"On Board the Light-Ship" is the title--retained in loving deference to
his intention--that would have been given to this collection of stories
by their author. Had Vielé lived but a little while longer, he would
have justified it by placing them in a setting characteristically
fantastic and characteristically original.
He had planned to frame them in an encircling story describing, and duly
accounting for, the chance assemblage aboard a vessel of that unusual
type of a heterogeneous company; and--having in his own fanciful way
convincingly disposed of conditions not precisely in line with the
strictest probability--so to dovetail the several stories into their
encirclement that the telling of them, in turn, would have come easily
and naturally from those upcasts of the sea.
It was a project wholly after his own heart. I can imagine the pleasure
that he would have found in working his machinery--always out of sight,
and always running with a silent smoothness--for getting together in
that queer place his company of story-tellers. He would have used, of
course, the Light-ship and the light-keepers as his firmly real
ground-work. Ship and crew would have been presented in a matter-of-fact
way, in keeping with their recognized matter-of-fact existence, that
subtly would have instilled the habit of belief into the minds of his
readers: and so would have led them onward softly, being in a way
hypnotized, to an equal belief--as he slipped lightly along, with
seemingly the same simplicity and the same ingenuousness--in what
assuredly would not have been matter-of-fact explanations of how those
story-tellers happened to be at large upon the ocean before they were
taken on board!
That far I can follow him: but the play of fancy that he would have put
into his explanations--as he accounted in all manner of quite probable
impossible ways for such flotsam being adrift, and for its salvage
aboard the Light-ship--would have been so wholly the play of his own
alert individual fancy that it is beyond my ken. All that I can be sure
of--and be very sure of--is that his explanations of that marine
phenomenon, and of the coming of its several members up out of the sea
and over the ship's rail, would have been very delightfully and very
speciously satisfying. That the explanations might have been less
convincing when critically analyzed is a negligible detail: the only
essential requirement of a fantastic tale being that it shall be
convincing as it goes along.
Even my bald outline of this story--that now never will be told--shows
how harmoniously in keeping it is with Vielé's literary method. He
delighted in creating delicately fantastic conditions lightly bordering
upon the impossible; and, having created them, in so re-solving their
elements into the seemingly commonplace and the apparently probable that
the fine art with which he worked his transmutations was veiled by the
very perfection of its accomplishment.
Such was the method that he employed in the making of what I cherish as
his master-piece: "The Inn of the Silver Moon"--a story told so simply
and so directly, and with such a color of engaging frankness, that each
turn in its series of airily-adjusted impossible situations is accepted
with an unquestioning pleasure; and that leaves upon the mind of the
reader--even when released from the spell that compels belief throughout
the reading of it--a lasting impression of verity. It was the method,
precisely, of an exquisite form of literary art that has not flowered
more perfectly, I hold with submission, since the time of the so-called
Romantic School in Germany: when de la Motte Fouqué created "Undine,"
and Eichendorff created the "Good-for-Nothing," and all the world went
at a gay quick-step to bright soft music that had been silent for nearly
three hundred years.
Beyond recognizing the fact that it is of the same genre, to class "The
Inn of the Silver Moon" with "Undine" is to belittle it by an
over-claim; but to class it with "Aus dem Leben eines Tongenichts" is to
make a comparison in its favor: since Eichendorff's happy ending is a
little forced and a little tawdry; while Vielé's happy ending is as
inevitable as it is gracious--a result flowing smoothly from all the
precedent conditions, and so deftly revealed at the crisic culminating
moment that a perfecting finish is given to the delightingly perfect
logic of its surprise.
The manner of the making of the two stories is identical; and so is
their peculiar charm. In his preface to his translation of the
"Good-for-Nothing," forty years and more ago, Charles Godfrey Leland
wrote: "Like a bird, the youthful hero flits along with his music over
Austria and Italy--as semi-mysterious in his unpremeditated course, fed
by chance, and as pleasing in his artless character"; which is close to
being--if for artless we read sophisticated artlessness--an accurate
description of the joint journeying of _Monsieur Vifour_ and
_Mademoiselle de Belle Isle_. And Leland added: "It is strikingly
characteristic of the whole book that it abounds in adroitly-hidden
touches of art which produce an effect without betraying effort on the
part of the writer. We are willing to declare that we never read a story
so light and airy, or one betraying so little labor; but critical study
soon tells us _quant' é difficile questa facilità_! All this ease is the
grace of a true genius, who makes no false steps and has carefully
estimated his own powers." That description fits "The Inn of the Silver
Moon" to a hair!
In part, it applies only a little less closely to "Myra of the
Pines"--in which is much the same gay irresponsibility of motive and of
action; the same light touch, so sure that each delicate point is made
with a firm clearness; and the same play--save for the jarring note
struck by the "pig-man"--of a gently keen and a very subtle humour: that
maintains farce on the plane of high comedy by hiding artful contrivance
under a seeming artlessness; and that sparklingly crystallizes into
turns of phrase so seemingly spontaneous in their accurate appositeness
that the look of accident is given to them by their carefully perfected
felicity.
"The Last of the Knickerbockers" has this same humour and this same
happiness of phrasing; and in its serious midst is set the fantastic
episode of "The Yellow Sleigh"--that needs only to be amplified to
become another "Inn of the Silver Moon." But there its resemblance to
Vielé's other stories ends. Least of all has "The Inn of the Silver
Moon" anything in common with it. That delectable thistle-down romance
goes trippingly over sunbeams in a straightaway course that has no
intricacies: with all the interest constantly focussed upon a heroine
and a hero to whom all the other characters are minor and accessory; and
with never a break in the light-hearted note that is struck at the
start. "The Last of the Knickerbockers," a blend of comedy and
semi-tragedy, is far away from all this--both in spirit and in form. It
is the most largely and the most seriously conceived of Vielé's works:
not a romance, but a novel with a substantial plot carefully developed
in intricate action; and while the main interest is centred--as properly
it should be--upon a wholly charming heroine and a wholly satisfying
hero, these pleasing young people are made to know, and to keep, their
place in a crowd of strong characters strongly drawn.
It is a good story to read simply as a story; but it is more than that,
it is a document: an ambered preservation of a phase of New York society
that already almost has vanished, and that soon will have vanished
absolutely--when the last Mrs. and Mr. Bella Ruggles shall have closed
to decayed aristocracy the last shabbily pretentious boarding house in
the last dingy Kenilworth Place; and when decayed aristocracy, so
evicted, shall be forced to dwell in apartment-houses of the
bell-and-speaking-tube type, and to dine (as _Alida_ prophetically put
it) "at Italian tables-d'hôte--like the Café Chianti, in grandfather's
old house, where they have music and charge only fifty cents, including
wine"!
So true a presentment as this story is of New York's old-time strait
faiths and straiter social customs will outlive long, I am confident,
the great mass of the fiction of Vielé's day. It will be actively alive
while even a faint memory of those faiths and customs is cherished by
living people; and when all of such ancients shall have retired (with
the final befitting dignity attendant upon a special license) to their
family homes beneath the shadows of St. Mark's and Trinity, carrying
their memories with them, it will become, as I have said, a document:
preserving the traditions which otherwise would have been buried with
them; and so linking permanently--as they linked temporarily--New York's
ever-increasingly ardent present with its ever-paling less strenuous
past.
As to "The Inn of the Silver Moon," I can see no end to the lastingness
of it: since in the very essence of it is that which holds humanity with
an enduringly binding spell. The luring charm of a happy
love-story--charged with gay fantasy and epigrammatic grace and gently
pungent humour--is a charm perpetual and irresistible: that must hold
and bind while ever the world goes happily in ever-fresh sunshine, and
happily has in it ever-fresh young hearts.