PART II_A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays

REVIEWS AND ESSAYS

_Mark Twain_

If there is anything which should make an American sick and

disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost swerve

his allegiance to his flag it is that controversy between Mark Twain

and Max O'Rell, in which the Frenchman proves himself a wit and a

gentleman and the American shows himself little short of a clown and

an all around tough. The squabble arose apropos of Paul Bourget's

new book on America, "Outre Mer," a book which deals more fairly and

generously with this country than any book yet written in a foreign

tongue. Mr. Clemens did not like the book, and like all men of his

class, and limited mentality, he cannot criticise without becoming

personal and insulting. He cannot be scathing without being a

blackguard. He tried to demolish a serious and well considered work

by publishing a scurrilous, slangy and loosely written article about

it. In this article Mr. Clemens proves very little against Mr.

Bourget and a very great deal against himself. He demonstrates

clearly that he is neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters

and very little of a gentleman. His ignorance of French literature

is something appalling. Why, in these days it is as necessary for a

literary man to have a wide knowledge of the French masterpieces as

it is for him to have read Shakespeare or the Bible. What man who

pretends to be an author can afford to neglect those models of style

and composition. George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Henry James

excepted, the great living novelists are Frenchmen.

Mr. Clemens asks what the French sensualists can possibly teach the

great American people about novel writing or morality? Well, it

would not seriously hurt the art of the classic author of "Puddin'

Head Wilson" to study Daudet, De Maupassant, Hugo and George Sand,

whatever it might do to his morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a

kind. His humor is always rather broad, so broad that the polite

world can justly call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker

nor a man who loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has

made a "good thing" out of writing. He has been published in the

North American Review and in the Century, but he is not and never

will be a part of literature. The association and companionship of

cultured men has given Mark Twain a sort of professional veneer, but

it could not give him fine instincts or nice discriminations or

elevated tastes. His works are pure and suitable for children, just

as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and

donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young

innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that

teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the

gruff "haw-haw" of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward,

good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river steamer

and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years old. Thoroughly

likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters. It is

an unfortunate feature of American literature that a hostler with

some natural cleverness and a great deal of assertion receives the

same recognition as a standard American author that a man like

Lowell does. The French academy is a good thing after all. It at

least divides the sheep from the goats and gives a sheep the

consolation of knowing that he is a sheep.

It is rather a pity that Paul Bourget should have written "Outre

Mer," thoroughly creditable book though it is. Mr. Bourget is a

novelist, and he should not content himself with being an essayist,

there are far too many of them in the world already. He can develop

strong characters, invent strong situations, he can write the truth

and he should not drift into penning opinions and platitudes. When

God has made a man a creator, it is a great mistake for him to turn

critic. It is rather an insult to God and certainly a very great

wrong to man.

_Nebraska State Journal_, May 5, 1895

I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven who

had just read "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." He said: "If

there are any more books like them in the world, send them to me

quick." I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others

I had not the good fortune to know of them. What a red-letter-day it

is to a boy, the day he first opens "Tom Sawyer." I would rather

sail on the raft down the Missouri again with "Huck" Finn and Jim

than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in

May. Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his

Missouri boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan of Arc.

And certainly he never did a better piece of work than "Prince and

Pauper." One seems to get at the very heart of old England in that

dearest of children's books, and in its pages the frail boy king,

and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day wrought so much woe for

unhappy England, and the dashing Princess Elizabeth who lived to

rule so well, seem to live again. A friend of Mr. Clemens' once told

me that he said he wrote that book so that when his little daughters

grew up they might know that their tired old jester of a father

could be serious and gentle sometimes.

_The Home Monthly_, May 1897

_William Dean Howells_

Certainly now in his old age Mr. Howells is selecting queer titles

for his books. A while ago we had that feeble tale, "The Coast of

Bohemia," and now we have "My Literary Passions." "Passions,"

literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells' forte and surely no

man could be further from even the coast of Bohemia.

Apropos of "My Literary Passions" which has so long strung out in

the Ladies' Home Journal along with those thrilling articles about

how Henry Ward Beecher tied his necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs.

Hall Cain likes, why did Mr. Howells write it? Doesn't Mr. Howells

know that at one time or another every one raves over Don Quixote,

imitates Heine, worships Tourgueneff and calls Tolstoi a prophet?

Does Mr. Howells think that no one but he ever had youth and

enthusiasm and aspirations? Doesn't he know that the only thing that

makes the world worth living in at all is that once, when we are

young, we all have that great love for books and impersonal things,

all reverence and dream? We have all known the time when Porthos,

Athos and d'Artagan were vastly more real and important to us than

the folks who lived next door. We have all dwelt in that country

where Anna Karenina and the Levins were the only people who mattered

much. We have all known that intoxicating period when we thought we

"understood life," because we had read Daudet, Zola and Guy de

Maupassant, and like Mr. Howells we all looked back rather fondly

upon the time when we believed that books were the truth and art was

all. After a while books grow matter of fact like everything else

and we always think enviously of the days when they were new and

wonderful and strange. That's a part of existence. We lose our first

keen relish for literature just as we lose it for ice-cream and

confectionery. The taste grows older, wiser and more subdued. We

would all wear out of very enthusiasm if it did not. But why should

Mr. Howells tell the world this common experience in detail as

though it were his and his alone. He might as well write a detailed

account of how he had the measles and the whooping cough. It was all

right and proper for Mr. Howells to like Heine and Hugo, but, in the

words of the circus clown, "We've all been there."

_Nebraska State Journal_, July 14, 1895

_Edgar Allan Poe_

My tantalized spirit

Here blandly reposes,

Forgetting, or never

Regretting its roses,

Its old agitations

Of myrtles and roses.

For now, while so quietly

Lying, it fancies

A holier odor

About it, of pansies--

A rosemary odor

Commingled with pansies.

With rue and the beautiful

Puritan pansies.

--Edgar Allan Poe.

The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really about the only

useful literary organization in this country, is making vigorous

efforts to redress an old wrong and atone for a long neglect.

Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at the Poe cottage on

Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the purpose of starting an

organized movement to buy back the cottage, restore it to its

original condition and preserve it as a memorial of Poe. So it has

come at last. After helping build monuments to Shelley, Keats and

Carlyle we have at last remembered this man, the greatest of our

poets and the most unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the

hands of American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his

best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always seemed to

belong to the strolling Thespians who were his mother's people.

Among all the thousands of life's little ironies that make history

so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that Edgar Poe

should have been an American. Look at his face. Had we ever another

like it? He must have been a strange figure in his youth, among

those genial, courtly Virginians, this handsome, pale fellow,

violent in his enthusiasm, ardent in his worship, but spiritually

cold in his affections. Now playing heavily for the mere excitement

of play, now worshipping at the shrine of a woman old enough to be

his mother, merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six

miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring sun

of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal figure, a

sort of stage man who was wandering about the streets with his mask

and buskins on, a theatrical figure who had escaped by some strange

mischance into the prosaic daylight. His speech and actions were

unconsciously and sincerely dramatic, always as though done for

effect. He had that nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature common

to stage children who seem to have been dazzled by the footlights

and maddened by the applause before they are born. It was in his

blood. With the exception of two women who loved him, lived for him,

died for him, he went through life friendless, misunderstood, with

that dense, complete, hopeless misunderstanding which, as Amiel

said, is the secret of that sad smile upon the lips of the great.

Men tried to befriend him, but in some way or other he hurt and

disappointed them. He tried to mingle and share with other men, but

he was always shut from them by that shadow, light as gossamer but

unyielding as adamant, by which, from the beginning of the world,

art has shielded and guarded and protected her own, that

God-concealing mist in which the heroes of old were hidden, immersed

in that gloom and solitude which, if we could but know it here, is

but the shadow of God's hand as it falls upon his elect.

We lament our dearth of great prose. With the exception of Henry

James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure prose. We lament

our dearth of poets. With the exception of Lowell, Poe is our only

great poet. Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He

left it a perfect art. He wrote the first perfect short stories in

the English language. He first gave the short story purpose, method,

and artistic form. In a careless reading one can not realize the

wonderful literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects

that those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct

enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic

enough to be our marvel when we are old. To this day they are the

wonder and admiration of the French, who are the acknowledged

masters of craft and form. How in his wandering, laborious life,

bound to the hack work of the press and crushed by an ever-growing

burden of want and debt, did he ever come upon all this deep and

mystical lore, this knowledge of all history, of all languages, of

all art, this penetration into the hidden things of the East? As

Steadman says, "The self training of genius is always a marvel." The

past is spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in

learning those things which we do not need to know, but genius

reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by some

sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right thing.

Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative and

discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He rivalled

Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they were born. He

clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and persuasive unreality

never before heard of in English. No such profusion of color,

oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations and mystical

effects had ever before been wrought into language. There are tales

as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and

gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of

Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden

lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together

as the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the

inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who

could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the

grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could

delight you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you

with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make you run the

whole gamut of human emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that

miserable cottage at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream

palaces beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with

dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble and

polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he brought all the

treasured imagery of fancy, from the "huge carvings of untutored

Egypt" to "mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange

convolute censers, together with multitudinous, flaring and

flickering tongues of purple and violet fire." Hungry and ragged he

wrote of Epicurean feasts and luxury that would have beggared the

purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden House to

shame.

And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every

stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones of its

slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who

could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born

into a country without a literature. He was of that ornate school

which usually comes last in a national literature, and he came

first. American taste had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N.

P. Willis until it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was

considered a genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said.

In the North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but

Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went indeed,

sometimes, to the chilly _salon_ of Margaret Fuller, but he was

always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he had no business

with philosophy, he had no theories as to the "higher life" and the

"true happiness." He had only his unshapen dreams that battled with

him in dark places, the unborn that struggled in his brain for

birth. What time has an artist to learn the multiplication table or

to talk philosophy? He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis,

and flung Longfellow's lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the

world was twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning

of the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative

women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his

_Berenice_, his _Ligeia_, his _Marchesa Aphrodite_, pale and cold as

the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep for human

woe.

The tragedy of Poe's life was not alcohol, but hunger. He died when

he was forty, when his work was just beginning. Thackeray had not

touched his great novels at forty, George Eliot was almost unknown

at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne, Lowell and Dumas all did their

great work after they were forty years old. Poe never did his great

work. He could not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute

has put over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poe's

poems and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them

altogether. If one of the great and learned institutions of the land

had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author forty

years ago we should have had from him such works as would have made

the name of this nation great. But he sold "The Masque of the Red

Death" for a few dollars, and now the Drexel Institute pays a

publisher thousands to publish it beautifully. It is enough to make

Satan laugh until his ribs ache, and all the little devils laugh and

heap on fresh coals. I don't wonder they hate humanity. It's so

dense, so hopelessly stupid.

Only a few weeks before Poe's death he said he had never had time or

opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales were merely

experiments, thrown off when his day's work as a journalist was

over, when he should have been asleep. All those voyages into the

mystical unknown, into the gleaming, impalpable kingdom of pure

romance from which he brought back such splendid trophies, were but

experiments. He was only getting his tools into shape getting ready

for his great effort, the effort that never came.

Bread seems a little thing to stand in the way of genius, but it

can. The simple sordid facts were these, that in the bitterest

storms of winter Poe seldom wrote by a fire, that after he was

twenty-five years old he never knew what it was to have enough to

eat without dreading tomorrow's hunger. Chatterton had only himself

to sacrifice, but Poe saw the woman he loved die of want before his

very eyes, die smiling and begging him not to give up his work. They

saw the depths together in those long winter nights when she lay in

that cold room, wrapped in Poe's only coat, he, with one hand

holding hers, and with the other dashing off some of the most

perfect masterpieces of English prose. And when he would wince and

turn white at her coughing, she would always whisper: "Work on, my

poet, and when you have finished read it to me. I am happy when I

listen." O, the devotion of women and the madness of art! They are

the two most awesome things on earth, and surely this man knew both

to the full.

I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his purpose

always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was that hard

labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited his imagination,

that the jarring clamor about him never drowned the fine harmonies

of his fancy. His discrimination remained always delicate, and from

the constant strain of toil his fancy always rose strong and

unfettered. Without encouragement or appreciation of any sort,

without models or precedents he built up that pure style of his that

is without peer in the language, that style of which every sentence

is a drawing by Vedder. Elizabeth Barrett and a few great artists

over in France knew what he was doing, they knew that in literature

he was making possible a new heaven and a new earth. But he never

knew that they knew it. He died without the assurance that he was or

ever would be understood. And yet through all this, with the whole

world of art and letters against him, betrayed by his own people, he

managed to keep that lofty ideal of perfect work. What he suffered

never touched or marred his work, but it wrecked his character.

Poe's character was made by his necessity. He was a liar and an

egotist; a man who had to beg for bread at the hands of his

publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar, and had he not

had the insane egotism and conviction of genius, he would have

broken down and written the drivelling trash that his countrymen

delighted to read. Poe lied to his publishers sometimes, there is no

doubt of that, but there were two to whom he was never false, his

wife and his muse. He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and

relentless reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he

suffered. For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When

Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed us in

battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head with vine

leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his cup to us and

says, "forget." It's poor consolation, but he means it well.

The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that in fact

was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk a great deal

of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits earth so

seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so few. They had grand

theories that all men should be poets, that the visits of that rare

spirit should be made as frequent and universal as afternoon calls.

O, they had plans to make a whole generation of little geniuses. But

she only laughed her scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the

immortals, up in her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and

roofed with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only

man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips she had

touched with music and whose soul with song. In his youth she had

shown him the secrets of her beauty and his manhood had been one

pursuit of her, blind to all else, like Anchises, who on the night

that he knew the love of Venus, was struck sightless, that he might

never behold the face of a mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has

no care for the prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their

hecatombs sweet of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the

plans of seers and none may entreat her or take her by force. She

favors no one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and

when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that of

his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!

"The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,

He sets and each ephemeral insect then

Is gathered unto death without a dawn,

And the immortal stars awake again."

Yes, "and the immortal stars awake again." None may thwart the

unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists. What

matter that one man's life was miserable, that one man was broken on

the wheel? His work lives and his crown is eternal. That the work of

his age was undone, that is the pity, that the work of his youth was

done, that is the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of

men. The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We

lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like the

Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled that the voice

of God was silent. We will wait a long time for another. There are

Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen ones, let us turn to them.

Their names are forgotten. God is just. They are,

"Gathered unto death without a dawn.

And the immortal stars awake again."

_The Courier_, October 12, 1895

You can afford to give a little more care and attention to this

imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children. His

nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will need your

love more than the others. Be careful to get him the books he likes

and see that they are good ones. Get him a volume of Poe's short

stories. I know many people are prejudiced against Poe because of

the story that he drank himself to death. But that myth has been

exploded long ago. Poe drank less than even the average man of his

time. No, the most artistic of all American story tellers did not

die because he drank too much, but because he ate too little. And

yet we, his own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not

content with having starved him and wronged him while he lived, we

must even go on slandering him after he has been dead almost fifty

years. But get his works for this imaginative boy of yours and he

will tell you how great a man the author of "The Gold Bug" and "The

Masque of the Red Death" was. Children are impartial critics and

sometimes very good ones. They do not reason about a book, they just

like it or dislike it intensely, and after all that is the

conclusion of the whole matter. I am very sure that "The Fall of the

House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Black Cat" will

give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a new

bicycle could.

_The Home Monthly_, May 1897

_Walt Whitman_

Speaking of monuments reminds one that there is more talk about a

monument to Walt Whitman, "the good, gray poet." Just why the

adjective good is always applied to Whitman it is difficult to

discover, probably because people who could not understand him at

all took it for granted that he meant well. If ever there was a poet

who had no literary ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he.

He was neither good nor bad, any more than are the animals he

continually admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive

sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations,

enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was

the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is

admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph

he informs you that, "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,"

and that "The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed

drop horribly into a pail." No branch of surgery is poetic, and that

hopelessly prosaic word "pail" would kill a whole volume of sonnets.

Whitman's poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general,

some times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the

ocean with its "imperious waves, commanding" is beautiful, and that

the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste

may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet's

task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do

that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks to the

fixed stars. His "Leaves of Grass" is a sort of dictionary of the

English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation

set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.

But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental

force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life.

He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the

old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red

blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a

passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. He has no

code but to be natural, a code that this complex world has so long

outgrown. He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinbourne and

Gautier, who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects on

the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians who ate

and slept and married and smacked their lips over the mead horn. He

is rigidly limited to the physical, things that quicken his pulses,

please his eyes or delight his nostrils. There is an element of

poetry in all this, but it is by no means the highest. If a joyous

elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be

very much like Whitman's famous "song of myself." It would have just

about as much delicacy and deftness and discriminations. He says:

"I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid

and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do

not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in

the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick

discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is

demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another

nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is

respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth." And that is not irony

on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He

accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly and

unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception of a difference

in people or in things. All men had bodies and were alike to him,

one about as good as another. To live was to fulfil all natural laws

and impulses. To be comfortable was to be happy. To be happy was the

ultimatum. He did not realize the existence of a conscience or a

responsibility. He had no more thought of good or evil than the

folks in Kipling's Jungle book.

And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic vagabond

who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and the smell of spring

fields. A sort of good fellowship and whole-heartedness in every

line he wrote. His veneration for things physical and material, for

all that is in water or air or land, is so real that as you read him

you think for the moment that you would rather like to live so if

you could. For the time you half believe that a sound body and a

strong arm are the greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book

shows so much as "Leaves of Grass" that keen senses do not make a

poet. When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry

really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in

apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from the

gross.

_Nebraska State Journal_, January 19, 1896

_Henry James_

Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined to the

lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with the crowd. Now that

Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English speaking author who

is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of

course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of

human actions and motives, Henry James. In the last four years he

has published, I believe, just two small volumes, "The Lesson of the

Master" and "Terminations," and in those two little volumes of short

stories he who will may find out something of what it means to be

really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is

absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always

calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James

would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new

woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on

it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things

about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences!

If his character novels were all wrong one could read him forever

for the mere beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run

away with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He

subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his whole

paragraph partake of the same predominating color. You are never

startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never enraptured;

always delighted by that masterly prose that is as correct, as

classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart.

_The Courier_, November 16, 1895

It is strange that from "Felicia" down, the stage novel has never

been a success. Henry James' "Tragic Muse" is the only theatrical

novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage in it, a

glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation and the

sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so strangely and

inextricably blended in that life of the green room. For although

Henry James cannot write plays he can write passing well of the

people who enact them. He has put into one book all those inevitable

attendants of the drama, the patronizing theatre goer who loves it

above all things and yet feels so far superior to it personally; the

old tragedienne, the queen of a dying school whose word is law and

whose judgments are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of

course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who beats

and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable

until one fine morning she beats them down and comes into her

kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that is to live through her.

It is a great novel, that book of the master's, so perfect as a

novel that one does not realize what a masterly study it is of the

life and ends and aims of the people who make plays live.

_Nebraska State Journal_, March 29, 1896

_Harold Frederic_

"THE MARKET-PLACE." Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York: F. A.

Stokes & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.

Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work of that great

man whose career ended so prematurely and so tragically. The story

is a study in the ethics and purposes of money-getting, in the

romantic element in modern business. In it finance is presented not

as being merely the province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty

personal gratification, but of great projects, of great

brain-battles, a field for the exercising of talent, daring,

imagination, appealing to the strength of a strong man, filling the

same place in men's lives that was once filled by the incentives of

war, kindling in man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero

of the story, "Joel Thorpe," is one of those men, huge of body, keen

of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men, and a

magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked and lost in

a dozen countries, been almost within reach of fortune a dozen

times, and always missed her until, finally, in London, by promoting

a great rubber syndicate he becomes a multi-millionaire. He marries

the most beautiful and one of the most impecunious peeresses in

England and retires to his country estate. There, as a gentleman of

leisure, he loses his motive in life, loses power for lack of

opportunity, and grows less commanding even in the eyes of his wife,

who misses the uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by

storm and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic

scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.

Mr. Frederic says:

"Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the

greatest men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred

other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St.

Helena in excellent health, with companions that he talked

freely to, and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of

his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence

worth repeating. The greatness had entirely evaporated from

him the moment he was put on an island where he had nothing

to do."

It is very fitting that Mr. Frederic's last book should be in praise

of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of force,

however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished from the

inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of his life he wrote almost

as many pages as Balzac, most of it mere newspaper copy, it is true,

read and forgotten, but all of it vigorous and with the stamp of a

strong man upon it. And he played just as hard as he worked--alas,

it was the play that killed him! The young artist who illustrated

the story gave to the pictures of "Joel Thorpe" very much the look

of Harold Frederic himself, and they might almost stand for his

portraits. I fancy the young man did not select his model

carelessly. In this big, burly adventurer who took fortune and women

by storm, who bluffed the world by his prowess and fought his way to

the front with battle-ax blows, there is a great deal of Harold

Frederic, the soldier of fortune, the Utica milk boy who fought his

way from the petty slavery of a provincial newspaper to the foremost

ranks of the journalists of the world and on into literature, into

literature worth the writing. The man won his place in England much

as his hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his

self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished

his book he did not know that his end would be so much less glorious

than his hero's, that it would be his portion not to fall manfully

in the thick of the combat and the press of battle, but to die

poisoned in the tent of Chryseis. For who could foresee a tragedy so

needless, so blind, so brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that

such strength could perish through such insidious weakness, that so

great a man could be stung to death by a mania born in little minds?

In point of execution and literary excellence, both "The Market

Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of

Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The

first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American

fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work

of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong

opinions and an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of men. The

whole work, despite its irregularities and indifference to form, is

full of brain stuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful

intellect that some men put into politics, some into science and a

few, a very few, into literature. Both "Gloria Mundi" and "The

Market Place" bear unmistakable evidences of the slack rein and the

hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable padding, the stamp of

the space writer. They are imperfectly developed, and are not packed

with ideas like his earlier novels. Their excellence is in flashes;

it is not the searching, evenly distributed light which permeates

his more careful work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons

why Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income and

he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a day to

obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have learned to expect

to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate weakness, and

usually it devours the greater part, as the seven lean kine devoured

the seven fat in Pharaoh's vision. Achilles was a god in all his

nobler parts, but his feet were of the earth and to the earth they

held him down, and he died stung by an arrow in the heel.

_Pittsburg Leader_, June 10, 1899

_Kate Chopin_

"THE AWAKENING." Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S. Stone &

Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.

A Creole "Bovary" is this little novel of Miss Chopin's. Not that

the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a

Flaubert--save the mark!--but the theme is similar to that which

occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second "Madame

Bovary" should be written, but an author's choice of themes is

frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed

by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is

particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say

why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive,

well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes

much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers

is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but

light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects

directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present

instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. "Edna Pontellier,"

a Kentucky girl, who, like "Emma Bovary," had been in love with

innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married

"Leonce Pontellier" as a sort of reaction from a vague and visionary

passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive picture she used to kiss.

She acquired the habit of liking her husband in time, and even of

liking her children. Though we are not justified in presuming that

she ever threw articles from her dressing table at them, as the

charming "Emma" had a winsome habit of doing, we are told that "she

would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would

sometimes forget them." At a creole watering place, which is

admirably and deftly sketched by Miss Chopin, "Edna" met "Robert

Lebrun," son of the landlady, who dreamed of a fortune awaiting him

in Mexico while he occupied a petty clerical position in New

Orleans. "Robert" made it his business to be agreeable to his

mother's boarders, and "Edna," not being a creole, much against his

wish and will, took him seriously. "Robert" went to Mexico but found

that fortunes were no easier to make there than in New Orleans. He

returns and does not even call to pay his respects to her. She

encounters him at the home of a friend and takes him home with her.

She wheedles him into staying for dinner, and we are told she sent

the maid off "in search of some delicacy she had not thought of for

herself, and she recommended great care in the dripping of the

coffee and having the omelet done to a turn."

Only a few pages back we were informed that the husband, "M.

Pontellier," had cold soup and burnt fish for his dinner. Such is

life. The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward and ran

away from his responsibilities before they began. He was afraid to

begin a chapter with so serious and limited a woman. She remembered

the sea where she had first met "Robert." Perhaps from the same

motive which threw "Anna Keraninna" under the engine wheels, she

threw herself into the sea, swam until she was tired and then let

go.

"She looked into the distance, and for a moment the old

terror flamed up, then sank again. She heard her father's

voice, and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of

an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs

of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the

porch. There was a hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks

filled the air."

"Edna Pontellier" and "Emma Bovary" are studies in the same feminine

type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty

sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to

a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands

more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw

would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of

love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment.

The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only

women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose

development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but

without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about

things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing

about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest

from feeling. Now with women of the "Bovary" type, this relaxation

and recreation is impossible. They are not critics of life, but, in

the most personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions

through the fancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and

passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor,

neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better

things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For

these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of

the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas' great creation,

"Marguerite Gauthier." These people really expect the passion of

love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only

intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon

making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art,

expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite

variety, pleasure and distraction, to contribute to their lives what

the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less

limited and less intense idealists. So this passion, when set up

against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have

staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the

blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves

up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation

is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every

sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get

even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes.

Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to "Emma

Bovary," sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police

station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads.

"Edna Pontellier," fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea

on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover's

spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I

hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of

hers to a better cause.

_Pittsburg Leader_, July 8, 1899

_Stephen Crane_

"WAR IS KIND." Stephen Crane. $2.50. New York: F. A. Stokes

& Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.

This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray blotting paper,

on each page of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of

vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it

would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either

Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has

developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense

of the apes. His "Black Riders," uneven as it was, was a casket of

polished masterpieces when compared with "War Is Kind." And it is

not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these,

it is all that Sherman said it was.

The only production in the volume that is at all coherent is the

following, from which the book gets its title:

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,

Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky,

And the affrighted steed ran on alone.

Do not weep,

War is kind.

Hoarse booming drums of the regiment,

Little souls who thirst for fight,

These men were born to drill and die.

The unexplained glory flies above them.

Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--

A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind,

Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,

Raged at the breast, gulped and died.

Do not weep,

War is kind.

Swift-blazing flag of the regiment,

Eagle with crest of red and gold,

These men were born to drill and die.

Point for them the virtue of slaughter,

Make plain to them the excellence of killing,

And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button

On the bright, splendid shroud of your son,

Do not weep,

War is kind.

Of course, one may have objections to hearts hanging like humble

buttons, or to buttons being humble at all, but one should not stop

to quarrel about such trifles with a poet who can perpetrate the

following:

Thou art my love,

And thou art the beard

On another man's face--

Woe is me.

Thou art my love,

And thou art a temple,

And in this temple is an altar,

And on this temple is my heart--

Woe is me.

Thou art my love,

And thou art a wretch.

Let these sacred love-lies choke thee.

For I am come to where I know your lies as truth

And your truth as lies--

Woe is me.

Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or

vegetable? Is the expression, "Thou art the beard on another man's

face," intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber?

Certainly, after reading this, "Simple Simon" is a ballade of

perfect form, and "Jack and Jill" or "Hickity, Pickity, My Black

Hen," are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said:

Now let me crunch you

With full weight of affrighted love.

I doubted you

--I doubted you--

And in this short doubting

My love grew like a genie

For my further undoing.

Beware of my friends,

Be not in speech too civil,

For in all courtesy

My weak heart sees specters,

Mists of desire

Arising from the lips of my chosen;

Be not civil.

This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard's exquisite

sensitiveness:

Ah, God, the way your little finger moved

As you thrust a bare arm backward.

And made play with your hair

And a comb, a silly gilt comb

--Ah, God, that I should suffer

Because of the way a little finger moved.

Mr. Crane's verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures,

which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On

page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to

completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:

"My good friend," said a learned bystander,

"Your operations are mad."

Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to

some of Maupassant's.

_Pittsburg Leader_, June 3, 1899

After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris'

"Blix," it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that

one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, "Active Service,"

by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for

pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel

unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he

edits the Sunday edition of the New York "Eclipse," and delights in

publishing "stories" about deformed and sightless infants. "The

office of the 'Eclipse' was at the top of an immense building on

Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the

interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson was a

broad path of silver in the distance." This leaves little doubt as

to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus Coleman as its

Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman's days were spent in collecting yellow

sensations for his paper, and we are told that he "planned for each

edition as for a campaign." The following elevating passage is one

of the realistic paragraphs by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of

Coleman's life known to us:

Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze,

gilt and steel dropped magically from above. Coleman yelled

"Down!" * * * A door flew open. Coleman stepped upon the

elevator. "Well, Johnnie," he said cheerfully to the lad who

operated the machine, "is business good?" "Yes, sir, pretty

good," answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank

swiftly. Floor after floor seemed to be rising with

marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight

into the sky. There was soaring lights, figures and the

opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black

inscriptions. Other lights were springing heavenward. All

the lofty corridors rang with cries. "Up!" "Down!" "Down!"

"Up!!" The boy's hand grasped a lever and his machine obeyed

his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing

swiftness.

Later, when Coleman reached the street, Mr. Crane describes the

cable cars as marching like panoplied elephants, which is rather

far, to say the least. The gentleman's nights were spent something

as follows:

"In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of

champagne. The last of the wine he finished in somber mood

like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the straw that

litters his prison house. During his dinner he was

continually sending out messenger boys. He was arranging a

poker party. Through a window he watched the beautiful

moving life of upper Broadway at night, with its crowds and

clanging cable cars and its electric signs, mammoth and

glittering like the jewels of a giantess.

"Word was brought to him that poker players were arriving.

He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the broad hall,

occupied mainly by miscellaneous people and actors, all deep

in leather chairs, he found some of his friends waiting.

They trooped upstairs to Coleman's rooms, where, as a

preliminary, Coleman began to hurl books and papers from the

table to the floor. A boy came with drinks. Most of the men,

in order to prepare for the game, removed their coats and

cuffs and drew up the sleeves of their shirts. The electric

globes shed a blinding light upon the table. The sound of

clinking chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards,

careless and dextrous."

The atmosphere of the entire novel is just that close and

enervating. Every page is like the next morning taste of a champagne

supper, and is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes. There is no

fresh air in the book and no sunlight, only the "blinding light shed

by the electric globes." If the life of New York newspaper men is as

unwholesome and sordid as this, Mr. Crane, who has experienced it,

ought to be sadly ashamed to tell it. Next morning when Coleman went

for breakfast in the grill room of his hotel he ordered eggs on

toast and a pint of champagne for breakfast and discoursed affably

to the waiter.

"May be you had a pretty lively time last night, Mr.

Coleman?"

"Yes, Pat," answered Coleman. "I did. It was all because of

an unrequitted affection, Patrick." The man stood near, a

napkin over his arm. Coleman went on impressively. "The ways

of the modern lover are strange. Now, I, Patrick, am a

modern lover, and when, yesterday, the dagger of

disappointment was driven deep into my heart, I immediately

played poker as hard as I could, and incidentally got

loaded. This is the modern point of view. I understand on

good authority that in old times lovers used to languish.

That is probably a lie, but at any rate we do not, in these

times, languish to any great extent. We get drunk. Do you

understand Patrick?"

The waiter was used to a harangue at Coleman's breakfast

time. He placed his hand over his mouth and giggled.

"Yessir."

"Of course," continued Coleman, thoughtfully. "It might be

pointed out by uneducated persons that it is difficult to

maintain a high standard of drunkenness for the adequate

length of time, but in the series of experiments which I am

about to make, I am sure I can easily prove them to be in

the wrong."

"I am sure, sir," said the waiter, "the young ladies would

not like to be hearing you talk this way."

"Yes; no doubt, no doubt. The young ladies have still quite

medieval ideas. They don't understand. They still prefer

lovers to languish."

"At any rate, sir, I don't see that your heart is sure

enough broken. You seem to take it very easy."

"Broken!" cried Coleman. "Easy? Man, my heart is in

fragments. Bring me another small bottle."

After this Coleman went to Greece to write up the war for the

"Eclipse," and incidentally to rescue his sweetheart from the hands

of the Turks and make "copy" of it. Very valid arguments might be

advanced that the lady would have fared better with the Turks. On

the voyage Coleman spent all his days and nights in the card room

and avoided the deck, since fresh air was naturally disagreeable to

him. For all that he saw of Greece or that Mr. Crane's readers see

of Greece Coleman might as well have stayed in the card room of the

steamer, or in the card room of his New York hotel for that matter.

Wherever he goes he carries the atmosphere of the card room with him

and the "blinding glare of the electrics." In Greece he makes love

when he has leisure, but he makes "copy" much more ardently, and on

the whole is quite as lurid and sordid and showy as his worst Sunday

editions. Some good bits of battle descriptions there are, of the

"Red Badge of Courage" order, but one cannot make a novel of clever

descriptions of earthworks and poker games. The book concerns itself

not with large, universal interests or principles, but with a yellow

journalist grinding out yellow copy in such a wooden fashion that

the Sunday "Eclipse" must have been even worse than most. In spite

of the fact that Mr. Crane has written some of the most artistic

short stories in the English language, I begin to wonder whether,

blinded by his youth and audacity, two qualities which the American

people love, we have not taken him too seriously. It is a grave

matter for a man in good health and with a bank account to have

written a book so coarse and dull and charmless as "Active Service."

Compared with this "War was kind," indeed.

_Pittsburg Leader_, November 11, 1899

_Frank Norris_

A new and a great book has been written. The name of it is

"McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," and the man who wrote it is

Mr. Frank Norris. The great presses of the country go on year after

year grinding out commonplace books, just as each generation goes on

busily reproducing its own mediocrity. When in this enormous output

of ink and paper, these thousands of volumes that are yearly rushed

upon the shelves of the book stores, one appears which contains both

power and promise, the reader may be pardoned some enthusiasm.

Excellence always surprises: we are never quite prepared for it. In

the case of "McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," it is even more

surprising than usual. In the first place the title is not alluring,

and not until you have read the book, can you know that there is an

admirable consistency in the stiff, uncompromising commonplaceness

of that title. In the second place the name of the author is as yet

comparatively unfamiliar, and finally the book is dedicated to a

member of the Harvard faculty, suggesting that whether it be a story

of San Francisco or Dawson City, it must necessarily be vaporous,

introspective and chiefly concerned with "literary" impressions. Mr.

Norris is, indeed, a "Harvard man," but that he is a good many other

kinds of a man is self-evident. His book is, in the language of Mr.

Norman Hapgood, the work of "a large human being, with a firm

stomach, who knows and loves the people."

In a novel of such high merit as this, the subject matter is the

least important consideration. Every newspaper contains the

essential material for another "Comedie Humaine." In this case

"McTeague," the central figure, happens to be a dentist practicing

in a little side street of San Francisco. The novel opens with this

description of him:

"It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day,

McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car

conductor's coffee joint on Polk street. He had a thick,

gray soup, heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate;

two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of

strong butter and sugar. Once in his office, or, as he

called it on his sign-board, 'Dental Parlors,' he took off

his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed

his little stove with coke, he lay back in his operating

chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking steam

beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food

digested; crop-full, stupid and warm."

McTeague had grown up in a mining camp in the mountains. He

remembered the years he had spent there trundling heavy cars of ore

in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For

thirteen days out of each fortnight his father was a steady,

hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an

irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His

mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son

should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack

dentist and after a fashion, learned the business.

"Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his

mother's death; she had left him some money--not much, but

enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from

the charlatan and had opened his 'Dental Parlors' on Polk

street, an 'accommodation street' of small shops in the

residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected

a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car

conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk street

called him the 'doctor' and spoke of his enormous strength.

For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of

blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving

his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly,

ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with

a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as hard as wooden

mallets, strong as vices, the hands of the old-time car boy.

Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory

tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut,

angular; the jaw salient: like that of the carnivora.

"But for one thing McTeague would have been perfectly

contented. Just outside his window was his signboard--a

modest affair--that read: 'Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors.

Gas Given;' but that was all. It was his ambition, his

dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge

gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something

gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, but as

yet it was far beyond his means."

Then Mr. Norris launches into a description of the street in which

"McTeague" lives. He presents that street as it is on Sunday, as it

is on working days; as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are

going out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock

when the women are out purchasing from the small shopkeepers, as it

is at night when the shop girls are out with the soda-fountain

tenders and the motor cars dash by full of theatre-goers, and the

Salvationists sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he

reproduces the life in a by-street of a great city, the little

tragedy of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling

environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little

to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is

frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who

paint landscapes put their cows knee-deep in water to conceal the

defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets

throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,

imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,

stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,

a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly

transplanted. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects

of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of

mature, and accurate and comprehensive description is very unusual

among the younger American writers. Most of them observe the world

through a temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than

the objects they see. And temperament is a glass which distorts most

astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and

reproduces with a touch firm and decisive, strong almost to

brutalness. Yet this hand that can depict so powerfully the brute

strength and brute passions of a "McTeague," can deal very finely

and adroitly with the feminine element of his story. This is his

portrait of the little Swiss girl, "Trina," whom the dentist

marries:

"Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round

and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the

half-opened eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her

tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia. But it

was to her hair that one's attention was most attracted.

Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal

crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy,

abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have

given color to her face seemed to have been absorbed by that

marvelous hair: It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed

the temples of this little bourgeoise."

The tragedy of the story dates from a chance, a seeming stroke of

good fortune, one of those terrible gifts of the Danai. A few weeks

before her marriage "Trina" drew $5 000 from a lottery ticket. From

that moment her passion for hoarding money becomes the dominant

theme of the story, takes command of the book and its characters.

After their marriage the dentist is disbarred from practice. They

move into a garret where she starves her husband and herself to save

that precious hoard. She sells even his office furniture, everything

but his concertina and his canary bird, with which he stubbornly

refuses to part and which are destined to become very important

accessories in the property room of the theatre where this drama is

played. This removal from their first home is to this story what

Gervaise's removal from her shop is to L'Assommoir; it is the fatal

episode of the third act, the sacrifice of self-respect, the

beginning of the end. From that time the money stands between

"Trina" and her husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her

meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to

abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the

disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis

of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by

greed, the man's poisoned by disappointment and hate.

And all the while this same painful theme is placed in a lower key.

Maria, the housemaid who took care of "McTeague's" dental parlors in

his better days, was a half-crazy girl from somewhere in Central

America, she herself did not remember just where. But she had a

wonderful story about her people owning a dinner service of pure

gold with a punch bowl you could scarcely lift, which rang like a

church bell when you struck it. On the strength of this story

"Zercow," the Jew junk man, marries her, and believing that she

knows where this treasure is hidden, bullies and tortures her to

force her to disclose her secret. At last "Maria" is found with her

throat cut, and "Zercow" is picked up by the wharf with a sack full

of rusty tin cans, which in his dementia he must have thought the

fabled dinner service of gold.

From this it is a short step to "McTeague's" crime. He kills his

wife to get possession of her money, and escapes to the mountains.

While he is on his way south, pushing toward Mexico, he is overtaken

by his murdered wife's cousin and former suitor. Both men are half

mad with thirst, and there in the desert wastes of Death's Valley,

they spring to their last conflict. The cousin falls, but before he

dies he slips a handcuff over "McTeague's" arm, and so the author

leaves his hero in the wastes of Death's Valley, a hundred miles

from water, with a dead man chained to his arm. As he stands there

the canary bird, the survivor of his happier days, to which he had

clung with stubborn affection, begins "chittering feebly in its

little gilt prison." It reminds one a little of Stevenson's use of

poor "Goddedaal's" canary in "The Wrecker." It is just such sharp,

sure strokes that bring out the high lights in a story and separate

excellence from the commonplace. They are at once dramatic and

revelatory. Lacking them, a novel which may otherwise be a good one,

lacks its chief reason for being. The fault with many worthy

attempts at fiction lies not in what they are, but in what they are

not.

Mr. Norris' model, if he will admit that he has followed one, is

clearly no less a person than M. Zola himself. Yet there is no

discoverable trace of imitation in his book. He has simply taken a

method which has been most successfully applied in the study of

French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses

certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps

the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of

society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of

a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his

"method" to become too prominent, that his restraint savors of

constraint, yet he has written a true story of the people,

courageous, dramatic, full of matter and warm with life. He has

addressed himself seriously to art, and he seems to have no ambition

to be clever. His horizon is wide, his invention vigorous and bold,

his touch heavy and warm and human. This man is not limited by

literary prejudices: he sees the people as they are, he is close to

them and not afraid of their unloveliness. He has looked at truth in

the depths, among men begrimed by toil and besotted by ignorance,

and still found her fair. "McTeague" is an achievement for a young

man. It may not win at once the success which it deserves, but Mr.

Norris is one of those who can afford to wait.

_The Courier_, April 8, 1899

If you want to read a story that is all wheat and no chaff, read

"Blix." Last winter that brilliant young Californian, Mr. Norris,

published a remarkable and gloomy novel, "McTeague," a book deep in

insight, rich in promise and splendid in execution, but entirely

without charm and as disagreeable as only a great piece of work can

be. And now this gentleman, who is not yet thirty, turns around and

gives us an idyll that sings through one's brain like a summer wind

and makes one feel young enough to commit all manner of

indiscretions. It may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us

his versatility and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been

a process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed

one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life that he went

down to the seaside and wrote "La Reve," a book that every girl

should read when she is eighteen, and then again when she is eighty.

Powerful and solidly built as "McTeague" is, one felt that there

method was carried almost too far, that Mr. Norris was too

consciously influenced by his French masters. But "Blix" belongs to

no school whatever, and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride

of craft in it from cover to cover. "Blix" herself is the method,

the motives and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of

youth and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and

forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer, and the

march from "Lohengrin" is simply sticking out all over "Blix." It is

the story of a San Francisco newspaper man and a girl. The newspaper

man "came out" in fiction, so to speak, in the drawing room of Mr.

Richard Harding Davis, and has languished under that gentleman's

chaperonage until he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of

nothing but his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis' reporters all

bathed regularly and all ate nice things, but beyond that their

tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded

newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco,

break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty

for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no

astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is

the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself

was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and

parties and tried to make himself believe he was in love with her.

But it wouldn't work, for "Landy" couldn't love a society girl, not

though she were as beautiful as the morning and terrible as an army

with banners, and had "round full arms," and "the skin of her face

was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming

pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." For while "Landy Rivers" was at

college he had been seized with the penchant for writing short

stories, and had worshiped at the shrines of Maupassant and Kipling,

and when a man is craft mad enough to worship Maupassant truly and

know him well, when he has that tingling for technique in his

fingers, not Aphrodite herself, new risen from the waves, could

tempt him into any world where craft was not lord and king. So it

happened that their real love affair never began until one morning

when "Landy" had to go down to the wharf to write up a whaleback,

and "Blix" went along, and an old sailor told them a story and

"Blix" recognized the literary possibilities of it, and they had

lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and "Landy" because he was a

newspaper man and it was the end of the week, didn't have any change

about his clothes, and "Blix" had to pay the bill. And it was in

that green old tea house that "Landy" read "Blix" one of his

favorite yarns by Kipling, and she in a calm, off-handed way,

recognized one of the fine, technical points in it, and "Landy"

almost went to pieces for joy of her doing it. That scene in the

Chinese restaurant is one of the prettiest bits of color you'll find

to rest your eyes upon, and mighty good writing it is. I wonder,

though if when Mr. Norris adroitly mentioned the "clack and snarl"

of the banjo "Landy" played, he remembered the "silver snarling

trumpets" of Keats? After that, things went on as such things will,

and "Blix" quit the society racket and went to queer places with

"Landy," and got interested in his work, and she broke him of

wearing red neckties and playing poker, and she made him work, she

did, for she grew to realize how much that meant to him, and she

jacked him up when he didn't work, and she suggested an ending for

one of his stories that was better than his own; just this big,

splendid girl, who had never gone to college to learn how to write

novels. And so how, in the name of goodness, could he help loving

her? So one morning down by the Pacific, with "Blix" and "The Seven

Seas," it all came over "Landy," that "living was better than

reading and life was better than literature." And so it is; once,

and only once, for each of us; and that is the tune that sings and

sings through one's head when one puts the book away.

_The Courier_, January 13, 1900

AN HEIR APPARENT.

Last winter a young Californian, Mr. Frank Norris, published a novel

with the unpretentious title, "McTeague: a Story of San Francisco."

It was a book that could not be ignored nor dismissed with a word.

There was something very unusual about it, about its solidity and

mass, the thoroughness and firmness of texture, and it came down

like a blow from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more

sprightly performances of the hour.

The most remarkable thing about the book was its maturity and

compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining

"young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its

debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down

to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar

trick of phrase has found favor. It was a book addressed to the

American people and to the critics of the world, the work of a young

man who had set himself to the art of authorship with an almighty

seriousness, and who had no ambition to be clever. "McTeague" was

not an experiment in style nor a pretty piece of romantic folly, it

was a true story of the people--having about it, as M. Zola would

say, "the smell of the people"--courageous, dramatic, full of matter

and warm with life. It was realism of the most uncompromising kind.

The theme was such that the author could not have expected sudden

popularity for his book, such as sometimes overtakes monstrosities

of style in these discouraging days when Knighthood is in Flower to

the extent of a quarter of a million copies, nor could he have hoped

for pressing commissions from the fire-side periodicals. The life

story of a quack dentist who sometimes extracted molars with his

fingers, who mistreated and finally murdered his wife, is not, in

itself, attractive. But, after all, the theme counts for very

little. Every newspaper contains the essential subject matter for

another _Comedie Humaine_. The important point is that a man

considerably under thirty could take up a subject so grim and

unattractive, and that, for the mere love of doing things well, he

was able to hold himself down to the task of developing it

completely, that he was able to justify this quack's existence in

literature, to thrust this hairy, blonde dentist with the "salient

jaw of the carnivora," in amongst the immortals.

It was after M. Zola had completed one of the greatest and gloomiest

of his novels of Parisian life, that he went down by the sea and

wrote "La Reve," that tender, adolescent story of love and purity

and youth. So, almost simultaneously with "McTeague," Mr. Norris

published "Blix," another San Francisco story, as short as

"McTeague" was lengthy, as light as "McTeague" was heavy, as poetic

and graceful as "McTeague" was somber and charmless. Here is a man

worth waiting on; a man who is both realist and poet, a man who can

teach

"Not only by a comet's rush,

But by a rose's birth."

Yet unlike as they are, in both books the source of power is the

same, and, for that matter, it was even the same in his first book,

"Moran of the Lady Letty." Mr. Norris has dispensed with the

conventional symbols that have crept into art, with the trite,

half-truths and circumlocutions, and got back to the physical basis

of things. He has abjured tea-table psychology, and the analysis of

figures in the carpet and subtile dissections of intellectual

impotencies, and the diverting game of words and the whole

literature of the nerves. He is big and warm and sometimes brutal,

and the strength of the soil comes up to him with very little loss

in the transmission. His art strikes deep down into the roots of

life and the foundation of Things as They Are--not as we tell each

other they are at the tea-table. But he is realistic art, not

artistic realism. He is courageous, but he is without bravado.

He sees things freshly, as though they had not been seen before, and

describes them with singular directness and vividness, not with

morbid acuteness, with a large, wholesome joy of life. Nowhere is

this more evident than in his insistent use of environment. I recall

the passage in which he describes the street in which McTeague

lives. He represents that street as it is on Sunday, as it is on

working days, as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are going

out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock when

the women are out marketing among the small shopkeepers, as it is at

night when the shop girls are out with the soda fountain tenders and

the motor cars dash by full of theater-goers, and the Salvationists

sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he reproduces in

detail the life in a by-street of a great city, the little tragedy

of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling