Chapter C: N. and A. M. WILLIAMSON’S The Lady From the Air and their The (6)

J. C. Snaith, novelist. John Collis Snaith, born in 1876, in Nottinghamshire of Yorkshire stock. Athletic in his youth, before his health became impaired, playing cricket, football and hockey on county teams. Always in the middle of a novel, either at Skegness or in London, where he may with difficulty be tracked down at the Garrick Club, hidden among W. J. Locke, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, E. Temple Thurston, etc. His novels exhibit constant variety. Richard Mansfield was always hoping for a play from Snaith’s _Broke of Covenden_ so that he might act as Broke. _The Sailor_, supposed to have been suggested by John Masefield’s career, was a great popular success (1916) and is read and remembered widely today. _The Coming_, an exquisite and powerful story in which the reappearance of Jesus Christ in present-day England is suggested, made an extraordinary impression. On the whole it is perhaps Snaith’s own favourite. _The Undefeated_, a story of England in wartime, had a large sale and gives promise of more permanence than any similar book, including H. G. Wells’s _Mr. Britling_. A recent novel, _The Van Roon_, is a lighter story written around the theft of a famous painting. Snaith’s _Araminta_, which is being freshly brought out this year, is a whimsical romance of a country girl who comes to London and is sued for by two noblemen. Snaith says: “Each novel I write is in the nature of an experiment. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanising.” He is both versatile and in the quality of his work of unusual excellence.

W. B. Maxwell, novelist. English. A writer who has reached undeniable greatness at times and who, when possessing the finest material, need ask no odds of any living novelist. His most recent story, _The Day’s Journey_, is a beautifully-conceived and beautifully-written story of the friendship between two men enduring throughout their lives. The differences in character, the obstacles arising in the course of that friendship, the antagonisms and fallings-apart and the renewals of these two old comrades are put on paper with a fidelity of observation, a tenderness and an avoidance of sentimentality that would be difficult to overpraise. Maxwell’s novels are of great variety; attention is particularly called to _In Cotton Wool_, the story of a weakling. _Mrs. Thompson_, _The Devil’s Garden_ and _Spinster of This Parish_ are also highwater marks in his writing.

Hugh Walpole. Perhaps no living novelist has shown so uniform a quality or so progressive an excellence. He resembles a stock which, starting at a modest price and unfailingly paying dividends, has gone steadily upward to par and is now quoted at a premium. His great success, _The Cathedral_, is now followed by _Jeremy and Hamlet_, which, although not a “sequel,” is a companion volume to _Jeremy_ (most popular of all Walpole’s stories before the appearance of _The Cathedral_). As _Jeremy_ dealt with the history of a little boy--most singularly resembling the Hugh of Mr. Walpole’s own boyhood--so _Jeremy and Hamlet_ presents the adventures of that boy accompanied by the only proper companion for a small boy, a dog.

Rudyard Kipling. For a discussion of Kipling’s new work, _The Irish Guards in the Great War_, see Chapter 8. The best exposition of Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s _Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare_ (translated by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her _Modes and Morals_, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,” offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of _Plain Tales from the Hills_, of _Kim_ and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy” and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged” securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost universal currency.

Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century. But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate connection between poetry and real life which was established by the naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.” Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.” Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral.... Afterward, one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground.” The best approach is possibly through _The Story of Gösta Berling_. Her other great novels are _Jerusalem_, woven from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land, and _The Emperor of Portugallia_. Her _Nils_ stories for children are mentioned in Chapter 9. Complete works are best procured in the Northland Edition.

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A convenient size and a beautiful binding are more than desiderata. Who, wishing Bram Stoker’s grim masterpiece, _Dracula_, would not now prefer a new copy in the handy leather of the Lambskin Library? If one is out to acquire a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s _The Moon and Sixpence_, will he not choose it in its plum-coloured leather and gilt top of the Murray Hill Library? If I go forth to buy _Pride and Prejudice_, I am as certain as anything to ask for it from the volumes of the Modern Student’s Library, because this will give me William Dean Howells’s introduction to the novel.

There is a further advantage of these collections in that they give ready and inexpensive access to exceptional books that are otherwise out of print. I might have excessive trouble, for example, to get hold of _Dracula_ elsewhere. Yet the commonest advantage of such sets is probably as a guide in reading. A publisher does not put a book into his Lambskin Library, or his Murray Hill Library, or his Modern Student’s Library unless the book is one of proved worth and established permanence and continuing popularity. The Library, therefore, offers a convenient and trustworthy solution to those who, among books not freshly published, are unable to see the trees for the forest. A word about these collections is in order.

The Lambskin Library at present comprises nearly fifty volumes, chiefly fiction, although Lawrence F. Abbott’s _Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt_, Helen Keller’s _The Story of My Life_, Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_ and Franklin’s _Autobiography_ lay a massive foundation for biographies. Conrad, Frank Norris, Selma Lagerlöf, O. Henry, Dumas, Scott, Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Ellen Glasgow, Zola and Rider Haggard are some of the authors represented. Many of the books have interesting prefatory notes and among the contributors of these are William Lyon Phelps, Christopher Morley, William Allen White, John Macy and William Dean Howells.

The Modern Student’s Library is ultimately to include as many as possible of the books one would wish to read in a comprehensive survey of English and American literature. Both the general reader and the student have been held in mind; the books represent a sane departure from the heavily annotated texts of a few years ago. The books have been edited, and introductions to them have been provided by such authorities as William Dean Howells, Stuart P. Sherman, William Lyon Phelps and Carl Van Doren. Bacon’s _Essays_, Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, Browning, Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_, Emerson’s _Essays_, Hardy’s _The Return of the Native_, Hawthorne’s _The Scarlet Letter_, Meredith, Ruskin, Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Thoreau and Whitman are among those already included.

The Murray Hill Library, commencing with modern fiction, will probably enlarge its scope to include some of the best modern non-fiction. Its very handsome binding now covers twelve books, picked works by Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Irvin S. Cobb, Walpole, G. A. Birmingham, John Buchan, Stephen McKenna, Swinnerton and Richard Dehan.

Of an entirely different character but not less valuable are the very large volumes of the Nature Library--those volumes by Neltje Blanchan, Julia Ellen Rogers, Nina L. Marshall and others called (for the most part) _The Butterfly Book_, _The Shell Book_, _The Tree Book_, and so on. Fairly expensive books, these, but cheap at any price with their many and wonderful colour plates and photographs from life. In their outdoor field they are not to be surpassed.

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Books of a biographical character we have considered already (Chapter 8) but it ought to be emphasised that, for the investor in literature, they hold a position quite as enviable and altogether desirable as does the class of securities known as municipals for the investor of moneys. Time will not match for us a book like Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_, nor will literature furnish us with a more strangely suggestive career than that related in Raymond Weaver’s _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_. It was C. Alphonso Smith’s _O. Henry Biography_ that first gave the world the facts on which to base a true understanding of that extraordinary writer. The tale of unwearied courage in Edward Livingston Trudeau’s _Autobiography_ cannot lose either its freshness nor its strength of inspiration. To read P. P. Howe’s _Life of William Hazlitt_ and then to turn to his little book of selections called _The Best of Hazlitt_ is to enter into a permanently valuable share of the English literary inheritance. _The Letters of Henry James_, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock, and James’s own _Notes of a Son and Brother_; Sir Sidney Colvin’s _John Keats_ and his _Memories and Notes of Persons and Places_; the _Letters of James Huneker_ and Huneker’s autobiography, _Steeplejack_; and the _Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds_, edited by Horatio F. Brown, are all of the class of books whose content is a permanent acquisition, an actual “property” of which the reader, in legal language, becomes seized and possessed.

One’s investment in an ample author should be allowed to ramify in all directions natural to the lines of human interest. About Walt Whitman, for example, there is by now a cluster of books which the reader of _Leaves of Grass_ or of Whitman’s prose cannot afford, in their entirety, to neglect. Whether he will want one or all, or what ones he will want, will depend upon the relation he establishes with Whitman himself. The best brief biography is _Walt Whitman: The Man and His Work_, translated from the French of Leon Bazalgette by Ellen FitzGerald. Personally I do not think one can feel himself acquainted with Whitman unless he has read, or read in, the three massive volumes of Horace Traubel’s _With Walt Whitman in Camden_. _The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman_, edited by Thomas B. Harned, form an unusual and engrossing chapter in the lives of both. Those keenly interested will explore further yet in the two volumes of the _Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_, edited by Emory Holloway, who is now at work on a long and comprehensive biography of the poet.

The book with beautiful illustrations is a true investment, since now such illustrations are seldom if ever wasted on a second-rate text. To a great extent these illustrated books are ones appreciable by children as well as by their elders--things like _Westward Ho!_ and _The Last of the Mohicans_--and came up for our consideration in Chapter 9. But there are certain classics, like the editions of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and Milton’s _Comus_ with pictures by Arthur Rackham, which are adult throughout. One of the most splendid is the Vierge Edition of _Don Quixote_, in four volumes, illustrated with 260 drawings by Daniel Vierge and provided with an introduction by Royal Cortissoz. The same work, illustrated by Jean de Bosschere, may be had in one large volume; and other treasures of the sort are _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ and Shakespeare’s _The Tempest_, both illustrated by Edmund Dulac. I must not omit the edition of Scott’s _Quentin Durward_, with illustrations in color by the American artist, C. Bosseron Chambers.

When, in 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.

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“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_

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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....

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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