THE NEW ROMANCE
The novelists who began their work in the seventies found themselves
in a dilemma. On one side was the new school which was becoming more
and more insistent that literature in America must be a thing American,
colored by American soil, and vivid and vital with the new spirit
of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hardy, Maupassant, Howells, that was thrilling
everywhere like the voice of a coming era. But on the other hand there
was the firmly set tradition that the new world was barren of literary
material, that it lay spick and span with no romantic backgrounds save
perhaps the Dutch Hudson and old Puritan Salem and colonial Boston.
As late as 1872 the _North American Review_ declared that the true
writer of fiction "must idealize. The idealizing novelists will be the
real novelists. All truth does not lie in facts."[114] And it further
declared that he must look away from his own land, where there is no
shadow and no antiquity, into the uncharted fields of the imagination.
"One would say that the natural tendency of the American novelist
would be toward romance; that the very uniformity of our social life
would offer nothing tempting to the writer, unless indeed to the
satirist."[114]
It was the voice of the school that had ruled the mid century, a
school that was still alive and was still a dominating force of which
young writers were tremendously conscious. The reading public was not
prepared for the new realism: it had been nurtured on _The Token_
and _The Talisman_. The new must come not as a revolution, swift
and sudden; but as an evolution, slow and imperceptible. During the
seventies even Howells and James were romancers; romancers, however, in
process of change.
For the seventies in the history of American fiction was a period of
compromise and transition. The new school would be romantic and yet
at the same time it would be realistic. The way opened unexpectedly.
The widening of the American horizon, the sudden vogue of the Pike
literature, the new exploiting of the continent in all its wild nooks
and isolated neighborhoods--strange areas as unknown to the East as
the California mines and the canebrakes of the great river--and above
all the emergence of the South, brought with it another discovery:
Hawthorne and the mid-century school had declared romance with American
background impossible simply because in their provincial narrowness
they had supposed that America was bounded on the south and west by the
Atlantic and the Hudson. America was discovered to be full of romantic
material. It had a past not connected at all with the Knickerbockers
or even the Pilgrims. Behind whole vast areas of it lay the shadow of
old forgotten regimes, "picturesque and gloomy wrongs," with ruins and
mystery and vague tradition.
One of the earliest results, then, of the new realism, strangely
enough, was a new romanticism, new American provinces added to the
bounds of Arcady. The first gold of it, appropriately enough, came
from California, where Harte and Mrs. Jackson caught glimpses of
an old Spanish civilization alive only in the picturesque ruins of
its Missions. Quickly it was found again, rich and abundant, in New
Orleans, where Spain and then France had held dominion in a vague past;
then in the plantations of the old South where Page and others caught
the last glories of that fading cavalier civilization which had been
prolonged through a century of twilight by the archaic institution of
slavery; and then even in the spick-and-span new central West with its
traditions of a chivalrous old French regime.
America, indeed, was full of romantic area, full of a truly romantic
atmosphere, for it had been for centuries the battle-field of
races, the North--England, New England, Anglo-Saxons--against the
South--Spain, France, the slave-holding Cavaliers. And romance in
all lands is the record of the old crushed out by the new, the dim
tradition of a struggle between North and South: the South with its
tropic imagination, its passion, its beauty, its imperious pride, its
barbaric background; the North with its logic, its discipline, its
perseverance, its passionless force. Romance has ever held as its theme
the passing of an old Southern regime before the barbarians of the
North. And romance in America has centered always in the South. Realism
might flourish in Boston and the colder classical atmospheres, but
not along the gulf and the tropic rivers. The reading public, however,
and the great publishing houses were in the North. The result was
compromise: the new romanticism, Southern in its atmosphere and spirit,
Northern in its truth to life and conditions.
I
Harte in _Gabriel Conroy_ glimpsed the new fields of romance; George
Washington Cable (1844----), the earliest of the new Southern school,
was the first fully to enter them. His gateway was old New Orleans,
most romantic of Southern cities, unknown to Northern readers until his
pen revealed it. It seemed hardly possible that the new world possessed
such a Bagdad of wonder: old Spanish aristocracy, French chivalry of
a forgotten _ancien regime_, creoles, Acadians from the Grand Pre
dispersion, adventurers from all the picturesque ports of the earth,
slavery with its barbaric atmosphere and its shuddery background of
dread, and behind it all and around it all like a mighty moat shutting
it close in upon itself and rendering all else in the world a mere
hearsay and dream, the swamps and lagoons of the great river.
Cable was a native of the old city. During a happy boyhood he played
and rambled over the whole of it and learned to know it as only a boy
can know the surroundings of his home. His boyhood ended when he was
fourteen with the death of his father and the responsibility that
devolved upon him to help support his mother and her little family left
with scanty means. There was to be no more schooling. He marked boxes
in the custom house until the war broke out, and then at seventeen he
enlisted in the Confederate army and served to the end. Returning to
New Orleans, he found employment in a newspaper office, where he proved
a failure; he studied surveying until he was forced by malarial fever
caught in the swamps to abandon it; then, after a slow recovery, he
entered the employ of a firm of cotton factors and for years served
them as an accountant. It was an unpromising beginning. At thirty-five
he was still recording transfers of cotton, and weights and prices and
commissions.
But his heart, like Charles Lamb's, was in volumes far different
from those upon his office desk. He had always been a studious youth.
He had read much: Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Irving, Scott; and, like
a true native of the old city to whom French was a mother tongue,
Hugo, Merimee, About. He loved also to pore over antiquarian records:
_Relations_ of the priest explorers, and old French documents and
writings. His first impulse to write came to him as he sat amid these
dusty records. "It would give me pleasure," he once wrote in a letter,
"to tell you how I came to drop into the writing of romances, but I
cannot; I just dropt. Money, fame, didactic or controversial impulse I
scarcely felt a throb of. I just wanted to do it because it seemed a
pity for the stuff to go so to waste."
Cable's first story, "'Sieur George," appeared in _Scribner's Monthly_
in October, 1873. Edward King, touring the Southern States in 1872 for
his series of papers entitled _The Great South_, had found the young
accountant pottering away at his local history and his studies of local
conditions and had secured some of his work for Dr. Holland. During the
next three years five other articles were published in the magazine and
one, "Posson Jone," in _Appleton's_, but they caused no sensation. It
was not until 1879, when the seven stories were issued in book form as
_Old Creole Days_, that recognition came. The long delay was good for
Cable: it compelled him, in Hawthorne fashion, to brood over his early
work in his rare intervals of leisure, to contemplate each piece a long
time, and to finish it and enrich it. He put forth no immaturities; he
began to publish at the point where his art was perfect.
The reception accorded to _Old Creole Days_ was like that accorded to
Harte's _Luck of Roaring Camp_. It took its place at once as a classic,
and the verdict has never been questioned. There is about the book,
and the two books which quickly followed it, an exotic quality, an
_aura_ of strangeness, that is like nothing else in our literature.
They seem not American at all; surely such a background and such an
atmosphere as that never could have existed "within the bounds of our
stalwart republic." They are romance, one feels; pure creations of
fancy, prolongations of the Longfellowism of the mid century--and yet,
as one reads on and on, the conviction grows that they are not romance;
they are really true. Surely "Posson Jone" and "Madame Delphine"
are not creations of fancy. The elided and softly lisping dialect,
broken-down French rather than debased English, is not an invention of
the author's: it carries conviction the more one studies it; it is not
brought in to show: it adds at every point to the reality of the work.
And the carefully worked-in backgrounds--let Lafcadio Hearn speak, who
settled in the city a few months after "Jean-ah Poquelin" came out in
_Scribner's Monthly_:
The strict perfection of his Creole architecture is readily
recognized by all who have resided in New Orleans. Each one
of those charming pictures of places--veritable pastels--was
painted after some carefully selected model of French or
Franco-Spanish origin--typifying fashions of building which
prevailed in the colonial days.... The author of _Madame
Delphine_ must have made many a pilgrimage into the quaint
district, to study the wrinkled faces of the houses, or perhaps
to read the queer names upon the signs--as Balzac loved to do
in old-fashioned Paris.[115]
It is realism, and yet how far removed from Zola and Flaubert--Flaubert
with his "sentiment is the devil"! It is realism tempered with romance;
it is the new romance of the transition. There is seemingly no art
about it, no striving for effect, and there is no exhibition of
quaint and unusual things just because they _are_ quaint and unusual.
Rather are we transported into a charmed atmosphere, "the tepid,
orange-scented air of the South," with the soft Creole _patois_ about
us and romance become real. The very style is Creole--Creole as Cable
knew the Creoles of the quadroon type. There is a childish simplicity
about it, and there is a lightness, an epigrammatic finesse, an elision
of all that can be suggested, that is Gallic and not Saxon at all.
One can feel this exotic quality most fully in the portraits of women:
'Tite Poulette, Madame Delphine, Aurora Nancanou, Clotilde, and the
others, portraits etched in with infinitesimal lightness of touch,
suggested rather than described, felt rather than seen. These are
not Northern women, these daintily feminine survivals of a decadent
nobility, these shrinking, coquettish, clinging, distant, tearful,
proud, explosive, half barbarous, altogether bewitching creatures. A
suggestion here, a glimpse there, an exclamation, a flash of the eyes,
and they are alive and real as few feminine creations in the fiction
of any period. One may forget the story, but one may not forget Madame
Delphine. If one would understand the secret of Cable's art, that
Gallic lightness of touch, that subtle elision, that perfect balance
between the suggested and the expressed, let him read the last chapter
of _The Grandissimes_. It is a Cable epitome.
"Posson Jone," "Jean-ah Poquelin," and _Madame Delphine_, which,
despite its length and its separate publication, is a short story
belonging to the _Old Creole Days_ group, are among the most perfect of
American short stories and mark the highest reach of Cable's art.
_The Grandissimes_, his first long romance, appeared in 1880. Never
was work of art painted on broader canvas or with elements more
varied and picturesque. Though centering in a little nook among the
bayous, it contains all Louisiana. Everywhere perspectives down a
long past: glimpses of the explorers, family histories, old forgotten
wrongs, vendettas, survivals from a feudal past, wild traditions,
superstitions. Grandissime and Fusilier, young men of the D'Iberville
exploring party, get lost in the swamps. "When they had lain down
to die and had only succeeded in falling to sleep, the Diana of the
Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came
upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and
beauty, and fell sick of love." The love of this Indian queen begins
the romance. Both eager to possess her, they can settle the matter
only with dice. Fusilier wins and becomes the founder of a proud
line, semibarbarous in its haughtiness and beauty, the Capulets to
De Grapion's Montagues. The culmination comes a century later when
the old feudal regime in Louisiana was closed by Napoleon and the
remnants of the warring families were united according to the approved
Montague-Capulet formula.
But the theme of the book is wider than this quarrel of families, wider
than the conflict of two irreconcilable civilizations and the passing
of the outworn. In a vague way it centers in the episode of Bras
Coupe, the African king who refused to be a slave and held firm until
his haughty soul was crushed out with inconceivable brutality. The
cumulative and soul-withering power of an ancient wrong, the curse of
a dying man which works its awful way until the pure love of innocent
lovers removes it--it is _The House of the Seven Gables_ transferred to
the barbarous swamps of the Atchafalaya.
The strangeness of the book grows upon one as one reads. It is a book
of lurid pictures--the torture and death of Bras Coupe, the murder of
the _negresse_ Clemence, which in sheer horror and brutal, unsparing
realism surpasses anything in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, anything indeed
in the Russian realists. It is a book too with a monotone of fear:
the nameless dread that comes of holding down a race by force, or
as Joel C. Harris has phrased it, "that vague and mysterious danger
that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready
to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps
and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder and rapine and
pillage"; the superstitious thrill when at dead of night throbs up
from a neighboring slave yard "the monotonous chant and machine-like
time-beat of the African dance"; the horror of finding morning after
morning on one's pillow voodoo warnings and ghastly death charms placed
seemingly by supernatural hands. No one has ever surpassed Cable in
making felt this uncanny side of the negro. His characterization of
the voodoo quadroon woman Palmyre with her high Latin, Jaloff-African
ancestry, her "barbaric and magnetic beauty that startled the beholder
like the unexpected drawing out of a jeweled sword," her physical
perfection--lithe of body as a tigress and as cruel, witching and
alluring, yet a thing of horror, "a creature that one would want to
find chained"--it fingers at one's heart and makes one fear.
And with all this strangeness, this flash after flash of vivid
characterization, a style to match. "Victor Hugo," one exclaims often
as one reads. Let us quote, say from chapter five. The stars are
Cable's:
There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable
determination to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly
numerous Grandissimes.
"My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse;
"it is useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them
out by duels; we will try another plan. Thank you," he added,
as she handed his coat back to him, with the shoulder-straps
cut off. In pursuance of the new plan, Madame De Grapion--the
precious little heroine!--before the myrtles offered another
crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith
tradition) than herself.
Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very
day Numa Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere
child, received from Governor De Vaudreuil a cadetship.
"Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we
shall see! Ha! we shall see!"
"We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family.
"Will Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?"
* * * * *
Bang! Bang!
Alas, Madame De Grapion!
It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever
left a braver little widow.
It is French, too, in its sudden turns, its fragmentary paragraphs, its
sly humor, its swift summings-up with an epigram:
"Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we'll return to our senses."
"Now I'll put on my feathers again," says the plucked bird.
But as one reads on one realizes more and more that this style comes
from no mere imitation of a master: it is Creole; it is the style that
is the counterpart of the Creole temperament. It is verisimilitude; it
is interpretation.
Thus far the strength of the book; there are weaknesses as great. Cable
failed, as Harte failed, as most of the masters of the short story have
failed, in constructive power. The magnificent thesis of the romance is
not worked out; it is barely suggested rather than made to dominate the
piece. Moreover, the interest does not accumulate and culminate at the
end. It is a rich mass of materials rather than a finished romance. The
emphasis is laid upon characters, episodes, conditions, atmosphere, to
the neglect of construction. From it Cable might have woven a series of
perfect short stories: some parts indeed, like the tale of Bras Coupe,
_are_ complete short stories as they stand. The book is a gallery
rather than a single work of art.
_Dr. Sevier_, 1885, marks the beginning of Cable's later style, the
beginning of the decline in his art. The year before he had taken
up his permanent residence in Massachusetts and now as a literary
celebrity, with Boston not far, he became self-conscious and timid. His
art had matured in isolation; there had been an elemental quality about
it that had come from his very narrowness and lack of formal education.
In the classic New England atmosphere the Gallic element, the naive
simplicity, the elfin charm that had made his early writings like no
others, faded out of his art. It was as if Burns after the Kilmarnock
edition had studied poetry at Oxford and then had settled in literary
London. _Doctor Sevier_ is not a romance at all; it is a realistic
novel of the Howells type, a study of the Civil War period as it had
passed under Cable's own eyes, with no plot and no culminating love
interest. It is a running chronicle of ten years in the lives of John
and Mary Richling, tedious at times, impeded with problem discussion
and philosophizing. Its strength lies in its characterization: the
Italian Ristofalo and his Irish wife are set off to the life; but why
should the creator of Madame Delphine and Posson Jone and Palmyre
turn to Irish and Italian characterization? The story, too, has the
same defects as _The Grandissimes_: it lacks proportion and balance.
With a large canvas Cable becomes always awkward and ineffective.
With _Bonaventure_, graphic as parts of it unquestionably are, one
positively loses patience. Its plan is chaotic. At the end, where
should come the climax of the plot, are inserted three long chapters
telling with minute and terrifying realism the incidents of a flood in
the canebrakes. It is magnificent, yet it is "lumber." It is introduced
apparently to furnish background for the death of the "Cajun," but
the "Cajun" is only an incidental figure in the book. To deserve such
"limelight" he should have been the central character who had been
hunted with increasing interest up to the end and his crime and his
punishment should have been the central theme.
With _Madame Delphine_ (1881) had closed the first and the great
period in Cable's literary career. The second period was a period of
miscellany: journalized articles on the history and the characteristics
of the Creoles, on New Orleans and its life, on Louisiana, its history
and traditions, on phases of social reform. Necessary as this work may
have been, one feels inclined to deplore it. When one has discovered
new provinces in the realm of gold one does not well, it would seem, to
lay aside his magic flute and prepare guide books to the region.
The New England atmosphere brought to life a native area in Cable. His
mother had been of New England ancestry. Moral wrestlings, questions
of reform, problems of conscience, were a part of his birthright. One
feels it even in his earliest work: he had seen, we feel, the problem
of _The Grandissimes_ before he had found the story. After his removal
to Northampton, Massachusetts, it may be said that reform work became
his real profession. Not that we criticize his choice, for life ever
is greater than mere art; we record it simply because it explains. He
formed home culture clubs for the education and the esthetic culture
of wage-earners, and conducted a magazine in the interest of the work;
he interested himself actively in the cause of the negro; so actively,
indeed, that after his _Silent South_ and _The Negro Question_ and the
problem novel _John March, Southerner_, the South practically disowned
him.
His third period begins, perhaps, with his novel _Strong Hearts_
in 1899. The pen that so long had been dipped in controversy and
journalism and philanthropic propaganda again essayed fiction, but it
was too late. The old witchery was gone. His later novels, all his
fiction indeed after _Madame Delphine_, with the exception perhaps
of parts of _Bonaventure_, read as if written by a disciple of the
earlier Cable. The verve, the sly humor, the Gallic finesse, the Creole
strangeness and charm, have disappeared. There is a tightening in the
throat as one reads the last page of _Madame Delphine_, there is a
flutter of the heart as one reads the love story of Honore and Aurora,
but nothing grips one as he reads _The Cavalier_. A pretty little
story, undoubtedly, but is it possible that the author of it once wrote
"Posson Jone" and "Jean-ah Poquelin"? And _Gideon's Band_, a romance
with an attempt to win back the old witchery of style--it was all in
vain. Why say more?
Cable as a short story writer, a maker of miniatures with marvelous
skill of touch, was most successful perhaps with dainty femininities
of the old regime. Once, twice, thrice the light of romance glowed
upon his page. Then he became a reformer, a journalist, a man with a
problem. But he who gave to American literature _Madame Delphine_ and
_Old Creole Days_ need not fear the verdict of coming days. Already
have these works become classics.
II
The old Spanish regime in America furnished the theme of Lewis
Wallace's (1827-1905) first romance, _The Fair God_, published the year
"'Sieur George" appeared in _Scribner's_. He had returned from the
Mexican War interested in Aztec antiquities. After the Civil War, in
which he took a prominent part, he began in the intervals of his law
practice to write a military romance centering about Cortez and the
conquest, and in 1873, through the efforts of Whitelaw Reid, succeeded
in having it published in Boston. It was not, however, until 1884,
after the enormous popularity of _Ben Hur_, that it was discovered by
the reading public. It is really better in workmanship and proportions
than its more highly colored and vastly more exploited companion; it
moves strongly, its battle scenes have a resonance and excitement about
them that make them comparable even with Scott's, but its tendency
is to sentiment and melodrama: it is a blending of Prescott and
Bulwer-Lytton.
A far more distinctive study of old Spanish days is to be found in
Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_, undoubtedly the strongest romance of
the period. Mrs. Jackson was a daughter of Professor Nathan W. Fiske
of Amherst, Massachusetts, and until the last decade of her life was a
resident of her native New England. Not until she was thirty-five and
had been bereft of husband and children did she attempt literature.
Her first form of expression was poetry, the short, sharp cry of
desolation, narrowly personal and feminine. Then she wrote travel
sketches and juveniles and moral essays, and then an outpouring of
fiction intense and sentimental. During the seventies and the early
eighties her work was in all the magazines. So versatile and abundant
was she that at one time Dr. Holland seriously contemplated an issue of
_Scribner's_ made up wholly of her contributions.
To almost nothing of her work, save that at the very last, did she sign
her own name. She had an aversion to publicity that became really a
mannerism. Her early work she signed variously or not at all, then for
a time she settled upon the initials "H. H." It is no secret now that
she wrote the much-speculated-upon novels _Mercy Philbrick's Choice_
and _Hetty's Strange History_ in the No-Name Series, and that the _Saxe
Holm Stories_, which furnished the literary mystery of the seventies,
were from her pen. They are love stories of the _Lamplighter_ school
of fiction, sentimental, over-intense, moralizing. General and
colorless as most of them are, they here and there display a rare
power of characterization and a sharply drawn study of background and
conditions. Parts of "Farmer Bassett's Romance," with its analysis of
the "pagan element" in New England character, are worthy of Mary E.
Wilkins. The stories, however, belong with the old rather than the new,
and have been forgotten.
It is impossible to understand "H. H." without taking into account
her New Englandism. She was a daughter of the Brahmins, in many ways
a counterpart of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--intensely conscientious,
emotional, eager in the reform of abuses, brilliant, impetuous. While
visiting California in the mid seventies she came in contact with the
Indian problem and with characteristic impulsiveness set out to arouse
the nation. After six months of intense work in the Lenox library of
New York she published her _Century of Dishonor_, a bitter arraignment
of the national Indian policy, and at her own expense sent a copy
to every member of Congress. As a result she was appointed one of
two commissioners to examine and report upon "the condition and need
of the Mission Indians of California." Her report was thorough and
businesslike, but it accomplished little.
Then she conceived the purpose of enlarging her area of appeal by the
publication of a story--on the title page it stands _Ramona. A Story_.
The problem preceded plot and materials and background. "You have never
fully realized," she wrote only a few weeks before her death, "how
for the last four years my whole heart has been full of the Indian
cause--how I have felt, as the Quakers say, 'a concern' to work for it.
_My Century of Dishonor_ and _Ramona_ are the only things I have done
of which I am glad now."[116] And earlier than that she had written: "I
have for three or four years longed to write a story that should 'tell'
on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it; I knew I had no
background--no local color."[117]
_Ramona_ was conceived of, therefore, as a tract, as a piece of
propaganda, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's _Loveliness_. It was written
with passion, flaming hot from a woman's heart--not many have been the
romances written in heat. In this one respect it may be likened to Mrs.
Stowe's great work, but to call it, as so often it has been called,
"the _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ of the Indian," is to speak with inaptness.
The book is a romance, and only a romance; its whole appeal is the
appeal of romance. She had found at last her background, but it was a
background that dominated and destroyed her problem. Unconsciously she
surrendered herself to the charm of it until to-day the book is no
more a problem novel than is the _House of the Seven Gables_, which
also makes use of the excesses and crimes of a system.
No background could be more fitted for romance: southern California
with its "delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer"; the old Spanish
regime, "half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free handed,"
"when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land, and its
old name, 'New Spain,' was an ever-present link and stimulus";[118] and
over it all like a soft, old-world atmosphere the Romish church with
its mystery and its medieval splendor. "It was a picturesque life, with
more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic,
more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The
aroma of it all lingers there still."[118]
It had been the plan of the author first to elicit strongly the
reader's sympathy for Ramona and the Indian Alessandro, then to harrow
him with the persecutions wreaked upon them because they were Indians.
But the purpose fails from the start. Ramona's Indian blood is not
convincing to the reader. Until the story is well under way no one
of the characters except the Senora and the priest, not even Ramona
herself, suspects that she is not a daughter of the old Spanish house
of Ortegna. There was small trace of the Indian about her: her beauty
was by no means Indian--steel blue eyes and "just enough olive tint
in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it
swarthy." She had been reared as a member of the patriarchal household
of the Morenos, and in education and habit of life was as much Spanish
as her foster brother Felipe. And Alessandro--even the author explains
that Ramona "looked at him with no thought of his being an Indian--a
thought there had surely been no need of her having, since his skin
was not a shade darker than Felipe's." He is an Indian, we must admit,
and yet an Indian who looks like a Spaniard, an Indian who has been
educated carefully in the Mission like a priest, an Indian who can sing
Latin hymns with marvelous sweetness and play the violin like a master,
an Indian with all the characteristics of a courtly senor, more nobly
Spanish in soul than even Felipe himself, the heir of the great Moreno
estate--the imagination refuses to accept either of the two characters
as Indians. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was worked out with the blackest of
negroes; its central figure was a typical slave, who died at the end a
victim of the system, but as one reads _Ramona_ one thinks of Indians
only as incidental figures in the background.
It is a romance of the days of the passing of the haughty old Spanish
regime. A maiden of inferior birth, or, in terms of the ordinary
continental romance, a maiden whose mother was of the peasant class,
is brought up side by side and on a perfect equality with the heir
of the noble house. He falls in love with her, but he tells of his
love neither to her nor to his proud Castilian mother, who alone in
the family knows the secret of the girl's birth. Then the maiden
clandestinely marries, out of her caste as all but the Senora supposes,
a peasant, as her mother had been a peasant, and is driven out of the
home with harshness. A tenderly reared maiden, married to poverty,
forced to live for a period in squalor, bereaved at last of her
husband, rescued by her old lover when she is at the lowest point
of her misery, and taken back to the old home where the implacable
mother has died, and there wooed until she surrenders her new future
to the high-born foster brother, who, even though he has learned of
her peasant strain, has never ceased to love her--that is the romance.
The Indians, even Alessandro, are felt to be only incidental parts of
the story. The center of the romance is the slow, faithful, thwarted,
but finally triumphing, love of Felipe. The thing that really grips
is not the incidental wrongs and sufferings of the Indians, but the
relentlessly drawn picture of the old Senora and the last chapter where
the two lovers, united at last, have left behind them the old land, no
longer theirs--its deserted and melancholy Missions, its valleys and
long pastures which ring now with the shouts of a conquering race, and
turn their faces southward into a new world and a new and more joyous
life. Then it was that Ramona blossomed into her full beauty. "A loyal
and loving heart indeed it was--loyal, loving, serene. Few husbands
so blest as the Senor Felipe Moreno. Sons and daughters came to bear
his name. The daughters were all beautiful; but the most beautiful of
them all, and, it was said, the most beloved by both father and mother,
was the eldest one: the one who bore the mother's name, and was only
step-daughter to the Senor--Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian."
And so the romance ends, as romance should end, with all trouble and
uncertainty a mere cloud in the far past.
_Ramona_ is a bombshell that all unknowingly to its creator turned
out to be not a bombshell at all, but an exquisite work of art. The
intensity and the passion, which came from the viewing of abuses and
the desire to work reform, wove themselves into the very substance of
it. It is a blending of realism and romanticism and ethic earnestness
into a rounded romance. More and more is it evident that aside from
this and perhaps two or three sonnets, nothing else that its author
wrote is of permanent value. _Ramona_, however, is alone enough to give
her a place in American literature, a place indeed with the two or
three best writers of American romance.
III
The French occupation of the northern area of the continent has also
proved a rich literary field. It seems, as Howells has observed, that
the French have touched America "with romance wherever they have
touched it at all as soldiers, priests, exiles, or mere adventurers."
The bare history of their adventures is, as Parkman has recorded it,
romance. Cooper caught a glimpse of the richness of the field, and a
grand-niece of his, Constance Fenimore Woolson, made a new discovery
of it during the "local color" period that followed the advent of Bret
Harte. Her collection of stories, _Castle Nowhere_, 1875, pictured with
graphic realism the life of the rude settlements along the upper lakes,
but once or twice she dipped her pen into pure romance and became a
pioneer. Her sketch, "The Old Agency," which deals with the ancient
building at Mackinac with its memories of the Jesuits, and her strong
story "St. Clair Flats" reveal what she might have done had she not
turned her attention to other regions.
The field that she abandoned was taken later by Mary Hartwell
Catherwood, a native of Ohio, the first woman novelist of the period
to be born west of the Alleghenies. She was, moreover, the first woman
of any prominence in American literary ranks to acquire a college
education, graduating not in the East, as one might suppose, but from
a new college in the new West. The fact is significant. After a brief
period of teaching in Illinois, she became a newspaper writer and a
general literary worker, and she published her first book, _A Woman in
Armor_, as early as 1875. Juveniles, marketable stories, sketches,
critiques, flowed from her pen for nearly twenty years, and yet in
1888 she had settled upon no fixed style or field of work and she was
completely unknown to the reading public. She seems to have been trying
the literary currents of the time. Her first experiment, not to mention
her juveniles, was her _Craque-O'-Doom_, 1881, an E. P. Roe-like novel
of the _He Fell in Love with His Wife_ type, but it made no impression.
"Don't you know," she makes one of her characters say in words that
are an explanation, "that the key of the times is not sentiment but
practical common sense? Just after the war when the country was
wrought to a high pitch of nerves, current literature overflowed with
self-sacrifice. According to that showing--and current literature ought
to be a good reflection of the times--everybody was running around
trying to outdo his neighbor in the broken heart and self-renunciation
business." Next she assayed to enter the "practical sense" school, and
her "Serena," _Atlantic_, 1882, with its unsparingly realistic picture
of a death and funeral in an Ohio farmhouse, shows that she might have
made herself the Miss Jewett or the Miss Wilkins of her native region.
But minute studies of contemporary life failed to satisfy the demands
within her. She awoke at last to her true vocation over a volume of
Parkman, let us suppose over the sixth and the sixteenth chapters of
_The Old Regime in Canada_. From the glowing pages of this master of
narrative she caught a full breath of romance and for the first time
she realized her powers.
_The Romance of Dollard_, which appeared in the _Century_ in 1888,
and the other romances that swiftly followed, are no more like the
earlier work of the author than if they had been written by another
hand. It was as if a new and brilliant writer had suddenly appeared.
The suddenness, however, was only a seeming suddenness: the romances
were in reality the culmination of a long and careful period of
apprenticeship. Her style, to be sure, had been influenced by Parkman:
one cannot read a page without feeling that. There is the same
incisive, nervous manner; the same impetuous rush and vigor as if the
wild Northern winds were filling the paragraphs; the same short and
breathless sentences in descriptions of action, packed with excitement
and dramatic force. Yet there is vastly more than Parkman in her work.
There is a wealth of poetry and spiritual force in it, a healthy
sentiment, a skilful selecting and blending of romantic elements, and
a Hardy-like power to catch the spirit of a locality so as to make it
almost a personality in the tragedy. This background of wilderness,
this monotone of the savage North, is never absent. At the beginning
of every story and every chapter is struck, as it were, the dominating
key. Here is the opening paragraph of "The Windigo":
The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie's River called the Sault
could be heard at all hours through the settlement on the
rising shore and into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a
mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never
ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance
of winter locked it up. At August dusk, when all that shaggy
world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became very
distinct.
These rapids with their mournful cry become a character in the story;
they dominate every page until at the end they rescue the hero, bearing
in his arms the frightful "windigo," in a page of action that stirs
the blood. The Canadian wilds of the _coureurs de bois_, the roar of
swollen rivers, the sudden storms that lash the forests, the terror and
the mystery of night in the savage woods, and evermore the river, the
black St. Lawrence--one feels them like a presence. Like Cable, too,
she can make her reader share the superstitious thrill of the region.
Her _windigos_ and _loup-garous_ lay hold on one like a hand out of the
dark.
Amid this wild landscape a wild social order--savage Indians,
explorers, _voyageurs_, flaming Jesuits, _habitants_, _grands
seigneurs_, soldiers of fortune--Frontenac, Tonty, Dollard, La Salle,
Bigot, Montcalm, and perhaps the lost dauphin, son of Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette--and in the heart of it all and the moving force of it
all, beautiful women, exiles from France, exquisite maidens educated
in convents, charmingly innocent, lithe Indian girls, Indian queens,
robust daughters of _habitants_. Swords flash in duel and battle, love
rules utterly even such stormy souls as La Salle's, plots with roots
that extend even across the ocean into France are worked out in secret
fastness--with such material and such background romantic combinations
are endless.
The strength of Mrs. Catherwood's work lies in its tensity and
excitement, its vigor of narrative, its picturesque setting, its
power of characterization. From this very element of strength comes a
weakness. Romance must tread ever near the verge of the impossible,
and at times she pushes her situations too far and falls over into
the realm of melodrama. In _The White Islander_, for instance, the
Indians have the hero burning at the stake when suddenly Marie, the
French "white islander" who loves him, leaps into the circle of flames,
declaring that she will die with him. Then realizing there is no hope
of saving the two, the Jesuit father unites them in marriage, side by
side at the stake, while the flames are crackling, but the moment he
pronounces them man and wife the yells of the rescuing party resound
from the near forest and they are saved.
There is another weakness, one that lies far deeper, one indeed that
applies to the whole school of historical novelists that so flourished
in the nineties. The author had a passion for "documenting" her
romances. She studied her sources as carefully as if she were to write
a history; she used all the known facts that could be found; then she
supplemented these known facts copiously from her imagination. For
her _Romance of Dollard_ she got Parkman to write an introduction
commending its historical accuracy; she strewed the chapters with
corroborating footnotes; and she tried in all ways to give the
impression that it was a genuine piece of history. But there is no
evidence that Dollard ever married, and there is not a scrap even of
tradition that his bride died with him at the battle of the Long Saut.
To make an historical personage like Dollard or La Salle or Tonty the
leading, speaking character in a romance is to falsify the facts.
Historical romance is not history; it is pure fiction, true only to the
spirit of the age and the place represented and to the fundamentals of
human character and the ways of the human soul. It should be worked out
always with non-historical characters.
Of Mrs. Catherwood's romances the best is _The Lady of Fort St.
John_, made so perhaps on account of the unique character Rossignol.
Her strongest work, however, lies in her shorter stories. It was a
peculiarity of the whole period that nearly all of its writers of
fiction should have been restricted in their powers of creation to the
small effort rather than to the large. It was the age of cameos rather
than canvases. Her volume, _The Chase of St. Castin and Other Stories
of the French in the New World_, and her _Mackinac and Lake Stories_,
which deal with the mixed populations dwelling on the islands of the
Great Lakes, show her at her highest level. Her versatility, however,
was remarkable. Her _Spirit of an Illinois Town_, a realistic story
of a typical boom town, has in it the very soul of the new West, and
her _The Days of Jeanne d'Arc_, written after much observation of the
Vosges and Lorraine peasants in France and a year of work in the best
libraries, is as brilliant a piece of historical work as was produced
during the period.
Whatever her failings as a romancer she must be reckoned with always
as perhaps the earliest American pioneer of that later school of
historical fiction writers that so flourished in the nineties. After
her stirring tales had appeared, _Alice of Old Vincennes_, and
_Monsieur Beaucaire_, and _The Seats of the Mighty_, and all the
others, were foregone conclusions.
IV
The latest field in America for romance was that created by the Civil
War. The patriarchal life of the great Southern plantations had in
it a peculiar picturesqueness, especially when viewed through the
fading smoke of the conflict that destroyed it. An old aristocracy
had been overthrown by Northern invaders--field enough for romance.
It had been a peculiar aristocracy--a "democratic aristocracy," as
it was fond of explaining itself, "not of blood but of influence and
of influence exerted among equals,"[119] but none the less it was an
aristocracy in the heart of democratic America, Roman in its patrician
pride, its jealously guarded principle of caste, its lavish wealth,
and its slavery centered, social regime. Like all aristocracies it
was small in numbers. "Only about 10,781 families held as many as
fifty or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be
taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates of
the South."[120] But of these estates very many were only commercial
establishments with little social significance. The real aristocracy
was to be found in a few old families, notably in Virginia, in numbers
not exceeding the New England aristocracy of the Brahmins, which
had been set apart by a principle so radically different. Both were
narrowly provincial rather than national, both were centered within
themselves, both were intolerant and self-satisfied, and both alike
disappeared in the flames of the war to make way for the new national
spirit which was to rule the new age.
To feel the atmosphere of this Southern old regime, this exclusive
aristocracy, far older than the republic, one must read Thomas Nelson
Page's _The Old South_, or his earliest published sketch, "Old
Yorktown," _Scribner's Monthly_, 1881, a sketch that is in reality the
preface to his romances. It may be profitable, perhaps, to quote a few
paragraphs. After his description of the old custom house of York, the
first erected in America, he writes:
There the young bucks in velvet and ruffles gathered to talk
over the news or plan new plots of surprising a governor or
a lady-love. It was there the haughty young aristocrats, as
they took snuff or fondled their hounds, probably laughed over
the story of how that young fellow, Washington, who, because
he had acquired some little reputation fighting Indians, had
thought himself good enough for anybody, had courted Mary Cary,
and very properly had been asked out of the house of the old
Colonel, on the ground that his daughter had been accustomed
to ride in her own coach.... It would be difficult to find a
fitter illustration of the old colonial Virginia life than
that which this little town affords. It was a typical Old
Dominion borough, and was one of the eight boroughs into which
Virginia was originally divided. One or two families owned the
place, ruling with a sway despotic in fact, though in the main
temperate and just, for the lower orders were too dependent
and inert to dream of thwarting the "gentlefolk," and the
southerner uncrossed was ever the most amiable of men.
Among these ruling families were the Nelsons and the Pages:
The founder of the Page family in Virginia was "Colonel John
Page," who, thinking that a principality in Utopia might prove
better than an acre in Middlesex, where he resided, came over
in 1656. He had an eye for "bottom land," and left his son
Matthew an immense landed estate, which he dutifully increased
by marrying Mary Mann, the rich heiress of Timber Neck. Their
son, Mann, was a lad thirteen years old when his father died.
After being sent to Eton, he came back and took his place at
the "Council Board," as his fathers did before him and as his
descendants did after him.
It reminds one of Hawthorne's account of his own family in the
introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_.
Before the war the South had had its romancers. Kennedy and Simms and
others had tried early to do for it what Cooper had done for the more
northerly area. Then in the fifties John Esten Cooke (1830-1886), the
best novelist the South produced during the earlier period, put forth
a series of Virginia romances, the strongest of which undoubtedly was
_The Virginia Comedians_, 1854, republished in 1883. The strength of
the book, as indeed of all of Cooke's romances, lay in its vivacity,
its enthusiasm, its stirring pictures of the more picturesque elements
of the old Southern life: barbecues, horse races, contests between
fiddlers, the doings of negroes, and the like. Its weakness, in
addition to hasty workmanship and lack of cumulative power, was the
common weakness of all the mid-century fiction. It had a _St. Elmo_
atmosphere. Like all the rest of his fiction, it is tainted with
profuse sentimentality, with sensationalism, with a straining for
the unexpected and the picturesque. Panels in the wall slide apart
mysteriously, accidents happen in the nick of time, villains in the
form of French dancing masters are foiled at last by the hero. One is
in old Williamsburg, to be sure, "the Southern Boston" in its golden
prime, and is impressed with its courtly manners, its beautiful women,
its chivalrous heroes, its frequent duels; yet one is never quite
sure whether it is the real South or whether it is not after all the
story-world of an old-fashioned romancer who perhaps has never visited
the South at all save in imagination. It is romanticism overdone; it is
everything too much. Even its sprightliness and its occasional touches
of realism cannot rescue it from oblivion.
A dwelling upon the merely quaint and unusual in the local environment
to arouse laughter and interest was perhaps the leading source of
failure in Southern fiction even to the time of the later seventies.
From the days of Longstreet's _Georgia Scenes_, pictures there had been
of the "cracker," the mountaineer, the Pike, the conventional negro
of the Jim Crow and the Zip Coon or the Uncle Tom type, the colonel
of the fire-eating, whisky-drinking variety, but there had been no
painstaking picture of real Southern life drawn with loving hand, not
for mirth and wonder, not for the pointing of a moral, but for sympathy
and comprehension. Horace E. Scudder as late as 1880 noted that "the
South is still a foreign land to the North, and travelers are likely
to bring back from it only what does not grow in the North."[121] It
was true also of travelers in its books as well, for the most of its
books had been written for Northern publication. The first writer
really to picture the South from the heart outward, to show it not as
a picturesque spectacle but as a quivering section of human life, was
Thomas Nelson Page (1853----), whose first distinctive story, "Marse
Chan," appeared as late as 1884.
At the opening of the Civil War Page was eight years old. During the
years of conflict his home, one of the great plantations of Virginia,
was a center of Confederate activities, and time and again the region
about it was overrun by the invading armies. It was a marvelous
training for the future novelist. He had been born at precisely the
right moment. He had been a part of the old regime during the early
impressionable years that are golden in a life, the years that color
and direct the imagination in all its future workings, and he was young
enough when the era closed to adapt himself to the new order. At the
close of the war he studied the classics with his father, a scholar
of the old Southern type, took the course in the Virginia university
presided over by Robert E. Lee, studied law at the University of
Virginia, and then from 1875 to 1893 practised law in Richmond. These
are the essentials of his biography.
It was while he was establishing himself in his profession at the
old capital of the Confederacy that he did his first literary work.
_Scribner's Monthly_ had heard from the ruined South the first
murmurings of a new literature and was giving it every encouragement.
It had published King's series of articles on _The Great South_, it had
discovered Cable in 1873, it had encouraged Lanier, and in January,
1876, it had begun to issue a series of negro dialect poems by Irwin
Russell, a native of Port Gibson, Mississippi, poems that undoubtedly
had been suggested by the Pike balladry, and yet were so fresh and
original in material and manner that they in turn became a strong
influence on their times. That the poems launched Page in his literary
career he has freely admitted.
Personally I owe much to him. It was the light of his genius
shining through his dialect poems--first of dialect poems then
and still first--that led my feet in the direction I have since
tried to follow. Had he but lived, we should have had proof of
what might be done with true negro dialect; the complement of
"Uncle Remus."[122]
In April, 1877, came his first contribution to _Scribner's_, "Uncle
Gabe's White Folks," a dialect poem of the Russell order, yet one that
strikes the keynote of all its author's later work:
Fine ole place? Yes, sah, 't is so;
An' mighty fine people my white folks war--
But you ought ter 'a' seen it years ago,
When de Marster an' de Mistis lived up dyah;
When de niggers 'd stan' all roun' de do',
Like grains o' corn on de cornhouse flo'.
Together with Armistead C. Gordon of Staunton, Virginia, he wrote
other ballads and poetical studies which were issued as a joint
volume a decade later with the title _Befo' de War, Echoes in Negro
Dialect_. But in the meantime he had been experimenting with prose
dialect, and late in the seventies he submitted to the magazine a long
story told wholly in the negro vernacular. It was a bold venture:
even _Scribner's_ hesitated. They might print humorous dialect poems
and Macon's "Aphorisms from the Quarters" in their "Bric-a-Brac"
department, but a serious story all of it in a dialect that changed
many words almost beyond recognition--they held it for over four
years. When it did appear, however, as "Marse Chan" in 1884, it seemed
that their fears had been groundless. It was everywhere hailed as
a masterpiece. "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Meh Lady," and others
quickly followed, and in 1887 the series was issued as a collection
with the title _In Ole Virginia_, a book that is to Page what _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_ is to Harte and _Old Creole Days_ is to Cable.
The method of Page in these early stories was original. The phrase
"befo' de war" explains it. He would reproduce the atmosphere of
the old South, or what is more nearly the truth, the atmosphere of
aristocratic old Virginia plantation life. "No doubt the phrase 'Before
the war' is at times somewhat abused. It is just possible that there is
a certain Caleb Balderstonism in the speech at times. But for those who
knew the old county as it was then, and contrast it with what it has
become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and
mellower 'before the war' than it is now. For one thing, the moonlight
as well as the sunlight shines brighter in our youth than in maturer
age."[123] But Page expressed the phrase in negro dialect--"befo'
de war." The story of the vanished era, the gallantry and spirit of
its men, the beauty of its women, the nameless glow that hovers over
remembered youthful days, he would show through the medium of the
negro. It is exquisite art done with seemingly impossible materials.
An old slave tells the story in his own picturesque way and wholly
from his own viewpoint, yet so simply, so inevitably, that one forgets
the art and surrenders oneself as one surrenders to actual life with
its humor and its pathos and its tragedy. It is romance--an idealized
world, and an idealized negro. Surely no freed slave ever told a
consecutive tale like that, perfect in its proportions and faultless in
its lights and shadows, yet such a criticism never for a moment occurs
to the reader. The illusion is complete. The old South lives again and
we are in it both in sympathy and comprehension.
In the decade that followed this first book Page gave himself to
the writing of short stories and studies of Southern life, but only
once or twice did he catch again the magic atmosphere of the earlier
tales. _Two Little Confederates_ is exquisite work, but _Elsket_,
which followed, was full of inferior elements. Its negro stories,
"George Washington's Last Duel" and "P'laski's Tunament," are only good
vaudeville--they show but the surface of negro life; "Run to Seed" is
pitched almost with shrillness, and "Elsket" and "A Soldier of the
Empire," the one dealing with the last of her race, the other with the
last of his order, are European sketches a trifle theatrical in spite
of their touches of pathos.
_Red Rock_ (1898) marks the beginning of Page's second period, the
period of long romances. Once before with _On Newfound River_ he had
tried the border canvas and he had failed save in certain of his
characterizations and detached episodes. Now with _Red Rock_ he set
out to write what should stand among his works as _The Grandissimes_
stands among Cable's. Its sub-title, _A Chronicle of Reconstruction_,
explains at once its strength and its weakness. Its author approached
it as Mrs. Jackson had approached _Ramona_, with a purpose, and, unlike
Mrs. Jackson, he accomplished his purpose. The wrongs of the South
during the period are made vivid, but at the expense of the novel.
The opening pages are perfect. Chapter two with its merry-making
at the great plantation, and all its glimpses of traits and scenes
peculiarly Southern, leads the reader to feel that he has in his hands
at last the great romance of Southern life. There is the background of
an ancient wrong. The red stain on the great rock is supposed to be
the blood of the first mistress of the plantation murdered there by
an Indian; and the haunting picture over the fireplace of the first
master who had killed the Indian with his bare hands, then had glared
from his portrait until he had become the dominating center of the
plantation, is felt to be the dominating center also of the romance
as the Bras Coupe episode is the motif of _The Grandissimes_. But one
is soon disappointed. The problem dominates the romance; the book is
primarily a treatise, a bit of special pleading. It is undoubtedly all
true, but one set out to read a romance of the old South. True as its
facts may be, from the art side it is full of weaknesses. Leech, the
carpet-bagger, and Still, the rascally overseer, are villains of the
melodramatic type; they are a dead black in character from first to
last. The turning points of the action are accidents, the atmosphere
is too often that of _St. Elmo_. When the master is killed in battle
the picture of the Indian killer falls to the hearth, and again when
Leech is beating to death the wounded heir to the estate it falls upon
the assassin as if in vengeance and nearly crushes him. The plot is
chaotic. We are led to believe that Blair Cary, the doctor's daughter,
who in the opening chapters is as charming as even Polly herself in
_In Ole Virginia_, is to be the central figure, but Blair is abandoned
for no real reason and Miss Welsh, a Northern girl, finishes the tale.
Jacquelin, too, who dominates the earlier pages, peters out, and it
is not clear why Middleton, the Northern soldier, is brought in near
the close of the book, perhaps to marry Blair, who by every right of
romance belongs to Jacquelin. It is enough to say that the story is
weak just as _Gabriel Conroy_ is weak, just as _The Grandissimes_ and
_Pembroke_ are weak. The materials are better than the construction.
The fame of Page then must stand or fall, as Harte's must, or Cable's
or Miss Wilkins's, on the strength of his first book. His essays on
the Old South and other volumes are charming and valuable studies, his
novels are documents in the history of a stirring era, but his _In
Ole Virginia_ is a work of art, one of the real classics of American
literature.
Several others have used Virginia as a background for romance, notably
Mary Virginia Terhune, (1831----), who wrote under the pseudonym
"Marion Harland" something like twenty novels, the most of them in
the manner in vogue before 1870, and F. Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915),
whose _Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ (1891) is one of the most
sympathetic studies of Southern life ever written. Its sly humor, its
negro dialect, its power of characterization, its tender sentiment, its
lovable, whimsical central figure, and its glimpses of an old South
that has forever disappeared, make it one of the few books of the
period concerning which one may even now prophesy with confidence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEORGE W. CABLE. _Old Creole Days_, 1879; _The Grandissimes_,
1880; _Madame Delphine_, 1881; _The Creoles of Louisiana_, 1884;
_Dr. Sevier_, 1885; _The Silent South_, 1885; _Bonaventure_,
1888; _Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, 1889; _The Negro
Question_, 1890; _The Busy Man's Bible_, 1891; _John March,
Southerner_, 1894; _Strong Hearts_, 1899; _The Cavalier_, 1901;
_Byelow Hill_, 1902; _Kincaid's Battery_, 1908; _Gideon's Band_,
1914; _The Amateur Garden_, 1914.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON. _Verses_, 1870, 1874; _Bits of Travel_, 1872;
_Saxe Holm Stories_, 1873; _Bits of Talk About Home Matters_,
1873; _Bits of Talk for Young People_, 1876; _Mercy Philbrick's
Choice_ (No Name Series), 1876; _Hetty's Strange History_ (No
Name Series), 1877; _Bits of Travel at Home_, 1878; _Nelly's
Silver Mine_, 1878; _Saxe Holm Stories_ (Second Series), 1878;
_The Story of Boon_ (a Poem), 1879; _A Century of Dishonor_,
1881; _Mammy Tittleback and Her Family_, 1881; _The Training of
Children_, 1882; _The Hunter Cats of Connorloa_, 1884; _Ramona_
[First Published in the _Christian Union_], 1884; _Zeph_, 1886;
_Glimpses of Three Coasts_, 1886; _Sonnets and Lyrics_, 1886;
_Between Whiles_, 1887.
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD. _A Woman in Armor_, 1875;
_Craque-O'-Doom_, 1881; _Rocky Fork_, 1882; _Old Caravan Days_,
1884; _The Secrets of Roseladies_, 1888; _The Romance of
Dollard_, 1889; _The Story of Tonty_, 1890; _The Lady of Fort St.
John_, 1891; _Old Kaskaskia_, _The White Islander_, 1893; _The
Chase of St. Castin_, 1894; _The Spirit of an Illinois Town_,
_Little Renault_, _The Days of Jeanne d'Arc_, 1897; _Heroes of
the Middle West_, 1898; _Spanish Peggy_, 1899; _The Queen of the
Swamp_, 1899; _Lazarre_, 1901.
JOHN ESTEN COOKE. _Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John
Myers and His Times_, 1854; _The Virginia Comedians; or Old Days
in the Old Dominion_, 1854; _The Youth of Jefferson_, 1854;
_Ellie; or, The Human Comedy_, 1855; _The Last of the Foresters_,
1856; _Henry St. John, Gentleman: a Tale of 1874-75_, 1859;
_A Life of Stonewall Jackson_, 1863; _Stonewall Jackson: a
Military Biography_, 1866; _Surrey of Eagle's Nest_, 1866; _The
Wearing of the Gray_, 1867; _Mohun; or the Last Days of Lee and
His Paladins_, 1868; _Fairfax, the Maker of Greenway Court_,
1868; _Hilt to Hilt_, 1869; _Out of the Foam_, 1869; _Hammer and
Rapier_, 1870; _The Heir to Gaymount_, 1870; _A Life of General
R. E. Lee_, 1871; _Dr. Vandyke_, 1872; _Her Majesty the Queen_,
1873; _Pretty Mrs. Gaston, and Other Stories_, 1874; _Justin
Hartley_, 1874; _Canolles: the Fortunes of a Partisan of '81_,
1877; _Professor Presseusee, Materialist and Inventor_, 1878;
_Mr. Grantley's Idea_, 1879; _Stories of the Old Dominion_, 1879;
_The Virginia Bohemians_, 1880; _Virginia_, 1885; _The Maurice
Mystery_, 1885; _My Lady Pokahontas_, 1885.
THOMAS NELSON PAGE. _In Ole Virginia_, 1887; _Two Little
Confederates_, _Befo' de War_, 1888; _Elsket and Other Stories_,
_On Newfound River_, _The Old South_, _Among the Camps_, 1891;
_Pastime Stories_, _The Burial of the Guns_, 1894; _Social Life
in Old Virginia Before the War_, _The Old Gentleman of the Black
Stock_, 1896; _Two Prisoners_, 1897; _Red Rock, a Chronicle
of Reconstruction_, 1898; _Santa Claus's Partner_, 1899; _A
Captured Santa Claus_, 1902; _Gordon Keith_, 1903; _The Negro:
the Southerner's Problem_, 1904; _Bred in the Bone_, 1905; _The
Coast of Bohemia_ [poems], 1906; _Novels, Stories, Sketches, and
Poems_. Plantation Edition. 12 volumes, 1906; _Under the Crust_,
1907; _The Old Dominion--Her Making and Her Manners_, _Robert E.
Lee, the Southerner_, _Tommy Trot's Visit to Santa Claus_, 1908;
_John Marvel, Assistant_, 1909; _Robert E. Lee, Man and Soldier_,
1912; _The Land of the Spirit_, 1913.