I
Harte in Gabriel Conroy glimpsed the new fields of romance; George Washington Cable (1844——), the earliest of the new Southern school, was the first fully to enter them. His gateway was old New Orleans, most romantic of Southern cities, unknown to Northern readers until his pen revealed it. It seemed hardly possible that the new world possessed such a Bagdad of wonder: old Spanish aristocracy, French chivalry of a forgotten ancien régime, creoles, Acadians from the Grand Pré dispersion, adventurers from all the picturesque ports of the earth, slavery with its barbaric atmosphere and its shuddery background of dread, and behind it all and around it all like a mighty moat shutting it close in upon itself and rendering all else in the world a mere hearsay and dream, the swamps and lagoons of the great river.
Cable was a native of the old city. During a happy boyhood he played and rambled over the whole of it and learned to know it as only a boy can know the surroundings of his home. His boyhood ended when he was fourteen with the death of his father and the responsibility that devolved upon him to help support his mother and her little family left with scanty means. There was to be no more schooling. He marked boxes in the custom house until the war broke out, and then at seventeen he enlisted in the Confederate army and served to the end. Returning to New Orleans, he found employment in a newspaper office, where he proved a failure; he studied surveying until he was forced by malarial fever caught in the swamps to abandon it; then, after a slow recovery, he entered the employ of a firm of cotton factors and for years served them as an accountant. It was an unpromising beginning. At thirty-five he was still recording transfers of cotton, and weights and prices and commissions.
But his heart, like Charles Lamb's, was in volumes far different from those upon his office desk. He had always been a studious youth. He had read much: Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Irving, Scott; and, like a true native of the old city to whom French was a mother tongue, Hugo, Mérimée, About. He loved also to pore over antiquarian records: Relations of the priest explorers, and old French documents and writings. His first impulse to write came to him as he sat amid these dusty records. "It would give me pleasure," he once wrote in a letter, "to tell you how I came to drop into the writing of romances, but I cannot; I just dropt. Money, fame, didactic or controversial impulse I scarcely felt a throb of. I just wanted to do it because it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste."
Cable's first story, "'Sieur George," appeared in Scribner's Monthly in October, 1873. Edward King, touring the Southern States in 1872 for his series of papers entitled The Great South, had found the young accountant pottering away at his local history and his studies of local conditions and had secured some of his work for Dr. Holland. During the next three years five other articles were published in the magazine and one, "Posson Jone," in Appleton's, but they caused no sensation. It was not until 1879, when the seven stories were issued in book form as Old Creole Days, that recognition came. The long delay was good for Cable: it compelled him, in Hawthorne fashion, to brood over his early work in his rare intervals of leisure, to contemplate each piece a long time, and to finish it and enrich it. He put forth no immaturities; he began to publish at the point where his art was perfect.
The reception accorded to Old Creole Days was like that accorded to Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. It took its place at once as a classic, and the verdict has never been questioned. There is about the book, and the two books which quickly followed it, an exotic quality, an aura of strangeness, that is like nothing else in our literature. They seem not American at all; surely such a background and such an atmosphere as that never could have existed "within the bounds of our stalwart republic." They are romance, one feels; pure creations of fancy, prolongations of the Longfellowism of the mid century—and yet, as one reads on and on, the conviction grows that they are not romance; they are really true. Surely "Posson Jone" and "Madame Delphine" are not creations of fancy. The elided and softly lisping dialect, broken-down French rather than debased English, is not an invention of the author's: it carries conviction the more one studies it; it is not brought in to show: it adds at every point to the reality of the work. And the carefully worked-in backgrounds—let Lafcadio Hearn speak, who settled in the city a few months after "Jean-ah Poquelin" came out in Scribner's Monthly:
The strict perfection of his Creole architecture is readily recognized by all who have resided in New Orleans. Each one of those charming pictures of places—veritable pastels—was painted after some carefully selected model of French or Franco-Spanish origin—typifying fashions of building which prevailed in the colonial days.... The author of Madame Delphine must have made many a pilgrimage into the quaint district, to study the wrinkled faces of the houses, or perhaps to read the queer names upon the signs—as Balzac loved to do in old-fashioned Paris.[115]
It is realism, and yet how far removed from Zola and Flaubert—Flaubert with his "sentiment is the devil"! It is realism tempered with romance; it is the new romance of the transition. There is seemingly no art about it, no striving for effect, and there is no exhibition of quaint and unusual things just because they are quaint and unusual. Rather are we transported into a charmed atmosphere, "the tepid, orange-scented air of the South," with the soft Creole patois about us and romance become real. The very style is Creole—Creole as Cable knew the Creoles of the quadroon type. There is a childish simplicity about it, and there is a lightness, an epigrammatic finesse, an elision of all that can be suggested, that is Gallic and not Saxon at all.
One can feel this exotic quality most fully in the portraits of women: 'Tite Poulette, Madame Delphine, Aurora Nancanou, Clotilde, and the others, portraits etched in with infinitesimal lightness of touch, suggested rather than described, felt rather than seen. These are not Northern women, these daintily feminine survivals of a decadent nobility, these shrinking, coquettish, clinging, distant, tearful, proud, explosive, half barbarous, altogether bewitching creatures. A suggestion here, a glimpse there, an exclamation, a flash of the eyes, and they are alive and real as few feminine creations in the fiction of any period. One may forget the story, but one may not forget Madame Delphine. If one would understand the secret of Cable's art, that Gallic lightness of touch, that subtle elision, that perfect balance between the suggested and the expressed, let him read the last chapter of The Grandissimes. It is a Cable epitome.
"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.