THE significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits “the road.”
The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known untilJoyce of the North Woodswent into reprint.
The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”—is 10,000 copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the best novels.
Joycewent into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, didJanet of the DunesandA Son of the Hills. In a little more than three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since thenThe Place Beyond the Windsand later books have been put out by the reprinters. Isthere any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We think not.
But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest—you have to dig things out of her about herself. But—is this the answer? Is there something else?
Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.
What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a literary idealist?
The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose us with the nauseous compounds of realismand they shudder at the thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us—mentally and emotionally, of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your limitations and you’ll be all right!”
That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people, instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple, fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of character are what count—withthem. She is right, they do.
Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”—this sums up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to writeThe Place Beyond the Windswhich presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face saddens and she tells you:
“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed the facts to the girl’s mother.
“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to me that I must write about it—must do my small part toward banishing the evil.”
Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature. It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it. Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would have done as she did.
She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:
“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent me a bottle of Benedictine!
“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified the congregation by shouting:
“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell—I am going to give it to my sister!’”
Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon, afterward relating her experience in theBook News Monthly; travel along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty, wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife, mother, home-maker, novelist—a Jill of many trades and successful at them all!”
She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large, beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single drawer. It contains his catnip.
The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair, wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even interrupted.”
Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs—the originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here she writesmost of each novel, subjected to endless interruptions—friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her publishers and her husband have the address—no one else. She is one of the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter—she writes it all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys.Janet of the Duneswas her first novel.
Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie; principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in their hands.”
Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:
“The first thing I see is the place and the people—the background and the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of mind, I sit down to it—not before. Other writers, I understand, usually see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me, the background, the environment of my characters, isall-important. Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my desk beside me.”
Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. Thus inJoyce of the North Woodsher St. Ange is a place in northern New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. InThe Vindication, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s novel.A Son of the Hillswas the fruit of a visit in the Virginia mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. InMam’selle Jo, Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love which is in her.
Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably on. She has something to do and is about doing it.
Janet of the Dunes, 1908.Joyce of the North Woods, 1911.A Son of the Hills, 1913.The Place Beyond the Winds, 1914.The Vindication, 1917.Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country, 1918.Unbroken Lines, 1919.The Shield of Silence, 1921.At the Crossroads, 1922.(Also many books for boys and girls.)
Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
NOTHING is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain subjects—immigration and Americanization, for example—that is no part of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do instead.
The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs. Willsie,The Forbidden Trail, an exciting story of theStill Jimcountry, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from the war as might appear at first glance. Readers ofStill Jimwill recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo dam and hiseffort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the German Government—in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs. Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.
Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background ofStill JimandLydia of the Pines. She is a Bachelor of Arts of the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation. The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning recognition as a writer. She says now:
“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in three years or in five years—that is what makes for success for a writer.
“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I wanted to write.
“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor ofMunsey’s Magazine] a little love story calledBeatrice and the Rose. So after a few weeks in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories Iwanted him to buy. He looked them over and shook his head.
“‘Do me something else likeBeatrice and the Roseand I’ll take it,’ he said.
“‘I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’
“‘But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets. There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts—Theodore Dreiser.’
“‘All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’
“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the Butterick Building—four times I walked around that bulky flatiron before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor of theDelineator, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The interview turned out to be a momentous one for me.
“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, editorial work at a good salary.
“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing only.
“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’
“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go on.
“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.
“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made $500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan and always kept my eye on the future—and had the courage to refuse that job.”
Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special articles for such periodicals asHarper’s WeeklyandCollier’son important subjects—immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor ofHarper’s Weekly, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”
Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel wasThe Heart of the Desert, which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in theBook News Monthlyof March, 1917, said:
“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. Willsie’s hero inThe Heart of the Desert—and his truly heroic wooing and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a setting.”
And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion,The Heart of the Desertis one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”
Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:
“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have reference occurred in a copy ofHarper’s Weekly, not so very long before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely for the proverbial chivalry—and homicides—of that portion of America which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word ‘symbolic’—Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head, like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems to be saying what Lydia says sofinally in her inspiring new book,Lydia of the Pines:
“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to come our children’s children will be found there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited America.’
“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book wasStill Jim. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful photographs—and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which thelife of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.
“Lydia of the Pines[we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words onThe Heart of the Desert] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme ofLydia of the Pinesis one of the noblest she could have chosen—the infamy of political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’
“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’—such is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and pathos.
“InLydia of the Pinesone sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”
With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares thatLydia of the Pines“is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss Hawthorne aboutLydia. He found it fearfully dull while fully conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader sees Levine in two relations only—to Lydia and to the Indians, and unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writerStill Jimseems by far the better book.
But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:
“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of government or of life, and now the Indian problem. InLydia of the Pinesthe shameful story of our treatment of the red man is illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The whole story is there, toldover and over again with endless, pitiful detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”
Gertrude Atherton says: “I thinkLydia of the Pinesis an American classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerningStill Jim:
“All the book is American to the roots—but big Jim is the American soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;—it’s the whole effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of work—an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”
The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus inStill Jima desert rock muses:
“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which it was created.”
“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other, which the coyote will not do.”
InLydia of the Pinesit is a pine tree which murmurs:
“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the stars.”
“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an end we cannot see.”
There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book,Benefits Forgot: A Study of Lincoln andMother Love. This is a brief but true story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story.
Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley:
“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in America just as it did in England. It’s”—hesitation and a twinkling eye—“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty, something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation.
“As I see it there are two things American women can do—one abstract and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more difficult.
“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the average woman would only stopto realize just how important it is to be a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals. American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the children—it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught religion and morals, or grammar and geography.
“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize what it means herself. How many do?
“I hope more women realize it than men—that is, than the men I’ve asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street construction, I asked American men in every walk in life—and what do you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who knew how to get rich quick!
“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American, you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built.
“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he has a sense of freedomand equality, and then he arrives at a feeling of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is particularly evident now.
“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be Americans before they attempt to teach their children—or some one else’s children—what it means. I wish that we might have an American litany—a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our children! I wish that every American child might be brought to understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our Declaration of Independence—a state of mind compounded of utter bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.’
“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also the more important.
“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to have a variety of universal service for women—at least a mobilization of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting it in England, but American women will have to show,as English women have done, that they are worthy of the vote.
“And there is one thing American women must not forget—that the most important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to the future—to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times, women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which our fathers built the nation.”
Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the managing editor of theDelineator, Mrs. Willsie is still and essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent. Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.” To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will always yield gratefully and with pleasure.
The Heart of the Desert, 1913.Still Jim, 1915.Lydia of the Pines, 1917.Benefits Forgot, 1917.The Forbidden Trail, 1919.The Enchanted Canyon, 1921.Judith of the Godless Valley, 1922.
Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.
HALF a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an American citizen in 1905 or thereabouts, the author ofLittle Lord Fauntleroy, most famous of children’s stories by a living writer. Mrs. Burnett is a novelist, as such books asThe ShuttleandT. Tembaronattest. She is thought of half or more than half the time as a writer of tales for youngsters, and rightly. Of these she has produced a great number and their success is amazing. No beating of drums, no blasts on trumpets, even toy trumpets: yet as the publishers assure you, in respect of even her less known “juveniles,” they keep on selling, year after year, with the most relentless endurance. They don’t have to be advertised. In the famous sentiment of a famous advertisement, they are advertised by their loving friends.
The best thing for the adult to do, after paying his tribute toFauntleroy, is to readThe Shuttle, “a novel of international marriage.” It represents Mrs. Burnett’s life. She alone of all the writers of our day could have written such a book, declares a friend whose desire to remain anonymous is here observed.He supplies a sketch of Mrs. Burnett which had better be reproduced verbatim:
“She is English of the English by birth and temperament; born in Manchester, as you know, where she lived until she was about thirteen. Then, her father having failed in business, owing to the war in America—his failure had something to do with the blockading of the Southern ports, I believe—and he having died, the business went to ruin, although Mrs. Burnett’s mother tried her gentle best to save it. There was a large family of them, and Frances, who had already developed the faculty of story-telling, was the life and spirit of the crowd.
“An older brother had gone to join an uncle in Tennessee, and when the family’s fortunes were at lowest ebb he advised them to join him in America, which they did, and lived in the greatest poverty on the outskirts of Knoxville. They were so poor that when some one suggested that Frances write out one of her stories and send it toGodey’s Lady’s Bookthe money for the stamps had to be earned by picking blackberries.
“The first story was accepted and all subsequent stories sent. Then Mrs. Burnett graduated toPeterson’s Magazine. The Petersons were great friends of Mrs. Burnett in her early days. They recommended that she send some of her stories to theCentury, which she did, but the quality of them was so English that theCenturyeditors suspected they were not original but copied by the little Tennessee girl from stories in English magazines. When her second story was sent to them, they gave expression to theirdoubt. The thing was explained to them, and the publication of the stories—I believe the first wasSurly Tim’s Troubles—was made immediately.
“Mrs. Burnett has always kept in touch with England and English life. As soon as she had made her success, in fact, just after the publication ofThat Lass o’ Lowrie’s, she went back to England, and has spent some part of nearly every year in England since then. She has lived in all sections of England and has had houses in London; one at 63 Portland Place, and another in Charles Street, Mayfair. She has had country homes in Norfolk, Kent and Surrey. For nearly fifteen years she leased a very interesting old house in Kent, Maytham Hall, really the manor house of a very ancient estate. The house stands in the most wonderful of Kentish gardens, which Mrs. Burnett, with her enthusiasm for gardening, made even more beautiful than they were when she took them.
“Maytham Hall was the homestead of an ancient family of Moneypenneys. On the corner of the Hall grounds stands an ancient Norman church—the church of the Hundred of Rolvenden which is mentioned in the Domesday Book. All the Moneypenneys are buried in this church, which, in its simple way, is of remarkable beauty. Their tombstones surround the great Hall pew, which is almost as big as a room, and has tables and chairs in it. The Hall grounds stand between two very picturesque villages, both appanages of the estate, one called Rolvenden Village and the other Rolvenden Street. They are as picturesque as they can be, full of the quaint old gaffers and gammers.
“As to the American side of Mrs. Burnett, she has lived over here in touch with the most characteristically and the most broadly American society in Washington and later in New York and its vicinity. As a young girl she saw a good deal of New York life and it was during that time, I imagine, that she got the impressions that produced the earlier part ofThe Shuttle. Her saying that she was ‘English by birth and American by the birth of her two sons’ I have always thought an amusing expression of her case. In describing Bettina to me, once, she said that Bettina was a woman’s version of the cleverness and sense of values that the first Reuben Vandenpoel expressed. This seems to me to be the underlying quality in Bettina. Her sense of the world of things backed by her balance, her self-control and her typical American practicality.”
Mrs. Burnett loathes New York for its noise and dirt. Though she no longer has Maytham Hall with its great terraced lawns and its rose gardens she has a big country place near Manhasset, Long Island, New York, called Plandome. It is within commuting distance of New York but oh, how different!
A comfortable, rambling house is surrounded by gardens for which Mrs. Burnett buys flowers as uncontrollably as a bibliophile buys books. The house faces northwest and has “remarkable glimpses of sunsets.” Mrs. Burnett naturally has many children as visitors. For them there is a great doll house, the home of Lady Annabelle, who is larger than many of the youngsters that call on her, and who has a wonderful wardrobe. The big house is full of nests ofchildren’s toys. It also contains much age-darkened furniture brought over from Maytham Hall, principally oak pieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which Mrs. Burnett has collected. Lady Annabelle’s residence, for example, was formerly a bread and cheese cupboard which an antiquarian would tell you was probably made by a skilled woodworker not later than the year 1500.
As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs. Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she read chapters ofThe Secret Gardenas they were finished. Now, she is a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for hours on end. Impressions which flowered inThe Secret Gardencame from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about 900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret ofThe Secret Garden? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose? Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story, plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere and endlessly instructive.”
She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly. It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that the moment an idea—a “concept” philosophically speaking—formulates itself in her mindit does so as some part of a story. Her pleasant persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them abstractly as we have just done in the case ofThe Secret Garden.
This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage—a kind of verbal money that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We“swap” experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is not one of them!
Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him: “John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs. Burnett’s easily comprehended way too.
When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in noisome New York—you can buy things there, after all, and editors and publishers there do congregate—and then she flees to Bermuda. But not until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In Bermuda she—gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is unpretentious but charming.
To revert for a moment toThe Shuttle, we may note something almost prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America, in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regrettedthe characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.” That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no abstract themes. She wrote:
“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.
“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation between two great countries such as the history of the world—as far as I know it—has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer to each other. That they are of the same blood—the mere fact that they speak the same tongue—makes the thing inevitable in the end.
“I do not meanThe Shuttleto be merely a story of international marriage, but to suggest a thousand other things. The international marriage must, however, result in being a strong factor, and in the hands of a writer of fiction it must play a prominent part—a leading part, so to speak—because it is the love story, and without it we are lost. For the matter of that, without it ‘the shouting and the tumult’ would die, ‘the captains and the kings depart.’
“Because I am English by birth and American by a sort of adoption, and because I have vibrated between the two continents for years, I have learned to be impersonal and unpartisan. I was neither American nor English when I told the story. I was merely an intensely interested person who had formed a habit of crossing the Atlantic twice a year.
“There have been disastrous international marriages and there have been successful ones; there is no reason why there should not be international marriages at once dignified and splendid—even history-making. Still, I wish I had had room to add toThe Shuttlepictures of the thousand other things I find absorbing.”
It is not possible to do more than make suggestions as to what books of Mrs. Burnett’s a reader should be sure to dip into. No two set of suggestions would be identical, in all likelihood, but grownups can acquire at least a respectable acquaintance with her work by readingThat Lass o’ Lowrie’s,A Fair Barbarian,Little Lord Fauntleroy,Sara Crewe,The Pretty Sister of José,In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim,The Shuttle,The Dawn of a To-Morrow,The Secret Garden,T. TembaronandEmily Fox-Seton. No selective list for children is worth making; give them any or all!
That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, 1877. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.Dolly, A Love Story, 1877.Kathleen, 1877. Hurst.Surly Tim and Other Stories, 1877. Scribner.Haworth’s, 1879. Scribner.Louisiana, 1880. Scribner.A Fair Barbarian, 1881. Scribner.Through One Administration, 1883. Scribner.Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886. Scribner.Editha’s Burglar.The Page Company, Boston.Sara Crewe, 1888. Scribner.Little Saint Elizabeth, 1889.Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress, 1896. Scribner.The Pretty Sister of José, 1896. Scribner.A Lady of Quality, 1896. Scribner.His Grace of Ormonde, 1897. Scribner.The Captain’s Youngest, 1898.In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim, 1899. Scribner.The Making of a Marchioness, 1901. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.Stokes.In the Closed Room, 1904. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.A Little Princess, 1905. Scribner.Jarl’s Daughter, 1906. Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Queen Silverbell, 1906. The Century Company, New York. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Racketty-Packetty House, 1906. Century. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Earlier Stories(Lindsay’s Luck, etc.), 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Giovanni and the Other: Children Who Have MadeStories, 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Emily Fox-Seton(CombiningThe Making of a MarchionessandThe Methods of Lady Walderhurst). Stokes.Lindsay’s Luck.Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Miss Crespigny.Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Piccino and Other Child Stories.Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Pretty Polly Pemberton.Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Quiet Life.Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Theo.Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).Vagabondia.Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).The Shuttle, 1907. Stokes.The Cozy Lion, 1907. Century.Good Wolf, 1908. Moffat, Yard & Company, New York.Spring Cleaning, 1908. Century.The Dawn of a To-Morrow, 1909. Scribner.The Secret Garden, 1909. Stokes.My Robin, 1912. Stokes.T. Tembaron, 1913. A. L. Burt Company, New York.Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday, 1914. Moffat, Yard.One I Knew The Best of All, 1915. Scribner.The Lost Prince, 1915. Burt.The Land of the Blue Flower, 1916. Moffat, Yard.The Little Hunchback Zia, 1916. Stokes.The Way to the House of Santa Claus, 1916. Harper & Brothers, New York.White People, 1917. Harper.The Head of the House of Coombe, 1922. Stokes.Robin, 1922. Stokes.
THERE are two actresses who are never interviewed—Alla Nazimova and Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the rule.
An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree, “charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public Service Commissions will regulate them....
Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary E. Waller, about the woman behindThe Wood-Carver of ’Lympus. For, in the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to publicity. She has never permitted her portrait to be published.” As for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it is.
We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her time with her mother in the Vermont hills.
That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period before Miss Waller’s success as an author.
In 1902 there was published in Boston a book calledLittle Citizens, a story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907) in theChristian Herald:
“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since Miss Alcott publishedLittle Women. The title of the book,A Daughter of the Rich, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is motherless, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers, who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and strength that wealth could not give her.
“I have it in my heart to wish that this book might have the vogue thatLittle Womenhad. The simple, beautiful story is worth a thousand sermons and treatises on the best way of rearing and training a family.”
TheChristian Heraldenters many homes and Margaret E. Sangster was read by many thousands. There is no way of measuring the direct and indirect influence of such praise as she uttered. It is very great. But this was in 1907. The year following the appearance ofA daughter of the Rich, Miss Waller’s third book,The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, came along.
Books have curious fates. Gene Stratton-Porter’sFrecklestook three years to find its audience. A fine novel by St. John G. Ervine,Changing Winds, was published, had the expected sale and died; remained dead for about a year and then suddenly began selling again! In the case of a textbook such a phenomenon can always be traced to some simple explanation. For example, W. J. Henderson wrote a condensed treatise calledElements of Navigationwhich sold desultorily for years, the sales slowly declining. Came the Great War. The United States undertook to create a merchant marine. Thousands of men had to be trained to navigate merchant ships. Mr. Henderson’s booksold like hot cakes, was reprinted; was revised and pretty well rewritten; sold faster than fiction!
In the case of a novel a “resurrection” is seldom quite explicable. It is matter for conjecture what “brought back”Changing Winds. NowThe Wood-Carver of ’Lympuswas not a book that rose from the dead, but a book that almost never lived; that is to say, it was six months before it achieved popular success. Once “alive” it has ever since remained so. Seven years after publication thetwenty-eighthedition was published. It is unnecessary to say more.
The catalogue of the American Library Association, a conscientious publication if ever there was one, describes this book concisely: “Scene in the Green Mountains. An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood finds interests in the outside world through a chance acquaintance and becomes a wood-carver of renown.” There you are; see what conscientiousness can accomplish! All the charm, all the wistfulness, all the magic of hope and aspiration, and the triumph of achievement, which make this novel the beloved tale it is—stripped away! “An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood....” The librarians are not to blame, either. It is their business to outline concisely.... Whereas fiction is no matter of outlines but, like life, a thing of coloring, perspective, the glint of an eye, the shadowed corner of a smiling mouth. Fiction cannot be done in black and white; those who, under the label of “realism,” essay the task, invariably fail.
But we were to enumerate what is known of Miss Waller. Well, in 1913, after she had been besieged for nine years for her picture, a visitor to Nantucket,whither the author had gone to live, did succeed in seeing her and talking with her. He did not get a photograph of her (in the fall of 1912 a photographer went expressly to Nantucket and lay long in wait for a snapshot, coming away without a single exposure). But at least the visitor did see and converse with Miss Waller. How came this miracle about?
There had never been a hospital on Nantucket, in spite of the shipwrecks and succorings of two centuries. Certain residents decided it was time one was built. A board of trustees was formed and a house purchased. Money for maintenance was needed. So they built an enormous thermometer on the main street, under overarching elms. When the visitor came to trail Miss Waller he found the temperature about $6,800, which included royalties from one of Miss Waller’s books.
The hospital cottage was not new—but very solid. The visitor reflected that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads. Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and glimpses of moorland—or what they’d call moorland in an English novel. Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about herwork. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond question, thereisa Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wroteHamlet; Mary E. Waller, not Clara Louise Burnham, wroteThe Wood-Carver of ’Lympus.
And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and sketchy.A Daughter of the Richis technically described as “for girls of 10 and upward.”Sanna of the Island Townis a series of pen pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island village—Nantucket is the original.Through the Gates of the Netherlandsis the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline method is!
Edwin Markham likedOur Benny, saying: “It is fluent and simple and full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next belowSnowboundandMyles Standish.” Caution!Our Bennyis a narrative poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on toFlamsted Quarries. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless children. Later we find them in a small Mainevillage, a quarry town. There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and women whole.
My Ragpickeris about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in Paris.A Cry in the Wildernesshas American and Canadian characters and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St. Lawrence—Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada.Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heartwas published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between herself and her visitor.From an Island Outpostis a meditative book—thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island outpost on Nantucket.Out of the Silencesis a return to Canada and a novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota. The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson, McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him. He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love, romance and success come to him—and death. For the war calls to his manhood and takes him to France.
An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned.A Year Out of Lifeis only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s impressions of German life—long before the war, of course, for it was published in 1909.
Little Citizens, 1902.A Daughter of the Rich, 1903.The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, 1904.Sanna of the Island Town, 1905.Through the Gates of the Netherlands, 1906.A Year Out of Life, 1909.Our Benny, 1909.Flamsted Quarries, 1910.My Ragpicker, 1911.A Cry in the Wilderness, 1912.Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart, 1913.From an Island Outpost, 1914.Out of the Silences, 1918.
Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.