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John William De Forest: A Study Of Realism And Romance In Selected Works

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John William De Forest: A Study Of Realism And Romance In Selected Works

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received 66-7082
SULLIVAN, P hilip Edward, 1927-
JOHN WILLIAM DE FOREST: A STUDY OF
REALISM AND ROMANCE IN SELECTED
WORKS.
U n iversity of Southern C aliforn ia, P h .D ., 1966
Language and L iteratu re, m odern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright by
Philip Edward Sullivan
1966
JOHN WILLIAM DE FOREST:
A STUDY OF REALISM AND ROMANCE
IN SELECTED WORKS
* by
Philip Edward Sullivan
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 1966
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SC HOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
Philip Edward Sullivan
under the direction of h.^...Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Daie..J.a 3^n.A...):^...............
DISSERTATION COM M ITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. C A R E E R ........... 1
II. THE CIVIL W A R ................................. 20
III. THE RECONSTRUCTION ......................... 66
IV. THE GILDED A G E ............................... 123
V. LAST EFFORTS.................................. 173
VI. CONCLUSION.................................... 193
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................... 215
CHAPTER I
CAREER
John William De Forest (1826-1906) had a prolific but
unrewarding literary career; he produced twelve novels, two
volumes of poetry, two travel books, two histories, and two
posthumously published volumes of memoirs, in addition to
numerous essays and short stories for the leading magazines
of his day. Although De Forest was befriended by William
Dean Howells, his reputation never was great," and although
recent years have gained an increased audience for Miss
Ravenel1s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, his place
in literary history still appears to be slight. He is gen
erally conceded to be the first realistic American novelist,
but he himself felt that he worked largely from imagination,
and his first and last works were historical romances.
Taken as a whole, his works are uneven in mode and quality.
One of the few to deal directly in fiction with the
American Civil War as it was fought, De Forest had, for some
1
of his works at least, a period of incubation and training
which allowed him to write first-hand experiences into short
pieces of prose which he then used in full-length novels.
It is my thesis that as De Forest reworked these materials
which held him fast to the accuracy of what he had seen and
set down, his novels are realistic and unified and good.
When he went beyond his own experiences or failed to rewrite
earlier versions of them, then his imagination or his criti
cal theory, or possibly both, were not sufficient to assist
him, and the resulting novels were weak.
Hence the heavy quality of some of De Forest's novels.
Hence too the strain of allegory, parable, author comment,
melodramatic speeches, awkward diction, and sometimes out
right romance in order to capture an audience which he held
in contempt for liking romance. But his better works show
a fidelity to life and a complexity of character which are
generally characteristic of realistic fiction. These works,
primarily Miss Ravenel1s Conversion from Secession to Loyal
ty and Kate Beaumont, give the feeling that "this is how it
must have been." Personal participation in the Civil War
and the Reconstruction provided De Forest with his most
meaningful experience in life and inspired his best books.
When he simply used these settings to spin out an invented
story, the characters themselves seem implausible.
Because my method will be to examine the relationship
of shorter pieces of fiction to novels which develop the
same settings and characters provided by his experiences, a
somewhat extended biographical account of De Forest and his
works is necessary to the broader framework of this disser
tation. The following account synthesizes the three best
works available, dissertations by James H. Croushore and
Robert Hagemann, and the book on De Forest recently pub-
1
lished by James F. Light.
John William De Forest was the son of a New York broker
and commission merchant, John Hancock De Forest, who had
converted a woolen mill to cotton manufacturing in
Humphreysville (later Seymour), Connecticut, in 1821. John
William was born there on March 31, 1826, the last of four
2
sons who survived. Because of ill health, apparently
^-James H. Croushore, "John William De Forest: A Bio
graphical and Critical Study to the Year 1868," unpub. diss.
(Yale, 1944); Edward R. Hagemann, "John William De Forest
and the American Scene: An Analysis of His Life and
Novels," unpub. diss. (Univ. of Indiana, 1954); James F.
Light, John William De Forest (New York, 1965).
^Hagemann, p. 1. John W. De Forest, The De Forests of
Avesnes (New Haven, Conn., 1900), pp. 163-164. Light, pp.
15-17.
bronchitis, De Forest was unable to attend Yale University
as the rest of the family had, but went instead to private
schools. At the age of twenty he began the first of his
travels, going to Beirut, Syria, for its dry climate. Dur
ing this trip, which lasted twenty-two months, he made ob
servations which he later incorporated into published
sketches. These sketches in turn formed his book Oriental
Acquaintance (1856) and his novel Irene the Missionary
(1879).3
He returned to the United States in 1847, still with a
bronchial condition 1 1 troublesome enough to keep him from a
4
normal, active life," according to Croushore. There he
worked on a study of the Connecticut Indians which was pub
lished under the patronage of the Connecticut Historical
Society; the book went through four editions by 1871.5
Leaving the United States again in 1850, De Forest remained
in Europe until 1855, with Florence as the base for his
3
Hagemann, pp. 2-3; Crousnore, pp. 54-60; Light, pp.
21-25.
^Croushore, p. 66.
5A History of the Indians of Connecticut from the
Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, 1851). Hagemann,
p. 5 .
tours of the European capitals. He studied Italian, Latin,
and French, wrote some 2500 lines of poetry, and worked
briefly as a correspondent for Holden's Dollar Maaazin^.
which failed in 1851.^ His poetry was rejected by G. P.
Putnam, and his efforts to translate Hawthorne's The House
of the Seven Gables into Italian were abandoned when his
Italian assistant failed to finish his share of the work.
De Forest's first published article appeared in 1855,
the year of his return to the United States. An anonymous
review of Jules Bonnet's Vie d'Olvmpia Morata (Paris, 1851),
it was little more than a summary of Bonnet's biography of
7
the noted Italian Protestant woman. It was at this time
that he prepared five articles for Putnam's Monthly Maga
zine based on his experiences in the Levant; these sketches
were later incorporated into his travel book Oriental Ac
quaintance and accounted for nearly half of the book.
Upon his return to this country he also met Harriet
Silliman Shepard, whom he married at New Haven in June, 1856.
Miss Shepard was the daughter of Charles Upham Shepard,
^Croushore, p. 99; Hagemann, pp. 6-7; Light, pp. 28-37.
7The New Englander. XII (May 1855),’ 216-234.
Professor of Chemistry, who taught part of each year at the
Medical College in Charleston, South Carolina, and the other
part at Amherst, Massachusetts. This connection between the
son of a New England cotton manufacturer and the daughter of
a Southern scientist gave a scope to De Forest's understand
ing of the Civil War which is hard to overestimate. Pro
fessor Shepard's reputation was international. His special
interest was the application of chemistry and geology to
mining and agriculture, an interest which De Forest later
used in Kate Beaumont and Miss Ravenel's Conversion. The
young couple lived in Charleston for the first eighteen
months of their marriage, and their only child, Louise
Q
Shepard De Forest, was born there in 1857.
Oriental Acquaintance (1856) was encouragingly but not
widely reviewed, being overlooked by the influential Har
per 's New Monthly Magazine. In September of that year
De Forest published a short story based on his Syrian ex-
g
periences, "The Hasheesh Eater." In December of that year
the magazine also began serial publication of his first
®Light, pp. 38-43.
^Putnam's Monthly Magazine. VIII (September 1856),
233-239.
novel, Witching Times, which ran for ten numbers but was
10
never published m book form. Following the last install
ment of Witching Times. Putnam1s was merged with Emerson1s
United States Magazine and was then called Emerson1s Maga
zine and Putnam's Monthly. Croushore suggests that if Put-
ns.hi's Monthly had not been so close to the end of its ca
reer, Witching Times "might have won for its author, in the
pages of that periodical, a permanent means for publishing
later works."^ However, De Forest's second travel book,
European Acquaintance, was published in 1858 by Harper and
Brothers, and although it sold poorly, it attracted wider
critical notice than Witching Times. possibly because it
could be reviewed without publicizing a rival magazine.
De Forest spent the year writing his second novel, Seacliff.
also a romance, published in 1859 by Phillips, Sampson and
Company, founders of The Atlantic Monthly, the only magazine
which reviewed the novel.
His family, meanwhile, had been living with him in New
Haven. They returned briefly to Charleston in 1861, but the
tense political situation over Fort Sumter in Charleston
10Hagemann, p. 13. ^Croushore, p. 154.
Harbor caused De Forest to move his family back to New
England. This brief visit was the source material for the
first of De Forest's war sketches to be published in The
12
Atlantic. "Charleston Under Arms." The De Forests left
Charleston at the end of January, 1861, on the James Adaer.
one of the last ships to leave the port before the surrender
13
of Fort Sumter in April of that year.
Up to this time De Forest had traveled abroad exten
sively, had married, had become a father, and had published
two novels, two travel books, six short stories, and several
miscellaneous essays. Only his poetry had been rejected.
By today's standards, this would be an excellent accomplish
ment for a thirty-five-year-old author, but his publications
had won neither wide attention nor much money. Of this
period Hagemann says, "his travels abroad had made him into
a cosmopolite, changed him from a parochial New Englander
into something of an homme du monde. a man, now living in
the waning,confusing last days of Buchanan's administration,
who could see the whole affair in a light that made for
14
sobriety and thoughtfulness. His war service to come
12VII (April 1861), 488-505. 13Light, pp. 63-65.
l^Hagemann, p. 17.
would augment this period of literary apprenticeship and
provide him with his most successful literary achievement,
Miss Ravenel's Conversion.
A year after moving his family from Charleston, De
Forest was formally commissioned as Captain of Company I in
Connecticut's Charter Oak Regiment, a unit in Major General
Benjamin F. Butler's volunteer division consisting of one
regiment from each New England state. As De Forest himself
admitted, his qualifications for commission consisted simply
in the fact that he had recruited the company himself."^
The author served the Union with distinction until December
1864, participating as a line officer in the murderous
assault on Port Hudson in the Louisiana bayou country and
later as a staff officer in General Philip Sheridan's attack
on Richmond, Virginia. During this time he wrote the mater
ial published in Harper1s and elsewhere, later to be gath
ered into his proposed volume, A Volunteer's Adventures.
Much of this material was worked into Miss Ravenel*s Con
version. which he began writing upon his discharge.
Unable to maintain himself on his literary earnings,
A Volunteer' s Adventures . ed. James H. Croushore,
with intro, by Stanley T. Williams (New Haven, 1946), p. xi.
however, De Forest re-entered the service as a captain in
the Veteran Reserve Corps in January 1865 and then trans
ferred to the Freedmen’s Bureau in July 1866, beginning a
period of work in the Reconstruction which brought him into
close contact with the freed slaves, the impoverished aris
tocracy, the bushwhackers, and the poor white trash of the
South. His observations on this period of his life were
published variously, and collected for a proposed volume of
memoirs, eventually published in 1946 as A Union Officer in
16
the Reconstruction. As a member of the Reserve Corps, De
Forest wrote a report which earned him a promotion to brevet
major. When Grant dissolved the unit, De Forest was trans
ferred to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned
Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau; he served
there until 1868, mostly in South Carolina, where he was
already familiar with Charleston. Here he also wrote a long
novel, The Senator, which was seventy chapters long when the
manuscript was stolen. It has never been discovered, and
while Hagemann suggests that it may have been a version of
-^A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, eds. James H.
Croushore and David M. Potter (New Haven, 1948).
11
17
one of his political novels, none of them is that long.
His Reconstruction novels from this period are Kate
Beaumont (1872) and The Bloody Chasm (1881), plus a group of
short stories which will be examined later. During his
service in the Freedmen1s Bureau, De Forest also spent some
time in Washington, and so had the opportunity to observe
post-war politics, which he satirized heavily in a group of
three political novels, Honest John Vane and Plaving the
Mischief (1875) and Justine's Lovers (1878) in addition to a
group of short stories, some of which were assimilated into
the novels.
De Forest was mustered out of service in January 1868
at the age of forty-two, after six years of military service
for which his only regret was that he had not been in one of
the bigger battles like Gettysburg or Chickamauga. "I am
not only glad," he wrote in his volume of poems, "but I am
sincerely thankful that I did not miss Port Hudson and the
18
final victories in the Shenandoah Valley." De Forest was
one of the few American writers who really participated in
1 7
A'Hagemann, p. 31; Light, p. 81.
^Poems; Medley and Palestina (New Haven, 1902), p.
ix.
12
the Civil War, and his experiences, whether lying under a
rubber blanket in a ditch under cannon and sniper fire, or
watching Sheridan's attacks from horseback, or issuing
meager rations to newly freed slaves, provided the back
ground for his best novels.
The period 1868-1881 was the period of greatest liter
ary production for De Forest. He published eight novels,
thirty-one short stories, two short novels, twenty-two arti
cles, and thirteen poems. It was also the period of his
acquaintance with William Dean Howells. But he was beset by
financial difficulties, and in a plaintive tone he offered
himself as an editor to Galaxy. asking if they knew of "any
body, whether monthly, weekly, or daily, who wants an edi-
19
tor. I believe I could do such work acceptably."
De Forest published a great deal of his work in this
general period, but during 1876 and 1877 only one short
story and one travel article appeared in print. In 1877 he
asked Howells to write a letter to President Hayes recom
mending him for "some sort of foreign service and mentioning
a reason or two, such as respectable character, fair liter-
20
ary repute, with perhaps an allusion to military service."
^Hagemann, p. 35. ^ H a g e m a n n , 20; Light, p. 107.
13
Nothing came of this effort, and De Forest remained in New
Haven, publishing an article on the autochthonous origin of
the various peoples of Europe and a series of three articles
21
on the Turko-Russian war of 1877-1878.
After writing The Bloody Chasm (1881), De Forest pub
lished no other novel for seventeen years and only a few
articles and short stories. Of the post-war period that saw
the publication of the bulk of his work, Hagemann writes:
"I-Ie had his day, pitifully brief; he had received his ap
plause, pitifully weak; he went into retirement, destined to
22
be pitilessly long." Chronologically, of course, the
periods were much the same in length, and if we combine the
Civil War and the Freedmen's Bureau periods, the era of
productivity is much longer than the period of drought. But
for a man who sought literary fame, the time in the sun was
too brief.
The years 1881 to 1898 were occupied unsuccessfully in
21"A Turko-Russian War," Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
LVI (January 1878), 261-271; "The Cradle of the Human Race,"
The Atlantic Monthly. XLI (February 1878), 145-157; "The
Turkish Wars with the Hospitalers," Harper's New Monthly
Magazine, LVI (February 1878), 431-441; "The Russians on the
Bosphorus," £h_e_. Atlantic Monthly. XLI (April 1878), 502-512.
^^Hagemann, p. 46.
14
an attempt to promote a uniform edition of his works, a plan
that is only now being attempted by Professor Joseph Jay
23
Rubin. Traveling to Europe without his family, De Forest
wrote a novel called A Daughter of Toil, which he could not
get published. Century Magazine told him it was full "for
years to come," and Atlantic and Harper1s had much the same
story. He complained that he would be driven to volume
publication "which at present is almost without profit,"
but nothing came of that plan, and the manuscript, like that
24
of The Senator. has disappeared.
De Forest completed yet another novel in the winter of
1886-1887 which was again refused all around, but which
finally was published in volume form by Longmans, Green and
Company in 1898, eleven years later. This novel was A
Lover's Revolt, a historical romance of the American Revo
lutionary War. It was well reviewed, especially by James
Brander Matthews, who said it would rank with Cooper's The
25
Spy and S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. Free Quaker.
^^To date three novels have been published: Honest
John Vane (1960), Plaving the Mischief (1961), and Kate
SaaMffllMafc (1963) .
24Hagemann, p. 49; Light, pp. 165-167.
25"chronicle and Comment," The Bookman. VIII (October
15
Despite the good reviews, however, the sale was poor. In
1900 he published a genealogical history of his family, The
De Forests of Avesnes. and in 1901 and 1902 two collections
of his poetry.^ These mark the end of his publications.
When De Forest died in New Haven July 17, 1906, at the
age of eighty, the New Haven Evening Register published a
highly inaccurate account of his life under the heading:
Author-Soldier De Forest Dead
Distinguished Writer of Novels Dies at Eighty
Outside of New Haven there were no literary notices of his
27
death, and even Howells failed to comment.
De Forest's first and last novels were researched ro
mances, as was Overland in the middle of his career (1871),
but several of his works were at least partly based on
realistic settings and personages from his own experience.
Yet he looked on his books as works of the imagination, as
a letter quoted in The Book Buyer in 1899 makes clear:
How different it is nowadays from the time I wrote 1
1898), 99.
^ Downing Legends (New Haven, 1901); Poems: Medley and
Palestina (New Haven, 1902).
^^Hagemann, p. 59.
16
. . . And the style has changed too. Now they all
want to study problems and speak in parables. In my
day it was all imagination.^8
It is my contention that De Forest lacked imagination.
As Henry James observed of Honest John Vane, "it is not
29
art." De Forest had craft and skill enough to rework his
journalistic observations into good novels only where the
structure and setting were provided for him. When he got
beyond those experiences of his which were already struc
tured, he lacked creativity, inventiveness, and critical
theory. As a result, most of his books are extremely un
even, and De Forest must be counted a man who wrote a few
really good books and many poor ones.
In this dissertation I shall concentrate on represen
tative works which demonstrate both the success and failure
of De Forest's talent for-realism. De Forest's works
stemmed from his personal experiences in the United States;
in the successful novels he was faithful to the materials of
this experience and subordinated his personal opinions and
^®"The Rambler," The Book Buyer. XVII (January 1899),
572-573.
2®Henry James (rev. of Honest John Vane). The Nation.
XIX (December 31, 1874), 441-442.
17
prejudices. But out of these same American experiences he
also wrote literature in which he allowed himself some play
of imagination, which led him to rely on less successful
techniques of romance and allegory. In addition, he-also
wrote some objective journalistic accounts of these experi
ences. The three periods of De Forest's personal experience
which best show both success and failure are the Civil War,
the Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Out of his Civil
War experience De Forest wrote the highly artistic Miss
Ravenel1s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, as well as
the journalistic A Volunteer's Adventures, and some short
stories of mixed quality. His Reconstruction experiences
stimulated the writing of Kate Beaumont. The Bloody Chasm,
the journalistic A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, and
several short stories . Out of his concern with Washington
politics during the Gilded Age, De Forest wrote Honest John
Vane. Playing the Mischief, and Justine's Lovers, as well as
several short stories . In each of these periods of experi
ence I will show the relationship between the journalism,
the short stories, and the novels in order to demonstrate
how and why De Forest succeeded or failed as a realist.
In order to concentrate on these representative periods
I will omit everything De Forest wrote prior to Miss
18
Ravenel1s Conversion; these works have already been ade
quately examined in other critical studies and lack those
qualities which distinguish the author 1s later works . Fur
thermore, De Forest himself acknowledged that "In that book
for the first time . . . I came to know the value of per
sonal knowledge of one's subject . . . From Miss Ravenel on
30
I have written from life and have been a realist." I will
also omit obviously romantic works written after Miss
Ravene11s Conversion. including works that .might at first
seem relevant to an examination of De Forest's realism. For
instance, although the popular Overland contains several
characters from De Forest's Reconstruction experiences, I
omit this novel because in most of the book a stock hero
rescues a stock heroine from a series of adventures in the
glamorous Golden West which De Forest knew only from his
31
research in the Yale library. Furthermore, Overland
demonstrates qualities of romance which, as I will show,
De Forest reveals more dramatically in The Bloody Chasm, a
remarkably bad novel based on the same Reconstruction
Of)
Edwin Oviatt, "John W. De Forest in New Haven," The
New York Times Saturday Supplement, December 17, 1898, p.
856 .
31Light, p. 114.
19
experiences from which he wrote the highly artistic and
realistic Kate Beaumont.
Through my selections I shall show what qualities
characterize De Forest's realism and what weaknesses mar
some novels which might have been artistic successes. De
Forest's literary reputation during his own life and later
would have been far greater if he had attempted to repeat
the high achievements of Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Kate
Beaumont.
CHAPTER II
THE CIVIL WAR
When De Forest returned from the Civil War, he had
written down his experiences in two forms. He had published
some journalistic reports in popular magazines, and he had
written many letters. One of the magazine reports still
serves as an accurate account of the last days of peace in
Charleston, South Carolina, before Fort Sumter was fired
upon, ending all chances to avert the national disaster.^
The letters were used to form a volume of memoirs, A Volun
teer 1s Adventures. published in 1946, forty years after his
death.
These experiences formed the core of his Civil War
nove1, Miss Ravenel1s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty,
which he finished in 1865. The work was purchased by Harper
^■Bruce Catton, The Coming Furv (Garden City, New York,
1961), pp. 304-305.
20
21
and Brothers for serialization in their New Monthly Magazine
and for later publication as a book. But the novel which
Howells reviewed as the "first book to treat the war really
2 .
and artistically" was not considered fit for a family maga
zine, although De Forest was willing to make cuts and re
visions; hence the work appeared only in book form. Appar
ently the Harpers editor, Alfred H. Guernsey, objected to
the swearing and infidelity in the story, for De Forest
wrote;
I make no objection to your moral reform of the
story. If it goes into the MonthIv. of course it ought
to be made proper for families. Only I think it ought
to be understood, for the sake of vraisemblance. that
the Colonel did frequently swear and that the Louisiana
lady was not quite as good as she should be.^
The book was generally well received as a realistic picture
of the war, even by such a pro-Southern magazine as The Old
^William Dean Howells (rev. of Miss Ravenel's Conver-
sion), The Atlantic Monthly. XX (July 1867), 120-122.
•^Gordon S. Haight, Introd., Miss Ravenel's Conversion
from Secession to Loyalty, by John W. De Forest (New York,
1955), vii. This paperback edition by Rinehart and Company
has been used in this dissertation because it is the most
available one. All references will be to this edition ex
cept as noted otherwise, and the novel will be cited as Miss
Ravenel's Conversion and abbreviated as MRC.
22
Guard, which praised it becau.se its "demons are not all on
the side of the Confederates nor angels on the side of the
Federals as is the case with most war novels produced of
4
late in such profusion."
Although not widely read today, the novel is generally
considered the first "realistic" novel written in the United
States, and discussion of it affords an opportunity to make
a definition of the realism in that book which can serve as
a basis for understanding De Forest's later novels. In this
chapter I shall show what realism means in Miss Ravenel's
Conversion and indicate to what extent his realism differs
from reportorial accuracy by showing how passages in the
novel differ from similar passages in the reports and mem
oirs . It is my contention that in shaping material for a
thoroughly and imaginatively structured novel, De Forest
worked in a consistently artistic manner that he was unable
to repeat in later works. Thus his failure to attract a
large reading audience may be due as much to artistic fail
ure as to the more usual explanations that he faced a read
ing public of women who relished sentimental literature and
^Miss Ravenel's Conversion (anon. rev.), The Old Guard.
V (July 1867), 544.
23
that he had unusually bad luck with publishers who went
bankrupt.^
That De Forest himself considered the book realistic in
technique is clear from what he said in an interview years
later:
In that book for the first time in my life I came
to know the value of personal knowledge of one's sub
ject and the art of drawing upon life for one's char
acters . In my younger days everything was romance.
A writer was praised very highly when it was said of
him that he had a great imagination. . . . From my
Miss Ravenel on I have written from life, and have
been a realist. I have taken my personages from real
life, and in one case at least painted them so accur
ately that I had to publish the book anonymous ly. 6
To De Forest and his contemporaries, including Howells,
realism meant incidents accurately reported and characters
drawn faithfully from life. What those general strictures
amount to specifically in the words and texture of prose
fiction has been cause for much critical investigation.
^Howells advanced the idea that De Forest was too
blunt in his treatment of women in Heroines of Fiction (New
York, 1901), II, 153. Elsewhere he mentions a tacit agree
ment among magazine editors not to print anything offensive
to ladies. Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891), pp.
159-160.
^Edwin Oviatt, "John W. De Forest in New Haven," The
New York Times (Saturday Review section), December 17, 1898,
p. 856. Justine1 s Lovers (New York, 1878) is the anonymous
novel.
24
Indeed, a definition of,American realism is as elusive as a
definition of English Romanticism. The bibliography of the
discussion is large, and a brief summary is necessary to
7
clarify some aspects of the term.
Realism, says Spiller, "must always be a relative term,
g
varying with the author's view of reality." He calls De
Forest the "first professed realist, and perhaps the
staunchest," because he "treated contemporary life with a
9
complete objectivity." Thrall and Hibbard call realism a
reaction which "defined a literary method, a philosophical
and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject
-.10
matter.
But Donald Pizer points out that handbooks and histor
ies have been weak in defining the literary mode of realism,
and he achieves a more exact definition by examining three
^George J. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary
Realism (Princeton, 1963) gives a good selection of atti
tudes towards and examples of literary realism.
^Robert E. Spiller and others, A Literary History of
the United States. 3rd. ed. rev. (New York, 1963), p. 878.
^Spiller, p. 881.
■^William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook
to Literature. rev. C, Hugh Holman (New York, 1960), p. 397.
25
attitudes towards it in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885),
Huckleberry Finn (1885), and What Masie Knew (1897), all of
which are much later than De Forest's book in 1867.^ He
employs criteria proposed by George Becker in "one of the
few notable attempts at definition." Becker classified and
analyzed several definitions of realism used and exemplified
by both writers and critics in America during the latter
part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth
centuries.^
Becker proposes three criteria: (1) Detail is derived
from observation and documentation, including the use of
dialect; (2) There is a reliance upon the norm of experi
ence; this attitude emphasized the representative rather
than the exceptional and permitted loose ends as an essen
tial element in the story; and (3) There is objectivity in
presenting things as they are without personal prejudice.
ll-Donald Pizer, "Late Nineteenth-Century American
Realism: An Essay in Definition," Nineteenth Century Fic
tion . XVI (Spring 1961), 263-269.
l^George J. Becker, "Realism: An Essay in Definition,"
Modern Language Quarterly. X (June 1949), 184-197. This
notable essay is overlooked in the symposium on realism con
ducted in Comparative Literature. Ill (Summer 1951). Ac
cording to Pizer (n. 11), this symposium skirts the issue
of definition.
26
The realist's ambition is the dispassionate approach of the
scientist; his delusion is that he can manipulate data to
reach a conclusion as impersonal as that reached in a
laboratory.
These three criteria are broad enough to distinguish
nineteenth-century realism from romance, which Howells de
fined as literature of the fancy which attempted to "widen
13
the bounds of sympathy." But it is also necessary to
understand that early realism in America was in part a de
liberate attack upon sentimentalism, which Howells called
"literary lying" which gave the reader what he wanted, even
if what he wanted was falsehood. Howells, whom De Forest
14
praised as "a great realist," was one who led the attack
upon sentimentalism. In a study of Howells, Everett Carter
identifies two attitudes of early realism which grew out of
this attack. First, Howells and others deplored the effect
of contemporary literature when it was sentimental, denoun
cing it in their own fiction when they could. Second, they
were quite optimistic about the future of America and the
• ^criticism and Fiction, p . 15.
l^oviatt, p. 856.
27
15
contribution their realism could make. These attitudes
are needed in addition to Becker's three criteria in order
to understand De Forest's frequent author comment, a tech
nique not usually associated with realism.
Although De Forest's place as an early realist has been
generally acknowledged,^ the precise mode of his realism
has been somewhat generalized as consisting of characters
"drawn from life," gory accounts of the battlefield, and a
willingness to find good and evil on both sides of the Civil
War. But there is more to be found in De Forest's realism,
a term which was not in use in America when Miss Ravenel's
Conversion was published in 1867.
The first of Becker's criteria is eminently realized
throughout the book. A study of his magazine pieces and
•^Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism
(Philadelphia, 1950), pp. 45-46.
l^The first literary historian to acknowledge De
Forest's importance is Arthur H. Quinn in American Fiction
(New York, 1936). The major historians to comment on him
at length are Alexander Cowie in The Rise of the American
Novel (New York, 1948), and Gordon S. Haight in the section
"Realism Defined" in Literary History of the United States.
eds. Spiller and others (New York, 1963). The newest major
treatment is by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore (New York,
1962), but it is remarkable how many surveys of American
literature overlook De Forest even after Quinn's work
appeared.
28
memoirs shows De Forest's sense of detail is very strikingly
adapted in the novel. Because the war brought several
levels of society into army service, De Forest had ample
opportunity to record, sometimes in simple vignettes, the
colloquialisms and dialects of the soldiers, especially the
Irish and Negroes, but including also Southern words and
accents.
The second criterion concerns the norm of experience.
In Miss Ravenel's Conversion, a view of life emerges from a
structural design which contrasts two different views or
reactions, one of which may be called the stereotyped or
sentimental, while the other is based on observation and
experience. Reinforcing this structure is a unique pattern
which can be traced throughout the book in the texture of
the prose. De Forest consistently tones down what otherwise
would be a tough or brutal scene by using modifying words
or phrases which relax and soften rather than intensify and
emphasize. He thus avoids pushing his descriptions into
mere brutality and crudity; an example of this technique
. . 17
may be seen in the description of men waiting for battle.
17See pp. 55-57.
29
Objectivity, Becker's third criterion, is less present
in this book than are the first two criteria. It is quite
clear that De Forest had no intention of being a scientist
recording data; he viewed scientists as much more than
laboratory men, as exemplified by Dr. Ravenel, who hopes to
revive the Southern economy through mineralogy. Nor is his
approach to his materials in any way as dispassionate as
Becker requires. De Forest is pleased neither with all
Northern soldiers nor with all the Northern rationalizations
of the war. But he does firmly believe the Northern cause
to be a just one, almost a holy one, as the title of the
book suggests.
Nor can he refrain from making his position as author
clear. He employs many author comments which have been
uniformly considered by modern critics as being unrealistic
and belonging to the tradition of Thackeray, whom De Forest
18
admired. But such a reading overlooks De Forest's pur
pose . We must see his many author comments as part of the
18Philip H. Ford, "Techniques of John W. De Forest,
Transitional Novelist," unpub. diss. (Ohio State Univ.,
1953), p. 182. See also James W. Gargano, "John W. De
Forest: A Critical Study of His Novels," unpub. diss.
(Cornell, 1955), p. Ill, pp. 131-132.
30
attack on sentimentalism which Everett Carter deems so im-
19
portant m any consideration of American realism.
De Forest is anti-sentimental when he indicates to the
reader that what he records actually can happen, even though
certain literary works had prepared a reader to expect some
thing else. In addressing the reader, he mentions contemp
orary works or characters such as Uncle Tom, "Mrs,. Stowe’s
immortal idealism" (p. 246), who represent the falsehood of
20
sentimentalism. He thus shows that he is conscious of the
literary background in which he writes, and his comments and
apologies indicate that he knows he is doing something new.
-*-^In Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Master
(1871), chapter eight, "The Struggle in the Dark," is quite
deliberately anti-sentimental, warning the reader that there
is to be a struggle with a conscience, not with a sentiment
al, gothic monster. Throughout the book Eggleston refers
to his contemporary regionalists who attempt realism in
their literature, and he frequently reports to the reader
that what he writes is true. His relationship with De
Forest is interesting because in his revised edition of 1892
he refers to "prophetic writers who yearned so fondly for
the 'Great American Novel' twenty years before" and offers
his book as a portion of that novel which was coming out
"in sections" (p. 6 of the 1913 edition). De Forest's
phrase-making essay "The Great American Novel" had appeared
in The Nation twenty-four years earlier in 1868, and was
probably what Eggleston had in mind.
2°He also refers to modern science (pp. 34, 50, 56, et
passim) as a force to broaden and humanize society.
31
His comments often explain his own moral stand when his
characters violate moral codes. He upholds the common code
21
while explaining that immoral people really do exist.
In Miss Ravenel's Conversion, then, realism is that
view of life which emerges from contrasting naive belief
with experience, where opinions give way to facts, when, as
Dr. Ravenel says, "we give up consistency" (p. 64). One
aspect of De Forest's realism is that he achieves remarkable
verisimilitude in his characters by this pattern of con
trasting people and their views. Another aspect is the
manner in which he qualifies and softens "tough" scenes
which might otherwise be merely shocking. Yet another as
pect is his optimism for those who have succeeded in over
coming the dangers of war, whose characters have been forged
in the flames of battle. By implication there is optimism
for the country which has similarly emerged from that great
conflict.
This optimism is part of the impulse of the early
realists. When we add to this De Forest's use of dialect,
^The character of Van Zandt, a "luxurious brute,"
often requires De Forest to make an explanation like the
following: "I do not wish to £>e understood as insinuating
that all or even many of our officers , . . were given up
to plunder and debauchery" (p. 128).
32
his broad range of social classes, and his fidelity of ob
servation, we see that Miss Ravenel's Conversion is realist
ic in a rather insistent way. The novel concerns a four
sided love affair with political and moral implications,
set against the larger background of the Civil War. Nine
teen-year-old Lillie Ravenel arrives in New Boston, Bara-
taria (New Haven, Connecticut), with her father, a medical
professor and mineralogist who has been forced to leave New
Orleans at the outbreak of the war because his Union senti
ments endanger his life. In New Boston she meets Colonel
Carter, a swashbuckling Virginian in Union service, and
Edward Colburne, a struggling local lawyer who leaves his
practice to be a captain in Carter's regiment of Barataria
volunteers. When New Orleans is captured by Union forces,
the Ravenels return to their home, and Lillie marries the
dashing Carter, although her father approves the steadier,
less glamorous Colburne. The colonel has an affair with
Lillie's aunt, Mrs. Larue, and when the affair is discov
ered, the Ravenels return to New Boston. Colonel Carter is
killed in battle, and the story concludes with Colburne's
marriage to Lillie.
Several surface aspects of De Forest's realism may be
briefly mentioned here; they are not startling to a modern
33
reader, but they are remarkably different from the senti
mental fiction of De Forest's day. Battlefield conversation
22
in the popular fiction was extremely far-fetched. But De
Forest's characters are quite life-like. The hero, Colonel
Carter, is a heavy drinker and swearer. He carries on a
love affair with his wife's aunt. He speculates in army
property to finance his extravagant living. He insults
women, but he is splendid in battle and respected by his
men. When he dies, he brushes off the chaplain's concern
22in Henry Morford's The Coward (Philadelphia, 1864),
p. 97, for instance, a fantastic duel is proposed in the
heat of battle. The romantic dialog in this main scene is
typical of the book.
"You see those New York boys forming there, to do the
work. Ride with them and with me, if you DARE, Captain
Hector Coles, and see who goes furthest I That is my
duel'."
"I? I am on staff duty— not a mere cavalryman 1"
There was hesitation in the voice and deadly pallor on
the cheek; the civilian heard the one and saw the other.
"Refuse to go with me and fight out our quarrel in
that manner," the excited voice went on, "and by the God
who made us both, the whole army shall know who is the
coward'. More— " and again his mouth was very near to
the ear of the other— "she shall know it'."
Compare that passage to one in Miss Ravenel's Con
version when the doctor pushes the barrel of his rifle
through a loophole in the fort, whereupon a Rebel pulls at
it.
"Let go of my gun'." he shouted instinctively, without
considering the unreasonable nature of the request. "Let
go your self, you son of a bitch I" fsic1 returned the
outsider, not a whit more rational. (p. 311)
34
for his immortal soul.
"General, have you thought of the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ?" asked the Chaplain.
"Don't botheri Where's the brigade?" the colonel
replied. (p. 424)
The hero of the novel, Captain Colburne, is a man who
comes out second best. The girl he loves marries another,
and the captain must protect her from discovering her hus
band's immorality and fraud. He is passed over for promo
tions; the honors go to battlefield cowards or slackers at
home who have political influence. At the end of the war
he is ravaged by malaria and swamped with red tape. In
this book the boy gets the girl second-hand; she already
has a child, and there is not money enough for a honeymoon
trip.
Perhaps it is in the portrait of the charming, sophis
ticated, thoroughly immoral Mrs, Larue that one sees De
Forest as a pioneer realist. By contrast with her, Lillie
Ravenel is pale and dull. Mrs. Larue is witty, shrewd, and
selfish; she quotes "fine rhapsodies from Balzac" (p. 349)
and assures her lover that he can still love his wife be
cause "I am not exacting. I only want a corner of your
heart." She laughingly signs herself "Ste. Marie Magdalene"
in a note to Colonel Carter. This portrait of a lady who
35
laughed wittily at her own promiscuity was not a typical
female character in 1867, when fictional custom demanded
23
that "fallen women" be as unattractive as possible.
Realistic also is his picture of the war itself. The
competent officers were frequently drunkards. Men sometimes
threw down their rifles and ran away from battle. Liars and
cowards were promoted. Anyone with money could buy his way
out of the conscription, or if in the army, could buy a
safe position. Husbands in the army were often shiftless,
spending their money at the Commissary instead of sending it
home. Supplies were lost through carelessness in the rear
echelons or sold to support gambling debts. Old ladies
protested minor inconveniences on streetcars while young
men died inconclusively in alien country. Armies marched
more than they fought. Battles were bitterly contested on
one day and easily finished on the next, with no logical
connection apparent to the soldiers who fought them. Death
23carter, p. 39, cites Matilda Muffin (Rose Terry) for
a catalog of stock female characters in the decade 1857-
1867. Miss Muffin warns her readers not to identify her
with her characters, which include "a strong-minded, self-
denying Yankee girl, a broken-hearted Georgia beauty, a
fair princess, a consumptive school mistress, a young woman
dying of the perfidy of her lover, and a mysterious widow."
36
was impartial and grim.
But the artistic accomplishment of the book is that De
Forest is not one-sided. Not everyone in the army is a
drunkard. Some congressmen are honest. Some battles have
a sense to them that goes beyond a complicated time table.
The realism of the book indeed lies in the verisimilitude of
character, plot, and setting, as most of the reviewers
agree. But more specifically, the chief technique by which
this verisimilitude is achieved is to contrast characters
and scenes to evoke what might be called the complexity of
the real.
The structure of the novel— a juxtaposition or contrast
of views— is outlined in the second paragraph of the book
when De Forest comments,
No violent eruption rends a mountain without stirring
the existence of the mountain's mice. It was unquestion
ably the Southern rebellion which brought Miss Ravenel
and Mr. Colburne into interesting juxtaposition. (p. 1)
This juxtaposition expands throughout the book as Northern
and Southern armies confront each other, brigade against
brigade, rifleman against lone rifleman; a governor meets
with a line officer, a soldier with a civilian, a cultured
gentleman with a "cracker." In short, the Civil War erupts
in the United States, bringing a four-year period of armed
37
conflict between people bitterly opposed to each other.
After the war, there will be a "bloody chasm" dividing the
North and the South.
Lillie Ravenel, newly arrived in Barataria, is annoyed
by the stern, circumscribed houses of New Boston, which
reflect the "poky" people who live in them. She describes
the New England atmosphere in the following passage:
If I should be transported on Aladdin's carpet fast
asleep, to some unknown country, and should wake up and
find myself in such a house as this, I should know that
I was in New Boston. How the Professor must enjoy him
self here! This room is exactly twenty feet one way by
twenty feet the other. Then the hall is just ten feet
across by just forty in length. The Professor can look
at it and say, "Four times ten is forty." Then the
greenhouse and the study balance each other like the
paddle-boxes of a steamer. Why will you all be so
square? (p. 14)
Colburne's answer indicates his New Bostonian rigidity
when he replies, "But how shall we become triangular, or
circular, or star-shaped, or cruciform?" It is through the
experience of war that these two characters reach a form
mid-way between the two architectural extremes mentioned.
Colburne, who, "though cheerful and even jovial, had been
permeated to some extent by the solemn passion of Puritan
ism" (p. 73), comes to respect the Southern rebels as gen
tlemen fighting for their dearest countrysides. Lillie is
38
"converted" from the narrow, "Ashantee" views of her birth
place. Both become broader, more tolerant human beings, and
it is clear that De Forest hopes the country has undergone a
similar education through hardship and privation. He makes
this comment about Captain Colburne:
He is a better and stronger man for having fought three
years, out-facing death and suffering. Like the nation,
he has developed and learned his powers. . . . It is in
millions of such men that the strength of the Republic
consists. (pp. 484-485)
That attitude is essentially the heart of the optimism De
24
Forest felt for the country in 1865.
A good example of the technique of contrast is seen as
Colonel Carter ridicules the Northern hysteria when the
Union is defeated at Bull Run. The New Bostonians are de
pressed by the battle, believing it to be a great rout with
serious moral implications, but to the Colonel, who fought
24ne also felt some sadness that the war was over. A
wholly personal passage regrets that there will be "no more
groans of wounded, nor shouts of victors, nor reports of
triumphs which saved a nation from disappearing off the face
of the earth" (pp. 319-320). It is personal pride in suc
cessfully passing the test of battle which leads De Forest
to his optimistic feeling for the future of the republic.
In 1887 De Forest excised the passage for the projected
edition of his collected works. It was omitted in the 1939
(Harper and Brothers) edition, and restored for the 1955
edition (Rinehart).
39
and was captured in the engagement, the battle simply ended
in a mathematically necessary retreat. Carter explains that
there is more than one side to any story:
You must consider how easily inexperience is deceived.
Just get the story of an upset from an old stage-driver,
and then from a lady passenger; the first will tell it
as quite an ordinary story, and the second will make it
out a tragedy. Now when some old grannies of congress
men and some young ladies of newspaper reporters, none
of whom had ever seen either a victory or a defeat, got
entangled among half a dozen disordered regiments, they
naturally concluded that nothing like it had happened
in history. I tell you that it wasn't unparalleled,
and that it ought not to have been considered surpris
ing. Whichever of those two green armies got repulsed
was pretty sure to be routed. (p. 78)
This juxtaposition of the views of the old driver and
the skittish woman passenger, suggesting Carter and Col
burne, is the technique of contrast by which much of the
book's realism is projected; it is the contrast of objective
and subjective reaction.
These differing accounts of two observers could be
merely a matter of experience in observing, but De Forest
goes further. He also employs the pattern of contrasting
his characters to explore their moral framework and to de
velop them as credible human beings. Such a contrast ex
ists between Mrs. Larue and her lover, Colonel Carter, who
begins an affair with her while on a boat trip from New
40
Orleans to New York. There are several levels of contrast
employed in the affair, and they are self-consciously
introduced by the author. Chapters XXVII and XXVIII contain
the bulk of the extra-marital affair, and De Forest intro
duces the section by writing that the domestic happiness
and innocence of Colonel Carter is like a
prospect of flat peace and boundless prosperity that is
.tiresome to the human eye. . . . I announce therefore
with intellectual satisfaction that our Colonel is sum
moned to the trial of bidding goodbye to his wife, and
undertaking a journey to Washington. (pp. 343-344)
On this journey Carter's "Anglo-Saxon practicality and
conscience" are contrasted with Mrs. Larue's "French-
speaking moods," which are confined to "la sainte passion,"
including quotations from Balzac and Dumas. She appeals to
Carter's pity because at thirty, a widow without children,
she has no one to love and no right to love anyone. "Such
talk as this," says De Forest, "sounds unnatural in the
language of the Anglo-Saxon, but is not so unbecoming to the
tongue of the Gauls" (p. 349).
Because Carter is already married, there are left only
two alternatives, Mrs. Larue says, hidden love or spiritual
self-murder; and she asks, which is the greater of the two
crimes.
41
Is the former a crime? Society says so. But are
there not exceptions to all rules, even moral ones?
Love always has this great defence— that nature prompts
it, commands it. As for self-repression, asphyxia of
the heart, Nature never prompts that. (p. 350)
This European attitude is contrasted not only with the
Anglo-Saxon conscience which causes Carter to groan with
remorse even while he enjoys Mrs. Larue's embraces, but is
contrasted with the attitude of the faithful wife, Lillie.
When Mrs. Larue says to Carter that "we are one for
life . . . I shall never desire a husband," and yet wishes
that Lillie were with them on the ship because "she must
feel all alone in New Orleans," Carter is shocked into
silence because he is not used to such open feeling. He
thinks to himself that his wife "never philosophized con
cerning her love, never analyzed her sentiments" (p. 352).
Here Mrs. Larue's moral and emotional complexity is con
trasted with Lillie's simple morality and Carter's even more
simple lust. While the author clearly favors Lillie, it is
also clear that De Forest finds her simplicity part of that
"morally agreeable domestic happiness and innocence . . .
which would prove tiresome to the reader" (pp. 343-344).
In addition to being immoral, Mrs. Larue is also so
charming that she manages to captivate all the men she
42
meets, and the Northern clergymen seem eager to convert her
from the "errors of slavery and papacy," which, from a
Protestant point of view, are serious lapses. De Forest
emphasizes this charm to prepare for the return trip to New
Orleans, on which she and Carter lead
a peaceable, domestic sort of life, without much regard
to secrecy, without much terror at the continual danger
of discovery. They were like old sinners enough to
feel and behave much like innocent people. (p. 365)
De Forest’s whole treatment of this extra-marital
liaison shows that neither Carter nor Mrs. Larue is wholly
evil in the fundamentally immoral relationship which De
Forest condemns without oversimplifying. During this af
fair, Carter's affectionate letters to Lillie have been a
genuine source of comfort to her. Mrs. Larue has genuinely
pitied Lillie, so quickly bereft of her new husband. De
Forest thus presents a contrast of moral codes in a manner
which we may call realistic. We may account for frequent
author comments here, and throughout the book, as acknow
ledging the difference between sentimentalism and realism.
Unconventional morality is not the only realistic sub
ject in De Forest's attempt to portray life as it is. The
Northern concept of the war as a holy crusade is also
43
25
examined quite closely. Dr. Ravenel, who often serves as
the spokesman for an enlightened, experienced point of view,
indicts the North for its share of the war blame. In his
way he reinforces Lillie's youthful criticism of New England
stuffiness, with the young men "like celery," the houses
like boxes, and the social patterns rigid. When the Raven
els return to New Orleans after Union forces have captured
it, the doctor denounces both sides as follows:
Who could have believed that prosperous, gay, bragging
New Orleans would come to such grief and poverty1 . . . .
Business gone, money gone, population gone. . . . I
hope that the whole land will not have to pay as heavy
a price as New Orleans to be quit of its compact with
the devil [slavery]. We are all guilty to some extent.
The North thought that it could make money out of
slavery and yet evade the natural punishments of its
naughty connivance. It thought that it could use the
South as a catspaw to pull its chestnuts out of the
fires of hell. It hoped to cheat the devil by doing
its dirty work over the planter's shoulders. . . .
None of us ought to get off easily, and therefore I
conclude that we shall not. (pp. 122-123)
Dr. Ravenel here presents a view of Northern hypocrisy
^The crusade concept raised expectations for Northern
military triumphs because of moral superiority, and De
Forest's opinions were more typical of the slavery support
ers than of a New England officer. One Northern journal
editorializes that "of several delusions the abolitionists
are in, the grand delusion is that better men grow amid
free institutions of the North." "The Delusions of Aboli
tionists— A Letter to Rev. Henry Ward Beecher," The Old
Guard. I (June 1863), 121-124.
44
which De Forest, the son of a New England cotton manufactur
er, contrasts with the fire-eating cries of triumphant Union
troops who are looting the fine old city. Histories of the
Civil War show that Northern abolitionism was a fraud in the
eyes of many Southerners, especially those who shipped cot-
26
ton to the industrial centers of New England. "All share
the guilt" is a truism as appropriate now as when the book
was written a century ago.
In another indictment of the North, the views of stay-
at-homes are contrasted with Colburne's experiences in the
war. Patriots denounce the captain for daring to disagree
with the Northern point of view. It is just after the war;
he is feverish with malaria and exhausted from grueling
marches up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Because he
claims that the Rebels were first-class fighters and not
^The vast amount of literature on this subject is
surveyed in Spiller's Literary History, pp. 563-572. For
the tone of pro-slavery polemic as well as a measure of the
freedom of the press allowed in the North after the war,
nearly any page of The Old Guard magazine will provide
sufficient example. Slavery, for instance, is "a truth
fixed by the hand of God Himself in the heart of things."
J. H. Van Evrie, "Different Laws for Different Races," V
(January 1867), 63-69. Of Lincoln they could say "His life
was as illegitimate as his birth, and his death, at a
theatre on a Good Friday night, was as illegal as both his
birth and life." V (March 1867), p. 212.
45
cowards, he is called a Copperhead and thoroughly insulted.
To the Northerners who had not undergone the rigors of
battle, the Union soldiers were invincible, and the rebels
were a pack of traitorous curs. Too tired to argue the
point, Colburne tells Dr. Ravenel that he has managed to
learn manners as well as courage in the war. He says,
Thanks to my social training in the South, I am able to
say to a Northern man who abuses me for my opinions,
"Sir, I am profoundly grateful to you for not cutting
my throat from ear to ear. I shall never forget your
politeness." (p. 457)
This scene at the end of the book echoes the account of
Bull Run that Colonel Carter gave to Colburne at the begin
ning of the war. But now Colburne is the experienced sol
dier, too wise to deceive himself about his enemy, too
urbane to argue with a provincial New Bostonian. That
Colburne tells this to the doctor is significant also.
Whereas the doctor once held unpopular views in the South,
Colburne now holds unpopular views in the North. Colburne
has become, like Dr. Ravenel, a man of the world.
De Forest also uses contrast to achieve a realistic
picture of the Negro slave, chief symbol of the Civil War.
When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in
1852, she created a stereotype whose name is still used to
46
represent patient suffering and the art of getting along
under intolerable conditions. De Forest does not believe in
Uncle Tom and says so quite plainly through Dr. Ravenel,
who is in charge of a group of field hands remaining behind
when their white masters flee before the advance of the
Union army. The doctor wants to teach the freed slaves
self-discipline and self-reliance, and for an assistant he
has a Negro preacher, "Major" Scott. According to De
Forest's ironic description, Scott is
in pious conversation, venerable air, grand physique,
superb bass voice, musical ear, perfection of teeth,
and shining white of the eyes, a counterpart of Mrs.
Stowe's immortal idealism, Uncle Tom. (p. 247)
Scott's resemblance to Uncle Tom is only superficial,
however; De Forest goes beyond appearances in order to ex
plode the sentimental lie about Uncle Tom. Major Scott
lies, steals, and cannot understand "the binding nature of
the marriage contract." But the doctor is tolerant because
Scott is a man "whom the American Republic, thirty million
strong, has repressed and kept brutish wuth its whole power
from his birth down to about a year ago" (p. 247).
A chaplain argues that the enlightening power of divine
grace would save the Negro if he were really regenerated,
and the doctor attacks white religious hypocrisy by saying;
47
"My dear sir, renewing a man's heart is only a partial
reformation, unless you illuminate his mind. Suppose he
can't read. Suppose half of the Bible is not told him.
Suppose he is misled by half of the teaching, and all
the example of those whom he looks up to as his super
iors. I am grieved over his errors, but I do not think
it a case for righteous indignation, except against men
who brought this poor fellow up so badly."
"But Uncle Tom?" instanced the Chaplain, who had not
been long in the South.
"My dear sir, Uncle Tom is a pure fiction. There
never was such a slave and there never will be. A man
educated under the degrading influences of bondage must
always have some taint of uncommon grossness and lowness."
(p. 247)
Dr. Ravenel's reconstruction work with the Negroes
produces some results, but they are by no means sustained.
Yet out of his experience, the doctor has high hopes that
education and self-employment^and freedom will do much for
the Negroes. Contrasted with the doctor's experience is
the briefer experience of Captain Colburne, who is losing
some of the idealistic concepts he formed in the North about
the future of the manumitted slaves. Colburne has an order
ly, Henry, who dances and gambles all night and wants to
sleep all day. He could make thirty dollars a month working
on the levee in New Orleans, but he chooses to work for
Colburne for ten dollars because the duties are lighter.
"'Pears like I wants to have a good time better'n to have a
heap o' money," he says.
48
Colburne urges middle-class virtues on him, but Henry
demurs, and Colburne half-agrees in the following exchange:
"Ef I totes a big stent, I gits two dollars; an'
ef I totes 'nuff to kill a hoss, I gits two dollars
n'aff a day."
"Why, that is grand pay. . . . Stick to it and make
a man of yourself. Get some money in the bank, and
then give yourself a little schooling. You can make
yourself as truly respectable as any white man, Henry."
"Ya-as," he said hesitatingly, as if he thought the
result hardly worth the trouble; for which I hardly
blame him, considering the nature of a great many white
men of this country. "But it am right hard work, Cap
tain." (p. 252)
Colburne persists in urging that Henry strive for white
respectability, but to no purpose, and angrily he writes to
the doctor:
Now when you have freed with your own right hand as
many of these lazy bumpkins as I have, you will feel at
liberty to speak of them with the same disrespectful
levity. Wendell Phillips says that the negro is the
only man in America who can afford to fold his arms and
quietly await his future. That is just what the critter
is doing, and just what puts me out of patience with
him . . . if he doesn't fall to work pretty soon . . .
we shall kick him out of doors and get in somebody who
is not satisfied with folding his arms and waiting his
future. (p. 253)
Colburne knew nothing of the Negro before he came to
the South, and the doctor did. Furthermore, the doctor's
experience with the freed Negro is more akin to peace-time
self-employment than the view Colburne has of the camp
49
Negroes who joyfully follow the victorious Union troops.
Dr. Ravenel comments on the captain's letter:
He is too impatient . . . God has chosen to allow Him
self a hundred years to free the negro, We must not
grumble if He chooses to use up a hundred more in
civilizing him. What right has Captain Colburne to
demand roses or potatoes of land which has been sown
for centuries with nothing but thistles? We ought to
be thankful if it merely lies barren for a while.
(p. 253)
In this novel Dr. Ravenel stands for the enlightened
man of the nineteenth century. He has traveled widely and
read extensively. He is a professor of natural sciences.
Physician and mineralogist, he is concerned with the appli
cation of science to the improvement of the human condition,
and he had believed in racial equality thirty years before
the war. These views were held silently because he would
have "had his skull broken within twenty-four hours after
announcing them" (p. 227). But this man of practical and
humanistic science knows nothing about war, and his ignor
ance here is contrasted with Colburne's experience when the
doctor offers advice to the soldier who has been training in
the rigorous climate of the Louisiana bayous. Dr. Ravenel
tells Colburne to avoid the night air, and the captain re
plies that he must make his rounds after midnight, adding
that a soldier is lucky to have a blanket at night, much
50
less a tent. "War is a dreadful thing, even in its lesser
details," observed the doctor. Throughout the novel, De
Forest's technique is to shift from major problems to the
lesser details which compose them.
One of the remarkable juxtapositions, done entirely
without author comment, is the contrast between "Major"
Scott and Major Gazaway. Like Scott, Gazaway is a fine
physical specimen whose biceps "would break a mirror." But
there the similarities end. Gazaway's rank has been legal
ly conferred on him by the Governor of Barataria in ex
change for the votes Gazaway controls; Scott's title is
honorifically bestowed by a Union general whom Scott aided
by serving as camp boss of freed slaves. Scott pleads with
Colburne to be allowed to fight; Gazaway suggests to Col
burne that they give up the fort under Gazaway's command.
Scott jumps out of hiding and boldly faces the advance
guard of cavalrymen; Gazaway steals a blanket from a wound-
ed man in his fort, wraps himself in it, and lies quivering
during the Rebel attack, Scott is killed in action; Gaza
way lies his way out of the army and retires with $15,000
in graft which he earned by letting conscripted soldiers
escape. Scott is a freed Negro slave; Gazaway is a white
Yankee from Barataria, home of Puritan ethics. The
51
separate chapters devoted to these men follow each other,
but their juxtaposition is not called to the reader's
attention, and De Forest does not make a noble soul of
"Major" Scott. In fact, unless one is quite accustomed to
look upon Negroes as human beings, one can entirely miss
De Forest's contrast of a hero and a coward. No commenta
tor has noted it.
Throughout the novel De Forest shifts from one observer
to another, from one point of view to its opposite. He fo
cuses in one scene on a leisurely dinner in a rear-echelon
mansion; in another scene he shows a man drilled by a snip
er ' s bullet as he lies reading a newspaper. He describes a
battlefield confusion where a cup of bad water is a tempo
rary escape from death; he records a quiet conversation with
the Governor of Barataria who promotes a coward to gain some
votes. By seeing Southerners, Northerners, civilians, Ne
groes, officers, and enlisted men not as symbols and types,
but as human beings who, taken all together, form a complex
picture, De Forest shows the Civil War as what it must
27
"really" have been, as his brother soldiers acknowledged.
^Colonel Nicholson of the 12th Connecticut writes that
he and his brother volunteers agree that De Forest's war
writings are the most faithful and accurate account of the
52
A second major technique of De Forest's artistic real
ism is the manner in which the novelist tones down and sof
tens what might otherwise be a harsh description. De Forest
does this by contrasting a hard and soft background, a
gentle expression and a tough one, and by introducing ironic
juxtapositions which tend to soften a scene and make it more
believable than an unrelieved picture might be. Although
such juxtapositions may be seen easily throughout the book,
they indicate his art in composition when some of the pas
sages from the novel are contrasted with similar passages in
his journalistic sketches or his letters as they have been
collected and published under the title of A Volunteer's
28
Adventures.
By contrasting the sketches with the novel, we can see
the deliberate effort De Forest made to achieve his realism
by not insisting too much on shocking details. We may as
sume that the earlier sketches are accurate enough, but they
war that they have read. Letter inserted in Miss Ravenel*s
Conversion. 1867, in the Nicholson Collection, Henry E.
Huntington Library.
28
A Volunteer's Adventures, ed. James H. Croushore
(New Haven, 1946). The introduction gives the history of
publication, enumerating the chapter drafts which appeared
earlier in magazines.
53
are also the impressions of a man not entirely used to war.
The novelist, however, is a more experienced man than the
volunteer under fire for the first time, and he can exercise
greater control and show a larger sense of proportion than
the soldier-observer can.
A Volunteer's Adventures is a narrative account of De
Forest's experiences in the war as a volunteer captain of
the Twelfth Connecticut Regiment. The report covers his
military career from his participation in the expedition on
New Orleans in March of 1862 to his part in the battle of
Cedar Creek and the Opequon in the Shenandoah Valley in
October, 1864. In the first engagements, he was captain of
a line company of infantry riflemen, as close as any man
ever gets to confronting the enemy. Although the manual of
arms required a captain to march in the rear of his company,
De Forest felt he needed to set an example for his green
troops by marching into battle at the head of his company
(p. 75). In the closing campaign of the war, he was a dis
patch rider for General Emory, and in this staff position he
saw more of the battle than he had as a line officer. There
he gained that view of war which sees battles as "confound
ing, fragmentary, and incomprehensible," as he wrote to
Howells years later (p. 204). Some of this sense of
54
confusion is given in Miss Ravenel1s Conversion and greatly
adds to the realism of the novel.
Although some parts of A Volunteer's Adventures were
published in magazines and later revised for his memoirs,
all of his war writings were written in the field immediate
ly after an event, or were prepared from notes made in the
field. Some of the materials were revised after they had
been published, and some included portions of letters to his
wife. Although some of the accounts were fully written up
before the novel was completed and some were written up
afterward, the final form of A Volunteer's Adventures was
revised about 1890 under the title Military Life. Whether
written before or after the novel, the accounts were not
written as fiction, and by contrasting sections of the mili
tary life with counterpart passages in the novel, we can see
some of the technique which differentiates De Forest's fic
tion from biography, history, journalism, or, in short, non
fiction as De Forest conceived it.
Just as Becker used three criteria of realism to evalu
ate the novels of the period, some similar standards can ac
count for the differences between the objective reporting of
A Volunteer's Adventures and the realistic fiction of Miss
Ravenel*s Conversion. The four following generalizations
55
sufficiently explain these differences because they come
from parallel passages in the two books and because they
show De Forest imaginatively reworking his materials to fit
the novel's structural pattern as previously outlined: (1)
harsh details are muted and subdued in battle scenes because
in the larger framework of the novel, brutal details would
merely shock; (2) serious incidents are subordinated or con
trasted to bizarre incidents to suggest the confusion of
war; (3) first-hand experiences are compressed and re
arranged to give a broader and more- dramatic point of view;
and (4) profanity is used judiciously to develop character
and to show the general effect that war has on men. These
four criteria may be observed in the very texture of the
passages drawn from De Forest's experiences.
In the following passage we have a good example of how
a harsh scene is softened in the parallel passage of the
novel. The first excerpt is from A Volunteer's Adventures:
While we awaited the order to set forward I studied
with interest the physiognomies of our men. They had
by this time quite lost the innocent, pacific air which
characterized them when they entered service. Hardened
by exposure and suffering, they had a stony, indifferent
stare and an expression of surly patience, reminding me
of bulldogs and bloodhounds held in leash. (VA, p. 108)
The same battle scene in the novel is considerably
56
longer and much more dramatic, filled perhaps with more
author comment than a modern reader would approve. But the
changes are in the direction of that dramatic contrast which
is so integral a part of the novel. In the novel De Forest
writes:
One of Weitzel's aides now dashed up to Carter, and
immediately his staff officers galloped away to the
different commanders of regiments. An admonishing mur
mur of "Fall in, men!"— "Attention, men!" from the cap
tains ran along the line of the Tenth, and the soldiers
rose in their places to meet the grand, the awful possi
bility of battle. It was a long row of stern faces,
bronzed with sunburn, sallow in many cases with malaria,
grave with the serious emotions of the hour, but hard
ened by the habit of danger and set as firm as flints
toward the enemy. The old innocence of the peaceable
New England farmer and mechanic had disappeared from
these war-seared visages and had been succeeded by an
expression of hardened combativeness, not a little
brutal, much like the look of a lazy bulldog. Colburne
smiled with pleasure and pride as he glanced along the
line of his company, and noted this change in its
physiognomy. (MRC. p. 257)
Here the author's verisimilitude consists of softening
the hard appearance of the men. There is pride in the
fighting trim of the unit, but there are reminders of the
suffering they have endured. The men fall in to an "admon
ishing murmur" rather than to a parade-ground shout which
the sentimental reader might expect, and the effect suggests
that the engagement to come is serious but also routine.
The men have sunburn and malaria, concrete details that are
57
lacking in the sketch. The toughness of "bulldog" is sof
tened by the adjective "lazy," and the description adds up
to a view of the men which reflects Colburne's growing ex
perience .
Another set of excerpts shows De Forest's fictional
account of battle again emphasizing contrasts which give the
novel a dramatic quality which the non-fictional account
lacks. The first excerpt, from A Volunteer's Adventures,
shows the company marching under heavy shell fire in a thick
forest. Trees fall and crack while shells burst above the
marching men and spray them with fragments of wood and
steel. Against this background of death and terror De
Forest writes:
A quiet little fellow named Lane limped up to me,
saluted in his usual meek way, showed me a lacerated
heel, and said, "Captain, shall I go on?" . . .
Lane had scar.cely gone when a color corporal near
me dropped his musket and spun around with a broad
stream of blood dribbling down his face. I supposed
for a moment that he was a dead man; but the ball had
merely run along the upper edge of his leathern fore
piece, driving it through the skin; there was nothing
worse than a shallow gash from temple to temple.
(VA, p. 109)
The novel's version of this same incident exploits the
natural contrast of serious and bizarre incidents. The
scene in the novel comes from "one of the Captain's letters"
58
and is used to comment on his first experience under fire.
That it is not actually one of De Forest's letters, but a
working of experience into fiction, is best seen by an
addition not quoted above, The Volunteer's Adventure sec
tion reports that De Forest almost fainted under the shock
of the heavy cannonade "and I had to draw long breaths to
steady myself" (VA, p. 110). In the novel, Colburne takes a
sip of whiskey from a brother officer's canteen, adding
righteously, "It was the only occasion in my fighting ex
perience when I have had to resort to that support" (MRC. p.
260) .
The section I wish to quote deals only with the wounded
men, and the order of the wounding is reversed in the novel
so that the vicious cannonading becomes an almost comic
scene which softens the harshness of the action. The novel
version reads:
I had scarcely recovered myself from the whiskey and
fright when I saw a broad flow of blood stream down
the face of a color-corporal who stood within arm's
length of me. I thought he was surely a dead man; but
it was only one of the wonderful escapes of battle.
The bullet had skirted his cap where the forepiece
joins the cloth, forcing the edge of the leather through
the skin, and making a clean cut to the bone from temple
to temple. He went to the rear blinded and with a smart
headache but not seriously wounded. . . . a shell burst
in the center of my company, tearing one man's heel to
the bone but doing no other damage. The wounded man, a
59
good soldier though as quiet and gentle as a bashful
girl, touched his hat to me, showed his bleeding foot,
and asked leave to go to the rear, which I of course
granted. While he was speaking, another shell burst
about six feet from the first, doing no other harm at
all, although so near to Van Zandt as to dazzle and
deafen him. (MRC. pp. 260-261)
The changes here are small ones, but they serve to
compress the incidents and rearrange them to give greater
psychological validity to the scene as well as dramatic
emphasis and a broader point of view. In addition to the
change from deep breathing to whiskey as a restorative, the
novel gives greater sharpness to the color-corporal's wound,
merely a "shallow gash" in the sketch, but "clean cut to the
bone" in the novel. The "quiet little fellow" in the sketch
is further softened to "quiet and gentle as a bashful girl"
in the novel. When the shell bursts without harming any of
the men but deafening Van Zandt, there is a comic touch
added because Van Zandt is a ludicrous alcoholic to whom
any misadventure but death or injury might happen.
A further excerpt shows De Forest's treatments of
deserters. In A Volunteer's Adventures, he makes a digres
sion from his historical account to call attention to the
fact tha£ fugitives do not run crazily away as "misrepre
sented by poets and novelists" but "tramp steadily rearward,
60
not in the least wild with fright . . . taking care of them
selves with provoking intelligence" (.3£A, p. 220). But that
is a generalization he does not emphasize in the novel.
Rather he combines two incidents from his experience, and,
without moralizing, dramatizes the contrast of deserters
and fighters. He comes fairly close to such a "misrepre
sentation" as he accuses other novelists of. The two inci
dents are recorded in Volunteer1s Adventures and refer to
two battles widely separated in time and location.
The men stared about them with anxious faces, occa
sionally they had to break ranks in haste, to escape
the toppling timber; then they laughed at themselves
and each other, but not cheerfully. Once they shouted
uproariously when a splintered tree came down with a
crash and dispersed a file of stragglers who had
gathered behind it. Still I saw but one fugitive, a
sergeant of the First Louisiana, who dodged rearward
from covert to covert, his chin shaking and his face
ghastly. Braley of our regiment collared this fellow
and dragged him into his own company; but the scared
wretch presently slipped behind a tree, and thence
continued his flight with the speed of insanity.
( m , P. n o )
There was no fight in Medad Jones, as I shall call
him here. As the shell yowled over him, fifty feet
above his silly head, he halted and turned up a whiten
ing face while his rifle slid from his hands and clat
tered to the earth. Next he whirled rearward and set
off in a wild flight, leaping ten feet at a stride with
hands outstretched in front, like a baseball player
after a "flyer." (VA, p. 193)
The first description is from the Port Hudson battle
61
De Forest fought in 1863; the second is from a battle in the
Shenandoah Valley a year later. De Forest combines the two
incidents in Miss Ravenel1s Conversion;
Every regiment has its two or three cowards, or
perhaps its half-dozen, weakly-nerved creatures, whom
nothing can make fight, and who never do fight. One
abject hound, a corporal with his disgraced stripes
upon his arm, came by with a ghastly backward glare
of horror, his face colorless, his eyes projecting,
and his chin shaking. Colburne cursed him for a pol
troon, struck him with the flat of his sabre, and
dragged him into ranks of his own regiment; but the
miserable creature was too thoroughly unmanned by the
great horror of death to be moved to any show of re
sentment or even of courage by the indignity; he only
gave an idiotic stare with outstretched neck toward the
front, then turned with a nervous jerk like that of a
scared beast and rushed rearward. Further on, six men
were standing in single file behind a large beech,
holding each other by the shoulders when with a stunning
crash the entire top of the tree flew off and came down
among them butt foremost, sending out a cloud of dust
and splinters. Colburne smiled grimly to see the para
lyzed terror of their upward stare and the frantic
flight which barely saved them from being crushed to
jelly. A man who keeps the ranks hates a skulker and
wishes that he may be killed the same as any other
enemy. (MRC. pp. 259-260)
In both versions we have a soldier running crazily
away in just the manner De Forest claims was a novelist's
misrepresentation. The difference between the novel and the
historical account is a matter of greater sharpness and
specificity, especially in the picture of the stragglers
holding on to each other. Colburne is the moral point of
62
view here; he classes the skulker with the enemy. De Forest
as novelist dramatizes the contrast between those who fight
and those who run away.
Another area of change between reportorial account in
A Volunteer's Adventures and the novel shows the specific
technique of De Forest's realism, the profanity employed.
Greater leeway was allowed in the novel, of course, than in
the sketches as published in a family magazine. Occasion
ally in A Volunteer's Adventures De Forest uses the dash for
a profane word or employs a euphemism of dreadful falsity.
The company of volunteers is marching into its first battle,
watching their comrades fall beside them for the first time,
marching indeed with their rifles in parade fashion on their
shoulders. It is quite a dangerous situation.
All this time we were exposed to both cannon and
musketry without being allowed to reply. "Oh dear!
When shall fire?" I heard one of the color-corporals
exclaim. (,i£A, p. 64)
In the novel, such a situation is handled with author
commentary that "every few minutes there was an oath of rage
or a shriek of pain" (MRC. p. 263). The alcoholic Van Zandt
is allowed some "damns" and a great many "By Joves" which
De Forest needlessly explains are not what Van Zandt really
says (MRC, p. 268).
63
The erring but valiant Colonel Carter is allowed more
-r"
latitude than the other characters, much in keeping with
the more realistic treatment he gets in the novel as a
whole. In his last battle he exults over his men, "God
damn their souls 1 See them go in. God damn them! I can
put them anywhere" (p. 423). It is just at this point that
Carter is killed, which must have shocked De Forest's read
ers, for in the magazine sketch involving the color corporal
who says "Oh, dear," De Forest feels obliged to explain the
swearing in the presence of death and judgment.
The swearing mania was irrepressible. . . . In the rage
of the charge, in the red presence of slaughter, it
seemed as if every possible extremity of mere language
was excusable, provided it would aid in gaining victory.
A serious friend has asked me since if I did not think
of eternity. Not once. I was anxious for nothing but
to keep a steady line and to reach the enemy's position.
(VA. p. 480)
It is just this attitude that is well dramatized by
Colonel Carter's last moments. Immediately after the pro
fane joy quoted above, Carter receives a fatal wound and
the chaplain asks him, stupidly enough, how he feels.
"Going," was the whispered answer.
"Going! Oh, going where?" implored the other, sink
ing on his knees. "General, have you thought of the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ?"
For a moment Carter's deep voice returned to him as,
fixing his stern eyes on the Chaplain, he answered,
"Don't bother! Where is the Brigade?" (MRC. p. 424)
Informed that the Brigade has carried its position, the
colonel dies smiling. This scene is far more than a matter
of swearing for De Forest. He explains that with another
education, Carter might have been a Saint Vincent de Paul,
and adds that "with the training he had, it was perfectly
logical that in his last moments he should not want to be
bothered about Jesus Christ" (p. 424). In working up his
material into the novel, De Forest dramatizes and compresses,
but he cannot refrain from adding his own comment, which
again we must take, I think, as part of his attack on sen
timentalism.
There are many more passages containing similar mater
ial in the sketches and the novel, because the war episodes
are written from the author's own experiences, and the
sketches provided him accurate notes for almost all the
battle scenes in the book. The names of the general offi
cers are the same in novel and sketches? the "whit whit
whit" of bullets and the "sonorous spang of brass cannon"
are found in both. Incidents, reactions, colors, even
unusual words are the same. In summary, both sketches and
novel show a great accuracy of detail which gives a vivid
and spontaneous quality to the novel, but the chief differ
ence in the novel is that De Forest emphasizes contrasts for
65
dramatic effect; this technique fits into the structure of
the novel as a whole, and hence suggests an artistic prin
ciple and a very sure hand in controlling the material.
De Forest himself felt that his account of the military
part of the war was worth note, for he has the doctor com
ment favorably on Colburne's description of the Battle at
Cedar Creek, the battle which De Forest saw most clearly,
being a staff officer with an opportunity to observe the
entire encounter almost at will. The doctor exclaims:
That is the most splendid battle-piece that ever was
produced by any author, ancient or modern. . . . I know
just how that battle of Cedar Creek was fought, and I
almost think that I could fight such a one myself. . . .
When he comes home I shall insist upon his writing a
history of this war. (p. 439)
De Forest's history of that war is Miss Ravenel1s Con
version from Secession to Lovaltv. It was well written; it
29
was well reviewed, but the sales were small. For De
Forest, the problem was whether or not he could write as
forcefully again without such a wealth of experience as his
military service had provided for him.
^Allen Kline Nall, "A Critical Evaluation of John W.
De Forest," unpub. diss. (Univ. of Texas, 1952), p. 268.
Nall adds that it "seems impossible to obtain any complete
record of sales and size of edition." For a brief record
of De Forest's bad luck with publishers, see pp. 276ff.
CHAPTER III
THE RECONSTRUCTION
Like the hero of Miss Ravenel1s Conversion. John W. De
Forest returned home after three years of active duty with
what seemed to him "a totally ruined constitution." Al
though his commanding officer, Major General Godfrey Weit-
zel, offered him the rank of major and a regimental field
position, De Forest felt too weak for the post, and he was
mustered out of service on December 2, 1864. After only
two months of recuperation, however, during which time he
was writing Miss Ravenel's Conversion, he accepted a com
mission as a captain in the Veteran Reserve Corps on Febru
ary 10, 1865.^ When that group was disbanded in 1866, De
Forest, then a major, was assigned to the Bureau of Freed-
men, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the
Freedmen's Bureau. He took charge of a Bureau district in
^De Forest, A Volunteer's Adventures, pp. xvii-xviii.
66
67
South Carolina which was comprised of Greenville, Pickens,
2
and Anderson Counties, with headquarters at Greenville,
His fifteen months' service there provided him with the
background for a number of short stories and articles set in
the South and for one famous novel about the ante-bellum
3
plantation society, Kate Beaumont.
The influence of his service in the Freedmen's Bureau
can be seen in Kate Beaumont. but De Forest also had other
experiences and convictions to draw upon. He admired the
courage of the Southern soldiers he had fought in the recent
war; he respected the political talents and public spirit of
the aristocratic class; and he knew a good deal about the
upper class in South Carolina because before the war he had
lived in Charleston, where his wife grew up. Partly as a
result of his experiences, De Forest wrote an extremely
realistic novel in Kate Beaumont, even though its pre-war
plantation setting was more usually employed in romantic
2John W. De Forest, A Union Officer in the Reconstruc
tion (New Haven, 1948), p. xxix.
^Unless otherwise noted, all references to this novel
will be to the Monument Edition, edited with an introduc
tion by Joseph Jay Rubin (State College, Pennsylvania),
1963.
68
4
fictions that conjured up a gracious utopia.
In this novel De Forest tells the story of a long
standing feud between the McAlisters and the Beaumonts in
the "Hartland" district of South Carolina. After eight
years of scientific study and travel in Europe, Frank
McAlister returns home hoping to find phosphates that will
give his state an alternative to the cotton which "bandages
the eyes of the merchants and planters" there. By accident
he meets Kate Beaumont on the ship coming home, and although
the feud is, according to one of the participants, "a family
institution, our race palladium . . . the Beaumont estab
lished religion" (p. 135), the two young people fall in
love. Frank suggests that their marriage could end the
feud which has taken nine lives already, but out of loyalty
to her family Kate cannot accept his proposal until she
consults with them.
When the passengers abandon ship because of a fire,
Kate falls overboard and Frank rescues her. When the two
arrive in Hartland, the rescue serves to prevent a duel
between two other young men of the feuding families, and it
^For a discussion of romance literature see Francis
Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation (New York, 1925),
and Gregory Paine, Southern Prose Writers (New York, 1947).
69
seems possible that Kate and Frank can marry. But the feud
breaks out again when Frank disarms and ties up Kate's
younger brother Tom, who has fired several pistol shots at
Frank in a drunken exploit. By tying up a gentleman, Frank
has offered an irreparable insult. The consequent duel re
opens the family feud until it finally claims the life of
Kate's grandfather, Colonel Kershaw, the epitome of all that
is admirable in the South. It is proved that a poor rela
tion of the Beaumonts has accidentally killed the good old
man, and the feud is declared closed, freeing the young
people to marry. The marriage brings peace to the two
families, but it does not herald a new day for the state
because Frank gives up science as Ma thing not yet required
by Carolinians" (p. 214). He takes up the affairs of a
cotton planter and vows to his new wife that he will spend
the future trying to make up for the past. A contemporary
review justly commented, "If we had ever doubted the fact
. . . that Southern society was in a large sense medieval
and feudal, the present work would have removed that
doubt."5
5The Galaxv. XIII (May 1872), 713-714.
70
Despite the fact that Kate Beaumont is an imaginative
reconstruction of the pre-war South, it is also realistic by
those standards discussed in the previous chapter, standards
so particularly applicable to nineteenth-century American
fiction. To review briefly, there are four criteria: de
tail is derived from personal observation; the norm of ex
perience is relied upon; the artist attempts objectivity
without prejudice? and the work is anti-sentimental.
The detail of Kate Beaumont certainly reveals the
author's experiences as set down in A Union Officer in the
Reconstruction. South Carolina place names are used, and
the poor relations of the Beaumonts come from the "Dark
Corner," the mountainous region to the west of De Forest's
headquarters in Greenville. The "low-down" people there
drink Pickens whiskey "fresh from the mill, clar as water,
an' strong as pizen" (KB, p. 268), just as De Forest ob
served it as a Bureau major in Pickens County. The first
duel in the novel grows out of a church social which fea
tures a McAlister as a "Howling Gyasticus," a rural exhibit
briefly referred to in A Union Officer (pp. 47-48). Sam
Tony, "a youth of piny woods extraction, as lean and yellow
as his own fiddle" (KB, P> 265), is derived from A Union
Officer's account of the "low-down people" (U£), pp. 146ff.),
71
and he serves as the fiddler in the "cracker ball" which is
described with some zest in both novel and journal. It is
also quite likely that the character of Colonel Kershaw,
the paragon of Southern aristocracy, is modeled on a Con
federate general whom De Forest fought against in the
Shenandoah Valley.^ Finally, Frank McAlister's search for
phosphates in Kate Beaumont parallels the experiences of Dr.*
Charles Shepard, the author's father-in-law, with much the
same discouraging results.^
Kershaw is the name of a county in South Carolina as
well as the name of a prominent South Carolinian, General
J. B. Kershaw, distinguished Confederate general, attorney,
state senator, and judge of the 5th Circuit District of the
state. See Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography,
eds. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York, 1888),
III, 527. The figure of Colonel Kershaw is apparently not
a portrait from life, but it may be a tribute to the Con
federate general. De Forest had observed the historical
General Kershaw in the battle of Cedar Creek where the
Southerner mounted a charge so successful (although the
North won the battle) that De Forest wrote of it, "No day
break rush of moccasined Shawnees or Wyandots was ever more
dexterous and triumphant than this charge of Kershaw's
Georgians, Mississippians, and South Carolinians." A Volun
teer's Adventures, p. 208.
^Frank's search for phosphates is modeled upon Dr.
Shepard's prediction in 1859 that the state could export
great quantities of phosphates if it cared to develop its
natural resources. Dr. Shepard had pioneered phosphate de
posits with a colleague, Dr. St. Julien Ravenel, who did
develop a phosphate company during the Reconstruction which
contributed greatly to the state's income during that im
poverished time. Whether an earlier industrialization in
.72
By Becker's second criterion of realism, the author
should rely upon normal experience, not upon unusual happen
ings . De Forest demonstrates this commonplace experience
through members of the four distinct classes which he ob
served in post-war Southern society and included in Kate
Beaumont. Whereas many Northerners apparently thought that
there existed only two classes in the South, the slaveholder
and the slave, De Forest described four, distinguishing what
he termed the "chivalrous Southron," the "semi-chivalrous
g
Southron," the "low-downer," and the Negro. These classes
are well represented in Kate Beaumont, although by plot re
quirement the three lower classes are structurally subordi
nated to the aristocratic class. This subordination is
justified in the novel because it was the upper class which
the South would have helped the nation ward off a Civil War
is, of course, entirely theoretical, but De Forest's post
war hopes for Southern resurgence rested almost entirely on
industrialization and public education. For an account of
the two colleagues see Francis Butler Simkins and Robert
Hilliard Woody, in South Carolina During Reconstruction
(Chapel Hill, 1932), pp. 305-306.
®The expression "Southron" referred originally to an
Englishman as distinguished from a Scotsman. The name ap
peared in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and Southerners in
the United States used the name proudly for themselves.
Sometimes De Forest uses the term proudly, as a Southerner
might, and other times he uses the term ironically and de
risively as a Northerner might. See Editors' note, Union
Officer, p. 159.
73
held the social and economic power of the South before the
war. The hierarchic structure of Southern society is ex
plained in what De Forest called the "central monkey" ten
dency during his Bureau days.
The "central monkey" theory is De Forest's description
of the feudal social position of the large planter, and is
named after the traveler's story that
in the highlands of Africa exists a race of monkeys,
who, during the cold season, gather into tight little
knots, each having for its center a venerable senior
of great wisdom and influence, and the business of
the others being to keep him warm. . . . Every commun
ity has its great man . . . around whom his fellow
citizens gather when they want information, and to
whose monologues they listen with a respect akin to
humility. (UQ., pp. 194-195)
In Kate Beaumont this "central monkey" system is re
flected in the political struggle between Judge McAlister
and Peyton Beaumont, traditional Congressional representa
tive. The judge has been persuaded to run for Congress to
replace Beaumont as the central monkey. But when Kershaw
is accidentally killed, apparently by the McAlisters, the
citizens of the district turn against the judge because
they want men who hit what they aim at. The following con
versation sufficiently indicates De Forest's representation
of and contempt for the Southern central monkey system.
74
Mr. Stokes, "a fervent adherent of the Beaumonts, be it
charitably remembered," expresses the central monkey opinion
when Kershaw dies of his accidental wound.
"Popped the Colonel by accident, did they? . . . Sech
men hev no business carryin' shootin1-irons. . . . Why
I consider it one of the highest crimes and misdemean
ors to pop a man by accident. . . . Take the Beaumonts,
now. They don’t go round shootin1 the best men in the
country by accident. When they pop you, they mean it.
They've shot as many as any other crowd in the State,
an never had no damn foolish accident yet, but allays
bored the feller they drew bead on, an' no other. Now
thar's men you can tie to; thar‘s men you can hev a
confidence in; thar's men you can feel safe with. . . .
I don11 want to raise a crowd agin the McAlisters,
[because they are high-toned gentlemen and own hundreds
of Negroes] . . . But I must say that so fur, accident
or no accident, things is agin 'em. Yes sir, sure as
cotton is white an niggers is black, things is power
fully agin 'em." (]£B, pp. 365-366)
The place of Negroes in the Southern structure is sug
gested by Stokes's last remark. They are put into the back
ground of the novel instead of being idealized according to
9
the literary fashion. What little dramatic use is made of
the Negro, however, is extremely effective, mocking as it
does the influence of the white master on the Negro slave.
^Gaines, Southern Plantation, p. 63, suggests that by
1871 slaves were being used by Southern and Northern writers
alike to lament for days of past glory. See also Sterling
Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, D. C.,
1937), pp. 49-63.
75
Peyton Beaumont is served by Cato, a slave who sneaks
whiskey while preparing the two cocktails that start Beau
mont's day. Cato also assumes the family ferocity and tries
to push around a McAlister slave when the two meet at the
store. Randolph Armitage is served by Quash, a slave who
sleeps on the floor, in the woods, or wherever his master
leads on his drunken sprees. At the climax of the cracker
ball which brings together all four of the classes in
Southern society, the "chivalrous" drunken Randolph is bush
whacked by the "semi-chivalrous" Sam Hicks. Immediately
Randolph plunges into the underbrush in pursuit of his
honorable assailant and falls at the fence-line. But the
"low-down" Redhead Saxon is afraid to follow his feudal
lord, and orders Quash at gun point into the darkness after
his master. Under threat of being shot himself, Quash rides
into the brush and finds that his master has not been shot,
but has simply fallen off the fence rail in a drunken stu
por. The episode represents dramatically the deterioration
of Southern society.
The general attitude towards the Negro in the ante
bellum South is illustrated by'a minor character, Arthur
Gilyard, a clergyman of Huguenot blood who has cultivated
humility. He is a "model gentleman," says De Forest, who
76
looks on dueling as an "instrument for the development of
civilization by elevating the sense of honor and polishing
manners." As for his opinion of slavery, De Forest says,
if the Bible did not assail it, why should he? If in
these views he was illogical, antiquated and provincial,
he was at least perfectly honest. (p. 37 3)
In this sentence De Forest makes the novel's sole reference
to slavery as an institution and justifies Howells's comment
that the author "gains an immense advantage in refusing to
deal with slavery except as a social fact." In subordi
nating the three lower classes, including the Negro, to the
patrician ruling class, De Forest thus gives a complex view
of Southern society and dramatizes Becker’s "norm of exper
ience" as literary realism demands. By the third criterion
for realism, the author should achieve objectivity without
prejudice, and De Forest demonstrates this objectivity by
showing a complex society which has several variations
within the aristocratic class and by drawing individual
characters who are themselves complex. In order to satirize
■^-^Howells comments further that because De Forest re
fuses to deal with slavery except as a social fact "we are
brought nearer to his Southerners as men and women, and
enabled to like or dislike them for purely personal rea
sons." The Atlantic Monthly. XXIX (March 1872), 36 4-36 5.
77
the evil effects of the code duello on the planter class, he
introduces a variety of aristocrats whose attitudes toward
dueling vary from repugnance to enthusiasm. For the pur
poses of this dissertation, it is necessary to trace at some
length the characters of the aristocratic planters as De
Forest pictures them.
For De Forest the "chivalrous Southrons" embodied in
some ways the best possible human achievement of man in a
democratic country. In an essay published after the war, he
urged his countrymen to remember and to save the "better
peculiarities" of "that chivalrous Southron who was once our
11
pride and is now our adversion." In this essay De Forest
emphasized the integrity of the class, calling them unbrib-
able public servants who considered politics and the art of
ruling a high calling. Several years later, when the Re
construction was nearly over, he praised the same class
again by saying:
when the reign of the men who have plundered the South
ern white and debauched the Southern black is nearly
over. . . . The highly-endowed race, the heroic race,
The 'High Toned Gentleman,’" The Nation. VI (March
12, 1868), 206-208. This essay appeared three months after
the author had returned from his Bureau Service, or three
years before Kate Beaumont was written.
78
the blood race is sure to win.
In A Union Officer De Forest also praised this class. When
two gentlemen of the old Virginian or Carolinian school
greet each other, he reports:
The moral thermometer rises to summer heat; your humani
ties expand and bloom under the influence; you are a
kindlier and, I think, a better man for the sight.
(p. 186)
In Kate Beaumont this kind of gentleman of the old
school is portrayed in Colonel John Kershaw, Kate's grand
father. He is "one of the noble souls who look all their
nobility." De Forest continues:
In his youth he had been a very handsome man, and
at eighty he was venerably beautiful. His massive
aquiline face, strangely wrinkled into deep furrows
which were almost folds, was a sublime composition
of dignity, serenity, and benevolence. You would
have been tempted to say that a sculptor could not
have imagined anything better suited to typify an
-*-2"An Independent's Glance at the South," The Nation.
XXIII (September 28, 1876), 196-197. In this letter to the
editor, De Forest said it was not yet time to turn political
affairs over entirely to Southern politicians because their
economic theories were not modern enough. In a rare re
joinder, The Nation responded that De Forest did not under
stand how the Constitution specifically prevented certain
economic policies which De Forest (and others) feared. What
De Forest really had in mind, however, was a suspicion of
the Southerner's basic misunderstanding of money and debts.
See Union Officer, pp. 189-190.
79
intelligent, good, and grand old age. . . . He was one
of those simple, pure, honorable, sensible country
gentlemen . . . who strike one as having a reserve of
moral and intellectual power too great for their chan
ces of action, and who lead one to trust that Washing
tons will still be forthcoming when their country
needs. (pp. 139-140)
Respected by the entire household, he has so influenced his
fiery Beaumont relatives that only two duels have been
fought with the McAlisters since his daughter married Peyton
Beaumont (p. 140).
Kershaw exemplifies the best of the "chivalrous South
ron," but there are other members of the class who are not
13
so noble. Peyton Beaumont, his sons, and their relatives
by marriage, the Armitages, are intended to show a less
admirable aspect of the patrician breed. Peyton Beaumont
begins each day with two cocktails. On Sunday, when he
sleeps later, he drinks three. His slave, who mixes the
drinks, therefore calls him the most religious man he knows.
His appearance reflects his temper as De Forest describes
l-^The best picture of the stereotype which De Forest
is shattering with his complex view of the class is con
tained in the title essay of The Old Virginia Gentleman by
George W. Bagby, ed. Ellen M. Bagby, Richmond, 1938. The
chivalrous Southerner, according to Bagby's deliberately
idealized portrait, was, "in a word, as nearly perfect as
human infirmity permits man to be."
80
him:
In the bloodshot black eyes (suffused with the yellow
of habitual biliousness), in the stricture of the Grecian
mouth, in the cattish tremblings of the finely turned
though hairy nostrils, and in the nervous pointings of
the bushy eyebrows, there was an expression of intense
pugnacity, as fiery as powder and as long-winded as
death. (p. 124)
His lazy sons are non-practicing professionals trained
abroad, Poinsett a lawyer, and Vincent a doctor. "Work" is
beneath them. Tom is a courteous drunk who says that Ameri
ca is "in the swamps" when it comes to museums and archi
tecture. "All we can offer to a traveler is the bar. And
that's the reason, by Jove, that we're always nipping" (p.
57). The Beaumonts represent a planter class which combines
gunpowder and whiskey.
One step down in society from the Beaumonts, the
McAlisters, and Kershaw, but also "chivalrous Southrons,"
are two "high-toned gentlemen," Major Lawson and General
Johnson. Their titles are honorary and their punctilio is
beyond reproach. The peaceful Major Lawson hopes that the
romance between Kate and Frank will unite the latter-day
Capulets and Montagues of South Carolina. He serves De
Forest as a figure of sentimentalism, exaggerating the
young people's courtship into a Romeo and Juliet romance
81
without Shakespeare's tragedy. The bloodthirsty General
Johnson leads a retreat out the window of the shop where the
drunken Tom has blazed away in the dark at the unsuspecting
Frank McAlister. He fears that Tom will hold them respons
ible after Frank has tied Tom up. Lawson and Johnson are,
then, minor counterparts of Kershaw and Peyton Beaumont
respectively, and serve as comic exemplars on the chivalric
code, at once admirable and ludicrous.
Two steps down from the Kershaw-Beaumont-McAlister
level within chivalrous society are the Armitage brothers
who live in the rural fastness of Saxonburg County. Though
married to Nellie Beaumont, the handsome Randolph Armitage
gratifies himself with "low-down" women. His brother
Bentley has a wounded foot which slaps comically as he
walks, a shuffling comment on the code duello. Like the
Beaumonts, the Armitages are proud, quarrelsome, and alco
holic, but they also have a petty mean streak to them, and
lack the integrity of character which makes the Beaumonts
admirable. Taken together, the Beaumonts, the Armitages,
and the McAlisters make up part of the gentleman class which
contrasts sharply with the noble example of Colonel Kershaw.
In juxtaposing high courtesy with violence, De Forest sug
gests a deteriorating aristocracy which has become corrupt
82
by its gradual association with those classes which support
and serve it. Insofar as this portrayal of the upper class
is a complex one, De Forest's view is objective and without
prejudice, the third criterion of nineteenth-century real
ism .
In addition to portraying a complex upper class, De
Forest also draws complex characters within that class, and
this broad view of the individuals reflecting their society
is a second means of achieving objectivity without preju
dice. A complex character may be defined as one who shows
both strength and weakness, but aboye all, one who is cap
able of change and growth. In Kate Beaumont there are two
such dynamic characters, Peyton Beaumont and his daughter,
Nellie Armitage.
*■ ’
Peyton Beaumont is described as a man. of firm will,
with a strong sense of honor, and a fund of temperament "as
sublime as a tiger's and as ridiculous as a monkey's" (p.
124). Informed of an impending duel between Wallace
McAlister and his son Vincent, he rages when Poinsett sug
gests that McAlister may apologize and so preclude a duel:
By heavens I want him shot. . . . Here is the most
unprovoked and brutal outrage that I ever heard of.
This beast calls a Beaumont no gentleman. And here
you hope there'll be an apology, and that end it. I
83
want Vincent to hit him. I want the fellow shelved:
I don't care if he's killed; by heavens, I don't.
(p. 128)
Yet within an hour he is shouting to his sons to stop their
target practice and hide their pistols, and then within a
few moments he is weeping for joy at the pleasure of seeing
his daughter Kate return from abroad.
Although Peyton's own brother was shot and killed by
Frank's father, he swallows his ancient hatred for the
McAlisters when he learns that Frank has saved Kate from
drowning. When it is suggested that they might marry, he
is confident that her good sense will oppose such a union,
but he will not interfere with her choice because he trusts
her. Finally, although he is a proud plantation owner and
anxious, presumably, to maintain his traditional holdings,
he explodes with rage at the mere suggestion that a marriage
between Frank and Kate— who will inherit her grandfather's
huge plantation— would mean "good by to the Kershaw estate."
He responds:
"Good by to it and welcome'." roared Beaumont, indig
nant at this thrusting of filthy lucre under his honor
able nose. "What the Old Harry do I care for the Ker
shaw estate? I am a Beaumont, and the descendant of
Beaumonts. I thought we looked only to honor in our
family. MoneyI You can't turn my head by talking
money. X know the value of the thing. But, by heavens,
I wouldn't swerve a hair for the sake of it. I'd blow
84
my brains out first." (p. 181)
Peyton Beaumont, then, is gentle, pugnacious, and
honorable, indicating a complexity of character that goes
14
beyond the fictional stereotype of the Southern Planter.
More important, he is able to change his mind. His com
plexity is best indicated in his willingness to make peace
with the McAlisters, to shake hands with the man who killed
his brother, to talk sherry and horses with his blood enemy,
and to admit, with characteristic forcefulness, his admira
tion for Frank McAlister.
A more subtly complex character is Peyton Beaumont's
older daughter, the black-haired Nellie Armitage, whom
Howells included in his gallery of fictional heroines.^
Far from being the paragon of patience sentimentalized in
much plantation literature, Nellie is fiercely independent,
-*-^See Paine, Southern Prose Writers, pp. lxxxvii-xcii
for the general content of the romantic view of the Southern
plantation. See also The Nation reviewer's statement that
novels about the slave state were "simply veiled arguments
in favor of Abolitionism, or the unearthly visions of the
genuine Southern novelist." The Nation. XIV (March 21,
1872), 189-190.
^Howe l l s singles out Nellie for his Heroines of Fic
tion (New York, 1901), II, 152-163. For Howells, Nellie
epitomizes Southern chivalry by leaving her drunken husband.
85
and fully conscious of her aristocratic rights and obliga
tions when they conflict witfr her personal feelings. She
keeps her bedroom unlocked to Randolph, her drunken brute
of a husband, because "My husband has a right to come to my
room at any time" (p. 281). She is unwilling to leave him
because:
It would be known that I had failed; that Nellie Beau
mont could not live with her husband; that she could
not lie on her bed after making it; that she had failed
as a wife and a woman. (p. 274)
Randolph comes to her bed later, roaring drunk, knife in
hand, demanding to know where his whiskey is, and he offers
her an unbearable insult: "That's all I came here for
[whiskey]. Do you suppose I wanted you?" (p. 284). At
this, despite her sense of failure, Nellie leaves him, but
she forbids her father and brothers to shoot Randolph, and
she demands her father's promise because "In this matter I
have a right to command" (p. 318).
Despite her training in the traditions of dueling and
drinking, she advises her sister Kate to marry a Quaker or
a Yankee, "anything that doesn't get drunk and fight, any
thing that isn't high-strung. I hate the word. It's a
mean, slang word, and it stands for a curse" (p. 285).
Nellie is complex because she is capable of change, and
nowhere is this better shown than in her attitude toward
Kate1s love for Frank. Although she wanted Frank shot for
tying up her brother, and although she is disgusted by the
hypocrisy of her own marriage, she urges her fiery father
to bless Kate's marriage to Frank. In drawing Nellie, De
Forest violates fictional and social taboos by showing a
wife and mother capable of love and hate, capable of leaving
her aristocratic husband, and capable of forbidding "satis-
faction" by violence against all traditions of the tradi
tional South.^
As a final measurement of Kate Beaumont1s realism, the
book is decidedly anti-sentimental in its attack on the then
popular myth of Southern gentility. In this respect De
Forest is outside the mainstream of contemporary treatment
of the theme of plantation literature. King states that
Northern presses were flooded with articles on "Virginia,
South Carolina, the war, the Reconstruction, the Negro, the
17
past, present, and future of the South." According to
Gaines, the aristocratic life of the South as pictured in
l^See Gaines, pp. 173-208.
1 7
■ L/Joseph Leonard King, Jr., Dr. Georae William Baabv
(New York, 1927), p. 139.
87
most plantation literature revolved around three stock char-
18
acters, the old planter, the belle, and the Negro. They
embodied a life style that was honorable, lovely, and amus
ing, and from De Forest's point of view, they were utterly
false. By using these general character types but expanding
upon them, by showing individual distinctions between the
planters Kershaw and Beaumont and the belles Kate and Nel
lie, and by showing the Negro in his environment of the
total class structure, De Forest not only portrays the
Southern society without "literary lying" (sentimental
literature) but mocks the sentimental stereotypes as well.
Specifically De Forest explodes the concepts of a
gracious way of life by showing the bloody results of the
code duello. which demands "satisfaction" by firearms for
any insult, real or imagined. The code directly causes the
senseless death of Colonel Kershaw, the epitome of an
aristocratic grace which the sentimentalists claimed was
culture-wide. In this episode De Forest brings together
the several levels of his "chivalrous Southrons" in a
contretemps both ludicrous and tragic. The drunken
Armitages come to the Beaumont plantation to claim Nellie
- * - 8Gaines, pp. 17 3ff.
88
back again, and Peyton, violating the tradition of hospi
tality, throws Randolph down the steps. At this moment
Frank McAlister arrives on a peace mission and disarms
Randolph, while Peyton calls for his sons. The sons arrive,
and, not knowing Randolph's brutal outrages against their
sister, see only that a McAlister is holding down a rela
tive, and they begin firing from the veranda of their man
sion. Frank's suspicious brothers, who have been lurking
in the pleasant grove near the plantation house, see their
fears justified, and rush upon the scene with their pistols
blazing. While Peyton and Frank attempt to restrain their
families, the hatreds and traditions of the past overwhelm
them, and "at least thirty shots were exchanged in as many
seconds" (p. 348).
In this wild melee Kershaw is wounded, dying several
days later from what is presumed to be a McAlister bullet.
His death precludes Kate's marriage to Frank and forces
Judge McAlister to withdraw as a candidate for Congress.
When the bullet that killed Colonel Kershaw is extracted,
however, it is found to be marked with an "A" for Armitage.
Ironically, the senseless pride that led the aristocrats to
mark their bullets also identifies the killer as a relative
of the Beaumonts. Even more ironically, Hartland citizens
89
condemn the Armitages because the killing is accidental.
This episode serves De Forest in two ways. First, it
is an attack upon the sentimental fiction which portrays the
"good old days" of the Southern plantation as epitomized by
the peaceful and tranquil estate in John Pendleton Kennedy's
famous novel Swallowbarn (1832). The broad steps and spa
cious lawns of the Beaumont plantation are the setting for
the very antithesis of the traditional hospitality of the
gracious planter in the sentimental portrait. Second, the
episode is a direct attack on the moral poverty of the
aristocratic code as it was really practiced in the ante
bellum South. According to the code duello. this kind of
wild affair is termed a "rencontre"; it is an informal and
spontaneous exchange of pistol shots and lacks the gravity
and "honor" of a formally witnessed duel. Yet it is in this
rencontre that Colonel Kershaw, the epitome of Southern
aristocratic dignity, is killed. In Kate Beaumont this
episode marks one extreme of the satiric spectrum which De
Forest used in his attack on the Southern class system.
At the other end of the satiric spectrum is the mock
duel between the "high-toned" Randolph Armitage and the
"low-down" Redhead Saxon, who is not really entitled to duel
with a gentleman under the terms of the code. When Nellie
90
leaves Randolph, his brother Bentley prevents him from pur
suing her by getting him drunk for several days. The spree
reaches a ludicrous climax when Randolph demands "satisfac
tion" from Redhead for making a slighting remark. Bentley
and Mrs. Saxon act as formal seconds, removing the lead
slugs from the pistol cartridges. Calmly and harmlessly
the two drunks blaze away at each other in the main room of
Redhead's wretched mountain cabin. Both duelists fall in
their stupor, rise again, and call their "honor" satisfied.
In this scene, rendered without any author comment, De
Forest mocks the formal duels fought by the Beaumonts and
McAlisters, who are the social superiors of Armitage and
Saxon.
The several aspects of De Forest's realism are bril
liantly focused in the symbolic center of the book, Tom
Beaumont's duel with Frank McAlister. In this episode De
Forest deals what must have been intended as a death blow to
the sentimental picture of the pre-war South by combining
serious events with comic ones. The episode begins comic
ally when Tom drunkenly shoots at Frank in a darkened store
in Hartland, but misses him. The shooting is entirely un
provoked, as much the work of a drunken man as the ludi
crous "duel" between Randolph Armitage and Redhead Saxon.
91
Frank easily restrains Tom, but the young Beaumont will not
give his word that he will stop firing his pistol. Natu
rally enough, Frank takes his pistol away, ties him up, and
leaves the store. Following this action, events turn seri
ous. The patricians of Hartland are shocked beyond measure
at Frank for tying Tom, not at Tom for shooting Frank. Even
Frank's father admits that a horrible breach of honor has
been committed, and a formal duel is immediately arranged.
As one eyewitness puts it:
"Merciful Godl" whispered General Johnson to Wilkins.
"Tie a gentleman I I never heard of such a thing in the
whole course of my experience." (p. 231)
A simple rational action— tying up a disarmed drunk— becomes
the central episode used by De Forest to mock the stupid
code by which, at least in this book, the Southern aristo
crats lived before the war.
Reinforcing the contrast between the McAlisters and
the Beaumonts, between Frank the practical scientist and
Tom the plantation wastrel, between the medieval code duello
and a rational settlement of a drunken contretemps, is the
location of the dueling place on which the two men settle
their affair of honor. It is an "oldfield," and De Forest
describes this oldfield in terms suggesting more than that
92
of any physical location:
a deserted clearing, a plot of land once alive to
humanity, and now dead, a few acres gone utterly
barren except for weeds, bushes, and dwarf pines—
an oldfield, some four or five miles from the vil- r -
lage, was the place of meeting. (p. 240)
This oldfield is the symbolic center of the conflict between
the old way of life and the new. In addition to the con
flict represented by the principals, the relationship of the
seconds in the duel is too curiously inverted for a reader
to ignore.
The peace-loving Frank McAlister, who had hoped to end
the family feud, has General Johnson for his second. John
son is no particular friend of Frank's, but is a chivalrous
devotee of the ancient code, eager to see bloodshed. He is
a "bloodthirsty old beast" whose bleary eyes are fixed more
steadfastly on the protocols of death than on the conduct
of life. Tom, the fiery challenger in this duel, has for
his second Major Lawson, the kindly and peaceful friend of
Colonel Kershaw. Lawson would do anything to prevent the
duel, and so he offers himself to Tom as a second. Chivalry
requires Tom to accept the offer, although he would prefer
his own bloodthirsty brother Vincent. The seconds, then,
serve men who are opposite to them in temper and purpose,
93
simply because chivalry requires them to offer their ser
vices. The same code duello requires the acceptance of such
offers, regardless of the practical consequences in such
life and death matters. Because negotiations are carried on
between the seconds, the bloodthirsty General Johnson is in
a position to make Frank more hostile and savage than he
really is, even while Major Lawson is serving his best
friend's enemy Tom, who wants to kill Frank McAlister.
We can see in this duel a slight hint of the dilemma
of the Southern officers who resigned their Union commis
sions to serve a Confederacy which was pragmatically doomed
by the superior industrialization of the North, but whose
way of life demanded allegiance. Kate Beaumont is not,
however, a programmatic or allegorical novel; it convincing
ly attacks a fantastic code of honor which De Forest en
countered during and after the Civil War, a code which both
attracted and repelled him. De Forest's treatment of the
duel is both realistic and imaginative, suggesting more than
it states and leaving the reader free to see implications in
it that the author, perhaps, did not.
The duel itself takes only a few minutes. De Forest
implies that Frank, who is allowed the first shot, fires
carelessly into the air. The reader does not know whether
94
Tom misses or shoots deliberately into the air in reply.
But neither is wounded, and the duel concludes with a
flourish of gallant negotiations over whether a handshake is
required, and "in a few more.minutes the oldfield was left
deserted and without a stain" (p. 247). In addition to
satirizing the aristocratic life of the South, De Forest
here points up its tragic and blighting effect on decent
young people like Frank and Kate, the lovers in the story.
On one hand, what might have been a simple courtship has
been sentimentally heightened by Major Lawson into a pastor
al "Romeo and Juliet in South Carolina" which will unite the
Montagues and Capulets of Hartland (p. 108). On the other
hand, their love is shabbily demeaned by the Beaumont hyper
sensitivity which interprets almost every McAlister action
(like tying up Tom) as an insult that must be satisfied by
blood. The aristocratic code will not let the two alone.
It is clear, then, that Kate Beaumont is a realistic
book by the criteria proposed, and that a close reading of
the text in accordance with these criteria shows a book
consciously attempting an accurate and objective recon
struction of a period in American life which had already
been the subject of sentimentalizing literature and still
continues to be. But to write "realistically" is not in
95
itself good, even when the writer is ahead of his time, as
De Forest surely was in 1871. It must also be shown to what
extent the book is literarily a success or a failure, and
this evaluation may be done by the more traditional stand
ards of literary craftsmanship. At no later time did De
Forest have such a combination of personal experience, moral
commitment, and mixed feelings about his subject matter. At
no later time did he have the opportunity to set down his
non-fictional observations, mine them for short stories, and
then also attempt to write "The Great American Novel."
In addition to meeting the above-mentioned standards
for realism, Kate Beaumont is also a competent and artistic
work of literature. It is well-designed, it has a con
trolled comic tone throughout, and it effectively satirizes
the plantation society of the pre-war South. It involves
much more than accurate reporting by a man who was in an
excellent position to observe Southern life from a fresh and
informed vantage point, and there are documents by which we
can trace the difference between De Forest's reporting and
his fiction. His journalism (accurate reporting of what he
observed) appeared in a group of magazine articles in 1868
and 1869; later it was published posthumously as A Union
Officer in the Reconstruction. He also wrote two short
96
stories based on his Reconstruction experience. These are
tales in the local color tradition and are little more than
extended anecdotes. His most extended fictional piece de
rived from these Reconstruction experiences is, of course,
Kate Beaumont, which was written for serialization in The
Atlantic Monthly, revised for volume publication a year
later, and touched up again in connection with the author's
unsuccessful plan for a collected edition.
The differences between these works show four ways by
i
which we can differentiate De Forest's achievement in Kate
Beaumont from his achievements in his journalism and in his
shorter fiction. First, the novel shows that De Forest
added to his personal experiences and imaginatively trans
formed them into convincing fiction. Second, the diction
employed by the characters effectively reflects the four
levels of society included in the novel. Third, the auth
or's minimal revisions indicate his satisfaction with his
achievement despite the book's hasty composition. And
finally, Kate Beaumont is a work consistent with the auth
or's concept of "The Great American Novel."
In transforming his experiences into fiction, De
Forest selects from them and compresses them to fit the
large design of the novel. He employs^two major techniques
97
to do this. First, he subordinates his own personal prefer
ences for social classes so that his characters fit the
satirical design of the novel. The literary effect of this
is a dynamic relationship between his characters which is
not colored by personal prejudice. Second, he subordinates
and suppresses local color material to the novel's focus on
the "chivalrous Southrons." The literary effect of this
subordination is a well-controlled comic tone which is sus
tained throughout the novel and is not dependent upon folk
curiosities, which his journalistic writings could easily
have provided.
A striking example of the manner in which De Forest
subordinates his personal preferences in Southern society
is his treatment of the "semi-chivalrous Southron" or moun
taineer class. It is quite clear in A Union Officer that
he had the highest regard for these mountain men who refused
to join the Confederacy and remained loyal to the Union.
At great physical risk they remained in their native terri
tory, existing as best they could. Some of these mountain
men were simply draft-dodgers, unwilling to fight for either
side. But many helped Federal prisoners to escape through
Confederate lines, and because it was Bureau policy to help
the loyalists, De Forest came to know a great many of these
98
independent mountaineers and to respect and admire their
hardihood and fierce independence as much as he admired the
culture and personal integrity of many people in the upper
class.
This mountain class furnished him with the material
for the short story "Fate Ferguston," a local color tale
drawn from several character studies and observations re-
19
corded in A Union Officer. Although 1he short story is
based somewhat upon the author’s experiences as a Bureau
Major, the incident of the story itself comes from scattered
anecdotes recorded in that journal and compressed into the
tale of how mountain lynch law reaches out to kill "a
loyalist who was a bandit and murderer, and a soldier who
was a deserter." The incidents in the story itself are
colorful and curious, but there is little sense of design.,
The author reports the tale through the persona of a Bureau
Major whose job it is to punish the lynchers. The Major is
urged by the elder mountaineers to "let bygones be bygones,"
and the Major concludes that he is not justified in seeking
to punish Fate's murderers. No attempt is made to
l9"Fate Ferguston," The Galaxv. Ill (January 1, 1867),
87-100.
characterize the narrator. He simply forwards a statement
of the case to his superior officer with his own sentiments,
quoted above. Because there is no answer from his command
er, he assumes the case is ended. It is a convenient way to
end the tale, which includes characters who are composites
of many people to be found in the chapter on mountain men
in A Union Officer. The tale shows De Forest's ability to
select details and rearrange them into an interesting local
color story, and it also shows his respect for the elder
mountaineers who are not deserters, bandits, and murderers.
However, despite an obvious admiration for this class of
independent Southerners, De Forest makes a nighttime bush
whacker out of the only mountaineer in Kate Beaumont. Sam
Hicks. In the novel's famous "cracker ball" episode, Sam
becomes jealous when Randolph Armitage pays court to Sam's
fiancee, Sally Huggs. Although Sally is a "lone woman" of
questionable morality, and although Armitage has a lovely,
high-born wife, Randolph wants Sally and knocks down Sam.
Described as "not an ordinary low-downer, educated in the
depressing vicinity of great estates, and subservient to
the planting chivalry," Sam tries to attack the aristocrat,
but leaves the ball when the sycophantic low-downers stop
the fight. When Armitage starts home later, Sam fires two
shots at him from ambush. It is one of De Forest's strong
est condemnations of the Southern social structure that
neither Armitage, Saxon, nor the slave Quash thinks it un
reasonable or cowardly that Hicks should shoot a man, from
behind cover, in the dead of night. No one comments, least
of all the author. Such an affair is apparently to be taken
as a matter of course. By portraying a class he personally
admired through such an ignoble action, De Forest subordi
nates his own preferences in order to achieve a dramatic
effect. In this episode he imaginatively transforms his
personal experiences to serve his point of view as a novel
ist, which is to indicate how the class structure breeds an
unwholesome value system which affects everyone. In Kate
Beaumont the Negroes, the "low-downers," and the "semi-
chivalrous Southrons" are all subordinated to the patrician
"chivalrous Southrons," as they were subordinated in the
feudal hierarchy that De Forest attacks. The "cracker ball"
episode, which has been praised for its "realism" by modern
20
critics, serves to bring together the four levels of
society as De Forest observed them in order to attack them
^Cowie, p. 514.
101
21
all. De Forest never witnessed a "cracker ball," and,
although there certainly were such affairs in De Forest's
Bureau district, that portrayed in Kate Beaumont is an
imaginative episode which transforms the author's experience
and is designed to function within the novel's structure.
In addition to suppressing personal preferences for
independent mountaineers, De Forest also rigorously sup
presses local color material in order to carry out the de
sign of his novel. The "low-downers" especially provided
him with curiosities of a grotesque and repelling level of
society probably unknown to the North. De Forest's sketches
and studies in A Union Officer might easily have been used
as decoration in the novel's portrayal of the pre-war South.
When De Forest observed the low-downers, they had, of
course, been ravaged by the war, and "two-thirds of the men
of this class had fallen in the war or were cripples, leav
ing their wives and children to stark beggary in an impov
erished community" (p. 157). From his interviews with the
many low-downers who came to the Bureau for what food or
clothing they could get, De Forest wrote a "history" of a
21"i exceedingly regret that I never attended one of
these festivities," De Forest writes in A Union Officer, p.
140.
102
typical low-down family. He indicated that the war accel
erated a process of degeneration which had been going on
since the days when the Saxons were serfs under King Alfred.
He uses this family history both in a local color story,
22
' "An Independent Ku-Klux," and in Kate Beaumont. By con
trasting the two works, we can see how De Forest deliberate
ly avoided merely popular folklore and wove his low-downers
into the design of the novel to achieve a comic tone con
sistent with the satirical tone of the novel as a whole.
The hero of "An Independent Ku-Klux" is Selnarten
Bowen, whose first name is an illiterate corruption of
"Elnathan." He has a highly developed taste for wild pigs,
and he hunts them with a vengeance, even on other people's
land. He joins the Ku Klux Klan so that he can hunt wild
pigs among the free Negroes, and his membership brings him
into the cabin of Ham Irvine, a hardworking Negro cobbler
who owns a pig and keeps it locked in his cabin while he is
at work. The cabin fight between Ham and Selnarten is a
parallel to the cabin duel between Redhead Saxon and Ran
dolph Armitage in Kate Beaumont, and affords an opportunity
for a close examination of the novel's superior sense of
22The Galaxv. XIII (April 1872), 480-488.
103
design and characterization.
"An Independent Ku-Klux" is imaginative enough because
it rearranges materials found in A -Union Officer. The Negro
Ham Irvine, for instance, is modeled on Cato Allums (pp. 1-
13); the name Selnarten comes from a destitute case in De
Forest's Bureau district (p. 82); and the history of the
hero’s family is copied almost exactly from "History of a
Family" (pp. 154-158). But the tale does not rise above the
anecdotal level. Moreover, the tone of the short story is
uncontrolled because the mixture of serious and comic inci
dent is not consistent. Selnarten Bowen is a nearly idiotic
cracker, and therefore his haste to join the Ku Klux Klan is
not entirely humorous, nor is his inordinate taste for wild
pig, nor his monumental laziness. He thinks that being a
Klan member gives him certain rights over Negroes, especial
ly pig-keeping Negroes, and. he enters Ham Irvine's cabin to
kill Ham's pig. Ham returns and there is a fight in the
dark cabin, with Ham defending himself with his wooden leg.
The questionable humor ends grimly when Bowen shoots Ham
with his hunting rifle and kills him. De Forest lamely
concludes the tale by saying that Bowen gave himself up to
the militia, which had been called into the district to put
down Klan terrorism entirely unconnected with Ham's murder.
104
It is a flabby ending, and its humor is at the expense of a
hardworking freed Negro. It may have some of the comic
grotesquerie of such a later writer as Faulkner, but there
is no consistent attitude toward the characters, who are
treated as social curiosities or as puppets.
But in Kate Beaumont the treatment of Redhead Saxon is
genuinely comic and grotesque because he is seen in a larger
environment which encourages his dissolute life. He is be
friended by Squire Armitage, and when the two come to the
"cracker ball," it is clear that Saxon has an enviable place
on the social scale. He has a cabin and legal wife of his
own, which is more than can be said for many of the loafers
at the party, and he is not at the bottom of the social lad
der, because there are always Negro slaves below him, like
Quash, whom he orders into a dangerous situation at pistol
point. Redhead Saxon may be grotesque, but he is not a
curiosity; he fits into his environment in the novel. When
he and Randolph Armitage fight their sham duel in Saxon's
wretched cabin, the duel serves as a mocking echo of the
serious duel between Frank McAlister and Tom Beaumont, even
to the hand-shaking congratulations passed between the
duelists. The episode does more than draw attention to
drunken eccentricities down South; it fits the structure of
105
the novel's attack on the aristocratic code, and De Forest's
suppression of local color material helps him to achieve a
controlled comic tone. By contrast, "An Independent Ku-
Klux," which appeared after the novel, seems like a piece of
Kate Beaumont pulled out of the larger work and puffed into
some sort of life to please the popular taste for local
color stories. It is true that several details in the low-
downer section of the novel do come from A Union Officer,
including names, faces, and character traits (pp. 135-138).
But in the larger structure of the novel, De Forest had no
need for the mere accumulation of detail. Instead of treat
ing the low-downers in Kate Beaumont as rural curiosities in
the local color formula, De Forest's purpose is to link them
closely to the aristocrats to suggest the deterioration of
the planter class.
While the parallel incidents in Kate Beaumont. "An
Independent Ku-Klux," and A Union Officer allow one to see
De Forest's ability to transform life experience into good
fiction, it is entirely a matter of conjecture why the theme
of miscegenation is not in any way a part of Kate Beaumont
when that theme was also part of De Forest's experience (UO.
pp. 122-125). It may be a measure of artistic control that
he did not add that consideration to his attack on the
106
aristocratic code but left it to the earlier "A Gentleman of
an Old School/' a touching story of an aristocrat who took
his mulatto children North with him just before the war be
cause his drunken legitimate son would not agree to divide
23
the parental estate with them as equals. I believe that
De Forest's genuine admiration for the true patrician of
the South prevented him from adding this more serious theme
to the generally mocking tone of Kate Beaumont. The mulat-
toes he had encountered were generally well-educated and
competent people, with none of the lazy insolence of the
Beaumont sons as portrayed in Kate Beaumont. Whether the
theme was too tragic for Kate Beaumont, or whether reaction
against "A Gentleman of an Old School" cautioned him, the
theme of miscegenation in the aristocratic class would
surely have been local color material that could have ap
pealed to many readers, as it did in the generation after
24
De Forest. But he excluded the material from Kate Beau
mont. probably from a sense of the novel's structure. The
design of the novel, the dramatic relationship of the
^3The Atlantic Monthly. XXI (May 1868), 546-555.
^Gaines, p. 61, says this story "accurately fore
shadows the dominant taste of the subsequent period."
107
characters, and the controlled comic tone throughout the
book are results of De Forest's deliberate efforts to trans
form his life experiences into fiction. The efforts, one
can conclude, were successful.
The second major measurement of De Forest's literary
achievement in Kate Beaumont comes from the excellent range
of diction employed to differentiate and identify the char
acters. Because the novel focuses on the upper class, De
Forest depicts a wide range of diction to reflect that di
versity. Colonel Kershaw, for example, speaks a simple and
graceful language suited to his peaceful sentiments. Peyton
Beaumont talks explosively and forcefully in angry, almost
apoplectic bursts. Judge McAlister speaks a "honeyed civil
ity," circumambient and evasive (p. 212). The "rapid argu
mentation and application" (p. 215) in a Washington poli
tician's speech leave the Judge breathless when the visitor
stops speaking the "fol-de-rol of the country and comes
straight to his point" (p. 212).
Lower on the social scale, Bentley Armitage mixes his
basically patrician diction with colloquialisms which irri
tate Nellie Armitage, his Beaumont sister-in-law, because
these suggest the Armitage association with the low-downers
of back-country Saxonburg. On occasion Bentley speaks in
the language of the Arabian Nicrhts. his favorite reading
(p. 148). Major Lawson, the impecunious gentleman who won
his rank at dinner tables, pays compliments because "he has
little else to spare" (p. 105). Finally, there are two
small businessmen in the book who speak a kind of commercial
language made up of jokes, winks, nudges, repetitions, and
banalities. They lack the forthright language of the upper
class, whose words are carefully chosen to avoid the possi
bility of insult to fellow patricians who would resort im
mediately to pistols to defend their honor. Thus differen
tiating among the various kinds of upper-class Southerners,
De Forest reinforces his major point about that society: it
is both admirable and ludicrous, and it settles its personal
differences with violence masked by a genteel code.
The third measure of De Forest's literary achievement
is found in the revisions he made of Kate Beaumont. There
is ample evidence that the author was generally satisfied
with his final version despite his haste in writing it. His
revisions of the text after its serial publication were in
the direction of making one of the characters more credible
and in deleting a few irrelevant author comments about other
characters. Considered in their entirety, the revisions
show De Forest's sense of responsibility to his work.
109
The novel first appeared serially in The Atlantic
Monthly from January through December in 1871, along with
Their Wedding Journey by Howells and Watch and Ward by
James. In 1872 James R. Osgood, publisher of The Atlantic
Monthly, issued the novel in book form; the text was set
from corrected sheets of the magazine installments. Years
later De Forest made further changes while attempting to
publish an edition of his collected works. This is the text
used by Professor Joseph Jay Rubin in the currently avail
able Monument Edition, although there are some arbitrary
touches added, and acknowledged, by Professor Rubin. Thus
there are three states for Kate Beaumont through which one
can trace De Forest's concern with the texture of the book.
The most important change is in the age of Mrs. Ches
ter, Peyton Beaumont's coquettish sister, whose attempts to
ensnare Frank add to the aristocratic encumbrances that
prevent the hero from a simple courtship with the heroine.
Mrs. Chester is "fifty years old" in the 1871 version,
"nearly forty-four" in the 1872, and "nearly forty" in De
Forest's last revision for the Monument Edition. The seduc
tive widow Mrs. Larue was thirty in Miss Ravenel's Conver-
sion. and Mrs. Chester in the last version is perhaps more
credible as a pathetic temptress older than Mrs. Larue, but
110
not downright elderly by contrast with young Frank. A
Galaxy reviewer, however, found no reason to object to Mrs.
Chester's being forty-four. He wrote that Mrs. Chester was
not a caricature but a "real portrait of ladies to be found
25
in Fifth Avenue salons."
The few critics who have noticed De Forest sometimes
raise a mild objection to his author comments. The only
critic who has raised this objection about Kate Beaumont is
James Gargano, who says that the author comments constitute
"faulty artistry." They give the novel, he adds, "a certain
diffuseness and obviousness? they surround character and
action with heavy incrustations and they slacken the pace of
26
the narrative." Gargano worked only from the Osgood text,
the Monument Edition being then unavailable, and in the
Monument Edition the author comments remain, indicating that
De Forest wanted them there. These comments should be
viewed as a deliberately adopted means for the author to
attack sentimental literature and to picture society realis
tically. They are very much a part of the anti-sentimental
25Kate Beaumont (anon, rev.), The Galaxv. XIII (May
1872), 714.
^Gargano, p. 169.
Ill
concerns of the early realists. De Forest did, however,
excise a comment about the contemporary novel in America.
The character Frank McAlister says, in a shipboard conversa
tion, that "The American novelist either can't draw a char
acter, or he can't make a plot," and Professor Rubin sug
gests that this comment was removed from the 1872 edition
so that critics would have no easy quotations. But it is
more likely that the remark was removed because it does not
fit the character of Frank McAlister.
De Forest also corrected two sentence fragments which
may easily have resulted from the haste in which the book
was composed or proofread. Gargano cites them as instances
of "more than ordinarily lax style," although in their con
text they seem appropriate enough. The first describes the
heroine, Kate Beaumont: "Quite young; not more than eight
een apparently; maidenly purity there of course." The
second is part of the description of the aging coquette,
Mrs. Chester:
It was not because he had been civil to her niece; it
was because she wanted him to be sweet upon herself.
Couldn't help it; old habits too strong for her sense;
old habits and a born tendency.
Both of these "excrescences of style," as Gargano terms
them, were recast for the edition which De Forest planned,
112
indicating that De Forest was as well aware of an ungramma
tical sentence as the next man. A similar correction is
made in a passage cited by a contemporary reviewer as the
27
"mark of a careless style."
One other set of changes suggests that De Forest was
consciously working for fidelity to scene and character.
There is very little cursing in Kate Beaumont, and what
little there was in the magazine version is softened for
volume publication. "God," "Devil," "damn," and "drunk"
become "G-d," "dickens" or "doose," "blasted," and "tipsy."
The euphemism "H-ll" is used in all versions. Although
young Tom Beaumont is reproved by his aunt for "By Joving"
too much, the swearing in the novel is more good-natured
than profane, and certainly never attains the realism of the
swearing in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion. Professor Rubin
acknowledges that in his Monument Edition he has arbitrarily
restored the "God" used in the magazine publication. This,
I feel, was a mistake. It is quite apparent from contrast
ing A Volunteer's Adventures and A Union Officer in the
Reconstruction that swearing did not strike De Forest as
^ Kate Beaumont (anon, rev.), The Nation. XIV (March
21, 1872), 190.
113
worth considering in Kate Beaumont to the extent it did in
Miss Ravenel's Conversion. Soldiers swear frequently in the
war novel simply because in the stress of battle they curse,
even the best of them, and De Forest underscores this point
in A Volunteer 1s Adventures. But again because Kate Beau
mont is primarily about the upper class, it is a mark of
genteel society that its members are not in the habit of
swearing in mixed company. Although De Forest was willing
to censor the swearing in Miss Ravenel's Conversion so that
it could be published in a family magazine, he took it upon
himself to soften the magazine version of Kate Beaumont.
Rubin calls three changes a "surprising bowdlerization,"
but it is more likely that De Forest was attempting fidelity
to the patrician class which could not be accused of bad
manners, whatever its other faults.
Most of the revisions, then, are intended to achieve a
greater fidelity of characterization, and perhaps all of
them were required because the book was composed in haste.
De Forest acknowledged this haste in an interview he gave
some years later:
Mr. Howells, when he was editor of The Atlantic, in
1871, wrote to me for a novel. I wrote the first chap
ters of Kate Beaumont and sent it to him without the
first idea of how it was coming out. Then I was taken
ill and went to Charleston to recuperate. A few weeks
114
later I sent Howells a plot of the book in the rough,
and went on with the story. Until the end, however,
I had no idea of how it was coming out. When I read
the first four chapters in Atlantic I could not believe
that it was my own work. I had written it so hastily
that I had forgotten it. I said to myself "what is
Howells doing here, putting in his ideas and who is
this character 'Bill' [Wilkins, a minor character]
and what shall I ever do with him?" . . . The book,
when finished, sold very well, and is, I think, about
the best thing I ever did.^®
Because he corrected the first version for the Osgood
edition of 1872 and later for his collected works edition,
we may assume that the text of the Monument Edition, except
for Rubin's acknowledged changes, is what the author con
sciously intended. As I shall show, KateBeaumont is con
sistent with De Forest's theory of the novel.
The fourth major measure of Kate Beaumont's artistic
success is that the book is entirely consistent with the
author's theory of the novel. De Forest expressed this
theory in "The Great American Novel," an essay which was
published in 1858 in The Nation and which succeeded in
coining a phrase even if it had little influence on American
29
literature. In this essay De Forest defines the novel as
28oviatt, "John W. De Forest in New Haven," p. 856.
^9"The Great American Novel," The Nation. VI (January
9, 1868), 27-29. This article, like others in The Nation,
appeared anonymously, but there are obvious autobiographical
115
"the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of Ameri
can existence." It would be a "tableau," and a "robust and
straightforward account of people" (p. 27). The English
models of such a novel are by Thackeray and Trollope; the
French models are by Balzac and George Sand. Throughout
the essay, it is clear that De Forest wanted a novel to
present realistic people, a good plot, and a vigorous style.
Such a novel has "seldom been accomplished, and never
fully achieved," De Forest continues (p. 28). But it is
clear that De Forest himself made the attempt. "The Great
American Novel" contains an ironic self-portrait of "a
clever friend" who has published two or three experiments
details in it that identify the author as De Forest. Yet
even after Daniel C. Haskell compiled Indexes of Titles and
Contributors for volumes I-CV of The Nation in 1951, this
phrase-making essay remains nearly anonymous. It is printed
anonymously in Louis D. Rubin and John Reese Moore, The Idea
of an American Novel (New York, 1961), pp. 27-34, although
the Nation index had been available for ten years. Herbert
Brown, "The Great American Novel," American Literature. VII
(March 1935), 1-14, makes no reference to this essay in his
full bibliography. His earliest citation of the term is
from T. S. Perry writing in The North American Review. CXV
(October 1872), 366-378, four years after the De Forest
essay appeared. Perry acknowledges that there are many who
ask for a "Great American Novel" but who would not recognize
it if it came. He says that De Forest's novels are American
enough, but not great, because his "eye was better than his
imagination." It is one of the many ironies of De Forest's
career that this essay has not been credited to him.
116
which were "well reviewed by critics, but rather well
neglected by the purchasing public" (p. 27). This friend,
he continues,
has fought at the front, has aided in the work of re
construction, has written articles and other things
which he calls trivialities. But at every leisure
moment he returns to his idea of producing "the Great
American novel." (p. 27)
Only De Forest himself fits that description, and of his
"two or three experiments" already written, Miss Ravenel's
Conversion best fits the "tableau" concept of American life.
Kate Beaumont, written three years after the essay,
also fits the description. It is robust and straightforward
because its characters are vigorous and credible. They are
credible because they come from the ordinary strata of
upper-class society in a time when such a society really
did exist. The action in the novel is consistent with the
beliefs of the people in that society, and most importantly,
the episodes are based on the observations De Forest made
when he lived in the South. Further, Kate Beaumont attempts
to picture "the ordinary emotions and manners of American
existence" ("Great American Novel," p. 27) inasmuch as its
materials come from the normality of human experience as I
have already shown in this chapter. It may be objected
117
that the upper class is not "ordinary" in American life,
but it must also be admitted that the upper class itself is
treated broadly and honestly, and that in Kate Beaumont the
lower classes are appropriately subordinated to the upper
class, which controlled the political, economic, and social
life of the South. Finally, Kate Beaumont is a tableau of
the South. It has a panoramic sweep which moves the book
easily from Europe to South Carolina, from Hartland to
Saxonburg, from palatial plantations to rude cabins and
oldfields. The genealogy of the Beaumonts and McAlisters
traces the political differences between Scotch-Irish Pres
byterians and Huguenots, between up-country men and lowland
planters, between local and national politics. The entire
social milieu of the South is presented in Kate Beaumont
and forcefully illustrates De Forest's requirement that a
novel be about ordinary people and their actions.
A further insight into De Forest's concept of the novel
can be gained by examining the rest of the Nation essay, in
which De Forest reviews the history of American prose fic
tion. He names and dismisses Irving, Cooper, Paulding,
Brown, Kennedy, and Simms because they have not pictured
America but have dealt largely with ghosts, "and the ghosts
have vanished utterly" (p. 27). Hawthorne's art draws
118
De Forest's admiration, but his works are romances and thus
give only "a vague consciousness" of life. They are "full
of acute spiritual analysis," but on the other hand they can
show us "little but the subjective" of human affairs. Haw
thorne's characters do not fit De Forest's requirements for
realistic fiction because "they belong to the wide realm of
art rather than to our nationality." He further disparages
Hawthorne's people because
They are as probably natives of the furthest mountains
of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of
America. They are what Yankees might come to be who
should shut themselves up for life to meditate in old
manses. They have no sympathy with this eager and
laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds
so many railroads, does the most business on a given
capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its
population, believes in the physically impossible and
does some of it. (p. 28)
Furthermore, De Forest adds, Hawthorne's characters cannot
talk naturally and they cannot act dramatically. It is
clear that De Forest wants to distinguish the novel from the
romance by the realistic qualities of the characters and
their actions. To make the novel specifically American, an
author will have to include a spectrum of society quite
different from the "idealistic recluses," as De Forest terms
them, of Hawthorne's works (p. 28).
In similar fashion De Forest dismisses the writers who
were contemporary with him. Artistic and delightful as they
might be, their focus is too narrow, too false, or lacking
in passion. Robert T. Spence Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Donald Grant Mitchell, Bayard Taylor, and Henry Ward Beecher
are summoned up and dismissed as being provincial in scene
or in spirit. Even the best of them, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
does not pay enough attention to the "moral characteristics"
of his New England setting. Holmes has "scarcely alluded to
the kind of society which made [Emerson or Wendell Phillips]
what they are. These writers fail because they cannot show
American life so broadly, truly, and sympathetically
that every American of feeling and culture is forced
to acknowledge the picture as a likeness of something
which he knows.
The novel which has come closest to this description is
Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, says De Forest, because it
is "a picture of American life, drawn with a few strong and
passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a
portrait." The character of Uncle Tom himself is a false
one, De Forest says, but otherwise the Northerners and
Southerners are familiar to us all.
In summary, De Forest wants a novel to be a work which
includes recognizable people who perform recognizable ac
tions? they will talk naturally, and they will represent a
120
cross-section of American life. The novel will show the
relation of the society to the kind of men who have actually
come from there historically, and the book will be written
forthrightly and passionately, for an audience of some cul
ture and some depth of feeling. De Forest requires deft
execution, but he has no such elaborate theory of art and
the novel as James was later to demand from himself and
others.
Despite the fact that he was himself trying to write
the great American novel, De Forest had few hopes that he or
anyone else could do it because there were too many barri
ers. He names these barriers as the lack of an internation
al copyright which would make writing even minimally profit
able, the lack of a literary heritage that would "teach him
what not to write," and the lack of a stable community of
any kind. "Where are the 'high-toned gentlemen' whom the
North and South gloried in a quarter of a century since?" he
asks, adding humorously but seriously, "Where is everything
that was?" The great American novel cannot be written, he
says, until more talent is brought to it and until there is
a copyright to protect that talent. Even then, he con
cludes, it may not be time, because America changes spirit
ually and physically much too rapidly for anyone to write
121
about it except in the newspaper.
Except in the interview referred to in Chapter II, De
Forest never again wrote on the state of the novel or on
American literature in general. His novel Miss Ravenel's
Conversion had been an attempt to write the great American
novel, but it had not been successful with the reading audi
ence. The Civil War had shaken the republic as no other
single event had shaken the new nation, but the conflict
passed almost immediately into the realm of sentimentality
30
and romance. The essay was undoubtedly an acknowledgment
that he had not achieved that mythical work he had at
tempted. In it we see the reason for the regional charac
ter of Kate Beaumont and the period in which it was set,
the structured society of an important section of the coun
try before the Civil War divided the North and the South.
It is clear also that Kate Beaumont fulfills those require
ments which could be fulfilled. The book is a vigorous
panorama of an entire society. Its characters are perfectly
credible and their actions are entirely natural in the con
text of their society. De Forest did not ask more than this
•^See, for example, Ernest E. Leisy, The American His
torical Novel (Norman, Oklahoma, 1950), p. 157ff. and Robert
A. Lively, Fiction Fights the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1957).
of a novel. In Kate Beaumont he wrote a novel as he thought
it should be written, and that in itself is an artistic
accomplishment.
CHAPTER IV
THE GILDED AGE
Turning from Civil War and Reconstruction experiences,
De Forest found ample subject matter in the general politi
cal corruption of the post-war period. Between 1869 and
1878 he published three novels and five short stories which
satirized the bribery, office-seeking, log-rolling, and
fraudulent legislation of the Gilded Age and Great Barbe
cue .^ But though De Forest lived in America during this
period and wrote on this subject for nearly a decade, he
never succeeded in using realistic techniques to describe
this political society. Instead he employed the techniques
of allegory and romance, and the works are so similar in
style that they can be treated here in one chapter. These
works, set mainly in Washington, D.C., describe a limited
•^For a brief discussion of this period see Vernon L.
Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York,
1927-1930), III, 23-26.
123
124
society, in contrast to the broad social structures dis
played in Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Kate Beaumont, and
De Forest's style reflects that limitation. He identifies
corrupt office holders with the same images, cigars and
champagne; he introduces the same allegorical congressmen,
Christian, Greatheart, and Ironman; and he comments on his
characters in the same strident voice of an outraged citi
zen. The result is a considerable body of literature which
violates the standards of realism and the author's own defi
nition of the American novel, regardless of whatever excel
lence the works may have as social criticism.
In these works on Washington politics, De Forest relies
upon general knowledge and not upon personal experience, and
thus he violates the first criterion of nineteenth-century
realism, that details should be drawn from personal obser-
2
vation. It is true that De Forest was stationed in Wash
ington for a brief time during 1865 and 1866, but while he
was undoubtedly familiar with bureaucratic procedures in
the capital, he wrote no journalistic accounts like A Vol
unteer's Adventures and A Union Officer in the Reconstruc-
O
For discussion of the criteria of realism used in
this dissertation see Chapter II.
125
tion. Instead he employed his free time to finish Miss
Ravenel's Conversion and to publish several short stories
and magazine articles about his war experience; he spent his
official time writing a history of the Veterans Reserve
3
Corps to whxch he was attached. There is no evidence,
then, that he made such deliberate observations of the
Washington scene as those which enriched the factual basis
of Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Kate Beaumont. Instead, it
is clear from a reading of the works that the materials of
De Forest's Washington fiction are so general that any in
formed person of his day might have known them.
The first of the Washington novels is Honest John Vane.
serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in 1873 and published in
4
1875. The book traces the political rise and moral down
fall of Representative John Vane of Slowburgh, New York,
and De Forest intends the book to show a typical example of
corruption in the national legislature. Previously a poor
3A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, pp. xiv-xv. He
also visited Washington briefly after the war for the frank
purpose of office seeking. Light, p. 107.
^All citations from this work will be from the "Monu
ment Edition," edited with an introduction by Joseph Jay
Rubin (State College, Pennsylvania), 1960.
126
but honest carpenter and later a refrigerator manufacturer,
Vane goes to Congress as a result of political manipulations
he is too naive to understand. His legislative training
consists solely of a reputation for honesty that he gained
by turning down a hundred-dollar bribe while he was a member
of the state legislature, an experience which De Forest
dismisses in less than a sentence. Otherwise Vane is total
ly unaware of history, political science, art, and litera
ture, and he serves De Forest as an example of a man who is
too ignorant to be a city's school teacher but good enough
to be its national legislator.
Married to an ambitious and unfaithful wife, he pro
poses such obviously doomed reforms as abolishing the con-
5
gressional franking privilege, but because his salary is so
low and his wife's ambitions so high, he slips more and more
into the control of Darius Dorman, the railroad lobbyist.
Soon Vane becomes entangled in special legislation favoring
^In 1869 when the Credit Mobilier was in operation,
James Parton was detailing petty expenses that reached as
tronomical proportions in Congress. "The surrender of the
franking privilege, besides being the most popular act which
Congress could do, would be also one of the most beneficial
to itself." De Forest was aiming at an old target in his
attack on the franking abuses. See James Parton, "The Small
Sins of Congress," The Atlantic Monthly. XXIV (November
1869), 517-533.
127
the Great Subfluvial Tunnel project, a fantastic scheme to
"bridge the bloody chasm" between the North and the South
by building a railroad under the entire length of the Mis
sissippi River. A corporation called The Hen Persuader is
formed within the Great Subfluvial, much as a china egg is
put under a hen to persuade her to lay real ones. The
dummy corporation drains off government funds advanced to
the parent company, and Vane's corruption begins when he
takes stock in the false company. When the swindle becomes
public, Vane admits that he owns stock in the company he
has so devotedly legislated for, but his reputation and his
confession of ignorance save him. The last chapter of the
novel is entitled "Weathercock John Triumphant," and De
Forest shifts to the present tense to say that Vane will
soon resume his legislative tasks of milking the public
treasury. The entire book is written in a coarse and breezy
style commensurate with such a free-wheeling plot.
As social criticism, De Forest's novel shares subject
matter with The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles
Dudley Warner, but De Forest was not influenced by his more
famous contemporary.^ Instead, Honest John Vane attacks
^The Gilded Age was begun in February and finished in
128
such public scandals as the notorious Credit Mobilier fraud.
The outlines of that infamous case are well enough docu
mented to require no rehearsal here; suffice it to say that
the investigating Wilson Committee fixed the company's
profits at more than $40,000,000, the sum cited by Vane when
he rejects participation in the Great Subfluvial Tunnel
7
scheme (p. 131). But although some commentators point out
the many parallels between The Great Subfluvial Tunnel and
g
the Credit Mobilier, De Forest, like most New Englanders,
knew of a more local analog for the private swindle of pub
lic money, the Massachusetts Hoosac Tunnel.
This tunnel burrowed through Hoosac Mountain in an
April of 1873. See Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twainr A Bio
graphy (New York, 1912), II, 478. Honest John Vane was ser
ialized in The Atlantic Monthly from July to November of
1873, and De Forest would have been writing it at almost the
same time Twain was working on The Gilded Age. Neither
could have seen the other's work in print in time to be in
fluenced.
^Rubin, Introd., Honest John Vane, pp. 11-12. See also
Allan Nevins, "The Moral Collapse in Government and Busi
ness," The Emergence of Modern America (New York, 1927), pp.
178-208. For a reasoned disagreement with the Wilson Com
mittee see Jay Boyd Crawford, The Credit Mobilier of America
(Boston, 1880), pp. 88-120.
®Rubin, pp. 49-50. The parallels are drawn less in
sistently by Hagemann, pp. 198, 206. De Forest's scheme is
called a "thin disguise for the Credit Mobilier" by Gargano,
pp. 224-226.
129
effort to join Greenfield, Massachusetts, with the state
line of New York, there to be linked to the city of Troy by
a railroad line yet to be constructed. The mountain rock
proved nearly impenetrable, and the road itself was entirely
unnecessary because other railroads served the general area,
and no railroads connected to the tunnel. A Nation article
said of it, "If the tunnel be likened to a bridge, it is a
bridge with no roads leading to it, and with no people who
care to cross it. Concerning it, the expression is almost
9
true that it begins and ends nowhere."
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts foreclosed on the
contractors in 1861, and it was a common New England habit
to say "When the Hoosac Tunnel is built" to mean "never."^
The sum of money swindled from the taxpayers never reached
the astounding proportions achieved in the Credit Mobilier
and Honest John Vane. but the comically outrageous elements
of the Hoosac project would have appealed to De Forest, who
must certainly have known of this fantastic scheme to link
^Rowland Connor, "The Story of the Great American Tun
nel," The Nation. XXI (August 19, 1875), 114-116.
■^Connor, p. 114. Work began on the tunnel in 1851
and the first regular passenger car went through it on July
8, 1875. That car could not go far, of course.
130
an insignificant town in Massachusetts to the boundary line
of New York State, with a side trip through Vermont, in
order to build a superfluous railroad. The work resembled
"a tunnel through a snow-bank made by school children,
though not nearly so regular."'^'*' According to Connor, the
chief engineer of the financial arrangements, one H. Haupt,
outdid even the masterful crook in the Credit Mobilier case,
12
the Massachusetts congressman Oakes Ames.
Both the Credit Mobilier and the Hoosac Mountain Tunnel
schemes were certainly known to De Forest. In Honest John
Vane De Forest identifies the real head of the Great Sub
fluvial Tunnel corporation as "Mr. Simon Sharp, the member
from the old Whetstone State" (p. 213); elsewhere the Whet
stone State is called "a well-known Commonwealth" (p. 116).
These names point to Massachusetts and the impenetrable
mountain as well as to the mastermind of the Credit Mobilier
corporation within the Union Pacific Railroad company. But
whether the sources of Honest John Vane were specific or
general, they were not part of De Forest's deliberate obser
vations. The newspapers and magazines of the day were
^Connor, p. 115.
1 P
ACConnor, p. 114.
131
13
enough to convey the temper of the times to the author,
and they may even have suggested to him the general corrup
tion in Washington which Honest John Vane portrays.
The second criterion of realistic literature is that
the writer should rely upon ordinary experience and not upon
14
the unusual. Honest John Vane violates this principle
because De Forest draws the contrast between corruption and
honesty too quickly and too simplistically. When Vane meets
his first congressional colleague, Simon Sharp of the Whet
stone Commonwealth, Sharp warns Vane to stay away from use
less legislation if he wants to be re-elected. By "useless"
Sharp means the general legislation which Vane naively be
lieves in: "reform, foreign relations, sectional questions,
constitutional points, and so on" (p. 123). Sharp insists
that "special legislation" is the way to make a good repu
tation, and he immediately describes the Great Subfluvial
Tunnel Road as an example, but the scheme is so patently
crooked that John Vane immediately rejects it. When Sharp
leaves, Vane spurns lobbyist Dorman with a diatribe which
•^Rubin, pp. 15-20. See also Charles F. Adams, "In
flation and the Railroads," The North American Review. CVIII
(January 1869), 33.
■^See my Chapter II.
132
strongly suggests the author's historical hindsight:
"You can't fool me that way, old boy. . . . I see
as plainly as you do that the Great Subfluvial is to
be built at the expense of the Treasury for the bene
fit of directors and officers and boss stockholders,
who will take the shares at fifty, say, and sell them
at par, and then leave the whole thing on the hands
of the small investors and Uncle Sam. That's what you
mean to do, and want me to help you do. . . . But I
won't help plunder the Treasury of forty millions, and
the stock-buying public of twice as much more, merely
to give you a hundred thousand and myself five thou
sand. I tell you squarely, and you may as well under
stand it first as last, that I won't go into your
lobbying." (pp. 130-131) '
Dorman's response also shows the simplistic attitude
that the author takes. Dorman describes all legislation as
log-rolling and suggests that all congressmen are crooks.
His contempt for congressmen is the greater because they
are content with such a little profit. "They are pusillan-
imously half honest," he concludes (p. 132). If this ex
change is meant to be realistic, it hardly does credit to
the subtlety of lobbyists even among such obtuse and ignor
ant men as John Vane. One can hardly agree to De Forest's
proposal that vice makes such bold attempts on virtue at
such a high national level.
Oppressed by the gap between his salary and his wife's
social climbing, Vane eats less and gives up streetcars to
walk to and from his office. In4these details a breath of
133
realism enters the novel, but such realistic touches quickly
disappear beneath the weight of the outrageous Great Sub
fluvial Tunnel and its fraudulent Hen Persuader. When Vane
and Dorman discuss the dummy corporation, the blatant con
spiracy transcends the realm of ordinary experience, even by
comparison with the actualities of the Credit Mobilier
scandal, which implicated several congressmen. In any case
an appeal to history does not excuse the oversimplification
of dramatic events. Honest John Vane must be evaluated as
literature, and the experiences delineated in the book are
not those of the average congressman, at least not in such
hyperbolic terms as De Forest consistently employs. Much
of the book consists of long speeches between Vane and Dor
man, and these speeches so lack characterization that both
characters become cartoons. When the author heaps contempt
upon them, he deplores a situation, not people, and the
reader cannot share the author's contempt because he cannot
identify with the characters. Such absence of individuality
places the action in the realm of the unusual if not the
fantastic, and provides a second reason why the novel cannot
be called realistic.
By the third criterion of realism, the author should
134
15
demonstrate objectivity without prejudice, a standard De
Forest met in Kate Beaumont and Miss Ravenel's Conversion by
giving a complex view of society and by developing complex
characters. But in Honest John Vane De Forest's view of
society is absurdly narrow because the major characters are
quite flat and the minor characters are allegorical stick-
figures. The hero's name suggests vanity, but more emphat
ically, a weather-vane which blows with any wind, and in
this connection two chapter headings refer to "Weathercock
John." Thus even the hero's name reinforces the "jelly-fish
flabbiness" which the author imposes upon him (p. 183).
De Forest takes sixteen chapters to reach the moral
climax when Honest John takes Dorman's offer of stocks in
the Great Subfluvial swindle, but no reader could doubt the
outcome because De Forest engineers Vane's downfall by al
most insultingly informing the reader about Vane's character
every step of the way. Three chapters consist entirely of
the author's scornful commentary on Vane and his wife (chs,
4, 12, 18), and although De Forest calls Vane ignorant,
pious, and dull, he merely says so without letting Vane
demonstrate himself. The reader does not see; De Forest
l^See my Chapter II.
135
tells him. When Vane accepts the damning stocks, De Forest
expostulates for an entire chapter relieved by only two
sentences of dialogue. Some of the coarse flavor of De
Forest1s attitude towards his main character may be seen in
the following excerpt from this chapter:
Can we palliate his guilt? We repeat here— for the
moral importance of the fact will justify iteration,—
that he came of a low genus. . . . Of that notable
pride which renders unassailable the integrity of a
Washington, a Calhoun, an Adams, or a Sumner, he had
not laid the lowest foundation, and perhaps could not.
In place of this fortress, he possessed only the little,
combustible blockhouse of vanity. . . . Such a motive
force is of course no force at all, but a mere weather
cock, which obeys the wind of public opinion, instead
of directing it. . . . For a time, the prosperity of
these knaves had not punctured his soap-bubble honesty.
(pp. 180-182)
What really prevents De Forest from being objective is
that he intends the reader to accept Honest John as a typi
cal congressman, for he repeats throughout the novel that
Vane is the very soul of the average representative. After
detailing Vane's ignorance, De Forest comments:
It may be thought that, for the sake of a joke, I am
exaggerating Mr. Vane's Eden-like nakedness [of know
ledge and education] and innocence; but I do solemnly
and sadly assure the reader that I have not robbed him
of a single fig-leaf of knowledge which belonged to
him. (p. 92)
Slowburgh also comes under this attack, and again De Forest
136
intends the reader to see the town as typical. He writes:
The few who believed that Vane ought to be acquainted
either with finance, or political economy, or consti
tutional limitations, or international law, and that
furthermore he should be a person of tried character
and honor,— these few eccentrics had no political
influence. (p. 97)
De Forest may intend Vane and Slowburgh to be typical, but
his heavy hand prevents the reader from agreeing.
De Forest treats Vane's wife with even greater heavi
ness; throughout the novel she functions only by spending
money and attending parties. Even Vane's two children serve
merely to expose her shabby avarice. She considers them a
financial impediment to marriage, and when Vane wins his
seat in Washington, De Forest sends them off to school.
They make no personal entrance at all in the novel, and De
Forest introduces them by saying of Vane, "He had a wife
thirty years old in the graveyard, and he had two children
of eight and ten who were not there" (p. 71). Here De
Forest's contempt for his characters approaches the gro
tesque because it is heaped gratuitously upon children De
Forest himself invents. Vane's courtship of Olympia re
volves entirely around the congressman's future fortunes by
which Olympia plans to escape the dull poverty of Slowburgh.
Her previous coolness turns to ardor when Honest John wins
137
the election, and De Forest comments harshly:
A learned pig, or any other intellect of second-rate
order, might predict with accuracy the result of such
a state of things. These two people, who so earnestly
wanted each other, soon managed to have each other.
(p. 107)
The characters cannot escape from such a heavy hand as this.
Even Olympia's infidelity is predicated on cheap social
climbing. When she arrives in Washington she lives beyond
Vane's income and openly courts the attentions of the
wealthy roue, Senator Ironman, whose name is a slang term
16
for dollar. When illicit funds roll in for Vane, Olympia
quits her affair with Ironman, content with her husband now
that he has money. De Forest narrates the entire affair and
summarizes Olympia's character in the following commentary:
She possessed in large measure that unsympathy alleged
by some writers to amount to hostility, which certainly
does exist to some extent between the sexes. Her world
was very different from her husband's world, and she
^The earliest use of this term in America is 1915,
according to Mitford M. Mathews, A Dictionary of American
isms (Chicago, 1951), I, 890. The term "iron" has an older
history in England; see Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of
Slang and Unconventional English (London, 1937), p. 427.
Partridge says that the word meant "money" as early as 1780.
Whether or not De Forest was ahead of his time seems irrele
vant. Senator Ironman is extremely wealthy and lends Vane
$1500 to cover the price of the stocks Vane accepted.
Really, Ironman pays to keep Olympia in Washington.
138
did not much care to have him take an interest in hers,
nor did she want at all to worry about his. That the
two spheres had any intimate connection she could rarely
perceive, except when the masculine one ceased to radi
ate gold upon the feminine one. (p. 199)
By repeating this goId-image elsewhere, De Forest suggests
that Olympia may be taken by any Jove who descends upon her
17
m a shower of gold. Such a simplistic motivation pre
vents Olympia from being a realistic characterization like
Mrs. Larue in Miss Ravenel's Conversion or Nellie Armitage
in Kate Beaumont.
Moreover, De Forest intends Olympia to stand as a
typical Washington wife, as the following commentary makes
clear:
A venerable Congressman, thoroughly versed in all the
male and female wickedness of Washington, assures me
that women are conscienceless plunderers of public
property, and will steal any official article which
they can lay hands on, from a paperfolder upward.
(p. 189)
Such a disapproving treatment of the heroine obviously does
not allow the development required of a complex character.
17
Ironman is compared with Jove on p. 148? elsewhere he
is "the opulently dazzling Ironman" (p. 162). When Vane
begins to accept graft, De Forest makes the image explicit:
"A man who can dazzle and fascinate his own wedded Danae
with showers of gold is nothing less than a Jove of a hus
band" (p. 188).
139
If these major characters in Honest John Vane are flat,
they are at least human; the other characters are allegori
cal figures, many of them drawn from Bunyan's Pilgrim1s
Progress. De Forest treats the lobbyist Darius Dorman
(doorman to hell) as an agent of the devil rather than as
an agent of the railroads, and a biased view of Washington
politics results. This "brownie in bad preservation" (p.
115), this "Mephistopheles of the lobby" (p. 168), this
"fiend in embryo" (p. 171) apparently enters from hell for
each appearance in the novel. When he leaves at the end of
the book, he disappears "either by stepping briskly around
a corner or by slipping under a flagstone" (p. 231). Dor
man's allies in Washington are congressmen Christian,
Faithful, Greatheart, Hopeful, Ironman, Potiphar of New
Sodom, and Job Poor, who gives out jobs to office-seekers.
De Forest acknowledges his debt to Bunyan's allegory in the
following passage:
It was a new and perversely reversed and altogether
bedevilled rendering of the Pilgrim's Progress into
American politics; it was much as if Bunyan had at
last pitched his Christian and Hopeful into the little
lurid hole which led from the gate of Zion to the pit.
Nothing could be more subverting and confounding and
debilitating to the moral sense, unless it might be
to see silver Demas and filthy Muckrake welcomed by
the shining ones into the Holy City. (p. 224)
140
But allegory is not realism, as De Forest himself force
fully pointed out in his essay on the Great American
i 18
Novel.
The only non-allegorical congressman in Honest John
Vane is Frank Cavendish, who appears only once to explain
the need for a revenue tariff which would affect only the
wealthy. Vane calls this plan impossible because "this
great Republic which brags so of its freedom, is tyrannized
over by a few thousand capitalists and jobbers" (p. 159).
Both men reflect only the author's views, and Mr. Cavendish
says no more in the novel. Because De Forest does not
differentiate between characters, and because he presents
no honestly conflicting points of view, he fails to give an
objective view of society. Instead, he uses an allegorical
framework which inhibits the characters and prevents them
from gaining any verisimilitude at all.
The allegorical quality of Honest John Vane also vio
lates the last criterion of realism, anti-sentimentalism,
^The Nation. VI (January 9, 1868), 27-29. Referring
to Hawthorne, De Forest wrote that "the light of other
worlds . . . catch little but the subjective of humanity" ■
(p. 28).
141
19
or an attack on the literary lying of the day. Although
De Forest attacks corruption in government, he employs
romantic and gothic elements which he had previously dis-
20
paraged in Hawthorne's works. De Forest treats the alle
gorical figure of Darius Dorman very crudely by comparison
with Hawthorne's skill in, for instance, "My Kinsman, Major
Molineux." De Forest never quite says that Dorman comes
from hell, but he persistently suggests a demonic origin
that becomes gratingly intrusive. Whenever Dorman appears,
De Forest heavily alludes to Dorman's "claw-like fingers"
(p. 83) or to "his feet (if, indeed, they were not hoofs)"
(p. 82); Dorman also swears "by the Devil" or "By Beelzebub
(for he had very odd fashions of swearing)" (p. 116).
Moreover, the setting has gothic qualities quite incon
sistent with realism. In telling Simon Sharp about Vane's
vulnerable honor, Dorman speaks "with spasmodic twinges of
cheerless gaiety which resembled the cracked and thin
laughter heard far down in Hell" (p. 133). Again, when
Vane accepts stocks from Dorman they both laugh, and this
19
See my Chapter II.
^The Nation. VI, p. 28. "Such personages as Hawthorne
creates belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our
nationality."
142
gothic passage follows:
There was also a sound of other hilarity, not so dis
tinct and therefore all the more singular, about the
office. There were faint but audible chuckles in the
walls, along the lofty ceiling, and under the floor.
(p. 211)
Clearly, then, De Forest wrote an unrealistic novel in
Honest John Vane. The book lacks objectivity, factual de
tail, conflicting points of view, complex characters, and a
broad view of society, all those elements which infuse Miss
Ravene11s Conversion and Kate Beaumont. The few realistic
touches in Honest John Vane quickly succumb to the ponderous
allegory or sink beneath heavy author commentary. De Forest
directs this commentary not against sentimentality, as he
did in his realistic novels, but against his own characters,
and this kind of intrusion embodies the very sentimentalism
De Forest had previously attacked. Far from showing the
author's pioneer talent for realism, Honest John Vane ex
hibits De Forest's older fondness for romance and ghost
stories. It should be said in fairness to De Forest that
the diction throughout the book is consistently coarse and
demeaning; the novel pulses with a splenetic energy which
continually offends or amuses, depending, perhaps, on one's
taste. But, although the characters hurl lively speeches
143
at each other, they all speak for the author, and ultimately
the book fails because the author loses his distance from
his subject matter and from his characters. Unfortunately,
Honest John Vane typifies the other works De Forest wrote
about Washington politics.
De Forest set his second Gilded Age novel, Playing the
Mischief, in the administration of President Ulysses S.
Grant, who appears in the story as the "great soldier of the
21
age." Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner serialized the long
22
novel of fifty-three chapters in 1874-1875, and Harpers
published the book in 1875. Thus De Forest published two
novels on Washington politics in one year. Partly because
De Forest pictured recognizable Washington celebrities,
Plavina the Mischief sold over 6,000 copies in its first
year, the best-selling work De Forest wrote in his life-
23
time. In this novel De Forest again attacks special
^Plaving the Mischief, ed. with an introduction by
Joseph Jay Rubin (State College, Pennsylvania, 1961), p.
113. All citations of this novel will be from this edition.
References to introduction will be to Rubin.
22XX-XXI (November 21, 1874-May 22,. 1875).
^Light, pt 152.
144
legislation and lobbying; here he shows Josie Murray's
successful efforts to push a fraudulent claim through Con
gress. By using her considerable beauty and intelligence,
Josie collects $100,000 for a barn burned in the War of
1812. This raid on the public treasury startles even veter
an lobbyists in Washington because the government had al
ready paid a $2,000 claim on the barn, which was originally
worth just half that much.
The novel retains some of the characters from Honest
John Vane, but De Forest's techniques waver more noticeably
in Playing the Mischief. He treats one character half-
realistically and half-allegorically, and he keeps a heavy
hand on all of them, as he did in Honest John Vane. The
uneven treatment of characters shows again how far De Forest
had retreated from his realistic achievements in Miss
Ravenel's Conversion and Kate Beaumont. From Honest John
Vane he retains the familiar figures of John Vane, Simon
Sharp, and Senator Ironman (pp. 173ff.). Lobbyist Darius
Dorman again represents "the nether house" (p. 370), and to
assist him De Forest revives lobbyist Ananias Pullwool from
an earlier story that will be discussed later. Congressmen
Christian and Faithful also appear, but they no longer be
long to the railroad ring as they did in Honest John Vane;
145
instead they honestly reflect the virtues suggested by their
names (p. 160). De Forest also sketches some new allegori
cal figures. Senator Pickens Rigdon smells of the white
whiskey that comes from Pickens County where De Forest
24
served in the Freedman's Bureau. Hamilton Bray is a vain
braggart (pp. 136-137); Aristides Cato Bradford is a right
eous New Englander from an old and therefore incorruptible
family? Fred Curbstone is a dishonest financial tipster (p.
177); Clay Beauman is a handsome dandy (p. 46), and Dave
Shorthand is a malicious newspaper columnist (p. 218). Of
these characters De Forest permits only Bradford to develop,
but the author tells the reader about him instead of letting
Bradford reveal himself. A rather major character in the
novel, Bradford spurns Josie because she will not give up
her false claim, yet he pities her slightly because his
fiancee does. A "soul of a single virtue," Bradford devel
ops some pity for Josie, and this new attitude marks the
only change in any character in the entire book (pp. 415-
416).
If Playing the Mischief was a succes de scandal because
OA
A Union Officer m the Reconstruction, p. 139.
146
25
it pictured living people, De Forest cheated his readers
because he treats most of his roman a clef characters very
skimpily. Some are dismissed in a sentence or two, yet
enough of them fill the book to give it a hint of verisimil
itude. President Grant (pp. 113-115) and Senator Charles
Sumner, the "unbribable statesman," appear briefly (p. 180).
Modern critics identify De Forest’s horrendous sculptress,
Jessie Cohen, as the real-life Vinnie Ream, General Bangs
as the famous Ben Butler, wealthy Simeon Allchin as the fat
banker Henry Cooke, and the tophatted Bloomer Girl attorney
Nancy Appleyard as the accomplished feminist, Dr. Mary
Walker.^ Light suggests that De Forest's Sykes Drummond
recalls Zachariah Chandler, the bluff Congressman with "a
27
donkeyish laugh," but no figure has been suggested yet for
Y.M.C.A. Smyler, although an anonymous Harpers reviewer
wrote that nobody familiar with Washington could doubt who
28
the original was. These characters are highly restricted
by their allegorical qualities, and they provide the story
pc
Gargano, p. 248.
26Rubin, p. 17; Light, pp. 145-146.
2^Light, p. 146.
28LI (September 1875), 602.
147
with coy name-dropping rather than with a realistic back
ground .
The main characters especially show De Forest's in
creasing inability to draw a realistically complex charac-
_r-
ter, one who is capable of change, one who combines good
and bad qualities. The heroine, Josie Murray, remains
static throughout the book, entirely motivated by avarice.
Morally a duplicate of "that veteran flirt" Olympia Vane
(Honest John Vane, p. 68), Josie hastens the deaths of her
aunt, her uncle, and her friend Belle Warden because she
refuses to drop her fraudulent claim. Like Olympia, Josie
loves only people who have money, and she engages herself
to two men simultaneously because they can advance her bill
in Congress. She loses the upright Bradford, "the heart
she had begged for in vain" (p. 404), because she pushes
her special legislation after agreeing to withdraw it.
Josie's most extended and enthusiastic speech describes how
she would live if she were rich, and her visions of door
panelings, window furnishings, carpetings, laces, damasks,
and cabinets make her "smack her lips" (pp. 90-93). Just as
Olympia dismisses Senator Ironman, Josie jilts her two
fiances when her bill passes and she needs them no longer.
Josie is more dramatic than Olympia, and she has a certain
148
roguish spirit, but she remains predictably greedy and ruth
less throughout the long stretches of the book.
De Forest treats his chief male character, George W.
Hollowbread, with the same heavy contempt he showered on
Honest John Vane, but he wavers between satire and sympathy,
first mocking Hollowbread's vanity and obesity, and then
telling the reader that Hollowbread sincerely loves Josie
and therefore deserves some pity. The name "Hollowbread"
29
suggests false money, and De Forest associates the Con
gressman with elastic credit and cheap greenbacks in con
trast to the "hard money" policy of Bradford (pp. 55-57).
De Forest never develops this allegorical identification
with financial policies, however, and the name becomes in
creasingly incongruous as De Forest dwells on the man's
huge size and his ludicrous efforts to hide it. De Forest
mercilessly exposes this "obvious old turkey gobbler" (p.
122) for his corseted figure and describes Hollowbread1s
suit in the following fashion:
Coat, vest, and pantaloons were furnished with pads,
straps, and springs; and I will not undertake to say
^Partridge, p. 90. "Bread-and-butter" was colloquial
U. S. in the 1820's, although "bread" by itself did not
mean money as it now does.
149
that there might not have been a few cogwheels and
pulleys. It is confounding to think what might have
happened had this marvelous raiment been buttoned
together and dropped on the floor. It might have
buzzed and scrabbled away, of its own motion and
internal force, like a clockwork locomotive. It
might have lounged into a chair, and sat down on the
small of its hollow back, and put its empty legs on
the mantel-piece. It might have jumped out of the
window, and set ladies a-screaming and dogs a-barking.
It might have taken a car to the Capitol, and claimed
its accustomed oaken chair in the Hall of Representa
tives, there to play the part of a dignified figure
head. (pp. 182-183)
By the end of the novel De Forest asks the reader to sym
pathize with the jilted old man, "this case of abused love"
(p. 444), but because De Forest wavers in his attitude
toward the character, the reader finds it difficult to
accept Hollowbread as a human being.
The most mishandled character in the large gallery of
characters is Sykes Drummond, the arrogant, handsome legis
lator who finally manipulates Josie's bill through Congress.
On one hand De Forest treats Drummond as a human being se
verely limited because of his low family background? on the
other hand he treats him as a devil figure like Darius Dor
man in Honest John Vane. As a result of De Forest's uncer
tain handling, Drummond remains unconvincing even though an
anonymous Harpers reviewer wrote that everybody would be
150
30
familiar with him. Whenever Drummond appears, De Forest
refers to him in satanic terms which link him with Darius
Dorman and other devil figures that De Forest used in short
stories which will be discussed later. Drummond "smiles
with insolent glee" and makes Josie drop her own eyes (p.
45), establishing him as a "Robert-the-Devil type" (p. 46).
"Energetic as the devil," he displays a "beaute du diable"
which is "bewitching because so dauntlessly wicked"; he
flashes "a dusky glare of black eyes" (p. 128). His black
hair is "Plutonian" (p. 130), and he could be "as close as
the cruel grave" (p. 133). His eyes are "passion-haunted"
(p. 158) and Josie cannot master herself when he stares at
her (p. 150). These physical characteristics are not merely
sensual, because "almost his only worthy trait was the
frankness of his wickedness, if we may apply the word
worthy to a satanic impudence of guilt" (p. 194). Finally
De Forest links these traits to his other devil figures in
the following excerpt:
To vote for such an undisguised, blatant, bragging
scoundrel as Drummond is much like voting open-eyed
for the devil with his horns, hoofs, and tail on. It
must certainly have been a wicked district, or else a
30lI (September, 1875), 602.
151
district inhabited mainly by idiots, which elected
this diabolic youngster. (p. 194)
But Drummond is also a courageous war veteran whose
aggressive nature can be traced to his unfortunate child
hood. Drummond tells Josie that his mother died, his father
remarried, his father then died, and his step-mother re
married. "I wasn't anybody's son," he explains? "what I
have had I have fought for" (p. 386). De Forest's uncertain
treatment of Drummond can be called inept or clumsy, but it
shows rather strikingly his wavering between using realistic
techniques and the allegorical techniques he had once con
demned. The split treatment of Sykes Drummond reaches a
strange climax in a later book, The Bloody Chasm (1881)? De
Forest writes the first half of that book realistically? in
the second half he uses romantic techniques which almost
parody literary sentimentality.
In various minor details also, De Forest shows that he
cannot maintain a realistic point of view. Perhaps because
critics assailed Honest John Vane for being too narrow a
31
view of Washington, he devotes a few paragraphs to the
31,1 Honest John Vane paints a blackened and untrue pic
ture of life and morals at Washington." The New Yprk Inde
pendent . January 28, 1875, p. 8.
152
daughter of Senator Ledyard, "one of those Congressmen who
deserve the title of honorable" (p. 230). But De Forest
treats her presence with disdain, writing in a heavy com
mentary that she is there merely to show "that we concede
the presence of delicately pure souls in the political
circles of Washington" (p. 231). He dispatches one charac
ter in completely gothic fashion. When Mrs. Belle Warden
reads in the paper that Josie's claim has passed, she
clutches her hands to her heart and falls dead. De Forest
conducts this scene with asterisks and exclamation points,
and then he hurries briskly on because "the nature of this
scene is only too easily imagined" (p. 415). He hurls gra
tuitous insult as he did in Honest John Vane. He contrives
a ludicrous scene in which Nancy Appleyard shoots Sykes
Drummond and misses, but the bullet goes through the hat of
a Negro child who passes by, apparently only to serve De
Forest's questionable sense of comedy (p. 216). De Forest
parenthetically suggests that the upright New Englander
Bradford plays love games with the ladies (p. 249). Most
unaccountably he gives the precise age of everyone in the
book, and then he forgets the most important one, the age
difference between Rector John Murray and his wife Huldah.
Whether she is fifteen or twenty years older makes no
153
difference to the reader, but De Forest insists on a speci-
32
fic difference without being able to remember it. These
and similar lapses show De Forest moving further and further
from the realistic accomplishments of Kate Beaumont and Miss
Ravenel's Conversion. In his next novel he deliberately
33
attempts sentimentality, "the literary lie."
In the third Washington novel, Justine's Lovers (1878),
De Forest imitated what he disparagingly termed "the ordin-
34
ary woman's novel." The book contains Justine's auto
biographical confession addressed to "my readers, the girls,
35
all unknown to me," and De Forest's deliberate attempt at
reaching the despised audience of women novel readers in
cluded issuing the book anonymously and taking pleasure at
3 0
escaping identification. In an earlier novel, The
J See pp. 77, 78, 167, 345 and such specific confirma
tion as "tottering octogenarian" (p. 78).
33See my definition of this term in Chapter II.
■^Remark by De Forest to W. M. Griswold in Descriptive
Lists of Novels, ed. William M. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass.,
1891), p. 83.
35Justine's Lovers (New York, 1878), p. 18.
^Griswold, p. 83.
154
Wetheral Affair, a mystery story that mixed romance and
realism, De Forest had attacked such women as "the millions
who find their sentimental recreation in such papers as the
37
sanguinary Spasmodic and the amatory Turtle Dove." But in
Justine's Lovers he tried to attract and please these read
ers, largely without success, even though an anonymous re
viewer called the book "a woman's novel, written by a woman,
for women," and characterized the "authoress" as "bright,
38
clever, witty, and wise."
Justine intends to show her readers "what a difference
there is between romance in the actual fact and romance as
girls imagine it’ ." (p. 1). By "romance" Justine means love
without complications, but the book fails to develop any
literary difference between romance and realism. Years
later De Forest remembered the book as being so "realistic"
39
that he had it published anonymously, and Appleton's felt
40
that some people in Washington barely escaped being named.
But De Forest's memory or the heroine's first-page thesis to
37The Wetherel Affair (New York, 1873), p. 116.
38The New York Post. May 31, 1878, p. 6.
39()viatt, "J- De Forest in New Haven," p. 856.
^Quoted in Griswold, p. 82.
155
the contrary, the book depends upon such romantic conven
tions as genteel endurance in hard times, an evil lover, a
wealthy lover, and a happy ending tinged with sorrow; a
surprise inheritance crowns the heroine's efforts to care
for her sick mother and to maintain her own dignity amid
misfortunes.
The novel takes place during the administration of
President Rutherford B. Hayes, and Justine Vane (no relation
to Honest John Vane) tells the story of how she and her
mother fall from wealth to poverty because Justine's dead
father once signed a note for an arms company that went
bankrupt after the Civil War. Justine's wealthy fiance,
Henry Starkenburgh, breaks the engagement when his own
father dies from futile efforts to save the Vane estate.
Not only does Henry ignore his father's pledge to stand by
the Vanes and endow them, but he considers Justine's new
poverty a hindrance to his own career and his obligations
to maintain his snobbish mother in the comfortable style
she has done nothing to earn.
The story continues in a highly romantic manner. A
humble clerk in Washington coaxes Justine to apply for a
government post. Rejected and humiliated among the legions
of office seekers, she starts a nursery school’ and sends for
156
her mother, who arrives nearly dead from starvation. Mrs.
Vane has lived on pilot-bread and water for two months in
order to send money to Justine, who is so poor herself that
she cannot pay her mother's cab fare to the home where the
humble clerk has generously taken her in. Justine accepts
the help of two men, one young and one old, who nurse her
mother back to health. The young man offers his services
as a physician? the older man offers his considerable for
tune to buy the nourishing food Mrs. Vane needs. A third
young man loves Justine, but she does not encourage him
because he already supports a widowed sister and her three
small children, and her happiness would be at their expense.
All the men devote themselves to Justine without breathing
a word of love until finally the pathetic plight of the girl
becomes too much for the aging, sickly, wealthy Mcllvaine
Wain. He proposes marriage so that he can better assist
Justine and her mother. Out of devotion to her mother and
gratitude for a sincere and generous love, Justine accepts
the proposal, and the pace of the book quickens rather for
tuitously. Wain dies of a heart attack on a sudden business
trip to California, but not before he wills her "five hun
dred thousand at least" (p. 128), Grief-stricken at Wain's
death, but ignorant of her inheritance, Justine hears a new
157
and impassioned marriage proposal from her old suitor Henry
Starkenburgh, now a rising member of Congress, whose banking
connections have informed him of Justine's fortune. At this
melodramatic moment Justine hesitates and offers the follow
ing explanation to her feminine audience:
This man had partially regained his dominion over me,
and made himself seem very desirable. Moreover, I must
save my mother from destitution; that I must do, no
matter what else was done or undone. . . . How can any
one, any woman and daughter at least, marvel that I
wavered. (p. 127)
Still wavering, she is called away suddenly to hear the
news of her inheritance, and she returns to denounce Stark
enburgh for desiring her money. Mindful of her obligations
to her friends, she bequeaths $50,000 to her Washington
hosts, another $50,000 to her host's daughter as a dowry,
and $20,000 to her doctor so that he can buy a hospital.
She closes her story by noting that the young doctor has
beautiful hazel eyes; despite her tragic love affairs in the
past, she will not try to escape love if it comes to her.
If Henry James thought Josie Murray of Playing the
41
Mischief was "a heartless young jade," Justine Vane is
41Rev. of Plaving the Mischief. The Nation. XXI
(April 12, 1875), 106.
Josie's exact opposite. Justine is as good as Josie was
bad, but De Forest limits both characters by describing them
entirely in reference to the same temptation of money. The
pose of a feminine author prevented De Forest from using any
of the allegorical characters and heavy commentaries of the
first two Washington novels because such techniques would
have revealed his true hand, but Justine's Lovers neverthe
less has several parallels with Playing the Mischief. Josie
Murray engages herself to two corrupt men simultaneously,
rejects the love of a good man, hastens the death of her
Washington relations who take her in, literally shocks her
friend Belle Warden to death, and looks forward to making
more money at the close of the book. Justine, on the other
hand, engages herself honorably to two men but rejects the
corrupt one; she remembers her benefactors when she inherits
money, and she can look forward to honorable love once more.
The elderly Mcllvaine Wain can endow Justine easily because
all his relatives are conveniently wealthy, but when the
aging Hollowbread tries to endow Josie Murray, his relatives
put him in a mental institution. Josie Murray is an exten
sion of Olympia Vane, and Justine is the reverse of both of
them, but De Forest defines her as simplistically as he did
159
42
the other heroines.
Realistic touches do occur in Justine1s Lovers. mainly
in such Washington scenes as when Justine attends a Presi
dential reception, and when she is humiliated in her ap
pointment with a Cabinet Secretary who enjoyed her family's
society in better days. Such scenes are undoubtedly based
. . 43
on De Forest's own visit to Washington to seek an office,
and indeed the novel frequently suggests De Forest's own
44
bitterness at his reduced circumstances. Only a few years
earlier Howells called De Forest "the only real American
parallel exists between Olympia and Justine also.
Olympia does not consider John Vane a good match because he
has two children to feed— they are pictured eating "buttered
slapjacks" (p. 71). Justine does not consider marriage to
Mr. Leming because "I should be taking bread out of the
mouth of a widow and-orphans to put it into my own." See
also the reference to "the paradise of brownstone fronts
and Aubusson carpets" from which the Vanes have fallen in
Justine'_s__Lovers (p. 56). This is the world to which Josie
aspires; see her catalog of opulence which includes "stair
carpets of Aubusson, now fifteen dollars a yard" (p. 91).
^^jjight, p. 107.
^Kindly Mr. Starkenburgh rejects the label of satirist
that Justine teasingly tries to attach to him by saying, "a
satirist, a serious and bitter satirist, is a pest in the
family and a stumbling block in society" (p. 26). De Forest
seems to be paraphrasing his critics here.
160
45
novelist," but the year of Justine's Lovers culminated a
period of disappointments for De Forest. In 1876 he pub
lished only one short story and one article; in 1877 he
published nothing at all. In 1877 he asked Howells to ob
tain a foreign ministry for him from President Rutherford B.
Hayes. Howells had written a campaign biography fcr his
cousin Rutherford, but although Howells succeeded in similar
requests for other authors, he could do nothing for De
46
Forest. The crushing blow came in 1878 when Mrs. De
Forest died in Charleston unexpectedly, while the author
was in New Haven following his unsuccessful trip to Washing
ton .
Some of the melancholy and disappointment of these
years undoubtedly informs the pathetic tale of Justine,
4S
"Recent Literature," The Atlantic Monthly. XXXIV
(August 1874), 229-230.
^Howells helped Bret Harte and James Russel Lowell to
government ministries. Edwin H. Cady, Road to Realism
(Syracuse, 1956), p. 183. For the somewhat incomplete ac
count of this request see Hagemann, p. 41; Light, p. 107.
It is not known whether Howells made the request or whether
Hayes turned it down. Hayes did read Justine's Lovers.
which flatteringly compared him with Abraham Lincoln (p. 70),
and Hayes added a marginal note "W. K. Rogers" on the scene
with the Secretary and Justine. William K. Rogers was
Hayes's private secretary and life-long friend. See Hage
mann , p . 44.
published the year of Mrs. De Forest's death, but the
clearest autobiographical material in the novel is Justine's
efforts to solace her lonely hours by adapting Biblical
psalms into poetry, a practice De Forest himself followed,
judging by his publication of these poems some years
47
later. The verses are uniformly colorless, though Jus
tine's friend says they are better hymns than most and
should make her a fortune (p. 80). When De Forest published
these verses shortly before his death, the soldier and poet
Thomas Wentworth Higginson confessed that he did not know
what view to take of the "curious book" with its "grim ver
sification and phraseology." Unable to judge the work by
literary standards, Higginson concluded charitably, "At any
rate, a man who is the author of more than one good novel,
and who afterward fsic 1 fought at Port Hudson and in the
Shenandoah Valley, has some right to beguile his old age as
48
he will." The poetry is unmistakably sentimental, and
^ Poems; Medlev and Palestina. The biblical verses
are published in the section called "Palestina." None of
the verses received prior publication,, although the poems
in the "Medley" section appeared in various magazines before
being collected. It is not known whether any of the bibli
cal verses were offered for separate publication.
^"Recent American Poetry," The Nation. LXXIV (May 29,
1902), 430.
162
De Forest regularly changes the specific diction of the
Bible for generalities and abstractions. The original of
Psalm CII, for example, is a "grievous complaint," but De
Forest distorts the meaning of the poem by emphasizing the
49
poet1s need for sweet comfort.
The prose in Justine's Lovers reflects the heroine's
cloying sense of devotion and dignity, and the last chapter
of the hovel provides a fair example of the sentimentality
which pervades the entire book:
I will be like the generous, unforgetting man to whom
I owe my present peace. The dear ones who survive me
shall have cause to be thankful that they loved me.
Even through the portals of death I will carry the
sweet consciousness that I have not ceased to aid and
comfort all "those lovers of mine." (p. 134)
These sentiments about death do not suit the young girl
who writes them. In reaching for the female audience, De
Forest shows some signs of desperation. But in addition to
the three novels on Washington politics, De Forest also
published several short stories which depend heavily oh
allegorical and simplistic characters, and these works show
49
Psalm CII is the poem that Wain sees and says Justine
can make a fortune on. Only one stanza is printed in Jus-
tine's Lovers (p. 80). The full poem is published in Poems:
Medlev and Palestina. p. 144.
163
that De Forest never really developed the realistic tech
niques he had used successfully in Miss Ravenel's Conversion
and Kate Beaumont. They show that Justine's Lovers is by no
means unique in the De Forest canon.
De Forest's short stories on political topics suggest
that the author used predominantly unrealistic techniques in
the bulk of his work. In 1869 he published "The City of
Brass," an allegorical attack on the disastrous results of
50
total abolition. The story deals with the problem of what
to do when imprisoned "Afreets" emerge from their age-old
prisons. The allegorical frame of the story recounts ad
ventures in the Arabian desert to free Danhash the Afreet
from his "immeasurable pillar of black stone" (p. 390).
Once freed, Danhash wants his numerous relations uncorked
from brass bottles submerged in a lake. The newly liberated
people then turn on their saviour and chase him and the
narrator out of their capital, the City of Brass.
The narrator describes Danhash as "the everlasting
nigger, that unparalleled nightmare of our age of visions"
(p. 390). He identifies the liberator as John Howard
50The Atlantic Monthly. XXIV (October 1869), 389-398.
164
Harrison, "a Bostonian by birth, a philanthropist by in
stinct, and a follower of isms by religion. Need I say
more?" (p. 390). Harrison shouts, "We have come to liberate
you," through a "speaking trumpet," and he uses acids to
melt the Seal of Solomon which keeps Danhash imprisoned,
saying that Solomon is dead (p. 390). The story closes
when the tribesmen pitch Harrison from a tower in the pal
ace, but Danhash catches him in mid-air and deposits him
safely out in the desert along with the narrator. The
general references in the story point to William Lloyd
Garrison proclaiming abolition through the "speaking trum
pet" of his newspaper The Liberator. founded in Boston.
Melting the Seal of Solomon with scientific acids suggests
Garrison's modernistic attacks on orthodox churches which
he called "cages of unclean birds, Augean stcbles of pollu-
51
tion." The tower episode probably refers to the Boston
riot of 1835 when a mob attacked Garrison and dragged him
through the streets; only the personal intervention of Mayor
52
Theodore Lyman saved him.
51A Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen John
son (New York, 1928-1936), VII, 170.
52£AB, VII, 170.
165
The political point of the story is equally clear. The
newly liberated Negroes will disrupt representative govern
ment in Washington because they are not ready for social
responsibility. De Forest writes that after a feast of
3,000 years "they stood in need of such immediate nourish
ment that they seized whatever they could lay their claws
on" (p. 397). The "free and independent devils" sit along
the mountains in hungry rows " like turkey-^buzzards on the
roof of the Charleston meat-market" (p. 397). While De
Forest hated slavery, he did not welcome the sudden freeing
of the slaves or their immediate incorporation into the
53
processes of national government. He relied on the didac
tic possibilities of allegory to deal fictionally with a
serious problem posed by Reconstruction and still not en
tirely solved. "The City of Brass" is the most completely
allegorical story De Forest wrote, but its influence can be
seen in such later characters as Ironman, Vane, Beauman,
54
Allchin, and General Bangs.
53See my earlier summary of "An Independent's Glance at
the South," and De Forest's solemn respect for "the highly
endowed race . . . the blood race" of the Southern white.
Chapter III.
5^See Light, pp. 139, 141, 145-146 for suggested iden
tifications of these portraits of living persons.
166
In 1872 De Forest treated the same problem realistical-
55
ly in "The Colored Member," but he marred the realism by
the same kind of character simplification and exaggeration
that weakened Honest John Vane. Pompey Beaumont, an ex
slave from Alligatorville, reports to the state legislature
to begin a term as a duly elected representative. The white
governor entertains him lavishly with champagne and cigars.
The governor's beautiful white wife takes his arm and
strolls through the governor's mansion with him. But when
his carpet-bagger mentor tells him how to vote and offers a
five-dollar bribe, the sum outrages Pompey's sense of fair
play. He demands more money from the railroad lobbyist,
saying:
It's time to steal. . . . White folks has been stealing
from me and from all the rest of us ever since we was
bawn. Has we ever got anythin' we ever worked for?
No, we hasn't. White folks stole all we earned, an'
paid us in lickin's. Now it's my chance to steal from
them, an' I'm jest a gwine ter do it, you bet yer
money. (p. 301)
But the carpet-bagger also controls .the election count in
Pompey's district and promptly disqualifies him in favor of
a white conservative.
55The Galaxy. XIII(March 1872), 293-302.
167
Here again De Forest points out that the Negroes are
not ready for self-government. Uneducated and resentful of
whites, they submit to unscrupulous politicians who manipu
late them and the state legislatures. But De Forest's per
sonal contempt for both the carpet-baggers and the freed
Negroes so over-simplifies the characters that the realistic
diction and details provide only a quaint background that
often approaches the grotesque. De Forest's contemptuous
attitude toward his chief character can be seen in the
following description:
His lips projected to that degree that he might almost
have used them as feelers in the dark or as buffers to
deaden a collision; while it was possible to imagine a
manikin naturalist as standing upon them quite at his
ease, and measuring with a half-inch pole the breadth
of the nostrils above. His jaws were so huge, protu
berant, and powerful, that a Darwinian might be excused
for inferring from them that he belonged to a race
which not very long since got its living by cracking
cocoanuts and marrow bones with its teeth. (p. 293)
This kind of attitude very closely resembles the heavy
hand De Forest keeps bn his characters in Honest John Vane
and elsewhere. The diction is sprightly and fresh, but the
comedy of the piece comes at the expens 3 of Pompey Beau
mont's Negro physique exaggerated in minstrel show fashion.
Perhaps some of De Forest's caricature of the Negro legis
lator comes from personal observations De Forest made in the
168
hill country of South Carolina, but the author's mistrust of
Negro citizenship also derives more abstractly from Darwin
ism in its application to individual and collective social
56
responsibility. Though he may have felt scientifically
justified in mistrusting immediate citizenship for Negroes,
in all his fiction De Forest calls Negroes by their first
names in typical white-folks style, revealing a sense of
superiority he envied in Southerners. In Plaving the Mis
chief . for instance, Senator Pickens Rigdon speaks "with an
almost elaborate civility of diction" to a Negro waiter who
"recognized the old master-type with instant respect" (p.
308).
In 1872 De Forest also published "An Inspired Lobby-
57
ist," a slapstick attack on legislative crimes. Ananias
Pullwool, a character later revived in Plavinq the Mischief,
goes to a state which alternates its capital between the
two cities of Fastburg and Slowburg, later the home district
of Honest John Vane. There Pullwool plans a simple and
lucrative future. Each year he will get a legislator to
S^See Colonel John Murray's endorsement of Darwinism,
Playing the Mischief, pp. 102-104.
57The Atlantic Monthly. XXX (December 1872), 676-684.
169
introduce a bill settling the capital permanently; then he
will secretly collect money from each city to lobby against
the bill.
Pullwool is the prototype of Darius Dorman in Honest
John Vane, indicating that De Forest was not only a clumsy
allegorist in that book, but unimaginative as well, relying
upon his own stock characters. The opening sentence sets
the coy tone of this particular story and indeed the entire
body of Washington fiction. De Forest begins the story by
saying:
A certain fallen angel (politeness toward his numerous
and influential friends forbids me to mention his name
abruptly) lately entered into the body of Mr. Ananias
Pullwool, of Washington, D.C. (p. 676)
In addition to laboring under the burden of heavy author
comment, Pullwool also shows the physical oddities that mark
De Forest’s devil figures. He has a "game" eye which the
Devil peeps through; he has a wart on his face "as though
the Devil had accidentally poked his horn through," and he
exudes "diabolical impudence" (pp. 676-677).
A less obvious devil figure, Mr. Heller, appears in
three short stories. In "A Queen of Society," the heroine
signs a compact with him, and her fortunes rise immediate-
170
5 8
ly. In "Father Higgins's Preferment," an ignorant Irish
priest tells Professor Heller of a secret ambition to be a
bishop and finds himself suddenly in the Fiji Islands where
59
the natives deify him. In "Cap'n Phin Glover as Presi
dent," Mr. Heller offers the Yankee sea captain the sultan-
ship of Arabia.60 In each story Heller takes some form of
"a tall and dark man with startling black eyes."6' * '
In "The Other Fellow," De Forest combines the two
62
characters of the lobbyist and the devil. Senator Wesley
makes a compact with "the other fellow," who sends a lesser
demon, Blasorious, to serve the senator as a butler. Bla-
sorious has eyes that smoke and blaze so strongly that the
senator nicknames him "Blazes." As secretary to the Con
solidated Railroad Company, "the other fellow" manipulates
the senator into fraudulent legislation while Blazes keeps
his smoky eyes open for signs of backsliding. Repentance
58Putnam's Magazine. N.S. V (April 1870), 393-406.
59Haroer1s New Monthly Magazine. XLIV (May 1872), 918-
922.
60The Christian Union. VI (August 14-21, 1872), 141-
142, 164-165.
61"Father Higgins's Preferment," p. 918.
62The Atlantic Monthly. XLII (December 1878), 669-682.
comes when the Senator, glutted now with profits, cigars,
champagnes, and rich foods, falls in love with a beautiful
widow, who is apparently innocent and virtuous. Increasing
ly subject to hallucinations, he resolves to marry the woman
and save his soul, but when he embraces her, he apparently
sees something horrible on her neck, some mark of the devil,
it is implied, and he commits suicide by leaping out of her
apartment window.
This final attack on Washington politics shows De
Forest at his clumsiest. The gothic death scene of Senator
Wesley is matched by the simplification of the widow, "a
lobbyist, alas" (p. 680). The smoky-eyed demon, the arch
fiend working for the railroad, the corpulent judge, the
scheming woman, the man who sells his country and his soul
to the devil in exchange for cigars, champagne, and rich
food— these materials pervade the Washington fiction and
reveal De Forest as a writer who could not maintain distance
from his subject matter or control of his materials and his
own feelings. The late date of "The Other Fellow," 1878,
shows that a strong commitment to an older way of writing
outweighed De Forest's belief in realism, just as allegory
and author commentary outweighed the realistic techniques of
172
the fiction dealing with Washington politics during the
Reconstruction.
CHAPTER V
LAST EFFORTS
In The Bloody Chasm (New York, 1881), De Forest made a
last attempt to transform his military experience into mean
ingful fiction on the order of Miss Ravenel's Conversion and
Kate Beaumont, his most realistic, most artistic novels.
De Forest did his best work in those two novels because the
facts of his experience compelled him to be fair-minded, and
his characters represented people he knew and respected.
The Bloody Chasm fails, however, because De Forest loses
control of his characters. Although his personal experi
ences and convictions produce many excellent scenes which
are realistic and compelling, most of the book reveals De
Forest's essential uncertainty about the difference between
realism and romance, objectivity and sentimentalism. As a
result, The Bloody Chasm is a curious hodge-podge of tech
nique; a mixture of romance, realism, travel book, and
political allegory, it shows De Forest writing in the same
173
174
work a high quality of realism and some of the worst senti
mentality of his long career.
It is possible to say that The Bloody Chasm divides
neatly between realism and romance just as the book shifts
its locale from Charleston to Paris, and it is possible to
suggest that De Forest would have written another Miss
Ravenel's Conversion or Kate Beaumont if he had restricted
his locale to Charleston, whose people he knew so well.^
I feel, however, that the plot contains romantic elements
from the very beginning, and that De Forest clearly ignored
the implications of the plot and the characters in an effort
to make the book a political allegory with an air of ro
mance .
The story opens in the bombed-out city of Charleston in
the bitter days just after the Civil War. The aged Boston
merchant Silas Mather confidently expects to locate the
remnants of his wife's Southern family and alleviate the
poverty that their foolish and treasonable war brought upon
them. He wants to honor the memory of his wife's dying
request, and he wants to exult over the enemy. This part
of the novel De Forest handles very well. The ruined
^Hagemann, pp. 246-250.
175
buildings of Charleston provide a convincing background for
a ruined social order, and De Forest expertly sketches in
his major figures of that defeated system: a proud aristo
cratic lady, a Confederate general who keeps his chivalrous
spirit amid the humiliating ruins of the lost cause, and
two Negroes who value their new freedom to be as poor as
the former owners they choose to continue serving.
De Forest intends Mather's visit to show a contrast
between the righteous piety of Northern triumph and the
galling humiliation of the Southern defeat. Mather's
motives are believably subtle because he is grief-stricken
at his wife's death, and in seeking out her Southern rela
tives he is honoring a deep-sworn vow. But a personal de
sire for revenge also animates him. Years earlier Silas
had been a penniless tutor to the Beauforts, aristocratic
planters who epitomized the expansive Southern style of
2
living grandly m debt for generations. He had audaciously
^De Forest's quick summary of the Beauforts' finances
(p. 76) comes from his experience in the Reconstruction. He
writes that "When the war opened more than half the rice and
sea-island estates were mortgaged to the verge of bankrupt
cy. . . . The virtue of generosity had been prolonged into
the vice of ruinous extravagance." A Union Officer in the
Reconstruction, p. 191.
176
courted and married the beautiful Elizabeth Beaufort, taken
her to his native New England, and become a millionaire
through hard work and thrift, but the high-toned Beauforts
"never forgave her [Elizabeth] for marrying a Yankee tutor"
(p. 26). In returning to Charleston, Mather plans to re
lieve the distress of those same Beauforts who humiliated
the Mathers by ignoring them. They never sent Elizabeth
"ten letters . . . in thirty years of marriage" (p. 35).
Against this complex background, Mather's trip to Charleston
recalls some of the successful techniques of Miss Ravenel's
Conversion. in which De Forest artistically contrasts atti
tudes and characters so that prejudice gives way to under
standing as ignorance gives way to knowledge.
Wandering Charleston's desolate streets, Mather meets
Confederate General Marion Hilton, former attorney for the
Beauforts. The two had met in Mather's Boston office short
ly before the war, and Mather warned Hilton that secession
could not be allowed. Mather resumes the acquaintance by
mockingly repeating his prophetic warning, but Hilton's
gentle rebukes, his war-ravaged physique, his deep grief at
the Southern losses, and his painful account of the Beaufort
family's ruin strike a responsive sympathy in the old Puri
tan and soften his antagonism toward the aristocrats who
177
humiliated him for so long.
In yet another contrast, Mather looks possessively upon
the large brick mansion which had been the Beaufort town
house; then he visits the unpainted board shanty where
Virginia Beaufort now lives, the one remaining member of
that large clan. Virginia does washing and lives with Uncle
Phil and Mauma Chloe, former Beaufort slaves who have wel
comed her into their own shack out of sympathy for the girl
they once cared for at the Beauforts' sea-island plantation
of 6,000 acres.
Finally Mather meets Virginia herself, proud, bitter,
and beautiful. In his complacent benevolence, Mather imag
ines that she will appreciate his offer to bring her back to
Boston so she can continue her interrupted education and
live off his bounty. Gradually he comes to accept her in
sulting refusal to take Northern money because she would
thereby dishonor the memory of her father, her sister, and
her four brothers who died in the war. He even understands
the old Negroes when they return the pocketbook he presses
on them. They cannot insult Virginia with food bought with
Yankee money. In a stubborn gesture Virginia gives Uncle
Phil her last dollar to buy dinner for their New England
guest and invites Silas to share a frugal meal in the
178
rickety shack. Sorrowful but resigned to try other means,
Mather returns to Boston. The patronizing Yankee comes to
feel genuine compassion for his enemies because he sees them
face to face. If De Forest had maintained this technique of
dramatically contrasting opposite feelings, characters, and
fortunes, he might very well have made his point. The
Bloody Chasm intends to show that personal confrontation is
necessary for North-South understanding; mutual respect and
sympathy must bridge the "bloody chasm" that divides the two
parts of the country.
But in these same opening chapters De Forest also in
troduces a separate conflict between generations, religions,
social classes, and nationalities which he then fails to
develop ot resolve. Mather takes his heir and nephew, Union
Colonel Harry Underhill, to Charleston with him in order to
thwart Harry's incipient romance with Norah Macraorran, an
Irish-Catholic choir singer in Boston. Mather fears that a
marriage between Harry and Norah would end with Mather's
money going to "Giant Pope . . . a superficial, formal,
3
false Church" (p. 19). Norah fortuitously appears in
^Mather holds his first conversation in Charleston with
the Huguenot pastor Joseph Roget and tells him about Harry's
romance with the Catholic singer. Reverend Roget suggests
179
Charleston to start a choir there, and when the two young
people meet, De Forest describes Harry as "a blonde Sasse
nach" while Norah represents "the. dark Irish, that mysteri
ous race which was conquered so long ago by the yellow
haired Tuatha na Danaan" (p. 13). Mather considers Norah
"a decent girl, perhaps, but still a commonplace Irish girl
and a Catholic" (p. 104). Harry himself blushes to find out
that Norah's mother is a washerwoman and that her sister is
a house-maid (p. 108). Although Virginia Beaufort herself
takes in washing, even walking through the streets of
Charleston with her clothes basket, Harry does not consider
this a fault in Virginia. Yet when General Hilton informs
Harry of Mrs. Macmorran1s work, Harry agrees with the gen
eral's snobbish remark that although "they are entirely
decent people . . . as a family, they are not of our sort"
(p. 108). Harry's last feelings for Norah crumble when he
finds that her brother is a policeman complete with a thick
Irish brogue. Norah speaks without accent presumably
because she studied singing (pp. 132-133).
By showing Harry mildly in love with an Irish-Catholic
they distract Harry with a Huguenot singer, who turns out
to be Virginia Beaufort (pp. 10-12).
from a lower-class family, De Forest draws a parallel be
tween Harry and his Uncle Silas, who was himself an upstart
lower-class person to the Beaufort family, and a Yankee to
boot. But De Forest personally agrees with Silas Mather's
fear of "Giant Pope" and Harry's disdain for Norah's fami-
4
ly. Apparently De Forest felt it was perfectly legitimate
for a Yankee to marry a Southern lady, as he himself had,
but for a Yankee Huguenot merchant (like the De Forests and
Silas Mather) to marry an Irish Catholic daughter of a
washerwoman was out of the question, and he expects the
reader to agree with this double standard. When Harry
leaves Norah for the last time, however, De Forest writes
ironically that "our modern Bayard, the chivalrous hero of
the age, turned his back and walked slowly homeward" (p.
133). Thus De Forest does suggest that Harry is a flawed
hero, yet he continues to employ him seriously in the main
plot as the person who can heal the breach between the two
^De Forest wrote a series of four articles bn the his
tory of the Catholic Church for Galaxy Magazine, based on
the thesis that "Society cannot found a sacerdotal tyranny
without risk of seeing it assume the form of a political
tyranny." Of Pope Gregory VII he wrote, 1 1 it seems to be
inhuman not to regret that he should ever have been born."
The first quotation is from "The Growth of 'Giant Pope,'"
XV (January 1873), 53. The second is from "Gregory VII-—
King of Kings," XIV (November 1872), 617.
181
families and, allegorically, between the North and the
South.
Ignoring the implications of the parallel between Harry
and Norah, Silas and Elizabeth, De Forest shunts Norah into
the subplot of the second half of the book, which centers on
the ridiculous marriage of convenience between Harry and
Virginia Beaufort. Silas Mather dies in Boston, leaving
half his fortune to Virginia Beaufort if she marries Harry
Underhill. Unable to watch Uncle Phil and Mauma Chloe
starve themselves any longer, Virginia accepts on the con
dition that Harry leave immediately after the marriage. Out
of a sense of family obligation and a respect for Virginia's
Southern pride, Harry accepts the marriage. De Forest
stages a completely gothic wedding ceremony with Virginia
dressed in funereal black and Harry wearing false whiskers.
Because she has never seen Harry face to face, he gives her
a portrait of his dead brother (killed at Gettysburg like
her own brother) as a wedding present. To round matters
out, the affair tak^s place secretly in Charleston's ruined
church at night.
Following the marriage, Virginia makes a Grand Tour of
Europe accompanied by Uncle Phil, Mauma Chloe, and Aunt Anna
Beaufort Dumont. They are chaperoned by General Hilton,
affluent himself now that Virginia has paid his old legal
fees for managing the Beaumont affairs. De Forest intends
to show that the South needs to lose its provincialism in
order to reconcile itself with the North, but his fictional
methods caricature the very people he has drawn realistical
ly in the earlier chapters of the book. He turns Uncle Phil
and Mauma Chloe into shuffling darkies who amuse the white
folks with a tale of mistaking the Louvre Museum for a hotel
and then getting lost there "because it's bigger on the
inside than it is on the outside" (p. 160). He turns Gen
eral Hilton into a sulky rustic, suspicious of the European
men and their cringing manners (pp. 218-219). De Forest
tries to show that Virginia loses her South Carolina ignor
ance by studying music and French, but he undercuts these
accomplishments through General Hilton’s admiration for
Virginia's "mental and moral growth." Hilton seriously
claims that Virginia is now fit to be "a queen of civilized
men," because she "speaks French like a native, better than
the natives— more distinctly and comprehensibly" (p. 218).
Finally, De Forest turns Union Colonel Harry Underhill
into Confederate Colonel Henry Peyton of Virginia. Wearing
Confederate gray clothes and combing his hair in bangs,
Harry woos his own wife by writing sentimental poetry in
183
praise of the Confederate dead. By such attentions he wins
the heart of the beautiful lady, and at a dramatic moment
reveals himself as her true husband, while General Hilton
smiles and the old darkies giggle behind the door. De
Forest concludes the story by marrying off Norah Macmorran
and granting her a handsome dowry from the Underhills.
Norah has turned up in Paris and studies singing with
Virginia's music teacher, a coincidence that provides De
Forest with many opportunities for secret meetings and
hushed conversations about the Confederate poet. The dowry
to Norah comes in the last sentences of the book, and De
Forest does not acknowledge the fact that Silas Mather's
fear has proved correct; his money gets into the hands of
an Irish Catholic. De Forest does not intend an irony; he
simply forgets. The novel that might have shown a way to
reconcile the North and the South, or might have shown the
way to bridge class and religious differences turns out to
be a sentimental romance with all the principals rich and
happily married at the end. The book was issued from the
same plates the next year (1882) as The Oddest of Court
ships . but, however titled, it is a ludicrous account of
impossible human beings.
Harry Underhill's Confederate poems reveal De Forest at
184
his most sentimental and least sensitive. In order to make
Virginia recall her dead family and so become emotionally
dependent upon him, Harry composes and recites a poem about
Pickett's Charge, a battle in which Virginia's brother died.
This seems a devious way of winning his wife back, and it is
rather incomprehensible that a Northern soldier would eulo
gize a Southern general who hanged captured Union soldiers
born in South Carolina on the grounds that they were trai-
5
tors to their state. Aside from the context of the reci
tation, the poem itself jingles badly. De Forest seems un
aware, for instance, of the ambiguous puns on the spoken
words "knightly," "head," and "shiver" in the following
stanza:
Five thousand were his heroes,
Three thousand those who bled;
They marched without a shiver
To join the knightly dead;
They crossed the ghostly river
With swift and steady tread;
And fame shall shine forever
Around that column's head.
(p. 236)
^Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of '61 (Boston,
1883), p. 553. General Pickett never resigned his commis
sion in the United States Army, and Grant's generous terms
to Lee at Richmond were resented by many Union soldiers who
wanted Pickett tried for murder.
.185
When Virginia's teacher sets the poem to music, Vir
ginia sings it and everyone weeps, including the author.
Virginia twice repeats the punning line "To join the
knightly dead" (p. 259), and she had earlier echoed breath
lessly the punning last line of that stanza (p. 237). Per
haps gross insensitivities like these led one critic to
suggest that in The Bloody Chasm De Forest humorously paro-
g
died sentimental romances, but the realistic scenes in
Charleston are not parodies, and when De Forest printed his
collected poetry, he included "Pickett's Charge" as well as
an even more fumbling poem from The Bloody Chasm. "Raven
Van Ross" (p. 285). Harry writes this poem about Virginia’s
sister, such a beautiful blonde that she was nicknamed
"Raven" as a joke (pp. 35-37). A highly spirited aristo
crat, Raven-watches in horror as Sherman's Army marches
through the street outside her house in Columbia, Georgia,
and fires a pistol at the huge column of men. When they
take no notice of her, she dies of a heart attack. This
^Ford, p. 117. Ford's "proof" that the book is a paro
dy includes his citation of the execrable poem "Raven Van
Ross" written by Colonel Peyton. But De Forest seriously
included this poem in his section "Under the Colors" in his
volume of collected poems, and he added a note that the poem
was based on a true incident, somewhat disguised. Poems;
Medlev and Palestina. p. 25.
186
poem also provokes a storm of tears when Underhill recites
it.
In shifting the point of view towards the entire gal
lery of characters, De Forest fails at both realism and
romance. That he personally disdained the Irish as marriage
partners for Yankees may, perhaps, be understood as his own
regional prejudice, but to misunderstand his own characters
cannot be excused in a writer. Colonel Underhill, General
Hilton, Virginia Beaufort, Uncle Phil and Mauma Chloe per
form actions in the second half of the book that are out of
character with their actions in the first half. The expla
nation for this split is not that De Forest shifted the
locale of the novel from Charleston to Paris, for he had
7
lived in Paris too, but that he introduced Norah Macmorran
and Harry Underhill as a parallel with Silas Mather and
Elizabeth Beaufort of an older generation, and then he snob
bishly relegated Norah to the background, while retaining
Harry as the hero and ignoring the parallel between the two
sets of lovers. Had he attempted to explore that parallel,
De Forest might have written a book about class mobility in
a rapidly changing society. Instead of trying to cope with
7European Acquaintance, pp. 177-190.
187
the future, however, De Forest was trying to close up the
wounds of the past, and the ludicrous marriage of Harry and
Virginia shows how poorly he understood what he was doing.
The Bloody Chasm was De Forest's last published effort
written from his personal experience, but it was not his
last attempt. While he was in Europe during the winter of
1885-1886, he wrote a novel called A Daughter of Toil which
he offered unsuccessfully to several magazines and then
g
burned. The burned manuscript invites conjecture. Was it,
as Hagemann suggests, "a partial adumbration of Crane's
9
Maaaie or Dreiser's Sister Carrie"? The answer, if there
is any, must be based on De Forest's past accomplishments.
Far from adumbrating Maggie Johnson or Carrie Meeber,
the heroine of A Daughter of Toil would probably have re
sembled Norah Macmorran, the virtuous daughter of the wash
erwoman whom General Hilton describes in the following pas
sage:
o
Light, p. 167. De Forest offered the manuscript to
Century. The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. Ac
cording to Hagemann, Harper's told De Forest they would not
have room for the novel until 1888, a date that De Forest
said "would not do." Hagemann, p. 49.
^Hagemann, p. 59.
188
The mother is a worn woman— has done a good deal of
washing, I fancy; her rounded back tells the plain
tive story of labor— hard and long labor. {p. 108)
In the same book De Forest writes that Uncle Phil's cabin
contains a bench "such as daughters of toil stand their tubs
upon" (p. 28). This is the only time De Forest uses this
phrase, and it is related to the washing that Virginia
Beaufort takes in.
De Forest's description of the novel supports my con
jecture. In a letter to the editor of Century Magazine.
De Forest called the work "one of the romances of working
life" and then described "romance" in such a way as to sug
gest exotic or unusual events which really^happen in life.
The heroine would be, he says, a virtuous girl who manages
to rise a little bit beyond her environment. That this
novel was no radical departure from De Forest's previous
efforts can be seen in the following excerpt from the let
ter:
The characters, both high and low, are largely taken
from portraits. The plot partakes of the nature of ro
mance; that is, when we see such things we call them
romantic.
■^Light, p. 166; Hagemann, pp. 48-49.
De Forest liked to record the unusual and the bizarre,
and good examples of what he means by "things we call ro
mantic when we see them" fill the pages of his early travel
book European Acquaintance. He writes, for instance, the
true story of Enrichetta, an Italian flower girl whose
beauty and high spirits bring her such a good business that
she arouses the envy of a rival flower girl in the same
area. The rival urges her lover to murder Enrichetta, which
he attempts to do by gashing her throat with a flower-
scissors, "as if she were a rose or a marigold"; but he
fails to kill her. The authorities banish the rival and
imprison the assailant, so that when Enrichetta returns to
her market place, she does more business than ever before
because she has no competition, and the customers sympathize
with her (p. 196). When De Forest merely observed his sur
roundings, he was attracted by such "romantic" events; when
he acted intensely in his surroundings, as he did in his
military service, his observations were more "realistic";
that is, they came from the "norm of experience" discussed
earlier.'*'"*’ A Daughter of Toil took place mainly in New York
11
See my Chapter II for the discussion of these terms.
The fantastic poem "Raven Van Ross" exemplifies this taste
for curiosities of life. See note 6.
190
City, which De Forest knew only casually, and in Europe,
where De Forest was emotionally uninvolved, as European
Acquaintance clearly shows. It seems likely that A Daughter
of Toil would have relied upon curiosities rather than upon
the flat landscapes of such later sociological novels as
Maggie and Sister Carrie.
Elsewhere in the letter to Century Magazine. De Forest
says that the novel "deals rather freely with such subjects
as rate'of wages, cost of living, details of labor and
12
humble lodgings." Although none of De Forest's published
novels deals with such specific details, De Forest does in
clude such items in European Acquaintance. telling penny by
penny how cheaply and happily he lived in Florence until the
dolce far niente existence stung his Puritan conscience. He
recounts with delight exactly what he paid for breakfast,
l ^ G a r g a n o , p . 325. These prices and wages may have
been subject to such rapid change that the Harper1s sugges
tion of a delay for two years meant the work would.be out of
date by that time. Hence De Forest may have burned the
novel because it was no longer pertinent. His last novel,
A Lover's Revolt, was written in 1887, but De Forest kept it
on hand for eleven years until Howells persuaded Longmans,
Green to publish it in 1898 (Hagemann, p. 57). If A Daugh
ter of Toil had still been in manuscript, Howells could
surely have found a publisher for it, even though it resem
bled his own A Minister's Charge, according to a letter from
De Forest to Howells (Light, p. 166).
191
dinner, cab fares, flowers, Swiss cigars, and room rent,
and the tone of the account suggests that one can live quite
cheaply if one has no extravagant desires {pp. 191-207). In
A Daughter of Toil he would very probably have extolled the
virtues of thrifty living under adverse circumstances, vir
tues that Crane and Dreiser excluded from their pictures
of the lower class.
From what De Forest had written before he finished A
Daughter of Toil, it is impossible to conjecture a De Forest
novel with the moral wasteland found in Maggie or Sister
Carrie. De Forest could have shown grinding poverty as he
did in Justine's Lovers and The Bloody Chasm: he could have
shown whiskey-soaked men with tobacco-stained mustaches, as
he did in Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Kate Beaumont, and
he could even have acknowledged prostitution as he did in
A Union Officer, but De Forest's treatment of good and evil
would appear to have been simplistic, as it was in his
attitudes toward Norah, Justine Vane, Josie Murray, and
Olympia Vane. In order to draw complex heroines like Mrs.
Larue or Nellie Armitage, or fairly credible heroines like
Lillie Ravenel or Kate Beaumont, De Forest needed a society
like that of the military or planter class which he could
know and, within limits, which he could respect. Only the ■
Civil War gave him such a background, and if he never wrote
realistically outside that milieu, he did achieve in Miss
Eavenel's Conversion and Kate Beaumont what no other writer
of his time achieved. But the blurred focus and the slip
shod characterization of The Bloody Chasm show clearly
enough that De Forest could not sustain his military exper
iences beyond their immediate context. As a result, A
Daughter of Toil would not have been radically different, I
believe, from the other novels he based on his civilian
experiences in the post-war United States.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
De Forest obviously failed to attract either a popular
or a critical audience during a long and productive career
(1851-1898) in which he published twelve novels, two novel
las, two histories, two travel books, two volumes of poetry,
two volumes of memoirs, forty-five short stories, and forty
articles. ^ No figures are available on De Forest's book
sales, nor have any estimates been made of the author's
2
income from his writing, but we do know that his financial
situation was always precarious. Although he inherited a
legacy of $20,000 in 1888, for instance, in 1890 he felt
■^Edward R. Hagemann, "A Checklist of the Writings of
John William De Forest (1826-1906)," Studies in Bibliogra
phy. VIII (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1956), 185-194. This
list is not complete, as Hagemann notes (p. 186), and I have
included the two volumes of memoirs Which were published
posthumously.
^Nall, p. 268.
193
194
impelled to apply for a Civil War pension of twelve dollars
a month which was not granted until 1904, just two years
3
before his death. On the other hand, his books were gen-
4
erally reviewed m the press, but his literary reputation
5
has always suffered from neglect, even during his own life.
Indeed, the first book on De Forest came out only in 1965.
It is true that William Dean Howells championed De Forest,
even linking him with Henry James by saying that De Forest
was the "pioneer realist on the path which American novel
ists took after the Civil War when our authorship felt the
rising tide of national life in an impulse to work of the
^Light, pp. 169-170. The pension was given on the
basis of a heart disease which ultimately caused De Forest's
death at the age of eighty.
^Hagemann, "Checklist," pp. 193-194, gives a list of
contemporary reviews for De Forest's work.
^When De Forest published his volume of poems, The
Downing Legends. in 1901, an anonymous critic in The Balti
more Sun admitted that he had never heard of De Forest be
fore. Quoted in Light, pp. 168-169. For a brief review of
the author's neglect, see Robert Falk, The Victorian Mode
in American Fiction. 1865-1885 (Lansing, Michigan, 1965),
pp. 32-33.
/I
James F. Light. Professor Albert E. Stone of Emory
University had planned to complete his biography in prog
ress, but Light's work may preclude the work because Stone
feels that only one good book on De Forest is needed. Let
ter to me, June 29, 1965.
195
7
highest refinement, the most essential truth." Recently
Professor Falk described the relationship between De Forest
and James by calling The Bostonians the "capstone of
achievement of the fictional manner begun fifteen years
earlier . . ."[in Miss Ravenel's Conversion 1. The rela
tionship however, is extremely thin, a matter of resem
blances between rather ordinary characters and such common
fictional situations as the division between the North and
the South. Howells's estimation of the two writers remains
accurate today; in 1901 he wrote that "Mr. De Forest's books
are a part of our literary history; Mr. James's books are a
9
part of our literature."
De Forest failed to attract an audience mainly because
he was an extremely inconsistent writer, even as a single
book, The Bloody Chasm, amply demonstrates. Lacking any
critical theory to sustain a fictional aim, he devoted him
self to production rather than to art. He had too much
taste and talent to turn out hack work successfully, but he
made frequent attempts at popularity in such novels as
^Heroines of Fiction (New York, 1901), II, 164.
^Falk, p. 155.
^Heroines of Fiction. II, 165.
196
Overland. Justine's Lovers. A Lover's Revolt, and other
works.
Thus, with the exception of Miss Ravenel's Conversion
and Kate Beaumont. De Forest's works are extremely uneven,
wavering as they do between realism and romance, a problem
common to writers of that period between 1865 and 1885 which
Falk characterizes as the "Victorian Era" in American fic
tion."^ When De Forest went beyond his own experiences, he
faltered badly, and the broad range of his themes and sub
jects shows that he frequently went beyond those experien
ces. His contemporary T. S. Perry said accurately that "his
11
eye is better than his imagination."
De Forest himself blamed the female audience for his
12
lack of success, and Howells concurred. That women made
up the bulk of the book-reading public cannot be denied.
Professor Hart writes that "because women were the rulers of
the home and home was where the novel was read, fiction came
10Falk, pp. 19-31.
American Novels," The North American Review. CXV
(October 1872), 369.
l^Falk, pp. 36-40.
197
more and more to concern itself with women and their special
13
world." De Forest made many efforts to reach that "spe
cial world," attempting, by his own admission, to imitate
14
the "ordinary woman's novel" in Justine's Lovers. and
including in his other works virtuous women who exemplified
the best sensibilities and manners of the age. If women
liked novels to end with safe and wealthy marriages after a
series of romantic adventures, De Forest certainly wrote
many such stories. But he also must have insulted women
with such satirical targets as Squire Nancy Appleyard and
the mercenary Josie Murray, to say nothing of the shameless
flirts in Kate Beaumont and The Bloody Chasm or the demented
15
heroine of Della, or The Wild Girl. In any case he failed
to hold an audience, male or female.
After Miss Ravenel's Conversion failed to find a popu
lar audience, De Forest's standards for his work were not
very exacting. Only a year after castigating romance and
^James D. Hart, The Popular Book in America (New York,
1950), p. 90.
■^Note by De Forest to W. M. Griswold in Descriptive
Lists of Novels, pp. 82-83.
15Published serially in Hearth and Home. II (February
5-March 19, 1870).
198
16
allegory in the essay "The Great American Novel," De
Forest indicated in a letter to the editor of The Galaxy how
much he had abandoned the realistic path he had attempted,
9
and how far he was willing to go to please an unknown read
ing public. In explaining a story which the editor wanted
to reject because it was too romantic, De Forest wrote:
The story of ordinary life no longer excites remark,
no matter how well done. The day for easy success of
commonplace subjects and good writing is over. What
I try to do is sketch realistic characters and put
them through a series of extraordinary and even gro
tesque circumstances. Such things excite remark . . .
and that brings readers.^
De Forest obviously tried to attract an audience, including
the feminine audience, but he did not realize what that
attempt cost him. It caused him to take his eyes off his
subject matter, and in losing his attention he often lost
control of his characters and the world they lived in.
Lacking a personal theory about literature except that
he should attract readers by giving them extraordinary ad
ventures, De Forest must have been more than casually in
terested in reviews of his books, but here he met with
16The Nation. VI (January 9, 1868), 27-29.
^Quoted in Light, p. 105.
199
opinions almost as mixed as his own. Of Miss Ravenel's
Conversion. for instance, an anonymous Nation critic had
this to say of the book's plot and characters:
The plot, then, is of the simplest . . . the characters
we find not interesting, and with one exception not
well drawn— in fact, it would be saying too little not
to say that for the most part they are the old familiar
figures. . . . we are quite willing to say that it is
a poor novel with a deal of good in it.^®
Yet William Dean Howells praised the novel on just these
same points, writing:
These people of Mr. De Forest's are so unlike characters
in novels as to be like people in life, and none will
wish the less to see them because he knows the outline
of their history. . . . Not only is the plot good and
very well managed, but there is scarcely a feebly
painted character or scene in the book. . . . Our war
. . . has laid upon our literature a charge under which
it has hitherto staggered very lamely. . . . Mr. De
Forrest fsic 1 is the first to treat the war really and
artistically. . . . ^
Such widely divergent reviews could only have confused De
Forest, and this sharp difference of critical opinion con-
20
tinued. Whereas Howells praised Honest John Vane, for
18The- Nation. IV (June 20, 1867), 491-492.
18The Atlantic Monthly. XX (July 1867), 120-122.
^Thirty-five years later, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
wrote, "De Forest's novels might have had more substantial
success had not Mr. Howells selected one of them i ~ Miss
200
instance, by saying that, "In this country, at lea^t, there
. . 21
has never been so good a political satire as this," Henry
James dismissed it as a "tract for popular distribution,"
saying that the author lacked "the cunning hand of a sati-
22
rist." The reviewers of De Forest's books praised or
blamed, but they did not offer a constructive criticism
based on a clear theory of the novel. Such constructive
criticism could have given the author a firmer direction in
his work than his own vague notions of how to attract read
ers .
De Forest could have benefited also from steady edi
torial advice, but he had no continuing relationship with
any single publishing house. The eleven novels that went
to volume publication were published by eight different
firms, while his two histories and two travel books were
Ravenel's Conversion 1 for rather extravagant praise, from
which some reaction apparently followed." The Nation. LXXIV
(May 29, 1902), 430. Similarly, Harry Thurston Peck accused
Howells of being color blind in condemning Scott while
praising De Forest as "one of the greatest of novelists."
The Bookman. IV (February 1897), 537.
21"Recent Literature," The Atlantic Monthly. XXXV
(February 1875), 228.
^The Nation. XIX (December 31, 1874), 441-442.
201
published by four different firms, or a total of twelve
publishers for fifteen books. De Forest needed corrective
advice on almost every work he wrote, and a single publisher
might have eliminated the imperfections which Howells ack
nowledged after De Forest stopped writing:
I cannot read many pages of his without wishing he had
done this or that differently. It is not only the
master who chooses to leave things in,the rough; it is
sometimes the 'prentice who has not yet learned how
to shape them perfectly.23
De Forest's apprentice years continued, apparently, to the
end of his career, and editorial assistance might have pro
vided him with just that stimulus and direction he could
have responded to, even as he had responded in the military
service to a discipline which produced results, at least
most of the time.
Perhaps as a result of these mixed reviews, an absence
of steady editorial criticism, and his own lack of firm
convictions, De Forest wavered back and forth between real
ism, as previously defined, and romance, with its allegori
cal, gothic, and sentimental effects. He wrote mystery
stories, ghost stories, political allegories, social
23Heroines of Fiction. II, 162.
202
satires, travel books, and histories; he wrote articles on
Catholicism, racial origins, military campaigns, and poli
tics. He lived some novels and researched others; he re-
24
vised some works extensively and others only slightly.
He set some of his fiction in Europe and some in Syria, and
his American locales ranged from pre-revolutionary days in
Salem to a contemporary Golden West which he had never seen.
He peopled his stories with devil figures, mad people,
feminists, stereotypes, and "real" characters in an odd
assortment of scenes and plots, earning Cowie's remark that
25
De Forest lacked "a steady, all-absorbing aim." Further
more, De Forest only partially committed himself to realism,
as he acknowledged in a letter to Howells, saying of realism
and romance that "the two kinds of fiction are equally
26
allowable and in a certain sense equally true." But with
the exception of the books based on his own military ser
vice, De Forest could not separate realism from romance,
^See the introductions by Joseph Jay Rubin to his
editions of De Forest (State College, Pennsylvania): Honest
John Vane (1960), p. 59; Plaving the Mischief (1961), p. 38;
Kate Beaumont (1963), p. 40.
25cowie, p. 520.
^Letter dated December 6, 1886; quoted in Light, p.
167.
203
though in his old age he still claimed that "From Miss
Ravenel on I have written from life and have been a real-
27
ist." Nor could he fuse allegory and realism to form
symbols that could accommodate fantasy, which is the prac
tice of modern realists such as Ralph Ellison in The In
visible Man or Nelson Algren in The Man with the Golden Arm.
Thus De Forest certainly contributed to the development of
realistic techniques and attitudes, but he could not employ
them consistently.
Recently Professor Levy has found traces of incipient
28
naturalism in De Forest's Honest John Vane. and the in
quiry is a fruitful one because it sheds light on the un
certain attitude towards society that De Forest shows in his
fiction. Levy finds that Honest John Vane reflects the two
major tendencies of naturalism— its characters emerge large
ly as victims of external forces, and their motivations are
understood as mechanistic or biological processes— -but he
'finds also that De Forest's relationship to these tendencies
is only, tentative, to be found in the metaphorical
^Oviatt, "John W. De Forest in New Haven," p. 856.
^®Leo B. Levy, "Naturalism in the Making," New England
Quarterly. XXXVII (March 1964), 89-98.
204
structure of the novel and in a partial commitment to the
idea of economic determinism (p. 91). Levy concludes:
De Forest is divided between saying that men are helpless
before external pressures, and establishing the notion
that the limiting forces are within men themselves. He
has no theory, only implications that circumstances de
prive men of their choice. (p. 93)
De Forest reveals an uncertainty in his philosophic view of
man which prevents him from taking a consistent attitude
towards his fictional characters.
De Forest may have been an incipient naturalist, but
he was not equipped philosophically to be a whole-hearted
one because his sense of biological and environmental de
termination was middle-class rather than democratic, and he
did not see nature as indifferent. In fact, nature plays
no part at all in De Forest’s works. To De Forest, man is
always a moral creature. De Forest did not really indict
environmental circumstances as the naturalists did; rather
he condemned personal pretentiousness beyond what he himself
felt was proper and correct. Hence he scorned Honest John
Vane for being a pretentious lout in the same government
which once boasted of Washington, Calhoun, Adams, and Sum
ner, as much as he condemned him for swindling the American
people (p. 181). Hence, too, he respected the Negroes who
205
worked hard and kept their place and their folk wisdom, but
he ridiculed them when they went to the legislature or the
Paris Louvre; The Bloody Chasm furnishes examples of both
attitudes. He was, in other words, a very middle-class
■ t
person who required that people be clean and neat before
they could be respected. When De Forest was appointed aide
to General Emory during the Shenandoah campaign, his first
worry was about his appearance, as he unintentionally re
vealed in his honest report of his only conversation with
the general:
At this time I was in a common soldier's blouse and
trousers, both so ragged and dirty that I was ashamed
to present myself at corps headquarters.
"You see the only clothes that I have at hand,
General," I said. "My uniform is at Harper's Ferry."
"I am not very well dressed myself," he replied.
"I think you will do."29
As a result of this sense of propriety, De Forest could
not always see his society straight on, or at least he could
not write about society without judging it from a narrowly
middle-class point of view. He would have liked a govern
ment by well-qualified men of sensibility and background,
and when this government obviously did not exist, his
29A ..Volunteer.1 s_ Adventures . p. 197.
* 1
206
reaction was often limited to caricature and lampoon. Nor
could he have been a muckraker any more than he could have
been a naturalist because he did not like to get mud on his
feet. He weakens his description of the Edinburgh slums by
passing judgment on what he sees, and he ends the "tour" by
30
confessing himself "weary of horrors." When a drunk takes
offense at the "spectacle of four decently dressed stran
gers" and lurches through the group, De Forest shows the
gulf between them by noting the effect of the encounter as
"scattering the sparks of our pacific cigars in all direc
tions" (p. 704). Though admirably fitted by his Bureau
experience to write about the low-downers and the freed
Negroes, he never considered them in his fiction about the
post-war world. For all his fruitful involvement in the
Civil War, De Forest never dealt with the impact of that war
on the nation except in the ludicrous The Bloody Chasm.
Both the times and his own personality prevented De Forest
from developing the realistic achievements of Miss Ravenel's
Conversion and Kate Beaumont.
Edmund Wilson suggests that De Forest never quite
30"crumbs of Travel," The Atlantic Monthly. XXXVIII
(December 1876), 696-705.
207
escaped the Calvinist influence that dominated New Eng-
31
land. Wilson asks the following astute question:
Why should one who has been appointed a member of the
"Communion of Saints" try to imagine the lives of the
predestinated damned? and how are the predestinated
damned to imagine the lives of the "Saints"? (p. 742)
The negative response implied may account for De Forest's
lack of involvement with most of his characters and his
alacrity in killing many of them off with convenient heart
32
attacks simply for the sake of the plot, but a full answer
to Wilson's question would need to come from a biography
which reveals De Forest's personal feelings, and materials
33
on this subject apparently do not exist. However, we do
3^-Patriotic Gore, pp. 739-742.
-^Belle Warden's heart attack in Plavina the Mischief
(p. 415) is perhaps the most gothic of De Forest's many
death scenes, rivaled only by the death of Raven Van Ross in
The Bloody Chasm (pp. 36-37, 284-285) for its complete gra
tuitousness .
-^Light's book makes public the most essential letters
that have been used in unpublished dissertations up to this
time, and they reveal very little of the inner man. Pro
fessor Stone (see note 6) reports that the biographical
materials "fall off very sharply after 1881." The first
attempt at a biography of De Forest was made by Anne D.
Jenovese around 1935 for a doctoral dissertation that was
not completed. The document is filed in the De Forest col
lection at Yale University, and Light remarks (p. 186) that
it has value because Mrs. Jenovese had the cooperation of
De Forest's grandson, Louis Effingham De Forest. L. E. De
208
get a suggestion of the author's feelings through his fic
tion. Apparently a man who endured life when it was painful
and enjoyed it when it was not, De Forest wrote out of dis
appointment but never out of anguish. His works splutter
frequently, but they lack savagery. Self-conscious, he
never becomes really coarse, as Twain becomes in attacking
the medieval church in Connecticut Yankee, for instance.
Although De Forest hated that same institution, he wrote of
it with a New England disdain, never losing his sense of
decorum.^
Above all, De Forest never wrote about himself. He
never revealed any deep despair or high enthusiasm; he was
a man of middle feelings. He could have achieved much more
by letting himself .go, by committing himself passionately
to something, but he reached out tentatively to people and
hoped their response would be enthusiastic. He was not a
thinker, he was not a reformer, and he was not brutally
frank except in describing what he had actually seen, such
Forest published at least nineteen histories of prominent
New England families on his own press, but did not write a
history of his own neglected grandfather.
34ne wrote a series of four articles on the Catholic
Church and the "Growth of Giant Pope" for The Galaxy. XIV-
XV (1878).
209
as the grisly field-hospital scenes in Miss Ravenel's Con
version . Light says that De Forest believed in the golden
35
mean, but it is more exact to admit that De Forest lacked
passionate convictions. He could do a great deal of hard
work, as his literary production attests, but once he
entered a situation, he tended to do the best he could with
out questioning that situation. He loved order and liked to
be part of the army team. He had an appreciation of irony,
but he also had a timidity of spirit that prevented him from
exploring irony beyond the observable surface.
Essentially De Forest was a belle-lettrist, a man of
public service and patriotic dedication with a strong sense
of family honor. Quite significantly, his first and last
works were histories, a history of the Indians of his own
state and a history of his own family in which he mentions
himself only briefly. His relish for the simplicity of
camp-life and battle orders hardly fitted him to catch the
changing face of America, although his novels certainly
show a great concern with that changing face. Most
■^Light finds the "figure in the carpet in De Forest's
work is his conviction of the superiority of moderation over
extremes" (p. 161). Light does not press the thesis too
insistently; rightly so, I think.
210
important, as a moralist he lacked real vision; his concept
of good and evil was narrow, limited almost entirely to
money and manners. Hawthorne, James, and Melville could
grasp at the ungraspable and suggest the terrors and uncer
tainties of the inner regions of the mind and heart as they
struggled up into consciousness. De Forest felt this mater
ial was not the material of the novel. Although Twain's
heroes never grew up, Twain could suggest childhood's mix
ture of cruelty, innocence, hope, and terror by juxtaposing
grim visions of death with childish pranks, presumably
simply to be admitted and mixed in the reader's conscious
ness. But De Forest kept his eye on the surface of things;
he wrote down what he saw, not what he imagined or what
might be imagined.
We see the result of this limited imagination chiefly
in the superficial relationships between De Forest's young
lovers, whose feelings for each other De Forest restricts
to the conventions of sentimental romance. For example,
Frank McAlister vows to Kate Beaumont that he will spend
his future consoling her for the past, hardly the way to
begin married life (p. 423). Only once— in Miss Ravenel's
Conversion— does a De Forest hero convincingly reveal the
author's own resigned view of life and cold attitude towards
211
human hopes and sufferings. At the end of that novel
Captain Colburne, De Forest's alter ego, wants to marry
Lillie Carter, the widow of the magnetic, utterly human
colonel who died cursing with joy that his brigade had taken
its objective. Colburne has emerged from the war weakened
by malaria and disillusioned because cowards were promoted
while his own bravery went unrewarded. Mourning the death
of her husband, Lillie sighs to Colburne that she has been
"so unhappy," and Colburne replies quickly that "multitudes"
have been unhappy. He offers this consolation to the woman
he loves:
"There are ten thousand blossoms on an apple tree,
but not five hundred of them mature into fruit. So it
is with us human beings: a few succeed, the rest are
failures. It is a part of the method of God. He cre
ates many in order that some may be sure to reach his
proposed end. He abounds in means; he has more mater
ial than he needs; he minds nothing but his results.
You and I, even if we are blighted blooms, must be
content with knowing that his purposes are certain to
succeed, and in that fact we can rejoice, forgetting
ourselves."
"Ohi but that is very hard," said Lillie.
"Yes, it is. But what right have we to demand that
we shall be happy? That is a condition that we have
no right and no power to make with the Creator of the
Universe." (p. 463)
Colburne's advice here reflects the Calvinistic removal
from life that Wilson suggests underlies the author's lack
of passion. Colburne denies Lillie's genuine grief and
212
limits his own justified bitterness. De Forest's rigid
morality and personal resignation to life violate artistic
integrity here? he manipulates and restricts the genuine
feelings of his characters even in this, his best novel.
De Forest's narrow vision of human possibilities con
fined him to recording familiar surroundings and employing
conventional characters and situations throughout most of
his career. The Civil War and the Reconstruction lifted
him out of himself and plunged him into a turmoil of exis
tence that resulted in the best.fiction he wrote. In this
fiction he used realistic techniques, one of the first
Americans, it should be acknowledged, who did so. But when
these germinal experiences ended, De Forest relied on older
techniques and a philosophy which was not adequate to the
conditions around him. Most fatally, he apparently sup
pressed his own innermost feelings and thereby weakened his
novels. They all contain brilliant passages that lift De
Forest above the ranks of most of his contemporaries but
not to those heights reached by the passionately committed
Howells, Twain, and James. What could have been an excep
tional career foundered for many reasons: the age, the
audience, the publishing business? yet only one manuscript
novel failed of publication. De Forest's reputation must
213
rest, therefore, on what he wrote, and his numerous works
add up to an extremely uneven achievement. De Forest failed
because he lacked a theory of the novel to sustain his fic
tion and because he lacked a theory of life that would com
pel him to write more honestly than he did. The post-war
world that held so much promise for the volunteer soldier
heaped its rewards on hack writers, corrupt politicians,
and swindling capitalists; De Forest responded to that
world by living in seclusion and working as hard as he
could. His philosophy fitted him to accept and deplore the
world simultaneously, and in trying to please an audience
that he could not respect, De Forest betrayed a truly
creative and energetic talent by preparing, as Captain
Colburne does, to accept failure before it actually oc
curred.
BI B L IO G RA P HY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources;
Works of John William De Forest
Books and novels
The History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest
Known Period to 1850. Hartford, Conn.: W. J. Hamers-
ley, 1851.
Oriental Acquaintance. New York: Dix, Edwards and Co.,
1856.
"Witching Times," Putnam's Monthly Magazine. VIII-X (Decem
ber 1856-September 1857).
European Acquaintance: Being Sketches of People in Europe.
New York: Harper and Bros., 1858.
Seacliff. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1859.
Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Lovaltv. New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1867.
Overland. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1871.
Kate Beaumont. Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1872.
The Wetherel Affair. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1873.
Honest John Vane. New Haven, Conn.: Richmond and Patten,
1875.
Playing the Mischief. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1875.
215
216
Justine's Lovers. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1878.
Irene the Missionary. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879.
The Bloody Chasm. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1881.
A Lover's Revolt. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898.
The De Forests of Avesnes. New Haven, Conn.: The Tuttle,
Morehouse and Taylor Co., 1900.
The Downing Legends: Stories in Rhyme. New Haven, Conn.:
The Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Co., 1901.
Poems: Medley and Palestina. New Haven, Conn.: The
Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor Co., 1902.
A Volunteer's Adventures, ed. James H. Croushore, with
intro, by Stanley T. Williams. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1946.
A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, eds. James H. Crou
shore and David M. Potter. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1948.
Short stories
"The Hasheesh Eater," Putnam's Monthly Magazine. VIII (Sep
tember 1856), 233-239.
"Fate Ferguston," The Galaxv. Ill (January 1, 1867), 87-100.
"'Rum Creeters Is Women,'" Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
XXXIV (March 1867), 484-491.
"A Gentleman of an Old School," The Atlantic Monthly. XXI
(May 1868), 546-555.
"Parole d'Honneur," Harper's New Monthly Magazine. XXXVII
(August-September 1868), 372-378, 483-490.
"The Drummer Ghost," The Atlantic Monthly. XXIV (July 1869),
1-13.
217
"A Night at Sea," Harper's New Monthly Magazine. XXXIX (July
1869), 195-203.
"The City of Brass," The Atlantic Monthly. XXIV (October
1869), 389-398.
"Lieutenant Barker's Ghost Story," Harper's New Monthly
Magazine. XXXIX (October 1869), 713-720.
"Della, or the Wild Girl," Hearth and Home. II (February 5-
March 19, 1870).
"A Queen of Society," Putnam's Magazine. N.S. V (April
1870), 393-406.
"The Colored Member," The Galaxy. XIII (March 1872), 293-
302.
"An Independent Ku-Klux," The Galaxy. XIII (April 1872),
•480-488.
"Father Higgins's Preferment,/1 Harper's New Monthly Maga
zine. XLIV (May 1872), 918-922.
"Cap'n Phin Glover as President," The Christian Union. VI
(August 14-21, 1872), 141-142.
"An Inspired Lobbyist," The Atlantic Monthly. XXX (December
1872), 676-684.
"The Other Fellow," The Atlantic Monthly. XLII (December
1878), 669-682.
Articles
Rev. of Vie d'Olvmpia Morata. The New Englander. XII (May
1855), 216-234.
"Charleston under Arms," The Atlantic Monthly. VII (April
1861), 488-505.
"The First Time under Fire," Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
XXIX (September 1864), 475-482.
218
"Sheridan's Battle of Winchester," Harper's New Monthly
Magazine. XXX (January 1865), 195-200.
"Sheridan's Victory of Middletown," Harper1s New Monthly
Magazine. XXX (February 1865), 352-360.
"Port Hudson," Harper's New Monthly Magazine. XXXV (August
1867), 334-344.
"The Great American Novel," The Nation. VI (January 9, 1868),
27-29.
"Two Girls," The Nation. VI (February 6, 1868), 107-109.
"The 'High-Toned Gentleman,'" The Nation. VI (March 12,
1868), 206-208.
"Drawing Bureau Rations: I. The Applicants," Harper's New
Monthly Magazine. XXXVI (May 1868), 792-799; "II. The
Distribution," Harper1s. XXXVII (June 1868), 74-82.
"Forced Marches," The Galaxy. V (June 1868), 708-718.
"The Low-Down People," Putnam's Magazine. N.S. I (June
1868), 704-716.
"The Man and Brother," The Atlantic Monthly. XXII (Septem-
ber-October 1868), 337-348, 414-425.
"A Bureau Major's Business and Pleasures," Harper1s New
Monthly Magazine. XXXVII (November 1868), 766-775.
"A Report of Outrages," Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
XXXVIII (December 1868), 75-84.
"Chivalrous and Semi-Chivalrous Southrons," Harper's New
Monthly Magazine. XXXVIII (January-February 1869),
192-200, 339-347.
"A Revival of the Papacy," The Galaxv. XIV (October 1872),
483-494.
"Gregory VII— King of Kings," The Galaxv. XIV (November
1872), 604-617.
219
"The Growth of 'Giant Pope.' I. From Pastor to Pontiff,"
The Galaxy. XIV (December 1872), 764-776? "II. From
Pontiff to Prince," The Galaxy. XV (January 1873), 41-
53.
"An Independent's Glance at the South," The Nation. XXIII
(September 28, 1876), 196-197.
"Crumbs of Travel," The Atlantic Monthly. XXXVIII (December
1876), 696-705.
"A Turko-Russian War," Harper's New Monthly Magazine. LVI
(January 1878), 261-271.
"The Cradle of the Human Race," The Atlantic Monthly. XLI
(February 1878), 145-157.
"The Turkish Wars with the Hospitalers," Harper1s New Month
ly Magazine. LVI (February 1878), 431-441.
"The Russians on the Bosphorus," The Atlantic Monthly. XLI
(April 1878), 502-512.
"The Rambler," The Book Buyer. XVII (January 1899), 572-573.
Secondary Sources
Doctoral dissertations
Croushore, James H. "John William De Forest; A Biographi
cal and Critical Study to the Year 1868." Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation. Yale University, 1944.
Davidson, James. "John William De Forest and His Contempor
aries: The Birth of American Realism." Unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation. New York University, 1957.
Ford, Philip Hastings. "The Techniques of John W. De For
est, Transitional Novelist." Unpublished Ph.D. diss
ertation. Ohio State University, 1953.
Gargano, James W. "John William De Forest: A Critical
Study of His Novels." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.
220
Cornell University, 1955.
Hagemann, Edward R. "John William De Forest and the Ameri
can Scene: An Analysis of His Life and Novels." Un
published Ph.D. dissertation. Indiana University,
1954.
Nall, Allen Kline. "A Critical Evaluation of John William
De Forest." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Univer
sity of Texas, 1952.
Books and periodicals
Adams, Charles F. "Inflation and the Railroads," The North
American Review. CVIII (January 1869), 33.
Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, eds. James
Grant Wilson and John Fiske. New York: D. Appleton
Co., 1888.
Bagby, George W. The Old Virginia Gentleman, ed. Ellen M.
Bagby. New York: Scribner's, 1938.
Becker, George J., ed. Documents of Modern Literary Real
ism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
_______________"Realism: An Essay in Definition,"
Modern Language Quarterly. X (June 1949), 184-197.
Beer, Thomas. The Mauve Decade. New York: A. A. Knopf,
1926 .
Bowron, Bernard R. "Realism in America," Comparative Liter
ature . Ill (Summer 1951), 268-285.
Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer. New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1940.
__________________. The Writer in America. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1953.
Brown, Herbert R. "The Great American Novel," American
Literature. VII (March 1935), 1-14.
221
Brown, Herbert R. The Sentimental Novel in America. Dur
ham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1940.
Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. Washing
ton, D. C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.
Cady, Edwin H. The Road to Realism. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1956.
Carter, Everett. Howells and the Aoe of Realism. Phila
delphia: Lippincott, 1950.
Catton, Bruce. The Coming Furv. Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday, 1961.
Cecil, L. Moffitt. "Miss Ravenel's Conversion and Pilgrim1s
Progress.1 1 College English. XXIII (February 1962), 352-
357.
Clemens, Samuel, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age.
Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1873.
Coffin, Charles Carleton. The Boys of '61. Boston: Estes
and Lauriat, 1883.
Connor, Rowland. "The Story of the Great American Tunnel,"
The Nation. XXI (August 19, 1875), 114-116.
Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New
York: American Book Co., 1948.
Crawford, Jay Boyd. The Credit Mobilier of America. Bos
ton: n.p., 1880.
Davidson, James. "The Post-Bellum Poor-White as Seen by J.
W. De Forest," Southern Folklore Quarterly. XXIV
(June 1960), 101-108.
"The Delusions of Abolitionists— A Letter to Rev. Henry
Ward Beecher," The Old Guard. I (June 1863), 121-124.
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vols. New York: Scribners, 1928-1936.
222
Eggleston, Edward. The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Rev. ed.
New York: Orange Judd Co., 1892.
Falk, Robert. The Victorian Mode in American Fiction. 1865-
1885. Lansing: Michigan State University Press; 1965.
Gaines, Francis Pendleton. The Southern Plantation. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1925.
Gordon, Clarence. "Mr. De Forest's Novels," The Atlantic
Monthly. XXIII (February 1882), 611-621.
Griswold, William M. Descriptive Lists of Novels. Cam
bridge, Mass.: W. M. Griswold, 1890-1891.
Hagemann, Edward R. "A Checklist of the Writings of John
William De Forest (1826-1906)," Studies in Biblio-
qraphy. VIII (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1956), 185-
194.
____________________. "John William De Forest and The Galaxv.
Some Letters (1867-1872)," Bulletin of the New York
Public Library. LIX (April 1955), 175-194.
Haight, Gordon S. Introduction to J. W. De Forest's Miss
Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. New
York: Rinehart and Co., 1955.
__________________. "Realism Defined," in Spiller, Robert E.,
et al., Literary History of the United Statas. New
York: Macmillan Co., 1963.
Hart, James D. The Popular Book in America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1950.
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Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1963.
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Nation. LXXIV (May 29, 1902), 430.
Howard, Leon. Literature and the American Tradition.
Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1960.
223
Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1891.
_______________________. Heroines of Fiction. 2 vols. New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1901.
_______________________. "Recent Literature," The Atlantic
Monthly. XXIV (August 1874), 229-230.
_______________________ . Rev. of Kate Beaumont. The Atlantic
Monthly. XXIX (March 1872), 364-365.
______________ . Rev. of Miss Ravenel's Conversion
from Secession to Lovaltv. The Atlantic Monthly.
XX (July 1867), 120-122.
Hubbell, Jay B. The South in AmericanLiterature: 1607-
1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,
1954.
James, Henry. Rev. of Honest John Vane. The Nation. XIX
(December 31, 1874), 441-442.
_____________ . Rev. of Playing the Mischief. The Nation.
XXI (April 12, 1875), 106.
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1878, p. 6.
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713-714.
Kate Beaumont. Anon, rev., The Nation. XIV (March 21,
1872), 190.
Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallowbarn. Philadelphia: Carey
and Lea, 1832.
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Columbia University Press, 1927.
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1942), 1-13.
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575-580.
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Creator Sullivan, Philip Edward (author)

Core Title John William De Forest: A Study Of Realism And Romance In Selected Works

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor McElderry, Bruce R. (committee chair), Malone, David H. (committee member), Metzger, Charles R. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-199915

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