Her unit of measure is short. It is not hers to trace the slow development of a soul through a long period; it is hers to deal with climactic episodes, with the one moment in a repressed life when the repression gives way and the long pent-up forces sweep all before them, as in "The Revolt of Mother," or "A Village Singer." Her effects she accomplishes with the fewest strokes possible. Like the true New Englander that she is, she will waste not a word. In her story "Life-Everlasting," Luella—the author's miserliness with words withholds her other name—has gone to carry a pillow to the farmhouse of Oliver Weed. She wonders at the closed and deserted appearance of the premises.
Luella heard the cows low in the barn as she opened the kitchen door. "Where—did all that—blood come from?" said she.
She began to breathe in quick gasps; she stood clutching her pillow, and looking. Then she called: "Mr. Weed! Mr. Weed! Where be you? Mis' Weed! Is anything the matter? Mis' Weed!" The silence seemed to beat against her ears. She went across the kitchen to the bedroom. Here and there she held back her dress. She reached the bedroom door, and looked in.
Luella pressed back across the kitchen into the yard. She went out into the yard and turned towards the village. She still carried the life-everlasting pillow, but she carried it as if her arms and that were all stone. She met a woman whom she knew, and the woman spoke; but Luella did not notice her; she kept on. The woman stopped and looked after her.
Luella went to the house where the sheriff lived, and knocked. The sheriff himself opened the door. He was a large, pleasant man. He began saying something facetious about her being out calling early, but Luella stopped him.
"You'd—better go up to the—Weed house," said she, in a dry voice. "There's some—trouble."
That is all we are told as to what Luella saw, though it comes out later that the man and his wife had been murdered by the hired man—how we know not. There is a primitiveness about the style, its gasping shortness of sentence, its repetitions like the story told by a child, its freedom from all straining for effect, its bareness and grimness, that stamps it as a genuine human document; not art but life itself.
For external nature she cares little. Her backgrounds are meager; the human element alone interests her. There is no Mary E. Wilkins country as there is a Sarah Orne Jewett country; there are only Mary E. Wilkins people. A somber group they are—exceptions, perhaps, grim survivals, distortions, yet absolutely true to one narrow phase of New England life. Her realism as she depicts these people is as inexorable as Balzac's. "A Village Lear" would have satisfied even Maupassant. Not one jot is bated from the full horror of the picture; it is driven to its pitiless end without a moment of softening. No detail is omitted. It is Père Goriot reduced to a chapter. A picture like this from "Louisa" grips one by its very pitilessness:
There was nothing for supper but some bread and butter and weak tea, though the old man had his dish of Indian-meal porridge. He could not eat much solid food. The porridge was covered with milk and molasses. He bent low over it, and ate large spoonfuls with loud noises. His daughter had tied a towel around his neck as she would have tied a pinafore on a child. She had also spread a towel over the tablecloth in front of him, and she watched him sharply lest he should spill his food.
"I wish I could have somethin' to eat that I could relish the way he does that porridge and molasses," said she [the mother]. She had scarcely tasted anything. She sipped her weak tea laboriously.
Louisa looked across at her mother's meager little figure in its neat old dress, at her poor small head bending over the teacup, showing the wide parting in the thin hair.
"Why don't you toast your bread, mother?" said she. "I'll toast it for you."
"No, I don't want it. I'd jest as soon have it this way as any. I don't want no bread, nohow. I want somethin' to relish—a herrin', or a little mite of cold meat, or somethin'. I s'pose I could eat as well as anybody if I had as much as some folks have. Mis' Mitchell was sayin' the other day that she didn't believe but what they had butcher's meat up to Mis' Nye's every day in the week. She said Jonathan he went to Wolfsborough and brought home great pieces in a market-basket every week."
She is strong only in short efforts. She has small power of construction: even Pembroke may be resolved into a series of short stories. The setness of Barnabas Thayer is prolonged until it ceases to be convincing: we lose sympathy; he becomes a mere Ben Jonson "humor" and not a human being. The story is strong only in its episodes—the cherry party of the tight-fisted Silas Berry, the midnight coasting of the boy Ephraim, the removal of Hannah to the poorhouse, the marriage of Rebecca—but these touch the very heart of New England. Because of their artlessness they are the perfection of art.
In her later period Miss Wilkins became sophisticated and self-conscious. The acclaim of praise that greeted her short stories tempted her to essay a larger canvas in wider fields of art. She had awakened to a realization of the bareness of her style and she sought to bring to her work ornament and the literary graces. She experimented with verse and drama and juveniles, with long novels and romances, and even with tales of New Jersey life. In vain. Her decline began with Madelon, which is improbable and melodramatic, and it continued through all her later work. She wrote problem novels like The Portion of Labor, long and sprawling and ineffective, and stories like By the Light of the Soul, as impossible and as untrue to life as a young country girl's dream of city society. As a novelist and as a depicter of life outside of her narrow domain, she has small equipment. She stands for but one thing: short stories of the grim and bare New England social system; sketches austere and artless which limn the very soul of a passing old régime; photographs which are more than photographs: which are threnodies.
VI
The last phase of the school may be studied in the work of Alice Brown, representative of the influences at the end of the century. The late recognition of her fiction—she was born in 1857—which placed her a decade after Miss Wilkins who was born in 1862, compelled her to serve an apprenticeship like that of Howells, and subjected her work to the new shaping influences of the nineties. When she did gain recognition in 1895, she brought a finished art. She had mastered the newly worked-out science of the short story, she had studied the English masters—chiefest of all Stevenson, whose influence so dominated the closing century.
She was not a realist as Miss Wilkins was a realist. The New England dialect stories of Meadow Grass were not put forth to indicate the final field that she had chosen for her art: they were experiments just as all the others of her earlier efforts were experiments. Of her first seven books, Fools of Nature, with its background of spiritualism, was a serious attempt at serious fiction with a thesis worthy of a George Eliot, Mercy Warren and Robert Louis Stevenson were biographical and critical studies, By Oak and Thorn was a collection of travel essays, The Road to Castelay was a collection of poems, and The Day of His Youth perhaps a romance.