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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

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, inspired, 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.

To J. W.

By RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL EAN WEBSTER went in golden, glowing June, Upon a full-pulsed, warm-breathed, vital day, With rich achievement luring her to stay, Putting her keen, kind pen aside too soon

In the ripe promise of her ardent noon.

Yet, sturdy-souled and whimsical and gay,
I think she would have chosen it that way,
On the high-hill note of her life's clear tune.
And while gray hearts grow green again with mirth,
And wakened joy and beauty go to find

The small, blue-ginghamed lonely ones of earth,
While charm and cheer and color work their will
In the glad gospel that she left behind,
She will be living, laughing with us still.

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New England, the National Wallflower

By ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT

Illustrations by Lester G. Hornby

BY reputation a blue-stocking, an aristo

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

chicory; its pointed firs and wine-glass

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

like one.
In the "native" an American
feels that he sees a caricature of himself.

This misguided being, so strangely resembling him, believes in "plain living and high thinking," considers a professor of philosophy an attractive person, "applauds anything that 's called a sonata," goes unblushingly to a Unitarian meetinghouse, and, when he dies, leaves seventyfour dollars, twelve thousand musty volumes, and an autograph letter from Ibsen to Browning-or so the American fancies. Why? It is difficult to guess.

Every spring and again every autumn, Americans, obsessed with that fallacious prepossession, pour across New England. From what they see, and with their genius for overlooking the distinction between facts and truths, they might as logically think New England illiterate. Tramps, pensioners, curmudgeons, and indigent space-writers overrun her grandest library. Italians, not New-Englanders, most prize Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Her Boston Opera Company perished of inanition. New England villages breathlessly await the next novel by Mr. Harold Bell Wright. Hearst newspapers thrive. Her favorite artist, so an outsider might suspect, is the creator of "Mutt and Jeff," her favorite actor Mr. Charles Chaplin. The boldest defense of the Reverend Billy Sunday is signed by a distinguished Unitarian. Another, when consulted regarding the future of Unitarianism in New England, declares, "It will be extinct in fifty years." Meanwhile, she has her Elijah II, her Holy Rollers, and sects that keep watch for the end of the world.

This, if one naïvely substitutes facts for truths, is the reality back of the mythical New England, whose "much learning hath made her mad," though some, Dr. Rainsford among them, attribute her supposed lunacy to pie, doughnuts, boiled dinner, and baked beans. By recalling manifestly unrepresentative menus, I might feign to support that theory. At breakfast, in a Vermont farm-house, I experienced apple-pie seasoned with catnip. In a Massachusetts farm-house the habitual

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Sunday breakfast was oyster-stew. Beans abound, and beans particularly virulent; no authentic New England baked bean has ever yet migrated. Moreover, there is "the clam before the storm.' Hence that remarkable definition of New-Englanders as "an insane race to whom Americans intrust the higher education of their young."

Although New England, while undeniably well educated as a whole, is incurably sane and sensible as a whole, Americans are in for a few shocks, nevertheless. I have personally met the New-Englander who enriched the literature of his country with a volume compounded of laundrylists, astrology, board-bills, and remarks on the fourth dimension; also the NewEnglander who reverses the stars and stripes as a flag for the "Nu Tru Ju" nation, of which he is the founder. In every New England city half a dozen of these harmless originals roam at large. Has the West such lunatics? Has the South? Yes, caged. In New England, where wealth is several generations old, it now and then happens that a family can support an unfortunate at home and give him his freedom. This explains. It explains completely.

But what, pray, accounts for the New England intellect as betrayed by its tongue? The broad a dominates. The final r, silenced where it belongs, recurs where it does not; witness "lawr and awda." Vermont talks "caow." Maine talks "paultics." Quincys are "Quinzys"; Pierces, "Purses." Saco is "Sawco." Billerica becomes "Bill Ricka" and on intimate acquaintance "Bill Ricky." One speaks of a "horse and team." Says the ashman, "I bang the barrel down, like this, on the edge of the team." A long, lean, melancholy omnibus is a "barge." A "lumper," discussing the collapse of a wrecked vessel, declares, "She lasted quick." In rural New England clever means "not over 'n' above bright." One ends by quoting the Earl of Pawtucket: "Do you suppose these people know they 're foreigners?"

Foreigners they are by inheritance

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