The insertion of marginal drawings of nature subjects in Freckles made a distinct impression get abroad that it was simply a nature book, with the result that three long years were required for the novel to attain its enormous popularity. Published in 1904, the book had sold, ten years later, 670,733 copies in the regular edition.
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Mrs. Porter as an author is now fairly before us and may be considered profitably before we take a look at her newest novel, The White Flag. So familiar a phenomenon calls for incisive comment. She writes her stories “exactly as they take shape in my mind” and the excisions are sometimes—as in the case of Her Father’s Daughter, which yet remained overlong—quite heavy. The edited and published fiction is of itself remarkable for an unrestraint, a vigorous emphasis, a masculine zeal, with which there is generally combined freshness of feeling and a transparent sincerity. It is this sincerity, proceeding as it so often does from a total unconsciousness of what lies behind it, that the popular instinct detects at once in the pages of a work of fiction. It has, of course, nothing whatever to do with literary art, it is never shamed or enriched by the processes of introspection, and in this it conforms to the wilful egoism fundamental with the Northern races in a new country and exploitable environment. The student of psychology may be interested, for more reasons than the inheritance of Holland ancestry, to compare the late Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Stratton-Porter in personalities and characters. Each has swayed the millions; each, beyond all possible question, has influenced human lives. Neither was oppressed by the enormous responsibility attached to such a rôle. I would not say that the one had more education than has the other, but their educations were different.
“To spend time writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I would not,” exclaims Mrs. Porter, to whom art is an expression of flower-beds and children a-plenty, censored books and human lives lived on sober and industrious models. And she compromised on a book “into which I put all the nature work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I was familiar.” In simple justice it should be pointed out that she insisted upon alternating nature books and novels, although far more money could be earned by writing only fiction.
Just as the child was taken from the fields, shoed and harnessed in “Sunday clothes” and put into school, so the naturalist was torn, though somewhat more gently and gradually, from her proper enjoyments and placed in the trammels of book-length fiction. What wonder that she revolted?—but the rebellion of Picciola, though ending in personal triumph, was not the end of school; and the rebellion of the novelist, though rewarded with a tremendous personal triumph, did not end her ordeal of novel-writing. What people like Mrs. Porter never achieve is a successful rebellion from, within, themselves. Something more powerful than they quells their self-insurrections; they go on; money seems worth while for what can be done with it to give happiness and widen opportunity for others; the task is good—why? It is a task; something that must be done very thoroughly. The father, Mark Stratton, to whom his daughter was so observably devoted, gave her a set of ideals that were to lift her up, like strong links of iron, and then to turn into rigid chains. She who owes so much to him owes to him more than she has ever suspected, a compulsion put upon her from within herself, the final reward or fate of every worshipper.
She has tried to escape. She has written poetry. There was The Fire Bird; and lately there has been Euphorbia, a long narrative published serially to the astonishment of readers of Good Housekeeping. The subject of Euphorbia is interesting—a woman to whom marriage brings non-fulfilment, whose husband tramples and uproots the red-and-white wild flower she loves. When at length the man dies, the mother has one fearful moment in which her child reaches toward a bit of euphorbia with she knows not which intention. But he loves it. Escape! It is not necessary to make as much of this as the psychoanalyst would make of it, nor, perhaps, to miss the mark so widely. “My life has been fortunate,” Mrs. Porter admits, “in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have known I have met, lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is upon the lives of these that I base what I write.” There is a puzzling fierceness in the attacks she launches on those who write otherwise; she is vulnerable somewhere in this connection or she would show less heat and animosity. And, to some extent, her active resentment is justified, for she has had a heavy experience of misleading praise and some experience of hypocrisy. I remember an occasion upon which she wrote to me, with scornful inflections, to lay before me the evidence in the case of a certain well-known writer who had enthusiastically praised her work, though “not for publication.” It was a course which, like herself, I should join in condemning; but was it so much of a matter? Did, could, the voice of a single one, count for much where she had heard already the open voices of praise from so many thousands? And if it was so, then why?
Who answers that will make possibly the largest single contribution to the psychology of literature, for this identical question finally arises in the case of writers great and small.
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Never, perhaps, has Mrs. Porter been more herself than in her latest book, The White Flag; although Her Father’s Daughter, as originally written, was overgrown. Both these books are autobiography—Her Father’s Daughter of the heart, The White Flag of mind and memory. If Mrs. Porter has but one story to tell, no one has succeeded in telling it so often with such freshness of feeling or such repeated success in the matter of readers. The White Flag is the story of Mahala Spellman, daughter and only child of Mahlon and Elizabeth Spellman. The opening scenes are laid in the Indiana of the 1880s. The village is called Ashwater. For what seems an excessive time our attention is concentrated upon Elizabeth as a little girl and Junior Moreland as a little boy. Nothing could be more typical of Mrs. Porter than the attention she bestows upon her heroine in childhood—the exact detail of Mahala’s dress, the recorded precision of her unfailingly correct behaviour. If there is something unnatural about the child, there is everything natural to a child in Mrs. Porter’s fiction. In picturing the richest man in the village Mrs. Porter blackens his villainy to a pitch where Mr. Moreland is neither more nor less credible than some of the characters in, let us say, Way Down East.
Mahala, in ensuing chapters, refuses Junior Moreland in the face of the fact that his father could save her father from ruin. Her father fails, and, broken, dies. Her mother becomes an invalid. When finally Mahala can truthfully say that all is lost except self-respect and courage, a deadly blow is levelled at her self-respect. Some money is stolen. Circumstantial evidence accuses Mahala, and Ashwater shuns her.