Our pen has carried us from our author. Of course Mr. Fawcett will say—and say with truth—that his strictures were aimed at the abuse and not the legitimate use of the drama. But his fault was that he does not make this clear, and by intimation he leaves himself open to the charge.
Aside from this, his work is a work of genius; and his story of the little girl who struggled with such vain endeavor against her environment will live among the noblest productions of fiction given us.
The Professor’s Sister, by Julian Hawthorne (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—This is the most successful work of a successful novelist, and holds the reader entranced from the first page till nearly the last. We say reader, but not all readers. Mr. Hawthorne is as peculiar in his work as his eminent father was, with a more select audience. He is at home in the wild, weird production of humanity, touched and marked by a spiritualism that is far above and beyond the average readers of romance. If it calls for as much culture, in its way, to enjoy a work of art as its creation called for in the artist, Mr. Hawthorne’s fictions demand the same tastes and thought the author indulges in. The little girl who craves love-stories, or the traveller upon the cars who picks up a book to lose in its pages the wearisome sense of travel, will scarcely select the Professor’s Sister, and if he or she does, will wonder what in the name of Heaven it is all about.
There is another class, however, that will read with avidity and interest every page of this book, and this class grows wider in our midst every day. One meets at every turn a man or woman who will tell, in a matter-of-fact way generally, that is positively comical, of some experience he or she has 249 had with spooks. This, not the old-fashioned experience with ghosts. All that has long since been relegated to the half-forgotten limbo of superstitious things. One hears of communions with the dead, told off as one would tell of any ordinary occurrence common to our daily life. This is the natural reaction of the human mind against the scientific materialism of the day, that seeks to poison and destroy all religious faith. Religion is as necessary to health of mind as pure air is to that of body, and when deprived of either, we struggle for loop-holes of light and breath with instinctive desperation. Shut out the light of heaven from the soul, be it in library or laboratory, and one sickens and resists.
Mr. Hawthorne wisely lays the scene of his story in Germany. The rarefied condition of the German mind is recognized the world over, and through the everlasting smoke of philosophers’ and students’ pipes one is prepared for all sorts of fantastic shapes moving through the mist. The author opens with a talk on occult subjects that sounds like voices heard in a fog-bank. With the reader thus prepared, he plunges him into a drama where substantial men and women mingle with spirits, and the strange story does overcome us like a summer’s cloud, without our special wonder.
We have said the story holds one spellbound till near the end. The dénoûment is not good. “Calling spirits from the vasty deep” is much easier than disposing of them after they come. To give a satisfactory explanation of the mystery, and to exorcise the spirit back to rest, make no easy task, and Mr. Hawthorne is not to blame for finding it difficult.
We cannot drop the book without calling attention to the author’s happy use of English, in depicting character. Here is a specimen:
“Madame Hertrugge was white, red, and black. Her skin was white, her cheeks and lips red, her hair, eyes, and eyebrows black. Her mouth was beautifully formed, and firm, with a firm chin. Her eyes were rather full, imperious, and ardent. She was overflowing with vitality. The hand which she extended to one in greeting was soft but strong, with long fingers. She was dressed in black, as became her recent widowhood; but she had not the air of mourning much. She was sensuous, voluptuous, but there was strength behind the voluptuousness. You received from her a powerful impression of sex. Every line of her, every movement, every look, was woman. And she made you feel that she valued you just so far as you were man. You might be as nearly Caliban as a man can be, but if you were a man she would consider you. You might court her successfully with a horsewhip, but if she felt the master in you, and were convinced that you were captivated by her, she would accept you. It was ludicrous to think of the senile old merchant having married such a creature. In fact, marriage, viewed in connection with this woman, seemed an absurdity. There was nothing holy about her, nothing reserved, nothing sacred. I don’t mean that she was not ladylike, as the phrase is. She knew the society catechism, and practised it to a nicety, but like a clever actress, rather than by instinct or sympathy. It was obvious that she didn’t value respectability and propriety the snap of her white fingers, save as a means to an end; and if she were in the company of one whom she trusted 250 intimately, she would laugh those popular virtues to scorn with her warm, insolent breath. As it was, all the forms and ceremonies in the world could not disguise her. Her very dress suggested rather than concealed what was beneath it. She was a naked goddess—a pagan goddess—and there was no help for it. She made you realize how powerless our nice institutions are in the presence of a genuine, rank human temperament.
“And be it here observed that I am here writing of her as a temperament, and nothing more. I knew nothing of her former life and experience. I had no reason to think that her conduct has ever been less than unexceptionable. But the facts about her were insignificant compared with her latent possibilities. Circumstances might hitherto have been adverse to her development; but opportunity—rosy, golden, audacious opportunity—was all she needed. She certainly bore no signs of satiety; she had nothing of the blasé air. She was thirsty for life, and she would appreciate every draught of it. She was impatient to begin. And, contemplating her abounding, triumphant, delicious well-being, it seemed as if she might maintain the high-tide of enjoyment until she was a hundred. It really inclined one to paganism to look at her.”
What Dreams May Come, by Frank Lin (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—This is a cleverly constructed story of English life by an American pen, and the average reader is kept in doubt as to the sex of the author. There is a clear, incisive style of the masculine sort on one page that indicates the man; there is a treatment of female wearing apparel on another that gives proof of the feminine. With us there is one feature that solves the doubt. The pages abound in convictions. Now the female mind, as a general thing, is not given to doubt. When a woman believes anything she believes it, and her faith is as firm as the solid rock. She stands “on hardpan,” to use a phrase common to the Pacific slope. Although the book is built on dreams, the theory of heredity it is written to promulgate is no dream in the mind of this fair author. We have called attention to the fact that the use of the novel to illustrate some doctrine, philosophical or religious, is really an abuse. One takes up such form of fiction to be amused, and one feels put upon and abused to find it an essay more or less learned on life and things. If a little information can be injected in the story unbeknownst, like the parson’s liquor told of by President Lincoln, well and good; but it is rarely done successfully. If philosophy is indulged in, one quickly detects the bald head and wrinkled brow; if it is religion, the cloven hoof or wicked tail of Satan betrays the author.