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It was bound to affect her writing, and perhaps the first traces of it are in The Witch (1914), but it was clearly apparent in Foes (1918), where, as I have said before this, “upthrusting through the surface of a stirring historical adventure, we had the evidence of the author’s breathless personal adventure.” It is one thing to be by temperament a mystic; quite another to become, as Miss Johnston had now become, a mystic by the witness of some inner illumination. In some cases the change has brought with it a proselyting spirit of great fervor; in Miss Johnston’s there was a complete absence of any such missionary zeal. All the same she could not go on writing novels in which the picture of some bygone time was idealized simply for the sake of a charming picture. Foes has been correctly described as “a dramatic story of eighteenth century Scotland with a lasting feud, a long chase, and a crescendo of hatred and peril.” But it is also a story of sublime forgiveness, as much so as John Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy. In Michael Forth (1919) and Sweet Rocket (1920) there was, as in certain novels of Herman Melville’s, notably Pierre, more transcendentalism than story. It was inevitable that she should be inarticulate for a while, but it was only for a while. For in 1922 appeared her story, Silver Cross, a tale of England in the time of Henry VII. and of two rival religious establishments. Silver Cross was both beautiful and intelligible. For the prose style I like best Stewart Edward White’s word, “stippling.” It has also been said of what was to be her mode of utterance for a book or two: “Written in a clipped sort of prose stripped of ‘a’ and ‘an’ and ‘the’ and other particles as well as articles, the text is a highly mannered English replete with cadenced sentences and animated by nervous rhythms. The very diction bears poetic surcharges, and the whole effect on the reader is to distill in his soul a delicate enchantment or else to exasperate him to death.”[101] The core of the tale is irony, irony directed at religious bigotry and religious intolerance; it lies there at the base of the flower and from it the reader may make his own bitter honey. Or, if he have no stomach for that, he may take his satisfaction and pleasure in the rich sound of ecclesiastical trumpets, the green England, the pageant of a simple world unrolled before him.
In the same year with Silver Cross Miss Johnston’s 1492 was published. The book is, of course, the story of Columbus, told with the accurate historical coloring and the poetic feeling one would expect of the author; but it uses a technical device which, while not novel, is deserving of attention from the analyst of fiction. This is the employment as narrator of the story of Jayme de Marchena, a fictional person, represented as a Jew who has been banished from Spain under the decree of exile promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella. Miss Johnston makes of him a man of philosophical mind, an “obscure Spinoza” whose thoughts are a constant commentary on the voyage from Palos and the succeeding voyages. Thus, without distorting history or creating an imaginary portrait of the Genoese sailor and discoverer, the book (in form a novel) gives us one of the great events in human affairs in a perspective that neither history nor biography affords. Again what we have is the vision of one standing on a hilltop, alone and yet not alone—of one who is at the same instant standing in the night watches on the deck of a caravel and listening to the cry from the man on lookout....