Now we have come to it. In the first place, Mr. Lincoln shows the quick faculty evidenced from the outset by Mary Roberts Rinehart of getting the humour on every page. Mrs. Rinehart has not always practised with that intention, but Mr. Lincoln has never neglected the rapid shift of the reader’s mood. To insure it, he does not hesitate to sacrifice something of his more important scenes, making them if necessary less dramatic. The common-sensicality running through his stories is a solvent to drama and a feeder to the spirit of fun; if it makes it impossible for his story ever to leave the ground, it also kills to a large extent the language, or lingo, of sentimentality so-called, that terrible jargon in which so much popular fiction is sugared and preserved. Mr. Lincoln pickles his stories in this salty common-sensibleness, rather—a breath of Cape Cod air and a dip in the ocean brine. All his “atmosphere” is as matter of fact as a dip in the ocean, and the temperature is much more unvarying and satisfactory ... unless you may find it tepid. He is a funmaker, resorting without hesitation to such crude and cheerful devices as the spree in which Henry Ward Beecher Payson breaks his “Sunday best,” or cork, leg. And yet fun warms the heart. We laugh inanely, and afterward we have the feeling of having laughed inanely, a sense of a slight immoderacy or excess, of a mild dissipation which perhaps has not really done us any good (though the harm be passing and inconsiderable); but when the moment comes we are ready to laugh again.
vii
A final note on that debateable Yankee shrewdness, then....
Can we not find its fruitful exercise in Mr. Lincoln’s own case? I think we can. Here was a man of around thirty whose observation was keen, whose caution was used to direct him in a proper self-committal, whose own personal sense of humour was of a sufficient dryness to keep him from the easy trails of self-deception. Just as his friend, Captain Lorenzo Baker, of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was able to discern in the casual remarks of a West Indian the commercial possibilities of the yellow banana, so Joseph C. Lincoln could perceive from a token or two the personal possibilities of Cape Cod as he could put it on paper. And acuteness, or, as the Yankee says, ‘cuteness, having done its work, that other trait of Yankee shrewdness, the caution which restrains and then goes in headlong, was brought into play. Mr. Lincoln committed himself wholeheartedly to his fictional enterprise. He put all his money, or rather, the energy which was his equivalent for money, on the bob-tailed nag—in a little sloop which was his own boat rather than in somebody else’s two-masted schooner. The rest was plain sailing and persistence that could have been fatally spoiled if that inner dryness of wit and clearness of perception had ever failed him. But he never forgot that it was his own little sloop, the sailing of which must be kept within the manœuvres she could execute. He has never, for example, tried to write the great American novel which, consciously or unconsciously, has brought up into the wind, all sails shaking and way lost, the craft of more than one of his fellow sailors. A Yankee and shrewd, earning many rewards, including that of a very widespread affection.
Books by Joseph C. Lincoln
1902 Cape Cod Ballads
1904 Cap’n Eri
1905 Partners of the Tide
1906 Mr. Pratt
1907 The “Old Home House”
1908 Cy Whittaker’s Place
1909 Our Village
1909 Keziah Coffin
1910 The Depot Master
1911 Cap’n Warren’s Wards
1911 The Woman-Haters
1912 The Postmaster
1912 The Rise of Roscoe Paine
1913 Mr. Pratt’s Patients
1914 Cap’n Dan’s Daughter
1914 Kent Knowles: Quahaug
1915 Thankful’s Inheritance
1916 Mary-’Gusta
1917 Extricating Obadiah
1918 “Shavings”
1919 The Portygee
1921 Galusha the Magnificent
1922 Fair Harbor
1923 Doctor Nye of North Ostable
All fiction, except Cape Cod Ballads (verse) and Our Village (sketches of life and people on the Cape).
Sources on Joseph C. Lincoln
Joseph Crosby Lincoln. Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.
Joseph C. Lincoln’s America, by Hildegarde Hawthorne. Booklet. D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.