And right here comes the chief indictment against him: he works without deep emotion, without tenderness, without altruism, without the higher reaches of imagination. He has no social or moral purpose, as Howells had. He sees the body but not the soul, society rather than life in its deeper currents, a society marvelously complex in its requirements and its accouterments, its conventions and traditions, but he looks little below the superficial, the temporal, the merely worldly. He is inferior to Howells inasmuch as he lacks poetry, he lacks humor, he lacks heart. He is inferior to James and George Meredith inasmuch as he had no power of introspection and no distinctive style. He had no passion—he never becomes enthusiastic even about his native Italy; he had little love for nature—the city engrosses him, not trees and mountains and lakes. He writes of the human spectacle and is content if he bring amusement for the present moment.
He was, therefore, one more influence in the journalization of the novel. He wrote rapidly and easily, and his style is clear and natural, but it is also without distinction. His pictures are vividly drawn and his stories are exceedingly readable—journalistic excellences, but there is nothing of inspiration about them, no breath of genius, no touch of literature in the stricter sense of that word. Like every skilful journalistic writer, he has the power to visualize his scene, to paint characters with vividness, and to make essentials stand out. Notably was this true of his historical fiction. Characters like Philip II. and Eleanor, Queen of France, he can make real men and women that move and convince. He has created a marvelous gallery of characters, taking his forty-five novels together, complex and varied beyond that produced by any other American novelist, and there are surprisingly few repetitions. He stands undoubtedly as the most brilliant of the American writers of fiction, the most cosmopolitan, the most entertaining. His galaxy of Roman novels, especially the Saracinesca group, bids fair to outlive many novels that contain deeper studies of human life and that are more inspired products of literary art.
IV
The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, as in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who came into literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Unlike Crawford, she was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within a narrow provincial area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer materials of life, the problems of the soul.
The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and reared at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swallowed up by the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she went at sixteen to New York to study drawing and design at Cooper Institute; and after her graduation she became instructor in design at the Girls' Normal College, New York City. In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and removed to Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued her first book—a collection of poems entitled An Old Garden, and two years later John Ward, Preacher, a novel that attracted instant and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to Robert Elsmere, then at the height of its enormous vogue. Since that time she has published four other major novels: Sidney, Philip and His Wife, The Awakening of Helena Richie, and The Iron Woman, and many short stories, notably the collections entitled The Wisdom of Fools, Old Chester Tales, and Dr. Lavendar's People.
By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious and contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be immortalized as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place of traditions, a bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of well-bred old English and Scotch and Irish families with deep religious prejudices and with narrow yet wholesome and kindly ideals. She was reared in a religious atmosphere—her father was a Presbyterian and her mother an Episcopalian, the combination so disastrous in John Ward, Preacher. She lived amid books, all of which she might read save only the novels, a prohibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last she was led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no conventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, of concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tradition of the elders. It was an environment that cultivated the poet as well as the Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for Nature, the deeps of love and life that were to find expression in a note like this, recorded in her first volume:
O distant Christ, the crowded, darkening years
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me:
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee,
But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears.
My groping hands would touch thy garment's hem,
Would find some token thou art walking near;
Instead, they clasp but empty darkness drear,
And no diviner hands reach out to them.
My straining eyes, O Christ, but long to mark
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet,
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet,
Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark.