MARY S. WATTS
“2722 Cleinview Avenue, East Walnut Hills,
“Cincinnati, Ohio, June 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“I have here a letter from Mr. Latham of Macmillans with a very
complimentary request from you for data regarding myself. There really
is not much to say about me as a person. The trade of writing has been
pursued--in times past, at least--by so many picturesque people in so
picturesque a fashion that the rest of the world has got into the habit
of thinking an author must of necessity be picturesque; but such is not
my case, rather to my regret whenever anybody displays this kind and
gratifying curiosity about me. One would dearly love to be a slap-dash,
swashbuckling sort of person like Borrow, say; or a sick, fiery,
indomitable R. L. S. Then there would be something to write about. As it
is, I am only an inconspicuous gentlewoman--I hope a gentlewoman
anyway!--with a more or less Victorian style of writing which has
frequently proved a profound puzzle to critics of a younger generation.
“The dates are to be got out of _Who’s Who_, but to spare trouble I will
give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio;
went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for
some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since.
Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably
the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to
everybody, but the farm experience was _sui generis_, not exactly like
anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and
involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the
middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from
the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable
patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I
think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things
which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I
was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated
people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual
backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without
the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild,
uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and
write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the
_Ladies’ Home Journal_ have changed everything. Don’t think I am not
serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the
so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and
isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put
together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make
you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and
I had no companions of our own age; we were not allowed to associate
with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had
to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all
the characters in turn.
“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it
has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately
in _Nathan Burke_. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the
uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other
kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man--at least I
thought him old then--named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living
shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers.
He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and
butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a
rifle--a _rifle_, mind you!--at the utmost distance the weapon would
carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’
he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when _one_ orter do.’ I remember
him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels,
the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the
front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with
Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to
scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the
tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it
inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the
dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing,
red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of
Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died
somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been
particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I
wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I
have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken
living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not
have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of
Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order,
to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels
autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben,
they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I
have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An
author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own
eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.
“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of
accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present
itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in
some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn
over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making
over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something
there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I
understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on,
never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the
night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and
pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do
sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis
and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son,
Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and
have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule
afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the
unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors,
for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making
contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I
can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I
believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible
ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!
“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any
rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went
and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like
regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent
them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep
disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were
trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write
anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I
was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am
still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not
happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been
rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are
still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I
began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman
and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the
incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity.
Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but
we realize now that he was a writer--just that. And he was a great
personality--just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to
imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better
than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out,
but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification,
that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and
imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who
can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me
that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or
modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I
remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of
the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean
‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy
slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean
_conversational_, as conversation is carried on between persons in what
I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me
about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable
extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like
somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was
so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper.
It was in _Barry Lyndon_ that this first struck me, I believe. Who
showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon
re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating.
Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After
a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old
genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was
modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity
which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain
true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony,
repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction
better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful
importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery
vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is
not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing--also--better imagined
than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the
Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final
touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic
Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements,
getting drunk and creating scandal--that is a masterpiece of realism;
and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading
Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading
Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually
learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice
by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single
person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the
original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying
characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on!
Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out
of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc.
It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it,
willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for
something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious,
middle-of-the-road policy; you see I _might_ turn out to be a writer
after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’--I
have seen this phrase used in description of my writing--my emphasis of
the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for
that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature
are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long.
“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as
those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in
search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing _Nathan
Burke_, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And
while at work on _Van Cleve_, a story in which the Spanish-American War
makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to
Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the
trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine
society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also
done--that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy--but I could have
done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the
atmosphere.
“The dates of publication are about as follows: _The Tenants_ (McClure),
1908; _Nathan Burke_ (Macmillan), 1910; _The Legacy_, 1911; _Van Cleve:
His Friends and His Family_, published serially in the _Atlantic
Monthly_, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; _The Rise of Jennie
Cushing_, 1915; _The Rudder_, 1916; _The Boardman Family_, 1918; also a
book called _Three Short Plays_, 1917.
“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest--whether in your
judgment it is fit to make public or not--about the people who in
printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on
attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and
the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and
futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do
something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or
idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this
man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know
one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he
ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author;
he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different
and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make
a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this
opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do
people accuse _me_ of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a
burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me
credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create;
it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for.
What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we
meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or
submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By
their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart
the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method;
whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one
unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse _me_ of
his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is
exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to
the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of
his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about
the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about
Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One
act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, _I_ didn’t do it. They did it
themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.
“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes
for the forthcoming book, I am
“Sincerely yours,
“MARY S. WATTS.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of
the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to
which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages,
he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know
something about them if only that they may discount his statements at
their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs.
Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the
whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent
pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other
American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this
satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid
merits of her work.
Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all
writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style
with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that
non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely
realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain
passages and which affords the reader--and the writer--necessary relief.
But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been
able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in
every one of her stories.
She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not
only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of
circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a
moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know
particularly well--do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all
his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him;
if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you
may; and yet you think you know _him_ rather well! The truth is, you
know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart
and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character
which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall.
You’ve never done that--why should you? But you must do just that if you
are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a
dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody
you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case,
for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait.
Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice”
of feminine perception, a quality which makes _Pride and Prejudice_
immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of
hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely
a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled,
constitute a merciless betrayal--the betrayal is merciless whether it is
favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes
you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see
him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme,
but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an
otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too
readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up
for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the
prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.
She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all
and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing
is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and
her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in
_Nathan Burke_ and Everett Boardman in _The Boardman Family_ whom Gene
Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton
could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some
use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s
not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be
reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she
proceeds to show us what _is_ made of them--not a pretty spectacle, to
be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only
to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would
subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the
moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words
in _A Personal Record_?
“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope,
charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have
come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I
would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle
for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view--and in
this view alone--never for despair! Those visions, delicious or
poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair--the
laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high
tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle
mind--that’s our affair!”
It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair,
from _Nathan Burke_ to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in
_The Rudder_, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi
Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the
machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.
“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’
said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’
“‘Um-huh. Well, I _have_ seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly
anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly
to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of
escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them
another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle
of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.
“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.
“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’
said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get
home.’”
A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.
“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty
effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr.
Loring, my work has seldom had a--a token of appreciation that I--I
value m-more--ahem--ho, ha--_ahem, hem_--!’”
Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in _Nathan
Burke_, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical
illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but
pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness?
There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon
individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a
deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of _The Boardman
Family_, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which
occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She
intends to become a professional dancer.
“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander
Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door
and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone,
but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds
and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella
laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall
she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair
braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked
very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the
watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s
watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a
half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish.
Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or
two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a
hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky
alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman,
whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing
chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced
an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared
to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if
He existed, He must surely be a gentleman--old Sarah Boardman got down
on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young
girl.
“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and
alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know,
in a guarded voice.
“‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little
gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’”
A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the
enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to
infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you
have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah
Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very
fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some
lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at
the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known
Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her
daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs.
Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s
pride--reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it--would
inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect
it.
In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: _Nathan Burke_,
then _The Legacy_, her next book after _Nathan Burke_; then _The Rise of
Jennie Cushing_. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that
_Van Cleve_, coming between _The Legacy_ and _Jennie Cushing_, was
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and must have reached a
great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in
covers. _The Rudder_ was less successful than any of the others, though
it is too early to judge of the popularity of _The Boardman Family_,
published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present
writer is unable to fathom, _The Rudder_ was criticised with a most
unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly
mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to
perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less
dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the
novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal
characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful
selection for recording, _The Rudder_ leaves nothing to be desired. I
should rate it with _The Legacy_ while freely conceding that the
developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in
_The Legacy_, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and
interest.
The close of _The Legacy_, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am _I_ a
good woman--a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly
foreshadowed _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, which, since its presentation
in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its
main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs.
Watts’s, not even excepting _Nathan Burke_. It is a pity that the film
representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the
conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending--none can
object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it
is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent
anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book
ending, of _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is neutral. It could not be
otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and
fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize
her love for Don and save her from herself.
_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is the most dramatic, the most artistic,
and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any
question a really great novel and both in its conception and its
execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature
and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of _Nathan
Burke_, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively
narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is
natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in
_Nathan Burke_. The popularity of _The Legacy_ is partly attributable to
the fact that it followed _Nathan Burke_. But the popularity of _Jennie
Cushing_ represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an
audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her
earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by _Jennie Cushing_ and
not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of _The
Legacy_. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear
enough from this fact: In the case of _Nathan Burke_ and _The Legacy_
the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off
quickly. But _Jennie Cushing_ was published in October, reprinted in
November--and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a
book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power.
Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but
incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl
whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally
when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to
work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and
mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose
only mistake was in keeping silent once too often--or _was_ that a
mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about
her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to
make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest
price the world could exact from her--cool, courageous Jennie! And yet
she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with
the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing?
But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry
her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell
him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not;
one hesitates to say that Jennie _could not_ deny herself anything.
_The Boardman Family_ suffers one serious defect. After writing with all
her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra
Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager;
and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after
getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts
Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly
has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have
sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship
Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of
being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without
a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we
should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had
created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not
extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is
beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery
to be cleared up later.
_Van Cleve_ is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next
to _Nathan Burke_, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the
interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy
Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her _Three Short
Plays_, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will
say merely that _An Ancient Dance_ is the most ingenious and
dramatically effective. _Civilization_ is splendid satire but
inconclusive in its termination. _The Wearin’ O’ The Green_ is a farce
that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays
are most agreeable reading.
BOOKS BY MARY S. WATTS
_The Tenants_, 1908.
_Nathan Burke_, 1910.
_The Legacy_, 1911.
_Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_, 1913.
_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, 1914.
_The Rudder_, 1916.
_Three Short Plays_, 1917.
_The Boardman Family_, 1918.
_From Father to Son_, 1919.
_The Noon Mark_, 1920.
_The House of Rimmon_, 1922.
_Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York._