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There lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner. Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say: “Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published, indeed, but not read. And one of those books is Michael Forth, by Mary Johnston.
Miss Johnston was read before the publication of Michael Forth and she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. Michael Forth is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come, in place of the writer of superb historical romances like To Have and To Hold and historical novels like The Long Roll and Cease Firing, an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Melville.
“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard it,” concludes an anonymous writer.[99] The account of Mary Johnston’s adventure given by this writer is as unsatisfactory as secondhand versions of a mystical experience must necessarily be. Miss Johnston may or may not write the story; Emerson said that “the highest cannot be spoken,” and, most certainly, it cannot with adequacy be written. Miss Johnston has made some attempt to put her adventure on paper, but the result so far discourages her. In what follows I am merely trying to convey the quality of her strange experience. I have not her sanction for what I say; I had rather not make the trial. But there is really no escape. If we are to understand the growth of the writer we must have some notion of the thing that befell.