“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair, in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.
“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always said was just this: “Press forward!”’ He passed on.
“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.
“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’”
So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it is of the essence of drama that things go on. A play or a book which leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various events—bitter, happy, tragic and glorious—marking so many stages of an unending record. The last words of The Long Roll are worthy of the greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.
The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is one element of her genius—perhaps the most important. The second element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative imagination” is.
If you will turn to her book The Wanderers you will find that it is a series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?
Well, we can’t tell you how it is done, for if that could be told the manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such chapters as open The Wanderers. All we can be certain of is this, that Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a primitive woman of the treefolk—so much was the first imaginative step. And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike, wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his author.
All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense, she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest—an almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of poignancy and the art of touching to tears—these are to be had for taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True, but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!
Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.