MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS
———

THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS

The Women Who Make
Our Novels

BY
GRANT M. OVERTON

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

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—

“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?