Beyond recognizing the fact that it is of the same genre, to class "The Inn of the Silver Moon" with "Undine" is to belittle it by an over-claim; but to class it with "Aus dem Leben eines Tongenichts" is to make a comparison in its favor: since Eichendorff's happy ending is a little forced and a little tawdry; while Vielé's happy ending is as inevitable as it is gracious—a result flowing smoothly from all the precedent conditions, and so deftly revealed at the crisic culminating moment that a perfecting finish is given to the delightingly perfect logic of its surprise.
The manner of the making of the two stories is identical; and so is their peculiar charm. In his preface to his translation of the "Good-for-Nothing," forty years and more ago, Charles Godfrey Leland wrote: "Like a bird, the youthful hero flits along with his music over Austria and Italy—as semi-mysterious in his unpremeditated course, fed by chance, and as pleasing in his artless character"; which is close to being—if for artless we read sophisticated artlessness—an accurate description of the joint journeying of Monsieur Vifour and Mademoiselle de Belle Isle. And Leland added: "It is strikingly characteristic of the whole book that it abounds in adroitly-hidden touches of art which produce an effect without betraying effort on the part of the writer. We are willing to declare that we never read a story so light and airy, or one betraying so little labor; but critical study soon tells us quant' é difficile questa facilità! All this ease is the grace of a true genius, who makes no false steps and has carefully estimated his own powers." That description fits "The Inn of the Silver Moon" to a hair!
In part, it applies only a little less closely to "Myra of the Pines"—in which is much the same gay irresponsibility of motive and of action; the same light touch, so sure that each delicate point is made with a firm clearness; and the same play—save for the jarring note struck by the "pig-man"—of a gently keen and a very subtle humour: that maintains farce on the plane of high comedy by hiding artful contrivance under a seeming artlessness; and that sparklingly crystallizes into turns of phrase so seemingly spontaneous in their accurate appositeness that the look of accident is given to them by their carefully perfected felicity.
"The Last of the Knickerbockers" has this same humour and this same happiness of phrasing; and in its serious midst is set the fantastic episode of "The Yellow Sleigh"—that needs only to be amplified to become another "Inn of the Silver Moon." But there its resemblance to Vielé's other stories ends. Least of all has "The Inn of the Silver Moon" anything in common with it. That delectable thistle-down romance goes trippingly over sunbeams in a straightaway course that has no intricacies: with all the interest constantly focussed upon a heroine and a hero to whom all the other characters are minor and accessory; and with never a break in the light-hearted note that is struck at the start. "The Last of the Knickerbockers," a blend of comedy and semi-tragedy, is far away from all this—both in spirit and in form. It is the most largely and the most seriously conceived of Vielé's works: not a romance, but a novel with a substantial plot carefully developed in intricate action; and while the main interest is centred—as properly it should be—upon a wholly charming heroine and a wholly satisfying hero, these pleasing young people are made to know, and to keep, their place in a crowd of strong characters strongly drawn.
It is a good story to read simply as a story; but it is more than that, it is a document: an ambered preservation of a phase of New York society that already almost has vanished, and that soon will have vanished absolutely—when the last Mrs. and Mr. Bella Ruggles shall have closed to decayed aristocracy the last shabbily pretentious boarding house in the last dingy Kenilworth Place; and when decayed aristocracy, so evicted, shall be forced to dwell in apartment-houses of the bell-and-speaking-tube type, and to dine (as Alida prophetically put it) "at Italian tables-d'hôte—like the Café Chianti, in grandfather's old house, where they have music and charge only fifty cents, including wine"!
So true a presentment as this story is of New York's old-time strait faiths and straiter social customs will outlive long, I am confident, the great mass of the fiction of Vielé's day. It will be actively alive while even a faint memory of those faiths and customs is cherished by living people; and when all of such ancients shall have retired (with the final befitting dignity attendant upon a special license) to their family homes beneath the shadows of St. Mark's and Trinity, carrying their memories with them, it will become, as I have said, a document: preserving the traditions which otherwise would have been buried with them; and so linking permanently—as they linked temporarily—New York's ever-increasingly ardent present with its ever-paling less strenuous past.
As to "The Inn of the Silver Moon," I can see no end to the lastingness of it: since in the very essence of it is that which holds humanity with an enduringly binding spell. The luring charm of a happy love-story—charged with gay fantasy and epigrammatic grace and gently pungent humour—is a charm perpetual and irresistible: that must hold and bind while ever the world goes happily in ever-fresh sunshine, and happily has in it ever-fresh young hearts.
Thomas A. Janvier.
New York,
June 20, 1909.