Like every other prize, this one has its penalty. What will carry one to the top of a high rock will also, unimpeded, carry one over the rock’s edge. The balance in egoism always trembles; when it comes to rest, one dies. And here is Mrs. Porter, who had in her a capacity that could have overcome mountains and that found only moderately difficult hills in its path. She must have burst into a thousand pieces if it hadn’t been that she was a naturalist first and a novelist afterward, that she underwent the preoccupations of a wife and mother, that she toiled in swamps and wrote books, kept other people alive with her money as well as her courage and vitality, launched forth on self-pinions as a poet, corresponded with innumerable readers, did this and that and the other and then hit upon something else. She was one of twelve children. “To this mother at forty-six and this father at fifty, each at intellectual topnotch,” she was born, the Minerva of mature and remarkable parents, a child who kept, in her own words, “thinking things which she felt should be saved,” so that she frequently tugged at her mother’s skirts and begged her to “set down” what the child considered stories and poems—generally some big fact in nature that thrilled the child, usually expressed in Biblical terms. Whom have we here? An incarnation as extraordinary as the Florence Nightingale whom Lytton Strachey put on paper? I think so.
iii
Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, at the time of their marriage, as a “ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman—Mary. God fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift of Grace, He put Flower Magic into her fingers.”
From tiny seeds found in rice and coffee, Mary (Shellenbarger) Stratton started little vines and climbing plants. Rooted things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they almost never failed to grow. When, intent on growing a tree or shrub from a slip or cutting that appeared hopeless, she cut the slip diagonally, inserted the lower end in a small potato and planted as if it were rooted, she was nearly always successful. Being of Dutch extraction, bulbs were her favourites—tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths that she called “blue bells.” From these she distilled perfume by putting clusters, at the time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined with freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. In Ohio a man gave her two tiny cedars of Lebanon which she brought with her to the farm in Wabash County, Indiana, planting one in her front yard and one in the small cemetery on the corner of her husband’s land. It stands, thirty feet tall or over, two feet in circumference, guarding her grave.
All twelve of her children lived to be eight; an attack of scarlet fever joined with whooping cough was fatal to two of them a little over that age. The house, “Hopewell Farm,” was an oblong box kept speckless. The liberal table and appetising food were known by all who travelled that way. She made the clothing for her brood. In the house that she kept so faultlessly clean, at the table she heaped with hearty dishes, Mark Stratton, conscious of his worthy British blood, praised her “tidiness” and accepted responsibility for the mental and spiritual welfare of his wife and children. It was understood that he had been named for a Mark Stratton who lived in New York and married a beauty, Anne Hutchinson. It was misunderstood that the first Mark and his wife settled on Stratton Island, “afterward corrupted to Staten.” From this point back for generations across the ocean, we are told that Mrs. Porter’s father “followed his line to the family of Strattons of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head (1913). To his British traditions and the customs of his family, Mark Stratton clung with rigid tenacity, never swerving from his course a particle under the influence of environment or association.” Perhaps, after all, he was British. “All his ideas were clear-cut; no man could influence him against his better judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy, in honour, and cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be proud than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he knew to express himself.” It is not too highly imaginative, I am sure, to believe that Mr. Stratton also planted slips and cuttings successfully; but they were slips of his own tenacious mind and they were planted most successfully in the receptive mind of his daughter, Gene.
We must note Mr. Stratton rather carefully. “His very first earnings he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read”—toiling upward in the night, in that time of Longfellowship, that has since been abandoned for fifteen minutes a day, in this era of Eliotry. The memory of Mr. Stratton enabled him to quote paragraphs at a time from Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott and Bancroft—he was perhaps fondest of history—while as for the Bible, he could repeat it entire, his daughter says, except for the genealogies, and give chapter and verse. The genealogies were “a waste of grey matter to learn.” Mrs. Porter confesses: “I was almost afraid to make these statements, although there are many living who can corroborate them, until John Muir published the story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the history of such rearing as was my father’s, told of as the customary thing among the children of Muir’s time.”
Sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics, delivered without thought of personal fatigue or selfish inconvenience at the end of journeys of many miles were Mark Stratton’s contribution to the cause of Good. It seems unkind to examine such performances dispassionately. “He worshipped beauty: beautiful faces, souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals, flowers. He loved colour: rich, bright colour and every variation down to the faintest shadings.” Mrs. Porter keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was carrying when stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight. “Over inspired Biblical passages, over great books, over sunlit landscapes, over a white violet abloom in deep shade, over a heroic deed of man, I have seen his brow light up, his eyes shine.” He used especially to thrill his young daughter by the story of John Maynard, who piloted a burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at the wheel. That he should tell it was natural, since the telling gave him opportunity to reproduce, with many inflections, the captain’s cry of “John Maynard!” and the answer, “Aye, aye, sir!” echoed until it sank to a mere gasp, a whisper....
iv
Gene Stratton was only a few years old when her mother, who had once nursed three of the children through typhoid fever, contracting it herself, broke down. Mrs. Stratton lived for several years, suffering continually, frequently tortured by pain. The youngest child was therefore allowed to follow an impulse and escape the training given her sisters. She followed her father and brothers outdoors, sleeping on their coats in fence corners, awakening, sometimes, to find shy creatures peering into her face. “I trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded, catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.” She made special pets of birds. She had been taught that they were useful and had “a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a ’kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird, and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.”
All this life became a thing of memory just before the mother’s death. Then they left the farm and went to town, to the city of Wabash, that Mrs. Stratton might have constant medical attention. The ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, plump as a wild partridge, the little Dutch woman who had borne twelve children and kept a spotless farmhouse and heaped up good things on the long dinner table, lay with her head on a pillow, a cinnamon pink or a trillium placed where its fragrance would reach her with every breath she drew. She was dying. She had helped Mark Stratton with the bush- and vine-covered fences that crept around the acres they owned in a strip of gaudy colour; she shared the achievement of that orchard, lying in a valley, with its square of apple trees in the centre, so that at the time of blossoming it appeared as if a great pink-bordered white blanket had been let down on the earth. To her equally with her husband was due the presence on shale, which they might have drained, of sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. All this was going out of her children’s life and she was going out with it. The youngest child, in particular, had been leading a harum-scarum existence; if she reported promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal times, with enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more was asked of her until the Sabbath. Mary Stratton was perhaps about to be released, to receive the benefit of a freedom in which, if her hands were not busy, it was not likely she would be happy or know what to do. Gene Stratton, whose father permitted his youngest to idolise him, was to be taken from outdoor freedom, her feet shod, her body restricted by the burden of Sunday clothing, her active legs stilled to a shuffle beneath the desk of a close schoolroom, and her mind set to droning over books. Unfortunately she came to the ordeal with no purely feminine resources of inattention, preoccupation or indifference. Her father had seen to that. It was he who was responsible for the child that revelled in Paul and Virginia, Undine, Picciola, The Vicar of Wakefield, Pilgrim’s Progress—“exquisitely expressed and conceived stories” that “may have done much in forming high conceptions of what really constitutes literature, and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by my parents.” Mrs. Porter adds: “One of these stories formed the basis of my first publicly recognised literary effort.” She was assigned to write a class composition on “Mathematical Law.” She postponed, rebelled, wrote a paper retelling the story of Picciola and in fear and defiance read it aloud in class. After one page the teacher halted her while she summoned in the superintendent of city schools to hear the sixteen foolscap pages from the beginning. “One instant the room was in laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. Never again was a subject forced upon me.” She was her father’s daughter, and her father was Mark Stratton.