A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays Part 34

_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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionately 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 cla.s.s, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than G.o.d 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 pa.s.sions 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 Delcla.s.se paid for Dumas' great creation, "Marguerite Gauthier." These people really expect the pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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. n.o.body ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes.

Sometimes it comes in the form of a.r.s.enic, 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 t.i.tle:

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.

Hoa.r.s.e 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-G.o.d, 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.tons, or to b.u.t.tons 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, G.o.d, 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, G.o.d, that I should suffer Because of the way a little finger moved.

Mr. Crane's verselets are ill.u.s.trated 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 Maupa.s.sant's.

_Pittsburg Leader_, June 3, 1899

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

"Blix," it is with a.s.sorted 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s 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.