IV
The direct opposite of F. Marion Crawford, in literary belief, as in background and object, was Margaretta Wade Deland, who came into literary prominence at the close of the eighties. Unlike Crawford, she was a poet, a realist, a depicter of life within a narrow provincial area, and, moreover, a worker in the finer materials of life, the problems of the soul.
The essentials of her biography are few. She was born and reared at Manchester, a little Pennsylvania village, now swallowed up by the great manufacturing city of Allegheny; she went at sixteen to New York to study drawing and design at Cooper Institute; and after her graduation she became instructor in design at the Girls' Normal College, New York City. In 1880 she was married to Lorin F. Deland and removed to Boston, where she has since resided. In 1886 she issued her first book—a collection of poems entitled An Old Garden, and two years later John Ward, Preacher, a novel that attracted instant and widespread attention because of its likeness in theme to Robert Elsmere, then at the height of its enormous vogue. Since that time she has published four other major novels: Sidney, Philip and His Wife, The Awakening of Helena Richie, and The Iron Woman, and many short stories, notably the collections entitled The Wisdom of Fools, Old Chester Tales, and Dr. Lavendar's People.
By nature and early environment Mrs. Deland was serious and contemplative. The little Pennsylvania town, later to be immortalized as Old Chester, during her childhood was a place of traditions, a bit of antiquity amid the newness about it, of well-bred old English and Scotch and Irish families with deep religious prejudices and with narrow yet wholesome and kindly ideals. She was reared in a religious atmosphere—her father was a Presbyterian and her mother an Episcopalian, the combination so disastrous in John Ward, Preacher. She lived amid books, all of which she might read save only the novels, a prohibition that proved to be a good one, for when at last she was led to write fiction of her own, she went about it with no conventional preconceptions. It made for freshness, for originality, of concentration upon life rather than upon form and the tradition of the elders. It was an environment that cultivated the poet as well as the Puritan within her, the sensitiveness for Nature, the deeps of love and life that were to find expression in a note like this, recorded in her first volume:
O distant Christ, the crowded, darkening years
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me:
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee,
But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears.
My groping hands would touch thy garment's hem,
Would find some token thou art walking near;
Instead, they clasp but empty darkness drear,
And no diviner hands reach out to them.
My straining eyes, O Christ, but long to mark
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet,
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet,
Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark.
It was, therefore, but natural that her work should be both serious and ethical and that it should be touched with beauty. In John Ward, Preacher, she took as her theme the revolt of a soul against the infallibilities of a system of belief. It is not necessarily a religious novel or yet a purpose novel. The primary motif of Robert Elsmere is theological and doctrinal discussion. It is religious polemic made attractive by being cast into story form and as such it deserves the anathema of Crawford, but in Mrs. Deland's novel the human interest is paramount. Religion is the force that acts upon two lives, just as jealousy might have been taken or misdirected love or any other human dynamic, and the novel is the record of the reactions under the stress.
So with all her novels. The theme is the destruction or the redemption of a soul, the abasement or the rehabilitation of a character through some immaterial force applied from within. She deals with great ethical and sociological forces: heredity, as in her novelette The Hands of Esau; divorce, as in The Iron Woman; the compelling power of love, as in Sidney. Her primary aim is not, as with Crawford and Harte, simply to entertain; it is rather to expose the human soul to its own view, to show it its limitations and its dangers, that the soul may be purged through fear of what may be—the aim indeed of the Greek drama. Her equipment for the work was complete. To feminine tenderness and insight she added a depth of view and an analysis that is masculine. She was a poet too, but a poet with the severity of form and the moving realism of the short story writer. Two of her novels, The Awakening of Helena Richie and The Iron Woman, have not been surpassed in construction and in moving power by any other writer of the period.
Her Old Chester Tales also, with their central figure Dr. Lavendar, have the elements that make for permanence. They are really without time or place. Old Chester undoubtedly is in western Pennsylvania, the author's native town, but it might be New England as well. The tales deal with universal types and with universal motifs with a broadness and a sympathy and a literary art that raises them into the realm of the rarer classics. From them emerges the figure of Dr. Lavendar to place beside even Adams and Primrose. Place is not dwelt upon; humanity is all. They are not so much stories as fragments of actual life touched with the magic of poetry and of ethic vision. From that worldly social area of life presented to us by such latter-day novelists as Crawford and Edith Wharton and Robert Chambers they are as far removed as is a fashionable Newport yacht, with its club-centered men and cigarette-smoking women, from the simple little hamlet among the hills.