Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:
“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have reference occurred in a copy of Harper’s Weekly, not so very long before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely for the proverbial chivalry—and homicides—of that portion of America which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word ‘symbolic’—Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head, like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems to be saying what Lydia says so finally in her inspiring new book, Lydia of the Pines:
“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to come our children’s children will be found there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited America.’
“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was Still Jim. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful photographs—and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.
“Lydia of the Pines [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words on The Heart of the Desert] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of Lydia of the Pines is one of the noblest she could have chosen—the infamy of political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’
“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’—such is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and pathos.
“In Lydia of the Pines one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”
With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that Lydia of the Pines “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss Hawthorne about Lydia. He found it fearfully dull while fully conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader sees Levine in two relations only—to Lydia and to the Indians, and unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer Still Jim seems by far the better book.
But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:
“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In Lydia of the Pines the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”