equals,"[119] but none the less it was an aristocracy in the heart of democratic America, Roman in its patrician pride, its jealously guarded principle of caste, its lavish wealth, and its slavery centered, social régime. Like all aristocracies it was small in numbers. "Only about 10,781 families held as many as fifty or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates of the South."[120] But of these estates very many were only commercial establishments with little social significance. The real aristocracy was to be found in a few old families, notably in Virginia, in numbers not exceeding the New England aristocracy of the Brahmins, which had been set apart by a principle so radically different. Both were narrowly provincial rather than national, both were centered within themselves, both were intolerant and self-satisfied, and both alike disappeared in the flames of the war to make way for the new national spirit which was to rule the new age.
To feel the atmosphere of this Southern old régime, this exclusive aristocracy, far older than the republic, one must read Thomas Nelson Page's The Old South, or his earliest published sketch, "Old Yorktown," Scribner's Monthly, 1881, a sketch that is in reality the preface to his romances. It may be profitable, perhaps, to quote a few paragraphs. After his description of the old custom house of York, the first erected in America, he writes:
There the young bucks in velvet and ruffles gathered to talk over the news or plan new plots of surprising a governor or a lady-love. It was there the haughty young aristocrats, as they took snuff or fondled their hounds, probably laughed over the story of how that young fellow, Washington, who, because he had acquired some little reputation fighting Indians, had thought himself good enough for anybody, had courted Mary Cary, and very properly had been asked out of the house of the old Colonel, on the ground that his daughter had been accustomed to ride in her own coach.... It would be difficult to find a fitter illustration of the old colonial Virginia life than that which this little town affords. It was a typical Old Dominion borough, and was one of the eight boroughs into which Virginia was originally divided. One or two families owned the place, ruling with a sway despotic in fact, though in the main temperate and just, for the lower orders were too dependent and inert to dream of thwarting the "gentlefolk," and the southerner uncrossed was ever the most amiable of men.
Among these ruling families were the Nelsons and the Pages:
The founder of the Page family in Virginia was "Colonel John Page," who, thinking that a principality in Utopia might prove better than an acre in Middlesex, where he resided, came over in 1656. He had an eye for "bottom land," and left his son Matthew an immense landed estate, which he dutifully increased by marrying Mary Mann, the rich heiress of Timber Neck. Their son, Mann, was a lad thirteen years old when his father died. After being sent to Eton, he came back and took his place at the "Council Board," as his fathers did before him and as his descendants did after him.
It reminds one of Hawthorne's account of his own family in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter.
Before the war the South had had its romancers. Kennedy and Simms and others had tried early to do for it what Cooper had done for the more northerly area. Then in the fifties John Esten Cooke (1830–1886), the best novelist the South produced during the earlier period, put forth a series of Virginia romances, the strongest of which undoubtedly was The Virginia Comedians, 1854, republished in 1883. The strength of the book, as indeed of all of Cooke's romances, lay in its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its stirring pictures of the more picturesque elements of the old Southern life: barbecues, horse races, contests between fiddlers, the doings of negroes, and the like. Its weakness, in addition to hasty workmanship and lack of cumulative power, was the common weakness of all the mid-century fiction. It had a St. Elmo atmosphere. Like all the rest of his fiction, it is tainted with profuse sentimentality, with sensationalism, with a straining for the unexpected and the picturesque. Panels in the wall slide apart mysteriously, accidents happen in the nick of time, villains in the form of French dancing masters are foiled at last by the hero. One is in old Williamsburg, to be sure, "the Southern Boston" in its golden prime, and is impressed with its courtly manners, its beautiful women, its chivalrous heroes, its frequent duels; yet one is never quite sure whether it is the real South or whether it is not after all the story-world of an old-fashioned romancer who perhaps has never visited the South at all save in imagination. It is romanticism overdone; it is everything too much. Even its sprightliness and its occasional touches of realism cannot rescue it from oblivion.
A dwelling upon the merely quaint and unusual in the local environment to arouse laughter and interest was perhaps the leading source of failure in Southern fiction even to the time of the later seventies. From the days of Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, pictures there had been of the "cracker," the mountaineer, the Pike, the conventional negro of the Jim Crow and the Zip Coon or the Uncle Tom type, the colonel of the fire-eating, whisky-drinking variety, but there had been no painstaking picture of real Southern life drawn with loving hand, not for mirth and wonder, not for the pointing of a moral, but for sympathy and comprehension. Horace E. Scudder as late as 1880 noted that "the South is still a foreign land to the North, and travelers are likely to bring back from it only what does not grow in the North."[121] It was true also of travelers in its books as well, for the most of its books had been written for Northern publication. The first writer really to picture the South from the heart outward, to show it not as a picturesque spectacle but as a quivering section of human life, was Thomas Nelson Page (1853——), whose first distinctive story, "Marse Chan," appeared as late as 1884.
At the opening of the Civil War Page was eight years old. During the years of conflict his home, one of the great plantations of Virginia, was a center of Confederate activities, and time and again the region about it was overrun by the invading armies. It was a marvelous training for the future novelist. He had been born at precisely the right moment. He had been a part of the old régime during the early impressionable years that are golden in a life, the years that color and direct the imagination in all its future workings, and he was young enough when the era closed to adapt himself to the new order. At the close of the war he studied the classics with his father, a scholar of the old Southern type, took the course in the Virginia university presided over by Robert E. Lee, studied law at the University of Virginia, and then from 1875 to 1893 practised law in Richmond. These are the essentials of his biography.
It was while he was establishing himself in his profession at the old capital of the Confederacy that he did his first literary work. Scribner's Monthly had heard from the ruined South the first murmurings of a new literature and was giving it every encouragement. It had published King's series of articles on The Great South, it had discovered Cable in 1873, it had encouraged Lanier, and in January, 1876, it had begun to issue a series of negro dialect poems by Irwin Russell, a native of Port Gibson, Mississippi, poems that undoubtedly had been suggested by the Pike balladry, and yet were so fresh and original in material and manner that they in turn became a strong influence on their times. That the poems launched Page in his literary career he has freely admitted.
Personally I owe much to him. It was the light of his genius shining through his dialect poems—first of dialect poems then and still first—that led my feet in the direction I have since tried to follow. Had he but lived, we should have had proof of what might be done with true negro dialect; the complement of "Uncle Remus."[122]
In April, 1877, came his first contribution to Scribner's, "Uncle Gabe's White Folks," a dialect poem of the Russell order, yet one that strikes the keynote of all its author's later work:
Together with Armistead C. Gordon of Staunton, Virginia, he wrote other ballads and poetical studies which were issued as a joint volume a decade later with the title Befo' de War, Echoes in Negro Dialect. But in the meantime he had been experimenting with prose dialect, and late in the seventies he submitted to the magazine a long story told wholly in the negro vernacular. It was a bold venture: even Scribner's hesitated. They might print humorous dialect poems and Macon's "Aphorisms from the Quarters" in their "Bric-à-Brac" department, but a serious story all of it in a dialect that changed many words almost beyond recognition—they held it for over four years. When it did appear, however, as "Marse Chan" in 1884, it seemed that their fears had been groundless. It was everywhere hailed as a masterpiece. "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Meh Lady," and others quickly followed, and in 1887 the series was issued as a collection with the title In Ole Virginia, a book that is to Page what The Luck of Roaring Camp is to Harte and Old Creole Days is to Cable.
The method of Page in these early stories was original. The phrase "befo' de war" explains it. He would reproduce the atmosphere of the old South, or what is more nearly the truth, the atmosphere of aristocratic old Virginia plantation life. "No doubt the phrase 'Before the war' is at times somewhat abused. It is just possible that there is a certain Caleb Balderstonism in the speech at times. But for those who knew the old county as it was then, and contrast it with what it has become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower 'before the war' than it is now. For one thing, the moonlight as well as the sunlight shines brighter in our youth than in maturer age."[123] But Page expressed the phrase in negro dialect—"befo' de war." The story of the vanished era, the gallantry and spirit of its men, the beauty of its women, the nameless glow that hovers over remembered youthful days, he would show through the medium of the negro. It is exquisite art done with seemingly impossible materials. An old slave tells the story in his own picturesque way and wholly from his own viewpoint, yet so simply, so inevitably, that one forgets the art and surrenders oneself as one surrenders to actual life with its humor and its pathos and its tragedy. It is romance—an idealized world, and an idealized negro. Surely no freed slave ever told a consecutive tale like that, perfect in its proportions and faultless in its lights and shadows, yet such a criticism never for a moment occurs to the reader. The illusion is complete. The old South lives again and we are in it both in sympathy and comprehension.
In the decade that followed this first book Page gave himself to the writing of short stories and studies of Southern life, but only once or twice did he catch again the magic atmosphere of the earlier tales. Two Little Confederates is exquisite work, but Elsket, which followed, was full of inferior elements. Its negro stories, "George Washington's Last Duel" and "P'laski's Tunament," are only good vaudeville—they show but the surface of negro life; "Run to Seed" is pitched almost with shrillness, and "Elsket" and "A Soldier of the Empire," the one dealing with the last of her race, the other with the last of his order, are European sketches a trifle theatrical in spite of their touches of pathos.
Red Rock (1898) marks the beginning of Page's second period, the period of long romances. Once before with On Newfound River he had tried the border canvas and he had failed save in certain of his characterizations and detached episodes. Now with Red Rock he set out to write what should stand among his works as The Grandissimes stands among Cable's. Its sub-title, A Chronicle of Reconstruction, explains at once its strength and its weakness. Its author approached it as Mrs. Jackson had approached Ramona, with a purpose, and, unlike Mrs. Jackson, he accomplished his purpose. The wrongs of the South during the period are made vivid, but at the expense of the novel. The opening pages are perfect. Chapter two with its merry-making at the great plantation, and all its glimpses of traits and scenes peculiarly Southern, leads the reader to feel that he has in his hands at last the great romance of Southern life. There is the background of an ancient wrong. The red stain on the great rock is supposed to be the blood of the first mistress of the plantation murdered there by an Indian; and the haunting picture over the fireplace of the first master who had killed the Indian with his bare hands, then had glared from his portrait until he had become the dominating center of the plantation, is felt to be the dominating center also of the romance as the Bras Coupé episode is the motif of The Grandissimes. But one is soon disappointed. The problem dominates the romance; the book is primarily a treatise, a bit of special pleading. It is undoubtedly all true, but one set out to read a romance of the old South. True as its facts may be, from the art side it is full of weaknesses. Leech, the carpet-bagger, and Still, the rascally overseer, are villains of the melodramatic type; they are a dead black in character from first to last. The turning points of the action are accidents, the atmosphere is too often that of St. Elmo. When the master is killed in battle the picture of the Indian killer falls to the hearth, and again when Leech is beating to death the wounded heir to the estate it falls upon the assassin as if in vengeance and nearly crushes him. The plot is chaotic. We are led to believe that Blair Cary, the doctor's daughter, who in the opening chapters is as charming as even Polly herself in In Ole Virginia, is to be the central figure, but Blair is abandoned for no real reason and Miss Welsh, a Northern girl, finishes the tale. Jacquelin, too, who dominates the earlier pages, peters out, and it is not clear why Middleton, the Northern soldier, is brought in near the close of the book, perhaps to marry Blair, who by every right of romance belongs to Jacquelin. It is enough to say that the story is weak just as Gabriel Conroy is weak, just as The Grandissimes and Pembroke are weak. The materials are better than the construction.
The fame of Page then must stand or fall, as Harte's must, or Cable's or Miss Wilkins's, on the strength of his first book. His essays on the Old South and other volumes are charming and valuable studies, his novels are documents in the history of a stirring era, but his In Ole Virginia is a work of art, one of the real classics of American literature.
Several others have used Virginia as a background for romance, notably Mary Virginia Terhune, (1831——), who wrote under the pseudonym "Marion Harland" something like twenty novels, the most of them in the manner in vogue before 1870, and F. Hopkinson Smith (1838–1915), whose Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891) is one of the most sympathetic studies of Southern life ever written. Its sly humor, its negro dialect, its power of characterization, its tender sentiment, its lovable, whimsical central figure, and its glimpses of an old South that has forever disappeared, make it one of the few books of the period concerning which one may even now prophesy with confidence.
George W. Cable. Old Creole Days, 1879; The Grandissimes, 1880; Madame Delphine, 1881; The Creoles of Louisiana, 1884; Dr. Sevier, 1885; The Silent South, 1885; Bonaventure, 1888; Strange True Stories of Louisiana, 1889; The Negro Question, 1890; The Busy Man's Bible, 1891; John March, Southerner, 1894; Strong Hearts, 1899; The Cavalier, 1901; Byelow Hill, 1902; Kincaid's Battery, 1908; Gideon's Band, 1914; The Amateur Garden, 1914.
Helen Hunt Jackson. Verses, 1870, 1874; Bits of Travel, 1872; Saxe Holm Stories, 1873; Bits of Talk About Home Matters, 1873; Bits of Talk for Young People, 1876; Mercy Philbrick's Choice (No Name Series), 1876; Hetty's Strange History (No Name Series), 1877; Bits of Travel at Home, 1878; Nelly's Silver Mine, 1878; Saxe Holm Stories (Second Series), 1878; The Story of Boon (a Poem), 1879; A Century of Dishonor, 1881; Mammy Tittleback and Her Family, 1881; The Training of Children, 1882; The Hunter Cats of Connorloa, 1884; Ramona [First Published in the Christian Union], 1884; Zeph, 1886; Glimpses of Three Coasts, 1886; Sonnets and Lyrics, 1886; Between Whiles, 1887.
Mary Hartwell Catherwood. A Woman in Armor, 1875; Craque-O'-Doom, 1881; Rocky Fork, 1882; Old Caravan Days, 1884; The Secrets of Roseladies, 1888; The Romance of Dollard, 1889; The Story of Tonty, 1890; The Lady of Fort St. John, 1891; Old Kaskaskia, The White Islander, 1893; The Chase of St. Castin, 1894; The Spirit of an Illinois Town, Little Renault, The Days of Jeanne d'Arc, 1897; Heroes of the Middle West, 1898; Spanish Peggy, 1899; The Queen of the Swamp, 1899; Lazarre, 1901.
John Esten Cooke. Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John Myers and His Times, 1854; The Virginia Comedians; or Old Days in the Old Dominion, 1854; The Youth of Jefferson, 1854; Ellie; or, The Human Comedy, 1855; The Last of the Foresters, 1856; Henry St. John, Gentleman: a Tale of 1874-75, 1859; A Life of Stonewall Jackson, 1863; Stonewall Jackson: a Military Biography, 1866; Surrey of Eagle's Nest, 1866; The Wearing of the Gray, 1867; Mohun; or the Last Days of Lee and His Paladins, 1868; Fairfax, the Maker of Greenway Court, 1868; Hilt to Hilt, 1869; Out of the Foam, 1869; Hammer and Rapier, 1870; The Heir to Gaymount, 1870; A Life of General R. E. Lee, 1871; Dr. Vandyke, 1872; Her Majesty the Queen, 1873; Pretty Mrs. Gaston, and Other Stories, 1874; Justin Hartley, 1874; Canolles: the Fortunes of a Partisan of '81, 1877; Professor Presseusee, Materialist and Inventor, 1878; Mr. Grantley's Idea, 1879; Stories of the Old Dominion, 1879; The Virginia Bohemians, 1880; Virginia, 1885; The Maurice Mystery, 1885; My Lady Pokahontas, 1885.
Thomas Nelson Page. In Ole Virginia, 1887; Two Little Confederates, Befo' de War, 1888; Elsket and Other Stories, On Newfound River, The Old South, Among the Camps, 1891; Pastime Stories, The Burial of the Guns, 1894; Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War, The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock, 1896; Two Prisoners, 1897; Red Rock, a Chronicle of Reconstruction, 1898; Santa Claus's Partner, 1899; A Captured Santa Claus, 1902; Gordon Keith, 1903; The Negro: the Southerner's Problem, 1904; Bred in the Bone, 1905; The Coast of Bohemia [poems], 1906; Novels, Stories, Sketches, and Poems. Plantation Edition. 12 volumes, 1906; Under the Crust, 1907; The Old Dominion—Her Making and Her Manners, Robert E. Lee, the Southerner, Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus, 1908; John Marvel, Assistant, 1909; Robert E. Lee, Man and Soldier, 1912; The Land of the Spirit, 1913.
The year 1866 saw the low-water mark, perhaps, not only of the American novel, but of American literature generally. On May 12 of this year The Round Table of New York, in an editorial entitled "Plain Talk with American Writers," declared that "The literary field was never so barren, never so utterly without hope of life.... The era of genius and vigor that seemed ready to burst on us only a few months ago has not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old." Then it issued a challenge to the new generation of literary men: "We have very little strong, original writing. Who will awaken us from this sleep? Who will first show us the first signs of a genuine literary reviving?... If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened for young aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is wide open."
We know now that the reviving was close at hand. Within five years the flood-gates were opened, and Clemens, Harte, Hay, Burroughs, Howells, Miller, and all the group were publishing their first work. Among others a young Georgia school-teacher felt the thrill as he read the Round Table call, and he made haste to send to the paper a budget of poems—"Barnacles," "Laughter in the Senate," and some others, to be, if possible, the first fruits of this new period. A year later, in 1867, he went himself to New York to bring out a novel, Tiger Lilies, a book sent forth with eagerness and infinite hope, for was not every door wide open? It is a book to linger over: crude as it is, it was the first real voice from the new South.
The little group of Southern poets that had gathered itself about Paul Hamilton Hayne (1831–1886), the chief of whom were Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897), Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822–1874), and Henry Timrod (1829–1867)—poets who were contemporary with Bayard Taylor and his group—belongs rather with the period before the war than with the new national period that followed it. They were poets of beauty like Stoddard, singing the music of Keats and Tennyson and the old Cavalier poets—dreamers, makers of dainty conceits and pretty similes, full of grace and often of real melody, but with little originality either of manner or message. The war came into their lives sharply and suddenly, a cataclysm that shook all their plans into ruins about them. It swept away their property, their homes, their libraries, even their health. For a time during the conflict they turned their poetry into martial channels: invectives on the invading "Huns," rallying songs, battle lyrics, patriotic calls. When the war was over they found themselves powerless to adjust themselves. Hayne before the war was a graceful sonneteer, a worshiper of classic beauty, a writer of odes, not to the nightingale but to the mocking bird: