in her shorter stories the agreeable ease and grace which one associates with the best letters of cultivated women. An occasional error like the confusion, common with her, of "aggravating" with "provoking" simply disarms that dislike which we have of the literary Aristides as of others. The clue to the secret probably lies in part in native gift; in part in the special quality of her education. That, in the formal sense, was scanty. What there was of it was obtained at the South Berwick Academy, but the ill-health which has been referred to as keeping her out of doors also kept her out of school, so that, as the Introduction says, her "reading and study received most of its direction at home." Although what she studied is hid from us, what she read is revealed, - at any rate in part. There is evidence enough in her writings, not only that she early had access to literature of a solid and sustaining kind, a man like her father was certain to have not much of any other in his library, - but also that she early learned to love it. On this point, the list of books which Miss Lancaster and Miss Denis read at Deephaven is instructive: it includes works by Thackeray, Sir Thomas Browne, Fénelon, Thomas Fuller, Addison, and Emerson. And these young women were not terrified by old-fashioned stories and essays, or even by old sermons, and — behold the true book-lover! - they used to read them "with much more pleasure because they had such quaint old brown leather bindings."

Among the books of the two girls some volume by Hawthorne ought, perhaps, also to appear. The Scarlet Letter was published as early as 1850, and in Miss Jewett's writings are many traces of his influence. It may be fanciful to detect a resemblance to Hawthorne in Miss Chauncey in Deephaven or in Lady Ferry in Old Friends and New, but the likeness is plain in such stories as The Gray Man and The Landscape Chamber. This accusation (I should like to say in parenthesis) of undergoing the influence of

Hawthorne is made against almost every New England writer of gloomy stories, and I sometimes wonder if it is entirely just. I have thought that the similarities on which it is founded may rather be evidence of the representative character of Hawthorne's mind; that other stories resemble his, not because they are written with a borrowed inspiration, but because they are written by men of the same gloomy stock. Although Miss Jewett, so far as I know, is not Puritan, her imagination, her seriousness, and her religious nature, taken with her close observation of a people in whom Calvinism had strangely wrought, may be held enough to account for an uncanny bit of symbolism, or story of pursuing fate. However it may be with her, I am ready in general to believe that we should have stories of the sort which we are accustomed to call Hawthornesque had Hawthorne never existed. But I can return from this long digression by averring with some confidence that this writer of exquisite English had a share in showing Miss Jewett how to write. And the moral of it all seems to be the old one that the reading of good books is the best preparation for the writing of them.

If the technique of her style is good, its moral qualities reflect the character which I have been trying to describe, and are no less remarkable in a girl not yet quite out of her teens. It has restraint: there is a conspicuous absence alike of girlish smartness and of girlish gush. It is kind: the humor has no youthful blend of cruelty. It has simplicity: there is no studied phrase-making or fine writing. It shows education in the best sense, and a culture that is real and considerable, if still susceptible of increment in her later years. The tone of it all, indeed, is valuable testimony to the mature poise of her mind, to the strength of her character, to the refinement of her taste, and to the wisdom and skill of her father's training. The whole point which I am trying to make is that, behind such a gift for graceful writing as is possessed by many empty-headed and

empty-hearted people, there was in Miss Jewett's case a very real and valuable force, that of a strong and generous character and a cultivated mind.

If the point has been made successfully, the time has come to speak of the motive which led the young gentlewoman to put to literary use her knowledge of her humble neighbors. I do not believe that one less sordid or more charming ever prompted an author. In the early seventies the summer boarder, so soon to develop into the summer cottager, was born, and with him a new audience for any writer who could describe the scenes in which he found so great a pleasure. Miss Jewett seized the opportunity, but the rough analysis which has been made of her character has failed abjectly if any one is surprised to hear that it was not her head, but her heart, which saw its profit in the obvious chance. In a recent preface to Deephaven she records with a characteristic touch of gentle humor her early terror lest her beloved country-folk be misunderstood. "It seemed not altogether reasonable," she writes, "when timid ladies mistook a selectman for a tramp, because he happened to be crossing a field in his shirt-sleeves." And so, in obedience to that serious and generous side of her character which I have been at pains to note, she set herself to the benevolent task of clearing up all such misapprehensions as this. In a larger view, she undertook to interpret what is best in the countryman to what is best in his city brother. The task presented itself to her as a public duty, and in that spirit she has carried it out. "There is a noble saying of Plato," she writes in the preface already mentioned, "that the best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with one another." That is high ground for a girl to take. I hope I am not cynical in thinking that, in the majority of cases, the first use to which a clever boy or girl, born in the country of the more favored classes, would put literary talent would be smartly to recount the ludicrous aspects of rural

character. If I am right, we can judge by that what unusual thoughtfulness and kindness of heart Miss Jewett displayed.

This motive reflected her goodness: a secondary one reflects her scholarly instincts. It is the motive of the Chronicler. She hoped her careful observations of rural speech and customs might have historical value. "Le paysan est donc," she quotes George Sand, "si l'on peut ainsi dire, le seul historien qui nous reste des temps antehistoriques." The historical point of view is not only attractive but familiar to her, for she has herself played the historian. The Story of the Normans—a subject perhaps made especially alluring to her by that interest in the French which her kinship would cause, and which scattered references throughout her stories make very evident-shows how strong is the historical bent of her mind.

Prompted by these motives, she began her first published book, Deephaven. This work, although for some reason it did not appear in book form until 1877, when she was twenty-eight years old, was written when she was "just past her twentieth birthday." It is an interesting and complete illustration of all that has been said about her here. Two charming girls, aristocratic to their finger-tips,— "types," as Miss Jewett herself calls them," of those pioneers who were already on the eager quest for rural pleasures," go to spend their summer in a fine old country house which belongs to the family of one of them, and which stands in rural grandeur in a sleepy, decaying seaport village on the northern New England coast. There they make the acquaintance of all the village characters, and are unaffectedly surprised and charmed to find them, in their way, such delightful people. The histories of these racy and individual folk form the real stuff of the book. The reader will perceive that Miss Jewett's experience of life as an aristocrat in close touch with humbler country-folk, her personal character, and her literary purpose are all

given, by a book of this plan, perfect expression. Her art, as is natural, does not do itself so thorough justice. Still, her character-drawing, although it shows like a faint pencil sketch beside the deep color of her maturer portraiture, has remarkable shrewdness and justice, and has all the distinguishing qualities of her richer work. The book still has vitality; but, as it is immature in thought and feeling, its chief charm, at least for the seasoned reader, now lies in the sweet spirit of refined girlhood which breathes between all its lines. This slight, modest, girlish, charming piece of writing, although a promise rather than an achievement, was successful with the public: the edition which I have is dated 1896, and is marked as the twenty-third.

Besides the two motives which I have already mentioned as prompting Miss Jewett to write, there was a third: she wished, that is, to interpret town to country. "At the same time," she says, continuing her example of the city women, she was sensible of grave wrong and misunderstanding when these same timid ladies were regarded with suspicion, and their kindnesses were believed to come from pride and patronage."

In her effort to do away with this species of misunderstanding, I fear she has not been so successful. In the first place, art of a less delicate sort than hers is needed to reach wide popular appreciation, and in the second, her aristocratic point of view is here an undoubted disadvantage. In all the stories dealing in part with gentlefolk, this point of view has of course its direct representative in whose always friendly eyes we see the countryfolk reflected. Then, too, even in the stories the action of which employs only uncultivated folk, Miss Jewett, as in The Country of the Pointed Firs, generally introduces herself as a spectator and herself supplies the aristocratic attitude. Even when she seems to absent herself wholly she is palpable. We often speak of detecting an author behind his characters. Miss Jewett never attempts to conceal

herself, but is always in front of hers, describing, explaining, most visibly acting as their interpreter. And a very attractive picture it is too, I digress to say, which she thus quite unconsciously draws of herself,—a dignified and sympathetic Lady Bountiful whose intercourse with her humble friends is marked by exquisite tact and unaffected respect for them as men and women. As Lady Bountiful is an aristocratic English conception, the comparison is, on second thought, more significant than I guessed when it occurred to me. For Miss Jewett says somewhere that the social conditions of New England, as she knew them when a child, were recognizably English, and it is certain that her own attitude toward country people is so. If one thinks a moment, he will perceive that her closest literary analogue is Miss Jane Barlow, who, although Irish, is as good for the present purpose as an Englishwoman. Miss Barlow's attitude is distinctly that of a lady writing of a beloved peasantry. It is a charming attitude, against which I do. not share the resentment that I once heard a self-educated Irish peasant express, and Miss Jewett's is strikingly similar. For example, a passage which might have come straight from an English story is her description of John Grant, an honest farmer, who appears in A Village Ship. He had, it seems, "great respect for the Grants, and looked upon them as people who never need be ashamed of themselves or their forefathers in any company, being people who paid their debts and did their duty in the place to which it had pleased God to call them." And it is worth noticing also that John Grant, of whom Miss Jewett thoroughly approves, orders himself to the Jeffries, the gentlefolk of the story, although they have fallen on evil days, as lowly and reverently as to all his betters. However much one may wish that the beautiful spirit instilled by the most aristocratic of churches were more prevalent in these rebellious days, the teaching must be admitted to be that of an aristocracy. An

other evidence of conservative feeling is the fact that, although Miss Jewett is full of pity for individual hardship, her work may be searched in vain for any expression of discontent with the social order. It all indicates, I think, that she would address a rural audience with less acceptance than a more democratic author who could speak of rich and cultivated people from the popular point of view.

However that may be, I think that no one can read her book and remain unaware that the audience which she seeks, quite naturally and unconsciously, is made of the people of her own social and intellectual class. I have a theory that a study of an author's metaphors, similes, and illustrative instances, since their use, when they are not mere decoration, is to make a meaning vividly plain, will surely reveal what people he is especially addressing. I have noted two in The Tory Lover. In describing Major Tilly Haggens she says that he had a tall, heavily made person, clumsily built, but not without a certain elegance like an old bottle of Burgundy." In describing the minister, she speaks of the buckles which fastened his stock behind, of the buckles on his tight knee-breeches, and of other buckles large and flat on his square-toed shoes, and declares with great aptness that he looked like “a serious book with clasps." If it is objected that these examples are from a story frankly addressed to the class in question, take two others from stories to which the objection does not apply. In A Native of Winby Miss Jewett describes the pupils of a country school. "Only one or two of them," she says, "had an awakened human look in their eyes, such as Matthew Arnold delighted himself in finding so often in the schoolchildren of France." In An Only Son she says humorously of the selectmen of Dalton that for dignity they would not have "looked out of place in that stately company which Carpaccio has painted in the Reception to the English Ambassadors." I am doubtless wrong, but I think that

neither of these allusions would be wholly clear to some people who would resent being classed as uncultivated. In urging this argument, I do not forget that her stories abound in illustrations like that, for example, which declares it as useless to expect that some persons will be thrifty as to expect that a black-and-white cat will be a good mouser. Not to mention that the reason which so limits the powers of a black-and-white cat is carefully explained in the text (which need not be done for the rural reader), the appeal in this as in other such cases is made to the love of the quaint in sophisticated people. But the audience chosen by Miss Jewett may be determined, better than by this perhaps doubtful test, by the whole tenor of her work (which, however, is not so easy of citation), in which the attitude is always felt to be that of an observer de haut en bas. No attentive reader, I think, can escape the conclusion that she has always written as a "summer visitor" for "summer people." Besides providing a great deal of entertainment she has undoubtedly done in that particular field no small amount of good.

Miss Jewett's character, and her purpose, which, of course, is an expression of her character, may be reasonably regarded as having also influenced, more perhaps than she knows, her choice of material. A woman of refined tastes, she naturally feels strongly the usual feminine distaste for crude tragedy and sordid detail. A writer anxious to win respect and liking for a special class in the community, she naturally chooses for emphasis the scenes in which it appears to the best advantage. There must, of course, be shade as well as light in the picture, but the reader is made to feel that if any of her people are hard-hearted and selfish, they are seldom worse than that, they are to be pitied as victims of hard conditions rather than blamed. The king of Folly Island, for example, does not know that he is selfish. Accordingly, what she oftenest shows us is thrift, neighborly kindness, cheeriness, and

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shrewd humor in the face of joyless surroundings, patient endurance, and unselfish abnegation. Yet she knows, of course, that there is another side. In her novel, A Country Doctor, she makes Dr. Ferris declare: "I tell you, Leslie, that for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity, New England cannot be matched the world over. It's like the regions in Iceland that are full of geysers." Yet A Country Doctor is a striking example of her tendency to shun the geyser in action. It begins where most novels would end. There is a whole novel, and to most minds a highly interesting one, in the tragedy which left the child, who becomes the heroine of the story, to be adopted by Dr. Leslie. But what the reader is actually given is the simple, idyllic chronicle of the life of a little girl who chooses to become a physician rather than a wife. A less obvious, but still a good example is supplied in Miss Jewett's second novel, A Marsh Island. Slight in plot, sentimental in atmosphere, it concerns a young artist who nearly falls in love with a farmer's daughter. Plainly, the least push would send this situation across its neat boundaries into the region of poignant tragedy; but Miss Jewett is careful to stay her hand. The story remains merely pretty, if with a charming Dresden-chinalike prettiness.

A long idyl, unfortunately, defeats its own ends by becoming cloying, at least to those who are past their youthful love of sweets. Miss Jewett seems to have realized that the novel was not the form in which to present the good and beautiful things of which alone she cared to tell her readers, since not for nearly twenty years did she attempt another long tale. This -it may as well be treated here—was The Tory Lover. In it she reverts to a figure which, as I have already noted, had long ago touched and quickened her imagination, "the waspish little man" John Paul Jones. Reverting also to those traditions of aristocratic Berwick which are so dear to her, she writes, as is natural, with enthusiasm. The book has admir

able passages and pictures. I have a vivid memory of the description of Berwick, of the account of Miss Hamilton's voyage to England, of the admirable sketch of Franklin in France. It has a scholar's accuracy in the historical portions, and a continuous charm of style of which the catch-penny purveyor of so-called historical fiction has no clear conception. But the title, The Tory Lover, aroused in our well-tutored public the hope of a swashing romance of the cloak and sword. Readers avid of melodrama missed the rush of incident and the recurrent shock of surprise peculiar to such compositions, and would not be put off with mere hon

But this is a digression: the point to be made is that the novel is not the form for one who has neither love of action for its own sake, nor any enjoyment even dramatic in the sharp, bitter struggles of life. For the exhibitor of modest and retiring virtue, "what to other eyes is unflavored dullness," the short story-alas, simply because it is short is distinctly preferable. A single note must not be sounded long. Moreover, since modest virtue is a matter of character, the sketch is preferable to the short story for its display. Incident, if of an elaborate sort, not only occupies the space required to draw character properly, but, in the case of quiet country life, introduces an element of improbability. Had Miss Jewett employed strong incident with any lavishness, her account of sturdy, commonplace, virtuous New England, although it might well have been correct in detail, would, in the mass, have taken a distorted aspect of strenuous liveliness which it is far from possessing. A proper proportion of stories of the two sorts would have produced the