If one has suffered much from illness and pain, one is very likely to have occasional moments in which one returns to life newly-washed, like the world in trembling freshness and sunlight on a morning after storm. If one stands on a Virginia hill, or a hill anywhere, one may sometimes have a distinct awareness that the length and breadth and depth round about and below are only a kind of length and breadth and descent to a creature measuring them with his legs; even the eye seems to declare that genuine dimensions are elsewhere. Stand on the hill one day, return to it one, five or ten years afterward, standing in the same place. It is quite possible that nothing has changed in the scene about you. A certain time has passed, but you, to yourself, haven’t changed. You have grown a little older, but the essential you is not anybody else. Suddenly you realize that time is not a dimension, either, any more than the length and breadth round about or the drop to the valley below; and that as long as you are you and no one else, the day, the year or the century would make no genuine difference. The only distance or direction lies between the unchanging you and somebody else. You are really no farther from Balboa discovering the Pacific from a Panama summit than if you were standing beside him now sharing the discovery; the direction is from your spirit to his, from his to yours, and the distance is neither lessened nor increased by race, nationality, religion, leagues or centuries.
That is, instead of merely acquiring the notion of the fourth dimension of mathematics, you have come to see that all the so-called dimensions, length, breadth, height, time and imaginable others are merely conveniences of earthly existence, or necessities of earthly existence, like eating and breathing.
As you stand on the hill, you are alone and yet not alone. The physical you is alone, as always; but the unchanging you is one of a company whom you can identify only to the extent of what you may have read or heard about them. In the company will be Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Spinoza, Ludwig van Beethoven, Cardinal Newman, William Blake, Walt Whitman—to mention a few of various times and countries—as well as countless others.
Then will follow the strangest part of the experience and the part most difficult to put in words. It is, however, something of which some intimation comes even to the humblest pair of lovers, just as it is the passionate fulfillment of the great, the immortal lovers of legend.
There is a feeling so intense that it can find coherent expression only in poetry which holds it securely in the rigid mold of metre and rhyme; there is another feeling, or degree of feeling either more intense or more delicate which can communicate itself only in a language of cunningly-related sounds which we call music. And there is even a pitch of feeling greater than these, higher and very tranquil and most piercing in its intensity and loveliness. This feeling has only one expression—love. The object of that love is immaterial to it. That object may be, outwardly, the body of the beloved. It may be a person or an idea. It may be anything. The effects of this feeling are almost infinitely various. You will find some of them described in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. The feeling itself is a religious feeling but it may not expend itself on a religious object. The feeling made Francis of Assisi the Clown of God. It brought visions to Joan of Arc and put her at the head of a victorious army. Under its influence Beethoven wrote symphonies, Blake made pictures, and Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass. Sometimes, when the effects are tranquil, we say that the Lover has found peace—to which has sometimes been added a phrase of further description, “the peace that passeth understanding.”
Nearly all these aspects of a continuous human experience came to Mary Johnston. There was the not unusual preliminary circumstance of invalidism. There was the loss of a father, much-loved. There were the Virginia hills she walked upon and there was frequent solitude. The sense of passing the boundaries of time and space was facilitated by two things: first, her devotion to history, and second, her strongly-developed novelist’s imagination. Shortly after she was forty, therefore, she came to a day when, for an hour or part of an hour, she had access to a state of knowledge, of sympathy, of understanding which is so sane that it infuses its sanity into every act of living and so joyous that those to whom the experience is vouchsafed can throw aside every lesser joy. After that first experience Mary Johnston waited for it to renew itself, and gradually what had come as a miracle remained as a human faculty; so that since then she has acquired the apparent power or privilege of leaning out from the gold bar of Heaven, of letting earth slip without loosing herself from earth. You know how your mind will pass behind the stars while your feet yet continue to tread firm soil as you go on walking. That is a feeble likeness to the thing.
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It was bound to affect her writing, and perhaps the first traces of it are in The Witch (1914), but it was clearly apparent in Foes (1918), where, as I have said before this, “upthrusting through the surface of a stirring historical adventure, we had the evidence of the author’s breathless personal adventure.” It is one thing to be by temperament a mystic; quite another to become, as Miss Johnston had now become, a mystic by the witness of some inner illumination. In some cases the change has brought with it a proselyting spirit of great fervor; in Miss Johnston’s there was a complete absence of any such missionary zeal. All the same she could not go on writing novels in which the picture of some bygone time was idealized simply for the sake of a charming picture. Foes has been correctly described as “a dramatic story of eighteenth century Scotland with a lasting feud, a long chase, and a crescendo of hatred and peril.” But it is also a story of sublime forgiveness, as much so as John Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy. In Michael Forth (1919) and Sweet Rocket (1920) there was, as in certain novels of Herman Melville’s, notably Pierre, more transcendentalism than story. It was inevitable that she should be inarticulate for a while, but it was only for a while. For in 1922 appeared her story, Silver Cross, a tale of England in the time of Henry VII. and of two rival religious establishments. Silver Cross was both beautiful and intelligible. For the prose style I like best Stewart Edward White’s word, “stippling.” It has also been said of what was to be her mode of utterance for a book or two: “Written in a clipped sort of prose stripped of ‘a’ and ‘an’ and ‘the’ and other particles as well as articles, the text is a highly mannered English replete with cadenced sentences and animated by nervous rhythms. The very diction bears poetic surcharges, and the whole effect on the reader is to distill in his soul a delicate enchantment or else to exasperate him to death.”[101] The core of the tale is irony, irony directed at religious bigotry and religious intolerance; it lies there at the base of the flower and from it the reader may make his own bitter honey. Or, if he have no stomach for that, he may take his satisfaction and pleasure in the rich sound of ecclesiastical trumpets, the green England, the pageant of a simple world unrolled before him.
In the same year with Silver Cross Miss Johnston’s 1492 was published. The book is, of course, the story of Columbus, told with the accurate historical coloring and the poetic feeling one would expect of the author; but it uses a technical device which, while not novel, is deserving of attention from the analyst of fiction. This is the employment as narrator of the story of Jayme de Marchena, a fictional person, represented as a Jew who has been banished from Spain under the decree of exile promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella. Miss Johnston makes of him a man of philosophical mind, an “obscure Spinoza” whose thoughts are a constant commentary on the voyage from Palos and the succeeding voyages. Thus, without distorting history or creating an imaginary portrait of the Genoese sailor and discoverer, the book (in form a novel) gives us one of the great events in human affairs in a perspective that neither history nor biography affords. Again what we have is the vision of one standing on a hilltop, alone and yet not alone—of one who is at the same instant standing in the night watches on the deck of a caravel and listening to the cry from the man on lookout....