nequivocal, low-water mark
in the intellectual product with which he has to deal. This book,
"Kavanagh," had the curious fate of bringing great disappointment to
most of his friends and admirers, and yet of being praised by the two
among his contemporaries personally most successful in fiction,
Hawthorne and Howells. Now that the New England village life has proved
such rich material in the hands of Mary Wilkins, Sarah Jewett, and
Rowland Robinson, it is difficult to revert to "Kavanagh" (1849) without
feeling that it is from beginning to end a piece of purely academic
literature without a type of character, or an incident--one might almost
say without a single phrase--that gives quite the flavor of real life.
Neither the joys nor the griefs really reach the reader's heart for one
moment. All the characters use essentially the same dialect, and every
sentence is duly supplied with its anecdote or illustration, each one of
which is essentially bookish at last. It has been well said of it that
it is an attempt to look at rural society as Jean Paul would have looked
at it. Indeed, we find Longfellow reading aloud from the "Campaner Thal"
while actually at work on "Kavanagh," and he calls the latter in his
diary "a romance."{78} When we consider how remote Jean Paul seems from
the present daily life of Germany, one feels the utter inappropriateness
of his transplantation to New England. Yet Emerson read the book "with
great contentment," and pronounced it "the best sketch we have seen in
the direction of the American novel," and discloses at the end the real
charm he found or fancied by attributing to it "elegance." Hawthorne,
warm with early friendship, pronounces it "a most precious and rare
book, as fragrant as a bunch of flowers and as simple as one flower....
Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book, nor could any
other succeed in it. It is entirely original, a book by itself, a true
work of genius, if ever there was one." Nothing, I think, so well shows
us the true limitations of American literature at that period as these
curious phrases. It is fair also to recognize that Mr. W. D. Howells,
writing nearly twenty years later, says with almost equal exuberance,
speaking of "Kavanagh," "It seems to us as yet quite unapproached by the
multitude of New England romances that have followed it in a certain
delicate truthfulness, as it is likely to remain unsurpassed in its
light humor and pensive grace."{79}