“It is needless, however, to criticise her stories individually. What we must note of her work is this: It meets the great human need of cheer, it satisfies a great human desire with its wholesome milk of kindness. To make many nations laugh and laugh innocently; to bring entertainment to the sickbed and army trench and throne room and schoolroom; and to the million common houses of a million common people—this is the mission of her books and this their finest achievement.”
Wise and honest words, these, of Margaret Steele Anderson’s. What she has said so well we shall not attempt to better. We shall agree whole-heartedly with her that the best praise was given Alice Hegan Rice “by a very wise old man, who spoke for a great host of readers when he said:
“‘Madam, I salute you! You have done the world a service. You have cheered us, you have made us laugh happily and with courage.’”
Books by Alice Hegan Rice
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, 1901.
Lovey Mary, 1903.
Sandy, 1905.
Captain June, 1907.
Mr. Opp, 1909.
A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill, 1912.
The Honorable Percival.
Calvary Alley, 1917.
Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories, 1918.
Quin, 1921.
Published by the Century Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ALICE DUER MILLER
IF Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of distinction which our high critical minds rave about.
She can go deeply—and deftly—into the minds of her people and bring out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there. But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly) about the thoughts and emotions of her characters—with those we have no patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a good deal of sympathy.
Ladies Must Live is full of clever conversation; so is The Happiest Time of Their Lives. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them half-admirable because they say adroit things—or say things adroitly. This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs. Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do so?