WHY do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest—On Christmas Day in the Morning,On Christmas Day in the Evening, andThe Enlisting Wife, for instances—sell most rapidly. Not the size; perhaps it has something to do with the substance!
No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She is our emotional self—that part of self which is a common possession—touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her for affording it to us.
These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the people of repressed instincts thereis one instinct seldom repressed—the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know—the rest of us—full well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most people that does not change.
Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated is that in 1914—and several of her most successful books have appeared since—she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier stories; there are the readers of her work in theLadies’ Home Journaland other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening ripples;—no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!
She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her father was a Baptist clergyman, the author ofThe Baptism of FireandThe World Lighted. Grace was an only child. While she was still a young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the Thanksgiving number of theLadies’ Home Journal.
It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who accepted it without delay. The story was calledThe Flowing Shoe-Stringand described the reformation, through love, of a charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it very well! She found herself in rather notable company—Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving number.
Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she made her second appearance in theLadies’ Home Journal, in 1898, withA Silk-Lined Girl. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the table of contents.
This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898 Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to theJournal’sreaders the first of a series of tales about Juliet which became, in 1905, a book,The Indifference of Juliet. Juliet’s indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop withThe Indifference of Julietand so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to theJournal’sreaders were published between covers under the titleWith Juliet in England.
Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for whom she is most widely known and thanked—Redfield Pepper Burns, the generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet.Red Pepper Burnswas followed byMrs. Red PepperandRed Pepper’s Patients. But hold on—not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond had given us the story ofThe Second Violin. In 1908 cameAround the Corner in Gay Street, in 1909A Court of Inquiry; there were also the two Christmas booklets—On Christmas Day in the Morning(1908) andOn Christmas Day in the Evening(1910). BetweenRed Pepper BurnsandMrs. Red PepperappearedStrawberry Acresand ayear afterMrs. Red Pepperwas publishedThe Twenty-fourth of June.
But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs. Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.
Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter ofRed Pepper’s PatientsDr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner—they are all graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. Why quibble?
Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. FromThe Twenty-fourth of June:
“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost—I don’t know what they cost—I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’
“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I want to know I’ve got a towelin my hand, that I can whisk round me and slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....
“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again in there?’”
It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being entirely unforced.
In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset.Red Pepper Burnswas a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate little heart messages asThe Enlisting WifeandThe Whistling Motherare just as successful. Take the opening ofThe Enlisting Wife:
“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last paragraph of a letter from her young husband.
“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old boyish love of ease and snug corners—then—well—time will prove me, anyhow. Darling, can you guesshow you are with me, every waking moment—and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife—even though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married us—how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting comrade!—O Judith!’
“I don’t cry often—not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the tears—happy ones—and I kissed the dear words again and again before I tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how ‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”
Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived perfectly to set downnotthe things the Judith Wendells and Kirke Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond and more like her.
The Indifference of Juliet, 1905.With Juliet in England, 1907.Round the Corner in Gay Street, 1908.Red Pepper Burns, 1910.Strawberry Acres, 1911.Mrs. Red Pepper, 1913.The Second Violin, 1906.A Court of Inquiry, 1909.On Christmas Day in the Morning, 1908.On Christmas Day in the Evening, 1910.The Twenty-fourth of June, 1914.Under the Country Sky.Under the Christmas Stars.The Brown Study.Red Pepper’s Patients, 1917.The Whistling Mother, 1917.The Enlisting Wife, 1918.Brotherly House.Red and Black, 1919.Foursquare, 1922.
The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
SOME novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last is Willa Sibert Cather.
She has written four novels. You pick upAlexander’s Bridgeand read with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It is—excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon another book by the same author and start to read.
Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather better than a filled one).O Pioneers!is in its way an epic of the Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though intensely satisfied withO Pioneers!you never for a moment expect more of her—perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would be in any way reasonable.
A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker thanO Pioneers!asO Pioneers!was thicker thanAlexander’s Bridge. It is calledThe Song of the Lark. You eye it speculatively. You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again.
The Song of the Larkis a much bigger thing than her second novel in every respect except one—it has not the same peculiar quality of seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of America in the period of that life. But wait—think a moment. Does not this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the fight—what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever lived?
From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable wonder of the woman who could—and did—write them. But here no wonder lies. At least, you may read the externalrecord of Willa Sibert Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.
“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone, Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations. When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.
“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements, talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a writer than any that came afterward.
“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the PittsburghLeader. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the English department in the Allegheny High School.
“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her first book of verse,April Twilights, and her first book of short stories,The Troll Garden. The latter book attracted a good deal of attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906, Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff ofMcClure’s Magazine. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was managing editor ofMcClure’s Magazine, and during these four years did no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel,Alexander’s Bridge, and a novelette,The Bohemian Girl, both of which appeared serially inMcClure’s Magazine. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of the Pueblo Indians.
“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West. This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.”
Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to frame a hypothesis to account forMiss Cather’s astonishingly rapid progress as a novelist. The material forO Pioneers!andThe Song of the Lark, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters ofThe Song of the Larkwhich relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if we can find a clew to it there.
“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than they said—as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again—no other adventure ever carries one quite so far.”
Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and emotional feeling—of heart and mind—which carried the girlbeyondthe spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of any or all of these things? Of course you do!
Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward.
“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,” she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people for whom I had a personal feeling.
“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way; you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new, don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it or leave it.’
“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I dedicatedO Pioneers!to her because I had talked over some of the characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word of mouth.”
Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically say that she had to depart fromactual persons when she came to do her good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled over it let us supplement what she says.
There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or, if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time has passed and we are calmer; until we canrecallin a warm, remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash.
Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, isthe experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have undergone it before her.
In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not die in the middle of the creative task.
We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.
“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’”
Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose.
Let us consider her four books.
Alexander’s Bridgemight have been written by Edith Wharton. It has only one fault, a certaincloudiness characteristic of finely-written stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says:
“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this jargon!].
“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his ideals do not.
“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.”
There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner action of the novel. And the onlyfault with the novel, we repeat, is that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley Alexander.
O Pioneers!is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add, of a very original gift—talent—genius; the degree of her endowment is not precisely determinable even yet. InO Pioneers!it is a woman who dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother, distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as she would survive anything that life could do to her.
The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character which marks the true novelist, theresolute putting through of what these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about. That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’sO Pioneers!doesn’t try to.
The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic, that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the satisfaction of the reader is complete.
The Song of the Larkgains overO Pioneers!in the first place by its sheer bulk.O Pioneers!was a series of scenes in a single but changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But asThe Song of the Larkis entirely centered about the development of a single person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail; more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out what—what—it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least mite of information. We must have everything about her from her girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend.
My Antoniais a book to be put alongsideO Pioneers!It is less epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy, horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is variously touched and amused—and always the book is engrossing. Such a book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses fiction.
There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been said already. If this chapter hasbeen too venturesome in its inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.
April Twilights, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston.The Troll Garden, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.Alexander’s Bridge, 1912.O Pioneers!1913.The Song of the Lark, 1915.My Antonia, 1918.Youth and the Bright Medusa, 1920.One of Ours, 1922.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
TO write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight, fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has said of her book,Jewel:
“I likeJewelbest. I think she is my high water mark. It is a Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of secondLittle Lord Fauntleroy, and besides, it wouldn’t beJewel.”
Which may be so but which does not hold true ofThe Right Princess. There the identification ofFrances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative. Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and worth the reader’s while asThe Opened Shutters, from which the terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent.
The point we would make, then, the point that ought, in sheer honesty, to be made at the very outset of any consideration of Mrs. Burnham’s work, is her genuine and incontestable achievement as a straight-way, out-and-out, talented story-teller, a pure and simple fictioneer, an experienced and popular American novelist. That some of her novels have probably done more to put Christian Science precepts before the world in what the Scientist believes to be the true light than anything ever written other than the church’s texts—that this is so may be granted. But it is not a fact we have to concern ourselves with here. We concede it and pass on. We pass on in either direction, going back to the fourteen books which precededThe Right Princessor forward to the eight novels which have appeared sinceThe Leaven of Love. They are the bulk of Mrs. Burnham’s work. And yet—it is to be feared we shall have to bestow most of our attention upon the six books between! They represent Mrs. Burnham’s widest popularity and what is possibly her best work judged strictly in literary aspects. But enough of this for the present; it is time enough to cross bridges when we come to them. Let us first get a glimpse of Mrs. Burnham herself.
A tall woman, spare in build, with light hair, blue eyes and a merry manner, a conversationalist with anecdotes, a manner of great simplicity, serenity, calm pleasantness. She was the eldest daughter of George F. Root, as popular a songwriter as this country has produced. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she has lived most of her life in Chicago. She summers in Maine. Her education was in the public and in private schools in Chicago, and at the New Church School, Waltham, Massachusetts. Politically she is, or was, a Progressive; and at this point we cannot do better than to quote her own words in the ChicagoRecord-Heraldof November 24, 1912:
“People who see the large, sunshiny hotel room in which I work, whose bay windows command a wide expanse of lake, say that they no longer wonder at the good cheer of my stories. If I ever had the blues I should believe in the water cure. I have always believed in the ounce of prevention. Indeed, I try it all summer up in Maine.
“Bailey Island, my summer home, is only a small green hill in the superb sweep of the Atlantic. My cottage stands eighty feet above the sea, and there is nothing but water between me and Europe. It is great fun for a woman who usually lives at a hotel to keep house three months of the year.
“But Bailey Island is not an inspiring place. I never work in summer. My father always told me to let the water in the reservoir fill up then. Besides, a brick wall is all the view I want when I am at work. Even this dear Lake Michigan is almost too distracting at times.
“Lake Michigan explains why I have not followed the tide of successful writers to New York. I love Chicago, with all its soot and wind. I am naturally optimistic, and therefore expect that within the next decade the Illinois Central will be electrified. Then won’t this spot be a winter paradise?
“Nevertheless, it is tempting to use my island as a background for my stories. InThe Inner FlameI have gone back to it again. Besides, the Villa Chantecler is a real place—a henhouse cleared and renovated by an enthusiastic young artist and given that clever name. The Chantecler studio was too picturesque an incident not to become material.
“However, very little of my material is taken from real life. It is playing with fire to draw recognizable portraits of people; but I fancy nearly all authors are quite aware that they are making composite pictures of friends or acquaintances. For instance, the man who inspired the character of Philip Sidney, the hero ofThe Inner Flame, is a brother-in-law of John McCutcheon; while Edgar Fabian’s personality and mannerisms are copied faithfully from another one of my friends whose character is as different from Edgar’s as can be imagined. It is very seldom that any individual appeals to me as material, but when he or she does, I generally fall. Inasmuch as in all my books there is not one villain, I should not think they would mind.
“I have been asked whether I have a ‘method’ in writing. I have—necessarily. Genius has inspirations. It writes in the night, or walking in the field, and burns cords of cigarettes. Mere talent must bepersistent and industrious, and can often forego cigarettes.
“When I was a very young girl I read something Miss Mulock said apropos of writing which made a deep impression. It was this: ‘An author should go to his desk as regularly as a carpenter to his bench, and with as little thought of inspiration.’ I point to my twenty novels as a proof that I have heeded that direction; for if any one doubts the manual labor of book writing let him pick up any story and copy a chapter from it in long hand. I have averaged one novel a year, yet my maximum period of daily work is three morning hours.
“If a young person aspiring to print should ask me whether there is a definite way to begin, I should tell him to start by catching a big brother. Preferably his own, for any one else’s might be a hindrance. Mine is Frederick W. Root, ex-president of the Literary Club, Cliff Dweller, Little Roomer, and in many other respects an orthodox Chicagoan. He has been my mascot ever since the day when he started on the labor—and hard labor it was—of drawing a young sister away from the music which was her chief interest and starting her at story writing. You know I am one of the Roots. My father, George F. Root, was known chiefly by his war songs,Tramp, Tramp, TrampandThe Battle Cry of Freedomand so on, but every home in the land knows his simple, melodious songs, and I should like to feel that the vitality in my unpretentious stories is akin to the spontaneous harmony that flowed for fifty happy years from his clear mind.
“I suppose the reason I did not wish to write was that music satisfied me. My brother persisted against my indifference for a year. At last we were both exasperated. He shut me into a room with him one day, and opening a very business-like looking knife, declared with a fearful scowl that I should not leave that room alive unless I promised to try faithfully to write a story. I laughed a little and wept a little, and at last promised to show him that I couldn’t do it.
“Some one asked him once in my presence why he was so certain that I could write. He replied: ‘Oh, she has a picturesque way of telling things and isn’t too much hampered by the truth.’ I forgive him even such aspersions. He is an example of what ‘a heart at leisure from itself’ can do for another. I owe him everything; above all the blessed assurance which sometimes reaches me that my stories help others.
“It is wonderful that I met no obstacles in starting. With no conscious preparation I was like a ship ready to be launched. Fred pushed me off into deep water.
“I enjoy my work, but not quite in the carefree way I used to enjoy it. With each new book now I am conscious of some anxiety not to disappoint my large parish; not to go backward. Both in books and plays I believe the destructive is doomed. In this world there exists only one rose without a thorn. There are many larger, more alluring, more fragrant, but there is only one thornless rose; it is work that you love.”
Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not deter her. A poem sent toWide Awakewas her first accepted work.No Gentlemenwas her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her books, wasThe Right Princess, and when, after the usual hitches, it was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in 1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh, your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first—my very first—villain lives in that little play.”
To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known” as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but coveredwith grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to live there is related, with changes of names, in her novelDr. Latimer. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly inThe Opened Shutters, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last chapter ofThe Opened Shutters?
“She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by, and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia Lacey:
“‘You said Love would open the shutters, and it has.’”The incident is charged with a special significance in the story. It appears that when the real mill disappeared a coincidence was noted, the sort of thing that many persons prefer to think no coincidence at all. We quote from the PortlandEvening Expressof July 31, 1909:
“It seems that one day last summer Captain Morrill of the Harpswell Steamboat Company, who is not too fond of story reading, picked upThe Opened Shuttersto read. His wife in telling about it to Mrs. Burnham said that he read the story far into the night, not being willing to put it down till he had read the last word. The next day when he was sailing down thebay, his attention was suddenly directed to the old Tide Mill. He looked at it long and steadily. Could it be? Were his eyes deceiving him? Had he read so late and thought so deeply on the story that things did not look quite natural to him? He looked at the old mill again. Yes, it was sinking into the sea—and the shutters were wide open! The sun, too, was shining through. For years these old shutters had not let in a rift of light; but now they were aflood with it.”
Those who do not hug the supernatural are at liberty to suppose that the strain of settling and sinking unbarred and flung open the shutters. Of Captain Morrill it may be noted that his presence of mind and bravery several years earlier had saved the lives of Mrs. Burnham and other passengers in a collision between the steamboat Sebascodegan and a revenue cutter. But for himThe Opened Shutterswould never have been written.
The beginning of this capital story was not with the Tide Mill, however, but with the name Thinkright Johnson. Like certain persons whose appearance before Mrs. Burnham’s mind’s eye has compelled her to write about them, this New Englandish appellation gave birth to a book. Thinkright Johnson—Thinkright Johnson; the name haunted Mrs. Burnham for days and weeks, “till I knew that the only way I could have any peace was to write something about him.”
It was the same way with Jewel. She kept coming before her author. “She is the exact type of one of my little nieces, in character, looks, and even to thethings that she says. In some way I felt compelled to write about her.”
On the other hand the story ofThe Right Princesscame to Mrs. Burnham one evening when she was all dressed for the theater. “As I stood in my room, all ready to go, it began to come to me. I drew off one of my gloves and sat down to my desk just to jot down a few of the ideas; but the whole thing grew so rapidly in my mind that I did not realize anything in the world about me again, till I found myself removing one of my shoes many hours later.
“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But, ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me. Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print, coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot.
“My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to me.
“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to take it out.”
Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also.
It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists ofThe Right Princess(1902),Jewel(1903) andThe Leaven of Love(1908).The Opened Shutters(1906) is free from the special terminology of the Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey.
Heart’s Haven(1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told and very happily worked out.
Though withThe Leaven of LoveMrs. Burnham has given over writing Christian Science novels the underlying ideas of her work, which were there before she wroteThe Right Princess, which were there whenshe wroteDr. Latimer, remain unaltered and always expressed. These ideas are those of peaceful and happy existences, of the validity of mental experiences, of the influence of intellectual environment. Thus as lately as 1916, inInstead of the Thorn, she gives us the story of a Chicago girl brought up in luxury, whose father is ruined in circumstances that seem to her to involve his business associate. The fact that this young man is in love with the girl sets up the complication, or struggle, necessary to make a novel. The girl is finally persuaded to go to New England for rest, and Mrs. Burnham directs the reader’s attention less to the solution of certain external problems than to the way in which simple, quiet village life restores the heroine’s mental poise and happiness. As for the proof that Mrs. Burnham’s faith was antecedent to the first of her Christian Science novels what clearer evidence need be asked than Helen Ivison’s characterization of Dr. Latimer in the story,Dr. Latimer?
“The secret of his influence over people is only that absolute trust in God which he has learned somehow in life’s school. He puts self out of the way more than any one we ever knew, and so a power shines through him which is not of this world, and people, when they come near him, feel all that is morally best in them being drawn forward, and are conscious of crowding out of sight all that they would be ashamed to have come to his notice.”
Nothing better illustrates the quality of Mrs. Burnham’s humor—a humor that makes her stories palatable reading even where the reader disagrees violently with the ideas set forth—than the chapters inJewelwhere Jewel is suffering from what those about her agree to be fever and sore throat. Dr. Ballard has prepared medicine in a glass of water. Jewel is to take a couple of spoonfuls of the “water” to satisfy Mrs. Forbes. Instead she drinks heavily from an unmedicated pitcherful. By evening she is much better. Then does the doctor, who thinks he has tricked Jewel by persuading her to trick the housekeeper, learn that he has been fooled instead.
“‘Didn’t you drink any of the water?’ asked Dr. Ballard at last.
“‘Yes, out of the pitcher.’
“‘Why not out of the glass?’
“‘It didn’t look enough. I was so thirsty.’
“Mr. Evringham finally found voice.
“‘Jewel, why didn’t you obey the doctor?’ ...
“Jewel thought a minute.
“‘He said it wasn’t medicine, so what was the use?’ she asked.
“Mr. Evringham, seeming to find an answer to this difficult, bit the end of his mustache.”
Equally amusing, equally good as humor, is Jewel’s behavior with respect to the overshoes which she is ordered to wear. At first she wears them regardless. Then she is told to wear them only when it rains. A rainy day dawns. Grandfather Evringham comes downstairs in bad humor. “‘Beastly weather.’”Jewel inquires:
“‘But the flowers and trees want a drink, don’t they?’
“‘’M. I suppose so.’
“‘And the brook will be prettier than ever.’
“‘’M. See that you keep out of it.’
“‘Yes, I will, grandpa; and I thought the first thing this morning, I’ll wear my rubbers all day. I was so afraid I might forget I put them right on to make sure.’”
Recovering shortly Mr. Evringham observes:
“‘The house doesn’t leak anywhere. I think it will be safe for you to take them off until after breakfast.’”
Now this is excellent humorous writing and Mrs. Burnham’s novels are filled with it, even her Christian Science novels, perhaps those particularly; it is so good simply because she has most thoroughly assimilated her material before starting to write. How many writers more famous than she, more gifted, possibly, from a critical standpoint, would have made a sorry failure of such books asJewelandThe Right Princesswe don’t care to think. But you may see the disaster any day in the case of writers like Winston Churchill, engrossed by certain political and ethical ideals, and Ernest Poole, whose fine novelThe Harborfailed of the highest rank simply because he had not assimilated the sociological ideas which he wished to present through his characters. It is continually happening, this effort of the good artist to handle material he has not mastered; and as surely as he essays the task he leaves his place as a novelist to mount the pulpit of the preacher, the rostrum of the reformer, the soapbox of the agitator—and a fine story is spoiled beyond all salvaging.
But when Mrs. Burnham writes of ChristianScience beliefs, ideas and mental attitudes she is not writing primarily to lay those things before the reader. She is writing to tell a story. These are the elements of her story. From them she weaves her web of fancy but they are the colors and not the pattern.
In the depiction of character, notably the strongly accentuated characters of New England, Mrs. Burnham is unfailingly and admirably successful.The Opened Shutterslends itself from the start to the happy illustration of this faculty. Who more accurately observed and justly reported than Miss Lacey, Judge Trent and John Dunham? Miss Lacey meets the judge’s housekeeper, old Hannah, and exclaims:
“‘I just met Judge Trent, Hannah. Dear me, can’t you brush that hat of his a little? It looks for all the world like a black cat that has just caught sight of a mastiff.’”
Martha Lacey’s attitude toward Judge Trent is summed up in the refrain continually sounding at the back of her head:
“‘If I’d married him, he’”—would have done so and so or wouldn’t have done something else. No two ways about that! The consciousness of this stern and immutable fact is what makes Judge Trent’s life one long sensation of relief at having been refused.
“The judge softly closed the door behind her. ‘There, but for the grace of God,’ he murmured devoutly, ‘goes Mrs. Calvin Trent.’ Then he returned to his desk, put on his hat, and sat down at his work.”
Plots? There are hundreds of writers who can build twenty-story plots with express elevator serviceand private subway stations. There aren’t so many who can see people clearly and see them whole and set them down brightly on paper. Mrs. Burnham’s novels will be widely read and enjoyed for so long as she writes them and afterward for many a day.
The Quest Flower.Flutterfly.The Golden Dog.No Gentlemen, 1882.A Sane Lunatic, 1883.Dearly Bought, 1884.Next Door, 1885.Young Maids and Old, 1886.The Mistress of Beech Knoll, 1887.Miss Bagg’s Secretary, 1892.Dr. Latimer, 1893.Miss Archer Archer, 1894.Sweet Clover, a Romance of the White City, 1894The Wise Woman, 1895.A Great Love, 1898.A West Point Wooing and Other Stories, 1899.Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip, 1901.The Right Princess, 1902.Jewel: a Chapter in Her Life, 1903.Jewel’s Story Book, 1904.The Opened Shutters, 1906.The Leaven of Love, 1908.Clever Betsy, 1910.The Inner Flame, 1912.The Right Track, 1914.Instead of the Thorn, 1916.Heart’s Haven, 1918.
All of Mrs. Burnham’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
IT is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs. Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could conscientiously praise:
Name in full: Demetra Kenneth Brown.
Chief occupation or profession: Wife.
Residence & address: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York.
Place of birth: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora.
Date of birth: 1877.
Education, when and where received, in detail: First privately. Then at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne. One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as frivolous womenuse garments—throwing away when not becoming.
Date of marriage: 1904, April 21.
Military, political and civic record: No records whatever except of bad temper.
Director or trustee of the following educational or public institutions: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of bringing up my husband.
Politics: For the best man who is on the ticket.
Religious denomination: Orthodox Greek.
Professional associations, learned and technical societies, decorations, etc.: None.
Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if holder of any office, so state): Have not any money to spare.
Social clubs: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth.
Business or professional record: On the editorial staff of Greek newspaperAtlantisfor about six months in New York City. French teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903. Writer since 1904.
Office or position occupied by you: Wife.
Title of (first) book: First Secretary.
Year first published: 1907.
Publisher: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).
This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.
Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived inConstantinople for more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials. Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch, therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home, coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here, however, she was soon left to shift for herself.
Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff ofAtlantisshe found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of the French department of the school.
In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey. Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women, and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets. Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what shesaw and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book,Haremlik, which means “the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:
Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would write.
Haremlikwas her second book. It made a wide and deep impression. There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs. Brown’s later book,A Child of the Orient, which is the tale of the author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of theArabian Nightsfills the pages ofHaremlikandA Child of the Orient. The final chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.
Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is, though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love for Greece, her hopes for its future, are prettyclearly disclosed in the opening chapter ofHaremlik. And so when the European War had passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor, Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies—at least endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as those entered upon with Serbia.
Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had done she was able to write, purely as a reporter,In the Heart of German Intrigue, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to do.
Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her autobiographical books such asA Child of the OrientandHaremlikare, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has todo with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial offering,The First Secretary.The Duke’s Price, written with her husband;Finella in Fairyland,In the Shadow of Islam, andThe Grasp of the Sultan, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are all hers, as well asThe Heart of the Balkans. Of all theseThe Grasp of the Sultan, which received serial publication and sold well even before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.
The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five years.
This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little Prince Bayazet.
The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine control of suspense and with thrillafter thrill. The finest thing about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive “documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!