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Carl Van Doren’s words about Miss Johnston, in his Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920, that she brings to the legends and traditions of the Old Dominion no fresh interpretations, have been made obsolete by Croatan, and are, of course, so far as they are made applicable to legends in general, denied by her last half dozen novels. It is most true, though, that Miss Johnston is an historian and a scholar in her tastes. To the series of fifty volumes interlocking to form a complete American history, and published by the Yale University Press under the general title, The Chronicles of America, Miss Johnston contributed the volume on Pioneers of the Old South. The book deals with Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia as well, but Virginia is, of course, the principal subject. The period is 1607-1735 and Miss Johnston’s short account is an admirable piece of writing, concise, accurate, uncontroversial; alive with crisp human portraits and touched with poetry and imagination in its occasional descriptive passages.
Miss Johnston’s new novel, to be published late in 1924, under the title, The Slave Ship, is a story of the American slave trade in the eighteenth century. David Scott, a prisoner after the battle of Culloden, is sold into slavery on the American plantations. The cruelty with which he is treated hardens his conscience, so that when he escapes he goes without much hesitation or scruple into a slave ship and then into slave trading. The novel follows with intensity and compassion the career which takes him from this most abominable traffic to an understanding of what it means. The novel is, therefore, a story (like Foes) of one who journeyed on the road to Damascus. But I recall no story which pictures with more vividness and power the Middle Passage of infamous memory. The Slave Ship is notable, too, for the greater suavity of Miss Johnston’s prose style; the “a’s,” “an’s,” and “the’s” are recovered and there are less tangible changes—all for the better.
“Nothing can be done but by being greater than the thing to be done” is a piece of wisdom uttered in Miss Johnston’s fable, “The Return of Magic.”[104] A writer is, or should be, capable of growth in two directions—as an artisan and as a source of emotion to be communicated in terms of beauty. The number who show growth in either fashion is not large; the number who grow both ways is very small. Five years ago I had occasion to survey the work of thirty-five American women novelists, three of whom have since died. One or two others have produced no new work in the period since. With the most liberal disposition toward the thirty or so others, it does not seem to me that more than a half dozen show growth either as writers or artists. Possibly three have produced work in these five years indicative of a mind enlarging as the hand serving it has grown more certain. Mary Johnston is one of the three.[105]