VII
The enormous quantity and richness of the fiction of the period make impossible extended criticism of any save those who were leaders or innovators. Many did most excellent work, work indeed in some cases that seems to point to permanence, yet since they brought nothing new either in material or in method we need not dwell long upon them.
No type of fiction, for instance, was more abundant all through the period than that which we have called the E. P. Roe type, and the most voluminous producer of it undoubtedly was Captain, later General, Charles King, who created no fewer than fifty-five novels of the half-sensational, half-sentimental type which we associate with the name of Roe. With his wide knowledge of army life, especially as lived in the frontier camps of the West after the Civil War, he was able to give his work a verisimilitude that added greatly to their popularity. The love story was skilfully blended with what seemed to be real history. The frontier stories of Mary Hallock Foote, wife of a civil engineer whose work called him into the mining camps of Colorado and Idaho, have the same characteristics. Their author, a clever illustrator, was able to extend her art to her descriptions of the primitive regions and savage humanity of the frontier, and for a time she was compared even with Bret Harte. But not for long. Her books, save for their novelty of setting, have no characteristics that are not conventional. Better is the work of Clara Louise Burnham. There is in her fiction more of imaginative power and more command of the subtleties of style, but even her best efforts fall far short of distinction.
Of the romancers of the period the leader for a time unquestionably was Julian Hawthorne, only son of the greatest of American romancers. In his earlier days he devoted himself to themes worthy of the Hawthorne name and treated them in what fairly may be called the Hawthorne manner. His novels, like Bressant and Archibald Malmaison, were hailed everywhere as remarkably promising work and there were many who predicted for him a place second only to his father's. But the man lacked seriousness, conscience, depth of life, knowledge of the human heart. After a short period of worthy endeavor he turned to the sensational and the trivial, and became a yellow journalist. No literary career seemingly so promising has ever failed more dismally.
Stronger romancers by far have been Blanche Willis Howard, Frederick J. Stimson, and Arthur Sherburne Hardy. Few American women have been more brilliant than Miss Howard. Her One Summer has a sprightliness and a humor about it that are perennial, and her Breton romance Guenn is among the greatest romances of the period in either England or America. The spirit of true romance breathes from it; and it came alive from its creator's heart and life. So far does it surpass all her other work that she is rated more and more now as a single-work artist. She passed her last years away from America in Stuttgart, where her husband, Herr von Teuffel, was acting as court physician to the king of Würtemberg. Hardy also was a romancer, a stylist of the French type, brilliant, finished. Few have ever brought to fiction a mind more keenly alert and more analytical. He was a mathematician of note, a writer of treatises on least squares and quarternions. But he was a poet as well and a romancer. His But yet a Woman has an atmosphere about it that is rarely found in literature in English. His Passe Rose is the most idealistic of all the historical romances: it moves like a prose poem. Stimson too had artistic imagination, grace of style of the old type joined to the freshness and vigor of the new period. It is to be regretted that he chose to devote himself to the law and write legal treatises that are everywhere recognized as authoritative rather than to do highly distinctive work in the more creative field of prose romance. None of these writers may be said to have added anything really new to the province in which they worked and so may be dismissed with a brief comment. They worked in old material with old methods and largely with old ideals, and though they worked often with surpassing skill, they were followers rather than leaders.
Several novels made much stir in the day of their first appearance, Bellamy's Looking Backward, for instance, John Hay's The Bread-Winners (1884), and Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers, that picture of Chicago life that for a time was thought to be as promising as Frank Norris's realistic work. Robert Grant's humorous and sprightly studies of society and life were also at various times much discussed, but all of them are seen now to have been written for their own generation alone. With every decade almost there comes a newness that for a time is supposed to put into eclipse even the fixed stars. A quarter of a century, however, tells the story. The Norwegian scholar and poet and novelist Boyesen, who did what Howells really did not do, take Tolstoy as his master, was thought for two decades to be of highest rank, but to-day his work, save for certain sections of his critical studies, is no longer read.
Even F. Hopkinson Smith is too near just at present for us to prophesy with confidence, yet it is hard to believe that his Colonel Carter is to be forgotten, and there are other parts of his work, like Tom Grogan and Caleb West, books that centered about his profession of lighthouse architect, that seem now like permanent additions to American fiction. There was a breeziness about his style, a cosmopolitanism, a sense of knowledge and authority that is most convincing. Some of his short stories, like those for instance in At Close Range—"A Night Out," to be still more specific—have a picturing power, a perfect naturalness, an accuracy of diction, that mark them as triumphs of realism in its best sense. Like Dr. Mitchell, he came late to literature, but when he did come he came strongly, laden with a wealth of materials, and he has left behind him a handful at least of novels and studies that bid fair to endure long.