The first two books were published by W. A. Wilde, Boston; the books about Miss Billy and Pollyanna by the Page Company, Boston; the last six books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
ONCE Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley, in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin for the occasion.”
“You have many children,” said the seer.
“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied.
“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones; they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?... I cannot understand. Isee them.”
They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how wonderfully right was her vision.
“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the faithful Emma Jane,—all these figures crowd about us, and claim their places as everybody’s children.”
It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write about her without emotion, thekind of emotion that it is good to feel. The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite? Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions, you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming—keep off this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour!
Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara. She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was called to directthe famous Silver Street kindergartens of San Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you are.
Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being. Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill,swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake. A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco, placid and turbulent, which runs throughTimothy’s QuestandRebeccaandRose o’ the River.
Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with, the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions, stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square dances on the threshing floor.
Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco, the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;—you have the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance ofThe Old Peabody Pew. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she has shared with you her feelings about life.
Do you remember the Penelope books? Do youremember! Somehow,Penelope’s Progress, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2, please:
“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she was seventeen, of givingher lovers similar advice, and up to this time no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”
Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether “b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”) was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:
“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”
Marm Lisais graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of Present Perfection? We have. On the wallwas “an ingenious pictorial representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform; blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.
The cat ’Zekiel inThe Old Peabody Pew:
“’Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma, and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.”
The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their seats side by side in the old family pew.
“(‘And consid’able close, too, though there was plenty o’ room!’)
“(‘And no one that I ever heard of so much as suspicioned that they had ever kept company!’)
“(‘And do you s’pose she knew Justin was expected back when she scrubbed his pew a-Friday?’)
“(‘And this explains the empty pulpit vases!’)
“(‘And I always said that Nancy would make a real handsome couple if she ever got anybody to couple with!’)”
The boastful old man, Turrible Wiley, inRose o’ the River:
“‘I remember once I was smokin’ my pipe when a jam broke under me. ’Twas a small jam, or what we call a small jam on the Kennebec,—only about three hundred thousand pine logs. The first thing I knowed, I was shootin’ back an’ forth in the b’ilin’ foam, hangin’ on t’ the end of a log like a spider. My hands was clasped round the log, and I never lost control o’ my pipe. They said I smoked right along, jest as cool an’ placid as a pond-lily.’
“‘Why’d you quit drivin’?’ inquired Ivory.
“‘My strength wa’n’t ekal to it,’ Mr. Wiley responded sadly. ‘I was all skin, bones, an’ nerve....
“‘I’ve tried all kinds o’ labor. Some of ’em don’t suit my liver, some disagrees with my stomach, and the rest of ’em has vibrations.’”
In January, 1911, over 2,000,000 copies of Mrs. Wiggin’s books had been sold; to-day the total is probably approaching 3,000,000. The most popular of her books isRebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which has been likened, in explanation of its popularity, toLittle Women. But no explanation is necessary. Rebecca is entirely, naturally human. Whether she is perplexing her aunts or telling Miss Dearborn thatshe can’t write about nature and slavery, having really nothing to say about either; whether she is making her report on the missionaries’ children “all born under Syrian skies,” or aweing Emma Jane with original ideas, or helping the Simpsons, with the aid of Mr. Aladdin, to acquire a wonderful lamp;—at all times, at every moment Rebecca Rowena Randall reminds us of the youngsters we have known, and perhaps, a little, of the youngsters we were once ourselves.
The triumph of naturalness, the perfect fidelity to the life of the child; these explainRebeccaandRebecca’ssuccess, signalized less in the selling of hundreds of thousands of copies, in the acting of the play made from the book for months and months and months, than in the joyous recognition with which Mrs. Wiggin’s heroine was greeted. Rebecca inditing the couplet:
“When Joy and Duty clashLet Duty go to smash”—
“When Joy and Duty clashLet Duty go to smash”—
“When Joy and Duty clashLet Duty go to smash”—
Rebecca playing on the tinkling old piano, “Wild roved an Indian girl, bright Alfarata,” Rebecca doing this, thinking that, saying the thing that needs to be said—generous, romantic, resourceful and brighter than her surroundings—is a person it does us all good to know. Copies of the book in libraries are read to shreds. The world, which can see through any sham, loves this story. The world is right. To learn, in the words of one of Conrad’s heroes, to live, to love and to put your trust in life is all that matters. Mrs. Wiggin shows us how.
The Birds’ Christmas Carol, 1886.The Story of Patsy, 1889.A Summer in a Canyon, 1889.Timothy’s Quest, 1890.The Story Hour, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.)Children’s Rights, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.)A Cathedral CourtshipandPenelope’s English Experiences, 1893.Polly Oliver’s Problem, 1893.The Village Watch-Tower, 1895.Froebel’s Gifts, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.)Froebel’s Occupations, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)Kindergarten Principles and Practice, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)Marm Lisa, 1896.Nine Love Songs, And A Carol, 1896. (Music by Mrs. Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.)Penelope’s Progress, 1898.Penelope’s Scottish Experiences, 1900.Penelope’s Irish Experiences, 1901.The Diary of a Goose Girl, 1902.Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1903.The Affair at the Inn, 1904. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)Rose o’ the River, 1905.New Chronicles of Rebecca, 1907.Finding a Home, 1907.The Flag Raising, 1907.The Old Peabody Pew, 1907.Susanna and Sue, 1909.Robinetta, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)Mother Carey’s Chickens, 1911.A Child’s Journey With Dickens, 1912.The Story of Waitstill Baxter, 1913.Penelope’s Postscripts, 1915.The Romance of a Christmas Card, 1916.Golden Numbers, 1917.The Posy Ring, 1917.Ladies in Waiting, 1919.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
“DIDN’T you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary Johnston’s novel,The Long Roll, “how everybody really belongs in a book?”
It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these twenty years, ever sincePrisoners of Hopeannounced to the world the advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for.
She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the ending of the first chapter ofTo Have and To Hold? A shipload of maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by has told Ralph Percyabout it and counseled him to go to town and get him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.
“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’
“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”
Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless self-torture of a murderer, is the ending ofLewis Rand. Rand has killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:
“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’
“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand]gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason——’
“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’
“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said he must have sleep.’”
The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages ofThe Long Roll:
“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the Speaker’s Chair.
“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair, in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.
“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always said was just this: “Press forward!”’He passed on.
“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.
“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’”
So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it is of the essence of drama thatthings go on. A play or a book which leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various events—bitter, happy, tragic and glorious—marking so many stages of an unending record. The last words ofThe Long Rollare worthy of the greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.
The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is one element of her genius—perhaps the most important. The second element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative imagination” is.
If you will turn to her bookThe Wanderersyou will find that it is a series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?
Well, we can’t tell youhowit is done, for if that could be told the manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such chapters as openThe Wanderers. All we can be certain of is this, that Miss Johnston was able to place herself inthe surroundings of a primitive woman of the treefolk—so much was the first imaginative step. And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his author.
All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense, she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest—an almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery ofpoignancy and the art of touching to tears—these are to be had for taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True, but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!
Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.
The Long Rollstarts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier, the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country. The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar.
The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand. MajorJohnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought home where, a year later, her mother died.
Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that shecankeep house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however.
Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel,Prisoners of Hope, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park.To Have and To Hold, appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain resort. The first draft waswritten with a lead pencil and revised with exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten.
Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father indubitably did a great deal to make possibleThe Long RollandCease Firing, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times. He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited.
In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large, airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begunto dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia, where she went to work uponThe Long RollandCease Firing, the rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were busied to portray.
Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt, springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland; Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through. Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent flame.
With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied there was at one time occupied by General Lee.Lewis Randwas written on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and “The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot! Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for itsowner, making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home.
There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone. Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland. Flowers execute the processional of the seasons.
Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is maintained without abatement.
In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of leaded glass about the room protect books of every description—history, philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism—a battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the wallsand mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the author.
Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in theBook News Monthlyof March, 1911.
“Prisoners of Hope,To Have and to HoldandAudreyare full of allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church, representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.
“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full flush of her loveliness.
“Lewis Randis of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond, where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand and her husband from their country residence near the State University, in Charlottesville.”
There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill inLewis Rand, was the mother of Fauquier Cary inThe Long Roll. The Churchills, the Carys and others should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks, Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.
It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication ofHagarin 1913 all her work had beenhistorical and had consisted, with the exception ofThe Goddess of Reason, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only departure from this being her first two books.Prisoners of Hope(1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663;To Have and To Hold(1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in 1621. Then cameAudrey(1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of Col. William Byrd andLewis Rand(1908) which pictured the Virginia of Jefferson.The Long Roll(1911) andCease Firing(1912) gave us the State during the Civil War. There was another romance,Sir Mortimer, betweenAudreyandLewis Rand, and beforeThe Goddess of Reason, which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in theBook News Monthlyof March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to becomeThe Goddess of Reasonwas to blame.The Goddess of Reasongave her dramatic genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give usThe Long RollandCease Firingwithin the next five years.
Although inThe Witch, her next novel afterHagar, our writer went back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness ofLewis Randand the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and joy of living.”The Fortunes of Garin(1915) was pure romance and adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl whom he rescued from peril years before. OfThe Wanderers(1917) we have already spoken.Foes(1918) is a story of boyhood friendship transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque story is superbly told in most poetic prose.
How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by two examples fromThe Long Roll. Illustrated, we say, notshownin the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the coward:
“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He was wedged between comrades—Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes—he could not fall out, drop behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized withpanic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharpzzzz-ip!zzzzzz-ip! Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two men were running—running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! before I’d be sech a fool——’ A shell came, and burst—burst between the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, and vomited.”
We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:
“First Brigade headquarters was a tree—an especially big tree-a little removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notionsabout his health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders—down came reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’ instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude, monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy ofthe sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said—in fact, they did say—that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little study you may see several things which go far to explain the effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.
For example:—
Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice again in the account of StonewallJackson’s funeral how the focus is narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is directed to a single point.
Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as he knows its tragic sorrow.
Glance again at the ending ofLewis Rand. It is quiet but in the unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he must have sleep.’”It is placed squarely upon you to construct the picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and lose himself from the secret terror.
Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling at all; purely reflex physical actionwas the most that was possible for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no consciousness that could be recognized as such.
The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is thestrict report of their verdict on him—“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
. . . . . .
It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copiesbeforethe publication ofThe Long Roll, when she had only some six books to her credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.
Prisoners of Hope, 1898.To Have and to Hold, 1900.Audrey, 1902.Sir Mortimer, 1904.The Goddess of Reason, 1907.Lewis Rand, 1908.The Long Roll, 1911.Cease Firing, 1912.Hagar, 1913.The Witch, 1914.The Fortunes of Garin, 1915.The Wanderers, 1917.Foes, 1918.Michael Forth, 1919.Sweet Rocket, 1920.Silver Cross, 1922.1492, 1922.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes, Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
THEY rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this place.
“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.
“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty, but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one seesupon women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from decency and thrift.
“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world. When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”
Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the same sentence. From the day when the first installment ofA Circuit Rider’s Wifeappeared in theSaturday Evening Postit was manifest that America had a new writer of distinction.
The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she shared with us andwe who had had a taste of that experience were able to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in the room where a child is being born.
Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable education—for a girl.
At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the material from which she was able later to constructA Circuit Rider’s Wife. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the AtlantaConstitution, published in theSunny South(owned by theConstitution) a story of hers calledDarwinkle’s Dream. It was a gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to “give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes; nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!
In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems accepted by theIndependentmagazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she became a contributor to theSaturday Evening Postand with the publication ofA Circuit Rider’s Wifereached her deserved place. Her husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.
Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it. From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the picture:
“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset. Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway—cozyapartments done all in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow contributors to theSaturday Evening Post.]
“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.
“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’ said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the blossoms; they look like butterflies.”
“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go together.’
“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’”
At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.
“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this paragon he said $100!”
We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her bookIn Search of a Husband, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows, music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”
Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter began:
“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:—‘He has never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of the Potential mood.”
This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s character drawing.
It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is—a man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”—that most distinguishes Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on eugenics.
“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art, literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce. This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.
“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:
“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of everything concerning sex. Of everything—destroy their curiosity, you know.’
“‘How will you do it?’ I asked.
“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the means we are employing.’
“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is nature’s method.’
“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our criminals.’
“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I doubt if it saves them.
“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical rating may be.”
WhenA Circuit Rider’s Widowwas published it was interpreted in some quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South; there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon reading her very direct statement:
“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central figure inA Circuit Rider’s Widow] as the preacher to come who will deliver thischurch from what is almost a military system of government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”
The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against Germany.
Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a criticism of life—which literature is sometimes held to be. In the valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her book,The Co-Citizens, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her intoThe Co-Citizensand although she lived in Cartersville, near “the valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the novel.
No better close for this chapter than its opening—Mrs. Harris’s own words! She is picturing her life—and quite as vividly herself—to Isma Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home:
“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself.
“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together.
“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb—John, who didn’t know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.
“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed—such a dingy little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots of the great trees.
“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead are from their transgressions.”