The Women Who Make Our Novels
Grant M. Overton
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
| PAGE | |
| CHAPTER I | |
|---|---|
| Edith Wharton | 1 |
| CHAPTER II | |
| Alice Brown | 11 |
| CHAPTER III | |
| Ellen Glasgow | 20 |
| CHAPTER IV | |
| Gertrude Atherton | 41 |
| CHAPTER V | |
| Mary Roberts Rinehart | 54 |
| CHAPTER VI | |
| Kathleen Norris | 68 |
| CHAPTER VII | |
| Margaret Deland | 78 |
| CHAPTER VIII | |
| Gene Stratton-Porter | 88 |
| CHAPTER IX | |
| Eleanor H. Porter | 108 |
| CHAPTER X | |
| Kate Douglas Wiggin | 121 |
| CHAPTER XI | |
| Mary Johnston | 132 |
| CHAPTER XII | |
| Corra Harris | 153 |
| CHAPTER XIII | |
| Mary Austin | 164 |
| CHAPTER XIV | |
| Mary S. Watts | 177 |
| CHAPTER XV | |
| Mary E. Wilkins Freeman | 198 |
| CHAPTER XVI | |
| Anna Katharine Green | 204 |
| CHAPTER XVII | |
| Helen R. Martin | 215 |
| CHAPTER XVIII | |
| Sophie Kerr | 226 |
| CHAPTER XIX | |
| Marjorie Benton Cooke | 238 |
| CHAPTER XX | |
| Grace S. Richmond | 246 |
| CHAPTER XXI | |
| Willa Sibert Cather | 254 |
| CHAPTER XXII | |
| Clara Louise Burnham | 267 |
| CHAPTER XXIII | |
| Demetra Vaka | 284 |
| CHAPTER XXIV | |
| Edna Ferber | 292 |
| CHAPTER XXV | |
| Dorothy Canfield Fisher | 298 |
| CHAPTER XXVI | |
| Amelia E. Barr | 304 |
| CHAPTER XXVII | |
| Alice Hegan Rice | 313 |
| CHAPTER XXVIII | |
| Alice Duer Miller | 320 |
| CHAPTER XXIX | |
| Eleanor Hallowell Abbott | 326 |
| CHAPTER XXX | |
| Harriet T. Comstock | 334 |
| CHAPTER XXXI | |
| Honoré Willsie | 342 |
| CHAPTER XXXII | |
| Frances Hodgson Burnett | 357 |
| CHAPTER XXXIII | |
| Mary E. Waller | 369 |
| CHAPTER XXXIV | |
| Zona Gale | 377 |
| CHAPTER XXXV | |
| Mary Heaton Vorse | 386 |
INTRODUCTION
THIS book, the rather unpremeditated production of several months’ work, is by a man who is not a novelist and who is therefore entirely unfitted to write about women who are novelists. Several excuses may be urged; the author is, by general agreement, young. He has to do with many novels, being, indeed, a sort of new and strange creature, a literary reporter self-styled, a person connected with a newspaper and charged with the task of describing new books for the readers thereof. As he could make no critical pretensions he had to fall back upon a process peculiar to newspaper work, the attempt at a simple putting before the public of facts, of things lately said and done—in short, of news. He had to regard a new book as a piece of news to be communicated as honestly and as entertainingly as any other occurrence. And so, here. He has tried to be a good reporter of the personalities, performances and methods of work of some of the best known American women novelists.
An effort has been made to include in this book all the living American women novelists whose writing, by the customary standards, is artistically fine. An equal effort has been made to include all the living American women novelists whose writing has attained a wide popularity. The author does not contend, nor will he so much as allow, that the production of writing artistically fine is a greater achievement than the satisfaction of many thousands of readers. It may be more lasting; it is not more meritorious; and to attempt to institute comparisons between the two things is absurd. The critic may be justified in treating of Edith Wharton and ignoring Gene Stratton-Porter. The literary reporter who should do such a thing doesn’t know his job.
It is, therefore, to be feared that this is no book for highbrows. But a lower forehead and a broader outlook have their advantages. In the striking popularity of a particular storyteller a thoughtful observer may see important and significant evidences of the tendencies of his time. And that may be much more worth his while than the most careful speculation as to who will be read fifty years from now.
The order in which authors are taken up in the book is accidental and therefore meaningless. The reader is recommended to follow his own inclination in perusing the chapters. They are entirely detached from each other, as are the subjects considered except for an occasional reference, in discussing one, to another’s work. These references, and in fact all the discussions of various books, are to be taken as expository and not critical. If a thing is stated to be good, bad or indifferent the statement is made as a statement of fact and not of personal opinion.
The justification of this book is the need of it. It is ridiculous that there should be nothing easily accessible about such writers as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Mary Johnston, Mary S. Watts, Anna Katharine Green, Clara Louise Burnham, Amelia E. Barr and Edna Ferber. The condensations of Who’s Who in America are dry bones; books on living American writers are all “studies” or compilations of a highly selective sort; their authors want to be revered by posterity as persons of wonderful critical perception and judgment. The authors themselves have not the time to satisfy their readers’ curiosity and their publishers hesitate lest they may not remain their publishers!
And so the literary reporter steps in. Some of the chapters in this book, generally condensed in content, have appeared in the columns of Books and the Book World, the literary magazine of The Sun, New York, of which he is the editor. In their preparation he has been wonderfully helped by the authors themselves and by other individuals and publishing houses, for which he makes acknowledgment and returns his thanks in a note elsewhere in the book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
MY indebtedness to various persons and sources is repeatedly made manifest in the text. Only the co-operation of publishers has made possible the preparation of these sketches in a short time. I wish particularly to thank the following for important help:
Houghton Mifflin Company and Mr. Roger L. Scaife and Mrs. Helen Bishop-Dennis for material on Mary Roberts Rinehart, Eleanor H. Porter, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Johnston, Mary Austin, Willa Sibert Cather, Clara Louise Burnham and Demetra Vaka.
Doubleday, Page & Company and Mr. Harry E. Maule for material on Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gene Stratton-Porter, Corra Harris, Helen R. Martin, Sophie Kerr, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Grace S. Richmond and Harriet T. Comstock.
The Macmillan Company and Mr. Harold S. Latham for material on Alice Brown and Mary S. Watts and Zona Gale.
Harper & Brothers and Miss Hesper Le Gallienne for material on Gertrude Atherton, Margaret Deland and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
The Century Company for material on Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.
Frederick A. Stokes Company and Mr. William Morrow for material on Gertrude Atherton, Edna Ferber, Honoré Willsie and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Dodd, Mead & Company for material on Anna Katharine Green, Gertrude Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.
Henry Holt & Company and Miss Ellen Knowles Eayrs for material on Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Charles Scribner’s Sons for material on Edith Wharton.
Little, Brown & Company for material on Mary E. Waller.
THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS
CHAPTER I
EDITH WHARTON
THE order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say, therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed, immutably fixed upon from the Beginning—not of a book but of a Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much in the divine right of kings—an accident at the beginning of it. Had the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd, there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working out of them, a pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book—other than a work of fiction—are either that it presents facts or suggests ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and their books—simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better than a pale reflection of life.
Edith Wharton comes first in this book that she may the better stand alone. She has always stood alone. The distinguishing thing about her is the distinguishing thing about her work—aloneness, which is not the same thing as aloofness. She is not aloof. At 56 she is working in France, doing that which her hand finds to do. Her aloneness arises from the facts of her life. Never were so many favoring stars clustered together as for her when she was born. She had everything.
She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item 2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton of Boston in 1885 (item 4—no! countless items of luck had already intervened!). In other words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family, was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing. Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night. They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native genius to expression. Think of it—Italy and all the other rich backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs. Wharton had a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word.
She is not a genius but she moves and always has moved in a world of geniuses. From childhood she had, of course, an easy familiarity with French, German and Italian. The ordinary bounds upon reading—the only way of keeping the company of the supremely great of earth—were thus swept a measureless distance away. French, German and Italian as well as English literature were accessible to her—and the French includes the Russian, of course. She read widely and we are told that “when she came upon Goethe she was more prepared than the average to take to heart his counsels of perfection and reach after a high and effective culture!” Reach? Not upward, surely; there was nothing above her. Outward, perhaps. At any rate, here was Mrs. Wharton in the actual presence and company of a genius if ever there lived one. It is agonizing to think what Goethe would have said were he alive these days. He would have said the supremely scathing thing, the thing that would have withered forever the moral cancer of his countrymen, and we cannot articulate it. A magical mind and a magical tongue and a magical pen—Goethe. He was always saying sesame. We, who have not his genius, have to batter down the barred door.
It is to Goethe above all other literary influence that Mrs. Wharton feels indebted. Strike out the word “literary.” The influence of Goethe is not a literary influence, but an influence proceeding directly from the heart of life itself. What sort of an influence is it? High, pure, clean and yet human. Intangible, too; about all you really can say of it is that it is like the company of some people who bring out all the best that is in you. They do not put into you anything new. They draw you out, or rather, they draw something out of you. At the risk of shocking the fastidious reader and to the joy of the literally-minded we may say that they are the spiritual equivalent of the mustard plaster. They have an equal drawing power and efficacy, but they do not draw out the ache but the great glow and spirit which are the incontestable proof of the existence in the human soul of something immortal.
Mrs. Wharton read widely, as we say, and she read in the main “standard” fiction. Her taste is for George Eliot and the ethical teachings of that earlier woman novelist. Her taste is equally for Gustave Flaubert, the “craftsman’s master,” the writer who teaches writers how to write. You learn the innermost secrets of your writing craft from Flaubert and then you put aside everything you have learned from the master and learn from life. Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Meredith have been Mrs. Wharton’s steady diet; she has re-read them so often as repeatedly and contentedly to fall into arrears with respect to current fiction. She has had always a great interest in biology and in whatever touches upon the history of human thought. This, in brief, is the substance of Edith Wharton the woman and the background of Edith Wharton the novelist.
We shall not discuss Mrs. Wharton’s books in detail in this chapter and book for the best of reasons—they leave no room for two opinions of her work. Of almost no other novelist whom we shall consider would it be possible to say this; indeed of some American women novelists there are nearer twenty-two than two opinions. Some writers, like Gertrude Atherton, are subjects of perpetual controversy; others are the cause of wide but sharply defined cleavages of opinion—Gene Stratton-Porter, for example. The work of still others is more properly matter for speculation as to what they may do than estimate of what they have done. But Mrs. Wharton falls in none of these classifications. There is only one opinion about her work: it is excellent but lifeless; it is Greek marble with no Pygmalion near. From this sweeping verdict three—and only three—of her books are to be excepted. They are Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth and Summer. In these three books you can feel the pulse beat. In Ethan Frome the pulse is the feeble quiver of the crushed and dying human heart; in The House of Mirth there is the slow throb of human suffering and anguish, mental no less than spiritual; in Summer there is the excited and accelerated vibration of human passion.
It will be taken as a very dogmatic piece of business on our part when we say that her work leaves no room for two opinions. Was there ever a bit of writing, some will ask, which could not give birth in the minds of readers to more than one opinion? Often, indeed, twin opinions are born to the same reader!
We must answer that here and hereafter we are dealing with easily ascertainable facts and not indulging in criticism. Mrs. Wharton’s work leaves room for only one opinion simply because those who might form another opinion do not read her. And those who do not read her take their opinions from those who do and then, following the instinct of our natures, declare (quite honestly) the borrowed opinion as their own. Our real audacity consists in the assertion, implied in what we have said, that of all the thousands who read Mrs. Wharton not one believes in his heart for one solitary instant that the mass of her fiction is alive. They look upon her work as they look upon the Winged Victory; it is ravishingly beautiful, it has perfection of form, it has every attribute of beauty possible of attainment by the consummate artist, but it has also the severe limitations of any form of art.
We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All art is necessarily a representation of life or some aspect of it. The moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow himself to think of any kind of art in what he is doing, he goes into a fourth dimension—and life exists in only three dimensions. This is not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact, almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade.
And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living. If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of Conrad, one book of Thomas Hardy’s—we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this book.
Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined it more completely. The Portrait of a Lady is the everlasting witness of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he did do. Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth and Summer are all inferior to The Portrait of a Lady and all superior to James’s later work.
If any one tells you otherwise it is because he is thinking in terms of art and not in terms of life. And some will tell you otherwise, for the world never has lacked those to whom art was more than life just as the world has never lacked those to whom a future life was more than the life of this earth. With these we have no quarrel; we can but respect them; God made them so. It takes all kinds of people, we agree, to make a world; if that is so, manifestly it takes all kinds of views to get the true view. In any triangle the sum of all three angles is equal to two right angles. If, therefore, one of the angles of the triangle is a right angle, the sum of the other two will equal a right angle. The angle of outlook which sees only the artistry in a piece of literary work added to the angle of outlook which sees only the livingness in the same work may make the right angle which we all aspire to look from.
Books by Edith Wharton
The Greater Inclination, 1899.
The Touchstone, 1900.
Crucial Instances, 1901.
The Valley of Decision, 1902.
Sanctuary, 1903.
The Descent of Man, and Other Stories, 1904.
Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904.
Italian Backgrounds, 1905.
The House of Mirth, 1905.
Madame de Treymes, 1907.
The Fruit of the Tree, 1907.
The Hermit and the Wild Woman, 1908.
A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908.
Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse, 1909.
Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910.
The Reef, 1912.
The Custom of the Country, 1913.
The Book of the Homeless, 1915.
Fighting France, 1915.
Ethan Frome.
The Decoration of Houses.
The Joy of Living.
Xingu and Other Stories.
Summer, 1917.
The Marne, 1918.
French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919.
The Age of Innocence, 1920.
The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922.
The Reef, Summer, The Marne, French Ways and Their Meaning, The Age of Innocence, and The Glimpses of the Moon were published by D. Appleton & Company, New York; Mrs. Wharton’s other books were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
CHAPTER II
ALICE BROWN
FROM New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows:
“I have been too busy in legitimate ways—gardening, cooking, cursing the Hun—to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’ of walking—[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little ‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought back the mail for the rest.
“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was graduated—after which I taught several years, in the country and in Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my certainty to write.
“I did a little work on the Christian Register and then went to the Youth’s Companion, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the latest books and magazines.
“And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry on—sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more.
“And that’s all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’
“Gloomily yours,
“Alice Brown.”
[In pencil]
“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it pans out!”
And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier, may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people. Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will be found at the close of this chapter.
New England stories (Meadow-Grass), English travels (By Oak and Thorn), poems (The Road to Castaly), a study of Stevenson written in collaboration, stories for girls (as The Secret of the Clan), a play that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (Children of Earth) and a number of novels of which The Prisoner is the most notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature.
She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play—the play that captured Winthrop Ames’s prize—which was splendidly imaginative and even rather poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can make up for that lack.
As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t believe that try to go through My Love and I, first published under the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left out. Again, she can write a book like The Prisoner, which is as fine in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all (as Miss Brown would say).
It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice Brown to her novels; but this disadvantage to her is no greater than the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to do. But chivalry is not dead.
The Prisoner is the story of a relatively young man who has just come out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary parallel.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course; prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world, cruelty——.
Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality, and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in ideas as ideas, and in The Prisoner she has packed a few more than can be found in any American novel of the last dozen years. The root idea is that expressed by the prisoner—or ex-prisoner—himself. As Jeff says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible paradox of binding himself to the law.”
This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K. Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is “outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one of us any longer if he ever was.
At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very clear, for otherwise The Prisoner will be, in its real import, lost on the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in which we try to keep every one in the fellowship—for society is essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make laws simply to state what is not in that creed, the whole creed itself being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make laws about.
And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations. Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man who has put himself beyond the pale must himself bring himself within it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the paradox that he can be free in no other way—ever.
The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However, we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical, thought-provoking—why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox—there is no gainsaying the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it than Alice Brown has done.
On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on the roll of American novelists at least as high as we place, among the men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the West, The Virginian.
Books by Alice Brown
Fools of Nature.
Meadow-Grass.
By Oak and Thorn.
Life of Mercy Otis Warren.
The Road to Castaly.
The Day of His Youth.
Robert Louis Stevenson—A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney).
Tiverton Tales.
King’s End, 1901.
Margaret Warrener, 1901.
The Mannerings.
High Noon.
Paradise.
The County Road, 1906.
The Court of Love, 1906.
Rose McLeod, 1908.
The Story of Thyrza, 1909.
Country Neighbors, 1910.
John Winterbourne’s Family, 1910.
The One-Footed Fairy, 1911.
The Secret of the Clan, 1912.
My Love and I, 1912.
Vanishing Points, 1913.
Robin Hood’s Barn, 1913.
Children of Earth, 1915.
Bromley Neighborhood.
The Prisoner, 1916.
The Flying Teuton, 1918.
Homespun and Gold, 1920.
The Wind Between the Worlds, 1920.
Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
CHAPTER III
ELLEN GLASGOW
ELLEN GLASGOW’S first two books were produced before she was twenty. She is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist—better, a disciple of naturalism—and concerned with social and personal problems of the last thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s.
She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her writing is filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in her interpretation of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are!
Miss Glasgow has had to drive so hard and so strongly and so much alone; she has had to face such a vast inertia of tradition and such a tenacity of feeling, that the struggle has narrowed her. She hates sentimentality, and rightly. It has been the terrible obstacle she has had to confront. Of her South she once said:
“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,” Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality, which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her novel Virginia, the title referring, however, not to her State, but to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton.
You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington, the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington:
“It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody—in a doctor, or a friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,’ but the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally, the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless, the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.”
Mr. Tarkington went on to say:
“Miss Glasgow is sorry that there are so many writers willing to supply the demand for ‘sugary philosophy,’ but those writers are not only willing to supply; they are inspired to supply. They aren’t superior people turning the trick for money, as Miss Glasgow seems to think; they are ‘giving the best that is in them.’ They take their art solemnly.”
The truest word on the subject ever uttered and most essential to be reprinted here. It is not so much for the refutation of Miss Glasgow that we give it. The full application of Mr. Tarkington’s remarks will be seen in some of the later chapters of this book.
But to return to our Southern realist.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, 1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson) Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men—lawyers, judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to school—an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of political economy and socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong. The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.” The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she went to her father and said:
“Father, I have written a book.”
Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was The Descendant, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.”
The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious consideration as an American novelist—as a novelist picturing American life—was The Voice of the People, published in 1900. She has referred in after years to The Descendant as “a mere schoolgirl effort,” although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could not so characterize The Voice of the People, nor could any one else. It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic State convention. An old family friend, a delegate to the convention, smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater.
It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a friend—Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a novel of New York life.”
“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?”
“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular locality.”
A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has necessarily only a few localities—those he knows tolerably well. Miss Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her Virginia settings do.
Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the touch of Jane Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.”
Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of Virginia and Life and Gabriella was rewritten at least three times, some parts more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has been typewritten.
And always novels. “I cannot write short stories,” Miss Glasgow explains. “They bore me excruciatingly. The whole technique of the short story and the novel is different. All the best of the short stories must be painfully condensed with slight regard for the evolutionary causes bringing about this or that effect. Everything that I see, I see in the form of a novel—as a large canvas. I want to trace the process of cause and effect; and that is why both Virginia and Gabriella were a joy in the writing. Those books do not deal with problems. I do not ever let a problem get into my novels—there is none, except, of course, as some problem of an individual life may present itself to the character. I am not concerned with any propaganda. A book should never serve any purpose but the telling of life as it is—being faithfully realistic.”
“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is the writer’s true business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them.
“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come, always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and places—at a reception, on the train, on the street.”
When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it there. She selects her people, who have their individual problems as she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely about novel writing and her literary ideals.
“There are three things a novelist has to do to prove himself,” she declared. “First, he must show an ability to create personalities; second, he must exhibit a sincerity of style; and third, he must evince the capacity for an intelligent criticism of life. Without these he is not worth very much in a serious, big way. To contribute to the knowledge and understanding of life—that should be his motive in writing, not primarily to create a pleasant impression.
“There have been several stages in our growth since the special type of fiction was evolved. There was the sentimentality of Richardson; then came my favorite, Fielding, our first realist; and finally arrived the critical period with its early representative in Jane Austen and more recent upholder in Meredith. We had to pass through stages far from real life before we reached the time of direct dealing with life, of real criticism of life. Take such men as Wells and Galsworthy—and maybe Arnold Bennett;—are they not trying to see life through and through? I do not believe in the realism that merely depicts for the picture. Realism of the kind I mean not only depicts, but interprets as well.”
“How about Fielding, your favorite?” asked Mr. Moses.
“Oh, he had his faults, but they were honest ones.” Mr. Moses remarked Miss Glasgow’s enthusiasm as she talked. “He was the first to teach us that life—and ordinary life, too—has poetry in it. There are some of our writers with a social conscience who use narrative as a mere vehicle for philosophy. It is always well to have a big central idea to hold the building together, but realism—though some novelists would separate it—cannot be practiced apart from vision. The novelist must have a perspective in life.
“When I first began writing I steeped myself in economics, in sociology—and later in German mysticism. But one learns only that he may unlearn, if necessary. In doing Virginia I was obliged to revisit certain localities to refresh my memory of things. But I could not write of them immediately; the impressions had to filter through my imagination.
“A man who writes for his age seldom writes for any other. And that is why I do not believe in being consciously local. Mr. Howells, as our greatest realist, made us see the poetry of the life he knew best. While I’ve never consciously been influenced by any school, I have felt what he has done for the novel. At one time I knew my Balzac, my Flaubert, my Guy de Maupassant, by heart. And of course I read the Russians, who, I think, are the greatest of all novelists. But as far as I am aware, I have worked my own method out for myself.”
Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow all of this complexity.”
Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed in definite phrases. Take, for example, the titles of two of her books, The Wheel of Life (1906) and The Ancient Law (1908). They merely repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively, in her earlier novel, The Deliverance.
For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with the life of Virginia in her later books.
Virginia, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy—provided Miss Glasgow writes the third! Life and Gabriella was the second book of the uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex.
“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life. Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness.
“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point where one may mold his destiny. One must use the circumstances of life rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be the captain of her own soul.
“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to whether Life and Gabriella was intended to express the modern revolt of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried, or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain single.
“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform. Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and the one in Maine are—just men.
“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if their happiness is to last through the years.
“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the South has been attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began Virginia I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of human lives to changing conditions.
“In Virginia I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling. Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then dominated her.
“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active.
“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and success.”
“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out of her—that is, what you want concerning her own work. On literature generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point.
“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.”
Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy. I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.
“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life just what he puts into it—or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’”
We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, or was, living with the character which will become the central figure in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between Virginia and Life and Gabriella. I have no idea when the next will be finished. I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, that is impossible. You change so much in ten years—all would be different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose that is true.”
Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading The Deliverance these fourteen years after its first publication, your admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast—all these blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not in the least surprised at the finding.
Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after reading Virginia. It is worth quoting in full:
“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to give her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’
“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point.
“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble, but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one, she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so witty, but fully as wise.
“You have only to read Virginia to convince yourself.
“‘Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it.’
“‘Having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’
“‘To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry.’
“‘If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of it were heroic.’
“‘From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her anything she had set her heart upon—not even the privilege of working herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’
“‘You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way men are about Abby.’
“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her religious convictions?’
“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’
“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’
“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from her pen in every paragraph.”
In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since there has been an American literature—we have thought it best to put her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him; she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for yourself—the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close of a chapter in The Deliverance—after all, is not this wonderful story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake, the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate, has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher, grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it. He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro overseer dwells at Blake Hall!
“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him—a Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before him—bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted—the beauty dwelt upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was—a man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the moment of fulfillment.
“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him—that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon—it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone—the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand—he saw that now in his first moment of awakening—a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.
“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.”
Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s real material, the human soul. The Deliverance is a story of revenge with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken and sipping her port, blind—blind—successfully deceived, successfully kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”
A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be anything but proud.
Books by Ellen Glasgow
The Descendant, 1897.
Phases of an Inferior Planet, 1898.
The Voice of the People, 1900.
The Freeman and Other Poems, 1902.
The Battleground, 1902.
The Deliverance, 1904.
The Wheel of Life, 1906.
The Ancient Law, 1908.
The Romance of a Plain Man, 1909.
The Miller of Old Church, 1911.
Virginia, 1913.
Life and Gabriella, 1916.
The Builders, 1919.
One Man in His Time, 1922.
Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers, New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
CHAPTER IV
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
GERTRUDE ATHERTON has been the subject of more controversy than any other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries.
A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and Henry James. Pick up her novel Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman says that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire. She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing daunts her that is alive—vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in essentials right when he said of her in the New York Evening Post of June 15, 1918:
“Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons, the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common, unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on the drab or the colorless.
“An Alexander Hamilton or a Rezanov seems to be made to her hand, and if she cannot find what she wants in history or in fact, she prefers to dream of a woman genius, the young German countess, Gisela Niebuhr, a Brunnhilde who leads her sisters to revolt against Prussianism and all that makes Germany hideous to the world to-day.
“To understand genius, it has been said, is to approach it, and Mrs. Atherton beyond any doubt understands genius. She understands its trials, temptations, vagaries and accomplishments. She knows that the fires which feed it are certain to break out in many ways aside from its recognized work. Did Mrs. Atherton take the trouble to acknowledge the existence of Mrs. Grundy, it would be only that she might destroy that unpopular lady.
“‘Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience with dullness. She could no more have written Pollyanna than she could have written the Book of Job. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her field of research.”
Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to The Conqueror, he develops his idea:
“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a genius, and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs. Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton because he fought her idol, and how much she despises Jefferson! But Washington—even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son....
“Critics have sometimes charged Mrs. Atherton with the grave misdemeanor of writing like herself, not like somebody else; of not being Mrs. Wharton, of not being Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson. The charge is just. She is not any of those persons, nor in the least like them. She does not write for a handful of other writers, nor does she waste much time in polishing sentences. She writes for the public.... You cannot read five pages of her fiction without feeling certain that their author has lived life, not merely dreamed it.”
This is the most illuminating comment on Mrs. Atherton that has so far seen the light of day, and we shall not attempt more than to supply a footnote or two. Mr. Forman says that Mrs. Atherton writes for the public and not for writers. True, but is it the public which reads Gene Stratton-Porter or Pollyanna? Decidedly not. Her public—a very large one—consists of those who do not ask or desire that fiction shall interpret them to themselves or shape their lives for them, consciously or otherwise. It is made up of the thousands who are capable of some degree of purely æsthetic enjoyment in literature. For the pure æsthetes Mrs. Wharton et al. For the unæsthetic and ethical the two Mrs. Porters. For the great hosts who appreciate literary art and story-telling skill but who won’t sacrifice everything for them, who demand a real narrative, color, action, suspense and seek no moral end in the tale to justify the tale’s existence—for them Mrs. Atherton. And they—these people of her vast audience—are the great middle ground. They represent in their attitude toward fiction the healthiest note of all.
The “literary” or highbrow attitude toward Mrs. Atherton is perfectly conveyed in an article upon her by Mr. H. W. Boynton, also published in the New York Evening Post but over two years earlier, on February 26, 1916. We extract a few illustrative sentences:
“I may say frankly that I write of Mrs. Atherton not out of a special admiration for her work,” begins Mr. Boynton, in a highly self-revelatory manner, “but because for any surveyor of modern American fiction she is so evidently a figure in some measure ‘to be reckoned with.’... Her publicity may be said to have been extraordinary in proportion to her achievement.... The person who is examining her work as literature can find nothing to the purpose here (Mrs. Balfame).”
How comfortable to feel like that! Mrs. Atherton, with an amused smile, would probably say, at the intimation that there was no “literature” in Mrs. Balfame, and perhaps other of her books: “But life is so much more than literature!” When Mr. Boynton charges her with leaving life out of her books Mrs. Atherton will be seriously exercised.
Gertrude Atherton is a great grandniece of Benjamin Franklin. She was born in 1857 in San Francisco, the daughter of Thomas L. Horn. She was educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, California, and at Sayre Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. At an early age she was married to George H. Bowen Atherton, a Californian who declined to travel and who died when he finally was lured to Chile as a guest on a warship. Mrs. Atherton describes her marriage as “one of the most important incidents of my school life.”
She had always wanted to go round about the world and when she wasn’t able to do so she amused herself by writing complete travel books, taking her characters through all parts of Europe. She knew enough geography to make her stories truthful.
“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview appearing in Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, on March 31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real life and re-create their destinies for them and—well, my books are the result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.”
This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, The Avalanche, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. The Avalanche is a tale of California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive with war work—she returned from the European battlefronts to be the American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the wounded”—rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen chapters, she split the last in two.
“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks—which shows what one can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but an incident in the climax.
“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.
“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all its own.”
Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, writing in Books and Authors for September, 1917, said:
“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers in a very crush of notables—authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats, publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along with men and women who are prominent abroad.”
It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de Staëls she is among them!
The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was Senator North, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,” was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her.
Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of information concerning the place and its history. As a result vividness is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad, incongruous, surprising, touching.
“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training—which stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of statement to drive her point home.
Even Mr. Boynton allows that Perch of the Devil contains some of Mrs. Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The character of Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth, study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.”
“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs. Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In the various stages of her development, moreover—beginning when she was the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress—I found myself meeting all American women in one. The West to-day—particularly the Northwest—embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement. They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both sophisticated and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her qualities—good and bad—grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change, even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and amusing myself speculating upon her past.”
In the long list of Mrs. Atherton’s books with which this chapter concludes it would be desirable, but it is hardly possible, to follow the example of guidebooks and star and doublestar her more important novels. It is impracticable because any such designations would have to be those of a single taste or of a coterie of tastes. Patience Sparhawk, the dramatized biography of Alexander Hamilton called The Conqueror, and possibly her recent novel of a German revolution, or the revolt of the German women under the leadership of Gisela Niebuhr, would be marked with the double star; certainly The Conqueror would. The present writer would singlestar Senator North and the novels of early California—The Doomswoman, Rezanov, The Splendid Idle Forties and The Californians. Of The Living Present we must speak to call attention to the final paper in the book’s second part, a tribute to four New York women, of whom one is Honoré Willsie, the subject of a later chapter in this book. The Living Present is not a novel. The first half is concerned with French women in war time, the fruit of Mrs. Atherton’s observations and experience in war work; the second half has the general title Feminism in Peace and War. Perch of the Devil must be doublestarred, so probably must Ancestors and Tower of Ivory. Such books as Rulers of Kings and The Travelling Thirds are least important. Mrs. Balfame, as a capital mystery story, the result doubtless of Mrs. Atherton’s attendance at a celebrated murder trial in the interests of a New York newspaper, must be single starred in any list. The Valiant Runaways, long out of print, has been republished this fall (1918). It is a story for boys, of Spanish California, with an encounter with a savage bear, a rescue from a dangerous river, capture by Indians and an escape on wild mustangs capped by a revolutionary battle! The performance may be considered a final reminder of Mrs. Atherton’s versatility. No one has ever found fault with her for not being versatile!
Books by Gertrude Atherton
A Whirl Asunder, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. Now out of print.
Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, 1897. Stokes.
His Fortunate Grace, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print.
American Wives and English Husbands, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
The Californians, 1898. Stokes.
A Daughter of the Vine, 1899. Lane.
The Valiant Runaways, 1899. Dodd, Mead.
Senator North, 1900. Lane.
The Aristocrats, 1901. Lane.
The Conqueror, 1902. Stokes.
The Splendid Idle Forties, 1902. Stokes.
A Few of Hamilton’s Letters, 1903. Stokes.
Rulers of Kings, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York.
The Bell in the Fog, 1905. Harper.
The Travelling Thirds, 1905. Harper.
Ancestors, 1907. Harper.
The Gorgeous Isle, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company. Not listed in their last catalogue.
Tower of Ivory, 1910. Stokes.
Julia France and Her Times, 1912. Stokes.
Perch of the Devil, 1914. Stokes.
California—An Intimate History, 1914. Harper.
Before the Gringo Came (Combining The Doomswoman, published in 1892, and Rezanov, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes.
Mrs. Balfame, 1916. Stokes.
The Living Present, 1917. Stokes.
The White Morning, 1918. Stokes.
The Avalanche, 1919. Stokes.
The Sisters-in-Law, 1921. Stokes.
Sleeping Fires, 1922. Stokes.
CHAPTER V
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
“I AM being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist.
“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot place in my boys’ hands.”
Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the American Magazine for October, 1917. It is almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not quite. Add this:
“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’”
Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only reticences.
She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in writing The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, the stories collected under the title Tish and the novel K. And then she became the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And then——
“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “It gave me a strong body, and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would have happened had the work come first. But I should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me and showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every particle of success that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded.
“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer (1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten years for them.”
She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. She began in 1905—she was twenty-nine that year—and worked at a “tiny” mahogany desk or upon a card table, “so low and so movable. It can sit by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with my two fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the youngsters were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.”
Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a short article telling how she had systematized the work of the household with two maids and a negro “buttons.” She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, “a heart-breaking day, going from publisher to publisher.” In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. “But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sent The Circular Staircase, my first novel. They published it and some eight other books of mine.”
In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made about $1,200. She was surrounded by “sane people who cried me down,” but who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her everlasting help. He “has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humor have kept me going, when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has shaken under my feet.” To the three boys their mother’s work has been a matter of course ever since they can remember. “I did not burst on them gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family regards his bank.”