HE career of Jean Webster McKin

THE

ney, who died last June on the day that her little daughter was born, was remarkable for its steady, sure progress. Mourned by hundreds of thousands, her great personal charm, her warm sympathies, and above all her penetrating sense of humor made her toward the last a very potent influence in semi-public life. Absolutely the artist, yet absolutely without the usual vagaries of the artistic temperament, and possessed of an indomitable will, only her untimely death prevented her from reaching her goal-a place in the front rank of American writers.

In all her busy, happy years she realized more completely than most of us the lines of Henley's poem: to the very end she was indeed the master of her fate. As a small child she began to shape her course, to manage her own affairs. Her real name was Alice Jane Chandler Webster, the Jane being after the mother of her greatuncle, Mark Twain. At boarding-school her room-mate was also named Alice, and, to avoid confusion, Alice Webster was asked to take her second name. Girl-like, she objected to the plainness of Jane, and so then and ever after she called herself Jean Webster.

Having chosen her own name, it was not long after that she began more or less consciously to work toward a literary career. It is recorded that Mark Twain as a boy of ten held spellbound his entire family with the simple narrative of his small adventures. Jean Webster seems to have had in common with her uncle this same gift of narration. Her letters from boarding-school and later from Vassar were the delight of her parents, and it was natural that the English courses should claim her chief interest.

It was the daily theme, invented, I believe, by Barrett Wendell of Harvard, that gave her her first real opportunity to develop her natural gifts, and in recognition of them the young freshman was appointed local correspondent to a Pough

keepsie paper. She very nearly lost this coveted position through a practical joke. Upon the occasion of a visit by a noted. astronomer, some fanciful information about him, imparted to her by a guileful junior, created a considerable stir when duly published. Jean Webster swallowed her chagrin, and turned the incident into a short story that was published in a monthly magazine. Other stories of college life followed, and at the end of her senior year she collected them and offered the manuscript for book publication. This volume was soon published under the title of "When Patty Went to College," and stands to-day as the best volume of undergraduate stories that have emanated from a woman's college, a book notable. for its spirit of youth and for its shrewd and humorous observation.

At this time Jean Webster was living with her mother in the family home at Fredonia, New York. While negotiations for her first book were pending, she packed her bag and came to New York. She never went back. Like many other young writers, she found both her opportunity and her inspiration in that "stepmother" of American cities, and henceforth she was a part of its life.

In those early days she spent most of her summers abroad, and Italy became the land of her heart's desire. Its great charm for her is reflected in three of her later works: "Jerry, Junior," "The Wheat Princess," and an unpublished comedy, "The Pigs of Palestrina."

Two factors in her success as a writer were her native wit and her genius for hard work. Though all her little comedies have the spontaneous air of being "dashed off," they were the product of months of painstaking labor and much revision. While she was writing her famous "Daddy-Long-Legs" at a friend's home in Greenwich, Connecticut, she spent her leisure moments in talking with an Italian boy named Mario who worked about the house. They usually talked of Italy and

HE career of Jean Webster McKinney, who died last June on the day. that her little daughter was born, was remarkable for its steady, sure progress. Mourned by hundreds of thousands, her great personal charm, her warm sympathies, and above all her penetrating sense of humor made her toward the last a very potent influence in semi-public life. Absolutely the artist, yet absolutely without. the usual vagaries of the artistic temperament, and possessed of an indomitable. will, only her untimely death prevented her from reaching her goal-a place in the front rank of American writers.

In all her busy, happy years she realized more completely than most of us the lines of Henley's poem: to the very end she was indeed the master of her fate. As a small child she began to shape her course, to manage her own affairs. Her real name was Alice Jane Chandler Webster, the Jane being after the mother of her greatuncle, Mark Twain. At boarding-school her room-mate was also named Alice, and, to avoid confusion, Alice Webster was asked to take her second name. Girl-like, she objected to the plainness of Jane, and so then and ever after she called herself Jean Webster.

Having chosen her own name, it was not long after that she began more or less consciously to work toward a literary career. It is recorded that Mark Twain as a boy of ten held spellbound his entire family with the simple narrative of his small adventures. Jean Webster seems to have had in common with her uncle this same gift of narration. Her letters from boarding-school and later from Vassar were the delight of her parents, and it was natural that the English courses should claim her chief interest.

It was the daily theme, invented, I believe, by Barrett Wendell of Harvard, that gave her her first real opportunity to develop her natural gifts, and in recognition of them the young freshman was appointed local correspondent to a Pough

keepsie paper. keepsie paper. She very nearly lost this coveted position through a practical joke. Upon the occasion of a visit by a noted astronomer, some fanciful information about him, imparted to her by a guileful junior, created a considerable stir when duly published. Jean Webster swallowed her chagrin, and turned the incident into a short story that was published in a monthly magazine. Other stories of college life followed, and at the end of her senior year she collected them and offered the manuscript for book publication. This volume was soon published under the title of "When Patty Went to College," and stands to-day as the best volume of undergraduate stories that have emanated from a woman's college, a book notable for its spirit of youth and for its shrewd and humorous observation.

At this time Jean Webster was living with her mother in the family home at Fredonia, New York. While negotiations for her first book were pending, she packed her bag and came to New York. She never went back. Like many other young writers, she found both her opportunity and her inspiration in that “stepmother" of American cities, and henceforth she was a part of its life.

In those early days she spent most of her summers abroad, and Italy became the land of her heart's desire. Its great charm for her is reflected in three of her later works: "Jerry, Junior," "The Wheat Princess," and an unpublished comedy, "The Pigs of Palestrina."

Two factors in her success as a writer were her native wit and her genius for hard work. Though all her little comedies have the spontaneous air of being "dashed off," they were the product of months of painstaking labor and much revision. While she was writing her famous "Daddy-Long-Legs" at a friend's home in Greenwich, Connecticut, she spent her leisure moments in talking with an Italian boy named Mario who worked about the house. They usually talked of Italy and

in his native tongue. Once he was asked if he had ever read one of Miss Webster's stories. He said he had. Which one? Why, the one she put in the scrap-basket! These were the discarded chapters of "Daddy-Long-Legs"; for it was this author's practice enormously to over-write a story and then cut it to what she deemed its proper proportions, a rare trait in these days of so much per word. So Mario had the honor of reading some passages in the careers of Daddy and Judy that no one else will ever see.

Jean Webster's large-hearted interest in humanity was always the actuating motive of her pen. There is a pretty play of sentiment in everything she wrote, but her wholesome sense of humor always saved her from sentimentality, and no writer of our time was more skilful than she in those pleasing contrasts of humor and pathos that are characteristic of modern American fiction.

Jean Webster was in no sense a reformer. "Daddy-Long-Legs" was the spontaneous creation of her brain, in spired, no doubt, by her passionate love of children. As a play, even more than in book form, it did more good than a thousand tracts in pointing the need of institutional reforms. Its effect was so immediate and so wide-spread that the author found herself at the center of a reform movement. As a result she wrote

JEAN

her last published work, "Dear Enemy," which, beneath the light, engaging lovestory that plays about the surface, presents the last word in the care of dependent children-a book destined to do more effective service in behalf of these unfortunates than all the treatises yet published. Such is the magic of personality when. combined with a seeing eye and a singing pen. The names of her characters, whimsically enough, she usually chose from the telephone-book, but the characters themselves were always taken from life both in her fiction and in her play-writing.

She had evolved a thorough technic; she was master of the tools she wrought with; and at the time of her death she lacked only complete maturity of mind and experience to achieve the great things she was potentially capable of. As it is, what she has left us will stand the test of time, I believe, as the best of its kind.

Only a few intimates know of the wide benefactions and the generous giving of time and thought that filled the days of her busy life. But those who have caught in her writings the friendliness and good humor of her attitude toward life will not be surprised to know that she lived as she wrote. And there is poignant pathos in the fact that this sturdy optimist who did so much in her later years for the cause of childhood should at the last have given her life for a little child. D. Z. D.

crat, a saint, and withal a prude, New England sits alone, the national wallflower. She has ceased to belong. Paris boasts a "Grand Hotel of the Universe and of the United States"; by the same token, behold "the United States of America and of New England!"

Yet Frenchmen love their Bretons, who are the New-Englanders of France, an elder race recalling a dim past and inhabiting a remote corner province; and Americans at least love the province peopled by their own New-Englanders. Delightful it is, with its unpainted farm-houses, eaveless or gambrel-roofed and mossy; its ancient, pillared white churches; its tombstones, leaning awry; its well-sweeps and old oaken buckets; its stone walls; its winding lanes and roadsides blue with

elms; its mountains, cool and luscious, reëchoing the song of cascading brooks; its shores, a tumble of red rocks or white with shell-strewed sand. As a Brittany, perfect. Every prospect pleases; but, alas! the American goes on to add ungenerously, "and only man is a 'native.'

Now, it is relatively a simple matter for Frenchmen to love Bretons. No Frenchman thinks of judging a Breton by French standards. Radical, self-confessed differences of blood, speech, tradition, custom, and even costume separate Jean from Jehan, and, consequently, draw them together. Between Americans and NewEnglanders no such binding barriers exist. A New-Englander looks like an American, dresses like an American, frequently acts like an American, and almost talks