A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 8

love that was so frank, so
sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she loves
Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because she
wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college
in America. When this brother comes back to Japan--he is the touch of
melodrama in the pretty idyl--he is maddened by an acquired
Occidental sense of his sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a
fever and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness
of the young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the
kind that is characterized and does not characterize. The charm, the
delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. Her father
was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort of
marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies, and
possibly something of the English constancy which is not always so
evident as in his case qualifies the daughter's nature. Her mother was,

of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her own
people--the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as in
Philadelphia--because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in
what makes her loveliest. There is a quite indescribable freshness in the
art of this pretty novelette--it is hardly of the dimensions of a
novel--which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native
to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassing lovableness.
Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl could, I should
think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana's book from going
out and marrying Japanese girls. They are safe from this, however, for
the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safely commended at least
to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in the art of imitating
nature as has not come under my hand for a long while. It has its little
defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and its felicity through the
sparing touch make me unwilling to note them. In fact, I have forgotten
them.
VI.
I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of an author
who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as the Japanese,
but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not our interest. Mr.
Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality in acquiring literary
quantity, and though his book, "The Marrow of Tradition," is of the
same strong material as his earlier books, it is less simple throughout,
and therefore less excellent in manner. At his worst, he is no worse than
the higher average of the ordinary novelist, but he ought always to be
very much better, for he began better, and he is of that race which has,
first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if it will not suffer from a smile
far more blighting than any frown. He is fighting a battle, and it is not
for him to pick up the cheap graces and poses of the jouster. He does,
indeed, cast them all from him when he gets down to his work, and in
the dramatic climaxes and closes of his story he shortens his weapons
and deals his blows so absolutely without flourish that I have nothing
but admiration for him. "The Marrow of Tradition," like everything
else he has written, has to do with the relations of the blacks and whites,
and in that republic of letters where all men are free and equal he stands

up for his own people with a courage which has more justice than
mercy in it. The book is, in fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in
history why it should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and
yet it would be better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he is so
inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor foibles may be, he
is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans may well be proud of; but
while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he is too clearly
of a judgment that is made up. One cannot blame him for that; what
would one be one's self? If the tables could once be turned, and it could
be that it was the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in
the bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago,
what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity the
argument of his fiction?
Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel, and shows
us the