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Harold Frederic
By Willa Cather
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THE MARKET-PLACE. Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York:
F. A. Stokes & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work
of that great man whose career ended so prematurely
and so tragically. The story is a study in the ethics and purposes
of money-getting, in the romantic element in modern
business. In it finance is presented not as being merely the
province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty personal gratification,
but of great projects, of great brain-battles, a field
for the exercising of talent, daring, imagination, appealing to
the strength of a strong man, filling the same place in mens
lives that was once filled by the incentives of war, kindling in
man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero of the
story, Joel Thorpe, is one of those men, huge of body, keen
of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men,
and a magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked
and lost in a dozen countries, been almost within reach of
fortune a dozen times, and always missed her until, finally, in
London, by promoting a great rubber syndicate he becomes a
multi-millionaire. He marries the most beautiful and one of
the most impecunious peeresses in England and retires to his
country estate. There, as a gentleman of leisure, he loses his
motive in life, loses power for lack of opportunity, and grows
less commanding even in the eyes of his wife, who misses the
uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by storm
and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic
scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.
Mr. Frederic says:
Napoleon was the greatest man of his ageone of the
greatest men of all agesnot only in war but in a hundred
other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St. Helena
in excellent health, with companions that he talked freely to,
and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of his conversations
there, we dont get a single sentence worth repeating.
The greatness had entirely evaporated from him the moment
he was put on an island where he had nothing to do.
It is very fitting that Mr. Frederics last book should be in
praise of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of
force, however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished
from the inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of
his life he wrote almost as many pages as Balzac, most of it
mere newspaper copy, it is true, read and forgotten, but all of
it vigorous and with the stamp of a strong man upon it. And
he played just as hard as he workedalas, it was the play that
killed him! The young artist who illustrated the story gave to
the pictures of Joel Thorpe very much the look of Harold
Frederic himself, and they might almost stand for his portraits.
I fancy the young man did not select his model carelessly.
In this big, burly adventurer who took fortune and
women by storm, who bluffed the world by his prowess and
fought his way to the front with battle-ax blows, there is a
great deal of Harold Frederic, the soldier of fortune, the
Utica milk boy who fought his way from the petty slavery of
a provincial newspaper to the foremost ranks of the journalists
of the world and on into literature, into literature worth
the writing. The man won his place in England much as his
hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his
self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished
his book he did not know that his end would be so
much less glorious than his heros, that it would be his portion
not to fall manfully in the thick of the combat and the
press of battle, but to die poisoned in the tent of Chryseis.
For who could foresee a tragedy so needless, so blind, so
brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that such strength could
perish through such insidious weakness, that so great a man
could be stung to death by a mania born in little minds?
In point of execution and literary excellence, both The
Market Place and Gloria Mundi are vastly inferior to The
Damnation of Theron Ware, or that exquisite London idyl,
March Hares. The first 200 pages of Theron Ware are
as good as anything in American fiction, much better than
most of it. They are not so much the work of a literary
artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong opinions and
an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of men. The
whole work, despite its irregularities and indifference to form,
is full of brain stuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful
intellect that some men put into politics, some into science
and a few, a very few, into literature. Both Gloria Mundi
and The Market Place bear unmistakable evidences of the
slack rein and the hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable
padding, the stamp of the space writer. They are imperfectly
developed, and are not packed with ideas like his earlier
novels. Their excellence is in flashes; it is not the searching,
evenly distributed light which permeates his more careful
work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons why
Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income
and he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a
day to obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have
learned to expect to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate
weakness, and usually it devours the greater part,
as the seven lean kine devoured the seven fat in Pharaohs
vision. Achilles was a god in all his nobler parts, but his feet
were of the earth and to the earth they held him down, and
he died stung by an arrow in the heel.
Pittsburg Leader, June 10, 1899
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