| Probably
the strongest and most individual of New England's women
writers of to-day is Miss Mary E. Wilkins, whose New
England Nun and Other Short Stories" has been so
successful in England as well as in America. Miss Wilkins'
stories can hardly be called stories in the true sense
of the word. They are merely short, concisely told episodes
in a number of New England lives among the work-a-day
people. The rural village is her environment, and the
pathetic side of woman life, chiefly that of the single
old women or attenuated girls who drift into old maidenhood,
and who are a leading characteristic of New England
life, is brought out in these homely pictures. There
is very little of what might be called dramatic action
in these sketches, but the charm lies in the pathos
that enfolds the characters who are placed before you.
It might be said that these sketches are monotonous
in their similarity, but any person who has lived in
rural New England will see that this is owing to the
environment, which is dreary in the extreme and envelops
the woman life in a sameness of sentiment and occupation.
When Miss Wilkins lays stress on the life of the women
in her sketches, we must remember she is a woman herself,
and more likely to sympathise with that side of the
picture, but outside of this fact it is apparent to
the outside observer at once that the New England women
of this class are superior to the men in intellect and
general character. One strong reason for this is the
natural intelligence of the past generations, and the
lonely life led by the women of the present generation,
who still hold on to the superior part as a sort of
golden age, while the men for the most part have gone
west or south, or died off or degenerated. When Miss
Wilkins speaks of a New England Nun she brings out this
fact of the lonely, contemplative life of the many elderly
maidens, who gather rose leaves, live in refined loneliness
and look back to the ante-bellum past; and the outside
world would be surprised at the amount of sentiment
that is hidden away in some of these old, quiet lives.
Many of these women have themselves plucked up courage,
and have gone west or south as school teachers, and
have borne with them to the more rude localities of
hate busy world some of that culture and refinement
that is a part of their existence. A few have by a miraculous
accident been married, but for the most part this is
out of the question. The young men all went west or
south after the war or during the California gold fever,
and most of them took to themselves life partners among
strangers, and forgot the more refined and more high-strung,
if less beautiful, maidens who for the most part put
them in the shade at the academics and debating schools
of their eastern home. Here and there is found a man
who went neither west nor south, or did both and came
home, a failure, and married one of these pensive maidens,
who all the rest of her life tried to respect him. But
to the New England female mind the young man who went
west and never came back, save for a short time as a
western senator or judge, is the ideal of the successful
hero. The other class, who stayed or came back to live
a second-best kind of existence, generally chew tobacco
and drink cider and New England rum, and develop a coarseness
of exterior that is extremely painful to the women,
who are remarkably dainty in their household matters.
Miss Wilkins has given us many instances of this pathetic
type, but she has failed to give us one that is perhaps
the most pathetic of all—a picture of the home
life where the woman tries her best to respect and live
happily with the sort of man I have described. The New
England man of this sort is generally more of a man,
in the accepted sense, than the woman is a woman, but
he necessarily is more of an animal; and when a man
who loves tobacco and rum and cider and obscene stories,
and is decidedly lazy to boot, is allied to a prim,
active woman, who dotes on Ruskin and paints and is
a lover of flowers and poetry, and yet polishes her
house from end to end to chase the flies out—when,
as we have said, this class of man and woman are tied
together for life we have a sort of dog and cat mixture
that is more pathetic in its dramatic possibilities
of the finer sort than any Miss Wilkins has described.
And yet this picture I have suggested is common enough
in New England life to make it one of its most pathetic
characteristics.
C.
There
is a sensible article in the July number of The Contemporary
Review, entitled "Are We Really So Bad?" It
is about "the girl of the period," and is
in some sort a refutation of the dismal things said
by Lady Jeune and Madame Adams in The North American
Review. I cannot understand the objection that many
women have to the growth of wider tastes, more robust
activities and freer manners among their own sex. It
is absolutely necessary that this change should take
place if the race is to reach its noblest and fullest
development, and if, as in our time, the new state of
things leads to some extravagances and unseemliness,
that is simply the effect of a natural reaction from
the condition of stunted grown and "intolerable
ennui" which were the boast of the past.
We say that
women are unfitted for such and such occupations, forgetting
that their unfitness is due simply to the fact that
the rudimentary capacity for those occupations, which
certainly is in them, is immature through never having
been allowed exercise. Women are quite fitted for all
the intellectual occupations undertaken by men, and
for many of the physical. In some of the intellectual
ones they decidedly excel. When the coming generations
of women shall have been admitted to full freedom of
movement and to the practice of every human activity,
and shall have perfectly adapted themselves to the changed
conditions, our children's children shall know a type
of women of which we can only dream—natural queens
among men, to whom they shall look up, as the Goths
of old did to their Abruna women, superhumanly beautiful,
superhumanly wise.
L.
It
was that time during the month of August when the September
magazines commence to come in. It was a typical August
day; the drowsiness of the heat, showering down from
a grey, hazy sky, and the dull, sultry horison could
have been produced by no other month. A cicada threw
his long stinging crescendo from a butternut tree. But,
although it was August, I was reading a September magazine,
and as there was nothing in it to keep me awake I gradually
fell asleep, hardly conscious that I was going, for
the cicada kept hunting me through the first descents
of slumber until I was beyond reach of his note in its
deepest caverns and recesses. Suddenly I became conscious
that it was Sunday. I was intensely aware of the fact,
although I was perplexed by smelling soapsuds, and before
long I saw a very small Chinaman hanging out clothes
on a line. I was walking along the street all the time
and observed many other things, but the Chinaman and
the clothes line, with the effect that an amateur photographer
obtains when he takes two pictures on one plate, were
always sliding in front of everything else. By-and-bye
I stopped in front of a store where a man was selling
pith helmets, and I asked him what was the day of the
week. He replied, "We call it Monday." I suppose
he noticed my surprised air, because he added quickly;
"You know we're all mixed up in the time now."
"Would you think it too much trouble to explain?"
I asked. "It's no trouble at all," he answered;
"but I can't explain, nobody can; our scientific
people have stopped discussing whether Mars is inhabited
and all that sort of thing and are trying to discover
the ratio of advance, as they call it." "What
is the 'ratio of advance'; what do you mean by it?"
I asked. "I don't mean anything by it; that's the
difficulty; but, as you're a stranger, I will tell you
all that anybody knows about it. We call to-day Monday,
but last year it was Wednesday, and the year before
it was Friday, and this year is really 1908, but we
call it 1997—" "Well," I said,
"that must be very confusing." "It is,"
he replied, "when you think of it, but the best
way is not to think of it." "But how can you
help thinking of it? When you have to date your correspondence
you must know what year it is." "Well,"
he replied, "we get that from the newspapers, in
fact that is the only way to get it, and now the scientists
are trying to figure out how the newspapers know."
I asked him how it came about that the world had got
so far ahead of itself, as it were. "Well,"
he said, "the magazines were to blame. They commenced
to issue their numbers in the preceding month, and very
soon they got two months ahead, and that's the way the
difficulty commenced. I believe myself it would have
been all right if the newspapers hadn't taken it up.
But they did. They began to anticipate, and then there
was no end to it. Why, some of the radical journals
are away into the twenty-first century, and there is
no stopping them now. Some of the wise men try to make
out that the whole trouble originated from the desire
of mankind to peer into the future, and, failing that,
they tried to cheat themselves by anticipating time."
"Do you believe that?" I asked. He did not
give me a direct answer, but he asked me if I would
like to buy a pith helmet; it would keep my head cool.
I was just on the point of telling him he needed it
for that purpose more than I did when I heard the cicada
quieting down after an immense crescendo.
S.
Those
who do accomplish anything in literature in this country
have, at any-rate, the grim satisfaction of knowing
that it is not what they might have done under more
favorable circumstances, it is at least the product
of sheer natural talent. The Canadian litterateur must
depend solely upon himself and nature. He is almost
without the exhilaration of lively and frequent literary
intercourse—that force and variety of stimulus
which counts for so much in the fructification of ideas.
The human mind is like a plant, it blossoms in order
to be fertilised, and to bear seed must come into actual
contact with the mental dispersion of others. Of this
natural assistance, the Canadian writer gets the least
possible, and, if out of hate poverty of his opportunities
he accomplishes something, let him not be blamed for
being, perhaps, a little too boastful and inclined to
rate himself at a little more than his actual worth.
Our only remedies
for this want is an occasional visit to the American
literary centre, or to London if we are fortunate enough
to have the means of getting there, and the friendly
help of books, especially those memoirs which distinguished
people in the older countries have left behind them
for the entertainment and encouragement of those that
come after. For the rest we shall have to do our best
to create by degrees what we so much feel the need of
now, by drawing toward one another as much as possible
and bridging the long distances that separate us by
friendly and helpful correspondence.
L.
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