American nights entertainment
social customs.” When she first attempted “nature studies sugar-coated
with fiction” she proceeded with the same furtiveness. “I who waded
morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in air, and
crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many
misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that
if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank”--Mr. Porter
was president of the Bank of Geneva--“need not know.” Through loss
of her address at the New York end, she waited unanswered until one
day, months later, when she went into “our store” on an errand and the
storekeeper said: “I read your story in the Metropolitan last night. It
was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?” Mrs. Porter relates:
“My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I said
as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he could hear
it, ‘No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any spare copies? My
sister might want one.’”
The appearance of her first story led to an order for a second, to be
illustrated with her own photographs. She had a day, or less, to fill
the request for photographs, and kept a number of persons up all night
to pose for her. The genesis of _Freckles_, her second book, was the
discovery by lumbermen of a nest of the black vulture in the Limberlost
Swamp. Her husband, whose business had compelled him to allow her to
work alone but who was also a natural history enthusiast, insisted that
he must go with her. “A Limberlost trip at that time was not to be
joked about. The swamp had not been shorn, branded, and tamed. There
were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was
impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just
invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and
quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the
worst of such locations in the Central States.
“A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired
to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we
reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces
and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in
kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced
our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies,
mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes.
We sank ankle deep at every step, and logs we thought solid broke under
us. Our progress was a steady succession of prying and pulling each
other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed
parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the
tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its
unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and
brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
“We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and
binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost
three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take
wing.”
The idea of _Freckles_ came one day when they were leaving the swamp.
A big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and
swirling earthward, and fell in Mrs. Porter’s path. It was an eagle’s
feather, but although she instantly looked aloft, Mrs. Porter’s
well-trained eyes could not catch sight of the bird. She has always
regretted that to her story the title _Freckles_ was given; her wish
was for “The Falling Feather”--that tangible thing drifting down out of
Nowhere, just as the boy came in the story of her fashioning.
The insertion of marginal drawings of nature subjects in _Freckles_
made a distinct impression get abroad that it was simply a nature book,
with the result that three long years were required for the novel to
attain its enormous popularity. Published in 1904, the book had sold,
ten years later, 670,733 copies in the regular edition.
vi
Mrs. Porter as an author is now fairly before us and may be considered
profitably before we take a look at her newest novel, _The White Flag_.
So familiar a phenomenon calls for incisive comment. She writes her
stories “exactly as they take shape in my mind” and the excisions
are sometimes--as in the case of _Her Father’s Daughter_, which yet
remained overlong--quite heavy. The edited and published fiction is of
itself remarkable for an unrestraint, a vigorous emphasis, a masculine
zeal, with which there is generally combined freshness of feeling
and a transparent sincerity. It is this sincerity, proceeding as it
so often does from a total unconsciousness of what lies behind it,
that the popular instinct detects at once in the pages of a work of
fiction. It has, of course, nothing whatever to do with literary art,
it is never shamed or enriched by the processes of introspection, and
in this it conforms to the wilful egoism fundamental with the Northern
races in a new country and exploitable environment. The student of
psychology may be interested, for more reasons than the inheritance
of Holland ancestry, to compare the late Theodore Roosevelt and Gene
Stratton-Porter in personalities and characters. Each has swayed the
millions; each, beyond all possible question, has influenced human
lives. Neither was oppressed by the enormous responsibility attached to
such a rôle. I would not say that the one had more education than has
the other, but their educations were different.
“To spend time writing a book based wholly upon human passion and
its outworking I would not,” exclaims Mrs. Porter, to whom art is an
expression of flower-beds and children a-plenty, censored books and
human lives lived on sober and industrious models. And she compromised
on a book “into which I put all the nature work that came naturally
within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination and
straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known intimately,
folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I was familiar.”
In simple justice it should be pointed out that she insisted upon
alternating nature books and novels, although far more money could be
earned by writing only fiction.
Just as the child was taken from the fields, shoed and harnessed in
“Sunday clothes” and put into school, so the naturalist was torn,
though somewhat more gently and gradually, from her proper enjoyments
and placed in the trammels of book-length fiction. What wonder that she
revolted?--but the rebellion of _Picciola_, though ending in personal
triumph, was not the end of school; and the rebellion of the novelist,
though rewarded with a tremendous personal triumph, did not end her
ordeal of novel-writing. What people like Mrs. Porter never achieve
is a successful rebellion from, within, themselves. Something more
powerful than they quells their self-insurrections; they go on; money
seems worth while for what can be done with it to give happiness and
widen opportunity for others; the task is good--why? It is a task;
something that must be done very thoroughly. The father, Mark Stratton,
to whom his daughter was so observably devoted, gave her a set of
ideals that were to lift her up, like strong links of iron, and then to
turn into rigid chains. She who owes so much to him owes to him more
than she has ever suspected, a compulsion put upon her from within
herself, the final reward or fate of every worshipper.
She has tried to escape. She has written poetry. There was _The
Fire Bird_; and lately there has been _Euphorbia_, a long narrative
published serially to the astonishment of readers of Good Housekeeping.
The subject of _Euphorbia_ is interesting--a woman to whom marriage
brings non-fulfilment, whose husband tramples and uproots the
red-and-white wild flower she loves. When at length the man dies,
the mother has one fearful moment in which her child reaches toward
a bit of euphorbia with she knows not which intention. But he loves
it. Escape! It is not necessary to make as much of this as the
psychoanalyst would make of it, nor, perhaps, to miss the mark so
widely. “My life has been fortunate,” Mrs. Porter admits, “in one
glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods.
For every bad man and woman I have known I have met, lived with, and
am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly
clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high
ideals, and it is _upon the lives of these that I base what I write_.”
There is a puzzling fierceness in the attacks she launches on those
who write otherwise; she is vulnerable somewhere in this connection
or she would show less heat and animosity. And, to some extent, her
active resentment is justified, for she has had a heavy experience
of misleading praise and some experience of hypocrisy. I remember an
occasion upon which she wrote to me, with scornful inflections, to lay
before me the evidence in the case of a certain well-known writer who
had enthusiastically praised her work, though “not for publication.” It
was a course which, like herself, I should join in condemning; but was
it so much of a matter? Did, could, the voice of a single one, count
for much where she had heard already the open voices of praise from so
many thousands? And if it was so, then why?
Who answers that will make possibly the largest single contribution
to the psychology of literature, for this identical question finally
arises in the case of writers great and small.
vii
Never, perhaps, has Mrs. Porter been more herself than in her latest
book, _The White Flag_; although _Her Father’s Daughter_, as originally
written, was overgrown. Both these books are autobiography--_Her
Father’s Daughter_ of the heart, _The White Flag_ of mind and memory.
If Mrs. Porter has but one story to tell, no one has succeeded in
telling it so often with such freshness of feeling or such repeated
success in the matter of readers. _The White Flag_ is the story of
Mahala Spellman, daughter and only child of Mahlon and Elizabeth
Spellman. The opening scenes are laid in the Indiana of the 1880s.
The village is called Ashwater. For what seems an excessive time our
attention is concentrated upon Elizabeth as a little girl and Junior
Moreland as a little boy. Nothing could be more typical of Mrs. Porter
than the attention she bestows upon her heroine in childhood--the exact
detail of Mahala’s dress, the recorded precision of her unfailingly
correct behaviour. If there is something unnatural about the child,
there is everything natural to a child in Mrs. Porter’s fiction.
In picturing the richest man in the village Mrs. Porter blackens
his villainy to a pitch where Mr. Moreland is neither more nor less
credible than some of the characters in, let us say, _Way Down East_.
Mahala, in ensuing chapters, refuses Junior Moreland in the face of the
fact that his father could save her father from ruin. Her father fails,
and, broken, dies. Her mother becomes an invalid. When finally Mahala
can truthfully say that all is lost except self-respect and courage,
a deadly blow is levelled at her self-respect. Some money is stolen.
Circumstantial evidence accuses Mahala, and Ashwater shuns her.
It will not be supposed that Mrs. Porter fails to raise up a champion
in her heroine’s hour of need. All along we have been in touch,
in close touch, with Jason. We knew him as a boy, apparently the
washerwoman’s son. We know him as a young man, springing to Mahala’s
relief. There is no real reason why, in such a situation and with two
such principal characters, Mrs. Porter should not work miracles. She
does.... Of course her point is that the virtue, goodness and courage
of Mahala and Jason earn their own ample rewards; and the thousands who