In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely greater than between his first few novels and such work as The House of Mohun or Sackcloth and Scarlet.
24. Mary Johnston’s Adventure
i
There lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner. Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say: “Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published, indeed, but not read. And one of those books is Michael Forth, by Mary Johnston.
Miss Johnston was read before the publication of Michael Forth and she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. Michael Forth is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come, in place of the writer of superb historical romances like To Have and To Hold and historical novels like The Long Roll and Cease Firing, an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Melville.
“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard it,” concludes an anonymous writer.[99] The account of Mary Johnston’s adventure given by this writer is as unsatisfactory as secondhand versions of a mystical experience must necessarily be. Miss Johnston may or may not write the story; Emerson said that “the highest cannot be spoken,” and, most certainly, it cannot with adequacy be written. Miss Johnston has made some attempt to put her adventure on paper, but the result so far discourages her. In what follows I am merely trying to convey the quality of her strange experience. I have not her sanction for what I say; I had rather not make the trial. But there is really no escape. If we are to understand the growth of the writer we must have some notion of the thing that befell.
ii
The child was not strong, and her Scots grandmother first, an aunt afterward, taught her. She grew up in the village of Buchanan, Botetourt County, Virginia, still in the 1870’s a place of canalboats and the stagecoach. Major John William Johnston was a Confederate veteran, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature. Naturally the house was not without books. Mary Johnston found the histories particularly engrossing. Then the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and this daughter was sent to school at Atlanta. She was then sixteen. In a few months her health compelled her to return home where, a year later, her mother died. As she was the eldest of several children the direction of the household fell to her. She suffered intermittently from illness for many years. In her twenties and while living in a New York apartment she began a romance of colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century, writing much of it in a quiet corner of Central Park, so as to be outdoors. She had been writing short stories which editors sent back to her and which she burned on the first rejection. It is said that the late Walter H. Page, at the time with Houghton Mifflin Company, discovered her.[100] The historical romance, Prisoners of Hope (1898) became her first book and was successful; her second novel, To Have and To Hold (1900) was a record-making best seller and had literary merits most exceptional in the flood of historical fiction then running. Miss Johnston traveled considerably in Europe in quest of better health. After the death of her father she lived for some time at 110 East Franklin Street, Richmond. Then she built a home, “Three Hills,” near Warm Springs, Virginia, where she has lived since. Knowing that her Civil War novels, The Long Roll and Cease Firing, owe much to Major Johnston’s analyses and recollections, some Southerners have said that Mary Johnston’s father was at least equally responsible with her for the splendid performance in her earlier novels. They quite misunderstand the nature of the inspiration he undoubtedly gave her. Of direct help—which is what these people really have in mind—he gave much, as she has acknowledged; it was, however, unimportant. Direct help can as well be got from books. If today you tell Miss Johnston how well you liked such a novel of hers as Lewis Rand (1908), she will probably respond: “Of course you realize that the picture of those times is idealized.” In other words, although hers is one of those natures which must seek the ideal, possess and be possessed by it, the conception of the ideal has completely changed. Where once she found it in the bright glints of an earlier American day, now she finds it in our day and every day, past or present or to be—the pure silver of the human spirit that runs in a deep if irregular vein through the worn old rock of human destiny.
For she is like silver herself, like old silver choicely patterned. The small, oval face and pointed chin are serene in expression beneath a fine forehead and crisp hair with a great deal of its blackness still in it. Her manner is reposeful, friendly, unaffected and sympathetic. She talks readily about anything and everything but you have a feeling that she is also, at moments, somewhere else—this quite without any sacrifice or lessening of her hereness and attentiveness. I now come to the personal experience which, to be intelligible to most of us, must be put in a crude and simple kind of paraphrase.