Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels - Grant M. Overton - Страница 10

We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, or was, living with the character which will become the central figure in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between Virginia and Life and Gabriella. I have no idea when the next will be finished. I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, that is impossible. You change so much in ten years—all would be different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose that is true.”

Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading The Deliverance these fourteen years after its first publication, your admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast—all these blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not in the least surprised at the finding.

Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after reading Virginia. It is worth quoting in full:

“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to give her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’

“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point.

“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble, but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one, she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so witty, but fully as wise.

“You have only to read Virginia to convince yourself.

“‘Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it.’

“‘Having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’

“‘To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry.’

“‘If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of it were heroic.’

“‘From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her anything she had set her heart upon—not even the privilege of working herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’

“‘You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way men are about Abby.’

“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her religious convictions?’

“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’

“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’

“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from her pen in every paragraph.”

In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since there has been an American literature—we have thought it best to put her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him; she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for yourself—the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close of a chapter in The Deliverance—after all, is not this wonderful story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake, the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate, has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher, grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it. He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro overseer dwells at Blake Hall!

“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him—a Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before him—bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted—the beauty dwelt upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was—a man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the moment of fulfillment.

“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him—that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon—it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone—the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand—he saw that now in his first moment of awakening—a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.

“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.”

Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s real material, the human soul. The Deliverance is a story of revenge with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken and sipping her port, blind—blind—successfully deceived, successfully kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”

A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be anything but proud.