MARY JOHNSTON
“Didn’t you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary
Johnston’s novel, _The Long Roll_, “how everybody really belongs in a
book?”
It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these
twenty years, ever since _Prisoners of Hope_ announced to the world the
advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary
to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that
special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or
nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary
Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a
discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston
has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can
entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for.
She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the
ending of the first chapter of _To Have and To Hold_? A shipload of
maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown,
Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by
has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get
him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds
himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master
Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes
back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.
“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I
cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own
caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’
“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and
stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I
diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”
Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s
imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless
self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of _Lewis Rand_. Rand has
killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into
the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the
sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell
from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:
“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room
yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand
spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’
“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning
before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand]
gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason----’
“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’
“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said
he must have sleep.’”
The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of _The Long Roll_:
“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale
gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and
climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession
bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and
the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry
and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the
Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the
coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March
rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place
uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward
and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol
and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the
Speaker’s Chair.
“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from
the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who
could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face,
the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair,
in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy.
All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.
“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead
leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde
soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes.
He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He
spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always
said was just this: “_Press forward!_”’ He passed on.
“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man
like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a
philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you
consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.
“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the
Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed
upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the
Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we
must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’”
So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power
to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it
is of the essence of drama that _things go on_. A play or a book which
leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that
nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic
effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various
events--bitter, happy, tragic and glorious--marking so many stages of an
unending record. The last words of _The Long Roll_ are worthy of the
greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.
The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a
writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible
material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is
one element of her genius--perhaps the most important. The second
element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use
terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative
imagination” is.
If you will turn to her book _The Wanderers_ you will find that it is a
series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the
underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship
is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the
period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the
French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were
no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of
how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before
recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the
scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the
human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull
conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are
one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of
years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?
Well, we can’t tell you _how_ it is done, for if that could be told the
manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such
chapters as open _The Wanderers_. All we can be certain of is this, that
Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a
primitive woman of the treefolk--so much was the first imaginative step.
And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and
hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her
actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by
creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling
than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to
which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or
reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What
is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike,
wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but
a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and
a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of
imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his
author.
All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a
serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense,
she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has
she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These
two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born
endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest--an
almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for
documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading
the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack
at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of
poignancy and the art of touching to tears--these are to be had for
taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they
will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous
to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True,
but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as
such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!
Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us
see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that
interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will
be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning
further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.
_The Long Roll_ starts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and
it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary
Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander
Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains
shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier,
the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of
civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal
boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country.
The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two
railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar.
The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a
Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand.
Major Johnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted
her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older
governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was
sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved
to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and
professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing
school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought
home where, a year later, her mother died.
Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was
interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of
some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present
industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several
children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the
direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in
view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that she _can_ keep
house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that
she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however.
Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no
especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel,
_Prisoners of Hope_, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun
while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large
part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park. _To Have and To Hold_,
appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was
begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain
resort. The first draft was written with a lead pencil and revised with
exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten.
Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her
home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth
Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father
indubitably did a great deal to make possible _The Long Roll_ and _Cease
Firing_, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of
inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had
served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining
promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times.
He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy
to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject
his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description
enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and
tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had
seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited.
In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over
the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink
crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large,
airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of
antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends
come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were
possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss
Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begun
to dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia,
where she went to work upon _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, the
rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a
faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were
busied to portray.
Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt,
springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland;
Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys
have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in
estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has
been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through.
Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters
high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent
flame.
With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia
resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied
there was at one time occupied by General Lee. _Lewis Rand_ was written
on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually
she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away
from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off
to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not
confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and
“The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot!
Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for its owner,
making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home.
There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with
here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is
large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments
and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a
formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone.
Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland.
Flowers execute the processional of the seasons.
Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The
broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun
parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam
closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are
the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the
South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is
maintained without abatement.
In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia
hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When
her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a
cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of
leaded glass about the room protect books of every description--history,
philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism--a
battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one
terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the
walls and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of
many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s
linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the
author.
Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going
through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A
beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the _Book News Monthly_
of March, 1911.
“_Prisoners of Hope_, _To Have and to Hold_ and _Audrey_ are full of
allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least
impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors
to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a
dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her
guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward
in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that
in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the
one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding
country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of
the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church,
representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.
“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s
fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured
heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the
official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full
flush of her loveliness.
“_Lewis Rand_ is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper
James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams
into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson,
as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was
admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The
grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond,
where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about
them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic
quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians
of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the
times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has
for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of
the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly
souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand
and her husband from their country residence near the State University,
in Charlottesville.”
There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity
Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in _Lewis Rand_, was the mother of
Fauquier Cary in _The Long Roll_. The Churchills, the Carys and others
should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks,
Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent
Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.
It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of
Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of _Hagar_ in 1913 all her
work had been historical and had consisted, with the exception of _The
Goddess of Reason_, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in
Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only
departure from this being her first two books. _Prisoners of Hope_
(1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; _To Have
and To Hold_ (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in
1621. Then came _Audrey_ (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of
Col. William Byrd and _Lewis Rand_ (1908) which pictured the Virginia of
Jefferson. _The Long Roll_ (1911) and _Cease Firing_ (1912) gave us the
State during the Civil War. There was another romance, _Sir Mortimer_,
between _Audrey_ and _Lewis Rand_, and before _The Goddess of Reason_,
which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very
likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the _Book
News Monthly_ of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the
poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become _The Goddess
of Reason_ was to blame. _The Goddess of Reason_ gave her dramatic
genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something
better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed
Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us _The
Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ within the next five years.
Although in _The Witch_, her next novel after _Hagar_, our writer went
back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of
the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of _Lewis
Rand_ and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of
prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and
joy of living.” _The Fortunes of Garin_ (1915) was pure romance and
adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored
as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a
fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to
France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the
princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl
whom he rescued from peril years before. Of _The Wanderers_ (1917) we
have already spoken. _Foes_ (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship
transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after
the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque
story is superbly told in most poetic prose.
How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by
two examples from _The Long Roll_. Illustrated, we say, not _shown_ in
the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her
dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw
material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the
coward:
“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large
on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He
was wedged between comrades--Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him
with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes--he could not fall out, drop
behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed
forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable
experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized
with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking;
moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp _zzzz-ip_! _zzzzzz-ip_!
Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying
smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the
fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two
men were running--running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like
people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or
bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they
moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd!
before I’d be sech a fool----’ A shell came, and burst--burst between
the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A
part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling.
Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him,
and vomited.”
We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:
“First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree-a little
removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden
table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for.
At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J.
Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen
chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before
him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of
each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An
awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his
health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace,
romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and
feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce
and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the
idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had
fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and
formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He
drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the
sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A
blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came
reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness
quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but
little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water
and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had
caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little
Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’
instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the
Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the
week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something,
but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it
promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these
were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic,
tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude,
monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy
of the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his
staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an
implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great
and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly
the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery
tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s
Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until
Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to
weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was
to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the
small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the
critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling
Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some
mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied
approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact,
they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the
other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little
study you may see several things which go far to explain the
effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not
directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her
and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.
For example:--
Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice
again in the account of Stonewall Jackson’s funeral how the focus is
narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the
Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a
single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is
directed to a single point.
Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck
home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form,
lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom
and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall
of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the
building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a
league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges
abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as
he knows its tragic sorrow.
Glance again at the ending of _Lewis Rand_. It is quiet but in the
unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the
greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he
must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the
picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and
lose himself from the secret terror.
Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar
unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the
backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the
shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling
at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible
for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he
may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no
consciousness that could be recognized as such.
The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson
has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man.
Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal
opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in
contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials
of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character.
But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam
in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of
course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell
us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of
him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a
queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the
fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we
can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss
Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget
that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly
under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to
church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final
touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of
their verdict on him--“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
* * * * *
It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is
to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss
Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies _before_ the
publication of _The Long Roll_, when she had only some six books to her
credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.
BOOKS BY MARY JOHNSTON
_Prisoners of Hope_, 1898.
_To Have and to Hold_, 1900.
_Audrey_, 1902.
_Sir Mortimer_, 1904.
_The Goddess of Reason_, 1907.
_Lewis Rand_, 1908.
_The Long Roll_, 1911.
_Cease Firing_, 1912.
_Hagar_, 1913.
_The Witch_, 1914.
_The Fortunes of Garin_, 1915.
_The Wanderers_, 1917.
_Foes_, 1918.
_Michael Forth_, 1919.
_Sweet Rocket_, 1920.
_Silver Cross_, 1922.
_1492_, 1922.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes,
Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver
Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston._