In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

324CIVIL WAR HISTORY of his fictional narrative, to distort or even misrepresent historical events. Since this narrative is not hampered by the demands of probability, the author is happily free from this fault. Mr. Mason's historical reconstruction is satisfactory. He does not portray the total "River War" in the West. Episodes such as that at Belmont, where the Union gunboats apparently acquitted themselves with sometìiing less than distinction, are not part of the action of the novel. But such military events as are shown—notably the remarkable naval victory at Fort Henry, the river action at Fort Donelson, and the naval engagement at Memphis—are ably presented. Social history, particularly life among the profiteering set in St. Louis, seems authentic. If Mr. Mason's historical novel is unexceptionable as history, it is unfortunately not as novel. The plot is preposterous and the characterization crude. Surely it is enough, if not too much, to have a hero discover he is a bastard and kill his father only to learn he is not a bastard and did not kill his father. But Mr. Mason gives us also a heroine who becomes a victim of amnesia, is installed in a house of ill fame, and, retaining her virginity, is the chaste vessel who leads the hero back to the path of rectitude. Other characters appear: the cowardly deserter who regains his courage, the courtesan with the heart of gold, but they are old friends, and need not detain us. Most of these characters, through suffering, become very noble indeed, and the incorrigible are conveniently killed, if combatants, by Confederate bullets, and if civilians, by falling trees. Anything is possible, and if subsequent editions of this work should appear, it would be well to restore to General Albert Sidney Johnston the missing "t" in his name (p. 196), and to clear up the case of the missing Phil Greenway (p. 115), who seems to turn into Tobias Greenway at p. 118. Perhaps Colonel North, a hero of other books by Mr. Mason, could solve this one. S. Stewart Gordon Albany, New York. Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. By John William De Forest. Edited with an introduction by Gordon S. Haight. ("Rinehart Editions"; New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955. Pp. xx, 485. $1.45.) some ninety years ago, while actively engaged in the field during the Civil War, a Connecticut captain in the Union army wrote this the "first realistic American novel." Miss Ravenel's Conversion was not published, however, until 1867. A present-day reader of many scenes in the book—for example, Chapter XX, the attack on Port Hudson in Louisiana, and Chapter XXI, a description of a bebind-the-lines field hospital far more bloody than the line of battlemust come away convinced that Mr. Haight does not err in his insistence that De Forest anticipated by thirty years and, in important respects, surpassed the realism of detail and the merciless exposure of human frailty under fire which literary historians readily honor in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. De Forest has not received his due. Book Reviews325 The reasons for this neglect are fairly obvious. First he was running counter to the tides of taste of his time; die tyrannical female reader had decreed for sickly sentimentalism and romantic idealization of the soldier, whether in blue or in gray. De Forest the realist, by rejecting melodrama, sentimentality, and sectional bias, paid the price of contemporary unpopularity, in spite of immediate praise by William Dean Howells who prophesied his eventual recognition as one of the masters of American fiction. "These people of MSr. De Forest's are so unlike characters in novels as to be like people in life," Howells wrote in die Atlantic Monthly of July, 1867, and went on to state that Da Forest "is the first to treat die war realty and artistically." But diere is another reason for the longstanding neglect of diis author. Criticism is often a remarkably hidebound and categorical institution; a prior mistake is seldom rectified. The historical symmetry of major movements and "isms" is embarrassed by discussion of writers who like Paulding, Poe, and De Forest speak...

pdf

Share