MARGARET DELAND
Edith Wharton, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is
similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their
books. And their books are not silent.
If the band of a kiltie regiment plays _The Campbells Are Coming_, one
of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born
in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while
she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle,
Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany,
and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories.
“Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country
house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania
more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges
and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces,
and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a
shining arm about the circle of the western hills.”
“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!”
Beautiful simile!
In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking
hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and
imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She
was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of
Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow.
Her first taste in reading was formed upon _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_
and _Tales of a Grandfather_, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of
Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was
that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are
not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the
prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures;
not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday
life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively
determine what he shall be.”
In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs.
Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in
character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young
people that surround her are character studies of a completeness
unexcelled in American fiction.
There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But
first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely,
inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people
as well as things.
It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking
heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or
environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal
controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is
largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons,
differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing
pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is
known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and
inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this
is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_.
Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance;
we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we
know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails
utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully
acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in
her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary
sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It
makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful
account of her forebears could have made her.
Now in _The Iron Woman_, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get
both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded.
Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of
giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete
that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just
a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to
the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing)
we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances
they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and
upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and
the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly
anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen:
“But after a breathless six months of partnership--in business, if in
nothing else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little
two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he
was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could
take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed
him that there was nothing for him to do but die--so that there might be
room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in
those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her
pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration,
but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under
like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as
Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and
contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the
strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means
of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely
she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel
anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky
lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman
to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to
nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve
conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous,
she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her
shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since
it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she
sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was
doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal
instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct
without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years
of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but
duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t
Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no
explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie,
and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his
service while he was still in petticoats.
“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief,
Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was
chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was
chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous
candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first
expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’
accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and
she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a
sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected
sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head
down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No,
no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall
into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand--a big,
beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning
his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over
your airs!’ she said.”
It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with
the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and
observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at
all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind
of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography?
Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an
actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or
reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that
he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile
or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account
for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he
should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful
record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the
evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them.
In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is
for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory
things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable
or we will not accept the character--and in this he is generally right.
Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are
forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things
from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist
make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is
always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however
desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory
education--compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly,
where both do serious ill.
Considered as fiction, _The Iron Woman_ is vitiated ever so slightly by
the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be
explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has
obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the
story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses
to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty
_not_ as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will
dare, _will dare_, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and
thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say,
did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were
there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But
you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living
person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition
and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we
speak of _The Iron Woman_ as biography, the best and brightest of
biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too
minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The
writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so
successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she
enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of
biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid
success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that
conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and
easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort
of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their
self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in
the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.
We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work
something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in
dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the
feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read _The Iron Woman_, a feeling
which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we
venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs.
Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her
exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to
the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to
her Old Chester books and stories. In _The Awakening of Helena Richie_,
in _Old Chester Tales_, in _Dr. Lavendar’s People_--in them all, in all
her work--we believe that the reader who takes the biographical
standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full
satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America
has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is,
after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting
an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable
lives.
BOOKS BY MARGARET DELAND
_Good for the Soul._
_The Rising Tide._
_R. J.’s Mother._
_The Way to Peace._
_Where the Laborers Are Few._
_John Ward, Preacher._
_The Old Garden and Other Verses._
_Philip and His Wife._
_Florida Days._
_Sidney._
_The Story of a Child._
_The Wisdom of Fools._
_Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories._
_Old Chester Tales._
_Dr. Lavendar’s People._
_The Common Way_, 1904.
_The Awakening of Helena Richie_, 1906.
_An Encore_, 1907.
_The Iron Woman_, 1911.
_The Voice_, 1912.
_Partners_, 1913.
_The Hands of Esau_, 1914.
_Around Old Chester_, 1915.
_Small Things_, 1919.
_The Vehement Flame_, 1922.
_Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by
D. Appleton & Company, New York._