APOLOGY

As the work upon which the great Master of modern English Fiction was engaged when death claimed all of him that could die, the half-finished Mystery of Edwin Drood, possesses a quality far beyond the estimation of literary criticism; and, by the sympathetic eloquence even of its incompleteness, is more preciously suggestive of the immortal Writer's own mortal personality than is any one of the many inimitable creations that his genius was permitted to complete. Perused with an understanding of the intimate relations existing between intellectual endeavor and physical and moral passivity, it has a positively painful interest, as a revelation of the tired Worker in the Work never to be finished; nobly striving to compass the round fulness of a living reality from a dying dream, and, in the occasional unconscious despair of prophetic instinct, involuntarily showing fate-struck Nature upon the page as the evening shadow, and the prayer, of faltering Art.

The Story, opening with an elaboration of masterly purpose in which the strength of intense concentration for a moment counterfeits the strength of spontaneity, soon halts with the halting power of the Story-teller so near his rest; then turns intractable and prone to break beneath the relaxing hand uncertain of its former cunning ; a little later, shows the indomitable mind, constrained almost convulsively to a greater light because of the approaching shadow of the body's dissolution, and in its darkening premonitions throwing a shadow of that shade, and even a defined portion of the physical struggle against it, [Foot-note: It is well known that Mr. Dickens passed so many hours daily in the open air, to keep down that inherited sanguine tendency to the brain, of which he ultimately died.] upon the wavering mimic scene ; and, at tost, breaks off, half told, to remain the tenderest of all its Master's stories the story of his Death!

If as that, alone, the Mystery of Edwin Drood could be accepted and 'estimated by the critic, its completeness in incompleteness would be questioned by none; but, as an effort of art, in which the artist still lives, it has, and must have, another aspect; and in the latter is the justification of such exacting commentary, as unprejudiced literary judgment may properly award, to any published work challenging its verdict. The half of the novel which we have is unmistakable evidence that another half could not possibly have formed a whole in any way equal to the standard which the author's previous triumphs had erected for himself. To read it critically, is to believe readily the current report, that its writer regarded it with peculiar uneasiness, as a task in which he was anything but confident of artistic success, and that, after committing its first monthly numbers to the press, he expressed to several friends a fear that it might injure his literary reputation. The art of Dickens, like that of all great genius, comes by the immediate inspiration of his unpremeditated sympathy with what, to others, might seem the most unlikely of human subjects; and it becomes a mere forced and lifeless imitation of itself, when, as in this case, anticipated and pledged for a deliberately complicated plot and what is called a psychological study of abnormal character. Mr. Jasper, the central personage of the Mystery, is an unwholesome monstrosity, of which the writer of "David Copperfield," even in the fullest flush of his matchless powers, could never have made happy imaginative use; and, from his first appearance in the narrative, there is an overwrought laboriousness of mystification about him which, in illustration of extremes meeting, has very soon the awkward effect of making him no mystery at all. The design of representing a man with a dual existence, in one phase of which he intends to, and thinks he does, commit murder, while in the other he confounds the deed and doer with a personality distinct from his own, is kept so nervously apparent at the beginning, as a justification of the plotted denottment, that any reader fairly skilled in the necessary- artistic relations of one part of a story to another, must derive therefrom a premature knowledge of what the designer supposably wishes to conceal for the time being. The author could scarcely have been without some presentiment of this likelihood, while striving to manipulate an artificial type of character so wholly unnatural to his wholesome, straightforward genius; and the depressing effect upon himself is plainly to be seen, not more in furthers pasmodic excesses of shade, than in the falsity of his unequalled Humor to itself, in such a mechanical "side light" as Mr. Sapsea.

It is because his Adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood serves, in unavoidable proportion to its fidelity, to make prominent the artistic infelicities of the latter, that the adapter has ventured such a preface as the foregoing to his apology for turning the serious work of an illustrious foreign writer to ludicrous native use.

As one not without some studious knowledge of the scope and various approved methods of art in Fiction, and practice in the difficulties of American novel-writing, the present scribe has more than once employed the sober print of literary journalism to assert his belief, that the notorious lack of the higher order of imaginative writing in this Country is due rather to the physical, social, and artistic crudity of the Country itself, than to its deficiency in that order of genius which has given to older lands their greater poets, artists, and novelists. Commenting, not long ago, upon Mr. Disraeli's "Lothair," as a striking social and artistic study, he wrote:

"The American literary student has in this elegant work of fiction a most useful hint respecting the practicabilities of an American novel. It has scarcely any mechanical plot; yet its interest as a narrative never flags for an instant. It abounds in dialogue upon trite subjects; yet that dialogue always possesses a marked intellectual value for its evidence of a high mental class-cultivation. In short, 'Lothair' is such a novel as could not be written of a country like ours with the smallest chance of being anything but drearily commonplace. We have our mercantile palaces on Fifth Avenue, our gorgeous assemblies of fashion, our men of score millions, our expensive churches and proselyting clergy; but they are all of yesterday, they are without tradition or history, and the wonders of swift creation that they give to fact would furnish but prosaic monstrosities to the graceful hand of Disraelitish fiction. Journalists who prate about the lack of first-class imaginative writing here at home, and pretend to designate materials for the native romancer, commit a great mistake in presuming that a novel of society is the work offering choicest matter and opportunity to the coming master of home fiction. Your figures and their action in the foreground will make but a cheap photograph, if there is no suggestive background; and it is lack of permanent romantic background for his picture that places the novelist of American higher society in the position either of a didactic social essayist, or of a satirist of the caprices of shopkeeping fortune. In former days, the South, with its patriarchal and feudal usages, offered a background upon which our only American novels proper were drawn. What artistic possibilities there still may be in that section are only to be ascertained by future experiment; but there can be little doubt that the general American field of opportunities for the writer of fiction lies rather in the picturesquery of Western adventure, or the dramatic contrast of the extremes of wealth and poverty in the great cities, than in the lives and abodes of the native social class superficially corresponding with the foreign social strata celebrated by 'Lothair.' The first rightlydirected step toward effective novel-writing in America must be inspired by a determination to discard all existing foreign models as thoroughly impracticable, and a courage to treat what there is of the genuinely picturesque and dramatic in American life with an originality of style and method suited especially to American subjects. Wholesome strength, rather than poetical daintiness, must be the great characteristic of the romancer; and his characters must be made to think and act and talk like Americans only."

To the above, after quoting it, a literary publication of high character replied:

"There is, doubtless, a large share of truth in all this; but we must still hope that a competent artistic skill would be able to make of our social pictures something more than a 'cheap photograph.' The absolute mastership of fictitious writing, as an art, is the great need. Washington Irving succeeded in giving to the Hudson a series of legends that attach a classic interest to its shores, such as no other locality in America possesses; Hawthorne could give to the rudest incidents of colonial life every quality of picturesque mellowness. But these men had the superior artistic touch, and this is a gift or attainment that always seems to us peculiarly lacking in American literature. When the accomplished master shall appear, we hope he will show us how ordinary American life may be photographed in blending, contrasted, and vivid groups, without that rawness that marks the ordinary attempts to portray us."

An accomplished theatrical critic also attacked the proposition, in its implied bearing upon the drama, and said:

"I am of opinion that men in America have the same inscrutable hearts, prone to love and hate and lie and venerate, that beat in the jungles of Africa or the saloons of London: they are swayed by pretty much the same vices and animated by the same virtues; swollen with vanity or collapsed with humiliation; roaring, defying, praying, suffering, achieving, and dying everywhere with the same desperation or devoutness. Our women, too, are they not as vain, as self-sacrificing, as tender, as trivial, as any in Bath or Baden? Are they not everywhere the same, if we come to look at them narrowly; with immortal souls under their caprices and carmine, drawn by the same mysterious destiny this way and that?

"Society, then, even in America, is, first of all, flesh and blood, with souls in it, and plays its own intense and multiform comedy of life in our homes and hovels with as much meaning as if it felt the pressure of all the ages since Adam, and were lifted occasionally by the promise of as great a hereafter as exists for communities whose art is older. Are they not the fit subjects for that elder art which seeks the remote and ideal beauty that is universal? Or are they, with all their kinship of flesh and immortality, to be weighed only for their manners in this balance?"

To both of whom the answer, in part, was: "Mastery of art may enable the American novelist to plot a symmetrical fable, devise varied incidents, plan effective alternations of incidental light and shadow, and observe the various other mechanical requisites of fabulous construction; yet, after all this, it is upon the specific social genius of the grade of life to be reflected that his own intellectual genius must depend for the yielding of a defined Romantic interest to the fiction. If that social genius is incorrigibly prosaic and crude, without stability from one day to another, and involving no single permanent principle of class prestige and distinction, the fabulating genius can make it romantically interesting only at the expense of fidelity to nature. Our American higher society, originating almost wholly as it does from the tendency of fluctuating wealth to spasmodic sensational luxury, and not from hereditary privilege or esthetical aspiration, is informed much more by the logic of trade and the pride of financial energy than by the obligations of illustrious ancestry and the fine egotism of conscious superiority in class cultivation. It is without normal body, it has no distinctive manner, and its saliencies are better calculated to surprise than interest. While such characteristics may be republican, and creditable enough for reality, they are inexorable drawbacks to the romantic interest of fictitious presentment; and no charm of literary style, nor vraisemblant effort of the imagination, can make them poetic."

It was after thus arguing the question seriously, and being rather vexed at the apparent failure of his critics to appreciate his exact meaning they talking about legends, and figures in the foreground, while he, conceding those, contended for present social coloring, permanent romantic background, and an atmosphere and a middle distance to give artistic body to the picture that the present writer conceived the idea of seriocomically demonstrating the assumed accuracy of his views by deliberately reducing the current work of some great foreign novelist to American equivalents. Hence the CLOVEN FOOT.

In the latter, the adapter has aimed to Americanize his original as conscientiously as possible, while imitating, to the best of his ability, the style and idiosyncrasies of the English author. Mr. John Jasper, the English opium-smoker, would, if transferred to this country, be scarcely other than Mr. John Bumstead, the American clove-eater. For the ancient city of Cloisterham, with its venerable Cathedral and Nun's House, the nearest transatlantic match, in a majority of respects, is the suburban Bumsteadville, with its Ritualistic Church and Aims-House. The English "Rosebud's" equivalent by adaptation is the American "Flowerpot." Edwin Drood, the not very brilliant young man of London, would be the mere boy in New York, and so on through all the characters, scenes, and incidents of the Original and its Adaptation, as varied by the social genius, usages, and characteristics of either country.

To give the Adaptation all possible romantic illusion, an illustrated "Sketch of the Author" is also "adapted": and if, after this preliminary exposition, and the elucidation of the numerous foot-notes, the intelligent reader can still see no more than an indifferent joke in the ensuing pages, it may be as well for him to ask himself if he is so very intelligent, after all ?

O. C. K.

1870.

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The homage of our world to thee,

O Matchless Scribe! when thou wert here,

Was all that's loving in a Laugh,

And all that's tender in a Tear.

So, if with quiv'ring lip we name

The fellow Mortal who Departs,

A Smile shall call him back again,

To live Immortal in our Hearts.

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