Chapter 2

, we discussed books of essays, it was with the thought of their beguiling qualities pretty much forward in our minds. I hope I do not derogate the essay, a literary form raised to the highest eminence by Bacon, Emerson, Lamb and so many others, when I say that its widest and most useful office resembles the form of investment known as short-term notes. Investors of money are constantly in receipt of funds for which, at the moment, they have no suitable repository; and investors in literature are frequently in the same fix. The man with money buys high grade commercial paper with an early maturity and watches for his long-term investment. The reader with time on his hands may often most profitably do likewise. But in one respect he is the more favoured person. If his brief-lived investment is well-chosen, the chances are great that it will lead him to some author or some group of books to which he can gladly commit his reading hours for a month or several months or a year.

Such, among literary profit-producers, are books like Stuart P. Sherman’s _The Genius of America_ and his _Americans_, the first devoted to “studies in behalf of the younger generation” of such subjects as Puritanism, shifting morals, popular education and American critical writing; the second a series of presentations of individual figures--Roosevelt, Emerson, Whitman, Carnegie, Paul Elmer More, Franklin, and others. Either his _On_ or his fictional satire, _The Mercy of Allah_, should lead the chance reader some ways further in the conquest of Hilaire Belloc. Dr. Joseph Collins’s _The Doctor Looks at Literature_ has, in a very few months, created and aborted some thousands of readers of James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoievski, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Katherine Mansfield and the other contemporary writers whose pathology it inquires into. Books about books have all the range from Jesse Lee Bennett’s invaluable reader’s Baedeker, _What Books Can Do for Me_ (with priceless reading lists of every variety) to Maurice Francis Egan’s delightful _Confessions of a Book-Lover_ and Henry van Dyke’s _Companionable Books_. What will you try? John Corbin’s _The Return of the Middle Class_ with its impulsion toward other social studies? J. H. Gardiner’s _The Bible as English Literature_ or William Lyon Phelps’s _Human Nature in the Bible_ with their lights upon ancient thinking and racial character? Corbin’s book may lead you back to Edward Carpenter’s _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_. Gardiner and Phelps may send you to Horace G. Hutchinson’s _The Greatest Story in the World_, which is the story of mankind from the beginnings of history to the time of the firm establishment of the Roman Empire. From that picturesque history of the civilisations that succeeded each other in the Mediterranean lands would you be led in the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s _Men of the Old Stone Age_ and Madison Grant’s _The Passing of the Great Race_, or toward the recent books by Lothrop Stoddard, or into the fascinations of Edwyn Bevan’s _Hellenism and Christianity_ and G. Lowes Dickinson’s _The Greek View of Life_, I wonder? As one wishful of your enjoyment and satisfaction, I hope you wonder, too.

Here, of all things, is _A History of Chinese Literature_, by Herbert A. Giles, professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge (you didn’t know they had one, did you?). It begins with Confucius (born B.C. 551) and is divided into eight parts according to dynasties. One sees easily that while each age had its poets and writers, the drama and the novel did not develop in China until the Mongol Dynasty (A.D. 1200) and the famous Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1544). From all the important writers Dr. Giles quotes at length in excellent translation; he summarises plays and explains the curious technique of the Chinese theatre. The book is rounded off with examples of Chinese wit and humour.

Here is George H. McKnight’s _English Words and Their Background_, with facts only recently recognised about the relation and differences of American English and British English; with a good chapter on slang; with new light on the changes word meanings have undergone, and why; with stuff about personal names and place names.

The general reader has perhaps tried to find out about Dante, and found, on the one hand, some work by the scholar and for the scholar, on the other, books full of technical and controversial idiom. Behold, here is Mary Bradford Whiting’s _Dante: The Man and the Poet_ with its simple and memorable account of the student, lover and statesman, the exile and wanderer, the poet and seer. Or he has wondered if it were impossible for anyone to write about sex with beauty and sanity--and then has had the miracle of getting hold of Havelock Ellis’s _Little Essays of Love and Virtue_ wrought in his behalf. He has been the victim all his life of such stuff as Freudians are made on, and some benignant fate has put into his hands Basil King’s convincing account of _The Conquest of Fear_. He has wearied over the Younger Generation and been comforted as he read Brander Matthew’s _The Tocsin of Revolt_; contemporary criticism--too contemporary--has set his teeth on edge until he found a more ripened wisdom in the books of W. C. Brownell. A sense of futility and a dark brown taste of boredom have resulted from the perusal of the usual kind of book on How to Live; and the sparkling and nutritious antidote has proved to be Arnold Bennett’s _How to Make the Best of Life_. For that condition in which one cannot endure concentration on a single topic for the duration of a book--what? Perhaps either volume of Bennett’s _Things That Have Interested Me_, or some such book as Basil Anderton’s _Sketches From a Library Window_, in which one may read about a French gourmet, a sixteenth century humanist, holiday joys in Northumberland, the art of the translator, the adventures of an English seaman in the Napoleonic wars, or Sir Thomas Browne.

v

“I never read fiction.”

The next time I meet him I shall not place in his hands a novel, not even one of the great masterpieces among the novels. I shall hand him _My Best Story_, to which thirty-one English authors have contributed (though we may claim John Russell for America). Here in a single book are such perfect tales as Stacy Aumonier’s “The Great Unimpressionable,” one from Ernest Bramah’s _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, Quiller-Couch’s “Statement of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman,” Galsworthy’s “Courage,” Perceval Gibbon’s “The Connoisseur,” Cunninghame Graham’s “The Lone Wolf,” Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Gold Fish,” John Russell’s “The Price of a Head” and Rebecca West’s “In a City That Is Now Ploughed Fields.” Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, W. W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Israel Zangwill are some of the others who furnish stories for the collection. Such a book, by its variety as well as from its superlative quality, ought to win him to fiction more readily than any long tale, however distinguished.

He is rare, but you do sometimes meet him, that type of literary investor who cannot trust himself to range over the whole field ... like one whose fortune, however great, must needs be kept strictly in savings bank accounts. I grant you that one needs to know his fiction, both in itself and in relation to his possible profit. But I personally would not for the world be one of those who have never heard of Charles De Coster’s _Legend of Ulenspiegel_, that classic of the Lowland countries which Hendrik Van Loon named recently as one of the ten books he has enjoyed the most. I should not be willing to be ignorant of “Elizabeth,” whose _Vera_ had such grim power and whose _The Enchanted April_ made a good many enchanted Mays, Junes, Julys, Augusts and other months for its readers. Of what avail to have read novels by Kathleen Norris and to have missed _Certain People of Importance_, I should like to know? Who thinks he has any acquaintance with the work of Edna Ferber if he has omitted to read _The Girls_ or such tales, in _Gigolo_, as “Old Man Minnick” and “Home Girl”? Yet there are unfortunate persons who read _One Man in His Time_ and who will read the stories in _The Shadowy Third_ and innocently suppose they have “read” Ellen Glasgow, that competent and admirable novelist whose earlier novels, like _The Deliverance_, have such surprising vitality when you read or re-read them today.

Opportunities lost? Ah, but one of the grand advantages of the literary investment over the money opportunity is right here: Your new and worthwhile book and your old and seasoned book are, alike, always offering.

_16. Naturalist vs. Novelist: Gene Stratton-Porter_

i

With Gene Stratton-Porter, the quality of enthusiasm is not strained, it droppeth as torrential rains from the heaven of her state of mind. Anyone acquainted with Mrs. Porter and regarding her with positive affection is certain to be subject to the recurring notion that she has, after all, confused heaven with earth. It is not that she finds nothing on earth to contemn, but that she finds the same objects for perpetual glorification. The rest of us live our wavering lives in a flux of emotions, which we commonly mistake for accomplishments of our intellects. We glorify this at one age, and that at another. Mrs. Porter, from the beginning, has worshipped the same pantheon.

A pantheon it is, owing to her possibly inherited passion for the works of nature. Her idea of art is as clear-cut as the ordinary mortal’s notion of property. Perhaps clearer, since the ordinary mortal often finds difficulty in distinguishing the forms of property, whether real, personal, or mixed (as lawyers say). To Mrs. Porter, art is any human effort that encourages, or even possibly forces, nature to grow. It is art when you handle flowers with the deftness and astonishing results achieved by Mrs. Porter’s mother; it is art when you write a story that tends to stimulate or fortify the natural (i.e., usual) impulses of the average man or woman to live and learn, to seek and engage in interesting work, to mate, to beget or bear children. Any art that does not tend directly toward these primary social and personal ends isn’t art to her; she regards it with heavy suspicion.

Some years ago it was suggested to Mrs. Porter that she furnish autobiographical material for a booklet which should satisfy the eager requests of her readers for personal facts. Mrs. Porter assented. The result was a booklet largely in her own words, and remarkable for an accent that some would call boastful and others, refreshing. We may defer for a few moments the details that Mrs. Porter set down, but the question of her personal tone and temper is one to be considered at the very outset. Is she merely naïve? Is she self-assertive, conceited, boastful? What does she embody, and what is the secret--if it is a secret--of the enormously wide appeal of her work? To attempt an answer isn’t easy. But let us see....

ii

Gene Stratton-Porter is a self-made woman, with all the drawbacks that self-manufacture entails. Certain definite advantages, too! It is not meant that she owes nothing to her parentage, wifehood, motherhood--she owes much to these, and her great indebtedness to her father and mother she has herself proclaimed. And yet, in the rôle in which the world views her, she owes nothing to anybody except herself. For although the late Richard Watson Gilder gave her encouragement with her first book, and although others encouraged her with the famous _Freckles_, she would undoubtedly have gone on with no encouragement whatever and would have become what she is today. Why? The explanation inheres in that phrase, “self-made.” Self-made people, whatever they may lack, are obviously people with a capacity which we don’t ordinarily bother to distinguish except by the result they achieve with it. That is, perhaps, typical of the mental laziness of the rest of us. But if we ask ourselves what the capacity is, in terms other than the easily-named result, the answer may be extremely surprising.

Who are the persons who are so happily independent of the encouragement, the approval, the applause without a tiny measure of which the rest of us couldn’t go on? They divide into the two great classes of mankind, if we consider psychology and temperament. There are the mystics--the saints, the martyrs, and some artists. There are the non-mystics--many artists among them, to be sure. The mystical mind isn’t the secret. The mental make-up of those who walk (who are able to walk) by themselves, is. They have, either from birth or by hard-wrung conquest, a kind of self-sufficiency more precious, for living purposes, than fine gold. It may be the bright, unconscious self-sufficiency of a Gene Stratton-Porter, or the admirable fortitude of a Joseph Conrad or the diffident charm of a Booth Tarkington--the manner is nothing; it is there. The mode of acquisition, except as it bears on work and affects personality, whether birthright or painful purchase, is nothing, either. The thing is there, like driven piles or bedrock. He who lacks that foundation must take his chance of his house, built on sands, being washed away.

With Mrs. Porter this invaluable element of personality has existed from the time of her earliest childhood. Nor is the faculty in question a superficial matter, like self-confidence. It was with a considerable lack of self-confidence that Mrs. Porter began writing; but notice that she began. How many others who had the self-confidence when they started have had to acquire the self-sufficiency, the power of self-sustention? How many have failed to do that? Self-confidence, indeed, is the most perfect of traitors. But there is a reservoir in the Self....

Like every other prize, this one has its penalty. What will carry one to the top of a high rock will also, unimpeded, carry one over the rock’s edge. The balance in egoism always trembles; when it comes to rest, one dies. And here is Mrs. Porter, who had in her a capacity that could have overcome mountains and that found only moderately difficult hills in its path. She must have burst into a thousand pieces if it hadn’t been that she was a naturalist first and a novelist afterward, that she underwent the preoccupations of a wife and mother, that she toiled in swamps and wrote books, kept other people alive with her money as well as her courage and vitality, launched forth on self-pinions as a poet, corresponded with innumerable readers, did this and that and the other and then hit upon something else. She was one of twelve children. “To this mother at forty-six and this father at fifty, each at intellectual topnotch,” she was born, the Minerva of mature and remarkable parents, a child who kept, in her own words, “thinking things which she felt should be saved,” so that she frequently tugged at her mother’s skirts and begged her to “set down” what the child considered stories and poems--generally some big fact in nature that thrilled the child, usually expressed in Biblical terms. Whom have we here? An incarnation as extraordinary as the Florence Nightingale whom Lytton Strachey put on paper? I think so.

iii

Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, at the time of their marriage, as a “ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman--Mary. God fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift of Grace, He put Flower Magic into her fingers.”

From tiny seeds found in rice and coffee, Mary (Shellenbarger) Stratton started little vines and climbing plants. Rooted things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they almost never failed to grow. When, intent on growing a tree or shrub from a slip or cutting that appeared hopeless, she cut the slip diagonally, inserted the lower end in a small potato and planted as if it were rooted, she was nearly always successful. Being of Dutch extraction, bulbs were her favourites--tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths that she called “blue bells.” From these she distilled perfume by putting clusters, at the time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined with freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. In Ohio a man gave her two tiny cedars of Lebanon which she brought with her to the farm in Wabash County, Indiana, planting one in her front yard and one in the small cemetery on the corner of her husband’s land. It stands, thirty feet tall or over, two feet in circumference, guarding her grave.

All twelve of her children lived to be eight; an attack of scarlet fever joined with whooping cough was fatal to two of them a little over that age. The house, “Hopewell Farm,” was an oblong box kept speckless. The liberal table and appetising food were known by all who travelled that way. She made the clothing for her brood. In the house that she kept so faultlessly clean, at the table she heaped with hearty dishes, Mark Stratton, conscious of his worthy British blood, praised her “tidiness” and accepted responsibility for the mental and spiritual welfare of his wife and children. It was understood that he had been named for a Mark Stratton who lived in New York and married a beauty, Anne Hutchinson. It was misunderstood that the first Mark and his wife settled on Stratton Island, “afterward corrupted to Staten.” From this point back for generations across the ocean, we are told that Mrs. Porter’s father “followed his line to the family of Strattons of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head (1913). To his British traditions and the customs of his family, Mark Stratton clung with rigid tenacity, never swerving from his course a particle under the influence of environment or association.” Perhaps, after all, he was British. “All his ideas were clear-cut; no man could influence him against his better judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy, in honour, and cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be proud than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he knew to express himself.” It is not too highly imaginative, I am sure, to believe that Mr. Stratton also planted slips and cuttings successfully; but they were slips of his own tenacious mind and they were planted most successfully in the receptive mind of his daughter, Gene.

We must note Mr. Stratton rather carefully. “His very first earnings he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read”--toiling upward in the night, in that time of Longfellowship, that has since been abandoned for fifteen minutes a day, in this era of Eliotry. The memory of Mr. Stratton enabled him to quote paragraphs at a time from Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott and Bancroft--he was perhaps fondest of history--while as for the Bible, he could repeat it entire, his daughter says, except for the genealogies, and give chapter and verse. The genealogies were “a waste of grey matter to learn.” Mrs. Porter confesses: “I was almost afraid to make these statements, although there are many living who can corroborate them, until John Muir published the story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the history of such rearing as was my father’s, told of as the customary thing among the children of Muir’s time.”

Sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics, delivered without thought of personal fatigue or selfish inconvenience at the end of journeys of many miles were Mark Stratton’s contribution to the cause of Good. It seems unkind to examine such performances dispassionately. “He worshipped beauty: beautiful faces, souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals, flowers. He loved colour: rich, bright colour and every variation down to the faintest shadings.” Mrs. Porter keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was carrying when stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight. “Over inspired Biblical passages, over great books, over sunlit landscapes, over a white violet abloom in deep shade, over a heroic deed of man, I have seen his brow light up, his eyes shine.” He used especially to thrill his young daughter by the story of John Maynard, who piloted a burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at the wheel. That he should tell it was natural, since the telling gave him opportunity to reproduce, with many inflections, the captain’s cry of “John Maynard!” and the answer, “Aye, aye, sir!” echoed until it sank to a mere gasp, a whisper....

iv

Gene Stratton was only a few years old when her mother, who had once nursed three of the children through typhoid fever, contracting it herself, broke down. Mrs. Stratton lived for several years, suffering continually, frequently tortured by pain. The youngest child was therefore allowed to follow an impulse and escape the training given her sisters. She followed her father and brothers outdoors, sleeping on their coats in fence corners, awakening, sometimes, to find shy creatures peering into her face. “I trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded, catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.” She made special pets of birds. She had been taught that they were useful and had “a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a ’kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird, and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.”

All this life became a thing of memory just before the mother’s death. Then they left the farm and went to town, to the city of Wabash, that Mrs. Stratton might have constant medical attention. The ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, plump as a wild partridge, the little Dutch woman who had borne twelve children and kept a spotless farmhouse and heaped up good things on the long dinner table, lay with her head on a pillow, a cinnamon pink or a trillium placed where its fragrance would reach her with every breath she drew. She was dying. She had helped Mark Stratton with the bush- and vine-covered fences that crept around the acres they owned in a strip of gaudy colour; she shared the achievement of that orchard, lying in a valley, with its square of apple trees in the centre, so that at the time of blossoming it appeared as if a great pink-bordered white blanket had been let down on the earth. To her equally with her husband was due the presence on shale, which they might have drained, of sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. All this was going out of her children’s life and she was going out with it. The youngest child, in particular, had been leading a harum-scarum existence; if she reported promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal times, with enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more was asked of her until the Sabbath. Mary Stratton was perhaps about to be released, to receive the benefit of a freedom in which, if her hands were not busy, it was not likely she would be happy or know what to do. Gene Stratton, whose father permitted his youngest to idolise him, was to be taken from outdoor freedom, her feet shod, her body restricted by the burden of Sunday clothing, her active legs stilled to a shuffle beneath the desk of a close schoolroom, and her mind set to droning over books. Unfortunately she came to the ordeal with no purely feminine resources of inattention, preoccupation or indifference. Her father had seen to that. It was he who was responsible for the child that revelled in _Paul and Virginia_, _Undine_, _Picciola_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_, _Pilgrim’s Progress_--“exquisitely expressed and conceived stories” that “may have done much in forming high conceptions of what really constitutes literature, and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by my parents.” Mrs. Porter adds: “One of these stories formed the basis of my first publicly recognised literary effort.” She was assigned to write a class composition on “Mathematical Law.” She postponed, rebelled, wrote a paper retelling the story of _Picciola_ and in fear and defiance read it aloud in class. After one page the teacher halted her while she summoned in the superintendent of city schools to hear the sixteen foolscap pages from the beginning. “One instant the room was in laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. Never again was a subject forced upon me.” She was her father’s daughter, and her father was Mark Stratton.

“My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one of my books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast jar in July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to him with a composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and made suggestions for its betterment. When I wanted to express something in colour, he went to an artist, sketched a design for an easel, personally superintended the carpenter who built it, and provided tuition. On that same easel I painted the water colours for _Moths of the Limberlost_, and one of the most poignant regrets of my life is that he was not there to see them, and to know that the easel which he built through his faith in me was finally used in illustrating a book.

“If I thought it was music through which I could express myself, he paid for lessons and detected hidden ability which should be developed. Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in his belief in me. He was half the battle. It was he who demanded a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigours of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in ten years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history, true to nature. It was he who demanded of me from birth the finishing of any task I attempted and who taught me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years, if necessary, to find and secure the material I wanted. It was he who daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in _The Harvester_, and who constantly used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men to do the same.”

No further illumination should be needed on the most extraordinary personal influence in Mrs. Porter’s life.

v

Gene Stratton was married in 1886, at the age of eighteen, to Charles Darwin Porter, of Wabash, Indiana. Marriage, a home of her own, and a daughter were successively brought to bear upon a nature already powerful; none of them succeeded in eradicating the impress of Mark Stratton. The new home was a cabin of fourteen rooms (at first), standing on some fifteen acres near the Limberlost Swamp. The familiar address runs: “Limberlost Cabin, Rome City, Indiana.” Red, white, pink, blue, lavender and yellow flower-beds of an acre apiece were laid off in the deep woods running down the shore of a lake; the cabin stands in the middle of the yellow bed, a dwelling of large rooms and four fireplaces, two of which Mrs. Porter built, to a large extent, herself. One is of pudden stone, red and blue pebbles; another, in the living room, is constructed of field boulders split to expose their quartz crystals that sparkle under artificial light. The windows were built with broad, deep casements especially to furnish feeding-tables for birds. On the open, cement-floored porch may stand in winter wheat, apples, cabbage and celery bunches. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, sapsuckers, flickers, song sparrows, jays, cardinals and squirrels come to the sills to eat the chopped wheat, ground corn and suet put out for them.

But this is to mix past and the comparative present. It was not long before Mrs. Porter’s daughter was old enough to go to school. “I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s clothes, I kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and washed dishes, besides, three times a day. In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography ...” but we need not go with her into the details of this one among many of her personal triumphs. She was for two years editor of the camera department of Recreation, for two years on the natural history staff of Outing, for four years specialist in natural history photography on the Photographic Times Annual Almanac. She had a dread of failure and, at first, carried on her special work as secretly as possible. “My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines, but only a few people in our locality read these, none were interested in nature photography or natural science; so what I was trying to do was not realised even by my own family. I did not want to fail before my man person and my daughter and our respective families.” She was further afraid of ridicule in a community “where I was already severely criticised on account of my ideas of housekeeping, dress and social customs.” When she first attempted “nature studies sugar-coated with fiction” she proceeded with the same furtiveness. “I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank”--Mr. Porter was president of the Bank of Geneva--“need not know.” Through loss of her address at the New York end, she waited unanswered until one day, months later, when she went into “our store” on an errand and the storekeeper said: “I read your story in the Metropolitan last night. It was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?” Mrs. Porter relates: “My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I said as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he could hear it, ‘No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any spare copies? My sister might want one.’”

The appearance of her first story led to an order for a second, to be illustrated with her own photographs. She had a day, or less, to fill the request for photographs, and kept a number of persons up all night to pose for her. The genesis of _Freckles_, her second book, was the discovery by lumbermen of a nest of the black vulture in the Limberlost Swamp. Her husband, whose business had compelled him to allow her to work alone but who was also a natural history enthusiast, insisted that he must go with her. “A Limberlost trip at that time was not to be joked about. The swamp had not been shorn, branded, and tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the worst of such locations in the Central States.

“A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step, and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a steady succession of prying and pulling each other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.

“We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take wing.”

The idea of _Freckles_ came one day when they were leaving the swamp. A big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling earthward, and fell in Mrs. Porter’s path. It was an eagle’s feather, but although she instantly looked aloft, Mrs. Porter’s well-trained eyes could not catch sight of the bird. She has always regretted that to her story the title _Freckles_ was given; her wish was for “The Falling Feather”--that tangible thing drifting down out of Nowhere, just as the boy came in the story of her fashioning.

The insertion of marginal drawings of nature subjects in _Freckles_ made a distinct impression get abroad that it was simply a nature book, with the result that three long years were required for the novel to attain its enormous popularity. Published in 1904, the book had sold, ten years later, 670,733 copies in the regular edition.

vi

Mrs. Porter as an author is now fairly before us and may be considered profitably before we take a look at her newest novel, _The White Flag_. So familiar a phenomenon calls for incisive comment. She writes her stories “exactly as they take shape in my mind” and the excisions are sometimes--as in the case of _Her Father’s Daughter_, which yet remained overlong--quite heavy. The edited and published fiction is of itself remarkable for an unrestraint, a vigorous emphasis, a masculine zeal, with which there is generally combined freshness of feeling and a transparent sincerity. It is this sincerity, proceeding as it so often does from a total unconsciousness of what lies behind it, that the popular instinct detects at once in the pages of a work of fiction. It has, of course, nothing whatever to do with literary art, it is never shamed or enriched by the processes of introspection, and in this it conforms to the wilful egoism fundamental with the Northern races in a new country and exploitable environment. The student of psychology may be interested, for more reasons than the inheritance of Holland ancestry, to compare the late Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Stratton-Porter in personalities and characters. Each has swayed the millions; each, beyond all possible question, has influenced human lives. Neither was oppressed by the enormous responsibility attached to such a rôle. I would not say that the one had more education than has the other, but their educations were different.

“To spend time writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I would not,” exclaims Mrs. Porter, to whom art is an expression of flower-beds and children a-plenty, censored books and human lives lived on sober and industrious models. And she compromised on a book “into which I put all the nature work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I was familiar.” In simple justice it should be pointed out that she insisted upon alternating nature books and novels, although far more money could be earned by writing only fiction.

Just as the child was taken from the fields, shoed and harnessed in “Sunday clothes” and put into school, so the naturalist was torn, though somewhat more gently and gradually, from her proper enjoyments and placed in the trammels of book-length fiction. What wonder that she revolted?--but the rebellion of _Picciola_, though ending in personal triumph, was not the end of school; and the rebellion of the novelist, though rewarded with a tremendous personal triumph, did not end her ordeal of novel-writing. What people like Mrs. Porter never achieve is a successful rebellion from, within, themselves. Something more powerful than they quells their self-insurrections; they go on; money seems worth while for what can be done with it to give happiness and widen opportunity for others; the task is good--why? It is a task; something that must be done very thoroughly. The father, Mark Stratton, to whom his daughter was so observably devoted, gave her a set of ideals that were to lift her up, like strong links of iron, and then to turn into rigid chains. She who owes so much to him owes to him more than she has ever suspected, a compulsion put upon her from within herself, the final reward or fate of every worshipper.

She has tried to escape. She has written poetry. There was _The Fire Bird_; and lately there has been _Euphorbia_, a long narrative published serially to the astonishment of readers of Good Housekeeping. The subject of _Euphorbia_ is interesting--a woman to whom marriage brings non-fulfilment, whose husband tramples and uproots the red-and-white wild flower she loves. When at length the man dies, the mother has one fearful moment in which her child reaches toward a bit of euphorbia with she knows not which intention. But he loves it. Escape! It is not necessary to make as much of this as the psychoanalyst would make of it, nor, perhaps, to miss the mark so widely. “My life has been fortunate,” Mrs. Porter admits, “in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have known I have met, lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is _upon the lives of these that I base what I write_.” There is a puzzling fierceness in the attacks she launches on those who write otherwise; she is vulnerable somewhere in this connection or she would show less heat and animosity. And, to some extent, her active resentment is justified, for she has had a heavy experience of misleading praise and some experience of hypocrisy. I remember an occasion upon which she wrote to me, with scornful inflections, to lay before me the evidence in the case of a certain well-known writer who had enthusiastically praised her work, though “not for publication.” It was a course which, like herself, I should join in condemning; but was it so much of a matter? Did, could, the voice of a single one, count for much where she had heard already the open voices of praise from so many thousands? And if it was so, then why?

Who answers that will make possibly the largest single contribution to the psychology of literature, for this identical question finally arises in the case of writers great and small.

vii

Never, perhaps, has Mrs. Porter been more herself than in her latest book, _The White Flag_; although _Her Father’s Daughter_, as originally written, was overgrown. Both these books are autobiography--_Her Father’s Daughter_ of the heart, _The White Flag_ of mind and memory. If Mrs. Porter has but one story to tell, no one has succeeded in telling it so often with such freshness of feeling or such repeated success in the matter of readers. _The White Flag_ is the story of Mahala Spellman, daughter and only child of Mahlon and Elizabeth Spellman. The opening scenes are laid in the Indiana of the 1880s. The village is called Ashwater. For what seems an excessive time our attention is concentrated upon Elizabeth as a little girl and Junior Moreland as a little boy. Nothing could be more typical of Mrs. Porter than the attention she bestows upon her heroine in childhood--the exact detail of Mahala’s dress, the recorded precision of her unfailingly correct behaviour. If there is something unnatural about the child, there is everything natural to a child in Mrs. Porter’s fiction. In picturing the richest man in the village Mrs. Porter blackens his villainy to a pitch where Mr. Moreland is neither more nor less credible than some of the characters in, let us say, _Way Down East_.

Mahala, in ensuing chapters, refuses Junior Moreland in the face of the fact that his father could save her father from ruin. Her father fails, and, broken, dies. Her mother becomes an invalid. When finally Mahala can truthfully say that all is lost except self-respect and courage, a deadly blow is levelled at her self-respect. Some money is stolen. Circumstantial evidence accuses Mahala, and Ashwater shuns her.

It will not be supposed that Mrs. Porter fails to raise up a champion in her heroine’s hour of need. All along we have been in touch, in close touch, with Jason. We knew him as a boy, apparently the washerwoman’s son. We know him as a young man, springing to Mahala’s relief. There is no real reason why, in such a situation and with two such principal characters, Mrs. Porter should not work miracles. She does.... Of course her point is that the virtue, goodness and courage of Mahala and Jason earn their own ample rewards; and the thousands who are reading _The White Flag_ will accept this as so.

Books by Gene Stratton-Porter

1903 _The Song of the Cardinal_ 1904 _Freckles_ 1907 _What I Have Done With Birds_ (republished, 1917, as _Friends in Feathers_) 1908 _At the Foot of the Rainbow_ 1909 _A Girl of the Limberlost_ 1909 _Birds of the Bible_ 1910 _Music of the Wild_ 1911 _The Harvester_ 1912 _Moths of the Limberlost_ 1913 _Laddie_ 1915 _Michael O’Halloran_ 1916 _Morning Face_ 1918 _A Daughter of the Land_ 1920 _Homing With the Birds_ 1921 _Her Father’s Daughter_ 1922 _The Fire Bird_ 1923 _White Flag_ _Euphorbia_ appeared as a serial in Good Housekeeping: January, February, March numbers, 1923.

Sources on Gene Stratton-Porter

_Gene Stratton-Porter, A Little Story of Her Life and Work._ This is the booklet, now out of print, published some ten years ago by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, based upon the long self-account written by Mrs. Porter and prepared by Eugene F. Saxton.

“An American Bird-Woman.” Anonymous article in CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL (London and Edinburgh. New York: International News Company), Part 46, October 1, 1914: page 636.

Private Information.

_17. Poetry and Plays_

i

If you look at the poets as they move in their procession before your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his age--the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too, after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and flavour of the poetry.” From this thought J. F. Roxburgh has written “a beginner’s introduction to English poetry” with the charming title, _The Poetic Procession_. His brief review of the poets from the Elizabethans to the men now writing is felicitous enough. But although I am sure his intention in the sentences quoted was not literal, the image of present-day poets in Homburg hats is very disconcerting. Don Marquis has probably worn one, thus inviting the visitation of insurance agents. But I am sure some of his poems have been written with the wind blowing through his hair. Such poems as “The Name,” in his _Dreams and Dust_, for example, or those “Premonitions” in his _Poems and Portraits_. It is as difficult to say, with Marquis, where the humourist stops in his poetry and the thinker steps in as to mark the same exit-entrance in the man’s prose. _Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs_ and a part of _Poems and Portraits_ are supposed to belong to Marquis the jester; but, of the second-named book, which part? “The man who has laughed lest he should weep, the clown of the seven times broken heart” is Richard Le Gallienne’s apt characterisation of Marquis. I am not sure that “The Tom Cat” in _Poems and Portraits_ is a bit less “serious” than such a poem as “Inhibition” in the same collection.

Behind the placid front of use The baffled whims move to and fro; We fear to let these genii go....

Sober-faced, we carry hidden within us something for which the poet has found one of those rare things in the language, the perfect phrase; it is

The golden nonsense of the heart.

Perhaps we also are like the Tom-cat and, on our occasions, “chant the hate of a million years.”

He will lie on a rug to-morrow And lick his silky fur, And veil the brute in his yellow eyes And play he’s tame, and purr.

But at midnight in the alley He will crouch again and wail, And beat the time for his demon’s song With the swing of his demon’s tail.

I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and God.

The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration; and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s _Dust and Light_ (1919) and his _The Black Panther_ (1922) have a beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines from “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_:

Deftly does the dust express In mind her hidden loveliness, And from her cool silence stream The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream; For the earth that breeds the trees Breeds cities too, and symphonies. Equally her beauty flows Into a saviour, or a rose-- Looks down in dream, and from above Smiles at herself in Jesus’s love. Christ’s love and Homer’s art Are but the workings of her heart; Through Leonardo’s hand she seeks Herself, and through Beethoven speaks In holy thunderings around The awful message of the ground.

The thought is Emersonian, but with Emerson lyricism was a doubtful and an inconstant capture. Here is “The Lion-House,” from _The Black Panther_, a poem, I cannot but think, that any poet would be proud to sign:

Always the heavy air, The dreadful cage, the low Murmur of voices, where Some Force goes to and fro In an immense despair!

As through a haunted brain-- With tireless footfalls The Obsession moves again, Trying the floor, the walls, Forever, but in vain.

In vain, proud Force! A might Shrewder than yours, did spin Around your rage that bright Prison of steel, wherein You pace for my delight.

And O, my heart, what Doom What warier Will has wrought The cage, within whose room Paces your burning thought, For the delight of Whom?

The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book of poems, _Black Armour_, were not so much to match the title as to convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the parts of a suit of armour--Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up, Plumes--perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis (though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem “Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a

Liar and bragger, He had no friend Except a dagger And a candle-end

and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of rhyming, was summed up when

He spoke this sentence With a princely air: “The noose draws tighter; This is the end; I’m a good fighter, But a bad friend: I’ve played the traitor Over and over; I’m a good hater, But a bad lover.”

But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as Coleridge’s in his _Ancient Mariner_, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might have been written by a poet of a long-past century--I leave you to name him--but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine no one but Elinor Wylie writing:

Now that your eyes are shut Not even a dusty butterfly may brush them; My flickering knife has cut Life from sonorous lion throats to hush them.

If pigeons croon too loud Or lambs bleat proudly, they must come to slaughter, And I command each cloud To be precise in spilling silent water.

Let light forbear those lids: I have forbidden the feathery ash to smutch them; The spider thread that thrids The gray-plumed grass has not my leave to touch them.

My casual ghost may slip, Issuing tiptoe, from the pure inhuman; The tissues of my lip Will bruise your eyelids, while I am a woman.

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The title poem in Amanda Hall’s book, _The Dancer in the Shrine_, tempts to quotation, but there seems to me something unfair in reprinting it complete and to cut lines from it is to mutilate both what is taken and that which is left. There is a good deal of the life of the countryside in the book; Miss Hall’s New England is that of Thoreau but her lyrical gift is distinctly personal. A characteristic mood and treatment is shown in “I’ll Build My House of Sticks and Stones,” from which the following couplets are taken:

I’ll build my house of sticks and stones, Of lollypops and herring bones,

None other than myself to please-- Of fine, fresh straw or green sage cheese;

I’ll build my house of this and that To suit my pleasure and my cat--

I’ll clothe myself in cast-off rags, In cobwebs or in barley bags,

The shabbier I am encased The fruitier my joy will taste.

I’ll set my two lips to the air And carol to the birds’ despair....

Some musing morning as I sing Perhaps I’ll catch God listening,

In soft enchantment at His sill. He’ll tell His angels to be still,

He’ll say to them in tones discreet That there is singing in the street...

The pagan quality keeps its joyousness while transmuting it into something reverent and beautiful in such lines as “The Dancer in the Shrine.” The religious note, differently accented, may be found in the work of Alice Meynell, whose complete verse is now available in _The Poems of Alice Meynell_. Mrs. Meynell’s death has brought a sharp emphasis upon the rare character of her poetic gift. Alfred Noyes says she has left to the world a volume “containing only masterpieces,” but I like better the words of J. L. Garvin: “Not one of her poems but was the music of a thought as most of her essays were the fruit of perception.” Let me not quote “The Shepherdess,” so widely known and so self-expressive, but “Chimes” with its changing image and its “music of a thought” sung to perfection:

Brief, on a flying night, From the shaken tower, A flock of bells take flight, And go with the hour.

Like birds from the cote to the gales, Abrupt--O hark! A fleet of bells set sails, And go to the dark.

Sudden the cold airs swing. Alone, aloud, A verse of bells takes wing And flies with the cloud.

Mrs. Meynell was one of a group of contemporary Catholic poets of whom, it may be, Aline Kilmer is the most widely known and read in America. Of the others of that group I should like especially to mention two whose new books of verse have just appeared--Sister M. Madeleva, a nun in the congregation of the Holy Cross at Holy Rosary Academy, California, and Wilfred Rowland Childe, who is English. Sister M. Madeleva’s collection called _Knights Errant_ contains verse highly spiritual in type, clear and strong in emotional expression, and admirable for the manner in which the author has adhered to subjects and thoughts strictly within the limits of her clearly defined experience. Mysticism is natural to these Catholic singers, and will be found strongly in Mr. Childe’s _The Gothic Rose_, a book of poems quite Gothic in spirit, sometimes wistful, sometimes marked with melancholy and obviously the outgrowth of a loving adoration. Although such poems as “The Dirge for Westminster” and “The Virgin of Flanders” are the body of _The Gothic Rose_, there is a range including an Oxford poem (“Idylle Oxonienne”), one or two classical subjects, such as “Daphne,” and the modern verse of “The Austrian River.”

Like Amanda Hall, Josephine Daskam Bacon is both novelist and poet, but it is as a poet that Mrs. Bacon will arrest our attention for her _Truth o’ Women_, which has been described as a _Spoon River Anthology_ for women. The book consists of a group of “Epitaphs for Women” in free verse; this one being characteristic:

I was sorry to leave you, Because I knew you needed me. But are there no women who are sorry to die Because they need their husbands? I wanted, dying, to be one of them!

Forty of these “Epitaphs” are followed by a series of dramatic monologues under the general title, “Truth o’ Women.” The monologues are spoken by the mother of Joan of Arc, Lincoln’s mother, Dante’s wife, Milton’s daughters, the wife of Judas, one of Bluebeard’s wives, the mother of Mary and Martha and the wives of Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Cadmus, Adam, Shakespeare, Socrates, Pilate and Julius Cæsar.

No, evidently realism in poetry is not through! Look, here is “an epic of insignificance” called _The Life and Death of Mrs. Tidmuss_, by Wilfrid Blair. Pursuing the Spoon River comparison for Mrs. Bacon’s book, one is on the verge of calling Blair’s work a _Main Street_ of England in verse. In subject matter it is more like John Masefield’s _Widow in the Bye Street_, I should say. We start with Selina as the young daughter of a greengrocer, see her as a slow and bashful girl leading a drab existence and wooed finally by Tom Tidmuss, who is interested in poultry-raising. He is a printer by trade. They plan to marry and get a cottage. Then, for the first time, Selina lives:

She had a ring, and roses in her cheek.

A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day.

She had no wedding bells. Her well-oiled sire Led her in tribal veilings up the aisle To where a curate, impatient for his hire, Hovered, and Tom in his stiff Sunday style. Things went through quick. It mattered not. She moved In a mazed phantasmagoria all the while.

Thereafter births, deaths, a subdued drudgery, old age, the selling of the house and furniture and the going to live with her daughter, where she is not very happy. The poet concludes on a swift crescendo, _maestoso_:

Death sets free: it is Life that holds in thrall ... Blow up, O trumpets of eternity! Shout, souls of God, from starry sea to sea! Stars, clash your shining shields--a soul is free!

iii

Of George Santayana as a poet I have incidentally spoken in