(1859-)
New England blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr.
Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago
even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of
prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret
Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind
of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking
for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the
Great West.
Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited
place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for
predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a
musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he
was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged
at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted
little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor
Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This
fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the
book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and
widely read. 'The Chatelaine of La Trinite,' his next venture,
appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year.
Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain
remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in
common with this workaday world.
To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book--published as a
serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and
called 'The Cliff-Dwellers'--pictured Chicago in its most sordid and
utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole
community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence,
the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the
book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain
whether to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his
mercilessness.
In 1895 appeared 'With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago
social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still
delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more
sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is
carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This
theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an
old-fashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience
to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process
is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic
lightness of touch. 'With the Procession' is such a story as might
happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis
are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's
Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking
himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of
the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his
readers that they too shall fall to thinking.