clew's reviews: a book log

The Lion and the Unicorn, Richard Harding Davis

These short stories aren't as good as Davis' novel Soldiers of Fortune; they'd be better if read separately, but together they're too predictable. They're like early or tepid Rudyard Kipling.

Accordingly, the best stories are the ones that depend for substance and effect on the horrors of war; On the Fever Ship and The Man With One Talent.

The latter is mildy educational or corroborative or depressing given international politics. A man who knows how awful conditions in Cuba are thinks he's convinced a powerful, eloquent Senator to visit Cuba and make its plight understood. The Senator's financial backers convince him not to go; they invite the man to a luxurious dinner to break the news gently; he reproaches them. When he dies mutilated in Cuba, they take it as evidence that their views were sensible.

The Spanish-American War was even more confusing than that, of course; it was supported by USians who thought it would be good for trade, led to the invasion of the Phillippines against the will of the Filipinos, and was politically or psychologically useful in the US partly because the nationalism it inspired papered over the North-South tensions left from our Civil War.

Although these illustrations are very Gibson-like, they're by Howard Chandler Christy. Christy looks like an example of the practicality of art as a get-out-of-Hicksville career a hundred years ago, when there weren't as many entries into the urban middle class as there are now. I have puzzled friends, and quite fairly, by referring to art as a plausible careerist path, and the Civil War to WWI era is what I was thinking of. I would guess, in a randomly-informed way, that business was a proportionally worse bet when more businesses were privately held and family managed, leaving fewer rungs from clerkship to management. Artists and engineers with no connections might have had a better chance of eventual independence. Dunno. Cf. New Grub Street and, for the predictable Anthony Trollope reference, The Three Clerks.

I'm clearly going in circles enough to make mine a small world: from The Vagrant,

"I should have felt [grateful] that way toward Mrs. Ewing more than anyone else."

"I know, 'Jackanapes,'" remarked Collier, shortly; "a brutal assault upon the feelings, I say."

I've read Jackanapes and it's startling to see it compared, is it is here, to Lewis Carroll. Fame comes and goes.

Project Gutenberg etext #1620 So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.). | TrackBack