_But give to thine own story
Simplicity, with glory._
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett, I find this
observation: “_The thing that teases the mind over and over for years,
and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or
great, it belongs to Literature._” Miss Jewett was very conscious of the
fact that when a writer makes anything that belongs to Literature
(limiting the term here to imaginative literature, which she of course
meant), his material goes through a process very different from that by
which he makes merely a good story or a good novel. No one can exactly
define this process; but certainly persistence, survival, recurrence in
the writer’s mind, are highly characteristic of it. The shapes and
scenes that have “teased” the mind for years, when they do at last get
themselves rightly put down, make a very much higher order of writing,
and a much more costly, than the most vivid and vigorous transfer of
immediate impressions.
In some of Miss Jewett’s earlier books, “Deephaven,” “Country Byways,”
“Old Friends and New,” one can find first sketches, first impressions,
which later crystallized into the almost flawless examples of literary
art that make up these two volumes. One can, as it were, watch in
process the two kinds of making: the first, which is full of perception
and feeling but rather fluid and formless, the second, which is so
tightly built and significant in design. The design is, indeed, so
happy, so right, that it seems inevitable; the design is the story and
the story is the design. The “Pointed Fir” sketches are living things
caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them.
They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not
stories at all, but life itself.
A great many good stories were being written upon New England themes at
the same time that Miss Jewett was writing; stories that to many
contemporary readers may have seemed more interesting than hers, because
they dealt with more startling “situations,” were more heavily accented,
more elaborately costumed and posed in the studio. But most of them are
not very interesting to read and re-read to-day; they have not the one
thing that survives all arresting situations, all good writing and
clever storymaking—inherent, individual beauty; the kind of beauty we
feel when a beautiful song is sung by a beautiful voice that is exactly
suited to the song.
Pater said that every truly great drama must, in the end, linger in the
reader’s mind as a sort of ballad. Probably the same thing might be said
of every great story. It must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader
an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that
is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. A quality that one
can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over
again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience
in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden. The magnitude of
the subject-matter is not of primary importance, seemingly. An idyl of
Theocritus, concerned with sheep and goats and shade and pastures, is
to-day as much alive as the most dramatic passages of the Iliad—stirs
the reader’s feeling quite as much, perhaps, if the reader is a poet.
It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can
achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by
using his “imagination” upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The
truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he
can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and
pretentious house, looks poor and shabby in a few years. If he achieves
anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself
absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift;
is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. He fades
away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be
born again. The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt
him, in having his mind “teased” by them, in trying to get these
conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in
conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this
method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different
attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more
suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges
with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively
little that is the very flower of himself and his genius. I have tried
to gather into these two volumes the very best of Miss Jewett’s
beautiful work; the stories which, read by an eager student fifty years
from now, will give him the characteristic flavor, the spirit, the
cadence, of an American writer of the first order—and of a New England
which will then be a thing of the past.
Even in the stories that fall a little short of being Miss Jewett’s
finest, there are many delightful characters and there is much beautiful
writing. Take, for instance, the first part of “A Second Spring,” or the
chapter from “Deephaven” called “In Shadow”; or glance at this clear,
daybreak passage at the beginning of “By the Morning Boat”:
On the coast of Maine, where many green islands and salt inlets fringe
the deep-cut shore line; where balsam firs and bayberry bushes send
their fragrance far seaward, and song sparrows sing all day, and the
tide runs plashing in and out among the weedy ledges; where cowbells
tinkle on the hills and herons stand in the shady coves—on the lonely
coast of Maine stood a small gray house facing the morning light. All
the weather-beaten houses of that region face the sea apprehensively,
like the women who live in them.
Or consider the closing paragraph of “Marsh Rosemary,” which might stand
as a tender apology for the art of all new countries, which must grow
out of a thin new soil and bear its fate:
Who can laugh at my Marsh Rosemary, or who can cry, for that matter?
The gray primness of the plant is made up from a hundred colors if you
look close enough to find them. This Marsh Rosemary stands in her own
place, and holds her dry leaves and tiny blossoms steadily toward the
same sun that the pink lotus blooms for, and the white rose.
The stories chosen for these two volumes vary little in quality, though
one may have one’s favorites among them. Personally, I like “The Flight
of Betsey Lane” better than “The Hiltons’ Holiday,” though the latter
story was especially dear to Miss Jewett herself. I think I know why;
that story simply _is the look_—shy, kind, a little wistful—that shines
out at one from good country faces on remote farms; it is the look
_itself_—and therefore is a little miracle. To have got it down upon the
printed page is like bringing the tenderest of early spring flowers from
the deep wood into the hot light of summer noon without bruising its
petals. The story “William’s Wedding” at the end of the “Pointed Fir”
volume was uncompleted at the time of Miss Jewett’s death, and while all
the essentials of the picture are there, the writing is in places a
little vague, lacks the last coördinating touch of the writer’s hand.
To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his genius. A reporter
can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view,
but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the
range and character of his talent. These stories of Miss Jewett’s have
much to do with fisherfolk and seaside villages; with juniper pastures
and lonely farms, neat gray country houses and delightful, well-seasoned
old men and women. That, when one thinks of it in a flash, is New
England. I remember hearing an English actor say that until he made a
motor trip through New England he had supposed that the Americans killed
their aged in some merciful fashion, for he saw none in the cities where
he played.
There are many kinds of people in the State of Maine, and its
neighboring States, who are not in Miss Jewett’s books. There may be
Othellos and Iagos and Don Juans, but they are not highly characteristic
of the country, they do not come up spontaneously in the juniper
pastures as the everlasting does. Miss Jewett wrote of the people who
grew out of the soil and the life of the country near her heart, not
about exceptional individuals at war with their environment. This was
not a creed with her, but an instinctive preference. She once laughingly
told me that her head was full of dear old houses and dear old women,
and that when an old house and an old woman came together in her brain
with a click, she knew that a story was under way.
Born within the scent of the sea but not within sight of it, in a
beautiful old house full of strange and lovely things brought home from
all over the globe by seafaring ancestors, she spent much of her
girlhood driving about the country with her doctor father on his
professional rounds among the farms. She early learned to love her
country for what it was. What is quite as important, she saw it as it
was. She happened to have the right nature, the right temperament, to
see it so—and to understand by intuition the deeper meaning of all she
saw.
She had not only the eye, she had the ear. From childhood she must have
treasured up those pithy bits of local speech, of native idiom, which
enrich and enliven her pages. The language her people speak to each
other is a native tongue. No writer can invent it. It is made in the
hard school of experience, in communities where language has been
undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature
and experiences of the people. The “sayings” of a community, its
proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its
history, suggest its attitude toward the world, and its way of accepting
life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and
he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think
and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to heart.
Much of Miss Jewett’s delightful humor comes from her delicate and
tactful handling of this native language of the waterside and
countryside, never overdone, never pushed a shade too far; from this,
and from her own fine attitude toward her subject-matter. This attitude
in itself, though unspoken, is everywhere felt, and constitutes one of
the most potent elements of grace and charm in her stories. She had with
her own stories and her own characters a very charming relation;
spirited, gay, tactful, noble in its essence and a little arch in its
expression. In this particular relationship many of our most gifted
writers are unfortunate. If a writer’s attitude toward his characters
and his scene is as vulgar as a showman’s, as mercenary as an
auctioneer’s, vulgar and meretricious will his product remain forever.
Gilbert Murray has illustrated the two kinds of beauty in writing by a
happy similitude. There is a kind of beauty, he says, which comes from
rich ornamentation; like the splendor one might admire on a Chinese
junk, gorgeously gilded and painted, hung with rich embroideries and
tapestries. Then there is the beauty of a modern yacht, where there is
no ornamentation at all; our whole sensation of pleasure in watching a
yacht under sail comes from the fact that every line of the craft is
designed for one purpose, that everything about it furthers that
purpose, so that it has an organic, living simplicity and directness.
This, he says, is the beauty for which the Greek writers strove; it is
certainly that for which Miss Jewett strove.
If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility
of a long, long life, I would say at once, “The Scarlet Letter,”
“Huckleberry Finn,” and “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” I can think
of no others that confront time and change so serenely. The latter book
seems to me fairly to shine with the reflection of its long, joyous
future. It is so tightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with
heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows old-fashioned. I like to
think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young
student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up
this book and say, “A masterpiece!” as proudly as if he himself had made
it. It will be a message to the future, a message in a universal
language, like the tuft of meadow flowers in Robert Frost’s fine poem,
which the mower abroad in the early morning left standing, just skirted
by the scythe, for the mower of the afternoon to gaze upon and wonder
at—the one message that even the scythe of Time spares.