PRISON LIFE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. By Bvt. Lt. Col. John J. Craven,
M.D. G. W. Dillingham Company, New York. Price, $1.20.
The recent controversy concerning General Miles and the shackling of
Jefferson Davis while the latter was a prisoner of war at Fortress
Monroe, makes this new edition of Dr. Craven’s book, originally published
in 1866, of timely value and importance. Dr. Craven was the medical
adviser of Mr. Davis during most of his imprisonment, and his notes,
taken from daily and intimate intercourse with his patient, form the
basis of this volume. While written with professional reserve and
military discretion, it is a most satisfactory and reliable account
of the facts concerning the imprisonment of Mr. Davis, and throws an
interesting and significant light on his character as viewed on close
range by a political enemy at a time when prejudice and passion so
generally usurped the place of judgment. Dr. Craven frankly expresses
his original prejudiced and bitter attitude toward his patient, even to
naming the precise occasion on which a kindlier sentiment was aroused
in his breast. A stronger, sincerer tribute to Mr. Davis’ character
could hardly be conceived than this plain and unadorned record of
the change effected in the attitude of an honest enemy toward the
man whom he abhorred as a kind of moral monster. Dr. Craven was not
only impressed with the learning and ability of his distinguished
prisoner, but again and again bears impartial witness to his modesty,
fortitude, and unselfishness, relating conversations and incidents which
particularly impressed him at the time. The strength of that impression
is sufficiently evinced by the fact that Dr. Craven had the courage to
publish such a book at a time when sectional feeling ran so high.
The facts in regard to the shameful treatment of Mr. Davis by General
Miles are fully confirmed by copies of the official reports bearing on
the matter, and the account is a painful commentary on the injustice and
cruelty of the policy allowed to rule in regard to a conquered people.
Mr. Davis was sick and feeble; moreover, he was closely guarded night and
day, in an impregnable fortress. Under the circumstances his shackling
was a wanton and unnecessary humiliation of a helpless man, and the
bare relation of the incident as witnessed by Dr. Craven, though set
down without comment or criticism, is enough to make the blood of any
generous reader boil with indignation and revolt. It is impossible to
doubt the honesty and accuracy of such a record, and it must remain a
heavy indictment against those responsible for the outrage here detailed.
Dr. Craven’s son, who republishes this book, is fully justified in so
doing, not only for the satisfaction of a present interest, but for the
consideration of future generations.
THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Harper and
Brothers, New York. Price, $1.50.
Mrs. Ward in her latest novel works very much the same combination which
proved to so exactly fit the public taste in “Lady Rose’s Daughter,”
and if the result is not the same success, it will be only because the
popular impression will be dulled by repetition. Again we have a heroine
nurtured in a scandalous menage in Paris and shadowed by a criminal
heredity, and Lady Kitty, like Julie in the earlier novel, has two
lovers, contrasted in character much as were Delafield and the caddish
young soldier to whom Julie so nearly yielded. The crucial moment of
temptation, however, comes to Lady Kitty after her marriage, and the
hand of fate which snatched Julie from danger plunges the later heroine
into the abyss of ruin and disgrace. William Ashe, like Marchmont, is
of a noble house and high in political circles, but he is not quite so
much of an archangel, though he, too, exhibits a patient and tolerant
forbearance toward the indiscretions and errors of the woman he loves,
which, however philosophical, somewhat removes him from the normal human
type and its sympathies. Geoffrey Cliffe, the objectionable lover, is
a poet instead of a soldier, but he, too, woos Kitty to disgrace and
finally meets a violent death. Both novels are elaborate studies of
heredity, and in each the final decision between irretrievable error and
duty hangs upon an unforeseen incident which turns the scales like a fate.
Again Mrs. Ward has drawn on real life for her characters and plot. The
Byronic inspiration of Geoffrey Cliffe is sufficiently obvious and the
suggestion of Lady Caroline Lamb’s story is plainly to be read in Lady
Kitty and her obsession. More than one prominent political figure of a
generation ago has been promptly identified by the English reviewers.
Of the two heroines, Lady Kitty is a better realization than Julie, who,
to our mind quite failed to keep the novelist’s promise of intellectual
brilliancy and social magnetism. It is really a wonderful and poignant
impression conveyed by Mrs. Ward’s elaborate picture of Lady Kitty,
frail and fair, passionate and weak, poetic and frivolous, sweet and
perverse—with a lack of moral and mental balance which spells for us
nothing less than insanity. For after all, we are disposed to question
whether such a character is not properly a study in alienism rather than
in feminine psychology. That she was not a responsible agent, but merely
the unfortunate creature of her own impelling fancies and passions,
is the view stressed by every implication of the author, and indeed,
against the very shady record of Lady Kitty’s life can only be pleaded
temperamental insanity and hereditary sin.
An equally elaborate, but not so successful, piece of work is the
presentation of William Ashe. He is depicted as a kind of Admirable
Crichton—handsome, learned, amiable—a scholar, a statesman, and a social
lion. “Religiously he was a skeptic, enormously interested in religion.
Politically he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty.”
But with all the author’s keen analysis and clever descriptive phrases,
this versatile and philosophical hero never becomes very real to our
perceptions or sympathies. It would seem that his creator had fashioned
and molded him carefully and perfectly, but had failed to breathe into
him the breath of life.
Mrs. Ward’s rich literary equipment is no less manifest in this novel
than in her previous works, and her power to deal with the larger
interests of life is undiminished. The old time English society novel
in her hands has been expanded, dignified, transformed, into a serious
and significant presentation of life and its problems. Her outlook on
the world of thought, of affairs, and of men and women is technically
informed and philosophically impartial; her talent is enormously
efficient. Perhaps her remarkable ability was never better demonstrated
than when she made in “Lady Rose’s Daughter” a deliberate bid for a
wider and lower kind of popular favor. The new appeal, so marked in that
book and in “The Marriage of William Ashe,” was so skilfully turned and
has been so successful in enlarging the writer’s clientele, that as a
literary _tour de force_, it challenges a kind of unwilling admiration.
There seem to be lacking to her marvelous gifts and powers only the touch
of spontaneity, the flash of dramatic fire.
THE GEORGIANS. By Will N. Harben, author of “Abner Daniel,” “The
Substitute,” etc. New York: Harper and Brother. Price, $1.50.
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.
Mrs. Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes
overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle
Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery so
characteristic of the negro, Mrs. Stuart gives us sustained and elaborate
rhetoric and sentiment. To our perception, too, the story should have
ended with the death of the old negro couple, and what follows seems a
decline to an anti-climax.
Mrs. Stuart is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish
life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the
Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid
sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best.
RETURN: a Story of the Sea Islanders in 1739. By Alice MacGowan
and Grace MacGowan Cooke. L. C. Page and Company, Boston.
Price, $1.50.
This is an extremely hollow piece of literary labor, with seemingly no
other inspiration than Mary Johnson’s romances. There is no atmosphere
wherefrom incident or characters could draw any vital semblance, and the
style is the thinnest and stalest decoction of Miss Johnson’s manner and
diction. It is to be hoped that the writers will once for all forswear
the field of colonial history and romance, and return to their own—the
life they know and can describe so well in Texas and Tennessee.