216 



FICTION, AMERICAN. 



of Miss Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope. Here 

 we have good, sound work, interesting characters 

 suid situations set against interesting historical 

 backgrounds, the human element in its relation 

 to the making of a people the right kinds of 

 material used in a masterful manner. Miss John- 

 ston's imagination needs pruning, perhaps, her 

 talent must be trained away from its melodramatic 

 tendencies to yield its best fruit, but hers is work 

 of a high quality indeed, which in the opening 

 chapters of Prisoners of Hope rises to the dignity 

 of true literature and gives rich promise. She 

 has a beautiful gift, virile through a woman's 

 intuition at its best, and she is of interest as 

 the Hrst writer of her sex to invade successfully 

 a field monopolized by men from the days of Scott 

 and Cooper to those of Stanley J. Weyman. 

 \\ oman writers of exuberant imagination we have 

 had ere now witness Mrs. Radclitfe and her Mys- 

 teries of Udolpho but Miss Johnston stands on 

 higher ground, and, with all the embarrassing 

 riches of her fancy, she is a conscientious historian. 

 A place like Mr. Weyman's in contemporary fic- 

 tion is within her grasp, provided the accident 

 of sex does not at the last moment prove to be 

 an unexpected but insurmountable barrier, for, 

 after all, fighting is men's work. 



Mr. James Lane Allen furnishes a striking in- 

 stance of the results of taking infinite pains. His 

 latest book, The Reign of Law, is hardly a novel, 

 if incident, plot, harmonious progress, and ulti- 

 mate unity constitute a novel. Nor, as a chapter 

 of intellectual life and doubt, of new lamps for 

 old, can it boast of much originality, certainly 

 not of novelty, at this late day. But if Mr. Allen's 

 imagination has lagged for once, if his inventive- 

 ness has refused to respond to his call, he has per- 

 iected a literary method of such beauty and deli- 

 cacy thai one willingly forgets that he does not 

 give what one expected, and reads willingly on to 

 the end. To say that he is a stylist is but to 

 tell part of the story; he has complete command 

 of all the resources of his craft, which he employs 

 here successfully to hide from all but the hard- 

 ened professional reader the lack of a truly great 

 subject. Therefore he but arouses the fervent 

 wish that ere long his imagination may return 

 to him strengthened and refreshed. He is a true 

 artist, whose wide recognition and appreciation 

 more than offset the welcome given to When 

 Knighthood was in Flower. 



This true feeling for literary art was also the 

 cause of the reception of Mr. Winston Churchill's 

 Hie-hard Carvel, a novel built upon the soundest, 

 the noblest model of Anglo-Saxon fiction the 

 work of William Makepeace Thackeray. No copy, 

 whether conscious or unconscious, is ever quite so 

 good as its original, but Richard Carvel came suf- 

 ficiently near it to deceive not only the cultured 

 public to which literature is an intellectual pleas- 

 ure, or at most an avocation, but also many a sea- 

 soned critic. It is Thackerayan even in its length, 

 but where the master trod without hesitation, 

 conscious of his power, the pupil might well have 

 hesitated. The story is unquestionably too long, 

 too deliberate. It drags in many places, it adds 

 no notable character to the living world of fic- 

 tion, but one can not lightly forget the spirited 

 chapters devoted to Richard Carvel's London life, 

 with the ring of true Americanism echoing through 

 them. So, with all its shortcomings, strangely 

 overlooked in the chorus of praise that greeted 

 its coming, Richard Carvel is a capital patriotic 

 tonic not the masterpiece it was at lirst. supposed 

 to lie, but a notable milestone early in the road 

 of the new American fiction. 



Mr. James Lane Allen and Mr. Paul Leicester 



Ford are the only " old hands " in this company 

 of successful novelists. Janice Meredith, too, came 

 at the right moment, though its faults were more 

 readily pointed out than those of the earlier 

 Richard Carvel. The critics, at least, had regained 

 their poise. Planned on an enormous scale, to 

 embrace the entire period of the War for Inde- 

 pendence, the book broke down signally as a novel 

 of adventure. The tale of war and derring-do has 

 its limits, beyond which nothing remains but 

 repetitions of hairbreadth escapes already used. 

 Mr. Ford was led into this fault by lack of 

 further combinations, even as the exuberance of 

 her taste for adventure led Miss Johnston into 

 overdoing this kind of thing toward the end of 

 Prisoners of Hope. As a human document, too, 

 Janice Meredith falls far short of the highest 

 standard. Its heroine's character does not develop 

 in the days that tried men's souls, and women's 

 too. As she was in the beginning, so she is at 

 the end of the tale: a shallow, frivolous coquette, 

 with no suggestion of the makings of a noble 

 Avoman, of the traditional American Revolutionary 

 great-grandmother. But Paul Leicester Ford, the 

 student of American history, redeems the short- 

 comings of Paul Leicester Ford the novelist. His 

 book is, above all else, a study of the life of that 

 epoch, the feelings of the colonists, rebels, " loyal- 

 ists," and " trimmers "- not so much of the lead- 

 ers, though they, too, are not lacking, as of the 

 country people and their transplanted squirearchy. 

 Mr. Ford's novel is strongest in that one of its 

 three interests the historic, the human, and the 

 adventurous which at the present time is prob- 

 ably the most important to the American reading 

 public, the historical one. 



The Rev. Mr. Sheldon's In His Steps deserves 

 mention merely because no book that finds an 

 audience of a million readers can well be entirely 

 overlooked. It is not literature; it is a tract 

 in the simplest form of that kind of writing. A 

 mere reference to its meteoric career must suffice. 

 It stands beyond the confines of American letters, 

 a sunflower among the weeds of li reading matter " 

 third class, to adopt the post-office classification, 

 the only practicable one in this case. 



The popular books here discussed are about 

 evenly divided between national history and na- 

 tional character, for we may include colonial days 

 in the study of the national history of the United 

 States. When we proceed to give a glance at 

 the recent minor successes we find that history 

 carries the day. Our naval victories in the war 

 with Spain were no doubt largely responsible for 

 the sudden prominence given in fiction to the 

 naval side of our wars. Mr. Cyrus Townsend 

 Brady here stands alone, a popular novelist rather 

 than a trained literary artist a muscular Chris- 

 tian and an ardent patriot, the biographer, also, 

 of Paul Jones, the hero of more than one of his 

 stories. Less successful attempts to exploit t he 

 American Revolution have been made within th6 

 past two years in vast numbers. They all bear 

 evidence to the same national tendency of our 

 latest fiction, but are remarkable only for their 

 striking revelation of the comparative paucity of 

 the fundamental situations upon which such tales 

 are built the love of a patriotic maiden for an 

 Knglish oflicer, a conflict of duty and inclination, 

 and the alarums of war. Adventures and leaders 

 on both sides are added according to the lore <>f 

 the author. The very simplicity of the recipe 

 makes its compounding difficult, and successes 

 will grow fewer as the attempts become more 

 frc<|iieiit. Meanwhile we still await a really good 

 tale of the campaign in the Carolinas, of the Cow- 

 pens, Morgan, and Tarleton. 



II 



