A far more distinctive study of old Spanish days is to be found in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, undoubtedly the strongest romance of the period. Mrs. Jackson was a daughter of Professor Nathan W. Fiske of Amherst, Massachusetts, and until the last decade of her life was a resident of her native New England. Not until she was thirty-five and had been bereft of husband and children did she attempt literature. Her first form of expression was poetry, the short, sharp cry of desolation, narrowly personal and feminine. Then she wrote travel sketches and juveniles and moral essays, and then an outpouring of fiction intense and sentimental. During the seventies and the early eighties her work was in all the magazines. So versatile and abundant was she that at one time Dr. Holland seriously contemplated an issue of Scribner's made up wholly of her contributions.
To almost nothing of her work, save that at the very last, did she sign her own name. She had an aversion to publicity that became really a mannerism. Her early work she signed variously or not at all, then for a time she settled upon the initials "H. H." It is no secret now that she wrote the much-speculated-upon novels Mercy Philbrick's Choice and Hetty's Strange History in the No-Name Series, and that the Saxe Holm Stories, which furnished the literary mystery of the seventies, were from her pen. They are love stories of the Lamplighter school of fiction, sentimental, over-intense, moralizing. General and colorless as most of them are, they here and there display a rare power of characterization and a sharply drawn study of background and conditions. Parts of "Farmer Bassett's Romance," with its analysis of the "pagan element" in New England character, are worthy of Mary E. Wilkins. The stories, however, belong with the old rather than the new, and have been forgotten.
It is impossible to understand "H. H." without taking into account her New Englandism. She was a daughter of the Brahmins, in many ways a counterpart of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—intensely conscientious, emotional, eager in the reform of abuses, brilliant, impetuous. While visiting California in the mid seventies she came in contact with the Indian problem and with characteristic impulsiveness set out to arouse the nation. After six months of intense work in the Lenox library of New York she published her Century of Dishonor, a bitter arraignment of the national Indian policy, and at her own expense sent a copy to every member of Congress. As a result she was appointed one of two commissioners to examine and report upon "the condition and need of the Mission Indians of California." Her report was thorough and businesslike, but it accomplished little.
Then she conceived the purpose of enlarging her area of appeal by the publication of a story—on the title page it stands Ramona. A Story. The problem preceded plot and materials and background. "You have never fully realized," she wrote only a few weeks before her death, "how for the last four years my whole heart has been full of the Indian cause—how I have felt, as the Quakers say, 'a concern' to work for it. My Century of Dishonor and Ramona are the only things I have done of which I am glad now."[116] And earlier than that she had written: "I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should 'tell' on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it; I knew I had no background—no local color."[117]
Ramona was conceived of, therefore, as a tract, as a piece of propaganda, like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Loveliness. It was written with passion, flaming hot from a woman's heart—not many have been the romances written in heat. In this one respect it may be likened to Mrs. Stowe's great work, but to call it, as so often it has been called, "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Indian," is to speak with inaptness. The book is a romance, and only a romance; its whole appeal is the appeal of romance. She had found at last her background, but it was a background that dominated and destroyed her problem. Unconsciously she surrendered herself to the charm of it until to-day the book is no more a problem novel than is the House of the Seven Gables, which also makes use of the excesses and crimes of a system.
No background could be more fitted for romance: southern California with its "delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer"; the old Spanish régime, "half barbaric, half elegant, wholly generous and free handed," "when the laws of the Indies were still the law of the land, and its old name, 'New Spain,' was an ever-present link and stimulus";[118] and over it all like a soft, old-world atmosphere the Romish church with its mystery and its medieval splendor. "It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still."[118]
It had been the plan of the author first to elicit strongly the reader's sympathy for Ramona and the Indian Alessandro, then to harrow him with the persecutions wreaked upon them because they were Indians. But the purpose fails from the start. Ramona's Indian blood is not convincing to the reader. Until the story is well under way no one of the characters except the Señora and the priest, not even Ramona herself, suspects that she is not a daughter of the old Spanish house of Ortegna. There was small trace of the Indian about her: her beauty was by no means Indian—steel blue eyes and "just enough olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it swarthy." She had been reared as a member of the patriarchal household of the Morenos, and in education and habit of life was as much Spanish as her foster brother Felipe. And Alessandro—even the author explains that Ramona "looked at him with no thought of his being an Indian—a thought there had surely been no need of her having, since his skin was not a shade darker than Felipe's." He is an Indian, we must admit, and yet an Indian who looks like a Spaniard, an Indian who has been educated carefully in the Mission like a priest, an Indian who can sing Latin hymns with marvelous sweetness and play the violin like a master, an Indian with all the characteristics of a courtly señor, more nobly Spanish in soul than even Felipe himself, the heir of the great Moreno estate—the imagination refuses to accept either of the two characters as Indians. Uncle Tom's Cabin was worked out with the blackest of negroes; its central figure was a typical slave, who died at the end a victim of the system, but as one reads Ramona one thinks of Indians only as incidental figures in the background.
It is a romance of the days of the passing of the haughty old Spanish régime. A maiden of inferior birth, or, in terms of the ordinary continental romance, a maiden whose mother was of the peasant class, is brought up side by side and on a perfect equality with the heir of the noble house. He falls in love with her, but he tells of his love neither to her nor to his proud Castilian mother, who alone in the family knows the secret of the girl's birth. Then the maiden clandestinely marries, out of her caste as all but the Señora supposes, a peasant, as her mother had been a peasant, and is driven out of the home with harshness. A tenderly reared maiden, married to poverty, forced to live for a period in squalor, bereaved at last of her husband, rescued by her old lover when she is at the lowest point of her misery, and taken back to the old home where the implacable mother has died, and there wooed until she surrenders her new future to the high-born foster brother, who, even though he has learned of her peasant strain, has never ceased to love her—that is the romance. The Indians, even Alessandro, are felt to be only incidental parts of the story. The center of the romance is the slow, faithful, thwarted, but finally triumphing, love of Felipe. The thing that really grips is not the incidental wrongs and sufferings of the Indians, but the relentlessly drawn picture of the old Señora and the last chapter where the two lovers, united at last, have left behind them the old land, no longer theirs—its deserted and melancholy Missions, its valleys and long pastures which ring now with the shouts of a conquering race, and turn their faces southward into a new world and a new and more joyous life. Then it was that Ramona blossomed into her full beauty. "A loyal and loving heart indeed it was—loyal, loving, serene. Few husbands so blest as the Señor Felipe Moreno. Sons and daughters came to bear his name. The daughters were all beautiful; but the most beautiful of them all, and, it was said, the most beloved by both father and mother, was the eldest one: the one who bore the mother's name, and was only step-daughter to the Señor—Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian." And so the romance ends, as romance should end, with all trouble and uncertainty a mere cloud in the far past.
Ramona is a bombshell that all unknowingly to its creator turned out to be not a bombshell at all, but an exquisite work of art. The intensity and the passion, which came from the viewing of abuses and the desire to work reform, wove themselves into the very substance of it. It is a blending of realism and romanticism and ethic earnestness into a rounded romance. More and more is it evident that aside from this and perhaps two or three sonnets, nothing else that its author wrote is of permanent value. Ramona, however, is alone enough to give her a place in American literature, a place indeed with the two or three best writers of American romance.