III
In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in distinction from the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. Marion Crawford must be given a leading place. Of all American writers he devoted himself most fully to the major form of fiction. He wrote forty-five novels, and few sketches and short stories: he was a novelist and only a novelist. He appeared at the one moment when the type of fiction which he represented was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book, Mr. Isaacs (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment—India, five years before Kipling made it his background; it had a religious atmosphere—the mystic beliefs of the Orient; and it told a story with sentiment and with dramatic movement. Zoroaster, with its opening sentence, "The hall of the banquets was made ready for the feast in the palace of Babylon," appealed to an audience that had rated Ben Hur among the greatest of novels.
But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main current of his work. No two novelists could differ more radically than he and Roe. To him the purpose-novel was a bastard thing unworthy the powers of a true artist.
Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics generally belong to institutions set apart for especial purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to preach to people who prefer their own church, and to teach people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the social contract—and as such it ought to be either mercilessly crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label itself "Purpose" in very big letters.[156]
The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of art for art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket-stage" whose only office is to please.
The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint which was singularly different from that held by the short story writers who were so busily exploiting provincial little neighborhoods in all the remote nooks and corners of the land. His training had given him an outlook more cosmopolitan than even that of Henry James. He had been born at Bagni-di-Lucca, in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and he had spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had studied at Concord, New Hampshire; at Trinity College, Cambridge; at Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg; and finally at Rome, where he had specialized in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allahabad, India, connected with the Indian Herald, and later on, his health failing, he visited his uncle in New York, Samuel Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice threw some of his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The instant success of Mr. Isaacs determined his career. After extensive travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he spent the remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary productivity, and of growing popularity with readers both in America and in Europe.
No other American novelist has ever covered so much of territory. He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and India, and he wrote with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing with times and places as diverse as Persia in the times of Zoroaster; as the second crusade—Via Crucis; as the era of Philip II in Spain—In the Palace of the King; as Venice in the Middle Ages—Marietta, a Maid of Venice; as early Arabia—Kahled; and as early Constantinople—Arethusa.
The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen novels that deal with life in Rome and its environs: Saracinesca, Sant' Ilario, Don Orsino, Taquisara, Corleone, Casa Braccio, A Roman Singer, Marzio's Crucifix, Heart of Rome, Cecilia, Whosoever Shall Offend, Pietro Ghisleri, To Leeward, A Lady of Rome, and The White Sister. The novels deal almost exclusively with the middle and higher classes of Rome, classes of which most Americans know nothing at all, for, to quote from the opening chapter of To Leeward:
There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent foreigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways, hotels, typhoid fever, incense, and wax candles; and there is the Rome within, a city of antique customs, good and bad, a town full of aristocratic prejudices, of intrigues, of religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fashioned scandal, of happiness and unhappiness, of just people and unjust.
It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, unknown to any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he has shown us, as Howells attempted to show the social life of Boston and New England, and as Cable sought to enter the heart of Creole New Orleans. With what success? Those who know most of Roman life have spoken with praise. He has given to his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say; too much of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet on the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought to reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston or Cable to New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside as one native born, as one reared in the society he describes, even to the detail of accepting its religious belief. One may well believe it, for everywhere in the novels is the perfection of naturalness, the atmosphere of reality.
With his seven stories of American life, An American Politician and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a foreigner, as an observer of the outward with no fullness of sympathy, no depth of knowledge. He was European in viewpoint and in experience, and he knew better the European background—Germany as in Greifenstein and The Cigarette-Maker's Romance, or England as in The Tale of a Lonely Parish, or even Constantinople as in Paul Patoff.
He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of the surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan comparisons, wisdom from everywhere, modern instances from Stamboul and Allahabad and Rome. To read him is like walking through foreign scenes with a fully informed guide, a marvelous guide, indeed, a patrician, a polished man of the world. Everywhere in his work an atmosphere of good breeding—charming people of culture and wideness of experience: diplomats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of the world and ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no uncouth characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In the telling of the tale he has but a single purpose:
We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers, and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not, as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery.[157]
From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has told his stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. Slight though his stories may often be in development, they are ingenious always in construction and they are cumulative in interest. He has undoubted dramatic power, sparkling dialogue, thrust and parry, whole novels like Saracinesca, for instance, that might be transferred to the stage with scarcely an alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him always from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is a species of drama:
It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past hundred years, found the way of carrying a theater in its pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are made of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly put together. A play is good in proportion as it represents the more dramatic, passionate, romantic, or humorous sides of real life. A novel is excellent according to the degree in which it produces the illusions of a good play—but it must not be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that illusion is eminently necessary to success.[157]
Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melodramatic; we lose the impression of real life and feel an atmosphere of staginess, that exaggeration of effect which thrills for a moment and then disgusts.
And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he works without deep emotion, without tenderness, without altruism, without the higher reaches of imagination. He has no social or moral purpose, as Howells had. He sees the body but not the soul, society rather than life in its deeper currents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks little below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. He is inferior to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks humor, he lacks heart. He is inferior to James and George Meredith inasmuch as he had no power of introspection and no distinctive style. He had no passion—he never becomes enthusiastic even about his native Italy; he had little love for nature—the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes. He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring amusement for the present moment.
He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization of the novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is clear and natural, but it is also without distinction. His pictures are vividly drawn and his stories are exceedingly readable—journalistic excellences, but there is nothing of inspiration about them, no breath of genius, no touch of literature in the stricter sense of that word. Like every skilful journalistic writer, he has the power to visualize his scene, to paint characters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out. Notably was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and women that move and convince. He has created a marvelous gallery of characters, taking his forty-five novels together, complex and varied beyond that produced by any other American novelist, and there are surprisingly few repetitions. He stands undoubtedly as the most brilliant of the American writers of fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most entertaining. His galaxy of Roman novels, especially the Saracinesca group, bids fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of human life and that are more inspired products of literary art.