up and tread the floor like the Nilghai's choruses in The Light that Failed, nor any grim joy of fight to endanger tabletops as Ortheris's fight with the captain in His Private Honor does, nor any gulp of suspense to catch your throat such as rises at the charge at Silver's Theatre in With the Main Guard. Yet there are bits that are thoroughly all lacking here. Captains Courageous good, like this about an iceberg: "A awakens no hot emulation to make one whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging and spouting ;" and this about a ship: "Now a bark is feminine beyond all other daughters of the sea, and this tall, hesitating creature, with her white and gilt figurehead, looked just like a bewildered woman half lifting her skirts to cross a muddy street under the jeers of bad little boys." One looks and listens in vain, however, for language chaste and rhythmic like the style of The Spring Running, or for the melancholy grace of words that made Without Benefit of Clergy half-intoxicating and all pitiful. Captains Courageous has not sweep of power that of right belongs to the handiwork of its maker, the oldtime rush and energy, the straining pace of syllables doubly laden, the silences that come where words fail for weakness. One misses the eager thrill of phrases like this from The Light that Failed, "the I-I-I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveler." There is an almost incredible lack of significance in parts of it, as if it were a steamer under-engined for its length. Some chapters are floated by mere description, and go crippled like an ocean-liner relying on its sails. It is matter of doubt whether in all Mr. Kipling's other books together one could find so many barren pages as are here. Page after page drags on after the story is told, like the latter joints of a scotched snake. Some of Mr. Kipling's early short stories, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, Love O' Women, and Beyond the Pale, have greater wealth of human interest, more import of life, death, and destiny, than this whole volume carries. The power of humor in The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, the glare of race feeling in The Man who Was, and the splendid reaches of imagination in The Man who Would be King are We take Mr. Kipling very seriously, for he is the greatest creative mind that we now have: he has the devouring eye and the portraying hand. And Captains Courageous is badly wrought and is less than the measure of his power. It may be when he sent it out some words of his own had been forgotten words with which he dedicated one of his earliest books, "For I have wrought them for Thy sake And breathed in them mine agonies." It seems to us to lack this sort of inspiration. Miss Wilkins's Jerome. all A good way to judge the structure of a story is to examine it as if you intended turning it into a play. To do so is to ask about it two very searching questions: Is it well constructed? Is its theme strongly based upon the verities of human nature? Looking upon the story with the eye of the dramatist, you will see all its superfluities fade away, the "analysis of character," all the author's wise or humorous reflections, all the episodical incidents. Everything by which writers of novels are enabled to blind their readers to the structural weakness of their productions, or to the essential improbability or triviality of their themes, seems to detach itself and vanish, leaving the substance and the form naked to the eye. It is interesting to apply this test, which seems fair, although severe, to Miss Wilkins's latest story, Jerome. The plot, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: Jerome, a poor young man who is not likely ever to have any property to call his own, promises that he will give away to the poor of the town all his wealth if he ever becomes rich. Two incredulous rich men, taunted and stung thereto by the gibes of the company, declare that if, within ten years, Jerome receives and gives away as much as ten thousand dollars, they on their side will give away to the poor one fourth of their property. Jerome becomes possessed of a fortune, and does with it as he had promised to do. The two rich men thereupon fulfill their agreements. This is the keystone of the novel, the central fact of the story which supports the whole structure. All that precedes is preparatory, all that follows is explanatory. Now, to revert to the test of a play, this is not an idea upon which a serious drama could be founded. That such a bargain should be made and kept may be within the possibilities of human nature; few things, indeed, lie outside the possibilities of human nature. But it is not within the probabilities. Any serious play which should be based upon it would inevitably seem artificial. It is an idea for a farce, or, on a higher level, for a satirical comedy; for each of these species of composition may be based upon an absurdity, if, when once started, it is developed naturally and logically. A serious play, however, if it is not to miss its effect, must treat a serious theme; one of which no spectator for an instant will question the reality. By such a test as this Miss Wilkins's novel fails because its theme lacks probability and dignity. The theme, in fact, is of the right proportion for a short story, and this, indeed, is what Miss Wilkins has made; but she has prefixed to it a series of short stories and sketches dealing with preceding events, and has added another series of short stories and sketches dealing with subsequent events. These are all rather loosely bound together, and the result is that the reader, thinking over the story, does not have an idea of it as a unit; he thinks now of one part, now of another; and by the mere fact of his so thinking of it he confesses that he has not found it a good novel, but a bad novel by a good writer of short stories. Miss Wilkins employs in Jerome her shortstory methods, and has not mastered the technique of a larger structure. She is, as it were, Meissonier trying to paint a large, bold canvas. The mention of Meissonier calls to mind the merits of the story, which, as any reader of her work may guess, are neither few nor small. There are many admirable human portraits in the book, many excellently dramatic bits of action, much strong, nervous, natural dialogue. Always the work is that of a keenly observant eye, and of the brooding type of mind that is most surely dowered with the creative imagination. A single excellent passage will illustrate our meaning. Jerome's mother is speaking to him of the report that he has given away his wealth: "I want to know if it's true,' she awe. "Ann Edwards looked at her son, with a face of pale recrimination and She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it without a word. 'I never had a black silk dress in my life,' said she finally, in a shaking voice, and that was all the reproach which she offered." The longer you consider Ann Edwards's comment, the more admirable you must think it. One tendency shows itself in this latest novel by Miss Wilkins which should not pass without mention, and which must be lamented by every reader who wishes well to the literary art. The book, as may be guessed even from this brief synopsis of its plot, is a weak at tempt to question the present economic system. It sets off the wickedness or the selfishness of the rich against the virtue and helplessness of the poor after the manner of the sentimental socialist. A brief literary criticism is hardly the place to treat of economics, but one may pause to remark how odd it is that the novelist, since his business is particular ly the study of human nature, and his capital a knowledge of it, should not perceive that the economic trouble lies, not in the present system of property, but in human nature itself. Mr. Howells has been for a long peMr. Howriod so anxiously and almost ells's An morbidly preoccupied with Open-Eyed Conspiracy. American types and social portents and problems that it is a great pleasure to find him, in An Open-Eyed Conspiracy, dropping into something like the gay and engaging manner of former days. We are glad to meet Mr. and Mrs. March again upon their summer travels, and to perceive how lightly, after all, that worthy pair have been touched by the twenty-five years or so that have intervened since they kindly took Kitty Ellison to Canada, and made, to that good girl's temporary cost, the chance acquaintance of the fade and futile Mr. Arbuton. We know now that Mrs. March, at least, will never grow old; and that we should find her after another quarter century, were any of us to live so long, as defiantly impulsive and illogical, as inconsistently concerned, and as incurably sympathetic with youthful romance, as ever. There is an accent of deep conviction underlying the final bonmot with which Mr. March concludes the Saratoga Idyl: "The girlhood passes, but the girl remains." Yet it is rather base of him to say it plaintively, when the results, in his own wife's case, have been so charming; and Mr. March appears to us upon the whole not quite as clearly unspotted from the world as his He constructively mundane consort. was ever prone, beneath his outward bonhomie, to fix a somewhat too sad and haggard eye upon those contrasts of material condition in our American life, which hardly deserve to be called social distinctions. Both the Marches ought to have known, by the present decade, that two such clear-headed and final-secular young persons as Miss Gage and Mr. Kendrick would assuredly arrange their own little affairs, and work out unassisted their own salvation or the reverse. The scenery of the beautiful but no longer fashionable spa where the idyl takes place is portrayed with photographic precision, and a disdain of the methods of mere impressionism which warms one's heart; while the fatal occasion of the hop at the Grand Union Hotel and the conspicuously ineffectual chaperonage of Mr. March are described with a deal of quaint humor, quite in the irresistible manner of the author's best period. The Saratoga Idyl is as light as those unattached gossamers which float about in the warm air on dreamy October days, and are sometimes called Virgin's Thread. But like them it seems a true though slight product of the season of rest and mellow fruitfulness," and the leisurely reader will find it haunted by all the peculiar and penetrating charm of the alienis mensibus lent gift of narrative, and speaks a language which is especially grateful to many ears, whether by custom or through curiosity, for it is the language of the world of which Mr. Davis's own Van Bibber is the recognized type. 66 How strong this appeal must be one realizes when the book's elements of weakness, through unreality and a failure to convince, are considered even for a moment. It is needful only to look at the central figure, a hero such as never was on sea or land." He is defined as "a tall broad-shouldered youth," and surely he cannot be far beyond thirty at the utmost. At sixteen he embarked at New Orleans as a sailor before the mast. From the diamond fields of South Africa, where he landed from his first voyage, he went on to Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers. It must have been in this period of his life that he was an officer in the English army, "when they were short of officers" in the Soudan, received a medal from the Sultan of Zanzibar, since he was out of cigars the day I called," and won the Legion of Honor while fighting as a Chasseur d'Afrique against the Arabs. It was presumably later that he built a harbor fort at Rio, and, because it was successfully reproduced on the Baltic, was created a German baron. In a later year, possibly, he was president of an International Congress of Engineers at Madrid; but in his casual accounts of himself it is a little difficult to keep track of the years, and to know just where he had time for his visits to Chili and Peru, and incidentally for his experiences as a cowboy on our own plains, and as the builder of the Jalisco and Mexican Railroad. When a youth has done all these things, there is no reason why he should not take the further steps, in which we follow him, as the head of an enormous mining enterprise in South America, the temporary, and of course successful, commander in a revolution at Olancho, and the perfect ly "turned out" man of the world, who soon discovers the superiority of his employer's younger daughter, and wins her hand without having to ask for it. It should be said in justice to this Admirable Crichton that he defines some of his own actions as "gallery plays." In like manner, when the cloud of the revolution is about to burst, the heroine appears on the scene, protesting, "I always ride over to polo alone at Newport, at least with James;" her brother says, "It reminds me of a football match, when the teams run on the field;" and the hero himself likens it to a scene in a play. When a revolution begins on this wise, with such partici pants, one is well prepared to see it go forward somewhat like a performance of amateur theatricals, in which the players enjoy themselves exceedingly, but make very timid and incipient approaches to reality. Indeed, for all of Mr. Davis's brave and familiar habit of speech, as if from the very core of things, the real scene of the revolution seems to be the author's study-table, and the merit of the book grows sensibly less as the fight proceeds. The inherent elements of its structure, already mentioned, go far to redeem the book. But not only by their means has Mr. Davis shown his strength. In the sisters, Alice and Hope Langham, he has made two excellent types of the girl spoiled and unspoiled by the world. In Mac Williams, with his "barber-shop chords" and his good vulgarity, he has drawn a picture admirably true to life. In the vivid reproduction of scenes, in none more notably than that of the killing of Stuart and the leaving of his dead body in the empty room, he has sometimes shown the hand almost of a master in description. It is no disheartening sign of the times that such a book is read, for youth and beauty and prowess march across its pages, and behind them one feels the creator's honest sympathy with these things. 1 |