The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1916-1920, 1918-07-14
F. u | 7 9 r | A L

ment more intense than used to feel when l spent
a morning with one of these pioneer women at her
baking or butter making. / used to ride home in
the most unreasonable state of excitement always
felt as if they told me much more than they said
as if had actually got inside another persons
skin. If begins that early it is the story of the
man eating tiger over again-no other adventure
ever carries one quite so far
Do you detect something's Do you perceive QD
a set Of impressions acquired at the most plastic
age and with sharpness of CONFORMATION never to
be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellec-
tual and emotional feeling-of heart and mind
which carried the girl beyond the spoken word and
also (3l an imaginative faculty which could 60 on
living thing after merely hearing about it and
living it through to the unnarrated possibly unex-
perienced, conclusionf Do you get hint of any
or all of these thingsf Of course you do!
What She Had to Learn.
Going further we learn that when Miss GATHER
began to write she tried to put the Swedish and
Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood
into her short stories. "The results, ~ We in
formed, "never satisfied her. She discussed this
dissatisfaction afterward.
at is always hard to write about things that are
near your hear" she argued. ''From kind of
instinct of selfprotection you distOrt and disguise
them. Those stories were poor that they dis
couraged me. decided that wouldn't write any
more about the country and the people for whom
had personal feeling
''Then had the good fortune to meet SARAH
ORNE JEwETT, who had read all of my early stories
and had very clear and definite opinions about them
and about where my work fell short She said:
Write it as it is don't try to make it like this
that You can't do it in anybody else s way you
boxo 20 &c
happens to be new, don't let that brighten you.
Don't try to write the kind of short story that this
or that magazine wants. write the truth and let
them take it or leave it.
at is that kind of honesty, that earnest
deavOr to tell truly the thing that hauns the mind,
that love in Miss JEwETT's own work. | dedi-
Gated 0 Pioneers! to her because had talked over
of the characters with her, and in this book
tried to tell the story of the people truthfully
and simply as if were telling it to her by word
of MOUTH
Why She Had to Learn 1t.
This is downright enlightening Miss GATHER
does not specifically say that she had to depart
from actual persons when she came to do her good
work, but that is the inference we draw. She does
not entirely lay bare the real reason; and for the
benefit Of those who may be puzzled over it let us
supplement what she says.
There is pitch of emotion at which the artist
cannot work; he can only see, feel learn, store up;
the rendering of what he has felt and seen comes
afterward. WORDSWORTH said that poetry was emo
ton recollected in tranquility. He might Just as
well have extended the definition to include all
forms of art. When you come to sit down and
put on paper actual persons whom we knew and
loved Tor hated We cannot do it if the feeling is
still very strong, any more than can write about
them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake
and our emotional and mental disturbance is so
great that cannot collect our thoughts, or if
We contrve to collect them partially, cannot put
them down on paper. Tears blur the vision We
have to wait, then, until little time has passed
and we are calmer; until We can recall in warm,
remembering glow the feeling of that time, recall
it just sufficiently for artist s purpose We sail
through it then, but are not awash.
Very often this intensity of feeling about actual
persons persists as to make it impracticabe to
write honestly about them at ALL And so the artist
is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying
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