A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

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.