VI
Criticism of the Craddock novels must begin always with the statement that their author was not a native of the region with which she dealt. She had been born into an old Southern family with wealth and traditions, and she had been reared in a city amid culture and a Southern social régime. The Tennessee mountains she knew only as a summer visitor may know them. For fifteen summers she went to the little mountain town of Beersheba, prototype undoubtedly of the "New Helvetia Springs" of her novels, and from there made excursions into the wilder regions. She saw the mountains with the eyes of the city vacationist: she was impressed with their wildness, their summer moods with light and shadow, their loneliness and their remote spurs and coves and ragged gaps. She saw them with the picture sense of the artist and she described them with a wealth of coloring that reminds one of Ruskin. In every chapter, often many times repeated, gorgeous paintings like these:
A subtle amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes of the T'other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the variegated foliage to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but about the base the air seemed dun-colored, though transparent; seen through it, even the red of the crowded trees was but a somber sort of magnificence, and the great masses of gray rocks, jutting out among them here and there, wore a darkly frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze of scarlet and gold in the full glory of the sunshine; the topmost cliffs caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of green or grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry bushes, nourished in the heart of the deep fissures.
Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the banks of the Scolacutta River, riotous with the late floods, fringed with the papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely glint he could see the sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a bronze green, above the intermediate ranges: behind him was the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed from an unaccustomed standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white and amber clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now only green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of translucent color on the purple slope. In such an environment the little rickety wooden mill—with its dilapidated leaking race, with its motionless wheel moss-grown, with its tottering supports throbbing in the rush of the water which rose around them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers about the door—might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink the scene was the acme of excitement and interest.
A picture of summer it is for the most part painted lavishly with adjectives, and presented with impressionistic rather than realistic effect. Every detail is intensified. The mountains of eastern Tennessee are only moderate ridges, yet in the Craddock tales they take on the proportions of the Canadian Rockies or the Alps. The peak that dominates In the Clouds seems to soar like a Mont Blanc:
In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive peak of Thunderhead towers preëminent among the summits of the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly significant. What strange attraction of the earth laid hold on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations of the range? Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage they rise—rise!... Sometimes it was purple against the azure heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green spaces of the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the clans had gathered to claim the changeling.
Always the scenery dominates the book. It is significant that all of her early titles have in them the name of a locality,—the setting is the chief thing: Lost Creek, Big Injun Mounting, Harrison's Cove, Chilhowee, the Great Smoky Mountains, Broomsedge Cove, Keedon Bluffs. In stories like The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain the background becomes supreme: the human element seems to have been added afterwards by a sort of necessity; the central character is the great witch-face on the mountain.
It reminds one of Hardy, and then one remembers that when "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in the Atlantic, The Return of the Native had for three months been running as a serial in Harper's Monthly, and that, somewhat later, In the "Stranger-People's" Country and Wessex Folk ran for months parallel in the same magazine. It is impossible not to think of Hardy as one reads Where the Battle Was Fought, 1884. The battle-field dominates the book as completely as does Egdon Heath The Return of the Native, and it dominates it in the same symbolic way:
By wintry daylight the battle-field is still more ghastly. Gray with the pallid crab-grass which so eagerly usurps the place of the last summer's crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty, yawning graves, where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce the hardiest plowman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent. A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the plain.
The title of the book—Where the Battle Was Fought—makes the battle-field central in the tragedy, and so it is with the short stories "'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" and "Drifting Down Lost Creek." Nature is always cognizant of the human tragedy enacted before it and always makes itself felt. In The Juggler, Tubal Cain Sims believes that murder has been done:
"He sighed an' groaned like suthin' in agony. An' then he says, so painful, 'But the one who lives—oh, what can I do—the one who lives!'" He paused abruptly to mark the petrified astonishment on the group of faces growing white in the closing dusk.
An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope. At the sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound bayed from the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the river. A light, stellular in the gloom that hung about the lower levels, suddenly sprung up in the window. A tremulous elongated reflection shimmered in the shallows.
But such effects in her work are fitful: one feels them strongly at times, then forgets them in the long stretches of dialect conversation and description seemingly introduced for its own sake. Of the art that could make of Egdon Heath a constantly felt, implacable, malignant presence that harried and compelled its dwellers until the reader at last must shake himself awake as from a nightmare, of this she knew little. She worked by means of brilliant sketches; she relied upon her picturing power to carry the story, and as a result the effect is scattered.
In her characterization she had all the defects of Scott: she worked largely with externals. She had an eye for groups posed artistically against a picturesque background as in that marvelous opening picture in "'Way Down on Lonesome Cove." She expended the greatest of care on costume, features, habits of carriage and posture, tricks of expression, individual oddities, but she seldom went deeper. We see her characters distinctly; not often do we feel them. In her major personages, like the Prophet, the Despot, the Juggler, we have little sympathetic interest, and it is impossible to believe that they were much more than picturesque specimens even to the author herself. To get upon the heart of the reader a character must first have been upon the heart of his creator. Here and there undoubtedly she did feel the thrill of comprehension as she created, a few times so keenly indeed that she could forget her art, her note book, and her audience. The one thing that seems to have touched her heart as she journeyed through the summer valleys and into the remote coves seems to have been the pitiful loneliness and heart-hunger of the women. Could she have done for all of her characters what she did for Celia Shaw and Madeline and Dorinda and a few other feminine souls, the final verdict upon her work might have been far different from what it must be now.
Her stories necessarily are woven from scanty materials. In the tale of a scattered and primitive mountain community there can be little complication of plot. The movement of the story must be slow, as slow indeed as the round of life in the coves and the lonesome valleys. But in her long-drawn narratives often there is no movement at all. She elaborates details with tediousness and records interminable conversations, and breaks the thread to insert whole chapters of description, as in Chapter VI of The Juggler, which records the doings at a mountain revival meeting seemingly for the mere sake of the local color. Nearly all of her longer novels lack in constructive power. Like Harte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she could deal strongly with picturesque moments and people, but she lacked the ability to trace the growth of character or the slow transforming power of a passion or an ideal or a sin.
Her style was peculiarly her own; in this she was strong. It is worthy of note that in an age rendered styleless by the newspaper and the public school she was able to be individual to the extent that one may identify any page of her writings by the style alone. It is not always admirable: there is a Southern floridness about it, a fondness for stately epithet that one does not find in Harris or in others of the Georgia group. She can write that the search light made "a rayonnant halo in the dim glooms of the riparian midnight," and she can follow the jocose observation of a woman washing dishes with this tremendous sentence: "'What fur?' demanded the lord of the house, whose sense of humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunting anxiety, and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of his discovery, to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome metaphor with which his weighty spouse had characterized her dissatisfaction with the ordering of events." It may be interesting to know that the woman vouchsafed no reply. Rather, "she wheezed one more line of her matutinal hymn in a dolorous cadence and with breathy interstices between the spondees."
She is at her best when describing some lonely valley among the ridges, or the moonlight as it plays fitfully over some scene of mountain lawlessness, or some remote cabin "deep among the wooded spurs." In such work she creates an atmosphere all her own. Few other writers have so made landscape felt. One may choose illustrations almost at random:
On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky Mountains, the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken save for one meager clearing.
Deep among the wooded spurs Lonesome Cove nestles, sequestered from the world. Naught emigrates from thence except an importunate stream that forces its way through a rocky gap, and so to freedom beyond. No stranger intrudes; only the moon looks in once in a while. The roaring wind may explore its solitudes; and it is but the vertical sun that strikes to the heart of the little basin, because of the massive mountains that wall it round and serve to isolate it.
The night wind rose. The stars all seemed to have burst from their moorings and were wildly adrift in the sky. There was a broken tumult of billowy clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly among them, a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends, sometimes half submerged, once more gallantly struggling to the surface, and again sunk. The bare boughs of the trees beat together in a dirgelike monotone.
Nowhere is she commonplace; nowhere does she come down from the stately plane that she reaches always with her opening paragraph. Even her dialect is individual. Doubtless other writers have handled the mountain speech more correctly, doubtless there is as much of Charles Egbert Craddock in the curious forms and perversions as there is of the Tennessee mountaineers, yet no one has ever used dialect more convincingly than she or more effectively. She has made it a part of her style.
The story of Charles Egbert Craddock is a story of gradual decline. In the Tennessee Mountains was received with a universality of approval comparable only with that accorded to The Luck of Roaring Camp. In her second venture, Where the Battle Was Fought, she attempted to break from the narrow limits of her first success and to write a Hardy-like novel of the section of Southern life in which she herself belonged, but it failed. From all sides came the demand that she return again to her own peculiar domain. And she returned with The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. It was praised, but with the praise came a note of dissatisfaction, a note that became more and more dominant with every novel that followed. Her first short stories had appealed because of their freshness and the strangeness of their setting. Moreover, since they were the first work of a young writer they were a promise of better things to come. But the promise was not fulfilled. After The Juggler, her last attempt on a large scale to create a great Tennessee-mountains novel, she took the advice of many of her critics and left the narrow field that she had cultivated so carefully. She wrote historical romances and novels of contemporary life, but the freshness of her early work was gone. After 1897 she produced nothing that had not been done better by other writers.
Her failure came not, as many have believed, from the poverty of her materials and the narrowness of her field. Thomas Hardy deliberately had chosen for his novels a region and a people just as primitive. A great novel should concern itself with the common fundamentals of humanity, and these fundamentals, he believed, may be studied with more of accuracy in the isolated places where the conventions of polite society have not prevented natural expression. Or, to quote Hardy's own words:
Social environment operates upon character in a way that is oftener than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture by making the exteriors of men their screen rather than their index, as with untutored mankind. Contrasts are disguised by the crust of conventionality, picturesqueness obliterated, and a subjective system of description necessitated for the differentiation of character. In the one case the author's word has to be taken as to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they can be seen as in an écorché.[139]
The failure of Charles Egbert Craddock came rather from her inability to work with large masses of material and coördinate it and shape it into a culminating force. She was picturesque rather than penetrating, melodramatic rather than simple, a showman rather than a discerning interpreter of the inner meanings of life. She could make vivid sketches of a moment or of a group or a landscape, but she could not build up touch by touch a consistent and compelling human character. Her genius was fitted to express itself in the short story and the sketch, and she devoted the golden years of her productive life to the making of elaborate novels. A little story like "'Way Down on Lonesome Cove" is worth the whole of the The Juggler or In the Clouds. The short stories with which she won her first fame must stand as her highest achievement.