A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

III

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.