| | 1 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Indian of Commerce  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | For purposes of literary classification, all Indians may be divided, quite
regardless of linguistic affinities, into three sole tribes—the human,
the inhuman, and the super-human. There is the actual aborigine, interesting to
competent fiction as to science because he is a man and at the same time a
living archive from the childhood of the race. There is the wooden eikon which
stands for questionable cigars or unquestionable penny-a-lining—in
either case a mere peg upon which to hang commercial profit. And there is also
the Red Man of Rhapsody—a conveniently distant fiction to carry
heroics which would seem rather too absurd if fathered upon poor human nature as
we see it next door. With the last-mentioned tribe deals one of the handsomest
and one of the most preposterous books of the season, 'A Child of the Sun,' by
Charles Eugene Banks (Stone). Brilliant as a parrot in mechanical coloration,
the text also seems to have undergone some mental "three-color process."
Fenimore Cooper was cold ethnography to this, and even Prescott's Empire of
Montezuma quite as true to life. There is nothing Indian in these pages, except
the good intention. A curbstone version of the "legend" of the Piasau serves for
warp; and into it the author has woven a truly curious fabric of girl-graduate
mundiloquence and scope. Nominally in prose, the book is in fact very largely
couched in wilful and poor Hiawathan measure, doubly cheap by being masked in
"long type." Perhaps the most diagrammatic comment on the quality of the volume
is in its own exemplary lines about "Pakoble," belle of the "Arctide" tribe, who
was "so perfect in beauty that the artists of the Arctides often begged the
favor of her time, that they might preserve her loveliness to future
generations." It must be said that the fifteen "color-type" illustrations, by
Louis Betts, are far and away above their company and their sort. Of no value as
racial types, they are very uncommonly attractive and sympathetic, and not
without a touch of real poetry in conception as well as in color-scheme. Its
whole dress would befit a worthier volume. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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