II
The appearance of "Monsieur Motte" in the New Princeton Review of January, 1886, marks another step in the development of the short story. It was as distinctively French in its atmosphere and its art as if it had been a translation from Maupassant, yet it was as originally and peculiarly American as even Madame Delphine, which in so many ways it resembles. Its English, which is Gallic in idiom and in incisive brevity; its atmosphere quivering with passion; its characters whimsical, impulsive, exquisite of manners; its dainty suggestions of femininity, as in the case of the little Creole maiden Marie Modeste or the stately Madame Lareveillère; its hints of a rich and tragic background, and its startling "Marjorie Daw" culmination—there is no Monsieur Motte; Monsieur Motte is only the pathetic négresse Marcélite—all this was French, but the background was old Creole New Orleans, and it was drawn by one who professed herself a severe realist, or, to quote her own words, "I am not a romanticist, I am a realist à la mode de la Nouvelle-Orleans. I have never written a line that was not realistic, but our life, our circumstances, the heroism of the men and women that surrounded my early horizon—all that was romantic. I had a mind very sensitive to romantic impressions, but critical as to their expression."
The writer was Grace Elizabeth King, daughter of a prominent barrister of New Orleans, herself with a strain of Creole blood, educated at the fashionable Creole pension of the Mesdames Cenas—the Institute St. Denis of "Monsieur Motte" and "Pupasse"—bilingual like all the circle in which she moved, and later a resident for some two years in France—no wonder that from her stories breathes a Gallic atmosphere such as we find in no other work of the period. Three more episodes, each a complete short story—"On the Plantation," "The Drama of an Evening," and "The Marriage of Marie Modeste"—she added to her first story, bits of art that Flaubert would have delighted in, and issued them in 1888 under the title Monsieur Motte. She followed it with Earthlings, which she has never republished, from Lippincott's Magazine, and with other stories and sketches contributed to Harper's and the Century that later appeared as Tales of a Time and Place and Balcony Stories.
The impulse to write fiction came to Miss King from a conviction that Cable had done scant justice to the real Creoles of Louisiana. She would depict those exclusive circles of old Creole life that she herself had known in her early childhood, circles almost exclusively French with just a touch, perhaps, of Spanish. She would differ from Cable as Sarah Orne Jewett differs from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her pictures of New England life. Her sketches, therefore, are more minutely drawn, more gentle, more suggestive of the richness and beauty of a vanished age that was Parisian and Bourbon in its brilliancy. She excels in her pictures of old Mesdames, relics of the old régime, drawn by the lightest of touches and suggestions until they are intensely alive, like Bon Maman or like Madame Josephine in "A Delicate Affair." A hint or a suggestion is made to do the work of a page of analysis. Note a passage like this:
She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won; for she never hesitated to cheat and get out of a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.
Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders and say, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.
All her feminine creations are Gallic, like Marie Modeste, or, better still, the vividly drawn Misette in Earthlings, volatile, lovable—impossible. She is always at her best while depicting these whimsical, impracticable, tropic femininites; she makes them not so bewitching as does Cable, but she makes them more real and more intensely alive.
Her earlier stories are the best, judged merely as short stories. As she continued her work she discovered more and more the wealth of romantic material in the annals of the old city, especially in the studies of Charles Gayarré (1805–1895), greatest of Southern historians. The influence of his work upon her becomes increasingly evident. Her stories grew into sketches. Balcony Stories are not so much stories as they are realistic sketches of social conditions in New Orleans after the Reconstruction. More and more she wrote studies in Creole atmospheres, impressions of picturesque places and persons after the manner of Hearn, until at length she abandoned fiction altogether to devote herself to history. In the period when historical fiction for a time ruled everything, she wrote history itself in a manner that was as graphic and as picturesque as fiction. Perhaps nothing that she has written has in it more of vitality than her history of New Orleans and its people. It is possible that her final place is to be with the historians rather than with the makers of fiction.
In the technique of the short story she was surpassed by a later worker in Louisiana materials, Kate Chopin (1851–1904), some of whose work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. She wrote but little, two volumes of stories, notably Bayou Folks, containing all that is now accessible of her shorter work. Many of her sketches and stories have never been republished from the magazines.
The strength of Mrs. Chopin's work came partly from the strangeness of her material—she told of the Grand Pré Acadians in the canebrakes of central Louisiana—and from her intimate knowledge of her field, but it came more from what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius. She was of Celtic temperament—her father was a Galway County Irishman and her mother was of mingled French and old Virginian stock. Educated in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at St. Louis, married at nineteen to a New Orleans cotton factor, spending fourteen years in Louisiana, the last four of them in the remote hamlet of Cloutiersville in Natchitoches Parish, "a rambling little French village of one street, with the Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and the Red River flowing through everybody's backyard," left a widow at thirty-five with six children—all this had little to do with the making of literature. Indeed, until her return to St. Louis a year after her bereavement, she had never even thought of writing. She began almost by chance, and, succeeding from the first, she wrote story after story almost without effort and wholly without study of narrative art. For a decade her work was in all of the Northern magazines, then five years before her death, discouraged by the reception of her novel The Awakening, she became silent.
No writer of the period was more spontaneously and inevitably a story teller. There is an ease and a naturalness about her work that comes from more than mere art. She seldom gave to a story more than a single sitting, and she rarely revised her work, yet in compression of style, in forbearance, in the massing of materials, and in artistry she ranks with even the masters of the period. A story like "Desireé's Baby," with its inevitableness and its culminating sentence that stops for an instant the reader's heart, is well-nigh perfect. She was emotional, she was minutely realistic, and, unlike Grace King, used dialect sometimes in profusion; she was dramatic and even at times melodramatic, yet never was she commonplace or ineffective. She had command at times of a pervasive humor and a pathos that gripped the reader before he was aware, for behind all was the woman herself. She wrote as Dickens wrote, with abandonment, with her whole self. There is art in her work, but there is more than art. One may read again and again such bits of human life as "Madame Celestin's Divorce": it is the art that is independent of time and place, the art indeed that is universal.