KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
Once Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley,
in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin
for the occasion.”
“You have many children,” said the seer.
“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied.
“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones;
they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman
declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?...
I cannot understand. I _see them_.”
They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how
wonderfully right was her vision.
“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of
the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa
and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly
Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the
faithful Emma Jane,--all these figures crowd about us, and claim their
places as everybody’s children.”
It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write
about her without emotion, the kind of emotion that it is good to feel.
The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better
world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite?
Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may
indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the
emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions,
you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a
desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming--keep off
this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple
and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are
not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless
millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour!
Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred
teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits
which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like
prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to
have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of
Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent
east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school
for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen
her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After
her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara.
She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was
called to direct the famous Silver Street kindergartens of San
Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens
for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of
Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their
spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training
teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made
others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat
and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought
to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if
she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is
at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton
Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the
manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable
doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be
self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so
agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look
upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness
is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you
are.
Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village
of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being.
Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works
she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed
windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill,
swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling
of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village
is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the
Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake.
A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or
so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco,
placid and turbulent, which runs through _Timothy’s Quest_ and _Rebecca_
and _Rose o’ the River_.
Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr.
Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not
recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of
the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior
was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and
the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with,
the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as
ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left
their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply
fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of
the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a
silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness
pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions,
stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back
into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square
dances on the threshing floor.
Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we
have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In
the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco,
the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading
from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of
the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have
very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all
those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved
but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;--you have
the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more
pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the
perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance of _The
Old Peabody Pew_. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall
with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she
has shared with you her feelings about life.
Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you _remember_! Somehow,
_Penelope’s Progress_, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and
Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2,
please:
“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer
whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy
than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the
nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she
was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time
no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not
unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those
disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and
perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and
calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were
filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their
Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”
Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written
the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent
over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether
“b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his
discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely
referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”)
was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:
“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced
Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and
her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the
Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of
Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”
_Marm Lisa_ is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the
youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such
places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of
Present Perfection? We have. On the wall was “an ingenious pictorial
representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the
successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by
colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for
Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition
of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform;
blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious
Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that
in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was
left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face
powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.
The cat ’Zekiel in _The Old Peabody Pew_:
“’Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma,
and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to
slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five
minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and
gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no
heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.”
The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth
walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some
parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their
seats side by side in the old family pew.
“(‘And consid’able close, too, though there was plenty o’ room!’)
“(‘And no one that I ever heard of so much as suspicioned that they had
ever kept company!’)
“(‘And do you s’pose she knew Justin was expected back when she scrubbed
his pew a-Friday?’)
“(‘And this explains the empty pulpit vases!’)
“(‘And I always said that Nancy would make a real handsome couple if she
ever got anybody to couple with!’)”
The boastful old man, Turrible Wiley, in _Rose o’ the River_:
“‘I remember once I was smokin’ my pipe when a jam broke under me. ’Twas
a small jam, or what we call a small jam on the Kennebec,--only about
three hundred thousand pine logs. The first thing I knowed, I was
shootin’ back an’ forth in the b’ilin’ foam, hangin’ on t’ the end of a
log like a spider. My hands was clasped round the log, and I never lost
control o’ my pipe. They said I smoked right along, jest as cool an’
placid as a pond-lily.’
“‘Why’d you quit drivin’?’ inquired Ivory.
“‘My strength wa’n’t ekal to it,’ Mr. Wiley responded sadly. ‘I was all
skin, bones, an’ nerve....
“‘I’ve tried all kinds o’ labor. Some of ’em don’t suit my liver, some
disagrees with my stomach, and the rest of ’em has vibrations.’”
In January, 1911, over 2,000,000 copies of Mrs. Wiggin’s books had been
sold; to-day the total is probably approaching 3,000,000. The most
popular of her books is _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, which has been
likened, in explanation of its popularity, to _Little Women_. But no
explanation is necessary. Rebecca is entirely, naturally human. Whether
she is perplexing her aunts or telling Miss Dearborn that she can’t
write about nature and slavery, having really nothing to say about
either; whether she is making her report on the missionaries’ children
“all born under Syrian skies,” or aweing Emma Jane with original ideas,
or helping the Simpsons, with the aid of Mr. Aladdin, to acquire a
wonderful lamp;--at all times, at every moment Rebecca Rowena Randall
reminds us of the youngsters we have known, and perhaps, a little, of
the youngsters we were once ourselves.
The triumph of naturalness, the perfect fidelity to the life of the
child; these explain _Rebecca_ and _Rebecca’s_ success, signalized less
in the selling of hundreds of thousands of copies, in the acting of the
play made from the book for months and months and months, than in the
joyous recognition with which Mrs. Wiggin’s heroine was greeted. Rebecca
inditing the couplet:
“When Joy and Duty clash
Let Duty go to smash”--
Rebecca playing on the tinkling old piano, “Wild roved an Indian girl,
bright Alfarata,” Rebecca doing this, thinking that, saying the thing
that needs to be said--generous, romantic, resourceful and brighter than
her surroundings--is a person it does us all good to know. Copies of the
book in libraries are read to shreds. The world, which can see through
any sham, loves this story. The world is right. To learn, in the words
of one of Conrad’s heroes, to live, to love and to put your trust in
life is all that matters. Mrs. Wiggin shows us how.
BOOKS BY KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
_The Birds’ Christmas Carol_, 1886.
_The Story of Patsy_, 1889.
_A Summer in a Canyon_, 1889.
_Timothy’s Quest_, 1890.
_The Story Hour_, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.)
_Children’s Rights_, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_A Cathedral Courtship_ and _Penelope’s English Experiences_, 1893.
_Polly Oliver’s Problem_, 1893.
_The Village Watch-Tower_, 1895.
_Froebel’s Gifts_, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Froebel’s Occupations_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Kindergarten Principles and Practice_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Marm Lisa_, 1896.
_Nine Love Songs, And A Carol_, 1896. (Music by Mrs.
Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.)
_Penelope’s Progress_, 1898.
_Penelope’s Scottish Experiences_, 1900.
_Penelope’s Irish Experiences_, 1901.
_The Diary of a Goose Girl_, 1902.
_Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, 1903.
_The Affair at the Inn_, 1904. (With Mary and Jane
Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
_Rose o’ the River_, 1905.
_New Chronicles of Rebecca_, 1907.
_Finding a Home_, 1907.
_The Flag Raising_, 1907.
_The Old Peabody Pew_, 1907.
_Susanna and Sue_, 1909.
_Robinetta_, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
_Mother Carey’s Chickens_, 1911.
_A Child’s Journey With Dickens_, 1912.
_The Story of Waitstill Baxter_, 1913.
_Penelope’s Postscripts_, 1915.
_The Romance of a Christmas Card_, 1916.
_Golden Numbers_, 1917.
_The Posy Ring_, 1917.
_Ladies in Waiting_, 1919.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._