Books by Corra Harris

A Circuit Rider’s Wife, 1910.
Eve’s Second Husband, 1911.
The Recording Angel, 1912.
In Search of a Husband, 1913.
The Co-Citizens, 1915.
A Circuit Rider’s Widow, 1916.
Making Her His Wife, 1918.
From Sunup to Sundown, 1919. (With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter.)
Happily Married, 1920.
My Son, 1921.
The Eyes of Love, 1922.

First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; last three by George H. Doran Company.

CHAPTER XIII

Mary Austin

Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist, Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges. Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study.

Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to return to the life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself seriously to writing.

Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have published work of hers.

All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood.

[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of paper.]

N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to tell. I have just looked, nothing more, when I was too sick to do anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it.

I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small, plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me.

Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell, they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner.

When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four horses.

For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine where the population is two-thirds Mexican and there gained the knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field work.

Now for my work—the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of in Jimville.—the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work, and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do, then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth. They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs? You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as they have done me.

This is the best I can do for you in this way,—but whatever you are minded to say of my work say this—that I have been writing only four or five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some years more.

. . . . . .

So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later Houghton Mifflin Company published The Land of Little Rain, a collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary Austin’s qualifications as a writer.

“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.

“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.”

The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a writer! And she has style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What else has she?

She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go deeper into the book, reading the accounts of The Pocket Hunter and Jimville: A Bret Harte Town. When you have finished you know Mrs. Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not know her performance.

It began right after the appearance of The Land of Little Rain with her next work, the novel Isidro, a romance dealing with the California of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with A Woman of Genius.

She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her new environment and she will tell you a story:

“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.

“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’

“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”

Ask her about her fine novel The Ford, a story of present day California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:

“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these things for the sequel to The Ford! It was I who discovered and made public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in the book.”

We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. Peattie, writing in the Boston Transcript, supplies just those externals that we need to round out our picture:

“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida Meacham Strobridge]—Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen months appeared twice in the Atlantic in sketches which could have been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. A Shepherd of the Sierras and The Little Coyote were the titles of these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order. It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has appeared chiefly in the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas.

“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well as remarkable individuality. Her paper on The Indian Arts read at one of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....

“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse, serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”

A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow. Herself, she is a desert species—but transplanted in time! She made her final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot maturity she would have given us her best—her all, her completion—at four inches.

She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The Atlantic which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same Atlantic which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s Van Cleve before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the Atlantic serialized Isidro. The North American Review, no less severely selective than the Atlantic,—the North American, which had printed serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary Austin’s The Man Jesus month by month. The Man Jesus is a biography such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: “Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”

If we say that The Man Jesus called for unusual knowledge and an unusual faculty, what shall we say of A Woman of Genius? Some readers were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is possessed of”—or by—a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.

And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.

“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.

“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’

“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....

“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’

“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’”

“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing—it was the first week in November—beginning to collect on the edges of the walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced them together there in the cold twilight.”

“‘I’m sorry, daughter’—she hesitated—‘I can’t help you. I don’t know.... I never knew myself.’”

We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother, Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of being a dutiful son. A Woman of Genius is the work of a woman of genius.

“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this—that I ... have not yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know.

Books by Mary Austin

Love and the Soul-Maker, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
The Green Bough. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
The Land of the Sun, Houghton Mifflin.
The Land of Little Rain, 1903. Houghton Mifflin.
The Basket Woman, 1904. Houghton Mifflin.
Isidro, 1905. Houghton Mifflin.
The Flock, 1906. Houghton Mifflin.
Santa Lucia, 1908. Harper & Brothers, New York.
Lost Borders, 1909. Houghton Mifflin.
The Arrow Maker, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
Christ in Italy, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
A Woman of Genius, 1912. Doubleday, Page.
The Lovely Lady, 1913. Doubleday, Page.
The Man Jesus, 1915. Houghton Mifflin.
The Ford, 1917. Houghton Mifflin.
The Young Woman Citizen, 1918. The Woman’s Press, New York.
The Trail Book, 1918. Houghton Mifflin.
26 Jayne Street, 1920. Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER XIV

MARY S. WATTS

“The dates are to be got out of Who’s Who, but to spare trouble I will give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio; went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since. Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to everybody, but the farm experience was sui generis, not exactly like anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild, uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the Ladies’ Home Journal have changed everything. Don’t think I am not serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and I had no companions of our own age; we were not allowed to associate with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all the characters in turn.

“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately in Nathan Burke. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man—at least I thought him old then—named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers. He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a rifle—a rifle, mind you!—at the utmost distance the weapon would carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’ he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when one orter do.’ I remember him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels, the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing, red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order, to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben, they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.

“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on, never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son, Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors, for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!

“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity. Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but we realize now that he was a writer—just that. And he was a great personality—just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out, but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification, that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean ‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean conversational, as conversation is carried on between persons in what I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper. It was in Barry Lyndon that this first struck me, I believe. Who showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating. Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony, repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing—also—better imagined than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements, getting drunk and creating scandal—that is a masterpiece of realism; and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on! Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc. It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it, willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious, middle-of-the-road policy; you see I might turn out to be a writer after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’—I have seen this phrase used in description of my writing—my emphasis of the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long.

“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing Nathan Burke, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And while at work on Van Cleve, a story in which the Spanish-American War makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also done—that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy—but I could have done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the atmosphere.

“The dates of publication are about as follows: The Tenants (McClure), 1908; Nathan Burke (Macmillan), 1910; The Legacy, 1911; Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family, published serially in the Atlantic Monthly, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; The Rise of Jennie Cushing, 1915; The Rudder, 1916; The Boardman Family, 1918; also a book called Three Short Plays, 1917.

“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest—whether in your judgment it is fit to make public or not—about the people who in printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author; he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do people accuse me of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create; it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for. What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method; whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse me of his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, I didn’t do it. They did it themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.

“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes for the forthcoming book, I am

“Sincerely yours,
“Mary S. Watts.”

Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages, he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know something about them if only that they may discount his statements at their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs. Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid merits of her work.

Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain passages and which affords the reader—and the writer—necessary relief. But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in every one of her stories.

She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know particularly well—do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him; if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you may; and yet you think you know him rather well! The truth is, you know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall. You’ve never done that—why should you? But you must do just that if you are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case, for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait.

Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice” of feminine perception, a quality which makes Pride and Prejudice immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled, constitute a merciless betrayal—the betrayal is merciless whether it is favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme, but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.

She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in Nathan Burke and Everett Boardman in The Boardman Family whom Gene Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she proceeds to show us what is made of them—not a pretty spectacle, to be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words in A Personal Record?

“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view—and in this view alone—never for despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair—the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind—that’s our affair!”

It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, from Nathan Burke to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in The Rudder, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.

“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’

“‘Um-huh. Well, I have seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.

“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.

“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get home.’”

A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.

“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr. Loring, my work has seldom had a—a token of appreciation that I—I value m-more—ahem—ho, ha—ahem, hem—!’”

Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in Nathan Burke, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness? There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of The Boardman Family, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She intends to become a professional dancer.

“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone, but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish. Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman, whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if He existed, He must surely be a gentleman—old Sarah Boardman got down on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young girl.

“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know, in a guarded voice.

“‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’”

A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs. Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s pride—reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it—would inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect it.

In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: Nathan Burke, then The Legacy, her next book after Nathan Burke; then The Rise of Jennie Cushing. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that Van Cleve, coming between The Legacy and Jennie Cushing, was published serially in the Atlantic Monthly and must have reached a great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in covers. The Rudder was less successful than any of the others, though it is too early to judge of the popularity of The Boardman Family, published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present writer is unable to fathom, The Rudder was criticised with a most unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful selection for recording, The Rudder leaves nothing to be desired. I should rate it with The Legacy while freely conceding that the developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in The Legacy, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and interest.

The close of The Legacy, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am I a good woman—a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly foreshadowed The Rise of Jennie Cushing, which, since its presentation in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs. Watts’s, not even excepting Nathan Burke. It is a pity that the film representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending—none can object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book ending, of The Rise of Jennie Cushing is neutral. It could not be otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize her love for Don and save her from herself.

The Rise of Jennie Cushing is the most dramatic, the most artistic, and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any question a really great novel and both in its conception and its execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of Nathan Burke, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in Nathan Burke. The popularity of The Legacy is partly attributable to the fact that it followed Nathan Burke. But the popularity of Jennie Cushing represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by Jennie Cushing and not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of The Legacy. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear enough from this fact: In the case of Nathan Burke and The Legacy the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off quickly. But Jennie Cushing was published in October, reprinted in November—and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power.

Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose only mistake was in keeping silent once too often—or was that a mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest price the world could exact from her—cool, courageous Jennie! And yet she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing? But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not; one hesitates to say that Jennie could not deny herself anything.

The Boardman Family suffers one serious defect. After writing with all her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager; and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery to be cleared up later.

Van Cleve is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next to Nathan Burke, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her Three Short Plays, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will say merely that An Ancient Dance is the most ingenious and dramatically effective. Civilization is splendid satire but inconclusive in its termination. The Wearin’ O’ The Green is a farce that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays are most agreeable reading.

Books by Mary S. Watts

The Tenants, 1908.
Nathan Burke, 1910.
The Legacy, 1911.
Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family, 1913.
The Rise of Jennie Cushing, 1914.
The Rudder, 1916.
Three Short Plays, 1917.
The Boardman Family, 1918.
From Father to Son, 1919.
The Noon Mark, 1920.
The House of Rimmon, 1922.

Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York.

CHAPTER XV

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of which we have not been perfectly aware—her stories are cordially welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint consciousness that once in some place among a few people they may have had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them—and that is all.

The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, The Copy-Cat, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book! The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty:

“Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life. Thereafter she went to school ‘dressed like the best,’ and her mother petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet.

“It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality.

“One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company, and tea was served.

“‘I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,’ Lily whispered to Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.

“‘Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.’”

This in the year of our Lord 1914! This in the year when blood began to flow as it has never flowed before; when free peoples everywhere awoke to the presence of Black Evil on earth; when big, generous America with all her faults was not exactly likely to be thrilled or touched or enlightened by the recital of how a plain little girl finally got up enough gumption to wear pink ribbons instead of blue. And yet we suppose the people who set such store by “literary” values thought this a “delightful little story”—“so true a picture of children”—“and wasn’t that a charming conceit of sleeping in each other’s beds!” But it is wretched stuff, really. At the end Mrs. Freeman simply tells you that after “that night” Amelia’s mother’s whole nature changed and the uninterestingly imitative little girl developed “a little stamp of individuality” and will you please swallow all this quickly on Mrs. Freeman’s mere say-so because she is tired of writing and the thing is already the right magazine length anyway. Bah!

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is an extremely modest person. She is of New England stock in both lines. Her ancestors were Puritan colonists. She was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, and received her education there and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. Ten years of her life were spent in Brattleboro, Vermont, but after the death of her parents she returned to Randolph where she made her home until her marriage on New Year’s Day, 1902, to Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. Since then Mrs. Freeman has lived in Metuchen.

Exactly when the intention to write first came to her, Mrs. Freeman does not remember. She always felt that she must work at something, but did not know what it was to be. Though she was fond of painting and sculpture, her chief interest as a girl was reading. Socially, her tastes were exceedingly catholic, and she was on the best of terms with all her neighbors, many of whom she found herself studying as characteristic New England types, thus unconsciously preparing herself for the moment when she was to become a writer. She likes “people who drop their g’s and use the double negative, as well as people who don’t.”

Success as a writer came to her instantly. She suffered none of the rebuffs and delays and discouragements usual to the young author. Her earliest work was done for children and took the form of short stories and poems in juvenile magazines. Her first grown-up story was The Old Lovers, sent to Harper’s Bazar. Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of that periodical, upon receiving this contribution, written in a cramped and unformed handwriting, evidently that of a child, determined upon a hasty reading, but was so struck in the opening paragraphs with the humor and the pathos of the story that she promptly sent Mrs. Freeman a check. In the same mail with the Bazar acceptance came a notification that her story, The Shadow Family, had captured the prize in a competition conducted by the Boston Sunday Budget. Both the checks seemed very large to the new writer. “My delight and astonishment knew no bounds.”

Mrs. Freeman is a rather small woman, singularly unaffected, cordial, frank. A friend once described her thus: “A little, frail-looking creature, with a splendid quantity of pale-brown hair, and dark-blue eyes with a direct look and a clear, frank expression—eyes that readily grow bright with fun.” Mrs. Freeman has plenty of humor, is quiet and whimsical, is fond of country ways, but confesses to fear of cows, caterpillars and all creeping things.

Her popularity has been sufficient to bring about the translation of a number of her books into various European languages.

Books by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

The Debtor.
The Fair Lavini.
A Humble Romance, 1887.
A New England Nun, 1891.
Young Lucretia, 1892.
Jane Field, 1892.
Giles Corey, 1893.
Pembroke, 1894.
Madelon, 1896.
Jerome—A Poor Man, 1897.
Silence, 1898.
Evelina’s Garden, 1899.
The Love of Parson Lord, 1900.
The Hearts of Highway, 1900.
The Portion of Labor, 1901.
Understudies, 1901.
Six Trees, 1903.
The Wind in the Rose Bush, 1903.
The Givers, 1904.
Doc Gordon, 1906.
By the Light of the Soul, 1907.
Shoulders of Atlas, 1908.
The Winning Lady, 1909.
The Green Door, 1910.
The Butterfly House, 1912.
Yates Pride, 1912.
The Copy-Cat and Other Stories, 1914.
The Jamesons.
People of Our Neighborhood.
Edgewater People, 1918.

Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; but The Butterfly House is published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.