“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her religious convictions?’
“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’
“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’
“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from her pen in every paragraph.”
In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since there has been an American literature—we have thought it best to put her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him; she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for yourself—the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close of a chapter in The Deliverance—after all, is not this wonderful story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake, the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate, has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher, grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it. He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro overseer dwells at Blake Hall!
“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him—a Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before him—bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted—the beauty dwelt upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was—a man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the moment of fulfillment.
“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him—that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon—it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone—the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand—he saw that now in his first moment of awakening—a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.
“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.”
Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s real material, the human soul. The Deliverance is a story of revenge with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken and sipping her port, blind—blind—successfully deceived, successfully kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”
A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be anything but proud.