University of Virginia Library

III. HER MATURE POWER

There are two other volumes by Miss Glasgow, separated by an interval of nearly a decade, which nevertheless deserve to be analysed together, because of the interesting contrast they afford: The Voice of the People and The Romance of a Plain Man. Throughout all of her books, one notices a theme to which Miss Glasgow reverts again and again, with never-flagging interest, and that is the theme of unequal marriages. Under the changed conditions of the reconstruction period it was inevitable that the old distinctions of race and breeding, the old prejudices against honest toil and industry should be to some extend modified; and that the daughters of impoverished families should not in all cases think that they were stooping if they wedded brave and honourable men whose fathers perhaps had been mere plain tillers of the soil. This problem, in its various aspects, Miss Glasgow has approached over and over again; but it is only in the two books now under discussion that she has frankly made it the central theme. Far apart as they are in other respects—since The Voice of the People is not without crudities of construction, while The Romance of a Plain Man is easily Miss Glasgow's finest achievements up to the present time—the two books offer a curious parallel of plot for very nearly the first half of their development. Nicholas Burr and Ben Starr are both small, barefoot, not over-clean boys when they first meet, in the one case, Eugenia Battle, in the other Sally Mickleborough, spick and span and freshly starched—and in each case the small girl makes the small boy exceedingly uncomfortably by declaring that she cannot play with him because he is "common." In each case the childish insult fires a latent ambition; Nicholas Burr confides to kindly old Judge Bassett his secret hope of some day becoming a judge; and Ben Starr similarly owns to General Bolingbroke, who happens to be president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, his own determination to work his way up eventually to the presidency of that same road. In each case the boy's ambition both amuses and pleases the busy man, and in each case the boy's education is cared for, his way made smooth, and the first steps toward his ultimate goal are guided by a wise and protecting hand. And in the later book Sally Mickleborough is brought to acknowledge, precisely as Eugenia Battle

acknowledges in the earlier, that "common" was a mistaken and an unjust word, and that she is glad and proud to give her heart and hand to the man who has already achieved so much for her sake. But here the two books part company.

Ellen Glasgow

[Description: An oval-shaped head-and-shoulders portrait of Miss Glasgow in white summer dress and shawl.]

In each of them the pride of the girl's family forms an almost insurmountable barrier; in each of them there is another man who by birth, fortune and education seems expressly designed for the girl's husband. In the earlier book Miss Glasgow decides that between Nick Burr and Eugenia Battle there is too great a gulf ever to be bridged over even by love; a stray scrap of scandal touching him, too hastily believed in by her, estranges them permanently; she marries the man in her own class, while he goes on doggedly climbing the rungs of the political ladder, to his final goal as governor of the State. The voice of the people, through the ballot, has given him his political ambition; the voice of the people, through the tongue of scandal, robbed him of married happiness; the voice of the people, through the mad frenzy of a mob, bent upon lynching a negro whom he, as governor, has sworn to give a fair trial, robs him of his life. And the woman lives on, in a marriage that has brought neither joy nor sorrow, finding her only real emotion in the cares of motherhood.

The Romance of a Plain Man is a book as much bigger and stronger as a decade of steady growth can well make it. To begin with, Miss Glasgow has realised that such a story, concerning itself mainly with the inward growth of a man's character, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by being seen through the man's eyes. Therefore, she tells it in the first person. Secondly, she realises that when two people care for each other with the fierce, unreasoning passion either of Nick and Eugenia or of Ben and Sally, they are not likely to let either small obstacles or great ones come between them; that they will brush aside entreaties, warnings and commands, and take their chances of being either supremely happy or utterly miserable. In the marriage of Ben Starr and Sally Mickleborough the author, if we rightly understand her, wishes to show how difficult it is for a man sprung from a humble and rather vulgar source to understand the finer feelings of those more gently born. For Sally's sake Ben Starr wants wealth and education and power; and for her sake he wins them, rapidly, surely and with apparent ease. He wants them first to prove to her that he is not "common"; and afterward, having won her in defiance of her family and her social world, he continues to strive for more money, more power, more positions of trust, always with a fixed idea that they will bring her greater happiness. And here is where he makes his one great mistake, that almost wrecks their married life in mid-course. He does not realise that his absorption in the big game of finance leaves him little time even to think of his wife, and none at all to place at her service. Because the obvious difference between himself and the men in Sally's own class is money and position and education, he makes the natural mistake of thinking that the attainment and possession of these things is in itself the key to social equality, the one thing essential to his happiness and hers. And the last and most important lesson in his whole course of self-education he is slow in learning—that the essential thing does not lie in these achievements but behind them—it lies in a man's power to mould his own character until he is capable of attaining his goal. It is not a bank account, nor a directorship in a railway, nor social recognition, nor a knowledge of the Odes of Horace that in themselves win and hold the love of a woman like Sally Mickleborough; but without the energy and persistence to compass these things, Ben Starr would not have been the kind of man to win her. But having once won her, though he should lose his money, forget his Latin, find himself under a social cloud, she is the sort of woman who will cling all the more loyally—and with feminine illogic be the happier for serving him. This lesson Ben Starr might have learned early in their married life, during temporary reverses, when for some weeks Sally is slowly nursing him back to health after a desperate illness, and incidentally earning their daily bread with her own frail, unaccustomed hands. Had he been less of a "plain" man, and gifted with a little more subtlety, he would have seen that for these few weeks they were nearer to true happiness than at any time before. But as a matter of fact he does not see, but goes on toiling, amassing, reaching out for more power, more fame, and year by year approaching his boyhood's ambition, the presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Midland Railroad. And at last it is only under the stress of a great sorrow and a greater fear; only when he sees his wife's life trembling in the balance, that this essentially plain man receives enlightenment, and realises that the path to happiness may lie through the deliberate sacrifice of a life-long ambition.

Such in brief is the substance of Miss Glasgow's latest volume, which at the same time is her most thoughtful, most mature, and altogether biggest novel. It is a peculiarly American novel, since it symbolises with a subtlety that is essentially feminine and a force that is almost virile the practical limitations of the doctrine that all men are born free and equal.