Books by Mary Johnston
Prisoners of Hope, 1898.
To Have and to Hold, 1900.
Audrey, 1902.
Sir Mortimer, 1904.
The Goddess of Reason, 1907.
Lewis Rand, 1908.
The Long Roll, 1911.
Cease Firing, 1912.
Hagar, 1913.
The Witch, 1914.
The Fortunes of Garin, 1915.
The Wanderers, 1917.
Foes, 1918.
Michael Forth, 1919.
Sweet Rocket, 1920.
Silver Cross, 1922.
1492, 1922.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes, Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
CHAPTER XII
CORRA HARRIS
THEY rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this place.
“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.
“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty, but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees upon women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from decency and thrift.
“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world. When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”
Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the same sentence. From the day when the first installment of A Circuit Rider’s Wife appeared in the Saturday Evening Post it was manifest that America had a new writer of distinction.
The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in the room where a child is being born.
Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable education—for a girl.
At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the material from which she was able later to construct A Circuit Rider’s Wife. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, published in the Sunny South (owned by the Constitution) a story of hers called Darwinkle’s Dream. It was a gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to “give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes; nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!
In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems accepted by the Independent magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she became a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and with the publication of A Circuit Rider’s Wife reached her deserved place. Her husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.
Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it. From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the picture:
“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset. Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway—cozy apartments done all in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow contributors to the Saturday Evening Post.]
“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.
“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’ said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the blossoms; they look like butterflies.”
“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go together.’
“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’”
At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.
“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this paragon he said $100!”
We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book In Search of a Husband, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows, music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”
Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter began:
“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:—‘He has never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of the Potential mood.”
This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s character drawing.
It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is—a man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”—that most distinguishes Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on eugenics.
“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art, literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce. This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.
“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:
“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of everything concerning sex. Of everything—destroy their curiosity, you know.’
“‘How will you do it?’ I asked.
“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the means we are employing.’
“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is nature’s method.’
“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our criminals.’
“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I doubt if it saves them.
“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical rating may be.”
When A Circuit Rider’s Widow was published it was interpreted in some quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South; there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon reading her very direct statement:
“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central figure in A Circuit Rider’s Widow] as the preacher to come who will deliver this church from what is almost a military system of government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”
The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against Germany.
Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a criticism of life—which literature is sometimes held to be. In the valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her book, The Co-Citizens, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into The Co-Citizens and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the novel.
No better close for this chapter than its opening—Mrs. Harris’s own words! She is picturing her life—and quite as vividly herself—to Isma Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home:
“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself.
“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together.
“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb—John, who didn’t know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.
“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed—such a dingy little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots of the great trees.
“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead are from their transgressions.”