Talk:The Virginian, Macmillan Co, 1902

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Beverly Stark in "Six Books of Some Importance," The Bookman, August 1902:

In the four pages of introduction to The Virginian, Mr. Wister maintains that his book, although it deals with a period not yet remote, is none the less a colonial romance, because Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier. Dr. Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, he thinks, exactly fits the common understanding of the term "historical novel." But, he urges, Silas Lapham is also an historical novel, for it pictures an era and personifies a type. "It matters not," writes Mr. Wister, "that in the one we find George Washington and in the other none save imaginary figures; else The Scarlet Letter were not historical. Nor does it matter that Dr. Mitchell did not live in the time of which he wrote, while Mr. Howells saw many Silas Laphams with his own eyes; else Uncle Tom's Cabin were not historical."

Where, suggests Mr. Wister, is the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? In a measure he is gone; and yet he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. In the old days his ungoverned hours did not unman him. "If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times. Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him old-fashioned." In Mr. Wister's eyes, the type seems to have been wholly admirable, heroic, splendidly barbaric, and it is thus that the author has endeavoured to preserve him in The Virginian.

Were The Virginian without any other qualities, the chapter called "Em'ly" alone would make it worth reading. Although in many respects they are as far apart as the poles, the story of "Em'ly" curiously recalls Guy de Maupassant's story of the paralysed toper, whose shrewish wife forced him to play the humiliating part of a hen. "Em'ly" is a supreme type of yearning spinsterhood, and the description of her awkwardly and strenuously mothering the litter of rapidly growing setter puppies is delicious in its humour. Here and there in the book there are passages which are somewhat vague, and the relations between the different characters are not always clearly defined. But the lines between types are finely drawn, and Mr. Wister has caught and conveyed admirably the spirit and atmosphere of the era and scenes of which he writes. The Virginian is a strong and vigorous novel.

• "Some Recent Stories," in The Outlook, 19 July 1902:

Among the few novels of the season which have any claim upon the lover of good work, Mr. Owen Wister's "The Virginian," bearing the imprint of the Macmillan Company, holds a first place. It is a story which adds to the record of life in this country by reason of its reality, its close observation, and its entire veracity. The cowboy has haunted the theater in cheap plays and the newspapers in reminiscent tales of his prowess these many years; he has appeared with some semblance of life in short stories; but Mr. Wister is the first man of letters who has dealt with him honestly, simply, and with the sense of proportion and restraint of an artist. A vigorous writer, a first-hand student of life on the plains and the ranch, Mr. Wister has approached the cowboy as a type of elemental man, fashioned on a large scale by conditions which kept conventional qualities in the background and evoked the primal instincts and passions. These conditions, which created the cowboy and which explain him, Mr. Wister knows at first hand. He has given his chief character the interpretation of a vast country, unbroken by individual holdings, made great horizons visible to his reader, brought into the imagination the solitude and savage wildness of mountain ranches with unbroken: reaches of crystalline sky over them, and has breathed into his tale the energy, the primitive force, the instinctive assertion of natural rights, which give the life of the frontier virility, audacity, and the interest which accompanies the play of human character largely untrammeled by custom and law. The Virginian is not, like his predecessors, a melodramatic hero; he is a real man of large mold with a touch of the heroic; a successor of the men who pushed forward the old frontier, penetrated the solitudes of the great West, fought on both sides in the Civil War, took to the free life on the plains at its close, and have now vanished to appear no more, There is no veneering of this cowboy; no ea§y polishing of his wildness; there is, rather, a clear, clean record of his life in its courage, its wild humor, its rough vigor, and its manliness. No such story has been written before, and the tale will not be retold. In clear, vigorous, sympathetic style, Mr. Wister has drawn a type of distinctively American manhood and made an epic of free life as Gogol made an epic of old Cossack life in "Taras Bulba;" he has written a first-hand book in a time which is largely given over to books of imitation; he has brought the cowboy into literature.

• H. W. Boynton in "Books New and Old: Summer Fiction," The Atlantic Monthly, August 1902:

... The whole story (The Master of Caxton) is worthy of gratitude; a clean, simple, straightforward tale.

So is The Virginian,—and something more. Mr. Wister may be said to have given us a final apotheosis of the cowboy: a type which the author laments in his preface as already obsolete. The Virginian is a figure of splendor, and of splendor all the more irresistible because our recognition of it does not depend upon what the author says about him, though he has a good deal to say. Strong and shrewd, and gentle in all senses except the sense of formal breeding, the Virginian wins his successes fairly by force of character. His early career as we know it at the beginning of the story gives no decided promise of success. He ran away at fourteen, and during the ten years following picked up very little book education. When he falls under the sway of the little schoolmistress and is inspired to read, he retains his practical acuteness, and judges by his own canons. "I have read that play Othello," he writes. "No man should write down such a thing. Do you know if it is true? I have seen one worse affair down in Arizona. He killed his little child as well as his wife, but such things should not be put down in fine language for the public. I have read Romeo and Juliet. That is beautiful language, but Romeo is no man. I like his friend Mercutio that gets killed. He is a man. If he had got Juliet there would have been no foolishness and trouble." This is the respectable judgment of a man of action, reared in what Mr. Wister calls "the great playground for young men," not holding himself above any of its work or play, and satisfied to refine upon its standards rather than to change them. Some of the cowboy play is decidedly rough, not to say vicious, as the East knows sufficiently well. The Virginian's biographer frankly makes allowance, as in his comment upon a scene in a Rocky Mountain saloon: "Youth untamed sat here for an idle moment, spending easily its hard-earned wages. City saloons rose into my vision, and I instantly preferred this Rocky Mountain place. More of death it undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents. And death is a thing much cleaner than vice. Moreover, it was by no means vice that was written upon these wild and manly faces. Even where baseness was visible, baseness was not uppermost. Daring, laughter, endurance,—these were what I saw upon the countenances of the cowboys. And this very first day of my knowledge of them marks a date with me. For something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took on heroic stature."

Nothing draws one more strongly to the Virginian, the type of this nobility, than his savage health, moral as well as physical. There are, indeed, certain acknowledged facts of his early experience which might be cited to the contrary. "He told me of a Thanksgiving visit to town that he had made with Steve," says the narrator, long after we have learned to trust the Virginian. "'We was just colts then,' he said. He dwelt on their coltish doings, their adventures sought and wrought in the perfect fellowship of youth. 'For Steve and me most always hunted in couples back in them gamesome years,' he explained. And he fell into the elemental talk of sex; such talk as would be an elk's or tiger's; and spoken so by him, simply and naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality, it was without offense. But it would be offense should I repeat it." The Virginian's code was the code of his fellows. But he was incapable of meanness; he had never, we are sure, harmed a weaker than himself, as he had never (according to an ill-advised phrase to the mother of his betrothed) "killed for pleasure or profit."

If his schoolmistress, Molly Wood, lacks this superb aboriginal simplicity, her New England blood and training are at fault. She cannot quite free herself from conventional qualms, but is essentially fine-grained and sound, fit to be grafted upon this wild offshoot of a good Southern stock. And the great triumphs of her love, first over social, and second over moral fastidiousness, give one the impression of a richer if not more charming personality than Bud Dale's Virgie.

The Wyoming in which the action of Owen Wister's story takes place has much in common with the California of Bret Harte. Substituting cattle for gold, the conditions are very similar: a society of men, a society untrammeled and unaided by the machinery of civilization. But Owen Wister's interpretation of that life is very different from his predecessor's. ...

• "The New Books," in The Outlook, 25 November 1911:

Owen Wister's 'Virginian' is a "sure-enough" man, a male being, whom the most earnest female advocates of equality of the sexes could never convert into a thing like unto themselves. He is also a person to whom the much-abused word charming may be applied without a blush. As a*Virginian he is exceptional, for ,he has no ancestors or family portraits or old furniture or silver—nothing common to his native State but a soft drawling speech and a chivalrous attitude towards the weak who happen to be women. As a cow-puncher of Wyoming he is, however, a historical personage, as genuine as George Washington. For Mr. Wister says that, during the last decade, cattle-thieves and politicians have ravaged Wyoming, and between them exterminated the cowboy with his high heels, his jingling spurs, and his awful readiness to shoot or to be shot. "He rides," says Mr. Wister, "in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his caravels." Many good stories about the ungoverned cowboy have been well told, depending mostly for effect on external picturesqueness and thrilling adventure. Mr. Wister, In a number of short tales, and now at length in 'The Virginian,' has given him character, connecting him with the rest of his species, while emphasizing a differentiation due to his career. Several chapters included in 'The Virginian' have been published separately, and are given rather more space in the novel than they are worth to its principal motives—characterization of the Virginian. The New England relatives of Molly Wood, schoolma'am at Bear Creek, are hypothetical New Englanders, so tearful of compromising their respectability. Throughout the tale, Molly Wood is never quite good enough tor the pains and persistence with which the Virginian woos her, but in the last crisis she justifies his choice. As a test of character for both, the final moment of conflict between Molly and her lover is excellently devised. The dramatic thrill in it is very quick, and the outcome so satisfactory that one realizes an immense fear of a disappointment. 'The Virginian' has, we believe, been one of the most popular books of the season; it deserves to endure through many seasons.