Opportunities lost? Ah, but one of the grand advantages of the literary investment over the money opportunity is right here: Your new and worthwhile book and your old and seasoned book are, alike, always offering.

16. Naturalist vs. Novelist:
Gene Stratton-Porter

i

WITH Gene Stratton-Porter, the quality of enthusiasm is not strained, it droppeth as torrential rains from the heaven of her state of mind. Anyone acquainted with Mrs. Porter and regarding her with positive affection is certain to be subject to the recurring notion that she has, after all, confused heaven with earth. It is not that she finds nothing on earth to contemn, but that she finds the same objects for perpetual glorification. The rest of us live our wavering lives in a flux of emotions, which we commonly mistake for accomplishments of our intellects. We glorify this at one age, and that at another. Mrs. Porter, from the beginning, has worshipped the same pantheon.

A pantheon it is, owing to her possibly inherited passion for the works of nature. Her idea of art is as clear-cut as the ordinary mortal’s notion of property. Perhaps clearer, since the ordinary mortal often finds difficulty in distinguishing the forms of property, whether real, personal, or mixed (as lawyers say). To Mrs. Porter, art is any human effort that encourages, or even possibly forces, nature to grow. It is art when you handle flowers with the deftness and astonishing results achieved by Mrs. Porter’s mother; it is art when you write a story that tends to stimulate or fortify the natural (i.e., usual) impulses of the average man or woman to live and learn, to seek and engage in interesting work, to mate, to beget or bear children. Any art that does not tend directly toward these primary social and personal ends isn’t art to her; she regards it with heavy suspicion.

Some years ago it was suggested to Mrs. Porter that she furnish autobiographical material for a booklet which should satisfy the eager requests of her readers for personal facts. Mrs. Porter assented. The result was a booklet largely in her own words, and remarkable for an accent that some would call boastful and others, refreshing. We may defer for a few moments the details that Mrs. Porter set down, but the question of her personal tone and temper is one to be considered at the very outset. Is she merely naïve? Is she self-assertive, conceited, boastful? What does she embody, and what is the secret—if it is a secret—of the enormously wide appeal of her work? To attempt an answer isn’t easy. But let us see....

ii

Gene Stratton-Porter is a self-made woman, with all the drawbacks that self-manufacture entails. Certain definite advantages, too! It is not meant that she owes nothing to her parentage, wifehood, motherhood—she owes much to these, and her great indebtedness to her father and mother she has herself proclaimed. And yet, in the rôle in which the world views her, she owes nothing to anybody except herself. For although the late Richard Watson Gilder gave her encouragement with her first book, and although others encouraged her with the famous Freckles, she would undoubtedly have gone on with no encouragement whatever and would have become what she is today. Why? The explanation inheres in that phrase, “self-made.” Self-made people, whatever they may lack, are obviously people with a capacity which we don’t ordinarily bother to distinguish except by the result they achieve with it. That is, perhaps, typical of the mental laziness of the rest of us. But if we ask ourselves what the capacity is, in terms other than the easily-named result, the answer may be extremely surprising.

Who are the persons who are so happily independent of the encouragement, the approval, the applause without a tiny measure of which the rest of us couldn’t go on? They divide into the two great classes of mankind, if we consider psychology and temperament. There are the mystics—the saints, the martyrs, and some artists. There are the non-mystics—many artists among them, to be sure. The mystical mind isn’t the secret. The mental make-up of those who walk (who are able to walk) by themselves, is. They have, either from birth or by hard-wrung conquest, a kind of self-sufficiency more precious, for living purposes, than fine gold. It may be the bright, unconscious self-sufficiency of a Gene Stratton-Porter, or the admirable fortitude of a Joseph Conrad or the diffident charm of a Booth Tarkington—the manner is nothing; it is there. The mode of acquisition, except as it bears on work and affects personality, whether birthright or painful purchase, is nothing, either. The thing is there, like driven piles or bedrock. He who lacks that foundation must take his chance of his house, built on sands, being washed away.

With Mrs. Porter this invaluable element of personality has existed from the time of her earliest childhood. Nor is the faculty in question a superficial matter, like self-confidence. It was with a considerable lack of self-confidence that Mrs. Porter began writing; but notice that she began. How many others who had the self-confidence when they started have had to acquire the self-sufficiency, the power of self-sustention? How many have failed to do that? Self-confidence, indeed, is the most perfect of traitors. But there is a reservoir in the Self....