Roe, like Holland, had sprung from the common people and had been largely self-educated. For a time he had attended Williams College, Massachusetts, he had enlisted for the war as the chaplain of a regiment, and after the war had settled down as pastor of the First Church at Highland Falls, New York. After nine years his health failed him and he betook himself to an out-of-doors life, fruit raising at Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his experience he embodied in several practical handbooks like Success with Small Fruits, first published serially in Scribner's. The last years of his life he gave to fiction, turning it out with facility and in quantity and always with the theory that he was thereby continuing his work as a pastor. "My books," he wrote, "are read by thousands; my voice reached at most but a few hundred. My object in writing, as in preaching, is to do good; and the question is, Which can I do best? I think with the pen, and I shall go on writing no matter what the critics say."[154]
That his novels are lacking in the higher elements of literary art, in structure and style and creative imagination, is apparent even to the uncritical, but that they are lacking in truth to life and power to move the reader no one can declare. At every point they are wholesome and manly. Roe's assertion that he worked with reverence in the fundamental stuff of life one must admit or else deny his contention that, "The chief evidence of life in a novel is the fact that it lives."[155] Surely it must be admitted that few novels of the period have shown more vitality.
His influence has been considerable. With Holland and his school he helped greatly in the building up of that mass of novel readers, mostly women it must be said, which by the middle of the eighties had reached such enormous proportions. He led readers on to Lew Wallace's The Fair God and Ben Hur, and to the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who added to the conventional devices of Holland and Roe—sentiment, sensation, love-centered interest culminating inevitably in marriage at the close of the story—literary art and a certain dramatic power. She was realistic in method,—her That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877) reproduced the Lancashire dialect in all its uncouthness—but the atmosphere of her work was romantic. Her Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), unquestionably the most successful juvenile of the period, has been described as "a fairy tale of real life." All of her books, indeed, have this fairy tale basis. She has been exceedingly popular, but she cannot be counted among the original forces of the period. From her the current of popularity flowed on to F. Marion Crawford's cosmopolitan work, to Margaret Deland's strong problem novel John Ward, Preacher; then it swelled into a flood with David Harum and the historical novels that made notable the nineties. At the close of the century fiction was read by all and in quantities that seem incredible.
III
In a chapter which traces the growth of the novel, in distinction from the growth of the sketch or the short story, F. Marion Crawford must be given a leading place. Of all American writers he devoted himself most fully to the major form of fiction. He wrote forty-five novels, and few sketches and short stories: he was a novelist and only a novelist. He appeared at the one moment when the type of fiction which he represented was most certain of wide recognition. His earliest book, Mr. Isaacs (1882), dealt with a new, strange environment—India, five years before Kipling made it his background; it had a religious atmosphere—the mystic beliefs of the Orient; and it told a story with sentiment and with dramatic movement. Zoroaster, with its opening sentence, "The hall of the banquets was made ready for the feast in the palace of Babylon," appealed to an audience that had rated Ben Hur among the greatest of novels.
But the earliest books of Crawford showed little of the main current of his work. No two novelists could differ more radically than he and Roe. To him the purpose-novel was a bastard thing unworthy the powers of a true artist.
Lessons, lectures, discussions, sermons, and didactics generally belong to institutions set apart for especial purposes and carefully avoided, after a certain age, by the majority of those who wish to be amused. The purpose-novel is an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to preach to people who prefer their own church, and to teach people who think they know enough already. It is an ambush, a lying-in-wait for the unsuspecting public, a violation of the social contract—and as such it ought to be either mercilessly crushed or forced by law to bind itself in black and label itself "Purpose" in very big letters.[156]
The office of the novel was, therefore, entertainment and only entertainment. He has been the chief exponent in America of art for art's sake. A novel, he maintained, is a little "pocket-stage" whose only office is to please.
The life and the training of Crawford gave him a viewpoint which was singularly different from that held by the short story writers who were so busily exploiting provincial little neighborhoods in all the remote nooks and corners of the land. His training had given him an outlook more cosmopolitan than even that of Henry James. He had been born at Bagni-di-Lucca, in Tuscany, son of Thomas Crawford the sculptor, and he had spent the first eleven years of his life in Rome. Later he had studied at Concord, New Hampshire; at Trinity College, Cambridge; at Karlsruhe, at Heidelberg; and finally at Rome, where he had specialized in the classics. In 1873 he was at Allahabad, India, connected with the Indian Herald, and later on, his health failing, he visited his uncle in New York, Samuel Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe, and at his advice threw some of his Indian experiences into the form of fiction. The instant success of Mr. Isaacs determined his career. After extensive travels in Turkey and elsewhere, he settled down in Italy in a picturesque villa overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he spent the remaining years of his life, years of enormous literary productivity, and of growing popularity with readers both in America and in Europe.
No other American novelist has ever covered so much of territory. He wrote with first-hand knowledge of life in America, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in Constantinople, and India, and he wrote with scholarly accuracy historical novels dealing with times and places as diverse as Persia in the times of Zoroaster; as the second crusade—Via Crucis; as the era of Philip II in Spain—In the Palace of the King; as Venice in the Middle Ages—Marietta, a Maid of Venice; as early Arabia—Kahled; and as early Constantinople—Arethusa.