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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ca0039e --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #65134 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65134) diff --git a/old/65134-0.txt b/old/65134-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3d05188..0000000 --- a/old/65134-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11260 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Women Who Make Our Novels, by Grant M. -(Martin) Overton - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: The Women Who Make Our Novels - -Author: Grant M. (Martin) Overton - -Release Date: April 22, 2021 [eBook #65134] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Chuck Greif and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at - https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images - generously made available by The Internet Archive/American - Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS *** - - - - - MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS - - THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS - - - - - The Women Who Make - Our Novels - - BY - GRANT M. OVERTON - - [Illustration] - - NEW YORK - MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY - 1922 - - - - - COPYRIGHT, 1918, - BY - MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY - - - _First printing December 12, 1918_ - _Second printing April 25, 1919_ - - - - -TABLE OF CONTENTS - - -CHAPTER I PAGE - -_Edith Wharton_ 1 - - -CHAPTER II - -_Alice Brown_ 11 - - -CHAPTER III - -_Ellen Glasgow_ 20 - - -CHAPTER IV - -_Gertrude Atherton_ 41 - - -CHAPTER V - -_Mary Roberts Rinehart_ 54 - - -CHAPTER VI - -_Kathleen Norris_ 68 - - -CHAPTER VII - -_Margaret Deland_ 78 - - -CHAPTER VIII - -_Gene Stratton-Porter_ 88 - - -CHAPTER IX - -_Eleanor H. Porter_ 108 - - -CHAPTER X - -_Kate Douglas Wiggin_ 121 - - -CHAPTER XI - -_Mary Johnston_ 132 - -CHAPTER XII - -_Corra Harris_ 153 - - -CHAPTER XIII - -_Mary Austin_ 164 - - -CHAPTER XIV - -_Mary S. Watts_ 177 - - -CHAPTER XV - -_Mary E. Wilkins Freeman_ 198 - - -CHAPTER XVI - -_Anna Katharine Green_ 204 - - -CHAPTER XVII - -_Helen R. Martin_ 215 - - -CHAPTER XVIII - -_Sophie Kerr_ 226 - - -CHAPTER XIX - -_Marjorie Benton Cooke_ 238 - - -CHAPTER XX - -_Grace S. Richmond_ 246 - - -CHAPTER XXI - -_Willa Sibert Cather_ 254 - - -CHAPTER XXII - -_Clara Louise Burnham_ 267 - - -CHAPTER XXIII - -_Demetra Vaka_ 284 - - -CHAPTER XXIV - -_Edna Ferber_ 292 - -CHAPTER XXV - -_Dorothy Canfield Fisher_ 298 - - -CHAPTER XXVI - -_Amelia E. Barr_ 304 - - -CHAPTER XXVII - -_Alice Hegan Rice_ 313 - - -CHAPTER XXVIII - -_Alice Duer Miller_ 320 - - -CHAPTER XXIX - -_Eleanor Hallowell Abbott_ 326 - - -CHAPTER XXX - -_Harriet T. Comstock_ 334 - - -CHAPTER XXXI - -_Honoré Willsie_ 342 - - -CHAPTER XXXII - -_Frances Hodgson Burnett_ 357 - - -CHAPTER XXXIII - -_Mary E. Waller_ 369 - - -CHAPTER XXXIV - -_Zona Gale_ 377 - - -CHAPTER XXXV - -_Mary Heaton Vorse_ 386 - - - - -INTRODUCTION - - -This book, the rather unpremeditated production of several months’ work, -is by a man who is not a novelist and who is therefore entirely unfitted -to write about women who are novelists. Several excuses may be urged; -the author is, by general agreement, young. He has to do with many -novels, being, indeed, a sort of new and strange creature, a literary -reporter self-styled, a person connected with a newspaper and charged -with the task of describing new books for the readers thereof. As he -could make no critical pretensions he had to fall back upon a process -peculiar to newspaper work, the attempt at a simple putting before the -public of facts, of things lately said and done--in short, of news. He -had to regard a new book as a piece of news to be communicated as -honestly and as entertainingly as any other occurrence. And so, here. He -has tried to be a good reporter of the personalities, performances and -methods of work of some of the best known American women novelists. - -An effort has been made to include in this book all the living American -women novelists whose writing, by the customary standards, is -artistically fine. An equal effort has been made to include all the -living American women novelists whose writing has attained a wide -popularity. The author does not contend, nor will he so much as allow, -that the production of writing artistically fine is a greater -achievement than the satisfaction of many thousands of readers. It may -be more lasting; it is not more meritorious; and to attempt to institute -comparisons between the two things is absurd. The critic may be -justified in treating of Edith Wharton and ignoring Gene -Stratton-Porter. The literary reporter who should do such a thing -doesn’t know his job. - -It is, therefore, to be feared that this is no book for highbrows. But a -lower forehead and a broader outlook have their advantages. In the -striking popularity of a particular storyteller a thoughtful observer -may see important and significant evidences of the tendencies of his -time. And that may be much more worth his while than the most careful -speculation as to who will be read fifty years from now. - -The order in which authors are taken up in the book is accidental and -therefore meaningless. The reader is recommended to follow his own -inclination in perusing the chapters. They are entirely detached from -each other, as are the subjects considered except for an occasional -reference, in discussing one, to another’s work. These references, and -in fact all the discussions of various books, are to be taken as -expository and not critical. If a thing is stated to be good, bad or -indifferent the statement is made as a statement of fact and not of -personal opinion. - -The justification of this book is the need of it. It is ridiculous that -there should be nothing easily accessible about such writers as Edith -Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Mary Johnston, Mary S. Watts, -Anna Katharine Green, Clara Louise Burnham, Amelia E. Barr and Edna -Ferber. The condensations of _Who’s Who in America_ are dry bones; books -on living American writers are all “studies” or compilations of a highly -selective sort; their authors want to be revered by posterity as persons -of wonderful critical perception and judgment. The authors themselves -have not the time to satisfy their readers’ curiosity and their -publishers hesitate lest they may not remain their publishers! - -And so the literary reporter steps in. Some of the chapters in this -book, generally condensed in content, have appeared in the columns of -_Books and the Book World_, the literary magazine of _The Sun_, New -York, of which he is the editor. In their preparation he has been -wonderfully helped by the authors themselves and by other individuals -and publishing houses, for which he makes acknowledgment and returns his -thanks in a note elsewhere in the book. - - - - -ACKNOWLEDGMENT - - -My indebtedness to various persons and sources is repeatedly made -manifest in the text. Only the co-operation of publishers has made -possible the preparation of these sketches in a short time. I wish -particularly to thank the following for important help: - -Houghton Mifflin Company and Mr. Roger L. Scaife and Mrs. Helen -Bishop-Dennis for material on Mary Roberts Rinehart, Eleanor H. Porter, -Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Johnston, Mary Austin, Willa Sibert Cather, -Clara Louise Burnham and Demetra Vaka. - -Doubleday, Page & Company and Mr. Harry E. Maule for material on Ellen -Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gene Stratton-Porter, Corra Harris, Helen R. -Martin, Sophie Kerr, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Grace S. Richmond and -Harriet T. Comstock. - -The Macmillan Company and Mr. Harold S. Latham for material on Alice -Brown and Mary S. Watts and Zona Gale. - -Harper & Brothers and Miss Hesper Le Gallienne for material on Gertrude -Atherton, Margaret Deland and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. - -The Century Company for material on Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller -and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. - -Frederick A. Stokes Company and Mr. William Morrow for material on -Gertrude Atherton, Edna Ferber, Honoré Willsie and Frances Hodgson -Burnett. - -Dodd, Mead & Company for material on Anna Katharine Green, Gertrude -Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. - -Henry Holt & Company and Miss Ellen Knowles Eayrs for material on -Dorothy Canfield Fisher. - -Charles Scribner’s Sons for material on Edith Wharton. - -Little, Brown & Company for material on Mary E. Waller. - - - - -THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS - - - - -CHAPTER I - -EDITH WHARTON - - -The order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance -that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also -accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not -accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it -is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say, -therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious -compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed, -immutably fixed upon from the Beginning--not of a book but of a -Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely -divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much -in the divine right of kings--an accident at the beginning of it. Had -the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they -preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd, -there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working -out of them, a pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be -left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton. - -We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the -accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their -novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and -very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but -rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book--other -than a work of fiction--are either that it presents facts or suggests -ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our -first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and -their books--simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it -is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better -than a pale reflection of life. - -Edith Wharton comes first in this book that she may the better stand -alone. She has always stood alone. The distinguishing thing about her is -the distinguishing thing about her work--aloneness, which is not the -same thing as aloofness. She is not aloof. At 56 she is working in -France, doing that which her hand finds to do. Her aloneness arises from -the facts of her life. Never were so many favoring stars clustered -together as for her when she was born. She had everything. - -She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the -daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item -2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton -of Boston in 1885 (item 4--no! countless items of luck had already -intervened!). In other words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General -Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family, -was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that -careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could -confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect -acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so -discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing. -Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes -of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night. -They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly -and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native -genius to expression. Think of it--Italy and all the other rich -backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right -surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable -gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in -the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius -and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs. -Wharton _had_ a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in -the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word. - -She is not a genius but she moves and always has moved in a world of -geniuses. From childhood she had, of course, an easy familiarity with -French, German and Italian. The ordinary bounds upon reading--the only -way of keeping the company of the supremely great of earth--were thus -swept a measureless distance away. French, German and Italian as well -as English literature were accessible to her--and the French includes -the Russian, of course. She read widely and we are told that “when she -came upon Goethe she was more prepared than the average to take to heart -his counsels of perfection and reach after a high and effective -culture!” Reach? Not upward, surely; there was nothing above her. -Outward, perhaps. At any rate, here was Mrs. Wharton in the actual -presence and company of a genius if ever there lived one. It is -agonizing to think what Goethe would have said were he alive these days. -He would have said the supremely scathing thing, the thing that would -have withered forever the moral cancer of his countrymen, and we cannot -articulate it. A magical mind and a magical tongue and a magical -pen--Goethe. He was always saying sesame. We, who have not his genius, -have to batter down the barred door. - -It is to Goethe above all other literary influence that Mrs. Wharton -feels indebted. Strike out the word “literary.” The influence of Goethe -is not a literary influence, but an influence proceeding directly from -the heart of life itself. What sort of an influence is it? High, pure, -clean and yet human. Intangible, too; about all you really can say of it -is that it is like the company of some people who bring out all the best -that is in you. They do not put into you anything new. They draw you -out, or rather, they draw something out of you. At the risk of shocking -the fastidious reader and to the joy of the literally-minded we may say -that they are the spiritual equivalent of the mustard plaster. They -have an equal drawing power and efficacy, but they do not draw out the -ache but the great glow and spirit which are the incontestable proof of -the existence in the human soul of something immortal. - -Mrs. Wharton read widely, as we say, and she read in the main “standard” -fiction. Her taste is for George Eliot and the ethical teachings of that -earlier woman novelist. Her taste is equally for Gustave Flaubert, the -“craftsman’s master,” the writer who teaches writers how to write. You -learn the innermost secrets of your writing craft from Flaubert and then -you put aside everything you have learned from the master and learn from -life. Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Meredith have been Mrs. Wharton’s -steady diet; she has re-read them so often as repeatedly and contentedly -to fall into arrears with respect to current fiction. She has had always -a great interest in biology and in whatever touches upon the history of -human thought. This, in brief, is the substance of Edith Wharton the -woman and the background of Edith Wharton the novelist. - -We shall not discuss Mrs. Wharton’s books in detail in this chapter and -book for the best of reasons--they leave no room for two opinions of her -work. Of almost no other novelist whom we shall consider would it be -possible to say this; indeed of some American women novelists there are -nearer twenty-two than two opinions. Some writers, like Gertrude -Atherton, are subjects of perpetual controversy; others are the cause of -wide but sharply defined cleavages of opinion--Gene Stratton-Porter, for -example. The work of still others is more properly matter for -speculation as to what they may do than estimate of what they have done. -But Mrs. Wharton falls in none of these classifications. There is only -one opinion about her work: it is excellent but lifeless; it is Greek -marble with no Pygmalion near. From this sweeping verdict three--and -only three--of her books are to be excepted. They are _Ethan Frome_ and -_The House of Mirth_ and _Summer_. In these three books you can feel the -pulse beat. In _Ethan Frome_ the pulse is the feeble quiver of the -crushed and dying human heart; in _The House of Mirth_ there is the slow -throb of human suffering and anguish, mental no less than spiritual; in -_Summer_ there is the excited and accelerated vibration of human -passion. - -It will be taken as a very dogmatic piece of business on our part when -we say that her work leaves no room for two opinions. Was there ever a -bit of writing, some will ask, which could not give birth in the minds -of readers to more than one opinion? Often, indeed, twin opinions are -born to the same reader! - -We must answer that here and hereafter we are dealing with easily -ascertainable facts and not indulging in criticism. Mrs. Wharton’s work -leaves room for only one opinion simply because those who might form -another opinion do not read her. And those who do not read her take -their opinions from those who do and then, following the instinct of our -natures, declare (quite honestly) the borrowed opinion as their own. Our -real audacity consists in the assertion, implied in what we have said, -that of all the thousands who read Mrs. Wharton not one believes in his -heart for one solitary instant that the mass of her fiction is alive. -They look upon her work as they look upon the Winged Victory; it is -ravishingly beautiful, it has perfection of form, it has every attribute -of beauty possible of attainment by the consummate artist, but it has -also the severe limitations of any form of art. - -We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never -can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of -writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All -art is necessarily a _representation_ of life or some aspect of it. The -moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow -himself to think of any kind of _art_ in what he is doing, he goes into -a fourth dimension--and life exists in only three dimensions. This is -not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact, -almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the -mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the -mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade. - -And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think -of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special -preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living. -If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do -entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed -completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we -know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of Conrad, one book of Thomas -Hardy’s--we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific -illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this -book. - -Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the -resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is -not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely -similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth -well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in -cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more -disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined -it more completely. _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the everlasting witness -of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he -did do. _Ethan Frome_, _The House of Mirth_ and _Summer_ are all -inferior to _The Portrait of a Lady_ and all superior to James’s later -work. - -If any one tells you otherwise it is because he is thinking in terms of -art and not in terms of life. And some will tell you otherwise, for the -world never has lacked those to whom art was more than life just as the -world has never lacked those to whom a future life was more than the -life of this earth. With these we have no quarrel; we can but respect -them; God made them so. It takes all kinds of people, we agree, to make -a world; if that is so, manifestly it takes all kinds of views to get -the true view. In any triangle the sum of all three angles is equal to -two right angles. If, therefore, one of the angles of the triangle is a -right angle, the sum of the other two will equal a right angle. The -angle of outlook which sees only the artistry in a piece of literary -work added to the angle of outlook which sees only the livingness in the -same work may make the right angle which we all aspire to look from. - - -BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON - -_The Greater Inclination_, 1899. -_The Touchstone_, 1900. -_Crucial Instances_, 1901. -_The Valley of Decision_, 1902. -_Sanctuary_, 1903. -_The Descent of Man, and Other Stories_, 1904. -_Italian Villas and Their Gardens_, 1904. -_Italian Backgrounds_, 1905. -_The House of Mirth_, 1905. -_Madame de Treymes_, 1907. -_The Fruit of the Tree_, 1907. -_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_, 1908. -_A Motor-Flight Through France_, 1908. -_Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_, 1909. -_Tales of Men and Ghosts_, 1910. -_The Reef_, 1912. -_The Custom of the Country_, 1913. -_The Book of the Homeless_, 1915. -_Fighting France_, 1915. -_Ethan Frome._ -_The Decoration of Houses._ -_The Joy of Living._ -_Xingu and Other Stories._ -_Summer_, 1917. -_The Marne_, 1918. -_French Ways and Their Meaning_, 1919. -_The Age of Innocence_, 1920. -_The Glimpses of the Moon_, 1922. - -_The Reef, Summer, The Marne, French Ways and Their Meaning, The Age of -Innocence, and The Glimpses of the Moon were published by D. Appleton & -Company, New York; Mrs. Wharton’s other books were published by Charles -Scribner’s Sons, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER II - -ALICE BROWN - - -From New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request -for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows: - -“I have been too busy in legitimate ways--gardening, cooking, cursing -the Hun--to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark -facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles -inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’ -of walking--[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country -there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips -and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people -were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little -‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was -done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought -back the mail for the rest. - -“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and -then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and -forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was -graduated--after which I taught several years, in the country and in -Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my -certainty to write. - -“I did a little work on the _Christian Register_ and then went to the -_Youth’s Companion_, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the -latest books and magazines. - -“And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry -on--sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens -and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old -houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more. - -“And _that’s_ all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a -genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless -you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’ - - “Gloomily yours, - - “ALICE BROWN.” - -[In pencil] - -“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it -pans out!” - -And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for -embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier, -may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of -her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people. -Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will -be found at the close of this chapter. - -New England stories (_Meadow-Grass_), English travels (_By Oak and -Thorn_), poems (_The Road to Castaly_), a study of Stevenson written in -collaboration, stories for girls (as _The Secret of the Clan_), a play -that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (_Children of -Earth_) and a number of novels of which _The Prisoner_ is the most -notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature. - -She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story -writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved -a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet -she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible -to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play--the play that captured -Winthrop Ames’s prize--which was splendidly imaginative and even rather -poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance -of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is -everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a -wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can -make up for that lack. - -As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t -believe that try to go through _My Love and I_, first published under -the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left -out. Again, she can write a book like _The Prisoner_, which is as fine -in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing -derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all -(as Miss Brown would say). - -It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women -novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice -Brown to her novels; but this disadvantage to her is no greater than -the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is -not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the -whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and -consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can -to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to -do. But chivalry is not dead. - -_The Prisoner_ is the story of a relatively young man who has just come -out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a -keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the -absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her -story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary -parallel. - -Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out -of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the -released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course; -prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of -the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is -much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate -him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world, -cruelty----. - -Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality, -and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of -humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in -ideas as ideas, and in _The Prisoner_ she has packed a few more than can -be found in any American novel of the last dozen years. The root idea -is that expressed by the prisoner--or ex-prisoner--himself. As Jeff -says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real -difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the -law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put -even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by -her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he -meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible -paradox of binding himself to the law.” - -This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K. -Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison -is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible -thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply -evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In -pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut -himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he -can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is -very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is -“outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his -fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect -whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go -unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one -of us any longer if he ever was. - -At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very -clear, for otherwise _The Prisoner_ will be, in its real import, lost on -the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a -man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in -which we try to keep every one in the fellowship--for society is -essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make -laws simply to state what is _not_ in that creed, the whole creed itself -being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way -to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have -got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back -in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding -themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the -inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries -with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make -laws about. - -And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the -creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so -doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the -unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see -that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man -see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented -prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to -punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations. -Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable -piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man -who has put himself beyond the pale must himself bring himself within -it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We -give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a -mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though -physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the -paradox that he can be free in no other way--ever. - -The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that -we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However, -we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss -Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to -speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations -that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this -indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical, -thought-provoking--why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is -simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be -found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly -inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but -perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox--there is no gainsaying -the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry -James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and -sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy -material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it -than Alice Brown has done. - -On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on -the roll of American novelists at least as high as we place, among the -men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the -West, _The Virginian_. - - -BOOKS BY ALICE BROWN - -_Fools of Nature._ -_Meadow-Grass._ -_By Oak and Thorn._ -_Life of Mercy Otis Warren._ -_The Road to Castaly._ -_The Day of His Youth._ -_Robert Louis Stevenson--A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney)._ -_Tiverton Tales._ -_King’s End_, 1901. -_Margaret Warrener_, 1901. -_The Mannerings._ -_High Noon._ -_Paradise._ -_The County Road_, 1906. -_The Court of Love_, 1906. -_Rose McLeod_, 1908. -_The Story of Thyrza_, 1909. -_Country Neighbors_, 1910. -_John Winterbourne’s Family_, 1910. -_The One-Footed Fairy_, 1911. -_The Secret of the Clan_, 1912. -_My Love and I_, 1912. -_Vanishing Points_, 1913. -_Robin Hood’s Barn_, 1913. -_Children of Earth_, 1915. -_Bromley Neighborhood._ -_The Prisoner_, 1916. -_The Flying Teuton_, 1918. -_Homespun and Gold_, 1920. -_The Wind Between the Worlds_, 1920. - -_Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books -by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER III - -ELLEN GLASGOW - - -Ellen Glasgow’s first two books were produced before she was twenty. She -is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist--better, a disciple of -naturalism--and concerned with social and personal problems of the last -thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a -book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in -the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used -respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the -civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s -province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more -gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something -reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the -leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s. - -She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and -transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a -region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own -sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an -evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her -writing is filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life -before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She -does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such -crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in _her -interpretation_ of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be -able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are! - -Miss Glasgow has had to drive so hard and so strongly and so much alone; -she has had to face such a vast inertia of tradition and such a tenacity -of feeling, that the struggle has narrowed her. She hates -sentimentality, and rightly. It has been the terrible obstacle she has -had to confront. Of her South she once said: - -“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle -against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or -later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will -have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not -an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,” -Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on -another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I -have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the -struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she -explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality, -which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in -New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her -novel _Virginia_, the title referring, however, not to her State, but -to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton. - -You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s -handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as -she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most -adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut -her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by -sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it -were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things -clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared -that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that -Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive -idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly -without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to -the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who -rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was -wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but -whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never -to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington, -the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable -exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington: - -“It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody--in a doctor, or a -friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism -in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,’ but -the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally, -the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless, -the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” - -Mr. Tarkington went on to say: - -“Miss Glasgow is sorry that there are so many writers willing to supply -the demand for ‘sugary philosophy,’ but those writers are not only -willing to supply; they are inspired to supply. They aren’t superior -people turning the trick for money, as Miss Glasgow seems to think; they -are ‘giving the best that is in them.’ They take their art solemnly.” - -The truest word on the subject ever uttered and most essential to be -reprinted here. It is not so much for the refutation of Miss Glasgow -that we give it. The full application of Mr. Tarkington’s remarks will -be seen in some of the later chapters of this book. - -But to return to our Southern realist. - -Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, -1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson) -Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men--lawyers, -judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to -school--an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her -Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary -intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He -is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her -affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for -scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of -political economy and socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong. -The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.” -The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later -join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she -went to her father and said: - -“Father, I have written a book.” - -Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might -have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally -supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was _The -Descendant_, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid -exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the -offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.” - -The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious -consideration as an American novelist--as a novelist picturing American -life--was _The Voice of the People_, published in 1900. She has referred -in after years to _The Descendant_ as “a mere schoolgirl effort,” -although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could -not so characterize _The Voice of the People_, nor could any one else. -It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class -distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and -dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political -machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of -the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the -hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic -State convention. An old family friend, a delegate to the convention, -smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house -in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the -building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory -must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and -uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater. - -It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a -friend--Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a -novel of New York life.” - -“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?” - -“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do -not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular -locality.” - -A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness -of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not -answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has -necessarily only a few localities--those he knows tolerably well. Miss -Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her -Virginia settings do. - -Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main -Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that -cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden -in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the -real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and -has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the touch of Jane -Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes -every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not -locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only -animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her -dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.” - -Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of _Virginia_ and -_Life and Gabriella_ was rewritten at least three times, some parts -more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds -incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a -pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has -been typewritten. - -And always novels. “I cannot write short stories,” Miss Glasgow -explains. “They bore me excruciatingly. The whole technique of the short -story and the novel is different. All the best of the short stories must -be painfully condensed with slight regard for the evolutionary causes -bringing about this or that effect. Everything that I see, I see in the -form of a novel--as a large canvas. I want to trace the process of cause -and effect; and that is why both _Virginia_ and _Gabriella_ were a joy -in the writing. Those books do not deal with problems. I do not ever let -a problem get into my novels--there is none, except, of course, as some -problem of an individual life may present itself to the character. I am -not concerned with any propaganda. A book should never serve any purpose -but the telling of life as it is--being faithfully realistic.” - -“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is the writer’s true -business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be -pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them. - -“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write -comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of -plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a -piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within -stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come, -always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and -places--at a reception, on the train, on the street.” - -When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her -novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it -there. She selects her people, who have _their_ individual problems as -she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from -that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural -and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s -methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely -about novel writing and her literary ideals. - -“There are three things a novelist has to do to prove himself,” she -declared. “First, he must show an ability to create personalities; -second, he must exhibit a sincerity of style; and third, he must evince -the capacity for an intelligent criticism of life. Without these he is -not worth very much in a serious, big way. To contribute to the -knowledge and understanding of life--that should be his motive in -writing, not primarily to create a pleasant impression. - -“There have been several stages in our growth since the special type of -fiction was evolved. There was the sentimentality of Richardson; then -came my favorite, Fielding, our first realist; and finally arrived the -critical period with its early representative in Jane Austen and more -recent upholder in Meredith. We had to pass through stages far from real -life before we reached the time of direct dealing with life, of real -criticism of life. Take such men as Wells and Galsworthy--and maybe -Arnold Bennett;--are they not trying to see life through and through? I -do not believe in the realism that merely depicts for the picture. -Realism of the kind I mean not only depicts, but interprets as well.” - -“How about Fielding, your favorite?” asked Mr. Moses. - -“Oh, he had his faults, but they were honest ones.” Mr. Moses remarked -Miss Glasgow’s enthusiasm as she talked. “He was the first to teach us -that life--and ordinary life, too--has poetry in it. There are some of -our writers with a social conscience who use narrative as a mere vehicle -for philosophy. It is always well to have a big central idea to hold the -building together, but realism--though some novelists would separate -it--cannot be practiced apart from vision. The novelist must have a -perspective in life. - -“When I first began writing I steeped myself in economics, in -sociology--and later in German mysticism. But one learns only that he -may unlearn, if necessary. In doing _Virginia_ I was obliged to revisit -certain localities to refresh my memory of things. But I could not -write of them immediately; the impressions had to filter through my -imagination. - -“A man who writes for his age seldom writes for any other. And that is -why I do not believe in being consciously local. Mr. Howells, as our -greatest realist, made us see the poetry of the life he knew best. While -I’ve never consciously been influenced by any school, I have felt what -he has done for the novel. At one time I knew my Balzac, my Flaubert, my -Guy de Maupassant, by heart. And of course I read the Russians, who, I -think, are the greatest of all novelists. But as far as I am aware, I -have worked my own method out for myself.” - -Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never -written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her -books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best -expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all -of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the -greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life -was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow -all of this complexity.” - -Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and -the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s -words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha -on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more -accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is -always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed -in definite phrases. Take, for example, the titles of two of her books, -_The Wheel of Life_ (1906) and _The Ancient Law_ (1908). They merely -repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively, -in her earlier novel, _The Deliverance_. - -For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond -home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an -apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow -empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its -books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the -atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the -change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with -the life of Virginia in her later books. - -_Virginia_, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable -controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in -this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy--provided Miss Glasgow -writes the third! _Life and Gabriella_ was the second book of the -uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about -these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent -suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex. - -“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same -as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life. -Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness. - -“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point -where one may mold his destiny. One must use the circumstances of life -rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be -the captain of her own soul. - -“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to -whether _Life and Gabriella_ was intended to express the modern revolt -of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break -through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not -now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried, -or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain -single. - -“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce -easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform. -Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a -certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature -should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and -the one in Maine are--just men. - -“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have -concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only -thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if -their happiness is to last through the years. - -“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to -be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of -individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest -and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most -firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the -South has been attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began -_Virginia_ I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of -human lives to changing conditions. - -“In _Virginia_ I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative -of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system -and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every -well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her -reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling. -Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine -self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then -dominated her. - -“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used -by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books -are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active. - -“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for -it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of -womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so -many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired -happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action -and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and -success.” - -“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and -coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she -talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out -of her--that is, what you want concerning her own work. On literature -generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point. - -“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it -should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the -weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.” - -Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy. -I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard -that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of -disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her -success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life. - -“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life -just what he puts into it--or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I -suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always -groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as -you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’” - -We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, -or was, living with the character which will become the central figure -in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to -write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon -as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I -wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between _Virginia_ -and _Life and Gabriella_. I have no idea when the next will be finished. -I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year -regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book -than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep -it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, -that is impossible. You change so much in ten years--all would be -different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose -that is true.” - -Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be -the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would -not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading -_The Deliverance_ these fourteen years after its first publication, your -admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her -penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of -the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast--all these -blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when -the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look -confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not -in the least surprised at the finding. - -Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or -better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after -reading _Virginia_. It is worth quoting in full: - -“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and -special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for -the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to -learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a -line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to give -her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’ - -“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely -and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this -almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a -friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began -reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she -could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them -unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the -charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character -drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own -individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of -no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point. - -“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble, -but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is -bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one, -she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit -cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so -witty, but fully as wise. - -“You have only to read _Virginia_ to convince yourself. - -“‘Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, -to make the worst of it.’ - -“‘Having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come -at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’ - -“‘To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility -of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of -gallantry.’ - -“‘If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of -it were heroic.’ - -“‘From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her -anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working -herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’ - -“‘You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way -men are about Abby.’ - -“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her -religious convictions?’ - -“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a -respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so -respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’ - -“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of -Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’ - -“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from -her pen in every paragraph.” - -In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it -best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the -greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since -there has been an American literature--we have thought it best to put -her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her -aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of -her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand -before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you -what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him; -she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give -you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for -yourself--the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want -to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and -conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close -of a chapter in _The Deliverance_--after all, is not this wonderful -story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake, -the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate, -has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher, -grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s -revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it. -He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro -overseer dwells at Blake Hall! - -“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs -outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the -little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him--a -Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before -him--bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if -he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this -life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted--the beauty dwelt -upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which -might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the -brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was--a -man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had -sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the -moment of fulfillment. - -“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he -felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat -himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw -him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was -not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the -excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. -He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the -nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the -breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone--the -bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart -and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw -that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed -as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step -by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, -and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph. - -“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the -light.” - -Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s -real material, the human soul. _The Deliverance_ is a story of revenge -with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far -beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative -forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The -hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, -while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign -of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be -preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; -wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind -grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, -directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing -upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling -with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her -youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken -and sipping her port, blind--blind--successfully deceived, successfully -kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years -since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her -head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’” - -A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be -anything but proud. - - -BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW - -_The Descendant_, 1897. -_Phases of an Inferior Planet_, 1898. -_The Voice of the People_, 1900. -_The Freeman and Other Poems_, 1902. -_The Battleground_, 1902. -_The Deliverance_, 1904. -_The Wheel of Life_, 1906. -_The Ancient Law_, 1908. -_The Romance of a Plain Man_, 1909. -_The Miller of Old Church_, 1911. -_Virginia_, 1913. -_Life and Gabriella_, 1916. -_The Builders_, 1919. -_One Man in His Time_, 1922. - -_Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers, -New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York._ - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -GERTRUDE ATHERTON - - -Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversy than any -other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her -importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living -novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of -her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At -home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who -occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries. - -A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and -vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and -Henry James. Pick up her novel _Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, -written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling -in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary -gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who -cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no -use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people -we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no -distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no -individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman -says that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of -those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth -by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always -she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and -recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire. -She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing -daunts her that is alive--vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin -she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The -only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in -essentials right when he said of her in the New York _Evening Post_ of -June 15, 1918: - -“Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness -she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in -her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer -school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons, -the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common, -unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on -the drab or the colorless. - -“An Alexander Hamilton or a Rezanov seems to be made to her hand, and if -she cannot find what she wants in history or in fact, she prefers to -dream of a woman genius, the young German countess, Gisela Niebuhr, a -Brunnhilde who leads her sisters to revolt against Prussianism and all -that makes Germany hideous to the world to-day. - -“To understand genius, it has been said, is to approach it, and Mrs. -Atherton beyond any doubt understands genius. She understands its -trials, temptations, vagaries and accomplishments. She knows that the -fires which feed it are certain to break out in many ways aside from its -recognized work. Did Mrs. Atherton take the trouble to acknowledge the -existence of Mrs. Grundy, it would be only that she might destroy that -unpopular lady. - -“‘Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a -novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters -that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience -with dullness. She could no more have written _Pollyanna_ than she could -have written the _Book of Job_. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her -field of research.” - -Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She -is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her -talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to _The -Conqueror_, he develops his idea: - -“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But -important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s -feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the -storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a _genius_, -and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no -character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than -was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs. -Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton -because he fought her idol, and how much she despises Jefferson! But -Washington--even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with -Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son.... - -“Critics have sometimes charged Mrs. Atherton with the grave misdemeanor -of writing like herself, not like somebody else; of not being Mrs. -Wharton, of not being Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson. The charge -is just. She is not any of those persons, nor in the least like them. -She does not write for a handful of other writers, nor does she waste -much time in polishing sentences. She writes for the public.... You -cannot read five pages of her fiction without feeling certain that their -author has lived life, not merely dreamed it.” - -This is the most illuminating comment on Mrs. Atherton that has so far -seen the light of day, and we shall not attempt more than to supply a -footnote or two. Mr. Forman says that Mrs. Atherton writes for the -public and not for writers. True, but is it the public which reads Gene -Stratton-Porter or _Pollyanna_? Decidedly not. Her public--a very large -one--consists of those who do not ask or desire that fiction shall -interpret them to themselves or shape their lives for them, consciously -or otherwise. It is made up of the thousands who are capable of some -degree of purely æsthetic enjoyment in literature. For the pure æsthetes -Mrs. Wharton _et al._ For the unæsthetic and ethical the two Mrs. -Porters. For the great hosts who appreciate literary art and -story-telling skill but who won’t sacrifice everything for them, who -demand a real narrative, color, action, suspense and seek no moral end -in the tale to justify the tale’s existence--for them Mrs. Atherton. And -they--these people of her vast audience--are the great middle ground. -They represent in their attitude toward fiction the healthiest note of -all. - -The “literary” or highbrow attitude toward Mrs. Atherton is perfectly -conveyed in an article upon her by Mr. H. W. Boynton, also published in -the New York _Evening Post_ but over two years earlier, on February 26, -1916. We extract a few illustrative sentences: - -“I may say frankly that I write of Mrs. Atherton not out of a special -admiration for her work,” begins Mr. Boynton, in a highly -self-revelatory manner, “but because for any surveyor of modern American -fiction she is so evidently a figure in some measure ‘to be reckoned -with.’... Her publicity may be said to have been extraordinary in -proportion to her achievement.... The person who is examining her work -as literature can find nothing to the purpose here (_Mrs. Balfame_).” - -How comfortable to feel like that! Mrs. Atherton, with an amused smile, -would probably say, at the intimation that there was no “literature” in -_Mrs. Balfame_, and perhaps other of her books: “But life is so much -more than literature!” When Mr. Boynton charges her with leaving life -out of her books Mrs. Atherton will be seriously exercised. - -Gertrude Atherton is a great grandniece of Benjamin Franklin. She was -born in 1857 in San Francisco, the daughter of Thomas L. Horn. She was -educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, California, and at Sayre -Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. At an early age she was married to -George H. Bowen Atherton, a Californian who declined to travel and who -died when he finally was lured to Chile as a guest on a warship. Mrs. -Atherton describes her marriage as “one of the most important incidents -of my school life.” - -She had always wanted to go round about the world and when she wasn’t -able to do so she amused herself by writing complete travel books, -taking her characters through all parts of Europe. She knew enough -geography to make her stories truthful. - -“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview -appearing in _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, on March -31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of -fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface -at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real -life and re-create their destinies for them and--well, my books are the -result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.” - -This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, -_The Avalanche_, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by -Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. _The Avalanche_ is a tale of -California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman -whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has -solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, -submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive -with war work--she returned from the European battlefronts to be the -American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the -wounded”--rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet -country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen -chapters, she split the last in two. - -“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks--which shows what one -can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original -incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now -that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but -an incident in the climax. - -“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how -they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a -child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life. - -“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature -and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but -myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is -full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all -its own.” - -Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with -dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has -balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house -which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, -writing in _Books and Authors_ for September, 1917, said: - -“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers -in a very crush of notables--authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats, -publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not -a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and -who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s -interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the -rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time -friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good -percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along -with men and women who are prominent abroad.” - -It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior -to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de -Staëls she is among them! - -The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was -_Senator North_, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was -written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence -that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks -that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,” -was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had -begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her. - -Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new -novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the -characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of -information concerning the place and its history. As a result vividness -is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as -she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits -observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She -notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of -taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the -criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly -abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are -charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters -shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her -material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in -the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special -and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost -infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at -all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the -satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is -fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad, -incongruous, surprising, touching. - -“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training--which -stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the -country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so -mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of -statement to drive her point home. - -Even Mr. Boynton allows that _Perch of the Devil_ contains some of Mrs. -Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The -character of Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so -much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own -explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She -had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of -American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth, -study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with -any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.” - -“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs. -Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western -towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In -the various stages of her development, moreover--beginning when she was -the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress--I found myself -meeting all American women in one. The West to-day--particularly the -Northwest--embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one -of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large -latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the -country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a -Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon -too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even -develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the -more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it -over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement. -They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of -easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both -sophisticated and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted -Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot -play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American -women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows -in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the -source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her -qualities--good and bad--grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change, -even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and -amusing myself speculating upon her past.” - -In the long list of Mrs. Atherton’s books with which this chapter -concludes it would be desirable, but it is hardly possible, to follow -the example of guidebooks and star and doublestar her more important -novels. It is impracticable because any such designations would have to -be those of a single taste or of a coterie of tastes. _Patience -Sparhawk_, the dramatized biography of Alexander Hamilton called _The -Conqueror_, and possibly her recent novel of a German revolution, or the -revolt of the German women under the leadership of Gisela Niebuhr, would -be marked with the double star; certainly _The Conqueror_ would. The -present writer would singlestar _Senator North_ and the novels of early -California--_The Doomswoman_, _Rezanov_, _The Splendid Idle Forties_ and -_The Californians_. Of _The Living Present_ we must speak to call -attention to the final paper in the book’s second part, a tribute to -four New York women, of whom one is Honoré Willsie, the subject of a -later chapter in this book. _The Living Present_ is not a novel. The -first half is concerned with French women in war time, the fruit of -Mrs. Atherton’s observations and experience in war work; the second half -has the general title _Feminism in Peace and War_. _Perch of the Devil_ -must be doublestarred, so probably must _Ancestors_ and _Tower of -Ivory_. Such books as _Rulers of Kings_ and _The Travelling Thirds_ are -least important. _Mrs. Balfame_, as a capital mystery story, the result -doubtless of Mrs. Atherton’s attendance at a celebrated murder trial in -the interests of a New York newspaper, must be single starred in any -list. _The Valiant Runaways_, long out of print, has been republished -this fall (1918). It is a story for boys, of Spanish California, with an -encounter with a savage bear, a rescue from a dangerous river, capture -by Indians and an escape on wild mustangs capped by a revolutionary -battle! The performance may be considered a final reminder of Mrs. -Atherton’s versatility. No one has ever found fault with her for not -being versatile! - - -BOOKS BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON - -_A Whirl Asunder_, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company, - New York. Now out of print. -_Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, 1897. Stokes. -_His Fortunate Grace_, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print. -_American Wives and English Husbands_, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. -_The Californians_, 1898. Stokes. -_A Daughter of the Vine_, 1899. Lane. -_The Valiant Runaways_, 1899. Dodd, Mead. -_Senator North_, 1900. Lane. -_The Aristocrats_, 1901. Lane. -_The Conqueror_, 1902. Stokes. -_The Splendid Idle Forties_, 1902. Stokes. -_A Few of Hamilton’s Letters_, 1903. Stokes. -_Rulers of Kings_, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York. -_The Bell in the Fog_, 1905. Harper. -_The Travelling Thirds_, 1905. Harper. -_Ancestors_, 1907. Harper. -_The Gorgeous Isle_, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company. - Not listed in their last catalogue. -_Tower of Ivory_, 1910. Stokes. -_Julia France and Her Times_, 1912. Stokes. -_Perch of the Devil_, 1914. Stokes. -_California--An Intimate History_, 1914. Harper. -_Before the Gringo Came_ (Combining _The Doomswoman_, - published in 1892, and _Rezanov_, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes. -_Mrs. Balfame_, 1916. Stokes. -_The Living Present_, 1917. Stokes. -_The White Morning_, 1918. Stokes. -_The Avalanche_, 1919. Stokes. -_The Sisters-in-Law_, 1921. Stokes. -_Sleeping Fires_, 1922. Stokes. - - - - -CHAPTER V - -MARY ROBERTS RINEHART - - -“I am being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever -were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I -am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist. - -“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is -sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline -the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot -place in my boys’ hands.” - -Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the _American Magazine_ for October, 1917. It is -almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not -quite. Add this: - -“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, -that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’” - -Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him -nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are -not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only -reticences. - -She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia -(Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s -public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she -acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in -writing _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, the stories -collected under the title _Tish_ and the novel _K._ And then she became -the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And -then---- - -“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “It -gave me a strong body, and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. -I do not know what would have happened had the work come first. But I -should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. -Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me and -showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we -call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every particle of success -that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my -family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded. - -“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have -out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer -(1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in -Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten -years for them.” - -She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. She -began in 1905--she was twenty-nine that year--and worked at a “tiny” -mahogany desk or upon a card table, “so low and so movable. It can sit -by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with -my two fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the -youngsters were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully -hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when -leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.” - -Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work -was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a -short article telling how she had systematized the work of the household -with two maids and a negro “buttons.” She sold one or two of the poems -for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family -made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, “a -heart-breaking day, going from publisher to publisher.” In two places -she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. -“But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later -sent _The Circular Staircase_, my first novel. They published it and -some eight other books of mine.” - -In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made -about $1,200. She was surrounded by “sane people who cried me down,” but -who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her -everlasting help. He “has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief -in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humor have kept me going, -when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has -shaken under my feet.” To the three boys their mother’s work has been a -matter of course ever since they can remember. “I did not burst on them -gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother -than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been -attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family -regards his bank.” - -Sometimes, Mrs. Rinehart, a banker’s family regards his bank as a -confounded nuisance! But that’s when the bank takes charge of the man -and demands an undue share of his time and energy. You have never let -your writing do that. With you it has been family first! Most of the -work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 which witnessed your signal -success was done in your home. But sometimes when you had a long piece -of work to do you felt, as you tell us, “the necessity of getting away -from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, you -rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while -you had a novel in hand. It was barely furnished and the most -significant omission was a telephone. There you got through “a -surprising amount of work.” And then, in 1917, you became a commuter. - -Your earnings had risen from the $1,200 of that first year to $50,000 -and possibly more in a twelve-month. But let us have the story in your -own words: - -“My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an -enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, -copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial -rights, and dramatizations, had made from the small beginning of that -book of poems a large and complicated business. - -“I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also -records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article -opposing capital punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky -Mountains, and finish off with a love story! - -“I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered -into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working -hours was dismaying. - -“And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He -said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that -virtually was what I was doing.” - -This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a -cut in the little room just off the front parlor. - -Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or -sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It -takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to -the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen -pipe in the garage. - -“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready; -my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over -my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back. - -“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from -publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready -to play.” - -She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as -Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on -me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is -no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day -morning and perhaps three afternoons.” She goes riding, plays golf, -visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal -Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are -long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually -rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the -saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... These -outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and -one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as men do.” She -writes about it better than many men do. - -Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact -that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has -done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper -reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it, -was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young -nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but -completely expressive phrase used in her novel _K._ And then she had the -great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the -secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw -what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments. -Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing -its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be -in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine -affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed -her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store. - -Her first novel, _The Circular Staircase_, was a mystery tale; so was -her second, _The Man in Lower Ten_. They appeared in 1908 and 1909 -respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This -was _Double Life_, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her -husband, she wrote _The Avenger_ (1908) and much later she collaborated -with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce _Seven Days_. This was -first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris -Theater, New York, her farce _Cheer Up_ was put on. “Two plays were -successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion. - -She has written short stories for all the most popular American -magazines--the _Saturday Evening Post_ perhaps particularly; -_McClure’s_, _Everybody’s_, _Collier’s_, the _American_ and the -_Metropolitan_ are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories -are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some -of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or -characters, have been published in book form, as _Tish_ and _Bab, a -Sub-Deb_. The stories in _Tish_ relate various escapades of an unmarried -woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel, -_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,” -is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving, -curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like -herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up -hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is -unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the -carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts -great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the -canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing _Tish_; in -_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ we have a story in which -the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital -where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing -affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller -than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both -ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely -as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable -puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great -as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, _Seven Keys -to Baldpate_, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the -observer. _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ is a remarkable -evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain -inoffensive--and become the source of helpless mirth. - -_Bab, a Sub-Deb_, with its account of the doings of a girl who has not -yet “come out,” a sub-débutante, is also unique and, to the extent of -the character’s capacity, just as diverting. Mrs. Rinehart does nothing -by halves, she exploits the possibilities of her people to the top of -their bents--and hers. She exploits--always legitimately--her own -affairs, as in _My Creed_, the autobiographical article in the _American -Magazine_ upon which we have drawn so heavily in this sketch, and _The -Altar of Freedom_, an account of her struggle to part with a son who -felt he must answer America’s call for men in 1917. With gusto she gives -us the account of a vacation trip--see _Through Glacier Park_ or -_Tenting To-Night_. With the heaviest possible charge of sentiment but -never an explosive cap of sentimentality, she puts before us a small -boy, the crown prince of a mythical but completely real kingdom, whose -pitifully circumscribed existence, whose scrapes and friendships and -admiration of Abraham Lincoln, have for their background court intrigues -and the uncovering of treason; read _Long Live the King!_ With complete -self-knowledge comes complete knowledge of others; Mrs. Rinehart can go -straight to the American heart and does it in _The Amazing Interlude_, -that story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the -Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers. Here is romance so heady -and strong that most readers overlook, purposely and gladly, the -improbability of Henri’s return to Sara Lee and the little house of -mercy after daybreak discovered him, delirious and in a Belgian uniform, -dangling on the German wire. Artistically _The Amazing Interlude_ excels -by its portrait of Harvey, Sara Lee’s fiancé back home, Harvey who -resisted her “call” to service, who brought her back home, whose hard -selfishness as an American and whose lack of comprehension as a man make -him entirely typical of thousands in this country prior to April 6, -1917. - -The novel _K._--or story _K._, if we accept Mrs. Rinehart’s disclaimer -as to novel writing--is possibly more representative of her work than -any other single book. It illustrates perfectly her ingenuity in -contriving and handling a plot; for the book ends on page 410 and the -most necessary revelation does not come until page 407. It exemplifies -her finished gift for telling a story; there are no wasted words and in -half a page she can transport you from laughter to tenderness. Half a -page? On page 70 you may see it done in seven lines. The girl Sidney -Page has slipped from a rock into the river, alighting on her feet and -standing neck deep. Rescued by K. Le Moyne, she remarks: - -“‘There wasn’t any danger, really, unless--unless the river had -risen.... I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.’ - -“He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her -shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on -the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He -held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something -infinitely precious.” - -_K._ shows its author’s power to portray character effectively in -sweeping outlines filled in, on occasion, with solid or mottled masses -of color. K. himself is the kind of a person that Mary S. Watts might -have put before us in some 600 closely printed pages. It is a difference -of method merely and while not every one would be able to appreciate the -thousand little touches with which Mrs. Watts drew her hero, Mrs. -Rinehart’s more vigorous delineation is effective at all distances, in -all lights, with almost all readers. She manages in this tale to present -a wide variety of persons and a great range of emotions and she manages -it less by atmospheric details and a single setting--the Street--than by -an astonishing number of relationships between a man and a woman; or, in -the case of Johnny, “the Rosenfeld boy,” and Joe Drummond, a youth and -a woman or girl. It will be worth the reader’s while to note that the -story contains no less than ten such relationships. First there are K. -and Sidney and Joe and Sidney. Then there are Max Wilson and Sidney, Max -Wilson and Carlotta Harrison, Tillie and Mr. Schwitter, Christine Lorenz -and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Johnny -Rosenfeld, K. and Tillie and K. and Christine. This is very complicated -and unusual art--if it is not novelizing, then we do not know what -novelizing is. Consider the gamut run. K. and Sidney are the ripe -lovers. Joe’s unrequited love for Sidney is the desperate passion of -immaturity. Max Wilson’s feeling for Sidney is the infatuation of a -nature inherently fickle where women are concerned. Carlotta Harrison’s -love for Max Wilson is the dark passion. The relation between Tillie and -Schwitter goes to the bedrock of human instincts, is a thing Thomas -Hardy might have concerned himself with. It is pathetic; he would have -made it tragic as well; we are satisfied that in her disposition of it -Mrs. Rinehart is sufficiently faithful to the truth of life. Christine -Lorenz and Palmer Howe are the disillusioned married; but in this case, -as Christine said: “‘The only difference between me and other brides is -that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.’” - -Grace Irving and Palmer Howe bring before us the man and the woman in -their worst relationship in the story, or in life either. Grace Irving -and Johnny Rosenfeld are a picture of thwarted motherhood and a blind -feeling for justice. K. and Tillie are proofs of the reach of friendship -and the efficacy of understanding. K. and Christine give us the woman -saved from herself. - -The height--or the depth--to which Mrs. Rinehart attains in this story -is a thing to marvel at, and just as marvelous is the surety with which -she gets her distance. The tenth chapter of _K._ will not easily be -overmatched in American fiction or that of any other country. Here is -Mr. Schwitter, the nurseryman, middle-aged or older, not very -articulate, with a wife in an asylum playing with paper dolls; and here -is Tillie, punching meal tickets for Mrs. McKee, not becoming younger, -lonelier every day, suffering heartaches and disappointment without end. -Mr. Schwitter has proposed a certain thing. - -“Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, -embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He -meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the -look in her eyes and stared out of the front window. - -“‘Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,’ he said heavily. -‘They’re hell on sewers.’” - - * * * * * - -“The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit -down at my desk and begin work simultaneously,” wrote Mrs. Rinehart in -1917. “One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and -struggle. That was my belief in what is called ‘inspiration.’ I think I -had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had -hardly words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little -lift in the veil. - -“It does not come any more. - -“Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so -many things to write about, and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, -but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the -technique of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I -have less to say. - -“I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and -more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do real work, -I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous -writing, and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and -adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of -these great times in which I live, now I shall fail.” - -If her readers shared this feeling they must have murmured to themselves -as they turned the absorbing pages of _The Amazing Interlude_: “How -absurd!” It is doubtful if they recalled her spoken misgiving at all. - - -BOOKS BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART - -_The Circular Staircase_, 1908. -_The Man in Lower Ten_, 1909. -_When a Man Marries_, 1909. -_The Window at the White Cat_, 1910. -_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, 1911. -_Where There’s a Will_, 1912. -_The Case of Jenny Brice_, 1913. -_The After House_, 1914. -_The Street of Seven Stars_, 1914. -_K._, 1915. -_Through Glacier Park._ -_Tish_, 1916. -_The Altar of Freedom_, 1917. -_Long Live the King!_ 1917. -_Tenting To-Night_, 1918. -_Bab, a Sub-Deb._ -_Kings, Queens and Pawns_, 1915. -_The Amazing Interlude_, 1918. -_Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave_, 1919. -_Dangerous Days_, 1919. -_Love Stories_, 1919. -_Affinities and Other Stories_, 1920. -_“Isn’t That Just Like a Man?”_ 1920. -_The Truce of God_, 1920. -_A Poor Wise Man_, 1920. -_More Tish_, 1921. -_Sight Unseen and The Confession_, 1921. -_The Breaking Point_, 1922. - -_Published by George H. Doran Company, New York, except the following, -which are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: The After -House, The Street of Seven Stars, K., Through Glacier Park, Tish, The -Altar of Freedom, Long Live the King! and Tenting To-Night._ - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -KATHLEEN NORRIS - - -“Mrs. Norris,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the -fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or -action. If she lacks the final touch of Frank Norris’s power, she has -the compensating gift of a more controlled and concentrated observation. -She has the secret of closely adding detail to detail in a triumph of -what another California author has called Littleism, but what seems to -be nature’s way of achieving Largeism.” - -Of course, this is the method of Kathleen Norris, the method in her -madness, to use the word madness in its old sense of being possessed by -something. What is Mrs. Norris possessed by? Why, the irresistible -impulse to put things before you and make you consider whether they -should be so. H’m, a preacher might do that. Well, had most preachers -the presentative skill of Kathleen Norris there would be ticket -speculators on the sidewalks in front of their tabernacles! - -If you want to make people think write a novel--but be sure you know -how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper -reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact -for faultless fact” that “amounts to a disease,” quite as the lilting -lines in _The Mikado_ have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is -distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present -writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and -observant mind: - -As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or -problem is at the bottom of each of her novels. - -Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of -certain persons and events. - -Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and -said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be -describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be -deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding -from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is -covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons -and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations -to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself -always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of -our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going -past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and -not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the -dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it. - -In other words, life assimilates all its great facts and problems and -the novelist who would set them forth effectively must first have -assimilated them too, so that they will not have to be “brought in” the -story he is telling, but will be in it from the beginning, disclosing -themselves as the action develops. The reader must feel that he has -_discovered_ the fact or the problem for himself, that he, all by -himself, has abstracted it out of the scenes put before him. He must see -Cora Doe go by and hear of John Doe’s last appearance and look upon the -wreck of their lives--but all the rest must be left to him to grasp -unaided! The real reason why no story can have a moral is that every -reader must find his own moral, even if each finds the same one! - -Mrs. Norris understands this and practices it. She does not ask you to -consider whether a girl, bred in sordid surroundings and having access -in youth only to tawdry ideals, can lift herself to gentleness and -dignity and become, at any cost, the captain of her soul. No! She makes -you acquainted with Julia Page. She refrains from questioning the -efficacy of divorce and writes _The Heart of Rachael_, which makes every -reader ask himself the question. If her readers unite in an identical -answer and that answer is the one Mrs. Norris herself would return, does -that convict her of stepping outside the novelist’s province? Bless you, -no; the novelist’s province is as large as life is, and its boundaries -in the case of any given writer as far as he can carry and maintain -them. Mrs. Norris’ s frontiers are wide. - -The woman first. An interesting article in the _Book News Monthly_ -several years ago posited that “Kathleen Norris upsets all our accepted -ideas of how a novelist is made.... With the exception of five months -spent in taking a literary course at the University of California, Mrs. -Norris never had any schooling, and, until five years ago (1908), she -never had been outside her native State.... No thrilling adventures, no -prairie life, or mountaineering, no experiences of travel, or residence -in Paris or Berlin, have been hers.” The impression of wonder which this -may create will be somewhat modified by the sketch of her life which -follows, and for which we are chiefly indebted to the same article. - -Kathleen Norris was the daughter of James A. Thompson, of San Francisco. -The father was a San Franciscan of long residence and twice served as -president of the famous Bohemian Club. At the time of his death he was -manager of the Donohoe-Kelly Bank. Kathleen was the second child in a -family of six--three boys and three girls. Mr. Thompson would not send -his children to school and they were taught at home, with an occasional -governess for language study. In 1899 the family moved to Mill Valley -across San Francisco Bay, and “Treehaven,” a bungalow in the beautiful -valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, became the home. A quieter life -can hardly be imagined. There weren’t many neighbors, the children did -not go to school, most of the visitors were grown people, there were no -children’s parties. Kathleen Norris never saw the inside of a theater -until she was sixteen, which will astonish readers of _The Story of -Julia Page_. There was, however, a large library, there were plenty of -magazines, there were miles of forest as a playground, there were -horses, cows, dogs, cats, a garden. Mountains were there to be climbed -and creeks to be waded. “The boys as well as the girls of the family all -became practical cooks.” - -Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San -Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had -been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken -with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than -a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death -left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home -in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable -asset.” - -The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved -bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at -once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took -three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and -carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month. -Their one terror--never realized--was of debt.” - -Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, -make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. -Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to -wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had -generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with -pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and -occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved -mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the -family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she -was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of -making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a -year’s course in the English department of the University of California -and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the -age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San -Francisco _Argonaut_ paid her $15.50 for a story called _The Colonel and -the Lady_. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and -had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very -encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for -several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement -house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society -editor of the San Francisco _Evening Bulletin_. A few months later she -became a reporter for the San Francisco _Call_, where she worked for two -years. - -“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or -hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we -should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these -years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and -made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed. -“During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908, -there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution -to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of -American novelists. Long before _Josselyn’s Wife_ could be brought out -in the fall of 1918, _Sisters_ had begun to be published serially. - -In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris, -younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of _McTeague_ and _The -Pit_. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a -novelist, the author of _The Amateur_ and _Salt: The Education of -Griffith Adams_. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port -Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his -distinguished uncle, Frank Norris. - -Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her -father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine -editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for -years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs. -Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from -editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training -now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the -appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she -got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail: - - “Dear Mrs. Norris: - - “The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not - quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the _Atlantic_ is, that when a - tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is - surely a tone for the _Atlantic_ to adopt. - - “It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story. - - “Very truly yours, - - “THE EDITOR.” - - - -The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery -Sedgwick, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, was _What Happened to -Alanna_. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking -for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which _What -Happened to Alanna_ had been submitted to _McClure’s Magazine_ and the -date on which it had been returned to her. - -Her next six stories appeared in _McClure’s_. After that it seemed to -the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris -was on five tables of contents. - -And then the _Delineator_ offered a prize for a story of not more than -3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run -to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the -_Delineator_ lost and the _American Magazine_ gained _Mother_. On the -story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it -sufficiently to make a book. - -Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes -are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she -did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has -run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the -_Ladies’ Home Journal_, paid a high price for the privilege of running -the novel as a serial _after_ its publication as a book. This is -apparently a unique instance. - -_Mother_ was followed by _The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, the story of a -great-hearted woman who brought her fresh and honest ideals into the -heart of a narrow Western city. Those who read it may excusably gasp to -hear that it was written in six weeks on an order from the _Woman’s Home -Companion_. _Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, collected short stories, was the -third book, appearing in the spring of 1913. _The Treasure_ had had -serial publication in the _Saturday Evening Post_. _Saturday’s Child_ -preceded it. And then Mrs. Norris made her first great success with a -full length novel which many will consider the biggest book she has -done. It was _The Story of Julia Page_, the first of three novels which -have been called Mrs. Norris’s trilogy of American womanhood. The others -are _The Heart of Rachael_ and _Martie, the Unconquered_. Between these -last two appeared her short novel, _Undertow_, dealing with two young -married spendthrifts. _Josselyn’s Wife_, “the story of a woman’s faith,” -tells of a sweet, simple girl, Ellen Latimer, transported by a whirlwind -marriage to Gibbs Josselyn from the humdrum existence of a small country -town to the luxuries of the wealthy social life of New York. There is a -time when the young second wife of Gibbs Josselyn’s father threatens to -break up the happiness of the younger Josselyn and Ellen, for Gibbs -succumbs readily to her undeniable fascination. Then comes the crash. -Through the long agony of a murder trial it is the wife he has neglected -who alone upholds him. It is her faith that wins and that brings him at -last to an understanding of his egotistical folly. - -Mrs. Norris is not yet at the height and fullness of her powers, as well -as can be judged contemporaneously. It is easy enough to look back on -the completed work of a writer’s lifetime and say, “Here he reached his -apex, here he began to decline, here he rose again for an hour.” But to -estimate the present and relate it tentatively to the future is very -much harder. _Mother_ was one “peak” in the graph of Mrs. Norris’s -progress, _The Story of Julia Page_ was another and a higher, -_Josselyn’s Wife_ is at least as high. There is every prospect that in -the active and happy years we may hope are ahead of her, Kathleen Norris -will excel the impressive novels she has already given us. - - -BOOKS BY KATHLEEN NORRIS - -_Mother_, 1911. -_The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, 1912. -_Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, 1913. -_Saturday’s Child_, 1914. -_The Treasure_, 1915. -_The Story of Julia Page_, 1915. -_The Heart of Rachael_, 1916. -_Undertow_, 1917. -_Martie, the Unconquered_, 1917. -_Josselyn’s Wife_, 1918. -_Sisters_, 1919. -_Harriet and the Piper_, 1920. -_The Beloved Woman_, 1921. -_Lucretia Lombard_, 1922. -_Certain People of Importance_, 1922. - -_These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, -New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -MARGARET DELAND - - -Edith Wharton, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is -similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their -books. And their books are not silent. - -If the band of a kiltie regiment plays _The Campbells Are Coming_, one -of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born -in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while -she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle, -Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany, -and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories. - -“Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country -house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania -more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges -and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces, -and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a -shining arm about the circle of the western hills.” - -“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!” -Beautiful simile! - -In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking -hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and -imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She -was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of -Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow. - -Her first taste in reading was formed upon _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_ -and _Tales of a Grandfather_, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of -Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was -that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are -not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the -prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures; -not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday -life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively -determine what he shall be.” - -In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs. -Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in -character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young -people that surround her are character studies of a completeness -unexcelled in American fiction. - -There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But -first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely, -inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people -as well as things. - -It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking -heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or -environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal -controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is -largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons, -differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing -pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is -known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and -inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this -is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_. -Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance; -we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we -know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails -utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully -acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in -her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary -sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It -makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful -account of her forebears could have made her. - -Now in _The Iron Woman_, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get -both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded. -Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of -giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete -that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just -a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to -the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing) -we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances -they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and -upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and -the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly -anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen: - -“But after a breathless six months of partnership--in business, if in -nothing else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little -two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he -was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could -take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed -him that there was nothing for him to do but die--so that there might be -room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in -those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her -pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration, -but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under -like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as -Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and -contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the -strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means -of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely -she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel -anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky -lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman -to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to -nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve -conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, -she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her -shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since -it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she -sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was -doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal -instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct -without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years -of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but -duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t -Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no -explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, -and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his -service while he was still in petticoats. - -“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, -Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was -chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was -chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous -candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first -expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’ -accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and -she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a -sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected -sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head -down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No, -no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall -into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand--a big, -beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning -his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over -your airs!’ she said.” - -It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with -the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and -observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at -all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind -of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography? -Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an -actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or -reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that -he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile -or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account -for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he -should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful -record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the -evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them. - -In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is -for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory -things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable -or we will not accept the character--and in this he is generally right. -Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are -forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things -from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist -make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is -always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however -desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory -education--compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly, -where both do serious ill. - -Considered as fiction, _The Iron Woman_ is vitiated ever so slightly by -the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be -explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has -obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the -story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses -to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty -_not_ as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will -dare, _will dare_, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and -thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say, -did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were -there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But -you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living -person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition -and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we -speak of _The Iron Woman_ as biography, the best and brightest of -biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too -minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The -writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so -successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she -enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of -biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid -success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that -conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and -easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort -of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their -self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in -the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other. - -We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work -something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in -dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the -feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read _The Iron Woman_, a feeling -which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we -venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs. -Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her -exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to -the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to -her Old Chester books and stories. In _The Awakening of Helena Richie_, -in _Old Chester Tales_, in _Dr. Lavendar’s People_--in them all, in all -her work--we believe that the reader who takes the biographical -standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full -satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America -has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is, -after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting -an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable -lives. - - -BOOKS BY MARGARET DELAND - -_Good for the Soul._ -_The Rising Tide._ -_R. J.’s Mother._ -_The Way to Peace._ -_Where the Laborers Are Few._ -_John Ward, Preacher._ -_The Old Garden and Other Verses._ -_Philip and His Wife._ -_Florida Days._ -_Sidney._ -_The Story of a Child._ -_The Wisdom of Fools._ -_Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories._ -_Old Chester Tales._ -_Dr. Lavendar’s People._ -_The Common Way_, 1904. -_The Awakening of Helena Richie_, 1906. -_An Encore_, 1907. -_The Iron Woman_, 1911. -_The Voice_, 1912. -_Partners_, 1913. -_The Hands of Esau_, 1914. -_Around Old Chester_, 1915. -_Small Things_, 1919. -_The Vehement Flame_, 1922. - -_Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by -D. Appleton & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -GENE STRATTON-PORTER - - -Because Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is -the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day, -with the probable exception of Harold Bell Wright. She is absolutely -sincere in all her work, she is in dead earnest, she does not care -primarily for money, but for certain ideas and ideals. Let no one -underestimate the tremendous power that is hers because of these things, -let no one underestimate her hold upon millions of readers; let none -undervalue the influence she has exerted and continues to exert, an -influence always for good, for clean living, for manly men, for womanly -women, for love of nature, for sane and reasonable human hopes and -aspirations, for honest affection, for wholesome laughter, for a healthy -emotionalism as the basis and justification of humble and invaluable -lives. - -If Mrs. Porter has egoism it is the sort of egoism that the world needs. -It is nothing more or less than a firm and sustaining belief in one’s -self, in the worth of one’s work, and is bred of a passionate conviction -that you must always give the best of yourself without stint. Is it -egoistical to believe that? Is it self-centeredness to be proud of that? -Is it wrong, having set the world the best example of which you are -capable, to call it to the world’s attention? You will not get the -present reporter to say so! You will get from him nothing but an -expression of his own conviction that while literature, æsthetically -viewed, may not have been enriched by Mrs. Porter’s writings, thousands, -yes, tens of thousands of men and women have been made happier and -better by her stories. And that just about sweeps any other possible -accomplishment into limbo! - -The secret of Mrs. Porter’s success is sincerity, complete sincerity; -doing one’s best work and doing it to the top of one’s bent. It is not a -question of art. There is no art about it. The finest literary artist in -the world could not duplicate her performance unless he were a duplicate -of _her_. It’s not a literary matter at all; the thing has its roots in -the personality, in the mind and heart and nervous organization of the -writer. If you could be a Gene Stratton-Porter you could write the -novels she writes and achieve just the success she achieves, a success -which is improperly measured by earnings of $500,000 to $750,000 from -her books, a success of which the true measure can never be taken -because it is a success in human lives and not in dollars. - -The best evidence of this--for there will be doubters--is the story of -her life, very largely told in her own words, published in a booklet by -Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The booklet, for some time to be had -on request, is now out of print. In what follows it is drawn upon freely -and almost to the exclusion of anything else. - -“Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, -at the time of their marriage, as a ‘ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, -pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright -brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name -ever given a woman--Mary.’ He further added that ‘God fashioned her -heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her -especial gift of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers.’” - -There were twelve children. Mrs. Stratton was “a wonderful mother.” She -kept an immaculate house, set a famous table, hospitably received all -who came to her door, made her children’s clothing. Her great gift was -making things grow. “She started dainty little vines and climbing plants -from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted things she soaked -in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they -almost never failed to justify her expectations. She even grew trees and -shrubs from slips and cuttings no one else would have thought of trying -to cultivate, her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the -lower end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly -always grew!” - -She was of Dutch extraction and “worked her special magic with bulbs, -which she favored above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, -lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called ‘blue bells,’ -she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by putting -clusters at time of perfect bloom in bowls lined with freshly made, -unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of -extract thus obtained with alcohol. ‘She could do more different -things,’ says the author, ‘and finish them all in a greater degree of -perfection, than any other woman I have ever known. If I were limited to -one adjective in describing her, “capable” would be the word.’” - -Mark Stratton was of English blood, a descendant of that first Mark -Stratton of New York, who married the beauty, Anne Hutchinson. He was of -the English family of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head. -He was tenacious, had clear-cut ideas, could not be influenced against -his better judgment. “He believed in God, in courtesy, in honor, and -cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would -rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be -proud, than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he -knew to express himself. His very first earnings he spent for a book; -when other men rested, he read; all his life he was a student of -extraordinarily tenacious memory. He especially loved history: Rollands, -Wilson’s _Outlines_, Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he -could quote from all of them paragraphs at a time, contrasting the views -of different writers on a given event, and remembering dates with -unfailing accuracy.” The Bible he knew by heart, except for the Old -Testament pedigrees. This is a literal statement of fact. He traveled -miles to deliver sermons, lectures, talks. He worshiped humanity and all -outdoors. Color was a prime delight. “‘He had a streak of genius in his -makeup, the genius of large appreciation,’” says Mrs. Porter. He -reveled in descriptions of personal bravery. - -“To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at -intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for years by -the dire stress of civil war, and the period immediately following, the -author was born,” on a farm in Wabash county, Indiana, in 1868. “From -childhood she recalls ‘thinking things which she felt should be saved,’ -and frequently tugging at her mother’s skirts and begging her to ‘set -down’ what the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were -some big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in Biblical -terms.” - -The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark -Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five -years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and -plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, the house and barn -commodious; the family “rode abroad in a double carriage trimmed in -patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray horses, and sometimes -the father ‘speeded a little’ for the delight of the children.” - -The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first -remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of -her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest -child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers afield -“and when tired out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking -with shy creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she -pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects and plays she -invented. ‘By the day I trotted from one object which attracted me to -another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw -while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or -following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the -inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of -corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets. - -“‘I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a -mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, -and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite -as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.... I fed -butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a -cellar window, doctored all the sick and wounded birds and animals the -men brought me from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits -they carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew -older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So -I had the first money I ever earned.’” - -At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic -for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a -review of Saintine’s _Picciola_, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and -a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her -audience. - -“‘The most that can be said of what education I have is that it is the -very best kind in the world for me; the only possible kind that would -not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had been -to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances -intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in -company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and -mentality.’” Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted -to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward -painted the water colors for _Moths of the Limberlost_. If she wanted to -try music he paid for lessons for her. “‘It was he who demanded a -physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of -scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in -five years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own -illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history, -true to nature.... It was he who daily lived before me the life of -exactly such a man as I portrayed in _The Harvester_, and who constantly -used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men -to do the same.’” - -In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin -Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely -in abeyance for a while. “It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she -designed for their home, and the books she read. When her daughter was -old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter’s time came.” - -She explains: “‘I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong, vital -to the marrow, and I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs, -thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin -of fourteen rooms, and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s -clothes, I kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six -hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and -cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day. In my spare time -(mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have -been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography to such a -degree that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper -once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled it. -He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. -He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me tell -him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom for a -darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey platters in the -kitchen sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an -exhibition.’ ... - -“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to -_Recreation_, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of -the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be -paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form -some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that -she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The -second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the -natural history staff of _Outing_, working closely with Mr. Caspar -Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to -turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with -fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up -fiction, she wrote a little story entitled _Laddie, the Princess, and -the Pie_.” - -She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was -disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from -ladders high in the air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a -tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a -box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in -the bank need not know what I had attempted.’” - -That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her -story in the _Metropolitan_. She had not seen it. She wrote to the -editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her -address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a -Christmas story? - -She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his -time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 -A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings -and costuming. - -Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent -it to the _Century_. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of -it. This is the origin of _The Song of the Cardinal_. “Following Mr. -Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body -of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a -fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the -cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903. - -She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which -the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture -once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions -and insensible most of the time. - -_Freckles_ appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every -other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of -studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make -McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a -composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with -those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The -book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible. -She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “‘There were most -excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was -impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just -invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and -quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known in the -worst of such locations in the Central States.’” Nevertheless lumbermen -had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “‘I hastened to tell my husband -the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the -pale blue egg.’” So he said he would go with her. - -It was awful. - -“‘A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to -the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached -the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse -stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in -waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between -steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, -poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle -deep at every step and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our -progress was a steady succession of pulling and prying each other to the -surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our -bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared -the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odors -for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and -egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat. - -“‘We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and -binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost -three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take -wing.’” - -The story itself--_Freckles_--originated in the fact that one day, while -leaving the swamp, a big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long -came spinning and swirling earthward and fell in the author’s path. It -was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s -it became. - -_Freckles_ took three years to find its audience. The marginal -illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that -it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word -of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was -printed in 1914, ten years after the story’s first appearance. The -jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the -most important three of the ten years were largely wasted! - -Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and -emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most -money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real -reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively -before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state. - -“‘I had had one year’s experience with _The Song of the Cardinal_, -frankly a nature book, and from the start I realized that I never could -reach the audience I wanted with a book on nature alone. To spend time -writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I -would not. So I compromised on a book into which I put all the nature -work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little -bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I -had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which -I was familiar. So I said to my publishers: “I will write the books -exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish them. I know they -will sell enough that you will not lose. If I do not make over $600 on a -book I shall never utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it -should be and leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will -take into their hearts and homes.” I altered _Freckles_ slightly, but -from that time on we worked on this agreement. - -“‘My years of nature work have not been without considerable insight -into human nature, as well,’ continues Mrs. Porter. ‘I know its -failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its failures, its depth -of crime; and the people who feel called upon to spend their time -analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these sources of depravity have -that privilege, more’s the pity! If I had my way about it, this is a -privilege no one could have in books intended for indiscriminate -circulation. I stand squarely for book censorship, and I firmly believe -that with a few more years of such books as half a dozen I could -mention, public opinion will demand this very thing. My life has been -fortunate in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked -in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, -lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of -thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish -high ideals, and it is _upon the lives of these that I base what I -write_. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is -idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best -that good men and good women can do at level best. - -“‘I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who proclaim -that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life -are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are -straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals, -honor, and loving kindness. They form “idealized pictures of life” -because they are copies from life where it touches religion, chastity, -love, home, and hope of Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to -publicity and the divorce court. They all end in the shelter and -seclusion of a home. - -“‘Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, -whether they really believe it or not, that no book is _true to life_ -unless it is true to the _worst in life_, that the idea has infected -even the women.’” - -_A Girl of the Limberlost_ “‘comes fairly close to my idea of a good -book. No possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can, -and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer -touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I -write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am -capable of making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best -thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so far -been able to do.’” - -Prior to the appearance of _A Daughter of the Land_ this was Mrs. -Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly -true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or -two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the -delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the -book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in -a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the -very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which -appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human -breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at -high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret -and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl -needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is -both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of -generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with -them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the -girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation -without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well -as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether -it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The -innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives -them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)--emotion, -pure, deep, contenting and cleansing--these will ask no more than Mrs. -Porter gives them here. - -The idea of _The Harvester_ was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor -who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng -diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to -her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl -healed by them. “‘I wrote primarily to state that to my personal -knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no man -is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills otherwise.... I -wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my points and -establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe around promptly -wrote me that they had always observed the moral code; others that the -subject never in all their lives had been presented to them from my -point of view, but now that it had been, they would change and do what -they could to influence all men to do the same.’” - -_Laddie_--“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know to the -last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute -accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than -I ever have known any others.... There was such a man as Laddie, and he -was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing -is always better than its presentment.’” - -Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “When the -public had discovered her and given generous approval to _A Girl of the -Limberlost_, when _The Harvester_ had established a new record, that -would have been the time for the author to prove her commercialism by -dropping nature work, and plunging headlong into books it would pay to -write, and for which many publishers were offering her alluring sums. -Mrs. Porter’s answer was the issuing of such books as _Music of the -Wild_ and _Moths of the Limberlost_. No argument is necessary.” No -argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small -fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent -years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific -materials. - -This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she -has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories. - -“‘In the beginning of the end a great swamp region lay in northeastern -Indiana. Its head was in what is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body -in Allen and Wells, and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay. -The Limberlost lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it, exactly -as described in my books. The process of dismantling it was told in -_Freckles_ to start with, carried on in _A Girl of the Limberlost_, and -finished in _Moths of the Limberlost_. Now it has so completely fallen -prey to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and -farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory and build -a new cabin about seventy miles north at the head of the swamp in Noble -county, where there are many lakes, miles of unbroken marsh, and a far -greater wealth of plant and animal life than existed during my time in -the southern part. At the north end every bird that frequents the -Central States is to be found. Here grow in profusion many orchids, -fringed gentians, cardinal flowers, turtle heads, starry campions, -purple gerardias, and grass of Parnassus. In one season I have located -here almost every flower named in the botanies as native to those -regions and several that I can find in no book in my library. - -“‘But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen acres of -forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in a marsh country. It means -the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which will provide the -comforts of life for my family and furnish a workshop consisting of a -library, a photographic darkroom and negative closet, and a printing -room for me. I could live in such a home as I could provide on the -income from my nature work alone; but when my working grounds were -cleared, drained and plowed up, literally wiped from the face of the -earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been for the -earnings of my novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in -great part, upon my nature work. Based on this plan of work and life I -have written ten books, and “please God I live so long,” I shall write -ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern -Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods -legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men and -women I have known.’” - -This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, _A Daughter of -the Land_, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who -fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of -luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest -novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty, -from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious -attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big. - -Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs. -Porter’s own account of herself--but could any one do better than to -present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has -to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The -one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving -of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect -of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly -infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is -giving of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I -don’t know much about literature, _but I know what I like_.” To be sure -you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the -secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication -or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always -means narrowing it) does _not_ know what he likes! He knows only what he -doesn’t like--or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of -every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a -tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of -corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get -thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere -and with everybody. - -If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s -stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for -certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them -so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot -compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? -Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his -own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this -sort is to be had for a price,--if you want to pay so much. - -“‘To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of -fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life -than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he -can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is a wonder-working -book.’” - -Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her -books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a -criticism of life.” How about molding lives? - - -BOOKS BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER - -_The Song of the Cardinal_, 1903. -_Freckles_, 1904. -_What I Have Done With Birds_ [_Friends in Feathers_], 1907. -_At the Foot of the Rainbow_, 1908. -_A Girl of the Limberlost_, 1909. -_Birds of the Bible_, 1909. -_Music of the Wild_, 1910. -_The Harvester_, 1911. -_Moths of the Limberlost_, 1912. -_Laddie_, 1913. -_Michael O’Halloran_, 1915. -_Morning Face._ -_A Daughter of the Land_, 1918. -_Homing with the Birds_, 1920. -_Her Father’s Daughter_, 1921. -_The Fire Bird_, 1922. - -_Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York._ - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -ELEANOR H. PORTER - - -In the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth -(top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof. -“Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a -hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront -us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and -fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes--“laughing eyes”--changing -expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil -and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a -conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming--charming! - -She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds -or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature. -She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has -finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book -three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter -here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and -tinkered with--and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few -changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and -later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston: - -“Advance orders for your new novel _Just David_ are 100,000 copies.” - -Isn’t that rewarding? _Just David_ will be out in a few days now.... - -The author of _Just David_--and _The Road to Understanding_ and _Oh, -Money! Money!_ and, why _of course_ of _Pollyanna_!--is not thinking of -the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No. -Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But -what rewards her for the task of writing them--did you ever sit down and -write, just _write_, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?--what -gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof -that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in -_her_, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better -somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for -entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found -elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while. - -Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely -flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this -hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them -gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces, -what would you say? What _could_ you say? Do you think your -sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do -you think that _you_ could give them what they need? Would your -subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little -braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life? - -Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl -Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid -in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana -city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and -Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button -showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the -hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and -children everywhere--surely she and her work call for respectful -consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we -can only put our fingers on it! There is. - -And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at -work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William -Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was -not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime -white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in -front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up -to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen -her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play -out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my -tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play -the beautiful things I saw--sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way, -perhaps, _David_ is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in -voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in -expressing just the mood I want to express.” - -She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands -in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella -Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods -from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated -birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health -arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and -she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack, -mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished -one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When -she wrote _Just David_ she had only to recall her youth, after all. - -Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private -teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and -in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She -lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield, -Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr. -and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs. -Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them. - -We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morning. Yes, the morning -hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her -first book, published in 1907, was _Cross Currents_, a study of child -labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of -youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed, -her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon -several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It -was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When -these dead awaken! _If_ these dead were to awaken, were to come back to -us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would -see? What would they say and do? - -Well-- - -“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes -in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly -matter.... - -_Cross Currents_ was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a -sequel, _The Turn of the Tide_. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of -clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot, -that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed. -One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what -would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three -bachelors. - -From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came _Miss -Billy_; and from _Miss Billy_ came _Miss Billy’s Decision_ and _Miss -Billy--Married_. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She -thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she would write a short -story--only a short story--based on the idea in this sentence or so.... - -_Pollyanna_-- - -So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of _Pollyanna_--they are -not her real readers who know better!--that it is much fairer to her and -ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came -_Just David_, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts -had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what -is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that _you_ -could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know? -At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness, -no trace of longing for something once loved and lost--not awhile but -forever? - -David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the -father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward -he is brought to a quiet country town--a lad in love with music, with -birds and flowers. - -“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the -world through David’s eyes. One day--one wonderful day--they went to -walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left -his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods! - -“It was not accomplished without a struggle, as David could have told. -All the morning David urged and begged. If for once, just once, they -would leave everything and come, they would not regret it, he was sure. -But they shook their heads and said, ‘No, no, impossible.’ In the -afternoon the pies were done and the potatoes dug and David urged and -pleaded again. And to please the boy they went. - -“It was a curious walk. Ellen Holly trod softly with timid feet. She -threw hurried, frightened glances from side to side. It was plain that -Ellen Holly did not know how to play. Simon Holly stalked at her elbow, -stern, silent and preoccupied. It was plain that Simon Holly not only -did not know how to play, but did not care to find out. - -“The boy tripped along ahead and talked. He had the air of a monarch -displaying his kingdom. Here was a flower that was like a story for -interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth telling. Even -Simon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly -picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch; -and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly’s murmured, ‘But, David, where is the -difference? They look so much alike,’ had said: - -“‘Oh, but they are not. Just see how much more pointed at the top this -fir is than that spruce back there; and the branches grow straight out, -too, like arms, and they are all smooth and tapering at the end like a -pussy-cat’s tail. But the spruce back there--its branches turned down -and out--didn’t you notice?--and they are all bushy at the end like a -squirrel’s tail. Oh, they’re lots different. - -“‘That’s a larch way ahead--that one with the branches all scraggly and -close down to the ground. I could start to climb that easy, but I -couldn’t that pine over there. See, it’s way up before there is a place -for your feet! But I love pines. Up there on the mountain, where I -lived, the pines were so tall that it seemed as if God used them -sometimes to hold up the sky.’ - -“And Simon Holly heard, and said nothing, and that he did say -nothing--especially nothing in answer to David’s confident assertions -concerning celestial and terrestrial architecture--only goes to show how -well, indeed, the man was learning to look at the world through David’s -eyes....” - -“If the characters are true, the story tells itself,” says Mrs. Porter. -“The plot comes very easily after I get some leading idea which I wish -to work out. It is sometimes months after I have something in mind -before I have carried the idea along far enough to begin writing. The -ideas for novels come from careful observation and wide reading. - -“No, I would not say that novels are written by inspiration. I call it -enthusiasm. And unless the writer has enthusiasm while writing a novel I -think the indifference is bound to show in the story.” - -Her own enthusiasm holds her to the task, carries her through the year -she devotes to a book, enables her sometimes to write steadily for eight -or nine hours and then spend an evening with her heavy correspondence. -Her enthusiasm, a steady flame, burns to the end; and then her -exhaustion does not matter. The task is done. - -Without an idea--a crisp, definite, interesting idea is always there, -whether you like her novels or no--without an idea Mrs. Porter won’t -write. But when she begins to write she has much more than the idea. -She has a synopsis written out. She couldn’t work without one, she says. -And to that synopsis she sticks pretty closely. “For I must see my aim,” -she explains, “I must have every part of the story bear definitely -toward the object. The synopsis of _Pollyanna_ differs very little from -the completed story. However, the glad game was not in the synopsis. -That did invent itself--in the second chapter. And of course various -characters always have a way of sort of writing themselves in, and new -scenes and incidents suggest themselves as the book grows.” - -Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of -trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held -up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds -hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the -characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot -of things that no author could say directly without being charged with -sermonizing.” - -Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her -preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of -sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that -_if the characters are true_ they can say things that, from the author, -would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always -be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but -do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a -moral out of--or into--every other thing we hear our neighbors say or -see them do? - -The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of -“evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer -him: - -“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and -brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I -have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To -most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent -qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may -lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life -as may the other kind. - -“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing -in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed--sometimes? -That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in -logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be -overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of -the doughnut is not only very foolish--but very detrimental to one’s -digestion.” - -Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if -the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us -demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels -of muck and insanity--and nothing else. He must condemn them for their -worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we -have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always -enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of -the purveyors of cheerfulness. - -You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that -cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the -situation in a “grown-up” novel like _The Road to Understanding_ it is -your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who -has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of -marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They -are separated--never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation” -for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be -semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her -husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in -deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it. -Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little -daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never -gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather -impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the -passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does -very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea -and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a -denouement but--they are brought together again. - -An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing -_Oh, Money! Money!_ It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, -possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his -heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins -and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain -John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a -thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose -humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know -how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it -out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the -man behind the money.” - -Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a -psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale, -advanced by the publishers just before the publication of _Oh, Money! -Money!_--six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as -these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here -they are: - -1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world--the getting -and spending of money. - -2. The story of three families--cousins--who unexpectedly receive -$100,000 each from an unknown relative, will strike a responsive chord, -in every reader’s heart and set every reader thinking how _he_ would -spend the money. - -3. It has the same quality that has made Cinderella the most popular of -all fairy tales, the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly -treated come out on top in spite of all odds. - -4. The scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of -country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy. - -5. There is a charming love theme with a happy ending. - -6. And, above all, the story teaches an unobtrusive lesson that will -appeal to every one of Mrs. Porter’s readers; the lesson that happiness -must come from within, and that money cannot buy it. - - * * * * * - -Eleanor Hodgman Porter died on May 21, 1920. - - -BOOKS BY ELEANOR H. PORTER - -_Cross Currents_, 1907. -_The Turn of the Tide_, 1908. -_The Story of Marco_, 1911. -_Miss Billy_, 1911. -_Miss Billy’s Decision_, 1912. -_Pollyanna_, 1913. -_Miss Billy--Married_, 1914. -_Pollyanna Grows Up_, 1915. -_Just David_, 1916. -_The Road to Understanding_, 1917. -_Oh, Money! Money!_ 1918. -_Dawn_, 1919. -_Mary-Marie_, 1919. -_Sister Sue_, 1921. - -_The first two books were published by W. A. Wilde, Boston; the books -about Miss Billy and Pollyanna by the Page Company, Boston; the last six -books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER X - -KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN - - -Once Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley, -in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin -for the occasion.” - -“You have many children,” said the seer. - -“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied. - -“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones; -they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman -declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?... -I cannot understand. I _see them_.” - -They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how -wonderfully right was her vision. - -“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of -the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa -and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly -Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the -faithful Emma Jane,--all these figures crowd about us, and claim their -places as everybody’s children.” - -It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write -about her without emotion, the kind of emotion that it is good to feel. -The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better -world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite? -Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may -indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the -emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions, -you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a -desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming--keep off -this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple -and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are -not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless -millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour! - -Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred -teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits -which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like -prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to -have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of -Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent -east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school -for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen -her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After -her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara. -She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was -called to direct the famous Silver Street kindergartens of San -Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens -for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of -Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their -spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training -teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made -others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat -and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought -to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if -she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is -at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton -Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the -manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable -doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be -self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so -agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look -upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness -is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you -are. - -Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village -of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being. -Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works -she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed -windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill, -swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling -of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village -is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the -Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake. -A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or -so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco, -placid and turbulent, which runs through _Timothy’s Quest_ and _Rebecca_ -and _Rose o’ the River_. - -Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr. -Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not -recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of -the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior -was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and -the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with, -the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as -ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left -their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply -fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of -the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a -silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness -pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions, -stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back -into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square -dances on the threshing floor. - -Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we -have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In -the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco, -the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading -from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of -the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have -very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all -those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved -but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;--you have -the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more -pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the -perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance of _The -Old Peabody Pew_. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall -with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she -has shared with you her feelings about life. - -Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you _remember_! Somehow, -_Penelope’s Progress_, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and -Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2, -please: - -“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer -whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy -than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the -nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she -was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time -no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not -unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those -disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and -perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and -calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were -filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their -Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.” - -Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written -the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent -over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether -“b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his -discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely -referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”) -was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote: - -“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced -Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and -her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the -Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of -Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.” - -_Marm Lisa_ is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the -youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such -places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of -Present Perfection? We have. On the wall was “an ingenious pictorial -representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the -successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by -colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for -Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition -of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform; -blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious -Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that -in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was -left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face -powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent. - -The cat ’Zekiel in _The Old Peabody Pew_: - -“’Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma, -and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to -slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five -minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and -gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no -heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.” - -The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth -walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some -parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their -seats side by side in the old family pew. - -“(‘And consid’able close, too, though there was plenty o’ room!’) - -“(‘And no one that I ever heard of so much as suspicioned that they had -ever kept company!’) - -“(‘And do you s’pose she knew Justin was expected back when she scrubbed -his pew a-Friday?’) - -“(‘And this explains the empty pulpit vases!’) - -“(‘And I always said that Nancy would make a real handsome couple if she -ever got anybody to couple with!’)” - -The boastful old man, Turrible Wiley, in _Rose o’ the River_: - -“‘I remember once I was smokin’ my pipe when a jam broke under me. ’Twas -a small jam, or what we call a small jam on the Kennebec,--only about -three hundred thousand pine logs. The first thing I knowed, I was -shootin’ back an’ forth in the b’ilin’ foam, hangin’ on t’ the end of a -log like a spider. My hands was clasped round the log, and I never lost -control o’ my pipe. They said I smoked right along, jest as cool an’ -placid as a pond-lily.’ - -“‘Why’d you quit drivin’?’ inquired Ivory. - -“‘My strength wa’n’t ekal to it,’ Mr. Wiley responded sadly. ‘I was all -skin, bones, an’ nerve.... - -“‘I’ve tried all kinds o’ labor. Some of ’em don’t suit my liver, some -disagrees with my stomach, and the rest of ’em has vibrations.’” - -In January, 1911, over 2,000,000 copies of Mrs. Wiggin’s books had been -sold; to-day the total is probably approaching 3,000,000. The most -popular of her books is _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, which has been -likened, in explanation of its popularity, to _Little Women_. But no -explanation is necessary. Rebecca is entirely, naturally human. Whether -she is perplexing her aunts or telling Miss Dearborn that she can’t -write about nature and slavery, having really nothing to say about -either; whether she is making her report on the missionaries’ children -“all born under Syrian skies,” or aweing Emma Jane with original ideas, -or helping the Simpsons, with the aid of Mr. Aladdin, to acquire a -wonderful lamp;--at all times, at every moment Rebecca Rowena Randall -reminds us of the youngsters we have known, and perhaps, a little, of -the youngsters we were once ourselves. - -The triumph of naturalness, the perfect fidelity to the life of the -child; these explain _Rebecca_ and _Rebecca’s_ success, signalized less -in the selling of hundreds of thousands of copies, in the acting of the -play made from the book for months and months and months, than in the -joyous recognition with which Mrs. Wiggin’s heroine was greeted. Rebecca -inditing the couplet: - - “When Joy and Duty clash - Let Duty go to smash”-- - -Rebecca playing on the tinkling old piano, “Wild roved an Indian girl, -bright Alfarata,” Rebecca doing this, thinking that, saying the thing -that needs to be said--generous, romantic, resourceful and brighter than -her surroundings--is a person it does us all good to know. Copies of the -book in libraries are read to shreds. The world, which can see through -any sham, loves this story. The world is right. To learn, in the words -of one of Conrad’s heroes, to live, to love and to put your trust in -life is all that matters. Mrs. Wiggin shows us how. - - -BOOKS BY KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN - -_The Birds’ Christmas Carol_, 1886. -_The Story of Patsy_, 1889. -_A Summer in a Canyon_, 1889. -_Timothy’s Quest_, 1890. -_The Story Hour_, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.) -_Children’s Rights_, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.) -_A Cathedral Courtship_ and _Penelope’s English Experiences_, 1893. -_Polly Oliver’s Problem_, 1893. -_The Village Watch-Tower_, 1895. -_Froebel’s Gifts_, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.) -_Froebel’s Occupations_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.) -_Kindergarten Principles and Practice_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.) -_Marm Lisa_, 1896. -_Nine Love Songs, And A Carol_, 1896. (Music by Mrs. - Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.) -_Penelope’s Progress_, 1898. -_Penelope’s Scottish Experiences_, 1900. -_Penelope’s Irish Experiences_, 1901. -_The Diary of a Goose Girl_, 1902. -_Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, 1903. -_The Affair at the Inn_, 1904. (With Mary and Jane - Findlater and Allan McAulay.) -_Rose o’ the River_, 1905. -_New Chronicles of Rebecca_, 1907. -_Finding a Home_, 1907. -_The Flag Raising_, 1907. -_The Old Peabody Pew_, 1907. -_Susanna and Sue_, 1909. -_Robinetta_, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.) -_Mother Carey’s Chickens_, 1911. -_A Child’s Journey With Dickens_, 1912. -_The Story of Waitstill Baxter_, 1913. -_Penelope’s Postscripts_, 1915. -_The Romance of a Christmas Card_, 1916. -_Golden Numbers_, 1917. -_The Posy Ring_, 1917. -_Ladies in Waiting_, 1919. - -_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MARY JOHNSTON - - -“Didn’t you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary -Johnston’s novel, _The Long Roll_, “how everybody really belongs in a -book?” - -It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these -twenty years, ever since _Prisoners of Hope_ announced to the world the -advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary -to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that -special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or -nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary -Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a -discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston -has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can -entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for. - -She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the -ending of the first chapter of _To Have and To Hold_? A shipload of -maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, -Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by -has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get -him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds -himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master -Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes -back to the English manorhouse that had been his home. - -“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I -cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own -caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’ - -“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and -stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I -diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.” - -Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s -imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless -self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of _Lewis Rand_. Rand has -killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into -the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the -sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell -from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows: - -“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room -yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand -spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’ - -“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning -before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand] -gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason----’ - -“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’ - -“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said -he must have sleep.’” - -The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of _The Long Roll_: - -“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale -gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and -climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession -bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and -the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry -and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the -Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the -coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March -rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place -uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward -and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol -and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the -Speaker’s Chair. - -“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from -the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who -could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, -the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair, -in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. -All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired. - -“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead -leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde -soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. -He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He -spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always -said was just this: “_Press forward!_”’ He passed on. - -“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man -like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a -philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you -consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on. - -“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the -Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed -upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the -Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we -must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’” - -So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power -to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it -is of the essence of drama that _things go on_. A play or a book which -leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that -nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic -effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various -events--bitter, happy, tragic and glorious--marking so many stages of an -unending record. The last words of _The Long Roll_ are worthy of the -greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales. - -The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a -writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible -material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is -one element of her genius--perhaps the most important. The second -element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use -terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative -imagination” is. - -If you will turn to her book _The Wanderers_ you will find that it is a -series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the -underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship -is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the -period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the -French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were -no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of -how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before -recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the -scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the -human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull -conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are -one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of -years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture? - -Well, we can’t tell you _how_ it is done, for if that could be told the -manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such -chapters as open _The Wanderers_. All we can be certain of is this, that -Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a -primitive woman of the treefolk--so much was the first imaginative step. -And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and -hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her -actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by -creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling -than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to -which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or -reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What -is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, -wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but -a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and -a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of -imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his -author. - -All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a -serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense, -she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has -she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These -two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born -endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest--an -almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for -documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading -the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack -at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of -poignancy and the art of touching to tears--these are to be had for -taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they -will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous -to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True, -but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as -such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do! - -Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us -see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that -interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will -be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning -further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia. - -_The Long Roll_ starts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and -it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary -Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander -Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains -shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier, -the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of -civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal -boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country. -The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two -railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar. - -The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a -Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand. -Major Johnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted -her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older -governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was -sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved -to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and -professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing -school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought -home where, a year later, her mother died. - -Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was -interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of -some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present -industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several -children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the -direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in -view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that she _can_ keep -house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that -she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however. - -Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no -especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel, -_Prisoners of Hope_, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun -while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large -part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park. _To Have and To Hold_, -appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was -begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain -resort. The first draft was written with a lead pencil and revised with -exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten. - -Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her -home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth -Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father -indubitably did a great deal to make possible _The Long Roll_ and _Cease -Firing_, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of -inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had -served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining -promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times. -He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy -to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject -his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description -enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and -tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had -seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited. - -In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over -the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink -crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large, -airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of -antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends -come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were -possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss -Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begun -to dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia, -where she went to work upon _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, the -rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a -faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were -busied to portray. - -Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt, -springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland; -Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys -have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in -estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has -been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through. -Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters -high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent -flame. - -With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia -resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied -there was at one time occupied by General Lee. _Lewis Rand_ was written -on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually -she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away -from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off -to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not -confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and -“The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot! -Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for its owner, -making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home. - -There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with -here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is -large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments -and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a -formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone. -Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland. -Flowers execute the processional of the seasons. - -Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The -broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun -parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam -closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are -the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the -South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is -maintained without abatement. - -In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia -hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When -her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a -cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of -leaded glass about the room protect books of every description--history, -philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism--a -battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one -terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the -walls and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of -many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s -linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the -author. - -Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going -through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A -beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the _Book News Monthly_ -of March, 1911. - -“_Prisoners of Hope_, _To Have and to Hold_ and _Audrey_ are full of -allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least -impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors -to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a -dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her -guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward -in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that -in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the -one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding -country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of -the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church, -representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life. - -“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s -fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured -heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the -official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full -flush of her loveliness. - -“_Lewis Rand_ is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper -James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams -into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, -as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was -admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The -grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond, -where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about -them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic -quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians -of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the -times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has -for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of -the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly -souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand -and her husband from their country residence near the State University, -in Charlottesville.” - -There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity -Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in _Lewis Rand_, was the mother of -Fauquier Cary in _The Long Roll_. The Churchills, the Carys and others -should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks, -Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent -Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things. - -It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of -Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of _Hagar_ in 1913 all her -work had been historical and had consisted, with the exception of _The -Goddess of Reason_, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in -Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only -departure from this being her first two books. _Prisoners of Hope_ -(1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; _To Have -and To Hold_ (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in -1621. Then came _Audrey_ (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of -Col. William Byrd and _Lewis Rand_ (1908) which pictured the Virginia of -Jefferson. _The Long Roll_ (1911) and _Cease Firing_ (1912) gave us the -State during the Civil War. There was another romance, _Sir Mortimer_, -between _Audrey_ and _Lewis Rand_, and before _The Goddess of Reason_, -which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very -likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the _Book -News Monthly_ of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the -poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become _The Goddess -of Reason_ was to blame. _The Goddess of Reason_ gave her dramatic -genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something -better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed -Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us _The -Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ within the next five years. - -Although in _The Witch_, her next novel after _Hagar_, our writer went -back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of -the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of _Lewis -Rand_ and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of -prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and -joy of living.” _The Fortunes of Garin_ (1915) was pure romance and -adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored -as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a -fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to -France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the -princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl -whom he rescued from peril years before. Of _The Wanderers_ (1917) we -have already spoken. _Foes_ (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship -transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after -the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque -story is superbly told in most poetic prose. - -How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by -two examples from _The Long Roll_. Illustrated, we say, not _shown_ in -the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her -dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw -material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the -coward: - -“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large -on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He -was wedged between comrades--Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him -with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes--he could not fall out, drop -behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed -forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable -experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized -with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; -moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp _zzzz-ip_! _zzzzzz-ip_! -Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying -smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the -fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two -men were running--running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like -people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or -bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they -moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! -before I’d be sech a fool----’ A shell came, and burst--burst between -the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A -part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. -Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, -and vomited.” - -We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages: - -“First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree-a little -removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden -table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. -At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. -Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen -chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before -him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of -each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An -awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his -health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, -romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and -feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce -and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the -idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had -fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and -formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He -drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the -sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A -blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came -reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness -quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but -little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water -and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had -caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little -Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’ -instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the -Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the -week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, -but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it -promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these -were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, -tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude, -monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy -of the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his -staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an -implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great -and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly -the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery -tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s -Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until -Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to -weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was -to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the -small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the -critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling -Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some -mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied -approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact, -they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!” - -Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the -other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little -study you may see several things which go far to explain the -effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not -directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her -and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought. - -For example:-- - -Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice -again in the account of Stonewall Jackson’s funeral how the focus is -narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the -Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a -single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is -directed to a single point. - -Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck -home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, -lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom -and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall -of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the -building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a -league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges -abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as -he knows its tragic sorrow. - -Glance again at the ending of _Lewis Rand_. It is quiet but in the -unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the -greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he -must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the -picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and -lose himself from the secret terror. - -Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar -unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the -backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the -shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling -at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible -for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he -may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no -consciousness that could be recognized as such. - -The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson -has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. -Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal -opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in -contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials -of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. -But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam -in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of -course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell -us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of -him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a -queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the -fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we -can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss -Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget -that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly -under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to -church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final -touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of -their verdict on him--“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!” - - * * * * * - -It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is -to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss -Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies _before_ the -publication of _The Long Roll_, when she had only some six books to her -credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal. - - -BOOKS BY MARY JOHNSTON - -_Prisoners of Hope_, 1898. -_To Have and to Hold_, 1900. -_Audrey_, 1902. -_Sir Mortimer_, 1904. -_The Goddess of Reason_, 1907. -_Lewis Rand_, 1908. -_The Long Roll_, 1911. -_Cease Firing_, 1912. -_Hagar_, 1913. -_The Witch_, 1914. -_The Fortunes of Garin_, 1915. -_The Wanderers_, 1917. -_Foes_, 1918. -_Michael Forth_, 1919. -_Sweet Rocket_, 1920. -_Silver Cross_, 1922. -_1492_, 1922. - -_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes, -Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver -Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER XII - -CORRA HARRIS - - -They rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their -hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of -their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is -not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts -and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which -is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this -place. - -“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is -unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm -inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over -the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday -school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not -angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools -and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a -limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby. - -“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts -upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty, -but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees upon -women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from -decency and thrift. - -“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness -will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world. -When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on -Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen -what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the -valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love -one another and to believe in God and His mercies.” - -Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost -superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this -country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer -has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar -directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the -longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can -contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the -same sentence. From the day when the first installment of _A Circuit -Rider’s Wife_ appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ it was manifest -that America had a new writer of distinction. - -The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s -work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted -with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was -externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very -profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she -shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able -to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual -depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by -exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, -at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched -intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father -lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in -the room where a child is being born. - -Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by -her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. -Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early -years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made -trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a -local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at -home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and -early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable -education--for a girl. - -At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was -his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the -material from which she was able later to construct _A Circuit Rider’s -Wife_. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor -of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his -wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with -no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta -_Constitution_, published in the _Sunny South_ (owned by the -_Constitution_) a story of hers called _Darwinkle’s Dream_. It was a -gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to -“give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes; -nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of -Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it! - -In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems -accepted by the _Independent_ magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she -became a contributor to the _Saturday Evening Post_ and with the -publication of _A Circuit Rider’s Wife_ reached her deserved place. Her -husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887. - -Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so -far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a -long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it. -From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for -she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an -Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the -living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an -article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the -picture: - -“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the -whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset. -Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The -guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway--cozy apartments done all -in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’ -quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another -adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There -are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance -in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told -me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind -her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored -retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow -contributors to the _Saturday Evening Post_.] - -“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old -woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house. - -“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’ -said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she -remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the -blossoms; they look like butterflies.” - -“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her -neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go -together.’ - -“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man -she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’” - -At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks -endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about -twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and -beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have. - -“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this -paragon he said $100!” - -We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some -of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They -are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book _In -Search of a Husband_, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young -man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the -Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and -the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows, -music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He -explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North -America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I -ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?” - -Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it -must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter -began: - -“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in -techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:--‘He has -never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive -mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to -fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the -subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of -the Potential mood.” - -This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s -character drawing. - -It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is--a -man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”--that most distinguishes -Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on -eugenics. - -“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have -heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art, -literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce. -This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all -harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that -would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female. - -“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not -for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me: - -“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what -nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of -everything concerning sex. Of everything--destroy their curiosity, you -know.’ - -“‘How will you do it?’ I asked. - -“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and -these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the -means we are employing.’ - -“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is -nature’s method.’ - -“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not -enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the -kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our -criminals.’ - -“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so -wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be -solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are -not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so -they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I -doubt if it saves them. - -“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They -hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred -human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for -passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the -contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if -such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass -a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two -people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical -rating may be.” - -When _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_ was published it was interpreted in some -quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South; -there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in -certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion -respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon -reading her very direct statement: - -“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and -breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central -figure in _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_] as the preacher to come who will -deliver this church from what is almost a military system of -government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the -democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be -properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized -civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.” - -The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was -uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against -Germany. - -Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having -read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a -criticism of life--which literature is sometimes held to be. In the -valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It -should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her -book, _The Co-Citizens_, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer -suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public -services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the -right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of -information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected -these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into -_The Co-Citizens_ and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the -valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the -novel. - -No better close for this chapter than its opening--Mrs. Harris’s own -words! She is picturing her life--and quite as vividly herself--to Isma -Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives -not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of -pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home: - -“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and -my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church -sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself. - -“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could -get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like -brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time -will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with -which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion -and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is -the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together. - -“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and -tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in -the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody -could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count -now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the -church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the -coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend -down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his -monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And -I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb--John, who didn’t -know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who -surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith. - -“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed--such a dingy -little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think -she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn -it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and -collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till -night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots -of the great trees. - -“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after -I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead -are from their transgressions.” - - -BOOKS BY CORRA HARRIS - -_A Circuit Rider’s Wife_, 1910. -_Eve’s Second Husband_, 1911. -_The Recording Angel_, 1912. -_In Search of a Husband_, 1913. -_The Co-Citizens_, 1915. -_A Circuit Rider’s Widow_, 1916. -_Making Her His Wife_, 1918. -_From Sunup to Sundown_, 1919. (_With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter._) -_Happily Married_, 1920. -_My Son_, 1921. -_The Eyes of Love_, 1922. - -_First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by -Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; last three by George H. Doran -Company._ - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - -MARY AUSTIN - - -[Spellings and punctuation, even though inadvertent, have been -faithfully transcribed for the sake of preserving something intensely -human in the personal sketch below.] - - [Typewritten] Independence, Cal. - - Nov. 25th, 1902. - - - Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.; - - Gentlemen, - - Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some - account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have - no doubt that you can get some expression of opinion from Mr. Muir - in regard to my book “A Land of Little Rain”. but I will take pains - to make sure of the matter and write you again in regard to it. - Chas. F. Lummis, editor of Out West, and George Hamlin Fitch, - literary editor of The San Fransisco Chronicle, and also the - reviewer of the Argonaut can be counted on to give me some friendly - notice, especially Lummis as he is my first and warmest friend in - the west.... I have written the biographical sketch in the third - person to avoid the use of so many “I’s,” which always makes me - miserable, you can cut out all that is not to the point. - - Sincerely yours - - MARY AUSTIN. - - [Written] - - P. S. I am afraid you will be disappointed with the notes but it is - the best I can do. - - [Enclosure. Typewritten] - -Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her -mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist, -Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called -children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as -soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate -acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her -university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to -California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in -the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges. -Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for -following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of -mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional -opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study. - -Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her -state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by -this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert -dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after -teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to -return to the life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself -seriously to writing. - -Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St. -Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have -published work of hers. - -All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under -the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things -drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild -beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood. - - * * * * * - -[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue -in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of -paper.] - - * * * * * - -N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I -thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to -tell. I have just _looked_, nothing more, when I was too sick to do -anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I -was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I -got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so -full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make -room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but -I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I -will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit -up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it. - -I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting -eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people -who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small, -plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always -busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the -village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me. - -Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways -of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have -given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward -Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers -they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution -which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered -the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of -any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell, -they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner. - -When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large -educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert -to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the -water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in -from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber -with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care -of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four -horses. - -For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine -where the population is two-thirds Mexican and there gained the -knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should -say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a -botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field -work. - -Now for my work--the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child -verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am -a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can -understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a -greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have -discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of -in Jimville.--the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work, -and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor -friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied -than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible -that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone -medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For -consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these -single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length -upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all -blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in -which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly -reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do, -then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth. -They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the -sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they -do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs? -You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for -you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as -they have done me. - -This is the best I can do for you in this way,--but whatever you are -minded to say of my work say this--that I have been writing only four or -five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some -years more. - - * * * * * - -So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later -Houghton Mifflin Company published _The Land of Little Rain_, a -collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, -that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary -Austin’s qualifications as a writer. - -“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and -south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. - -“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far -into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets -the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s -is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that -supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that -purpose is not proven.” - -The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a _writer!_ And she has -style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything -with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What -else has she? - -She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and -time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go -deeper into the book, reading the accounts of _The Pocket Hunter_ and -_Jimville: A Bret Harte Town_. When you have finished you know Mrs. -Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not -know her performance. - -It began right after the appearance of _The Land of Little Rain_ with -her next work, the novel _Isidro_, a romance dealing with the California -of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with _A Woman -of Genius_. - -She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been -fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she -lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a -studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, -but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness -of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her -new environment and she will tell you a story: - -“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated -naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He -was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in -bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the -Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America. - -“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’ - -“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the -Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once -you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then -New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.” - -Ask her about her fine novel _The Ford_, a story of present day -California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy -Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning: - -“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the -waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. -Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to -do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these -things for the sequel to _The Ford_! It was I who discovered and made -public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river -in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in -the book.” - -We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a -portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. -Peattie, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, supplies just those -externals that we need to round out our picture: - -“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida -Meacham Strobridge]--Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen -months appeared twice in the _Atlantic_ in sketches which could have -been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. _A -Shepherd of the Sierras_ and _The Little Coyote_ were the titles of -these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order. -It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has -appeared chiefly in the _Youth’s Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_. - -“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government -land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her -companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an -Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes -the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is -artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well -as remarkable individuality. Her paper on _The Indian Arts_ read at one -of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of -Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire -convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that -it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners.... - -“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her -utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are -usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse, -serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.” - -A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded -Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants -of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or -four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow. -Herself, she is a desert species--but transplanted in time! She made her -final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done -so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot -maturity she would have given us her best--her all, her completion--at -four inches. - -She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The _Atlantic_ -which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same -_Atlantic_ which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine -seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that -five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s _Van Cleve_ -before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the _Atlantic_ -serialized _Isidro_. The _North American Review_, no less severely -selective than the _Atlantic_,--the _North American_, which had printed -serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary -Austin’s _The Man Jesus_ month by month. _The Man Jesus_ is a biography -such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine -literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. -It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, -who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: -“Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.” - -If we say that _The Man Jesus_ called for unusual knowledge and an -unusual faculty, what shall we say of _A Woman of Genius_? Some readers -were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number -must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as -finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of -Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a -possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is -possessed of”--or by--a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was -not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was -actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of -serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who -think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person -of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering -of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are -guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to -befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world -has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them. - -And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us -pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation. - -“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of -the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was -when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke. - -“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’ - -“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. -Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended -shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness.... - -“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the -ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private -terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to -speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’ - -“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’” - -“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it -was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the -walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a -background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my -mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, -scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking -the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced -them together there in the cold twilight.” - -“‘I’m sorry, daughter’--she hesitated--‘I can’t help you. I don’t -know.... I never knew myself.’” - -We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in -infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her -struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his -defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing -period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without -money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death -itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for -the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story -is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth -Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But -the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses -into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is -of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother, -Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of -being a dutiful son. _A Woman of Genius_ is the work of a woman of -genius. - -“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this--that I ... have not -yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know. - - -BOOKS BY MARY AUSTIN - -_Love and the Soul-Maker_, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. -_The Green Bough._ Doubleday, Page & Company, New York. -_The Land of the Sun_, Houghton Mifflin. -_The Land of Little Rain_, 1903. Houghton Mifflin. -_The Basket Woman_, 1904. Houghton Mifflin. -_Isidro_, 1905. Houghton Mifflin. -_The Flock_, 1906. Houghton Mifflin. -_Santa Lucia_, 1908. Harper & Brothers, New York. -_Lost Borders_, 1909. Houghton Mifflin. -_The Arrow Maker_, 1911. Doubleday, Page. -_Christ in Italy_, 1911. Doubleday, Page. -_A Woman of Genius_, 1912. Doubleday, Page. -_The Lovely Lady_, 1913. Doubleday, Page. -_The Man Jesus_, 1915. Houghton Mifflin. -_The Ford_, 1917. Houghton Mifflin. -_The Young Woman Citizen_, 1918. The Woman’s Press, New York. -_The Trail Book_, 1918. Houghton Mifflin. -_26 Jayne Street_, 1920. Houghton Mifflin. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - -MARY S. WATTS - - - “2722 Cleinview Avenue, East Walnut Hills, - - “Cincinnati, Ohio, June 19, 1918. - -“My dear Mr. Overton: - -“I have here a letter from Mr. Latham of Macmillans with a very -complimentary request from you for data regarding myself. There really -is not much to say about me as a person. The trade of writing has been -pursued--in times past, at least--by so many picturesque people in so -picturesque a fashion that the rest of the world has got into the habit -of thinking an author must of necessity be picturesque; but such is not -my case, rather to my regret whenever anybody displays this kind and -gratifying curiosity about me. One would dearly love to be a slap-dash, -swashbuckling sort of person like Borrow, say; or a sick, fiery, -indomitable R. L. S. Then there would be something to write about. As it -is, I am only an inconspicuous gentlewoman--I hope a gentlewoman -anyway!--with a more or less Victorian style of writing which has -frequently proved a profound puzzle to critics of a younger generation. - -“The dates are to be got out of _Who’s Who_, but to spare trouble I will -give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio; -went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for -some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since. -Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably -the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to -everybody, but the farm experience was _sui generis_, not exactly like -anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and -involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the -middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from -the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable -patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I -think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things -which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I -was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated -people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual -backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without -the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild, -uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and -write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the -_Ladies’ Home Journal_ have changed everything. Don’t think I am not -serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the -so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and -isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put -together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make -you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and -I had no companions of our own age; we were not allowed to associate -with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had -to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all -the characters in turn. - -“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it -has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately -in _Nathan Burke_. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the -uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other -kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man--at least I -thought him old then--named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living -shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers. -He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and -butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a -rifle--a _rifle_, mind you!--at the utmost distance the weapon would -carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’ -he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when _one_ orter do.’ I remember -him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels, -the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the -front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with -Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to -scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the -tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it -inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the -dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing, -red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of -Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died -somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been -particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I -wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I -have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken -living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not -have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of -Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order, -to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels -autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben, -they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I -have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An -author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own -eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows. - -“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of -accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present -itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in -some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn -over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making -over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something -there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I -understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on, -never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the -night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and -pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do -sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis -and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son, -Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and -have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule -afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the -unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors, -for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making -contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I -can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I -believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible -ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation! - -“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any -rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went -and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like -regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent -them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep -disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were -trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write -anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I -was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am -still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not -happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been -rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are -still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I -began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman -and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the -incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity. -Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but -we realize now that he was a writer--just that. And he was a great -personality--just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to -imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better -than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out, -but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification, -that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and -imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who -can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me -that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or -modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I -remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of -the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean -‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy -slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean -_conversational_, as conversation is carried on between persons in what -I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me -about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable -extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like -somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was -so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper. -It was in _Barry Lyndon_ that this first struck me, I believe. Who -showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon -re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating. -Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After -a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old -genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was -modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity -which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain -true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony, -repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction -better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful -importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery -vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is -not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing--also--better imagined -than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the -Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final -touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic -Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements, -getting drunk and creating scandal--that is a masterpiece of realism; -and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading -Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading -Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually -learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice -by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single -person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the -original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying -characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on! -Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out -of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc. -It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it, -willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for -something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious, -middle-of-the-road policy; you see I _might_ turn out to be a writer -after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’--I -have seen this phrase used in description of my writing--my emphasis of -the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for -that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature -are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long. - -“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as -those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in -search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing _Nathan -Burke_, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And -while at work on _Van Cleve_, a story in which the Spanish-American War -makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to -Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the -trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine -society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also -done--that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy--but I could have -done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the -atmosphere. - -“The dates of publication are about as follows: _The Tenants_ (McClure), -1908; _Nathan Burke_ (Macmillan), 1910; _The Legacy_, 1911; _Van Cleve: -His Friends and His Family_, published serially in the _Atlantic -Monthly_, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; _The Rise of Jennie -Cushing_, 1915; _The Rudder_, 1916; _The Boardman Family_, 1918; also a -book called _Three Short Plays_, 1917. - -“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest--whether in your -judgment it is fit to make public or not--about the people who in -printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on -attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and -the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and -futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do -something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or -idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this -man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know -one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he -ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author; -he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different -and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make -a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this -opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do -people accuse _me_ of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a -burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me -credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create; -it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for. -What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we -meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or -submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By -their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart -the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method; -whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one -unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse _me_ of -his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is -exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to -the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of -his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about -the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about -Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One -act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, _I_ didn’t do it. They did it -themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company. - -“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes -for the forthcoming book, I am - - “Sincerely yours, - - “MARY S. WATTS.” - - * * * * * - -Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of -the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to -which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages, -he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know -something about them if only that they may discount his statements at -their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs. -Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the -whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent -pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other -American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this -satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid -merits of her work. - -Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all -writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style -with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that -non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely -realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain -passages and which affords the reader--and the writer--necessary relief. -But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been -able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in -every one of her stories. - -She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not -only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of -circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a -moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know -particularly well--do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all -his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him; -if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you -may; and yet you think you know _him_ rather well! The truth is, you -know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart -and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character -which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall. -You’ve never done that--why should you? But you must do just that if you -are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a -dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody -you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case, -for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait. - -Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice” -of feminine perception, a quality which makes _Pride and Prejudice_ -immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of -hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely -a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled, -constitute a merciless betrayal--the betrayal is merciless whether it is -favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes -you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see -him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme, -but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an -otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too -readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up -for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the -prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors. - -She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all -and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing -is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and -her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in -_Nathan Burke_ and Everett Boardman in _The Boardman Family_ whom Gene -Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton -could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some -use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s -not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be -reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she -proceeds to show us what _is_ made of them--not a pretty spectacle, to -be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only -to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would -subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the -moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words -in _A Personal Record_? - -“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel -and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, -charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have -come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I -would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle -for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view--and in -this view alone--never for despair! Those visions, delicious or -poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair--the -laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high -tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle -mind--that’s our affair!” - -It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, -from _Nathan Burke_ to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in -_The Rudder_, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi -Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the -machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each. - -“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ -said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’ - -“‘Um-huh. Well, I _have_ seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly -anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly -to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of -escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them -another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle -of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation. - -“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it. - -“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ -said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get -home.’” - -A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake. - -“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty -effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr. -Loring, my work has seldom had a--a token of appreciation that I--I -value m-more--ahem--ho, ha--_ahem, hem_--!’” - -Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in _Nathan -Burke_, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical -illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but -pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness? -There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon -individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a -deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of _The Boardman -Family_, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which -occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She -intends to become a professional dancer. - -“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander -Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door -and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone, -but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds -and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella -laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall -she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair -braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked -very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the -watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s -watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a -half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish. -Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or -two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a -hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky -alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman, -whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing -chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced -an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared -to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if -He existed, He must surely be a gentleman--old Sarah Boardman got down -on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young -girl. - -“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and -alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know, -in a guarded voice. - -“‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little -gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’” - -A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the -enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to -infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you -have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah -Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very -fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some -lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at -the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known -Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her -daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs. -Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s -pride--reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it--would -inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect -it. - -In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: _Nathan Burke_, -then _The Legacy_, her next book after _Nathan Burke_; then _The Rise of -Jennie Cushing_. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that -_Van Cleve_, coming between _The Legacy_ and _Jennie Cushing_, was -published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and must have reached a -great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in -covers. _The Rudder_ was less successful than any of the others, though -it is too early to judge of the popularity of _The Boardman Family_, -published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present -writer is unable to fathom, _The Rudder_ was criticised with a most -unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly -mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to -perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less -dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the -novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal -characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful -selection for recording, _The Rudder_ leaves nothing to be desired. I -should rate it with _The Legacy_ while freely conceding that the -developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in -_The Legacy_, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and -interest. - -The close of _The Legacy_, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am _I_ a -good woman--a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly -foreshadowed _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, which, since its presentation -in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its -main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs. -Watts’s, not even excepting _Nathan Burke_. It is a pity that the film -representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the -conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending--none can -object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it -is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent -anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book -ending, of _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is neutral. It could not be -otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and -fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize -her love for Don and save her from herself. - -_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is the most dramatic, the most artistic, -and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any -question a really great novel and both in its conception and its -execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature -and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of _Nathan -Burke_, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively -narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is -natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in -_Nathan Burke_. The popularity of _The Legacy_ is partly attributable to -the fact that it followed _Nathan Burke_. But the popularity of _Jennie -Cushing_ represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an -audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her -earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by _Jennie Cushing_ and -not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of _The -Legacy_. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear -enough from this fact: In the case of _Nathan Burke_ and _The Legacy_ -the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off -quickly. But _Jennie Cushing_ was published in October, reprinted in -November--and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a -book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power. - -Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but -incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl -whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally -when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to -work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and -mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose -only mistake was in keeping silent once too often--or _was_ that a -mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about -her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to -make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest -price the world could exact from her--cool, courageous Jennie! And yet -she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with -the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing? -But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry -her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell -him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not; -one hesitates to say that Jennie _could not_ deny herself anything. - -_The Boardman Family_ suffers one serious defect. After writing with all -her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra -Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager; -and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after -getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts -Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly -has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have -sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship -Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of -being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without -a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we -should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had -created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not -extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is -beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery -to be cleared up later. - -_Van Cleve_ is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next -to _Nathan Burke_, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the -interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy -Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her _Three Short -Plays_, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will -say merely that _An Ancient Dance_ is the most ingenious and -dramatically effective. _Civilization_ is splendid satire but -inconclusive in its termination. _The Wearin’ O’ The Green_ is a farce -that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays -are most agreeable reading. - - -BOOKS BY MARY S. WATTS - -_The Tenants_, 1908. -_Nathan Burke_, 1910. -_The Legacy_, 1911. -_Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_, 1913. -_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, 1914. -_The Rudder_, 1916. -_Three Short Plays_, 1917. -_The Boardman Family_, 1918. -_From Father to Son_, 1919. -_The Noon Mark_, 1920. -_The House of Rimmon_, 1922. - -_Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XV - -MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN - - -If this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of -American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be -found in three considerations: - -Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her -successes have been with short stories, and they have been many. - -Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, -largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does -not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute -standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the -fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of -course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such -writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to -literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification -even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The -reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of -opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells -and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question -their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground -from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as -Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. -There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is -Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, -sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but -never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of -which we have not been perfectly aware--her stories are cordially -welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation -to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint -consciousness that _once_ in some place among a few people they may have -had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they -are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them--and that is all. - -The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely -historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she -would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently -as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, _The -Copy-Cat_, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book! -The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating -another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty: - -“Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not -know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life. -Thereafter she went to school ‘dressed like the best,’ and her mother -petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet. - -“It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own -improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality. - -“One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one -with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company, -and tea was served. - -“‘I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,’ Lily whispered to -Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her. - -“‘Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.’” - -This in the year of our Lord 1914! This in the year when blood began to -flow as it has never flowed before; when free peoples everywhere awoke -to the presence of Black Evil on earth; when big, generous America with -all her faults was not exactly likely to be thrilled or touched or -enlightened by the recital of how a plain little girl finally got up -enough gumption to wear pink ribbons instead of blue. And yet we suppose -the people who set such store by “literary” values thought this a -“delightful little story”--“so true a picture of children”--“and wasn’t -that a charming conceit of sleeping in each other’s beds!” But it is -wretched stuff, really. At the end Mrs. Freeman simply tells you that -after “that night” Amelia’s mother’s whole nature changed and the -uninterestingly imitative little girl developed “a little stamp of -individuality” and will you please swallow all this quickly on Mrs. -Freeman’s mere say-so because she is tired of writing and the thing is -already the right magazine length anyway. Bah! - -Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is an extremely modest person. She is of New -England stock in both lines. Her ancestors were Puritan colonists. She -was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, and received her education -there and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. Ten years of her life were spent in -Brattleboro, Vermont, but after the death of her parents she returned to -Randolph where she made her home until her marriage on New Year’s Day, -1902, to Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. Since then Mrs. -Freeman has lived in Metuchen. - -Exactly when the intention to write first came to her, Mrs. Freeman does -not remember. She always felt that she must work at something, but did -not know what it was to be. Though she was fond of painting and -sculpture, her chief interest as a girl was reading. Socially, her -tastes were exceedingly catholic, and she was on the best of terms with -all her neighbors, many of whom she found herself studying as -characteristic New England types, thus unconsciously preparing herself -for the moment when she was to become a writer. She likes “people who -drop their g’s and use the double negative, as well as people who -don’t.” - -Success as a writer came to her instantly. She suffered none of the -rebuffs and delays and discouragements usual to the young author. Her -earliest work was done for children and took the form of short stories -and poems in juvenile magazines. Her first grown-up story was _The Old -Lovers_, sent to _Harper’s Bazar_. Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of -that periodical, upon receiving this contribution, written in a cramped -and unformed handwriting, evidently that of a child, determined upon a -hasty reading, but was so struck in the opening paragraphs with the -humor and the pathos of the story that she promptly sent Mrs. Freeman a -check. In the same mail with the _Bazar_ acceptance came a notification -that her story, _The Shadow Family_, had captured the prize in a -competition conducted by the Boston _Sunday Budget_. Both the checks -seemed very large to the new writer. “My delight and astonishment knew -no bounds.” - -Mrs. Freeman is a rather small woman, singularly unaffected, cordial, -frank. A friend once described her thus: “A little, frail-looking -creature, with a splendid quantity of pale-brown hair, and dark-blue -eyes with a direct look and a clear, frank expression--eyes that readily -grow bright with fun.” Mrs. Freeman has plenty of humor, is quiet and -whimsical, is fond of country ways, but confesses to fear of cows, -caterpillars and all creeping things. - -Her popularity has been sufficient to bring about the translation of a -number of her books into various European languages. - - -BOOKS BY MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN - -_The Debtor._ -_The Fair Lavini._ -_A Humble Romance_, 1887. -_A New England Nun_, 1891. -_Young Lucretia_, 1892. -_Jane Field_, 1892. -_Giles Corey_, 1893. -_Pembroke_, 1894. -_Madelon_, 1896. -_Jerome--A Poor Man_, 1897. -_Silence_, 1898. -_Evelina’s Garden_, 1899. -_The Love of Parson Lord_, 1900. -_The Hearts of Highway_, 1900. -_The Portion of Labor_, 1901. -_Understudies_, 1901. -_Six Trees_, 1903. -_The Wind in the Rose Bush_, 1903. -_The Givers_, 1904. -_Doc Gordon_, 1906. -_By the Light of the Soul_, 1907. -_Shoulders of Atlas_, 1908. -_The Winning Lady_, 1909. -_The Green Door_, 1910. -_The Butterfly House_, 1912. -_Yates Pride_, 1912. -_The Copy-Cat and Other Stories_, 1914. -_The Jamesons._ -_People of Our Neighborhood._ -_Edgewater People_, 1918. - -_Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; but The Butterfly House is -published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XVI - -ANNA KATHARINE GREEN - - -The real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs. -Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert -maker of fine furniture and who wrote _Initials Only_ and _The -Leavenworth Case_. We mean the Anna Katharine Green Mind, a Mind no -longer young counted by years, a Mind as subtle and powerful and clever -as ever, counted by achievement. Read _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_, -published at the close of 1917, if you doubt that Mind’s unabated -mastery. Anna Katharine Green--but hush! What awe-inspiring quality -invests the mere whisper of that name? Why do cold shivers run up and -down our backs? Why in our commonplace surroundings--porch, porch -chairs, typewriter, manuscript--why, why do we chill all over? Why do -the thrills in dots and dashes like a hurrying Morse code torture our -nerves? - -We will tell you. - -It is because last night we opened a book and read: - - I - - WHERE IS BELA? - - “A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar - in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse - a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager, - anxious, hesitating people? - - “I will tell you. - - “This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate; - nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be - lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this - is Judge Ostrander’s place....” - -We read. And we read. The others retired for the night. The pale moon -swam slowly through the heavens, regarding us with a calm, cold -indifference. The town clock boomed midnight, then one, then two. -Fatality hung in the air. Horror coursed in the veins and the blood -ceased to pulse through the arteries. Occasionally a ripened apple -dropped from the nearby tree to the ground. At the thud we jumped. But -we could not stop until, on page 381, the last of _Dark Hollow_, we had -read the solemn words: “Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver, -hope!” Then we crept off to bed. Utter exhaustion of all sensation -brought swift sleep.... - -It must have been about a third of the way through that the conviction -stole over us of Judge Ostrander’s guilt. Who murdered Algernon -Etheridge in Dark Hollow? Did John Scoville, executed for the crime? -Did--shuddering thought--young Oliver Ostrander slay that friend of his -father’s whom he hated so? Neither ... neither! Then who? Why, the -unlikeliest person in the book, of course, and trust Anna Katharine -Green to make it plausible! - -Mrs. Green--it is difficult to know whether to call Mrs. Rohlfs “Miss -Green” or “Mrs. Green”--Mrs. Green cannot write “for a cent,” as slang -has it; but she can write and has written for a good many dollars! And -by that we don’t mean her motive is purely businesslike; we prefer to -believe that she writes for the exercise of her marvelous and peculiar -talent, and to afford excitement and entertainment to many thousands who -read her books. What is this talent? (It is impossible in writing about -her to avoid falling into the theatricism of her narrative style!) - -Did you ever try to write a mystery story? If you have tried you will -understand much better than we can tell you. And if you haven’t it will -be necessary to take a single specimen of Mrs. Green’s work to -illustrate her powers. - -_Dark Hollow_--and she never wrote a more excellent yarn--centers about -the murder of Algernon Etheridge twelve years before the narrative -begins. John Scoville, keeper of a tavern, was tried and executed for -the crime, swearing his innocence. Etheridge was the closest personal -friend Judge Archibald Ostrander had. Circumstances compelled Judge -Ostrander to preside at Scoville’s trial and the Judge was not merely -impartial, but manifestly favored, so far as was compatible with -fairness, the defense. The evidence against Scoville was purely -circumstantial but strong. He had been in Dark Hollow that night at the -time of the crime. Etheridge was killed with Scoville’s stick. -Scoville’s character was bad. - -For twelve years since the crime Judge Ostrander has lived shut off from -the world, except for his appearances on the bench. His grounds are -walled off by a high board fence within a high board fence and he lives -alone with a huge negro servant. His son and he have parted irrevocably. - -When the story opens this negro, Bela, has gone forth on morning -errands, unprecedentedly leaving the gate in the fence ajar! A woman in -purple, heavily veiled, has entered the grounds. The gaping neighborhood -ventures in after her but does not find her. The crowd comes upon the -Judge sitting erect and apparently lifeless in his house! It is an -attack of catalepsy. A little later the negro, mortally wounded by an -automobile, returns and dies trying to guard the iron door in the house -which preserves his master’s secret. - -The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge -and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her -daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband -did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his -execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to -uncover new evidence. - -Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of -Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap -seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the -picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his father’s house with a band -of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in -the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it -was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s -closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of -Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement -that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is -taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man -was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her -to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at -the close; forgery has been done! - -Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and -the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of -the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a -remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at -his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate -drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is -not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it. - -“‘The train south?’ - -“‘Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’” - -Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter, -Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser -uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great -major questions hang unanswered over her story--till the very close. -Then the one closed avenue to a solution is unbarred, the stunning -surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying -dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale -there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the -reader of what he would least have believed before. - -This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent. -Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly -infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was -necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a -dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to -innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly -was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of -these people to each other. - -It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty -minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where -was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place -in the story--Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of -Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the -book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of -every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half -hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and -Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at -every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each -say and do and hear and see? The author must know _all_ these things in -order to spare the reader what is irrelevant. She must have every inch -of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t -believe this? Try writing a story like _Dark Hollow_, improvising as you -go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you! - -The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of -what might be called chapter climaxes--the brief thrills, one or more to -a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves, -and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in -advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are -real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and -are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the -incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other -bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station. - -It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective -story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every -person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly -true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which -must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it -ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured -in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate -invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation. -Looking at _Dark Hollow_ in retrospect it is quite easy to see why -certain things had to be--so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer -because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend. -Oliver had to be under suspicion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession -plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther -Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver. -Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes, -yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not -penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s -cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such -nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It -won’t hold together for a moment. - -No! The real starting point in _Dark Hollow_ was the conception on the -part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion, -slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years, -inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a -convict’s cell _in his own home_! All the rest--the painting of a black -band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on -his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home -for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion -by so much as an eye at a knothole--all these followed. Then on this -solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken -conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but -solid and sound) structure of the book. - -That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and -illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or -analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true. -_The Leavenworth Case_, and _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_ and _Dark -Hollow_--every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of -trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous -trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where -the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the -outset of _Dark Hollow_. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head -and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine -going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it -instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only -average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before -her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with -dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental -mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside -the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal. - -But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever -having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has -constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s -detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle -has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to -depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did in _The -Goldbug_. She has not had to carry us through generations and -coincidences as Gaboriau did in _File No. 113_. She never employs the -fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K. -Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and -criminals, as _The Innocence of Father Brown_. She can handle more -complex strands than Melville Davisson Post. But Mr. Post can write -rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the -Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will -produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a -generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In -her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from -the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in -American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is -well to be satisfied! - - -BOOKS BY ANNA KATHARINE GREEN - -_The Leavenworth Case._ A. L. Burt Company, New York. -_A Strange Disappearance._ -_The Sword of Damocles._ -_Hand and Ring._ -_The Mill Mystery._ -_Marked “Personal.”_ -_Miss Hurd--An Enigma._ -_Behind Closed Doors._ -_Cynthia Wakeham’s Money._ -_Dr. Izard._ -_The Old Stone House and Other Stories._ -_7 to 12._ -_X. Y. Z._ -_The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock._ -_That Affair Next Door._ -_Lost Man’s Lane._ -_Agatha Webb._ -_Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama._ -_A Difficult Problem and Other Stories._ -_The Circular Study._ Doubleday, Page & Company. -_One of My Sons._ -_The Filigree Ball._ Bobbs-Merrill Company. -_The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems_, 1894. - G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. -_The Millionaire Baby_, 1905. Burt. -_The House in the Mist_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co. -_The Amethyst Box_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co. -_The Chief Legatee_, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. -_The Mayor’s Wife_, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co. -_Three Thousand Dollars_, 1909. -_The House of the Whispering Pines_, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt. -_Initials Only_, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in - the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918. -_Masterpieces of Mystery_, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished - in 1919 as _Room No. 3._ Dodd, Mead. -_Dark Hollow_, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt. -_The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange_, 1915. -_The Woman in the Alcove_, 1916. Burt. -_The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_, 1917. Dodd, Mead. -_The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man_, 1922. Dodd, Mead. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII - -HELEN R. MARTIN - - -A chapter on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged -interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, -constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And -always on the same subject--her subject--the Pennsylvania Dutch. - -What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said. -She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from -Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was -brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or -so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after -taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing -for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg, -the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among -whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it -to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her -for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met -Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an -instructor in music. And Mrs. Martin was herself a teacher. At one time -she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City. -She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents. - -Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is -interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up -children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte -Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any -general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many -of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with -these problems is kept out of her work--the older generation of the -people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared -their heads--but her last two novels, _Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or -Christian?_ and _Maggie of Virginsburg_, introduce them extensively and -disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with _Gertie Swartz_ arose entirely -from her inability to assimilate such matter _before_ writing her story. -As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are -indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced -bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life -out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as -they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of -the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the -representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that -the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many -futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only -things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action -or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, -otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as -the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of -Sociological Sores. - -_Gertie Swartz_ aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work -arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to -give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the -controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under -the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do -the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made -in the New York _Evening Post_ for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. -Pennypacker. - -Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania -Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have -never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s -_Hearts Contending_, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells, -“should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie -Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania -Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of -Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, _The Pennsylvania -Pilgrim_ (he thought it better than _Snowbound_ but said the public -would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the -Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania -Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the -lingering accent, because Americans speak French and German badly. -Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high -station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr. -Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s -curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is -larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious -that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is -it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s -house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A -punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would -forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because -the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs. -Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures! - -There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment -her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie -Maddern Fiske made _Barnabetta_ into a play, _Erstwhile Susan_, and -appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is -what Richard Watson Gilder of the _Century_ once said to Mrs. Martin: -“Your people do not converse on paper--they talk. When a community is -written up that community always resents it, even if it is described -flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own -conceit about itself.” - -So much for compliments. If you call for proofs ask Mrs. Martin to show -you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published) -some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania -Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character, -asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining -that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits, -complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad -traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her -delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her -delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs. -Martin says: - -“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated -descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of -whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers, -except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But -the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster, -Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race -from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters -described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I -wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the -rest of my heroines. - -“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who -have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.” - -We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a -synoptic discussion of her tales and give instead what she has to say, -outside her books, about the people in them. - -“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of -whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect, -not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about -Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is -absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play _Erstwhile -Susan_ and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch) -with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a -Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and -leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very -frugal and ‘close’--they never outgrow that. - -“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They -never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are -worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold -kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too -seductive charms may not be revealed. - -“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and -their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ -board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, -then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me -to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, -anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone -fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful -funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married -life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse. - -“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband -the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now -that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I -quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I -said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t -know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, -being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’” - -The following further account of these people is taken from a talk -Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the -opening of Mrs. Fiske in _Erstwhile Susan_. The interview, printed in -the New York _Evening Post_ of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. -Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated: - -“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he -sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the -average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once -disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ -I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, -cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make -something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what -do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that -fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will -refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt -ironed? My mister don’t.’ - -“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual -towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower -gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of -love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The -parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years. - -“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house -and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania -Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women. -He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market, -modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more -money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his -daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for--to work for the men -folks in the kitchen or near it. - -“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s -bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies -as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three -girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of -their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who -tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he -watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of -them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a -hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in the first test -scrimped a few crumbs for him--and won his hand and heart. Soon after, -his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked--which is -Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ... - -“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know. -It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible--for they -are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of -them sooner or later join one of the several religious -sects--Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’ -they say, and join one of these sects. - -“Their word is as good as gold--but they’ll quibble with their word. A -grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh -more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer. -‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his -literal word it is good to the last penny.” - -These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think -about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her -was printed in the _Evening Sun_, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no -problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary -of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in -Harrisburg!’ they will say.” - -Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule -that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by -living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband; -denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly -stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by -herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule -she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her -dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the -house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak -to his wife. - -“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that -I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give -him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would -punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely -fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not -understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!” - -Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a -booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and -Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating -exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin, -to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and -yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines! - - -BOOKS BY HELEN R. MARTIN - -_Elusive Hildegarde._ -_Her Husband’s Purse._ -_His Courtship._ -_Warren Hyde._ -_Tillie, a Mennonite Maid_, 1904. -_Sabina, a Story of the Amish_, 1905. -_The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of - the Pennsylvania Dutch_, 1907. -_The Revolt of Anne Royle_, 1908. -_The Crossways_, 1910. -_When Half-Gods Go_, 1911. -_The Fighting Doctor_, 1912. -_The Parasite_, 1913. -_Barnabetta_, 1914. -_For a Mess of Pottage_, 1915. -_Martha of the Mennonite Country_, 1915. -_Those Fitzenbergers_, 1917. -_Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?_ 1918. -_Maggie of Virginsburg_, 1918. -_The Schoolmaster of Hessville_, 1920. -_The Marriage of Susan_, 1921. - -_Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York, and the Century Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII - -SOPHIE KERR - - “July 19, 1918. - -“My dear Mr. Overton: - -“It has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen -beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences -of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good -heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have -never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down -and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very -queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only -facts.... - -“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy -belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, -conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising--an -average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit -farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for -people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, -an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign -flowering shrubs. - -“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High -School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college. - -“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always -had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it -was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school -or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound -culture, or even any vital enthusiasm--with the exception of the -psychology teacher at college. - -“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most -college girls write--very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind -of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas -of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I -was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to -be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter--I was always of a -severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write -stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the -machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the _Ladies’ -World_, and one into the _Country Gentleman_, and one into _Truth_, -which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I -had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend -of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of -graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there -with Professor Samuel Emerson. - -“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that -ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and -painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that -my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I -didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how -humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and -told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was -too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the -thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have -doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful -way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality. - -“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to -try to get what I did not have--a disciplined, well-ordered, logical -mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got -any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and -environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater -capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this--the habit of -thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the -individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so. - -“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of -my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then -began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh _Gazette_, one of -whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly -little essays--though that word is really too dignified for them--on the -foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment -and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in -Washington and Baltimore--we Southerners are great visitors, you -know--occasionally a scrap of very light verse. - -“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the _Gazette_ -people and asked for a job. I got it--I was to run the woman’s page of -their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties -of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday -supplement. The people on the _Gazette_ were very kind and patiently -tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I -worked there very happily for several years. - -“But I had been trying some magazine work--more light, semi-humorous -stuff, and the _Woman’s Home Companion_ bought several of my pieces. I -went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them -for a job. And got it,--assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then -the assistant editor, and is now the editor. - -“I have stayed with the _Companion_ ever since, save for a year when I -went with the ill-starred _Circle_, and now I am managing editor. All -this covers a period of over ten years. - -“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some -stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these -were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried -to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books -out--_Love at Large_, _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden Block_--and -another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most -of which have been published. Of course the very best story I ever -wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in -my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind--some day I’ll wish -you on an editor, yet.’ - -“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I -rarely--almost never--put real people or incidents in my stories, and -then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go -forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after -character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything -logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the -cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its -detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes -in these,--but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long -editorial training is an asset. - -“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily -reflect my own views or beliefs--I have no propaganda spirit--the -story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me -for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters--beliefs which -were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the -character who expressed them. - -“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it -all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which -you may be able to use somehow--they sound like the answers to an _Alice -in Wonderland_ questionnaire.) - -“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and -I do not read any of these because of the possible effect they may have -on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but -because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather -be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it; -indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better -strawberry preserves than any one in the world--this is not arrogance, -but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, -editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] would say. I work very hard, all the -time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them, -when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have -trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story -without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of -several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction -that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own--or most other -people’s--writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time -when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of -interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of -big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure -it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both. - -“(Now, really--this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert -again to _Alice_. Will it do--or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left -unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am -afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t want -_that_ to go into your book.)” - -So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an -appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately -gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a -multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the -statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we -know, in the _New Republic_ but when that Effort decides to take up the -publication of short stories doubtless she will! - -Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred -formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and -primarily with her as the author of _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden -Block_. - -Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the -resemblance pretty nearly stops. _The Blue Envelope_ has for its heroine -a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is -pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and -having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman -of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her -bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie -goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes -love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her -money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead -father that she spend two years earning her living. - -This adventure--earning your living is the greatest adventure in the -world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!--this enterprise takes Leslie -to New York. And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a -living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the -business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s -training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters -the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives. - -The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the -end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going -to give to the United States Government--sarnite. The formula must be -delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons, -agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and -earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie -Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance. - -Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that -you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it -away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what -shall we say? _The Blue Envelope_ is simple, straightforward, absorbing -and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. -We don’t mean realism--abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is -naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing -incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action -in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in -the world! - -Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life -and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a -realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we -never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical--we are -dead in earnest--it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as -unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one -extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in -between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special -sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal -and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so. - -It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly -plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the -most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of -a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the -nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a -romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or -Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the -faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while -naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to -have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our -belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and -excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic -value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is -evidenced for everybody in the contrast between _The Blue Envelope_ and -its successor from her pen, _The Golden Block_. - -_The Golden Block_ is part of the life story of a business woman, -Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a -secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her -his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a -week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. -The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has -got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference -between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has -happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman--a much -better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business -women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are -new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too -straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in -order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr -doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most -skillful thing in that admirable story _The Golden Block_ is the way in -which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. -Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is -also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the -comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole -family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time -that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey -or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of -course the surest way to promote _their_ happiness is to succeed -herself. - -Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is -proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is -as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being -called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does -not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a -philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She -speaks and thinks only for herself--not of herself except when asked to -explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not -mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she -can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a -man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute -of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if -the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no -sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might -have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!” - -If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the -sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will -cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars -of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make -the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for -Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep -growing. - - -BOOKS BY SOPHIE KERR - -_Love at Large_, 1916. -_The Blue Envelope_, 1917. -_The Golden Block_, 1918. -_The See-Saw_, 1919. -_Painted Meadows_, 1920. -_One Thing Is Certain_, 1922. - -_Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue -Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, -Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. -Doran Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XIX - -MARJORIE BENTON COOKE - - -Of course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is -simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by -an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of -an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative -introspection--by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created -her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look -into your heart and write.” - -No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no -matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never -lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that -to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of -imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is -completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He -builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the -character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the -rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions; -these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not -much more than set them down. Incredible? Not in the least. Thackeray, -Scott--we don’t know how many writers--testify to the obstinacy with -which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really -no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The -parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow -his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes -his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does -always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and -despise him for it, for the story rings false. - -But the book _Bambi_ is another matter and precisely what the difference -consists in we have tried to show. Let us illustrate it anew. _Bambi_ is -imagined autobiography. Instead of creating Bambi and letting her go her -way Miss Cooke conducted herself through the story. Or, if you want to -put it in another way, you may say that she created Bambi and endowed -her with certain of her own traits--gayety, courage, tenderness, wit, a -love of drama--and then let her go her way. It is because of the -intimate personal quality of her heroine that Miss Cooke dedicated her -book “To Bambi, with thanks to her for being Herself! M. B. C.” - -The book is a marvel--an absolute marvel. It sold heavily and promptly, -that was to be expected; but the marvel consists not in the book’s -popularity but in the extraordinary enthusiasm it stirred in its -readers. Since no one who has read it seems to be able to avoid the use -of superlatives in speaking of it--certainly this writer isn’t--it might -be best to put aside any attempt at characterization. What follows shall -be--analysis! - -The first chapter takes the reader off his feet. Bambi, loving the -dreamer Jarvis though perhaps not very consciously loving him, sends for -a minister and has herself wedded to him, despite the absent-minded -objections of her father, the professor of mathematics. Jarvis needs -looking after. This perfectly implausible proceeding is made entirely -plausible--you swallow it whole and with immense relish--by just two -technical triumphs on Miss Cooke’s part. - -1. Everything is in dialogue. You are not asked to believe that the -Professor is one kind of a person, Bambi another, and Jarvis a third, -and all three eminently unlikely; you see them do this and that and you -hear them say so and so. Miss Cooke doesn’t ask you to believe _her_, -she asks you to believe your senses! - -2. The dialogue is witty--the wittiest--but there we go off on -superlatives again. The dialogue is witty but natural in the completest -sense of the word and the wit springs entirely from the situation. No -other wit is so good, as any dramatist will tell you. - -These two things are the key to the whole story and the key to the utter -amazement which overcomes the reader when he applies the test of -probability to it--after he has read it through. Of course the wonder of -that first chapter could not be entirely sustained through 366 pages, -but by the time Miss Cooke’s capital starting situation has lost its -sharpest edge the plot has reared its head! Oh, yes, there’s a plot; all -such a story as _Bambi_ will stand; a plot with adequate suspense and a -steady sweep toward a dénouement. For in a tale like _Bambi_ you must -not have too much plot; the chief interest is ever in the charming and -lovable heroine. - -But this sketch is all Bambi and none of it Marjorie Benton Cooke, of -whom Bambi is only a projection, in dotted lines, as a draughtsman would -say. Miss Cooke herself is the daughter of Joseph Henry Cooke and Jessie -(Benton) Cooke. She was born in Richmond, Indiana. In 1899 she received -the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In -the same year she began writing for the magazines. In fact her first -printed “novel” exists as a yellowed clipping in her mother’s scrapbook. -Underneath it is penned a memorandum: “Published the Sunday after -Marjorie received her degree.” It was a whimsical episode, the story of -a lost dime, divided into two “chapters,” and appeared in the Chicago -_Record-Herald_. It contained no promise of _Bambi_. - -“Marjorie and her doting parents,” as Mrs. Cooke once remarked, “thought -fame and fortune were hers to command.” They weren’t. She traveled a -long, hard road, writing scraps of humor and satire for newspapers and -magazines, concocting little stories and selling them. She was fifteen -years away from _Bambi_ when she started. But she had the gift for -dramatic recitation with which she later endowed that young woman. In -1902 she began touring the United States as a monologist. Dozens of her -monologues have been published but will not be found listed at the end -of this chapter. Miss Cooke would be the last to expect them to be. They -are interesting only as the preparation necessary to write _Bambi_, -particularly that first chapter. Miss Cooke has always been interested -in social questions, as any one who remembers Jarvis Jocelyn’s -experiences in New York will understand. She is a member of the Little -Room Club in Chicago, the Heterodoxy Club and the Women’s University -Club in New York. - -Her books, as distinguished from her printed monologue booklets, began -in 1903 with _Modern Monologues_, continued in 1905 with _Dramatic -Episodes_ and _Plays for Children_, marked time in 1907 with _More -Modern Monologues_ and budded with a novel, her first novel, in -1910--_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_. _Dr. David_ appeared in 1911; -and there were _To a Mother_, _The Twelfth Christian_, a dramatic poem, -and three one-act plays which were produced--all before _Bambi_. - -_And_ Miss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with -the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has -forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the -conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of -her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded--just a -manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she -would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F. -Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read -until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read -till seven, looked at the clock, and--went on reading. You can eat any -day, you know.... - -Later a telegram went forth: “_Bambi_ is ours. Love at first sight.” - -Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her -book; that’s why they are what they ought to be. And you are to picture -her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her -feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if -you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be -acquainted with Bambi when you call. - -What else? _Bambi_ was followed by _Cinderella Jane_ and that -interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter -without love on either side--they made a success of it and were rewarded -by becoming lovers--that tale was succeeded by _The Threshold_, in which -Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to -her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell, -employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his -17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by -Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story -in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the -like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on -the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well. - -If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious -subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people in _The -Threshold_, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock--which does -not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the -world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no -farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan -Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to write _The Threshold_ she knew, -as a good novelist does, exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to -find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about -the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t -she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to -run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive -answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally -misleading--so few of us really know what we think about anything in the -future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and -that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put -her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she -would come to believe about the things ahead. - -Miss Cooke’s _The Clutch of Circumstance_, on the other hand, is just a -good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots--but -based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of -whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is -guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy! - -Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the -wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said -in _The Threshold_ about Joan is the best thing to say about her author: -“The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, -even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil -inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.” - -I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, -because, for the readers of her books, the picture of her as she lived -is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of -one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, -1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie -Benton Cooke died. - - -BOOKS BY MARJORIE BENTON COOKE - -_Modern Monologues_, 1903. -_Dramatic Episodes_, 1905. -_Plays for Children_, 1905. -_More Modern Monologues_, 1907. -_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_, 1910. -_Dr. David_, 1911. -_Bambi_, 1914. -_The Dual Alliance_, 1915. -_Cinderella Jane_, 1917. -_The Threshold_, 1918. -_The Clutch of Circumstance_, 1918. -_The Cricket_, 1919. -_Married?_ 1921. - -_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. -McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by -Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is -published by George H. Doran Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XX - -GRACE S. RICHMOND - - -Why do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of -any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity -has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest--_On -Christmas Day in the Morning_, _On Christmas Day in the Evening_, and -_The Enlisting Wife_, for instances--sell most rapidly. Not the size; -perhaps it has something to do with the substance! - -No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her -contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest -feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at -the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we -ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for -us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She -is our emotional self--that part of self which is a common -possession--touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the -delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her -for affording it to us. - -These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the -people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom -repressed--the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is -an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may -give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but -which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know--the rest of us--full -well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful -exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come -away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the -essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most -people that does not change. - -Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated -is that in 1914--and several of her most successful books have appeared -since--she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the -million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier -stories; there are the readers of her work in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ -and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are -always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much -like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening -ripples;--no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to -know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose -publishers have a time to get her to be photographed! - -She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare -outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the -Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her -father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of _The Baptism of Fire_ and -_The World Lighted_. Grace was an only child. While she was still a -young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter -was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, -following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some -indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. -Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician -with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not -until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for -magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the -Thanksgiving number of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_. - -It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the -principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who -accepted it without delay. The story was called _The Flowing -Shoe-String_ and described the reformation, through love, of a -charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it -very well! She found herself in rather notable company--Mrs. A. D. T. -Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt -Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving -number. - -Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the -editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she -made her second appearance in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, in 1898, with -_A Silk-Lined Girl_. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company -had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater -Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the -table of contents. - -This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898 -Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular -contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by -when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has -had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the -_Journal’s_ readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which -became, in 1905, a book, _The Indifference of Juliet_. Juliet’s -indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of -marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with _The Indifference -of Juliet_ and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to -the _Journal’s_ readers were published between covers under the title -_With Juliet in England_. - -Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for -whom she is most widely known and thanked--Redfield Pepper Burns, the -generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane -impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. _Red Pepper Burns_ was -followed by _Mrs. Red Pepper_ and _Red Pepper’s Patients_. But hold -on--not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond -had given us the story of _The Second Violin_. In 1908 came _Around the -Corner in Gay Street_, in 1909 _A Court of Inquiry_; there were also the -two Christmas booklets--_On Christmas Day in the Morning_ (1908) and _On -Christmas Day in the Evening_ (1910). Between _Red Pepper Burns_ and -_Mrs. Red Pepper_ appeared _Strawberry Acres_ and a year after _Mrs. -Red Pepper_ was published _The Twenty-fourth of June_. - -But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs. -Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here -is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative -as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it. - -Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be -inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter -of _Red Pepper’s Patients_ Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist -who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his -Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of -the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The -Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be -bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the -unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner--they are all -graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. -Why quibble? - -Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From _The -Twenty-fourth of June_: - -“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled -bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my -life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost--I don’t know -what they cost--I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’ - -“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I -want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and -slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed.... - -“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my -dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again -in there?’” - -It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. -It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being -entirely unforced. - -In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because -she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a -better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared -in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. _Red -Pepper Burns_ was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper -Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the -Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate -little heart messages as _The Enlisting Wife_ and _The Whistling Mother_ -are just as successful. Take the opening of _The Enlisting Wife_: - -“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just -before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little -record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last -paragraph of a letter from her young husband. - -“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man -I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means -standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old -boyish love of ease and snug corners--then--well--time will prove me, -anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking -moment--and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife--even -though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married -us--how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting -comrade!--_O Judith!_’ - -“I don’t cry often--not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, -there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the -tears--happy ones--and I kissed the dear words again and again before I -tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and -night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how -‘absolutely’ I am your wife!” - -Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of -characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization -is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived -perfectly to set down _not_ the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke -Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body -and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and -write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. -Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are -habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection -to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our -emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the -unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are -emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond -and more like her. - - -BOOKS BY GRACE S. RICHMOND - -_The Indifference of Juliet_, 1905. -_With Juliet in England_, 1907. -_Round the Corner in Gay Street_, 1908. -_Red Pepper Burns_, 1910. -_Strawberry Acres_, 1911. -_Mrs. Red Pepper_, 1913. -_The Second Violin_, 1906. -_A Court of Inquiry_, 1909. -_On Christmas Day in the Morning_, 1908. -_On Christmas Day in the Evening_, 1910. -_The Twenty-fourth of June_, 1914. -_Under the Country Sky._ -_Under the Christmas Stars._ -_The Brown Study._ -_Red Pepper’s Patients_, 1917. -_The Whistling Mother_, 1917. -_The Enlisting Wife_, 1918. -_Brotherly House._ -_Red and Black_, 1919. -_Foursquare_, 1922. - -_The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the -rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXI - -WILLA SIBERT CATHER - - -Some novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their -best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show -steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last -is Willa Sibert Cather. - -She has written four novels. You pick up _Alexander’s Bridge_ and read -with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It -is--excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all -through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you -are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is -nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell -to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon -another book by the same author and start to read. - -Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as -your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather -better than a filled one). _O Pioneers!_ is in its way an epic of the -Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping -panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and -the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough -believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though -intensely satisfied with _O Pioneers!_ you never for a moment expect -more of her--perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would -be in any way reasonable. - -A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker -than _O Pioneers!_ as _O Pioneers!_ was thicker than _Alexander’s -Bridge_. It is called _The Song of the Lark_. You eye it speculatively. -You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are -halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again. - -_The Song of the Lark_ is a much bigger thing than her second novel in -every respect except one--it has not the same peculiar quality of -seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of -America in the period of that life. But wait--think a moment. Does not -this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the -whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not -thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead -toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting -with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea -Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the -fight--what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever -lived? - -From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger -than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable -wonder of the woman who could--and did--write them. But here no wonder -lies. At least, you may read the external record of Willa Sibert -Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains -her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through -this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any. - -“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of -Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts -were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone, -Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations. -When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled -on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State -where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the -tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families -in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or -twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians. - -“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind -the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school -near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She -had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements, -talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The -first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a -writer than any that came afterward. - -“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss -Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and -immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pittsburgh -_Leader_. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for -several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the -English department in the Allegheny High School. - -“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her -first book of verse, _April Twilights_, and her first book of short -stories, _The Troll Garden_. The latter book attracted a good deal of -attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906, -Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of -_McClure’s Magazine_. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was -managing editor of _McClure’s Magazine_, and during these four years did -no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry -Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel, _Alexander’s Bridge_, and a -novelette, _The Bohemian Girl_, both of which appeared serially in -_McClure’s Magazine_. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long -stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many -hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of -the Pueblo Indians. - -“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she -lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West. -This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of -articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles -of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of -Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.” - -Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to -frame a hypothesis to account for Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid -progress as a novelist. The material for _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of -the Lark_, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her -impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of _The Song of the Lark_ -which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred -Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in -these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her -own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if -we can find a clew to it there. - -“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used -to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her -baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable -state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than -they said--as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one -begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again--no -other adventure ever carries one quite so far.” - -Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions -acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration -never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and -emotional feeling--of heart and mind--which carried the girl _beyond_ -the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on -living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to -the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of -any or all of these things? Of course you do! - -Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to -put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into -her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied -her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward. - -“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,” -she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and -disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I -decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people -for whom I had a personal feeling. - -“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all -of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them -and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t -try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way; -you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, -don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story -that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it -or leave it.’ - -“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the -thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I -dedicated _O Pioneers!_ to her because I had talked over some of the -characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the -people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word -of mouth.” - -Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically -say that she had to depart from actual persons when she came to do her -good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay -bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled -over it let us supplement what she says. - -There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only -see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen -comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in -tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to -include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on -paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it -if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about -them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and -mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or, -if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on -paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time -has passed and we are calmer; until we can _recall_ in a warm, -remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently -for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash. - -Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as -to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the -artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other -persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but -not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations -of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is -the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have -undergone it before her. - -In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to -her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative -faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their -created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources -early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not -die in the middle of the creative task. - -We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it. - -“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been -collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new -since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has -been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that -touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before -you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the -true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it -is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that -I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which -excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’” - -Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the -warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose. - -Let us consider her four books. - -_Alexander’s Bridge_ might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has -only one fault, a certain cloudiness characteristic of finely-written -stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the -essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss -Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says: - -“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a -pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and -work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and -much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the -social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a -participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself -only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of -encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity -that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this -jargon!]. - -“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal -relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace -of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his -ideals do not. - -“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation -to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his -self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he -himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose -which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of -himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.” - -There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner -action of the novel. And the only fault with the novel, we repeat, is -that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be -necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss -Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley -Alexander. - -_O Pioneers!_ is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a -novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next -novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add, -of a very original gift--talent--genius; the degree of her endowment is -not precisely determinable even yet. In _O Pioneers!_ it is a woman who -dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much -kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with -sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers -left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed -soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the -family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work -well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies -her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her -brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother, -distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care -and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The -terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a -woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as -she would survive anything that life could do to her. - -The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character -which marks the true novelist, the resolute putting through of what -these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about. -That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable -but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that -will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need -not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may -for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why -cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes -it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s _O -Pioneers!_ doesn’t try to. - -The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic, -that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a -historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the -satisfaction of the reader is complete. - -_The Song of the Lark_ gains over _O Pioneers!_ in the first place by -its sheer bulk. _O Pioneers!_ was a series of scenes in a single but -changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author -had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But as _The -Song of the Lark_ is entirely centered about the development of a single -person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail; -more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the -innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out -what--_what_--it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must -have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least -mite of information. We must have everything about her from her -girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the -persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or -upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We -must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really -privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they -drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And -Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she -puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no -less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant -conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable -conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend. - -_My Antonia_ is a book to be put alongside _O Pioneers!_ It is less -epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful -depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns -about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their -surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short -stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy, -horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is -perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is -variously touched and amused--and always the book is engrossing. Such a -book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of -Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses -fiction. - -There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been -said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its -inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O -reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree -but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will -be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have -said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will -have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds -measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same -estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters -supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it. - - -BOOKS BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER - -_April Twilights_, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston. -_The Troll Garden_, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. -_Alexander’s Bridge_, 1912. -_O Pioneers!_ 1913. -_The Song of the Lark_, 1915. -_My Antonia_, 1918. -_Youth and the Bright Medusa_, 1920. -_One of Ours_, 1922. - -_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright -Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXII - -CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM - - -To write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written -twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s -offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham -has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to -convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how -capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight, -fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a -fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds -of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few -of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that -she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this -faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has -said of her book, _Jewel_: - -“I like _Jewel_ best. I think she is my high water mark. It is a -Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology -that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of second _Little -Lord Fauntleroy_, and besides, it wouldn’t be _Jewel_.” - -Which may be so but which does not hold true of _The Right Princess_. -There the identification of Frances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of -which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative. -Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an -unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and -worth the reader’s while as _The Opened Shutters_, from which the -terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent. - -The point we would make, then, the point that ought, in sheer honesty, -to be made at the very outset of any consideration of Mrs. Burnham’s -work, is her genuine and incontestable achievement as a straight-way, -out-and-out, talented story-teller, a pure and simple fictioneer, an -experienced and popular American novelist. That some of her novels have -probably done more to put Christian Science precepts before the world in -what the Scientist believes to be the true light than anything ever -written other than the church’s texts--that this is so may be granted. -But it is not a fact we have to concern ourselves with here. We concede -it and pass on. We pass on in either direction, going back to the -fourteen books which preceded _The Right Princess_ or forward to the -eight novels which have appeared since _The Leaven of Love_. They are -the bulk of Mrs. Burnham’s work. And yet--it is to be feared we shall -have to bestow most of our attention upon the six books between! They -represent Mrs. Burnham’s widest popularity and what is possibly her best -work judged strictly in literary aspects. But enough of this for the -present; it is time enough to cross bridges when we come to them. Let us -first get a glimpse of Mrs. Burnham herself. - -A tall woman, spare in build, with light hair, blue eyes and a merry -manner, a conversationalist with anecdotes, a manner of great -simplicity, serenity, calm pleasantness. She was the eldest daughter of -George F. Root, as popular a songwriter as this country has produced. -Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she has lived most of her life in -Chicago. She summers in Maine. Her education was in the public and in -private schools in Chicago, and at the New Church School, Waltham, -Massachusetts. Politically she is, or was, a Progressive; and at this -point we cannot do better than to quote her own words in the Chicago -_Record-Herald_ of November 24, 1912: - -“People who see the large, sunshiny hotel room in which I work, whose -bay windows command a wide expanse of lake, say that they no longer -wonder at the good cheer of my stories. If I ever had the blues I should -believe in the water cure. I have always believed in the ounce of -prevention. Indeed, I try it all summer up in Maine. - -“Bailey Island, my summer home, is only a small green hill in the superb -sweep of the Atlantic. My cottage stands eighty feet above the sea, and -there is nothing but water between me and Europe. It is great fun for a -woman who usually lives at a hotel to keep house three months of the -year. - -“But Bailey Island is not an inspiring place. I never work in summer. My -father always told me to let the water in the reservoir fill up then. -Besides, a brick wall is all the view I want when I am at work. Even -this dear Lake Michigan is almost too distracting at times. - -“Lake Michigan explains why I have not followed the tide of successful -writers to New York. I love Chicago, with all its soot and wind. I am -naturally optimistic, and therefore expect that within the next decade -the Illinois Central will be electrified. Then won’t this spot be a -winter paradise? - -“Nevertheless, it is tempting to use my island as a background for my -stories. In _The Inner Flame_ I have gone back to it again. Besides, the -Villa Chantecler is a real place--a henhouse cleared and renovated by an -enthusiastic young artist and given that clever name. The Chantecler -studio was too picturesque an incident not to become material. - -“However, very little of my material is taken from real life. It is -playing with fire to draw recognizable portraits of people; but I fancy -nearly all authors are quite aware that they are making composite -pictures of friends or acquaintances. For instance, the man who inspired -the character of Philip Sidney, the hero of _The Inner Flame_, is a -brother-in-law of John McCutcheon; while Edgar Fabian’s personality and -mannerisms are copied faithfully from another one of my friends whose -character is as different from Edgar’s as can be imagined. It is very -seldom that any individual appeals to me as material, but when he or she -does, I generally fall. Inasmuch as in all my books there is not one -villain, I should not think they would mind. - -“I have been asked whether I have a ‘method’ in writing. I -have--necessarily. Genius has inspirations. It writes in the night, or -walking in the field, and burns cords of cigarettes. Mere talent must -be persistent and industrious, and can often forego cigarettes. - -“When I was a very young girl I read something Miss Mulock said apropos -of writing which made a deep impression. It was this: ‘An author should -go to his desk as regularly as a carpenter to his bench, and with as -little thought of inspiration.’ I point to my twenty novels as a proof -that I have heeded that direction; for if any one doubts the manual -labor of book writing let him pick up any story and copy a chapter from -it in long hand. I have averaged one novel a year, yet my maximum period -of daily work is three morning hours. - -“If a young person aspiring to print should ask me whether there is a -definite way to begin, I should tell him to start by catching a big -brother. Preferably his own, for any one else’s might be a hindrance. -Mine is Frederick W. Root, ex-president of the Literary Club, Cliff -Dweller, Little Roomer, and in many other respects an orthodox -Chicagoan. He has been my mascot ever since the day when he started on -the labor--and hard labor it was--of drawing a young sister away from -the music which was her chief interest and starting her at story -writing. You know I am one of the Roots. My father, George F. Root, was -known chiefly by his war songs, _Tramp, Tramp, Tramp_ and _The Battle -Cry of Freedom_ and so on, but every home in the land knows his simple, -melodious songs, and I should like to feel that the vitality in my -unpretentious stories is akin to the spontaneous harmony that flowed for -fifty happy years from his clear mind. - -“I suppose the reason I did not wish to write was that music satisfied -me. My brother persisted against my indifference for a year. At last we -were both exasperated. He shut me into a room with him one day, and -opening a very business-like looking knife, declared with a fearful -scowl that I should not leave that room alive unless I promised to try -faithfully to write a story. I laughed a little and wept a little, and -at last promised to show him that I couldn’t do it. - -“Some one asked him once in my presence why he was so certain that I -could write. He replied: ‘Oh, she has a picturesque way of telling -things and isn’t too much hampered by the truth.’ I forgive him even -such aspersions. He is an example of what ‘a heart at leisure from -itself’ can do for another. I owe him everything; above all the blessed -assurance which sometimes reaches me that my stories help others. - -“It is wonderful that I met no obstacles in starting. With no conscious -preparation I was like a ship ready to be launched. Fred pushed me off -into deep water. - -“I enjoy my work, but not quite in the carefree way I used to enjoy it. -With each new book now I am conscious of some anxiety not to disappoint -my large parish; not to go backward. Both in books and plays I believe -the destructive is doomed. In this world there exists only one rose -without a thorn. There are many larger, more alluring, more fragrant, -but there is only one thornless rose; it is work that you love.” - -Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her -first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not -deter her. A poem sent to _Wide Awake_ was her first accepted work. _No -Gentlemen_ was her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also -was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl -lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when -the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was -after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a -member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms -Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her -books, was _The Right Princess_, and when, after the usual hitches, it -was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in -1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will -not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of -seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t -imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh, -your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first--my very -first--villain lives in that little play.” - -To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go -first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known” -as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter -of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has -failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two -summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a -summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she -explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled -structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but covered -with grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The -Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but -a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may -see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to -live there is related, with changes of names, in her novel _Dr. -Latimer_. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly in _The Opened -Shutters_, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance -in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last -chapter of _The Opened Shutters_? - -“She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught -sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The -sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by, -and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia -Lacey: - -“‘You said Love would open the shutters, and it has.’” The incident is -charged with a special significance in the story. It appears that when -the real mill disappeared a coincidence was noted, the sort of thing -that many persons prefer to think no coincidence at all. We quote from -the Portland _Evening Express_ of July 31, 1909: - -“It seems that one day last summer Captain Morrill of the Harpswell -Steamboat Company, who is not too fond of story reading, picked up _The -Opened Shutters_ to read. His wife in telling about it to Mrs. Burnham -said that he read the story far into the night, not being willing to put -it down till he had read the last word. The next day when he was sailing -down the bay, his attention was suddenly directed to the old Tide Mill. -He looked at it long and steadily. Could it be? Were his eyes deceiving -him? Had he read so late and thought so deeply on the story that things -did not look quite natural to him? He looked at the old mill again. Yes, -it was sinking into the sea--and the shutters were wide open! The sun, -too, was shining through. For years these old shutters had not let in a -rift of light; but now they were aflood with it.” - -Those who do not hug the supernatural are at liberty to suppose that the -strain of settling and sinking unbarred and flung open the shutters. Of -Captain Morrill it may be noted that his presence of mind and bravery -several years earlier had saved the lives of Mrs. Burnham and other -passengers in a collision between the steamboat Sebascodegan and a -revenue cutter. But for him _The Opened Shutters_ would never have been -written. - -The beginning of this capital story was not with the Tide Mill, however, -but with the name Thinkright Johnson. Like certain persons whose -appearance before Mrs. Burnham’s mind’s eye has compelled her to write -about them, this New Englandish appellation gave birth to a book. -Thinkright Johnson--Thinkright Johnson; the name haunted Mrs. Burnham -for days and weeks, “till I knew that the only way I could have any -peace was to write something about him.” - -It was the same way with Jewel. She kept coming before her author. “She -is the exact type of one of my little nieces, in character, looks, and -even to the things that she says. In some way I felt compelled to write -about her.” - -On the other hand the story of _The Right Princess_ came to Mrs. Burnham -one evening when she was all dressed for the theater. “As I stood in my -room, all ready to go, it began to come to me. I drew off one of my -gloves and sat down to my desk just to jot down a few of the ideas; but -the whole thing grew so rapidly in my mind that I did not realize -anything in the world about me again, till I found myself removing one -of my shoes many hours later. - -“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But, -ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me. -Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to -me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters -which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let -them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of -course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print, -coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot. - -“My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me -perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my -first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people -hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to -me. - -“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, -and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he -particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to -take it out.” - -Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr -McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and -George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also. - -It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s -Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group -of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a -common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of -ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of _The -Right Princess_ (1902), _Jewel_ (1903) and _The Leaven of Love_ (1908). -_The Opened Shutters_ (1906) is free from the special terminology of the -Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the -character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey. - -_Heart’s Haven_ (1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a -village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to -whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding -and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story -he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring -her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told -and very happily worked out. - -Though with _The Leaven of Love_ Mrs. Burnham has given over writing -Christian Science novels the underlying ideas of her work, which were -there before she wrote _The Right Princess_, which were there when she -wrote _Dr. Latimer_, remain unaltered and always expressed. These ideas -are those of peaceful and happy existences, of the validity of mental -experiences, of the influence of intellectual environment. Thus as -lately as 1916, in _Instead of the Thorn_, she gives us the story of a -Chicago girl brought up in luxury, whose father is ruined in -circumstances that seem to her to involve his business associate. The -fact that this young man is in love with the girl sets up the -complication, or struggle, necessary to make a novel. The girl is -finally persuaded to go to New England for rest, and Mrs. Burnham -directs the reader’s attention less to the solution of certain external -problems than to the way in which simple, quiet village life restores -the heroine’s mental poise and happiness. As for the proof that Mrs. -Burnham’s faith was antecedent to the first of her Christian Science -novels what clearer evidence need be asked than Helen Ivison’s -characterization of Dr. Latimer in the story, _Dr. Latimer_? - -“The secret of his influence over people is only that absolute trust in -God which he has learned somehow in life’s school. He puts self out of -the way more than any one we ever knew, and so a power shines through -him which is not of this world, and people, when they come near him, -feel all that is morally best in them being drawn forward, and are -conscious of crowding out of sight all that they would be ashamed to -have come to his notice.” - -Nothing better illustrates the quality of Mrs. Burnham’s humor--a humor -that makes her stories palatable reading even where the reader disagrees -violently with the ideas set forth--than the chapters in _Jewel_ where -Jewel is suffering from what those about her agree to be fever and sore -throat. Dr. Ballard has prepared medicine in a glass of water. Jewel is -to take a couple of spoonfuls of the “water” to satisfy Mrs. Forbes. -Instead she drinks heavily from an unmedicated pitcherful. By evening -she is much better. Then does the doctor, who thinks he has tricked -Jewel by persuading her to trick the housekeeper, learn that he has been -fooled instead. - -“‘Didn’t you drink any of the water?’ asked Dr. Ballard at last. - -“‘Yes, out of the pitcher.’ - -“‘Why not out of the glass?’ - -“‘It didn’t look enough. I was so thirsty.’ - -“Mr. Evringham finally found voice. - -“‘Jewel, why didn’t you obey the doctor?’ ... - -“Jewel thought a minute. - -“‘He said it wasn’t medicine, so what was the use?’ she asked. - -“Mr. Evringham, seeming to find an answer to this difficult, bit the end -of his mustache.” - -Equally amusing, equally good as humor, is Jewel’s behavior with respect -to the overshoes which she is ordered to wear. At first she wears them -regardless. Then she is told to wear them only when it rains. A rainy -day dawns. Grandfather Evringham comes downstairs in bad humor. -“‘Beastly weather.’” Jewel inquires: - -“‘But the flowers and trees want a drink, don’t they?’ - -“‘’M. I suppose so.’ - -“‘And the brook will be prettier than ever.’ - -“‘’M. See that you keep out of it.’ - -“‘Yes, I will, grandpa; and I thought the first thing this morning, I’ll -wear my rubbers all day. I was so afraid I might forget I put them right -on to make sure.’” - -Recovering shortly Mr. Evringham observes: - -“‘The house doesn’t leak anywhere. I think it will be safe for you to -take them off until after breakfast.’” - -Now this is excellent humorous writing and Mrs. Burnham’s novels are -filled with it, even her Christian Science novels, perhaps those -particularly; it is so good simply because she has most thoroughly -assimilated her material before starting to write. How many writers more -famous than she, more gifted, possibly, from a critical standpoint, -would have made a sorry failure of such books as _Jewel_ and _The Right -Princess_ we don’t care to think. But you may see the disaster any day -in the case of writers like Winston Churchill, engrossed by certain -political and ethical ideals, and Ernest Poole, whose fine novel _The -Harbor_ failed of the highest rank simply because he had not assimilated -the sociological ideas which he wished to present through his -characters. It is continually happening, this effort of the good artist -to handle material he has not mastered; and as surely as he essays the -task he leaves his place as a novelist to mount the pulpit of the -preacher, the rostrum of the reformer, the soapbox of the agitator--and -a fine story is spoiled beyond all salvaging. - -But when Mrs. Burnham writes of Christian Science beliefs, ideas and -mental attitudes she is not writing primarily to lay those things before -the reader. She is writing to tell a story. These are the elements of -her story. From them she weaves her web of fancy but they are the colors -and not the pattern. - -In the depiction of character, notably the strongly accentuated -characters of New England, Mrs. Burnham is unfailingly and admirably -successful. _The Opened Shutters_ lends itself from the start to the -happy illustration of this faculty. Who more accurately observed and -justly reported than Miss Lacey, Judge Trent and John Dunham? Miss Lacey -meets the judge’s housekeeper, old Hannah, and exclaims: - -“‘I just met Judge Trent, Hannah. Dear me, can’t you brush that hat of -his a little? It looks for all the world like a black cat that has just -caught sight of a mastiff.’” - -Martha Lacey’s attitude toward Judge Trent is summed up in the refrain -continually sounding at the back of her head: - -“‘If I’d married him, he’”--would have done so and so or wouldn’t have -done something else. No two ways about that! The consciousness of this -stern and immutable fact is what makes Judge Trent’s life one long -sensation of relief at having been refused. - -“The judge softly closed the door behind her. ‘There, but for the grace -of God,’ he murmured devoutly, ‘goes Mrs. Calvin Trent.’ Then he -returned to his desk, put on his hat, and sat down at his work.” - -Plots? There are hundreds of writers who can build twenty-story plots -with express elevator service and private subway stations. There aren’t -so many who can see people clearly and see them whole and set them down -brightly on paper. Mrs. Burnham’s novels will be widely read and enjoyed -for so long as she writes them and afterward for many a day. - - -BOOKS BY CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM - -_The Quest Flower._ -_Flutterfly._ -_The Golden Dog._ -_No Gentlemen_, 1882. -_A Sane Lunatic_, 1883. -_Dearly Bought_, 1884. -_Next Door_, 1885. -_Young Maids and Old_, 1886. -_The Mistress of Beech Knoll_, 1887. -_Miss Bagg’s Secretary_, 1892. -_Dr. Latimer_, 1893. -_Miss Archer Archer_, 1894. -_Sweet Clover, a Romance of the White City_, 1894 -_The Wise Woman_, 1895. -_A Great Love_, 1898. -_A West Point Wooing and Other Stories_, 1899. -_Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip_, 1901. -_The Right Princess_, 1902. -_Jewel: a Chapter in Her Life_, 1903. -_Jewel’s Story Book_, 1904. -_The Opened Shutters_, 1906. -_The Leaven of Love_, 1908. -_Clever Betsy_, 1910. -_The Inner Flame_, 1912. -_The Right Track_, 1914. -_Instead of the Thorn_, 1916. -_Heart’s Haven_, 1918. - -_All of Mrs. Burnham’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, -Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXIII - -DEMETRA VAKA - - -It is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing -house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a -folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be -matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of -these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs. -Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following -data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could -conscientiously praise: - -_Name in full_: Demetra Kenneth Brown. - -_Chief occupation or profession_: Wife. - -_Residence & address_: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York. - -_Place of birth_: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora. - -_Date of birth_: 1877. - -_Education, when and where received, in detail_: First privately. Then -at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne. -One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various -schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as -frivolous women use garments--throwing away when not becoming. - -_Date of marriage_: 1904, April 21. - -_Military, political and civic record_: No records whatever except of -bad temper. - -_Director or trustee of the following educational or public -institutions_: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of -bringing up my husband. - -_Politics_: For the best man who is on the ticket. - -_Religious denomination_: Orthodox Greek. - -_Professional associations, learned and technical societies, -decorations, etc._: None. - -_Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if -holder of any office, so state)_: Have not any money to spare. - -_Social clubs_: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis -clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more -room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth. - -_Business or professional record_: On the editorial staff of Greek -newspaper _Atlantis_ for about six months in New York City. French -teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903. -Writer since 1904. - -_Office or position occupied by you_: Wife. - -_Title of (first) book_: First Secretary. - -_Year first published_: 1907. - -_Publisher_: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct). - - * * * * * - -This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several -points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows. - -Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in Constantinople for -more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials. -Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch, -therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able -to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But -she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions -revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged -marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home, -coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here, -however, she was soon left to shift for herself. - -Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor -romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of -_Atlantis_ she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her -that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time -she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a -private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of -the French department of the school. - -In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey. -Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no -intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations -from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women, -and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered -Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets. -Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she saw -and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, _Haremlik_, which means -“the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events: - -Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for -long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at -last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary -if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged -to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after -her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience -while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would -write. - -_Haremlik_ was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression. -There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch -translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs. -Brown’s later book, _A Child of the Orient_, which is the tale of the -author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl -with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the _Arabian Nights_ -fills the pages of _Haremlik_ and _A Child of the Orient_. The final -chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of -America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as -different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens. - -Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional -character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is, -though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love -for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty clearly disclosed in -the opening chapter of _Haremlik_. And so when the European War had -passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had -developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a -struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor, -Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the -leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies--at least -endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as -those entered upon with Serbia. - -Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its -quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet -it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, -the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had -access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French -she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed -not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. -Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had -done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, _In the Heart of -German Intrigue_, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the -mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of -interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what -Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to -do. - -Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her -autobiographical books such as _A Child of the Orient_ and _Haremlik_ -are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has -to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a -novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial -offering, _The First Secretary_. _The Duke’s Price_, written with her -husband; _Finella in Fairyland_, _In the Shadow of Islam_, and _The -Grasp of the Sultan_, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are -all hers, as well as _The Heart of the Balkans_. Of all these _The Grasp -of the Sultan_, which received serial publication and sold well even -before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting -and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place. - -The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents -Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in -English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to -Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who -has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The -youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a -beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, -who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son -away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and -obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five -years. - -This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in -love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little -Prince Bayazet. - -The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine -control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing -about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s -thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could -have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of -study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred -as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive -“documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite -impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose -ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, -too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical -accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a -hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for -the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this -effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in -her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth -is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will -permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the -East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used -to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so -long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the -chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca! - - -BOOKS BY DEMETRA VAKA - -_The First Secretary_, 1907. -_Haremlik_, 1909. -_The Duke’s Price_, 1910. -_Finella in Fairyland_, 1910. -_In the Shadow of Islam_, 1911. -_A Child of the Orient_, 1914. -_The Grasp of the Sultan_, 1916. -_The Heart of the Balkans_, 1917. -_In the Heart of German Intrigue_, 1918. - -_Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, -Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXIV - -EDNA FERBER - - -The most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in -Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first -novel in the wastebasket whence, like Kipling’s _Recessional_, it was -retrieved by another. No, no! the most interesting thing about Edna -Ferber is that she’s a superb short story writer, one of the best in -America, one of the dozen best. - -You are all wrong. The supremely interesting fact about Edna Ferber is -this: She invented the Tired Business Woman. - -When writing about Miss Ferber why be dull? Why go in for the higher -criticism? As for the lower criticism, we hope we are above it. -Certainly _she_ is. - -To get back to name, dates, etc.: Chicago, Des Moines and Appleton, -Wisconsin, all have a stake in Miss Ferber’s success. Kalamazoo doesn’t -vociferate. It doesn’t have to, for she was born there and though seven -cities claimed Homer dead it will be no use for seven or eight or six -places to claim Edna Ferber living. Kalamazoo will see to that; -Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she made her debut--the only debut that’s -really worth making--on August 15, 1887. That is why we shall speak of -her very respectfully. She is a month older than we are and a month is -everything. - -The daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia (Neuman) Ferber. Educated -in the public and high schools of--alas for Kalamazoo!--Appleton, -Wisconsin. At seventeen she became a reporter on the Appleton _Daily -Crescent_--“the youngest real reporter in the world.” She has it on us. -We were almost nineteen when--but never mind. Appleton, we hear, soon -became too small for Miss Ferber. Appletons have a way of doing that, or -isn’t it rather that the Edna Ferbers have a way of growing too big for -the Appletons? Anyway, Miss Ferber went to Milwaukee and then to a big -Chicago daily, the _Tribune_, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on -the _Journal_. _Dawn O’Hara_, her first book, was written in the time -she could spare from newspaper work. After it was completed she did not -like it. It was her mother who rescued the manuscript from the -wastebasket and sent it to a publisher, the same person mentioned in the -dedication of the novel: “To my dear mother who frequently interrupts -and to my sister Fannie who says ‘Sh-sh-sh!’ outside my door.” - -The best piece of work Mrs. Ferber ever did! The book took publisher and -public by storm. It came out in 1911 and in the same year the new -American author attained the dignity of twenty-four years. Our copy of -_Dawn O’Hara_ is marked “eighth edition,” but as it is a reprinted copy -that may understate, or rather under-indicate, the book’s success. A few -thousands one way or another hardly matters among so many thousands of -copies sold! - -Without pressing the autobiographical idea too hard it is perfectly -evident that much of the background of _Dawn O’Hara_ is from Miss -Ferber’s own experience, notably the settings in Milwaukee. How she -could ever have been so dissatisfied with her story as to discard it -utterly any present-day reader will be puzzled to imagine. It is -extremely well told. It is full of the perfect human--humorously -human--quality which lifts so many of Miss Ferber’s short stories into -high place. Take this passage: - -“The Whalens live just around the corner. The Whalens are omniscient. -They have a system of news gathering which would make the efforts of a -New York daily appear antiquated. They know that Jenny Laffin feeds the -family on soup meat and oatmeal when Mr. Laffin is on the road; they -know that Mrs. Pearson only shakes out her rugs once in four weeks; they -can tell you the number of times a week that Sam Dempster comes home -drunk; they know that the Merkles never have cream with their coffee -because little Lizzie Merkle goes to the creamery every day with just -one pail and three cents; they gloat over the knowledge that Professor -Grimes, who is a married man, is sweet on Gertie Ashe, who teaches -second reader in his school; they can tell you where Mrs. Black got her -seal coat, and her husband only earning two thousand a year; they know -who is going to run for mayor, and how long poor Angela Sims has to -live, and what Guy Donnelly said to Min when he asked her to marry him. - -“The three Whalens--mother and daughters--hunt in a group. They send -meaning glances to one another across the room, and at parties they get -together and exchange bulletins in a corner. On passing the Whalen house -one is uncomfortably aware of shadowy forms lurking in the windows, and -of parlor curtains that are agitated for no apparent cause.” - -Beautiful! Gardiner of Harvard could have turned it inside out for you -and have shown you just where Miss Ferber impinged on your sensations -and how and to what end.... But the thing shows the facility of her best -work. Are the Whalens important to the story of _Dawn O’Hara_? They are -not. They are merely figures on the canvas, amusing but unimportant -people, no more than “brushed in” but brushed in with a firmness of -touch, a fidelity of detail, a humorous artist eye that is, as we say, -“taking” or “fetching” and wholly delightful. - -Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to -chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except -the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss -Ferber’s is _not_ a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The -T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She -does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important -business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home -old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, _not_ bring them home to -dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or -a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of -making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their -living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit for this, that she -has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the -self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A -woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything -else. Read, or re-read, _Emma McChesney & Co._ with this in a corner of -your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have -finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose -impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of -Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular -demonstration of the play. - -Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the -stories contained in her latest book, _Cheerful--By Request_ (1918) and -perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called _The Gay Old -Dog_. At thirty-one she has her best years--as literary records -go--before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at -this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything -she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that -month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves! - - -BOOKS BY EDNA FERBER - -_Dawn O’Hara_, 1911. -_Buttered Side Down_, 1912. -_Roast Beef Medium_, 1913. -_Personality Plus_, 1914. -_Emma McChesney & Co._, 1915. -_Fanny Herself_, 1917. -_Cheerful--By Request_, 1918. -_Half Portions_, 1920. -_$1200 a Year_, 1920. -_The Girls_, 1921. -_Gigolo_, 1922. - -_First six books published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York; the -others by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXV - -DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER - - -Mrs. Fisher is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say -nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s -work does that. No, because it does not speak sufficiently for her. - -You are asked here and now to think of her not as a novelist but as a -woman. For as a novelist we could say of her only the obvious fact, that -she is a top-notcher judged by any and every standard. The woman who -could write _The Squirrel-Cage_ does not need any critical tests applied -to determine the worth and genuineness of her work, nor the sincerity of -it. What she does need, or rather, what her readers and all readers -need, is a reminder of her rôle as teacher, helper, friend. She is one -of those fine people whose work makes the plain word “service” a shining -and symbolic thing. “Service” is no longer a word but a ritual and a -liturgy. - -We shall give an outline of her life but as the friend who prepared it -for us says in a letter enclosing it: “It does not do justice to her -very useful war work.” This letter further says, with simple truth: - -“She has been one who has not broken down under the strain but has gone -on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running, almost entirely -alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle, editing a magazine for -them, running the presses, often with her own hands, getting books -written for them; all the time looking out for refugees and personal -cases that came under her attention; caring for children from the -evacuated portions of France, organizing work for them; then she dropped -all that and ran the camp on the edge of the war zone where her husband -was stationed to train the young ambulance workers; and while there she -started any number of important things--reading rooms, etc. Then she -went back to her work in Paris. Just now she is at the base of the -Pyrenees, organizing a Red Cross hospital for children from the -evacuated portions. - -“All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is -reflected in her _Home Fires in France_, just published this fall. It is -just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been -written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no -heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and -some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life -together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct -what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.” - -It and the deeds back of it. When you read _Home Fires in France_ you -will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed: - -“If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it -selling 100,000 copies at once.” - -With _The Squirrel-Cage_, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a -novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, _A Montessori -Mother_ (1913) and _Mothers and Children_ (1914), and then the teacher -resumed the rôle of storyteller with _The Bent Twig_. Before _The -Squirrel-Cage_ Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks. -After it she was an important figure in American fiction. - -Dorothy Canfield Fisher is thirty-eight years old, a bachelor of -philosophy and a doctor of philosophy, mistress of six languages, author -of twelve books, mother of two children. She and her husband, John -Redwood Fisher, captain of a Columbia football team, himself a critic -and writer, divided their time before the war between a farm near a -little Vermont village and occasional excursions to New York, Rome or -some other metropolis. In 1915, Mr. Fisher joined the ambulance service -and went to France. Mrs. Fisher was at work on _Understood Betsy_, but -as soon as that was finished she followed her husband to Paris with her -children. Since then she has been absorbed in war relief work which has -ranged from running an establishment that prints books for soldiers -blinded in battle to managing five peasant women cooks and buying -supplies for a large training camp for ambulance drivers. Mr. Fisher is -now a first lieutenant in the United States Army in France. - -Mrs. Fisher was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was president -of the University of Kansas. As a high school girl in Lawrence she made -friends with an army officer on the staff of a nearby war college. He -taught her to ride horseback and introduced her to his hobby, higher -mathematics. This friendship has lately been resumed in France. The -young army officer is now General John J. Pershing. - -Dorothea Frances Canfield, or Dorothy Canfield, became an undergraduate -in Ohio State University, of which her father (James Hulme Canfield) was -president at that time. Her degree of bachelor of philosophy came from -Ohio State University. When Mr. Canfield moved to New York to be -librarian at Columbia University his daughter took up postgraduate work -there, specializing in the Romance languages, and won her degree of -doctor of philosophy. For three years, from 1902 to 1905, she was -secretary of the Horace Mann School. Her associates all her life have -been cosmopolitan in the proper sense of that word. Her mother, Flavia -(Camp) Canfield, is an artist of some attainment and with her Dorothy -Canfield spent a good deal of her life abroad. The result--one -result--was friends of all nationalities living pretty much all over the -world. Mrs. Fisher is consequently a person of broad sympathies, but the -predominant quality in her seems to be a clear-headed, hearty New -England Americanism. At one time or another she has picked up a good -knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. French she -acquired as a child tumbling about in the Paris studio of her mother. -Now her children are learning their French in Paris. - -After their marriage in 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher left New York and went -hunting for a working and living place far away from the city. On the -side of one of the Green Mountains, near the little village of -Arlington, Vermont, they found a fair approximation of what they were -after. The old house already on the farm they made over to suit their -needs and wishes. A spring branch on the mountain side was boxed up and -the water piped down to the house. An electric lighting plant was -installed. A study entirely separate from the house was built. Mr. and -Mrs. Fisher make no effort to have the farm cultivated. That is, they -didn’t in the good--or bad--old days before the war. They were on it to -live and work, but not to bury themselves in agricultural details. The -nearest approach to tilling the soil was the garden, the re-foresting of -the mountain side with baby pine trees, and the rejuvenation of an -ancient saw mill to work up the scrub timber. - -Arlington is “in no sense a literary rural community.” The village has -only a few hundred people in it, is two miles away from the Fisher farm, -and its post-office has few manuscripts to handle either way. In -1911-12, for variety, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went to Rome for the winter. -It was there that she made the acquaintance of Madame Montessori. An -American publisher was having trouble with the translation of Madame -Montessori’s book about her pedagogical system. Knowing that Mrs. Fisher -was an excellent Italian scholar and that she was already on the ground, -the publisher arranged for her assistance with the translation. Almost -every day of that winter Mrs. Fisher was at the Casa di Bambini -(Children’s House) looking after the translation and helping to -entertain and to explain the Montessori system to commissions sent from -England, France and other European countries. The direct result of that -winter was Mrs. Fisher’s _A Montessori Mother_, a simplification and -adaptation, in her delightfully easy and half-humorous style, of the -Italian system to the needs of American mothers. Besides being published -in the United States, Canada, England and India this book has been -translated into five foreign languages. - -Mrs. Fisher is now one of five members of the State School Board for -Vermont, the first woman to be on the State Board of Education in -Vermont. This is in line with her ablest work, which has been in -training children and adolescents. - - -BOOKS BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER - -_Corneille and Racine in England_, 1904. -_English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor -G. R. Carpenter)_, 1906. -_What Shall We Do Now?_ 1906. -_Gunhild_, 1907. -_The Squirrel-Cage_, 1912. -_A Montessori Mother_, 1913. -_Mothers and Children_, 1914. -_The Bent Twig_, 1915. -_Hillsboro People_, 1916. -_The Real Motive_, 1917. -_Understood Betsy_, 1917. -_Home Fires in France_, 1918. -_The Day of Glory_, 1919. -_The Brimming Cup_, 1921. -_Rough-Hewn_, 1922. - -_First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by -Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXVI - -AMELIA E. BARR - - -On March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor -of _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, of printing what -is certainly the best account extant of Amelia E. Barr within a -reasonable length. Although the article was unsigned it was the work of -Mr. A. Elwood Corning, who had been a neighbor of Mrs. Barr at Richmond -Hill, Long Island, New York. It was based upon a personal visit and -interview. This chapter is really nothing more than a reprint of Mr. -Corning’s article with a few changes, particularly those necessitated by -Mrs. Barr’s death on March 10, 1919, at her Richmond Hill home. To Mr. -Corning, then, the credit of this chapter. - -Amelia E. Barr struck the popular taste more than thirty years ago with -her _Bow of Orange Ribbon_. She was one of the most prolific of -present-day writers of fiction. Her last completed novel, _The Paper -Cap_, published in the fall of 1918, brought the number of her books up -to over seventy, and this does not include hundreds of short stories, a -poem a week for _fourteen years_, written for Bonner’s _Ledger_, or the -numerous newspaper articles, essays and verses of the first fourteen -years of her literary life. - -On March 29, 1918, Mrs. Barr entered her eighty-eighth year. In the -preceding twelve months she had published three books, and shortly -before her eighty-seventh birthday (or the birthday which made her -eighty-seven years old!) she completed a fourth in manuscript! This was -_The Paper Cap_, the scenes of which are laid in Yorkshire, England, -where the novelist spent a part of her childhood. Mrs. Barr thought it -one of the best stories she had written. The paper cap of the title is -that of the workingman and the story centers around his fight for the -suffrage. It was really a contest between the hand loom and the power -loom. - -It was about 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Corning reached Mrs. Barr’s -study on the visit which preceded the preparation of his article. Mrs. -Barr had been writing since 7 that morning, with only a brief -intermission for luncheon, and was not feeling, she declared, so well as -usual. “This is one of mamma’s blue Mondays,” said her daughter. But -after she had begun to discuss current events, some incidents of her -early life in Texas and above all the war Mrs. Barr became animated. She -was an interesting and enthusiastic talker with positive views, a power -of unusually apt expression and a mind keenly alert. Convinced of a -fact, she uttered it with passionate force. - -On this particular afternoon the manuscript of _The Paper Cap_ was lying -on her writing table. “It will be done to-morrow,” she said with the -spirit of one who looks upon the completion of a work which has required -much thought and painstaking labor. She pushed the manuscript toward Mr. -Corning; it was as free of corrections and interpolations as if it had -been freshly copied from a former draft. Mrs. Barr seldom changed what -she first wrote and always used sheets of yellow paper, finding this -tint more restful to her eyes than white. - -When weary of building stories she handed the manuscript over to a -stenographer to be typewritten. Mrs. Barr wrote with a lead pencil. -Going to a drawer she brought out a box full of old pencil stubs, some -of which dated back to the days when she was writing _The Bow of Orange -Ribbon_. A few years ago six or seven of these stubs were given to as -many friends, who had them tipped with gold and made into shawl pins. - -In personal appearance and dress Mrs. Barr was typically English. She -had a large face and marvelous physique, was rapid of movement and lithe -of step. A flowing gown of some delicate shade was usually worn loosely -over a lace petticoat, and a beribboned cap of lace and rosebuds or -sometimes cowslips rested becomingly on her silvery hair. - -But the most striking characteristic of this remarkable woman was the -retention of so much youthful vigor and optimism, which she attributed -to her English ancestry. Born at Ulverton, Lancashire, England, March -29, 1831, Amelia Barr was descended from a long line of Saxon forebears, -of whom the men for generations had been either seamen or preachers of -the Gospel. Her father, the Rev. Dr. William Henry Huddleston, was a -scholar and a preacher of eloquence. The child’s early education was -largely under his supervision. As he was a regular contributor to -English reviews, the little daughter was brought up in a literary -environment. - -Before she was six she is said to have known intimately the tales of the -_Arabian Nights_, and nothing pleased her more in those days than to be -the recipient of a new book, a pleasure seldom afforded her. She would -often accompany her father on his preaching itineraries through the -fishing villages and thus became a lover of the sea, from which she -doubtless formed impressions which have disclosed themselves in her -fiction. - -At eighteen she was sent to a Free Kirk seminary in Glasgow, where she -remained until her marriage to Robert Barr in July, 1850. For three -years the young couple lived in Scotland. Here Mrs. Barr made the -acquaintance of Henry Ward Beecher, who years later was able to help her -begin her career as a writer. - -Failure in business compelled the Barrs to come to America. They first -came to New York, where the future novelist saw for the first time to -her great delight ready-made dresses and oranges, a fruit not easily -procurable in the north of England or Scotland. - -The Barrs with their two little daughters soon went West, locating in -Chicago. After a time misfortune drove them South. They went first to -Austin, later to Galveston, Texas. The history of these eventful and -sorrowful years is told in Mrs. Barr’s autobiography, _The Red Leaves of -a Human Heart_. - -In Austin success was sandwiched in with failure, disappointments and -heartaches. In those early days on the frontier there was a great -scarcity of many things which went to make up home life. When Mrs. Barr -came to America she had been told that she was going into a desolate and -savage country in which there were none of the comforts of life and -where none could be obtained. So she brought with her a great assortment -of useful articles, such as needles, tape, sewing cotton (linens, silks, -etc.). Finding that they had more than they wanted of such things, the -Barrs traded some of them for tea and other staple articles of food. - -Despite vicissitudes Mrs. Barr never neglected her reading or the daily -instruction of her children. The noon hour was reserved for study and at -that time no one was permitted to disturb her. She could be seen daily -sitting with a young baby on her lap by the open door of her log house -partaking of the noonday meal and reading at the same time. In all, Mrs. -Barr had fifteen children. Three daughters are now living, one the wife -of Kirk Munro, the popular writer for boys. - -In spite of her large family Mrs. Barr found time to accomplish things -outside household duties. During the Civil War, for example, articles of -amusement were few. One was put to great inconvenience in securing -games. So Mrs. Barr, an enthusiastic whist player, painted a pack of -cards, which were to those who remember them a most real counterpart of -an original set. - -At the close of the war the Barrs moved to Galveston, and there, in -1867, Mrs. Barr experienced the overwhelming sorrow of her life. Yellow -fever entered her home. The whole family was stricken, and before Mrs. -Barr herself had fully recovered she suffered the loss of her husband -and three little sons. - -After endeavoring to support herself and three daughters in the South -she came with them to New York in the fall of 1869. - -One day she was asked if she could write stories and replied that she -had often written them for the amusement of her children but had -destroyed them after they had served their purpose. She promised to try -again and received $30 for the effort. - -“What, $30 for that article?” she exclaimed. “Why, I can write three or -four of them a week.” - -She eventually found work on the _Christian Union_, of which Beecher was -editor, and this opened a career which brought her both a reputation and -honor. At first she rented a few rooms at 27 Amity Street, Brooklyn, a -house once occupied by Edgar Allan Poe, although at the time she was -unconscious of the fact. When she moved into these quarters she found -that after paying the rent she had only $5 in her purse. - -“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak -dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as -she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.” - -For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs. -It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she -would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving -sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning. - -Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had -been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40 -between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in -those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind -pictures, and they were never disturbed. - -In 1884 _Jan Vedder’s Wife_ was published. The success of this book -almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular -American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over -fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average -of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one -unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she -was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books -after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in -her library, which numbered several thousand volumes. - -She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it -said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once -remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of -their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in -love with him and made him my hero.” - -Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a -thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which -ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical -novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically -considered they should be read as follows: - -_The House on Cherry Street._ -_The Strawberry Handkerchief._ -_The Bow of Orange Ribbon._ -_A Maid of Old New York._ -_A Song of a Single Note._ -_The Maid of Maiden Lane._ -_Trinity Bells._ -_The Belle of Bowling Green._ - -So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so -extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance -would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of -them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them -offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times, -manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and -worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.” - - -BOOKS BY AMELIA E. BARR - -_Jan Vedder’s Wife._ -_A Border Shepherdess._ -_Feet of Clay._ -_Bernicia._ -_Remember the Alamo._ -_She Loved a Sailor._ -_The Lone House._ -_A Sister of Esau._ -_Prisoners of Conscience._ -_The Tioni Whelp._ -_The Black Shilling._ -_The Bow of Orange Ribbon._ -_A Maid of Old New York._ -_A Song of a Single Note._ -_The Maid of Maiden Lane._ -_Trinity Bells._ -_The Belle of Bowling Green._ -_The Red Leaves of a Human Heart._ -_The Strawberry Handkerchief_, 1908. -_The Hands of Compulsion_, 1909. -_The House on Cherry Street_, 1909. -_All the Days of My Life_, 1913. -_Playing With Fire_, 1914. -_The Winning of Lucia_, 1915. -_Three Score and Ten_, 1915. -_Measures of a Man_, 1915. -_Profit and Loss_, 1916. -_Joan_, 1917. -_Christine_, 1917. -_An Orkney Maid_, 1918. -_The Paper Cap_, 1918. -_Songs in the Common Chord_, 1920. -_(About 40 other books.)_ - -_Mrs. Barr’s novels are published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. -Some may be had in reprint, others are out of print._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXVII - -ALICE HEGAN RICE - - -The author of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was born in 1870 in a -big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her -grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan -as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which -is quite as world famous as _Mr. Dooley_, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant -contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the -daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet -Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have -traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big, -columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant -showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes -songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as -_Wraiths and Realities_ and songs inspired by their mere happy -proximity, making a book such as _Poems to A. H. R._, both published in -1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused -pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of -_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was made). But she writes as agreeably -as ever. Mostly shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a -short story writer. Even _Mrs. Wiggs_ was but a long short story. - -Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century--ninety years -anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth -Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, -with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about -personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common -acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day -school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, -brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, -blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at -Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville--these were the -tissue of those youthful days. - -School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There -was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an -expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she -says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It -wouldn’t have been right for me to go.” - -She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. -When she was sixteen the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ had published _The -Reveries of a Spinster_, an anonymous companion-piece to _The Reveries -of a Bachelor_. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the -newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of -spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories -and had been a contributor to humorous papers. - -There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the -writing of _Mrs. Wiggs_. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away -bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” -living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad -tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of -Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele -Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was -it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of -the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all -Alice Hegan.” To quote further: - -“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of -ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half -ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no -‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn -Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden -Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire -Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, -Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at -the time, but it means, now, such stories as _Mrs. Wiggs_ and _Mr. Opp_, -_Emmy Lou_, _The Lady of the Decoration_ and the _Little Colonel_ books. -It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life--which -rendered a year of _Harper’s_ very memorable--and such achievement in -anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and -a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this -little story--and the club, as a body, became the very figure of -laughter, literally holding both its sides. - -“The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and -that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up -out of his pocket.’” - -There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of _Mrs. -Wiggs_. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible -have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old -woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers -as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South -Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs. -Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere--and they have been -everywhere--Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in -Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the -Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after -a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret -Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a -billboard near Benares. _Mrs. Wiggs_ would be played there that night by -an English company!” - -Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The -Rices’ house stands in St. James Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide -sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of _Mrs. Wiggs_ -devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to -a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was -chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for -youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home. - -When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second -floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives -somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful -letters to the letters of all kinds--curious, friendly, grateful--that -she is constantly receiving. - -“Though _Mrs. Wiggs_ has made its author famous,” says Margaret -Anderson, “_Mr. Opp_ is Mrs. Rice’s finest piece of work. In the hero of -this story, which is a story of Dickensian humor and robustness, we mark -a real and very big development--a development, moreover, which is not a -thing of violence but proceeds along the lines of the man’s peculiar -nature. - -“Mrs. Wiggs is fixed, the same at the end of the book as at the opening; -but Mr. Opp grows, and the interest of the reader increases with his -growth. The story has not been read as _Mrs. Wiggs_ was read, but for -imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better -book. - -“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, for _Lovey Mary_ followed -_Mrs. Wiggs_ in general character, while _Sandy_, though wholesome, -engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an -equal inspiration. Her story of _Billy-Goat Hill_ shows some excellent -and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling -those of Annie and her husband in _David Copperfield_, while Connie and -Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety. - -“In _The Honorable Percival_ Mrs. Rice has aimed deliberately at the -light, the frothy, the effect of touch-and-go, yet here we note -especially an increase in her art. The thing is light and sure; it is -froth but froth well-made and inviting; it does touch and go, but it -touches with a spark and goes vividly. - -“It is needless, however, to criticise her stories individually. What we -must note of her work is this: It meets the great human need of cheer, -it satisfies a great human desire with its wholesome milk of kindness. -To make many nations laugh and laugh innocently; to bring entertainment -to the sickbed and army trench and throne room and schoolroom; and to -the million common houses of a million common people--this is the -mission of her books and this their finest achievement.” - -Wise and honest words, these, of Margaret Steele Anderson’s. What she -has said so well we shall not attempt to better. We shall agree -whole-heartedly with her that the best praise was given Alice Hegan Rice -“by a very wise old man, who spoke for a great host of readers when he -said: - -“‘Madam, I salute you! You have done the world a service. You have -cheered us, you have made us laugh happily and with courage.’” - - -BOOKS BY ALICE HEGAN RICE - -_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_, 1901. -_Lovey Mary_, 1903. -_Sandy_, 1905. -_Captain June_, 1907. -_Mr. Opp_, 1909. -_A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill_, 1912. -_The Honorable Percival._ -_Calvary Alley_, 1917. -_Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories_, 1918. -_Quin_, 1921. - -_Published by the Century Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXVIII - -ALICE DUER MILLER - - -If Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity -she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a -different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not -that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not -that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of -distinction which our high critical minds rave about. - -She can go deeply--and deftly--into the minds of her people and bring -out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there. -But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because -Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly) -about the thoughts and emotions of her characters--with those we have no -patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer -wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a -good deal of sympathy. - -_Ladies Must Live_ is full of clever conversation; so is _The Happiest -Time of Their Lives_. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a -book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable -effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a -cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such -books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them -half-admirable because they say adroit things--or say things adroitly. -This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs. -Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take -too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To -which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in -the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do -so? - -Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And -this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger -person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the -immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s -ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too -low voltage for that. And indeed in _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_ -we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and -his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most -immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set -before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of -that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with -her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent, -affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill -successfully the rôle of tigress tamers! - -Yes, the great defect of Mrs. Miller’s stories is that we seldom care to -know the people in them, the Mrs. Farrons, the Nancy Almars, nor even -the Christine Fenimers and the innocent but tiresomely insipid Mathilde -Severances. We will occasionally consent to meet them and watch them -perform (better company being lacking at the moment) for one main reason -and only one: the skill with which they are brought before us and there -put through their tricks. And if our very figure of speech seems to have -in it something derogatory, to imply that these persons are not much -better than puppets, the implication is not without an honest -significance. Moving among artificialities, surrounded by polite and -transparent deceptions, it would be too much not to expect these -“society” folk to partake of their environment. They are wholly -mechanistic, to go to metaphysics for a suitable term; they are precious -puppets and nothing more; thanks to Mrs. Miller’s skill the strings -which control them are mostly invisible, but the jerky motion of them -gives the secret away. - -Having been as honest about this as we know how to be, let us turn to -the first pages of _Ladies Must Live_ and cull a few samples of Mrs. -Miller’s writing, samples which will convey to those who have not read -her some idea of her gift of epigram and facile and beautiful -characterization: - -“Mrs. Ussher ... turned toward hidden social availability very much as -the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring.... She was -unaware of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and -usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction.... During -the short period of their existence, Mrs. Ussher gave to these -friendships the utmost loyalty and devotion. She agonized over the -financial, domestic and romantic troubles of her friends; she sat up -till the small hours, talking to them like a schoolgirl; during the -height of their careers she organized plots for their assistance; and -even when their stars were plainly on the decline, she would often ask -them to lunch, if she happened to be alone. - -“Many people, we know, are prone to make friends with the rich and -great. Mrs. Ussher’s genius consisted in having made friends with them -before they were either.” - -Nancy Almar’s husband says to her: - -“‘I hope you’ll explain to them why I could not come.’ - -“‘You mean that I would not have gone if you had?’ - -“‘No,’ he said, ‘that I’m called South on business.’ - -“‘I shan’t tell them that, but I’ll tell them you say so, if you like.’” - -She was as good as her word--she usually was. - -“‘Would any one like to hear Roland’s explanation of why he is not with -us?’ - -“‘Had it anything to do with his not being asked?’ said a pale young -man; and as soon as he had spoken he glanced hastily round the circle to -ascertain how his remark had succeeded. - -“So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in -fact, though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with -her again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He -had been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a -day or two before, she had observed that underlying his socialistic -theories was an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell -his bejeweled hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh, -twenty times more, he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his -friends the bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised -him, and where she despised she made no secret of the fact. - -“‘Not asked, Mr. Wickham!’ she said. ‘I assume my husband is asked -wherever I am,’ and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint -smile: ‘One’s husband is always asked, isn’t he?’ - -“‘Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come,’ said another -speaker.” - -Even from so slight an excerpt we think it will be plain that in the art -of characterization and in the business of writing dialogue Mrs. Miller -has nothing to learn. She is really one of the most hopeful prospects in -American literature to-day and the great hope for her and for readers -lies in the possibility--almost a probability--that she will abandon the -very restricted and unimportant milieu of her recent novels for better -fields. It is simple honesty to recognize that _The Happiest Time of -Their Lives_ holds out a great promise that she will do this. Such -persons as Pete Wayne and his mother, and even the rather pathetic -grandfather Mr. Lanley (of the New York Lanleys) are “real,” that is, -members of the human community and not sickening products of the social -hothouses. If Mrs. Miller will do a novel in which most of the men and -most of the women are “people”--regular people or irregular people, -great or small, does not matter; but they must be people--we in America -will be the first to acclaim her. - -Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated. -This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter -of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from -Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry -Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the -upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth -Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of -that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where -most of the others aspire to. - - -BOOKS BY ALICE DUER MILLER - -_The Modern Obstacle_, 1903. -_Calderon’s Prisoner_, 1904. -_Less Than Kin_, 1909. -_Blue Arch_, 1910. -_Are Women People?_ 1915. -_Come Out of the Kitchen_, 1916. -_Ladies Must Live_, 1917. -_The Happiest Time of Their Lives_, 1918. -_Wings in the Night_, 1918. Poems. -_The Charm School_, 1919. Harper & Brothers. -_The Beauty and the Bolshevist_, 1920. Harper & Brothers. -_Manslaughter_, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company. - -_With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century -Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXIX - -ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT - - -Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce -Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, -inventive--not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word -imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any -other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell -Wright--to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a -novel--we hope the reader will pardon this digression--by making an -elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, _not_ of the story but of certain -moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to -impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten -draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words -denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright -strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and -inserts “David Fanning”--and the copy goes to the printer. - -Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her -because of her pen name’s connotations--Miss Abbott finds a title and -then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the -title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the -Boston _Globe_, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this -chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the -really interesting facts about the author of _Molly Make-Believe_ and -presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory -title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner -as the detective who is pursuing a clue.” - -This is perfectly intelligible. _Molly Make-Believe_ as a title teems -with ideas; so does _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_; so does _The White-Linen -Nurse_. - -“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real -person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a -tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.” - -Upon this the Boston _Globe_ writer remarks, with a great deal of -truthfulness: - -“She may choose a commonplace subject--a girl, a woman, a road, a -husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the -uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent -part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her -heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare -is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a -Sunday spouse. - -“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added -to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her -phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is -an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after -reading _The Kink in the Air_, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ -in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.” - -Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor -Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an -industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling -English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott -books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has -uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at -such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure -humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. -They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of _Molly -Make-Believe_ and look at the page in the front which records _over -twenty_ editions in five years! - -We follow the lead of the Boston _Globe_ article: - -Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing -is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she -comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It -must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest -others. “Painter, musician, writer--whether anybody else likes your work -or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that -work to the point where you like it yourself.” - -She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is -composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her -machine. In writing _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ she devoted twelve hours each -day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the -quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard, -a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the -ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be -and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work -imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is -usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical -attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days--it will make the hardiest -shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if -they do 500 or 1,000 words a day--and not every day at that. But as a -rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as -she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short -novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in -succession she won a $1,000 prize in _Collier’s Weekly_ short story -contests with _The Very Tired Girl_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_. - -Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and -English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts. -This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might -have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted -titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name -at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long -poems published in _Harper’s Magazine_ attracted much attention. - -How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the -text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm. -The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come -to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was -for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop -her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories. -Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution: - -“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.” - -But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her -success as a fictioneer, therefore, to _Lippincott’s Magazine_ and the -_Smart Set_ quite as much as to anything else. - -As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family -which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a -daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the _Literary -World_ of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the _Outlook_ -and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a -granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys. - -Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated -from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman -Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied -theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the -Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to -1878 he was editor of the _Congregationalist_; afterward he became -editor of the _Literary World_. He was ordained a minister of the -Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church, -Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott -wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies. - -Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated -by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public -schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child -exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and -patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom -did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement. - -“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it -drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch -up--and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened -to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful, -day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom -without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.” - -At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered -the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a -subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her -rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s _Sketch Book_. - -“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs -of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my -class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s -unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers, -through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors. -And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual -friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed, -earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts -College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails, -wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps, -we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and -timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people -we must have been--astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most -deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of -having already fixed our minds on higher things. - -“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a -Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and -were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our -more frivolous-minded companions.” - -Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in -her work to whom _Molly Make-Believe_ is dedicated. He aids and abets -her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under -Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is -medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and -sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and -Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing -tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the -Florida everglades--doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband -and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find -to do happily together. - - -BOOKS BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT - -_Molly Make-Believe_, 1910. -_The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, 1911. -_The White-Linen Nurse_, 1913. -_The Indiscreet Letter_, 1915. -_Little Eve Edgarton_, 1915. -_The Stingy Receiver_, 1917. - -_Published by the Century Company, New York_. - -_The Ne’er-Do-Much_, 1918. - -_Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York_. - -_Old-Dad_, 1919. - -_Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York_. - - - - -CHAPTER XXX - -HARRIET T. COMSTOCK - - -The significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in -reprint. - -After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the -plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or -some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive -form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not -think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits -“the road.” - -The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until _Joyce of the North -Woods_ went into reprint. - -The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”--is 10,000 -copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are -best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the -best novels. - -_Joyce_ went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and -then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, -did _Janet of the Dunes_ and _A Son of the Hills_. In a little more than -three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since -then _The Place Beyond the Winds_ and later books have been put out by -the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We -think not. - -But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The -answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic -writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in -public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a -homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in -Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for -fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates -to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest--you -have to dig things out of her about herself. But--is this the answer? Is -there something else? - -Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture -and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it -really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism. - -What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us -agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we -all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a -literary idealist? - -The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with -what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the -homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ -is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind -of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose -us with the nauseous compounds of realism and they shudder at the -thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do -is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us--mentally and emotionally, -of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions -may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on -them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are -what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become -flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your -limitations and you’ll be all right!” - -That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself -or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the -word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good -novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically -considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people, -instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and -feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not -and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight -of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple, -fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of -character are what count--with _them_. She is right, they do. - -Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the -novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive -manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”--this sums -up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write _The Place Beyond the -Winds_ which presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of -silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face -saddens and she tells you: - -“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the -very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry -the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found -him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed -the facts to the girl’s mother. - -“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to -me that I must write about it--must do my small part toward banishing -the evil.” - -Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature. -It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s -course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it. -Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of -it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would -have done as she did. - -She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then -only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As -for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her -experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote: - -“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent -me a bottle of Benedictine! - -“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified -the congregation by shouting: - -“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell--I am going to give -it to my sister!’” - -Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon, -afterward relating her experience in the _Book News Monthly_; travel -along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full -complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty, -wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife, -mother, home-maker, novelist--a Jill of many trades and successful at -them all!” - -She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little -round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and -drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large, -beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is -polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single -drawer. It contains his catnip. - -The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock -is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair, -wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty -welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even -interrupted.” - -Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one -corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk -is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft -buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs--the -originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here -she writes most of each novel, subjected to endless -interruptions--friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the -novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done -Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her -publishers and her husband have the address--no one else. She is one of -the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter--she writes it -all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She -began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing -children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. _Janet of the -Dunes_ was her first novel. - -Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded -I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the -problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie; -principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always -know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote -of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming -down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in -their hands.” - -Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says: - -“The first thing I see is the place and the people--the background and -the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time -comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of -mind, I sit down to it--not before. Other writers, I understand, usually -see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me, -the background, the environment of my characters, is all-important. -Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my -desk beside me.” - -Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds -are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. -Thus in _Joyce of the North Woods_ her St. Ange is a place in northern -New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In _The -Vindication_, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour -Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely -among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected -child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s -novel. _A Son of the Hills_ was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia -mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. -Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In _Mam’selle Jo_, -Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and -she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled -clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love -which is in her. - -Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer -cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the -possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story -will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. -Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably -on. She has something to do and is about doing it. - - -BOOKS BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK - -_Janet of the Dunes_, 1908. -_Joyce of the North Woods_, 1911. -_A Son of the Hills_, 1913. -_The Place Beyond the Winds_, 1914. -_The Vindication_, 1917. -_Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country_, 1918. -_Unbroken Lines_, 1919. -_The Shield of Silence_, 1921. -_At the Crossroads_, 1922. -_(Also many books for boys and girls.)_ - -_Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the -Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are -published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXXI - -HONORÉ WILLSIE - - -Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but -in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It -will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of -readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture -Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of -reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would -require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain -subjects--immigration and Americanization, for example--that is no part -of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do -instead. - -The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs. -Willsie, _The Forbidden Trail_, an exciting story of the _Still Jim_ -country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever -efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the -discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United -States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from -the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of _Still Jim_ will -recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo -dam and his effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the -German Government--in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate -ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs. -Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact -knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an -inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with -him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona. - -Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar -McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New -Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background -of _Still Jim_ and _Lydia of the Pines_. She is a Bachelor of Arts of -the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation. -The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to -New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning -recognition as a writer. She says now: - -“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in -three years or in five years--that is what makes for success for a -writer. - -“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want -to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I -wanted to write. - -“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] a -little love story called _Beatrice and the Rose_. So after a few weeks -in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories I wanted him to -buy. He looked them over and shook his head. - -“‘Do me something else like _Beatrice and the Rose_ and I’ll take it,’ -he said. - -“‘I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If -that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’ - -“‘But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets. -There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts--Theodore -Dreiser.’ - -“‘All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’ - -“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to -see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the -Butterick Building--four times I walked around that bulky flatiron -before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside -and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor -of the _Delineator_, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied -with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The -interview turned out to be a momentous one for me. - -“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to -New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, -editorial work at a good salary. - -“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good -regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing -only. - -“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’ - -“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I -wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go -on. - -“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the -writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. -You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five -years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will -buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he -assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown. - -“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked -it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have -had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made -$500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan -and always kept my eye on the future--and had the courage to refuse that -job.” - -Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the -magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special -articles for such periodicals as _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Collier’s_ on -important subjects--immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States -Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of _Harper’s -Weekly_, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials -of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.” - -Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was _The Heart of the Desert_, -which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard -Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the _Book News -Monthly_ of March, 1917, said: - -“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, -but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, -nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal -peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. -Willsie’s hero in _The Heart of the Desert_--and his truly heroic wooing -and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all -her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one -brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim -passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a -setting.” - -And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, _The Heart -of the Desert_ is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of -the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any -prejudice in favor of its subject matter.” - -Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the -rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. -Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an -interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her -novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne: - -“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a -photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have -reference occurred in a copy of _Harper’s Weekly_, not so very long -before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were -taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the -Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp -democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning -smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden -West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic -figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely -for the proverbial chivalry--and homicides--of that portion of America -which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, -particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. -Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word -‘symbolic’--Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of -sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the -near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled -hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from -which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at -her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In -the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to -represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, -to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of -those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love -this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or -even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head, -like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems -to be saying what Lydia says so finally in her inspiring new book, -_Lydia of the Pines_: - -“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is -real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to -identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is -this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such -wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually -mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the -roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to -come our children’s children will be found there and our family name -will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how -else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited -America.’ - -“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking -along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld -one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes -thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was -_Still Jim_. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful -photographs--and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom -I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could -hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily -astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from -the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast -spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. -There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which -the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever -books come and go, perishing like the summer skies. - -“_Lydia of the Pines_ [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words -on _The Heart of the Desert_] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and -characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing -nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she -is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a -practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for -wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of _Lydia of -the Pines_ is one of the noblest she could have chosen--the infamy of -political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong -to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’ - -“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’--such -is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but -most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real -estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story -too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. -Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and -pathos. - -“In _Lydia of the Pines_ one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more -surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, -and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.” - -With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that _Lydia of the -Pines_ “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this -volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of -personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss -Hawthorne about _Lydia_. He found it fearfully dull while fully -conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to -present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John -Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader -sees Levine in two relations only--to Lydia and to the Indians, and -unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of -hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer _Still Jim_ -seems by far the better book. - -But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says: - -“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested -in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big -problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early -traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of -government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In _Lydia of the -Pines_ the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is -illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is -concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the -material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to -facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners -in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The -whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful -detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass -of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also -with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.” - -Gertrude Atherton says: “I think _Lydia of the Pines_ is an American -classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning _Still Jim_: - -“All the book is American to the roots--but big Jim is the American -soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;--it’s the whole -effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of -work--an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.” - -The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and -three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus in -_Still Jim_ a desert rock muses: - -“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call -this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which -it was created.” - -“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other, -which the coyote will not do.” - -In _Lydia of the Pines_ it is a pine tree which murmurs: - -“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the -stars.” - -“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an -end we cannot see.” - -There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book, _Benefits -Forgot: A Study of Lincoln and Mother Love_. This is a brief but true -story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made -great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of -the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his -ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story. - -Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has -sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in -their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an -interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley: - -“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is -made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in -America just as it did in England. It’s”--hesitation and a twinkling -eye--“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good -figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty, -something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is -going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and -the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation. - -“As I see it there are two things American women can do--one abstract -and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national -stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans -of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to -the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more -difficult. - -“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the -average woman would only stop to realize just how important it is to be -a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world -of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals. -American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the -children--it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they -ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught -religion and morals, or grammar and geography. - -“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize -what it means herself. How many do? - -“I hope more women realize it than men--that is, than the men I’ve -asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is -an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street -construction, I asked American men in every walk in life--and what do -you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who -knew how to get rich quick! - -“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even -being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out -that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must -have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person -can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American, -you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding -of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built. - -“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he -has a sense of freedom and equality, and then he arrives at a feeling -of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among -thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is -particularly evident now. - -“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be -Americans before they attempt to teach their children--or some one -else’s children--what it means. I wish that we might have an American -litany--a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our -children! I wish that every American child might be brought to -understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our -Declaration of Independence--a state of mind compounded of utter -bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and -country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes -and their sacred honor.’ - -“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do -is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also -the more important. - -“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain -extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government -through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more -completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to -have a variety of universal service for women--at least a mobilization -of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women -here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting -it in England, but American women will have to show, as English women -have done, that they are worthy of the vote. - -“And there is one thing American women must not forget--that the most -important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a -country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to -the future--to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times, -women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them -intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to -bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which -our fathers built the nation.” - -Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the -managing editor of the _Delineator_, Mrs. Willsie is still and -essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so -forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a -splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the -mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent. -Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened -breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.” -To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will -always yield gratefully and with pleasure. - - -BOOKS BY HONORÉ WILLSIE - -_The Heart of the Desert_, 1913. -_Still Jim_, 1915. -_Lydia of the Pines_, 1917. -_Benefits Forgot_, 1917. -_The Forbidden Trail_, 1919. -_The Enchanted Canyon_, 1921. -_Judith of the Godless Valley_, 1922. - -_Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXXII - -FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT - - -Half a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of -Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an -American citizen in 1905 or thereabouts, the author of _Little Lord -Fauntleroy_, most famous of children’s stories by a living writer. Mrs. -Burnett is a novelist, as such books as _The Shuttle_ and _T. Tembaron_ -attest. She is thought of half or more than half the time as a writer of -tales for youngsters, and rightly. Of these she has produced a great -number and their success is amazing. No beating of drums, no blasts on -trumpets, even toy trumpets: yet as the publishers assure you, in -respect of even her less known “juveniles,” they keep on selling, year -after year, with the most relentless endurance. They don’t have to be -advertised. In the famous sentiment of a famous advertisement, they are -advertised by their loving friends. - -The best thing for the adult to do, after paying his tribute to -_Fauntleroy_, is to read _The Shuttle_, “a novel of international -marriage.” It represents Mrs. Burnett’s life. She alone of all the -writers of our day could have written such a book, declares a friend -whose desire to remain anonymous is here observed. He supplies a sketch -of Mrs. Burnett which had better be reproduced verbatim: - -“She is English of the English by birth and temperament; born in -Manchester, as you know, where she lived until she was about thirteen. -Then, her father having failed in business, owing to the war in -America--his failure had something to do with the blockading of the -Southern ports, I believe--and he having died, the business went to -ruin, although Mrs. Burnett’s mother tried her gentle best to save it. -There was a large family of them, and Frances, who had already developed -the faculty of story-telling, was the life and spirit of the crowd. - -“An older brother had gone to join an uncle in Tennessee, and when the -family’s fortunes were at lowest ebb he advised them to join him in -America, which they did, and lived in the greatest poverty on the -outskirts of Knoxville. They were so poor that when some one suggested -that Frances write out one of her stories and send it to _Godey’s Lady’s -Book_ the money for the stamps had to be earned by picking blackberries. - -“The first story was accepted and all subsequent stories sent. Then Mrs. -Burnett graduated to _Peterson’s Magazine_. The Petersons were great -friends of Mrs. Burnett in her early days. They recommended that she -send some of her stories to the _Century_, which she did, but the -quality of them was so English that the _Century_ editors suspected they -were not original but copied by the little Tennessee girl from stories -in English magazines. When her second story was sent to them, they gave -expression to their doubt. The thing was explained to them, and the -publication of the stories--I believe the first was _Surly Tim’s -Troubles_--was made immediately. - -“Mrs. Burnett has always kept in touch with England and English life. As -soon as she had made her success, in fact, just after the publication of -_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, she went back to England, and has spent some -part of nearly every year in England since then. She has lived in all -sections of England and has had houses in London; one at 63 Portland -Place, and another in Charles Street, Mayfair. She has had country homes -in Norfolk, Kent and Surrey. For nearly fifteen years she leased a very -interesting old house in Kent, Maytham Hall, really the manor house of a -very ancient estate. The house stands in the most wonderful of Kentish -gardens, which Mrs. Burnett, with her enthusiasm for gardening, made -even more beautiful than they were when she took them. - -“Maytham Hall was the homestead of an ancient family of Moneypenneys. On -the corner of the Hall grounds stands an ancient Norman church--the -church of the Hundred of Rolvenden which is mentioned in the Domesday -Book. All the Moneypenneys are buried in this church, which, in its -simple way, is of remarkable beauty. Their tombstones surround the great -Hall pew, which is almost as big as a room, and has tables and chairs in -it. The Hall grounds stand between two very picturesque villages, both -appanages of the estate, one called Rolvenden Village and the other -Rolvenden Street. They are as picturesque as they can be, full of the -quaint old gaffers and gammers. - -“As to the American side of Mrs. Burnett, she has lived over here in -touch with the most characteristically and the most broadly American -society in Washington and later in New York and its vicinity. As a young -girl she saw a good deal of New York life and it was during that time, I -imagine, that she got the impressions that produced the earlier part of -_The Shuttle_. Her saying that she was ‘English by birth and American by -the birth of her two sons’ I have always thought an amusing expression -of her case. In describing Bettina to me, once, she said that Bettina -was a woman’s version of the cleverness and sense of values that the -first Reuben Vandenpoel expressed. This seems to me to be the underlying -quality in Bettina. Her sense of the world of things backed by her -balance, her self-control and her typical American practicality.” - -Mrs. Burnett loathes New York for its noise and dirt. Though she no -longer has Maytham Hall with its great terraced lawns and its rose -gardens she has a big country place near Manhasset, Long Island, New -York, called Plandome. It is within commuting distance of New York but -oh, how different! - -A comfortable, rambling house is surrounded by gardens for which Mrs. -Burnett buys flowers as uncontrollably as a bibliophile buys books. The -house faces northwest and has “remarkable glimpses of sunsets.” Mrs. -Burnett naturally has many children as visitors. For them there is a -great doll house, the home of Lady Annabelle, who is larger than many of -the youngsters that call on her, and who has a wonderful wardrobe. The -big house is full of nests of children’s toys. It also contains much -age-darkened furniture brought over from Maytham Hall, principally oak -pieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which Mrs. Burnett has -collected. Lady Annabelle’s residence, for example, was formerly a bread -and cheese cupboard which an antiquarian would tell you was probably -made by a skilled woodworker not later than the year 1500. - -As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs. -Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she -read chapters of _The Secret Garden_ as they were finished. Now, she is -a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for -hours on end. Impressions which flowered in _The Secret Garden_ came -from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about -900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns -not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may -encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks -given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret of _The -Secret Garden_? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose? -Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind -it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it -adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret -garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story, -plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is -not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere -and endlessly instructive.” - -She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not -understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has -a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly. -It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales -which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that -the moment an idea--a “concept” philosophically speaking--formulates -itself in her mind _it does so as some part of a story_. Her pleasant -persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as -the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves -abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really -presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them -abstractly as we have just done in the case of _The Secret Garden_. - -This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to -get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to -teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease -and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain -abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been -prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual -exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage--a kind of verbal money -that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all -used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the -majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual -exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have -heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We “swap” -experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the -other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or -generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is -not one of them! - -Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you -as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor -and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him: -“John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you -would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you -something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your -respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them -well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs. -Burnett’s easily comprehended way too. - -When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in -noisome New York--you can buy things there, after all, and editors and -publishers there do congregate--and then she flees to Bermuda. But not -until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every -flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In -Bermuda she--gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the -present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is -unpretentious but charming. - -To revert for a moment to _The Shuttle_, we may note something almost -prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America, -in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted the -characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.” -That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no -abstract themes. She wrote: - -“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I -had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have -liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel. - -“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international -marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation -between two great countries such as the history of the world--as far as -I know it--has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in -the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence -and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer -to each other. That they are of the same blood--the mere fact that they -speak the same tongue--makes the thing inevitable in the end. - -“I do not mean _The Shuttle_ to be merely a story of international -marriage, but to suggest a thousand other things. The international -marriage must, however, result in being a strong factor, and in the -hands of a writer of fiction it must play a prominent part--a leading -part, so to speak--because it is the love story, and without it we are -lost. For the matter of that, without it ‘the shouting and the tumult’ -would die, ‘the captains and the kings depart.’ - -“Because I am English by birth and American by a sort of adoption, and -because I have vibrated between the two continents for years, I have -learned to be impersonal and unpartisan. I was neither American nor -English when I told the story. I was merely an intensely interested -person who had formed a habit of crossing the Atlantic twice a year. - -“There have been disastrous international marriages and there have been -successful ones; there is no reason why there should not be -international marriages at once dignified and splendid--even -history-making. Still, I wish I had had room to add to _The Shuttle_ -pictures of the thousand other things I find absorbing.” - -It is not possible to do more than make suggestions as to what books of -Mrs. Burnett’s a reader should be sure to dip into. No two set of -suggestions would be identical, in all likelihood, but grownups can -acquire at least a respectable acquaintance with her work by reading -_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, _A Fair Barbarian_, _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, -_Sara Crewe_, _The Pretty Sister of José_, _In Connection With the De -Willoughby Claim_, _The Shuttle_, _The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, _The Secret -Garden_, _T. Tembaron_ and _Emily Fox-Seton_. No selective list for -children is worth making; give them any or all! - - -BOOKS BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT - -_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, 1877. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. -_Dolly, A Love Story_, 1877. -_Kathleen_, 1877. Hurst. -_Surly Tim and Other Stories_, 1877. Scribner. -_Haworth’s_, 1879. Scribner. -_Louisiana_, 1880. Scribner. -_A Fair Barbarian_, 1881. Scribner. -_Through One Administration_, 1883. Scribner. -_Little Lord Fauntleroy_, 1886. Scribner. -_Editha’s Burglar._ The Page Company, Boston. -_Sara Crewe_, 1888. Scribner. -_Little Saint Elizabeth_, 1889. -_Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress_, 1896. Scribner. -_The Pretty Sister of José_, 1896. Scribner. -_A Lady of Quality_, 1896. Scribner. -_His Grace of Ormonde_, 1897. Scribner. -_The Captain’s Youngest_, 1898. -_In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim_, 1899. Scribner. -_The Making of a Marchioness_, 1901. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. -_The Methods of Lady Walderhurst._ Stokes. -_In the Closed Room_, 1904. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York. -_A Little Princess_, 1905. Scribner. -_Jarl’s Daughter_, 1906. Donohue. Given in the United States - Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Queen Silverbell_, 1906. The Century Company, New York. Given - in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Racketty-Packetty House_, 1906. Century. Given in the United - States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Earlier Stories_ (_Lindsay’s Luck_, etc.), 1907. Scribner. - Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Giovanni and the Other: Children Who Have Made -Stories_, 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States - Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Emily Fox-Seton_ (Combining _The Making of a Marchioness_ - and _The Methods of Lady Walderhurst_). Stokes. -_Lindsay’s Luck._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue - of Books in Print (1912). -_Miss Crespigny._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue - of Books in Print (1912). -_Piccino and Other Child Stories._ Scribner. Given in the - United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Pretty Polly Pemberton._ Hurst. Given in the United States - Catalogue of Books in Print (1912). -_Quiet Life._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue - of Books in Print (1912). -_Theo._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books - in Print (1912). -_Vagabondia._ Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue - of Books in Print (1912). -_The Shuttle_, 1907. Stokes. -_The Cozy Lion_, 1907. Century. -_Good Wolf_, 1908. Moffat, Yard & Company, New York. -_Spring Cleaning_, 1908. Century. -_The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, 1909. Scribner. -_The Secret Garden_, 1909. Stokes. -_My Robin_, 1912. Stokes. -_T. Tembaron_, 1913. A. L. Burt Company, New York. -_Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday_, 1914. Moffat, Yard. -_One I Knew The Best of All_, 1915. Scribner. -_The Lost Prince_, 1915. Burt. -_The Land of the Blue Flower_, 1916. Moffat, Yard. -_The Little Hunchback Zia_, 1916. Stokes. -_The Way to the House of Santa Claus_, 1916. Harper & Brothers, New York. -_White People_, 1917. Harper. -_The Head of the House of Coombe_, 1922. Stokes. -_Robin_, 1922. Stokes. - - - - -CHAPTER XXXIII - -MARY E. WALLER - - -There are two actresses who are never interviewed--Alla Nazimova and -Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no -longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude -Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of -securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the -rule. - -An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal -publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most -authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the -personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in -the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree, -“charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like -traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public -Service Commissions will regulate them.... - -Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary -E. Waller, about the woman behind _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. For, in -the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to -publicity. She has never permitted her portrait to be published.” As -for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it -is. - -We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied -abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and -maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that -her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history -of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home -on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her -time with her mother in the Vermont hills. - -That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period -before Miss Waller’s success as an author. - -In 1902 there was published in Boston a book called _Little Citizens_, a -story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication -of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by -Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907) -in the _Christian Herald_: - -“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since -Miss Alcott published _Little Women_. The title of the book, _A Daughter -of the Rich_, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking -qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the -story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where -parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully -bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician -persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling -out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is -motherless, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the -home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers, -who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a -single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and -strength that wealth could not give her. - -“I have it in my heart to wish that this book might have the vogue that -_Little Women_ had. The simple, beautiful story is worth a thousand -sermons and treatises on the best way of rearing and training a family.” - -The _Christian Herald_ enters many homes and Margaret E. Sangster was -read by many thousands. There is no way of measuring the direct and -indirect influence of such praise as she uttered. It is very great. But -this was in 1907. The year following the appearance of _A daughter of -the Rich_, Miss Waller’s third book, _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, came -along. - -Books have curious fates. Gene Stratton-Porter’s _Freckles_ took three -years to find its audience. A fine novel by St. John G. Ervine, -_Changing Winds_, was published, had the expected sale and died; -remained dead for about a year and then suddenly began selling again! In -the case of a textbook such a phenomenon can always be traced to some -simple explanation. For example, W. J. Henderson wrote a condensed -treatise called _Elements of Navigation_ which sold desultorily for -years, the sales slowly declining. Came the Great War. The United States -undertook to create a merchant marine. Thousands of men had to be -trained to navigate merchant ships. Mr. Henderson’s book sold like hot -cakes, was reprinted; was revised and pretty well rewritten; sold faster -than fiction! - -In the case of a novel a “resurrection” is seldom quite explicable. It -is matter for conjecture what “brought back” _Changing Winds_. Now _The -Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_ was not a book that rose from the dead, but a -book that almost never lived; that is to say, it was six months before -it achieved popular success. Once “alive” it has ever since remained so. -Seven years after publication the _twenty-eighth_ edition was published. -It is unnecessary to say more. - -The catalogue of the American Library Association, a conscientious -publication if ever there was one, describes this book concisely: “Scene -in the Green Mountains. An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood -finds interests in the outside world through a chance acquaintance and -becomes a wood-carver of renown.” There you are; see what -conscientiousness can accomplish! All the charm, all the wistfulness, -all the magic of hope and aspiration, and the triumph of achievement, -which make this novel the beloved tale it is--stripped away! “An -ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood....” The librarians are not -to blame, either. It is their business to outline concisely.... Whereas -fiction is no matter of outlines but, like life, a thing of coloring, -perspective, the glint of an eye, the shadowed corner of a smiling -mouth. Fiction cannot be done in black and white; those who, under the -label of “realism,” essay the task, invariably fail. - -But we were to enumerate what is known of Miss Waller. Well, in 1913, -after she had been besieged for nine years for her picture, a visitor to -Nantucket, whither the author had gone to live, did succeed in seeing -her and talking with her. He did not get a photograph of her (in the -fall of 1912 a photographer went expressly to Nantucket and lay long in -wait for a snapshot, coming away without a single exposure). But at -least the visitor did see and converse with Miss Waller. How came this -miracle about? - -There had never been a hospital on Nantucket, in spite of the shipwrecks -and succorings of two centuries. Certain residents decided it was time -one was built. A board of trustees was formed and a house purchased. -Money for maintenance was needed. So they built an enormous thermometer -on the main street, under overarching elms. When the visitor came to -trail Miss Waller he found the temperature about $6,800, which included -royalties from one of Miss Waller’s books. - -The hospital cottage was not new--but very solid. The visitor reflected -that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission -oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking -tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads. -Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another -house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a -chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of -windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The -mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and -glimpses of moorland--or what they’d call moorland in an English novel. -Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about her -work. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year -round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond -question, there _is_ a Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she -may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down -that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wrote _Hamlet_; Mary E. Waller, not Clara -Louise Burnham, wrote _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. - -And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss -Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and -sketchy. _A Daughter of the Rich_ is technically described as “for girls -of 10 and upward.” _Sanna of the Island Town_ is a series of pen -pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island -village--Nantucket is the original. _Through the Gates of the -Netherlands_ is the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in -Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its -art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from -the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort -of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline -method is! - -Edwin Markham liked _Our Benny_, saying: “It is fluent and simple and -full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below -_Snowbound_ and _Myles Standish_.” Caution! _Our Benny_ is a narrative -poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to -_Flamsted Quarries_. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees -a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless -children. Later we find them in a small Maine village, a quarry town. -There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a -simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and -women whole. - -_My Ragpicker_ is about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in -Paris. _A Cry in the Wilderness_ has American and Canadian characters -and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St. -Lawrence--Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada. _Aunt Dorcas’s Change -of Heart_ was published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it -was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between -herself and her visitor. _From an Island Outpost_ is a meditative -book--thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island -outpost on Nantucket. _Out of the Silences_ is a return to Canada and a -novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota. -The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a -youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly -philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge -of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson, -McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal -of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to -get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him. -He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed -indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love, -romance and success come to him--and death. For the war calls to his -manhood and takes him to France. - -An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned. _A Year Out of Life_ is -only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s -impressions of German life--long before the war, of course, for it was -published in 1909. - - -BOOKS BY MARY E. WALLER - -_Little Citizens_, 1902. -_A Daughter of the Rich_, 1903. -_The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, 1904. -_Sanna of the Island Town_, 1905. -_Through the Gates of the Netherlands_, 1906. -_A Year Out of Life_, 1909. -_Our Benny_, 1909. -_Flamsted Quarries_, 1910. -_My Ragpicker_, 1911. -_A Cry in the Wilderness_, 1912. -_Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart_, 1913. -_From an Island Outpost_, 1914. -_Out of the Silences_, 1918. - -_Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, -Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all -Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, -Boston._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXXIV - -ZONA GALE - - -My dear Mr. Overton:-- - -“The first story which I ever wrote was printed. I printed it myself, in -pencil, for it was before I could write. And the story appeared in a -book. I made the book, of manilla paper, bound with ribbon. The story -began: ‘The sun was just sinking behind the western hills when three -travelers appeared. One was tall and one was short and one was -middle-sized.’ And when the heroine arrived and one of these travelers -asked her to marry him, I remember pressing my mother to tell me how to -spell ‘N--yes’, which constituted the maid’s reply. - -“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One -selection was this: - - When I am a lady, a lady - I will be a milliner if I can. - I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats - And in my store there shall be no mice and rats, - When I am a lady. - -“When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came -back to me from a publisher. It was called _A White Dove_, but I do not -know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel, -_Vedita_, of tremendous length--this is easy to remember because of the -cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which -was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was -readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian -servant, whom I later used in _The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_. - -“A short story I first submitted at sixteen--it was called _Both_, was -three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the -Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_. I had just entered the University at -Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and -came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in -the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one -or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, -though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by _Success Magazine_, -I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the _Delineator_ gave me a -first prize of $2,000 for a short story, _The Ancient Dawn_. In 1904 I -began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and -forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were -collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were -followed by _Friendship Village_ stories. The first editor to whom these -stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance -with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as -these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the -majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure -that the first editor was not right. - -“After graduating from Wisconsin University, about six years were spent -in newspaper work, in Milwaukee and New York, and in magazine work in -New York--and in that time a master’s degree was given by Wisconsin -University for work done in absentia, but neither degree, in itself, has -ever meant anything to me, though of course that part of the work which -I liked and wanted was invaluable.... I began newspaper work on the -Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_ which accepted that first story of mine, -and I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning -at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment, but the chief -thing that I can recall about those mornings was the intense wish that -the elevator which was taking me up to the city room would turn out to -be the elevator taking me down again. At the end of two weeks the city -editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion -into anything else that I have written. I was another month in getting -on the staff. In New York the process was different. After being refused -by nearly every paper there, I went back to the New York _World_, and by -the office boy every morning I sent in a list of suggestions, made from -that day’s news, on which I thought I could write; and the city editor -checked those that I might try. After a good many weeks I went on the -staff of the _World_. - -“And all of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none -of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but pure -delight. But at the time I was under the illusion that I was very -determined. - -“For the last few years I have lived here with my father and mother, in -the little town where I was born and where they have spent most of their -lives. My mother’s family, named Beers, is English; and my father’s -family, English, of Scotch-Irish descent, settled in Watertown, -Massachusetts, in 1640, nine generations ago. My -great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry Gale, led his company against the -courthouse at Worcester, where the supreme court was sitting, and -demanded the repeal of the imprisonment-for-debt law, just after the -Revolution; and for this he was condemned to death, and then reprieved, -and removed to Vermont.... Here in Portage, in my father’s house, a -little river runs close by the door, and there are lilacs on the bank -and hills to the south, and there are many wild birds, and squirrels -live in trees close to the windows. It is true that people love to try -to make their own surroundings sound romantic and unique, and hereby, to -my own taste, I do so. Here I have written ten books of fiction, two -published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and all the rest by the Macmillan -Company; and a little play, _Neighbors_, published by Huebsch. - -“I have had some years of that passion for reform. I was president of a -civic association here, then chairman of the State Federation’s civic -work, then of the national civic work of the General Federation of -Woman’s Clubs, and on the board of the American Civic association. I -have resigned from everything in favor of the new democracy.... My only -executive connection with any organization is with the board of the -American Union Against Militarism. I have been a believer in equal -suffrage since before it was respectable to believe. My paramount taste -is for poetry. At the moment my chief admiration is for Russia. My -deepest interest is to find those who feel something of the fundamental -truth underlying all religion. And my recreation is talk with those who -believe with passion in the new industrial and social and spiritual -To-morrow. - - “ZONA GALE.” - -“Portage, Wisconsin. - -“February, 1919.” - -Characteristically, Miss Gale says nothing, in her reply to a request -for information about herself, concerning her novel, _Birth_, the book -which has not only made absolutely necessary her inclusion in any record -of American women novelists, but has placed her in the front rank. For -however we may array the women writers of the United States, no one who -has read _Birth_ is likely to deny that it possesses some of the -attributes of greatness and literary permanence or that it has “its -share of the qualities which lift writing out of time.” - -Pressed to say what is in her heart, Miss Gale will tell you that, “as a -matter of fact, _Birth_ is really my first novel. Since the most -fantastic book with which I began, I have never done anything of novel -length. All my other books have been short stories threaded together, -save three stories of 30,000 words published separately, in no sense -novels. After writing ten books, this book is really my first try at a -novel.... It is embarrassing to be caught looking in a mirror--or -saying one’s own name aloud over the telephone. But to try to do both, -in print, seems to underscore all one’s lacks.” A very modest person, -you see. The author of this book is aware of a certain injustice arising -from his inclusion of a number of letters. The risk is clear. He begs to -say, here and now, that he assumes that risk; and he had rather take the -chance that readers may suspect some of his subjects of -self-consciousness than encounter the certainty that they will think -these authors hardly human--names on title-pages merely. - -When _Birth_ appeared some people were bewildered. One reviewer asked -pathetically what had become of the Zona Gale of _Friendship Village_. -But those whose saturation-point for sentimentality is decidedly, and, -as we believe, healthfully low, gave a great shout of satisfaction to -which added sounds of admiration formed a contrapuntal bass. For _Birth_ -is a thing Thomas Hardy would not be ashamed to put his name to. Nor, we -suspect, George Meredith, either. We like to think that were George -Eliot living to-day, and mistress of the art of fiction (which, bless -her, she never was) she would have written such a book. - -The fact that at this writing _Birth_ has not been “discovered” by the -large public which such a book ultimately commands is of little -importance. That will come. The failure of many book reviewers and book -reporters to detect and proclaim its distinction is an indictment of -book “reviewing” more specific and damning than any generality in which -we might indulge. The real elements of the book’s excellence may best be -recorded in the words of a daughter of Henry Mills Alden, Constance -Murray Greene, who said (_Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New -York, November 24, 1918): - -“The charm consists in delightful and continuous humor, often sharp and -never overkind, which isn’t at all what people mean by ‘charming’ in the -new and popular sense. But here is the real substance of things more to -be desired than the fine gold of sunshine. Miss Gale is incurably funny -and we love her for it--witness the delivery horse, ‘hanging out its -tongue, not at all because of fast driving but from preference,’ and -Mis’ Henry Bates, whose stomach wouldn’t allow her to drink coffee. ‘She -always spoke’ (to quote directly) ‘as if her stomach stood back of her -chair.’ ... _Birth_ achieves the rare result of being both mystical and -colloquial.” How? - -You may well ask. The setting is a tiny Wisconsin town, except for some -scenes in Chicago. The “hero” is a traveling salesman handling pickle -and fruit products; insignificant; with long, thin, freckled wrists and -a coat that gave the effect of blowing when there was no wind; with no -graces. You sicken over the little man’s humiliations in such social -life as Burage, Wisconsin, boasted. He marries a girl of the village, a -girl of some social gifts and quite ordinary and silly feminine -ambitions--and becomes a paperhanger, though knowing nothing of the -business. Barbara Pitt, Marshall Pitt’s wife, is dropped abruptly from -the story--daring technique but justified in the result--and the novel -develops as a narrative of the life-relation of father and son. This -little man, this Marshall Pitt, being human, had his immortal moments. -Zona Gale can put them on paper: - -“It was in this manner that their child was born. There he was, -sentient. A rift in experience, the crossing of the street by Barbara at -one moment rather than the next; the opening of a gate by Pitt in the -afternoon instead of the morning. Then joy, ill, the depths, madness, -flowing about the two. These passed but there remained the -child--living, exquisite, sturdy, sensitive, a new microcosm, -experiencing within himself the act of God.” - -Prose? Poetry! Deep and vibrant music. It has the austere beauty and the -imaginative content of Johann Sebastian Bach--say the _Chaconne_ in D -minor. - -“Love is a creative force,” says Mrs. Greene in the article we have -already quoted, “and though Marshall Pitt had been unable through the -inarticulate material in which his soul was embodied to fashion himself -in any accordance with his blurred hopes, he could by virtue of his -great love for Barbara and their child offer to Jeffrey [his son] the -inspiration lacking which his life, even to his last heroic act, had -seemed a futile thing. In dying because he lacked cleverness to see the -means of escape, to save the only living thing that had loved him in -return, he made his last awkward gesture that of rescuing a dog!” We may -quote the passage, condensed slightly: - -“They carried Pitt, and in his arms was a white Marseilles spread in -which he had swathed the little dog. The spread was burning, Pitt’s hair -was burning and the thin cotton of his shirt was all burned away about -his throat and breast and blazed upon his shoulders. - -“They laid him on the ground and the people beat out the flames. As the -fire was quenched there was a terrific commotion in the white -Marseilles spread. Out leaped Jep, not a silken hair on him singed, and -he snapped indignantly at having been caused intolerable -inconvenience.... - -“‘Well, but of all the fool things. For a _dog_.’...” - - -BOOKS BY ZONA GALE - -_Romance Island_, 1906. -_The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_, 1907. -_Friendship Village_, 1908. -_Friendship Village Love Stories_, 1909. -_Mothers to Men_, 1911. -_Christmas_, 1912. -_When I Was a Little Girl_, 1913. -_Neighborhood Stories_, 1914. -_Heart’s Kindred_, 1915. -_A Daughter of Tomorrow_, 1917. -_Birth_, 1918. -_Peace in Friendship Village_, 1919. -_Miss Lulu Bett_, 1920. -_Neighbors_ (play), 1920. -_Miss Lulu Bett_ (play), 1921. - -_First two books published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis; -Neighbors first published by B. W. Huebsch, New York; Miss Lulu Bett, -novel and play, published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Other -books published by the Macmillan Company, New York._ - - - - -CHAPTER XXXV - -MARY HEATON VORSE - - -There have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come -out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary -Heaton Vorse as an answer to these doubters. In spite of the fact that -she once lived in Greenwich Village it is greatly to be doubted if the -woman who could write _The Prestons_ was ever of it. John Reed gives a -brief verbal picture of Mary Heaton Vorse entirely surrounded by -Greenwich Villagers and cigarette smoke, seated on the floor, doing -several things at once and, despite a deafening chatter from the girls -with the bobbed hair and the boys with the flowing ties, dictating a -short story with the utmost calm, speed and concentration. She dwelt -among highly trodden ways--and took her own track. - -As a short story writer Mary Heaton Vorse is of the first importance in -any survey of contemporary American writers. As a novelist she shares -with Zona Gale the distinction of being put on the map by a single -superb book. As a personality she is alive and present to any one who -ever has met and talked with her. Corinne Lowe had a phrase likening her -to a Botticelli painting. Benjamin De Casseres describes her by her -voice, insists that it is the one thing making the striking first -impression and lingering in the memory like lovely music. I wish now -that I had set down the precise and extraordinary words in which Mr. De -Casseres extemporized his picture of the woman by the mere description -of her speech--its timbre and “tone color,” as musicians would say. No -paraphrase will serve; the reader will have to take on faith an -assertion--here made quite simply--that this woman of the memorable -voice, the isolation in the midst of the crowd and the face of sympathy -and comprehension is a woman of no common endowment. - -But that, doubtless, would be evident to any one reading _The Prestons_. -Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she -said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers of _The Prestons_: - -“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for -next fall instead of a sequel to _The Prestons_. You do not know how -happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of _The Prestons_ -have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess -that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so -short a time. - -“I love _The Prestons_--all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms -my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American -public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true -interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel -to _The Prestons_.” - -A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall, -on conditions.... - -The truth about _The Prestons_ is this: Hardly a man or woman will be -able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the -American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No -finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book--to _any_ -book. - -The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the -word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor -patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and -nothing else. - -So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the -feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary -Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one -narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of -emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was: - -Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its -very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end -of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No -great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to -a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those -little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The -only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old -son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do -something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief; -seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing -absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs. -Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the -philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family -servant and shield and friend. - -Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you -will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been -turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will -be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you -will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the -dog. They are so much--you. - -It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like _The Prestons_ -than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling. -It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the -house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is -lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the -graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on, -dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all -over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a -policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.” - -On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor -where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The -mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain. -In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his -observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read: - -“2 P. M.--Guinea pigs sleeping. - -“2:30 P. M.--Still sleeping. - -“3 P. M.--Running around cage (I poked them with a stick). - -“3:15 P. M.--Eating. - -“Note: Guinea pigs eat with persistence. - -“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.” - -Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that -Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by -naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed -into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads -in books.” - -She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of -a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and -his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to -college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn -and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping -from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.” - -She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria -believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious -processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is -Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out -in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the -beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for -breakfast. - -Of all the surprising affairs in which the youthful Jimmie had a hand we -think the affair of the fat little Baker boy the most amusing. “We was -in the swing,” Jimmie explained to his mother, “and I butted Ed in the -belly.” - -“‘He hit him in the abdomen,’ corrected the Baker girl. - -“‘I have always been very particular,’ Mrs. Baker announced, ‘Mrs. -Preston, about the language my children use, as you can see for -yourself. You heard how Jimmie referred to Edward’s abdomen. He has used -that word at least six times in the last five minutes; and that, Mrs. -Preston, I cannot stand. I will have my home kept refined and I say no -home can be refined where vulgar, common words are in daily use.’ - -“To this I found nothing to say but ‘Come home with me, Jimmie.’ - -“On the way, ‘Have I got to say “abdomen”?’ he asked. ‘Say, have I?’ - -“I took refuge in the cowardly woman’s evasion. ‘I don’t think that -there’s the slightest need of your using either of those terms ever,’ I -replied. - -“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one -could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’” - -The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of -Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on -marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song: - - “Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen, - Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen, - Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.” - -They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called -on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the -street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here comes -Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this -diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel. - -Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young -Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less -responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the -bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the -house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether -undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played -detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck. - -We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh -over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in -their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at -such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to -the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older -than he. - -This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and -with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of -observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an -American novel that transcends it. - -Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram -Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad. -She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and, -secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph -O’Brien. - - -BOOKS BY MARY HEATON VORSE - -_The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife_, 1908. -_The Very Little Person_, 1911. -_The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman_, 1911. -_The Heart’s Country_, 1913. -_The Ninth Man._ -_The Prestons_, 1918. - -_The Prestons is published by Boni & Liveright, New York._ - - - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -born in 1859=> -born in 1857 -{pg 49} - -showed Miss Johnson=> -showed Miss Johnston -{pg 145} - - -demanding an implicity of obedience=> -demanding an implicitly of obedience -{pg 149} - -Books ry Clara Louise Burnham=> -Books by Clara Louise Burnham -{pg 282} - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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(Martin) Overton</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The Women Who Make Our Novels</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Grant M. (Martin) Overton</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 22, 2021 [eBook #65134]</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Chuck Greif and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)</div> - -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS ***</div> -<hr class="full" /> - -<div class="c"> -<a href="images/cover.jpg"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" height="500" alt="" /></a> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i">{i}</a></span> </p> - -<p class="cb">MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS<br /><br /> -———</p> - -<p class="c">THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span> </p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span> </p> - -<h1> -The Women Who Make<br /> -Our Novels</h1> - -<p class="c">BY<br /> -GRANT M. OVERTON<br /> -<br /> -<img src="images/colophon.png" -width="100" -alt="" -/> -<br /> -<br /> -NEW YORK<br /> -MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY<br /> -1922<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span><br /><br /><br /> - -<span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1918,<br /> -BY<br /> -MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY<br /> -——<br /> -<br /> -<i>First printing December 12, 1918</i><br /> -<i>Second printing April 25, 1919</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v">{v}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="TABLE_OF_CONTENTS" id="TABLE_OF_CONTENTS"></a>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h2> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" summary=""> -<tr><td> </td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><i>Edith Wharton</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><i>Alice Brown</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_11">11</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><i>Ellen Glasgow</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_20">20</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><i>Gertrude Atherton</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_41">41</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><i>Mary Roberts Rinehart</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_54">54</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><i>Kathleen Norris</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_68">68</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><i>Margaret Deland</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_78">78</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><i>Gene Stratton-Porter</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_88">88</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><i>Eleanor H. Porter</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_108">108</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_X"><i>Kate Douglas Wiggin</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_121">121</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><i>Mary Johnston</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_132">132</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><i>Corra Harris</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_153">153</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><i>Mary Austin</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_164">164</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><i>Mary S. Watts</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_177">177</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><i>Mary E. Wilkins Freeman</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_198">198</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><i>Anna Katharine Green</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_204">204</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><i>Helen R. Martin</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_215">215</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><i>Sophie Kerr</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_226">226</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><i>Marjorie Benton Cooke</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_238">238</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><i>Grace S. Richmond</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_246">246</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><i>Willa Sibert Cather</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_254">254</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><i>Clara Louise Burnham</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_267">267</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><i>Demetra Vaka</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_284">284</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">CHAPTER XXIV</a> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><i>Edna Ferber</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_292">292</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">CHAPTER XXV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV"><i>Dorothy Canfield Fisher</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_298">298</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">CHAPTER XXVI</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI"><i>Amelia E. Barr</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_304">304</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">CHAPTER XXVII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII"><i>Alice Hegan Rice</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_313">313</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">CHAPTER XXVIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII"><i>Alice Duer Miller</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_320">320</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">CHAPTER XXIX</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX"><i>Eleanor Hallowell Abbott</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_326">326</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">CHAPTER XXX</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX"><i>Harriet T. Comstock</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_334">334</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">CHAPTER XXXI</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI"><i>Honoré Willsie</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_342">342</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">CHAPTER XXXII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII"><i>Frances Hodgson Burnett</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_357">357</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">CHAPTER XXXIII</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII"><i>Mary E. Waller</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_369">369</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">CHAPTER XXXIV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV"><i>Zona Gale</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_377">377</a></td></tr> - -<tr><th class="c" colspan="2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV">CHAPTER XXXV</a></th></tr> - -<tr><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV"><i>Mary Heaton Vorse</i></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_386">386</a></td></tr> - -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii">{viii}</a></span> </p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span> </p> - -<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HIS book, the rather unpremeditated production of several months’ work, -is by a man who is not a novelist and who is therefore entirely unfitted -to write about women who are novelists. Several excuses may be urged; -the author is, by general agreement, young. He has to do with many -novels, being, indeed, a sort of new and strange creature, a literary -reporter self-styled, a person connected with a newspaper and charged -with the task of describing new books for the readers thereof. As he -could make no critical pretensions he had to fall back upon a process -peculiar to newspaper work, the attempt at a simple putting before the -public of facts, of things lately said and done—in short, of news. He -had to regard a new book as a piece of news to be communicated as -honestly and as entertainingly as any other occurrence. And so, here. He -has tried to be a good reporter of the personalities, performances and -methods of work of some of the best known American women novelists.</p> - -<p>An effort has been made to include in this book all the living American -women novelists whose writing, by the customary standards, is -artistically fine. An equal effort has been made to include all the -living American women novelists whose writing has attained a wide -popularity. The author does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x">{x}</a></span> contend, nor will he so much as allow, -that the production of writing artistically fine is a greater -achievement than the satisfaction of many thousands of readers. It may -be more lasting; it is not more meritorious; and to attempt to institute -comparisons between the two things is absurd. The critic may be -justified in treating of Edith Wharton and ignoring Gene -Stratton-Porter. The literary reporter who should do such a thing -doesn’t know his job.</p> - -<p>It is, therefore, to be feared that this is no book for highbrows. But a -lower forehead and a broader outlook have their advantages. In the -striking popularity of a particular storyteller a thoughtful observer -may see important and significant evidences of the tendencies of his -time. And that may be much more worth his while than the most careful -speculation as to who will be read fifty years from now.</p> - -<p>The order in which authors are taken up in the book is accidental and -therefore meaningless. The reader is recommended to follow his own -inclination in perusing the chapters. They are entirely detached from -each other, as are the subjects considered except for an occasional -reference, in discussing one, to another’s work. These references, and -in fact all the discussions of various books, are to be taken as -expository and not critical. If a thing is stated to be good, bad or -indifferent the statement is made as a statement of fact and not of -personal opinion.</p> - -<p>The justification of this book is the need of it. It is ridiculous that -there should be nothing easily accessible about such writers as Edith -Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Mary Johnston, Mary S.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xi" id="page_xi">{xi}</a></span> Watts, -Anna Katharine Green, Clara Louise Burnham, Amelia E. Barr and Edna -Ferber. The condensations of <i>Who’s Who in America</i> are dry bones; books -on living American writers are all “studies” or compilations of a highly -selective sort; their authors want to be revered by posterity as persons -of wonderful critical perception and judgment. The authors themselves -have not the time to satisfy their readers’ curiosity and their -publishers hesitate lest they may not remain their publishers!</p> - -<p>And so the literary reporter steps in. Some of the chapters in this -book, generally condensed in content, have appeared in the columns of -<i>Books and the Book World</i>, the literary magazine of <i>The Sun</i>, New -York, of which he is the editor. In their preparation he has been -wonderfully helped by the authors themselves and by other individuals -and publishing houses, for which he makes acknowledgment and returns his -thanks in a note elsewhere in the book.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiii" id="page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xii" id="page_xii">{xii}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="ACKNOWLEDGMENT" id="ACKNOWLEDGMENT"></a>ACKNOWLEDGMENT</h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span>Y indebtedness to various persons and sources is repeatedly made -manifest in the text. Only the co-operation of publishers has made -possible the preparation of these sketches in a short time. I wish -particularly to thank the following for important help:</p> - -<p>Houghton Mifflin Company and Mr. Roger L. Scaife and Mrs. Helen -Bishop-Dennis for material on Mary Roberts Rinehart, Eleanor H. Porter, -Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Johnston, Mary Austin, Willa Sibert Cather, -Clara Louise Burnham and Demetra Vaka.</p> - -<p>Doubleday, Page & Company and Mr. Harry E. Maule for material on Ellen -Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gene Stratton-Porter, Corra Harris, Helen R. -Martin, Sophie Kerr, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Grace S. Richmond and -Harriet T. Comstock.</p> - -<p>The Macmillan Company and Mr. Harold S. Latham for material on Alice -Brown and Mary S. Watts and Zona Gale.</p> - -<p>Harper & Brothers and Miss Hesper Le Gallienne for material on Gertrude -Atherton, Margaret Deland and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.</p> - -<p>The Century Company for material on Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller -and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.</p> - -<p>Frederick A. Stokes Company and Mr. William Morrow for material on -Gertrude Atherton, Edna<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiv" id="page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span> Ferber, Honoré Willsie and Frances Hodgson -Burnett.</p> - -<p>Dodd, Mead & Company for material on Anna Katharine Green, Gertrude -Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.</p> - -<p>Henry Holt & Company and Miss Ellen Knowles Eayrs for material on -Dorothy Canfield Fisher.</p> - -<p>Charles Scribner’s Sons for material on Edith Wharton.</p> - -<p>Little, Brown & Company for material on Mary E. Waller.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="THE_WOMEN_WHO_MAKE_OUR_NOVELS" id="THE_WOMEN_WHO_MAKE_OUR_NOVELS"></a>THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS</h2> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br /> -<small>EDITH WHARTON</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance -that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also -accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not -accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it -is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say, -therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious -compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed, -immutably fixed upon from the Beginning—not of a book but of a -Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely -divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much -in the divine right of kings—an accident at the beginning of it. Had -the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they -preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd, -there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working -out of them, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span> pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be -left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton.</p> - -<p>We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the -accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their -novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and -very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but -rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book—other -than a work of fiction—are either that it presents facts or suggests -ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our -first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and -their books—simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it -is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better -than a pale reflection of life.</p> - -<p>Edith Wharton comes first in this book that she may the better stand -alone. She has always stood alone. The distinguishing thing about her is -the distinguishing thing about her work—aloneness, which is not the -same thing as aloofness. She is not aloof. At 56 she is working in -France, doing that which her hand finds to do. Her aloneness arises from -the facts of her life. Never were so many favoring stars clustered -together as for her when she was born. She had everything.</p> - -<p>She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the -daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item -2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton -of Boston in 1885 (item 4—no! countless items of luck had already -intervened!). In other<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span> words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General -Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family, -was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that -careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could -confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect -acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so -discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing. -Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes -of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night. -They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly -and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native -genius to expression. Think of it—Italy and all the other rich -backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right -surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable -gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in -the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius -and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs. -Wharton <i>had</i> a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in -the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word.</p> - -<p>She is not a genius but she moves and always has moved in a world of -geniuses. From childhood she had, of course, an easy familiarity with -French, German and Italian. The ordinary bounds upon reading—the only -way of keeping the company of the supremely great of earth—were thus -swept a meas<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span>ureless distance away. French, German and Italian as well -as English literature were accessible to her—and the French includes -the Russian, of course. She read widely and we are told that “when she -came upon Goethe she was more prepared than the average to take to heart -his counsels of perfection and reach after a high and effective -culture!” Reach? Not upward, surely; there was nothing above her. -Outward, perhaps. At any rate, here was Mrs. Wharton in the actual -presence and company of a genius if ever there lived one. It is -agonizing to think what Goethe would have said were he alive these days. -He would have said the supremely scathing thing, the thing that would -have withered forever the moral cancer of his countrymen, and we cannot -articulate it. A magical mind and a magical tongue and a magical -pen—Goethe. He was always saying sesame. We, who have not his genius, -have to batter down the barred door.</p> - -<p>It is to Goethe above all other literary influence that Mrs. Wharton -feels indebted. Strike out the word “literary.” The influence of Goethe -is not a literary influence, but an influence proceeding directly from -the heart of life itself. What sort of an influence is it? High, pure, -clean and yet human. Intangible, too; about all you really can say of it -is that it is like the company of some people who bring out all the best -that is in you. They do not put into you anything new. They draw you -out, or rather, they draw something out of you. At the risk of shocking -the fastidious reader and to the joy of the literally-minded we may say -that they are the spiritual equiva<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span>lent of the mustard plaster. They -have an equal drawing power and efficacy, but they do not draw out the -ache but the great glow and spirit which are the incontestable proof of -the existence in the human soul of something immortal.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wharton read widely, as we say, and she read in the main “standard” -fiction. Her taste is for George Eliot and the ethical teachings of that -earlier woman novelist. Her taste is equally for Gustave Flaubert, the -“craftsman’s master,” the writer who teaches writers how to write. You -learn the innermost secrets of your writing craft from Flaubert and then -you put aside everything you have learned from the master and learn from -life. Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Meredith have been Mrs. Wharton’s -steady diet; she has re-read them so often as repeatedly and contentedly -to fall into arrears with respect to current fiction. She has had always -a great interest in biology and in whatever touches upon the history of -human thought. This, in brief, is the substance of Edith Wharton the -woman and the background of Edith Wharton the novelist.</p> - -<p>We shall not discuss Mrs. Wharton’s books in detail in this chapter and -book for the best of reasons—they leave no room for two opinions of her -work. Of almost no other novelist whom we shall consider would it be -possible to say this; indeed of some American women novelists there are -nearer twenty-two than two opinions. Some writers, like Gertrude -Atherton, are subjects of perpetual controversy; others are the cause of -wide but sharply defined cleavages of opinion—Gene Stratton-Porter, for -example. The work of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span> still others is more properly matter for -speculation as to what they may do than estimate of what they have done. -But Mrs. Wharton falls in none of these classifications. There is only -one opinion about her work: it is excellent but lifeless; it is Greek -marble with no Pygmalion near. From this sweeping verdict three—and -only three—of her books are to be excepted. They are <i>Ethan Frome</i> and -<i>The House of Mirth</i> and <i>Summer</i>. In these three books you can feel the -pulse beat. In <i>Ethan Frome</i> the pulse is the feeble quiver of the -crushed and dying human heart; in <i>The House of Mirth</i> there is the slow -throb of human suffering and anguish, mental no less than spiritual; in -<i>Summer</i> there is the excited and accelerated vibration of human -passion.</p> - -<p>It will be taken as a very dogmatic piece of business on our part when -we say that her work leaves no room for two opinions. Was there ever a -bit of writing, some will ask, which could not give birth in the minds -of readers to more than one opinion? Often, indeed, twin opinions are -born to the same reader!</p> - -<p>We must answer that here and hereafter we are dealing with easily -ascertainable facts and not indulging in criticism. Mrs. Wharton’s work -leaves room for only one opinion simply because those who might form -another opinion do not read her. And those who do not read her take -their opinions from those who do and then, following the instinct of our -natures, declare (quite honestly) the borrowed opinion as their own. Our -real audacity consists in the assertion, implied in what we have said, -that of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span> all the thousands who read Mrs. Wharton not one believes in his -heart for one solitary instant that the mass of her fiction is alive. -They look upon her work as they look upon the Winged Victory; it is -ravishingly beautiful, it has perfection of form, it has every attribute -of beauty possible of attainment by the consummate artist, but it has -also the severe limitations of any form of art.</p> - -<p>We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never -can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of -writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All -art is necessarily a <i>representation</i> of life or some aspect of it. The -moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow -himself to think of any kind of <i>art</i> in what he is doing, he goes into -a fourth dimension—and life exists in only three dimensions. This is -not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact, -almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the -mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the -mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade.</p> - -<p>And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think -of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special -preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living. -If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do -entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed -completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we -know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span> Conrad, one book of Thomas -Hardy’s—we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific -illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this -book.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the -resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is -not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely -similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth -well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in -cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more -disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined -it more completely. <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> is the everlasting witness -of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he -did do. <i>Ethan Frome</i>, <i>The House of Mirth</i> and <i>Summer</i> are all -inferior to <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> and all superior to James’s later -work.</p> - -<p>If any one tells you otherwise it is because he is thinking in terms of -art and not in terms of life. And some will tell you otherwise, for the -world never has lacked those to whom art was more than life just as the -world has never lacked those to whom a future life was more than the -life of this earth. With these we have no quarrel; we can but respect -them; God made them so. It takes all kinds of people, we agree, to make -a world; if that is so, manifestly it takes all kinds of views to get -the true view. In any triangle the sum of all three angles is equal to -two right angles. If, therefore, one of the angles<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span> of the triangle is a -right angle, the sum of the other two will equal a right angle. The -angle of outlook which sees only the artistry in a piece of literary -work added to the angle of outlook which sees only the livingness in the -same work may make the right angle which we all aspire to look from.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Edith Wharton</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Greater Inclination</i>, 1899.<br /> -<i>The Touchstone</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>Crucial Instances</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>The Valley of Decision</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>Sanctuary</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>The Descent of Man, and Other Stories</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Italian Villas and Their Gardens</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Italian Backgrounds</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>The House of Mirth</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>Madame de Treymes</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Fruit of the Tree</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Hermit and the Wild Woman</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>A Motor-Flight Through France</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Tales of Men and Ghosts</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Reef</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Custom of the Country</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Book of the Homeless</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Fighting France</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Ethan Frome.</i><br /> -<i>The Decoration of Houses.</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span><i>The Joy of Living.</i><br /> -<i>Xingu and Other Stories.</i><br /> -<i>Summer</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Marne</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>French Ways and Their Meaning</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Age of Innocence</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The Glimpses of the Moon</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>The Reef, Summer, The Marne, French Ways and Their Meaning, The Age of -Innocence, and The Glimpses of the Moon were published by D. Appleton & -Company, New York; Mrs. Wharton’s other books were published by Charles -Scribner’s Sons, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br /> -<small>ALICE BROWN</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>ROM New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request -for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows:</p> - -<p>“I have been too busy in legitimate ways—gardening, cooking, cursing -the Hun—to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark -facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles -inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’ -of walking—[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country -there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips -and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people -were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little -‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was -done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought -back the mail for the rest.</p> - -<p>“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and -then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and -forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was -graduated—after which I taught several years, in the country and in -Boston, hating it more and more every<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span> minute, and then threw over my -certainty to write.</p> - -<p>“I did a little work on the <i>Christian Register</i> and then went to the -<i>Youth’s Companion</i>, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the -latest books and magazines.</p> - -<p>“And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry -on—sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens -and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old -houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more.</p> - -<p>“And <i>that’s</i> all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a -genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless -you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’</p> - -<p class="c"> -“Gloomily yours,<br /><span style="margin-left: 15%;"> -“<span class="smcap">Alice Brown</span>.”</span><br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -[In pencil]<br /> -</p> - -<p>“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it -pans out!”</p> - -<p>And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for -embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier, -may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of -her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people. -Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will -be found at the close of this chapter.</p> - -<p>New England stories (<i>Meadow-Grass</i>), English travels (<i>By Oak and -Thorn</i>), poems (<i>The Road to Castaly</i>), a study of Stevenson written in -collaboration, stories for girls (as <i>The Secret of the Clan</i>), a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span> play -that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (<i>Children of -Earth</i>) and a number of novels of which <i>The Prisoner</i> is the most -notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature.</p> - -<p>She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story -writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved -a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet -she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible -to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play—the play that captured -Winthrop Ames’s prize—which was splendidly imaginative and even rather -poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance -of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is -everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a -wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can -make up for that lack.</p> - -<p>As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t -believe that try to go through <i>My Love and I</i>, first published under -the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left -out. Again, she can write a book like <i>The Prisoner</i>, which is as fine -in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing -derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all -(as Miss Brown would say).</p> - -<p>It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women -novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice -Brown to her novels;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span> but this disadvantage to her is no greater than -the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is -not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the -whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and -consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can -to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to -do. But chivalry is not dead.</p> - -<p><i>The Prisoner</i> is the story of a relatively young man who has just come -out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a -keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the -absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her -story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary -parallel.</p> - -<p>Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out -of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the -released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course; -prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of -the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is -much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate -him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world, -cruelty——.</p> - -<p>Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality, -and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of -humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in -ideas as ideas, and in <i>The Prisoner</i> she has packed a few more than can -be found in any American novel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span> of the last dozen years. The root idea -is that expressed by the prisoner—or ex-prisoner—himself. As Jeff -says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real -difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the -law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put -even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by -her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he -meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible -paradox of binding himself to the law.”</p> - -<p>This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K. -Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison -is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible -thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply -evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In -pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut -himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he -can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is -very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is -“outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his -fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect -whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go -unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one -of us any longer if he ever was.</p> - -<p>At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span> to make this very -clear, for otherwise <i>The Prisoner</i> will be, in its real import, lost on -the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a -man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in -which we try to keep every one in the fellowship—for society is -essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make -laws simply to state what is <i>not</i> in that creed, the whole creed itself -being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way -to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have -got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back -in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding -themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the -inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries -with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make -laws about.</p> - -<p>And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the -creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so -doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the -unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see -that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man -see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented -prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to -punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations. -Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable -piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man -who has put himself beyond the pale<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span> must himself bring himself within -it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We -give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a -mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though -physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the -paradox that he can be free in no other way—ever.</p> - -<p>The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that -we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However, -we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss -Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to -speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations -that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this -indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical, -thought-provoking—why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is -simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be -found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly -inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but -perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox—there is no gainsaying -the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry -James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and -sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy -material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it -than Alice Brown has done.</p> - -<p>On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on -the roll of American novelists<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span> at least as high as we place, among the -men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the -West, <i>The Virginian</i>.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Alice Brown</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Fools of Nature.</i><br /> -<i>Meadow-Grass.</i><br /> -<i>By Oak and Thorn.</i><br /> -<i>Life of Mercy Otis Warren.</i><br /> -<i>The Road to Castaly.</i><br /> -<i>The Day of His Youth.</i><br /> -<i>Robert Louis Stevenson—A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney).</i><br /> -<i>Tiverton Tales.</i><br /> -<i>King’s End</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>Margaret Warrener</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>The Mannerings.</i><br /> -<i>High Noon.</i><br /> -<i>Paradise.</i><br /> -<i>The County Road</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>The Court of Love</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>Rose McLeod</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Story of Thyrza</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Country Neighbors</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>John Winterbourne’s Family</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The One-Footed Fairy</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Secret of the Clan</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>My Love and I</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Vanishing Points</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Robin Hood’s Barn</i>, 1913.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span><i>Children of Earth</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Bromley Neighborhood.</i><br /> -<i>The Prisoner</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Flying Teuton</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Homespun and Gold</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The Wind Between the Worlds</i>, 1920.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books -by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br /> -<small>ELLEN GLASGOW</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">E</span>LLEN GLASGOW’S first two books were produced before she was twenty. She -is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist—better, a disciple of -naturalism—and concerned with social and personal problems of the last -thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a -book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in -the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used -respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the -civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s -province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more -gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something -reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the -leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s.</p> - -<p>She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and -transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a -region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own -sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an -evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her -writing is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span> filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life -before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She -does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such -crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in <i>her -interpretation</i> of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be -able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are!</p> - -<p>Miss Glasgow has had to drive so hard and so strongly and so much alone; -she has had to face such a vast inertia of tradition and such a tenacity -of feeling, that the struggle has narrowed her. She hates -sentimentality, and rightly. It has been the terrible obstacle she has -had to confront. Of her South she once said:</p> - -<p>“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle -against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or -later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will -have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not -an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,” -Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on -another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I -have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the -struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she -explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality, -which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in -New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her -novel <i>Virginia</i>, the title<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span> referring, however, not to her State, but -to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton.</p> - -<p>You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s -handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as -she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most -adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut -her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by -sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it -were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things -clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared -that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that -Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive -idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly -without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to -the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who -rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was -wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but -whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never -to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington, -the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable -exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington:</p> - -<p>“It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody—in a doctor, or a -friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism -in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span>’ but -the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally, -the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless, -the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.”</p> - -<p>Mr. Tarkington went on to say:</p> - -<p>“Miss Glasgow is sorry that there are so many writers willing to supply -the demand for ‘sugary philosophy,’ but those writers are not only -willing to supply; they are inspired to supply. They aren’t superior -people turning the trick for money, as Miss Glasgow seems to think; they -are ‘giving the best that is in them.’ They take their art solemnly.”</p> - -<p>The truest word on the subject ever uttered and most essential to be -reprinted here. It is not so much for the refutation of Miss Glasgow -that we give it. The full application of Mr. Tarkington’s remarks will -be seen in some of the later chapters of this book.</p> - -<p>But to return to our Southern realist.</p> - -<p>Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, -1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson) -Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men—lawyers, -judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to -school—an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her -Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary -intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He -is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her -affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for -scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of -political economy and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span> socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong. -The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.” -The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later -join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she -went to her father and said:</p> - -<p>“Father, I have written a book.”</p> - -<p>Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might -have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally -supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was <i>The -Descendant</i>, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid -exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the -offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.”</p> - -<p>The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious -consideration as an American novelist—as a novelist picturing American -life—was <i>The Voice of the People</i>, published in 1900. She has referred -in after years to <i>The Descendant</i> as “a mere schoolgirl effort,” -although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could -not so characterize <i>The Voice of the People</i>, nor could any one else. -It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class -distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and -dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political -machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of -the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the -hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic -State convention. An old family friend, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span> delegate to the convention, -smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house -in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the -building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory -must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and -uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater.</p> - -<p>It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a -friend—Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a -novel of New York life.”</p> - -<p>“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?”</p> - -<p>“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do -not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular -locality.”</p> - -<p>A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness -of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not -answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has -necessarily only a few localities—those he knows tolerably well. Miss -Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her -Virginia settings do.</p> - -<p>Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main -Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that -cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden -in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the -real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and -has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span> touch of Jane -Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes -every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not -locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only -animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her -dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.”</p> - -<p>Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of <i>Virginia</i> and -<i>Life and Gabriella</i> was rewritten at least three times, some parts -more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds -incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a -pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has -been typewritten.</p> - -<p>And always novels. “I cannot write short stories,” Miss Glasgow -explains. “They bore me excruciatingly. The whole technique of the short -story and the novel is different. All the best of the short stories must -be painfully condensed with slight regard for the evolutionary causes -bringing about this or that effect. Everything that I see, I see in the -form of a novel—as a large canvas. I want to trace the process of cause -and effect; and that is why both <i>Virginia</i> and <i>Gabriella</i> were a joy -in the writing. Those books do not deal with problems. I do not ever let -a problem get into my novels—there is none, except, of course, as some -problem of an individual life may present itself to the character. I am -not concerned with any propaganda. A book should never serve any purpose -but the telling of life as it is—being faithfully realistic.”</p> - -<p>“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span> the writer’s true -business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be -pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them.</p> - -<p>“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write -comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of -plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a -piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within -stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come, -always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and -places—at a reception, on the train, on the street.”</p> - -<p>When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her -novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it -there. She selects her people, who have <i>their</i> individual problems as -she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from -that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural -and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s -methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely -about novel writing and her literary ideals.</p> - -<p>“There are three things a novelist has to do to prove himself,” she -declared. “First, he must show an ability to create personalities; -second, he must exhibit a sincerity of style; and third, he must evince -the capacity for an intelligent criticism of life. Without these he is -not worth very much in a serious, big way. To contribute to the -knowledge and understanding of life—that should be his motive in -writing, not primarily to create a pleasant impression.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span></p> - -<p>“There have been several stages in our growth since the special type of -fiction was evolved. There was the sentimentality of Richardson; then -came my favorite, Fielding, our first realist; and finally arrived the -critical period with its early representative in Jane Austen and more -recent upholder in Meredith. We had to pass through stages far from real -life before we reached the time of direct dealing with life, of real -criticism of life. Take such men as Wells and Galsworthy—and maybe -Arnold Bennett;—are they not trying to see life through and through? I -do not believe in the realism that merely depicts for the picture. -Realism of the kind I mean not only depicts, but interprets as well.”</p> - -<p>“How about Fielding, your favorite?” asked Mr. Moses.</p> - -<p>“Oh, he had his faults, but they were honest ones.” Mr. Moses remarked -Miss Glasgow’s enthusiasm as she talked. “He was the first to teach us -that life—and ordinary life, too—has poetry in it. There are some of -our writers with a social conscience who use narrative as a mere vehicle -for philosophy. It is always well to have a big central idea to hold the -building together, but realism—though some novelists would separate -it—cannot be practiced apart from vision. The novelist must have a -perspective in life.</p> - -<p>“When I first began writing I steeped myself in economics, in -sociology—and later in German mysticism. But one learns only that he -may unlearn, if necessary. In doing <i>Virginia</i> I was obliged to revisit -certain localities to refresh my memory of things.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span> But I could not -write of them immediately; the impressions had to filter through my -imagination.</p> - -<p>“A man who writes for his age seldom writes for any other. And that is -why I do not believe in being consciously local. Mr. Howells, as our -greatest realist, made us see the poetry of the life he knew best. While -I’ve never consciously been influenced by any school, I have felt what -he has done for the novel. At one time I knew my Balzac, my Flaubert, my -Guy de Maupassant, by heart. And of course I read the Russians, who, I -think, are the greatest of all novelists. But as far as I am aware, I -have worked my own method out for myself.”</p> - -<p>Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never -written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her -books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best -expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all -of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the -greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life -was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow -all of this complexity.”</p> - -<p>Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and -the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s -words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha -on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more -accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is -always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed -in definite phrases. Take, for example,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span> the titles of two of her books, -<i>The Wheel of Life</i> (1906) and <i>The Ancient Law</i> (1908). They merely -repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively, -in her earlier novel, <i>The Deliverance</i>.</p> - -<p>For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond -home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an -apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow -empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its -books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the -atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the -change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with -the life of Virginia in her later books.</p> - -<p><i>Virginia</i>, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable -controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in -this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy—provided Miss Glasgow -writes the third! <i>Life and Gabriella</i> was the second book of the -uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about -these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent -suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex.</p> - -<p>“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same -as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life. -Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness.</p> - -<p>“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point -where one may mold his destiny.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span> One must use the circumstances of life -rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be -the captain of her own soul.</p> - -<p>“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to -whether <i>Life and Gabriella</i> was intended to express the modern revolt -of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break -through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not -now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried, -or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain -single.</p> - -<p>“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce -easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform. -Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a -certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature -should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and -the one in Maine are—just men.</p> - -<p>“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have -concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only -thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if -their happiness is to last through the years.</p> - -<p>“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to -be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of -individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest -and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most -firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the -South has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span> attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began -<i>Virginia</i> I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of -human lives to changing conditions.</p> - -<p>“In <i>Virginia</i> I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative -of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system -and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every -well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her -reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling. -Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine -self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then -dominated her.</p> - -<p>“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used -by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books -are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active.</p> - -<p>“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for -it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of -womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so -many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired -happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action -and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and -success.”</p> - -<p>“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and -coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she -talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out -of her—that is, what you want concern<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span>ing her own work. On literature -generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point.</p> - -<p>“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it -should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the -weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.”</p> - -<p>Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy. -I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard -that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of -disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her -success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.</p> - -<p>“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life -just what he puts into it—or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I -suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always -groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as -you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, -or was, living with the character which will become the central figure -in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to -write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon -as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I -wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between <i>Virginia</i> -and <i>Life and Gabriella</i>. I have no idea when the next will be finished. -I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year -regularly. It seems that one ought to give<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span> more of one’s self to a book -than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep -it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, -that is impossible. You change so much in ten years—all would be -different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose -that is true.”</p> - -<p>Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be -the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would -not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading -<i>The Deliverance</i> these fourteen years after its first publication, your -admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her -penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of -the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast—all these -blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when -the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look -confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not -in the least surprised at the finding.</p> - -<p>Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or -better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after -reading <i>Virginia</i>. It is worth quoting in full:</p> - -<p>“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and -special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for -the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to -learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a -line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span> give -her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’</p> - -<p>“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely -and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this -almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a -friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began -reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she -could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them -unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the -charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character -drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own -individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of -no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point.</p> - -<p>“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble, -but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is -bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one, -she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit -cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so -witty, but fully as wise.</p> - -<p>“You have only to read <i>Virginia</i> to convince yourself.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, -to make the worst of it.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Having lived through the brief illumination of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span> romance, she had come -at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility -of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of -gallantry.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of -it were heroic.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her -anything she had set her heart upon—not even the privilege of working -herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way -men are about Abby.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her -religious convictions?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a -respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so -respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of -Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’</p> - -<p>“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from -her pen in every paragraph.”</p> - -<p>In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it -best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the -greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since -there has been an American literature—we have thought it best to put -her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her -aspect to others,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span> just as she would herself let a character in one of -her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand -before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you -what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him; -she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give -you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for -yourself—the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want -to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and -conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close -of a chapter in <i>The Deliverance</i>—after all, is not this wonderful -story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake, -the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate, -has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher, -grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s -revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it. -He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro -overseer dwells at Blake Hall!</p> - -<p>“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs -outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the -little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him—a -Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before -him—bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if -he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this -life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted—the beauty dwelt -upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the hap<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span>piness which -might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the -brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was—a -man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had -sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the -moment of fulfillment.</p> - -<p>“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he -felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat -himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw -him—that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was -not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon—it was rather the -excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. -He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the -nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the -breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone—the -bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart -and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand—he saw -that now in his first moment of awakening—a life that he had destroyed -as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step -by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, -and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.</p> - -<p>“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the -light.”</p> - -<p>Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s -real material, the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span> soul. <i>The Deliverance</i> is a story of revenge -with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far -beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative -forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The -hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, -while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign -of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be -preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; -wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind -grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, -directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing -upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling -with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her -youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken -and sipping her port, blind—blind—successfully deceived, successfully -kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years -since the slave Phyllis “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her -head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be -anything but proud.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Ellen Glasgow</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Descendant</i>, 1897.<br /> -<i>Phases of an Inferior Planet</i>, 1898.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span><i>The Voice of the People</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>The Freeman and Other Poems</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>The Battleground</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>The Deliverance</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>The Wheel of Life</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>The Ancient Law</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Romance of a Plain Man</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The Miller of Old Church</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Virginia</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Life and Gabriella</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Builders</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>One Man in His Time</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers, -New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br /> -<small>GERTRUDE ATHERTON</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">G</span>ERTRUDE ATHERTON has been the subject of more controversy than any -other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her -importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living -novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of -her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At -home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who -occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries.</p> - -<p>A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and -vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and -Henry James. Pick up her novel <i>Patience Sparhawk and Her Times</i>, -written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling -in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary -gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who -cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no -use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people -we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no -distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no -individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman -says<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span> that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of -those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth -by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always -she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and -recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire. -She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing -daunts her that is alive—vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin -she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The -only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in -essentials right when he said of her in the New York <i>Evening Post</i> of -June 15, 1918:</p> - -<p>“Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness -she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in -her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer -school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons, -the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common, -unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on -the drab or the colorless.</p> - -<p>“An Alexander Hamilton or a Rezanov seems to be made to her hand, and if -she cannot find what she wants in history or in fact, she prefers to -dream of a woman genius, the young German countess, Gisela Niebuhr, a -Brunnhilde who leads her sisters to revolt against Prussianism and all -that makes Germany hideous to the world to-day.</p> - -<p>“To understand genius, it has been said, is to approach it, and Mrs. -Atherton beyond any doubt under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span>stands genius. She understands its -trials, temptations, vagaries and accomplishments. She knows that the -fires which feed it are certain to break out in many ways aside from its -recognized work. Did Mrs. Atherton take the trouble to acknowledge the -existence of Mrs. Grundy, it would be only that she might destroy that -unpopular lady.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a -novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters -that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience -with dullness. She could no more have written <i>Pollyanna</i> than she could -have written the <i>Book of Job</i>. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her -field of research.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She -is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her -talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to <i>The -Conqueror</i>, he develops his idea:</p> - -<p>“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But -important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s -feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the -storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a <i>genius</i>, -and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no -character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than -was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs. -Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton -because he fought her idol, and how much she<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span> despises Jefferson! But -Washington—even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with -Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son....</p> - -<p>“Critics have sometimes charged Mrs. Atherton with the grave misdemeanor -of writing like herself, not like somebody else; of not being Mrs. -Wharton, of not being Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson. The charge -is just. She is not any of those persons, nor in the least like them. -She does not write for a handful of other writers, nor does she waste -much time in polishing sentences. She writes for the public.... You -cannot read five pages of her fiction without feeling certain that their -author has lived life, not merely dreamed it.”</p> - -<p>This is the most illuminating comment on Mrs. Atherton that has so far -seen the light of day, and we shall not attempt more than to supply a -footnote or two. Mr. Forman says that Mrs. Atherton writes for the -public and not for writers. True, but is it the public which reads Gene -Stratton-Porter or <i>Pollyanna</i>? Decidedly not. Her public—a very large -one—consists of those who do not ask or desire that fiction shall -interpret them to themselves or shape their lives for them, consciously -or otherwise. It is made up of the thousands who are capable of some -degree of purely æsthetic enjoyment in literature. For the pure æsthetes -Mrs. Wharton <i>et al.</i> For the unæsthetic and ethical the two Mrs. -Porters. For the great hosts who appreciate literary art and -story-telling skill but who won’t sacrifice everything for them, who -demand a real narrative, color, action, suspense and seek no<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span> moral end -in the tale to justify the tale’s existence—for them Mrs. Atherton. And -they—these people of her vast audience—are the great middle ground. -They represent in their attitude toward fiction the healthiest note of -all.</p> - -<p>The “literary” or highbrow attitude toward Mrs. Atherton is perfectly -conveyed in an article upon her by Mr. H. W. Boynton, also published in -the New York <i>Evening Post</i> but over two years earlier, on February 26, -1916. We extract a few illustrative sentences:</p> - -<p>“I may say frankly that I write of Mrs. Atherton not out of a special -admiration for her work,” begins Mr. Boynton, in a highly -self-revelatory manner, “but because for any surveyor of modern American -fiction she is so evidently a figure in some measure ‘to be reckoned -with.’... Her publicity may be said to have been extraordinary in -proportion to her achievement.... The person who is examining her work -as literature can find nothing to the purpose here (<i>Mrs. Balfame</i>).”</p> - -<p>How comfortable to feel like that! Mrs. Atherton, with an amused smile, -would probably say, at the intimation that there was no “literature” in -<i>Mrs. Balfame</i>, and perhaps other of her books: “But life is so much -more than literature!” When Mr. Boynton charges her with leaving life -out of her books Mrs. Atherton will be seriously exercised.</p> - -<p>Gertrude Atherton is a great grandniece of Benjamin Franklin. She was -born in 1857 in San Francisco, the daughter of Thomas L. Horn. She was -educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, California, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span> at Sayre -Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. At an early age she was married to -George H. Bowen Atherton, a Californian who declined to travel and who -died when he finally was lured to Chile as a guest on a warship. Mrs. -Atherton describes her marriage as “one of the most important incidents -of my school life.”</p> - -<p>She had always wanted to go round about the world and when she wasn’t -able to do so she amused herself by writing complete travel books, -taking her characters through all parts of Europe. She knew enough -geography to make her stories truthful.</p> - -<p>“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview -appearing in <i>Books and the Book World</i> of <i>The Sun</i>, New York, on March -31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of -fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface -at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real -life and re-create their destinies for them and—well, my books are the -result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.”</p> - -<p>This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, -<i>The Avalanche</i>, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by -Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. <i>The Avalanche</i> is a tale of -California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman -whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has -solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, -submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive -with war work—she returned<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span> from the European battlefronts to be the -American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the -wounded”—rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet -country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen -chapters, she split the last in two.</p> - -<p>“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks—which shows what one -can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original -incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now -that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but -an incident in the climax.</p> - -<p>“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how -they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a -child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.</p> - -<p>“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature -and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but -myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is -full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all -its own.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with -dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has -balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house -which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, -writing in <i>Books and Authors</i> for September, 1917, said:</p> - -<p>“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span> apartment gathers -in a very crush of notables—authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats, -publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not -a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and -who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s -interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the -rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time -friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good -percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along -with men and women who are prominent abroad.”</p> - -<p>It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior -to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de -Staëls she is among them!</p> - -<p>The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was -<i>Senator North</i>, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was -written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence -that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks -that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,” -was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had -begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new -novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the -characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of -information concerning the place and its history. As a result<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span> vividness -is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as -she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits -observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She -notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of -taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the -criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly -abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are -charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters -shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her -material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in -the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special -and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost -infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at -all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the -satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is -fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad, -incongruous, surprising, touching.</p> - -<p>“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training—which -stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the -country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so -mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of -statement to drive her point home.</p> - -<p>Even Mr. Boynton allows that <i>Perch of the Devil</i> contains some of Mrs. -Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The -character of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span> Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so -much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own -explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She -had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of -American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth, -study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with -any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.”</p> - -<p>“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs. -Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western -towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In -the various stages of her development, moreover—beginning when she was -the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress—I found myself -meeting all American women in one. The West to-day—particularly the -Northwest—embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one -of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large -latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the -country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a -Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon -too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even -develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the -more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it -over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement. -They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of -easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both -sophisticated<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span> and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted -Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot -play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American -women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows -in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the -source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her -qualities—good and bad—grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change, -even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and -amusing myself speculating upon her past.”</p> - -<p>In the long list of Mrs. Atherton’s books with which this chapter -concludes it would be desirable, but it is hardly possible, to follow -the example of guidebooks and star and doublestar her more important -novels. It is impracticable because any such designations would have to -be those of a single taste or of a coterie of tastes. <i>Patience -Sparhawk</i>, the dramatized biography of Alexander Hamilton called <i>The -Conqueror</i>, and possibly her recent novel of a German revolution, or the -revolt of the German women under the leadership of Gisela Niebuhr, would -be marked with the double star; certainly <i>The Conqueror</i> would. The -present writer would singlestar <i>Senator North</i> and the novels of early -California—<i>The Doomswoman</i>, <i>Rezanov</i>, <i>The Splendid Idle Forties</i> and -<i>The Californians</i>. Of <i>The Living Present</i> we must speak to call -attention to the final paper in the book’s second part, a tribute to -four New York women, of whom one is Honoré Willsie, the subject of a -later chapter in this book. <i>The Living Present</i> is not a novel. The -first half is con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span>cerned with French women in war time, the fruit of -Mrs. Atherton’s observations and experience in war work; the second half -has the general title <i>Feminism in Peace and War</i>. <i>Perch of the Devil</i> -must be doublestarred, so probably must <i>Ancestors</i> and <i>Tower of -Ivory</i>. Such books as <i>Rulers of Kings</i> and <i>The Travelling Thirds</i> are -least important. <i>Mrs. Balfame</i>, as a capital mystery story, the result -doubtless of Mrs. Atherton’s attendance at a celebrated murder trial in -the interests of a New York newspaper, must be single starred in any -list. <i>The Valiant Runaways</i>, long out of print, has been republished -this fall (1918). It is a story for boys, of Spanish California, with an -encounter with a savage bear, a rescue from a dangerous river, capture -by Indians and an escape on wild mustangs capped by a revolutionary -battle! The performance may be considered a final reminder of Mrs. -Atherton’s versatility. No one has ever found fault with her for not -being versatile!</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Gertrude Atherton</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>A Whirl Asunder</i>, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. Now out of print.<br /> -<i>Patience Sparhawk and Her Times</i>, 1897. Stokes.<br /> -<i>His Fortunate Grace</i>, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print.<br /> -<i>American Wives and English Husbands</i>, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.<br /> -<i>The Californians</i>, 1898. Stokes.<br /> -<i>A Daughter of the Vine</i>, 1899. Lane.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span><i>The Valiant Runaways</i>, 1899. Dodd, Mead.<br /> -<i>Senator North</i>, 1900. Lane.<br /> -<i>The Aristocrats</i>, 1901. Lane.<br /> -<i>The Conqueror</i>, 1902. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Splendid Idle Forties</i>, 1902. Stokes.<br /> -<i>A Few of Hamilton’s Letters</i>, 1903. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Rulers of Kings</i>, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York.<br /> -<i>The Bell in the Fog</i>, 1905. Harper.<br /> -<i>The Travelling Thirds</i>, 1905. Harper.<br /> -<i>Ancestors</i>, 1907. Harper.<br /> -<i>The Gorgeous Isle</i>, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company. Not listed in their last catalogue.<br /> -<i>Tower of Ivory</i>, 1910. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Julia France and Her Times</i>, 1912. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Perch of the Devil</i>, 1914. Stokes.<br /> -<i>California—An Intimate History</i>, 1914. Harper.<br /> -<i>Before the Gringo Came</i> (Combining <i>The Doomswoman</i>, published in 1892, and <i>Rezanov</i>, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Mrs. Balfame</i>, 1916. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Living Present</i>, 1917. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The White Morning</i>, 1918. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Avalanche</i>, 1919. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Sisters-in-Law</i>, 1921. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Sleeping Fires</i>, 1922. Stokes.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br /> -<small>MARY ROBERTS RINEHART</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“I</span> AM being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever -were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I -am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist.</p> - -<p>“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is -sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline -the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot -place in my boys’ hands.”</p> - -<p>Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the <i>American Magazine</i> for October, 1917. It is -almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not -quite. Add this:</p> - -<p>“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, -that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him -nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are -not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only -reticences.</p> - -<p>She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia -(Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s -public and high<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span> schools, then of a training school for nurses where she -acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in -writing <i>The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry</i>, the stories -collected under the title <i>Tish</i> and the novel <i>K.</i> And then she became -the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And -then——</p> - -<p>“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “It -gave me a strong body, and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. -I do not know what would have happened had the work come first. But I -should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. -Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me and -showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we -call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every particle of success -that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my -family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded.</p> - -<p>“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have -out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer -(1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in -Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten -years for them.”</p> - -<p>She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. She -began in 1905—she was twenty-nine that year—and worked at a “tiny” -mahogany desk or upon a card table, “so low and so movable. It can sit -by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with -my two <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span>fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the -youngsters were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully -hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when -leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.”</p> - -<p>Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work -was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a -short article telling how she had systematized the work of the household -with two maids and a negro “buttons.” She sold one or two of the poems -for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family -made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, “a -heart-breaking day, going from publisher to publisher.” In two places -she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. -“But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later -sent <i>The Circular Staircase</i>, my first novel. They published it and -some eight other books of mine.”</p> - -<p>In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made -about $1,200. She was surrounded by “sane people who cried me down,” but -who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her -everlasting help. He “has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief -in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humor have kept me going, -when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has -shaken under my feet.” To the three boys their mother’s work has been a -matter of course ever since they can remember. “I did not burst on them -gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother -than I am a writer, and that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span> family attitude in general has been -attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family -regards his bank.”</p> - -<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Rinehart, a banker’s family regards his bank as a -confounded nuisance! But that’s when the bank takes charge of the man -and demands an undue share of his time and energy. You have never let -your writing do that. With you it has been family first! Most of the -work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 which witnessed your signal -success was done in your home. But sometimes when you had a long piece -of work to do you felt, as you tell us, “the necessity of getting away -from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, you -rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while -you had a novel in hand. It was barely furnished and the most -significant omission was a telephone. There you got through “a -surprising amount of work.” And then, in 1917, you became a commuter.</p> - -<p>Your earnings had risen from the $1,200 of that first year to $50,000 -and possibly more in a twelve-month. But let us have the story in your -own words:</p> - -<p>“My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an -enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, -copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial -rights, and dramatizations, had made from the small beginning of that -book of poems a large and complicated business.</p> - -<p>“I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also -records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article -opposing capital<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span> punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky -Mountains, and finish off with a love story!</p> - -<p>“I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered -into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working -hours was dismaying.</p> - -<p>“And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He -said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that -virtually was what I was doing.”</p> - -<p>This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a -cut in the little room just off the front parlor.</p> - -<p>Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or -sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It -takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to -the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen -pipe in the garage.</p> - -<p>“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready; -my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over -my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back.</p> - -<p>“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from -publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready -to play.”</p> - -<p>She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as -Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on -me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is -no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day -morning and perhaps three after<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span>noons.” She goes riding, plays golf, -visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal -Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are -long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually -rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the -saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... These -outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and -one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as men do.” She -writes about it better than many men do.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact -that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has -done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper -reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it, -was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young -nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but -completely expressive phrase used in her novel <i>K.</i> And then she had the -great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the -secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw -what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments. -Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing -its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be -in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine -affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed -her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store.</p> - -<p>Her first novel, <i>The Circular Staircase</i>, was a mys<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span>tery tale; so was -her second, <i>The Man in Lower Ten</i>. They appeared in 1908 and 1909 -respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This -was <i>Double Life</i>, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her -husband, she wrote <i>The Avenger</i> (1908) and much later she collaborated -with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce <i>Seven Days</i>. This was -first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris -Theater, New York, her farce <i>Cheer Up</i> was put on. “Two plays were -successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.</p> - -<p>She has written short stories for all the most popular American -magazines—the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> perhaps particularly; -<i>McClure’s</i>, <i>Everybody’s</i>, <i>Collier’s</i>, the <i>American</i> and the -<i>Metropolitan</i> are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories -are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some -of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or -characters, have been published in book form, as <i>Tish</i> and <i>Bab, a -Sub-Deb</i>. The stories in <i>Tish</i> relate various escapades of an unmarried -woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel, -<i>The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry</i>. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,” -is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving, -curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like -herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up -hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is -unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the -carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span> -great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the -canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing <i>Tish</i>; in -<i>The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry</i> we have a story in which -the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital -where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing -affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller -than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both -ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely -as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable -puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great -as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, <i>Seven Keys -to Baldpate</i>, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the -observer. <i>The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry</i> is a remarkable -evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain -inoffensive—and become the source of helpless mirth.</p> - -<p><i>Bab, a Sub-Deb</i>, with its account of the doings of a girl who has not -yet “come out,” a sub-débutante, is also unique and, to the extent of -the character’s capacity, just as diverting. Mrs. Rinehart does nothing -by halves, she exploits the possibilities of her people to the top of -their bents—and hers. She exploits—always legitimately—her own -affairs, as in <i>My Creed</i>, the autobiographical article in the <i>American -Magazine</i> upon which we have drawn so heavily in this sketch, and <i>The -Altar of Freedom</i>, an account of her struggle to part with a son who -felt he must answer America’s call for men in 1917. With gusto she gives -us the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span> account of a vacation trip—see <i>Through Glacier Park</i> or -<i>Tenting To-Night</i>. With the heaviest possible charge of sentiment but -never an explosive cap of sentimentality, she puts before us a small -boy, the crown prince of a mythical but completely real kingdom, whose -pitifully circumscribed existence, whose scrapes and friendships and -admiration of Abraham Lincoln, have for their background court intrigues -and the uncovering of treason; read <i>Long Live the King!</i> With complete -self-knowledge comes complete knowledge of others; Mrs. Rinehart can go -straight to the American heart and does it in <i>The Amazing Interlude</i>, -that story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the -Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers. Here is romance so heady -and strong that most readers overlook, purposely and gladly, the -improbability of Henri’s return to Sara Lee and the little house of -mercy after daybreak discovered him, delirious and in a Belgian uniform, -dangling on the German wire. Artistically <i>The Amazing Interlude</i> excels -by its portrait of Harvey, Sara Lee’s fiancé back home, Harvey who -resisted her “call” to service, who brought her back home, whose hard -selfishness as an American and whose lack of comprehension as a man make -him entirely typical of thousands in this country prior to April 6, -1917.</p> - -<p>The novel <i>K.</i>—or story <i>K.</i>, if we accept Mrs. Rinehart’s disclaimer -as to novel writing—is possibly more representative of her work than -any other single book. It illustrates perfectly her ingenuity in -contriving and handling a plot; for the book ends on page 410 and the -most necessary revelation does not come until page<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span> 407. It exemplifies -her finished gift for telling a story; there are no wasted words and in -half a page she can transport you from laughter to tenderness. Half a -page? On page 70 you may see it done in seven lines. The girl Sidney -Page has slipped from a rock into the river, alighting on her feet and -standing neck deep. Rescued by K. Le Moyne, she remarks:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>There wasn’t any danger, really, unless—unless the river had -risen.... I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.’</p> - -<p>“He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her -shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on -the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He -held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something -infinitely precious.”</p> - -<p><i>K.</i> shows its author’s power to portray character effectively in -sweeping outlines filled in, on occasion, with solid or mottled masses -of color. K. himself is the kind of a person that Mary S. Watts might -have put before us in some 600 closely printed pages. It is a difference -of method merely and while not every one would be able to appreciate the -thousand little touches with which Mrs. Watts drew her hero, Mrs. -Rinehart’s more vigorous delineation is effective at all distances, in -all lights, with almost all readers. She manages in this tale to present -a wide variety of persons and a great range of emotions and she manages -it less by atmospheric details and a single setting—the Street—than by -an astonishing number of relationships between a man and a woman; or, in -the case of Johnny, “the Rosenfeld boy,” and Joe Drummond,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span> a youth and -a woman or girl. It will be worth the reader’s while to note that the -story contains no less than ten such relationships. First there are K. -and Sidney and Joe and Sidney. Then there are Max Wilson and Sidney, Max -Wilson and Carlotta Harrison, Tillie and Mr. Schwitter, Christine Lorenz -and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Johnny -Rosenfeld, K. and Tillie and K. and Christine. This is very complicated -and unusual art—if it is not novelizing, then we do not know what -novelizing is. Consider the gamut run. K. and Sidney are the ripe -lovers. Joe’s unrequited love for Sidney is the desperate passion of -immaturity. Max Wilson’s feeling for Sidney is the infatuation of a -nature inherently fickle where women are concerned. Carlotta Harrison’s -love for Max Wilson is the dark passion. The relation between Tillie and -Schwitter goes to the bedrock of human instincts, is a thing Thomas -Hardy might have concerned himself with. It is pathetic; he would have -made it tragic as well; we are satisfied that in her disposition of it -Mrs. Rinehart is sufficiently faithful to the truth of life. Christine -Lorenz and Palmer Howe are the disillusioned married; but in this case, -as Christine said: “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The only difference between me and other brides is -that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Grace Irving and Palmer Howe bring before us the man and the woman in -their worst relationship in the story, or in life either. Grace Irving -and Johnny Rosenfeld are a picture of thwarted motherhood and a blind -feeling for justice. K. and Tillie are proofs of the reach of friendship -and the efficacy of under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span>standing. K. and Christine give us the woman -saved from herself.</p> - -<p>The height—or the depth—to which Mrs. Rinehart attains in this story -is a thing to marvel at, and just as marvelous is the surety with which -she gets her distance. The tenth chapter of <i>K.</i> will not easily be -overmatched in American fiction or that of any other country. Here is -Mr. Schwitter, the nurseryman, middle-aged or older, not very -articulate, with a wife in an asylum playing with paper dolls; and here -is Tillie, punching meal tickets for Mrs. McKee, not becoming younger, -lonelier every day, suffering heartaches and disappointment without end. -Mr. Schwitter has proposed a certain thing.</p> - -<p>“Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, -embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He -meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the -look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,’ he said heavily. -‘They’re hell on sewers.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p class="dtts">. . . . . .</p> - -<p>“The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit -down at my desk and begin work simultaneously,” wrote Mrs. Rinehart in -1917. “One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and -struggle. That was my belief in what is called ‘inspiration.’ I think I -had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had -hardly words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little -lift in the veil.</p> - -<p>“It does not come any more.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so -many things to write about, and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, -but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the -technique of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I -have less to say.</p> - -<p>“I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and -more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do real work, -I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous -writing, and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and -adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of -these great times in which I live, now I shall fail.”</p> - -<p>If her readers shared this feeling they must have murmured to themselves -as they turned the absorbing pages of <i>The Amazing Interlude</i>: “How -absurd!” It is doubtful if they recalled her spoken misgiving at all.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books By Mary Roberts Rinehart</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Circular Staircase</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Man in Lower Ten</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>When a Man Marries</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The Window at the White Cat</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Where There’s a Will</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Case of Jenny Brice</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The After House</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Street of Seven Stars</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>K.</i>, 1915.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span><i>Through Glacier Park.</i><br /> -<i>Tish</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Altar of Freedom</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Long Live the King!</i> 1917.<br /> -<i>Tenting To-Night</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Bab, a Sub-Deb.</i><br /> -<i>Kings, Queens and Pawns</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Amazing Interlude</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Dangerous Days</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Love Stories</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Affinities and Other Stories</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>“Isn’t That Just Like a Man?”</i> 1920.<br /> -<i>The Truce of God</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>A Poor Wise Man</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>More Tish</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>Sight Unseen and The Confession</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>The Breaking Point</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by George H. Doran Company, New York, except the following, -which are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: The After -House, The Street of Seven Stars, K., Through Glacier Park, Tish, The -Altar of Freedom, Long Live the King! and Tenting To-Night.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br /> -<small>KATHLEEN NORRIS</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“M</span>RS. NORRIS,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the -fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or -action. If she lacks the final touch of Frank Norris’s power, she has -the compensating gift of a more controlled and concentrated observation. -She has the secret of closely adding detail to detail in a triumph of -what another California author has called Littleism, but what seems to -be nature’s way of achieving Largeism.”</p> - -<p>Of course, this is the method of Kathleen Norris, the method in her -madness, to use the word madness in its old sense of being possessed by -something. What is Mrs. Norris possessed by? Why, the irresistible -impulse to put things before you and make you consider whether they -should be so. H’m, a preacher might do that. Well, had most preachers -the presentative skill of Kathleen Norris there would be ticket -speculators on the sidewalks in front of their tabernacles!</p> - -<p>If you want to make people think write a novel—but be sure you know -how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper -reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact -for faultless fact” that “amounts<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span> to a disease,” quite as the lilting -lines in <i>The Mikado</i> have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is -distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present -writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and -observant mind:</p> - -<p>As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or -problem is at the bottom of each of her novels.</p> - -<p>Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of -certain persons and events.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and -said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be -describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be -deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding -from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is -covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons -and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations -to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself -always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of -our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going -past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and -not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the -dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it.</p> - -<p>In other words, life assimilates all its great facts and problems and -the novelist who would set them forth effectively must first have -assimilated them too, so that they will not have to be “brought in” the -story he is telling, but will be in it from the beginning, dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span>closing -themselves as the action develops. The reader must feel that he has -<i>discovered</i> the fact or the problem for himself, that he, all by -himself, has abstracted it out of the scenes put before him. He must see -Cora Doe go by and hear of John Doe’s last appearance and look upon the -wreck of their lives—but all the rest must be left to him to grasp -unaided! The real reason why no story can have a moral is that every -reader must find his own moral, even if each finds the same one!</p> - -<p>Mrs. Norris understands this and practices it. She does not ask you to -consider whether a girl, bred in sordid surroundings and having access -in youth only to tawdry ideals, can lift herself to gentleness and -dignity and become, at any cost, the captain of her soul. No! She makes -you acquainted with Julia Page. She refrains from questioning the -efficacy of divorce and writes <i>The Heart of Rachael</i>, which makes every -reader ask himself the question. If her readers unite in an identical -answer and that answer is the one Mrs. Norris herself would return, does -that convict her of stepping outside the novelist’s province? Bless you, -no; the novelist’s province is as large as life is, and its boundaries -in the case of any given writer as far as he can carry and maintain -them. Mrs. Norris’ s frontiers are wide.</p> - -<p>The woman first. An interesting article in the <i>Book News Monthly</i> -several years ago posited that “Kathleen Norris upsets all our accepted -ideas of how a novelist is made.... With the exception of five months -spent in taking a literary course at the University of California, Mrs. -Norris never had any<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span> schooling, and, until five years ago (1908), she -never had been outside her native State.... No thrilling adventures, no -prairie life, or mountaineering, no experiences of travel, or residence -in Paris or Berlin, have been hers.” The impression of wonder which this -may create will be somewhat modified by the sketch of her life which -follows, and for which we are chiefly indebted to the same article.</p> - -<p>Kathleen Norris was the daughter of James A. Thompson, of San Francisco. -The father was a San Franciscan of long residence and twice served as -president of the famous Bohemian Club. At the time of his death he was -manager of the Donohoe-Kelly Bank. Kathleen was the second child in a -family of six—three boys and three girls. Mr. Thompson would not send -his children to school and they were taught at home, with an occasional -governess for language study. In 1899 the family moved to Mill Valley -across San Francisco Bay, and “Treehaven,” a bungalow in the beautiful -valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, became the home. A quieter life -can hardly be imagined. There weren’t many neighbors, the children did -not go to school, most of the visitors were grown people, there were no -children’s parties. Kathleen Norris never saw the inside of a theater -until she was sixteen, which will astonish readers of <i>The Story of -Julia Page</i>. There was, however, a large library, there were plenty of -magazines, there were miles of forest as a playground, there were -horses, cows, dogs, cats, a garden. Mountains were there to be climbed -and creeks to be waded. “The boys as well as the girls of the family all -became practical cooks.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San -Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had -been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken -with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than -a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death -left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home -in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable -asset.”</p> - -<p>The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved -bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at -once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took -three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and -carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month. -Their one terror—never realized—was of debt.”</p> - -<p>Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, -make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. -Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to -wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had -generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with -pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and -occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved -mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the -family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she -was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of -making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span> attempted to take a -year’s course in the English department of the University of California -and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the -age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San -Francisco <i>Argonaut</i> paid her $15.50 for a story called <i>The Colonel and -the Lady</i>. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and -had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very -encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for -several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement -house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society -editor of the San Francisco <i>Evening Bulletin</i>. A few months later she -became a reporter for the San Francisco <i>Call</i>, where she worked for two -years.</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or -hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we -should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these -years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and -made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed. -“During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908, -there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution -to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of -American novelists. Long before <i>Josselyn’s Wife</i> could be brought out -in the fall of 1918, <i>Sisters</i> had begun to be published serially.</p> - -<p>In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris, -younger brother of Frank<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span> Norris, the author of <i>McTeague</i> and <i>The -Pit</i>. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a -novelist, the author of <i>The Amateur</i> and <i>Salt: The Education of -Griffith Adams</i>. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port -Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his -distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.</p> - -<p>Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her -father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine -editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for -years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs. -Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from -editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training -now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the -appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she -got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind"> -“Dear Mrs. Norris:<br /> -</p> - -<p>“The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not -quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the <i>Atlantic</i> is, that when a -tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is -surely a tone for the <i>Atlantic</i> to adopt.</p> - -<p>“It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story.</p> - -<p class="c"> -“Very truly yours,<br /><span style="margin-left: 15%;"> -“<span class="smcap">The Editor.</span>”</span><br /> -</p></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span></p> - -<p>The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery -Sedgwick, editor of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, was <i>What Happened to -Alanna</i>. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking -for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which <i>What -Happened to Alanna</i> had been submitted to <i>McClure’s Magazine</i> and the -date on which it had been returned to her.</p> - -<p>Her next six stories appeared in <i>McClure’s</i>. After that it seemed to -the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris -was on five tables of contents.</p> - -<p>And then the <i>Delineator</i> offered a prize for a story of not more than -3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run -to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the -<i>Delineator</i> lost and the <i>American Magazine</i> gained <i>Mother</i>. On the -story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it -sufficiently to make a book.</p> - -<p>Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes -are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she -did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has -run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the -<i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i>, paid a high price for the privilege of running -the novel as a serial <i>after</i> its publication as a book. This is -apparently a unique instance.</p> - -<p><i>Mother</i> was followed by <i>The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne</i>, the story of a -great-hearted woman who brought her fresh and honest ideals into the -heart of a narrow<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span> Western city. Those who read it may excusably gasp to -hear that it was written in six weeks on an order from the <i>Woman’s Home -Companion</i>. <i>Poor Dear Margaret Kirby</i>, collected short stories, was the -third book, appearing in the spring of 1913. <i>The Treasure</i> had had -serial publication in the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>. <i>Saturday’s Child</i> -preceded it. And then Mrs. Norris made her first great success with a -full length novel which many will consider the biggest book she has -done. It was <i>The Story of Julia Page</i>, the first of three novels which -have been called Mrs. Norris’s trilogy of American womanhood. The others -are <i>The Heart of Rachael</i> and <i>Martie, the Unconquered</i>. Between these -last two appeared her short novel, <i>Undertow</i>, dealing with two young -married spendthrifts. <i>Josselyn’s Wife</i>, “the story of a woman’s faith,” -tells of a sweet, simple girl, Ellen Latimer, transported by a whirlwind -marriage to Gibbs Josselyn from the humdrum existence of a small country -town to the luxuries of the wealthy social life of New York. There is a -time when the young second wife of Gibbs Josselyn’s father threatens to -break up the happiness of the younger Josselyn and Ellen, for Gibbs -succumbs readily to her undeniable fascination. Then comes the crash. -Through the long agony of a murder trial it is the wife he has neglected -who alone upholds him. It is her faith that wins and that brings him at -last to an understanding of his egotistical folly.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Norris is not yet at the height and fullness of her powers, as well -as can be judged contemporaneously. It is easy enough to look back on -the completed work of a writer’s lifetime and say, “Here he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span> reached his -apex, here he began to decline, here he rose again for an hour.” But to -estimate the present and relate it tentatively to the future is very -much harder. <i>Mother</i> was one “peak” in the graph of Mrs. Norris’s -progress, <i>The Story of Julia Page</i> was another and a higher, -<i>Josselyn’s Wife</i> is at least as high. There is every prospect that in -the active and happy years we may hope are ahead of her, Kathleen Norris -will excel the impressive novels she has already given us.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Kathleen Norris</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Mother</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Poor Dear Margaret Kirby</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Saturday’s Child</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Treasure</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Story of Julia Page</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Heart of Rachael</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Undertow</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Martie, the Unconquered</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Josselyn’s Wife</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Sisters</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Harriet and the Piper</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The Beloved Woman</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>Lucretia Lombard</i>, 1922.<br /> -<i>Certain People of Importance</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, -New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br /> -<small>MARGARET DELAND</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">E</span>DITH WHARTON, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is -similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their -books. And their books are not silent.</p> - -<p>If the band of a kiltie regiment plays <i>The Campbells Are Coming</i>, one -of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born -in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while -she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle, -Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany, -and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories.</p> - -<p>“Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country -house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania -more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges -and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces, -and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a -shining arm about the circle of the western hills.”</p> - -<p>“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!” -Beautiful simile!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span></p> - -<p>In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking -hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and -imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She -was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of -Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow.</p> - -<p>Her first taste in reading was formed upon <i>Ivanhoe</i> and <i>The Talisman</i> -and <i>Tales of a Grandfather</i>, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of -Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was -that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are -not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the -prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures; -not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday -life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively -determine what he shall be.”</p> - -<p>In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs. -Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in -character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young -people that surround her are character studies of a completeness -unexcelled in American fiction.</p> - -<p>There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But -first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely, -inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people -as well as things.</p> - -<p>It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking -heredity into account, and this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span> irrespective of whether heredity or -environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal -controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is -largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons, -differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing -pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is -known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and -inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this -is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, <i>The Rise of Jennie Cushing</i>. -Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance; -we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we -know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails -utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully -acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in -her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary -sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It -makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful -account of her forebears could have made her.</p> - -<p>Now in <i>The Iron Woman</i>, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get -both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded. -Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of -giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete -that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just -a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to -the last inch what they are (as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span> we know our neighbors of long standing) -we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances -they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and -upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and -the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly -anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen:</p> - -<p>“But after a breathless six months of partnership—in business, if in -nothing else—Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little -two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he -was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could -take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed -him that there was nothing for him to do but die—so that there might be -room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in -those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her -pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration, -but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under -like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as -Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and -contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the -strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means -of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely -she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel -anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky -lips at her breast. She did her duty by<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span> him; she hired a reliable woman -to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to -nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve -conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, -she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her -shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since -it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she -sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was -doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal -instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct -without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years -of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but -duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t -Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no -explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, -and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his -service while he was still in petticoats.</p> - -<p>“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, -Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was -chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was -chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous -candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first -expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’ -accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed—and -she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a -sneeze—Blair had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span> a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected -sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head -down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No, -no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall -into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand—a big, -beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails—and turning -his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over -your airs!’ she said.”</p> - -<p>It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with -the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and -observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at -all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind -of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography? -Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an -actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or -reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that -he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile -or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account -for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he -should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful -record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the -evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them.</p> - -<p>In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is -for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory -things the author feels<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span> that he must make them entirely understandable -or we will not accept the character—and in this he is generally right. -Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are -forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things -from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist -make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is -always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however -desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory -education—compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly, -where both do serious ill.</p> - -<p>Considered as fiction, <i>The Iron Woman</i> is vitiated ever so slightly by -the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be -explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has -obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the -story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses -to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty -<i>not</i> as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will -dare, <i>will dare</i>, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and -thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say, -did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were -there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But -you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living -person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition -and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we -speak of <i>The Iron Woman</i> as biog<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span>raphy, the best and brightest of -biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too -minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The -writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so -successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she -enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of -biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid -success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that -conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and -easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort -of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their -self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in -the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.</p> - -<p>We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work -something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in -dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the -feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read <i>The Iron Woman</i>, a feeling -which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we -venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs. -Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her -exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to -the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to -her Old Chester books and stories. In <i>The Awakening of Helena Richie</i>, -in <i>Old Chester Tales</i>, in <i>Dr. Lavendar’s People</i>—in them all, in all -her work—we believe that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span> the reader who takes the biographical -standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full -satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America -has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is, -after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting -an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable -lives.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Margaret Deland</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Good for the Soul.</i><br /> -<i>The Rising Tide.</i><br /> -<i>R. J.’s Mother.</i><br /> -<i>The Way to Peace.</i><br /> -<i>Where the Laborers Are Few.</i><br /> -<i>John Ward, Preacher.</i><br /> -<i>The Old Garden and Other Verses.</i><br /> -<i>Philip and His Wife.</i><br /> -<i>Florida Days.</i><br /> -<i>Sidney.</i><br /> -<i>The Story of a Child.</i><br /> -<i>The Wisdom of Fools.</i><br /> -<i>Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories.</i><br /> -<i>Old Chester Tales.</i><br /> -<i>Dr. Lavendar’s People.</i><br /> -<i>The Common Way</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>The Awakening of Helena Richie</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>An Encore</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Iron Woman</i>, 1911.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span><i>The Voice</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Partners</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Hands of Esau</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Around Old Chester</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Small Things</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Vehement Flame</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by -D. Appleton & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br /> -<small>GENE STRATTON-PORTER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">B</span>ECAUSE Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is -the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day, -with the probable exception of Harold Bell Wright. She is absolutely -sincere in all her work, she is in dead earnest, she does not care -primarily for money, but for certain ideas and ideals. Let no one -underestimate the tremendous power that is hers because of these things, -let no one underestimate her hold upon millions of readers; let none -undervalue the influence she has exerted and continues to exert, an -influence always for good, for clean living, for manly men, for womanly -women, for love of nature, for sane and reasonable human hopes and -aspirations, for honest affection, for wholesome laughter, for a healthy -emotionalism as the basis and justification of humble and invaluable -lives.</p> - -<p>If Mrs. Porter has egoism it is the sort of egoism that the world needs. -It is nothing more or less than a firm and sustaining belief in one’s -self, in the worth of one’s work, and is bred of a passionate conviction -that you must always give the best of yourself without stint. Is it -egoistical to believe that? Is it self-centeredness to be proud of that? -Is it wrong, having<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span> set the world the best example of which you are -capable, to call it to the world’s attention? You will not get the -present reporter to say so! You will get from him nothing but an -expression of his own conviction that while literature, æsthetically -viewed, may not have been enriched by Mrs. Porter’s writings, thousands, -yes, tens of thousands of men and women have been made happier and -better by her stories. And that just about sweeps any other possible -accomplishment into limbo!</p> - -<p>The secret of Mrs. Porter’s success is sincerity, complete sincerity; -doing one’s best work and doing it to the top of one’s bent. It is not a -question of art. There is no art about it. The finest literary artist in -the world could not duplicate her performance unless he were a duplicate -of <i>her</i>. It’s not a literary matter at all; the thing has its roots in -the personality, in the mind and heart and nervous organization of the -writer. If you could be a Gene Stratton-Porter you could write the -novels she writes and achieve just the success she achieves, a success -which is improperly measured by earnings of $500,000 to $750,000 from -her books, a success of which the true measure can never be taken -because it is a success in human lives and not in dollars.</p> - -<p>The best evidence of this—for there will be doubters—is the story of -her life, very largely told in her own words, published in a booklet by -Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The booklet, for some time to be had -on request, is now out of print. In what follows it is drawn upon freely -and almost to the exclusion of anything else.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, -at the time of their marriage, as a ‘ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, -pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright -brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name -ever given a woman—Mary.’ He further added that ‘God fashioned her -heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her -especial gift of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>There were twelve children. Mrs. Stratton was “a wonderful mother.” She -kept an immaculate house, set a famous table, hospitably received all -who came to her door, made her children’s clothing. Her great gift was -making things grow. “She started dainty little vines and climbing plants -from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted things she soaked -in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they -almost never failed to justify her expectations. She even grew trees and -shrubs from slips and cuttings no one else would have thought of trying -to cultivate, her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the -lower end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly -always grew!”</p> - -<p>She was of Dutch extraction and “worked her special magic with bulbs, -which she favored above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, -lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called ‘blue bells,’ -she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by putting -clusters at time of perfect bloom in bowls lined with freshly made, -unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of -extract<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span> thus obtained with alcohol. ‘She could do more different -things,’ says the author, ‘and finish them all in a greater degree of -perfection, than any other woman I have ever known. If I were limited to -one adjective in describing her, “capable” would be the word.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Mark Stratton was of English blood, a descendant of that first Mark -Stratton of New York, who married the beauty, Anne Hutchinson. He was of -the English family of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head. -He was tenacious, had clear-cut ideas, could not be influenced against -his better judgment. “He believed in God, in courtesy, in honor, and -cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would -rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be -proud, than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he -knew to express himself. His very first earnings he spent for a book; -when other men rested, he read; all his life he was a student of -extraordinarily tenacious memory. He especially loved history: Rollands, -Wilson’s <i>Outlines</i>, Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he -could quote from all of them paragraphs at a time, contrasting the views -of different writers on a given event, and remembering dates with -unfailing accuracy.” The Bible he knew by heart, except for the Old -Testament pedigrees. This is a literal statement of fact. He traveled -miles to deliver sermons, lectures, talks. He worshiped humanity and all -outdoors. Color was a prime delight. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>He had a streak of genius in his -makeup, the genius of large apprecia<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span>tion,’<span class="lftspc">”</span> says Mrs. Porter. He -reveled in descriptions of personal bravery.</p> - -<p>“To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at -intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for years by -the dire stress of civil war, and the period immediately following, the -author was born,” on a farm in Wabash county, Indiana, in 1868. “From -childhood she recalls ‘thinking things which she felt should be saved,’ -and frequently tugging at her mother’s skirts and begging her to ‘set -down’ what the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were -some big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in Biblical -terms.”</p> - -<p>The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark -Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five -years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and -plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, the house and barn -commodious; the family “rode abroad in a double carriage trimmed in -patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray horses, and sometimes -the father ‘speeded a little’ for the delight of the children.”</p> - -<p>The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first -remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of -her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest -child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers afield -“and when tired out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking -with shy creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she -pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span> insects and plays she -invented. ‘By the day I trotted from one object which attracted me to -another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw -while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or -following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the -inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of -corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a -mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, -and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite -as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.... I fed -butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a -cellar window, doctored all the sick and wounded birds and animals the -men brought me from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits -they carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew -older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So -I had the first money I ever earned.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic -for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a -review of Saintine’s <i>Picciola</i>, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and -a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her -audience.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The most that can be said of what education I have is that it is the -very best kind in the world for me; the only possible kind that would -not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span> been -to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances -intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in -company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and -mentality.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted -to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward -painted the water colors for <i>Moths of the Limberlost</i>. If she wanted to -try music he paid for lessons for her. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>It was he who demanded a -physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of -scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in -five years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own -illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history, -true to nature.... It was he who daily lived before me the life of -exactly such a man as I portrayed in <i>The Harvester</i>, and who constantly -used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men -to do the same.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin -Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely -in abeyance for a while. “It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she -designed for their home, and the books she read. When her daughter was -old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter’s time came.”</p> - -<p>She explains: “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong, vital -to the marrow, and I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs, -thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin -of fourteen rooms, and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s -clothes, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span> kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six -hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and -cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day. In my spare time -(mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have -been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography to such a -degree that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper -once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled it. -He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. -He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me tell -him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom for a -darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey platters in the -kitchen sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an -exhibition.’ ...</p> - -<p>“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to -<i>Recreation</i>, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of -the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be -paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form -some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that -she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The -second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the -natural history staff of <i>Outing</i>, working closely with Mr. Caspar -Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to -turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with -fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span> -fiction, she wrote a little story entitled <i>Laddie, the Princess, and -the Pie</i>.”</p> - -<p>She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was -disgraceful. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from -ladders high in the air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a -tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a -box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in -the bank need not know what I had attempted.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her -story in the <i>Metropolitan</i>. She had not seen it. She wrote to the -editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her -address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a -Christmas story?</p> - -<p>She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his -time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 -A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings -and costuming.</p> - -<p>Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent -it to the <i>Century</i>. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of -it. This is the origin of <i>The Song of the Cardinal</i>. “Following Mr. -Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body -of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a -fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the -cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span></p> - -<p>She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which -the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture -once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions -and insensible most of the time.</p> - -<p><i>Freckles</i> appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every -other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of -studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make -McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a -composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with -those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The -book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible. -She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>There were most -excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was -impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just -invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and -quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known in the -worst of such locations in the Central States.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> Nevertheless lumbermen -had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I hastened to tell my husband -the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the -pale blue egg.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> So he said he would go with her.</p> - -<p>It was awful.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to -the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached -the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span> the horse -stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in -waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between -steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, -poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle -deep at every step and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our -progress was a steady succession of pulling and prying each other to the -surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our -bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared -the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odors -for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and -egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and -binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost -three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take -wing.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>The story itself—<i>Freckles</i>—originated in the fact that one day, while -leaving the swamp, a big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long -came spinning and swirling earthward and fell in the author’s path. It -was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s -it became.</p> - -<p><i>Freckles</i> took three years to find its audience. The marginal -illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that -it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word -of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was -printed in 1914, ten years after the stor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span>y’s first appearance. The -jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the -most important three of the ten years were largely wasted!</p> - -<p>Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and -emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most -money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real -reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively -before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I had had one year’s experience with <i>The Song of the Cardinal</i>, -frankly a nature book, and from the start I realized that I never could -reach the audience I wanted with a book on nature alone. To spend time -writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I -would not. So I compromised on a book into which I put all the nature -work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little -bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I -had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which -I was familiar. So I said to my publishers: “I will write the books -exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish them. I know they -will sell enough that you will not lose. If I do not make over $600 on a -book I shall never utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it -should be and leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will -take into their hearts and homes.” I altered <i>Freckles</i> slightly, but -from that time on we worked on this agreement.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>My years of nature work have not been without considerable insight -into human nature, as well,’ con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span>tinues Mrs. Porter. ‘I know its -failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its failures, its depth -of crime; and the people who feel called upon to spend their time -analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these sources of depravity have -that privilege, more’s the pity! If I had my way about it, this is a -privilege no one could have in books intended for indiscriminate -circulation. I stand squarely for book censorship, and I firmly believe -that with a few more years of such books as half a dozen I could -mention, public opinion will demand this very thing. My life has been -fortunate in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked -in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, -lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of -thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish -high ideals, and it is <i>upon the lives of these that I base what I -write</i>. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is -idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best -that good men and good women can do at level best.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who proclaim -that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life -are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are -straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals, -honor, and loving kindness. They form “idealized pictures of life” -because they are copies from life where it touches religion, chastity, -love, home, and hope of Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to -publicity and the divorce<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span> court. They all end in the shelter and -seclusion of a home.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, -whether they really believe it or not, that no book is <i>true to life</i> -unless it is true to the <i>worst in life</i>, that the idea has infected -even the women.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p><i>A Girl of the Limberlost</i> “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>comes fairly close to my idea of a good -book. No possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can, -and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer -touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I -write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am -capable of making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best -thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so far -been able to do.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Prior to the appearance of <i>A Daughter of the Land</i> this was Mrs. -Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly -true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or -two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the -delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the -book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in -a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the -very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which -appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human -breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at -high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret -and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span> buy the clothes the girl -needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is -both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of -generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with -them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the -girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation -without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well -as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether -it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The -innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives -them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)—emotion, -pure, deep, contenting and cleansing—these will ask no more than Mrs. -Porter gives them here.</p> - -<p>The idea of <i>The Harvester</i> was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor -who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng -diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to -her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl -healed by them. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I wrote primarily to state that to my personal -knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no man -is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills otherwise.... I -wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my points and -establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe around promptly -wrote me that they had always observed the moral code; others that the -subject never in all their lives had been presented to them from my -point of view, but now that it had been, they would change and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span> do what -they could to influence all men to do the same.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p><i>Laddie</i>—“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know to the -last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute -accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than -I ever have known any others.... There was such a man as Laddie, and he -was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing -is always better than its presentment.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “When the -public had discovered her and given generous approval to <i>A Girl of the -Limberlost</i>, when <i>The Harvester</i> had established a new record, that -would have been the time for the author to prove her commercialism by -dropping nature work, and plunging headlong into books it would pay to -write, and for which many publishers were offering her alluring sums. -Mrs. Porter’s answer was the issuing of such books as <i>Music of the -Wild</i> and <i>Moths of the Limberlost</i>. No argument is necessary.” No -argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small -fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent -years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific -materials.</p> - -<p>This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she -has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>In the beginning of the end a great swamp region lay in northeastern -Indiana. Its head was in what is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body -in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span> Allen and Wells, and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay. -The Limberlost lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it, exactly -as described in my books. The process of dismantling it was told in -<i>Freckles</i> to start with, carried on in <i>A Girl of the Limberlost</i>, and -finished in <i>Moths of the Limberlost</i>. Now it has so completely fallen -prey to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and -farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory and build -a new cabin about seventy miles north at the head of the swamp in Noble -county, where there are many lakes, miles of unbroken marsh, and a far -greater wealth of plant and animal life than existed during my time in -the southern part. At the north end every bird that frequents the -Central States is to be found. Here grow in profusion many orchids, -fringed gentians, cardinal flowers, turtle heads, starry campions, -purple gerardias, and grass of Parnassus. In one season I have located -here almost every flower named in the botanies as native to those -regions and several that I can find in no book in my library.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen acres of -forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in a marsh country. It means -the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which will provide the -comforts of life for my family and furnish a workshop consisting of a -library, a photographic darkroom and negative closet, and a printing -room for me. I could live in such a home as I could provide on the -income from my nature work alone; but when my working grounds were -cleared, drained<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span> and plowed up, literally wiped from the face of the -earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been for the -earnings of my novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in -great part, upon my nature work. Based on this plan of work and life I -have written ten books, and “please God I live so long,” I shall write -ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern -Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods -legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men and -women I have known.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, <i>A Daughter of -the Land</i>, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who -fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of -luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest -novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty, -from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious -attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big.</p> - -<p>Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs. -Porter’s own account of herself—but could any one do better than to -present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has -to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The -one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving -of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect -of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly -infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is -giving<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span> of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I -don’t know much about literature, <i>but I know what I like</i>.” To be sure -you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the -secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication -or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always -means narrowing it) does <i>not</i> know what he likes! He knows only what he -doesn’t like—or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of -every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a -tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of -corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get -thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere -and with everybody.</p> - -<p>If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s -stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for -certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them -so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot -compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? -Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his -own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this -sort is to be had for a price,—if you want to pay so much.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of -fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life -than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span> -can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is a wonder-working -book.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her -books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a -criticism of life.” How about molding lives?</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Gene Stratton-porter</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Song of the Cardinal</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>Freckles</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>What I Have Done With Birds</i> [<i>Friends in Feathers</i>], 1907.<br /> -<i>At the Foot of the Rainbow</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>A Girl of the Limberlost</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Birds of the Bible</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Music of the Wild</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Harvester</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Moths of the Limberlost</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Laddie</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Michael O’Halloran</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Morning Face.</i><br /> -<i>A Daughter of the Land</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Homing with the Birds</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>Her Father’s Daughter</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>The Fire Bird</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br /> -<small>ELEANOR H. PORTER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth -(top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof. -“Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a -hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront -us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and -fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes—“laughing eyes”—changing -expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil -and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a -conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming—charming!</p> - -<p>She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds -or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature. -She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has -finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book -three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter -here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and -tinkered with—and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few -changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and -later<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span> there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston:</p> - -<p>“Advance orders for your new novel <i>Just David</i> are 100,000 copies.”</p> - -<p>Isn’t that rewarding? <i>Just David</i> will be out in a few days now....</p> - -<p>The author of <i>Just David</i>—and <i>The Road to Understanding</i> and <i>Oh, -Money! Money!</i> and, why <i>of course</i> of <i>Pollyanna</i>!—is not thinking of -the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No. -Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But -what rewards her for the task of writing them—did you ever sit down and -write, just <i>write</i>, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?—what -gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof -that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in -<i>her</i>, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better -somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for -entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found -elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while.</p> - -<p>Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely -flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this -hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them -gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces, -what would you say? What <i>could</i> you say? Do you think your -sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do -you think that <i>you</i> could give<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span> them what they need? Would your -subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little -braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life?</p> - -<p>Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl -Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid -in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana -city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and -Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button -showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the -hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and -children everywhere—surely she and her work call for respectful -consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we -can only put our fingers on it! There is.</p> - -<p>And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at -work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William -Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was -not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime -white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in -front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up -to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen -her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play -out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my -tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span> And I liked to play -the beautiful things I saw—sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way, -perhaps, <i>David</i> is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in -voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in -expressing just the mood I want to express.”</p> - -<p>She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands -in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella -Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods -from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated -birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health -arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and -she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack, -mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished -one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When -she wrote <i>Just David</i> she had only to recall her youth, after all.</p> - -<p>Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private -teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and -in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She -lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield, -Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr. -and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs. -Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them.</p> - -<p>We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morn<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span>ing. Yes, the morning -hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her -first book, published in 1907, was <i>Cross Currents</i>, a study of child -labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of -youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed, -her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon -several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It -was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When -these dead awaken! <i>If</i> these dead were to awaken, were to come back to -us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would -see? What would they say and do?</p> - -<p>Well—</p> - -<p>“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes -in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly -matter....</p> - -<p><i>Cross Currents</i> was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a -sequel, <i>The Turn of the Tide</i>. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of -clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot, -that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed. -One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what -would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three -bachelors.</p> - -<p>From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came <i>Miss -Billy</i>; and from <i>Miss Billy</i> came <i>Miss Billy’s Decision</i> and <i>Miss -Billy—Married</i>. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She -thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span> would write a short -story—only a short story—based on the idea in this sentence or so....</p> - -<p><i>Pollyanna</i>—</p> - -<p>So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of <i>Pollyanna</i>—they are -not her real readers who know better!—that it is much fairer to her and -ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came -<i>Just David</i>, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts -had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what -is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that <i>you</i> -could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know? -At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness, -no trace of longing for something once loved and lost—not awhile but -forever?</p> - -<p>David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the -father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward -he is brought to a quiet country town—a lad in love with music, with -birds and flowers.</p> - -<p>“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the -world through David’s eyes. One day—one wonderful day—they went to -walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left -his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods!</p> - -<p>“It was not accomplished without a struggle, as David could have told. -All the morning David urged and begged. If for once, just once, they -would leave everything and come, they would not regret it, he was sure. -But they shook their heads and said,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span> ‘No, no, impossible.’ In the -afternoon the pies were done and the potatoes dug and David urged and -pleaded again. And to please the boy they went.</p> - -<p>“It was a curious walk. Ellen Holly trod softly with timid feet. She -threw hurried, frightened glances from side to side. It was plain that -Ellen Holly did not know how to play. Simon Holly stalked at her elbow, -stern, silent and preoccupied. It was plain that Simon Holly not only -did not know how to play, but did not care to find out.</p> - -<p>“The boy tripped along ahead and talked. He had the air of a monarch -displaying his kingdom. Here was a flower that was like a story for -interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth telling. Even -Simon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly -picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch; -and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly’s murmured, ‘But, David, where is the -difference? They look so much alike,’ had said:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Oh, but they are not. Just see how much more pointed at the top this -fir is than that spruce back there; and the branches grow straight out, -too, like arms, and they are all smooth and tapering at the end like a -pussy-cat’s tail. But the spruce back there—its branches turned down -and out—didn’t you notice?—and they are all bushy at the end like a -squirrel’s tail. Oh, they’re lots different.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>That’s a larch way ahead—that one with the branches all scraggly and -close down to the ground. I could start to climb that easy, but I -couldn’t that pine over there. See, it’s way up before there is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span> place -for your feet! But I love pines. Up there on the mountain, where I -lived, the pines were so tall that it seemed as if God used them -sometimes to hold up the sky.’</p> - -<p>“And Simon Holly heard, and said nothing, and that he did say -nothing—especially nothing in answer to David’s confident assertions -concerning celestial and terrestrial architecture—only goes to show how -well, indeed, the man was learning to look at the world through David’s -eyes....”</p> - -<p>“If the characters are true, the story tells itself,” says Mrs. Porter. -“The plot comes very easily after I get some leading idea which I wish -to work out. It is sometimes months after I have something in mind -before I have carried the idea along far enough to begin writing. The -ideas for novels come from careful observation and wide reading.</p> - -<p>“No, I would not say that novels are written by inspiration. I call it -enthusiasm. And unless the writer has enthusiasm while writing a novel I -think the indifference is bound to show in the story.”</p> - -<p>Her own enthusiasm holds her to the task, carries her through the year -she devotes to a book, enables her sometimes to write steadily for eight -or nine hours and then spend an evening with her heavy correspondence. -Her enthusiasm, a steady flame, burns to the end; and then her -exhaustion does not matter. The task is done.</p> - -<p>Without an idea—a crisp, definite, interesting idea is always there, -whether you like her novels or no—without an idea Mrs. Porter won’t -write. But when she begins to write she has much more than the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span> idea. -She has a synopsis written out. She couldn’t work without one, she says. -And to that synopsis she sticks pretty closely. “For I must see my aim,” -she explains, “I must have every part of the story bear definitely -toward the object. The synopsis of <i>Pollyanna</i> differs very little from -the completed story. However, the glad game was not in the synopsis. -That did invent itself—in the second chapter. And of course various -characters always have a way of sort of writing themselves in, and new -scenes and incidents suggest themselves as the book grows.”</p> - -<p>Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of -trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held -up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds -hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the -characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot -of things that no author could say directly without being charged with -sermonizing.”</p> - -<p>Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her -preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of -sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that -<i>if the characters are true</i> they can say things that, from the author, -would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always -be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but -do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a -moral out of—or into—every other thing we hear our neighbors say or -see them do?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span></p> - -<p>The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of -“evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer -him:</p> - -<p>“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and -brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I -have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To -most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent -qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may -lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life -as may the other kind.</p> - -<p>“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing -in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed—sometimes? -That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in -logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be -overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of -the doughnut is not only very foolish—but very detrimental to one’s -digestion.”</p> - -<p>Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if -the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us -demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels -of muck and insanity—and nothing else. He must condemn them for their -worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we -have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always -enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of -the purveyors of cheerfulness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span></p> - -<p>You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that -cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the -situation in a “grown-up” novel like <i>The Road to Understanding</i> it is -your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who -has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of -marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They -are separated—never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation” -for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be -semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her -husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in -deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it. -Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little -daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never -gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather -impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the -passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does -very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea -and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a -denouement but—they are brought together again.</p> - -<p>An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing -<i>Oh, Money! Money!</i> It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, -possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his -heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins -and each of them receives a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span> trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain -John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a -thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose -humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know -how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it -out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the -man behind the money.”</p> - -<p>Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a -psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale, -advanced by the publishers just before the publication of <i>Oh, Money! -Money!</i>—six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as -these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here -they are:</p> - -<p>1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world—the getting -and spending of money.</p> - -<p>2. The story of three families—cousins—who unexpectedly receive -$100,000 each from an unknown relative, will strike a responsive chord, -in every reader’s heart and set every reader thinking how <i>he</i> would -spend the money.</p> - -<p>3. It has the same quality that has made Cinderella the most popular of -all fairy tales, the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly -treated come out on top in spite of all odds.</p> - -<p>4. The scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of -country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy.</p> - -<p>5. There is a charming love theme with a happy ending.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span></p> - -<p>6. And, above all, the story teaches an unobtrusive lesson that will -appeal to every one of Mrs. Porter’s readers; the lesson that happiness -must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.</p> - -<p class="dtts">. . . . . .</p> - -<p>Eleanor Hodgman Porter died on May 21, 1920.</p> - -<p>BOOKS BY ELEANOR H. PORTER</p> - -<p> -<i>Cross Currents</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Turn of the Tide</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Story of Marco</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Miss Billy</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Miss Billy’s Decision</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Pollyanna</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Miss Billy—Married</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Pollyanna Grows Up</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Just David</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Road to Understanding</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Oh, Money! Money!</i> 1918.<br /> -<i>Dawn</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Mary-Marie</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Sister Sue</i>, 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>The first two books were published by W. A. Wilde, Boston; the books -about Miss Billy and Pollyanna by the Page Company, Boston; the last six -books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br /> -<small>KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>NCE Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley, -in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin -for the occasion.”</p> - -<p>“You have many children,” said the seer.</p> - -<p>“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied.</p> - -<p>“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones; -they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman -declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?... -I cannot understand. I <i>see them</i>.”</p> - -<p>They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how -wonderfully right was her vision.</p> - -<p>“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of -the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa -and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly -Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the -faithful Emma Jane,—all these figures crowd about us, and claim their -places as everybody’s children.”</p> - -<p>It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write -about her without emotion, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span> kind of emotion that it is good to feel. -The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better -world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite? -Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may -indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the -emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions, -you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a -desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming—keep off -this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple -and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are -not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless -millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour!</p> - -<p>Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred -teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits -which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like -prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to -have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of -Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent -east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school -for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen -her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After -her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara. -She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was -called to direct<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span> the famous Silver Street kindergartens of San -Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens -for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of -Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their -spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training -teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made -others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat -and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought -to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if -she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is -at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton -Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the -manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable -doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be -self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so -agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look -upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness -is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you -are.</p> - -<p>Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village -of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being. -Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works -she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed -windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span> -swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling -of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village -is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the -Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake. -A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or -so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco, -placid and turbulent, which runs through <i>Timothy’s Quest</i> and <i>Rebecca</i> -and <i>Rose o’ the River</i>.</p> - -<p>Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr. -Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not -recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of -the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior -was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and -the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with, -the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as -ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left -their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply -fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of -the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a -silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness -pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions, -stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back -into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square -dances on the threshing floor.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span></p> - -<p>Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we -have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In -the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco, -the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading -from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of -the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have -very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all -those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved -but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;—you have -the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more -pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the -perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance of <i>The -Old Peabody Pew</i>. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall -with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she -has shared with you her feelings about life.</p> - -<p>Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you <i>remember</i>! Somehow, -<i>Penelope’s Progress</i>, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and -Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2, -please:</p> - -<p>“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer -whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy -than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the -nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she -was seventeen, of giving<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span> her lovers similar advice, and up to this time -no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not -unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those -disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and -perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and -calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were -filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their -Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”</p> - -<p>Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written -the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent -over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether -“b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his -discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely -referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”) -was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:</p> - -<p>“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced -Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and -her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the -Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of -Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”</p> - -<p><i>Marm Lisa</i> is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the -youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such -places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of -Present Perfection? We have. On the wall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span> was “an ingenious pictorial -representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the -successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by -colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for -Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition -of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform; -blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious -Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that -in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was -left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face -powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.</p> - -<p>The cat ’Zekiel in <i>The Old Peabody Pew</i>:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma, -and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to -slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five -minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and -gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no -heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.”</p> - -<p>The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth -walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some -parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their -seats side by side in the old family pew.</p> - -<p>“(‘And consid’able close, too, though there was plenty o’ room!’)</p> - -<p>“(‘And no one that I ever heard of so much as suspicioned that they had -ever kept company!’)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span></p> - -<p>“(‘And do you s’pose she knew Justin was expected back when she scrubbed -his pew a-Friday?’)</p> - -<p>“(‘And this explains the empty pulpit vases!’)</p> - -<p>“(‘And I always said that Nancy would make a real handsome couple if she -ever got anybody to couple with!’)”</p> - -<p>The boastful old man, Turrible Wiley, in <i>Rose o’ the River</i>:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I remember once I was smokin’ my pipe when a jam broke under me. ’Twas -a small jam, or what we call a small jam on the Kennebec,—only about -three hundred thousand pine logs. The first thing I knowed, I was -shootin’ back an’ forth in the b’ilin’ foam, hangin’ on t’ the end of a -log like a spider. My hands was clasped round the log, and I never lost -control o’ my pipe. They said I smoked right along, jest as cool an’ -placid as a pond-lily.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Why’d you quit drivin’?’ inquired Ivory.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>My strength wa’n’t ekal to it,’ Mr. Wiley responded sadly. ‘I was all -skin, bones, an’ nerve....</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I’ve tried all kinds o’ labor. Some of ’em don’t suit my liver, some -disagrees with my stomach, and the rest of ’em has vibrations.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>In January, 1911, over 2,000,000 copies of Mrs. Wiggin’s books had been -sold; to-day the total is probably approaching 3,000,000. The most -popular of her books is <i>Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm</i>, which has been -likened, in explanation of its popularity, to <i>Little Women</i>. But no -explanation is necessary. Rebecca is entirely, naturally human. Whether -she is perplexing her aunts or telling Miss Dearborn that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span> she can’t -write about nature and slavery, having really nothing to say about -either; whether she is making her report on the missionaries’ children -“all born under Syrian skies,” or aweing Emma Jane with original ideas, -or helping the Simpsons, with the aid of Mr. Aladdin, to acquire a -wonderful lamp;—at all times, at every moment Rebecca Rowena Randall -reminds us of the youngsters we have known, and perhaps, a little, of -the youngsters we were once ourselves.</p> - -<p>The triumph of naturalness, the perfect fidelity to the life of the -child; these explain <i>Rebecca</i> and <i>Rebecca’s</i> success, signalized less -in the selling of hundreds of thousands of copies, in the acting of the -play made from the book for months and months and months, than in the -joyous recognition with which Mrs. Wiggin’s heroine was greeted. Rebecca -inditing the couplet:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“When Joy and Duty clash<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Let Duty go to smash”—<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Rebecca playing on the tinkling old piano, “Wild roved an Indian girl, -bright Alfarata,” Rebecca doing this, thinking that, saying the thing -that needs to be said—generous, romantic, resourceful and brighter than -her surroundings—is a person it does us all good to know. Copies of the -book in libraries are read to shreds. The world, which can see through -any sham, loves this story. The world is right. To learn, in the words -of one of Conrad’s heroes, to live, to love and to put your trust in -life is all that matters. Mrs. Wiggin shows us how.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Kate Douglas Wiggin</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Birds’ Christmas Carol</i>, 1886.<br /> -<i>The Story of Patsy</i>, 1889.<br /> -<i>A Summer in a Canyon</i>, 1889.<br /> -<i>Timothy’s Quest</i>, 1890.<br /> -<i>The Story Hour</i>, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.)<br /> -<i>Children’s Rights</i>, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.)<br /> -<i>A Cathedral Courtship</i> and <i>Penelope’s English Experiences</i>, 1893.<br /> -<i>Polly Oliver’s Problem</i>, 1893.<br /> -<i>The Village Watch-Tower</i>, 1895.<br /> -<i>Froebel’s Gifts</i>, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.)<br /> -<i>Froebel’s Occupations</i>, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)<br /> -<i>Kindergarten Principles and Practice</i>, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)<br /> -<i>Marm Lisa</i>, 1896.<br /> -<i>Nine Love Songs, And A Carol</i>, 1896. (Music by Mrs. Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.)<br /> -<i>Penelope’s Progress</i>, 1898.<br /> -<i>Penelope’s Scottish Experiences</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>Penelope’s Irish Experiences</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>The Diary of a Goose Girl</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>The Affair at the Inn</i>, 1904. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)<br /> -<i>Rose o’ the River</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>New Chronicles of Rebecca</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Finding a Home</i>, 1907.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span><i>The Flag Raising</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Old Peabody Pew</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Susanna and Sue</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Robinetta</i>, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)<br /> -<i>Mother Carey’s Chickens</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>A Child’s Journey With Dickens</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Story of Waitstill Baxter</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Penelope’s Postscripts</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Romance of a Christmas Card</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Golden Numbers</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Posy Ring</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Ladies in Waiting</i>, 1919.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132">{132}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br /> -<small>MARY JOHNSTON</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“D</span>IDN’T you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary -Johnston’s novel, <i>The Long Roll</i>, “how everybody really belongs in a -book?”</p> - -<p>It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these -twenty years, ever since <i>Prisoners of Hope</i> announced to the world the -advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary -to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that -special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or -nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary -Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a -discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston -has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can -entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for.</p> - -<p>She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the -ending of the first chapter of <i>To Have and To Hold</i>? A shipload of -maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, -Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by -has told Ralph Percy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133">{133}</a></span> about it and counseled him to go to town and get -him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds -himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master -Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes -back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.</p> - -<p>“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I -cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own -caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’</p> - -<p>“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and -stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I -diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”</p> - -<p>Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s -imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless -self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of <i>Lewis Rand</i>. Rand has -killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into -the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the -sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell -from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room -yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand -spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’</p> - -<p>“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning -before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand] -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134">{134}</a></span>gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason——’</p> - -<p>“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said -he must have sleep.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of <i>The Long Roll</i>:</p> - -<p>“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale -gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and -climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession -bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and -the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry -and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the -Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the -coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March -rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place -uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward -and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol -and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the -Speaker’s Chair.</p> - -<p>“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from -the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who -could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, -the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair, -in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. -All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.</p> - -<p>“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his mo<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135">{135}</a></span>ment before the dead -leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde -soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. -He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He -spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always -said was just this: “<i>Press forward!</i>”<span class="lftspc">’</span> He passed on.</p> - -<p>“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man -like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a -philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you -consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.</p> - -<p>“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the -Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed -upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the -Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we -must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power -to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it -is of the essence of drama that <i>things go on</i>. A play or a book which -leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that -nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic -effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various -events—bitter, happy, tragic and glorious—marking so many stages of an -unending record. The last words of <i>The Long Roll</i> are worthy of the -greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136">{136}</a></span></p> - -<p>The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a -writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible -material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is -one element of her genius—perhaps the most important. The second -element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use -terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative -imagination” is.</p> - -<p>If you will turn to her book <i>The Wanderers</i> you will find that it is a -series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the -underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship -is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the -period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the -French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were -no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of -how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before -recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the -scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the -human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull -conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are -one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of -years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?</p> - -<p>Well, we can’t tell you <i>how</i> it is done, for if that could be told the -manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such -chapters as open <i>The Wanderers</i>. All we can be certain of is this, that -Miss Johnston was able to place herself in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137">{137}</a></span> the surroundings of a -primitive woman of the treefolk—so much was the first imaginative step. -And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and -hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her -actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by -creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling -than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to -which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or -reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What -is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, -wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but -a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and -a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of -imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his -author.</p> - -<p>All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a -serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense, -she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has -she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These -two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born -endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest—an -almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for -documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading -the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack -at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138">{138}</a></span> -poignancy and the art of touching to tears—these are to be had for -taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they -will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous -to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True, -but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as -such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!</p> - -<p>Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us -see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that -interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will -be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning -further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.</p> - -<p><i>The Long Roll</i> starts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and -it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary -Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander -Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains -shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier, -the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of -civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal -boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country. -The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two -railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar.</p> - -<p>The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a -Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand. -Major<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139">{139}</a></span> Johnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted -her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older -governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was -sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved -to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and -professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing -school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought -home where, a year later, her mother died.</p> - -<p>Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was -interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of -some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present -industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several -children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the -direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in -view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that she <i>can</i> keep -house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that -she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however.</p> - -<p>Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no -especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel, -<i>Prisoners of Hope</i>, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun -while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large -part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park. <i>To Have and To Hold</i>, -appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was -begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain -resort. The first draft was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140">{140}</a></span> written with a lead pencil and revised with -exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten.</p> - -<p>Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her -home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth -Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father -indubitably did a great deal to make possible <i>The Long Roll</i> and <i>Cease -Firing</i>, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of -inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had -served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining -promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times. -He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy -to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject -his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description -enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and -tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had -seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited.</p> - -<p>In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over -the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink -crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large, -airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of -antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends -come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were -possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss -Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begun<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141">{141}</a></span> -to dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia, -where she went to work upon <i>The Long Roll</i> and <i>Cease Firing</i>, the -rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a -faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were -busied to portray.</p> - -<p>Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt, -springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland; -Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys -have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in -estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has -been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through. -Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters -high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent -flame.</p> - -<p>With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia -resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied -there was at one time occupied by General Lee. <i>Lewis Rand</i> was written -on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually -she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away -from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off -to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not -confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and -“The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot! -Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142">{142}</a></span> owner, -making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home.</p> - -<p>There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with -here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is -large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments -and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a -formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone. -Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland. -Flowers execute the processional of the seasons.</p> - -<p>Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The -broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun -parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam -closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are -the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the -South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is -maintained without abatement.</p> - -<p>In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia -hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When -her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a -cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of -leaded glass about the room protect books of every description—history, -philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism—a -battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one -terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the -walls<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143">{143}</a></span> and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of -many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s -linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the -author.</p> - -<p>Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going -through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A -beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the <i>Book News Monthly</i> -of March, 1911.</p> - -<p>“<i>Prisoners of Hope</i>, <i>To Have and to Hold</i> and <i>Audrey</i> are full of -allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least -impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors -to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a -dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her -guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward -in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that -in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the -one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding -country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of -the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church, -representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.</p> - -<p>“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s -fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured -heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the -official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full -flush of her loveliness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144">{144}</a></span></p> - -<p>“<i>Lewis Rand</i> is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper -James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams -into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, -as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was -admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The -grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond, -where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about -them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic -quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians -of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the -times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has -for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of -the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly -souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand -and her husband from their country residence near the State University, -in Charlottesville.”</p> - -<p>There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity -Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in <i>Lewis Rand</i>, was the mother of -Fauquier Cary in <i>The Long Roll</i>. The Churchills, the Carys and others -should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks, -Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent -Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.</p> - -<p>It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of -Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of <i>Hagar</i> in 1913 all her -work had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145">{145}</a></span> historical and had consisted, with the exception of <i>The -Goddess of Reason</i>, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in -Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only -departure from this being her first two books. <i>Prisoners of Hope</i> -(1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; <i>To Have -and To Hold</i> (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in -1621. Then came <i>Audrey</i> (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of -Col. William Byrd and <i>Lewis Rand</i> (1908) which pictured the Virginia of -Jefferson. <i>The Long Roll</i> (1911) and <i>Cease Firing</i> (1912) gave us the -State during the Civil War. There was another romance, <i>Sir Mortimer</i>, -between <i>Audrey</i> and <i>Lewis Rand</i>, and before <i>The Goddess of Reason</i>, -which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very -likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the <i>Book -News Monthly</i> of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the -poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become <i>The Goddess -of Reason</i> was to blame. <i>The Goddess of Reason</i> gave her dramatic -genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something -better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed -Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us <i>The -Long Roll</i> and <i>Cease Firing</i> within the next five years.</p> - -<p>Although in <i>The Witch</i>, her next novel after <i>Hagar</i>, our writer went -back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of -the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of <i>Lewis -Rand</i> and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of -prejudice and persecution “spiritually over<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146">{146}</a></span>come by gallant faith and -joy of living.” <i>The Fortunes of Garin</i> (1915) was pure romance and -adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored -as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a -fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to -France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the -princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl -whom he rescued from peril years before. Of <i>The Wanderers</i> (1917) we -have already spoken. <i>Foes</i> (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship -transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after -the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque -story is superbly told in most poetic prose.</p> - -<p>How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by -two examples from <i>The Long Roll</i>. Illustrated, we say, not <i>shown</i> in -the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her -dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw -material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the -coward:</p> - -<p>“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large -on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He -was wedged between comrades—Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him -with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes—he could not fall out, drop -behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed -forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable -experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized -with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147">{147}</a></span> panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; -moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp <i>zzzz-ip</i>! <i>zzzzzz-ip</i>! -Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying -smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the -fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two -men were running—running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like -people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or -bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they -moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! -before I’d be sech a fool——’ A shell came, and burst—burst between -the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A -part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. -Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, -and vomited.”</p> - -<p>We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:</p> - -<p>“First Brigade headquarters was a tree—an especially big tree-a little -removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden -table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. -At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. -Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen -chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before -him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of -each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An -awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148">{148}</a></span> about his -health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, -romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and -feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce -and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the -idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had -fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and -formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He -drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the -sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A -blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders—down came -reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness -quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but -little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water -and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had -caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little -Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’ -instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the -Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the -week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, -but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it -promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these -were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, -tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude, -monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy -of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149">{149}</a></span> the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his -staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an -implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great -and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly -the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery -tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s -Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until -Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to -weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was -to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the -small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the -critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling -Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some -mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied -approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said—in fact, -they did say—that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”</p> - -<p>Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the -other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little -study you may see several things which go far to explain the -effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not -directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her -and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.</p> - -<p>For example:—</p> - -<p>Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice -again in the account of Stonewall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150">{150}</a></span> Jackson’s funeral how the focus is -narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the -Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a -single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is -directed to a single point.</p> - -<p>Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck -home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, -lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom -and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall -of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the -building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a -league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges -abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as -he knows its tragic sorrow.</p> - -<p>Glance again at the ending of <i>Lewis Rand</i>. It is quiet but in the -unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the -greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>He said he -must have sleep.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> It is placed squarely upon you to construct the -picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and -lose himself from the secret terror.</p> - -<p>Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar -unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the -backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the -shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling -at all; purely reflex physical action<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151">{151}</a></span> was the most that was possible -for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he -may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no -consciousness that could be recognized as such.</p> - -<p>The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson -has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. -Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal -opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in -contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials -of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. -But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam -in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of -course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell -us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of -him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a -queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the -fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we -can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss -Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget -that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly -under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to -church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final -touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152">{152}</a></span> strict report of -their verdict on him—“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”</p> - -<p class="dtts">. . . . . .</p> - -<p>It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is -to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss -Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies <i>before</i> the -publication of <i>The Long Roll</i>, when she had only some six books to her -credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary Johnston</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Prisoners of Hope</i>, 1898.<br /> -<i>To Have and to Hold</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>Audrey</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>Sir Mortimer</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>The Goddess of Reason</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Lewis Rand</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Long Roll</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Cease Firing</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Hagar</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Witch</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Fortunes of Garin</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Wanderers</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Foes</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Michael Forth</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Sweet Rocket</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>Silver Cross</i>, 1922.<br /> -<i>1492</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes, -Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver -Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153">{153}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br /> -<small>CORRA HARRIS</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HEY rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their -hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of -their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is -not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts -and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which -is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this -place.</p> - -<p>“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is -unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm -inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over -the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday -school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not -angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools -and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a -limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.</p> - -<p>“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts -upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty, -but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154">{154}</a></span> upon -women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from -decency and thrift.</p> - -<p>“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness -will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world. -When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on -Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen -what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the -valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love -one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”</p> - -<p>Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost -superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this -country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer -has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar -directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the -longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can -contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the -same sentence. From the day when the first installment of <i>A Circuit -Rider’s Wife</i> appeared in the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> it was manifest -that America had a new writer of distinction.</p> - -<p>The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s -work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted -with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was -externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very -profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she -shared with us and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155">{155}</a></span> we who had had a taste of that experience were able -to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual -depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by -exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, -at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched -intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father -lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in -the room where a child is being born.</p> - -<p>Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by -her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. -Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early -years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made -trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a -local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at -home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and -early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable -education—for a girl.</p> - -<p>At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was -his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the -material from which she was able later to construct <i>A Circuit Rider’s -Wife</i>. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor -of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his -wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with -no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta -<i>Constitution</i>, pub<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156">{156}</a></span>lished in the <i>Sunny South</i> (owned by the -<i>Constitution</i>) a story of hers called <i>Darwinkle’s Dream</i>. It was a -gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to -“give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes; -nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of -Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!</p> - -<p>In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems -accepted by the <i>Independent</i> magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she -became a contributor to the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> and with the -publication of <i>A Circuit Rider’s Wife</i> reached her deserved place. Her -husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so -far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a -long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it. -From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for -she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an -Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the -living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an -article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the -picture:</p> - -<p>“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the -whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset. -Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The -guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway—cozy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157">{157}</a></span> apartments done all -in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’ -quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another -adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There -are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance -in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told -me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind -her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored -retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow -contributors to the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>.]</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old -woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.</p> - -<p>“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’ -said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she -remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the -blossoms; they look like butterflies.”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her -neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go -together.’</p> - -<p>“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man -she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks -endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about -twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and -beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158">{158}</a></span></p> - -<p>“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this -paragon he said $100!”</p> - -<p>We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some -of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They -are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book <i>In -Search of a Husband</i>, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young -man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the -Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and -the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows, -music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He -explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North -America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I -ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it -must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter -began:</p> - -<p>“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in -techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:—‘He has -never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive -mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to -fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the -subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of -the Potential mood.”</p> - -<p>This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s -character drawing.</p> - -<p>It is not her character drawing, penetrative and un<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159">{159}</a></span>canny as that is—a -man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”—that most distinguishes -Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on -eugenics.</p> - -<p>“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have -heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art, -literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce. -This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all -harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that -would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.</p> - -<p>“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not -for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what -nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of -everything concerning sex. Of everything—destroy their curiosity, you -know.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>How will you do it?’ I asked.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and -these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the -means we are employing.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is -nature’s method.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not -enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the -kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our -criminals.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160">{160}</a></span>’</p> - -<p>“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so -wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be -solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are -not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so -they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I -doubt if it saves them.</p> - -<p>“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They -hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred -human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for -passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the -contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if -such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass -a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two -people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical -rating may be.”</p> - -<p>When <i>A Circuit Rider’s Widow</i> was published it was interpreted in some -quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South; -there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in -certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion -respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon -reading her very direct statement:</p> - -<p>“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and -breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central -figure in <i>A Circuit Rider’s Widow</i>] as the preacher to come who will -deliver this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161">{161}</a></span> church from what is almost a military system of -government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the -democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be -properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized -civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”</p> - -<p>The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was -uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against -Germany.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having -read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a -criticism of life—which literature is sometimes held to be. In the -valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It -should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her -book, <i>The Co-Citizens</i>, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer -suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public -services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the -right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of -information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected -these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into -<i>The Co-Citizens</i> and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the -valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the -novel.</p> - -<p>No better close for this chapter than its opening—Mrs. Harris’s own -words! She is picturing her life—and quite as vividly herself—to Isma -Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162">{162}</a></span>vives -not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of -pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home:</p> - -<p>“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and -my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church -sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself.</p> - -<p>“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could -get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like -brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time -will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with -which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion -and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is -the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together.</p> - -<p>“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and -tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in -the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody -could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count -now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the -church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the -coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend -down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his -monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And -I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb—John, who didn’t -know whether he was willing to be a fool for Chris<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163">{163}</a></span>t’s sake and who -surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.</p> - -<p>“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed—such a dingy -little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think -she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn -it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and -collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till -night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots -of the great trees.</p> - -<p>“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after -I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead -are from their transgressions.”</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Corra Harris</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>A Circuit Rider’s Wife</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>Eve’s Second Husband</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Recording Angel</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>In Search of a Husband</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Co-Citizens</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>A Circuit Rider’s Widow</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Making Her His Wife</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>From Sunup to Sundown</i>, 1919. (<i>With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter.</i>)<br /> -<i>Happily Married</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>My Son</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>The Eyes of Love</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by -Doubleday, Page & Company, New <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164">{164}</a></span>York; last three by George H. Doran -Company.</i></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br /> -<small><span class="smcap">Mary Austin</span></small></h2> - -<p>[Spellings and punctuation, even though inadvertent, have been -faithfully transcribed for the sake of preserving something intensely -human in the personal sketch below.]</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>[Typewritten]</p> -<p class="rt">Independence, Cal.<br /> -Nov. 25th, 1902.</p> - -<p class="nind"> -Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.;<br /> -</p> - -<p>Gentlemen,</p> - -<p>Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some -account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have -no doubt that you can get some expression of opinion from Mr. Muir -in regard to my book “A Land of Little Rain”. but I will take pains -to make sure of the matter and write you again in regard to it. -Chas. F. Lummis, editor of Out West, and George Hamlin Fitch, -literary editor of The San Fransisco Chronicle, and also the -reviewer of the Argonaut can be counted on to give me some friendly -notice, especially Lummis as he is my first and warmest friend in -the west.... I have written the biographical sketch in the third -person to avoid the use of so many “I’s,” which always makes me<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165">{165}</a></span> -miserable, you can cut out all that is not to the point.</p> - -<p class="c"> -Sincerely yours<br /><span style="margin-left: 15%;"> -<span class="smcap">Mary Austin</span>.</span><br /> -</p> - -<p>[Written]</p> - -<p>P. S. I am afraid you will be disappointed with the notes but it is -the best I can do.</p> - -<p>[Enclosure. Typewritten]</p></div> - -<p>Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her -mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist, -Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called -children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as -soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate -acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her -university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to -California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in -the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges. -Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for -following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of -mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional -opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her -state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by -this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert -dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after -teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to -return to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166">{166}</a></span> life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself -seriously to writing.</p> - -<p>Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St. -Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have -published work of hers.</p> - -<p>All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under -the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things -drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild -beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood.</p> - -<hr style="width: 45%;" /> - -<p>[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue -in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of -paper.]</p> - -<hr style="width: 45%;" /> - -<p>N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I -thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to -tell. I have just <i>looked</i>, nothing more, when I was too sick to do -anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I -was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I -got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so -full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make -room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but -I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I -will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit -up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167">{167}</a></span></p> - -<p>I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting -eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people -who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small, -plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always -busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the -village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me.</p> - -<p>Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways -of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have -given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward -Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers -they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution -which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered -the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of -any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell, -they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner.</p> - -<p>When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large -educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert -to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the -water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in -from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber -with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care -of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four -horses.</p> - -<p>For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine -where the population is two-thirds<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168">{168}</a></span> Mexican and there gained the -knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should -say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a -botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field -work.</p> - -<p>Now for my work—the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child -verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am -a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can -understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a -greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have -discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of -in Jimville.—the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work, -and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor -friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied -than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible -that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone -medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For -consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these -single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length -upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all -blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in -which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly -reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do, -then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth. -They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the -sake<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169">{169}</a></span> of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they -do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs? -You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for -you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as -they have done me.</p> - -<p>This is the best I can do for you in this way,—but whatever you are -minded to say of my work say this—that I have been writing only four or -five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some -years more.</p> - -<p class="dtts">. . . . . .</p> - -<p>So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later -Houghton Mifflin Company published <i>The Land of Little Rain</i>, a -collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, -that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary -Austin’s qualifications as a writer.</p> - -<p>“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and -south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.</p> - -<p>“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far -into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets -the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s -is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that -supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that -purpose is not proven.”</p> - -<p>The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a <i>writer!</i> And she has -style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything -with it. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170">{170}</a></span> write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What -else has she?</p> - -<p>She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and -time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go -deeper into the book, reading the accounts of <i>The Pocket Hunter</i> and -<i>Jimville: A Bret Harte Town</i>. When you have finished you know Mrs. -Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not -know her performance.</p> - -<p>It began right after the appearance of <i>The Land of Little Rain</i> with -her next work, the novel <i>Isidro</i>, a romance dealing with the California -of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with <i>A Woman -of Genius</i>.</p> - -<p>She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been -fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she -lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a -studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, -but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness -of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her -new environment and she will tell you a story:</p> - -<p>“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated -naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He -was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in -bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the -Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171">{171}</a></span></p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’</p> - -<p>“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the -Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once -you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then -New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”</p> - -<p>Ask her about her fine novel <i>The Ford</i>, a story of present day -California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy -Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:</p> - -<p>“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the -waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. -Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to -do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these -things for the sequel to <i>The Ford</i>! It was I who discovered and made -public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river -in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in -the book.”</p> - -<p>We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a -portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. -Peattie, writing in the Boston <i>Transcript</i>, supplies just those -externals that we need to round out our picture:</p> - -<p>“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida -Meacham Strobridge]—Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen -months appeared twice in the <i>Atlantic</i> in sketches which could<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172">{172}</a></span> have -been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. <i>A -Shepherd of the Sierras</i> and <i>The Little Coyote</i> were the titles of -these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order. -It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has -appeared chiefly in the <i>Youth’s Companion</i> and <i>St. Nicholas</i>.</p> - -<p>“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government -land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her -companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an -Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes -the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is -artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well -as remarkable individuality. Her paper on <i>The Indian Arts</i> read at one -of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of -Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire -convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that -it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....</p> - -<p>“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her -utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are -usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse, -serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”</p> - -<p>A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded -Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants -of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173">{173}</a></span> -four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow. -Herself, she is a desert species—but transplanted in time! She made her -final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done -so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot -maturity she would have given us her best—her all, her completion—at -four inches.</p> - -<p>She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The <i>Atlantic</i> -which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same -<i>Atlantic</i> which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine -seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that -five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s <i>Van Cleve</i> -before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the <i>Atlantic</i> -serialized <i>Isidro</i>. The <i>North American Review</i>, no less severely -selective than the <i>Atlantic</i>,—the <i>North American</i>, which had printed -serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary -Austin’s <i>The Man Jesus</i> month by month. <i>The Man Jesus</i> is a biography -such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine -literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. -It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, -who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: -“Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”</p> - -<p>If we say that <i>The Man Jesus</i> called for unusual knowledge and an -unusual faculty, what shall we say of <i>A Woman of Genius</i>? Some readers -were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number -must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174">{174}</a></span> George Meredith and as -finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of -Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a -possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is -possessed of”—or by—a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was -not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was -actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of -serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who -think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person -of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering -of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are -guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to -befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world -has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.</p> - -<p>And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us -pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.</p> - -<p>“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of -the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was -when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’</p> - -<p>“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. -Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended -shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the -ball of it speeding away in the dusk<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175">{175}</a></span> of the floor on some private -terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to -speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing—it -was the first week in November—beginning to collect on the edges of the -walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a -background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my -mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, -scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking -the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced -them together there in the cold twilight.”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I’m sorry, daughter’—she hesitated—‘I can’t help you. I don’t -know.... I never knew myself.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in -infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her -struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his -defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing -period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without -money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death -itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for -the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story -is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth -Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But -the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses -into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is -of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother, -Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of -being a dutiful son. <i>A Woman of Genius</i> is the work of a woman of -genius.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176">{176}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this—that I ... have not -yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary Austin</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Love and the Soul-Maker</i>, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.<br /> -<i>The Green Bough.</i> Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.<br /> -<i>The Land of the Sun</i>, Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Land of Little Rain</i>, 1903. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Basket Woman</i>, 1904. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>Isidro</i>, 1905. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Flock</i>, 1906. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>Santa Lucia</i>, 1908. Harper & Brothers, New York.<br /> -<i>Lost Borders</i>, 1909. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Arrow Maker</i>, 1911. Doubleday, Page.<br /> -<i>Christ in Italy</i>, 1911. Doubleday, Page.<br /> -<i>A Woman of Genius</i>, 1912. Doubleday, Page.<br /> -<i>The Lovely Lady</i>, 1913. Doubleday, Page.<br /> -<i>The Man Jesus</i>, 1915. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Ford</i>, 1917. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>The Young Woman Citizen</i>, 1918. The Woman’s Press, New York.<br /> -<i>The Trail Book</i>, 1918. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<i>26 Jayne Street</i>, 1920. Houghton Mifflin.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177">{177}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br /> -<small>MARY S. WATTS</small></h2> - -<p class="rt"> -“2722 Cleinview Avenue, East Walnut Hills,<br /> -“Cincinnati, Ohio, June 19, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“My dear Mr. Overton:<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“I</span> HAVE here a letter from Mr. Latham of Macmillans with a very -complimentary request from you for data regarding myself. There really -is not much to say about me as a person. The trade of writing has been -pursued—in times past, at least—by so many picturesque people in so -picturesque a fashion that the rest of the world has got into the habit -of thinking an author must of necessity be picturesque; but such is not -my case, rather to my regret whenever anybody displays this kind and -gratifying curiosity about me. One would dearly love to be a slap-dash, -swashbuckling sort of person like Borrow, say; or a sick, fiery, -indomitable R. L. S. Then there would be something to write about. As it -is, I am only an inconspicuous gentlewoman—I hope a gentlewoman -anyway!—with a more or less Victorian style of writing which has -frequently proved a profound puzzle to critics of a younger generation.</p> - -<p>“The dates are to be got out of <i>Who’s Who</i>, but to spare trouble I will -give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio; -went to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178">{178}</a></span> school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for -some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since. -Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably -the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to -everybody, but the farm experience was <i>sui generis</i>, not exactly like -anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and -involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the -middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from -the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable -patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I -think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things -which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I -was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated -people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual -backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without -the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild, -uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and -write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the -<i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i> have changed everything. Don’t think I am not -serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the -so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and -isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put -together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make -you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and -I had no companions of our own<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179">{179}</a></span> age; we were not allowed to associate -with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had -to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all -the characters in turn.</p> - -<p>“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it -has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately -in <i>Nathan Burke</i>. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the -uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other -kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man—at least I -thought him old then—named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living -shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers. -He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and -butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a -rifle—a <i>rifle</i>, mind you!—at the utmost distance the weapon would -carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’ -he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when <i>one</i> orter do.’ I remember -him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels, -the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the -front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with -Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to -scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the -tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it -inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the -dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing, -red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without think<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180">{180}</a></span>ing of -Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died -somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been -particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I -wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I -have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken -living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not -have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of -Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order, -to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels -autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben, -they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I -have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An -author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own -eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.</p> - -<p>“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of -accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present -itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in -some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn -over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making -over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something -there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I -understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on, -never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the -night, or hopped off an omnibus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181">{181}</a></span> to rush after a scrap of paper and -pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do -sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis -and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son, -Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and -have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule -afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the -unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors, -for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making -contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I -can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I -believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible -ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!</p> - -<p>“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any -rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went -and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like -regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent -them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep -disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were -trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write -anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I -was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am -still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not -happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been -rewritten and published, and some incorporated in nov<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182">{182}</a></span>els, and some are -still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I -began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman -and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the -incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity. -Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but -we realize now that he was a writer—just that. And he was a great -personality—just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to -imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better -than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out, -but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification, -that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and -imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who -can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me -that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or -modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I -remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of -the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean -‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy -slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean -<i>conversational</i>, as conversation is carried on between persons in what -I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me -about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable -extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like -somebody else, but it still had the most<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183">{183}</a></span> amazing verisimilitude; it was -so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper. -It was in <i>Barry Lyndon</i> that this first struck me, I believe. Who -showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon -re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating. -Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After -a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old -genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was -modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity -which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain -true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony, -repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction -better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful -importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery -vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is -not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing—also—better imagined -than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the -Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final -touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic -Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements, -getting drunk and creating scandal—that is a masterpiece of realism; -and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading -Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading -Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually -learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184">{184}</a></span> -by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single -person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the -original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying -characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on! -Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out -of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc. -It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it, -willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for -something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious, -middle-of-the-road policy; you see I <i>might</i> turn out to be a writer -after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’—I -have seen this phrase used in description of my writing—my emphasis of -the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for -that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature -are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long.</p> - -<p>“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as -those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in -search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing <i>Nathan -Burke</i>, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And -while at work on <i>Van Cleve</i>, a story in which the Spanish-American War -makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to -Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the -trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine -society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185">{185}</a></span> have also -done—that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy—but I could have -done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the -atmosphere.</p> - -<p>“The dates of publication are about as follows: <i>The Tenants</i> (McClure), -1908; <i>Nathan Burke</i> (Macmillan), 1910; <i>The Legacy</i>, 1911; <i>Van Cleve: -His Friends and His Family</i>, published serially in the <i>Atlantic -Monthly</i>, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; <i>The Rise of Jennie -Cushing</i>, 1915; <i>The Rudder</i>, 1916; <i>The Boardman Family</i>, 1918; also a -book called <i>Three Short Plays</i>, 1917.</p> - -<p>“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest—whether in your -judgment it is fit to make public or not—about the people who in -printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on -attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and -the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and -futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do -something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or -idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this -man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know -one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he -ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author; -he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different -and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make -a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this -opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186">{186}</a></span> do -people accuse <i>me</i> of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a -burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me -credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create; -it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for. -What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we -meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or -submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By -their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart -the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method; -whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one -unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse <i>me</i> of -his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is -exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to -the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of -his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about -the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about -Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One -act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, <i>I</i> didn’t do it. They did it -themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.</p> - -<p>“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes -for the forthcoming book, I am</p> - -<p class="c"> -“Sincerely yours,<br /><span style="margin-left: 15%;"> -“<span class="smcap">Mary S. Watts</span>.”</span><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187">{187}</a></span></p> - -<p> </p> - -<p>Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of -the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to -which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages, -he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know -something about them if only that they may discount his statements at -their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs. -Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the -whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent -pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other -American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this -satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid -merits of her work.</p> - -<p>Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all -writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style -with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that -non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely -realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain -passages and which affords the reader—and the writer—necessary relief. -But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been -able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in -every one of her stories.</p> - -<p>She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not -only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of -circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a -moment and reflect to understand. Take<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188">{188}</a></span> any person whom you know -particularly well—do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all -his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him; -if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you -may; and yet you think you know <i>him</i> rather well! The truth is, you -know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart -and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character -which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall. -You’ve never done that—why should you? But you must do just that if you -are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a -dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody -you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case, -for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice” -of feminine perception, a quality which makes <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> -immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of -hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely -a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled, -constitute a merciless betrayal—the betrayal is merciless whether it is -favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes -you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see -him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme, -but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an -otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too -readily<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189">{189}</a></span> as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up -for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the -prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.</p> - -<p>She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all -and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing -is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and -her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in -<i>Nathan Burke</i> and Everett Boardman in <i>The Boardman Family</i> whom Gene -Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton -could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some -use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s -not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be -reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she -proceeds to show us what <i>is</i> made of them—not a pretty spectacle, to -be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only -to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would -subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the -moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words -in <i>A Personal Record</i>?</p> - -<p>“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel -and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, -charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have -come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I -would fondly believe that its object is purely spec<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190">{190}</a></span>tacular: a spectacle -for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view—and in -this view alone—never for despair! Those visions, delicious or -poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair—the -laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high -tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle -mind—that’s our affair!”</p> - -<p>It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, -from <i>Nathan Burke</i> to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in -<i>The Rudder</i>, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi -Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the -machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ -said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Um-huh. Well, I <i>have</i> seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly -anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly -to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of -escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them -another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle -of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ -said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get -home.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191">{191}</a></span> swallowing with a mighty -effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr. -Loring, my work has seldom had a—a token of appreciation that I—I -value m-more—ahem—ho, ha—<i>ahem, hem</i>—!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in <i>Nathan -Burke</i>, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical -illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but -pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness? -There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon -individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a -deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of <i>The Boardman -Family</i>, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which -occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She -intends to become a professional dancer.</p> - -<p>“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander -Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door -and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone, -but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds -and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella -laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall -she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair -braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked -very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the -watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s -watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a -half-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192">{192}</a></span>eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish. -Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or -two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a -hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky -alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman, -whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing -chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced -an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared -to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if -He existed, He must surely be a gentleman—old Sarah Boardman got down -on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young -girl.</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and -alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know, -in a guarded voice.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little -gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the -enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to -infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you -have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah -Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very -fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some -lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193">{193}</a></span> emphasizes what we said at -the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known -Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her -daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs. -Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s -pride—reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it—would -inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect -it.</p> - -<p>In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: <i>Nathan Burke</i>, -then <i>The Legacy</i>, her next book after <i>Nathan Burke</i>; then <i>The Rise of -Jennie Cushing</i>. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that -<i>Van Cleve</i>, coming between <i>The Legacy</i> and <i>Jennie Cushing</i>, was -published serially in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> and must have reached a -great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in -covers. <i>The Rudder</i> was less successful than any of the others, though -it is too early to judge of the popularity of <i>The Boardman Family</i>, -published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present -writer is unable to fathom, <i>The Rudder</i> was criticised with a most -unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly -mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to -perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less -dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the -novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal -characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful -selection for recording, <i>The Rudder</i> leaves nothing to be desired. I -should rate it with <i>The Legacy</i> while freely conceding that the -de<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194">{194}</a></span>veloped story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in -<i>The Legacy</i>, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and -interest.</p> - -<p>The close of <i>The Legacy</i>, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am <i>I</i> a -good woman—a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly -foreshadowed <i>The Rise of Jennie Cushing</i>, which, since its presentation -in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its -main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs. -Watts’s, not even excepting <i>Nathan Burke</i>. It is a pity that the film -representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the -conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending—none can -object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it -is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent -anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book -ending, of <i>The Rise of Jennie Cushing</i> is neutral. It could not be -otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and -fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize -her love for Don and save her from herself.</p> - -<p><i>The Rise of Jennie Cushing</i> is the most dramatic, the most artistic, -and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any -question a really great novel and both in its conception and its -execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature -and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of <i>Nathan -Burke</i>, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively -narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195">{195}</a></span> -natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in -<i>Nathan Burke</i>. The popularity of <i>The Legacy</i> is partly attributable to -the fact that it followed <i>Nathan Burke</i>. But the popularity of <i>Jennie -Cushing</i> represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an -audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her -earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by <i>Jennie Cushing</i> and -not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of <i>The -Legacy</i>. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear -enough from this fact: In the case of <i>Nathan Burke</i> and <i>The Legacy</i> -the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off -quickly. But <i>Jennie Cushing</i> was published in October, reprinted in -November—and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a -book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power.</p> - -<p>Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but -incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl -whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally -when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to -work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and -mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose -only mistake was in keeping silent once too often—or <i>was</i> that a -mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about -her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to -make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest -price the world could exact from her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196">{196}</a></span>—cool, courageous Jennie! And yet -she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with -the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing? -But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry -her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell -him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not; -one hesitates to say that Jennie <i>could not</i> deny herself anything.</p> - -<p><i>The Boardman Family</i> suffers one serious defect. After writing with all -her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra -Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager; -and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after -getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts -Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly -has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have -sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship -Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of -being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without -a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we -should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had -created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not -extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is -beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery -to be cleared up later.</p> - -<p><i>Van Cleve</i> is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next -to <i>Nathan Burke</i>, may perhaps<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197">{197}</a></span> best be depended upon to engage the -interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy -Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her <i>Three Short -Plays</i>, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will -say merely that <i>An Ancient Dance</i> is the most ingenious and -dramatically effective. <i>Civilization</i> is splendid satire but -inconclusive in its termination. <i>The Wearin’ O’ The Green</i> is a farce -that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays -are most agreeable reading.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary S. Watts</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Tenants</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Nathan Burke</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Legacy</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Rise of Jennie Cushing</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Rudder</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Three Short Plays</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Boardman Family</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>From Father to Son</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Noon Mark</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The House of Rimmon</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198">{198}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br /> -<small>MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>F this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of -American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be -found in three considerations:</p> - -<p>Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her -successes have been with short stories, and they have been many.</p> - -<p>Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, -largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does -not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute -standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the -fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of -course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such -writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to -literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification -even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The -reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of -opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells -and his school have so long instructed us to accept without<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199">{199}</a></span> question -their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground -from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as -Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. -There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is -Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, -sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but -never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of -which we have not been perfectly aware—her stories are cordially -welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation -to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint -consciousness that <i>once</i> in some place among a few people they may have -had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they -are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them—and that is all.</p> - -<p>The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely -historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she -would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently -as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, <i>The -Copy-Cat</i>, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book! -The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating -another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty:</p> - -<p>“Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not -know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life. -Thereafter she went to school ‘dressed like the best,’ and her mother -petted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200">{200}</a></span> her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet.</p> - -<p>“It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own -improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality.</p> - -<p>“One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one -with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company, -and tea was served.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,’ Lily whispered to -Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>This in the year of our Lord 1914! This in the year when blood began to -flow as it has never flowed before; when free peoples everywhere awoke -to the presence of Black Evil on earth; when big, generous America with -all her faults was not exactly likely to be thrilled or touched or -enlightened by the recital of how a plain little girl finally got up -enough gumption to wear pink ribbons instead of blue. And yet we suppose -the people who set such store by “literary” values thought this a -“delightful little story”—“so true a picture of children”—“and wasn’t -that a charming conceit of sleeping in each other’s beds!” But it is -wretched stuff, really. At the end Mrs. Freeman simply tells you that -after “that night” Amelia’s mother’s whole nature changed and the -uninterestingly imitative little girl developed “a little stamp of -individuality” and will you please swallow all this quickly on Mrs. -Freeman’s mere say-so because she is tired of writing and the thing is -already the right magazine length anyway. Bah!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201">{201}</a></span></p> - -<p>Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is an extremely modest person. She is of New -England stock in both lines. Her ancestors were Puritan colonists. She -was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, and received her education -there and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. Ten years of her life were spent in -Brattleboro, Vermont, but after the death of her parents she returned to -Randolph where she made her home until her marriage on New Year’s Day, -1902, to Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. Since then Mrs. -Freeman has lived in Metuchen.</p> - -<p>Exactly when the intention to write first came to her, Mrs. Freeman does -not remember. She always felt that she must work at something, but did -not know what it was to be. Though she was fond of painting and -sculpture, her chief interest as a girl was reading. Socially, her -tastes were exceedingly catholic, and she was on the best of terms with -all her neighbors, many of whom she found herself studying as -characteristic New England types, thus unconsciously preparing herself -for the moment when she was to become a writer. She likes “people who -drop their g’s and use the double negative, as well as people who -don’t.”</p> - -<p>Success as a writer came to her instantly. She suffered none of the -rebuffs and delays and discouragements usual to the young author. Her -earliest work was done for children and took the form of short stories -and poems in juvenile magazines. Her first grown-up story was <i>The Old -Lovers</i>, sent to <i>Harper’s Bazar</i>. Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of -that periodical, upon receiving this contribution, written in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202">{202}</a></span> cramped -and unformed handwriting, evidently that of a child, determined upon a -hasty reading, but was so struck in the opening paragraphs with the -humor and the pathos of the story that she promptly sent Mrs. Freeman a -check. In the same mail with the <i>Bazar</i> acceptance came a notification -that her story, <i>The Shadow Family</i>, had captured the prize in a -competition conducted by the Boston <i>Sunday Budget</i>. Both the checks -seemed very large to the new writer. “My delight and astonishment knew -no bounds.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Freeman is a rather small woman, singularly unaffected, cordial, -frank. A friend once described her thus: “A little, frail-looking -creature, with a splendid quantity of pale-brown hair, and dark-blue -eyes with a direct look and a clear, frank expression—eyes that readily -grow bright with fun.” Mrs. Freeman has plenty of humor, is quiet and -whimsical, is fond of country ways, but confesses to fear of cows, -caterpillars and all creeping things.</p> - -<p>Her popularity has been sufficient to bring about the translation of a -number of her books into various European languages.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Debtor.</i><br /> -<i>The Fair Lavini.</i><br /> -<i>A Humble Romance</i>, 1887.<br /> -<i>A New England Nun</i>, 1891.<br /> -<i>Young Lucretia</i>, 1892.<br /> -<i>Jane Field</i>, 1892.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203">{203}</a></span><i>Giles Corey</i>, 1893.<br /> -<i>Pembroke</i>, 1894.<br /> -<i>Madelon</i>, 1896.<br /> -<i>Jerome—A Poor Man</i>, 1897.<br /> -<i>Silence</i>, 1898.<br /> -<i>Evelina’s Garden</i>, 1899.<br /> -<i>The Love of Parson Lord</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>The Hearts of Highway</i>, 1900.<br /> -<i>The Portion of Labor</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>Understudies</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>Six Trees</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>The Wind in the Rose Bush</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>The Givers</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Doc Gordon</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>By the Light of the Soul</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Shoulders of Atlas</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Winning Lady</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The Green Door</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Butterfly House</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Yates Pride</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Copy-Cat and Other Stories</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Jamesons.</i><br /> -<i>People of Our Neighborhood.</i><br /> -<i>Edgewater People</i>, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; but The Butterfly House is -published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204">{204}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br /> -<small>ANNA KATHARINE GREEN</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs. -Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert -maker of fine furniture and who wrote <i>Initials Only</i> and <i>The -Leavenworth Case</i>. We mean the Anna Katharine Green Mind, a Mind no -longer young counted by years, a Mind as subtle and powerful and clever -as ever, counted by achievement. Read <i>The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow</i>, -published at the close of 1917, if you doubt that Mind’s unabated -mastery. Anna Katharine Green—but hush! What awe-inspiring quality -invests the mere whisper of that name? Why do cold shivers run up and -down our backs? Why in our commonplace surroundings—porch, porch -chairs, typewriter, manuscript—why, why do we chill all over? Why do -the thrills in dots and dashes like a hurrying Morse code torture our -nerves?</p> - -<p>We will tell you.</p> - -<p>It is because last night we opened a book and read:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205">{205}</a></span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -I<br /> -<br /> -WHERE IS BELA?<br /> -</p> - -<p>“A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar -in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse -a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager, -anxious, hesitating people?</p> - -<p>“I will tell you.</p> - -<p>“This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate; -nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be -lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this -is Judge Ostrander’s place....”</p></div> - -<p>We read. And we read. The others retired for the night. The pale moon -swam slowly through the heavens, regarding us with a calm, cold -indifference. The town clock boomed midnight, then one, then two. -Fatality hung in the air. Horror coursed in the veins and the blood -ceased to pulse through the arteries. Occasionally a ripened apple -dropped from the nearby tree to the ground. At the thud we jumped. But -we could not stop until, on page 381, the last of <i>Dark Hollow</i>, we had -read the solemn words: “Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver, -hope!” Then we crept off to bed. Utter exhaustion of all sensation -brought swift sleep....</p> - -<p>It must have been about a third of the way through that the conviction -stole over us of Judge Ostrander’s guilt. Who murdered Algernon -Etheridge in Dark<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206">{206}</a></span> Hollow? Did John Scoville, executed for the crime? -Did—shuddering thought—young Oliver Ostrander slay that friend of his -father’s whom he hated so? Neither ... neither! Then who? Why, the -unlikeliest person in the book, of course, and trust Anna Katharine -Green to make it plausible!</p> - -<p>Mrs. Green—it is difficult to know whether to call Mrs. Rohlfs “Miss -Green” or “Mrs. Green”—Mrs. Green cannot write “for a cent,” as slang -has it; but she can write and has written for a good many dollars! And -by that we don’t mean her motive is purely businesslike; we prefer to -believe that she writes for the exercise of her marvelous and peculiar -talent, and to afford excitement and entertainment to many thousands who -read her books. What is this talent? (It is impossible in writing about -her to avoid falling into the theatricism of her narrative style!)</p> - -<p>Did you ever try to write a mystery story? If you have tried you will -understand much better than we can tell you. And if you haven’t it will -be necessary to take a single specimen of Mrs. Green’s work to -illustrate her powers.</p> - -<p><i>Dark Hollow</i>—and she never wrote a more excellent yarn—centers about -the murder of Algernon Etheridge twelve years before the narrative -begins. John Scoville, keeper of a tavern, was tried and executed for -the crime, swearing his innocence. Etheridge was the closest personal -friend Judge Archibald Ostrander had. Circumstances compelled Judge -Ostrander to preside at Scoville’s trial and the Judge was not merely -impartial, but manifestly favored, so far as was compatible with -fairness, the defense. The evidence<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207">{207}</a></span> against Scoville was purely -circumstantial but strong. He had been in Dark Hollow that night at the -time of the crime. Etheridge was killed with Scoville’s stick. -Scoville’s character was bad.</p> - -<p>For twelve years since the crime Judge Ostrander has lived shut off from -the world, except for his appearances on the bench. His grounds are -walled off by a high board fence within a high board fence and he lives -alone with a huge negro servant. His son and he have parted irrevocably.</p> - -<p>When the story opens this negro, Bela, has gone forth on morning -errands, unprecedentedly leaving the gate in the fence ajar! A woman in -purple, heavily veiled, has entered the grounds. The gaping neighborhood -ventures in after her but does not find her. The crowd comes upon the -Judge sitting erect and apparently lifeless in his house! It is an -attack of catalepsy. A little later the negro, mortally wounded by an -automobile, returns and dies trying to guard the iron door in the house -which preserves his master’s secret.</p> - -<p>The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge -and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her -daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband -did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his -execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to -uncover new evidence.</p> - -<p>Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of -Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap -seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the -picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his fath<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_208" id="page_208">{208}</a></span>er’s house with a band -of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in -the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it -was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s -closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of -Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement -that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is -taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man -was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her -to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at -the close; forgery has been done!</p> - -<p>Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and -the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of -the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a -remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at -his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate -drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is -not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The train south?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter, -Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser -uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great -major questions hang unanswered over her story—till the very close. -Then the one closed avenue to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_209" id="page_209">{209}</a></span> a solution is unbarred, the stunning -surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying -dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale -there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the -reader of what he would least have believed before.</p> - -<p>This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent. -Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly -infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was -necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a -dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to -innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly -was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of -these people to each other.</p> - -<p>It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty -minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where -was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place -in the story—Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of -Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the -book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of -every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half -hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and -Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at -every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each -say and do and hear and see? The author must know <i>all</i> these things in -order to spare the reader what is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_210" id="page_210">{210}</a></span> irrelevant. She must have every inch -of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t -believe this? Try writing a story like <i>Dark Hollow</i>, improvising as you -go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you!</p> - -<p>The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of -what might be called chapter climaxes—the brief thrills, one or more to -a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves, -and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in -advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are -real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and -are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the -incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other -bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station.</p> - -<p>It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective -story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every -person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly -true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which -must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it -ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured -in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate -invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation. -Looking at <i>Dark Hollow</i> in retrospect it is quite easy to see why -certain things had to be—so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer -because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend. -Oliver had to be under sus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_211" id="page_211">{211}</a></span>picion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession -plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther -Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver. -Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes, -yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not -penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s -cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such -nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It -won’t hold together for a moment.</p> - -<p>No! The real starting point in <i>Dark Hollow</i> was the conception on the -part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion, -slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years, -inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a -convict’s cell <i>in his own home</i>! All the rest—the painting of a black -band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on -his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home -for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion -by so much as an eye at a knothole—all these followed. Then on this -solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken -conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but -solid and sound) structure of the book.</p> - -<p>That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and -illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or -analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true. -<i>The Leavenworth Case</i>, and <i>The Mystery of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_212" id="page_212">{212}</a></span> the Hasty Arrow</i> and <i>Dark -Hollow</i>—every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of -trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous -trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where -the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the -outset of <i>Dark Hollow</i>. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head -and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine -going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it -instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only -average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before -her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with -dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental -mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside -the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal.</p> - -<p>But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever -having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has -constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s -detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle -has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to -depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did in <i>The -Goldbug</i>. She has not had to carry us through generations and -coincidences as Gaboriau did in <i>File No. 113</i>. She never employs the -fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K. -Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and -criminals, as <i>The Innocence of Father Brown</i>. She can handle more -complex strands than Melville Davis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_213" id="page_213">{213}</a></span>son Post. But Mr. Post can write -rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the -Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will -produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a -generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In -her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from -the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in -American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is -well to be satisfied!</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Anna Katharine Green</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Leavenworth Case.</i> A. L. Burt Company, New York.<br /> -<i>A Strange Disappearance.</i><br /> -<i>The Sword of Damocles.</i><br /> -<i>Hand and Ring.</i><br /> -<i>The Mill Mystery.</i><br /> -<i>Marked “Personal.”</i><br /> -<i>Miss Hurd—An Enigma.</i><br /> -<i>Behind Closed Doors.</i><br /> -<i>Cynthia Wakeham’s Money.</i><br /> -<i>Dr. Izard.</i><br /> -<i>The Old Stone House and Other Stories.</i><br /> -<i>7 to 12.</i><br /> -<i>X. Y. Z.</i><br /> -<i>The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock.</i><br /> -<i>That Affair Next Door.</i><br /> -<i>Lost Man’s Lane.</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_214" id="page_214">{214}</a></span><i>Agatha Webb.</i><br /> -<i>Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama.</i><br /> -<i>A Difficult Problem and Other Stories.</i><br /> -<i>The Circular Study.</i> Doubleday, Page & Company.<br /> -<i>One of My Sons.</i><br /> -<i>The Filigree Ball.</i> Bobbs-Merrill Company.<br /> -<i>The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems</i>, 1894. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.<br /> -<i>The Millionaire Baby</i>, 1905. Burt.<br /> -<i>The House in the Mist</i>, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.<br /> -<i>The Amethyst Box</i>, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.<br /> -<i>The Chief Legatee</i>, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.<br /> -<i>The Mayor’s Wife</i>, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.<br /> -<i>Three Thousand Dollars</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The House of the Whispering Pines</i>, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.<br /> -<i>Initials Only</i>, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.<br /> -<i>Masterpieces of Mystery</i>, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished in 1919 as <i>Room No. 3.</i> Dodd, Mead.<br /> -<i>Dark Hollow</i>, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.<br /> -<i>The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Woman in the Alcove</i>, 1916. Burt.<br /> -<i>The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow</i>, 1917. Dodd, Mead.<br /> -<i>The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man</i>, 1922. Dodd, Mead.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_215" id="page_215">{215}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br /> -<small>HELEN R. MARTIN</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span> CHAPTER on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged -interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, -constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And -always on the same subject—her subject—the Pennsylvania Dutch.</p> - -<p>What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said. -She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from -Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was -brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or -so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after -taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing -for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg, -the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among -whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it -to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her -for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met -Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an -instructor in music. And Mrs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_216" id="page_216">{216}</a></span> Martin was herself a teacher. At one time -she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City. -She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is -interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up -children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte -Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any -general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many -of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with -these problems is kept out of her work—the older generation of the -people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared -their heads—but her last two novels, <i>Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or -Christian?</i> and <i>Maggie of Virginsburg</i>, introduce them extensively and -disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with <i>Gertie Swartz</i> arose entirely -from her inability to assimilate such matter <i>before</i> writing her story. -As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are -indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced -bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life -out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as -they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of -the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the -representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that -the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many -futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only -things that count are those which involve<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_217" id="page_217">{217}</a></span> action or precipitate action -or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, -otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as -the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of -Sociological Sores.</p> - -<p><i>Gertie Swartz</i> aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work -arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to -give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the -controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under -the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do -the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made -in the New York <i>Evening Post</i> for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. -Pennypacker.</p> - -<p>Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania -Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have -never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s -<i>Hearts Contending</i>, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells, -“should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie -Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania -Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of -Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, <i>The Pennsylvania -Pilgrim</i> (he thought it better than <i>Snowbound</i> but said the public -would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the -Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania -Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the -lingering<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_218" id="page_218">{218}</a></span> accent, because Americans speak French and German badly. -Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high -station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr. -Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s -curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is -larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious -that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is -it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s -house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A -punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would -forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because -the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs. -Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!</p> - -<p>There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment -her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie -Maddern Fiske made <i>Barnabetta</i> into a play, <i>Erstwhile Susan</i>, and -appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is -what Richard Watson Gilder of the <i>Century</i> once said to Mrs. Martin: -“Your people do not converse on paper—they talk. When a community is -written up that community always resents it, even if it is described -flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own -conceit about itself.”</p> - -<p>So much for compliments. If you call for proofs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_219" id="page_219">{219}</a></span> ask Mrs. Martin to show -you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published) -some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania -Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character, -asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining -that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits, -complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad -traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her -delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her -delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs. -Martin says:</p> - -<p>“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated -descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of -whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers, -except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But -the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster, -Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race -from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters -described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I -wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the -rest of my heroines.</p> - -<p>“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who -have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”</p> - -<p>We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a -synoptic discussion of her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_220" id="page_220">{220}</a></span> tales and give instead what she has to say, -outside her books, about the people in them.</p> - -<p>“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of -whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect, -not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about -Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is -absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play <i>Erstwhile -Susan</i> and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch) -with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a -Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and -leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very -frugal and ‘close’—they never outgrow that.</p> - -<p>“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They -never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are -worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold -kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too -seductive charms may not be revealed.</p> - -<p>“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and -their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ -board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, -then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me -to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, -anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone -fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful -funny!’ Then the wife<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_221" id="page_221">{221}</a></span> would tell me how in twenty-five years of married -life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.</p> - -<p>“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband -the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now -that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I -quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I -said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t -know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, -being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>The following further account of these people is taken from a talk -Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the -opening of Mrs. Fiske in <i>Erstwhile Susan</i>. The interview, printed in -the New York <i>Evening Post</i> of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. -Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:</p> - -<p>“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he -sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the -average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once -disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ -I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, -cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make -something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what -do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that -fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will -refer to your hus<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_222" id="page_222">{222}</a></span>band and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt -ironed? My mister don’t.’</p> - -<p>“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual -towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower -gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of -love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The -parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.</p> - -<p>“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house -and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania -Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women. -He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market, -modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more -money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his -daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for—to work for the men -folks in the kitchen or near it.</p> - -<p>“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s -bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies -as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three -girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of -their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who -tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he -watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of -them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a -hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_223" id="page_223">{223}</a></span> the first test -scrimped a few crumbs for him—and won his hand and heart. Soon after, -his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked—which is -Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...</p> - -<p>“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know. -It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible—for they -are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of -them sooner or later join one of the several religious -sects—Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’ -they say, and join one of these sects.</p> - -<p>“Their word is as good as gold—but they’ll quibble with their word. A -grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh -more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer. -‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his -literal word it is good to the last penny.”</p> - -<p>These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think -about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her -was printed in the <i>Evening Sun</i>, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no -problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary -of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in -Harrisburg!’ they will say.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule -that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by -living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_224" id="page_224">{224}</a></span> -denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly -stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by -herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule -she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her -dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the -house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak -to his wife.</p> - -<p>“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that -I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give -him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would -punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely -fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not -understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”</p> - -<p>Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a -booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and -Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating -exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin, -to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and -yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Helen R. Martin</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Elusive Hildegarde.</i><br /> -<i>Her Husband’s Purse.</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_225" id="page_225">{225}</a></span><i>His Courtship.</i><br /> -<i>Warren Hyde.</i><br /> -<i>Tillie, a Mennonite Maid</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Sabina, a Story of the Amish</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Revolt of Anne Royle</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Crossways</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>When Half-Gods Go</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Fighting Doctor</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Parasite</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Barnabetta</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>For a Mess of Pottage</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Martha of the Mennonite Country</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Those Fitzenbergers</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?</i> 1918.<br /> -<i>Maggie of Virginsburg</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The Schoolmaster of Hessville</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The Marriage of Susan</i>, 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New -York, and the Century Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_226" id="page_226">{226}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br /> -<small>SOPHIE KERR</small></h2> - -<p class="r"> -“July 19, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“My dear Mr. Overton:</p> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">“I</span>T has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen -beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences -of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good -heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have -never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down -and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very -queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only -facts....</p> - -<p>“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy -belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, -conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising—an -average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit -farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for -people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, -an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign -flowering shrubs.</p> - -<p>“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High -School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_227" id="page_227">{227}</a></span></p> - -<p>“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always -had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it -was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school -or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound -culture, or even any vital enthusiasm—with the exception of the -psychology teacher at college.</p> - -<p>“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most -college girls write—very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind -of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas -of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I -was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to -be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter—I was always of a -severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write -stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the -machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the <i>Ladies’ -World</i>, and one into the <i>Country Gentleman</i>, and one into <i>Truth</i>, -which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I -had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend -of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of -graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there -with Professor Samuel Emerson.</p> - -<p>“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that -ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and -painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_228" id="page_228">{228}</a></span> mind, and that -my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I -didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how -humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and -told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was -too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the -thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have -doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful -way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.</p> - -<p>“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to -try to get what I did not have—a disciplined, well-ordered, logical -mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got -any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and -environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater -capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this—the habit of -thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the -individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.</p> - -<p>“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of -my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then -began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh <i>Gazette</i>, one of -whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly -little essays—though that word is really too dignified for them—on the -foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment -and little amusing incidents that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_229" id="page_229">{229}</a></span> I gathered when visiting in -Washington and Baltimore—we Southerners are great visitors, you -know—occasionally a scrap of very light verse.</p> - -<p>“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the <i>Gazette</i> -people and asked for a job. I got it—I was to run the woman’s page of -their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties -of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday -supplement. The people on the <i>Gazette</i> were very kind and patiently -tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I -worked there very happily for several years.</p> - -<p>“But I had been trying some magazine work—more light, semi-humorous -stuff, and the <i>Woman’s Home Companion</i> bought several of my pieces. I -went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them -for a job. And got it,—assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then -the assistant editor, and is now the editor.</p> - -<p>“I have stayed with the <i>Companion</i> ever since, save for a year when I -went with the ill-starred <i>Circle</i>, and now I am managing editor. All -this covers a period of over ten years.</p> - -<p>“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some -stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these -were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried -to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books -out—<i>Love at Large</i>, <i>The Blue Envelope</i> and <i>The Golden Block</i>—and -another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most -of which have been published. Of course<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_230" id="page_230">{230}</a></span> the very best story I ever -wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in -my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind—some day I’ll wish -you on an editor, yet.’</p> - -<p>“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I -rarely—almost never—put real people or incidents in my stories, and -then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go -forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after -character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything -logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the -cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its -detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes -in these,—but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long -editorial training is an asset.</p> - -<p>“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily -reflect my own views or beliefs—I have no propaganda spirit—the -story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me -for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters—beliefs which -were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the -character who expressed them.</p> - -<p>“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it -all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which -you may be able to use somehow—they sound like the answers to an <i>Alice -in Wonderland</i> questionnaire.)</p> - -<p>“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and -I do not read any of these be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_231" id="page_231">{231}</a></span>cause of the possible effect they may have -on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but -because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather -be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it; -indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better -strawberry preserves than any one in the world—this is not arrogance, -but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, -editor of <i>Munsey’s Magazine</i>] would say. I work very hard, all the -time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them, -when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have -trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story -without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of -several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction -that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own—or most other -people’s—writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time -when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of -interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of -big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure -it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both.</p> - -<p>“(Now, really—this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert -again to <i>Alice</i>. Will it do—or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left -unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am -afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t want -<i>that</i> to go into your book.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_232" id="page_232">{232}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an -appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately -gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a -multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the -statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we -know, in the <i>New Republic</i> but when that Effort decides to take up the -publication of short stories doubtless she will!</p> - -<p>Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred -formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and -primarily with her as the author of <i>The Blue Envelope</i> and <i>The Golden -Block</i>.</p> - -<p>Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the -resemblance pretty nearly stops. <i>The Blue Envelope</i> has for its heroine -a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is -pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and -having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman -of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her -bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie -goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes -love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her -money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead -father that she spend two years earning her living.</p> - -<p>This adventure—earning your living is the greatest adventure in the -world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!—this enterprise takes Leslie -to New York.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_233" id="page_233">{233}</a></span> And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a -living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the -business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s -training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters -the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives.</p> - -<p>The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the -end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going -to give to the United States Government—sarnite. The formula must be -delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons, -agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and -earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie -Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance.</p> - -<p>Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that -you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it -away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what -shall we say? <i>The Blue Envelope</i> is simple, straightforward, absorbing -and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. -We don’t mean realism—abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is -naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing -incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action -in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in -the world!</p> - -<p>Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life -and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a -realist be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_234" id="page_234">{234}</a></span>cause he makes us see in what he sets before us things we -never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical—we are -dead in earnest—it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as -unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one -extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in -between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special -sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal -and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.</p> - -<p>It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly -plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the -most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of -a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the -nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a -romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or -Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the -faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while -naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to -have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our -belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and -excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic -value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is -evidenced for everybody in the contrast between <i>The Blue Envelope</i> and -its successor from her pen, <i>The Golden Block</i>.</p> - -<p><i>The Golden Block</i> is part of the life story of a business woman, -Margaret Bailey, and the most important<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_235" id="page_235">{235}</a></span> part. The novel finds her a -secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her -his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a -week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. -The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has -got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference -between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has -happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman—a much -better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business -women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are -new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too -straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in -order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr -doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most -skillful thing in that admirable story <i>The Golden Block</i> is the way in -which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. -Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is -also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the -comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole -family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time -that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey -or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of -course the surest way to promote <i>their</i> happiness is to succeed -herself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_236" id="page_236">{236}</a></span></p> - -<p>Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is -proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is -as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being -called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does -not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a -philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She -speaks and thinks only for herself—not of herself except when asked to -explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not -mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she -can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a -man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute -of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if -the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no -sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might -have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”</p> - -<p>If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the -sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will -cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars -of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make -the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for -Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep -growing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_237" id="page_237">{237}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Sophie Kerr</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Love at Large</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Blue Envelope</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Golden Block</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The See-Saw</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Painted Meadows</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>One Thing Is Certain</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue -Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, -Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. -Doran Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_238" id="page_238">{238}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br /> -<small>MARJORIE BENTON COOKE</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>F course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is -simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by -an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of -an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative -introspection—by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created -her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look -into your heart and write.”</p> - -<p>No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no -matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never -lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that -to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of -imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is -completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He -builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the -character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the -rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions; -these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not -much more than set them down. Incredible?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_239" id="page_239">{239}</a></span> Not in the least. Thackeray, -Scott—we don’t know how many writers—testify to the obstinacy with -which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really -no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The -parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow -his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes -his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does -always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and -despise him for it, for the story rings false.</p> - -<p>But the book <i>Bambi</i> is another matter and precisely what the difference -consists in we have tried to show. Let us illustrate it anew. <i>Bambi</i> is -imagined autobiography. Instead of creating Bambi and letting her go her -way Miss Cooke conducted herself through the story. Or, if you want to -put it in another way, you may say that she created Bambi and endowed -her with certain of her own traits—gayety, courage, tenderness, wit, a -love of drama—and then let her go her way. It is because of the -intimate personal quality of her heroine that Miss Cooke dedicated her -book “To Bambi, with thanks to her for being Herself! M. B. C.”</p> - -<p>The book is a marvel—an absolute marvel. It sold heavily and promptly, -that was to be expected; but the marvel consists not in the book’s -popularity but in the extraordinary enthusiasm it stirred in its -readers. Since no one who has read it seems to be able to avoid the use -of superlatives in speaking of it—certainly this writer isn’t—it might -be best to put aside any attempt at characterization. What follows shall -be—analysis!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_240" id="page_240">{240}</a></span></p> - -<p>The first chapter takes the reader off his feet. Bambi, loving the -dreamer Jarvis though perhaps not very consciously loving him, sends for -a minister and has herself wedded to him, despite the absent-minded -objections of her father, the professor of mathematics. Jarvis needs -looking after. This perfectly implausible proceeding is made entirely -plausible—you swallow it whole and with immense relish—by just two -technical triumphs on Miss Cooke’s part.</p> - -<p>1. Everything is in dialogue. You are not asked to believe that the -Professor is one kind of a person, Bambi another, and Jarvis a third, -and all three eminently unlikely; you see them do this and that and you -hear them say so and so. Miss Cooke doesn’t ask you to believe <i>her</i>, -she asks you to believe your senses!</p> - -<p>2. The dialogue is witty—the wittiest—but there we go off on -superlatives again. The dialogue is witty but natural in the completest -sense of the word and the wit springs entirely from the situation. No -other wit is so good, as any dramatist will tell you.</p> - -<p>These two things are the key to the whole story and the key to the utter -amazement which overcomes the reader when he applies the test of -probability to it—after he has read it through. Of course the wonder of -that first chapter could not be entirely sustained through 366 pages, -but by the time Miss Cooke’s capital starting situation has lost its -sharpest edge the plot has reared its head! Oh, yes, there’s a plot; all -such a story as <i>Bambi</i> will stand; a plot with adequate suspense and a -steady sweep toward a dénouement. For in a tale like <i>Bambi</i> you must -not have too much plot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_241" id="page_241">{241}</a></span> the chief interest is ever in the charming and -lovable heroine.</p> - -<p>But this sketch is all Bambi and none of it Marjorie Benton Cooke, of -whom Bambi is only a projection, in dotted lines, as a draughtsman would -say. Miss Cooke herself is the daughter of Joseph Henry Cooke and Jessie -(Benton) Cooke. She was born in Richmond, Indiana. In 1899 she received -the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In -the same year she began writing for the magazines. In fact her first -printed “novel” exists as a yellowed clipping in her mother’s scrapbook. -Underneath it is penned a memorandum: “Published the Sunday after -Marjorie received her degree.” It was a whimsical episode, the story of -a lost dime, divided into two “chapters,” and appeared in the Chicago -<i>Record-Herald</i>. It contained no promise of <i>Bambi</i>.</p> - -<p>“Marjorie and her doting parents,” as Mrs. Cooke once remarked, “thought -fame and fortune were hers to command.” They weren’t. She traveled a -long, hard road, writing scraps of humor and satire for newspapers and -magazines, concocting little stories and selling them. She was fifteen -years away from <i>Bambi</i> when she started. But she had the gift for -dramatic recitation with which she later endowed that young woman. In -1902 she began touring the United States as a monologist. Dozens of her -monologues have been published but will not be found listed at the end -of this chapter. Miss Cooke would be the last to expect them to be. They -are interesting only as the preparation necessary to write <i>Bambi</i>, -particularly that first chapter. Miss Cooke has always been inter<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_242" id="page_242">{242}</a></span>ested -in social questions, as any one who remembers Jarvis Jocelyn’s -experiences in New York will understand. She is a member of the Little -Room Club in Chicago, the Heterodoxy Club and the Women’s University -Club in New York.</p> - -<p>Her books, as distinguished from her printed monologue booklets, began -in 1903 with <i>Modern Monologues</i>, continued in 1905 with <i>Dramatic -Episodes</i> and <i>Plays for Children</i>, marked time in 1907 with <i>More -Modern Monologues</i> and budded with a novel, her first novel, in -1910—<i>The Girl Who Lived in the Woods</i>. <i>Dr. David</i> appeared in 1911; -and there were <i>To a Mother</i>, <i>The Twelfth Christian</i>, a dramatic poem, -and three one-act plays which were produced—all before <i>Bambi</i>.</p> - -<p><i>And</i> Miss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with -the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has -forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the -conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of -her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded—just a -manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she -would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F. -Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read -until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read -till seven, looked at the clock, and—went on reading. You can eat any -day, you know....</p> - -<p>Later a telegram went forth: “<i>Bambi</i> is ours. Love at first sight.”</p> - -<p>Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her -book; that’s why they are what<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_243" id="page_243">{243}</a></span> they ought to be. And you are to picture -her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her -feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if -you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be -acquainted with Bambi when you call.</p> - -<p>What else? <i>Bambi</i> was followed by <i>Cinderella Jane</i> and that -interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter -without love on either side—they made a success of it and were rewarded -by becoming lovers—that tale was succeeded by <i>The Threshold</i>, in which -Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to -her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell, -employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his -17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by -Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story -in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the -like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on -the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well.</p> - -<p>If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious -subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people in <i>The -Threshold</i>, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock—which does -not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the -world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no -farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan -Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to write <i>The Threshold</i> she knew, -as a good novelist does, exactly<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_244" id="page_244">{244}</a></span> what she wanted to do. She wanted to -find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about -the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t -she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to -run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive -answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally -misleading—so few of us really know what we think about anything in the -future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and -that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put -her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she -would come to believe about the things ahead.</p> - -<p>Miss Cooke’s <i>The Clutch of Circumstance</i>, on the other hand, is just a -good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots—but -based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of -whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is -guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!</p> - -<p>Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the -wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said -in <i>The Threshold</i> about Joan is the best thing to say about her author: -“The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, -even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil -inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”</p> - -<p>I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, -because, for the readers of her books,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_245" id="page_245">{245}</a></span> the picture of her as she lived -is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of -one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, -1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie -Benton Cooke died.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Marjorie Benton Cooke</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Modern Monologues</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>Dramatic Episodes</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>Plays for Children</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>More Modern Monologues</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Girl Who Lived in the Woods</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>Dr. David</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Bambi</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Dual Alliance</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Cinderella Jane</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Threshold</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The Clutch of Circumstance</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The Cricket</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Married?</i> 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. -McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by -Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is -published by George H. Doran Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_246" id="page_246">{246}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><br /> -<small>GRACE S. RICHMOND</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HY do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of -any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity -has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest—<i>On -Christmas Day in the Morning</i>, <i>On Christmas Day in the Evening</i>, and -<i>The Enlisting Wife</i>, for instances—sell most rapidly. Not the size; -perhaps it has something to do with the substance!</p> - -<p>No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her -contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest -feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at -the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we -ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for -us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She -is our emotional self—that part of self which is a common -possession—touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the -delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her -for affording it to us.</p> - -<p>These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the -people of repressed instincts there<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_247" id="page_247">{247}</a></span> is one instinct seldom -repressed—the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is -an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may -give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but -which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know—the rest of us—full -well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful -exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come -away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the -essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most -people that does not change.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated -is that in 1914—and several of her most successful books have appeared -since—she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the -million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier -stories; there are the readers of her work in the <i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i> -and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are -always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much -like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening -ripples;—no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to -know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose -publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!</p> - -<p>She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare -outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the -Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her -father was a Baptist clergyman, the au<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_248" id="page_248">{248}</a></span>thor of <i>The Baptism of Fire</i> and -<i>The World Lighted</i>. Grace was an only child. While she was still a -young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter -was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, -following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some -indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. -Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician -with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not -until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for -magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the -Thanksgiving number of the <i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i>.</p> - -<p>It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the -principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who -accepted it without delay. The story was called <i>The Flowing -Shoe-String</i> and described the reformation, through love, of a -charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it -very well! She found herself in rather notable company—Mrs. A. D. T. -Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt -Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving -number.</p> - -<p>Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the -editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she -made her second appearance in the <i>Ladies’ Home Journal</i>, in 1898, with -<i>A Silk-Lined Girl</i>. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company -had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline At<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_249" id="page_249">{249}</a></span>water -Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the -table of contents.</p> - -<p>This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898 -Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular -contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by -when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has -had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the -<i>Journal’s</i> readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which -became, in 1905, a book, <i>The Indifference of Juliet</i>. Juliet’s -indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of -marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with <i>The Indifference -of Juliet</i> and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to -the <i>Journal’s</i> readers were published between covers under the title -<i>With Juliet in England</i>.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for -whom she is most widely known and thanked—Redfield Pepper Burns, the -generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane -impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. <i>Red Pepper Burns</i> was -followed by <i>Mrs. Red Pepper</i> and <i>Red Pepper’s Patients</i>. But hold -on—not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond -had given us the story of <i>The Second Violin</i>. In 1908 came <i>Around the -Corner in Gay Street</i>, in 1909 <i>A Court of Inquiry</i>; there were also the -two Christmas booklets—<i>On Christmas Day in the Morning</i> (1908) and <i>On -Christmas Day in the Evening</i> (1910). Between <i>Red Pepper Burns</i> and -<i>Mrs. Red Pepper</i> appeared <i>Strawberry Acres</i> and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_250" id="page_250">{250}</a></span> year after <i>Mrs. -Red Pepper</i> was published <i>The Twenty-fourth of June</i>.</p> - -<p>But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs. -Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here -is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative -as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.</p> - -<p>Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be -inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter -of <i>Red Pepper’s Patients</i> Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist -who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his -Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of -the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The -Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be -bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the -unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner—they are all -graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. -Why quibble?</p> - -<p>Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From <i>The -Twenty-fourth of June</i>:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled -bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my -life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost—I don’t know -what they cost—I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I -want to know I’ve got a towel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_251" id="page_251">{251}</a></span> in my hand, that I can whisk round me and -slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my -dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again -in there?’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. -It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being -entirely unforced.</p> - -<p>In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because -she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a -better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared -in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. <i>Red -Pepper Burns</i> was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper -Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the -Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate -little heart messages as <i>The Enlisting Wife</i> and <i>The Whistling Mother</i> -are just as successful. Take the opening of <i>The Enlisting Wife</i>:</p> - -<p>“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just -before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little -record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last -paragraph of a letter from her young husband.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man -I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means -standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old -boyish love of ease and snug corners—then—well—time will prove me, -anyhow. Darling, can you guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_252" id="page_252">{252}</a></span> how you are with me, every waking -moment—and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife—even -though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married -us—how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting -comrade!—<i>O Judith!</i>’</p> - -<p>“I don’t cry often—not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, -there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the -tears—happy ones—and I kissed the dear words again and again before I -tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and -night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how -‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”</p> - -<p>Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of -characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization -is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived -perfectly to set down <i>not</i> the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke -Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body -and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and -write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. -Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are -habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection -to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our -emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the -unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are -emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond -and more like her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_253" id="page_253">{253}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Grace S. Richmond</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Indifference of Juliet</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>With Juliet in England</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Round the Corner in Gay Street</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Red Pepper Burns</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>Strawberry Acres</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Mrs. Red Pepper</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Second Violin</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>A Court of Inquiry</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>On Christmas Day in the Morning</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>On Christmas Day in the Evening</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Twenty-fourth of June</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Under the Country Sky.</i><br /> -<i>Under the Christmas Stars.</i><br /> -<i>The Brown Study.</i><br /> -<i>Red Pepper’s Patients</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Whistling Mother</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Enlisting Wife</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Brotherly House.</i><br /> -<i>Red and Black</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Foursquare</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the -rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_254" id="page_254">{254}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><br /> -<small>WILLA SIBERT CATHER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">S</span>OME novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their -best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show -steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last -is Willa Sibert Cather.</p> - -<p>She has written four novels. You pick up <i>Alexander’s Bridge</i> and read -with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It -is—excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all -through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you -are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is -nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell -to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon -another book by the same author and start to read.</p> - -<p>Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as -your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather -better than a filled one). <i>O Pioneers!</i> is in its way an epic of the -Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping -panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and -the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough -be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_255" id="page_255">{255}</a></span>liever in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though -intensely satisfied with <i>O Pioneers!</i> you never for a moment expect -more of her—perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would -be in any way reasonable.</p> - -<p>A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker -than <i>O Pioneers!</i> as <i>O Pioneers!</i> was thicker than <i>Alexander’s -Bridge</i>. It is called <i>The Song of the Lark</i>. You eye it speculatively. -You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are -halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again.</p> - -<p><i>The Song of the Lark</i> is a much bigger thing than her second novel in -every respect except one—it has not the same peculiar quality of -seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of -America in the period of that life. But wait—think a moment. Does not -this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the -whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not -thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead -toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting -with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea -Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the -fight—what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever -lived?</p> - -<p>From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger -than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable -wonder of the woman who could—and did—write them. But here no wonder -lies. At least, you may read the external<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_256" id="page_256">{256}</a></span> record of Willa Sibert -Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains -her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through -this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.</p> - -<p>“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of -Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts -were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone, -Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations. -When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled -on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State -where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the -tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families -in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or -twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.</p> - -<p>“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind -the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school -near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She -had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements, -talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The -first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a -writer than any that came afterward.</p> - -<p>“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss -Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and -immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pitts<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_257" id="page_257">{257}</a></span>burgh -<i>Leader</i>. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for -several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the -English department in the Allegheny High School.</p> - -<p>“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her -first book of verse, <i>April Twilights</i>, and her first book of short -stories, <i>The Troll Garden</i>. The latter book attracted a good deal of -attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906, -Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of -<i>McClure’s Magazine</i>. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was -managing editor of <i>McClure’s Magazine</i>, and during these four years did -no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry -Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel, <i>Alexander’s Bridge</i>, and a -novelette, <i>The Bohemian Girl</i>, both of which appeared serially in -<i>McClure’s Magazine</i>. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long -stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many -hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of -the Pueblo Indians.</p> - -<p>“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she -lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West. -This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of -articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles -of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of -Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.”</p> - -<p>Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to -frame a hypothesis to account for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_258" id="page_258">{258}</a></span> Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid -progress as a novelist. The material for <i>O Pioneers!</i> and <i>The Song of -the Lark</i>, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her -impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of <i>The Song of the Lark</i> -which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred -Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in -these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her -own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if -we can find a clew to it there.</p> - -<p>“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used -to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her -baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable -state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than -they said—as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one -begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again—no -other adventure ever carries one quite so far.”</p> - -<p>Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions -acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration -never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and -emotional feeling—of heart and mind—which carried the girl <i>beyond</i> -the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on -living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to -the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of -any or all of these things? Of course you do!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_259" id="page_259">{259}</a></span></p> - -<p>Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to -put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into -her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied -her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward.</p> - -<p>“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,” -she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and -disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I -decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people -for whom I had a personal feeling.</p> - -<p>“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all -of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them -and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t -try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way; -you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, -don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story -that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it -or leave it.’</p> - -<p>“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the -thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I -dedicated <i>O Pioneers!</i> to her because I had talked over some of the -characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the -people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word -of mouth.”</p> - -<p>Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically -say that she had to depart from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_260" id="page_260">{260}</a></span> actual persons when she came to do her -good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay -bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled -over it let us supplement what she says.</p> - -<p>There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only -see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen -comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in -tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to -include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on -paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it -if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about -them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and -mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or, -if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on -paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time -has passed and we are calmer; until we can <i>recall</i> in a warm, -remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently -for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash.</p> - -<p>Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as -to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the -artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other -persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but -not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations -of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_261" id="page_261">{261}</a></span> -the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have -undergone it before her.</p> - -<p>In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to -her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative -faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their -created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources -early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not -die in the middle of the creative task.</p> - -<p>We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.</p> - -<p>“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been -collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new -since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has -been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that -touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before -you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the -true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it -is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that -I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which -excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the -warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose.</p> - -<p>Let us consider her four books.</p> - -<p><i>Alexander’s Bridge</i> might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has -only one fault, a certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_262" id="page_262">{262}</a></span> cloudiness characteristic of finely-written -stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the -essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss -Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says:</p> - -<p>“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a -pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and -work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and -much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the -social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a -participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself -only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of -encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity -that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this -jargon!].</p> - -<p>“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal -relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace -of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his -ideals do not.</p> - -<p>“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation -to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his -self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he -himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose -which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of -himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.”</p> - -<p>There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner -action of the novel. And the only<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_263" id="page_263">{263}</a></span> fault with the novel, we repeat, is -that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be -necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss -Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley -Alexander.</p> - -<p><i>O Pioneers!</i> is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a -novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next -novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add, -of a very original gift—talent—genius; the degree of her endowment is -not precisely determinable even yet. In <i>O Pioneers!</i> it is a woman who -dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much -kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with -sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers -left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed -soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the -family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work -well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies -her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her -brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother, -distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care -and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The -terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a -woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as -she would survive anything that life could do to her.</p> - -<p>The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character -which marks the true novelist, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_264" id="page_264">{264}</a></span> resolute putting through of what -these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about. -That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable -but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that -will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need -not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may -for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why -cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes -it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s <i>O -Pioneers!</i> doesn’t try to.</p> - -<p>The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic, -that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a -historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the -satisfaction of the reader is complete.</p> - -<p><i>The Song of the Lark</i> gains over <i>O Pioneers!</i> in the first place by -its sheer bulk. <i>O Pioneers!</i> was a series of scenes in a single but -changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author -had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But as <i>The -Song of the Lark</i> is entirely centered about the development of a single -person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail; -more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the -innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out -what—<i>what</i>—it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must -have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least -mite of information. We must have every<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_265" id="page_265">{265}</a></span>thing about her from her -girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the -persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or -upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We -must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really -privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they -drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And -Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she -puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no -less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant -conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable -conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend.</p> - -<p><i>My Antonia</i> is a book to be put alongside <i>O Pioneers!</i> It is less -epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful -depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns -about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their -surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short -stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy, -horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is -perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is -variously touched and amused—and always the book is engrossing. Such a -book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of -Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses -fiction.</p> - -<p>There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been -said already. If this chapter has<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_266" id="page_266">{266}</a></span> been too venturesome in its -inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O -reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree -but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will -be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have -said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will -have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds -measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same -estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters -supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Willa Sibert Cather</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>April Twilights</i>, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston.<br /> -<i>The Troll Garden</i>, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.<br /> -<i>Alexander’s Bridge</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>O Pioneers!</i> 1913.<br /> -<i>The Song of the Lark</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>My Antonia</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Youth and the Bright Medusa</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>One of Ours</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright -Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_267" id="page_267">{267}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><br /> -<small>CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>O write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written -twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s -offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham -has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to -convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how -capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight, -fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a -fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds -of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few -of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that -she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this -faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has -said of her book, <i>Jewel</i>:</p> - -<p>“I like <i>Jewel</i> best. I think she is my high water mark. It is a -Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology -that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of second <i>Little -Lord Fauntleroy</i>, and besides, it wouldn’t be <i>Jewel</i>.”</p> - -<p>Which may be so but which does not hold true of <i>The Right Princess</i>. -There the identification of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_268" id="page_268">{268}</a></span> Frances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of -which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative. -Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an -unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and -worth the reader’s while as <i>The Opened Shutters</i>, from which the -terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent.</p> - -<p>The point we would make, then, the point that ought, in sheer honesty, -to be made at the very outset of any consideration of Mrs. Burnham’s -work, is her genuine and incontestable achievement as a straight-way, -out-and-out, talented story-teller, a pure and simple fictioneer, an -experienced and popular American novelist. That some of her novels have -probably done more to put Christian Science precepts before the world in -what the Scientist believes to be the true light than anything ever -written other than the church’s texts—that this is so may be granted. -But it is not a fact we have to concern ourselves with here. We concede -it and pass on. We pass on in either direction, going back to the -fourteen books which preceded <i>The Right Princess</i> or forward to the -eight novels which have appeared since <i>The Leaven of Love</i>. They are -the bulk of Mrs. Burnham’s work. And yet—it is to be feared we shall -have to bestow most of our attention upon the six books between! They -represent Mrs. Burnham’s widest popularity and what is possibly her best -work judged strictly in literary aspects. But enough of this for the -present; it is time enough to cross bridges when we come to them. Let us -first get a glimpse of Mrs. Burnham herself.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_269" id="page_269">{269}</a></span></p> - -<p>A tall woman, spare in build, with light hair, blue eyes and a merry -manner, a conversationalist with anecdotes, a manner of great -simplicity, serenity, calm pleasantness. She was the eldest daughter of -George F. Root, as popular a songwriter as this country has produced. -Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she has lived most of her life in -Chicago. She summers in Maine. Her education was in the public and in -private schools in Chicago, and at the New Church School, Waltham, -Massachusetts. Politically she is, or was, a Progressive; and at this -point we cannot do better than to quote her own words in the Chicago -<i>Record-Herald</i> of November 24, 1912:</p> - -<p>“People who see the large, sunshiny hotel room in which I work, whose -bay windows command a wide expanse of lake, say that they no longer -wonder at the good cheer of my stories. If I ever had the blues I should -believe in the water cure. I have always believed in the ounce of -prevention. Indeed, I try it all summer up in Maine.</p> - -<p>“Bailey Island, my summer home, is only a small green hill in the superb -sweep of the Atlantic. My cottage stands eighty feet above the sea, and -there is nothing but water between me and Europe. It is great fun for a -woman who usually lives at a hotel to keep house three months of the -year.</p> - -<p>“But Bailey Island is not an inspiring place. I never work in summer. My -father always told me to let the water in the reservoir fill up then. -Besides, a brick wall is all the view I want when I am at work. Even -this dear Lake Michigan is almost too distracting at times.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_270" id="page_270">{270}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Lake Michigan explains why I have not followed the tide of successful -writers to New York. I love Chicago, with all its soot and wind. I am -naturally optimistic, and therefore expect that within the next decade -the Illinois Central will be electrified. Then won’t this spot be a -winter paradise?</p> - -<p>“Nevertheless, it is tempting to use my island as a background for my -stories. In <i>The Inner Flame</i> I have gone back to it again. Besides, the -Villa Chantecler is a real place—a henhouse cleared and renovated by an -enthusiastic young artist and given that clever name. The Chantecler -studio was too picturesque an incident not to become material.</p> - -<p>“However, very little of my material is taken from real life. It is -playing with fire to draw recognizable portraits of people; but I fancy -nearly all authors are quite aware that they are making composite -pictures of friends or acquaintances. For instance, the man who inspired -the character of Philip Sidney, the hero of <i>The Inner Flame</i>, is a -brother-in-law of John McCutcheon; while Edgar Fabian’s personality and -mannerisms are copied faithfully from another one of my friends whose -character is as different from Edgar’s as can be imagined. It is very -seldom that any individual appeals to me as material, but when he or she -does, I generally fall. Inasmuch as in all my books there is not one -villain, I should not think they would mind.</p> - -<p>“I have been asked whether I have a ‘method’ in writing. I -have—necessarily. Genius has inspirations. It writes in the night, or -walking in the field, and burns cords of cigarettes. Mere talent must -be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_271" id="page_271">{271}</a></span> persistent and industrious, and can often forego cigarettes.</p> - -<p>“When I was a very young girl I read something Miss Mulock said apropos -of writing which made a deep impression. It was this: ‘An author should -go to his desk as regularly as a carpenter to his bench, and with as -little thought of inspiration.’ I point to my twenty novels as a proof -that I have heeded that direction; for if any one doubts the manual -labor of book writing let him pick up any story and copy a chapter from -it in long hand. I have averaged one novel a year, yet my maximum period -of daily work is three morning hours.</p> - -<p>“If a young person aspiring to print should ask me whether there is a -definite way to begin, I should tell him to start by catching a big -brother. Preferably his own, for any one else’s might be a hindrance. -Mine is Frederick W. Root, ex-president of the Literary Club, Cliff -Dweller, Little Roomer, and in many other respects an orthodox -Chicagoan. He has been my mascot ever since the day when he started on -the labor—and hard labor it was—of drawing a young sister away from -the music which was her chief interest and starting her at story -writing. You know I am one of the Roots. My father, George F. Root, was -known chiefly by his war songs, <i>Tramp, Tramp, Tramp</i> and <i>The Battle -Cry of Freedom</i> and so on, but every home in the land knows his simple, -melodious songs, and I should like to feel that the vitality in my -unpretentious stories is akin to the spontaneous harmony that flowed for -fifty happy years from his clear mind.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_272" id="page_272">{272}</a></span></p> - -<p>“I suppose the reason I did not wish to write was that music satisfied -me. My brother persisted against my indifference for a year. At last we -were both exasperated. He shut me into a room with him one day, and -opening a very business-like looking knife, declared with a fearful -scowl that I should not leave that room alive unless I promised to try -faithfully to write a story. I laughed a little and wept a little, and -at last promised to show him that I couldn’t do it.</p> - -<p>“Some one asked him once in my presence why he was so certain that I -could write. He replied: ‘Oh, she has a picturesque way of telling -things and isn’t too much hampered by the truth.’ I forgive him even -such aspersions. He is an example of what ‘a heart at leisure from -itself’ can do for another. I owe him everything; above all the blessed -assurance which sometimes reaches me that my stories help others.</p> - -<p>“It is wonderful that I met no obstacles in starting. With no conscious -preparation I was like a ship ready to be launched. Fred pushed me off -into deep water.</p> - -<p>“I enjoy my work, but not quite in the carefree way I used to enjoy it. -With each new book now I am conscious of some anxiety not to disappoint -my large parish; not to go backward. Both in books and plays I believe -the destructive is doomed. In this world there exists only one rose -without a thorn. There are many larger, more alluring, more fragrant, -but there is only one thornless rose; it is work that you love.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her -first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not -deter her. A poem sent to <i>Wide Awake</i> was her first accepted work.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_273" id="page_273">{273}</a></span> <i>No -Gentlemen</i> was her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also -was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl -lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when -the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was -after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a -member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms -Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her -books, was <i>The Right Princess</i>, and when, after the usual hitches, it -was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in -1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will -not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of -seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t -imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh, -your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first—my very -first—villain lives in that little play.”</p> - -<p>To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go -first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known” -as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter -of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has -failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two -summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a -summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she -explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled -structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but covered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_274" id="page_274">{274}</a></span> -with grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The -Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but -a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may -see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to -live there is related, with changes of names, in her novel <i>Dr. -Latimer</i>. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly in <i>The Opened -Shutters</i>, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance -in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last -chapter of <i>The Opened Shutters</i>?</p> - -<p>“She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught -sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The -sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by, -and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia -Lacey:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>You said Love would open the shutters, and it has.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> The incident is -charged with a special significance in the story. It appears that when -the real mill disappeared a coincidence was noted, the sort of thing -that many persons prefer to think no coincidence at all. We quote from -the Portland <i>Evening Express</i> of July 31, 1909:</p> - -<p>“It seems that one day last summer Captain Morrill of the Harpswell -Steamboat Company, who is not too fond of story reading, picked up <i>The -Opened Shutters</i> to read. His wife in telling about it to Mrs. Burnham -said that he read the story far into the night, not being willing to put -it down till he had read the last word. The next day when he was sailing -down the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_275" id="page_275">{275}</a></span> bay, his attention was suddenly directed to the old Tide Mill. -He looked at it long and steadily. Could it be? Were his eyes deceiving -him? Had he read so late and thought so deeply on the story that things -did not look quite natural to him? He looked at the old mill again. Yes, -it was sinking into the sea—and the shutters were wide open! The sun, -too, was shining through. For years these old shutters had not let in a -rift of light; but now they were aflood with it.”</p> - -<p>Those who do not hug the supernatural are at liberty to suppose that the -strain of settling and sinking unbarred and flung open the shutters. Of -Captain Morrill it may be noted that his presence of mind and bravery -several years earlier had saved the lives of Mrs. Burnham and other -passengers in a collision between the steamboat Sebascodegan and a -revenue cutter. But for him <i>The Opened Shutters</i> would never have been -written.</p> - -<p>The beginning of this capital story was not with the Tide Mill, however, -but with the name Thinkright Johnson. Like certain persons whose -appearance before Mrs. Burnham’s mind’s eye has compelled her to write -about them, this New Englandish appellation gave birth to a book. -Thinkright Johnson—Thinkright Johnson; the name haunted Mrs. Burnham -for days and weeks, “till I knew that the only way I could have any -peace was to write something about him.”</p> - -<p>It was the same way with Jewel. She kept coming before her author. “She -is the exact type of one of my little nieces, in character, looks, and -even to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_276" id="page_276">{276}</a></span> things that she says. In some way I felt compelled to write -about her.”</p> - -<p>On the other hand the story of <i>The Right Princess</i> came to Mrs. Burnham -one evening when she was all dressed for the theater. “As I stood in my -room, all ready to go, it began to come to me. I drew off one of my -gloves and sat down to my desk just to jot down a few of the ideas; but -the whole thing grew so rapidly in my mind that I did not realize -anything in the world about me again, till I found myself removing one -of my shoes many hours later.</p> - -<p>“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But, -ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me. -Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to -me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters -which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let -them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of -course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print, -coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot.</p> - -<p>“My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me -perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my -first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people -hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to -me.</p> - -<p>“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, -and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he -particularly dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_277" id="page_277">{277}</a></span>liked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to -take it out.”</p> - -<p>Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr -McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and -George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also.</p> - -<p>It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s -Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group -of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a -common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of -ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of <i>The -Right Princess</i> (1902), <i>Jewel</i> (1903) and <i>The Leaven of Love</i> (1908). -<i>The Opened Shutters</i> (1906) is free from the special terminology of the -Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the -character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey.</p> - -<p><i>Heart’s Haven</i> (1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a -village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to -whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding -and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story -he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring -her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told -and very happily worked out.</p> - -<p>Though with <i>The Leaven of Love</i> Mrs. Burnham has given over writing -Christian Science novels the underlying ideas of her work, which were -there before she wrote <i>The Right Princess</i>, which were there when<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_278" id="page_278">{278}</a></span> she -wrote <i>Dr. Latimer</i>, remain unaltered and always expressed. These ideas -are those of peaceful and happy existences, of the validity of mental -experiences, of the influence of intellectual environment. Thus as -lately as 1916, in <i>Instead of the Thorn</i>, she gives us the story of a -Chicago girl brought up in luxury, whose father is ruined in -circumstances that seem to her to involve his business associate. The -fact that this young man is in love with the girl sets up the -complication, or struggle, necessary to make a novel. The girl is -finally persuaded to go to New England for rest, and Mrs. Burnham -directs the reader’s attention less to the solution of certain external -problems than to the way in which simple, quiet village life restores -the heroine’s mental poise and happiness. As for the proof that Mrs. -Burnham’s faith was antecedent to the first of her Christian Science -novels what clearer evidence need be asked than Helen Ivison’s -characterization of Dr. Latimer in the story, <i>Dr. Latimer</i>?</p> - -<p>“The secret of his influence over people is only that absolute trust in -God which he has learned somehow in life’s school. He puts self out of -the way more than any one we ever knew, and so a power shines through -him which is not of this world, and people, when they come near him, -feel all that is morally best in them being drawn forward, and are -conscious of crowding out of sight all that they would be ashamed to -have come to his notice.”</p> - -<p>Nothing better illustrates the quality of Mrs. Burnham’s humor—a humor -that makes her stories palatable reading even where the reader disagrees -vio<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_279" id="page_279">{279}</a></span>lently with the ideas set forth—than the chapters in <i>Jewel</i> where -Jewel is suffering from what those about her agree to be fever and sore -throat. Dr. Ballard has prepared medicine in a glass of water. Jewel is -to take a couple of spoonfuls of the “water” to satisfy Mrs. Forbes. -Instead she drinks heavily from an unmedicated pitcherful. By evening -she is much better. Then does the doctor, who thinks he has tricked -Jewel by persuading her to trick the housekeeper, learn that he has been -fooled instead.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Didn’t you drink any of the water?’ asked Dr. Ballard at last.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Yes, out of the pitcher.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Why not out of the glass?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>It didn’t look enough. I was so thirsty.’</p> - -<p>“Mr. Evringham finally found voice.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Jewel, why didn’t you obey the doctor?’ ...</p> - -<p>“Jewel thought a minute.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>He said it wasn’t medicine, so what was the use?’ she asked.</p> - -<p>“Mr. Evringham, seeming to find an answer to this difficult, bit the end -of his mustache.”</p> - -<p>Equally amusing, equally good as humor, is Jewel’s behavior with respect -to the overshoes which she is ordered to wear. At first she wears them -regardless. Then she is told to wear them only when it rains. A rainy -day dawns. Grandfather Evringham comes downstairs in bad humor. -“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Beastly weather.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> Jewel inquires:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>But the flowers and trees want a drink, don’t they?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span><span class="lftspc">’</span>M. I suppose so.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_280" id="page_280">{280}</a></span>’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>And the brook will be prettier than ever.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span><span class="lftspc">’</span>M. See that you keep out of it.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Yes, I will, grandpa; and I thought the first thing this morning, I’ll -wear my rubbers all day. I was so afraid I might forget I put them right -on to make sure.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Recovering shortly Mr. Evringham observes:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The house doesn’t leak anywhere. I think it will be safe for you to -take them off until after breakfast.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Now this is excellent humorous writing and Mrs. Burnham’s novels are -filled with it, even her Christian Science novels, perhaps those -particularly; it is so good simply because she has most thoroughly -assimilated her material before starting to write. How many writers more -famous than she, more gifted, possibly, from a critical standpoint, -would have made a sorry failure of such books as <i>Jewel</i> and <i>The Right -Princess</i> we don’t care to think. But you may see the disaster any day -in the case of writers like Winston Churchill, engrossed by certain -political and ethical ideals, and Ernest Poole, whose fine novel <i>The -Harbor</i> failed of the highest rank simply because he had not assimilated -the sociological ideas which he wished to present through his -characters. It is continually happening, this effort of the good artist -to handle material he has not mastered; and as surely as he essays the -task he leaves his place as a novelist to mount the pulpit of the -preacher, the rostrum of the reformer, the soapbox of the agitator—and -a fine story is spoiled beyond all salvaging.</p> - -<p>But when Mrs. Burnham writes of Christian<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_281" id="page_281">{281}</a></span> Science beliefs, ideas and -mental attitudes she is not writing primarily to lay those things before -the reader. She is writing to tell a story. These are the elements of -her story. From them she weaves her web of fancy but they are the colors -and not the pattern.</p> - -<p>In the depiction of character, notably the strongly accentuated -characters of New England, Mrs. Burnham is unfailingly and admirably -successful. <i>The Opened Shutters</i> lends itself from the start to the -happy illustration of this faculty. Who more accurately observed and -justly reported than Miss Lacey, Judge Trent and John Dunham? Miss Lacey -meets the judge’s housekeeper, old Hannah, and exclaims:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I just met Judge Trent, Hannah. Dear me, can’t you brush that hat of -his a little? It looks for all the world like a black cat that has just -caught sight of a mastiff.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Martha Lacey’s attitude toward Judge Trent is summed up in the refrain -continually sounding at the back of her head:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>If I’d married him, he’<span class="lftspc">”</span>—would have done so and so or wouldn’t have -done something else. No two ways about that! The consciousness of this -stern and immutable fact is what makes Judge Trent’s life one long -sensation of relief at having been refused.</p> - -<p>“The judge softly closed the door behind her. ‘There, but for the grace -of God,’ he murmured devoutly, ‘goes Mrs. Calvin Trent.’ Then he -returned to his desk, put on his hat, and sat down at his work.”</p> - -<p>Plots? There are hundreds of writers who can build twenty-story plots -with express elevator service<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_282" id="page_282">{282}</a></span> and private subway stations. There aren’t -so many who can see people clearly and see them whole and set them down -brightly on paper. Mrs. Burnham’s novels will be widely read and enjoyed -for so long as she writes them and afterward for many a day.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Clara Louise Burnham</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Quest Flower.</i><br /> -<i>Flutterfly.</i><br /> -<i>The Golden Dog.</i><br /> -<i>No Gentlemen</i>, 1882.<br /> -<i>A Sane Lunatic</i>, 1883.<br /> -<i>Dearly Bought</i>, 1884.<br /> -<i>Next Door</i>, 1885.<br /> -<i>Young Maids and Old</i>, 1886.<br /> -<i>The Mistress of Beech Knoll</i>, 1887.<br /> -<i>Miss Bagg’s Secretary</i>, 1892.<br /> -<i>Dr. Latimer</i>, 1893.<br /> -<i>Miss Archer Archer</i>, 1894.<br /> -<i>Sweet Clover, a Romance of the White City</i>, 1894<br /> -<i>The Wise Woman</i>, 1895.<br /> -<i>A Great Love</i>, 1898.<br /> -<i>A West Point Wooing and Other Stories</i>, 1899.<br /> -<i>Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>The Right Princess</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>Jewel: a Chapter in Her Life</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>Jewel’s Story Book</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>The Opened Shutters</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>The Leaven of Love</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Clever Betsy</i>, 1910.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_283" id="page_283">{283}</a></span><i>The Inner Flame</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Right Track</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Instead of the Thorn</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Heart’s Haven</i>, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>All of Mrs. Burnham’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, -Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_284" id="page_284">{284}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><br /> -<small>DEMETRA VAKA</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing -house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a -folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be -matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of -these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs. -Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following -data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could -conscientiously praise:</p> - -<p><i>Name in full</i>: Demetra Kenneth Brown.</p> - -<p><i>Chief occupation or profession</i>: Wife.</p> - -<p><i>Residence & address</i>: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York.</p> - -<p><i>Place of birth</i>: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora.</p> - -<p><i>Date of birth</i>: 1877.</p> - -<p><i>Education, when and where received, in detail</i>: First privately. Then -at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne. -One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various -schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as -frivolous women<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_285" id="page_285">{285}</a></span> use garments—throwing away when not becoming.</p> - -<p><i>Date of marriage</i>: 1904, April 21.</p> - -<p><i>Military, political and civic record</i>: No records whatever except of -bad temper.</p> - -<p><i>Director or trustee of the following educational or public -institutions</i>: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of -bringing up my husband.</p> - -<p><i>Politics</i>: For the best man who is on the ticket.</p> - -<p><i>Religious denomination</i>: Orthodox Greek.</p> - -<p><i>Professional associations, learned and technical societies, -decorations, etc.</i>: None.</p> - -<p><i>Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if -holder of any office, so state)</i>: Have not any money to spare.</p> - -<p><i>Social clubs</i>: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis -clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more -room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth.</p> - -<p><i>Business or professional record</i>: On the editorial staff of Greek -newspaper <i>Atlantis</i> for about six months in New York City. French -teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903. -Writer since 1904.</p> - -<p><i>Office or position occupied by you</i>: Wife.</p> - -<p><i>Title of (first) book</i>: First Secretary.</p> - -<p><i>Year first published</i>: 1907.</p> - -<p><i>Publisher</i>: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).</p> - -<hr style="width: 45%;" /> - -<p>This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several -points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.</p> - -<p>Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_286" id="page_286">{286}</a></span> Constantinople for -more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials. -Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch, -therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able -to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But -she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions -revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged -marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home, -coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here, -however, she was soon left to shift for herself.</p> - -<p>Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor -romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of -<i>Atlantis</i> she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her -that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time -she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a -private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of -the French department of the school.</p> - -<p>In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey. -Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no -intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations -from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women, -and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered -Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets. -Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_287" id="page_287">{287}</a></span> saw -and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, <i>Haremlik</i>, which means -“the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:</p> - -<p>Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for -long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at -last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary -if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged -to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after -her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience -while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would -write.</p> - -<p><i>Haremlik</i> was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression. -There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch -translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs. -Brown’s later book, <i>A Child of the Orient</i>, which is the tale of the -author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl -with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> -fills the pages of <i>Haremlik</i> and <i>A Child of the Orient</i>. The final -chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of -America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as -different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional -character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is, -though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love -for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_288" id="page_288">{288}</a></span> clearly disclosed in -the opening chapter of <i>Haremlik</i>. And so when the European War had -passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had -developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a -struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor, -Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the -leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies—at least -endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as -those entered upon with Serbia.</p> - -<p>Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its -quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet -it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, -the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had -access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French -she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed -not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. -Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had -done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, <i>In the Heart of -German Intrigue</i>, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the -mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of -interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what -Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to -do.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her -autobiographical books such as <i>A Child of the Orient</i> and <i>Haremlik</i> -are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has -to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_289" id="page_289">{289}</a></span> do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a -novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial -offering, <i>The First Secretary</i>. <i>The Duke’s Price</i>, written with her -husband; <i>Finella in Fairyland</i>, <i>In the Shadow of Islam</i>, and <i>The -Grasp of the Sultan</i>, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are -all hers, as well as <i>The Heart of the Balkans</i>. Of all these <i>The Grasp -of the Sultan</i>, which received serial publication and sold well even -before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting -and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.</p> - -<p>The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents -Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in -English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to -Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who -has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The -youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a -beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, -who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son -away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and -obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five -years.</p> - -<p>This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in -love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little -Prince Bayazet.</p> - -<p>The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine -control of suspense and with thrill<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_290" id="page_290">{290}</a></span> after thrill. The finest thing -about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s -thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could -have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of -study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred -as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive -“documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite -impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose -ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, -too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical -accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a -hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for -the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this -effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in -her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth -is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will -permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the -East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used -to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so -long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the -chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_291" id="page_291">{291}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Demetra Vaka</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The First Secretary</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Haremlik</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The Duke’s Price</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>Finella in Fairyland</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>In the Shadow of Islam</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>A Child of the Orient</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Grasp of the Sultan</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Heart of the Balkans</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>In the Heart of German Intrigue</i>, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, -Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_292" id="page_292">{292}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><br /> -<small>EDNA FERBER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in -Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first -novel in the wastebasket whence, like Kipling’s <i>Recessional</i>, it was -retrieved by another. No, no! the most interesting thing about Edna -Ferber is that she’s a superb short story writer, one of the best in -America, one of the dozen best.</p> - -<p>You are all wrong. The supremely interesting fact about Edna Ferber is -this: She invented the Tired Business Woman.</p> - -<p>When writing about Miss Ferber why be dull? Why go in for the higher -criticism? As for the lower criticism, we hope we are above it. -Certainly <i>she</i> is.</p> - -<p>To get back to name, dates, etc.: Chicago, Des Moines and Appleton, -Wisconsin, all have a stake in Miss Ferber’s success. Kalamazoo doesn’t -vociferate. It doesn’t have to, for she was born there and though seven -cities claimed Homer dead it will be no use for seven or eight or six -places to claim Edna Ferber living. Kalamazoo will see to that; -Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she made her debut—the only debut that’s -really worth making—on August 15, 1887. That is why we shall speak of -her very re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_293" id="page_293">{293}</a></span>spectfully. She is a month older than we are and a month is -everything.</p> - -<p>The daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia (Neuman) Ferber. Educated -in the public and high schools of—alas for Kalamazoo!—Appleton, -Wisconsin. At seventeen she became a reporter on the Appleton <i>Daily -Crescent</i>—“the youngest real reporter in the world.” She has it on us. -We were almost nineteen when—but never mind. Appleton, we hear, soon -became too small for Miss Ferber. Appletons have a way of doing that, or -isn’t it rather that the Edna Ferbers have a way of growing too big for -the Appletons? Anyway, Miss Ferber went to Milwaukee and then to a big -Chicago daily, the <i>Tribune</i>, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on -the <i>Journal</i>. <i>Dawn O’Hara</i>, her first book, was written in the time -she could spare from newspaper work. After it was completed she did not -like it. It was her mother who rescued the manuscript from the -wastebasket and sent it to a publisher, the same person mentioned in the -dedication of the novel: “To my dear mother who frequently interrupts -and to my sister Fannie who says ‘Sh-sh-sh!’ outside my door.”</p> - -<p>The best piece of work Mrs. Ferber ever did! The book took publisher and -public by storm. It came out in 1911 and in the same year the new -American author attained the dignity of twenty-four years. Our copy of -<i>Dawn O’Hara</i> is marked “eighth edition,” but as it is a reprinted copy -that may understate, or rather under-indicate, the book’s success. A few -thousands one way or another hardly matters among so many thousands of -copies sold!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_294" id="page_294">{294}</a></span></p> - -<p>Without pressing the autobiographical idea too hard it is perfectly -evident that much of the background of <i>Dawn O’Hara</i> is from Miss -Ferber’s own experience, notably the settings in Milwaukee. How she -could ever have been so dissatisfied with her story as to discard it -utterly any present-day reader will be puzzled to imagine. It is -extremely well told. It is full of the perfect human—humorously -human—quality which lifts so many of Miss Ferber’s short stories into -high place. Take this passage:</p> - -<p>“The Whalens live just around the corner. The Whalens are omniscient. -They have a system of news gathering which would make the efforts of a -New York daily appear antiquated. They know that Jenny Laffin feeds the -family on soup meat and oatmeal when Mr. Laffin is on the road; they -know that Mrs. Pearson only shakes out her rugs once in four weeks; they -can tell you the number of times a week that Sam Dempster comes home -drunk; they know that the Merkles never have cream with their coffee -because little Lizzie Merkle goes to the creamery every day with just -one pail and three cents; they gloat over the knowledge that Professor -Grimes, who is a married man, is sweet on Gertie Ashe, who teaches -second reader in his school; they can tell you where Mrs. Black got her -seal coat, and her husband only earning two thousand a year; they know -who is going to run for mayor, and how long poor Angela Sims has to -live, and what Guy Donnelly said to Min when he asked her to marry him.</p> - -<p>“The three Whalens—mother and daughters—hunt in a group. They send -meaning glances to one an<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_295" id="page_295">{295}</a></span>other across the room, and at parties they get -together and exchange bulletins in a corner. On passing the Whalen house -one is uncomfortably aware of shadowy forms lurking in the windows, and -of parlor curtains that are agitated for no apparent cause.”</p> - -<p>Beautiful! Gardiner of Harvard could have turned it inside out for you -and have shown you just where Miss Ferber impinged on your sensations -and how and to what end.... But the thing shows the facility of her best -work. Are the Whalens important to the story of <i>Dawn O’Hara</i>? They are -not. They are merely figures on the canvas, amusing but unimportant -people, no more than “brushed in” but brushed in with a firmness of -touch, a fidelity of detail, a humorous artist eye that is, as we say, -“taking” or “fetching” and wholly delightful.</p> - -<p>Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to -chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except -the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss -Ferber’s is <i>not</i> a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The -T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She -does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important -business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home -old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, <i>not</i> bring them home to -dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or -a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of -making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their -living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_296" id="page_296">{296}</a></span> for this, that she -has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the -self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A -woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything -else. Read, or re-read, <i>Emma McChesney & Co.</i> with this in a corner of -your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have -finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose -impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of -Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular -demonstration of the play.</p> - -<p>Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the -stories contained in her latest book, <i>Cheerful—By Request</i> (1918) and -perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called <i>The Gay Old -Dog</i>. At thirty-one she has her best years—as literary records -go—before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at -this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything -she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that -month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves!</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Edna Ferber</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Dawn O’Hara</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Buttered Side Down</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Roast Beef Medium</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Personality Plus</i>, 1914.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_297" id="page_297">{297}</a></span><i>Emma McChesney & Co.</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Fanny Herself</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Cheerful—By Request</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Half Portions</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>$1200 a Year</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>The Girls</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>Gigolo</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>First six books published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York; the -others by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_298" id="page_298">{298}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><br /> -<small>DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span>RS. FISHER is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say -nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s -work does that. No, because it does not speak sufficiently for her.</p> - -<p>You are asked here and now to think of her not as a novelist but as a -woman. For as a novelist we could say of her only the obvious fact, that -she is a top-notcher judged by any and every standard. The woman who -could write <i>The Squirrel-Cage</i> does not need any critical tests applied -to determine the worth and genuineness of her work, nor the sincerity of -it. What she does need, or rather, what her readers and all readers -need, is a reminder of her rôle as teacher, helper, friend. She is one -of those fine people whose work makes the plain word “service” a shining -and symbolic thing. “Service” is no longer a word but a ritual and a -liturgy.</p> - -<p>We shall give an outline of her life but as the friend who prepared it -for us says in a letter enclosing it: “It does not do justice to her -very useful war work.” This letter further says, with simple truth:</p> - -<p>“She has been one who has not broken down under the strain but has gone -on doing a prodigious amount<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_299" id="page_299">{299}</a></span> of work. First running, almost entirely -alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle, editing a magazine for -them, running the presses, often with her own hands, getting books -written for them; all the time looking out for refugees and personal -cases that came under her attention; caring for children from the -evacuated portions of France, organizing work for them; then she dropped -all that and ran the camp on the edge of the war zone where her husband -was stationed to train the young ambulance workers; and while there she -started any number of important things—reading rooms, etc. Then she -went back to her work in Paris. Just now she is at the base of the -Pyrenees, organizing a Red Cross hospital for children from the -evacuated portions.</p> - -<p>“All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is -reflected in her <i>Home Fires in France</i>, just published this fall. It is -just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been -written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no -heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and -some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life -together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct -what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.”</p> - -<p>It and the deeds back of it. When you read <i>Home Fires in France</i> you -will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed:</p> - -<p>“If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it -selling 100,000 copies at once.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_300" id="page_300">{300}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>With <i>The Squirrel-Cage</i>, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a -novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, <i>A Montessori -Mother</i> (1913) and <i>Mothers and Children</i> (1914), and then the teacher -resumed the rôle of storyteller with <i>The Bent Twig</i>. Before <i>The -Squirrel-Cage</i> Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks. -After it she was an important figure in American fiction.</p> - -<p>Dorothy Canfield Fisher is thirty-eight years old, a bachelor of -philosophy and a doctor of philosophy, mistress of six languages, author -of twelve books, mother of two children. She and her husband, John -Redwood Fisher, captain of a Columbia football team, himself a critic -and writer, divided their time before the war between a farm near a -little Vermont village and occasional excursions to New York, Rome or -some other metropolis. In 1915, Mr. Fisher joined the ambulance service -and went to France. Mrs. Fisher was at work on <i>Understood Betsy</i>, but -as soon as that was finished she followed her husband to Paris with her -children. Since then she has been absorbed in war relief work which has -ranged from running an establishment that prints books for soldiers -blinded in battle to managing five peasant women cooks and buying -supplies for a large training camp for ambulance drivers. Mr. Fisher is -now a first lieutenant in the United States Army in France.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Fisher was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was president -of the University of Kansas. As a high school girl in Lawrence she made -friends with an army officer on the staff of a nearby war college. He -taught her to ride horseback and introduced<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_301" id="page_301">{301}</a></span> her to his hobby, higher -mathematics. This friendship has lately been resumed in France. The -young army officer is now General John J. Pershing.</p> - -<p>Dorothea Frances Canfield, or Dorothy Canfield, became an undergraduate -in Ohio State University, of which her father (James Hulme Canfield) was -president at that time. Her degree of bachelor of philosophy came from -Ohio State University. When Mr. Canfield moved to New York to be -librarian at Columbia University his daughter took up postgraduate work -there, specializing in the Romance languages, and won her degree of -doctor of philosophy. For three years, from 1902 to 1905, she was -secretary of the Horace Mann School. Her associates all her life have -been cosmopolitan in the proper sense of that word. Her mother, Flavia -(Camp) Canfield, is an artist of some attainment and with her Dorothy -Canfield spent a good deal of her life abroad. The result—one -result—was friends of all nationalities living pretty much all over the -world. Mrs. Fisher is consequently a person of broad sympathies, but the -predominant quality in her seems to be a clear-headed, hearty New -England Americanism. At one time or another she has picked up a good -knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. French she -acquired as a child tumbling about in the Paris studio of her mother. -Now her children are learning their French in Paris.</p> - -<p>After their marriage in 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher left New York and went -hunting for a working and living place far away from the city. On the -side of one of the Green Mountains, near the little village<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_302" id="page_302">{302}</a></span> of -Arlington, Vermont, they found a fair approximation of what they were -after. The old house already on the farm they made over to suit their -needs and wishes. A spring branch on the mountain side was boxed up and -the water piped down to the house. An electric lighting plant was -installed. A study entirely separate from the house was built. Mr. and -Mrs. Fisher make no effort to have the farm cultivated. That is, they -didn’t in the good—or bad—old days before the war. They were on it to -live and work, but not to bury themselves in agricultural details. The -nearest approach to tilling the soil was the garden, the re-foresting of -the mountain side with baby pine trees, and the rejuvenation of an -ancient saw mill to work up the scrub timber.</p> - -<p>Arlington is “in no sense a literary rural community.” The village has -only a few hundred people in it, is two miles away from the Fisher farm, -and its post-office has few manuscripts to handle either way. In -1911-12, for variety, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went to Rome for the winter. -It was there that she made the acquaintance of Madame Montessori. An -American publisher was having trouble with the translation of Madame -Montessori’s book about her pedagogical system. Knowing that Mrs. Fisher -was an excellent Italian scholar and that she was already on the ground, -the publisher arranged for her assistance with the translation. Almost -every day of that winter Mrs. Fisher was at the Casa di Bambini -(Children’s House) looking after the translation and helping to -entertain and to explain the Montessori system to commissions sent from -England, France and other<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_303" id="page_303">{303}</a></span> European countries. The direct result of that -winter was Mrs. Fisher’s <i>A Montessori Mother</i>, a simplification and -adaptation, in her delightfully easy and half-humorous style, of the -Italian system to the needs of American mothers. Besides being published -in the United States, Canada, England and India this book has been -translated into five foreign languages.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Fisher is now one of five members of the State School Board for -Vermont, the first woman to be on the State Board of Education in -Vermont. This is in line with her ablest work, which has been in -training children and adolescents.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Dorothy Canfield Fisher</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Corneille and Racine in England</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor<br /> -G. R. Carpenter)</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>What Shall We Do Now?</i> 1906.<br /> -<i>Gunhild</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>The Squirrel-Cage</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>A Montessori Mother</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Mothers and Children</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Bent Twig</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Hillsboro People</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>The Real Motive</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Understood Betsy</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Home Fires in France</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The Day of Glory</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Brimming Cup</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>Rough-Hewn</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by -Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_304" id="page_304">{304}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><br /> -<small>AMELIA E. BARR</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>N March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor -of <i>Books and the Book World</i> of <i>The Sun</i>, New York, of printing what -is certainly the best account extant of Amelia E. Barr within a -reasonable length. Although the article was unsigned it was the work of -Mr. A. Elwood Corning, who had been a neighbor of Mrs. Barr at Richmond -Hill, Long Island, New York. It was based upon a personal visit and -interview. This chapter is really nothing more than a reprint of Mr. -Corning’s article with a few changes, particularly those necessitated by -Mrs. Barr’s death on March 10, 1919, at her Richmond Hill home. To Mr. -Corning, then, the credit of this chapter.</p> - -<p>Amelia E. Barr struck the popular taste more than thirty years ago with -her <i>Bow of Orange Ribbon</i>. She was one of the most prolific of -present-day writers of fiction. Her last completed novel, <i>The Paper -Cap</i>, published in the fall of 1918, brought the number of her books up -to over seventy, and this does not include hundreds of short stories, a -poem a week for <i>fourteen years</i>, written for Bonner’s <i>Ledger</i>, or the -numerous newspaper articles, essays and verses of the first fourteen -years of her literary life.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_305" id="page_305">{305}</a></span></p> - -<p>On March 29, 1918, Mrs. Barr entered her eighty-eighth year. In the -preceding twelve months she had published three books, and shortly -before her eighty-seventh birthday (or the birthday which made her -eighty-seven years old!) she completed a fourth in manuscript! This was -<i>The Paper Cap</i>, the scenes of which are laid in Yorkshire, England, -where the novelist spent a part of her childhood. Mrs. Barr thought it -one of the best stories she had written. The paper cap of the title is -that of the workingman and the story centers around his fight for the -suffrage. It was really a contest between the hand loom and the power -loom.</p> - -<p>It was about 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Corning reached Mrs. Barr’s -study on the visit which preceded the preparation of his article. Mrs. -Barr had been writing since 7 that morning, with only a brief -intermission for luncheon, and was not feeling, she declared, so well as -usual. “This is one of mamma’s blue Mondays,” said her daughter. But -after she had begun to discuss current events, some incidents of her -early life in Texas and above all the war Mrs. Barr became animated. She -was an interesting and enthusiastic talker with positive views, a power -of unusually apt expression and a mind keenly alert. Convinced of a -fact, she uttered it with passionate force.</p> - -<p>On this particular afternoon the manuscript of <i>The Paper Cap</i> was lying -on her writing table. “It will be done to-morrow,” she said with the -spirit of one who looks upon the completion of a work which has required -much thought and painstaking labor. She pushed the manuscript toward Mr. -Corning; it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_306" id="page_306">{306}</a></span> as free of corrections and interpolations as if it had -been freshly copied from a former draft. Mrs. Barr seldom changed what -she first wrote and always used sheets of yellow paper, finding this -tint more restful to her eyes than white.</p> - -<p>When weary of building stories she handed the manuscript over to a -stenographer to be typewritten. Mrs. Barr wrote with a lead pencil. -Going to a drawer she brought out a box full of old pencil stubs, some -of which dated back to the days when she was writing <i>The Bow of Orange -Ribbon</i>. A few years ago six or seven of these stubs were given to as -many friends, who had them tipped with gold and made into shawl pins.</p> - -<p>In personal appearance and dress Mrs. Barr was typically English. She -had a large face and marvelous physique, was rapid of movement and lithe -of step. A flowing gown of some delicate shade was usually worn loosely -over a lace petticoat, and a beribboned cap of lace and rosebuds or -sometimes cowslips rested becomingly on her silvery hair.</p> - -<p>But the most striking characteristic of this remarkable woman was the -retention of so much youthful vigor and optimism, which she attributed -to her English ancestry. Born at Ulverton, Lancashire, England, March -29, 1831, Amelia Barr was descended from a long line of Saxon forebears, -of whom the men for generations had been either seamen or preachers of -the Gospel. Her father, the Rev. Dr. William Henry Huddleston, was a -scholar and a preacher of eloquence. The child’s early education was -largely under his supervision. As he was a regular contributor to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_307" id="page_307">{307}</a></span> -English reviews, the little daughter was brought up in a literary -environment.</p> - -<p>Before she was six she is said to have known intimately the tales of the -<i>Arabian Nights</i>, and nothing pleased her more in those days than to be -the recipient of a new book, a pleasure seldom afforded her. She would -often accompany her father on his preaching itineraries through the -fishing villages and thus became a lover of the sea, from which she -doubtless formed impressions which have disclosed themselves in her -fiction.</p> - -<p>At eighteen she was sent to a Free Kirk seminary in Glasgow, where she -remained until her marriage to Robert Barr in July, 1850. For three -years the young couple lived in Scotland. Here Mrs. Barr made the -acquaintance of Henry Ward Beecher, who years later was able to help her -begin her career as a writer.</p> - -<p>Failure in business compelled the Barrs to come to America. They first -came to New York, where the future novelist saw for the first time to -her great delight ready-made dresses and oranges, a fruit not easily -procurable in the north of England or Scotland.</p> - -<p>The Barrs with their two little daughters soon went West, locating in -Chicago. After a time misfortune drove them South. They went first to -Austin, later to Galveston, Texas. The history of these eventful and -sorrowful years is told in Mrs. Barr’s autobiography, <i>The Red Leaves of -a Human Heart</i>.</p> - -<p>In Austin success was sandwiched in with failure, disappointments and -heartaches. In those early days on the frontier there was a great -scarcity of many things which went to make up home life. When Mrs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_308" id="page_308">{308}</a></span> Barr -came to America she had been told that she was going into a desolate and -savage country in which there were none of the comforts of life and -where none could be obtained. So she brought with her a great assortment -of useful articles, such as needles, tape, sewing cotton (linens, silks, -etc.). Finding that they had more than they wanted of such things, the -Barrs traded some of them for tea and other staple articles of food.</p> - -<p>Despite vicissitudes Mrs. Barr never neglected her reading or the daily -instruction of her children. The noon hour was reserved for study and at -that time no one was permitted to disturb her. She could be seen daily -sitting with a young baby on her lap by the open door of her log house -partaking of the noonday meal and reading at the same time. In all, Mrs. -Barr had fifteen children. Three daughters are now living, one the wife -of Kirk Munro, the popular writer for boys.</p> - -<p>In spite of her large family Mrs. Barr found time to accomplish things -outside household duties. During the Civil War, for example, articles of -amusement were few. One was put to great inconvenience in securing -games. So Mrs. Barr, an enthusiastic whist player, painted a pack of -cards, which were to those who remember them a most real counterpart of -an original set.</p> - -<p>At the close of the war the Barrs moved to Galveston, and there, in -1867, Mrs. Barr experienced the overwhelming sorrow of her life. Yellow -fever entered her home. The whole family was stricken, and before Mrs. -Barr herself had fully recovered she suffered the loss of her husband -and three little sons.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_309" id="page_309">{309}</a></span></p> - -<p>After endeavoring to support herself and three daughters in the South -she came with them to New York in the fall of 1869.</p> - -<p>One day she was asked if she could write stories and replied that she -had often written them for the amusement of her children but had -destroyed them after they had served their purpose. She promised to try -again and received $30 for the effort.</p> - -<p>“What, $30 for that article?” she exclaimed. “Why, I can write three or -four of them a week.”</p> - -<p>She eventually found work on the <i>Christian Union</i>, of which Beecher was -editor, and this opened a career which brought her both a reputation and -honor. At first she rented a few rooms at 27 Amity Street, Brooklyn, a -house once occupied by Edgar Allan Poe, although at the time she was -unconscious of the fact. When she moved into these quarters she found -that after paying the rent she had only $5 in her purse.</p> - -<p>“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak -dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as -she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.”</p> - -<p>For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs. -It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she -would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving -sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning.</p> - -<p>Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had -been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40 -between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_310" id="page_310">{310}</a></span> -those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind -pictures, and they were never disturbed.</p> - -<p>In 1884 <i>Jan Vedder’s Wife</i> was published. The success of this book -almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular -American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over -fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average -of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one -unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she -was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books -after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in -her library, which numbered several thousand volumes.</p> - -<p>She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it -said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once -remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of -their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in -love with him and made him my hero.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a -thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which -ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical -novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically -considered they should be read as follows:</p> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The House on Cherry Street.</i><br /> -<i>The Strawberry Handkerchief.</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_311" id="page_311">{311}</a></span><i>The Bow of Orange Ribbon.</i><br /> -<i>A Maid of Old New York.</i><br /> -<i>A Song of a Single Note.</i><br /> -<i>The Maid of Maiden Lane.</i><br /> -<i>Trinity Bells.</i><br /> -<i>The Belle of Bowling Green.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so -extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance -would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of -them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them -offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times, -manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and -worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.”</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Amelia E. Barr</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Jan Vedder’s Wife.</i><br /> -<i>A Border Shepherdess.</i><br /> -<i>Feet of Clay.</i><br /> -<i>Bernicia.</i><br /> -<i>Remember the Alamo.</i><br /> -<i>She Loved a Sailor.</i><br /> -<i>The Lone House.</i><br /> -<i>A Sister of Esau.</i><br /> -<i>Prisoners of Conscience.</i><br /> -<i>The Tioni Whelp.</i><br /> -<i>The Black Shilling.</i><br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_312" id="page_312">{312}</a></span><i>The Bow of Orange Ribbon.</i><br /> -<i>A Maid of Old New York.</i><br /> -<i>A Song of a Single Note.</i><br /> -<i>The Maid of Maiden Lane.</i><br /> -<i>Trinity Bells.</i><br /> -<i>The Belle of Bowling Green.</i><br /> -<i>The Red Leaves of a Human Heart.</i><br /> -<i>The Strawberry Handkerchief</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Hands of Compulsion</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>The House on Cherry Street</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>All the Days of My Life</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Playing With Fire</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Winning of Lucia</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Three Score and Ten</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Measures of a Man</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Profit and Loss</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Joan</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Christine</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>An Orkney Maid</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>The Paper Cap</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Songs in the Common Chord</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>(About 40 other books.)</i><br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Mrs. Barr’s novels are published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. -Some may be had in reprint, others are out of print.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_313" id="page_313">{313}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII<br /><br /> -<small>ALICE HEGAN RICE</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE author of <i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i> was born in 1870 in a -big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her -grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan -as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which -is quite as world famous as <i>Mr. Dooley</i>, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant -contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the -daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet -Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have -traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big, -columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant -showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes -songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as -<i>Wraiths and Realities</i> and songs inspired by their mere happy -proximity, making a book such as <i>Poems to A. H. R.</i>, both published in -1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused -pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of -<i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i> was made). But she writes as agreeably -as ever. Mostly<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_314" id="page_314">{314}</a></span> shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a -short story writer. Even <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> was but a long short story.</p> - -<p>Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century—ninety years -anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth -Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace, -with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about -personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common -acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day -school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats, -brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide, -blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at -Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville—these were the -tissue of those youthful days.</p> - -<p>School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There -was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an -expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she -says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It -wouldn’t have been right for me to go.”</p> - -<p>She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. -When she was sixteen the Louisville <i>Courier-Journal</i> had published <i>The -Reveries of a Spinster</i>, an anonymous companion-piece to <i>The Reveries -of a Bachelor</i>. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the -newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of -spin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_315" id="page_315">{315}</a></span>ster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories -and had been a contributor to humorous papers.</p> - -<p>There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the -writing of <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i>. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away -bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” -living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad -tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of -Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’<span class="lftspc">”</span> says Margaret Steele -Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was -it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of -the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all -Alice Hegan.” To quote further:</p> - -<p>“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of -ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half -ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no -‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn -Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden -Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire -Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, -Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at -the time, but it means, now, such stories as <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> and <i>Mr. Opp</i>, -<i>Emmy Lou</i>, <i>The Lady of the Decoration</i> and the <i>Little Colonel</i> books. -It means also such work as Mrs. Roac<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_316" id="page_316">{316}</a></span>h’s studies of married life—which -rendered a year of <i>Harper’s</i> very memorable—and such achievement in -anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and -a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this -little story—and the club, as a body, became the very figure of -laughter, literally holding both its sides.</p> - -<p>“The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and -that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up -out of his pocket.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of <i>Mrs. -Wiggs</i>. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible -have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old -woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers -as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South -Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs. -Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere—and they have been -everywhere—Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in -Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the -Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after -a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret -Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a -billboard near Benares. <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> would be played there that night by -an English company!”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The -Rices’ house stands in St. James<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_317" id="page_317">{317}</a></span> Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide -sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> -devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to -a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was -chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for -youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home.</p> - -<p>When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second -floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives -somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful -letters to the letters of all kinds—curious, friendly, grateful—that -she is constantly receiving.</p> - -<p>“Though <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> has made its author famous,” says Margaret -Anderson, “<i>Mr. Opp</i> is Mrs. Rice’s finest piece of work. In the hero of -this story, which is a story of Dickensian humor and robustness, we mark -a real and very big development—a development, moreover, which is not a -thing of violence but proceeds along the lines of the man’s peculiar -nature.</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Wiggs is fixed, the same at the end of the book as at the opening; -but Mr. Opp grows, and the interest of the reader increases with his -growth. The story has not been read as <i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> was read, but for -imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better -book.</p> - -<p>“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, for <i>Lovey Mary</i> followed -<i>Mrs. Wiggs</i> in general character, while <i>Sandy</i>, though wholesome, -engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an -equal inspiration. Her story of <i>Billy-Goat Hill</i> shows some<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_318" id="page_318">{318}</a></span> excellent -and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling -those of Annie and her husband in <i>David Copperfield</i>, while Connie and -Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety.</p> - -<p>“In <i>The Honorable Percival</i> Mrs. Rice has aimed deliberately at the -light, the frothy, the effect of touch-and-go, yet here we note -especially an increase in her art. The thing is light and sure; it is -froth but froth well-made and inviting; it does touch and go, but it -touches with a spark and goes vividly.</p> - -<p>“It is needless, however, to criticise her stories individually. What we -must note of her work is this: It meets the great human need of cheer, -it satisfies a great human desire with its wholesome milk of kindness. -To make many nations laugh and laugh innocently; to bring entertainment -to the sickbed and army trench and throne room and schoolroom; and to -the million common houses of a million common people—this is the -mission of her books and this their finest achievement.”</p> - -<p>Wise and honest words, these, of Margaret Steele Anderson’s. What she -has said so well we shall not attempt to better. We shall agree -whole-heartedly with her that the best praise was given Alice Hegan Rice -“by a very wise old man, who spoke for a great host of readers when he -said:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Madam, I salute you! You have done the world a service. You have -cheered us, you have made us laugh happily and with courage.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_319" id="page_319">{319}</a></span>’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Alice Hegan Rice</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch</i>, 1901.<br /> -<i>Lovey Mary</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>Sandy</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>Captain June</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Mr. Opp</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>The Honorable Percival.</i><br /> -<i>Calvary Alley</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Quin</i>, 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by the Century Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_320" id="page_320">{320}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><br /> -<small>ALICE DUER MILLER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>F Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity -she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a -different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not -that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not -that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of -distinction which our high critical minds rave about.</p> - -<p>She can go deeply—and deftly—into the minds of her people and bring -out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there. -But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because -Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly) -about the thoughts and emotions of her characters—with those we have no -patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer -wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a -good deal of sympathy.</p> - -<p><i>Ladies Must Live</i> is full of clever conversation; so is <i>The Happiest -Time of Their Lives</i>. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a -book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable -effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a -cleverness beyond their powers. More<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_321" id="page_321">{321}</a></span>over, the young reader of such -books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them -half-admirable because they say adroit things—or say things adroitly. -This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs. -Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take -too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To -which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in -the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do -so?</p> - -<p>Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And -this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger -person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the -immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s -ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too -low voltage for that. And indeed in <i>The Happiest Time of Their Lives</i> -we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and -his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most -immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set -before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of -that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with -her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent, -affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill -successfully the rôle of tigress tamers!</p> - -<p>Yes, the great defect of Mrs. Miller’s stories is that we seldom care to -know the people in them, the Mrs. Farrons, the Nancy Almars, nor even -the Christine<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_322" id="page_322">{322}</a></span> Fenimers and the innocent but tiresomely insipid Mathilde -Severances. We will occasionally consent to meet them and watch them -perform (better company being lacking at the moment) for one main reason -and only one: the skill with which they are brought before us and there -put through their tricks. And if our very figure of speech seems to have -in it something derogatory, to imply that these persons are not much -better than puppets, the implication is not without an honest -significance. Moving among artificialities, surrounded by polite and -transparent deceptions, it would be too much not to expect these -“society” folk to partake of their environment. They are wholly -mechanistic, to go to metaphysics for a suitable term; they are precious -puppets and nothing more; thanks to Mrs. Miller’s skill the strings -which control them are mostly invisible, but the jerky motion of them -gives the secret away.</p> - -<p>Having been as honest about this as we know how to be, let us turn to -the first pages of <i>Ladies Must Live</i> and cull a few samples of Mrs. -Miller’s writing, samples which will convey to those who have not read -her some idea of her gift of epigram and facile and beautiful -characterization:</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Ussher ... turned toward hidden social availability very much as -the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring.... She was -unaware of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and -usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction.... During -the short period of their existence, Mrs. Ussher gave to these -friendships the utmost loyalty and devotion. She<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_323" id="page_323">{323}</a></span> agonized over the -financial, domestic and romantic troubles of her friends; she sat up -till the small hours, talking to them like a schoolgirl; during the -height of their careers she organized plots for their assistance; and -even when their stars were plainly on the decline, she would often ask -them to lunch, if she happened to be alone.</p> - -<p>“Many people, we know, are prone to make friends with the rich and -great. Mrs. Ussher’s genius consisted in having made friends with them -before they were either.”</p> - -<p>Nancy Almar’s husband says to her:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I hope you’ll explain to them why I could not come.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>You mean that I would not have gone if you had?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>No,’ he said, ‘that I’m called South on business.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I shan’t tell them that, but I’ll tell them you say so, if you like.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>She was as good as her word—she usually was.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Would any one like to hear Roland’s explanation of why he is not with -us?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Had it anything to do with his not being asked?’ said a pale young -man; and as soon as he had spoken he glanced hastily round the circle to -ascertain how his remark had succeeded.</p> - -<p>“So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in -fact, though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with -her again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He -had been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a -day or two before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_324" id="page_324">{324}</a></span> she had observed that underlying his socialistic -theories was an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell -his bejeweled hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh, -twenty times more, he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his -friends the bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised -him, and where she despised she made no secret of the fact.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Not asked, Mr. Wickham!’ she said. ‘I assume my husband is asked -wherever I am,’ and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint -smile: ‘One’s husband is always asked, isn’t he?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come,’ said another -speaker.”</p> - -<p>Even from so slight an excerpt we think it will be plain that in the art -of characterization and in the business of writing dialogue Mrs. Miller -has nothing to learn. She is really one of the most hopeful prospects in -American literature to-day and the great hope for her and for readers -lies in the possibility—almost a probability—that she will abandon the -very restricted and unimportant milieu of her recent novels for better -fields. It is simple honesty to recognize that <i>The Happiest Time of -Their Lives</i> holds out a great promise that she will do this. Such -persons as Pete Wayne and his mother, and even the rather pathetic -grandfather Mr. Lanley (of the New York Lanleys) are “real,” that is, -members of the human community and not sickening products of the social -hothouses. If Mrs. Miller will do a novel in which most of the men and -most of the women are “people”—regular people or irregular people, -great or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_325" id="page_325">{325}</a></span> small, does not matter; but they must be people—we in America -will be the first to acclaim her.</p> - -<p>Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated. -This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter -of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from -Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry -Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the -upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth -Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of -that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where -most of the others aspire to.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Alice Duer Miller</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Modern Obstacle</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>Calderon’s Prisoner</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Less Than Kin</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Blue Arch</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>Are Women People?</i> 1915.<br /> -<i>Come Out of the Kitchen</i>, 1916.<br /> -<i>Ladies Must Live</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Happiest Time of Their Lives</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Wings in the Night</i>, 1918. Poems.<br /> -<i>The Charm School</i>, 1919. Harper & Brothers.<br /> -<i>The Beauty and the Bolshevist</i>, 1920. Harper & Brothers.<br /> -<i>Manslaughter</i>, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century -Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_326" id="page_326">{326}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX<br /><br /> -<small>ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">E</span>LEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce -Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, -inventive—not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word -imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any -other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell -Wright—to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a -novel—we hope the reader will pardon this digression—by making an -elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, <i>not</i> of the story but of certain -moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to -impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten -draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words -denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright -strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and -inserts “David Fanning”—and the copy goes to the printer.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her -because of her pen name’s connotations—Miss Abbott finds a title and -then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_327" id="page_327">{327}</a></span> around the -title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the -Boston <i>Globe</i>, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this -chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the -really interesting facts about the author of <i>Molly Make-Believe</i> and -presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory -title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner -as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”</p> - -<p>This is perfectly intelligible. <i>Molly Make-Believe</i> as a title teems -with ideas; so does <i>The Sick-a-Bed Lady</i>; so does <i>The White-Linen -Nurse</i>.</p> - -<p>“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real -person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a -tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”</p> - -<p>Upon this the Boston <i>Globe</i> writer remarks, with a great deal of -truthfulness:</p> - -<p>“She may choose a commonplace subject—a girl, a woman, a road, a -husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the -uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent -part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her -heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare -is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a -Sunday spouse.</p> - -<p>“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added -to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her -phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is -an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_328" id="page_328">{328}</a></span> friends said, after -reading <i>The Kink in the Air</i>, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ -in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”</p> - -<p>Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor -Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an -industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling -English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott -books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has -uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at -such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure -humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. -They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of <i>Molly -Make-Believe</i> and look at the page in the front which records <i>over -twenty</i> editions in five years!</p> - -<p>We follow the lead of the Boston <i>Globe</i> article:</p> - -<p>Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing -is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she -comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It -must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest -others. “Painter, musician, writer—whether anybody else likes your work -or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that -work to the point where you like it yourself.”</p> - -<p>She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is -composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her -machine. In writing <i>The Sick-a-Bed Lady</i> she devoted twelve hours each -day<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_329" id="page_329">{329}</a></span> for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the -quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard, -a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the -ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be -and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work -imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is -usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical -attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days—it will make the hardiest -shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if -they do 500 or 1,000 words a day—and not every day at that. But as a -rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as -she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short -novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in -succession she won a $1,000 prize in <i>Collier’s Weekly</i> short story -contests with <i>The Very Tired Girl</i> and <i>The Sick-a-Bed Lady</i>.</p> - -<p>Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and -English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts. -This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might -have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted -titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name -at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long -poems published in <i>Harper’s Magazine</i> attracted much attention.</p> - -<p>How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the -text and scheme for an adver<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_330" id="page_330">{330}</a></span>tising circular sent out by a Boston firm. -The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come -to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was -for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop -her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories. -Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:</p> - -<p>“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”</p> - -<p>But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her -success as a fictioneer, therefore, to <i>Lippincott’s Magazine</i> and the -<i>Smart Set</i> quite as much as to anything else.</p> - -<p>As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family -which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a -daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the <i>Literary -World</i> of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the <i>Outlook</i> -and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a -granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.</p> - -<p>Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated -from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman -Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied -theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the -Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to -1878 he was editor of the <i>Congregationalist</i>; afterward he became -editor of the <i>Literary<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_331" id="page_331">{331}</a></span> World</i>. He was ordained a minister of the -Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church, -Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott -wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.</p> - -<p>Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated -by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public -schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child -exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and -patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom -did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.</p> - -<p>“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it -drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch -up—and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened -to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful, -day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom -without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”</p> - -<p>At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered -the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a -subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her -rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s <i>Sketch Book</i>.</p> - -<p>“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs -of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my -class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my fa<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_332" id="page_332">{332}</a></span>ther’s -unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers, -through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors. -And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual -friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed, -earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts -College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails, -wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps, -we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and -timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people -we must have been—astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most -deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of -having already fixed our minds on higher things.</p> - -<p>“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a -Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and -were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our -more frivolous-minded companions.”</p> - -<p>Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in -her work to whom <i>Molly Make-Believe</i> is dedicated. He aids and abets -her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under -Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is -medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and -sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and -Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing -tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the -Florida ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_333" id="page_333">{333}</a></span>glades—doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband -and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find -to do happily together.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Molly Make-Believe</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>The Sick-a-Bed Lady</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The White-Linen Nurse</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Indiscreet Letter</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>Little Eve Edgarton</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>The Stingy Receiver</i>, 1917.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Published by the Century Company, New York</i>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>The Ne’er-Do-Much</i>, 1918.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York</i>.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Old-Dad</i>, 1919.<br /> -<br /> -<i>Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_334" id="page_334">{334}</a></span><br /> -</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX<br /><br /> -<small>HARRIET T. COMSTOCK</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in -reprint.</p> - -<p>After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the -plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or -some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive -form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not -think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits -“the road.”</p> - -<p>The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until <i>Joyce of the North -Woods</i> went into reprint.</p> - -<p>The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”—is 10,000 -copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are -best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the -best novels.</p> - -<p><i>Joyce</i> went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and -then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, -did <i>Janet of the Dunes</i> and <i>A Son of the Hills</i>. In a little more than -three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since -then <i>The Place Beyond the Winds</i> and later books have been put out by -the reprinters. Is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_335" id="page_335">{335}</a></span> there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We -think not.</p> - -<p>But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The -answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic -writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in -public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a -homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in -Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for -fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates -to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest—you -have to dig things out of her about herself. But—is this the answer? Is -there something else?</p> - -<p>Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture -and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it -really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.</p> - -<p>What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us -agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we -all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a -literary idealist?</p> - -<p>The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with -what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the -homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ -is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind -of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose -us with the nauseous compounds of realism<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_336" id="page_336">{336}</a></span> and they shudder at the -thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do -is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us—mentally and emotionally, -of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions -may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on -them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are -what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become -flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your -limitations and you’ll be all right!”</p> - -<p>That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself -or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the -word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good -novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically -considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people, -instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and -feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not -and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight -of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple, -fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of -character are what count—with <i>them</i>. She is right, they do.</p> - -<p>Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the -novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive -manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”—this sums -up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write <i>The Place Beyond the -Winds</i> which presents the ques<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_337" id="page_337">{337}</a></span>tion of eugenics and the ethics of -silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face -saddens and she tells you:</p> - -<p>“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the -very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry -the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found -him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed -the facts to the girl’s mother.</p> - -<p>“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to -me that I must write about it—must do my small part toward banishing -the evil.”</p> - -<p>Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature. -It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s -course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it. -Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of -it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would -have done as she did.</p> - -<p>She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then -only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As -for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her -experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:</p> - -<p>“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent -me a bottle of Benedictine!</p> - -<p>“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified -the congregation by shouting:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_338" id="page_338">{338}</a></span></p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell—I am going to give -it to my sister!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon, -afterward relating her experience in the <i>Book News Monthly</i>; travel -along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full -complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty, -wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife, -mother, home-maker, novelist—a Jill of many trades and successful at -them all!”</p> - -<p>She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little -round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and -drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large, -beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is -polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single -drawer. It contains his catnip.</p> - -<p>The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock -is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair, -wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty -welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even -interrupted.”</p> - -<p>Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one -corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk -is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft -buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs—the -originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here -she writes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_339" id="page_339">{339}</a></span> most of each novel, subjected to endless -interruptions—friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the -novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done -Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her -publishers and her husband have the address—no one else. She is one of -the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter—she writes it -all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She -began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing -children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. <i>Janet of the -Dunes</i> was her first novel.</p> - -<p>Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded -I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the -problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie; -principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always -know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote -of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming -down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in -their hands.”</p> - -<p>Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:</p> - -<p>“The first thing I see is the place and the people—the background and -the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time -comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of -mind, I sit down to it—not before. Other writers, I understand, usually -see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me, -the background, the environment of my characters, is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_340" id="page_340">{340}</a></span> all-important. -Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my -desk beside me.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds -are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. -Thus in <i>Joyce of the North Woods</i> her St. Ange is a place in northern -New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In <i>The -Vindication</i>, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour -Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely -among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected -child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s -novel. <i>A Son of the Hills</i> was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia -mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. -Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In <i>Mam’selle Jo</i>, -Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and -she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled -clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love -which is in her.</p> - -<p>Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer -cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the -possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story -will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. -Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably -on. She has something to do and is about doing it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_341" id="page_341">{341}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Harriet T. Comstock</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Janet of the Dunes</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Joyce of the North Woods</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>A Son of the Hills</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Place Beyond the Winds</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>The Vindication</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Unbroken Lines</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Shield of Silence</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>At the Crossroads</i>, 1922.<br /> -<i>(Also many books for boys and girls.)</i><br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the -Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are -published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_342" id="page_342">{342}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI<br /><br /> -<small>HONORÉ WILLSIE</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">N</span>OTHING is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but -in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It -will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of -readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture -Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of -reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would -require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain -subjects—immigration and Americanization, for example—that is no part -of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do -instead.</p> - -<p>The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs. -Willsie, <i>The Forbidden Trail</i>, an exciting story of the <i>Still Jim</i> -country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever -efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the -discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United -States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from -the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of <i>Still Jim</i> will -recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo -dam and his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_343" id="page_343">{343}</a></span> effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the -German Government—in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate -ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs. -Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact -knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an -inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with -him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.</p> - -<p>Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar -McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New -Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background -of <i>Still Jim</i> and <i>Lydia of the Pines</i>. She is a Bachelor of Arts of -the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation. -The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to -New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning -recognition as a writer. She says now:</p> - -<p>“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in -three years or in five years—that is what makes for success for a -writer.</p> - -<p>“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want -to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I -wanted to write.</p> - -<p>“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of <i>Munsey’s Magazine</i>] a -little love story called <i>Beatrice and the Rose</i>. So after a few weeks -in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_344" id="page_344">{344}</a></span> wanted him to -buy. He looked them over and shook his head.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Do me something else like <i>Beatrice and the Rose</i> and I’ll take it,’ -he said.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If -that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets. -There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts—Theodore -Dreiser.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’</p> - -<p>“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to -see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the -Butterick Building—four times I walked around that bulky flatiron -before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside -and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor -of the <i>Delineator</i>, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied -with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The -interview turned out to be a momentous one for me.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to -New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, -editorial work at a good salary.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good -regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing -only.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_345" id="page_345">{345}</a></span>’</p> - -<p>“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I -wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go -on.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the -writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. -You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five -years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will -buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he -assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.</p> - -<p>“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked -it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have -had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made -$500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan -and always kept my eye on the future—and had the courage to refuse that -job.”</p> - -<p>Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the -magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special -articles for such periodicals as <i>Harper’s Weekly</i> and <i>Collier’s</i> on -important subjects—immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States -Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of <i>Harper’s -Weekly</i>, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials -of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was <i>The Heart of the Desert</i>, -which came out in 1913. It won imme<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_346" id="page_346">{346}</a></span>diate recognition for her. Richard -Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the <i>Book News -Monthly</i> of March, 1917, said:</p> - -<p>“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, -but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, -nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal -peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. -Willsie’s hero in <i>The Heart of the Desert</i>—and his truly heroic wooing -and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all -her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one -brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim -passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a -setting.”</p> - -<p>And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, <i>The Heart -of the Desert</i> is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of -the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any -prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”</p> - -<p>Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the -rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. -Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an -interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her -novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:</p> - -<p>“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a -photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have -reference occurred in a copy of <i>Harper’s Weekly</i>, not so very long -before that honored periodical was gath<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_347" id="page_347">{347}</a></span>ered to its fathers. They were -taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the -Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp -democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning -smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden -West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic -figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely -for the proverbial chivalry—and homicides—of that portion of America -which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, -particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. -Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word -‘symbolic’—Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of -sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the -near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled -hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from -which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at -her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In -the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to -represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, -to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of -those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love -this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or -even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head, -like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems -to be saying what Lydia says so<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_348" id="page_348">{348}</a></span> finally in her inspiring new book, -<i>Lydia of the Pines</i>:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is -real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to -identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is -this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such -wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually -mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the -roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to -come our children’s children will be found there and our family name -will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how -else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited -America.’</p> - -<p>“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking -along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld -one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes -thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was -<i>Still Jim</i>. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful -photographs—and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom -I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could -hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily -astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from -the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast -spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. -There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which -the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_349" id="page_349">{349}</a></span> life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever -books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.</p> - -<p>“<i>Lydia of the Pines</i> [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words -on <i>The Heart of the Desert</i>] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and -characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing -nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she -is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a -practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for -wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of <i>Lydia of -the Pines</i> is one of the noblest she could have chosen—the infamy of -political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong -to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’—such -is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but -most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real -estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story -too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. -Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and -pathos.</p> - -<p>“In <i>Lydia of the Pines</i> one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more -surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, -and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”</p> - -<p>With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne de<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_350" id="page_350">{350}</a></span>clares that <i>Lydia of the -Pines</i> “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this -volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of -personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss -Hawthorne about <i>Lydia</i>. He found it fearfully dull while fully -conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to -present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John -Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader -sees Levine in two relations only—to Lydia and to the Indians, and -unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of -hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer <i>Still Jim</i> -seems by far the better book.</p> - -<p>But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:</p> - -<p>“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested -in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big -problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early -traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of -government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In <i>Lydia of the -Pines</i> the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is -illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is -concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the -material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to -facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners -in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The -whole story is there, told<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_351" id="page_351">{351}</a></span> over and over again with endless, pitiful -detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass -of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also -with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”</p> - -<p>Gertrude Atherton says: “I think <i>Lydia of the Pines</i> is an American -classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning <i>Still Jim</i>:</p> - -<p>“All the book is American to the roots—but big Jim is the American -soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;—it’s the whole -effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of -work—an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”</p> - -<p>The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and -three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus in -<i>Still Jim</i> a desert rock muses:</p> - -<p>“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call -this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which -it was created.”</p> - -<p>“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other, -which the coyote will not do.”</p> - -<p>In <i>Lydia of the Pines</i> it is a pine tree which murmurs:</p> - -<p>“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the -stars.”</p> - -<p>“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an -end we cannot see.”</p> - -<p>There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book, <i>Benefits -Forgot: A Study of Lincoln and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_352" id="page_352">{352}</a></span> Mother Love</i>. This is a brief but true -story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made -great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of -the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his -ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story.</p> - -<p>Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has -sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in -their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an -interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley:</p> - -<p>“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is -made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in -America just as it did in England. It’s”—hesitation and a twinkling -eye—“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good -figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty, -something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is -going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and -the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation.</p> - -<p>“As I see it there are two things American women can do—one abstract -and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national -stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans -of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to -the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more -difficult.</p> - -<p>“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the -average woman would only stop<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_353" id="page_353">{353}</a></span> to realize just how important it is to be -a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world -of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals. -American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the -children—it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they -ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught -religion and morals, or grammar and geography.</p> - -<p>“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize -what it means herself. How many do?</p> - -<p>“I hope more women realize it than men—that is, than the men I’ve -asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is -an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street -construction, I asked American men in every walk in life—and what do -you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who -knew how to get rich quick!</p> - -<p>“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even -being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out -that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must -have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person -can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American, -you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding -of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built.</p> - -<p>“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he -has a sense of freedom<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_354" id="page_354">{354}</a></span> and equality, and then he arrives at a feeling -of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among -thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is -particularly evident now.</p> - -<p>“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be -Americans before they attempt to teach their children—or some one -else’s children—what it means. I wish that we might have an American -litany—a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our -children! I wish that every American child might be brought to -understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our -Declaration of Independence—a state of mind compounded of utter -bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and -country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes -and their sacred honor.’</p> - -<p>“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do -is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also -the more important.</p> - -<p>“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain -extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government -through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more -completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to -have a variety of universal service for women—at least a mobilization -of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women -here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting -it in England, but American women will have to show,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_355" id="page_355">{355}</a></span> as English women -have done, that they are worthy of the vote.</p> - -<p>“And there is one thing American women must not forget—that the most -important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a -country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to -the future—to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times, -women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them -intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to -bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which -our fathers built the nation.”</p> - -<p>Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the -managing editor of the <i>Delineator</i>, Mrs. Willsie is still and -essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so -forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a -splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the -mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent. -Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened -breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.” -To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will -always yield gratefully and with pleasure.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Honoré Willsie</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Heart of the Desert</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Still Jim</i>, 1915.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_356" id="page_356">{356}</a></span><i>Lydia of the Pines</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Benefits Forgot</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>The Forbidden Trail</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>The Enchanted Canyon</i>, 1921.<br /> -<i>Judith of the Godless Valley</i>, 1922.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_357" id="page_357">{357}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER XXXII<br /><br /> -<small>FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">H</span>ALF a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of -Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an -American citizen in 1905 or thereabouts, the author of <i>Little Lord -Fauntleroy</i>, most famous of children’s stories by a living writer. Mrs. -Burnett is a novelist, as such books as <i>The Shuttle</i> and <i>T. Tembaron</i> -attest. She is thought of half or more than half the time as a writer of -tales for youngsters, and rightly. Of these she has produced a great -number and their success is amazing. No beating of drums, no blasts on -trumpets, even toy trumpets: yet as the publishers assure you, in -respect of even her less known “juveniles,” they keep on selling, year -after year, with the most relentless endurance. They don’t have to be -advertised. In the famous sentiment of a famous advertisement, they are -advertised by their loving friends.</p> - -<p>The best thing for the adult to do, after paying his tribute to -<i>Fauntleroy</i>, is to read <i>The Shuttle</i>, “a novel of international -marriage.” It represents Mrs. Burnett’s life. She alone of all the -writers of our day could have written such a book, declares a friend -whose desire to remain anonymous is here observed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_358" id="page_358">{358}</a></span> He supplies a sketch -of Mrs. Burnett which had better be reproduced verbatim:</p> - -<p>“She is English of the English by birth and temperament; born in -Manchester, as you know, where she lived until she was about thirteen. -Then, her father having failed in business, owing to the war in -America—his failure had something to do with the blockading of the -Southern ports, I believe—and he having died, the business went to -ruin, although Mrs. Burnett’s mother tried her gentle best to save it. -There was a large family of them, and Frances, who had already developed -the faculty of story-telling, was the life and spirit of the crowd.</p> - -<p>“An older brother had gone to join an uncle in Tennessee, and when the -family’s fortunes were at lowest ebb he advised them to join him in -America, which they did, and lived in the greatest poverty on the -outskirts of Knoxville. They were so poor that when some one suggested -that Frances write out one of her stories and send it to <i>Godey’s Lady’s -Book</i> the money for the stamps had to be earned by picking blackberries.</p> - -<p>“The first story was accepted and all subsequent stories sent. Then Mrs. -Burnett graduated to <i>Peterson’s Magazine</i>. The Petersons were great -friends of Mrs. Burnett in her early days. They recommended that she -send some of her stories to the <i>Century</i>, which she did, but the -quality of them was so English that the <i>Century</i> editors suspected they -were not original but copied by the little Tennessee girl from stories -in English magazines. When her second story was sent to them, they gave -expression to their<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_359" id="page_359">{359}</a></span> doubt. The thing was explained to them, and the -publication of the stories—I believe the first was <i>Surly Tim’s -Troubles</i>—was made immediately.</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Burnett has always kept in touch with England and English life. As -soon as she had made her success, in fact, just after the publication of -<i>That Lass o’ Lowrie’s</i>, she went back to England, and has spent some -part of nearly every year in England since then. She has lived in all -sections of England and has had houses in London; one at 63 Portland -Place, and another in Charles Street, Mayfair. She has had country homes -in Norfolk, Kent and Surrey. For nearly fifteen years she leased a very -interesting old house in Kent, Maytham Hall, really the manor house of a -very ancient estate. The house stands in the most wonderful of Kentish -gardens, which Mrs. Burnett, with her enthusiasm for gardening, made -even more beautiful than they were when she took them.</p> - -<p>“Maytham Hall was the homestead of an ancient family of Moneypenneys. On -the corner of the Hall grounds stands an ancient Norman church—the -church of the Hundred of Rolvenden which is mentioned in the Domesday -Book. All the Moneypenneys are buried in this church, which, in its -simple way, is of remarkable beauty. Their tombstones surround the great -Hall pew, which is almost as big as a room, and has tables and chairs in -it. The Hall grounds stand between two very picturesque villages, both -appanages of the estate, one called Rolvenden Village and the other -Rolvenden Street. They are as picturesque as they can be, full of the -quaint old gaffers and gammers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_360" id="page_360">{360}</a></span></p> - -<p>“As to the American side of Mrs. Burnett, she has lived over here in -touch with the most characteristically and the most broadly American -society in Washington and later in New York and its vicinity. As a young -girl she saw a good deal of New York life and it was during that time, I -imagine, that she got the impressions that produced the earlier part of -<i>The Shuttle</i>. Her saying that she was ‘English by birth and American by -the birth of her two sons’ I have always thought an amusing expression -of her case. In describing Bettina to me, once, she said that Bettina -was a woman’s version of the cleverness and sense of values that the -first Reuben Vandenpoel expressed. This seems to me to be the underlying -quality in Bettina. Her sense of the world of things backed by her -balance, her self-control and her typical American practicality.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Burnett loathes New York for its noise and dirt. Though she no -longer has Maytham Hall with its great terraced lawns and its rose -gardens she has a big country place near Manhasset, Long Island, New -York, called Plandome. It is within commuting distance of New York but -oh, how different!</p> - -<p>A comfortable, rambling house is surrounded by gardens for which Mrs. -Burnett buys flowers as uncontrollably as a bibliophile buys books. The -house faces northwest and has “remarkable glimpses of sunsets.” Mrs. -Burnett naturally has many children as visitors. For them there is a -great doll house, the home of Lady Annabelle, who is larger than many of -the youngsters that call on her, and who has a wonderful wardrobe. The -big house is full of nests of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_361" id="page_361">{361}</a></span> children’s toys. It also contains much -age-darkened furniture brought over from Maytham Hall, principally oak -pieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which Mrs. Burnett has -collected. Lady Annabelle’s residence, for example, was formerly a bread -and cheese cupboard which an antiquarian would tell you was probably -made by a skilled woodworker not later than the year 1500.</p> - -<p>As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs. -Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she -read chapters of <i>The Secret Garden</i> as they were finished. Now, she is -a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for -hours on end. Impressions which flowered in <i>The Secret Garden</i> came -from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about -900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns -not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may -encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks -given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret of <i>The -Secret Garden</i>? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose? -Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind -it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it -adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret -garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story, -plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is -not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere -and endlessly instructive.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_362" id="page_362">{362}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not -understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has -a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly. -It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales -which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that -the moment an idea—a “concept” philosophically speaking—formulates -itself in her mind <i>it does so as some part of a story</i>. Her pleasant -persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as -the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves -abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really -presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them -abstractly as we have just done in the case of <i>The Secret Garden</i>.</p> - -<p>This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to -get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to -teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease -and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain -abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been -prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual -exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage—a kind of verbal money -that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all -used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the -majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual -exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have -heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_363" id="page_363">{363}</a></span> “swap” -experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the -other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or -generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is -not one of them!</p> - -<p>Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you -as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor -and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him: -“John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you -would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you -something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your -respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them -well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs. -Burnett’s easily comprehended way too.</p> - -<p>When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in -noisome New York—you can buy things there, after all, and editors and -publishers there do congregate—and then she flees to Bermuda. But not -until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every -flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In -Bermuda she—gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the -present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is -unpretentious but charming.</p> - -<p>To revert for a moment to <i>The Shuttle</i>, we may note something almost -prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America, -in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_364" id="page_364">{364}</a></span> the -characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.” -That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no -abstract themes. She wrote:</p> - -<p>“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I -had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have -liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.</p> - -<p>“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international -marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation -between two great countries such as the history of the world—as far as -I know it—has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in -the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence -and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer -to each other. That they are of the same blood—the mere fact that they -speak the same tongue—makes the thing inevitable in the end.</p> - -<p>“I do not mean <i>The Shuttle</i> to be merely a story of international -marriage, but to suggest a thousand other things. The international -marriage must, however, result in being a strong factor, and in the -hands of a writer of fiction it must play a prominent part—a leading -part, so to speak—because it is the love story, and without it we are -lost. For the matter of that, without it ‘the shouting and the tumult’ -would die, ‘the captains and the kings depart.’</p> - -<p>“Because I am English by birth and American by a sort of adoption, and -because I have vibrated between the two continents for years, I have -learned to be impersonal and unpartisan. I was neither Amer<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_365" id="page_365">{365}</a></span>ican nor -English when I told the story. I was merely an intensely interested -person who had formed a habit of crossing the Atlantic twice a year.</p> - -<p>“There have been disastrous international marriages and there have been -successful ones; there is no reason why there should not be -international marriages at once dignified and splendid—even -history-making. Still, I wish I had had room to add to <i>The Shuttle</i> -pictures of the thousand other things I find absorbing.”</p> - -<p>It is not possible to do more than make suggestions as to what books of -Mrs. Burnett’s a reader should be sure to dip into. No two set of -suggestions would be identical, in all likelihood, but grownups can -acquire at least a respectable acquaintance with her work by reading -<i>That Lass o’ Lowrie’s</i>, <i>A Fair Barbarian</i>, <i>Little Lord Fauntleroy</i>, -<i>Sara Crewe</i>, <i>The Pretty Sister of José</i>, <i>In Connection With the De -Willoughby Claim</i>, <i>The Shuttle</i>, <i>The Dawn of a To-Morrow</i>, <i>The Secret -Garden</i>, <i>T. Tembaron</i> and <i>Emily Fox-Seton</i>. No selective list for -children is worth making; give them any or all!</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>That Lass o’ Lowrie’s</i>, 1877. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.<br /> -<i>Dolly, A Love Story</i>, 1877.<br /> -<i>Kathleen</i>, 1877. Hurst.<br /> -<i>Surly Tim and Other Stories</i>, 1877. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Haworth’s</i>, 1879. Scribner.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_366" id="page_366">{366}</a></span><i>Louisiana</i>, 1880. Scribner.<br /> -<i>A Fair Barbarian</i>, 1881. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Through One Administration</i>, 1883. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Little Lord Fauntleroy</i>, 1886. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Editha’s Burglar.</i> The Page Company, Boston.<br /> -<i>Sara Crewe</i>, 1888. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Little Saint Elizabeth</i>, 1889.<br /> -<i>Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress</i>, 1896. Scribner.<br /> -<i>The Pretty Sister of José</i>, 1896. Scribner.<br /> -<i>A Lady of Quality</i>, 1896. Scribner.<br /> -<i>His Grace of Ormonde</i>, 1897. Scribner.<br /> -<i>The Captain’s Youngest</i>, 1898.<br /> -<i>In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim</i>, 1899. Scribner.<br /> -<i>The Making of a Marchioness</i>, 1901. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.<br /> -<i>The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.</i> Stokes.<br /> -<i>In the Closed Room</i>, 1904. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.<br /> -<i>A Little Princess</i>, 1905. Scribner.<br /> -<i>Jarl’s Daughter</i>, 1906. Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Queen Silverbell</i>, 1906. The Century Company, New York. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Racketty-Packetty House</i>, 1906. Century. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Earlier Stories</i> (<i>Lindsay’s Luck</i>, etc.), 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_367" id="page_367">{367}</a></span><i>Giovanni and the Other: Children Who Have Made<br /> -Stories</i>, 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Emily Fox-Seton</i> (Combining <i>The Making of a Marchioness</i> and <i>The Methods of Lady Walderhurst</i>). Stokes.<br /> -<i>Lindsay’s Luck.</i> Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Miss Crespigny.</i> Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Piccino and Other Child Stories.</i> Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Pretty Polly Pemberton.</i> Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Quiet Life.</i> Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Theo.</i> Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>Vagabondia.</i> Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).<br /> -<i>The Shuttle</i>, 1907. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Cozy Lion</i>, 1907. Century.<br /> -<i>Good Wolf</i>, 1908. Moffat, Yard & Company, New York.<br /> -<i>Spring Cleaning</i>, 1908. Century.<br /> -<i>The Dawn of a To-Morrow</i>, 1909. Scribner.<br /> -<i>The Secret Garden</i>, 1909. Stokes.<br /> -<i>My Robin</i>, 1912. Stokes.<br /> -<i>T. Tembaron</i>, 1913. A. L. Burt Company, New York.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_368" id="page_368">{368}</a></span><i>Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday</i>, 1914. Moffat, Yard.<br /> -<i>One I Knew The Best of All</i>, 1915. Scribner.<br /> -<i>The Lost Prince</i>, 1915. Burt.<br /> -<i>The Land of the Blue Flower</i>, 1916. Moffat, Yard.<br /> -<i>The Little Hunchback Zia</i>, 1916. Stokes.<br /> -<i>The Way to the House of Santa Claus</i>, 1916. Harper & Brothers, New York.<br /> -<i>White People</i>, 1917. Harper.<br /> -<i>The Head of the House of Coombe</i>, 1922. Stokes.<br /> -<i>Robin</i>, 1922. Stokes.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_369" id="page_369">{369}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII<br /><br /> -<small>MARY E. WALLER</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE are two actresses who are never interviewed—Alla Nazimova and -Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no -longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude -Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of -securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the -rule.</p> - -<p>An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal -publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most -authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the -personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in -the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree, -“charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like -traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public -Service Commissions will regulate them....</p> - -<p>Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary -E. Waller, about the woman behind <i>The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus</i>. For, in -the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to -publicity. She has never permitted her por<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_370" id="page_370">{370}</a></span>trait to be published.” As -for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it -is.</p> - -<p>We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied -abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and -maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that -her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history -of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home -on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her -time with her mother in the Vermont hills.</p> - -<p>That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period -before Miss Waller’s success as an author.</p> - -<p>In 1902 there was published in Boston a book called <i>Little Citizens</i>, a -story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication -of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by -Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907) -in the <i>Christian Herald</i>:</p> - -<p>“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since -Miss Alcott published <i>Little Women</i>. The title of the book, <i>A Daughter -of the Rich</i>, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking -qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the -story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where -parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully -bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician -persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling -out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is -mother<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_371" id="page_371">{371}</a></span>less, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the -home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers, -who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a -single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and -strength that wealth could not give her.</p> - -<p>“I have it in my heart to wish that this book might have the vogue that -<i>Little Women</i> had. The simple, beautiful story is worth a thousand -sermons and treatises on the best way of rearing and training a family.”</p> - -<p>The <i>Christian Herald</i> enters many homes and Margaret E. Sangster was -read by many thousands. There is no way of measuring the direct and -indirect influence of such praise as she uttered. It is very great. But -this was in 1907. The year following the appearance of <i>A daughter of -the Rich</i>, Miss Waller’s third book, <i>The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus</i>, came -along.</p> - -<p>Books have curious fates. Gene Stratton-Porter’s <i>Freckles</i> took three -years to find its audience. A fine novel by St. John G. Ervine, -<i>Changing Winds</i>, was published, had the expected sale and died; -remained dead for about a year and then suddenly began selling again! In -the case of a textbook such a phenomenon can always be traced to some -simple explanation. For example, W. J. Henderson wrote a condensed -treatise called <i>Elements of Navigation</i> which sold desultorily for -years, the sales slowly declining. Came the Great War. The United States -undertook to create a merchant marine. Thousands of men had to be -trained to navigate merchant ships. Mr. Henderson’s book<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_372" id="page_372">{372}</a></span> sold like hot -cakes, was reprinted; was revised and pretty well rewritten; sold faster -than fiction!</p> - -<p>In the case of a novel a “resurrection” is seldom quite explicable. It -is matter for conjecture what “brought back” <i>Changing Winds</i>. Now <i>The -Wood-Carver of ’Lympus</i> was not a book that rose from the dead, but a -book that almost never lived; that is to say, it was six months before -it achieved popular success. Once “alive” it has ever since remained so. -Seven years after publication the <i>twenty-eighth</i> edition was published. -It is unnecessary to say more.</p> - -<p>The catalogue of the American Library Association, a conscientious -publication if ever there was one, describes this book concisely: “Scene -in the Green Mountains. An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood -finds interests in the outside world through a chance acquaintance and -becomes a wood-carver of renown.” There you are; see what -conscientiousness can accomplish! All the charm, all the wistfulness, -all the magic of hope and aspiration, and the triumph of achievement, -which make this novel the beloved tale it is—stripped away! “An -ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood....” The librarians are not -to blame, either. It is their business to outline concisely.... Whereas -fiction is no matter of outlines but, like life, a thing of coloring, -perspective, the glint of an eye, the shadowed corner of a smiling -mouth. Fiction cannot be done in black and white; those who, under the -label of “realism,” essay the task, invariably fail.</p> - -<p>But we were to enumerate what is known of Miss Waller. Well, in 1913, -after she had been besieged for nine years for her picture, a visitor to -Nantucket,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_373" id="page_373">{373}</a></span> whither the author had gone to live, did succeed in seeing -her and talking with her. He did not get a photograph of her (in the -fall of 1912 a photographer went expressly to Nantucket and lay long in -wait for a snapshot, coming away without a single exposure). But at -least the visitor did see and converse with Miss Waller. How came this -miracle about?</p> - -<p>There had never been a hospital on Nantucket, in spite of the shipwrecks -and succorings of two centuries. Certain residents decided it was time -one was built. A board of trustees was formed and a house purchased. -Money for maintenance was needed. So they built an enormous thermometer -on the main street, under overarching elms. When the visitor came to -trail Miss Waller he found the temperature about $6,800, which included -royalties from one of Miss Waller’s books.</p> - -<p>The hospital cottage was not new—but very solid. The visitor reflected -that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission -oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking -tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads. -Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another -house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a -chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of -windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The -mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and -glimpses of moorland—or what they’d call moorland in an English novel. -Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_374" id="page_374">{374}</a></span> -work. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year -round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond -question, there <i>is</i> a Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she -may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down -that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wrote <i>Hamlet</i>; Mary E. Waller, not Clara -Louise Burnham, wrote <i>The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus</i>.</p> - -<p>And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss -Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and -sketchy. <i>A Daughter of the Rich</i> is technically described as “for girls -of 10 and upward.” <i>Sanna of the Island Town</i> is a series of pen -pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island -village—Nantucket is the original. <i>Through the Gates of the -Netherlands</i> is the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in -Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its -art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from -the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort -of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline -method is!</p> - -<p>Edwin Markham liked <i>Our Benny</i>, saying: “It is fluent and simple and -full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below -<i>Snowbound</i> and <i>Myles Standish</i>.” Caution! <i>Our Benny</i> is a narrative -poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to -<i>Flamsted Quarries</i>. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees -a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless -children. Later we find them in a small Maine<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_375" id="page_375">{375}</a></span> village, a quarry town. -There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a -simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and -women whole.</p> - -<p><i>My Ragpicker</i> is about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in -Paris. <i>A Cry in the Wilderness</i> has American and Canadian characters -and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St. -Lawrence—Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada. <i>Aunt Dorcas’s Change -of Heart</i> was published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it -was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between -herself and her visitor. <i>From an Island Outpost</i> is a meditative -book—thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island -outpost on Nantucket. <i>Out of the Silences</i> is a return to Canada and a -novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota. -The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a -youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly -philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge -of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson, -McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal -of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to -get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him. -He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed -indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love, -romance and success come to him—and death. For the war calls to his -manhood and takes him to France.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_376" id="page_376">{376}</a></span></p> - -<p>An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned. <i>A Year Out of Life</i> is -only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s -impressions of German life—long before the war, of course, for it was -published in 1909.</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary E. Waller</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Little Citizens</i>, 1902.<br /> -<i>A Daughter of the Rich</i>, 1903.<br /> -<i>The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus</i>, 1904.<br /> -<i>Sanna of the Island Town</i>, 1905.<br /> -<i>Through the Gates of the Netherlands</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>A Year Out of Life</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Our Benny</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Flamsted Quarries</i>, 1910.<br /> -<i>My Ragpicker</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>A Cry in the Wilderness</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>From an Island Outpost</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Out of the Silences</i>, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, -Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all -Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, -Boston.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_377" id="page_377">{377}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV<br /><br /> -<small>ZONA GALE</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">M</span>Y dear Mr. Overton:—</p> - -<p>“The first story which I ever wrote was printed. I printed it myself, in -pencil, for it was before I could write. And the story appeared in a -book. I made the book, of manilla paper, bound with ribbon. The story -began: ‘The sun was just sinking behind the western hills when three -travelers appeared. One was tall and one was short and one was -middle-sized.’ And when the heroine arrived and one of these travelers -asked her to marry him, I remember pressing my mother to tell me how to -spell ‘N—yes’, which constituted the maid’s reply.</p> - -<p>“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One -selection was this:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">When I am a lady, a lady<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I will be a milliner if I can.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And in my store there shall be no mice and rats,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When I am a lady.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came -back to me from a publisher. It was called <i>A White Dove</i>, but I do not -know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_378" id="page_378">{378}</a></span> -<i>Vedita</i>, of tremendous length—this is easy to remember because of the -cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which -was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was -readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian -servant, whom I later used in <i>The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre</i>.</p> - -<p>“A short story I first submitted at sixteen—it was called <i>Both</i>, was -three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the -Milwaukee <i>Evening Wisconsin</i>. I had just entered the University at -Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and -came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in -the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one -or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, -though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by <i>Success Magazine</i>, -I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the <i>Delineator</i> gave me a -first prize of $2,000 for a short story, <i>The Ancient Dawn</i>. In 1904 I -began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and -forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were -collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were -followed by <i>Friendship Village</i> stories. The first editor to whom these -stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance -with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as -these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the -majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure -that the first editor was not right.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_379" id="page_379">{379}</a></span></p> - -<p>“After graduating from Wisconsin University, about six years were spent -in newspaper work, in Milwaukee and New York, and in magazine work in -New York—and in that time a master’s degree was given by Wisconsin -University for work done in absentia, but neither degree, in itself, has -ever meant anything to me, though of course that part of the work which -I liked and wanted was invaluable.... I began newspaper work on the -Milwaukee <i>Evening Wisconsin</i> which accepted that first story of mine, -and I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning -at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment, but the chief -thing that I can recall about those mornings was the intense wish that -the elevator which was taking me up to the city room would turn out to -be the elevator taking me down again. At the end of two weeks the city -editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion -into anything else that I have written. I was another month in getting -on the staff. In New York the process was different. After being refused -by nearly every paper there, I went back to the New York <i>World</i>, and by -the office boy every morning I sent in a list of suggestions, made from -that day’s news, on which I thought I could write; and the city editor -checked those that I might try. After a good many weeks I went on the -staff of the <i>World</i>.</p> - -<p>“And all of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none -of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but pure -delight. But at the time I was under the illusion that I was very -determined.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_380" id="page_380">{380}</a></span></p> - -<p>“For the last few years I have lived here with my father and mother, in -the little town where I was born and where they have spent most of their -lives. My mother’s family, named Beers, is English; and my father’s -family, English, of Scotch-Irish descent, settled in Watertown, -Massachusetts, in 1640, nine generations ago. My -great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry Gale, led his company against the -courthouse at Worcester, where the supreme court was sitting, and -demanded the repeal of the imprisonment-for-debt law, just after the -Revolution; and for this he was condemned to death, and then reprieved, -and removed to Vermont.... Here in Portage, in my father’s house, a -little river runs close by the door, and there are lilacs on the bank -and hills to the south, and there are many wild birds, and squirrels -live in trees close to the windows. It is true that people love to try -to make their own surroundings sound romantic and unique, and hereby, to -my own taste, I do so. Here I have written ten books of fiction, two -published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and all the rest by the Macmillan -Company; and a little play, <i>Neighbors</i>, published by Huebsch.</p> - -<p>“I have had some years of that passion for reform. I was president of a -civic association here, then chairman of the State Federation’s civic -work, then of the national civic work of the General Federation of -Woman’s Clubs, and on the board of the American Civic association. I -have resigned from everything in favor of the new democracy.... My only -executive connection with any organization is with the board of the -American Union Against Militarism. I have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_381" id="page_381">{381}</a></span> a believer in equal -suffrage since before it was respectable to believe. My paramount taste -is for poetry. At the moment my chief admiration is for Russia. My -deepest interest is to find those who feel something of the fundamental -truth underlying all religion. And my recreation is talk with those who -believe with passion in the new industrial and social and spiritual -To-morrow.</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Zona Gale.</span>”<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“Portage, Wisconsin.<br /> -“February, 1919.”<br /> -</p> - -<p>Characteristically, Miss Gale says nothing, in her reply to a request -for information about herself, concerning her novel, <i>Birth</i>, the book -which has not only made absolutely necessary her inclusion in any record -of American women novelists, but has placed her in the front rank. For -however we may array the women writers of the United States, no one who -has read <i>Birth</i> is likely to deny that it possesses some of the -attributes of greatness and literary permanence or that it has “its -share of the qualities which lift writing out of time.”</p> - -<p>Pressed to say what is in her heart, Miss Gale will tell you that, “as a -matter of fact, <i>Birth</i> is really my first novel. Since the most -fantastic book with which I began, I have never done anything of novel -length. All my other books have been short stories threaded together, -save three stories of 30,000 words published separately, in no sense -novels. After writing ten books, this book is really my first try at a -novel.... It is embarrassing to be caught looking in a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_382" id="page_382">{382}</a></span>mirror—or -saying one’s own name aloud over the telephone. But to try to do both, -in print, seems to underscore all one’s lacks.” A very modest person, -you see. The author of this book is aware of a certain injustice arising -from his inclusion of a number of letters. The risk is clear. He begs to -say, here and now, that he assumes that risk; and he had rather take the -chance that readers may suspect some of his subjects of -self-consciousness than encounter the certainty that they will think -these authors hardly human—names on title-pages merely.</p> - -<p>When <i>Birth</i> appeared some people were bewildered. One reviewer asked -pathetically what had become of the Zona Gale of <i>Friendship Village</i>. -But those whose saturation-point for sentimentality is decidedly, and, -as we believe, healthfully low, gave a great shout of satisfaction to -which added sounds of admiration formed a contrapuntal bass. For <i>Birth</i> -is a thing Thomas Hardy would not be ashamed to put his name to. Nor, we -suspect, George Meredith, either. We like to think that were George -Eliot living to-day, and mistress of the art of fiction (which, bless -her, she never was) she would have written such a book.</p> - -<p>The fact that at this writing <i>Birth</i> has not been “discovered” by the -large public which such a book ultimately commands is of little -importance. That will come. The failure of many book reviewers and book -reporters to detect and proclaim its distinction is an indictment of -book “reviewing” more specific and damning than any generality in which -we might indulge. The real elements of the book’s excellence may best be -recorded in the words of a daughter of Henry Mills Alden, Constance -Murray Greene, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_383" id="page_383">{383}</a></span> said (<i>Books and the Book World</i> of <i>The Sun</i>, New -York, November 24, 1918):</p> - -<p>“The charm consists in delightful and continuous humor, often sharp and -never overkind, which isn’t at all what people mean by ‘charming’ in the -new and popular sense. But here is the real substance of things more to -be desired than the fine gold of sunshine. Miss Gale is incurably funny -and we love her for it—witness the delivery horse, ‘hanging out its -tongue, not at all because of fast driving but from preference,’ and -Mis’ Henry Bates, whose stomach wouldn’t allow her to drink coffee. ‘She -always spoke’ (to quote directly) ‘as if her stomach stood back of her -chair.’ ... <i>Birth</i> achieves the rare result of being both mystical and -colloquial.” How?</p> - -<p>You may well ask. The setting is a tiny Wisconsin town, except for some -scenes in Chicago. The “hero” is a traveling salesman handling pickle -and fruit products; insignificant; with long, thin, freckled wrists and -a coat that gave the effect of blowing when there was no wind; with no -graces. You sicken over the little man’s humiliations in such social -life as Burage, Wisconsin, boasted. He marries a girl of the village, a -girl of some social gifts and quite ordinary and silly feminine -ambitions—and becomes a paperhanger, though knowing nothing of the -business. Barbara Pitt, Marshall Pitt’s wife, is dropped abruptly from -the story—daring technique but justified in the result—and the novel -develops as a narrative of the life-relation of father and son. This -little man, this Marshall Pitt, being human, had his immortal moments. -Zona Gale can put them on paper:</p> - -<p>“It was in this manner that their child was born.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_384" id="page_384">{384}</a></span> There he was, -sentient. A rift in experience, the crossing of the street by Barbara at -one moment rather than the next; the opening of a gate by Pitt in the -afternoon instead of the morning. Then joy, ill, the depths, madness, -flowing about the two. These passed but there remained the -child—living, exquisite, sturdy, sensitive, a new microcosm, -experiencing within himself the act of God.”</p> - -<p>Prose? Poetry! Deep and vibrant music. It has the austere beauty and the -imaginative content of Johann Sebastian Bach—say the <i>Chaconne</i> in D -minor.</p> - -<p>“Love is a creative force,” says Mrs. Greene in the article we have -already quoted, “and though Marshall Pitt had been unable through the -inarticulate material in which his soul was embodied to fashion himself -in any accordance with his blurred hopes, he could by virtue of his -great love for Barbara and their child offer to Jeffrey [his son] the -inspiration lacking which his life, even to his last heroic act, had -seemed a futile thing. In dying because he lacked cleverness to see the -means of escape, to save the only living thing that had loved him in -return, he made his last awkward gesture that of rescuing a dog!” We may -quote the passage, condensed slightly:</p> - -<p>“They carried Pitt, and in his arms was a white Marseilles spread in -which he had swathed the little dog. The spread was burning, Pitt’s hair -was burning and the thin cotton of his shirt was all burned away about -his throat and breast and blazed upon his shoulders.</p> - -<p>“They laid him on the ground and the people beat out the flames. As the -fire was quenched there was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_385" id="page_385">{385}</a></span> terrific commotion in the white -Marseilles spread. Out leaped Jep, not a silken hair on him singed, and -he snapped indignantly at having been caused intolerable -inconvenience....</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well, but of all the fool things. For a <i>dog</i>.’...”</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Zona Gale</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>Romance Island</i>, 1906.<br /> -<i>The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre</i>, 1907.<br /> -<i>Friendship Village</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>Friendship Village Love Stories</i>, 1909.<br /> -<i>Mothers to Men</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>Christmas</i>, 1912.<br /> -<i>When I Was a Little Girl</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>Neighborhood Stories</i>, 1914.<br /> -<i>Heart’s Kindred</i>, 1915.<br /> -<i>A Daughter of Tomorrow</i>, 1917.<br /> -<i>Birth</i>, 1918.<br /> -<i>Peace in Friendship Village</i>, 1919.<br /> -<i>Miss Lulu Bett</i>, 1920.<br /> -<i>Neighbors</i> (play), 1920.<br /> -<i>Miss Lulu Bett</i> (play), 1921.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>First two books published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis; -Neighbors first published by B. W. Huebsch, New York; Miss Lulu Bett, -novel and play, published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Other -books published by the Macmillan Company, New York.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_386" id="page_386">{386}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXV" id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a>CHAPTER XXXV<br /><br /> -<small>MARY HEATON VORSE</small></h2> - -<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come -out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary -Heaton Vorse as an answer to these doubters. In spite of the fact that -she once lived in Greenwich Village it is greatly to be doubted if the -woman who could write <i>The Prestons</i> was ever of it. John Reed gives a -brief verbal picture of Mary Heaton Vorse entirely surrounded by -Greenwich Villagers and cigarette smoke, seated on the floor, doing -several things at once and, despite a deafening chatter from the girls -with the bobbed hair and the boys with the flowing ties, dictating a -short story with the utmost calm, speed and concentration. She dwelt -among highly trodden ways—and took her own track.</p> - -<p>As a short story writer Mary Heaton Vorse is of the first importance in -any survey of contemporary American writers. As a novelist she shares -with Zona Gale the distinction of being put on the map by a single -superb book. As a personality she is alive and present to any one who -ever has met and talked with her. Corinne Lowe had a phrase likening her -to a Botticelli painting. Benjamin De Casseres describes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_387" id="page_387">{387}</a></span> her by her -voice, insists that it is the one thing making the striking first -impression and lingering in the memory like lovely music. I wish now -that I had set down the precise and extraordinary words in which Mr. De -Casseres extemporized his picture of the woman by the mere description -of her speech—its timbre and “tone color,” as musicians would say. No -paraphrase will serve; the reader will have to take on faith an -assertion—here made quite simply—that this woman of the memorable -voice, the isolation in the midst of the crowd and the face of sympathy -and comprehension is a woman of no common endowment.</p> - -<p>But that, doubtless, would be evident to any one reading <i>The Prestons</i>. -Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she -said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers of <i>The Prestons</i>:</p> - -<p>“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for -next fall instead of a sequel to <i>The Prestons</i>. You do not know how -happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of <i>The Prestons</i> -have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess -that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so -short a time.</p> - -<p>“I love <i>The Prestons</i>—all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms -my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American -public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true -interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel -to <i>The Prestons</i>.”</p> - -<p>A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall, -on conditions....</p> - -<p>The truth about <i>The Prestons</i> is this: Hardly a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_388" id="page_388">{388}</a></span> man or woman will be -able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the -American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No -finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book—to <i>any</i> -book.</p> - -<p>The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the -word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor -patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and -nothing else.</p> - -<p>So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the -feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary -Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one -narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of -emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was:</p> - -<p>Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its -very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end -of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No -great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to -a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those -little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The -only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old -son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do -something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief; -seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing -absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs. -Preston’s unmarried sister who<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_389" id="page_389">{389}</a></span> lives with the family, and the -philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family -servant and shield and friend.</p> - -<p>Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you -will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been -turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will -be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you -will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the -dog. They are so much—you.</p> - -<p>It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like <i>The Prestons</i> -than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling. -It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the -house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is -lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the -graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on, -dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all -over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a -policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”</p> - -<p>On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor -where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The -mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain. -In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his -observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read:</p> - -<p>“2 P. M.—Guinea pigs sleeping.</p> - -<p>“2:30 P. M.—Still sleeping.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_390" id="page_390">{390}</a></span></p> - -<p>“3 P. M.—Running around cage (I poked them with a stick).</p> - -<p>“3:15 P. M.—Eating.</p> - -<p>“Note: Guinea pigs eat with persistence.</p> - -<p>“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.”</p> - -<p>Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that -Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by -naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed -into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads -in books.”</p> - -<p>She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of -a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and -his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to -college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn -and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping -from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.”</p> - -<p>She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria -believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious -processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is -Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out -in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the -beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for -breakfast.</p> - -<p>Of all the surprising affairs in which the youthful Jimmie had a hand we -think the affair of the fat little Baker boy the most amusing. “We was -in the swing,” Jimmie explained to his mother, “and I butted Ed in the -belly.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_391" id="page_391">{391}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>He hit him in the abdomen,’ corrected the Baker girl.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I have always been very particular,’ Mrs. Baker announced, ‘Mrs. -Preston, about the language my children use, as you can see for -yourself. You heard how Jimmie referred to Edward’s abdomen. He has used -that word at least six times in the last five minutes; and that, Mrs. -Preston, I cannot stand. I will have my home kept refined and I say no -home can be refined where vulgar, common words are in daily use.’</p> - -<p>“To this I found nothing to say but ‘Come home with me, Jimmie.’</p> - -<p>“On the way, ‘Have I got to say “abdomen”?’ he asked. ‘Say, have I?’</p> - -<p>“I took refuge in the cowardly woman’s evasion. ‘I don’t think that -there’s the slightest need of your using either of those terms ever,’ I -replied.</p> - -<p>“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one -could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of -Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on -marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called -on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the -street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_392" id="page_392">{392}</a></span> comes -Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this -diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel.</p> - -<p>Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young -Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less -responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the -bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the -house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether -undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played -detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck.</p> - -<p>We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh -over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in -their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at -such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to -the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older -than he.</p> - -<p>This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and -with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of -observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an -American novel that transcends it.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram -Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad. -She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and, -secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph -O’Brien.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_393" id="page_393">{393}</a></span></p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Books by Mary Heaton Vorse</span></h3> - -<p class="nind1"> -<i>The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife</i>, 1908.<br /> -<i>The Very Little Person</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman</i>, 1911.<br /> -<i>The Heart’s Country</i>, 1913.<br /> -<i>The Ninth Man.</i><br /> -<i>The Prestons</i>, 1918.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>The Prestons is published by Boni & Liveright, New York.</i></p> - -<p><a name="transcrib" id="transcrib"></a></p> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="" -style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;"> -<tr><th align="center">Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr> -<tr><td> -<p class="nind">born in 1859=> -born in 1857 -{pg 49}</p> - -<p class="nind">showed Miss Johnson=> -showed Miss Johnston -{pg 145}</p> - -<p class="nind">demanding an implicity of obedience=> -demanding an implicitly of obedience -{pg 149}</p> - -<p class="nind">Books ry Clara Louise Burnham=> -Books by Clara Louise Burnham -{pg 282}</p> -</td></tr> -</table> - -<hr class="full" /> -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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