Down at Caxton's 2

Down at Caxton's 2

Strange as it may seem, the knowledge of his wonderful power of

story-telling came late and in an accidental way. It is best described

in his own words. “Story-writing,” said the Colonel, “is the last

thing for me in literature. I had published two or three volumes on

English literature, and in conjunction with a friend had written a

life of Alexander Stephens, and also a book on American and European

literature, but had no idea of story-writing for money. Two or three

stories of mine had found their way into the papers before I left

Georgia. I had been a professor of English literature in Georgia, but

during the war I took a school of boys. I removed to Baltimore and took

forty boys with me and continued my school. There was in Baltimore, in

1870, a periodical called the _Southern Magazine_. The first nine of my

Dukesborough Tales were contributed to that magazine. These fell into

the hands of the editor of _Harper’s Magazine_, who asked me what I got

for them. I said not a cent, and he wanted to know why I had not sent

them to him. ‘Neelers Peeler’s Conditions’ was the first story for

which I got pay. It was published in the _Century_, over the signature

of Philemon Perch. Dr. Holland told Mr. Gilder to tell that man to

write under his own name, adding that he himself had made a mistake in

writing under a pseudonym. Sydney Lanier urged me to write, and said

if I would do so he would get the matter in print for me. So he took

‘Neelers Peeler’s Conditions,’ and it brought me eighty dollars. I was

surprised that my stories were considered of any value. I withdrew from

teaching about six years ago, and since that time have devoted myself

to authorship. I have never put a word in my book that I have not heard

the people use, and very few that I have not used myself. Powelton,

Ga., is my Dukesborough. I was born fourteen miles from there.

 

“Of the female characters that I have created, Miss Doolana Lines was

my favorite, while Mr. Bill Williams is my favorite among the male

characters. I started Doolana to make her mean and stingy like her

father, but I hadn’t written a page before she wrenched herself out

of my hands. She said to me, ‘I am a woman, and you shall not make me

mean.’ These stories are all of Georgia as it was before the war. In

the hill country the institution of slavery was very different from

what it was in the rice region or near the coast. Do you know the

Georgia negro has five times the sense of the South Carolina negro?

Why? Because he has always been near his master, and their relations

are closer. My father’s negroes loved him, and he loved them, and if a

negro child died upon the place my mother wept for it. Some time ago I

went to the old place, and an old negro came eight miles, walked all

the way, to see me.

 

“He got to the house before five o’clock in the morning, and opened the

shutters while I was asleep. With a cry he rushed into the room. ‘Oh,

Massa Dick.’ We cried in each other’s arms. We had been boys together.

One of my slaves is now a bishop—Bishop Lucius Holsey, one of the most

eloquent men in Georgia.”

 

These charming bits of autobiography show us the sterling nature of

Malcolm Johnston, a nature at once cheerful, kind and loving. It is

the object of such natures, in the pessimistic wayfares of life, to

make friends, illuminating them with sunshine and tickling them with

laughter.

 

 

 

 

MARION CRAWFORD.

 

 

In front of the Ara Coeli I stood. A swarthy Italian was telling of

the dramatic death of Cola di Rienzi. His English was lightly worn,

but it seemed to please his audience, and it was for that purpose

they had paid their lire. The crazy-quilt language of the cicerone

and his audacious way of handling history, made him cut an attractive

figure in the eyes of most tourists, whose desires are amusement rather

than study. As a type, to use a phrase borrowed from the school of

psychological novelism, he was a study. To the student Rome is a city

of absorbing interest, to the ordinary American bird of passage a dull

place. It all depends on your point of view. If you are a scholar, a

collector of old lace, or a vandal, Rome is your happy hunting ground.

If these pursuits do not interest you, Roman beggars with all sorts

and conditions of diseases, sometimes by nature, mostly by art, Roman

fleas, and the gaunt ghosts of the Campagna quickly drive you from the

capital of the Cæsars and Popes. A few other annoyances might be added,

such as sour wine, whose mist fumes are not to be shriven by your

bottle-let of eau de Cologne, garlic on the fringe of decay, and the

provoking smell of salt fish in the last stage of decomposition. But

you have come to Rome; it is a name to conjure with, and despite the

drawbacks, you must have a glimpse, an ordinary bowing acquaintance,

with the famed old dame. At the office, an English office, in the

Piazza di Spagna, you have asked for a “droll guide.” Who could listen

to a scholarly one amid such active drawbacks as wine, fleas and fish?

Michael Angelo Orazio Pantacci is your man. What do you care for

good English? Did you not leave New York to leave it behind? What do

you care for Roman history? Pantacci is your man, and his lecture on

Cola di Rienzi is a masterpiece. A stranger joined our little crowd.

Pantacci at that moment had attained his descriptive high-water mark.

His pose and voice were touchingly dramatic. Cola was, as he expressed

it, “to perish.” The stranger smiled and passed on. His smile was a

composite affair. It was easy to see in it Michael Angelo’s historical

duplicity and our ignorant simplicity. The stranger was tall, with the

shoulders slightly stooping, a nose as near an approach to the Grecian

as an American may come, a heavy black mustache, ruddy cheeks, that

whispered of English food mellowed with the glowing Chianti. Who is

that man? I said to my companion, whose eyes had followed the stranger

rather than Pantacci. “That,” said he, “is Marion Crawford, the author

of the Saracenesca books. You remember reading them at Albano.” Tell

me something about him. He is a very clever man. Cola has perished;

let us leave Pantacci. On the way to Cordietti’s tell me something of

his life. He knows how to tell a story, an art hardly to be met with

in contemporary fiction. Fiction has abrogated to herself the whole

domain of life, and thus the art of telling a story for the story’s

sake is lost. Fiction has a mission. She freights herself with all

isms. Scott, Manzoni, even the great wizard of Spanish fiction, could

they live again, were failures. Introspection is the cult, and, happily

for their fame, they knew nothing of it. These great masters told us

how scenes of life were enacted. Why, they left to the inquisitive

and later-day brood of commentators. Since then the all absorbing

scientific spirit prevails, and we moderns brush away the delightful

humor of Dickens for the analytical puzzles of Henry James; the keen

satire of Thackeray for the coxcomberies of George Meredith. Fairy cult

interests none, modern children are ancient men. Scepticism is rampant,

and the cause of it is, in a great manner, due to the modern novelist.

This product of the 19th century world-spirit coolly tells us that

romance lies dead. Realism has taken her place. If we are to believe

the theories of its votaries, it is without an ideal—a mere anatomical

transcript of man. What this theory leads to is well illustrated by

the gutter filth of Zola and Catulle Mendes. It makes novel writing

a trade. One ceases to be astonished at the output, if he thoroughly

grasps the difference between a tradesman and an artist. Trade is a

word much used by realists. Grant Allen, writing of that realistic

necromancer, Guy de Maupassant, has nothing apter to define his

position than the phrase “he knows his trade.” In point of fact, Grant

Allen enunciates a truth in this phrase, one that might be carried

still further, by saying that his whole school are journeymen laborers,

tradesmen, if you prefer, turning out work, tasteless and crude, at the

bidding of the erubescent young person of the period. It is readily

assumed that work of this kind is not, despite the word-jugglery of

their school, realism. It does not deal with the true man, but with

a phrase, and that abnormal. A better phrase in use in speaking of

the works of this school is, “literature of disease.” The artist who

lives must have a model, and that we call the ideal. The nearer he

approaches this the more lasting his work. All the great artists had

ideals. Workmen may be guided by the rule of thumb. The first lesson a

great artist learns is, “The art that merely imitates can only produce

a corpse; it lacks the vital spark, the soul, which is the ideal, and

which is necessary in order to create a living organic reality that

will quicken genius and arouse enthusiasm throughout the ages.” The

gulf between the trade-novelist and the artist-novelist is of vital

importance. The former believes that art is simply imitation, the

latter, that art is interpretation. One is a stone-cutter, the other a

sculptor.

 

Crawford’s canon is that art is interpretative, not imitative, and,

moreover, he has a story to tell and tells it for the story’s sake. He

has no affinity with that school so pointedly described by the Scotch

novelist, Barrie, as the one “which tells, in three volumes, how Hiram

K. Wilding trod on the skirt of Alice M. Sparkins without anything

coming of it.” “Cordietti’s,” said my friend, “give the order and I

will tell you what I know of Crawford.” Paulo, said I to the waiter,

some Chianti, and—well, a pigeon. “Crawford,” said my friend, “was born

in Rome about thirty-five years ago. His career has been a strange one,

full of life. His early years were spent in Rome, where his father was

known as a sculptor, his boyhood in the vicinity of Union Square, his

early manhood in England and India. In the latter country he was the

editor, proof-reader, typesetter of a small journal in the natives’

interest. As such he was a thorn to the notorious freak, Blavatsky.

Crawford is an American by inheritance, an Italian by breeding, an

Englishman by training, an Indian by virtue of writing about India

with the knowledge of a native. In 1873, by the financial panic, Mrs.

Crawford lost her large fortune, and Marion was forced to shift for

himself. He became a journalist, and as such wandered over most of

the interesting part of the globe. On his return to New York, at the

request of his uncle, Sam Ward, the epicurean, who had discerned his

kinsman’s rare power of story-telling, he wrote his first book, Mr.

Isaacs. It was a success. Of the writing of that book, Crawford has

told us it was “very curious. I did not imagine that I possessed a

faculty for story-writing, and I prepared for a career very different

from the career of a novelist. Yet I have found that all my early life

was an unconscious preparation for that work. My boyhood was spent

in Rome, where my parents had lived for many years. There I was put

through the usual classical training—no, it was not the usual one, for

the classics are much better taught in Italy than in this country. A

boy in Italy by the time he is twelve is taught to speak Latin, and his

training is so thorough that he can read it with ease. From Rome I went

to Cambridge, England, and remained at the university several years.

Then I studied for a couple of years at the German universities. During

this time I went in for the sciences, and I expected to devote myself

to scientific work. Finally I went off to the East, where I did a good

deal of observing, and continued my studies of the Oriental languages,

in which I had taken considerable interest. It was while I was in the

East that I met Jacobs, the hero of Mr. Isaacs. Many of the events I

have recorded in Mr. Isaacs were the actual experiences of Jacobs.”

 

The writing of his first novel occupied the months of May and June,

1882; it was published the same year, and at once established its

author in the front rank of living American writers of fiction. Since

then Crawford has written twenty volumes of fiction. Crawford is frank

and he tells us how he manages to produce in a few years the amount

of an ordinary lifetime. “By living in the open air, by roughing it

among the Albanian mountaineers, wandering by the sunny olive slopes

and vineyards of Calabria, and by taking hard work and pot luck with

the native sailors on long voyages in their feluccas,” are the means

of the novelist to hold health and make his pen work a laxative

employment. In these picturesque journeys, he lays the foundation of

his stories, makes the plots and evolves the characters. He does not

believe in Trollope’s idea of sitting down, pen in hand, and keep on

sitting until at its own wild will the story takes ink. The story in

these excursions has been fully fashioned, and it becomes but a matter

of penmanship to record it. How quickly this is done may be seen from

the rapid writing of the novelist, which averages 6,000 words the

working day. This rapid composition has its defects, defects that are

in some measure compensated by the photographic views of the life and

manners of the people. These views are in the rough, but they are truer

than when toned down. Poetry needs paring. The greatest novels have

been those that came like Crawford’s, fresh from the brain, and were

hastily despatched to the printer. Scott did not mope over the sheets.