Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot of things that no author could say directly without being charged with sermonizing.”
Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that if the characters are true they can say things that, from the author, would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a moral out of—or into—every other thing we hear our neighbors say or see them do?
The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of “evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer him:
“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life as may the other kind.
“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed—sometimes? That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of the doughnut is not only very foolish—but very detrimental to one’s digestion.”
Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels of muck and insanity—and nothing else. He must condemn them for their worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of the purveyors of cheerfulness.
You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the situation in a “grown-up” novel like The Road to Understanding it is your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They are separated—never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation” for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it. Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a denouement but—they are brought together again.
An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing Oh, Money! Money! It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the man behind the money.”
Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale, advanced by the publishers just before the publication of Oh, Money! Money!—six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here they are:
1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world—the getting and spending of money.