Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s Hearts Contending, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells, “should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim (he thought it better than Snowbound but said the public would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the lingering accent, because Americans speak French and German badly. Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr. Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs. Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!
There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie Maddern Fiske made Barnabetta into a play, Erstwhile Susan, and appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is what Richard Watson Gilder of the Century once said to Mrs. Martin: “Your people do not converse on paper—they talk. When a community is written up that community always resents it, even if it is described flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own conceit about itself.”
So much for compliments. If you call for proofs ask Mrs. Martin to show you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published) some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character, asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits, complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs. Martin says:
“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers, except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster, Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the rest of my heroines.
“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”
We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a synoptic discussion of her tales and give instead what she has to say, outside her books, about the people in them.
“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect, not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play Erstwhile Susan and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch) with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very frugal and ‘close’—they never outgrow that.
“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too seductive charms may not be revealed.
“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.
“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’”