Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose only mistake was in keeping silent once too often—or was that a mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest price the world could exact from her—cool, courageous Jennie! And yet she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing? But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not; one hesitates to say that Jennie could not deny herself anything.

The Boardman Family suffers one serious defect. After writing with all her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager; and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery to be cleared up later.

Van Cleve is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next to Nathan Burke, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her Three Short Plays, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will say merely that An Ancient Dance is the most ingenious and dramatically effective. Civilization is splendid satire but inconclusive in its termination. The Wearin’ O’ The Green is a farce that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays are most agreeable reading.

Books by Mary S. Watts

The Tenants, 1908.
Nathan Burke, 1910.
The Legacy, 1911.
Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family, 1913.
The Rise of Jennie Cushing, 1914.
The Rudder, 1916.
Three Short Plays, 1917.
The Boardman Family, 1918.
From Father to Son, 1919.
The Noon Mark, 1920.
The House of Rimmon, 1922.

Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York.

CHAPTER XV
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

IF this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be found in three considerations:

Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her successes have been with short stories, and they have been many.

Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant, largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing. There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing, sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of which we have not been perfectly aware—her stories are cordially welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint consciousness that once in some place among a few people they may have had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them—and that is all.