A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The heart of his work undoubtedly is made up of the fifteen novels that deal with life in Rome and its environs: Saracinesca, Sant' Ilario, Don Orsino, Taquisara, Corleone, Casa Braccio, A Roman Singer, Marzio's Crucifix, Heart of Rome, Cecilia, Whosoever Shall Offend, Pietro Ghisleri, To Leeward, A Lady of Rome, and The White Sister. The novels deal almost exclusively with the middle and higher classes of Rome, classes of which most Americans know nothing at all, for, to quote from the opening chapter of To Leeward:

There are two Romes. There is the Rome of the intelligent foreigner, consisting of excavations, monuments, tramways, hotels, typhoid fever, incense, and wax candles; and there is the Rome within, a city of antique customs, good and bad, a town full of aristocratic prejudices, of intrigues, of religion, of old-fashioned honor and new-fashioned scandal, of happiness and unhappiness, of just people and unjust.

It is this other half Rome, unknown to the casual tourist, unknown to any not native born and Romanist in faith, that he has shown us, as Howells attempted to show the social life of Boston and New England, and as Cable sought to enter the heart of Creole New Orleans. With what success? Those who know most of Roman life have spoken with praise. He has given to his aristocracy perhaps too much of charm, they say; too much of inflexible will, it may be; too much of fire and fury; yet on the whole he has been true to the complex life he has sought to reproduce, truer, perhaps, than Howells has been to Boston or Cable to New Orleans, for he has worked from the inside as one native born, as one reared in the society he describes, even to the detail of accepting its religious belief. One may well believe it, for everywhere in the novels is the perfection of naturalness, the atmosphere of reality.

With his seven stories of American life, An American Politician and the others, he is less convincing. He wrote as a foreigner, as an observer of the outward with no fullness of sympathy, no depth of knowledge. He was European in viewpoint and in experience, and he knew better the European background—Germany as in Greifenstein and The Cigarette-Maker's Romance, or England as in The Tale of a Lonely Parish, or even Constantinople as in Paul Patoff.

He wins us first with his worldliness, his vast knowledge of the surfaces of life in all lands. He is full of cosmopolitan comparisons, wisdom from everywhere, modern instances from Stamboul and Allahabad and Rome. To read him is like walking through foreign scenes with a fully informed guide, a marvelous guide, indeed, a patrician, a polished man of the world. Everywhere in his work an atmosphere of good breeding—charming people of culture and wideness of experience: diplomats, artists, statesmen, noblemen, gentlemen of the world and ladies indeed. There is no coarseness, no dialect, no uncouth characters. We are in the world of wealth, of old-established institutions, of traditions and social laws that are inflexible. In the telling of the tale he has but a single purpose:

We are not poets, because we can not be. We are not genuine playwriters for many reasons; chiefly, perhaps, because we are not clever enough, since a successful play is incomparably more lucrative than a successful novel. We are not preachers, and few of us would be admitted to the pulpit. We are not, as a class, teachers or professors, nor lawyers, nor men of business. We are nothing more than public amusers. Unless we choose we need not be anything less. Let us, then, accept our position cheerfully, and do the best we can to fulfil our mission, without attempting to dignify it with titles too imposing for it to bear, and without degrading it by bringing its productions down even a little way, from the lowest level of high comedy to the highest level of buffoonery.[157]

From this standpoint he has succeeded to the full. He has told his stories well; he holds his reader's interest to the end. Slight though his stories may often be in development, they are ingenious always in construction and they are cumulative in interest. He has undoubted dramatic power, sparkling dialogue, thrust and parry, whole novels like Saracinesca, for instance, that might be transferred to the stage with scarcely an alteration. His characters and episodes appeal to him always from the dramatic side. The novel, indeed, as he defines it is a species of drama:

It may fairly be claimed that humanity has, within the past hundred years, found the way of carrying a theater in its pocket; and so long as humanity remains what it is, it will delight in taking out its pocket-stage and watching the antics of the actors, who are so like itself and yet so much more interesting. Perhaps that is, after all, the best answer to the question, "What is a novel?" It is, or ought to be, a pocket-stage. Scenery, light, shade, the actors themselves, are made of words, and nothing but words, more or less cleverly put together. A play is good in proportion as it represents the more dramatic, passionate, romantic, or humorous sides of real life. A novel is excellent according to the degree in which it produces the illusions of a good play—but it must not be forgotten that the play is the thing, and that illusion is eminently necessary to success.[157]

Often he overdoes this dramatic element and becomes melodramatic; we lose the impression of real life and feel an atmosphere of staginess, that exaggeration of effect which thrills for a moment and then disgusts.