LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
"Nathaniel Parker Willis." By Henry A.Beers.
"Edgar Allan Poe." By George E. Woodbury.
(American Men of Letters Series.)
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
The American Men of Letters Series is giving us some excellent biographies, well written, the facts well assimilated and grouped, and the whole treatment so accurate and graphic as to be full not only of instruction but of entertainment. Formerly American biography was so deficient in just those qualities which endear English biographical literature to us, that we were inclined to believe that the fault was inherent in Americans and American life, that our days and works lacked picturesqueness and color and left no salient points for the chronicler to seize. We now see that the meagre harvests of former biographers were due to their hasty and superficial generalizations. For at least three of the volumes in this series—the life of James Fenimore Cooper and the two now before us—may be favorably compared with the best work in the English Men of Letters Series, which is indeed high praise. Unusual and striking as were the incidents in the life of Cooper, they had completely dropped out of sight of the present generation. The biographers of Willis and Poe had no such advantage. Willis is still remembered, not only as a litt?teur and journalist, but as a man about town, while legend has never ceased to be busy with the memory of Poe, so that the traditions of his strange career are curiously linked to and incorporated with his best-known works.
The present estimate of Willis as a literary man is so slight that it seems almost like impaling a butterfly to apply critical tests to his writings. Professor Beers has nevertheless made it a profitable and interesting study to follow him through his career, which was, upon the whole, singularly fortunate. Few authors have possessed so happy a knack of making the present moment both enjoyable and profitable. His personal endowments were all in his favor, and no sooner was he launched in Europe than he gained a great social success. England, in particular, opened some of its pleasantest circles to him. Not only did Lady Blessington take him up, but he became a favorite with many of the most lofty and exclusive members of the aristocracy. Never was opportunity more auspicious, for Willis was a born worshipper of refinements and luxuries. He had starved in America for beauty and color, and dear to him were all these adjuncts of a highly-civilized life. It was his mission to reproduce for Americans lively impressions in letters to newspapers at home, and in stories and sketches, in which he drew freely not only upon his own experiences, but upon all the hints and suggestions he could pick up. His industry and ingenious expedients were well rewarded: in fact, one is a little surprised to find that in 1842 he was writing four articles monthly for four magazines, and receiving one hundred dollars for each, which makes a sum total of almost five thousand a year. He was, besides, handsomely paid for his books both in England and at home, and had generally on hand some writing for illustrated volumes of travel, so that for many years he may easily be said to have made seven or eight thousand a year.
No greater contrast to Willis—the man of the world, who knew how to turn every habit, talent, and instinct to account—could be found than poor Poe, all whose opportunities were wasted, spoiled, or flung away. It is the most difficult thing in the world to arrive at anything like a complete idea of the identity of so fantastic a man as the author of the "Raven." The faults, inconsistencies, and contradictions of his character perplex and dismay one the more closely one looks into his letters and the minor incidents of his career. Mr. Woodbury has, however, acquitted himself well in this difficult task, and has in many cases separated truth from long-accepted fiction and given us a clear picture of what has hitherto been blurred and distorted by unfaithful friends and foes. The story is a most hopeless and pitiful one, its gloom brightened and its bitterness sweetened by but few of the consolations which belong to average human lives. The causes of this are apparent enough: they were constituents of Poe's brain and heart; but for him to have been otherwise organized would have been for his unique work to have had no existence.
Recent Fiction.
"Troubled Waters: A Problem of To-Day." By Beverley Ellison Warner.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company.
"A Marsh Island," By Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
"The Duchess Emilia." By Barrett Wendell. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.
"Across the Chasm." "Within the Capes." New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
"One of the Duanes." By Alice King Hamilton. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott
Company.
"Tales from Many Sources." Vols. I. and II. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
There is a generous use of good material in Mr. Warner's novel, the scene of which is laid in a New England manufacturing town, with all the sharp and diversified social contrasts, the eager strifes and competitions, that belong to such a community, clearly portrayed. The author calls his story "A Problem of To-Day," and it is his study to press home to the consciousness of the reader the series of dull and wearing miseries, the bitter discouragements and pathetic misfortunes, which pursue the working-man whose most faithful labor insures him no secure hold upon future comfort and prosperity. It is both the strength and the weakness of the book that its most prominent figure, Richard Wilton, is a wealthy mill-owner who has risen to his position in a way which makes him an unfair representative of the class of capitalists. A man without intellect or humanity, without faith, without law, a robber of the dead, a despoiler of the widow and orphan, a successful impostor, a remorseless brute who takes pleasure in outraging and crushing his subordinates, would naturally be a bad master and make his work-people miserable by heaped-up tyrannies. His faults are not the inevitable outgrowth of a position of power and the conflict between capital and labor, but are the result of his own individual depravity. But this man's personality is a powerful one, and his personality is the motive of most of the dramatic events which crowd the pages. The history of the "strike" which follows the reduction of wages at Trade Lawn Mills is faithfully and vigorously given. Mr. Warner evidently knows the temper of workingmen, their patience and impatience, their trials, temptations, and weaknesses. He gauges with pitiful fidelity the faults of character and purpose which make almost every "strike" contain within itself the germs of collapse and failure. The plot is cleverly conceived and successfully carried out. That the bubble which has for a time floated Richard Wilton's frauds and crimes bursts at last, and that the villain is brought to well-merited disgrace, is a matter of course. Trade Lawn Mills pass into the hands of their rightful owners, and certain co-operative ideas which are an essential ingredient of the story and its applied moral are carried out. The author attaches high importance to co-operative schemes, and finds in them the clear solution of the vexing questions concerning the future of the workingman. As an offset to the somewhat dark and troubled pictures of life which the story presents, there are sunny and pleasant passages in which a High-Church clergyman and a young lady by the name of Sydney Worthington figure. The whole book is, in fact, inspired by a spirit of hopefulness and a sure belief that divine order overrules the efforts, successes, and failures of the humblest human being and that a way of deliverance is sure to come.
If "A Marsh Island" shows no distinct advance upon Miss Jewett's earlier work, it is yet a pretty, artistic product which delicately emphasizes the author's best points and gives us her distinct charm without any waste of effects. Her feeling for rural life and her clear comprehension of rural people were never better displayed than in this little story. A generous play of late-summer and autumn radiance lights up its every nook and corner; it is mellow with warm color and odorous of late fruits and flowers. We cannot help finding the artist visitor, that product of the bloom of Boston civilization, a little hackneyed and time-worn. He has surely done his part in literature, and may retire to the heaven of the dilettante. But all the inhabitants of Marsh Island are human and attractive, and the untiring industries of the well-ordered household soothe one like the rhythm of a song. The bizarre, incongruous, but, upon the whole, satisfactory specimen of New England "help" which Miss Jewett generally introduces finds an excellent example here in the person of Temperance Kipp. Squire Owen is a genial man, so overflowing with generous nature that he can afford to fill out the more meagre humanities of his wife, who has susceptibilities, tempers, and moods. "They used to tell a story," he one day remarks to Mrs. Owen, with great satisfaction, when she has a distinct grievance about clothes,—"I do' know but you've heard it, —about old Sergeant Copp an' his wife, that was always quarrellin'. Somebody heard her goin' on one day. Says she, 'I do wish somebody'd give me a lift as fur as Westmarket. I do feel's if I ought to buy me a cap. I ain't got a decent cap to my back: if I was to die to-morrow, I ain't got no cap that's fit to lay me out in.' 'Blast ye,' says he, 'why didn't ye die when ye had a cap?'" The more impassioned side of life does not suit Miss Jewett so well as the humorous and pastoral; but each detail about her heroine is attractive, and nothing in recent fiction, is more true, touching, and womanly than Doris's journey to Westmarket in the autumnal dawn to keep her lover at home from the fishing-banks.
"The Duchess Emilia" is one of those stories which ought to be withdrawn from the province of criticism by the fact of their being the delight of the reader, thrilling him with their weirdness and firing his imagination by their splendid audacity. If the attention is so feebly grasped as to permit one to reason about an impossible situation, it becomes at once extravagant and absurd. One would require to be considerably carried away by illusion to be moved by Mr. Wendell's story. The hero is a New-Englander, born of mad parents (they met while both were patients in an insane asylum); and this inherited curse would seem to be enough for any hero to totter under. It becomes unimportant, however, when we discover that he has furthermore been taken possession of at birth by the spirit of a wicked and fascinating Italian duchess, who wishes to expiate her crimes before leaving this mundane sphere. One might readily expect some startling effects from the development of a plot thus removed from the haven of probabilities and set afloat in a sea of the wildest romance. The Duchess Emilia's repentance, however, seems to have ended the interest of her career, and her good deeds are appallingly dull; in fact, her whole personality thins away into insignificance.
"Across the Chasm" opens with fair promise, and our introduction to Virginia life and a talkative old negro "somewhar up in de nineties" is one which we should be glad to follow up by further acquaintance. This serves, however, merely as preamble, and in the next chapter we are transported to a city called Washington, although for characteristic flavor it might as well be any other place, and we enter upon the events attending a young lady's entrance into society. This might all be very pretty and pleasant, except for the deadly seriousness of the author. It is entirely frivolous and unimportant, but frivolity may be made charming and full of suggestion. Points of etiquette and behavior engage the minds, hearts, and passions of the personages of the story. It is a sort of animated illustration of the little book called "Don't." For example, "Don't leave your overcoat and rubbers in the hall when you go to make a call on a lady for the first time," receives practical exemplification when Major King, a high-toned Southerner, with unbuttoned frock-coat and baggy trousers, pays a visit to the heroine. He not only takes off his overcoat and rubbers, but tilts his chair, stays till midnight, and in every way calls down the wrath of that accomplished prig Mr. Louis Gaston, who is a high-toned Northerner. This yawning gulf between the generous faults of the South and the fastidious Phariseeism of the North is the problem of the book. The story is slight, wholly conventional, and rather commonplace, but it is gracefully told, and the conversations are not without interest.
Mr. Howard Pyle's "Within the Capes" belongs to a widely different category from the pretty feminine Southern sketch, and is quite equal to the most insatiable requirements, containing half a dozen successful kinds of fiction in itself. As a love-story, it is charming; as a sea- and shipwreck- and treasure-finding-story, it offers a fair challenge not only to Russell, but to Stevenson himself; while as a detective-story it is as good as most. The adventures are related by the hero, one Captain Tom Granger, who toward the end of his long life feels a desire to have his strange history live in his own version, and not in the fables of the gossips. A characteristic quaintness of expression gives validity to the narrative, with plenty of homely enforcement of Tom Granger's wit and wisdom.
"One of the Duanes" offers a vivid picture of the life which goes on among the officers and officers' wives and daughters who make up a little world within a world at our army and naval stations. Mrs. Hamilton has depicted the interests and excitements, the gossip and the scandals, in a way which impresses the reader as being faithful and without exaggeration. The story is interesting, and the book is thoroughly readable and enjoyable.
Two or three little volumes containing the best short stories that have been published ought to be a desirable addition to any library-table, to be picked up by a chance caller or read aloud on a rainy evening. And "Tales from all Sources" fairly well answer one's requirements of what such collections should contain, being grave and gay, bizarre and frivolous, to suit the various tastes. We should be glad to see Bulwer's "The Haunted and the Haunters" (called in some editions "The House and the Brain") reproduced in such a collection. The fault of this series, if it be a fault, is that most of the stories are well within the recollection of any one who has read the English magazines for the past few years, —"The Black Poodle," for example, and "The Pavilion on the Links," being matters of yesterday. However, both are sufficiently good to command a second reading.