"Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we'll return to our senses."
"Now I'll put on my feathers again," says the plucked bird.
But as one reads on one realizes more and more that this style comes from no mere imitation of a master: it is Creole; it is the style that is the counterpart of the Creole temperament. It is verisimilitude; it is interpretation.
Thus far the strength of the book; there are weaknesses as great. Cable failed, as Harte failed, as most of the masters of the short story have failed, in constructive power. The magnificent thesis of the romance is not worked out; it is barely suggested rather than made to dominate the piece. Moreover, the interest does not accumulate and culminate at the end. It is a rich mass of materials rather than a finished romance. The emphasis is laid upon characters, episodes, conditions, atmosphere, to the neglect of construction. From it Cable might have woven a series of perfect short stories: some parts indeed, like the tale of Bras Coupé, are complete short stories as they stand. The book is a gallery rather than a single work of art.
Dr. Sevier, 1885, marks the beginning of Cable's later style, the beginning of the decline in his art. The year before he had taken up his permanent residence in Massachusetts and now as a literary celebrity, with Boston not far, he became self-conscious and timid. His art had matured in isolation; there had been an elemental quality about it that had come from his very narrowness and lack of formal education. In the classic New England atmosphere the Gallic element, the naïve simplicity, the elfin charm that had made his early writings like no others, faded out of his art. It was as if Burns after the Kilmarnock edition had studied poetry at Oxford and then had settled in literary London. Doctor Sevier is not a romance at all; it is a realistic novel of the Howells type, a study of the Civil War period as it had passed under Cable's own eyes, with no plot and no culminating love interest. It is a running chronicle of ten years in the lives of John and Mary Richling, tedious at times, impeded with problem discussion and philosophizing. Its strength lies in its characterization: the Italian Ristofalo and his Irish wife are set off to the life; but why should the creator of Madame Delphine and Posson Jone and Palmyre turn to Irish and Italian characterization? The story, too, has the same defects as The Grandissimes: it lacks proportion and balance. With a large canvas Cable becomes always awkward and ineffective. With Bonaventure, graphic as parts of it unquestionably are, one positively loses patience. Its plan is chaotic. At the end, where should come the climax of the plot, are inserted three long chapters telling with minute and terrifying realism the incidents of a flood in the canebrakes. It is magnificent, yet it is "lumber." It is introduced apparently to furnish background for the death of the "Cajun," but the "Cajun" is only an incidental figure in the book. To deserve such "limelight" he should have been the central character who had been hunted with increasing interest up to the end and his crime and his punishment should have been the central theme.
With Madame Delphine (1881) had closed the first and the great period in Cable's literary career. The second period was a period of miscellany: journalized articles on the history and the characteristics of the Creoles, on New Orleans and its life, on Louisiana, its history and traditions, on phases of social reform. Necessary as this work may have been, one feels inclined to deplore it. When one has discovered new provinces in the realm of gold one does not well, it would seem, to lay aside his magic flute and prepare guide books to the region.
The New England atmosphere brought to life a native area in Cable. His mother had been of New England ancestry. Moral wrestlings, questions of reform, problems of conscience, were a part of his birthright. One feels it even in his earliest work: he had seen, we feel, the problem of The Grandissimes before he had found the story. After his removal to Northampton, Massachusetts, it may be said that reform work became his real profession. Not that we criticize his choice, for life ever is greater than mere art; we record it simply because it explains. He formed home culture clubs for the education and the esthetic culture of wage-earners, and conducted a magazine in the interest of the work; he interested himself actively in the cause of the negro; so actively, indeed, that after his Silent South and The Negro Question and the problem novel John March, Southerner, the South practically disowned him.
His third period begins, perhaps, with his novel Strong Hearts in 1899. The pen that so long had been dipped in controversy and journalism and philanthropic propaganda again essayed fiction, but it was too late. The old witchery was gone. His later novels, all his fiction indeed after Madame Delphine, with the exception perhaps of parts of Bonaventure, read as if written by a disciple of the earlier Cable. The verve, the sly humor, the Gallic finesse, the Creole strangeness and charm, have disappeared. There is a tightening in the throat as one reads the last page of Madame Delphine, there is a flutter of the heart as one reads the love story of Honoré and Aurora, but nothing grips one as he reads The Cavalier. A pretty little story, undoubtedly, but is it possible that the author of it once wrote "Posson Jone" and "Jean-ah Poquelin"? And Gideon's Band, a romance with an attempt to win back the old witchery of style—it was all in vain. Why say more?
Cable as a short story writer, a maker of miniatures with marvelous skill of touch, was most successful perhaps with dainty femininities of the old régime. Once, twice, thrice the light of romance glowed upon his page. Then he became a reformer, a journalist, a man with a problem. But he who gave to American literature Madame Delphine and Old Creole Days need not fear the verdict of coming days. Already have these works become classics.
II
The old Spanish régime in America furnished the theme of Lewis Wallace's (1827–1905) first romance, The Fair God, published the year "'Sieur George" appeared in Scribner's. He had returned from the Mexican War interested in Aztec antiquities. After the Civil War, in which he took a prominent part, he began in the intervals of his law practice to write a military romance centering about Cortez and the conquest, and in 1873, through the efforts of Whitelaw Reid, succeeded in having it published in Boston. It was not, however, until 1884, after the enormous popularity of Ben Hur, that it was discovered by the reading public. It is really better in workmanship and proportions than its more highly colored and vastly more exploited companion; it moves strongly, its battle scenes have a resonance and excitement about them that make them comparable even with Scott's, but its tendency is to sentiment and melodrama: it is a blending of Prescott and Bulwer-Lytton.