without thought of personal fatigue or selfish inconvenience at the
end of journeys of many miles were Mark Stratton’s contribution to
the cause of Good. It seems unkind to examine such performances
dispassionately. “He worshipped beauty: beautiful faces, souls, hearts,
beautiful landscapes, trees, animals, flowers. He loved colour: rich,
bright colour and every variation down to the faintest shadings.” Mrs.
Porter keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was carrying when
stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight. “Over inspired
Biblical passages, over great books, over sunlit landscapes, over
a white violet abloom in deep shade, over a heroic deed of man, I
have seen his brow light up, his eyes shine.” He used especially to
thrill his young daughter by the story of John Maynard, who piloted a
burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at the wheel. That he
should tell it was natural, since the telling gave him opportunity to
reproduce, with many inflections, the captain’s cry of “John Maynard!”
and the answer, “Aye, aye, sir!” echoed until it sank to a mere gasp, a
whisper....
iv
Gene Stratton was only a few years old when her mother, who had once
nursed three of the children through typhoid fever, contracting it
herself, broke down. Mrs. Stratton lived for several years, suffering
continually, frequently tortured by pain. The youngest child was
therefore allowed to follow an impulse and escape the training given
her sisters. She followed her father and brothers outdoors, sleeping
on their coats in fence corners, awakening, sometimes, to find shy
creatures peering into her face. “I trotted from one object which
attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about
everything I saw while I waded, catching fish, chasing butterflies over
clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of
the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently
improvised from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf
blankets.” She made special pets of birds. She had been taught that
they were useful and had “a gift of Grace in their beauty and music,
things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea
myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied
a ’kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into the nest
of the humming-bird, and did he not walk softly and whisper when he
approached the spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched
until I knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my
tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the
mother bird.”
All this life became a thing of memory just before the mother’s death.
Then they left the farm and went to town, to the city of Wabash, that
Mrs. Stratton might have constant medical attention. The ninety-pound
bit of pink porcelain, plump as a wild partridge, the little Dutch
woman who had borne twelve children and kept a spotless farmhouse and
heaped up good things on the long dinner table, lay with her head on
a pillow, a cinnamon pink or a trillium placed where its fragrance
would reach her with every breath she drew. She was dying. She had
helped Mark Stratton with the bush- and vine-covered fences that crept
around the acres they owned in a strip of gaudy colour; she shared
the achievement of that orchard, lying in a valley, with its square
of apple trees in the centre, so that at the time of blossoming it
appeared as if a great pink-bordered white blanket had been let down
on the earth. To her equally with her husband was due the presence on
shale, which they might have drained, of sheets of blue flag, marigold
and buttercups. All this was going out of her children’s life and
she was going out with it. The youngest child, in particular, had
been leading a harum-scarum existence; if she reported promptly three
times a day when the bell rang at meal times, with enough clothing to
constitute a decent covering, nothing more was asked of her until the
Sabbath. Mary Stratton was perhaps about to be released, to receive
the benefit of a freedom in which, if her hands were not busy, it was
not likely she would be happy or know what to do. Gene Stratton,
whose father permitted his youngest to idolise him, was to be taken
from outdoor freedom, her feet shod, her body restricted by the burden
of Sunday clothing, her active legs stilled to a shuffle beneath the
desk of a close schoolroom, and her mind set to droning over books.
Unfortunately she came to the ordeal with no purely feminine resources
of inattention, preoccupation or indifference. Her father had seen to
that. It was he who was responsible for the child that revelled in
_Paul and Virginia_, _Undine_, _Picciola_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_,
_Pilgrim’s Progress_--“exquisitely expressed and conceived stories”
that “may have done much in forming high conceptions of what really
constitutes literature, and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by
my parents.” Mrs. Porter adds: “One of these stories formed the basis
of my first publicly recognised literary effort.” She was assigned
to write a class composition on “Mathematical Law.” She postponed,
rebelled, wrote a paper retelling the story of _Picciola_ and in fear
and defiance read it aloud in class. After one page the teacher halted
her while she summoned in the superintendent of city schools to hear
the sixteen foolscap pages from the beginning. “One instant the room
was in laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who
had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. Never again
was a subject forced upon me.” She was her father’s daughter, and her
father was Mark Stratton.
“My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one of
my books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast jar in
July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to him with a
composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and made suggestions
for its betterment. When I wanted to express something in colour,
he went to an artist, sketched a design for an easel, personally
superintended the carpenter who built it, and provided tuition. On that
same easel I painted the water colours for _Moths of the Limberlost_,
and one of the most poignant regrets of my life is that he was not
there to see them, and to know that the easel which he built through
his faith in me was finally used in illustrating a book.
“If I thought it was music through which I could express myself, he
paid for lessons and detected hidden ability which should be developed.
Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in his belief in me.
He was half the battle. It was he who demanded a physical standard
that developed strength to endure the rigours of scientific field and
darkroom work, and the building of ten books in ten years, five of
which were on nature subjects, having my own illustrations, and five
novels, literally teeming with natural history, true to nature. It was
he who demanded of me from birth the finishing of any task I attempted
and who taught me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years,
if necessary, to find and secure the material I wanted. It was he who
daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in
_The Harvester_, and who constantly used every atom of brain and body
power to help and to encourage all men to do the same.”
No further illumination should be needed on the most extraordinary
personal influence in Mrs. Porter’s life.
v
Gene Stratton was married in 1886, at the age of eighteen, to Charles
Darwin Porter, of Wabash, Indiana. Marriage, a home of her own, and
a daughter were successively brought to bear upon a nature already
powerful; none of them succeeded in eradicating the impress of Mark
Stratton. The new home was a cabin of fourteen rooms (at first),
standing on some fifteen acres near the Limberlost Swamp. The familiar
address runs: “Limberlost Cabin, Rome City, Indiana.” Red, white, pink,
blue, lavender and yellow flower-beds of an acre apiece were laid off
in the deep woods running down the shore of a lake; the cabin stands
in the middle of the yellow bed, a dwelling of large rooms and four
fireplaces, two of which Mrs. Porter built, to a large extent, herself.
One is of pudden stone, red and blue pebbles; another, in the living
room, is constructed of field boulders split to expose their quartz
crystals that sparkle under artificial light. The windows were built
with broad, deep casements especially to furnish feeding-tables for
birds. On the open, cement-floored porch may stand in winter wheat,
apples, cabbage and celery bunches. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches,
sapsuckers, flickers, song sparrows, jays, cardinals and squirrels come
to the sills to eat the chopped wheat, ground corn and suet put out for
them.
But this is to mix past and the comparative present. It was not long
before Mrs. Porter’s daughter was old enough to go to school. “I knew
how to manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small
amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms and
kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s clothes, I kept a
conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs
every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and
washed dishes, besides, three times a day. In my spare time (mark
the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have
been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography ...” but
we need not go with her into the details of this one among many of
her personal triumphs. She was for two years editor of the camera
department of Recreation, for two years on the natural history staff
of Outing, for four years specialist in natural history photography
on the Photographic Times Annual Almanac. She had a dread of failure
and, at first, carried on her special work as secretly as possible.
“My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines, but
only a few people in our locality read these, none were interested
in nature photography or natural science; so what I was trying to
do was not realised even by my own family. I did not want to fail
before my man person and my daughter and our respective families.” She
was further afraid of ridicule in a community “where I was already
severely criticised on account of my ideas of housekeeping, dress and
social customs.” When she first attempted “nature studies sugar-coated
with fiction” she proceeded with the same furtiveness. “I who waded
morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in air, and
crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many
misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that
if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank”--Mr. Porter
was president of the Bank of Geneva--“need not know.” Through loss
of her address at the New York end, she waited unanswered until one
day, months later, when she went into “our store” on an errand and the
storekeeper said: “I read your story in the Metropolitan last night. It
was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?” Mrs. Porter relates:
“My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I said
as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he could hear
it, ‘No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any spare copies? My
sister might want one.’”
The appearance of her first story led to an order for a second, to be
illustrated with her own photographs. She had a day, or less, to fill
the request for photographs, and kept a number of persons up all night
to pose for her. The genesis of _Freckles_, her second book, was the
discovery by lumbermen of a nest of the black vulture in the Limberlost
Swamp. Her husband, whose business had compelled him to allow her to
work alone but who was also a natural history enthusiast, insisted that
he must go with her. “A Limberlost trip at that time was not to be
joked about. The swamp had not been shorn, branded, and tamed. There
were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was
impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just
invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and
quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the
worst of such locations in the Central States.
“A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired
to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we
reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces
and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in
kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced
our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies,
mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes.
We sank ankle deep at every step, and logs we thought solid broke under
us. Our progress was a steady succession of prying and pulling each
other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed
parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the
tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its
unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and
brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
“We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and
binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost
three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take
wing.”
The idea of _Freckles_ came one day when they were leaving the swamp.
A big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and
swirling earthward, and fell in Mrs. Porter’s path. It was an eagle’s
feather, but although she instantly looked aloft, Mrs. Porter’s
well-trained eyes could not catch sight of the bird. She has always
regretted that to her story the title _Freckles_ was given; her wish
was for “The Falling Feather”--that tangible thing drifting down out of
Nowhere, just as the boy came in the story of her fashioning.
The insertion of marginal drawings of nature subjects in _Freckles_
made a distinct impression get abroad that it was simply a nature book,
with the result that three long years were required for the novel to
attain its enormous popularity. Published in 1904, the book had sold,
ten years later, 670,733 copies in the regular edition.
vi
Mrs. Porter as an author is now fairly before us and may be considered
profitably before we take a look at her newest novel, _The White Flag_.
So familiar a phenomenon calls for incisive comment. She writes her
stories “exactly as they take shape in my mind” and the excisions
are sometimes--as in the case of _Her Father’s Daughter_, which yet
remained overlong--quite heavy. The edited and published fiction is of
itself remarkable for an unrestraint, a vigorous emphasis, a masculine
zeal, with which there is generally combined freshness of feeling
and a transparent sincerity. It is this sincerity, proceeding as it
so often does from a total unconsciousness of what lies behind it,
that the popular instinct detects at once in the pages of a work of
fiction. It has, of course, nothing whatever to do with literary art,
it is never shamed or enriched by the processes of introspection, and
in this it conforms to the wilful egoism fundamental with the Northern
races in a new country and exploitable environment. The student of
psychology may be interested, for more reasons than the inheritance
of Holland ancestry, to compare the late Theodore Roosevelt and Gene
Stratton-Porter in personalities and characters. Each has swayed the
millions; each, beyond all possible question, has influenced human
lives. Neither was oppressed by the enormous responsibility attached to
such a rôle. I would not say that the one had more education than has
the other, but their educations were different.
“To spend time writing a book based wholly upon human passion and
its outworking I would not,” exclaims Mrs. Porter, to whom art is an
expression of flower-beds and children a-plenty, censored books and
human lives lived on sober and industrious models. And she compromised
on a book “into which I put all the nature work that came naturally
within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination and
straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known intimately,
folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I was familiar.”
In simple justice it should be pointed out that she insisted upon
alternating nature books and novels, although far more money could be
earned by writing only fiction.
Just as the child was taken from the fields, shoed and harnessed in
“Sunday clothes” and put into school, so the naturalist was torn,
though somewhat more gently and gradually, from her proper enjoyments
and placed in the trammels of book-length fiction. What wonder that she
revolted?--but the rebellion of _Picciola_, though ending in personal
triumph, was not the end of school; and the rebellion of the novelist,
though rewarded with a tremendous personal triumph, did not end her
ordeal of novel-writing. What people like Mrs. Porter never achieve
is a successful rebellion from, within, themselves. Something more
powerful than they quells their self-insurrections; they go on; money
seems worth while for what can be done with it to give happiness and
widen opportunity for others; the task is good--why? It is a task;
something that must be done very thoroughly. The father, Mark Stratton,
to whom his daughter was so observably devoted, gave her a set of
ideals that were to lift her up, like strong links of iron, and then to
turn into rigid chains. She who owes so much to him owes to him more
than she has ever suspected, a compulsion put upon her from within
herself, the final reward or fate of every worshipper.
She has tried to escape. She has written poetry. There was _The
Fire Bird_; and lately there has been _Euphorbia_, a long narrative
published serially to the astonishment of readers of Good Housekeeping.
The subject of _Euphorbia_ is interesting--a woman to whom marriage
brings non-fulfilment, whose husband tramples and uproots the
red-and-white wild flower she loves. When at length the man dies,
the mother has one fearful moment in which her child reaches toward
a bit of euphorbia with she knows not which intention. But he loves
it. Escape! It is not necessary to make as much of this as the
psychoanalyst would make of it, nor, perhaps, to miss the mark so
widely. “My life has been fortunate,” Mrs. Porter admits, “in one
glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods.
For every bad man and woman I have known I have met, lived with, and
am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly
clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high
ideals, and it is _upon the lives of these that I base what I write_.”
There is a puzzling fierceness in the attacks she launches on those
who write otherwise; she is vulnerable somewhere in this connection
or she would show less heat and animosity. And, to some extent, her
active resentment is justified, for she has had a heavy experience
of misleading praise and some experience of hypocrisy. I remember an
occasion upon which she wrote to me, with scornful inflections, to lay
before me the evidence in the case of a certain well-known writer who
had enthusiastically praised her work, though “not for publication.” It
was a course which, like herself, I should join in condemning; but was
it so much of a matter? Did, could, the voice of a single one, count
for much where she had heard already the open voices of praise from so
many thousands? And if it was so, then why?
Who answers that will make possibly the largest single contribution
to the psychology of literature, for this identical question finally
arises in the case of writers great and small.
vii
Never, perhaps, has Mrs. Porter been more herself than in her latest
book, _The White Flag_; although _Her Father’s Daughter_, as originally
written, was overgrown. Both these books are autobiography--_Her
Father’s Daughter_ of the heart, _The White Flag_ of mind and memory.
If Mrs. Porter has but one story to tell, no one has succeeded in
telling it so often with such freshness of feeling or such repeated
success in the matter of readers. _The White Flag_ is the story of
Mahala Spellman, daughter and only child of Mahlon and Elizabeth
Spellman. The opening scenes are laid in the Indiana of the 1880s.
The village is called Ashwater. For what seems an excessive time our
attention is concentrated upon Elizabeth as a little girl and Junior
Moreland as a little boy. Nothing could be more typical of Mrs. Porter
than the attention she bestows upon her heroine in childhood--the exact
detail of Mahala’s dress, the recorded precision of her unfailingly
correct behaviour. If there is something unnatural about the child,
there is everything natural to a child in Mrs. Porter’s fiction.
In picturing the richest man in the village Mrs. Porter blackens
his villainy to a pitch where Mr. Moreland is neither more nor less
credible than some of the characters in, let us say, _Way Down East_.
Mahala, in ensuing chapters, refuses Junior Moreland in the face of the
fact that his father could save her father from ruin. Her father fails,
and, broken, dies. Her mother becomes an invalid. When finally Mahala
can truthfully say that all is lost except self-respect and courage,
a deadly blow is levelled at her self-respect. Some money is stolen.
Circumstantial evidence accuses Mahala, and Ashwater shuns her.
It will not be supposed that Mrs. Porter fails to raise up a champion
in her heroine’s hour of need. All along we have been in touch,
in close touch, with Jason. We knew him as a boy, apparently the
washerwoman’s son. We know him as a young man, springing to Mahala’s
relief. There is no real reason why, in such a situation and with two
such principal characters, Mrs. Porter should not work miracles. She
does.... Of course her point is that the virtue, goodness and courage
of Mahala and Jason earn their own ample rewards; and the thousands who
are reading _The White Flag_ will accept this as so.
Books by Gene Stratton-Porter
1903 _The Song of the Cardinal_
1904 _Freckles_
1907 _What I Have Done With Birds_ (republished, 1917,
as _Friends in Feathers_)
1908 _At the Foot of the Rainbow_
1909 _A Girl of the Limberlost_
1909 _Birds of the Bible_
1910 _Music of the Wild_
1911 _The Harvester_
1912 _Moths of the Limberlost_
1913 _Laddie_
1915 _Michael O’Halloran_
1916 _Morning Face_
1918 _A Daughter of the Land_
1920 _Homing With the Birds_
1921 _Her Father’s Daughter_
1922 _The Fire Bird_
1923 _White Flag_
_Euphorbia_ appeared as a serial in Good Housekeeping:
January, February, March numbers, 1923.
Sources on Gene Stratton-Porter
_Gene Stratton-Porter, A Little Story of Her Life and Work._ This
is the booklet, now out of print, published some ten years ago by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, based upon the long self-account written by
Mrs. Porter and prepared by Eugene F. Saxton.
“An American Bird-Woman.” Anonymous article in CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
(London and Edinburgh. New York: International News Company), Part 46,
October 1, 1914: page 636.
Private Information.
_17. Poetry and Plays_
i