Bob Taylor's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1, April 1905

by Various

The Law of the Land. By Emerson Hough, Author of “The Mississippi Bubble,” etc. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.

There is no lack of excitement in Mr. Hough’s latest novel—intrigue, mystery, villainy, a negro uprising, a Mississippi overflow—these succeed each other rapidly and bewilderingly, and there is “something doing” in every chapter. The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,—“the richest region on the face of the whole earth,” “the heart of the only American part of America”—and the race question in its intensest and most picturesque form is the theme of the book. From a dramatic and artistic standpoint, the theme and the setting are well chosen, and in the description of the negro gathering in the forest at the call of the savage drum and the half-hinted horrors of the revenge of the whites, there is the unmistakable thrill of literary power and skill.

The conventional hero is a railroad claim agent, rather an original role for a Southern hero of romance, and a thoroughly good fellow he is, but the masterpiece of characterization is that of Colonel Calvin Blount of the Big House,—rough, brave, chivalrous, lordly, ruling over his wide acres with the imperious will and open-handed generosity of a feudal baron. His trial for murder in a lynching case is the culminating point of the book, and Eddring’s speech in his defense presents the author’s solution of the race problem in the South. “The law of the land” must be transgressed sometimes in the letter that it may be kept in the spirit, and Colonel Blount is acquitted of the murder which he committed in view of the horrors which negro rule would bring to Southern civilization. There is nothing new or profound in Mr. Hough’s treatment of the race problem, but in presenting it as it exists in the lower South in its most extreme form, he has availed himself of excellent material for dramatic romance. To the average American the life to which Mr. Hough introduces us in “The Law of the Land” will seem as strange and foreign as a glimpse into the jungles of Africa, but it is real, if exceptional, and Mr. Hough’s vivid picture may disturb the academic theories of New England to some extent. Had the author spared us the treatise on the race problem as embodied in Eddring’s defense of Colonel Blount, the novel would have been lightened by so much dead weight of argument and rhetoric. As it is, “The Law of the Land,” leaving out the tinselly plot on which the heroine’s identity and fortune depend, is a good story of dramatic power, picturesque description, and strong characterization.

The Master-Word. A Story of the South To-day. By L. H. Hammond. The Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.

This, the first novel, of a Southern woman, bears no mark of immaturity, feminine weakness, or sectional prejudice. The style is notably compact and finished, the handling strong and restrained, and the grasp of philosophic breadth and impartiality. Mrs. Hammond is something more than the clever woman who, in such numbers, is pervading the literature of the day—she is clearly a woman who can think closely and deeply, and her literary work has a real solidity of substance and significance. She has given us in “The Master-Word” a strong and original story, direct from her own thought, experience and observation, though it does not prove always humanly convincing or artistically satisfactory.

“The Master-Word” is a problem novel in a double sense, for though the race question is the theme with which it is chiefly concerned, the sex question figures also in a subordinate way. Both problems are solved by the writer with the master-word, Love, not Law—Love that suffers, sacrifices, and conquers, not Law that judges, condemns and punishes. This idea is wrought out with psychical insight and vigorous reasoning, and as a thesis is eminently satisfactory, but the story which is the medium of its illustration does not always ring true, and moreover is weakest at the crucial points.

Margaret, the young wife of Philip Lawton, a prosperous and aristocratic lawyer and farmer of Tennessee, discovers suddenly the fact of her husband’s criminal relations with a mulatto woman and his fatherhood of the latter’s child, a girl about the age of Margaret’s own daughter. She refuses to forgive and their estranged relations continue till he is stricken with pneumonia. At his deathbed the love she thought dead revives, and she forgives, as she realizes that the master-word is Love, not Law. This scene, by the way, is strongly reminiscent of the concluding chapter of “The Mettle of the Pasture,” where the dying husband delivers himself of his stagy and unnatural monologue.

After Philip’s death, Margaret, as a sort of reparation in Philip’s name, conceives the idea of taking his illegitimate negro child, deserted by its mother, under her protection and care, so the little quadroon girl is brought to the Lawton home and placed in charge of Aunt Dilsey, the old mammy, who proclaims it her grandchild. There Viry is reared, playing with the Lawton children, sharing much of their life, but recognized as a “nigger” and treated on that basis. She is sent, as she grows older, to a negro college, where she learns rapidly, and finally comes back to the Lawtons and Aunt Dilsey, dissatisfied and embittered, frankly hating the race with which she is classed, but attached by the strongest affection to Bess Lawton, her half-sister. She becomes a teacher in a negro school, but holds herself aloof from the negroes, and grows more bitter and desperate. Bruce Carleton, the lover of Bess, is the object of her secret passion, and the savage, bestial strain in her make-up comes out in her plan to attract him and hold him in what to him would be a purely sensual tie. Finding out that Bess really loves him, however, she renounces her purpose, and, hopeless of happiness, tries to commit suicide. Then comes the culminating point of the book in the disclosure to Viry by Margaret of the secret of the former’s birth. Margaret lays bare her own suffering and her husband’s sin and makes a powerful appeal to the girl to accept her maimed and burdened life and make it in some measure an atonement and a redemption. Viry’s heart is reached at last, and she, too, bows to the master-word, Love, which means for her a life of service and loneliness. The race line must not be obliterated—this is made plain, and Mrs. Hammond’s argument is notably strong and unhackneyed. Margaret’s reply to Viry, when the latter, “the red blood burning in her face,” throws up to her the existence of three million mulattos as a proof that instinct is not against the union of black and white, is the most convincing and complete answer to that plea that has yet been presented.

It seems to us unfortunate that Mrs. Hammond should have chosen to base her story on an incident at once so repulsive and so untrue as that of Philip Lawton’s criminal connection with the degraded mulatto. For, under the conditions described and set forth by the author, the case of Philip is so absolutely untypical and strikingly exceptional that its use as the foundation stone of so serious a story seems an amazing blunder of judgment, taste and ethics. Then, again, it is hardly conceivable that a woman of Margaret’s training and temperament, would have found her duty in bringing her husband’s negro child into her own household in constant contact with herself and her children. The step seems forced and unnatural in the highest degree, and no less so appears the wife’s disclosure of her husband’s shame after so many years to the quadroon girl. Nature, womanhood, taste, all revolt against such a situation. Reality is sacrificed to theory, and Margaret becomes the author’s creature, not her creation; her spokesman, not a natural woman. Viry, too, is not quite genuine to our perceptions, and can certainly not be regarded as a typical product of her blood and environment. At best her story is an extreme case, put in its most extreme terms.

The phosphate region of Middle Tennessee is the scene of the story, and its peculiar conditions of labor and the twists and turns of local politics are presented with a keen and trenchant touch. The young people of the book are an extremely natural and agreeable set, and the love affair of Bess and Bruce is as fresh and wholesome as the fine country air that pervades the book. Bruce is really a wonder for a woman’s hero, being neither cad nor prig, but merely a straight and likable young fellow with human faults and failings. Aunt Dilsey is at once a photograph, a phonograph, and a sympathetic sketch of the old-time negro mammy.