Early Critical Notices of Sarah Orne
Jewett's Work
After 1909
A collection of notices and short essays that discuss
Jewett's contributions to American Literature.
Additions and suggestions welcome for this growing
collection.
1910
WHETHER Miss Jewett had opinions or not I do not know.
Her circle of admirers was too large for a Boston
drawing-room, and many of those who were most intimately
touched by her spirit knew her not in the flesh. In the
panorama of homely New England life that she unrolled with
deft fingers there was too much of the poignant, immediate
truth of fact to have place for social theory. Her world was
the world of art, not of dialectics. Her stories have a grave
sweetness of tone, a grace of delineation, a delicacy of tint
and outline, that lend the hard lives they depict a winning
charm. Yet they are at bottom studies in the Tragedy of the
Narrow Life. The tragedy is
lightened by the fact that the partition-walls of
circumstance that shut out so much are walls, not ceilings.
Above them is always a glimpse of the sky, and into each some
slender ray of sunlight falls think of "The Queen's Twin."
Most of the stories deal with lives of women. Miss
Jewett never fell into the blunder of making sex the ultimate
category. She never lost sight of the humanity that is larger
and deeper than sex. She held no brief for Woman as the
antagonist and critic of Man. Yet it is with peculiar
tenderness and insight that she draws the limitations that
attach to her own sex in the world of country life. Her
tenderness made her feel the pathos of such limitations to the
full; her insight forbade her to depict them as other than a
part of the general lot. Her remedy had she ever felt called
on to suggest one would have satisfied no suffragette. She
had pierced to a stratum too deep for such superficial
treatment.
I am not certain whether the Higher Education for
Women, to which we pin our faith to-day, seemed to her a final
solution of the problem. I am not sure that she had not before
her eyes that Highest Education of which she was so lovely an
exemplar,-- the education that can perhaps be found only in
the wise and perfectly ordered home. But she would have
admitted that the wise and perfectly ordered home was becoming
more and more an unrealized ideal, and that substitutes must
be found, and loyally accepted, for it. One of these
substitutes is the Woman's College.
The Woman's College has not yet addressed itself
frankly and wholeheartedly to its problem. The attempt to
ignore, instead of accepting and interpreting, sex has led it
too generally to simply duplicate for girls the training we
give our boys. But Simmons College has at least attempted to
recognize and act on the fact (as I conceive it to be) that
women will find their true field not in the region of
abstract thought and research, but in that of applied
knowledge. It is their gift a gift they have exercised
without technical training for centuries to make life
richer, more beautiful, more spiritual, by modifying its
texture as it comes day by day from the roaring loom of time.
I must not claim that this was Miss Jewett's ideal. I do not
know. But I do know that she was deeply interested in the
experiment that Simmons College is making; and I think that
she would have been pleased to see her name associated with a
scholarship that should in some degree diminish the number of
the Tragedies of the Narrow Life.
------------------------------------------
The Sarah Orne Jewett Scholarship Fund was raised and
given to the College during the present spring by Miss
Jewett's friends. The amount of this fund is three thousand
dollars, the interest of which is to be used annually for some
deserving student, preferably from the state of Maine, Miss
Jewett's native state. An additional one hundred and fourteen
dollars was included in the total amount subscribed, whereby
the scholarship may be made available at once.
From The North American Review 192:660 (November 1910),
pp. 719-20.
We have had three great New England story-writers. Mary
Wilkins Freeman has untutored genius, but never acquired
craftsmanship; Sarah Orne Jewett had exquisite craftsmanship
and lacked the force of genius; Alice Brown has genius and the
craftsman's skill combined. She creates atmosphere; a
rich, fragrant, flowering atmosphere of homely virtues, faith
and loyalty. Very tenderly she touches belated or miscarried
love-affairs, and especially has she a happy way of describing
"the loves that doubted, the loves that dissembled." If this
volume of "Country Neighbors," following closely on "Country
Roads," gives us perhaps a superfluity of the same thing, it
is not, after all, Miss Brown's fault that New England types
are monotonous.
1911
From Julian W. Abernethy, American Literature. New
York: Merrill, 1911, pp. 453-455.
A GROUP OF NEW ENGLAND WOMEN
Howells generously remarks, apropos of the short story,
that "the sketches and studies by the women seem faithfuller
and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion to
their number." The present activity of women in
literature is one of the most prominent facts of the age;
indeed it marks a historic epoch in the progress of
civilization. In imaginative literature women in America are
probably at the present time producing more work than men, and
of an average quality, possibly, quite as high in the scale of
literary merit. It is natural that in intellectual New England
the widest development of feminine genius should have
appeared. The common life and scenery of New England, the
home, childhood, the joys and sorrows of simple human hearts,
have been described by these women with remarkable fullness
and truth, with realistic force and idealistic purpose, and
with a pure regard for the relations of the virtues of
literature to the virtues of everyday life. The names of Mrs.
Stowe, Miss Alcott, Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Dorr, Mrs. Whitney,
Celia Thaxter, and many others have long been household words.
Few descriptions of nature are more genuine and
delightful than Celia Thaxter's "The Isles of Shoals."
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward gives us also sympathetic studies
of the sea that beats out its wild music for poets ears along
the rocky "north shore." She knows, too, the people in the
great factory towns, and at times her pen has been devoted
philanthropically to "causes." But she knows best and
describes best the heart and soul of the New England woman, in
her strongest moods and aspirations, as one sees in "The Story
of Avis" and other books in which the men are generally foils
for the women. She is impulsive, passionate, and intense in
her emotions, and her imagination is sometimes venturesome as
in "The Gates Ajar," which was a shock to the orthodox, a
comfort to many afflicted hearts, and a sensational literary
success. Sweet, tender, and graceful are the songs of Julia C.
R. Dorr in "Friar Anselmo," "Afternoon Songs," and other
volumes, to which are to be added several novels and books of
delightful travel sketches, such as "The Flower of England's
Face." With these authors is closely associated the novelist,
Sarah Orne Jewett, who with painstaking fidelity and in
beautiful prose suffused with quiet humor paints the life of
the good old-fashioned folk of her native section. We could
not well spare such books as "Deephaven," "A Marsh
Island," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs." Her books are
alive with the fragrance of the woods, the murmur of pines,
the lilt of the ebbing tide in the lush sea grass, and the
simple occupations of homely country folk. With this author
one gets very near to the simple heart of nature and of
natural people. Rose Terry Cooke achieved a notable success
with her short stories, presenting vividly the grimly humorous
aspects of New England character, as in "Miss Lucinda" and
"The Deacon's Week." A strong contrast to these bucolic
writers is found in the work of Harriet Prescott Spofford,
whose "Amber Gods," "Midsummer and May," and other short
stories display a luxuriant and romantic imagination "fairly
resplendent in color, rich in tone, and Oriental in perfume."
One of the strongest writers of this group is Margaret Deland,
who in "John Ward, Preacher" and "Sydney" grapples boldly with
profound problems without disturbing the balance of fine
literary values.
from Katharine Lee Bates, American
Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1911,
NATIONAL ERA: PROSE FICTION, pp.
135 and 318 319.
No
observer
of life lives in a golden age. We look back to "the
good old times" and forward to the millennium, but our own era
misses majesty. This last third of the century may yet win "a
glory from its being far," but it looks to-day like a season
of reaction from our crucial strife and of preparation for the
deeds to be. If literature tends at present to be a craft
rather than a calling, if our typical author is
"ne'er at leisure
To be himself, he has such tides of business,"
we can at least rejoice in the wide
diffusion and good average quality of the writing ability.
Academic treatises, especially on social questions, are
showered from the press. If the master-songs are missing,
tuneful voices answer one another from Appledore to the
wheatlands, and on to "white Sierra's verge." With Mary
Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett exploring the nooks and
corners of New England, with James Lane Allen interpreting the
life of Kentucky, and Thomas Nelson Page that of Virginia,
with Mary Murfree revealing the secrets of the Tennessee
mountains, with Hamlin Garland doing angry honor to the
western farmer's toil, with Mary Halleck Foote portraying that
wild mining life whose prose epic was begun by Bret Harte in The
Luck
of Roaring Camp, the length and breadth of the land
are finding speech. (135)
But our modern realism lends itself
especially to close local portraitures, as in the New England
stories most delicately done by SARAH O. JEWETT, most
vigorously by MARY WILKINS FREEMAN. It is of interest to trace
this New England line from HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, with her Old-Town
Folks,
The Minister's Wooing, and other well-remembered
novels, to the dialect stories of Alice Brown, the Cape Cod
studies of Joseph Lincoln, and note the narrowing and
intensifying of the realistic method. The down-East novels of
Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, poet wife of poet husband, strike,
for all their abrupt energy of passion, the unmistakable New
England seaport note. Even Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford,
naturally a dweller "in Titian's garden," she who flushed her
Amber Gods with such ardent color, tries to fall in
with the prevailing school. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD,
while she idealizes her characters, paints Fisherman Jack and
the "Christman" against the Gloucester background that she
knows so well. (318-319)
1912
From William E. Cairns, A History of American
Literature
New York: Oxford, 1912, 1916. P. 467.
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) began to write before 1883,
though most of her work was done later. She was a descendant
of old and cultured New England families, and was born at
South Berwick, Maine, where her father was a doctor with a
large country practice. As a member of a physician's family
Miss Jewett had an exceptional opportunity to know intimately
the lives of persons of all social grades. During her early
womanhood the summer boarder was beginning to frequent the
vicinity of South Berwick, and it was with a kindly hope of
interpreting her humbler neighbors to these visitors that she
began to write. Her first sketches were printed in the
"Atlantic Monthly." Deephaven, her first novel,
appeared in 1877, but is said to have been written earlier.
After the publication of Deephaven she continued to write
abundantly, producing a novel or a volume of short stories
almost every year. Most of her work portrays New England life,
and she is at her best in the representation of placid
existence in a manner that frequently invites comparisons with
Cranford. The Country of the Pointed Firs is
probably her best novel.
From William P. Trent and John
Erskine, Great American Writers. New York:
Holt, 1912, pp. 200 201
In February, 1851, she [Harriet Beecher
Stowe] began writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first
instalment of which appeared in the National Era,
June 5. In book form it was published in Boston, March 20,
1852, and its enormous and continuous sale began at once.
Mrs.
Stowe's
life from that time was eventful and full of
accomplishment, but the significance of it had been
conditioned by her previous experiences. She had inherited
missionary fervor, and had seen what it is to be oppressed,
and she devoted herself naturally to any cause of
enfranchisement that presented itself. Of the outward
details of her career it need only be recorded that she was
twice abroad; and on her first trip just after the
publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was welcomed
with remarkable honor in England and Scotland. In 1852 her
husband became professor in the Andover Theological
Seminary, and in 1863 the family removed from Andover to
Hartford, which was their final home. After the war Mrs.
Stowe bought a place at Mandarin, Florida, and interested
herself practically in the South. Her chief publications,
after Uncle Tom's Cabin, were Dred, 1856, The
Minister's
Wooing, 1858, The Pearl of Orr's Island,
1862, Agnes of Sorrento, 1863, Old Town Folks,
1869, Old Town Fireside Stories, 1871, My Wife
and I, 1872, We and Our Neighbors, 1875, Poganuc
People, 1878. Mrs. Stowe died at Hartford, July 1,
1896, and was buried at Andover beside her husband, who had
died ten years before.
Her
novels
are of two quite different kinds. Her reputation was
made by a novel with a purpose, and she followed her theme
in a second story; her early writing, however, and most of
her later books dealt with the New England of her girlhood.
If this second kind of story is less thought of now when her
name is mentioned, at least the literary historian knows
that in this field she was a pioneer. It is her picture of
New England, rather than Hawthorne's, which has been
imitated; it is with her that the work of Miss Sarah Orne
Jewett or Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman is associated. She
therefore has a double place in American literature, with a
masterpiece in one field and pioneer triumphs in another.
1914
Mark
Sullivan,
"Mark Sullivan's Selection is 'The Trawler.'" Colliers 54 (3
October 1914), p. 11.
THERE WAS never any doubt in my mind that "The
Trawler" was in a class by itself. It seems to me to
promise to be a definite and permanent contribution to
English literature. Fifty years from now if another Dr.
Eliot should make up another five-foot shelf I feel
confident he would include "The Trawler" as a picture of
life on the sea at the beginning of the twentieth century.
As a picture of the sea it deserves to stand alongside of
Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast," and the best of
Kingsley or Conrad. Indeed I think "The Trawler" ranks
with the writer whose stories of the sea in my judgment
excel even those of Kingsley and Dana, and are the best in
the English tongue; namely James Fenimore Cooper. It is
not merely "The Trawler's" excellence as a picture of life
on the sea that entitles it to a high standing. The author
shows a length of reach into the depths of human nature, a
sort of second sight about the springs of human emotion
and human action, which alone entitles him to a place in
literature. I am equally positive about "Saleratus Smith"
as second prize. This story, dealing with a revivalist, a
character who, I should guess, must be founded on Billy
Sunday, and a negro gambler, shows an accurate grasp of
primal and fundamental human emotions which puts it in a
group removed from most of the superficial short stories
of the day.
Practically all of the stories which are named as
prize winners have a relation, close or remote, to
permanent literature. I mean by this that only in a minor
way do they belong to the short-story form which is the
current vogue, and which forms the bulk of the
entertainment in the periodicals of the day. The only
story which conspicuously
belongs in this latter form is "Bridal Blush."
Because it has aimed for this form and because it achieves
its aim so excellently is the reason that entitled it, in my judgment, to
a prize.
Taken as a group, these prize winners form an
accurate picture of several widely separated phases of
American life. "Anent: A Biscuit Shooter," is a picture of
cowboy life; "The Hospital Ticket," of lumbermen in the
winter woods; "The Peacemaker of Tolley's Ledge," of
frontier life in California; "I'll Go the Reaper," of
farming life in the Middle West some years ago; "Colin
McCabe: Renegade," of reconstruction in the South; and
"The Trawler," of the sea. The reader of a future
generation who wants to know the lives of the people of
our time would do better to read this group of stories
than any formal history. Another impression that I got,
not only from the prize winners, but from the several
thousand manuscripts as a whole, was the number of authors
who are either natives of California or writing from
California. I think the person who would take the trouble
to look into it could readily demonstrate that California
is doing a good deal more than its share of the writing of
the contemporary periodicals. Another fact that impressed
me was the proportion of the stories which dealt with the
problem of two young people facing life and its problems
together. The number of stories of this type was very
large. Among them the one named as a possible prize winner
was "The Glory." There were more than a score of others
with the same general atmosphere and background and a
similar set of characters. From an editorial point of
view, I was sorry there was not more humor. Several
passable humorous stories were found, but not as many as
any editor would like to find. Humor is the most salable
commodity in the literary market. "The River" is one of
the stories that comes close to the form and spirit of
permanent literature. No one who is familiar with Thomas
Hardy's novels of rural life in England can fail to
reflect that "The River" has many of Mr. Hardy's best
characteristics. I, as well as Mr. Roosevelt, was very
much impressed by one story which did not come within the
ten prize winners, "Anne Laura Sweet." Mr. Roosevelt liked
it, but spoke of it as a little too suggestive of Mary E.
Wilkins. It is very suggestive of Miss Wilkins. If you
imagine some of Miss Wilkins's sturdy and simple
characters transferred from the New England hills to the
Kansas plains you will have the setting of this story.
Another merit of it is the simplicity with which it
is told. That the story should be suggestive of Mary E.
Wilkins is in my judgment a tribute to it, for if I were
to name the group of short-story writers who are to my
taste the greatest that American has had, I should
certainly include among them Mary E. Wilkins and Sarah
Orne Jewett. To take care of "Anne Laura Sweet" as well as
three other stories which were named by one or another of
the judges, but which did not come within the ten prize
winners, it was decided to add four prizes of $500 each in
the way of supplementary prizes.
From Edward Garnett, "Some Remarks
on American and English Fiction."
Atlantic Monthly 114
(December 1914) 748-9.
Let
us look back along the line some twenty years. From an
undated cutting from the London Speaker, which
must
belong to 1894, or 1895 at latest, I find that I
singled out Mr. Hamlin Garland, Miss Murfree, Miss Grace
King, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Miss Mary Wilkins, and Miss
Katharine Smith as the most gifted literary artists in the
younger rising school, Messrs. W. D. Howells's, Henry
James's, and George W. Cable's reputations having been of
course long solidly established.
By
some accident I did not come across Miss Sarah Orne
Jewett's incomparable short stories till several years
later, when I recommended an English publisher to import
an edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs. But
the failure of American criticism to recognize that, by
virtue of thirty little masterpieces in the short story,
Miss Jewett ranks with the leading European masters, and
its grudging, inadequate recognition of the most original
genius it has produced in story-telling, Mr. Stephen
Crane, showed me that it had not realized that real
talent, aesthetic or literary, is individual in its
structure, experience, outlook, and growth, and that it
makes its appeal and survives to posterity by reason of
its peculiar originality of tone and vision expressed in
beauty and force of form, of atmosphere, and of style.
Every
fresh native talent emerges by virtue of its
revelation of fresh aspects and original points of view,
which create fresh valuations in our comprehension of life
and human nature. Now this very simple test, which is
indeed self-evident, is the touchstone by which we
separate the genuine metal of imaginative art from the
sham or common alloy of the popular fabricated article. If
we apply it in the cases of Frank R. Stockton and Joel
Chandler Harris we perceive that the originality of those
delightful humorists entitles them to seats not far
removed from that of Mark Twain. Again, when Mr. Frank
Norris appeared, his McTeague was no literary
echo, or iteration or affirmation of current social ideas
or ideals, whatever may have been the precise measure of
his literary talent. The same may be said of Mr. Harold
Frederick's powerful novel Illumination. Later,
when Mr. Dreiser came in sight with his Sister Carrie,
the present writer had the honor of recommending it for
English publication, while that admirable piece of realism
was being cold-shouldered and boycotted for years by the
body of American publishers.
I
do not know whether the late O. Henry' s marvelous
powers of language, gayety, creative fecundity, and
imaginative power in handling a situation have yet
received their due in America, but the point I wish to
make clear is that between the writers above enumerated,
namely between Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Murfree, Miss
Mary Wilkins, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Wharton, Miss Anne
Douglas Sedgwick, Mr. Frank R. Stockton, Mr. J. C. Harris,
Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Stephen
Crane, Mr. Frank Norris, O. Henry,1 and such
clever popular favorites as Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss
Mary Johnston, Mr. Robert W. Chambers, Mr. Richard Harding
Davis, Mr. John Fox, Jr., Mr. Owen Johnson, it would be
waste of time to institute comparisons in respect of
artistic gifts and originality of temperament. The work of
the first class of writers, unequal as are their
achievement in point of individual genius, is of a grade
artistically far beyond the reach of the second class
enumerated.
In
saying that the work of the latter represented by the
six authors I have cited is obviously deficient in
'temperamental value,' I do not mean that these authors
are indistinguishable one from another, but that in tone,
in insight, in style, each is little more than a popular
sounding-board for the reverberation of current tones and
moods of the mass of minds. Take Mr. R. H. Davis's story,
The Man who could not Lose, Mr. R. W.
Chambers's The Business of Life, Mr. Owen
Johnson's The Salamander, and ask what measure of
creative originality informs them. None. None at all, or
next to none. These stories no doubt may amuse or interest
or instruct their audience, but the first is worthless,
the second mediocre, the third meretricious as an artistic
achievement. They are destined for the rubbish heap, if
indeed they have not been deposited there already. And the
works, all told, of Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss Mary
Johnston, and Mr. John Fox, Jr., despite the amazing
energy and industry of their authors, kick the beam when
weighed against a single little masterpiece by Miss Sarah
Orne Jewett or Stephen Crane. This of course is an obvious
truth to any critical intelligence, but I do not know how
far it is now accepted in America.
1 I omit Miss Katharine Smith and Mr. Dreiser,
for I am not aware whether their later work fulfilled the
promise respectively of The Cy-Barker Ledge and Sister
Carrie. The Author.
Katherine H. Schute, "The Story of a
Writer" in Play Day Stories by Sarah Orne
Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914, iii-xxvi
THE STORY OF A STORY WRITER
HOW OLD ARE YOU?
DID
it
ever occur to you boys and girls to say to a story,
"How old are you?" It is a sensible question to ask, for
stories have lives like people. Like people, they are
born, and live, and die. In the case of stories, it is
always a perfectly polite question, too.
Some
stories
live to be very old. Some of them, indeed, have
lived so long already that it seems as if they might last
as long as the world itself. Many of the stories that you
children love best are hundreds, and even thousands, of
years old. Such are the Bible stories of the child Samuel
in the Temple, and the shepherd boy David who slew the
great giant Goliath. Such are the lovely old fairy tales
of Cinderella, and of Beauty and the Beast. Such is the
myth of poor, foolish King Midas with his fatal touch of
gold, and of old Baucis and Philemon who -- in their
poverty -- entertained great gods, unawares. How I wish we
could know who first told some of these old tales! How I
wish we could see the boys and girls, the men and women,
who listened to them in those far-away days!
Many
stories
have very short lives. Five years, perhaps, after
they are first told or written, no one remembers them. Why
is it that some stories live to be old, while others die?
I think it must be because people love them, and listen to
them over and over again. What do you think?
The
stories
which are gathered together for you in this little
book were written for the boys and girls of nearly forty
years ago. Ever since, boys and girls have been hearing,
and reading, and enjoying them. You will not be surprised
at that when you become acquainted with Prissy and Sam,
Nelly and Joe, and the other girls and boys whom you will
meet in these pages. They are such pleasant companions
that they seem like one's own friends and are not soon
forgotten.
A YOUNG WRITER OF STORIES
We
know
who wrote these stories. If you will look at the
beginning of this book, you will find a picture of her,
and underneath the picture, her name. When you look at
that kind and lovely face, you will feel sure that any
stories that Miss Jewett told must be pleasant ones.
There
is
one thing, however, that you are not likely to know
unless I tell you: Miss Jewett began to write stories when
she was only a very little girl. She was fortunate in
having a sister, about two years older, who used to listen
to these stories. Many a day, and sometimes at night, when
the two little folks had been snugly tucked up in bed, the
story-teller would weave wonderful tales for her sister's
pleasure and her own. Often she wrote out these stories;
sometimes she wrote them in rhyme. How I wish we could see
some of those early stories!
THE OLD HOME
You
will
want to know more about this little girl, I am sure.
She was born in a beautiful old house, still standing in
the village of South Berwick, Maine. At that time, the
house was already about one hundred years old; it belonged
to her Grandfather Jewett, and had been his home for many
years before that September day in 1849, when the
dark-eyed granddaughter was born into the household.
The
grandfather
had been a sea-captain in his youth. But
while he was still a young man he left the sea and went
into the West India trade; that is, he owned
sailing-vessels which brought the products of the West
Indies to our shores, and carried back to the islands the
manufactures of our towns. This business kept alive his
interest in ships, and seafaring people, and foreign
lands. And so it came about that sea-tanned captains were
often guests at his hospitable table. Their talk and
stories gave the little girl a knowledge of the great,
distant world such as few children have a chance to
acquire. The old house, with its square rooms and spacious
entrance hall, was full of curious and interesting things
that had come from far-away seaports. What wonderful
stories each might have told her if it could have spoken!
When
the
little girl grew to womanhood, she wrote about her
interest in ships in words that you will like to read: "A
little way up the shore there was formerly a shipyard, and
I know of four ships that were built there much less than
fifty years ago. My grandfather was part owner of them,
and their names, with those of other ships, have been
familiar to me from my babyhood. It is amusing that the
ships of a family concerned in navigation seem to belong
to it and to be part of it, as if they were children who
had grown up and gone wandering about the world. Long
after some familiar craft has changed owners even, its
fortunes are affectionately watched."
In
front
of the fine old house was a square door-yard, shut
off from the village by white fences and four great lilac
bushes. From the gate a brick walk led to the front door,
with its shining brass knocker. Behind the house, where
now a wonderful flower garden blooms, were wide green
yards with tall elm trees shading them. Nearer the house
stood a long line of barns and sheds, one of which had a
large room in its upper story where an old ship's foresail
was spread over the floor. "This made a capital play-room
in wet weather," Miss Jewett tells us.
Around
the
village were deep pine woods, and high hills from
which the White Mountains could be seen. Below the village
two beautiful rivers joined forces and emptied their
waters into the sea, not many miles away.
THE LITTLE GIRL'S FAMILY
These
were
lovely surroundings for a little girl to grow up in,
were they not? But better still was the family group which
surrounded her in her childhood. Besides her grandfather
and grandmother, she was blest with a dear father and
mother, a companion and playmate in her sister Mary, and a
baby sister, six years younger. Before this baby sister
was born, the grandmother had died; but the grandfather
lived until our little story-writer was ten years old.
There were another grandfather and grandmother living in
the town of Exeter, New Hampshire. This grandfather was a
physician, Dr Perry; and to the same great profession
belonged the little girl's father, Dr. Theodore Jewett.
There were also some grand-aunts, who must have been very
kind and generous and fond of young people, for their
little niece remembered them with great affection as long
as she lived.
I
mention
all these relatives in order to show you that Miss
Jewett, when a child, saw a great deal of older people.
She loved them dearly and felt at home with them. Read
these words from a letter of Miss Jewett's, and you will
see how much she cared for old people: "She is one to be
most sadly missed the last of my three dear grand-aunts,
and they all died last year, and now their houses must all
be shut, -- dear and beautiful and full of kindness ever
since I can remember. I often say this to myself with a
thankful heart. It was wonderful to have kept them all so
long."
Miss
Jewett's
mother was a delicate, gentle woman with very
lovely manners, such as her mother had before her. This is
one reason, surely, why the daughter grew up to have a
gentle courtesy toward every one, especially, perhaps,
toward older people.
Her
father,
as I have already told you, was a physician, "a
country doctor." Many were the hours that his daughters
spent in driving about the country with him, as he went to
visit his patients. Dr. Jewett generally took only one
little girl at a time, often leaving the child to hold the
reins as he went indoors. In this way the girls came to
know and love horses and to understand how to manage them.
The
doctor
was a very wise and kind physician, and carried far
more than medicine to his patients. "A merry heart doeth
good like a medicine," says the old proverb; and sometimes
the doctor's hearty, friendly laugh would ring out as he
sat at the bedside of some sick patient. But often as he
joined his little companion, waiting in the carriage
outside, and drove away, a careworn look would come into
his face, and he would shake his head and say sorrowfully,
"Poor thing, poor thing!"
No
wonder
that his patients loved him dearly, when he carried
their troubles in his heart with so much sympathy! No
wonder that they had a cordial welcome for his daughters
long years after his work among them was finished! "Which
one of the doctor's girls be you?" some old man would say
as he met one of the three ladies on the street or in the
village store.
In
a
story of Miss Jewett's which you children would enjoy,
there is a delightful country doctor, Dr. Prince, who must
be very much like Miss Jewett's father. Betty
Leicester is the name of the story. You can make
Betty's acquaintance at the public library, any day, and
you will find it well worth making. As Betty sits waiting
in Dr. Prince's carriage, outside a home stricken with
illness and anxiety, her thoughts, I am sure, are such as
Miss Jewett herself must have had, more than once in her
girlhood, as she waited for her father.
HER PLAY DAYS
You
will
find that most of the children in this book of
stories like to play out of doors. Perhaps you will guess
rightly from this that Miss Jewett, herself, was an
out-of-door child. Sometimes she wandered about alone in
the pastures and the woods. This is her own way of telling
about it, -- "I was first cousin to a caterpillar if they
called me to come in, and I was own sister to a
giddy-minded bobolink when I ran away across the fields,
as I used to do very often."
Sometimes,
instead
of running away across the fields, she went very
primly to some old neighbor's house to call, like any
grown-up person. Here is her own pleasant memory of such a
call: "I can remember that I used to sit on a tall
ottoman, with nothing to lean against, and my feet were
off soundings, I was so high above the floor. We used to
discuss the weather, and I said that I went to school
(sometimes), or that it was then vacation, as the case
might be, and we tried to make ourselves agreeable to each
other. Presently my lady would take her keys out of her
pocket, and sometimes a maid would come to serve me, or
else she herself would bring me a silver tray with some
pound cakes baked in hearts and rounds, and I proudly felt
that I was a guest; though I was such a little thing an
attention was being paid me, and a thrill of satisfaction
used to go over me for my consequence and importance. A
handful of sugar-plums would have seemed nothing beside
this entertainment. I used to be careful not to crumble
the cake, and I used to eat it with my gloves on, and a
pleasant fragrance would cling for some time afterward to
the ends of the short lisle-thread fingers. I have no
doubt that my manners as I took leave were almost as
distinguished as those of my hostess, though I might have
been wild and shy all the rest of the week."
She
and
her sister Mary had the best of times together.
Sometimes they played vigorous boys' games with some boy
playfellows, who were near neighbors. But one of their
greatest delights was to play at housekeeping out of
doors, with bits of broken crockery, which served as
dishes. These they arranged on little wooden shelves,
which the gardener put up for them against the wall. I
suspect that they had an even better time than Nelly and
her friends with their fine tea-set in Marigold House. I
have tried both ways of playing house, myself, and I know
which is the better fun.
HER SCHOOL-DAYS
In
spite
of her outdoor life, Miss Jewett was not strong as a
child and was, therefore, unable to go to school
regularly. But while she was still a very little girl, she
began to learn two of the best things that can be learned
in school or out. She learned to read books and to see the
world about her.
Partly
because
there were many books in the old house, the little
girl soon became a great reader. Even in the dullest books
she found something to enjoy; and in the most interesting
she lost herself completely. Her father, and mother, and
one of her grandmothers guided her reading, encouraging
her to read aloud a great deal, in that way acquainting
her with some of the best books in the world, books that
were written for older people. But she was fond of
children's books and girls' books, too. In one of her most
delightful stories, Deephaven, she tells us the
names of some of the books that she loved when she was
young. Among these were Mr. Rutherford's Children,
Jean Ingelow's Stories told to a Child, and Mrs.
Whitney's A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life.
These books are still alive (you know what that
means); and two of them, at least, may be found at the
public library.
As
she
grew older she read a surprising number of books; and
often in her letters to her friends she spoke of the book
she was reading at the time. Many people read books
without taking anything away from them; but it was never
so with Miss Jewett. The places and people in books seemed
real to her, and were remembered long years after she
first met them. Here is a pleasant memory in a letter
written when she was over fifty years old: "I felt almost
as if I were seven years old again and cuddled into a
corner with my beloved story of Mr. Rutherford's
Children." Perhaps some book that you are
reading now will be a pleasant memory for you on some
far-away day. Which one do you suppose it will be? Once,
in a letter from Greece, Miss Jewett wrote: "I keep
thinking that I shall never be, so to speak, so handy to
Constantinople again, and I should like to have the means
of making the Arabian Nights come true." You see
she loved the Arabian Nights, too.
Although
I
did not put it in that way, I have already told you how
our little friend studied geography. Do you remember how
it was? History she learned from books and from the talk
that went on all about her. "I was always listening to
stories of three wars," she once wrote. These were the
siege of Louisburg, the Revolution (in which her ancestors
had taken part), and the War of 1812. When she was only
twelve years old, the Civil War broke out, so that she
learned all that part of the history of our country, while
it was in the making.
But
the
best part of her education lay in those long drives
which father and daughter took together. Dr. Jewett taught
the little girl to see the beauty of the country roads
through which they drove, and -- better still -- to be
interested in the people whom they visited. Not only the
people, but the old country houses, with their quaint
furnishings and old-fashioned gardens, grew to be her
familiar friends.
In
these
early years, the child's mind was full of dreams and
fancies of her own, visions of far-away things. If she had
been left to her own thoughts, she might not have realized
how much there was close by her that was full of beauty
and interest. I wonder if you know that it is the same
with all of us if we would only open our eyes. All about
us are beautiful things to look at, -- sky, and trees, and
grass, and the stones of which great buildings are made.
All around us, too, are people whom we should find well
worth knowing, if we would only take pains to be friendly
toward them.
Like
all
other children the little girl did not half know how
much her father was doing for her, although she dearly
loved the drives in his company. But when she grew up, she
knew that it was to him that she owed the best things in
her life.
HER ANIMAL FRIENDS
There
are
many things in Miss Jewett's writings which show that
she was fond of animals and observed them closely. She
watched and listened to them all, from the sweetest singer
among the birds to the homeliest old toad in the garden.
"I became very neighborly with a sober-minded toad," she
writes, "that sat still on the gravel walk, blinking and
looking at me, as if he had made plans for sitting on the
garden bench and I was giving him great inconvenience."
I
wish
there were room to add for you here all the
interesting things Miss Jewett has to tell about the
animals she watched. Here are a few.
TAMING ANIMALS
"It
is
not necessary to tame them before they can be familiar
and responsive; we can meet them on their own ground, and
be surprised to find how much we may have in common.
Taming is only forcing them to learn some of our customs;
we should be wise if we let them tame us to make use of
some of theirs."
DOWN THE RIVER
"It
sometimes
takes me a whole afternoon to go two miles down
the river. There are many reasons why I should stop every
now and then under one bank or another; to look up through
the trees at the sky, or at their pictures in the water;
or to let the boat lie still, until one can watch the
little fish come back to their playground on the yellow
sand and gravel; or to see the frogs, that splashed into
the water at my approach, poke their heads out a little
way to croak indignantly, or raise a loud note such as
Scotch bagpipers drive out of the pipes before they start
a tune. The swallows dart like bats along the surface of
the water after insects, and I see a drowned white
butterfly float by, and reach out for it; it looks so
frail and little in the river."
ANIMAL TRACKS
"I
wish
to tell you about a drive yesterday 'down the other
side of the river'; the river frozen; the snow very white
and thinly spread like nicest frosting over the fields,
and the pine woods as black as they could be, -- no birds,
but the tracks of every sort of little beastie. They
seemed to have been all out on visits and errands
and going such distances on their little paws and
claws; somehow it looks too much for a mouse to go half a
mile along the road or across a field. Think how a hawk
would see him! I think we knew every track but one, -- it
had long claws like a crow's and a tail that never lifted;
we settled upon a big old rat who had come up from an old
wharf by the river-side."
MOTHER ROBIN
"Oh,
you
should see the old robin by my bedroom window
a-fetching up her young family! I long to have you here to
watch the proceedings. Oh, the wide mouths of the three
young ones, -- how they do reach up and gape all together
when she comes near the nest with a worm! I am getting to
be very intimate with the growing family. I hate every
pussy when I think what a paw might do. I waited by the
window an hour at tea-time, spying them."
Besides
the
wild creatures, there were pet animals that were very
dear to her. Read what she says about a few of these:
first, about Sheila, her beautiful saddle-horse.
SHEILA
"She
is
careful when I come home late through the shadowy,
twilighted woods, and can hardly see my way; she forgets
then all her little tricks and capers, and is as steady as
a clock with her tramp, tramp, over the rough, dark
country roads. I feel as if I had suddenly grown a pair of
wings when she fairly flies over the ground, and the wind
whistles in my ears."
CRABBY
I
mourn
for poor Crabby -- poor little dog! I hate to think
we shall never see him again. I never liked him so much as
I have this summer, in his amiable and patient age.
However, I had worried much about what should come next
when he was blinder and feebler, and it is good to think
that his days are done so comfortably."
Besides
Crabby,
we hear of Jock, and Roger, and Browny, each of
whom was good company for her, at one time or another, in
her lonely pasture walks.
I
am
sure you will care for what she writes about the pet
bird that had belonged to her father.
BOBBY
"I
came
home this last time to find that dear bright wise
little Bobby, father's tame little bird that he was so
fond of, was dead and gone. There never was a little
creature with so true and good a heart. He knew so many
things -- though not one trick! and he would chirp
at me until I answered and spoke to him, and then would
sing himself to pieces. How often I have laughed and
begged him to be still; and now that live little voice is
still enough and its wisp of grey feathers. John and I put
him into a little box, and buried him when nobody else
knew it, down under the grass on father's grave, where so
much sweet cheerfulness lies still already. It was one of
the dear links with those old days, you know, dear, and I
can't help thinking that Bobby's spark of life is not put
out altogether."
OTHER OUT-OF-DOOR FRIENDS
It
was
not only animals that Miss Jewett loved, but all
out-of-door things. When she was a very little child, she
would come triumphantly in, with the first green grass
blades, a gift for her mother, tightly clasped in her warm
little hand. In a letter to the poet, Whittier, who was a
dear friend of hers, she once spoke of "the country out of
which I grew and where every bush and tree seem like my
cousins."
She
speaks
constantly of flowers and trees as if they were as
near and dear as cousins. One day in the fall she wrote to
a friend, "I see from the window that a row of zinnias are
all brown, but the upper flower-bed is as bright as ever
-- all the friendly marigolds -- and I shall have them
tucked up with a blanket if it is cold again tonight."
Here is what she has to say about others among her
"cousins."
GOOD-BYE TO THE WOODS
"The
woods
I loved best had all been cut down the winter
before. I had played under the great pines when I was a
child, and I had spent many a long afternoon under them
since. There never will be such trees for me any more in
the world. I knew where the flowers grew under them, and
where the ferns were greenest, and it was as much home to
me as my own house. They grew on the side of a hill, and
the sun always shone through the tops of the trees as it
went down, while below it was all in shadow. . . . I loved
those trees so much that I went over the hill on the
frozen snow to see them one sunny winter afternoon to say
good-bye, as if I were sure they could hear me, and looked
back again and again, as I came away, to be sure I should
remember how they looked. And it seemed as if they knew as
well as I that it was the last time, and they were going
to be cut down."
THE DEAREST TREE
"There
is
another solitary tree which is a great delight to me,
and I go to pay it an afternoon visit every now and then,
far away from the road across some fields and pastures. It
is an ancient pitch-pine, and it grows beside a spring,
and has acres of room to lord it over. It thinks
everything of itself, and although it is an untidy
housekeeper, and flings its dry twigs and sticky cones all
around the short grass underneath, I have a great
affection for it. I like pitch-pines better than any trees
in the world at any rate, and this is the dearest of its
race. I sit down in the shade of it and the brook makes a
good deal of noise as it starts out from the spring under
the bank, and there always is a wind blowing overhead
among the stiff green branches."
THREE YEARS LATER
"Alas,
when
I went to see my beloved big pitch-pine tree that I
loved best of all the wild trees that lived in Berwick, I
found only the broad stump of it beside the spring, and
the top boughs of it scattered far and wide. It was a real
affliction, and I thought you would be sorry, too,
for such a mournful friend as sat down and counted the
rings to see how many years old her tree was, and saw the
broad rings when good wet summers had helped it grow and
narrow ones when there had been a drought, and read as
much of its long biography as she could."
THE POPLAR FAMILY
"I
miss
very much some poplars which stood on the western
shore, opposite the great house, and which were not long
since cut down. They were not flourishing, but they were
like a little procession of a father and mother and three
or four children out for an afternoon walk, coming down
through the fields to the river. As you rowed up or down
they stood up in bold relief against the sky, for they
were on high land. I was deeply attached to them, and in
the spring when I went down river for the first time, they
always were covered with the first faint green mist of
their leaves, and it seemed as if they had been watching
for me, and thinking that perhaps I might go by that
afternoon."
Miss
Jewett
must have been especially fond of poplars, for in
the beautiful garden behind her old home some noble
poplars are standing, which she planted there with her own
hands. You see she not only loved the trees which she
found already growing in the world, but she helped to make
the world more beautiful by planting and tending trees of
her own. Just try planting a tiny tree some day, and see
what pleasure it will mean for you and other people later
on.
HER LOVE OF HOME
Miss
Jewett
traveled widely in foreign lands and cared deeply
for the beauty that she saw there. This was partly because
she had been able to see the beauty in her own country and
in her own home. The commonplace dandelion, she tells us,
was always her favorite flower. And once when she was in
Athens, one of the most famous and beautiful cities in the
world, she wrote about "the wintry sky, of such
astonishing blue, with its blinding light, like one of our
winter mornings after a snowstorm." So you see, you and I
may look at the blue winter's sky any clear day after a
snowstorm, and say to ourselves, "The sky looks like this
in Athens."
Here
are
other words of hers to show that traveling abroad had
made her more keenly alive to the beauty that lay all
about her at home.
A JOURNEY IN THE PASTURE
"I
did
have the most beautiful time yesterday afternoon. I
feel as if I had seen another country in Europe. Oh, a
great deal better than that, though I only went wandering
over a great tract of pasture-land down along the river."
A PLOUGHED FIELD
"Where
the
land has been plowed its color is as beautiful as any
color that can be found the world over, and the long
shining brown furrows grow warm lying in the sun."
A NEW ENGLAND LAKE
"The
house
where I stayed is so close to the lake that the
little waves come clucking up to the very walls, and one
lands as immediately as if it were Venice, and hears the
loons calling as if it were still a wilderness."
HER WORK
You
would
be astonished to know what a busy woman Miss Jewett
was, and how many stories she wrote. There are long ones
and short ones, stories for children and stories for grown
people, nearly twenty books in all. Writing stories may
seem to you like an easy kind of work, especially for any
one who began when she was a little girl. But Miss
Jewett's stories cost many hours of patient, painstaking
work. It was work that was worth doing, for the stories
have given pleasure to more people than you or I could
easily count.
One
good
thing about these stories is that they help different
kinds of people to understand one another. Miss Jewett
knew and loved country people and city people, rich people
and poor people; and she put all kinds into her books.
Then the out-of-door world that was so dear to her
constantly finds a place in her stories. Surely the next
best thing to being there, is to read stories that make us
imagine we are out of doors.
More
than
this, people are made better and happier by reading
such stories as she wrote; for although her stories are
sometimes sad, they are more often merry; and they are
always kind. She was quick to see the funny things that
people say and do; but she knew how to tell them without
"making fun of" the people themselves. But
perhaps the best thing about the stories is that they are
-- as we say "true to life." So true are they that in
years to come, people may turn to them to learn what life
was really like, in the last century, in New England
country places. Such stories have what we call historical
value.
HER FRIENDS
But
greater
than Miss Jewett's love for the out-of-door world,
in which she was always happy, and for her work, to which
she was deeply devoted, was her love for her friends. This
you may see again and again in her stories and her
letters. Like all the best and wisest people, she was very
grateful always for what other people had done for her,
and was quick to speak her gratitude. In writing once of a
lovely old-fashioned story by Mrs. Stowe, The Pearl of
Orr's Island, she told gratefully how the opening
chapters of the story taught her "to see with new eyes."
Once
when
speaking of a friend's visit she wrote, "It is a
great pleasure to have had her here in the old house; such
guests never really go away -- which makes an old house very
different from a new one."
Among
her
friends, in a little seashore town which she sometimes
visited, was an old fisherman. After he had grown so aged
and feeble that, instead of going out in the
fishing-boats, he sat at home knitting stockings, he
thought, one spring day, that he saw Miss Jewett driving
by. Hurriedly catching up the old spy-glass that he had
used at sea, he made sure that it was she, and then toiled
over to the moorings, where he had been but once before in
many months, to bid her welcome.
You
know
when an author writes a book, he often puts at the
beginning what is called a dedication; that is, a few
words in which he offers the book to some dear friend or
distinguished person, as if it were a gift. In her
dedications, Miss Jewett shows her warm affection for her
family and her many friends.
In
her
first book, Deephaven, she writes : --
"To
my
father and mother -- my two best friends -- and then to
all my other friends whose names I say to myself lovingly,
though I do not write them here."
Another
book
is dedicated "To my dear Sister Mary"; and another,
--
To my dear younger sister
C. A. E.
I have had many pleasures that were doubled because you
shared them, and so I write your name at the beginning
of this book.
S.
O.
J.
This
dedication
will interest you, I am sure: --
This book of stories
is dedicated with grateful affection
to
John Greenleaf Whittier.
But
the
dedication into which she put the warmest gratitude of
her whole life is placed at the beginning of Country
By-Ways, published soon after her father's death.
You must read these words aloud to see how beautiful they
are, how like a poem.
To
T. H. J.
My dear Father; my dear Friend:
The best and wisest man I ever knew;
Who taught me many lessons and showed me many things
As we went together along the
Country By-Ways.
HER LAST YEARS
With
the
last years of Miss Jewett's life came illness, and
suffering, and the laying aside of her work. All this she
bore with great patience and sweetness. Her love of
out-of-doors, of books, and of people, remained strong and
tender. She was surrounded by those who loved her and
delighted to serve her.
The
end
of the sweet, radiant life came, in early summer, in
the beautiful old homestead where it had begun almost
sixty years before. But such lives never really end.
Although they leave the world poorer because they have
passed out of it, they leave it richer because they have
been in it, and grateful for all they have given it.
1915
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, "Idealized New England," The
New
Republic (May 8, 1915) 20-21.
"WHAT a terrible book," I said, "what a
supremely cruel book!"
"A tragic masterpiece," she contradicted,
"a landmark in American literature. Against that iron New
England background Mrs. Wharton's few figures have an almost
Euripidean quality."
"But the Greeks never made their audiences
writhe," I protested. "Could you write choruses to 'Ethan
Frome,' melodious choruses to be chanted by tranquil, veiled
women and offering some alleviation to the bitter lot of man?
No," I went on with heat, "you'll find only jibbering fiends
to break Ethan's agony. The story is a fine example of what
hate can accomplish as creative inspiration; and of the
difference between observation and understanding."
"Come now," she said, "that sounds like
local prejudice. You should be sufficiently disaffected by New
York and Europe to perceive the depleted side of you native
states."
"Have I not seen the industrious Swede and
the inscrutable Finn absorbing the land cleared by my
ancestors' vitality?"
"Well then! And you care so much for the
French classic manner -- how can you fail to appreciate the
rapidity, the suppressions, the sharp yet delicate shadings of
this poignant New England drama?"
"Ah, but that's just why the book wounds me
so. My acquired literary sense, which Mrs. Wharton pricks to
admiration on every page, here conflicts with something far
more real and subconscious -- the knowledge I was born with of
the kind of people, the kind of place, yes and the kind of
drama of weakened will she is so relentlessly describing. And
I tell you that in spite of the vraisemblance of the
surface, she has got them all wrong. She has nowhere dug down
into the subsoil."
"You don't mind quarreling with the
authorities," she remarked. "Of course you read Mr. Herrick on
Mrs. Wharton in THE NEWREPUBLIC?"
"Yes, it was precisely the article which
sent me back to the sources. No doubt Mrs. Wharton is more
psychologist than social historian; no doubt, as he said, her
real interest is in the subtler and more universal sort of
spiritual conflicts. But I can't admit that the conflict
between love and duty in 'Ethan Frome' is less conditioned by
special environment, than, for example, Lily Bart's struggle."
"You will grant that men tied to wives
older than themselves, ill, ugly and querulous, are doomed in
every quarter of the globe to fall in love with girls like
blackberries who put red ribbons in their hair."
"Certainly. But Ethan and his wife Zeena,
and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, are not generalized
types. Would Mr. Herrick accept them as they stand, for Ohio
or Illinois? They are New England country people of old stock
living in a lonely snowed-in hill town in the Berkshires. Mrs.
Wharton's deliberate purpose is to show what life in
Starkfield really means to a man who has been there too many
winters; to show the grim New England skeleton that the summer
resident usually fails to discover during his pleasant months
in the elm-shaded village -- unless he happens upon a
degenerate chore-boy, or sees a poor little girl in short
skirts carrying her shame to school under a cape."
"True, and the New England writers have
largely ignored the skeleton. The 'idyll' has been done to
death, like the conscience. I commend Mrs. Wharton for finding
a new subject in an overworked field."
"So do I, but if 'Ethan Frome' is a New
England tale in the same sense as Miss Brown's or Mrs.
Freeman's stories or 'The Country of the Pointed Firs' -- and
this is just the point I am venturing to make against Mr.
Herrick -- then surely one is justified in asking, as he does
about the New York novels, whether the author has been fair to
her subject. Do Zeena's false teeth click true, do Ethan and
Mattie make love in Starkfield fashion, would they have taken
the fatal coast that brought about the intolerable horror of
their lives?"
"Ugh," said my friend, "those false teeth
-- what a sure realistic note! I can never forget the glass by
the bed, into which the wife dropped them when she blew out
the candle at night in the terrible gray, cold room."
"Of course you can't. Neither could Mrs.
Wharton. You both look at Starkfield with the eyes of the
sophisticated stranger who arrives there is a blizzard, and
stumbles through the drifts into Ethan's run-down 'place.' You
notice the superficial things that would make you miserable.
Ethan suffered in all sorts of ways, but not from false teeth:
he was brought up on them! His mother had them; his cousins
and neighbors had them; he probably admired Mattie less
because she hadn't 'had her molars out'!"
"Well, I waive the teeth," said she with a
shudder. "Let's take the coasting parties and the church
sociable. Surely Mrs. Wharton has those in key?"
"In the unconsciously contemptuous key of
the person who has a box at the opera. How should
cosmopolitans understand what such diversions mean to
Starkfield folks? They have all sorts of consolations if you
only knew. Even when winter breaks and the teams sink up to
their axles in mud, they have things to live for and look for
-- pussy-willows, for instance. Laugh if you like! Do you
remember 'Miss Tempy's Watchers' and the one thorny quince
tree she 'kind of expected into bloomin' ' every spring?"
"You mean that because of its very
repressions, its very barrenness, and physical deprivations,
New England life still produces a sort of flower -- "
"Pale as snowdrops, hidden in dead leaves
like hepaticas and arbutus; yet precious to those who know
where to look for it. That is the sort of flower Ethan's and
Mattie's love was, but they could never have expressed it to
each other."
"Mrs. Wharton lets them express it so
little," she objected.
"Ah, but a word, a touch would have spoiled
it for them. I think Ethan, dim and weakened descendant of
rugged forefathers that he was, would have had the spirit to
drive his Mattie to the station when his wife sent her
packing. But he would not have dreamed of stopping for that
preposterous coast for death. It was just Mrs. Wharton's own
sense of the blankness and emptiness, the lack of beauty and
passion in Starkfield lives, that made her construct that
tremendous fourth act for her lovers and condemn them to its
gruesome, long-drawn epilogue."
"You think they would have driven on
silently to the station and parted with a dumb handshake and a
look?"
"Sustained by something they did not
understand, something they half rebelled against and yet could
not possibly foreswear."
"Then Ethan's real tragedy would have been
that he had nothing real, tangible, to cling to -- only an
idea, a feeling, a dream to carry him through those slow gray
years when Zeena continued to flourish on patent medicines?"
"Exactly. The real New England tragedy, as
Mrs. Wharton herself realized at bottom, is not that something
happens but that nothing does. Yet if Ethan was tender to
Zeena instead of strangling her complaining voice in her lanky
throat, it was because when he was out alone in the pasture
lot and heard the hermit thrush singing in the pines he knew
he had been right. The image of his girl was warm in his heart
then and undefiled, like Martha's memory of her 'lady.' "
"Miss Jewett again! It isn't fair. She had
a natural love of light and sun, an aversion to the shadow and
cruelty and ugliness of life which Mrs. Wharton has the
courage to face and to probe."
"Is that the essential point of difference?
I don't think so. There are chapters in Miss Jewett's works --
in 'Deephaven' for example -- and passages in her letters
which show her full knowledge of the shadow even though she
did not often linger there. For that matter, almost any of her
stories if told from outside in rather than from inside out
might be sordid and grim. That's the bearing of our whole
argument, isn't it? Take the 'The Queen's Twin.' What was she?
To most people a poor, cracked old creature, the victim of a
silly delusion. It needed the feeling heart of Mrs. Todd to
realize that she was, in fact as in fancy, the sister soul of
royalty, a woman with a shining destiny."
"You evidently think the only creative
truth is that perceived by love. I believe any strong passion
is worth recording."
"Possibly. Indifference could not have
written 'Ethan Frome.' But if Mrs. Wharton had realized Ethan
as Miss Jewett did the Queen's Twin, as she herself loved and
understood her most significant creation, Lily Bart, we should
get some shock of those deep-down unwritable things which are
the vital parts of novels as they are of human beings. We
should get life, not a literary copy of it."
"It's no use," said my friend, "to argue on
her own soil with the descendant of a band of hopeless
idealists who see the hardest facts in a sort of Platonic
glow. I am afraid I must still read and admire 'Ethan Frome.'
"
"Wait till you are old. That is a New
England counsel, but just wait! Then the 'Queen's Twin,' and
the 'Dunnet Shepherdess' will still be full of living human
poetry and truth and the salt-sweet scent of high coast
pastures, and 'Ethan Frome' will be rotting in his grave."
From Henry James, "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields." Atlantic
Monthly 116 (July 1915) 21-31.
To speak in a mere parenthesis of Miss
Jewett, mistress of an art of fiction all her own, even though
of a minor compass, and surpassed only by Hawthorne as
producer of the most finished and penetrating of the numerous
'short stories' that have the domestic life of New England for
their general and their doubtless somewhat lean subject, is to
do myself, I feel, the violence of suppressing a chapter of
appreciation that I should long since somewhere have found
space for. Her admirable gift, that artistic sensibility in
her which rivaled the rare personal, that sense for the finest
kind of truthful rendering, the sober and tender note, the
temperately touched, whether in the ironic or the pathetic,
would have deserved some more pointed commemoration than I
judge her beautiful little quantum of achievement, her free
and high, yet all so generously subdued character, a sort of
elegance of humility or fine flame of modesty, with her
remarkably distinguished outward stamp, to have called forth
before the premature and overdarkened close of her young
course of production. She had come to Mrs. Fields as an
adoptive daughter, both a sharer and a sustainer, and nothing
could more have warmed the ancient faith of their confessingly
a bit disoriented countryman than the association of the elder
and the younger lady in such an emphasized susceptibility.
Their reach together was of the firmest and easiest, and I
verily remember being struck with the stretch of wing that the
spirit of Charles Street could bring off on finding them all
fragrant of a recent immersion in the country life of France,
where admiring friends had opened to them iridescent vistas
that made it by comparison a charity they should show the
least dazzle from my so much ruder display. I preserve at any
rate the memory of a dazzle corresponding, or in other words
of my gratitude for their ready apprehension of the
greatness of big 'composed' Sussex, which we explored together
almost to extravagance -- the lesson to my own sense all
remaining that of how far the pure, the peculiarly pure, old
Boston spirit, old even in these women of whom one was
miraculously and the other familiarly young, could travel
without a scrap of loss of its ancient immunity to set against
its gain of vivacity.
There was vivacity of a new sort
somehow in the fact that the elder of my visitors, the elder
in mere calculable years, had come fairly to cultivate, as it
struck me, a personal resemblance to the great George Eliot --
and this but through the quite lawful art of causing a black
lace mantilla to descend from her head and happily consort
with a droop of abundant hair, a formation of brow and a
general fine benignity; things that at once markedly recalled
the countenance of Sir Frederick Burton's admirable portrait
of the author of Romola and made it a charming anomaly
that such remains of beauty should match at all a plainness
not to be blinked even under the play of Sir Frederick's
harmonizing crayon. Other amplified aspects of the whole
legend, as I have called it, I was afterwards to see presented
on its native scene -- whereby it comes back to me that Sarah
Jewett's brave ghost would resent my too roughly Bostonizing
her: there hangs before me such a picture of her right
setting, the antique dignity -- as antiquity counts
thereabouts -- of a clear colonial house, in Maine, just over
the New Hampshire border, and a day spent amid the very
richest local revelations. These things were not so much of
like as of equally flushed complexion with two or three
occasions of view, at the same memorable time, of Mrs.
Fields's happy alternative home on the shining Massachusetts
shore, where I seem to catch in latest afternoon light the
quite final form of all the pleasant evidence. To say which,
however, is still considerably to foreshorten; since there
supervenes for me with force as the very last word, or the one
conclusive for myself at least, a haunted little feast as of
ghosts, if not of skeletons, at the banquet, with the image of
that immemorial and inextinguishable lady Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe, the most evidential and most eminent presence of them
all, as she rises in her place, under the extremity of appeal,
to declaim a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that
'Battle-hymn of the Republic,' which she had caused to be
chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a
real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and
indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line,
'Be
swift my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!'
The geniality of this performance swept into our
collective breast again the whole matter of my record, which I
thus commend to safe spiritual keeping.
1917
From William Dean Howells: A Study of the Achievement of
a Literary Artist
By Alexander Harvey
New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917.
p. 170-1
. . . . All through his criticism -- this is very significant --
one notes that Howells seems inclined to exempt Jane Austen from
his censure of the art of British novelists in general. Jane
Austen wins the approval of Howells because her methods are
those of the realism he professes.
If she had dealt in adventures of the
tremendous kind Howells, I fear, would never have praised her
art. The business of the novelist is to reflect what Howells
calls life. Now the thing that goes by the name of life to
Howells is but a superficial aspect of it.
Howells seems in his criticism to have no
suspicion of the melancholy fact that life is preposterous,
melodramatic, that it is more romantic than Ariosto's "Orlando."
He will allow no combination of psychological insight with
imagination and fancy. I suspect that his reluctance to give
Shakespeare his due springs from a dislike of the ghost in
"Hamlet." There are no ghosts, no fairies. Howells notes
further:
If Miss Jewett were of a little longer
breath than she has yet shown herself in fiction, I might say
the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already with us, and had
merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. . . .
One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a
figure as that in the Miss Wilkins's story where the bridegroom
fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me
think more of Miss Jewett's people. The shore folk and the
Down-Easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as
might have belonged in "The Country of the Pointed Firs," or
"Sister Wisby's Courtship," or "Dulham Ladies," or "An Autumn
Ramble," or twenty other entrancing tales.
The words will repay study. They sum up in a
brief paragraph the whole Howells gospel. They are like the
little piece of butter which the housekeeper tastes out of the
tub at market and which, to the discerning, affords a measure of
the quality of the whole.
Notes from Harvey's Index which seems to be a wild document
p. 250
Jewett, Sarah Orne. I don't give a fig for her but Howells
seems to think her great. 171
p. 260
Sissy, The. It is amazing to observe
how Howells raves over the sissies. For instance: "At Boston, or
near Boston, live those artists supreme in the kind of short
story which we have carried so far: Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins,
Miss Alice Brown, Mrs. Chase-Wyman, and Miss Gertrude Smith, who
comes from Kansas, and writes of the prairie farm-life, though
she leaves Mr. E. W. Howe (of The Story of a Country Town and
presently of the Atchison Daily Globe) to constitute, with the
humorous poet Iron-quill, a frontier literary center at Topeka.
Of Boston, too, though she is of western Pennsylvania origin, is
Mrs. Margaret Deland, one of our most successful novelists. Miss
Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into New Jersey, and is
the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen." And so on and so
forth! What she has done in literature.
Sissy School. This is native American and
Anglo-Saxon to the backbone.
p. 265
Wilkins. This is the maiden name of the lady
who has since become Mrs. Freeman and whose tales I am sorry I
am forced to disparage owing to my objection to the sissy school
of literature. Howells has no objection to it, of course. Hear
him rave: "Even the power of writing short stories, which we
suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, has spread
from New England. That is, indeed, the home of the American
short story, and it has there been brought to such perfection in
the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of
that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose
Terry Cook[e], that it presents upon the whole a truthful
picture of New England village life in some of its more obvious
phases."
From William Joseph Long, Outlines of English and
American Literature.
New York: Ginn and Co., 1917.
p. 515
We name only, by way of indicating the wide variety that
awaits the reader, the charming stories of Grace King and Kate
Chopin dealing with plantation life; the New England stories,
powerful or brilliant or somber, of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose
Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins; the tender and cheery
southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page; the impressive stories
of mountaineer life by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert
Craddock); the humorous, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of
stories told by Frank Stockton; and a bewildering miscellany
of other works, of which the names Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
Hamlin Garland, Alice French (Octave Thanet), Rowland
Robinson, Frank Norris and Henry C. Bunner are as a brief but
inviting index.
p. 517
The realistic movement in American fiction began, as we
have noted, with the short-story writers; and presently the
most talented of these writers, having learned the value of
real scenes and characters, turned to the novel and produced
works having the double interest of romance and realism; that
is, they told an old romantic tale of love or heroism and set
it amid scenes or characters that were typical of American
life. Miss Jewett's novels of northern village life, for
example, are even finer than her short stories in the same
field. The same criticism applies to Miss Murfree with her
novels of mountaineer life in Tennessee, to James Lane Allen
with his novels of his native Kentucky, and to many another
recent novelist who tells a brave tale of his own people. We
call these, in the conventional way, novels of New England or
the South or the West; in reality they are novels of humanity,
of the old unchanging tragedies or comedies of human life,
which seem more true or real to us because they appear in a
familiar setting.
Note on p. 518
Ή Several of Howells's earlier novels deal with New
England life, but superficially and without understanding.
However minutely they depict its manners or mannerisms they
seldom dip beneath the surface. If the reader wants not the
body but the soul of New England, he must go to some other
fiction writer, to Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, or to Rose
Terry Cooke.
1918
From Bliss Perry, The American Spirit in Literature.
New York: Yale, 1918,1921, pp. 248-250.
Let us glance back to 'the abandoned farm
of literature," as a witty New Yorker once characterized New
England. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed
a decline in the direct influence of that province over the
country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of
its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging under
the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political
importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient
promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative
literary significance. In one field of literature only has New
England maintained its rank since the Civil War, and that is
in the local short story. Here women have distinguished
themselves beyond the proved capacity of New England men. Mrs.
Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were
the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the
three artists who have written, out of the material offered by
a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or
Russia can produce -- Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman,
and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying
technique and with singular differences in their instinctive
choice of material, the dominant qualities of an isolated,
in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still inquisitive
and acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift passing
over into avarice, and mental power degenerating into
smartness; cold and hard under long repression of emotion, yet
capable of passion and fanaticism; at worst, a mere trader, a
crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with an austere
physical and moral beauty. Miss Jewett preferred to touch
graciously the sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament,
to linger in its ancient dignities and serenities. Miss Brown
has shown the pathos of its thwarted desires, its hunger for a
beauty and a happiness denied. Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed
its fundamental tragedies of will.
from Mrs. Humphry Ward
A Writer's Recollections
New York: Harper's, 1918
Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on
behalf of the London Play Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields
and Sarah Orne Jewett a pair of friends, gentle, eager,
distinguished, whom none who loved them will forget;
Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton,
standing to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill;
Hawthorne's house at Concord; and the lovely shore of Newport.
The wonderful new scenes unrolled themselves day by day; kind
faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was
indeed hard to tear ourselves away.
1919
From Walter C. Bronson, A Short History of American
Literature, New York: Heath, 1919.
pp. 284-286
Studies of New England life had been made before 1870
by HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1812 -1896) in The Minister's Wooing
(1859), The Pearl of
Orr's Island (1862), and Old Town Folks
(1869), the first and last describing religious and social
conditions in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the early
years of the Republic, and the second narrating the lives of
simple folk on the coast of Maine; the manner is too leisurely
for present taste, but the pictures give truly and vividly
much of the essence of New England life and character. HENRY WARD BEECHER (1813 1887), in Norwood (1867), did
the same thing, less skillfully, for the period of the Civil
War, including one of the earliest fictitious portraits of
Lincoln. ROSE TERRY COOKE (1827 1892), a pioneer
in the more terse and realistic manner, put into her stories
the intimate knowledge of rural life and character gained by
teaching school, beginning with Miss Lucinda (in The Atlantic Monthly,
1861) and continuing many years; Somebody's Neighbors (1881) is
a collection of some of her best stories, although The Deacon's Week
(1885) is preferred by some readers. HARRIET PRESCOTT
SPOFFORD (1835 - ),
who, after partial success in romantic fiction and poetry,
turned to more realistic work in such sketches as A Village Dressmaker
and A Rural Telephone,
strikes a deeper note, combining realism of setting with the
romance of passion, and suffusing the whole with a poetic
atmosphere; this is particularly true of The Wages of Sin in Old Madame and Other
Tragedies (1899). SARAH
ORNE JEWETT (1849 -1909) writes
with gentle sympathy and delicate truthfulness of life along
the Maine coast, interpreting the quiet nobility of simple men
and women in whom still survive the best traditions of the
earlier New England, with special fondness for taciturn old
sailors; Deephaven
(1877), A Country
Doctor (1884), and The Country of the
Pointed Firs (1896) show her at her best. MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1862 - ) excels Miss Jewett
in artistic concentration upon single effects, and draws with
remarkable precision and sureness of hand, but she has less
breadth and geniality, painting in water-colors the more
neutral and cramped types of Yankee character; A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun and
Other Stories (1891) remain her classic work, her
so-called novels, Pembroke
(1894) and Jerome, a
Poor Young Man (1897) lacking structural unity, and her
latest short stories showing a sad decline. ANNIE TRUMBULL SLOSSON (1838 - )
in Seven Dreamers
(1890), and other dialect stories, describes, with mingled
humor and pathos inclining toward religious sentimentality,
various odd characters in rural Connecticut and New Hampshire.
The more refreshing and enjoyable by contrast with the
feminine delicacy of these women writers are the masculine
vigor and broad humor of ROWLAND
E. ROBINSON (1833
1900), who faithfully portrays the rural Vermonter in Uncle Lisha's Shop
(1887) and several other collections of dialect sketches. ALICE BROWN (1857 - ),
much overrated at present, in her dialect stories, Meadow Grass (1895),
Tiverton Tales
(1899), The Country
Road (1906), etc., added nothing to previous studies of
New England life except more emotionalism; she makes overmuch
of old maids' platonic substitutes for marriage, and her style
lacks simplicity and naturalness; her novels, such as Paradise (1905) and
The Story of Thyrza (1909),
are
deficient in constructive power and grasp of passion; her
play, Children of Earth
(1915), similar in theme to her stories, was a failure on the
stage, and is little better as a closet-drama.
pp. 295-297
Somewhat akin to these studies of local conditions are
the novels on American history. Many things contributed to
cause an outburst of this species of prose fiction: the
popularity of European historical novels; the works of Parkman
and Fiske, combining historical accuracy with romantic
coloring and dramatic intensity; reaction from the depressing
realistic novel; and quickened patriotism after the
Spanish-American War, reλnforcing the national pride and sense
of power which followed on the reλstablishment of the Union.
The result was a flood of fiction compounded of history and
romance in greatly varying proportions. LEWIS WALLACE (1827 -1905) was a
forerunner in this field with his Fair God (1873), a
story of the early Spanish rιgime in the New World, full of dash and color,
but rather flashy than truly brilliant, like his better known
Ben Hur, a Tale of the
Christ (1880). MARY
HARTWELL CATHERWOOD (1847 1902), a
somewhat later pioneer, in The Romance of Dollard
(1888), The Lady of
Fort St. John (1891), The Chase of St. Castin
(1894), etc., pictured the achievements of French explorers
and settlers in Canada with glowing colors and much vivacity
of style, although her work cannot be ranked very high either
as historical fiction or as a study of human nature. S. WEIR MITCHELL (1829 1914), a
brilliant and versatile physician, achieved his greatest
success as an author in Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897), a novel of the
American Revolution; there is too much antiquarian detail
regarding Philadelphia, the centre of the action, and the
character-portrayal is somewhat conventional, but the story as
a whole is vivid and pleasing, and reaches true pathos in the
picture of Andrι's last hours. Early Virginian history has
been treated skilfully, although quite without touch of
greatness, by MARY JOHNSTON (1870 - )
in Prisoners of Hope
(1898), To Have and to
Hold (1900), Audrey
(1902), etc. PAUL LEICESTER FORD (1865 1902), a diligent student of
American history, is still rather historian than novelist in Janice Meredith (1899);
the
action of the novel covers the whole period of the
American Revolution, and although the love story begins
piquantly enough, it is soon apparent that the heroine is
being moved mercilessly from place to place in order to keep
her affairs and the historical events together. The strength
of the book is in the truth and vividness of the historical
pictures, in which the brutality, cowardice, and treachery of
some of the Revolutionists are candidly revealed; the portrait
of Washington, however, although frankly human, is not
powerful enough to be true to the original. MAURICE THOMPSON (1844 1901)
produced a very popular novel in Alice of Old Vincennes
(1900), dealing with events in Indiana under the French during
the Revolutionary War. Two writers already mentioned, MRS. FREEMAN and MISS JEWETT, attempted historical
fiction with small success, the former in The Heart's Highway (1900),
a
story of Virginia in the seventeenth century, and the latter
in The Tory Lover
(1901).
From "Maine's Contribution to Literature"
John Clair Minot.
Maine Library Bulletin 9 (1919) pp. 31-34.
pp. 33-34
And the women writers of Maine! Thirty years
ago George Bancroft Griffith compiled a book of eight hundred
and fifty pages, "The Poets of Maine." It was on lines similar
to those followed in "The Bowdoin Poets," published in 1840, and
the "Native Poets of Maine," published in 1854. Griffith found
nearly 450 Maine writers worthy of places in his compilation
though it will readily be admitted that only by a very liberal
and charitable construction can many of them be enrolled as
poets and of that number 167 were women. A present day
compilation, if made equally comprehensive, would probably mean
half a dozen volumes as large as Griffith's.
The women writers of Maine not to mention
again those already referred to include many authors widely
known and loved Harriet Prescott Spofford, with more than a
score of novels and books of verse to her credit, who declines
at eighty-three to lay aside the pen she has wielded so happily;
Sarah Orne Jewett, whose charming stories of the country of the
pointed firs won her the degree of Doctor of Letters from
Bowdoin in 1901, the first woman to receive a degree from that
college; Martha Baker Dunn, poet and essayist, whom the country
came to know better through the generous praise that President
Roosevelt gave one of her articles in the Atlantic Monthly ;
Emma Huntington Nason, poet and historian of old Hallowell, the
mother of Professor Arthur Huntington Nason of New York
University himself the author of several very scholarly works;
Caroline Dana Howe, of whose books of poems and thirty hymns,
nothing is better known than her song, "Leaf by Leaf the Roses
Fall;" Elizabeth Akers Allen, writer of much exquisite verse,
but of nothing more certain to endure than her
"Backward, turn backward, O Time in
your flight,
Make me a child again just for
tonight!"
Ella Maude Smith Moore, of Thomaston, whose poem beginning
"'Rock of Ages, cleft for me'
Though[t]lessly the maiden sung,
Fell the words unconsciously
From her
girlish, gleeful tongue,'
has been going the rounds for more than forty years, and carries
in its lines the same undying appeal that vibrates through Mrs.
Allen's "Rock Me to Sleep;" Clara Marcelle Greene, many of whose
poems have dramatic strength and fire; Frances Laughton Mace, a
prolific writer of graceful poems among which "Only Waiting" is
perhaps the most familiar; Ellen Hamlin Butler of Bangor, who
has written many good poems in the past forty years, but nothing
better than her recent "By Wireless," expressing, first, the
call that goes forth from the hearts of the Homeland to our
sailors and soldiers,
"Be strong, be strong, O Beloved,
pure-hearted and high of will!
Knights are ye and crusaders our
plighted vows to fulfill.
The God who girded your fathers shall
arm you with His might,
And the soul of the great Republic
goes with you into the night."
And then the answering call that comes back to us from those on
the battle front:
"Stand fast, stand fast, O Beloved! In the
glory of sacrifice
Give as we give our life-blood and
scorn to reckon the price.
Pour forth your treasure and spare
not! Bend to your toil nor stay!
In the name of the God of our fathers
keep faith as we fight today."
Would that we could linger longer with these
women writers of Maine. There are others Kate Vannah, Julia
May Williamson, Anna Boynton Averill, Olive E. Dana, Julia
Harris May, Annie Hamilton Donnell, Kate Putnam Osgood,
Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, to name a few, as well as some of our
own time on whose work it would be fitting and pleasant to
dwell if time permitted. Let it be granted that those whom I
have named will never be counted among the great makers of
literature, still we may claim for them that they have brought
to many lives that which the master poet sought when, at evening
time, he begged one whom he loved:
"Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay
That shall soothe this restless
feeling
And banish the thoughts of day.
*
* *
*
Read from some humbler poet
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer
Or tears from the
eyelid start.
Who, through long days of labor
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.
L. A. Pittenger, ed. A Collection of Short
Stories. New
York:
Macmillan, 1919, pp. xiv-xvi.
QUALITIES
OF
THE SHORT STORY
IT was not until well along in the nineteenth century
that any one attempted to define the short- story. The three
quotations given here are among the best things that have been
spoken on this subject.
"The right novella is never a novel cropped back from
the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck
into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is another
species, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of
unconsciousness to be brought into being of its own kind, and
not of another." -- W.
D.
HOWELLS,
North American Review,
173: 429.
"A true short-story is something other and something
more than a mere story which is short. A true short-story
differs from the novel chiefly in its essential unity of
impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word, a
short-story has unity as a novel cannot have it. . . . A short-story deals
with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or
the series of emotions called forth by a single situation." --
BRANDER
MATTHEWS,
The Philosophy of the
Short-Story.
"The aim of a short-story is to produce a single
narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is
consistent with the utmost emphasis." -- CLAYTON
HAMILTON,
Materials and Methods of
Fiction.
The short-story must always have a compact unity and a
direct simplicity. In such stories as Bjφrnson's The Father and
Maupassant's The Piece
of String this simplicity is equal to that of the
anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic
possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story
must always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in
the crucial tests of life.
The short-story does not demand the consistency in
treatment of the long story, for there are not so many
elements to marshal and direct properly, but the short-story
must be original and varied in its themes, cleverly
constructed, and lighted through and through with the glow of
vivid imaginings. A single incident in daily life is caught as
in a snap-shot exposure and held before the reader in such a
manner that the impression of the whole is derived largely
from suggestion. The single incident may be the turning-point
in life history, as in The
Man
Who Was; it may be a mental surrender of habits
fixed seemingly in indelible colors in the soul and a sudden,
inflexible decision to be a man, as in the case of Markheim; or it may
be a gradual realization of the value of spiritual gifts, as
Bjφrnson has concisely presented it in his little story The Father.
The aim of the short-story is always to present a
cross-section of life in such a vivid manner that the
importance of the incident becomes universal. Some
short-stories are told with the definite end in view of
telling a story for the sake of exploiting a plot. The Cask of Amontillado
is all action in comparison with The Masque of the Red
Death. The
Gold-Bug sets for itself the task of solving a puzzle
and possesses action from first to last. Other stories teach a
moral. Ethan Brand
deals with the unpardonable sin, and The Great Stone Face
is our classic story in the field of ideals and their
development. Hawthorne, above all writers, is most interested
in ethical laws and moral development. Still other stories aim
to portray character. Miss Jewett and Mrs. Freeman veraciously
picture the faded-out womanhood in New England; Henry James
and Bjφrnson turn the x-rays of psychology and sociology on
their characters; Stevenson follows with the precision of the
tick of a watch the steps in Markheim's mental evolution.
The types of the short-story are as varied as life
itself. Addison, Lamb, Irving, Warner, and many others have
used the story in their sketches and essays with wonderful
effect. The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow is as impressive as any of Scott's tales.
The allegory in The
Great Stone Face loses little or nothing when compared
with Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. No better type of detective story has been
written than the two short-stories, The Murders in the Rue
Morgue and The
Purloined Letter. Every emotion is subject to the call
of the short-story. Humor with its expansive free air is not
so well adapted to the short-story as is pathos. There is a
sadness in the stories of Dickens, Garland, Page, Mrs.
Freeman, Miss Jewett, Maupassant, Poe, and many others that
runs the whole gamut from pleasing tenderness in A Child's Dream of a Star
to unutterable horror in The Fall of the House of
Usher.
The short-story is stripped of all the incongruities
that led Fielding, Scott, and Dickens far afield. All its
parts harmonize in the simplest manner to give unity and
"totality" of impression through strict unity of form. It is a
concentrated piece of life snatched from the ordinary and
uneventful round of living and steeped in fancy until it
becomes the acme of literary art.
1920
WILLA SIBERT CATHER
By Latrobe Carroll
Bookman 53 (May 1920) 212-215
ON the Nebraska prairie some years ago,
a little girl rode about on her pony, among settlements of
Scandinavians and Bohemians, listening to their conversation,
fascinated by their personalities. She was Willa Sibert
Cather, who, as a woman, was to give in her novels the story
of their struggle with the soil. Ever since those early years,
she has been studying people, until she is today one of that
small group of American writers who tell of life with beauty
and entire earnestness. She has won the praise of those
critics whose standards are highest, whose condemnation of
insincerity and distortion is severest. Listen to Randolph
Bourne: "She has outgrown provincialism and can now be
reckoned among those who are richly interpreting youth all
over the world." And to H. L Mencken: "There is no other
American author of her sex, now in view, whose future promises
so much."
Miss Cather's reputation is of recent
growth. Though her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge", was
published in 1912, she remained comparatively unknown until
about five years ago. Then critics realized that every
successive book of hers had shown an advance, and began to
look forward with interest to her future work. She is,
however, still unknown to large sections of the American
reading public.
Not long ago, she sat in her New York
apartment in Greenwich Village, and talked to me about her
books. She seems just the one to have written them. She is
sincere, vigorous, self-controlled. There is no flippancy
about her. She has not made herself the heroine of any of her
novels, but she is akin to her own heroines. In "The Song of
the Lark", one of the characters remarks that Thea Kronborg,
the central figure, "doesn't sigh every time the wind
blows". Miss Cather herself is that sort. She has a
mental sturdiness.
She spoke of the beginnings of her impulse
to write.
"When I was about nine," she said, "father
took me from our place near Winchester, Virginia, to a ranch
in Nebraska. Few of our neighbors were Americans -- most of
them were Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Bohemians. I grew
fond of some of these immigrants -- particularly the old
women, who used to tell me of their home country. I used to
think them under-rated, and wanted to explain them to their
neighbors. Their stories used to go round and round in my head
at night. This was, with me, the initial impulse. I didn't
know any writing people. I had an enthusiasm for a kind of
country and a kind of people, rather than ambition.
"I've always had a habit of remembering
mannerisms, turns of speech," she explained. "The phraseology
of those people stuck in my mind. If I had made notes, or
should make them now, the material collected would be dead.
No, it's memory -- the memory that goes with the vocation.
When I sit down to write, turns of phrase I've forgotten for
years come back like white ink before fire. I think that most
of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before
the age of fifteen. That's the important period: when one's
not writing. Those years determine whether one's work will be
poor and thin or rich and fine."
After a high school preparation, Miss
Cather entered the University of Nebraska. She said, of this
time:
"Back in the files of the college magazine,
there were once several of my perfectly honest but very clumsy
attempts to give the story of some of the Scandinavian and
Bohemian settlers who lived not far from my father's farm. In
these sketches, I simply tried to tell about the people,
without much regard for style. These early stories were bald,
clumsy, and emotional. As I got toward my senior year, I began
to admire, for the first time, writing for writing's sake. In
those days, no one seemed so wonderful as Henry James; for me,
he was the perfect writer."
When Willa Cather graduated at nineteen,
her instructors and friends expected her to become a "writer"
in a few months, and achieve popular success. But they were
disappointed. For almost nine years she wrote little besides a
volume of verse, the experimental "April Twilights", and a
dozen stories for magazines. Most of these stories she now
dismisses as "affected" and "bad".
"It wasn't that I didn't want to write,"
she said of this period. "But I was too interested in trying
to find out something about the world and about people. I
worked on the Pittsburg 'Leader', taught English in the
Allegheny High School, went abroad for long periods, and
traveled in the west. I couldn't have got as much out of those
nine years if I'd been writing."
In 1905 there was published a collection of
her stories, "The Troll Garden". Largely by reason of these,
she was offered a position on "McClure's Magazine", of which
she was managing editor from 1908 until 1912.
"I took a salaried position," she said,
"because I didn't want to write directly to sell. I didn't
want to compromise. Not that the magazine demands were wrong.
But they were definite. I had a delightful sense of freedom
when I'd saved up enough to take a house in Cherry Valley, New
York, and could begin work on my first novel, 'Alexander's
Bridge'.
"In 'Alexander's Bridge' I was still more
preoccupied with trying to write well than with anything else.
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural. People
grow in honesty as they grow in anything else. A painter or
writer must learn to distinguish what is his own from that
which he admires. I never abandoned trying to make a
compromise between the kind of matter that my experience had
given me and the manner of writing which I admired, until I
began my second novel, 'O Pioneers!' And from the first
chapter, I decided not to 'write' at all -- simply to give
myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and
places I had believed forgotten. This was what my friend Sarah
Orne Jewett had advised me to do. She said to me that if my
life had lain in a part of the world that was without a
literature, and I couldn't tell about it truthfully in the
form I most admired, I'd have to make a kind of writing that
would tell it, no matter what I lost in the process."
"O Pioneers!" placed Miss Cather definitely
among the writers who count. It is an epic of the early
struggles of Swedish and Bohemian settlers in Nebraska -- a
book of beauty and power. In taking for a title the name of
one of Walt Whitman's poems, the author drew attention to his
influence upon the mood of her narrative.
In "The Song of the Lark", Willa Cather
chose a less impressionistic method. It is longer than "O
Pioneers!", less concentrated, resembling more closely the
conventional psychological novel. It is the story of Thea
Kronborg, a Swedish-American singer, who wrenches herself away
from an environment antagonistic to art, and becomes an opera
"star". Critics took widely divergent attitudes toward the
book. To many, it has not the same aliveness as "O Pioneers!"
Randolph Bourne found it a digression into a field for which
Miss Cather was not really fitted, either by her style, or her
enthusiasm. But Edward Everett Hale discovered in it "a sense
of something less common than life: namely, art as it exists
in life -- a very curious and elusive thing, but so beautiful,
when one gets it, that one forgets all else."
Miss Cather's most recent novel, "My
Antonia", is a fuller evocation of the "old, old west" than
was "O Pioneers!" The descriptions of the western prairie,
brief, poignant, lift us from our easy chairs and set us down
on those high plains. The book is ruthless, poetical,
tremendously alive. It is the finest thing Miss Cather has
written. H. L. Mencken laid it down with the conviction that
it is the best piece of fiction done by any woman in America.
The portrayal of Antonia is masterly.
"She was a Bohemian girl," Miss Cather
said, "who was good to me when I was a child. I saw a great
deal of her from the time I was eight until I was twelve. She
was big-hearted and essentially romantic."
Willa Cather's foreigners are true to type.
August Brunius, after noting that the Swede, as presented by
writers outside his own country, usually seems absurd to a
Swedish reader, goes on to say that in "O Pioneers!" and "The
Song of the Lark", Swedes are presented with true insight and
art. Small wonder that all Miss Cather's books have been
translated into the Scandinavian and are to be translated into
French.
Her latest volume, "Youth and the Bright
Medusa", is a collection of eight short stories. Simply and
vividly told, they are studies of the artistic temperament. In
them, there is none of the usual sentimentalizing about the
artist. They are widely recognized as work of distinction, An
anonymous critic in "The Nation" slyly remarks that the
collection "represents the triumph of mind over Nebraska".
Willa Cather's best work is satisfying
because it is sincere. In her books, there is none of the
sweet reek that pervades the pages of so many "lady
novelists". Love, to her, is "not a simple state, like
measles". Her treatment of sex is without either squeamishness
or sensuality. She loves the west, and the arts, particularly
music, and she has sought to express feelings and convictions
on these subjects. She tried, failed, and kept on trying until
she succeeded. For example, we have her word for it that at
college she attempted to tell about immigrants in rough
sketches. She drew them more skilfully in "The Bohemian Girl",
a short story which appeared in "McClure's Magazine" in 1912.
Then came "O Pioneers!", a work of art. In "My Antonia", she
reached what she had been advancing toward for many years.
Similarly in her exploration of the minds and emotions of
artists, she has striven to tell the truth -- the truth
stripped of sentimentality. She experimented in "The Troll
Garden", succeeded partially in "Youth and the Bright Medusa",
grasped fully what she had sought in "The Song of the Lark".
It would, of course, be unfair to speak of the books and
stories that led up to this novel and to "My Antonia" as
preliminary studies, for there is too much in them not touched
upon in the two later novels. But there is a certain summing
up, in these books, of two subjects which have interested Miss
Cather profoundly: the life of foreigners in the west, and the
mind and heart of the artist. Of the books, the author herself
said: "I think 'My Antonia' is the most successfully done.
'The Song of the Lark' was the most interesting to write."
"I work from two and a half to three hours
a day," Miss Cather went on to say. "I don't hold myself to
longer hours; if I did, I wouldn't gain by it. The only reason
I write is because it interests me more than any other
activity I've ever found. I like riding, going to operas and
concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing
interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it,
my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I
get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except
the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To
listen to them interests me as much as a good morning's work.
"For me, the morning is the best time to
write. During the other hours of the day I attend to my
housekeeping, take walks in Central Park, go to concerts, and
see something of my friends. I try to keep myself fit, fresh:
one has to be in as good form to write as to sing. When not
working, I shut work from my mind."
At present, Miss Cather is writing a new
novel -- she says of it:
"What I always want to do is to make the
'writing' count for less and less and the people for more. In
this new novel I'm trying to cut out all analysis,
observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in
order to make things and people tell their own story simply by
juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my
part.
"Just as if I put here on the table a green
vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things
affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which
neither of them will produce alone. Why should I try to say
anything clever, or by any colorful rhetoric detract attention
from those two objects, the relation they have to each other
and the effect they have upon each other? I want the reader to
see the orange and the vase -- beyond that, I am out of it.
Mere cleverness must go. I'd like the writing to be so lost in
the object, that it doesn't exist for the reader --
except for the reader who knows how difficult it is to lose
writing in the object. One must choose one's audience, and the
audience I try to write for is the one interested in the
effect the green vase brings out in the orange, and the orange
in the green vase."
Miss Cather has never sought publicity, or
quick success. It took her three years to write "The Song of
the Lark", and three to write "My Antonia". Of the two paths
of art -- give the public what it wants, or make your work so
fine that the public will want it -- she has consistently
chosen the path of fine work. She is moving unhurriedly toward
a richer self-expression.
William Dean Howells, "A Reminiscent Introduction" to The
Great Modern American Stories.
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920, viii-ix.
From p. 427 Author Note
JEWETT, SARAH ORN[M]E
(1849 1909),
was born in South Berwick, Maine, of New England ancestry. Her
father was a country doctor, and in making his professional
calls he frequently took his daughter with him. In that way she
became acquainted with many New England types of whom she wrote.
---------------
Deephaven (1877); Country Byways
(1881); A Marsh Island (1885); A White Heron and Other Stories
(1886); The King of Folly Island and Other People (1888);
Strangers and Wayfarers (1890); Tales of New England (1892); A
Native of Wi[n]mby and Other Tales (1893); The Country of the
Pointed Firs (1896); [The Normans] The Tory Lover (1901); Play
Days, a Book of Stories for Children (1878 [1906]); Letters of
Sarah Orn[m]e Jewett (edited by A. Fields) (1911).
Introduction text xiii-ix
The three great artists, working always in
simple and native stuff, whom I have almost inevitably grouped
together in the order of my acquaintance with their stories, are
collectively, if not severally, without equal among their
contemporaries in their order of fiction. I like the beautiful
art, the gentle nature-love and the delicate humor of Sarah Orne
Jewett because I knew it first as the very junior editor whom it
first came to in settled form, but I do not know that I value it
more than the stories of Mrs. Wilkins Freeman or the stories of
Miss Alice Brown, which I knew with the rest of the public when
they began to appear in response to other editorial welcome. I
think
The Revolt of Mother had the widest and warmest
welcome from the whole English-reading world; Miss Brown's story
here is fairly suggestive of her far-reaching study of New
England life; and very possibly it is because of my earlier
liking for Sarah Orne Jewett's story that I like it most. She is
less dramatic in the piece chosen than the others; the story is
scarcely more than a placid and whimsical study of scene and
character; it was hard to find any story of hers that was more
than a study, but how preciously richer than a story this study
is!
From Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction.
Boston: Houghton, Miffilin, 1920 (revised 1930)
p. 166
The use of landscape as an aid in powerful emotional effects
begins again, however, with Dickens. It is noticeably rare in
Thackeray, although here and there in single phrases and
sentences he introduces the element of landscape with
singularly delicate effect. But George Eliot, William Black,
and Thomas Hardy have written whole chapters, one may almost
say books, drenched with their feeling for the natural
landscape against which their fictitious personages are
relieved. In the stories of Ouida, and in some of the sketches
of Lafcadio Hearn, the landscape sense runs riot. But if
rightly subordinated to the human element, as is almost always
the case in the novels of Turgenieff, or in the stories of Mr.
Kipling or Miss Jewett, it becomes an element of extraordinary
power and charm.
pp. 303-4
And yet if the question be put point-blank, "Do not such
short story writers as Stevenson, Mr. Kipling, Miss Jewett,
Bret Harte, Daudet -- not to mention Poe and Hawthorne --
stand for a new movement, a distinct type of literature?" one
is bound to answer "Yes." Here is work that contrasts very
strongly, not only with the Italian novella, and other
medi?val types, but even with the English and American tales
of two generations ago. Where lies the difference? For
Professor Matthews is surely right in holding that there is a
difference. It is safer to trace it, however, not in the
external characteristics of this modern work, every feature of
which can easily be paralleled in prehistoric myths, but
rather in the attitude of the contemporary short story writer
toward his material, and in his conscious effort to achieve
under certain conditions a certain effect. And no one has
defined this conscious attitude and aim so clearly as Edgar
Allan Poe.
pp. 315-16
It is true, of course, that many stories, and these perhaps
of the highest rank, avail themselves of all three of these
modes of impression. Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
Mr. Cable's "Posson Jone," Mr. Aldrich's "Marjorie Daw," Mr.
Kipling's "The Man who would be King," Miss Jewett's "The
Queen's Twin," Miss Wilkins's "A New England Nun," Dr. Hale's
"The Man without a Country," present people and events and
circumstances, blended into an artistic whole, that defies
analysis. But because we sometimes receive full measure,
pressed down and running over, we should not forget that the
cup of delight may be filled in a simpler and less wonderful
way.
pp. 347-8
Then, too, the tendency to the production of sectional
fiction, to which allusion has just been made, has prevented
our fiction from taking on even the semblance of national
quality. By dint of keeping their eyes on the object, many of
our best writers have studied but the narrowest of fields.
They do not represent, or pretend to represent, with adequacy
the entirety even of that limited province for which they
stand as representative authors. We speak, for instance, of
Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mr. Page, Mr. Allen, Miss Johnston,
Mr. Harris, Miss King, and a half dozen more, as
representatives of the South in contemporary fiction; but they
exhibit as many Souths as there are writers. Who can select
any one book of these skilled story-tellers and say, "Here is
the South represented through the art of fiction?" Or take New
England, as interpreted by such excellent and such different
writers as Mrs. Stowe, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Mrs.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Mrs. Stowe shows one New
England, Miss Wilkins another; each is marvelously true to the
local color selected; but you cannot take "Old Town Folks" and
"Deephaven" and "Pembroke" and "A Singular Life" and say "Here
is New England." At best you can say "Here is a part of New
England." Now if there is a difference in passing from the
Vermont or Massachusetts of Miss Wilkins to the Maine of Miss
Jewett, think of the difference in passing from these to the
Virginia of Mr. Page, the Northwest of Mr. Garland, the
California of Bret Harte, the Alaska of Mr. Jack London! If we
can scarcely find a thoroughly representative sectional novel,
how shall we expect a representative national novel.
1922
From Blanche Colton Williams, Modern
American
Writers: Our Short Story Writers.
New York: Moffat,
Yard, & Co., 1922, pp. 1-21.
CHAPTER I
ALICE BROWN
MR. GRANT OVERTON in The Women Who
Make Our Novels says discriminatingly about the lady
whose name heads this chapter: "It is perhaps unfortunate
that in a book dealing with American women novelists it
should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice
Brown to her novels." Novelist, essayist, poet, dramatist,
Alice Brown has done her best work in the short-story. On
looking over certain of her earlier collections, however,
one might well ask, ''Would the content of these tales not
gain if organized into novel form?" Whether Miss Brown's
first short-stories are to be regarded as tentative efforts
toward noveldom or whether her novels must be viewed as the
work of a short-story writer straying afield is a moot
question. Not inconceivably she is one of those rare authors
destined to compara- tive success in two literary types.
The
New
Hampshire scenes and persons in Meadow Grass and
Tiverton Tales, obviously direct from her memory and
observation, occur and recur throughout the volumes. One
lays them down and with slight effort constructs a
neighborhood history. If not quite novels in embryo or even
in the amorphous state, they are at least prophecies.
Beginning with High Noon, Miss Brown entered into
constructive fiction. Her previous building rested on the
knowledge and inheritance of childhood. The High Noon
accomplishment is that of an artist finding herself,
uncertainly, gropingly, in her chosen form. For this reason
the stories are not real nor convincing as are those in the
earlier volumes. They are trials toward a new goal. In The
County
Road, Vanishing Points, and The
Flying Teuton the author has arrived. She is sure of
her manner, her invention and her technic. She has mellowed
to maturity. This is by no means to say that her first books
may not be so valuable. From the point of view of literary
history they are superior. No historian of New England
writing henceforth may afford to neglect her studies not
more than he might omit those of Sarah Orne Jewett or the
first work of Mary Wilkins Freeman. On the other hand, no
account of the short-story would be complete without
emphasis upon the greater art of her second and third
periods.
Had
Alice
Brown so elected she might have ranked higher as
essayist or poet than story writer. It is not too much to
add that she may be remembered as dramatist. Something of
her own feeling about the medium of expression she probably
put into the letter Zoe Montrose wrote Francis Hume (in The
Day
of His Youth): "Do not write verse until you fail
to express yourself in prose. Verse should glide full-winged
over the surface of the waters where the spirit of God lies
sleeping." Her versatility has meant breadth and variety; it
has not favored, even if it has not hindered, her
intensification in any one of the literary forms. If it has
conduced to mixture rather than subtile differentiation of
type, then the glory is greater to her short-stories that
they have emerged triumphant.
Alice
Brown
was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, December 5,
1857. "Her home was not so far from the sea," says Harriet
Prescott Spofford, ''that the swift sea-turn did not creep
in with its salt dews; and there the sound of the rote after
great storms reached her ears and startled her imagination."
She went to a district school, which she has undoubtedly
commemorated in Number Five, the opening essay in Meadow
Grass. "Up to the very hollow which made its
playground and weedy garden the road was elm-bordered and
lined with fair meadows, skirted in the background with
shadowy pines, so soft they did not even wave; they only
seemed to breathe." The treasures of the road she touches
with lingering hand: the watering trough, the lichened
fence, the pasture; the forget-me-not and the milkweed; the
little river, the bridge and the meadows.
There
her
environment was not unlike that of her compeers over
America; there history repeated itself. There was the boy
who led his class (he does his hayin' now by hand); there
was the youngster who ran away (he has become the shif'less
citizen); there the inseparable friends fell in love with
the same girl (only one remains); there was the little girl
who lived with the selec'man's wife and who had only one
beautiful thing to remember all her life a pink cambric
dress given her by the lady who "boarded'' a few weeks in
the neighborhood.
It
is
deducible from her Tiverton stories that, apart from her
school life, Miss Alice absorbed all the customs of the
country and saw everything. She watched the making of rugs,
hand-woven coverlets, occasionally the carding of wool into
rolls and the spinning of rolls into thread; she knew how to
make "riz doughnuts" and pies and biscuits; she knew what it
was to visit in the "sullar" barrels of Bald'ins and barrels
of pork. She knew how butter was kept cool (for she has
recorded an instance of a napkin lost in the well); she knew
how to chum and how to ''make the butter come.'' She
observed the hogsheads under the eaves, where insects came
daily to their death. She officiated at the winding of
grandfather's clocks, took sharp note of false teeth, and
knew that chewing cloves or wearing cracker poultices
supposedly abated the pain of an aching molar. She was aware
that a medicated stocking-leg is soothing to a sore throat.
She was familiar with the cinnamon rose, the clove pink and
the currant worm; she must have loved the larkspurs and
ladies' delights, for she uses them over and again; she took
note of hollows under syringa bushes where hens had bathed.
She walked lanes bordered with raspberry and rose; roaming
the fields and woods, she learned thoroughwort, spearmint,
pennyr'yal, wormwood and tansy. She loved the forest under
the sun and under the moon. Always she has loved trees; from
her first stories to her latest, she is a Druid.
With
adjoining
communities she was on terms of acquaintance.
Penrith figures occasionally; Horn o' the Moon frequently;
Sudleigh often. Sudleigh, rival of Tiverton! The name is no
mask for the initiated; it serves as well as the real for
others. It is perhaps an example of unconscious humor or
native shrewdness that New England thrift is illustrated in
the Sudleighites (not by the Tivertonians) who sold ice
water on a memorable occasion for a penny a glass.
Above
all,
Alice Brown knew people. Her picture of an old lady
climbing upon an antiquated steed by means of chair and
''cricket" one would take oath is memory drawn; her village
witch is reminiscent, albeit speaking, we doubt not, Miss
Brown's own philosophy: "There's a good deal missed when ye
stay at home makin' pies an' a good deal ye can learn if ye
live out-door." Some years have passed since we saw her Children
of
Earth at Mr. Ames's Little Theatre; but we have not
forgotten the village fool whose presence in the play
testifies to his creator's kinship with Shakespeare. Miss
Dyer and Mrs. Blair, of Joint Ownership (in Meadow
Grass) are true neighborhood types. Then there are
Parson True and his daughter, Farmer Eli Pike and his
family, including Hattie's Sereno, and the Mardens, who,
though types, are individualized, and we hazard, all of
them, from originals. There is the old lady who, despoiled
of youth's desire, approached octogenarianhood wearing a hat
that proudly sported lavender roses; there is the vexatious
Widow Poll, who tagged along where she was not wanted and
who thrust her heavy foot by accident, premeditated or
unpremeditated, into Heman's violin case (if she did not
wear Congress gaiters, with elastic sides, some of her
sisters did); there are the comforters of the sick who talk
of death under circumstances similar to those attending the
comfortee; there are those who immolate themselves on the
shrine of ancestor worship and drag out barren lives if
service is ever barren.
Her
nomenclature
is redolent of New England: Caleb (Kelup), Eli,
Cyrus, David, Elkanah, Solon, Liddy, Luceba, 'Mandy, Dorcas,
Delilah.
And
if
her characters are not idealized portraits of childhood
acquaintances they may well have been. If we go up Tiverton
way we believe we shall find them all older, perhaps, or
even in the churchyard or recognizable in their
descendants[.] " 'Ain't you Rufe Gill?' Fielding made the
concession of his verb to place and time. The other
straightened himself. 'Well, no,' he said, 'I ain't. But
father is.' " (From A Runaway Match, in High
Noon.)
In
The End of All Living, her final sketch in Tiverton
Tales, Miss Brown pictures the churchyard behind the
First Church, on a sloping hillside, "Overrun with a briery
tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning hand from
the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead." For
interest, the burial ground in Plymouth offers fit
comparison with the spot described by Miss Brown, as
Irving's Westminster Abbey is its companion-piece in
literature.
About
1871
or '72, Miss Brown began her course at Robinson
Seminary in Exeter. During the hardest winter months she
lived in Exeter, but the rest of the year she walked to and
from her home, nearly four miles.
It
is
less easy to determine from her work what she gathered in
that period of advanced schooling. But she must have tucked
away a good bit from the English poets, Wordsworth, Keats,
Milton, Rossetti and Tennyson; in those days she was
training to teach. Her first essays are touched with
unconscious rhythm of poetry. " or when the board was set,
what faces smiled," ends a sentence in Number Five,
"a haunting spirit in perennial bliss" closes The End of
All Living. Perfect iambic pentameters, each. It was
from her poetic power, Harriet Prescott Spofford said some
years ago, her friends expected the most.
Miss
Brown
taught for a few years in the country and Boston, but
"hating it more and more every minute," as she herself has
said, she gave up teaching for writing. After working for a
time on the Christian Register, she became, in 1885,
a member of the staff of The Youth's Companion.
There she ground out stuff from the latest books and
magazines and wrote stories. Eventually she resigned to
devote herself entirely to writing.
In
1886
she first went abroad, spending the greater part of the
year in France; in 1890 she went again, "enjoying five
months of gentle vagabondage in England." Part of the time
she spent in London, but more of it in Devon and Cornwall,
regions for which she was made eager through the history of
her native village. It will be recalled by those who have
read The Flat-Iron Lot (Tiverton Tales), "the
first settlers came from Devon.'' Six years later, By
Oak
and Thorn, a collection of travel reminiscences,
incorporated Miss Brown's reaction to her pleasant holiday.
In
1895
she made another journey, in the companionship of
Louise Imogen Guiney, walking all of ten weeks in Wales,
Shropshire and Devon, and going up to London for a season
with the younger English poets. In collaboration with Miss
Guiney, she published a booklet on Robert Louis Stevenson, a
study which is also an appreciation.
In
1895
Meadow Grass appeared.* Reviews of the book
favored Farmer Eli's Vacation. C. M. Thompson,
writing in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1906, states
that he regards it as Miss Brown's best achievement. But in
story value and structure it is inferior to Told in the
Poorhouse, A Righteous Bargain, or Joint
Owners in Spain, not to go outside of the same covers.
As has been indicated in reconstructing the early days of
Miss Brown's life, these are tales, presumably, of the
Hampton Falls neighborhood. The homely dialect of this and
her succeeding collection, Tiverton Tales (1899)
contributes to verisimilitude and drama as it inspires the
reader with sympathy for the dramatis person?. In English
fiction one must go to George Eliot for fit comparison; Mary
Ann Evans, one of, and yet apart from, Warwickshire folk,
saw their oddities and foibles. Miss Brown stands in the
same relation to her Tivertonians. She is one of them at
heart, and yet she is not quite democratic. Not that she
feels aloofness or means to convey superiority. She suffers
from or profits by a point of view, native to her and
strengthened by absence, which recognizes them as
''characters.'' In so recognizing them she unconsciously
aligns herself with the external standards of
conventionality and culture. Now and
then she drops into an "I" use which
brings her singularly back into the magic circle of her own.
Mr. C. M. Thompson liked her dialect stories because he knew
her class of people; a writer in Reedy's Mirror
later remarked that if one cannot sympathize with her people
it is because he is so saturated with the New England
atmosphere. The combined comment offers two somewhat
contradictory angles from which results agreement that she
is successful.
The
technique
of these stories reveals the tryer-out. After
All, for example, maintains unity by a nice emphasis
upon character; it works out its theme. But the ''story"
falters. So the dramatic note occurs, but by fits and
starts, showing that the author has the sense of drama but
has not learned properly to subdue the unimportant, to
graduate to scale and to point up her climaxes. She sees the
universally dramatic and pathetic in human relations,
however small the revealing occurrence. Told in the
Poorhouse will illustrate as well as any of the tales
her early inclination to the dramatic:
Josh
Marden
and his wife Lyddy Ann have been married for
''fifteen year" when Josh's second cousin 'Mandy comes to
help with the work. She starts trouble. Josh "looked at
'Mandy an' he got over seein' Lyddy Ann, that's all." On
Josh's birthday 'Mandy gave him a present of a bill folder.
He discarded the old one. Lyddy took it back for her own.
"An' arterwards it come out that the old pocket-book was one
she'd bought for him afore they was married earned in
bindin' shoes." Later, when 'Mandy presumed to sit in
Lyddy's place at table, the wife ordered her up. "You've
took my husband away, but you shan't take my place at
table." Josh orders Lyddy into the foreroom. 'Mandy leaves.
For some years Lyddy keeps to her side of the house, Josh to
his. At last he falls sick, suffers a stroke, and Lyddy
tends him. Before he dies he makes trial of speech. Lyddy
thinks she understands, " 'Yes, Joshuay, yes, dear!'
An' she got up an' took the pocket-book 'Mandy had gi'n him
off the top o' the bureau an' laid it down on the bed where
he could git it. But he shook his head, an' said the word
ag'in, an' a queer look as if she was scairt an' pleased
flashed over Lyddy Ann's face. She ran into the parlor, an'
come back with that old pocket-book he'd give up to her, an'
she put it into his well hand. That was what he wanted. His
fingers gripped it up, an' he shet his eyes. He never spoke
ag'in."
The
stories
in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales
reveal, in the complimentary sense, their feminine
authorship. Miss Brown sees events through the woman's eyes,
which means that she sees them more truly than if she
attempted the masculine point of view. For the sexes rarely
envision correctly other than through their respective
lenses. And although Miss Brown's later stories succeed in
assuming the masculine angle, she grew in years and in
practice before attempting it. Whether, therefore, playing
up a woman heroine or villain Miss Brown's earlier stories
emphasize the woman's outlook. Her men are convincing, but
slightly drawn; they appear infrequently, as men on a New
England farm are infrequently at the house. Her children are
shadowy. Either they are cowed and humble, like Rosie of the
March Wind, or they are well-behaved and
inconspicuously demure, like Claribel of After All.
Yet, later on, Miss Brown was to show her sympathy with
girlhood in The Secret of the Clan (1912).
If
Miss
Brown's mental attitude challenges comparisons with
that of George Eliot, her characters bring back memories of
Cranford. Deacon Pitts, mentioned in Dooryards,
prefatory sketch in Tiverton Tales, had a ghoulish
delight in funerals. This morning the butcher had brought
him news of death in a neighboring town. Suddenly, as he
turned back toward the house, bearing a pan of liver, his
pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling across
the fields. ''He set down his pan and made a trumpet of his
hands. 'Sarah!' he called piercingly. 'Sarah! Mr. Amasa
Blake's passed away! Died yesterday!' '' Who can forget the
Cranford lady, threatened to surrender by a fit of coughing,
her delicious morsel of gossip! And if the gentleman evokes
the thought, "At least Tiverton is not composed altogether
of Amazons!'' still he betrays his kinship with the females
of Mrs. Gaskell's species.
Tiverton Tales can hardly be described as elaborating
the sentiment of love; yet the greater number of them embody
the passion as it slighted or glanced at or enveloped her
people. The Mortuary Chest, most delightful of the
series, introduces the elderly maiden and her old lover
the clergyman who had married elsewhere and who now recalls
the past with his first love; Horn o' the Moon
presents Doctor Mary, self-appointed to nurse Johnnie
Veasey, and left forlorn when Johnnie goes away to marry the
other girl; A Stolen Festival, which tells something
about the first wedding anniversary of Letty and David,
betrays his forgetfulness of the day, Letty's pitiful
attempt to celebrate, and her early schooling to the
difference between the ways of men and women; A Last
Assembling, comparable only to Miss Wilkins's A
New England Nun, with a glint of Cornelia Comer's Long
Inheritance threading through it, psychologizes the
refusal of Dilly to marry Jethro after many years; A
Second Marriage unmistakably reveals the hidden
springs of Amelia's decision not to marry the love of her
boyhood, Laurie Morse.
But
the
most individual story in the volume is The Way of
Peace, which recounts the sorrow of a daughter for her
mother and her successful attempt to impersonate that
mother. When she saw herself in the mirror she was
comforted. And her way of peace was assured when the
youngest of her nephews and nieces crept up to her and
asked, "Grandma, when'd you get well?" Pathological and
nostalgic, perhaps, but saved by its uncompromising honesty.
In
making
a study of Alice Brown's development, her novels and
other works should be taken into account. It is to be
regretted that the present comment must omit them, with only
suggestions here and there, which may be traced out to the
fuller completion of the tapestry.
Her
early
story-writing was diversified, then, by a historical
study, Mercy Otis Warren, in connection with which
she did much research work acquainting herself fully with
the revolutionary era. A volume of poems, The Road to
Castaly, also marks her productivity before 1900. King's
End and Margaret Warrener were published in
1901.
The
volume
of stories succeeding Tiverton Tales marks a
distinct change in her subject-matter and her method, or
more accurately a reversion to the novelette experiment, The
Day
of His Youth. In High Noon (1904)
sentiment is pronounced and increased, love dominates, and
the business of marriage provokes the author's analytical
powers. Admirers confessed of Miss Brown's work, we think it
not too harsh to say that such stories as The Book of
Love are Myrtle Reedian, at best in the language of
the hero, Graham "a kind of divine nonsense." A
Meeting in the Market Place, His Enemy, Natalie
Blayne, A Runaway Match, Rosamund in
Heaven, The Miracle, The Map of the
Country, and The End of the Game all are
permeated by a scientific sentimental interest in love. The
disappointed, the hope of union after death, the adjustment
of temperaments, the salvation through service of those love
has passed by these and similar themes constitute the
illuminatingly subjective side of the volume.
Prominent
among
her characters, now, are literary men and women. Her
own attitude is more consciously literary. The title, High
Noon, she follows out by a proverb from the Persian,
"One instant only is the sun at noon," and indicates thereby
her recognition of the crucial moment. She is studying the
nature of the short-story and short-story writers. In The
End
of the Game she speaks of the short-story as
"perfect of form and sonnet-like in finish," mentions
Prosper Merimee the earliest of conte writers
and concludes The End of the Game in a Lady-or-Tiger
manner, which certainly points to study of Stockton. Her
local color, save for the marsh, is disappearing. The best
of the lot is Natalie Blayne, in that it is more
objective and is possessed of sufficient humor to redeem the
sentiment elsewhere overstrained.
In
The County Road (1906) the author returns to her
country folk but creates with a noticeably freer hand than
in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales. In ten
years her Tiverton friends have advanced, with the rest of
the world. Blue coverlets still exist, but the book telling
how to make them Cynthia of Bachelor's Fancy finds
in the attic. Nancy of the masculine pipe and tobacco still
wanders, Sudleigh stage runs, and shoe-binding continues.
But she looks forward, not backward. Her young people meet
on nearly equal terms with the old folk. It is true that
Abigail and Jonathan in A Day Off are the
protagonists and their daughter plays a secondary rτle, but
the daughter provides causation for the mother's acts
throughout It is also true that Old Immortality, the
most distinctive story in the volume, has an old couple for
its chief actors. But A Winter's Courting, The
Looking Glass, The Twisted Tree, and Bachelor's
Fancy have for heroines young and beautiful women. If
her study of love is still pathological, it is also more
sane and hopeful. By logical growth and development Miss
Brown uses old scenes in a novel way. Her temperament has
become pronounced and her art has advanced at the expense of
locale. The creator has displaced the copyist. Oddly enough,
the sea has gained hold upon Miss Brown. Cynthia of Elephant's
Mountain, worn threadbare, obsessed by her husband's
much greasing of his boots, leaves the country and takes
refuge with her sister by the sea. The scene is Fastnet, and
the Captain of the tale is one after Miss Jewett's order.
Her
dramatic
power has grown. A Day Off, for example, is
constructed in scenes, the action of which is developed
through dialogue. Her characters stand on their own feet,
here as in the other stories.
She
elaborates
her theories of soul-communion. The Cave of
Adullam emphasizes the joy of living in spirit beside
the heart's love; Bankrupt (of Meadow Grass)
is its prototype. Miss Lucretia of one is Dorcas of the
other in a similar situation.
A
new
note of allegory enters The County Road,
extended in her subsequent stories. Sylvia of The Twisted
Tree in her sick-soul condition is obsessed with the
idea that the tree symbolizes herself. (O. Henry touched the
theme in The Last Leaf). Haven, who loves Sylvia,
grafts new shoots upon the tree; Sylvia recovers. It is
worth while following out Miss Brown's interest in this motif
as expressed in A Home-spun Wizardry (Harper's,
October, 1913) and A Mind Cure (Harper's,
August, 1914).
We
have
emphasized the beginning of Miss Brown's work, for in
it lies the germ of all her subsequent development. We may
pass over Country Neighbors (1910), The
One-Footed Fairy and Other Stories (1911) and
study her perfect orientation in Vanishing Points
(1913). This collection was also preceded by her novels, Rose
McLeod and Paradise.
Her
setting
may be, now, Boston or Darjheeling; her characters
may be young, middle-aged or old; they may be curates,
editors or autocrats of civic affairs; they may be Aunt
Harriets of Overland, or Elisha Porsons of commercial
circles. She may set her stage for men, alone, as she does
in The Master one of the best "man" stories ever
written by a woman; for the actors in young love, as in The
Discovery
or The Flight of the Mouse; for
millionaires and journalists, as in The Lantern. She
may write in the person of a man-narrator or as the
camera-author. It matters not. Her people act and interact
so as to give the illusion of life.
She
breasts
out against new subjects, swimming with the times.
She makes, for instance, a case of social theories and
practices in The Man in the Cloister and concludes
that human kindness is the solution of the problem
presented. She has advanced in the plot or "fable." She has
a story to tell, not merely a thesis to illustrate, a
"character" to hit off. She is adept at creating suspense,
pause, climax; she weaves the fabric of her plot by clues
and forecast and their fulfillment. Whole scenes may be
lifted and acted on the stage with but slight changes for
"directions." In The Master, for example, the table
scene; in The Lantern, the scene between Porson and
the Marshalls. She is not always skillful with coincidence;
the double one in The Clue will strain the reader's
credulity. So the poor architecture of The House With
the Tower (Harper's, May, 1914), is righted by
a storm that rises all too easily. But she apologizes for
coincidence in a later volume: "It is true that the most
extraordinary and exact coincidences happen, as if pieces in
the mosaic of life, made to fit together in some mysterious
forecast of destiny, rush toward each other and are finally
joined."+ Perhaps she is colder and remoter in some of her
later tales. If so, the reason lies largely in the truth
that she leaves her characters to declare themselves: the
story is more objective than her earlier and comparatively
subjective interpretations.
March
21,
1913, Winthrop Ames, of The Little Theatre, New York,
inaugurated a drama contest. One thousand six hundred and
forty-six plays were submitted. In 1914, the award of ten
thousand dollars was made to Alice Brown for Children of
Earth. It is not a good acting play, as the published
version may show to those who did not see it while on the
boards. But the fidelity to New England life is not less
than that evinced in Meadow Grass and Tiverton
Tales; it is imaginative and poetic. It illustrates in
its non-success the paradox that some of the most dramatic
story-writers fall short on the actual stage.
The Flying Teuton (1918), following Bromley
Neighborhood and The Prisoner, carries on the
method of Vanishing Points, with an emphasis upon
the supernatural. She had already touched it in The
Tryst and There and Here of High Noon.
Her Tryst of the Flying Teuton is the
companion piece of the former Tryst in that the
earlier story looks mystically into the future and the life
beyond, while the later illustrates the theory of
transmigration of souls and hints at remote pasts of two who
meet in Paestum. The Flying Teuton, the story
lending its name to the book, is a sort of modem
Flying-Dutchman that has been classed among the great
short-stories produced by the World War. A Citizen and
His Wife is not far behind it a spy story combined
with a unique love motive: a traitor is betrayed by his wife
who loved him only a little less than her country. The
Island emphasizes Miss Brown's favorite thesis, that
life and love are continuous in a vast and beautiful way,
touched long before in A Meeting in the Market-Place
(High Noon). It conceives the ideal as one where
Keats's magic casements are part of the mansion of the soul,
where Shelley's Skylark is real and where invisible
colonies reach out to aid England. It is but a step from
this story content to The Wind Between the Worlds
(1920) and its theme of whether or not communication with
the dead is possible. It also finds reverberation in Old
Lemuel's Journey (Atlantic Monthly, June,
1920), which takes the dying man upon a mysterious visit
before his final demise.
A
quarter
century has elapsed between Miss Brown's first
stories and her latest. She has become a citizen of the
world; her story people have become citizens of the world.
And yet as a world-weary traveler returns with joy to his
native heath, she occasionally writes of her home folk. Her
flavor is less strong as the cosmopolite is less remarked
than the villager. There are readers who prefer the meadow
and Tiverton, those who prefer the denizens of the world
burning laurel leaves idly for ceremonial, pasting
book-plates in volumes newly arrived from England, telling
stories in French and referring easily to ''roses from
Paestan rosaries.'' It is perhaps a trifle to be lamented
that some of us like the author so well in all her phases we
cannot tell which Alice Brown we fain would see immortal.
But we are content to leave all her works on the knees of
the gods.
Williams's Notes
*Preceded by her early novel, Fools
of Nature.
+The Flying Teuton, page 48.
Volumes of stories by Miss Brown:
Meadow Grass, 1895.
Tiverton Tales, 1899.
High
Noon, 1904.
The County Road, 1906.
Country Neighbors, 1910.
The One-Footed Fairy, 1911.
Vanishing Points, 1913.
The Flying Teuton, 1918.
Homespun and Gold, 1920.
1923
Miss Jewett's Chemistry of Story Writing
Christian
Science
Monitor (July 2, 1923), p. 19.
"TODAY I am plunged into the depths of the rural
districts, and this promised to be one of my dear country
stories like the 'Only Son.' Good heavens! what a wonderful
kind of chemistry it is that evolves all the details of a
story and writes them presently in one flash of time! For two
weeks I have been noticing a certain string of things and
having hints of character, etc., and day before yesterday the
plan of the story comes into my mind, and in half an hour I
have put all the little words and ways into their places and
can read it off to myself like print. Who does it? for I grow
more and more sure that I don't."
Thus wrote Sarah Orne Jewett from her quiet home in
South Berwick, Me., on a certain Thursday in December, 1889.
Her most delightful letters, which have been compared to Dean
Swift's famous Journal to Stella for their lightness and
delicacy of touch and for their rare command of the so-called
"little language," contain many such references to the
wonderful chemistry of story writing. Now we read, "I am
bewitched with a story," and again, "I made up a first-rate
story," or "One began to write itself this morning."
* * *
Those who know her story of "The Gray Man" will find a
peculiar pleasure in her account of its genesis and beginning:
"I am thinking and planning my stories over and over, and
first of all seems to come the gray man. It was very funny; I
had the solitary man whom I talked about at first, and then
came the 'man who never smiled,' and I coquetted over these
two estimable characters for some days, when suddenly without
note or warning they turned a double somersault and one
swallowed the other, and I found they were really one person! The Gray Man was
masquerading a little, that was all, and by this time I have
ever so many notes about him and I long to write him all down
before I see you again."
Or perhaps equally interesting is this reference to the
simpler beginning of her "Marsh Rosemary": "In the meantime I
will simply state that the next story is called 'Marsh
Rosemary,' and I made it up as I drove to the station in Wells
this morning. It deals with real life. Somehow dear, dull old
Wells is a first-rate place to find stories in. Do you
remember how we drove up that long straight road across the
marshes last summer? It was along there the Marsh Rosemary
grew."
* * *
Yet we must not infer that the wonderful chemistry did
more than evolve Miss Jewett's clever stories. She struggled
with the problems of composition even as many another, and at
times found it a tiresome task, though she loved it much. We
read how with much "grumbling and groaning" she got two
numbers of a serial ready for the printer, and how the stories
often fell short of her early dreams of them.
This reference to "The Tory Lover" is typical: "'The Tory Lover'
got itself quite done at last, -- though almost every day I
get hurried notes from the House with questions about last
things. I grow very melancholy if I fall to thinking of the
distance between my poor story and the first dreams of it, but
I believe that I have done it just as well as I could. I was
delighted the other day when Mrs. Agassiz said that she had
been doubtful in the beginning, but had really liked each
number better than the last, and I found that my people had
made her a real pleasure in the end. One needs these things
for cheer."
And again we read:
"What a joyful time it is to be close to the end of a
long piece of work, and sad, too like coming into harbour at
the end of a voyage. The more one has cared to put one's very
best into a thing, the surer he is to think that it falls
short of the 'sky he meant.' But it is certain that everything
is in such work that we have put in. The sense of failure that
weighs the artist down is often nothing but a sense of
fatigue. I always think that the trees look tired in autumn
when their fruit has dropped, but I shall remember as long as
I remember anything a small seedling apple tree that stood by
a wall in a high wild pasture at the White Hills, -- standing
proudly over its first small crop of yellow apples all fallen
into a little almost hollow of the soft turf below. I could
look over its head, and it would have been a heart of stone
that did not beat fast with sympathy. There was Success!
but up there against the sky the wistfulness of later crops
was yet to come."
* * *
Surely there is inspiration and encouragement for all
in the story of the tiny apple tree, just as in these words of
advice to Mrs. R.: "But
tell
Mrs. R---- that the only way is to keep at work! If I
were she I should read half a dozen really good and typical
stories over and over! Maupassant's 'Ficelle' for pathos and
tragic directness, for one, and some of Miss Thackeray's fairy
stories 'Cinderella,' for instance, which I have always
admired very much old-fashioned romance put into modern
terms, and Miss Wilkins' story about getting the squashes in
one frosty night, and the cats being lost! I can't remember
its name though the story is so clear and exquisite to my
mind; and Daudet's 'La Cherve de M. Sequin' and 'La Mule du
Papa.' These are all typical and well proportioned in
themselves and well managed, and I speak of them because they
come readily to my mind, and give one clear ideas of a
beautiful way of doing things. One must have one's own method;
it is the personal contribution that makes true value in any
form of art or work of any sort.
"I could write much about these things, but I do not
believe that it is worth while to say anything , but keep at
work! If something comes into a writer's or a painter's mind,
the only thing is to try it, to see what one can do with it,
and give it a chance to show if it has real value.
Story-writing is always experimental, just as a water-color
sketch is, and that something which does itself is the
vitality of it. I think we must know what good work is, before
we can do good work of our own, and so I say, study work that
the best judges have called good and see why it is good;
whether it is, in that particular story, the reticence or the
bravery of speech, the power of suggestion that is in it, or
the absolute clearness and finality of revelation; whether it
sets you thinking, or whether it makes you see a landscape
with a live human figure living its life in the foreground."
* * *
Which brings us again to a sense of that wonderful
chemistry at which she herself marveled. Here is the creed
that made it possible: "In
short,
you must write to the human heart, the great
consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise
what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what
might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to
sentimentality you can write about life but never write life
itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on
it we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every
step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves. If
we have patience with cheapness and thinness, as Christians
must, we must know that it is cheapness and not make-believe
about it. To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is
the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a
solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world."
Edward J. O'Brien, The Advance of the American Short
Story
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1923.
pp. 155-158
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) is
equally satisfactory, and may take her place in this chronicle
as the best of the New England regionalists. The body of her
contribution to the American short story is much larger than
that of Cable, and exhibits a wider range of interest. The
daughter of a country doctor, she accompanied as a child her
father on his rounds, and in her gentle reticent mind stored up
the impressions which she was to record later with a slightly
hesitant art. Her style has been likened to that of Hawthorne
which it superficially resembles, but in recalling her better
stories we realize that their charm is that of a mild Indian
summer of golden sunlight on russet leaves, while that of
Hawthorne recalls the reflective glow of smoldering fire in
autumn after the leaves have fallen. She is a pastoral poet in
prose who is entirely content with simple familiar things, and
the tragedy of New England which is seldom hidden is reconciled
to life by dumb acceptance, and subdued to the light which
transfigures it very gently. Although that life is already dim
and a little spectral, she has caught its beauty and transferred
it to the page before it is too late, and the gentle melancholy
of the picture forbears to pass judgment upon what her eyes have
seen. It is the best side of New England which she records, and
much is missing that later chroniclers have set down. We do not,
however, reproach Miss Mitford for not seeing what Mrs. Gaskell
and others have recorded. In like manner, we may turn to Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman and others for the harsher aspects of New
England reality.
Miss Jewett achieved a style as personal as
that of Cable, and was equally successful in concealing her
literary influences. These were various and catholic enough,
ranging from Hawthorne and the Caroline poets to Italian novelle
and Addison and Steele. Her self-contained reticence is an
English inheritance half-forgotten, though remembered in the
presence of other races. Between these quiet lines we may often
read a great deal which has been left unspoken, and here and
there a philosophy of writing may be gathered from her pages.
"One is shown over many a house in these days," she writes, for
example, "where the interest may be more complex, but not more
definite."Ή Henry James, we may remember, suggests that the
modern short story may be either a picture or an anecdote. Miss
Jewett, as well as he, would express her preference for the
picture. And there along the Maine coast, which we know so well
after reading her stories, with its stony precipitous land, its
very walls of stone hedging stony fields, its gray inlets with
bursts of sunlight over the wind-driven salt spray, its little
white houses, and its tiny human havens, she brooded during
"those long hours when nothing happened except the growth of
herbs and the course of the sun," ² and distilled the pungent
fragrance of simple things into faithful chronicles and little
sunny vignettes. She takes us into her intimate friendly
confidence, and the landscape is a subtle background in gentle
shadow for the little pastoral plays she has witnessed and set
down. Many writers have followed her in recording New England
life. None has maintained so even and so high a level of quiet
permanent distinction.
Ή
The Country of the Pointed Firs,
1910, p. 201.
²
The Country of the Pointed Firs,
1910, p. 208.
From John Louis Haney, The Story of Our Literature.
New
York: Scribner's, 1923
(273).
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 -1909)
occupies a distinctive place in our literature because she
described, at first hand and with rare fidelity, the social
conditions prevalent in the decaying settlements along the
Maine coast. Her striking pictures of that transitional New
England life are at their best in Deephaven (1877)
and
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), but others
of note are scattered in similar collections of her tales. No
one who has become familiar with Miss Jewett's stories is
likely to misunderstand the characters or the life of the New
England coast during the past two generations.
Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the
American Short Story
New York: Harper, 1923
pp. 259-263
The growing popularity of unique local settings and
highly individualized characters as material for fiction
brought to light a new area in the much-cultivated New England
environment. The literary beginnings of Sarah Orne Jewett were
almost exactly contemporaneous with those of Harte and Miss
Woolson and Cable, her first story, indeed, "Mr. Bruce,"
appearing in The
Atlantic as early as 1869. Unlike any of these three,
however, she was indigenous to the region she portrayed, for
generations indigenous; she wrote always with complete
knowledge and with perfect sympathy. South Berwick, Me., was
her birthplace, a distinctive old town, not far removed from
Portsmouth, N. H., which once, to quote her biographer, had
"seemed the capital of New England and the governors and
clergymen thereof rulers and potentates." The legends of a
glorious past lay over the region like a Washington Irving
atmosphere. She tells us that not long after her twentieth
year she awoke to the fact that the New England of her early
favorite authors, Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Cooke, Lowell, and the
rest, was rapidly becoming a New England of tradition only,
and that the New England even of her own childhood before the
War was passing, if not already gone. Her native town had once
been a prosperous deep-sea port with busy wharves and wealthy
merchants, and there had been a courtly society in its richly
furnished manor houses, "Judges and Governors and grand
ladies," and in these same mansions now so decayed and
pathetic, even yet there were to be found survivals of this
aristocracy, families fallen on evil times because the
shipping had left the old harbor for more prosperous ports,
yet a group that still preserved "the best traditions of
culture and of manners, from some divine inborn instinct
toward what is simplest and best and purest."
A frail child, she had been taken much by her father, a
country doctor, on his professional rounds over a wide
territory, and from him she had learned the story of every
family in the region, had gathered the wisdom of a kindly and
much-experienced soul, and had come to know the lives of her
people with a peculiar intimacy. She had no suspicion at first
that she was gathering material for literary use; she did not
enter literature deliberately and with aforethought, with the
beginner's perplexity as to what her field was to be. Her work
came to her almost as a matter of duty. By 1870 a new social
movement had come into American life the modern
summer-vacation ebb and flow had begun.