“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse, serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”
A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow. Herself, she is a desert species—but transplanted in time! She made her final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot maturity she would have given us her best—her all, her completion—at four inches.
She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The Atlantic which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same Atlantic which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s Van Cleve before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the Atlantic serialized Isidro. The North American Review, no less severely selective than the Atlantic,—the North American, which had printed serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary Austin’s The Man Jesus month by month. The Man Jesus is a biography such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: “Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”
If we say that The Man Jesus called for unusual knowledge and an unusual faculty, what shall we say of A Woman of Genius? Some readers were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is possessed of”—or by—a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.
And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.
“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.
“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’
“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....
“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’
“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’”