It was natural that Ford should make much of the material that he knew so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its own sake rather than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly he falsified history by making his real personages, like Washington and Franklin, take part in conversations that never occurred and do things that strictly never were done, but it is equally true that he has given us the best conception that is now possible of how it must have felt to live in the days of the Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and vivacity, and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist enamoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of romance. His faults all centered about his undoubted deficiency in literary art: he lacked constructive power and distinction of style. His stories are the diversions of a professional historian, brilliant but without promise of permanence.
Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. Dr. Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, and like Dr. Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely to his profession. He was fifty-three and one of the leading world specialists on nervous diseases when he wrote his first full novel, In War Time. His own explanation, given in later years to a gathering of University of Pennsylvania men, has often been quoted:
When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long summer holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would have made entire idleness mere ennui. I turned to what, except for stern need, would have been my lifelong work from youth—literature—bored by idleness, wrote my first novel.
The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry all his life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to Stoddard and the other poets of beauty. In later years he published many volumes of it and contributed it to the magazines, but never for money. It explains much in his work. No other novelist of the period has so filled his fiction with quoted lyrics and with lyrical prose. It is here that he differs from writers like Ford and Norris: he would produce literature.
His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and also his last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served three years as a surgeon. Then, like Dr. Holmes, he wrote pathological studies on which he brought to bear his vast medical knowledge, novels like Dr. North and His Friends and Constance Trescott; he wrote brilliant tales of French life, like The Adventures of François, Dr. Mitchell's favorite among his novels, and A Diplomatic Adventure; he wrote idyllic studies of Nature like When All the Woods Are Green, and Far in the Forest, and, best of all, the historical romances Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, and The Red City.
These novels more than any others written during the period are products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the materials of which they are woven. We feel at every point that we are in the hands of an expert, the ablest neurologist of his generation, who has seen intimately vast areas of life of which the average reader knows nothing. His analysis of a character has the exactness of a clinic and he adds to it, moreover, an imaginative power that makes us see as well as know and feel. He is skilful in characterization. "Character," he once wrote, "is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without much explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If I fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not failed. Octavia Blake in the novel Roland Blake is drawn with peculiar skill; so is Lucretia Hunter in Circumstance, so is Constance Trescott, that study of over-devotion. Always is he best in his studies of femininity, doubtless because women had played so large a part in his medical practice.
With few exceptions his characters are from the higher classes, "gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel Dr. North, and he has made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and even James. He has discussed the point himself: "Nor can I tell why some men can not create gentlefolk. It is not knowledge, nor is it the being in or of their world that gives this power. Thackeray had it; so had Trollope; Dickens never; nor, in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this respect; and of the living I shall say nothing."[163] We feel this quality most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately his background, Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, and he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmosphere of old Second Street, in the days when it contained the most distinctive social set in America. He was a part of it; he wrote as if he were writing his own family history, lovingly, reverently. He was writing romance, but he was writing it as one who is on sacred historical ground where error of fact or of inference is unpardonable. He has himself outlined the work of the historical romancer:
Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character amid the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose, for instance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For years I must study the topography, dress, manners, and family histories; must be able in mind to visit this or that house; know where to call, whom I shall see, the hours of meals, the diet, games, etc. I must know what people say on meeting and parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so on, to get the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography, to command the written style of the day. Most men who write thus of another time try to give the effect of actuality by an excessive use of archaic forms. Only enough should be used to keep from time to time some touch of this past, and not so much as to distract incessantly by needless reminders. It is an art, and, like all good art effects, it escapes complete analysis.
Then as to the use of historical characters. These must naturally influence the fate of your puppets; they must never be themselves the most prominent personages of your story.[163]
He presents his material with skill: he is a story-teller; his plots move strongly and always by means not of explanations but of the self-development of his characters. Even his most minor figures form a distinct part of the movement. His style has more of distinction than has any other of the later romancers. He brought to his work the older ideals of literary form and expression, and he wrought not with the haste of the journalist and special correspondent, but with the leisure of the deliberate man of letters. Without question he is as large a figure in his period as Dr. Holmes was in his, and there are those who would rank him as the greater of the two. That he has not been given a more commanding place is due undoubtedly to his great fame as a medical expert. The physician has overshadowed the author.