On the Lightship Part 1

On the Lightship.

by Herman Knickerbocker Viele.

INTRODUCTION

"On Board the Light-Ship" is the t.i.tle--retained in loving deference to his intention--that would have been given to this collection of stories by their author. Had Viele lived but a little while longer, he would have justified it by placing them in a setting characteristically fantastic and characteristically original.

He had planned to frame them in an encircling story describing, and duly accounting for, the chance a.s.semblage aboard a vessel of that unusual type of a heterogeneous company; and--having in his own fanciful way convincingly disposed of conditions not precisely in line with the strictest probability--so to dovetail the several stories into their encirclement that the telling of them, in turn, would have come easily and naturally from those upcasts of the sea.

It was a project wholly after his own heart. I can imagine the pleasure that he would have found in working his machinery--always out of sight, and always running with a silent smoothness--for getting together in that queer place his company of story-tellers. He would have used, of course, the Light-ship and the light-keepers as his firmly real ground-work. Ship and crew would have been presented in a matter-of-fact way, in keeping with their recognized matter-of-fact existence, that subtly would have instilled the habit of belief into the minds of his readers: and so would have led them onward softly, being in a way hypnotized, to an equal belief--as he slipped lightly along, with seemingly the same simplicity and the same ingenuousness--in what a.s.suredly would not have been matter-of-fact explanations of how those story-tellers happened to be at large upon the ocean before they were taken on board!

That far I can follow him: but the play of fancy that he would have put into his explanations--as he accounted in all manner of quite probable impossible ways for such flotsam being adrift, and for its salvage aboard the Light-ship--would have been so wholly the play of his own alert individual fancy that it is beyond my ken. All that I can be sure of--and be very sure of--is that his explanations of that marine phenomenon, and of the coming of its several members up out of the sea and over the ship's rail, would have been very delightfully and very speciously satisfying. That the explanations might have been less convincing when critically a.n.a.lyzed is a negligible detail: the only essential requirement of a fantastic tale being that it shall be convincing as it goes along.

Even my bald outline of this story--that now never will be told--shows how harmoniously in keeping it is with Viele's literary method. He delighted in creating delicately fantastic conditions lightly bordering upon the impossible; and, having created them, in so re-solving their elements into the seemingly commonplace and the apparently probable that the fine art with which he worked his trans.m.u.tations was veiled by the very perfection of its accomplishment.

Such was the method that he employed in the making of what I cherish as his master-piece: "The Inn of the Silver Moon"--a story told so simply and so directly, and with such a color of engaging frankness, that each turn in its series of airily-adjusted impossible situations is accepted with an unquestioning pleasure; and that leaves upon the mind of the reader--even when released from the spell that compels belief throughout the reading of it--a lasting impression of verity. It was the method, precisely, of an exquisite form of literary art that has not flowered more perfectly, I hold with submission, since the time of the so-called Romantic School in Germany: when de la Motte Fouque created "Undine,"

and Eichendorff created the "Good-for-Nothing," and all the world went at a gay quick-step to bright soft music that had been silent for nearly three hundred years.

Beyond recognizing the fact that it is of the same genre, to cla.s.s "The Inn of the Silver Moon" with "Undine" is to belittle it by an over-claim; but to cla.s.s it with "Aus dem Leben eines Tongenichts" is to make a comparison in its favor: since Eichendorff's happy ending is a little forced and a little tawdry; while Viele's happy ending is as inevitable as it is gracious--a result flowing smoothly from all the precedent conditions, and so deftly revealed at the crisic culminating moment that a perfecting finish is given to the delightingly perfect logic of its surprise.

The manner of the making of the two stories is identical; and so is their peculiar charm. In his preface to his translation of the "Good-for-Nothing," forty years and more ago, Charles G.o.dfrey Leland wrote: "Like a bird, the youthful hero flits along with his music over Austria and Italy--as semi-mysterious in his unpremeditated course, fed by chance, and as pleasing in his artless character"; which is close to being--if for artless we read sophisticated artlessness--an accurate description of the joint journeying of _Monsieur Vifour_ and _Mademoiselle de Belle Isle_. And Leland added: "It is strikingly characteristic of the whole book that it abounds in adroitly-hidden touches of art which produce an effect without betraying effort on the part of the writer. We are willing to declare that we never read a story so light and airy, or one betraying so little labor; but critical study soon tells us _quant' e difficile questa facilita_! All this ease is the grace of a true genius, who makes no false steps and has carefully estimated his own powers." That description fits "The Inn of the Silver Moon" to a hair!

In part, it applies only a little less closely to "Myra of the Pines"--in which is much the same gay irresponsibility of motive and of action; the same light touch, so sure that each delicate point is made with a firm clearness; and the same play--save for the jarring note struck by the "pig-man"--of a gently keen and a very subtle humour: that maintains farce on the plane of high comedy by hiding artful contrivance under a seeming artlessness; and that sparklingly crystallizes into turns of phrase so seemingly spontaneous in their accurate appositeness that the look of accident is given to them by their carefully perfected felicity.

"The Last of the Knickerbockers" has this same humour and this same happiness of phrasing; and in its serious midst is set the fantastic episode of "The Yellow Sleigh"--that needs only to be amplified to become another "Inn of the Silver Moon." But there its resemblance to Viele's other stories ends. Least of all has "The Inn of the Silver Moon" anything in common with it. That delectable thistle-down romance goes trippingly over sunbeams in a straightaway course that has no intricacies: with all the interest constantly focussed upon a heroine and a hero to whom all the other characters are minor and accessory; and with never a break in the light-hearted note that is struck at the start. "The Last of the Knickerbockers," a blend of comedy and semi-tragedy, is far away from all this--both in spirit and in form. It is the most largely and the most seriously conceived of Viele's works: not a romance, but a novel with a substantial plot carefully developed in intricate action; and while the main interest is centred--as properly it should be--upon a wholly charming heroine and a wholly satisfying hero, these pleasing young people are made to know, and to keep, their place in a crowd of strong characters strongly drawn.

It is a good story to read simply as a story; but it is more than that, it is a doc.u.ment: an ambered preservation of a phase of New York society that already almost has vanished, and that soon will have vanished absolutely--when the last Mrs. and Mr. Bella Ruggles shall have closed to decayed aristocracy the last shabbily pretentious boarding house in the last dingy Kenilworth Place; and when decayed aristocracy, so evicted, shall be forced to dwell in apartment-houses of the bell-and-speaking-tube type, and to dine (as _Alida_ prophetically put it) "at Italian tables-d'hote--like the Cafe Chianti, in grandfather's old house, where they have music and charge only fifty cents, including wine"!

So true a presentment as this story is of New York's old-time strait faiths and straiter social customs will outlive long, I am confident, the great ma.s.s of the fiction of Viele's day. It will be actively alive while even a faint memory of those faiths and customs is cherished by living people; and when all of such ancients shall have retired (with the final befitting dignity attendant upon a special license) to their family homes beneath the shadows of St. Mark's and Trinity, carrying their memories with them, it will become, as I have said, a doc.u.ment: preserving the traditions which otherwise would have been buried with them; and so linking permanently--as they linked temporarily--New York's ever-increasingly ardent present with its ever-paling less strenuous past.

As to "The Inn of the Silver Moon," I can see no end to the lastingness of it: since in the very essence of it is that which holds humanity with an enduringly binding spell. The luring charm of a happy love-story--charged with gay fantasy and epigrammatic grace and gently pungent humour--is a charm perpetual and irresistible: that must hold and bind while ever the world goes happily in ever-fresh sunshine, and happily has in it ever-fresh young hearts.

THOMAS A. JANVIER.

NEW YORK, _June 20, 1909_.

THE STORY OF IGNATIUS, THE ALMONER

Though this happened at the Butler Penfields' garden party, the results concern Miss Mabel Dunbar more than any one else, except, perhaps, one other. Mabel had been invited, as she was invited everywhere, partly because she was a very pretty girl, and helped to make things go, and partly through public policy.

"So long as the dear child remains unmarried," Mrs. Fessenden had said, "we must continue to buy our tea from her."

For Mabel owed her amber draperies to the tea she sold and everybody bought because her grandmother had lived on Washington Square. In society, to speak of tea was to speak of Mabel Dunbar; to look in Mabel's deep brown eyes was to think of tea, and, incidentally, of cream and sugar.

"I used to consider her clever," Mrs. Fessenden remarked, "until she became so popular with clever men.... It is really most discouraging....

See, there is Lena Livingston, who has read Dante, pretending to talk to her own brother-in-law, while Mabel, who is not even married, walks off with Archer Ferris and Horace Hopworthy, one on each side."

"I do wonder what she talks to them about," speculated Mrs. Penfield, and Mrs. Fessenden replied:

"My dear, you may depend, they do not let her talk."

Mrs. Penfield reflected, while three backs, two broad and one slender and sinuous as a tea-plant, receded toward the shrubbery.

"I wonder which one Mabel will come back with?" she said.

"If Jack were here, he would give odds on Mr. Hopworthy," replied Jack's wife.

"Of course, Mr. Hopworthy is the coming man," observed Mrs. Penfield.

"But Mr. Ferris has 'arrived.'"

"Yes," a.s.sented Mrs. Fessenden, "as Jack says, he has arrived and taken all the rooms.... But, then, I have great faith in Mr. Hopworthy. You know Jack's aunt discovered him."

"Yes," said Mrs. Penfield, "I remember, but, Clara, it was you that introduced him."

"Oh, that was nothing," murmured Clara. "We were very glad----"

"My two best men!" sighed Mrs. Penfield, her eyes upon the shrubbery, where nothing now was to be seen.

"Yes," acquiesced her friend, "but think how badly that last Ceylon turned out."

Meanwhile, the three had found a cool retreat, an arbour sheltered from the sun and open to the air, wherein a rustic garden seat, a table and a chair extended cordial invitations.

"Ah, this is just the place!" cried Archer Ferris. "By shoving this seat along a trifle, and putting this chair here, we can be very comfortable."

It was noticeable that Mr. Ferris retained possession of the chair. As for the vacant place beside her on the bench, Mabel's parasol lay upon it. Mr. Ferris beamed as only the arrived can beam.

"With your permission, I will take the table," said Mr. Hopworthy, looking to Miss Dunbar, who smiled. Mr. Ferris became overcast.

"I fear our conversation may not interest you," he told the other man.

"You know, you do not write short stories."

And this was not the first time in the last half hour that Mr. Ferris had offered Mr. Hopworthy an opportunity to withdraw. The latter smiled, a broad, expansive smile.

"Oh, but I read them," he persisted, perching on the table. "That is,"

he added, "when there is plot enough to keep one awake."

Here Mr. Ferris smiled, or, rather, pouted, for his mouth, contrasted with that of Mr. Hopworthy, seemed child-like, not to say cherubic.

"Plots," he observed, "are quite Victorian. We are, at least, decadent, are we not, Miss Mabel?"

Mabel smoothed her amber skirt, and tried to look intelligent.