Page:The American Novel - Carl Van Doren.djvu/256

, where with certain fortunate mortals they discuss human affairs.

In half a dozen years Crawford had written ten novels of a remarkable variety, and the remainder of his life but continued this brilliant beginning. Having returned to Italy in 1883, he thereafter spent most of his life at Sorrento in a quiet activity almost never disturbed. As no biography has been published, the published facts of his career are not numerous. It is generally known, however, that he continued to travel widely, married, grew wealthy from the sale of his novels, became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1909.

Except that toward the end of his life Crawford partly turned from fiction to sober—and not remarkably spirited—history, he can hardly be said to have changed his methods from his earliest novel to his last. Improvisation was his knack and forte; he wrote rapidly and much—sometimes an entire novel in a month. He once said that, at least in his mature years, his imagination was constantly peopled with a swarming mass of human figures, of whom a group would now and then suddenly come together in a set of relationships and compel him to record them in a novel. His settings he took down, for the most part, from personal observation in the many localities he knew at first hand; his characters, too, are frequently studied from actual persons. In his plots, commonly held his peculiar merit, Crawford cannot be called really original; he employs all the ancient and honorable paraphernalia of melodrama—lost or hidden wills, forgeries, great persons in disguise, sudden legacies, physical violence. Moreover, it is almost a formula with