Books by Alice Hegan Rice
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, 1901.
Lovey Mary, 1903.
Sandy, 1905.
Captain June, 1907.
Mr. Opp, 1909.
A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill, 1912.
The Honorable Percival.
Calvary Alley, 1917.
Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories, 1918.
Quin, 1921.
Published by the Century Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ALICE DUER MILLER
IF Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of distinction which our high critical minds rave about.
She can go deeply—and deftly—into the minds of her people and bring out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there. But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly) about the thoughts and emotions of her characters—with those we have no patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a good deal of sympathy.
Ladies Must Live is full of clever conversation; so is The Happiest Time of Their Lives. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them half-admirable because they say adroit things—or say things adroitly. This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs. Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do so?
Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too low voltage for that. And indeed in The Happiest Time of Their Lives we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent, affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill successfully the rôle of tigress tamers!
Yes, the great defect of Mrs. Miller’s stories is that we seldom care to know the people in them, the Mrs. Farrons, the Nancy Almars, nor even the Christine Fenimers and the innocent but tiresomely insipid Mathilde Severances. We will occasionally consent to meet them and watch them perform (better company being lacking at the moment) for one main reason and only one: the skill with which they are brought before us and there put through their tricks. And if our very figure of speech seems to have in it something derogatory, to imply that these persons are not much better than puppets, the implication is not without an honest significance. Moving among artificialities, surrounded by polite and transparent deceptions, it would be too much not to expect these “society” folk to partake of their environment. They are wholly mechanistic, to go to metaphysics for a suitable term; they are precious puppets and nothing more; thanks to Mrs. Miller’s skill the strings which control them are mostly invisible, but the jerky motion of them gives the secret away.
Having been as honest about this as we know how to be, let us turn to the first pages of Ladies Must Live and cull a few samples of Mrs. Miller’s writing, samples which will convey to those who have not read her some idea of her gift of epigram and facile and beautiful characterization:
“Mrs. Ussher ... turned toward hidden social availability very much as the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring.... She was unaware of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction.... During the short period of their existence, Mrs. Ussher gave to these friendships the utmost loyalty and devotion. She agonized over the financial, domestic and romantic troubles of her friends; she sat up till the small hours, talking to them like a schoolgirl; during the height of their careers she organized plots for their assistance; and even when their stars were plainly on the decline, she would often ask them to lunch, if she happened to be alone.
“Many people, we know, are prone to make friends with the rich and great. Mrs. Ussher’s genius consisted in having made friends with them before they were either.”
Nancy Almar’s husband says to her:
“‘I hope you’ll explain to them why I could not come.’
“‘You mean that I would not have gone if you had?’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘that I’m called South on business.’
“‘I shan’t tell them that, but I’ll tell them you say so, if you like.’”
She was as good as her word—she usually was.
“‘Would any one like to hear Roland’s explanation of why he is not with us?’
“‘Had it anything to do with his not being asked?’ said a pale young man; and as soon as he had spoken he glanced hastily round the circle to ascertain how his remark had succeeded.
“So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in fact, though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with her again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He had been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a day or two before, she had observed that underlying his socialistic theories was an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell his bejeweled hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh, twenty times more, he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his friends the bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised him, and where she despised she made no secret of the fact.
“‘Not asked, Mr. Wickham!’ she said. ‘I assume my husband is asked wherever I am,’ and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint smile: ‘One’s husband is always asked, isn’t he?’
“‘Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come,’ said another speaker.”
Even from so slight an excerpt we think it will be plain that in the art of characterization and in the business of writing dialogue Mrs. Miller has nothing to learn. She is really one of the most hopeful prospects in American literature to-day and the great hope for her and for readers lies in the possibility—almost a probability—that she will abandon the very restricted and unimportant milieu of her recent novels for better fields. It is simple honesty to recognize that The Happiest Time of Their Lives holds out a great promise that she will do this. Such persons as Pete Wayne and his mother, and even the rather pathetic grandfather Mr. Lanley (of the New York Lanleys) are “real,” that is, members of the human community and not sickening products of the social hothouses. If Mrs. Miller will do a novel in which most of the men and most of the women are “people”—regular people or irregular people, great or small, does not matter; but they must be people—we in America will be the first to acclaim her.
Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated. This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where most of the others aspire to.