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From Across My Path: Memories of People I Have Known (1916)
La Salle Corbell Pickett
Sarah Orne Jewett pp. 143-8
MISS JEWETT was the faithful delineator of the life and character of old New England, as is Mary Wilkins Freeman of the New England of today. The daughter of the village doctor, the little Sarah Orne unconsciously absorbed the life of her environment as she drove with her father when he made his professional calls.
"The best of my education was received in my father's buggy and the places to which it carried me," she said. "The rest was mere schooling. With the wicked connivance of my father I used to run away from school and go the rounds with him; if we suffered a little from the pangs of our New England conscience we enjoyed enough from the delightful experience to make up for it. In the spring days the new opening beauties of the countryside fascinated me as I sat in my father's buggy and waited for him to finish his visit and go on to the next patient. The loveliness of sky and trees and flowers and soft carpet of grasses filled my soul with happiness. What dreams used to come to me up that long brown road leading off to fairy places in some entrancing Nowhere. When the professional call was long and the visions faded away I would go into the yard and play with the children who always brought me something new in childish character and point of view. When people sometimes remark upon the realistic personality of one of my book children I go back in thought to some moment of childish play and say," That did not take any work. It is just a child I knew once, lifted out of those days and feloniously transferred to my book. I ought to be arrested for kidnapping, because it was nothing else.'"
"If more people could kidnap to such good effect that crime would become the crowning virtue of the age," I replied.
"It would be a crime or a virtue easily achieved if the world had the advantages that were thrust upon me without my seeking. A dull little country village is just the place to find the real drama of life. In the roar of the city it is only the glaring virtues and the strident vices that become apparent. The delicate cadences are lost in the blare of the heavy tones."
"You learned to hear more of the cadences and see more of the shades of character than most people do."
"The village doctor comes nearer than anyone else to the true springs of village life, nearer even than the pastor of the one little church that points to the only way to heaven for all alike. The preacher, however great-hearted, comes with the mystifications of the spirit life that people like to hear about on Sunday mornings when they don their Sunday clothes and come together for their weekly sermon and chat in the churchyard after service is over. But the Doctor brings comfort and healing for the earth life, which they think they understand because there is no one to tell them there is anything to it except what they can see. I, being his other self, came next in intimacy, and the characters I met when the Doctor made his rounds became a part of my very life. "
"I always wondered why your people seemed like old friends to me."
"They were actual discoveries. In one house lived "Aunt Tempy ' and watching the quiet way in which she passed on the small blessings of life, the kindly smile, the gentle word, the helping hand, the gift from her own small store to some one who had even less, I was unconsciously evolving the ' Aunt Tempy ' whose passing would leave so wide and deep a void. In another poor little home was the self-abnegating milliner, longing for a wider opportunity to make some one else happy, and in a more imposing dwelling the rich lady of the little community, who would have enjoyed being liberal, had not some dead hand of her ancestors stretched out through the generations and held her back from the indulgence of generous impulses. So there were 'Aunt Tempy and her Watchers ' ready to hand."
"I know the glory of that kind of life. My first memories, even before I was able to ride alone, are of sitting in front of my father on horseback and riding through the countryside. And now work is all the more enjoyable, begun in such a beautiful way."
"I love the thought part of it and the weaving part, but the business phase is not so agreeable. I wonder if in the next life our thoughts will not grow like the wild flowers in the woodland and blossom and breathe fragrance and glow with color and light all unconnected with the book market."
In this era offuturist nightmares and cubist spasms the clear etchings traced by Sarah Orne Jewett are crowded out of the gallery of time, but we who knew her as a living presence like to go back and revel in the silvery light of her exquisitely drawn and delicately shaded word pictures of the quiet scenes in which she found the dramatic forces of life cast in the comedy and tragedy of everyday existence.
Edited by Terry Heller, Coe College.