Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain passages and which affords the reader—and the writer—necessary relief. But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in every one of her stories.
She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know particularly well—do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him; if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you may; and yet you think you know him rather well! The truth is, you know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall. You’ve never done that—why should you? But you must do just that if you are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case, for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait.
Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice” of feminine perception, a quality which makes Pride and Prejudice immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled, constitute a merciless betrayal—the betrayal is merciless whether it is favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme, but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.
She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in Nathan Burke and Everett Boardman in The Boardman Family whom Gene Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she proceeds to show us what is made of them—not a pretty spectacle, to be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words in A Personal Record?
“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view—and in this view alone—never for despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair—the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind—that’s our affair!”
It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, from Nathan Burke to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in The Rudder, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.
“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’
“‘Um-huh. Well, I have seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.
“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.
“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get home.’”