“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old boyish love of ease and snug corners—then—well—time will prove me, anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking moment—and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife—even though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married us—how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting comrade!—O Judith!’
“I don’t cry often—not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the tears—happy ones—and I kissed the dear words again and again before I tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how ‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”
Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived perfectly to set down not the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond and more like her.
Books by Grace S. Richmond
The Indifference of Juliet, 1905.
With Juliet in England, 1907.
Round the Corner in Gay Street, 1908.
Red Pepper Burns, 1910.
Strawberry Acres, 1911.
Mrs. Red Pepper, 1913.
The Second Violin, 1906.
A Court of Inquiry, 1909.
On Christmas Day in the Morning, 1908.
On Christmas Day in the Evening, 1910.
The Twenty-fourth of June, 1914.
Under the Country Sky.
Under the Christmas Stars.
The Brown Study.
Red Pepper’s Patients, 1917.
The Whistling Mother, 1917.
The Enlisting Wife, 1918.
Brotherly House.
Red and Black, 1919.
Foursquare, 1922.
The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXI
WILLA SIBERT CATHER
SOME novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last is Willa Sibert Cather.
She has written four novels. You pick up Alexander’s Bridge and read with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It is—excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon another book by the same author and start to read.
Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather better than a filled one). O Pioneers! is in its way an epic of the Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though intensely satisfied with O Pioneers! you never for a moment expect more of her—perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would be in any way reasonable.