GRANDISSIMES, The, by George W. Cable. No one has approached Geosge W. Cable in portraying and interpreting the charm of picturesque New Orleans. After scoring a brilliant success in his first volume of short stories,
Creole Days,' he undertook the more ambitious task of writing the novel,
The historic setting is that of the early years of the 19th century when the Americans had come into possession of the city and State. Agricola Fusilier, the representative of the proud families of the old regime, struggles somewhat tragically against the new order represented by the Americans and others with more modern ideas. Honore Grandissime, the more progressive member of the Grandissime family, had been educated in Paris, where he had caught something of the revolutionary ideas that were remaking modern life. He makes the inexcusable mistake of °going over to the enemy,° which phrase meant, in the lan guage of the reactionaries, aaffiliation with Americans in matters of business and of gov ernment, the exchange of social amenities with a race of upstarts.° It implied a craven con sent ato submit the sacredest prejudices of our fathers to the newfangled measuring-rods of pert and imported theories upon moral and political theories.° There are many other types of characters, notably the descendants of the De Grapions, a charming mother and her daughter, of the Creole type without the social prejudices of their clan and in a sense the victims of the social ideas that had prevailed. There are all sorts of negro types: Bras-Coupe, a former African king and now a slave; Clemence, the pedkr, who goes through the streets singing the African folk-songs with a sort of weird in cantation; and the two mulattoes, Palmyre and the free man of who bears the same name as his white counterpart, Honore Gran dissiine. These last two characters have naught
in common with the members of the race to whom they are linked by reason of the slightest tincture of negro blood, and yet they are shut out from all the privileges and possibilities of the white race. At the end they disappear mysteriously from New Orleans and go to France to end their tragic careers.
To these various types must be added one who is for a long time an outsider — Joseph Frowenfeld, a German immigrant with scien tific training sufficient to make him the pros perous owner of a drugstore, and with sufficient knowledge of modern intellectual and social ideas to make him a disinterested critic of the existing order in his adopted city. In fact, he is a sort of chorus through whom the author expresses his own views. He is told by the representatives of the old regime that he must 'fall in° with the ideas of the community in mind, in taste, in conversation. He does not do so, but gradually wins to himself all the more progressive types of the novel, and es pecially the love of the charming daughter of a distinguished Creole family.
Aside from the setting and characters, the interest of the novel centres in this interpreta tion of a vanished social order. There has been much controversy as to whether the author rightly andjustly portrays the people of New Orleans, and still more as to his views of tne negro problem. It seems as if, in his sense of the tragedy of the free people of color under the old order and the suggestion that the same injustice still prevails now that slavery has passed away, he. becomes in the novel less of the pure artist that he was in his first volume and more of the propagandist that he was in a later book,