The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:

“First Brigade headquarters was a tree—an especially big tree-a little removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for. At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace, romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders—down came reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’ instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something, but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic, tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude, monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy of the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said—in fact, they did say—that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”

Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little study you may see several things which go far to explain the effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.

For example:—

Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice again in the account of Stonewall Jackson’s funeral how the focus is narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is directed to a single point.

Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as he knows its tragic sorrow.

Glance again at the ending of Lewis Rand. It is quiet but in the unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and lose himself from the secret terror.

Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no consciousness that could be recognized as such.

The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man. Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character. But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of their verdict on him—“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”

. . . . . .