me to write a long story which should end dismally. It is only too
true that stories in real life frequently end that way, but I don’t
like my yarns to do so. So it is fair to presume that in whatever
books I may hereafter write, the hero and the heroine will be united,
virtue rewarded and vice punished, as has happened in those for which
I am already responsible. Perhaps this same weakness for a story, a
cheerful story, makes me care little for the so-called problem novel.
It doesn’t mean that I am not fond of novels dealing with certain
kinds of problems. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of the Cup_ I liked
immensely; but the sex problem, the divorce question, and all that sort
of thing does not appeal to me. A morbid lot of disagreeable people,
married or otherwise, moping and quarrelling through a long story seem
to me scarcely worth while. To a specialist in nervous diseases such a
study might be interesting, but I really doubt if the average healthy
man or woman finds it so. Certainly we should not care to associate
with such people were they living near us. We should get away from them
if we could.
“Perhaps I _could_ write a story with gloomy situations and an unhappy
ending, but I wouldn’t like to try it. I would much rather try to make
people cheerful and keep myself cheerful at the same time. There’s
enough sorrow in this world without finding it in books.”
So he spoke ten years ago; so, with possibly the change of an
illustration or two, would he speak today. From nine in the morning
until noon or one o’clock he disappears into his workshop, frequently
a place known only to himself, and either writes (with a soft, stubby
pencil, on large sheets of yellow paper) or thinks about characters and
the very attenuated skeleton which, for Mr. Lincoln, constitutes the
“plot.”
“I know there are people who can turn out a short story in two or
three hours and it will be good enough to sell, but I cannot help
feeling that it would have been much better if the writer had devoted
more time to it. In my case, doing work that is satisfactory to me
in any degree means that I must fairly sweat it out, if I may use the
expression.” There usually comes a time when he gets “a letter about
once a week asking how the thing is coming along. That has been a
frequent experience, especially when there are a lot of characters in
my story, and I’m having more or less trouble with them. The story
keeps stretching itself out. I think I may have to adopt Mark Twain’s
method, and begin throwing my people down the well.” There is a genial
artifice about nearly all his tales. Some years ago an interviewer
for the Boston Globe touched on the subject of “specialty” writing,
which was a natural topic, as all of Mr. Lincoln’s fiction is a highly
specialised affair, not only in its general localisation on Cape Cod
but in its characterisation and homely wit and humour. The author said:
“A man writes what he knows. If he tries anything else it must
fall--show hollow. And I find that it is necessary to write to your
audience--that one must consider that a large number of his readers are
to be women, and he must write things that will appeal to the women of
today.”
“You don’t mean that you would consider the women to the point of
writing stuff that would be saleable, and refrain from writing stuff
which appealed to you, but might not be saleable?”
“Well,” said Mr. Lincoln, slowly, “I haven’t any ‘message’ that I know
of. I’m not much of a high-brow. I have standards, though. And if I
am to do the thing I want to do, I must get my book printed. But I’ve
never been satisfied--although I did like _The Postmaster_ pretty
well.”
This was ten years ago, and Mr. Lincoln has gone on, unchanging. He
has the most enviable record of any living American writer. No book of
his has been a failure. Some have done better than others, but with
no serious qualification of the statement it can be said that each
book has added to his audience, so that he has for some years been an
unfailing best seller. Perhaps there has been a noticeable increase
in his popularity with and since _The Portygee_ (1919), which was
published serially and then surprised the publishers by beating Lincoln
records as a book. Or the gain may be traceable to the preceding book,
“_Shavings_,” and its successful dramatisation. But in his sustained,
unbroken and increasing popularity as a fictionist Mr. Lincoln has no
competitor. There are others whose individual books have sold more
heavily, whose total sales may be larger, but they have had lapses, and
their popularity has either been impaired or lost. Even as I write the
process known in the trade as “slipping” is observable, here and there,
in the case of one of the most popular American authors, a person with
a long record of immediate successes, one of whose work the American
soldier, in 1917-18, could not apparently get enough. Time does this
thing, but apparently it cannot touch, except to enhance, the passion
for the work of this native of Cape Cod, who clips his words a little
and sometimes says “hev” and “hed” for “have” and “had”--about whom
there is even a suspicion of the Down East nasal twanging as he talks.
A wholly lovable personality. He once wrote:
“Bless the children. They are the most convenient excuses in creation.
Probably, if it were not for them, you wouldn’t get to the zoological
gardens or the aquarium or the fairy play oftener than once a year or
so. And as for the circus--but that’s an old story.”
iv
We have not finished, though, with the man’s own account of his
relation to his work.
“You can’t use actual people. People aren’t as dramatic in actual
life as you want them to be. Of course, you may hear a phrase, or a
story--you may talk with a person and get an impression and build up
your character from those things. But using an actual person wouldn’t
work. Besides, it would be rather mean.
“In writing of a Cape Cod town or village, although I purposely
refrain from describing it as any one town in particular, I have tried
conscientiously to give the characteristics of Cape Cod towns I am
acquainted with. The promontories and inlets and hills and marshes in
‘my’ Cape Cod may not be found where I have located them, but I have
tried very hard to make them like those which are on the real Cape. And
so with the Cape Codders in my stories. I have never knowingly drawn
the exact, recognisable portrait of an individual. I have of course,
received hundreds of letters from readers who inform me, in strict
confidence, that they know the original of ‘Cap’n ----’ and recognised
him at once. Nevertheless they are wrong. I have endeavoured always
to be true to type, and in writing of the old deep-sea captain, the
coasting skipper, the longshoreman or the people of the Cape villages,
I have done my best to portray each as I have seen and known specimens
of his or her kind. And in attempting to transcribe the habit of
language I have made it a rule never to use an expression or idiom I
have not heard used by a native of the old colony.”
The differentiation of the various types of seaman has been carefully
made by Mr. Lincoln, and is perhaps valuable to a full appreciation of
his fiction.
“The type of sea captain who figures in my stories has not necessarily
an accurately corresponding type in my acquaintance. Going back to
the Cape after having lived in New York and Boston, I was able to get
varying angles on the lives of the men and women I had known in my
childhood. The old sea captains that I remembered best as a child were
of more than one character, classified according to their work. One
was the dignified old man who had travelled to some far-away corner of
the earth and returned prosperous, to spend the rest of his days as
an autocrat among his own people. He had met strange peoples, he had
been trusted with a ship, and, as in the days I write of there were
no instantaneous means of talking across the oceans, he was shrewd at
bargaining and, being one of the owners of the ship, he lost no chance
to bring home a cargo that would bring rich returns. In other words,
he was a shrewd trader as well as a sailing master. The same dignified
bearing that he used in his trade followed him on land, and, though
jovial in manner, he was developed in dignity and character.
“The other type of captain was more popular with the youngsters. He may
have been as shrewd, and possibly made as much money, but he was filled
with a greater sense of humour, and took life as a pastime. Men of this
description would gather round the stove and tell wonderful stories,
though all sea captains talk shop when they get together.
“Then too there were what are termed the ‘long-shore captains.’ These
were mostly engaged in fishing, or in trading with coast towns and
cities. They were necessarily more limited in their views, for they
spent more time ashore, often working a good-sized garden, fishing when
the spirit moved, and running a schooner to New York or Boston if the
chance came.
“Of all the sea-captains, however, those that I knew best were those
who were actually sailing in the 1870’s and 1880’s, and who were
largely engaged in carrying oranges and lemons from Mediterranean
ports. These men were really the last of our sailing captains. I have
one friend in particular who was in the fruit trade, and his stories
of how they crowded sail and took every risk to bring in their cargoes
are many and thrilling. Fruit, of course, is highly perishable, and
while it might be a valuable cargo one day, a week later it would be
worthless; therefore the sea races and adventures.”
In an article, “Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness,” appearing in the
American Magazine, Mr. Lincoln has told stories of Cape Cod captains he
has known. Acuity of observation, caution joined to a quality of going
in head-first if one goes in at all, and a singularly dry humour are a
large part of the “shrewdness,” as Lincoln makes it out. In the course
of the article he offers this admittedly serious statement:
“In all my forty-odd years of experience with Yankees I do not remember
ever having met one who habitually whittled. I have, of course, known
some who whittled occasionally, when they were making a ‘bow ’n’ arrer’
or a boat for one of the children. But I never knew one who whittled
when he was making a trade.” _Sic transit_ the “Yankee” of one species
of “fiction” and drama. But it is time to look at Mr. Lincoln’s own
fiction; then, perhaps, we may revert for a closing glance at the
puzzle of Yankee shrewdness.
v
The newest Lincoln novel (1923) is _Doctor Nye of North Ostable_--Mr.
Lincoln has something of a gift in titles for his special kind of
book. There is a comfortable assurance in knowing that one is going to
read about Dr. Nye, or a place called Fair Harbour, or an individual
named Keziah Coffin, or the sure-to-be-amusing process of _Extricating
Obadiah_. That last has a music of the syllables; it is solitary in
this respect among Lincoln titles which are also easily affected by
climatic changes, so that _Galusha the Magnificent_ had to be altered
in England to _The Magnificent Mr. Bangs_. But to return to our
fishing--
Ephraim Nye, M.D., a “sympathetic” hero, self-sacrificing, a man with
a deal of humour, has a black cloud over his past, as all North Ostable
knows. The story opens with his return to that Cape Cod village. All
that day Marietta Lamb (“Mary’s Lamb”) had been scrubbing away at a
great rate in the old Dillingham house, so long untenanted, and Henry
Ward Beecher Payson, in full working regalia of overalls and wooden leg
(for “best” and Sundays he had a cork leg) was busy in the yard. Miss
Althea Bemis, who lived across the road and missed nothing that went on
among her neighbours, asked innumerable questions, learning nothing.
Judge Copeland, Cyrenus Stone and Cap’n Mark Bearse, “natives,” and
“the three most influential men in North Ostable” appeared on the
scene. The Judge and Stone were bitter political enemies, always flying
at each other’s throats. Stone, who owned the empty house, admitted to
Cap’n Mark Bearse that the place was being made ready for someone whose
coming would be a great surprise.
Then, at nightfall, Doctor Eph arrived in a ramshackle gig.
People sat up late that night in North Ostable. In the home of Shubal
Bash discussion ran high as Shubal and his wife, Angelina, tried to
tell deaf old Aunt Lidy the story of Ephraim Nye. After studying
medicine, the young Ephraim had married Judge Copeland’s sister,
Fanny, and had returned to his native town to practise. Fanny was
fond of clothes and jewels and the Doctor worked hard to give them
to her. Respected and liked, everyone turned against him when it
was discovered that $7,200 of the $10,000 in the fund for the new
meeting-house, of which he was treasurer, had been stolen. The bank
had exhibited a check for $7,200 signed “Ephraim Nye, Treasurer,” and
the Doctor admitted the check to be his. His wife was very ill at the
time. After her death, which occurred shortly, Ephraim Nye was tried
and sentenced to five years in State’s prison. Later the money began to
come back in instalments until it was all paid up. Always the sums were
sent through Doctor Nye’s lawyer.
The two enemies, Cyrenus Stone and Judge Copeland, have, respectively,
a son and a daughter; and Tom Stone and Faith Copeland are young lovers.
The stage is now set for Mr. Lincoln’s story. And immediately, in a
backward glance, one gets the rapid impression that the plot consists
entirely of typhoid fever. Such an impression, however, is quite
unjust. _Doctor Nye_ is one of the more carefully articulated (or more
carefully complicated) Lincoln novels. In addition to the revelation
forming the climax of the story and putting Ephraim Nye in a heroic
light, there is a fully-constituted early love affair for the Doctor,
brought back and actively developed; there is the pair of young lovers,
Tom and Faith; there is the prolonged duel between Judge Copeland
and the Doctor; there is a considerable variety of minor incidents
essential to the movement of the tale and to its final outworking.
All this, mind you, aside from the real end sought by most readers of
Mr. Lincoln’s work--the exposition of “characters” and the continuous
oscillation into humour.
It is the humour, then, that most deserves our scrutiny; for many of
the Lincoln novels, practically plotless beside such a tale as _Doctor
Nye_, have only the assets of their “characters” and humour to sustain
a popular interest which they have not failed to feed. If there is any
question about this, a glance at the technical “descriptions” of half a
dozen of the books ought to settle the matter. Here, in a sentence, is
what some of them simmer down to:
_Partners of the Tide._ Cap’n Ezra Titcomb and young Bradley Nickerson
go into the wrecking business and meet with a series of surprising
adventures and difficulties.
_Cy Whittaker’s Place._ Old Cy Whittaker, bachelor, adopted a little
girl. He and an old crony form a “Board of Strategy” for her upbringing.
_Keziah Coffin._ Keziah Coffin, typical Cape Cod old maid, proves the
good angel of the minister in his courtship. Incidentally, she turns
out not to be incurably an old maid.
_The Postmaster._ Cap’n Zeb Snow is discontented with inactivity after
retiring from the sea. As postmaster he finds all the activity he wants.
_Thankful’s Inheritance._ Thankful Barnes and her helper Emily lose
their boarders when the house proves to be “ha’nted,” but they gain a
Cape Cod sea captain and also a handsome young lawyer--for life.
“_Shavings._” The quaint, unbusinesslike windmill-maker has no success
in posing as a bank robber, but his loyalty and shrewdness bring
happiness to all his friends.
_The Portygee._ The temperament and “calf love” of the son of a
Spanish opera singer make difficulties with his Yankee grandfather.
vi
No plots, only complications; but there must be admitted to be, within
somewhat narrow bounds, a considerable display of “characters.”
Although even here certain stock figures are (probably necessarily)
much employed--the gossiping old maid, Mis’ Somebody-or-Other; the
village comedian, like Henry Ward Beecher Payson, who periodically
lapses from good behaviour and goes on sprees. One of the most
interesting of Lincoln’s portrayals is Albert in _The Portygee_, a
young fellow half Spanish, half New Englander, with poetic and artistic
impulses. “Set there in the small hamlet, chafing at the restraints
and humdrumness of the place, Albert makes a delicious contrast to
the native population,” says Hildegarde Hawthorne. “We understand the
passionate, temperamental boy as well as his old Grandfather, with
his fury against all that sort of ‘foolishness,’ because their author
understands them.” I cannot go so far as Hildegarde Hawthorne in praise
of the variety or depth of Mr. Lincoln’s characters, while cheerfully
granting, as I do, their frequent colour and whimsical charm. Often and
inevitably, I suppose, in the work of one who has written two dozen
books the “characters” are not _character_, but a selected idiosyncrasy
or two. Often and inevitably in the case of one who is not the
inexhaustible and fecund creator, like Dickens.
But there is the humour....
Now we have come to it. In the first place, Mr. Lincoln shows the
quick faculty evidenced from the outset by Mary Roberts Rinehart
of getting the humour on every page. Mrs. Rinehart has not always
practised with that intention, but Mr. Lincoln has never neglected the
rapid shift of the reader’s mood. To insure it, he does not hesitate
to sacrifice something of his more important scenes, making them if
necessary less dramatic. The common-sensicality running through his
stories is a solvent to drama and a feeder to the spirit of fun; if it
makes it impossible for his story ever to leave the ground, it also
kills to a large extent the language, or lingo, of sentimentality
so-called, that terrible jargon in which so much popular fiction is
sugared and preserved. Mr. Lincoln pickles his stories in this salty
common-sensibleness, rather--a breath of Cape Cod air and a dip in the
ocean brine. All his “atmosphere” is as matter of fact as a dip in the
ocean, and the temperature is much more unvarying and satisfactory
... unless you may find it tepid. He is a funmaker, resorting without
hesitation to such crude and cheerful devices as the spree in which
Henry Ward Beecher Payson breaks his “Sunday best,” or cork, leg. And
yet fun warms the heart. We laugh inanely, and afterward we have the
feeling of having laughed inanely, a sense of a slight immoderacy or
excess, of a mild dissipation which perhaps has not really done us any
good (though the harm be passing and inconsiderable); but when the
moment comes we are ready to laugh again.
vii
A final note on that debateable Yankee shrewdness, then....
Can we not find its fruitful exercise in Mr. Lincoln’s own case? I
think we can. Here was a man of around thirty whose observation was
keen, whose caution was used to direct him in a proper self-committal,
whose own personal sense of humour was of a sufficient dryness to keep
him from the easy trails of self-deception. Just as his friend, Captain
Lorenzo Baker, of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was able to discern in the
casual remarks of a West Indian the commercial possibilities of the
yellow banana, so Joseph C. Lincoln could perceive from a token or two
the personal possibilities of Cape Cod as he could put it on paper. And
acuteness, or, as the Yankee says, ‘cuteness, having done its work,
that other trait of Yankee shrewdness, the caution which restrains and
then goes in headlong, was brought into play. Mr. Lincoln committed
himself wholeheartedly to his fictional enterprise. He put all his
money, or rather, the energy which was his equivalent for money, on
the bob-tailed nag--in a little sloop which was his own boat rather
than in somebody else’s two-masted schooner. The rest was plain sailing
and persistence that could have been fatally spoiled if that inner
dryness of wit and clearness of perception had ever failed him. But he
never forgot that it was his own little sloop, the sailing of which
must be kept within the manœuvres she could execute. He has never, for
example, tried to write the great American novel which, consciously
or unconsciously, has brought up into the wind, all sails shaking and
way lost, the craft of more than one of his fellow sailors. A Yankee
and shrewd, earning many rewards, including that of a very widespread
affection.
Books by Joseph C. Lincoln
1902 _Cape Cod Ballads_
1904 _Cap’n Eri_
1905 _Partners of the Tide_
1906 _Mr. Pratt_
1907 _The “Old Home House”_
1908 _Cy Whittaker’s Place_
1909 _Our Village_
1909 _Keziah Coffin_
1910 _The Depot Master_
1911 _Cap’n Warren’s Wards_
1911 _The Woman-Haters_
1912 _The Postmaster_
1912 _The Rise of Roscoe Paine_
1913 _Mr. Pratt’s Patients_
1914 _Cap’n Dan’s Daughter_
1914 _Kent Knowles: Quahaug_
1915 _Thankful’s Inheritance_
1916 _Mary-’Gusta_
1917 _Extricating Obadiah_
1918 “_Shavings_”
1919 _The Portygee_
1921 _Galusha the Magnificent_
1922 _Fair Harbor_
1923 _Doctor Nye of North Ostable_
All fiction, except _Cape Cod Ballads_ (verse) and _Our Village_
(sketches of life and people on the Cape).
Sources on Joseph C. Lincoln
_Joseph Crosby Lincoln._ Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY,
1921.
_Joseph C. Lincoln’s America_, by Hildegarde Hawthorne. Booklet. D.
APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.
_Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness_, by Joseph C. Lincoln. Article in
AMERICAN MAGAZINE, July, 1919.
_My Types: An Interview with Joseph C. Lincoln_, by Charles Francis
Reed, THE FORUM MAGAZINE, February, 1919.
_Cape Cod’s Genial Chronicler_: An Appreciation by Hamlin Garland.
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, 17 April, 1920.
_The Men Who Make Our Novels_, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD &
COMPANY, 1919.
_Joseph Crosby Lincoln_, by Adam C. Haeselbarth. BOOK NEWS MONTHLY,
1913.
_20. Edith Wharton and the Time Spirit_
i
At just past sixty Edith Wharton’s is still a name for the literary
conjuror in search of an impressive effect. She has lived a long
time--in the literary sense--and comparisons are not easy; she has
outlived, as a writer, most comparisons, including the one which
would probably have been fatal to anyone else, the comparison with
Henry James. She has outlived, in the physical sense, Henry James
himself; there are no more of his frequent letters to “Dear Edith.” It
is among the subtler tributes to Mrs. Wharton, the person, that the
intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her
“Master” is now seen in a light which considerably enhances the dignity
of the woman who was once called “Pupil.” For who, after reading the
correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any
longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage
so nicely tinctured with snobbery? Victor Hugo permitted himself to
be surrounded by those who worshipped him as a god, but Hugo posed,
godlike; whereas Henry James----
Mrs. Atherton is several years older than Edith Wharton, both as person
and author; Mary Johnston, born eight years later, is of almost
exactly the same literary age; but the first is a superb journalist and
a born storyteller and the second is a mystic and a historian. Mrs.
Wharton’s journalism in fiction is pretty well confined to _The House
of Mirth_ and _The Fruit of the Tree_; she invites comparison with Mary
Johnston only in that ambitious novel of mediæval Italy, _The Valley
of Decision_. In the two books on which Mrs. Wharton’s fame definitely
rests at the present, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_, she
achieves a success and an individuality only the more interesting
because it finds so strikingly different expressions.
In fact, on the evidence of the two stories, it would be superficially
impossible to assert that the “sterile” tragedy of New England
hillsides was from the same hand that wrote the minutely detailed
story of New York society in the 1870s. Considered for their meaning
and origin, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_ are both seen to
be tales of frustration, both tales of the America that Mrs. Wharton
quitted some fifteen years ago but can’t get out of her system, and
both stories in which the background is responsible for the actors
themselves as well as the play.
ii
[Illustration: EDITH WHARTON]