RECORDERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND DECLINE
The New England school, which had so dominated the mid-nineteenth
century, left, as we have seen, no heirs. As the great figures of the
"Brahmins" disappeared one by one, vigorous young leaders from without
the Boston circle came into their places, but the real succession--the
native New England literary generation after Emerson--was feminine.
During the decade from 1868 the following books, written by women born,
the most of them, in those thirties which had witnessed the beginnings
of the earlier group, came from the American press:
1868. _Little Women_, Louisa M. Alcott (1832-1888).
1868. _The Gates Ajar_, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911).
1870. _Verses_, Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885).
1872. _Poems_, Celia Thaxter (1836-1894).
1873. _The Saxe Holm Stories_, "Saxe Holm."
1875. _One Summer_, Blanche Willis Howard (1847-1898).
1875. _After the Ball and Other Poems_, Nora Perry (1841-1896).
1877. _Deephaven_, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909).
1878. _The China Hunter's Club_, Annie Trumbull Slosson (1838----).
Of the same generation, but earlier or else later in the literary
field, were the poets Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911), and Louise
Chandler Moulton (1835-1908); the essayist Mary Abigail Dodge, "Gail
Hamilton" (1838-1896); the novelists Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892),
Jane G. Austin (1831-1894), and Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835----);
and, latest of all to be known, the intense lyrist Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886). In the eighties was to come the school of the younger
realists, a part of the classical reaction--Alice Brown (1857----),
Kate Douglas Wiggin (1859----) and Mary E. Wilkins (1862----), who were
to record the later phases of the New England decline.
Outside of the New England environment there was also a notable
outburst of feminine literature. In the thirteen years from 1875
appeared the following significant first volumes:
1875. _Castle Nowhere_, Constance Fenimore Woolson (1848-1894).
1875. _A Woman in Armor_, Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1847-1902).
1877. _That Lass o' Lowrie's_, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849----).
1883. _The Led Horse Claim_, Mary Hallock Foote (1847----).
1884. _In the Tennessee Mountains_, Mary Noailles Murfree (1850----).
1884. _A New Year's Masque_, Edith M. Thomas (1854----).
1886. _The Old Garden and Other Verses_, Margaretta Wade Deland
(1857----).
1886. _Monsieur Motte_, Grace King (1852----).
1887. _Knitters in the Sun_, Alice French (1850----).
The wide recognition of the Victorian women, Charlotte Bronte, George
Eliot, and Mrs. Browning, and their American contemporaries, Margaret
Fuller and Mrs. Stowe, had given the impetus, and the enormous
popularity of prose fiction, a literary form peculiarly adapted to
feminine treatment, the opportunity. During all the period the work of
women dominated to a large degree the literary output.
I
The earliest group to appear was made up of daughters of the
Brahmins--Louisa M. Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Hawthorne
Lathrop, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others--transition figures who clung
to the old New England tradition, yet were touched by the new forces.
The representative figure is Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Daughter and
granddaughter of theologians and divinity professors, reared in
the atmosphere of the Andover theological seminary of the earlier
period, she was a daughter of her generation, a perfect sample of
the culminating feminine product of two centuries of New England
Puritanism--sensitive to the brink of physical collapse, intellectual,
disquieted of soul, ridden of conscience, introspective. We know the
type perfectly. Miss Jewett, Mrs. Freeman, Miss Brown, have drawn us
scores of these women--the final legatees of Puritanism, daughters of
Transcendentalists and abolitionists and religious wranglers.
Literature to this group of women was not only a heritage from the
past, from great shadowy masters who were mere names and books, it was
a home product in actual process of manufacture about their cradles.
The mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--Elizabeth Stuart--had published
in 1851 _Sunny-Side_, a simple story of life in a country parsonage,
that had sold one hundred thousand copies in one year. She had followed
it with _A Peep at Number Five_, a book that places her with Mrs.
Stowe as a pioneer depicter of New England life, and then, at the very
opening of her career, she had died in 1852. "It was impossible to be
her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, impossible to be
_their_ daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say
it."[104] The daughter was publishing at thirteen; at nineteen she was
the author of twelve Sunday-school books;[104] at twenty-four she had
issued _The Gates Ajar_, which was to go through twenty editions the
first year and to be translated into the principal European languages.
_Gates Ajar_ is a significant book, significant beyond its real
literary merit. It is a small book, an excited, over-intense book,
yet as a document in the history of a period and a confession laying
bare for an instant a woman's soul it commands attention. It is not a
novel; it is a _journal intime_, an impassioned theological argument, a
personal experience written with tears and read with tears by hundreds
of thousands. It was the writer herself who had received the telegram
telling that a loved one--not a brother as the book infers--had been
shot in battle; it was her own life that had almost flickered out as
the result of it; and it was she who had tried to square the teachings
ingrained into her Puritan intellect with the desolation of her woman's
heart.
It was peculiarly a New England book: only a New Englander of the old
tradition can understand the full meaning of it, and yet it came at
a moment when the whole nation was eager and ready for its message.
The war had brought to tens of thousands what it had brought to this
New England woman. In every house there was mourning, and the Puritan
vision of the after life, unreasonable and lifeless, was inadequate
for a nation that had been nourished upon sentimentalism. The heart
of the people demanded something warm and sensible and convincing in
place of the cold scriptural metaphors and abstractions. The new spirit
that had been awakened by the war called for reality and concrete
statement everywhere, and it found in the book, which made of heaven
another earth--a glorified New England perhaps--with occupation and
joys and friendships unchanged, a revelation with which it was in full
accord. It brought comfort, for in every line of it was the intensity
of conviction, of actual experience. It quivered with sympathy, it
breathed reality from every page, and it seemed to break down the
barriers until the two worlds were so near together that one might hold
his breath to listen. The book, while it undoubtedly helped to prolong
the sentimental era in America, nevertheless must be counted among the
forces that brought to the new national period its fuller measure of
toleration, its demand for reality, its wider sympathy.
All the author's later books bear the same marks of intensity, of
subjectivity, of purpose: all of them are outpourings of herself. She
is a special pleader shrilling against abuses, as in _Loveliness_,
which excoriates vivisection, arguing for causes as in _The Story of
Avis_ and _Doctor Zay_, which take high ground concerning women, or
preaching sermons as in _A Singular Life_, a vision of the ideal pastor
and his church. The accumulated Puritanism within her gave to all her
work dramatic tension. It is impossible to read her with calmness: one
is shocked and grieved and harrowed; one is urged on every page to
think, to feel, to rush forth and right some wrong, to condemn some
evil or champion some cause.
Her world was largely a subjective one; to write she must be touched
strongly on the side of her sympathy, she must have brought vividly
into her vision some concrete case. Before she could write "The
Tenth of January"--_Atlantic_, 1868--she must spend a month in the
atmosphere of the tragedy, not to collect realistic details, but
to feel for herself the horror that she would impart. Her aim was
sentimental: the whole story centers about the fact that while the
ruins of the fallen mill were burning there floated out of the flames
the voices of imprisoned girls singing "Shall We Gather at the
River?" In its fundamentals her work, all of it, is autobiographic.
Womanlike, she denied the fact--"If there be one thing among the
possibilities to which a truly civilized career is liable, more than
another objectionable to the writer of these words, the creation of
autobiography has long been that one,"[105] and yet her books, all of
them, have been chapters out of her own spiritual life. She has felt
rather than seen, she has pleaded rather than created. Rather than
present a rounded picture of the life objectively about her, she has
given analyses of her own New England soul.
She yielded, at last, in some degree, to the later tendencies of
American literature, and drew with realistic faithfulness characters
and characteristics in the little New England world that was hers--_A
Madonna of the Tubs_, _The Supply at St. Agatha's_, _Jack, the
Fisherman_, and a few others, yet even these are something more than
stories, something more than pictures and interpretations. In _Jack,
the Fisherman_, for instance, the temperance lesson stands out as
sharply as if she had taken a text. The artist within her was dominated
ever by the preacher; the novelist by the Puritan.
II
Another transition figure, typical of a group of writers and at the
same time illustrative of the change that came over the tone of
American literature after the war period, is Harriet Prescott Spofford.
A country girl, born in a Maine village, educated in the academy of
a country town in New Hampshire, compelled early to be the chief
support of an invalided father and mother, she turned from the usual
employments open to the women of her time--work in the cotton mills and
school teaching--to the precarious field of literature. That could mean
only story-writing for the family weeklies of the day, for a bourgeois
public that demanded sentimental love stories and romance. Success made
her ambitious. She applied herself to the study of fiction--American,
English, French. How wide was her reading one may learn from her
essays later published in the _Atlantic_, "The Author of 'Charles
Auchester'" and "Charles Reade." The new realism which was beginning
to be felt as a force in fiction, she flouted with indignation:--"he
never with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces
life to the dregs of the commonplace." Rather would she emulate the
popular novelist Elizabeth Sheppard: "At his, Disraeli's, torch she lit
her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his 'Contarini Fleming' she
declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth."[106] The essay
reveals the author like a flash-light. She too dreamed over Disraeli
and the early Bulwer-Lytton, over Charlotte Bronte and Poe, over George
Sand and French romance until at last when she submitted her first
story to the _Atlantic_, "In a Cellar," Lowell for a time feared that
it was a translation.
Other American women have had imaginations as lawless and as gorgeously
rich as Harriet Prescott Spofford's; Augusta J. Evans Wilson, for
instance, whose _St. Elmo_ (1866) sold enormously even to the end
of the new period, but no other American woman of the century was
able to combine with her imaginings and her riotous colorings a real
distinction of style. When in the fifth volume of the _Atlantic_
appeared "The Amber Gods," judicious readers everywhere cried out
in astonishment. Robert Browning and others in England praised it
extravagantly. A new star had arisen, a novelist with a style that was
French in its brilliancy and condensation, and oriental in its richness
and color.
_The Amber Gods_ fails of being a masterpiece by a margin so small
that it exasperates, and it fails at precisely the point where most
of the mid-century fiction failed. In atmosphere and style it is
brilliant, so brilliant indeed that it has been appraised more highly
than it deserves. Moreover, the _motif_, as one gathers it from the
earlier pages, is worthy of a Hawthorne. The amber beads have upon them
an ancestral curse, and the heroine with her supernatural beauty, a
satanic thing without a soul, is a part of the mystery and the curse.
Love seems at length to promise Undine-like a soul to this soulless
creature:
He read it through--all that perfect, perfect scene. From the
moment when he said,
"I overlean,
This length of hair and lustrous front--they turn
Like an entire flower upward"--
his voice low, sustained, clear--till he reached the line,
"Look at the woman here with the new soul"--
till he turned the leaf and murmured,
"Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
Be art--and, further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!"--
till then he never glanced up.
But there is lack of constructive skill, lack of definiteness, lack
of reality. The story sprawls at the end where it should culminate
with compelling power. The last sentence is startling, but it is
not connected with the _motif_ and is a mere sensational addition.
Everywhere there is the unusual, the overwrought, incoherent vagueness.
It is not experience, it is a revel of color and of sensuousness; it
is a Keats-like banquet, sweets and spicery.
The parallelism with Keats may be pressed far. She was first of all
a poet, a lyrist, a dweller in Arcady rather than in a New England
village. She, like so many others of her generation, had fallen under
the spell of the young Tennyson, and her world is a world of cloying
sweetness, of oriental sensuousness, of merely physical beauty. Poems
like "Pomegranate-Flowers" and "In Titian's Garden" show her tropical
temperament:
And some girl sea-bronzed and sparkling,
On her cheek the stain ensanguined,
Bears aloft the bossy salver:
As the innocent Lavinia
Brought them in old days of revel
Fruits and flowers amesh with sunbeams--
No red burnish of pomegranates,
No cleft peach in velvet vermeil,
No bright grapes their blue bloom bursting,
Dews between the cool globes slipping,
Dews like drops of clouded sapphire,
But the brighter self and spirit,
Glowed illusive in her beauty.
The same poetic glamour she threw over all the work that now poured
in swift profusion from her pen: _Sir Rohan's Ghost_, _Azarian_, and
a score of short stories in the _Atlantic_ and _Harper's_ and other
periodicals. It had been felt that the faults so manifest in "In a
Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" would disappear as the young author gained
in maturity and knowledge of her art, but they not only persisted, they
increased. Like Charlotte Bronte, whom in so many ways she resembled,
she knew life only as she dreamed of it in her country seclusion or
read of it in romance. At length toleration ceased. In 1865 _The
North American Review_ condemned _Azarian_ as "devoid of human nature
and false to actual society," and then added the significant words:
"We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be _real_, to be true to
something." It marks not alone the end of the first period in Miss
Prescott's career; it marks the closing of an era in American fiction.
Wonder has often been expressed that one who could write "The Amber
Gods" and _Sir Rohan's Ghost_ should suddenly lapse into silence and
refuse to work the rich vein she had opened. The change, however, was
not with the author; it was with the times. Within a year Howells was
assistant editor of the _Atlantic_. The artificiality of style and the
high literary tone demanded in the earlier period disappeared with the
war, and in their place came simplicity and naturalness and reality.
The author of _Azarian_ continued to write her passionate and melodious
romance, but the columns of the _Atlantic_ and _Harper's_ at length
were closed to her tales. A volume of her work of this period still
awaits a publisher.
She now turned to poetry--there was no ban upon that; the old regime
died first in its prose--and poured out lyrics that are to be compared
even with those of Taylor and Aldrich, lyrics full of passion and color
and sensuous beauty. Among the female poets of America she must be
accorded a place near the highest. Only "H. H." could have poured out a
lyric like this:
In the dew and the dark and the coolness
I bend to the beaker and sip,
For the earth is the Lord's, and its fullness
Is held like the cup to my lip.
For his are the vast opulences
Of color, of line, and of flight,
And his was the joy of the senses
Before I was born to delight.
Forever the loveliness lingers,
Or in flesh, or in spirit, or dream,
For it swept from the touch of his fingers
While his garments trailed by in the gleam.
When the dusk and the dawn in slow union
Bring beauty to bead at the brim,
I take, 't is the cup of communion,
I drink, and I drink it with Him!
A chapter of analysis could not so completely reveal the soul of
Harriet Prescott Spofford.
For a time she busied herself making books on art decoration applied
to furniture, and then at last she yielded to the forces of the age
and wrote stories that again commanded the magazines. With work like
"A Rural Telephone," "An Old Fiddler," and "A Village Dressmaker,"
she entered with real distinction the field that had been preempted
by Miss Cooke and Miss Jewett, the depiction of New England life in
its actuality. Then at the close of her literary life she wrote deeper
tales, like "Ordronnaux," a story with the same underlying _motif_
as "The Amber Gods"--the creation of a soul in soulless beauty--but
worked out now with reality, and experience, and compelling power. But
it was too late. Could she have learned her lesson when Rose Terry
Cooke learned hers; could she, instead of wasting her powers upon the
gorgeous _Azarian_, have sent forth in 1863 her volume _Old Madame and
Other Tragedies_, she might have taken a leading place among American
novelists.
III
The school of fiction that during the later period stands for the
depicting of New England life and character in their actuality had as
its pioneers Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke. Both did their earlier
work in the spirit and manner of the mid century; both were poets and
dreamers; both until late in their lives worked with feeling rather
than observation and gave to their fiction vagueness of outline and
romantic unreality. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was written by one who had
never visited the South, who drew her materials largely from her
feelings and her imagination, and made instead of a transcript of
actual life, a book of religious emotion, a swift, unnatural succession
of picturesque scene and incident, an improvisation of lyrical
passion--a melodrama. It is the typical novel of the period before
1870, the period that bought enormous editions of _The Lamplighter_,
_The Wide, Wide World_, and _St. Elmo_. _The Minister's Wooing_,
1859, a historical romance written in the Andover that a little later
was to produce _Gates Ajar_, was also fundamentally religious and
controversial: it contained the keynote of what was afterwards known as
the Andover movement. It dealt with a people and an environment that
the author knew as she knew her own childhood, and it had therefore,
as _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has not, sympathy of comprehension and truth
to local scene and character. And yet despite her knowledge and her
sympathy, the shadow of the mid century lies over it from end to end.
It lacked what _Elsie Venner_ lacked, what the great bulk of the
pre-Civil War literature lacked, organization, sharpness of line,
reality. Lowell, a generation ahead of his time, saw the weakness as
well as the strength of the book, and in pointing it out he criticized
not alone the author but her period as well. "My advice," he wrote
her with fine courage, "is to follow your own instincts--to stick to
nature, and avoid what people commonly call the 'Ideal'; for that, and
beauty, and pathos, and success, all lie in the simply natural....
There are ten thousand people who can write 'ideal' things for one who
can see, and feel, and reproduce nature and character."[107] Again the
voice of the new period in American literature. But Mrs. Stowe was not
one to heed literary advice; her work must come by inspiration, by
impulse connected with purpose, and it must work itself out without
thought of laws or models. _The Pearl of Orr's Island_ came by impulse,
as later, in 1869, came _Oldtown Folks_. "It was more to me than a
story," she wrote of it; "it is my resume of the whole spirit and body
of New England, a country that is now exerting such an influence on
the civilized world that to know it truly becomes an object."[108]
That these books, and the _Oldtown Fireside Stories_ that followed, do
furnish such a resume is by no means true, but that they are faithful
transcripts of New England life, and are pioneer books in a field that
later was to be intensively cultivated, cannot be doubted.
Mrs. Stowe's influence upon later writers was greater than is warranted
by her actual accomplishment. The fierce light that beat upon _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ gave to all of her work extraordinary publicity and made
of her a model when otherwise she would have been unknown. The real
pioneer was Rose Terry Cooke, daughter of a humble family in a small
Connecticut village. Educated in a seminary near her home, at sixteen
she was teaching school and at eighteen she was writing for _Graham's
Magazine_ a novel called _The Mormon's Wife_. That she had never been
in Utah and had never even seen a Mormon, mattered not at all; the tale
to win its audience need be true only to its author's riotous fancy.
But the author had humor as well as fancy, and her sense of humor was
to save her. In her school work in rural districts she was in contact
constantly with the quaint and the ludicrous, with all those strongly
individualized characters that Puritanism and isolated country living
had rendered abundant. They were a part of her every-day life; they
appealed not only to her sense of humor, but to her sympathy. She
found herself thinking of them as she sought for subjects for her
fiction. Her passion and her ambition were centered upon poetry. The
idealism and the loftiness that Harriet Prescott Spofford threw into
her early romance, she threw into her lyrics. Fiction was a thing of
less seriousness; it could be trifled with; it could even record the
humor and the quaintness of the common folk amid whom she toiled. She
turned to it as to a diversion and she was surprised to find that
Lowell, the editor of the new and exclusive _Atlantic_, preferred it to
her poetry. For the first volume of the magazine he accepted no fewer
than five of her homely little sketches, and praised them for their
fidelity and truth.
That the author considered this prose work an innovation and something
below the high tone of real literature, cannot be doubted. In "Miss
Lucinda" (_Atlantic_, 1861), as perfect a story of its kind as was ever
written, she feels called upon to explain, and her explanation is a
declaration of independence:
But if I apologize for a story that is nowise tragic, nor
fitted to "the fashion of these times," possibly somebody will
say at its end that I should also have apologized for its
subject, since it is as easy for an author to treat his readers
to high themes as vulgar ones, and velvet can be thrown into
a portrait as cheaply as calico; but of this apology I wash
my hands. I believe nothing in place or circumstance makes
romance. I have the same quick sympathy for Biddy's sorrows
with Patrick that I have for the Empress of France and her
august, but rather grim, lord and master. I think words are
often no harder to bear than "a blue batting," and I have a
reverence for poor old maids as great as for the nine Muses.
Commonplace people are only commonplace from character, and no
position affects that. So forgive me once more, patient reader,
if I offer you no tragedy in high life, no sentimental history
of fashion and wealth, but only a little story about a woman
who could not be a heroine.
This is the key to her later work. She wrote simple little stories of
commonplace people in a commonplace environment, and she treated them
with the sympathy of one who shares, rather than as one who looks down
upon a spectacle and takes sides. There is no bookish flavor about
the stories: they are as artless as the narrative told by a winter
hearth. In the great mass of fiction dealing with New England life and
character her work excels in humor--that subdued humor which permeates
every part like an atmosphere--in the picturing of the odd and the
whimsical, in tenderness and sympathy, and in the perfect artlessness
that is the last triumph of art. Hers is not a realism of the severe
and scientific type: it is a poetic realism like that of the earlier
and more delightful Howells, a realism that sees life through a window
with the afternoon light upon it. In the whole output of the school
there are few sketches more charming and more true than her "Miss
Lucinda," "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence," "Old Miss
Dodd," "The Deacon's Week," and "A Town and a Country Mouse." Others,
like Mrs. Slosson and Rowland E. Robinson, for instance, have caught
with exquisite skill the grotesque and the humorous side of New England
life, but none other has shown the whole of New England with the
sympathy and the comprehension and the delicacy of Rose Terry Cooke.
IV
Of the later group, the generation born in the fifties and the early
sixties, Sarah Orne Jewett is the earliest figure. With her there was
no preliminary dallying with mid-century sentiment and sensationalism;
she belongs to the era of _Oldtown Folks_ rather than of _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. "It was happily in the writer's childhood," she records in
her later introduction to _Deephaven_, "that Mrs. Stowe had written
of those who dwelt along the wooded sea-coast and by the decaying,
shipless harbors of Maine. The first chapters of _The Pearl of Orr's
Island_ gave the young author of _Deephaven_ to see with new eyes and
to follow eagerly the old shore paths from one gray, weather-beaten
house to another, where Genius pointed her the way." And again in a
letter written in 1889: "I have been reading the beginning of _The
Pearl of Orr's Island_ and finding it just as clear and perfectly
original and strong as it seemed to me in my thirteenth or fourteenth
year, when I read it first. I shall never forget the exquisite flavor
and reality of delight it gave me. It is classical--historical."[109]
She herself had been born by one of those same "decaying, shipless
harbors of Maine," at South Berwick, a village not far from the native
Portsmouth of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It was no ordinary town, this
deserted little port. "A stupid, common country town, some one dared
to call Deephaven in a letter once, and how bitterly we resented
it."[110] It had seen better days. There was an atmosphere about it
from a romantic past. In Miss Jewett's work it figures as Deephaven.
"The place prided itself most upon having been long ago the residence
of one Governor Chantrey, who was a rich ship-owner and East India
merchant, and whose fame and magnificence were almost fabulous....
There were formerly five families who kept their coaches in Deephaven;
there were balls at the Governor's and regal entertainments at other
of the grand mansions; there is not a really distinguished person in
the country who will not prove to have been directly or indirectly
connected with Deephaven." And again, "Deephaven seemed more like one
of the cozy little English seaside towns than any other. It was not in
the least American."
The social regime of this early Berwick had been cavalier rather than
Puritan. It had survived in a few old families like the Jewetts, a bit
of the eighteenth century come down into the late nineteenth. Miss
Jewett all her life seemed like her own Miss Chauncey, an exotic from
an earlier day, a survival--"thoroughly at her ease, she had the manner
of a lady of the olden time." Her father, a courtly man and cultivated,
a graduate of Bowdoin and for a time a lecturer there, gave ever the
impression that he could have filled with brilliancy a larger domain
than that he had deigned to occupy. He had settled down in Berwick as
physician for a wide area, much trusted and much revered, a physician
who ministered to far more than the physical needs of his people. His
daughter, with a daughter's loving hand, has depicted him in _A Country
Doctor_, perhaps the most tender and intimate of all her studies. She
owed much to him; from him had come, indeed, the greater part of all
that was vital in her education. Day after day she had ridden with him
along the country roads, and had called with him at the farmhouses and
cottages, and had talked with him of people and flowers and birds, of
olden times, of art and literature.
A story from her pen, "Mr. Bruce," signed "A. E. Eliot," had appeared
in the _Atlantic_ as early as 1869, but it was not until 1873 that "The
Shore House," changed later to "Kate Lancaster's Plan," the first of
the _Deephaven_ papers, appeared in the same magazine. She had begun
to write with a definite purpose. "When I was perhaps fifteen," she
records in an autobiographical fragment, "the first city boarders began
to make their appearance near Berwick, and the way they misconstrued
the country people and made game of their peculiarities fired me with
indignation. I determined to teach the world that country people were
not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wanted
the world to know their grand simple lives; and, so far as I had a
mission, when I first began to write, I think that was it."
Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Cooke were the depicters of the older New England,
the New England at flood tide; Miss Jewett was the first to paint the
ebb. With them New England was a social unit as stable as the England
of Jane Austen; with her it was a society in transition, the passing of
an old regime. The westward exodus had begun, with its new elements of
old people left behind by their migrating children, the deserted farm,
the decaying seaside town, the pathetic return of the native for a
brief day, as in "A Native of Winby," and, to crown it all, the summer
boarder who had come in numbers to laugh at the old and wonder at it.
She would preserve all that was finest in the New England that was
passing, and put it into clear light that all might see how glorious
the past had been, and how beautiful and true were the pathetic
fragments that still remained.
She approached her work with the serenity and the seriousness of one
who goes to devotions. She was never watchful for the eccentric and the
picturesque; there are no grotesque deacons and shrill old maids in
her stories. She would depict only the finer and gentler side of New
England life: men quiet and kindly; women sweet-tempered and serene.
We may smile over her pictures of ancient mariners "sunning themselves
like turtles on the wharves," her weather-beaten farmers gentle as
women, and her spinsters and matrons, like Miss Debby, belonging to "a
class of elderly New England women which is fast dying out," but we
leave them always with the feeling that they are noblemen and ladies in
disguise. Her little stretch of Maine coast with its pointed firs, its
bleak farms, and its little villages redolent of the sea she has made
peculiarly her own domain, just as Hardy has made Wessex his, and she
has made of her native Deephaven an American counterpart of Cranford.
Many times Miss Jewett has been compared with Hawthorne, and
undoubtedly there is basis for comparison. Her style, indeed, in its
simplicity and effortless strength may be likened to his, and her
pictures of decaying wharves and of quaint personages in an old town
by the sea have the same atmosphere and the same patrician air of
distinction, but further one may not go. Of his power to trace the
blighting and transforming effects of a sin and his wizard knowledge
of the human heart, she had nothing. She is a writer of little books
and short stories, the painter of a few subjects in a provincial little
area, but within her narrow province she has no rival nearer her own
times than Mrs. Gaskell.
Her kinship is with Howells rather than with Hawthorne, the Howells
of the earlier manner, with his pictures of the Boston of the East
India days, his half-poetic studies in background and character, his
portraits etched with exquisite art, his lambent humor that plays over
all like an evening glow. In her stories, too, the plot is slight,
and background and characterization and atmosphere dominate; and as
with him in the days before the poet had been put to death, realism
is touched everywhere with romance. She paints the present ever upon
the background of an old, forgotten, far-off past, with that dim light
upon it that now lies over the South of the old plantation days. Over
all of her work lies this gentle glamour, this softness of atmosphere,
this evanescent shade of regret for something vanished forever. Hers is
a transfigured New England, a New England with all its roughness and
coarseness and sordidness refined away, the New England undoubtedly
that her gentle eyes actually saw. Once, indeed, she wrote pure
romance. Her _The Tory Lover_ is her dream of New England's day of
chivalry, the high tide mark from which to measure the depth of its ebb.
Her power lies in her purity of style, her humorous little touches, and
her power of characterization. Work like her "A White Heron," "Miss
Tempy's Watchers," and "The Dulham Ladies," has a certain lightness of
touch, a pathos and a humor, a skill in delineation which wastes not a
word or an effect, that places it among the most delicate and finished
of American short stories. Yet brilliant as they are in technique, in
characterization and background and atmosphere, they lack nevertheless
the final touch of art. They are _too_ literary; they are too much
works of art, too much from the intellect and not enough from the
heart. They are Sir Roger de Coverley sketches, marvelously well done,
but always from the Sir Roger standpoint. There is a certain "quality"
in all that Miss Jewett wrote, a certain unconscious _noblesse oblige_
that kept her ever in the realm of the gentle, the genteel, the Berwick
old regime. One feels it in her avoidance of everything common and
squalid, in her freedom from passion and dramatic climax, in her
objective attitude toward her characters. She is always sympathetic,
she is moved at times to real pathos, but she stands apart from her
picture; she observes and describes; she never, like Rose Terry Cooke,
mingles and shares. She cannot. Hers is the pride that the lady of the
estate takes in her beloved peasantry; of the patrician who steps down
of an afternoon into the cottage and comes back to tell with amusement
and perhaps with tears of what she finds there.
All her life she lived apart from that which she described. Her
winters she spent in Boston, much of the time in the home of Mrs.
James T. Fields, surrounded by memorials of the great period of
American literature. Like Howells, she wrote ever in the presence of
the Brahmins--a task not difficult, for she herself was a Brahmin. It
was impossible for her to be common or to be narrowly realistic. She
wrote with deliberation and she revised and rerevised and finished her
work, conscious ever of her art--a classicist, sending forth nothing
that came as a cry from her heart, nothing that came winged with a
message, nothing that voiced a vision and a new seeing, nothing that
was not literary in the highest classical sense. In the history of the
new period she stands midway between Mrs. Spofford and Mrs. Freeman;
a new realist whose heart was with the old school; a romanticist, but
equipped with a camera and a fountain pen.
V
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is the typical representative of the group
born a generation after the women of the thirties, the group that knew
nothing of the emotional fifties and sixties, and that began its work
when the new literature of actuality, the realism of Flaubert and
Hardy and Howells, was in full domination. Of hesitancy, of transition
from the old to the new, her fiction shows no trace. From her first
story she was a realist, as enamoured of actuality and as restrained
as Maupassant. She seems to have followed no one: realism was a thing
native to her, as indeed it is native to all women. "Women are delicate
and patient observers," Henry James has said in his essay on Trollope.
"They hold their noses close, as it were, to the texture of life. They
feel and perceive the real." But to her realism Miss Wilkins added a
power usually denied her sex, the power of detachment, the epic power
that excludes the subjective and hides the artist behind the picture.
In all the writings of the creator of _Gates Ajar_ we see but the
intense and emotional soul of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; in that of the
writer of _A Humble Romance_ we see only the grim lineaments of New
England, a picture as remorseless and as startling as if a searchlight
had been turned into the dim and cobwebbed recesses of an ancient
vault. She stands not aloof like Miss Jewett; she is simply unseen. She
is working in the materials of her own heart and drawing the outlines
of her own home, yet she possesses the epic power to keep her creations
impersonal to the point of anonymousness.
For her work, everything in her life was a preparation. She was born
in Randolph not far from Boston, of an ancestry which extended back
into the darkest shadows of Puritanism, to old Salem and a judge in
the witchcraft trials. Her more immediate progenitors were of humble
station: her father was first a builder in her native Randolph, then
a store-keeper in Brattleboro, Vermont. Thus her formative years were
passed in the narrow environment of New England villages. The death of
her father and mother during her early girlhood must also be recorded,
as should the fact that her schooling was austere and limited.
When she approached literature, therefore, it was as a daughter of
the Puritans, as one who had been nurtured in repression. Love in its
tropical intensity, the fierce play of the passions, color, profusion,
outspoken toleration, freedom--romance in its broadest connotation--of
these she knew nothing. She had lived her whole life in the warping
atmosphere of inherited Puritanism, of a Puritanism that had lost
its earlier vitality and had become a convention and a superstition,
in a social group inbred for generations and narrowly restricted to
neighborhood limits. "They were all narrow-lived country people," she
writes. "Their customs had made deeper grooves in their roads; they
were more fastidious and jealous of their social rights than many in
higher positions."[111] "Everything out of the broad, common track was
a horror to these men, and to many of their village fellows. Strange
shadows that their eyes could not pierce, lay upon such, and they were
suspicious."[112] "She was a New England woman, and she discussed all
topics except purely material ones shamefacedly with her sister."[113]
In the mid eighties when she began her work the primitive Puritan
element had vanished from all but the more remote and sheltered nooks
of New England. The toll of the war, the Western rush, and the call
of the cities had left behind the old and the conservative and the
helpless, the last distorted relics of a distorting old regime. To
her these were the true New England: she would write the last act of
the grim drama that had begun at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. She
recorded it very largely in her first four volumes: _A Humble Romance_,
twenty-four short stories as grim and austere as Puritanism itself; _A
New England Nun and Other Stories_; _Jane Field_, a prolonged short
story; and _Pembroke, a Novel_. This is the vital part of her work, the
part that is to bear up and preserve her name if it is to endure.
The key to this earlier work is the word _repression_. The very style
is puritanic; it is angular, unornamented, severe; it is rheumatic like
the greater part of the characters it deals with; it gasps in short
sentences and hobbles disconnectedly. It deals ever with repressed
lives: with dwarfed and anemic old maids who have been exhorted all
their lives to self-examination and to the repression of every emotion
and instinct; with women unbalanced and neurotic, who subside at last
into dumb endurance; with slaves of a parochial public opinion and of
conventions ridiculously narrow hardened into iron laws; with lives in
which the Puritan inflexibility and unquestioning obedience to duty has
been inherited as stubbornness and balky setness, as in Deborah and
Barnabas Thayer who in earlier ages would have figured as martyrs or
pilgrims.
Her unit of measure is short. It is not hers to trace the slow
development of a soul through a long period; it is hers to deal with
climactic episodes, with the one moment in a repressed life when the
repression gives way and the long pent-up forces sweep all before
them, as in "The Revolt of Mother," or "A Village Singer." Her
effects she accomplishes with the fewest strokes possible. Like the
true New Englander that she is, she will waste not a word. In her
story "Life-Everlasting," Luella--the author's miserliness with words
withholds her other name--has gone to carry a pillow to the farmhouse
of Oliver Weed. She wonders at the closed and deserted appearance of
the premises.
Luella heard the cows low in the barn as she opened the kitchen
door. "Where--did all that--blood come from?" said she.
She began to breathe in quick gasps; she stood clutching her
pillow, and looking. Then she called: "Mr. Weed! Mr. Weed!
Where be you? Mis' Weed! Is anything the matter? Mis' Weed!"
The silence seemed to beat against her ears. She went across
the kitchen to the bedroom. Here and there she held back her
dress. She reached the bedroom door, and looked in.
Luella pressed back across the kitchen into the yard. She went
out into the yard and turned towards the village. She still
carried the life-everlasting pillow, but she carried it as if
her arms and that were all stone. She met a woman whom she
knew, and the woman spoke; but Luella did not notice her; she
kept on. The woman stopped and looked after her.
Luella went to the house where the sheriff lived, and knocked.
The sheriff himself opened the door. He was a large, pleasant
man. He began saying something facetious about her being out
calling early, but Luella stopped him.
"You'd--better go up to the--Weed house," said she, in a dry
voice. "There's some--trouble."
That is all we are told as to what Luella saw, though it comes out
later that the man and his wife had been murdered by the hired man--how
we know not. There is a primitiveness about the style, its gasping
shortness of sentence, its repetitions like the story told by a child,
its freedom from all straining for effect, its bareness and grimness,
that stamps it as a genuine human document; not art but life itself.
For external nature she cares little. Her backgrounds are meager; the
human element alone interests her. There is no Mary E. Wilkins country
as there is a Sarah Orne Jewett country; there are only Mary E. Wilkins
people. A somber group they are--exceptions, perhaps, grim survivals,
distortions, yet absolutely true to one narrow phase of New England
life. Her realism as she depicts these people is as inexorable as
Balzac's. "A Village Lear" would have satisfied even Maupassant. Not
one jot is bated from the full horror of the picture; it is driven to
its pitiless end without a moment of softening. No detail is omitted.
It is _Pere Goriot_ reduced to a chapter. A picture like this from
"Louisa" grips one by its very pitilessness:
There was nothing for supper but some bread and butter and weak
tea, though the old man had his dish of Indian-meal porridge.
He could not eat much solid food. The porridge was covered with
milk and molasses. He bent low over it, and ate large spoonfuls
with loud noises. His daughter had tied a towel around his neck
as she would have tied a pinafore on a child. She had also
spread a towel over the tablecloth in front of him, and she
watched him sharply lest he should spill his food.
"I wish I could have somethin' to eat that I could relish the
way he does that porridge and molasses," said she [the mother].
She had scarcely tasted anything. She sipped her weak tea
laboriously.
Louisa looked across at her mother's meager little figure in
its neat old dress, at her poor small head bending over the
teacup, showing the wide parting in the thin hair.
"Why don't you toast your bread, mother?" said she. "I'll toast
it for you."
"No, I don't want it. I'd jest as soon have it this way as any.
I don't want no bread, nohow. I want somethin' to relish--a
herrin', or a little mite of cold meat, or somethin'. I s'pose
I could eat as well as anybody if I had as much as some folks
have. Mis' Mitchell was sayin' the other day that she didn't
believe but what they had butcher's meat up to Mis' Nye's every
day in the week. She said Jonathan he went to Wolfsborough and
brought home great pieces in a market-basket every week."
She is strong only in short efforts. She has small power of
construction: even _Pembroke_ may be resolved into a series of short
stories. The setness of Barnabas Thayer is prolonged until it ceases to
be convincing: we lose sympathy; he becomes a mere Ben Jonson "humor"
and not a human being. The story is strong only in its episodes--the
cherry party of the tight-fisted Silas Berry, the midnight coasting of
the boy Ephraim, the removal of Hannah to the poorhouse, the marriage
of Rebecca--but these touch the very heart of New England. Because of
their artlessness they are the perfection of art.
In her later period Miss Wilkins became sophisticated and
self-conscious. The acclaim of praise that greeted her short stories
tempted her to essay a larger canvas in wider fields of art. She
had awakened to a realization of the bareness of her style and she
sought to bring to her work ornament and the literary graces. She
experimented with verse and drama and juveniles, with long novels
and romances, and even with tales of New Jersey life. In vain. Her
decline began with _Madelon_, which is improbable and melodramatic,
and it continued through all her later work. She wrote problem novels
like _The Portion of Labor_, long and sprawling and ineffective, and
stories like _By the Light of the Soul_, as impossible and as untrue
to life as a young country girl's dream of city society. As a novelist
and as a depicter of life outside of her narrow domain, she has small
equipment. She stands for but one thing: short stories of the grim and
bare New England social system; sketches austere and artless which limn
the very soul of a passing old regime; photographs which are more than
photographs: which are threnodies.
VI
The last phase of the school may be studied in the work of Alice Brown,
representative of the influences at the end of the century. The late
recognition of her fiction--she was born in 1857--which placed her a
decade after Miss Wilkins who was born in 1862, compelled her to serve
an apprenticeship like that of Howells, and subjected her work to the
new shaping influences of the nineties. When she did gain recognition
in 1895, she brought a finished art. She had mastered the newly
worked-out science of the short story, she had studied the English
masters--chiefest of all Stevenson, whose influence so dominated the
closing century.
She was not a realist as Miss Wilkins was a realist. The New England
dialect stories of _Meadow Grass_ were not put forth to indicate the
final field that she had chosen for her art: they were experiments just
as all the others of her earlier efforts were experiments. Of her first
seven books, _Fools of Nature_, with its background of spiritualism,
was a serious attempt at serious fiction with a thesis worthy of
a George Eliot, _Mercy Warren_ and _Robert Louis Stevenson_ were
biographical and critical studies, _By Oak and Thorn_ was a collection
of travel essays, _The Road to Castelay_ was a collection of poems, and
_The Day of His Youth_ perhaps a romance.
That she won her recognition as a writer of dialect tales rather than
as a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a romancer, was due, first, to
the nature of the times, and, secondly, to the fact that the tales
were a section of her own life written with fullness of knowledge
and sympathy. She had been born and reared in a New Hampshire town,
educated in a country school and a rural "female seminary," and, like
Rose Terry Cooke, she had taught school. Later she had broken from
this early area of her life and had resided in Boston. The glamour of
childhood grew more and more golden over the life she had left behind
her; the memories of fragrant summer evenings in the green country and
of the old homes she had known with all their varied inmates grew ever
more tender on her pages as she wrote. It was impossible for her not
to be true to this area that she knew so completely. Characters like
Mrs. Blair and Miss Dyer in "Joint Owners in Spain," or Farmer Eli in
"Farmer Eli's Vacation" stood living before her imagination as she told
of them. She had known them in the flesh. If she were to paint the
picture at all she must paint it as it was in her heart. To add to it
or to subtract from it were to violate truth itself.
Her stories differ from Mrs. Cooke's and Miss Jewett's in a certain
quality of atmosphere--it is difficult to explain more accurately. They
have a quality of humor and of pathos, a sprightliness and freedom
about them that are all their own. They never fall into carelessness
like so much of the work of Mrs. Stowe and they are never poorly
constructed. They are photographically true to the life they represent,
and yet they possess, many of them, the beauties and the graces and
the feeling of romance. They add richness to realism. In style she is
the antithesis of Miss Wilkins. There is beauty in all of her prose, a
half-felt tripping of feet often, a lilting rhythm as unpremeditated
as a bird-song, swift turns of expression that are near to poetry. An
inscription in the Tiverton churchyard halts her, and as she muses upon
it she is wholly a poet:
"The purple flower of a maid"! All the blossomy sweetness,
the fragrant lament of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas,
poor love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the
barren pity we accord the dead, but dowered with another youth
set like a crown upon the unstained front of this. Not going
with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with buds
and dripping over in perfume. She seems so sweet in her still
loveliness, the empty province of her balmy spring, that, for
a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of
your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer
for her loss. And yet, not so, since the world holds other
greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age
and stature, but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence--as
true a part of youth and joy and rapture as the immortal
figures on the Grecian urn. While she was but a flying phantom
on the frieze of time, Death fixed her there forever--a
haunting spirit in perennial bliss.
Whenever she touches nature she touches it as a poet. She was of the
mid nineties which saw the triumph of the nature school. Behind each of
her stories lies a rich background of mountain or woodland or meadow,
one that often, as in "A Sea Change," dominates in Thomas Hardy fashion
the whole picture.
Only a comparatively few of Miss Brown's volumes deal with the field
with which her name is chiefly associated. _Meadow Grass_, _Tiverton
Tales_, and _The Country Road_ contain the best of her dialect stories.
Her heart in later years has been altogether in other work. She has
written novels not provincial in their setting, and, unlike Miss
Wilkins, she has succeeded in doing really distinctive work. She has
the constructive power that is denied so many, especially women, who
have succeeded with the short story. She has done dramatic work which
has won high rewards and she has written poetry. Perhaps she is a poet
first of all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. _The Mayflower_, 1843; _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_, 1852; _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, 1854; _Dred_
(_Nina Gordon_), 1856; _The Minister's Wooing_, 1859; _The Pearl
of Orr's Island_, 1862; _Agnes of Sorrento_, 1862; _House and
Home Papers_, 1864; _Little Foxes_, 1865; _Religious Poems_,
1867; _Queer Little People_, 1867; _The Chimney Corner_, 1868;
_Oldtown Folks_, 1869; _Pink and White Tyranny_, 1871; _Oldtown
Fireside Stories_, 1871; _My Wife and I_, 1871; _We and Our
Neighbors_, 1875; _Poganuc People_, 1878; _A Dog's Mission_,
1881; _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_, Charles Edward Stowe,
1889.
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD. _Tiny_, 1866; _The Gates Ajar_,
1868; _Men, Women, and Ghosts_, 1869; _Hedged In_, 1870; _The
Silent Partner_, 1870; _Poetic Studies_, 1875; _The Story of
Avis_, 1877; _An Old Maid's Paradise_, 1879; _Doctor Zay_, 1882;
_Beyond the Gates_, 1883; _Songs of the Silent World_, 1884; _The
Madonna of the Tubs_, 1886; _The Gates Between_, 1887; _Jack the
Fisherman_, 1887; _The Struggle for Immortality_, 1889; _The
Master of the Magicians_ [with H. D. Ward], 1890; _Come Forth_
[with H. D. Ward], 1890; _Fourteen to One_, 1891; _Donald Marcy_,
1893; _A Singular Life_, 1894; _The Supply at St. Agatha's_,
1896; _Chapters from a Life_, 1896; _The Story of Jesus Christ_,
1897; _Within the Gates_, 1901; _Successors to Mary the First_,
1901; _Avery_, 1902; _Trixy_, 1904; _The Man in the Case_, 1906;
_Walled In_, 1907.
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. _Sir Rohan's Ghost_, 1859; _The Amber
Gods and Other Stories_, 1863; _Azarian_, 1864; _New England
Legends_, 1871; _The Thief in the Night_, 1872; _Art Decoration
Applied to Furniture_, 1881; _The Marquis of Carabas_, 1882;
_Poems_, 1882; _Ballads About Authors_, 1888; _In Titian's Garden
and Other Poems_, 1897; _The Children of the Valley_, 1901;
_The Great Procession_, 1902; _Four Days of God_, 1905; _Old
Washington_, 1906; _Old Madame and Other Tragedies_, 1910.
ROSE TERRY COOKE. _Poems by Rose Terry_, 1860; _Happy Dodd_,
1875; _Somebody's Neighbors_, 1881; _The Deacon's Week_, 1885;
_Root-Bound and Other Sketches_, 1885; _No. A Story for Boys_,
1886; _The Sphynx's Children and Other People's_, 1886; Poems by
Rose Terry Cooke (complete), 1888; _Steadfast: a Novel_, 1889;
_Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills_, 1891.
SARAH ORNE JEWETT. _Deephaven_, 1877; _Old Friends and New_,
1879; _Country By-Ways_, 1881; _The Mate of the Daylight_, 1883;
_A Country Doctor_, 1884; _A Marsh Island_, 1885; _A White
Heron_, 1886; _The Story of the Normans_, 1887; _The King of
Folly Island_, 1888; _Betty Leicester_, 1889; _Strangers and
Wayfarers_, 1890; _A Native of Winby_, 1893; _Betty Leicester's
Christmas_, 1894; _The Life of Nancy_, 1895; _The Country of the
Pointed Firs_, 1896; _The Queen's Twin_, 1899; _The Tory Lover_,
1901; _Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_, Edited by Annie Fields.
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN. _A Humble Romance_, 1887; _A New England
Nun_, 1891; _Young Lucretia_, 1892; _Jane Field_, 1892; _Giles
Corey, Yeoman: a Play_, 1893; _Pembroke_, 1894; _Madelon_, 1896;
_Jerome, a Poor Young Man_, 1897; _Silence_, 1898; _Evelina's
Garden_, 1899; _The Love of Parson Lord_, 1900; _The Heart's
Highway_, 1900; _The Portion of Labor_, 1901; _Understudies_,
1901; _Six Trees_, 1903; _The Wind in the Rose Bush_, 1903; _The
Givers_, 1904; _Doc Gordon_, 1906; _By the Light of the Soul_,
1907; _Shoulders of Atlas_, 1908; _The Winning Lady_, 1909; _The
Green Door_, 1910; _Butterfly House_, 1912; _Yates Pride_, 1912.
ALICE BROWN. _Fools of Nature_, 1887; _Meadow Grass_, 1895;
_Mercy Otis Warren_, 1896; _By Oak and Thorn_, 1896; _The Day
of His Youth_, 1896; _The Road to Castaly_, 1896; _Robert Louis
Stevenson--a Study_ (with Louise Imogen Guiney), 1897; _Tiverton
Tales_, 1899; _King's End_, 1901; _Margaret Warrener_, 1901;
_The Mannerings_, _High Noon_, _Paradise_, _The Country Road_,
_The Court of Love_, 1906; _Rose MacLeod_, 1908; _The Story of
Thyrza_, 1909; _County Neighbors_, _John Winterbourne's Family_,
1910; _The One-Footed Fairy_, 1911; _The Secret of the Clan_,
1912; _Vanishing Points_, _Robin Hood's Barn_, 1913; _Children of
Earth_, [$10,000 prize drama], 1915.