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Belford's Magazine, Vol II, No. 10, March 1889
How this condition affects us every citizen can realize if he will reflect. The writer of this lives in a quiet valley of Ohio. He never would know that a political government exists except for the assessor and collector. His police consists of a revolver, a shot-gun, and four dogs. Wrong-doers may threaten his life, restrain his liberty, enter his stables at night, or his house at any hour, and, so far as government goes, he is his own police.
So much for our political structure. How is it with the corporations? They are with him at all hours. He cannot sell a grain of wheat nor an ounce of meat without their consent and toll. The fuel he burns has its toll, that is an extortion. The clothes he wears, the food he eats, the oil he burns by night, the glass that gives him light by day, the walls that shelter him, the shingles or slate upon the roof – in a word, all that he has to purchase or use, pays an uncalled-for tribute to extortion and monopoly.
The political structure could be annihilated, and the citizen would not know of its disappearance but for the absence of assessor and collector, and for the fact learned from the press.
This is the condition of the dweller in a rural district. The denizen of a town is not much better off. If he comes in contact with the political structure at any point, it is to his injury. He is taxed enormously to drain, pave, and light the streets. The draining is a source of peril to health, the pavements are infamous, while the light only makes darkness visible. So far as the police is concerned, it is a political body, organized and used to further the ends of professional politicians. The citizen is in more peril from the club-inclined police than he is from thieves and ruffians.
A most startling illustration of the subserviency of the political power to the moneyed combinations incorporated to ride, booted and spurred, over popular rights, as Jefferson expressed it, was given by the late tramway strikes at New York. When the conductors and drivers threw up their employment because of the starvation wages and overwork decreed by the combine, thereby putting a stop to all transportation, instead of arresting the presidents and directors, and fetching them into court to show cause why their charter should not be taken from them for a failure to fulfil their duty to the public, the entire police force was taken from duty to the public and put under control of these corporations. The rebellious laborers were clubbed into submission, while for a week New-Yorkers were forced either to walk or to trust their necks to those artfully constructed death-traps called the elevated roads.
We are not siding in this one way or the other. It may be that the laborers were all in the wrong and the corporations right, or the case may have been the reverse. To decide this is precisely what we want in a legal tribunal commanding the respect of the public. This is not to be had. The policeman's club is in the pay and under the control of the corporations, and it decides.
All these comments will be decried as unpatriotic. Patriotism with us is something akin to the love a mother has for a sick or crippled child. We are like beggars on the highways of the world, exhibiting our sores to excite, not pity, but – heaven save the mark! – admiration. Of course we cannot be expected to cure cancers that we boast of.
In the space allotted us for a review it is impossible to do justice to Professor Bryce's entertaining ignorance. His book is an amusing one, not only because the author is clever in his way of expressing himself, but because we take a strange delight in hearing opinions about ourselves and our institutions. In his first introductory sentences the author says: "'What do you think of our institutions?' is the question addressed to the European traveller in the United States by every chance acquaintance." The citizen who puts this question little notes that he is making confession of the melancholy fact that our so-called "institutions" are open to doubt. It is not complimentary to our national character that we hang with breathless interest upon the opinion and judgment of any chance foreigner regarding what we are wont to assert, among ourselves, is simply perfect.
Kady, by Patience Stapleton (Belford, Clarke & Co.). – The fetid realism of recent American fiction – the realism which, fortunately for the honor of human nature, is wholly unreal – has become fatally tiresome from persistent reiteration of one theme. Even the most morbid readers must in time weary of an endless sequence of immoralities, all of the same family, and all whitened with the scales of the same moral leprosy. When the Saxon mind descends to sensualism it becomes merely gross and brutish; for it lacks the airy sprightliness of Latin licentiousness which turns evil to gayety and compels a smile at the corners of the mouth, even while the forehead corrugates into the frown of reprobation. American blood is essentially moral, and when overheated becomes clogged and thickened, producing the antic vagaries of delirium in the oppressed brain. An American cannot be just a little wicked, as a Frenchman can. He must be sound-hearted and clean-thoughted, or he must throw off all pretence to decency and descend into the sheer obscene. This is why American erotic fiction is hysterically immoral and not delicately suggestive, and why, instead of the filmy double entendre, which you can innocently laugh at for its wit, or, with more hardihood, enjoy for its tingling spice, we have the bald, unclothed picture, whose fiery coloring and sharp outline leave no chance for doubt as to its meaning.
When this order of fiction was flung, naked and ogling, into the midst of an astonished public, there was a gasp of surprise and a general halt of indecision; while, like the monkey burned with hot molasses candy, the common countenance was petrified into a curious mixture of horror and delight. Like a hanging, a dissection, or the details of a murder, it has presented a fascination for a large number of minds; but if there were to be a man hanged every day in each of the city squares, it would not be long before people passing by would say to each other, "Pooh! only a hanging! revolting business anyway!" and walk on without so much as a second glance. And so it is, or is getting to be, with that class of fiction which has only the erotic for its cause of being. When volume after volume, issuing from the press, offers as a central point and motive a microscopic analysis of the animal side of human nature, taking for text that all men are libidinous and all women unchaste in various degrees, the ordinary reader, seeking merely for amusement, at length finds himself suffocated in the steam of moral turpitude, and craves for a breath of purer, cleaner air. Such an atmosphere, cold, fresh, and bracing as the winds which blow over the mountain region where its scene is chiefly laid, surrounds this sweetest and most delightful of recent novels, "Kady."
"Kady" is the work of a mind at once refined and vigorous. The author labors at the exposition of no trite moral. There is not a line of preaching in the book, and yet it would be a hardened nature which could rise from reading it, with his heart full of the simple nobility of Abner Clark, and commit a mean action. To recognize the reality of such a character as that of the old pioneer, simple, uneducated, and rude, yet, in the inborn impulses of his nature, nobly delicate, loftily honorable, good in the best and manliest sense – to recognize that such men have lived and do live, is to put aside into the limbo of the vacuous all philosophies of negation and sophistries of pessimism. Abner Clark is unquestionably one of the few grand creations of American fiction. He is religious, but his religion is such that an infidel might respect it. It is the broad and simple creed of love – love, with its concomitants of charity, forgiveness, and wide sympathy. The simple prayer which he offers up over the grave of the artist Harrison's mother is a masterpiece. "An' we who must keep on in the round of toil and trouble need not wish her back, who was so weary with work and pain. The hand that reared these mount'ins, that laid the lake, that colors the sunset sky, is reached down to human creeturs, to the weakest or the strongest, and takes them into His keepin'. There's a dreary life here and a happy life hereafter; … and there's a home for us all beyond these mount'ins tall."
It is the religion of nature, the simple faith of the patriarchs of old, the belief that finds its strongest support in a noble pantheism, in the love of the Creator's handiwork, in a perception of the Omnipotent in the marvellous grandeur of material beauty. And yet this old man is neither superstitious nor weak. In order to save his young son from moral ruin and the clutches of card-sharpers, he can drink and gamble – aye, and play a game of poker like a bunco-steerer, and beat roguery before its very eyes. This game of poker, by the way, is one of the gems of the book. How the author, whose refinement of mind and heart is visible in every line of the whole story, has been able to study such scenes and such personages as this poker-party and these border roughs to such wonderful purpose, it is hard to understand. The whole incident stands out with the stern light and shadow of Salvator. It is almost brutal in its realism, but is touchingly relieved by the simple remorse of the misguided son and the rugged nobility of his father.
"I come here ternight ter save my boy an' teach him a lesson… Now git in the boat," said Abner, "and I, a father of sixty, will row his son, a drunkard and a gambler, home."
"Oh, father," sobbed the miserable boy, "I – I never can forgive myself! I will never touch cards again!" At the shore his father laid his hand on Seeley's shoulder. "Seeley, I love ye too well to be mad with ye, but try to take the decent road, an' foller it straight."
The old man's death in the pursuit of his duty, the single word, "Forgive," to his weak and repentant son, the wild grief of his daughter Kady, touch the very centre of true pathos. Kady herself, poor, loving, wild little Kady, half savage and true woman, is a beautiful character. Greatly tempted, misunderstood, slandered, and neglected, she never, by one weak or wilful act, loses the entire sympathy of the reader. As truthful in her character of border heroine as M'liss, Kady is a much more touching and lovable creation, without the occasional repulsive traits of Bret Harte's portraiture. As her father is a true and noble gentleman, despite the accidents of birth and environment, so is his daughter, under her uncouth garb and rude speech, a true and noble woman.
Clopper, with his serene optimism, Leddy, his wife, Miss Pinkham and the cap-border, Levi Bean, Tilford Harrison the egotistical and self-persecuting artist with his miserable family, the Dennisons, Louisy and Emmeline, Madam Ferris, and Aunt Mary – a whole gallery of masterly portraits, are all instinct with life, all painted from evident sittings of originals.
If there be any marked defect in the book it is in the excess of dialect and the thinness of the background of more cultivated life. It is much to say that this book, whose style is chiefly dialect, rarely ceases to charm and never tires. The author, whose pen has so long run in the uncouth speech of this border district, occasionally forgets her own English and drops a rude construction of sentence, or a primitive term into her own lucid phrases. But these slips are rare, and it is almost hypercriticism to notice them.
On all accounts "Kady" is one of the most remarkable books of the time. Purely American, without one taint of animalism though dealing with the most primitive humanity, true, sweet, and yet masculine in its power, it is a work which will take its place in the literature of the country as a model which cannot be too closely studied or too much admired.
'Twixt Love and Law: A novel, by Annie Jenness Miller (Belford, Clarke & Co.). – Literature which neither refreshes, amuses, nor instructs has no proper place in the world of letters; and assuredly that class of literature which enervates the mind and beckons beyond the noon-mark of propriety has no rights which the critic or the moralist is bound to respect. It is a marked characteristic of that order of recent fiction which takes for text the more or less unlawful relations of the sexes, that the style should be punctuated with shrieks, and the movement be a series of hysterical writhings. A woman with keen feelings does not, at every small anticlimax of her existence, perform a hand-spring and somersault as a means of giving vent to her emotions. Neither does she go about with a nose reddened with weeping, exploding in vociferous adjectives as a means of expressing her grief. "To be always and everywhere starved! starved! starved!" wails Mrs. Miller's heroine, as a sort of footnote to a proposal of marriage which she has just declined. "Oh, how cruel it is!" Thereupon "she shivered in the clutch of her despair, and, moaning, threw herself face downward upon the bosom of Mother Earth," very much to the amaze of the rejected suitor, who promptly picks her up and "holds her against his breast." She is intense, superlatively intense. "Her white bosom tossed and rose and fell; the burnished masses of her hair escaped and rioted on the midnight air. 'Spare me! spare me! Alex! Alex! Alex!' Out of the unyielding density of the night a voice of ecstasy breathed her name." A meeting takes place in this "unyielding density" with "Alex," a married man. The heroine being in love with him and he with her, it follows as a necessary element in this class of fiction that the wife should be all that is mean, evil, shrewish, and generally detestable. In such a state of affairs a wife is a difficult problem, a nuisance, and yet very useful; for if there were no wife to interpose her uncomfortable personality between the lovers, there would be no reason for all these meetings in the "unyielding density," no exclamatory passages, no daring escapades along the very verge of the questionable, and, hence, no novel – which, all things considered, might not be so great a misfortune after all. In the course of this story, which includes much outcry, many combats with tempestuous passion, some sacrifices, a trial for attempted murder, and a divorce, the unpleasant marital impediment is comfortably put out of the way, and the lovers are safely married.
"'Twixt Love and Law" is one of those books, "not wicked, but unwise," which, whatever their ostensible moral may be, add to the perplexity and difficulty of social adjustment. Admitting that our marriage and divorce laws are unjust and ineffectual, still, to bring contempt, open or implied, upon the marriage relation, can only impede, not advance, a rational solution of the question. In nine cases out of ten vanity and loose morals are the primary causes of marital unfaithfulness in desire or act. In writing such a book as "'Twixt Love and Law," clever and often brilliant as it is, the author has not used her graceful pen and clear head to the best interests of her sex.
THE APPEAL
Cold, bitter cold beneath the wild March moon,The winter snow lies on my frozen breast;And o'er my head the cypress branches croonA sad and ceaseless dirge, and break my rest.I hear the bell chime in the dark church tower,The rising wind, a passer's hasty tread;But no voice wakes the silence, hour by hour,Among the uncompanionable dead.Perchance they lie in deep, unconscious calm,Regretting nothing in the world above;Alas! for me it has not lost its charm —There is no peace where thou art not, my love!Oh! bid me come to thee, and I will riseFrom my unquiet couch and steal to thine,And touch thy cheek, and kiss thy sleeping eyes,And clasp thee, as of old, till morning shine!And I will murmur in thy drowsy earsSweet utterances of love and olden song,Till thou shalt half awake in blissful tears,And cry "My love, why hast thou staid so long?"Charles Lotin Hildreth.A COVENANT WITH DEATH. 1
CHAPTER I
"O Death in Life! the days that are no more."It would have been no surprise to his friends had Loyd Morton speedily followed his young wife to the grave. Their brief union had been a very communion of souls – one of those rare experiences in wedlock for jealousy of which Destiny may almost be pardoned. Small wonder, therefore, that his grief was of that speechless description which "whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break." For a time it was thought he could not survive his dumb despair; or, if he did, that melancholia would claim him an easy victim. It is needless to affirm that he escaped the wreck of both life and reason, since the existence of this chronicle attests so much.
The manner of his escape does not appear; though it was astutely surmised, and perhaps with some show of probability, that, being an expert and practitioner in disorders of the nervous system, he healed himself, albeit physicians of experience may entertain contrary views concerning the feasibility of the feat. At all events, he came forth to face his world again, a sad, pallid being indued with indomitable perseverance and fortitude; more than ever zealous in the discharge of his engagements; as never before devoted to his profession. But a sympathetic eye could not fail to detect the feverish abandonment of self, the positively voracious hungering for constant activity, which were in themselves a pathetic commentary upon the frame of mind in which his bereavement had left him.
He had become the wraith-like semblance of the original young Doctor Morton, once so buoyant, so pampered by favoring Fate – in a word, so worthy of righteous envy. Alas! what eternities to him were those hours of lonely seclusion when there were no visits to pay and no clients to awaken the sepulchral echoes of his house with summons at the bell – dark hours of nothingness, blank eras of forlorn distress!
Yet, let there be no suspicion that Loyd Morton's was an unmanly grief; it was no more a lachrymose distemper than it was a stubborn setting of his face against his lot. His sorrow was far too genuine to be self-conscious, and, if he brooded in his despair, it was simply because something had gone out of his life infinitely more precious than life itself; something that he would have given his life to recover, since absolute annihilation seemed to him preferable to this existing condition of death in life.
His love had been a first, all-absorbing passion; it had introduced into his hitherto prosaic existence a light and genial warmth that had set the soft glow of the rose upon its humblest attributes; it had afforded him an object to live for, a goal worthy his ambition, and had filled the void of indefinable longing with that sense of completeness which is ever the result of a perfect alliance between sympathy and sincerity of purpose.
He had met his affinity during his student-days; had wooed, and won, and married her in the first flush of that youthful affection. Possibly the old-time shades of Stuttgart lent a quaint and fascinating glamour to the courtship; but, if glamour there were, it became the permanent atmosphere that hallowed their marital relations when the work of life began at home, stripped of all romantic association. Indeed, their honeymoon never waned to setting; it simply suffered total eclipse.
It was fortunate that, at the period of his overwhelming bereavement, the young physician chanced to be in vogue. American nervous systems are notoriously more subject to disorder than any on the face of the earth; and he who ministers successfully to, or rather deciphers cleverly, these occult riddles of the human anatomy of the West, is not only an exceedingly busy, but an eminently fortunate, man. Day and night he is at the beck and call of those whose unstrung nerves require tuning; while, if his patience is forced to pay the penalty of his devotion, the shade of Midas, by way of recompense, seems indefatigable in its superintendence of the filling of his coffers.
To repute and popularity had Loyd Morton attained in an exceptional degree; and, for the reason that a host of wayward nervous systems could not be induced to respect the season of his grief, he was fairly dragged out of his seclusion, and made to identify himself with the real or imaginary woes of his patients. And it was fortunate that it was so, since on this account, only in the solitude of those chambers, about which clung the memory of his lost one like a benison, had he opportunity to listen to the lament of his anguished heart. And the monotonous cry of that heart was ever, "Paula, Paula, Paula! My wife!"
Surely there could have been no rest for her soul if that wail of affliction penetrated the celestial sphere to the enjoyment of which her blameless life entitled her. Far from contributing to her repose, such grieving emphasis must have fettered her spirit to earth.
"I feel," he told himself at the close of his first year of widowhood, "as though I was environed by a sere wilderness, over whose trackless wastes I must trudge until I meet the ashy horizon and find the end. No ray of light, no star to twinkle hope; always these weeping clouds of grizzled pallor! Only one comfort is vouchsafed me – fatigue. Fortunately, fatigue means sleep, and sleep oblivion!"
Lost in dreary revery, he sat by the window of his study one April evening, with the melancholy spring-tide gloaming about him. A nesting-bird twittered, and the scent of the sodden earth filtered in at the half-open casement.
Two years ago that day he had watched a German mother raise the bridal wreath from her daughter's brow, the happy ceremonial over, and had listened, as in a rapturous dream, to the words: "She is thine. Take her; but, oh! my son, guard, guide, and cherish her, for the sake of her fond mother, when the boundless sea shall roll between us!"
One year agone to an hour, and in the dismal after-glow of a rainy sunset, he had stood beside the open grave, his agonized heart-throbs echoing the wet clods as they fell upon the casket that contained the last fragment of his shattered hopes – his broken idol screened from his yearning gaze by hideous glint of plate and polished wood.
Nuptial and burial rites celebrated with the self-same ghastly flowers within a twelve-month! A wreath for a bride, a chaplet for a corpse, fragrant tokens for the quick and the dead – and so the chapter ended!
The monotonous drip of the eaves, the fitful sough of the miasmatic wind, the odor of the humid garden-plot, the blood-red hem of the leaden clouds whose skirts trailed languidly along the western horizon – all, all so vividly recalled that grievous hour of sepulture, so painfully accentuated its anniversary, that, in very desolation of soul, he exclaimed,
"My God! how unutterably lonely and wretched I am! What would I not give for one word, one glimpse, for the slightest assurance that we are not doomed to eternal separation; that the closing of the eyes in death does not signify instant annihilation!"
The sudden clang of the office-bell interrupted his utterance and almost deprived him of breath, so significant seemed the punctuation to his thought. He rose hastily and, contrary to his custom, preceded the servant through the hall.
Upon throwing open the outer door, he found himself confronted by a woman, closely veiled and clothed in black, her tall and slender figure standing forth in strong relief against the lurid gloom of the evening.
For an instant silence prevailed, save for the retreating footsteps of the servant as he returned to his quarters.
"You are Doctor Loyd Morton," the woman began in a tone low yet perfectly distinct, a tone of assertion rather than inquiry. "Can you give me a few moments' consultation?"
"These are my office-hours, madam," he replied, a feeling of mingled curiosity and repulsion taking possession of him.
"I know; but I am told that you are in great request. Shall we be undisturbed?"
"Quite so. Will you come in?"
He stepped aside and she entered, raising her veil as she did so, though the darkness of the hall prevented his determining what manner of countenance she wore. The twilight that penetrated the office through uncurtained windows, however, discovered a delicate, pale face framed in tendrils of soft chestnut hair and alight with eyes of the same indescribable tint. It was not a strictly beautiful face, according to the canons of beauty, yet it was one of those faces one glance at which invites another, until the spell of fascination claims the beholder.
