The plain people of the South, the sturdy common folk who made no pretensions to aristocratic grandeur but who in self-respect, prosperity and character, formed in this section, as elsewhere, the backbone of civilization and society, have not received their due representation in Southern fiction, generally speaking. Baronial splendors, “po’ white trash” peculiarities, and darky picturesqueness have been the favored themes of most Southern story-tellers, moving in the lines of least resistance to romantic and dramatic interest, while the great middle class has been made to occupy a disproportionately small place in their pictures of Southern life. It is not mere accident that the Georgia writers have given us the fullest and best treatment of this class, for in Georgia pre-eminently it dominated and colored the political and social body to a marked degree. Richard Malcolm Johnson, Joel Chandler Harris, and Watson have all given us stories with a strong flavor of the soil and the people who chiefly owned and cultivated it, and Mr. Harben’s tales of north Georgia have been notably successful in this line of fiction.
In “Abner Daniel,” Mr. Harben achieved one of the rarest things in modern fiction—a genuine creation. Typically, sympathetically, imaginatively, Abner Daniel rings true; in spirit and letter he is a perfect presentation. Broadly human as he is unmistakably North Georgian, he may be described as a Southern David Harum; but of the two characters Abner Daniel seems to us far more vital, far less dependent on his make-up and gags for reality. In “The Georgians,” Abner reappears, this time as the deus ex machina of a mysterious murder case, involving the love affair and various other interests of the story. The little village of Darley is sketched faithfully and sympathetically, and it is peopled with folk, whom we either know, or instinctively recognize as real. Under the not very deceptive alias of Tom P. Smith, Mr. Harben pictures a certain noted evangelist of Georgia and his revivalist methods, while as a companion piece he presents Jack Bantram, of another ecclesiastical type, who makes a simple and direct appeal to conscience and manhood. The religious ideals and customs of such communities have never received fuller or more sympathetic treatment than in this story, and, indeed, we may find here in simple, but effective narration, a most truthful picture of plain, provincial Georgia life in all its phases and forms. Among the real historical novels—those which are recording the vanishing social history of our nation—“The Georgians” deserves place and consideration.
Mysterious Mr. Sabin. By E. Phillips Oppenheim, Author of “A Prince of Sinners,” “Anna, the Adventuress,” etc. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Price, $1.50.
A most remarkable as well as mysterious individual is the villain of Mr. Oppenheim’s latest yarn. He appears in London with a beautiful girl who turns all the men’s heads and inspires young Lord Wolfenden with a sudden and serious passion. By a curious coincidence this young man’s father is a retired admiral, with a mania for writing up the coast defenses of England, while Mr. Sabin’s mission in England is to get possession of these papers to sell to the German Emperor. A political intrigue is involved, in which Mr. Sabin, as agent for the French Bourbons, has conceived the brilliant scheme of buying Germany’s aid with naval secrets of England, fully set forth in the maps and notes of the naval monomaniac. The success of these plans would be followed by war between England and Germany, and the coronation of Princess Helene—the mysterious young lady, of course—as Queen of France. There are all sorts of complications and sensational happenings, and just as things begin to look rather dark for the lovers and the peace of England, a nihilistic order checks Mr. Sabin’s operations and crushes his hopes and ambitions. This winds up the troubles of Wolfenden and his Princess, and prefaces the most remarkable and exciting adventures of Mr. Sabin as he flees incognito to America to escape the wrath of the disappointed war lord of Germany. Greatly to the reader’s relief, this most engaging villain arrives safely in Boston Harbor and we leave him settling down to a peaceful obscurity with his first love, to whom his bitterest enemy had rather inconsequentially directed him before he left England.
To the critical eye, the machinery of Mr. Oppenheim’s story is somewhat too evident, and occasionally it rattles and creaks, but it goes at a rapid rate, and the result is just what is intended—an interesting and exciting story, to be read with easy and pleasurable interest and forgotten immediately.
The Monks’ Treasure. By George Horton, Author of “Like Another Helen.” Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Price, $1.50.
Walter Lythgoe, the nephew of Erasmus Lythgoe, head of the great Lythgoe Baking Powder, is sent by the firm to Greece to lay in a supply of crude cream of tartar, and is dispatched on his errand with the admonition, “Keep out of all scrapes and complications with women.” Naturally the first thing done by the young man as he arrives on the island of Andros is to fall in love with a fair maiden and to immediately involve himself in the most gratuitous scrapes and astounding complications ever concocted for a novel hero to wriggle out of. Of course the fair maiden whom he loves so artlessly and chivalrously as the servant of the missionary turns out to be a duchess, and equally, of course, the treasure discovered by Walter and his friend in the vault of the monastery is her stolen patrimony. Walter conceives the brilliant scheme of carrying off the bags of gold, and after a series of incredible adventures, in which he and his Scotch crony pit their wits and courage against a jealous Greek lover and some murderous monks, the hero sails out triumphant from the island of Andros with his lady love and a trunk full of treasure.
The local coloring of the story is confined to the adjectives “rosy” and “purple,” sprinkled plentifully throughout the book, and despite the often stressed conjunction with the “amphora,” the beautiful Polyxene seems not widely differentiated from any unsophisticated heroine of more familiar climes. In fact, Mr. Horton has not succeeded in galvanizing a very mechanical series of adventures into real vitality by transporting his puppets and wheels to Greece.
The River’s Children: An Idyl of the Mississippi. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. New York: The Century Co.
In her “Sonny” stories Mrs. Stuart struck the note of original and homely humor to which the popular taste is so quick to respond and for that reason achieved therein her greatest success, but her tales of Creoles and negroes in the Lower Mississippi region have distinctive merit in their vivid and poetic pictures of the great river and its children. To her imagination the Mississippi is not the Father of Waters, but “Old Lady Mississippi,” a witch, a siren, a queen—to fear, to propitiate, and to worship, and to the strength of this conception “The River’s Children” bears striking testimony. The slender thread of story runs almost unnoted among the poetic and picturesque descriptions of the river and the quaint and charming patois of the river people. The great stream sweeps supreme through the book, its poetry, beauty and tragedy looming up larger upon our impression than the magnificence of the Le Ducs or the rather highly colored sketches of Israel and Hannah. Wonderful is the account of Brake Island in its days of fatness culminating in the glories of the famous house-party long ago; and a clever bit of reproduction, at once keen and kindly, is the talk of “Felix” and “Adolphe” on the peril of the rising waters. Not even Cable has caught more perfectly the foreign idiom and softened English of these foreign Americans, or their pleasure-loving, childlike temperament.