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.
iv
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.
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.”