responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and
progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried
and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity
which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene
moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story
proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly
in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is
works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the
three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book
does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference
between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident
and destiny in the existence of a child.
In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of
resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes
than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate,
be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced
hand.
BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH
1904 _Broke of Covenden_
1906 _Henry Northcote_
1907 _William Jordan, Junior_
1909 _Araminta_ [republished 1923]
1910 _Fortune_
1910 _Mrs. Fitz_
_Lady Barbarity_
_Anne Feversham_
1912 _The Principal Girl_
1914 _An Affair of State_
1915 _The Great Age_
1916 _The Sailor_
1917 _The Coming_
1918 _Mary Plantagenet_
_The Time Spirit_
1919 _The Undefeated_
In England: _Love Lane_
1920 _The Adventurous Lady_
1922 _The Council of Seven_
1923 _The Van Roon_
1924 _There Is a Tide_
SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH
Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be
found on page 155 _et seq._ of R. Brimley Johnson’s _Some Contemporary
Novelists_ (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.
An appreciative review of _The Sailor_ forms a short chapter in S. P. B.
Mais’s _Some Modern Authors_ (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 _et
seq._
“J. C. Snaith,” by W. M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.
BOOKS BY GEORGE GIBBS
1900 _Pike and Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy_
1901 _In Search of Mademoiselle_
1903 _American Sea Fights._ Portfolio of colored drawings
1905 _The Love of Monsieur_
1907 _The Medusa Emerald_
1909 _Tony’s Wife_
1911 _The Bolted Door_
1911 _The Forbidden Way_
1912 _The Maker of Opportunities_
1913 _The Silent Battle_
1913 _Madcap_
1914 _The Flaming Sword_
1915 _The Yellow Dove_
1916 _Paradise Garden_
1917 _The Secret Witness_
1918 _The Golden Bough_
1919 _The Black Stone_
1920 _The Splendid Outcast_
1921 _The Vagrant Duke_
1921 _Youth Triumphant_
1922 _The House of Mohun_
1923 _Fires of Ambition_
1924 _Sackcloth and Scarlet_
SOURCES ON GEORGE GIBBS
“Illustrates His Own Books” (article and interview), The Sun, New York,
18 February 1911.
“George Gibbs on His Work.” Interview by Francis Hill in the Philadelphia
Public Ledger. Date uncertain: 1912 or 1913.
“George Gibbs, a Novelist, and His Ideas.” Interview by Theodocia F.
Walton in the Philadelphia Press, 21 March 1920.
_Who’s Who in America._
NOTE: George Gibbs’s prowess as a painter in oils deserves a special
note. He has painted some splendid nudes which have been widely
exhibited, in particular one called “The Gold Screen” which has been at
the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts,
the St. Louis Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other
exhibitions. He has done some striking marines which have been shown at
the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery and are now (April,
1924) on view in Baltimore. He has become a portrait painter much in
demand with more commissions offered him than he cares to accept.
In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady
progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference
between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely
greater than between his first few novels and such work as _The House of
Mohun_ or _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.
24. Mary Johnston’s Adventure
i
There lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many
authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his
business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry
man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner.
Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his
shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in
propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude
toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude
toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is
a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say:
“Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are
about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face
and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day
he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published,
indeed, but not read. And one of those books is _Michael Forth_, by Mary
Johnston.
Miss Johnston was read before the publication of _Michael Forth_ and
she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her
best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. _Michael
Forth_ is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come,
in place of the writer of superb historical romances like _To Have and
To Hold_ and historical novels like _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_,
an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company
in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
Margaret Fuller and Melville.
“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath
not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard it,” concludes
an anonymous writer.[99] The account of Mary Johnston’s adventure
given by this writer is as unsatisfactory as secondhand versions of a
mystical experience must necessarily be. Miss Johnston may or may not
write the story; Emerson said that “the highest cannot be spoken,” and,
most certainly, it cannot with adequacy be written. Miss Johnston has
made some attempt to put her adventure on paper, but the result so far
discourages her. In what follows I am merely trying to convey the quality
of her strange experience. I have not her sanction for what I say; I had
rather not make the trial. But there is really no escape. If we are to
understand the growth of the writer we must have some notion of the thing
that befell.
ii
The child was not strong, and her Scots grandmother first, an aunt
afterward, taught her. She grew up in the village of Buchanan, Botetourt
County, Virginia, still in the 1870’s a place of canalboats and the
stagecoach. Major John William Johnston was a Confederate veteran, a
lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature. Naturally the house
was not without books. Mary Johnston found the histories particularly
engrossing. Then the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and this
daughter was sent to school at Atlanta. She was then sixteen. In a few
months her health compelled her to return home where, a year later, her
mother died. As she was the eldest of several children the direction of
the household fell to her. She suffered intermittently from illness for
many years. In her twenties and while living in a New York apartment she
began a romance of colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century, writing
much of it in a quiet corner of Central Park, so as to be outdoors. She
had been writing short stories which editors sent back to her and which
she burned on the first rejection. It is said that the late Walter H.
Page, at the time with Houghton Mifflin Company, discovered her.[100]
The historical romance, _Prisoners of Hope_ (1898) became her first book
and was successful; her second novel, _To Have and To Hold_ (1900) was
a record-making best seller and had literary merits most exceptional in
the flood of historical fiction then running. Miss Johnston traveled
considerably in Europe in quest of better health. After the death of her
father she lived for some time at 110 East Franklin Street, Richmond.
Then she built a home, “Three Hills,” near Warm Springs, Virginia,
where she has lived since. Knowing that her Civil War novels, _The Long
Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, owe much to Major Johnston’s analyses and
recollections, some Southerners have said that Mary Johnston’s father was
at least equally responsible with her for the splendid performance in her
earlier novels. They quite misunderstand the nature of the inspiration
he undoubtedly gave her. Of direct help—which is what these people really
have in mind—he gave much, as she has acknowledged; it was, however,
unimportant. Direct help can as well be got from books. If today you
tell Miss Johnston how well you liked such a novel of hers as _Lewis
Rand_ (1908), she will probably respond: “Of course you realize that the
picture of those times is idealized.” In other words, although hers is
one of those natures which must seek the ideal, possess and be possessed
by it, the conception of the ideal has completely changed. Where once she
found it in the bright glints of an earlier American day, now she finds
it in our day and every day, past or present or to be—the pure silver of
the human spirit that runs in a deep if irregular vein through the worn
old rock of human destiny.
For she is like silver herself, like old silver choicely patterned. The
small, oval face and pointed chin are serene in expression beneath a fine
forehead and crisp hair with a great deal of its blackness still in it.
Her manner is reposeful, friendly, unaffected and sympathetic. She talks
readily about anything and everything but you have a feeling that she
is also, at moments, somewhere else—this quite without any sacrifice or
lessening of her hereness and attentiveness. I now come to the personal
experience which, to be intelligible to most of us, must be put in a
crude and simple kind of paraphrase.
If one has suffered much from illness and pain, one is very likely to
have occasional moments in which one returns to life newly-washed, like
the world in trembling freshness and sunlight on a morning after storm.
If one stands on a Virginia hill, or a hill anywhere, one may sometimes
have a distinct awareness that the length and breadth and depth round
about and below are only a kind of length and breadth and descent to a
creature measuring them with his legs; even the eye seems to declare that
genuine dimensions are elsewhere. Stand on the hill one day, return to
it one, five or ten years afterward, standing in the same place. It is
quite possible that nothing has changed in the scene about you. A certain
time has passed, but you, to yourself, haven’t changed. You have grown a
little older, but the essential _you_ is not anybody else. Suddenly you
realize that time is not a dimension, either, any more than the length
and breadth round about or the drop to the valley below; and that as long
as you are _you_ and no one else, the day, the year or the century would
make no genuine difference. The only distance or direction lies between
the unchanging _you_ and somebody else. You are really no farther from
Balboa discovering the Pacific from a Panama summit than if you were
standing beside him now sharing the discovery; the direction is from your
spirit to his, from his to yours, and the distance is neither lessened
nor increased by race, nationality, religion, leagues or centuries.
That is, instead of merely acquiring the notion of the fourth dimension
of mathematics, you have come to see that all the so-called dimensions,
length, breadth, height, time and imaginable others are merely
conveniences of earthly existence, or necessities of earthly existence,
like eating and breathing.
As you stand on the hill, you are alone and yet not alone. The physical
_you_ is alone, as always; but the unchanging _you_ is one of a company
whom you can identify only to the extent of what you may have read or
heard about them. In the company will be Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc,
Spinoza, Ludwig van Beethoven, Cardinal Newman, William Blake, Walt
Whitman—to mention a few of various times and countries—as well as
countless others.
Then will follow the strangest part of the experience and the part most
difficult to put in words. It is, however, something of which some
intimation comes even to the humblest pair of lovers, just as it is the
passionate fulfillment of the great, the immortal lovers of legend.
There is a feeling so intense that it can find coherent expression
only in poetry which holds it securely in the rigid mold of metre and
rhyme; there is another feeling, or degree of feeling either more
intense or more delicate which can communicate itself only in a language
of cunningly-related sounds which we call music. And there is even a
pitch of feeling greater than these, higher and very tranquil and most
piercing in its intensity and loveliness. This feeling has only one
expression—love. The object of that love is immaterial to it. That
object may be, outwardly, the body of the beloved. It may be a person
or an idea. It may be anything. The effects of this feeling are almost
infinitely various. You will find some of them described in William
James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_. The feeling itself is a
religious feeling but it may not expend itself on a religious object.
The feeling made Francis of Assisi the Clown of God. It brought visions
to Joan of Arc and put her at the head of a victorious army. Under its
influence Beethoven wrote symphonies, Blake made pictures, and Whitman
wrote _Leaves of Grass_. Sometimes, when the effects are tranquil, we say
that the Lover has found peace—to which has sometimes been added a phrase
of further description, “the peace that passeth understanding.”
Nearly all these aspects of a continuous human experience came to
Mary Johnston. There was the not unusual preliminary circumstance of
invalidism. There was the loss of a father, much-loved. There were
the Virginia hills she walked upon and there was frequent solitude.
The sense of passing the boundaries of time and space was facilitated
by two things: first, her devotion to history, and second, her
strongly-developed novelist’s imagination. Shortly after she was forty,
therefore, she came to a day when, for an hour or part of an hour, she
had access to a state of knowledge, of sympathy, of understanding which
is so sane that it infuses its sanity into every act of living and so
joyous that those to whom the experience is vouchsafed can throw aside
every lesser joy. After that first experience Mary Johnston waited for it
to renew itself, and gradually what had come as a miracle remained as a
human faculty; so that since then she has acquired the apparent power or
privilege of leaning out from the gold bar of Heaven, of letting earth
slip without loosing herself from earth. You know how your mind will pass
behind the stars while your feet yet continue to tread firm soil as you
go on walking. That is a feeble likeness to the thing.
iii
It was bound to affect her writing, and perhaps the first traces of it
are in _The Witch_ (1914), but it was clearly apparent in _Foes_ (1918),
where, as I have said before this, “upthrusting through the surface of
a stirring historical adventure, we had the evidence of the author’s
breathless personal adventure.” It is one thing to be by temperament
a mystic; quite another to become, as Miss Johnston had now become, a
mystic by the witness of some inner illumination. In some cases the
change has brought with it a proselyting spirit of great fervor; in Miss
Johnston’s there was a complete absence of any such missionary zeal. All
the same she could not go on writing novels in which the picture of some
bygone time was idealized simply for the sake of a charming picture.
_Foes_ has been correctly described as “a dramatic story of eighteenth
century Scotland with a lasting feud, a long chase, and a crescendo of
hatred and peril.” But it is also a story of sublime forgiveness, as
much so as John Masefield’s _The Everlasting Mercy_. In _Michael Forth_
(1919) and _Sweet Rocket_ (1920) there was, as in certain novels of
Herman Melville’s, notably _Pierre_, more transcendentalism than story.
It was inevitable that she should be inarticulate for a while, but it
was only for a while. For in 1922 appeared her story, _Silver Cross_,
a tale of England in the time of Henry VII. and of two rival religious
establishments. _Silver Cross_ was both beautiful and intelligible. For
the prose style I like best Stewart Edward White’s word, “stippling.” It
has also been said of what was to be her mode of utterance for a book
or two: “Written in a clipped sort of prose stripped of ‘a’ and ‘an’
and ‘the’ and other particles as well as articles, the text is a highly
mannered English replete with cadenced sentences and animated by nervous
rhythms. The very diction bears poetic surcharges, and the whole effect
on the reader is to distill in his soul a delicate enchantment or else
to exasperate him to death.”[101] The core of the tale is irony, irony
directed at religious bigotry and religious intolerance; it lies there at
the base of the flower and from it the reader may make his own bitter
honey. Or, if he have no stomach for that, he may take his satisfaction
and pleasure in the rich sound of ecclesiastical trumpets, the green
England, the pageant of a simple world unrolled before him.
In the same year with _Silver Cross_ Miss Johnston’s _1492_ was
published. The book is, of course, the story of Columbus, told with the
accurate historical coloring and the poetic feeling one would expect
of the author; but it uses a technical device which, while not novel,
is deserving of attention from the analyst of fiction. This is the
employment as narrator of the story of Jayme de Marchena, a fictional
person, represented as a Jew who has been banished from Spain under the
decree of exile promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella. Miss Johnston
makes of him a man of philosophical mind, an “obscure Spinoza” whose
thoughts are a constant commentary on the voyage from Palos and the
succeeding voyages. Thus, without distorting history or creating an
imaginary portrait of the Genoese sailor and discoverer, the book (in
form a novel) gives us one of the great events in human affairs in a
perspective that neither history nor biography affords. Again what we
have is the vision of one standing on a hilltop, alone and yet not
alone—of one who is at the same instant standing in the night watches on
the deck of a caravel and listening to the cry from the man on lookout....
iv
Slow turns the water by the green marshes,
In Virginia.
Overhead the sea fowl
Make silver flashes, cry harsh as peacocks.
Capes and islands stand,
Ocean thunders,
The light houses burn red and gold stars.
In Virginia
Run a hundred rivers.[102]
The fine opening of Miss Johnston’s poem might serve as an evocation,
except in the detail of the lighthouses, for her novel, _Croatan_ (1923).
The mere fact of her return to the Virginia of colonial days must have
served to entice many readers to this book—who were held, I think, by the
tale itself, once they had begun it. The legend of Raleigh’s lost colony
of Roanoke and of a first white child born in Virginia, “Virginia Dare,”
is skilfully utilized for a romance quite the most perfect Miss Johnston
had imagined. The story of the three young people who grew up together
in the forest—English girl, Spanish boy and Indian youth—is one of many
overtones deftly sounded. Is Miss Johnston proclaiming a creed of racial
tolerance and interracial understanding? Then the proclamation is made
pianissimo and with muted strings, not with brass instruments. And the
forest scenes—what delicious notes from oboes!
It is very natural to contrast Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow, both
Virginians and both novelists of distinction as well as contemporaries.
Their very agreeable personalities are, however, markedly different. Miss
Glasgow is a product of her background and her time, as much so, for
example, as Edith Wharton; Miss Johnston has a great deal more likeness
to, let us say, Miss May Sinclair. Where Miss Glasgow tends to concern
herself with Virginia of the last half century, Miss Johnston, from
going back to the beginnings of her State, is quite as likely to plunge
effortlessly forward into the farthest imaginable future. For a witness
of what she can do in that direction one does well to read such a short
story as “There Were No More People,”[103] dealing with the extinction
of man and the slow emergence of “a creature who must be classed among
_aves_. He was small, two-footed, feathered and winged.... Slowly, taking
aeons to do it, he put out, in addition to his wings, rudimentary arms
that grew, taking a vast number of generations to accomplish it, into
true arm and hand. At the same time he began, very, very slowly, to
heighten and broaden his skull. Man would have thought him—as he would
have thought man—a strange looking creature.... It took time, but at
last there dawned self-consciousness. The old vehicle for sensation,
emotion, memory and thought that had been called man was gone. But
sensation, emotion, memory and thought are eternals, and a new vehicle
has been wrought. It is not a perfect vehicle. In much it betters man,
but it is not perfect. The new Thinker resembles the old in that he knows
selfishness and greed and uses violence.... It remains to be seen if he
can outwear and lay aside all that and remain—as man could not remain.”
[Illustration: MARY JOHNSTON
_Copyright, E. L. Mix._]
v
Carl Van Doren’s words about Miss Johnston, in his _Contemporary American
Novelists_, 1900-1920, that she brings to the legends and traditions of
the Old Dominion no fresh interpretations, have been made obsolete by
_Croatan_, and are, of course, so far as they are made applicable to
legends in general, denied by her last half dozen novels. It is most
true, though, that Miss Johnston is an historian and a scholar in her
tastes. To the series of fifty volumes interlocking to form a complete
American history, and published by the Yale University Press under the
general title, _The Chronicles of America_, Miss Johnston contributed the
volume on _Pioneers of the Old South_. The book deals with Maryland, the
Carolinas and Georgia as well, but Virginia is, of course, the principal
subject. The period is 1607-1735 and Miss Johnston’s short account is an
admirable piece of writing, concise, accurate, uncontroversial; alive
with crisp human portraits and touched with poetry and imagination in its
occasional descriptive passages.
Miss Johnston’s new novel, to be published late in 1924, under the
title, _The Slave Ship_, is a story of the American slave trade in the
eighteenth century. David Scott, a prisoner after the battle of Culloden,
is sold into slavery on the American plantations. The cruelty with which
he is treated hardens his conscience, so that when he escapes he goes
without much hesitation or scruple into a slave ship and then into slave
trading. The novel follows with intensity and compassion the career
which takes him from this most abominable traffic to an understanding of
what it means. The novel is, therefore, a story (like _Foes_) of one who
journeyed on the road to Damascus. But I recall no story which pictures
with more vividness and power the Middle Passage of infamous memory. _The
Slave Ship_ is notable, too, for the greater suavity of Miss Johnston’s
prose style; the “a’s,” “an’s,” and “the’s” are recovered and there are
less tangible changes—all for the better.