BOOKS AND AUTHORS
CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.
Prison Life of Jefferson Davis. By Bvt. Lt. Col. John J. Craven, M.D. G. W. Dillingham Company, New York. Price, $1.20.
The recent controversy concerning General Miles and the shackling of Jefferson Davis while the latter was a prisoner of war at Fortress Monroe, makes this new edition of Dr. Craven’s book, originally published in 1866, of timely value and importance. Dr. Craven was the medical adviser of Mr. Davis during most of his imprisonment, and his notes, taken from daily and intimate intercourse with his patient, form the basis of this volume. While written with professional reserve and military discretion, it is a most satisfactory and reliable account of the facts concerning the imprisonment of Mr. Davis, and throws an interesting and significant light on his character as viewed on close range by a political enemy at a time when prejudice and passion so generally usurped the place of judgment. Dr. Craven frankly expresses his original prejudiced and bitter attitude toward his patient, even to naming the precise occasion on which a kindlier sentiment was aroused in his breast. A stronger, sincerer tribute to Mr. Davis’ character could hardly be conceived than this plain and unadorned record of the change effected in the attitude of an honest enemy toward the man whom he abhorred as a kind of moral monster. Dr. Craven was not only impressed with the learning and ability of his distinguished prisoner, but again and again bears impartial witness to his modesty, fortitude, and unselfishness, relating conversations and incidents which particularly impressed him at the time. The strength of that impression is sufficiently evinced by the fact that Dr. Craven had the courage to publish such a book at a time when sectional feeling ran so high.
The facts in regard to the shameful treatment of Mr. Davis by General Miles are fully confirmed by copies of the official reports bearing on the matter, and the account is a painful commentary on the injustice and cruelty of the policy allowed to rule in regard to a conquered people. Mr. Davis was sick and feeble; moreover, he was closely guarded night and day, in an impregnable fortress. Under the circumstances his shackling was a wanton and unnecessary humiliation of a helpless man, and the bare relation of the incident as witnessed by Dr. Craven, though set down without comment or criticism, is enough to make the blood of any generous reader boil with indignation and revolt. It is impossible to doubt the honesty and accuracy of such a record, and it must remain a heavy indictment against those responsible for the outrage here detailed. Dr. Craven’s son, who republishes this book, is fully justified in so doing, not only for the satisfaction of a present interest, but for the consideration of future generations.
The Marriage of William Ashe. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Harper and Brothers, New York. Price, $1.50.
Mrs. Ward in her latest novel works very much the same combination which proved to so exactly fit the public taste in “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” and if the result is not the same success, it will be only because the popular impression will be dulled by repetition. Again we have a heroine nurtured in a scandalous menage in Paris and shadowed by a criminal heredity, and Lady Kitty, like Julie in the earlier novel, has two lovers, contrasted in character much as were Delafield and the caddish young soldier to whom Julie so nearly yielded. The crucial moment of temptation, however, comes to Lady Kitty after her marriage, and the hand of fate which snatched Julie from danger plunges the later heroine into the abyss of ruin and disgrace. William Ashe, like Marchmont, is of a noble house and high in political circles, but he is not quite so much of an archangel, though he, too, exhibits a patient and tolerant forbearance toward the indiscretions and errors of the woman he loves, which, however philosophical, somewhat removes him from the normal human type and its sympathies. Geoffrey Cliffe, the objectionable lover, is a poet instead of a soldier, but he, too, woos Kitty to disgrace and finally meets a violent death. Both novels are elaborate studies of heredity, and in each the final decision between irretrievable error and duty hangs upon an unforeseen incident which turns the scales like a fate.
Again Mrs. Ward has drawn on real life for her characters and plot. The Byronic inspiration of Geoffrey Cliffe is sufficiently obvious and the suggestion of Lady Caroline Lamb’s story is plainly to be read in Lady Kitty and her obsession. More than one prominent political figure of a generation ago has been promptly identified by the English reviewers.
Of the two heroines, Lady Kitty is a better realization than Julie, who, to our mind quite failed to keep the novelist’s promise of intellectual brilliancy and social magnetism. It is really a wonderful and poignant impression conveyed by Mrs. Ward’s elaborate picture of Lady Kitty, frail and fair, passionate and weak, poetic and frivolous, sweet and perverse—with a lack of moral and mental balance which spells for us nothing less than insanity. For after all, we are disposed to question whether such a character is not properly a study in alienism rather than in feminine psychology. That she was not a responsible agent, but merely the unfortunate creature of her own impelling fancies and passions, is the view stressed by every implication of the author, and indeed, against the very shady record of Lady Kitty’s life can only be pleaded temperamental insanity and hereditary sin.
An equally elaborate, but not so successful, piece of work is the presentation of William Ashe. He is depicted as a kind of Admirable Crichton—handsome, learned, amiable—a scholar, a statesman, and a social lion. “Religiously he was a skeptic, enormously interested in religion. Politically he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty.” But with all the author’s keen analysis and clever descriptive phrases, this versatile and philosophical hero never becomes very real to our perceptions or sympathies. It would seem that his creator had fashioned and molded him carefully and perfectly, but had failed to breathe into him the breath of life.
Mrs. Ward’s rich literary equipment is no less manifest in this novel than in her previous works, and her power to deal with the larger interests of life is undiminished. The old time English society novel in her hands has been expanded, dignified, transformed, into a serious and significant presentation of life and its problems. Her outlook on the world of thought, of affairs, and of men and women is technically informed and philosophically impartial; her talent is enormously efficient. Perhaps her remarkable ability was never better demonstrated than when she made in “Lady Rose’s Daughter” a deliberate bid for a wider and lower kind of popular favor. The new appeal, so marked in that book and in “The Marriage of William Ashe,” was so skilfully turned and has been so successful in enlarging the writer’s clientele, that as a literary tour de force, it challenges a kind of unwilling admiration. There seem to be lacking to her marvelous gifts and powers only the touch of spontaneity, the flash of dramatic fire.
The Georgians. By Will N. Harben, author of “Abner Daniel,” “The Substitute,” etc. New York: Harper and Brother. Price, $1.50.
The plain people of the South, the sturdy common folk who made no pretensions to aristocratic grandeur but who in self-respect, prosperity and character, formed in this section, as elsewhere, the backbone of civilization and society, have not received their due representation in Southern fiction, generally speaking. Baronial splendors, “po’ white trash” peculiarities, and darky picturesqueness have been the favored themes of most Southern story-tellers, moving in the lines of least resistance to romantic and dramatic interest, while the great middle class has been made to occupy a disproportionately small place in their pictures of Southern life. It is not mere accident that the Georgia writers have given us the fullest and best treatment of this class, for in Georgia pre-eminently it dominated and colored the political and social body to a marked degree. Richard Malcolm Johnson, Joel Chandler Harris, and Watson have all given us stories with a strong flavor of the soil and the people who chiefly owned and cultivated it, and Mr. Harben’s tales of north Georgia have been notably successful in this line of fiction.
In “Abner Daniel,” Mr. Harben achieved one of the rarest things in modern fiction—a genuine creation. Typically, sympathetically, imaginatively, Abner Daniel rings true; in spirit and letter he is a perfect presentation. Broadly human as he is unmistakably North Georgian, he may be described as a Southern David Harum; but of the two characters Abner Daniel seems to us far more vital, far less dependent on his make-up and gags for reality. In “The Georgians,” Abner reappears, this time as the deus ex machina of a mysterious murder case, involving the love affair and various other interests of the story. The little village of Darley is sketched faithfully and sympathetically, and it is peopled with folk, whom we either know, or instinctively recognize as real. Under the not very deceptive alias of Tom P. Smith, Mr. Harben pictures a certain noted evangelist of Georgia and his revivalist methods, while as a companion piece he presents Jack Bantram, of another ecclesiastical type, who makes a simple and direct appeal to conscience and manhood. The religious ideals and customs of such communities have never received fuller or more sympathetic treatment than in this story, and, indeed, we may find here in simple, but effective narration, a most truthful picture of plain, provincial Georgia life in all its phases and forms. Among the real historical novels—those which are recording the vanishing social history of our nation—“The Georgians” deserves place and consideration.
Mysterious Mr. Sabin. By E. Phillips Oppenheim, Author of “A Prince of Sinners,” “Anna, the Adventuress,” etc. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Price, $1.50.
A most remarkable as well as mysterious individual is the villain of Mr. Oppenheim’s latest yarn. He appears in London with a beautiful girl who turns all the men’s heads and inspires young Lord Wolfenden with a sudden and serious passion. By a curious coincidence this young man’s father is a retired admiral, with a mania for writing up the coast defenses of England, while Mr. Sabin’s mission in England is to get possession of these papers to sell to the German Emperor. A political intrigue is involved, in which Mr. Sabin, as agent for the French Bourbons, has conceived the brilliant scheme of buying Germany’s aid with naval secrets of England, fully set forth in the maps and notes of the naval monomaniac. The success of these plans would be followed by war between England and Germany, and the coronation of Princess Helene—the mysterious young lady, of course—as Queen of France. There are all sorts of complications and sensational happenings, and just as things begin to look rather dark for the lovers and the peace of England, a nihilistic order checks Mr. Sabin’s operations and crushes his hopes and ambitions. This winds up the troubles of Wolfenden and his Princess, and prefaces the most remarkable and exciting adventures of Mr. Sabin as he flees incognito to America to escape the wrath of the disappointed war lord of Germany. Greatly to the reader’s relief, this most engaging villain arrives safely in Boston Harbor and we leave him settling down to a peaceful obscurity with his first love, to whom his bitterest enemy had rather inconsequentially directed him before he left England.
To the critical eye, the machinery of Mr. Oppenheim’s story is somewhat too evident, and occasionally it rattles and creaks, but it goes at a rapid rate, and the result is just what is intended—an interesting and exciting story, to be read with easy and pleasurable interest and forgotten immediately.
The Monks’ Treasure. By George Horton, Author of “Like Another Helen.” Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Price, $1.50.
Walter Lythgoe, the nephew of Erasmus Lythgoe, head of the great Lythgoe Baking Powder, is sent by the firm to Greece to lay in a supply of crude cream of tartar, and is dispatched on his errand with the admonition, “Keep out of all scrapes and complications with women.” Naturally the first thing done by the young man as he arrives on the island of Andros is to fall in love with a fair maiden and to immediately involve himself in the most gratuitous scrapes and astounding complications ever concocted for a novel hero to wriggle out of. Of course the fair maiden whom he loves so artlessly and chivalrously as the servant of the missionary turns out to be a duchess, and equally, of course, the treasure discovered by Walter and his friend in the vault of the monastery is her stolen patrimony. Walter conceives the brilliant scheme of carrying off the bags of gold, and after a series of incredible adventures, in which he and his Scotch crony pit their wits and courage against a jealous Greek lover and some murderous monks, the hero sails out triumphant from the island of Andros with his lady love and a trunk full of treasure.
The local coloring of the story is confined to the adjectives “rosy” and “purple,” sprinkled plentifully throughout the book, and despite the often stressed conjunction with the “amphora,” the beautiful Polyxene seems not widely differentiated from any unsophisticated heroine of more familiar climes. In fact, Mr. Horton has not succeeded in galvanizing a very mechanical series of adventures into real vitality by transporting his puppets and wheels to Greece.
The River’s Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. New York: The Century Co.
In her “Sonny” stories Mrs. Stuart struck the note of original and homely humor to which the popular taste is so quick to respond and for that reason achieved therein her greatest success, but her tales of Creoles and negroes in the Lower Mississippi region have distinctive merit in their vivid and poetic pictures of the great river and its children. To her imagination the Mississippi is not the Father of Waters, but “Old Lady Mississippi,” a witch, a siren, a queen—to fear, to propitiate, and to worship, and to the strength of this conception “The River’s Children” bears striking testimony. The slender thread of story runs almost unnoted among the poetic and picturesque descriptions of the river and the quaint and charming patois of the river people. The great stream sweeps supreme through the book, its poetry, beauty and tragedy looming up larger upon our impression than the magnificence of the Le Ducs or the rather highly colored sketches of Israel and Hannah. Wonderful is the account of Brake Island in its days of fatness culminating in the glories of the famous house-party long ago; and a clever bit of reproduction, at once keen and kindly, is the talk of “Felix” and “Adolphe” on the peril of the rising waters. Not even Cable has caught more perfectly the foreign idiom and softened English of these foreign Americans, or their pleasure-loving, childlike temperament.
Mrs. Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery so characteristic of the negro, Mrs. Stuart gives us sustained and elaborate rhetoric and sentiment. To our perception, too, the story should have ended with the death of the old negro couple, and what follows seems a decline to an anti-climax.
Mrs. Stuart is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best.
Return: a Story of the Sea Islanders in 1739. By Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke. L. C. Page and Company, Boston. Price, $1.50.
This is an extremely hollow piece of literary labor, with seemingly no other inspiration than Mary Johnson’s romances. There is no atmosphere wherefrom incident or characters could draw any vital semblance, and the style is the thinnest and stalest decoction of Miss Johnson’s manner and diction. It is to be hoped that the writers will once for all forswear the field of colonial history and romance, and return to their own—the life they know and can describe so well in Texas and Tennessee.