The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Kate Douglas Wiggin

The Birds’ Christmas Carol, 1886.
The Story of Patsy, 1889.
A Summer in a Canyon, 1889.
Timothy’s Quest, 1890.
The Story Hour, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.)
Children’s Rights, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.)
A Cathedral Courtship and Penelope’s English Experiences, 1893.
Polly Oliver’s Problem, 1893.
The Village Watch-Tower, 1895.
Froebel’s Gifts, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.)
Froebel’s Occupations, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
Kindergarten Principles and Practice, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
Marm Lisa, 1896.
Nine Love Songs, And A Carol, 1896. (Music by Mrs. Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.)
Penelope’s Progress, 1898.
Penelope’s Scottish Experiences, 1900.
Penelope’s Irish Experiences, 1901.
The Diary of a Goose Girl, 1902.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1903.
The Affair at the Inn, 1904. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
Rose o’ the River, 1905.
New Chronicles of Rebecca, 1907.
Finding a Home, 1907.
The Flag Raising, 1907.
The Old Peabody Pew, 1907.
Susanna and Sue, 1909.
Robinetta, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
Mother Carey’s Chickens, 1911.
A Child’s Journey With Dickens, 1912.
The Story of Waitstill Baxter, 1913.
Penelope’s Postscripts, 1915.
The Romance of a Christmas Card, 1916.
Golden Numbers, 1917.
The Posy Ring, 1917.
Ladies in Waiting, 1919.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

CHAPTER XI
MARY JOHNSTON

“DIDN’T you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary Johnston’s novel, The Long Roll, “how everybody really belongs in a book?”

It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these twenty years, ever since Prisoners of Hope announced to the world the advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for.

She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the ending of the first chapter of To Have and To Hold? A shipload of maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.

“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’

“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”

Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of Lewis Rand. Rand has killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:

“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’

“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand] gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason——’

“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’

“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said he must have sleep.’”

The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of The Long Roll:

“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the Speaker’s Chair.

“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair, in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.

“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always said was just this: “Press forward!”’ He passed on.

“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.

“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’”

So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it is of the essence of drama that things go on. A play or a book which leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various events—bitter, happy, tragic and glorious—marking so many stages of an unending record. The last words of The Long Roll are worthy of the greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.

The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is one element of her genius—perhaps the most important. The second element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative imagination” is.

If you will turn to her book The Wanderers you will find that it is a series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?

Well, we can’t tell you how it is done, for if that could be told the manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such chapters as open The Wanderers. All we can be certain of is this, that Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a primitive woman of the treefolk—so much was the first imaginative step. And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his author.

All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense, she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest—an almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of poignancy and the art of touching to tears—these are to be had for taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True, but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!

Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.

The Long Roll starts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier, the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country. The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar.

The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand. Major Johnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought home where, a year later, her mother died.

Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that she can keep house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however.

Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel, Prisoners of Hope, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park. To Have and To Hold, appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain resort. The first draft was written with a lead pencil and revised with exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten.

Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father indubitably did a great deal to make possible The Long Roll and Cease Firing, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times. He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited.

In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large, airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begun to dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia, where she went to work upon The Long Roll and Cease Firing, the rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were busied to portray.

Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt, springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland; Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through. Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent flame.

With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied there was at one time occupied by General Lee. Lewis Rand was written on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and “The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot! Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for its owner, making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home.

There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone. Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland. Flowers execute the processional of the seasons.

Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is maintained without abatement.

In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of leaded glass about the room protect books of every description—history, philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism—a battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the walls and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the author.

Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the Book News Monthly of March, 1911.

“Prisoners of Hope, To Have and to Hold and Audrey are full of allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church, representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.

“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full flush of her loveliness.

“Lewis Rand is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond, where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand and her husband from their country residence near the State University, in Charlottesville.”

There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in Lewis Rand, was the mother of Fauquier Cary in The Long Roll. The Churchills, the Carys and others should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks, Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.

It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of Hagar in 1913 all her work had been historical and had consisted, with the exception of The Goddess of Reason, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only departure from this being her first two books. Prisoners of Hope (1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; To Have and To Hold (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in 1621. Then came Audrey (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of Col. William Byrd and Lewis Rand (1908) which pictured the Virginia of Jefferson. The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) gave us the State during the Civil War. There was another romance, Sir Mortimer, between Audrey and Lewis Rand, and before The Goddess of Reason, which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the Book News Monthly of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become The Goddess of Reason was to blame. The Goddess of Reason gave her dramatic genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us The Long Roll and Cease Firing within the next five years.

Although in The Witch, her next novel after Hagar, our writer went back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of Lewis Rand and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and joy of living.” The Fortunes of Garin (1915) was pure romance and adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl whom he rescued from peril years before. Of The Wanderers (1917) we have already spoken. Foes (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque story is superbly told in most poetic prose.

How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by two examples from The Long Roll. Illustrated, we say, not shown in the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the coward:

“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He was wedged between comrades—Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes—he could not fall out, drop behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking; moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp zzzz-ip! zzzzzz-ip! Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two men were running—running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd! before I’d be sech a fool——’ A shell came, and burst—burst between the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling. Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him, and vomited.”

We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:

“First Brigade headquarters was a tree—an especially big tree-a little removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders—down came reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’ instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude, monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy of the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said—in fact, they did say—that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”

Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little study you may see several things which go far to explain the effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.

For example:—

Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice again in the account of Stonewall Jackson’s funeral how the focus is narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is directed to a single point.

Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as he knows its tragic sorrow.

Glance again at the ending of Lewis Rand. It is quiet but in the unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and lose himself from the secret terror.

Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no consciousness that could be recognized as such.

The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of their verdict on him—“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”

. . . . . .

It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies before the publication of The Long Roll, when she had only some six books to her credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.