THE CLANSMAN: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. By Thomas
Dixon, Jr. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. Price, $1.50.
BETHANY: A Story of the Old South. By Thomas E. Watson. D. Appleton &
Co., New York. Price, $1.50.
In considering these two books, it is impossible to avoid comparing and
contrasting them with each other. Both aim at historical study as well
as romantic presentation, and both are conceived from the Southerner’s
view-point of the great Civil War. Both writers are famous platform
figures, and neither, it may be conceded, is equipped by taste,
temperament, or training, for purely literary work. Both Mr. Dixon and
Mr. Watson have interests more absorbing than the production of artistic
fiction, and the novels of neither can fairly be judged by the higher
critical standards. One feels in reading the fiction of Mr. Dixon and
Mr. Watson that it is but the vehicle of a purpose other than literary,
and furthermore, that that purpose must be the presentation of truth.
And here it is that the gap between the two authors begins to widen, for
Mr. Dixon’s self-conscious rhetoric and platform appeal give the lie
even to unimpeachable history, while Mr. Watson’s narration has the very
accent of truth in its homely simplicity and utter absence of pose.
“The Clansman” opens upon the political ferment at Washington just
before Lincoln’s assassination, and Lincoln, Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens,
and other prominent men of that period are depicted in somewhat daring
detail of characterization and narration. With the revolution of the
national policy which followed Lincoln’s death, the scene is shifted to
South Carolina, where the horrors of reconstruction and the heroic work
of the Ku Klux Klan are painted in Mr. Dixon’s most highly colored
rhetoric. We have no disposition to belittle the tragedy of that period
in the South, and there is no doubt that the secret organization known
as the Ku Klux Klan did save the Southern people from much indignity and
degradation, but the manner of Mr. Dixon’s narration has not the dignity
of truth, and, however true his individual instances may be, the effect
of the story is not that of truth. The note of heroic determination and
impressive mystery which dignified the mummery of the Ku Klux Klan into
a power to save Southern civilization and protect Southern womanhood,
Mr. Dixon misses entirely, and his treatment, like a tawdry bit of
gilding, vulgarizes what it touches.
“Mr. Dixon, in literature, has repeated his successes of the pulpit and
platform,” his publishers’ note informs us, and it is so far true that
he has repeated in his novels the methods of his platform and pulpit
successes. But save in the commercial sense, it cannot be said that Mr.
Dixon’s work in fiction is a success, and it stands justified only by a
prevailing bad taste and his own and his publishers’ pocket-book.
“A Story of the Old South”—we may be pardoned for a slightly tired
feeling on reading those words on the title page of “Bethany,” but the
first chapter is reassuring in its sturdy presentation of middle class
Georgia life, simple, unpretentious, plain, and absolutely uncolored
with the grandeur, so familiar in “befo’ the wah” fiction. It is
refreshing to read such passages as these:
“We Hortons were a family of middle class farmers. We had never been
anything else. We never expected to be anything else. Our condition was
good enough for us. We had plenty of land. We had always had it.... Yes;
we had prospered; and had always been independent. We were not rich, you
understand: just comfortable; with good farms, fat stock, and likely
niggers We owed no debts; we had a few hundred of dollars in pocket,
ready for an emergency—such as a request for a loan to some friend who
might have got into a temporary ‘tight’ by betting on the wrong horse,
or by trying to make four queens beat a straight flush....
“So far as we came into touch with the outside world at all, we were
indebted to Bethany—a little, one-horse hamlet, where we worshiped and
got the mail. Bethany had a granite depot on the Georgia railroad.
Bethany had a post office. Bethany had a dry-goods store and two
doggeries. Anyone who wished to run a horse race, fight chickens, play
poker, or throw ‘chuck-a-luck,’ could do so at Bethany.
“The mansion in which we lived was a very modest affair. It did not, in
the least, resemble a Grecian temple which had been sent into exile and
which was striving, unsuccessfully, to look at ease among corn-cribs,
cow-pens, horse-stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, negro cabins, and
worm-fenced cotton fields. It did not perch upon the top of the highest
hill for miles around, and browbeat the whole community with its
arrogant self-assertion. No; ours was just a plain house and none too
large, not built out of bricks brought over from England, but of timbers
torn from the heart of the long-leaf Georgia pine.”
In this vein Mr. Watson proceeds to give a picture of the plain Georgian
and his environment, which has all the charm of personal reminiscence
and the weight of historic truth. One feels in reading these simple
annals of the Hortons of Georgia that just so they must have lived and
not otherwise, and the last paragraph of the first chapter describes for
us the effect of Mr. Watson’s portrayal:
“It all rises before me complete as a picture, vivid as a flash of
lightning—a plain, unpretentious, comfortable, happy Southern home of
the old regime—and like a castle among the clouds it is gone forever,
even while I gaze; just as the republic of our fathers, of which that
old home was a typical part, is gone, forever gone.”
In Georgia, perhaps, this sturdy middle class exercised a more potent
and pervading influence over social and political life than was the case
in other Southern states, and its flavor and quality are reproduced to
the life by Mr. Watson. As we read his record we see what was perhaps
the most practical realization of the democratic ideal of society which
this democracy has yet produced—a community of Anglo-Saxon blood, rugged
manhood, gentle womanhood, simple habits and neighborly fraternity. Mr.
Watson gives us the picture of this period with no reservation or
exaggeration,—its beauties and its blots, its virtues and its vices, its
development and its limitation, and throughout his work there is a rare
mingling of impartial honesty and the sympathetic touch of close and
intimate knowledge and association.
The political agitation of the two years previous to the war in Georgia
is reproduced carefully and effectively by Mr. Watson, and the Toombs
and Stephens struggle set forth clearly and skilfully. The pen portraits
of these great Georgians are sharply and strongly outlined, and may be
regarded as of historic interest and importance. A spicy and forcible
chapter is that describing a political barbecue at Bethany at which
Toombs and Stephens spoke, and of which the festivities were further
marked by an eye-gouging affair between two drunken patriots. We see in
Mr. Watson’s narrative the various currents of Southern sentiment and
their irresistible convergence into the tide of secession, and the
Southern attitude is strongly justified as a logical result of the
Northern breach of contract in refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave laws.
“As to the right of secession,” says Mr. Watson, “no one denied it....
With Adams, Webster, and Calhoun harmonized in favor of secession, it
did seem that the principle must be sound.”
The second part of Mr. Watson’s book, and not the more interesting,
treats of the war and a rather shadowy love affair, pitched in the key
of the sentimental songs of that period, with their faded flowers,
mocking-birds, and pathetic partings. The story of the war is told
briefly, with no prejudice or passion, from the gallant days of hope and
victory to the last sad struggle against the inevitable. There is no
swagger of tone, no attempt at glamour in these war pictures, but a
faithful and forcible presentation of what that time meant to the common
soldier and the South. Indeed, the whole book has a historic value as a
truthful study of an interesting period of Southern and national life,
and with no pretense of literary art, it has a distinct charm of simple
narration and vivid reminiscence.
THE LAW OF THE LAND. By EMERSON HOUGH, Author of “The Mississippi
Bubble,” etc. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.
There is no lack of excitement in Mr. Hough’s latest novel—intrigue,
mystery, villainy, a negro uprising, a Mississippi overflow—these
succeed each other rapidly and bewilderingly, and there is “something
doing” in every chapter. The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,—“the
richest region on the face of the whole earth,” “the heart of the only
American part of America”—and the race question in its intensest and
most picturesque form is the theme of the book. From a dramatic and
artistic standpoint, the theme and the setting are well chosen, and in
the description of the negro gathering in the forest at the call of the
savage drum and the half-hinted horrors of the revenge of the whites,
there is the unmistakable thrill of literary power and skill.
The conventional hero is a railroad claim agent, rather an original role
for a Southern hero of romance, and a thoroughly good fellow he is, but
the masterpiece of characterization is that of Colonel Calvin Blount of
the Big House,—rough, brave, chivalrous, lordly, ruling over his wide
acres with the imperious will and open-handed generosity of a feudal
baron. His trial for murder in a lynching case is the culminating point
of the book, and Eddring’s speech in his defense presents the author’s
solution of the race problem in the South. “The law of the land” must be
transgressed sometimes in the letter that it may be kept in the spirit,
and Colonel Blount is acquitted of the murder which he committed in view
of the horrors which negro rule would bring to Southern civilization.
There is nothing new or profound in Mr. Hough’s treatment of the race
problem, but in presenting it as it exists in the lower South in its
most extreme form, he has availed himself of excellent material for
dramatic romance. To the average American the life to which Mr. Hough
introduces us in “The Law of the Land” will seem as strange and foreign
as a glimpse into the jungles of Africa, but it is real, if exceptional,
and Mr. Hough’s vivid picture may disturb the academic theories of New
England to some extent. Had the author spared us the treatise on the
race problem as embodied in Eddring’s defense of Colonel Blount, the
novel would have been lightened by so much dead weight of argument and
rhetoric. As it is, “The Law of the Land,” leaving out the tinselly plot
on which the heroine’s identity and fortune depend, is a good story of
dramatic power, picturesque description, and strong characterization.
THE MASTER-WORD. A Story of the South To-day. By L. H. HAMMOND. The
Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.
This, the first novel, of a Southern woman, bears no mark of immaturity,
feminine weakness, or sectional prejudice. The style is notably compact
and finished, the handling strong and restrained, and the grasp of
philosophic breadth and impartiality. Mrs. Hammond is something more
than the clever woman who, in such numbers, is pervading the literature
of the day—she is clearly a woman who can think closely and deeply, and
her literary work has a real solidity of substance and significance. She
has given us in “The Master-Word” a strong and original story, direct
from her own thought, experience and observation, though it does not
prove always humanly convincing or artistically satisfactory.
“The Master-Word” is a problem novel in a double sense, for though the
race question is the theme with which it is chiefly concerned, the sex
question figures also in a subordinate way. Both problems are solved by
the writer with the master-word, Love, not Law—Love that suffers,
sacrifices, and conquers, not Law that judges, condemns and punishes.
This idea is wrought out with psychical insight and vigorous reasoning,
and as a thesis is eminently satisfactory, but the story which is the
medium of its illustration does not always ring true, and moreover is
weakest at the crucial points.
Margaret, the young wife of Philip Lawton, a prosperous and aristocratic
lawyer and farmer of Tennessee, discovers suddenly the fact of her
husband’s criminal relations with a mulatto woman and his fatherhood of
the latter’s child, a girl about the age of Margaret’s own daughter. She
refuses to forgive and their estranged relations continue till he is
stricken with pneumonia. At his deathbed the love she thought dead
revives, and she forgives, as she realizes that the master-word is Love,
not Law. This scene, by the way, is strongly reminiscent of the
concluding chapter of “The Mettle of the Pasture,” where the dying
husband delivers himself of his stagy and unnatural monologue.
After Philip’s death, Margaret, as a sort of reparation in Philip’s
name, conceives the idea of taking his illegitimate negro child,
deserted by its mother, under her protection and care, so the little
quadroon girl is brought to the Lawton home and placed in charge of Aunt
Dilsey, the old mammy, who proclaims it her grandchild. There Viry is
reared, playing with the Lawton children, sharing much of their life,
but recognized as a “nigger” and treated on that basis. She is sent, as
she grows older, to a negro college, where she learns rapidly, and
finally comes back to the Lawtons and Aunt Dilsey, dissatisfied and
embittered, frankly hating the race with which she is classed, but
attached by the strongest affection to Bess Lawton, her half-sister. She
becomes a teacher in a negro school, but holds herself aloof from the
negroes, and grows more bitter and desperate. Bruce Carleton, the lover
of Bess, is the object of her secret passion, and the savage, bestial
strain in her make-up comes out in her plan to attract him and hold him
in what to him would be a purely sensual tie. Finding out that Bess
really loves him, however, she renounces her purpose, and, hopeless of
happiness, tries to commit suicide. Then comes the culminating point of
the book in the disclosure to Viry by Margaret of the secret of the
former’s birth. Margaret lays bare her own suffering and her husband’s
sin and makes a powerful appeal to the girl to accept her maimed and
burdened life and make it in some measure an atonement and a redemption.
Viry’s heart is reached at last, and she, too, bows to the master-word,
Love, which means for her a life of service and loneliness. The race
line must not be obliterated—this is made plain, and Mrs. Hammond’s
argument is notably strong and unhackneyed. Margaret’s reply to Viry,
when the latter, “the red blood burning in her face,” throws up to her
the existence of three million mulattos as a proof that instinct is not
against the union of black and white, is the most convincing and
complete answer to that plea that has yet been presented.
It seems to us unfortunate that Mrs. Hammond should have chosen to base
her story on an incident at once so repulsive and so untrue as that of
Philip Lawton’s criminal connection with the degraded mulatto. For,
under the conditions described and set forth by the author, the case of
Philip is so absolutely untypical and strikingly exceptional that its
use as the foundation stone of so serious a story seems an amazing
blunder of judgment, taste and ethics. Then, again, it is hardly
conceivable that a woman of Margaret’s training and temperament, would
have found her duty in bringing her husband’s negro child into her own
household in constant contact with herself and her children. The step
seems forced and unnatural in the highest degree, and no less so appears
the wife’s disclosure of her husband’s shame after so many years to the
quadroon girl. Nature, womanhood, taste, all revolt against such a
situation. Reality is sacrificed to theory, and Margaret becomes the
author’s creature, not her creation; her spokesman, not a natural woman.
Viry, too, is not quite genuine to our perceptions, and can certainly
not be regarded as a typical product of her blood and environment. At
best her story is an extreme case, put in its most extreme terms.
The phosphate region of Middle Tennessee is the scene of the story, and
its peculiar conditions of labor and the twists and turns of local
politics are presented with a keen and trenchant touch. The young people
of the book are an extremely natural and agreeable set, and the love
affair of Bess and Bruce is as fresh and wholesome as the fine country
air that pervades the book. Bruce is really a wonder for a woman’s hero,
being neither cad nor prig, but merely a straight and likable young
fellow with human faults and failings. Aunt Dilsey is at once a
photograph, a phonograph, and a sympathetic sketch of the old-time negro
mammy.
There is a looseness of construction, a prolixity of trifling incident,
at certain portions of the book which at times weaken its interest, and
it is evident that purely artistic ideals were not its chief
inspiration. Still, when all is said, its merits far outweigh its
faults, and it is well worth the serious criticism it will receive. It
testifies strongly to the writer’s brain and skill and arouses interest
in her future work.
THE SECRET WOMAN. By EDEN PHILLPOTTS. The Macmillan Company, New York.
Price, $1.50.
The comparison to Hardy has become a commonplace of any criticism of Mr.
Phillpotts’ literary output, and the comparison carries an inevitable
distinction and disparagement. The distinction is that Mr. Phillpotts is
the one writer worthy to be called a disciple of the Wessex chronicler,
and the disparagement is in the differentiation at once apparent in the
similarity. Primitive nature, physical and human, is Mr. Phillpotts’
theme as it is Mr. Hardy’s, and the primal passions in rustic life are
the elements of both novelists’ tragedy and comedy. But though one man
may want and try to make from the same material the same things as
wrought by another, it is out of his power to do so, and Mr. Phillpotts’
work lacks the strength and seriousness of Mr. Hardy’s. In the first
place, the colorless irony of the older writer, epitomized so perfectly
in his title, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” is lacking entirely in Mr.
Phillpotts, and the latter’s florid descriptions and psychologic
analyses fail of the Hardy effect because of this lack. The personal
note of Mr. Hardy, ironic, accentless, incisive, is the salt to his
magnificent dish of natural elements, without which their strength and
freshness would pall upon the taste. And as a literary artist, too, Mr.
Phillpotts falls below his master. Despite the wealth of natural
description with which he burdens so heavily his narratives, there is
nothing that touches the Hardy landscapes in power and artistic truth.
The wonderful and haunting picture of the moor in “The Return of the
Native” is Hardy at highwater mark, it is true, but there is nothing in
the Phillpotts gallery that can even be compared to it.
“The Secret Woman” is a story of human frailty, passion, crime, and soul
struggle, set in the rocks and glades of Dartmoor. An illicit love
between a married man and a beautiful and pagan-hearted girl is the
basis of the plot, and the murder of the man by his wife in a fit of
jealous rage is the first act of the tragedy. A touch worthy of Hardy
occurs in the interview between husband and wife just after the latter’s
discovery of the man’s unfaithfulness, when a sudden gust of wind and
rain drowns the wife’s voice as she offers pardon, thus through the blow
of blind fate sealing the husband’s doom. The murder is witnessed by the
two sons, but is kept secret, though it divides the brothers and fills
the mother’s life with a never-dying repentance. The figure of the
murderess, Anne Redvers, and the study of her character and soul
development, are the most elaborate and striking work of the book, but
it is Salome, “the secret woman,” and her intrigue with the dead man,
unknown and unsuspected, that furnish the motive for the drama. In
striking contrast are the two women, one dark, stern, conscientious,
softening and mellowing through sorrow and repentance into sympathy and
forgiveness, the other fair, conscienceless, self-indulgent, swayed but
by emotion and passion.
Jesse, one of the sons of the murdered man, loves this girl, his
father’s paramour, and she becomes his betrothed, driven to this step by
poverty, though she never intends to marry him. This intolerable
situation is finally ended by his confession to Salome of his mother’s
crime which has darkened his soul, and this is followed by Salome’s
reckless disclosure of her love and sin to Anne Redvers, whom she
denounces as a murderess. Anne goes to prison gladly, Jesse kills
himself, and Salome lives on, constant to her dead lover and incapable
of repentance. Truly Mr. Phillpotts has not spared us a possible horror.
We have, of course, the rustic comedy beneath the tragedy—the artless
peasants, their quaint talk and ancient superstitions; and the figure of
Joseph Westaway, the shiftless, tender-hearted incompetent, bravely and
unreasonably optimistic amid crowding misfortunes, is very nearly a
masterpiece of portraiture.
In this terrible drama, Mr. Phillpotts offers us in succession the
various theories of materialism, Old Testament theology, pagan
indifference, and simple, unquestioning faith in a divine power. Each is
presented with admirable impartiality, its play upon the story being
merely an aid to the desired dramatic effect. At the last, the struggle
is between Anne and Salome, and the former who has found peace in
Christian faith and atonement, makes her appeal to Salome to seek
comfort and salvation by the same road. Finally Salome promises to take
the sacrament, but as she kneels at the sacred table, her heart is
unchanged—
“A man’s voice suddenly ended the silence and—echoes from a far past—his
words fell upon her ear strangely. All solemnity has perished from them.
The Commandments tinkled like a child’s little prayer at bedtime....
Light rained down and quenched the candles and touched the petals of
exotic flowers. The air of the sanctuary was sweet with them; but
Salome’s thoughts harboured in the dust.”
AMERICA, ASIA AND THE PACIFIC. By WOLF VON SCHIERBRAND, PH.D. Henry
Holt & Co., New York.
The interest of the ancient and of the mediæval world centered around
the Mediterranean. Recall the names of the states that fought for and
obtained the trade of that sea and you have the history of civilization.
Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Venice, Spain, one after
another, played the leading role. With the discovery of the new world
the scene shifted to the Atlantic and England shouldered her way to the
limelight. Now, it seems, another new world and a richer has been
discovered. It happens also to be the oldest world and the last act of
the drama is to be played on the Pacific, the widest stage of all.
Before the whole world as audience, the nations are contending for the
prize—the trade of China. Which one is to get it?
Mr. von Schierbrand contributes to the solution of this question a very
entertaining and instructive volume. From his standpoint, which is a
most interesting one, the importance of the trade of the Far East to
ourselves is not to be overestimated. The wonderful productive energy of
the United States makes the need of new markets imperative. Four hundred
millions of Chinese can furnish us such markets. Basing our figures on
the precedent of Japan, China, if she would, could buy of the world
$35,000,000,000 more. Her mineral wealth, still undeveloped, is greater
than that of North America.
The author’s masterly marshaling of the means and the methods necessary
to increase our commercial opportunities is the feature of his book. The
political school to which he belongs and to which an immense majority of
Americans belong, if the recent election meant anything, studies, at the
same moment, the tonnage of the battleships and the quality of the
cotton blouse on the Chinese coolie’s back. It carries us around the
immense circle of the Pacific and calls the roll of the powers and
principalities of the future—Canada, America, Java, Sumatra, Celebes,
Borneo, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Siberia,—and asks
which of the nations shall share with us these riches. England’s claim
the writer dismisses with few words. England is conservative and
decadent. Russia is more dangerous. She aims to absorb all Asia and
close the door in the face of the world. The writer has an interesting
discussion of the Russo-Japanese war in the course of which he prods the
English again for not choking the Russians while they can.
Germany he pronounces our most formidable rival. German industry,
frugality, patience and skill have brought her up since 1870, when she
was purely an agricultural state, to the front rank in manufactures and
in foreign trade. It may be added, parenthetically, that she is making
persistent efforts to free herself from the American cotton monopoly.
Turning to the Japanese, the writer mentions a fact whose significance
is little appreciated in America. Japan practically monopolizes now the
trade in manufactured cotton with China, and, what is still more
significant, she gets nearly all her raw cotton from India.
What is the secret purpose of Japan? Nobody knows. Does she see herself
supplanting the wornout Manchu dynasty and leading the millions of the
East to the mastery of Asia by the strength of her military genius? Will
she then shut the doors to the outside world, as, in the sixteenth
century, she shut her own? The writer makes light of the so-called
Yellow Peril, arguing that Japan does not wish to exploit the latent
military strength of China, but aspires to lead her in the path of
industrial progress after the Western models upon which Japan has
fashioned herself.
Mr von Schierbrand ignores the underlying spiritual differences that
separate the Oriental from the European, differences that will always be
the cause of hostility, open or veiled, between them. After all it is
not so important who is to get the trade of the East but what are the
ideals that are finally to prevail there—the Christian ideals or
Oriental fatalism. It could be wished that the author felt more interest
in such discussions. One is tempted to quote against him his own words
in another connection: “Beside the mad passion for gain there is no
charm in rest, lettered ease, travel, still less in labor for the
general good—charity, education, the state; the ruling passion must rage
on, business must be expanded regardless of profit and with eyes closed
to impending loss. Instead of making ourselves more homes and more
beautiful things and cultured people in them, we cherish the tenement
house and the narrow life, and go on piling up and shoving out what we
are pleased to call goods, goods, goods.” It is well enough to chasten
ourselves with such reflections as we go on with the author to weigh the
claim of the United States to the lion’s share in the trade of the
Pacific.
The author bases our claim on the strategic advantage which the Panama
Canal is to give us, and this part of the book is unquestionably most
interesting to the South. The relation of the richest granary in the
world, the Mississippi Valley, to the Canal will rid it of the need of
railways. The canal will bring New York closer to the west coast of
South America than San Francisco, and New Orleans will be seven hundred
miles nearer still. The commercial availability of Southern coal and
iron will be immensely increased and the harbors of the South will
assume an importance long withheld from them as ports of call.
The book as a whole is well written, and the last chapters, which
summarize the author’s conclusions, especially so. What he has to say
about public opinion and of the force, more universal still, the primary
need of the human race of food, which together share the sovereignty of
the modern world, is well said and more philosophical by far than is
usual with the books of the imperialists.