There are no scenes in this novel, there is no atmosphere, no picturing of rooms or gardens or household gear which for one reason or another were dear to the narrator — as a particular cushion is dear to a cat, or a corner by the fire to a dog. There is no conversation, or almost none. Talk is used chiefly to present arguments. While conversation was slow to develop in the English novel, there is living human intercourse through conversation in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and many of the theological discussions between Christian and Faithful are more lively and full of feeling than any of Roxanna’s dialogues with her lovers.

  Roxanna had enough sense of character for her purpose. Of her hard-riding, hard-drinking first husband she paints a good picture; one gets a sense of the man’s personality. Her maid, the sprightly and resourceful Amy, the companion and sharer of her adventures, is, after Roxanna herself, the most living person in the book. In discussing her lovers, our heroine is concerned with only one quality, their generosity. When she deigns to be personal, her strokes tell, and one does manage to find out something about these men beyond the ample provision they made for Roxanna. If she and her author had not been so blind to everything but francs and pounds, they might have passed on a good deal to us.

  As against so many things that are absent from Defoe’s story, one thing is amazingly, powerfully, unflaggingly present: verisimilitude. From the first paragraph one never doubts that this is a woman’s actual story, told by a woman. The author never gets outside his character, never insinuates anything through her, has no feelings about her beyond those she has about herself. The reader forgets Daniel Defoe altogether; he is reading a woman’s autobiography. And what a woman! One cannot imagine the most starved little girl drudge, in the cruelest age of domestic service, if this book had fallen into her hands, lingering wistfully over its pages and coveting Roxanna’s Prince or her diamonds. One cannot believe that the most mush-headed boy would long to take her over from the Prince. The starved and the mush-headed are romantic; they want what goes with the Prince and the diamonds, they believe in their own capacity for pleasure. But Defoe and Roxanna knew well enough that they had none, and no more unromantic pair ever got themselves into print. Their great, their saving quality is that they do not try to be what they are not, and never for a moment pretend to any of the fine feelings they do not possess. This mental integrity makes the narrative, as a piece of writing, almost flawless; as self-sufficient as a column of figures correctly added. Lewd situations are dispatched without lewdness. The book is as safe as sterilized gauze. One is bumped up smartly against the truth, old enough but always new, that in novels, as in poetry, the facts are nothing, the feeling is everything.

  Open any volume of M. Fabre’s studies of insect life, and one can find passages about the life-struggle of beetles, the love-makings and domestic cares of ants or grasshoppers, passages that are so warm and rich and full of colour, so full of wisdom and humour and the sense of tragedy and beauty, that they make poor Roxanna, with her thirty years of profitable engagements, seem not animal, but mineral. With Fabre, the poetic Provençal was always getting the better of the scientist. When the lights are put out, and the moths he has vainly enticed for weeks at last come flying through the summer night to court the lady under a gauze tent on his study table, it is Fabre, and his breathless children, hidden in the dark, who have the romance and the adventure, not the moths. And they have more in their silent half-hour than Defoe is able to beat up for Roxanna and her dozen lovers in five hundred pages. M. Fabre is much more wonderful than his insects; but Defoe is not at all more remarkable than Roxanna. They are both most remarkable in that, lacking all the most valuable gifts a writer can have except one, they made themselves an immortal place in English, in European, literature.

  Defoe seems to have had only one deep interest, and that was in making a living. Read The Complete British Tradesman and marvel at how intensely, how acutely, every mean device and petty economy appealed to him; how every stingy trim, every possible twist and sharp practice in shopkeeping and servant-grinding, stirred him and gratified him. All the misers in fiction are sentimental, inexpert, and unresourceful, judged by the standards advocated in this work written for the guidance of Defoe’s fellow tradesmen. It is one of the meanest and most sordid books ever written. It makes one ashamed of being human.

  Defoe was concerned not only about the matter of making his own living, he was intensely interested in the way other people made theirs; in all the shifts by which we feed and clothe ourselves, and buy a business and get together a property. It must have been much harder to wring a livelihood from a stony world then than it is now: in the profound concern of this small, mean, vigorous spirit, we get some aching sense of the cruel pressure of the times.

  In one book Defoe’s single theme was quite enough. It happened that the way in which Robinson Crusoe made a living was extremely interesting: nearly everyone would like to try it for a month or two. Except for the moralizing, which few of us read, Defoe’s immortal work is an account of how Robinson maintained himself and acquired property on a desert island.

  The Fortunate Mistress is an account of how a woman maintained herself and acquired property — and her way of doing it is not interesting. Her profession, of course, is an old theme in art; and of the queens of that profession great artists have left portraits of enduring beauty in sculpture and painting and literature. But such a theme, in the hands of Roxanna and that thrifty hosier, Daniel Defoe — ! Shakespeare himself could never have created two such characters; he wouldn’t have had the patience. They remind us of what Heine said, that no irony can compete with God’s irony.

  Some sentimental critics, of the kind that Defoe himself called “high-flying,” have tried to make out a case for The British Tradesman as a masterpiece of irony. Its author would have said that you might as well call the multiplication table irony. Defoe attempted ironical treatment more than once, in imitation of Swift, but he could never sustain that mood for long. He was as devoid of humour as he was of idealism, of romance, and of geniality. Robinson Crusoe and The Fortunate Mistress splendidly illustrate to what different ends a writer can put the same talent. The one book has what Stevenson called charm of circumstance, the other emphatically has not; but in both the same nature is effectively asserting itself; mean enough and vital enough — invulnerable because it never affects qualities which it neither comprehends nor admires.

  MY FIRST NOVELS

  There Were Two

  MY FIRST NOVEL, Alexander’s Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture. It was the result of meeting some interesting people in London. Like most young writers, I thought a book should be made out of “interesting material,” and at that time I found the new more exciting than the familiar. The impressions I tried to communicate on paper were genuine, but they were very shallow. I still find people who like that book because it follows the most conventional pattern, and because it is more or less laid in London. London is supposed to be more engaging than, let us say, Gopher Prairie; even if the writer knows Gopher Prairie very well and London very casually. Soon after the book was published I went for six months to Arizona and New Mexico. The longer I stayed in a country I really did care about, and among people who were a part of the country, the more unnecessary and superficial a book like Alexander’s Bridge seemed to me. I did no writing down there, but I recovered from the conventional editorial point of view.

  When I got back to Pittsburgh I began to write a book entirely for myself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbours of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska, when I was eight or nine years old. I found it a much more absorbing occupation than writing Alexander’s Bridge; a different process altogether. Here there was no arranging or “inventing”; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong. This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. The other was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time. Since I wrote this book for myself, I ignored all the situations and accents that were then generally thought to be necessary. The “novel of the soil” had not then come into fashion in this country. The drawing-room was considered the proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart people or clever people. “O. Henry” had made the short story go into the world of the cheap boarding-house and the shop-girl and the truck-driver. But Henry James and Mrs. Wharton were our most interesting novelists, and most of the younger writers followed their manner, without having their qualifications.

  O Pioneers! interested me tremendously, because it had to do with a kind of country I loved, because it was about old neighbours, once very dear, whom I had almost forgotten in the hurry and excitement of growing up and finding out what the world was like and trying to get on in it. But I did not in the least expect that other people would see anything in a slow-moving story, without “action,” without “humour,” without a “hero”; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards, — set in Nebraska, of all places! As everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background; its very name throws the delicately atuned critic into a clammy shiver of embarrassment. Kansas is almost as unpromising. Colorado, on the contrary, is considered quite possible. Wyoming really has some class, of its own kind, like well-cut riding breeches. But a New York critic voiced a very general opinion when he said: “I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it.”

  O Pioneers! was not only about Nebraska farmers; the farmers were Swedes! At that time, 1912, the Swede had never appeared on the printed page in this country except in broadly humorous sketches; and the humour was based on two peculiarities: his physical strength, and his inability to pronounce the letter “j.” I had certainly good reasons for supposing that the book I had written for myself would remain faithfully with me, and continue to be exclusively my property. I sent it to Mr. Ferris Greenslet, of Houghton Mifflin, who had published Alexander’s Bridge, and was truly astonished when he wrote me they would publish it.

  I was very much pleased when William Heinemann decided to publish it in England. I had met Mr. Heinemann in London several times, when I was on the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine, and I had the highest opinion of his taste and judgment. His personal taste was a thing quite apart from his business, and it was uncompromising. The fact that a second-rate book sold tremendously never made him hedge and insist that there must be something pretty good in it after all. Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.

  When my third book, The Song of the Lark, came along, Heinemann turned it down. I had never heard from him directly that he liked O Pioneers! but now I had a short hand-written letter from him, telling me that he admired it very much; that he was declining The Song of the Lark because he thought in that book I had taken the wrong road, and that the full-blooded method, which told everything about everybody, was not natural to me and was not the one in which I would ever take satisfaction. “As for myself,” he wrote, “I always find the friendly, confidential tone of writing of this sort distressingly familiar, even when the subject matter is very fine.”

  At that time I did not altogether agree with Mr. Heinemann, nor with Randolph Bourne, in this country, who said in his review almost the same thing. One is always a little on the defensive about one’s last book. But when the next book, My Ántonia, came along, quite of itself and with no direction from me, it took the road of O Pioneers! — not the road of The Song of the Lark. Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar; and it quite destroys in a book a very satisfying element analogous to what painters call “composition.”

  KATHERINE MANSFIELD

  EVERY WRITER AND critic of discernment who looked into Katherine Mansfield’s first volume of short stories must have felt that here was a very individual talent. At this particular time few writers care much about their medium except as a means for expressing ideas. But in Katherine Mansfield one recognized virtuosity, a love for the medium she had chosen.

  The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. One can catalogue all the qualities that he shares with other writers, but the thing that is his very own, his timbre, this cannot be defined or explained any more than the quality of a beautiful speaking voice can be.

  It was usually Miss Mansfield’s way to approach the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents. She chose a small reflector to throw a luminous streak out into the shadowy realm of personal relationships. I feel that personal relationships, especially the uncatalogued ones, the seemingly unimportant ones, interested her most. To my thinking, she never measured herself up so fully as in the two remarkable stories about an English family in New Zealand, “Prelude” and “At the Bay.”

  I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday “happy family” who are merely going on living their daily lives, with no crises or shocks or bewildering complications to try them. Yet every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour. As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at the breaking-point.

  One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

  Katherine Mansfield’s peculiar gift lay in her interpretation of these secret accords and antipathies which lie hidden under our everyday behaviour, and which more than any outward events make our lives happy or unhappy. Had she lived, her development would have gone on in this direction more than in any other. When she touches this New Zealand family and those far-away memories ever so lightly, as in “The Doll’s House,” there is a magic one does not find in the other stories, fine as some of them are. With this theme the very letters on the page become alive. She communicates vastly more than she actually writes. One goes back and runs through the pages to find the text which made one know certain things about Linda or Burnell or Beryl, and the text is not there — but something was there, all the same — is there, though no typesetter will ever set it. It is this overtone, which is too fine for the printing press and comes through without it, that makes one know that this writer had something of the gift which is one of the rarest things in writing, and quite the most precious. That she had not the happiness of developing her powers to the full is sad enough. She wrote the truth from Fontainebleau a few weeks before she died: “The old mechanism isn’t mine any longer, and I can’t control the new.” She had lived through the first stage, had outgrown her young art, so that it seemed false to her in comparison with the new light that was breaking within. The “new mechanism,” big enough to convey the new knowledge, she had not the bodily strength to set in motion.

  Katherine Mansfield’s published Journal begins in 1914 and ends in 1922, some months before her death. It is the record of a long struggle with illness, made more cruel by lack of money and by the physical hardships that war conditions brought about in England and France. At the age of twenty-two (when most young people have a secret conviction that they are immortal), she was already ill in a Bavarian pension. From the time when she left New Zealand and came back to England to make her own way, there was never an interval in which she did not have to drive herself beyond her strength. She never reached the stage when she could work with a relaxed elbow. In her story “Prelude,” when the family are moving, and the storeman lifts the little girl into the dray and tucks her up, he says: “Easy does it.” She knew this, long afterward, but she never had a chance to put that method into practice. In all her earlier stories there is something fierce about her attack, as if she took up a new tale in the spirit of overcoming it. “Do or die” is the mood, — indeed, she must have faced that alternative more than once: a girl come back to make her living in London, without health or money or influential friends, — with no assets but talent and pride.

  In her volume of stories entitled Bliss, published in 1920 (most of them had been written some years before and had appeared in periodicals), she throws down her glove, utters her little challenge in the high language which she knew better than did most of her readers:

  But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

  A fine attitude, youthful and fiery: out of all the difficulties of life and art we will snatch something. No one was ever less afraid of the nettle; she was defrauded unfairly of the physical vigour which seems the natural accompaniment of a high and daring spirit.