The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1916-1920, 1918-07-28
Ellen Glasgow.

TLLEN GLASGOW S first two books were pro-
IL duced before she twenty. She is Vir-
gilman, like MARY JOHNSTON, but realist-better,
a disc pie Of naturalism- concerned with social
and personal problems of the last thirty years. A
dozen books stand to her credit all novels except a
book of verse; nearly all concerned with the social
reconstruction in the South. Danish the connota
tons of the word reconstruction as used respect
ing the South. The period Immediately following
the end of the civil war is almost the sole property
of THOMAS Dixon. Miss GLASGOW S province for a
number of wears and number of books has been
the gradual and faefu making over of
the South into something reasonably homogeneous
with the rest of the United States than the lesured
feudasm of the sos and the hopeless wreck of
the Sos
She is a novelist of manners but Of changing
manners, of cycles and transformations whether in
the lives of individuals the life of a region
Unlike Miss JOHNSTON, she cannot revive the past
for its sake but only for the sake of the present
and the future. She an cvOlutioniSt who has not
read DARWIN and HERBERT SPENCER in vain. Her
writing is filled with serious purpose, the purpose
TO put life before YOU not SO much as If is as how
she thinks you should it. She does not preach
or moraliZe, being far too fine artist for such
crudities. 1t is enough TO have given you the facts
in her Interpretation of them. She is quietly con-
fident that you will not be able TO get away from
them, so presented. And you hardly are!
Her Battle
Miss GLASGOW has had TO drive so hard and so
strongly and so much alone; she has had to face
such vast inertia of tradition and such tenacity
of fep1i hiatt hp ST has
hates sentimentaity, and rightly. 1t has been the
terrible obstacle she has had to confront. OF her
South she once said
81 love it; was brought up in it, but all my
life I've had to struggle against the Souths senti.
mentality, which inherit. We will sooner or later
have to tear aSunder that veil of Scntimentality.
Our people will have to realize that statement
made in criticism of the South is not act Of dis
loyalty. Please say that in as kind way as posi-
ble,'' Miss GLASGOW added, probably with some
compunction; for, as she said on another occasion,
when asked what the Southerners thought about
her: 81 have no idea. They very kind to me"
To finish her words about the struggle with inherited
sentimentality: IL say it as Southerner" she
explained. 1--WE must cultivate within truth in
stead of sentmcnalty which up to now has been
our darling vice These words were uttered in
New York in the fall of 1912 few months before
ferring however not to her State but to the hero
inc of the book. Virginia Pendeton
You can't fight sentimentality with tolerance,
and it is Miss GLASGOW handicap that to write the
great books she has written, to succeed she has
- succeeded under the most adverse conditions and
in the most adverse environment, she has had to
contract her horizon, even to shut her eyes and
thrust with all her might ahead Surrounded by
sentmentality and the tradition of past whose
glorious perfection it treason to question she
has not been able always to things clearly and
TO them whole. In the early part of 1916 she
declared that contemporary English fiction was
superior to American fiction, that Americans
demanding from writers and politicians alike an
''evasive idealism'' and ''sham optimism" and
"a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in
logic or human experience"
The Auocous Mistake.
There was some more to the same effect, but let
us not harrow the souls of ourselves who rejoice in
ELLEN GLASGOW S work by recalling any more of it.
She was wrong dead wrong: we think she would be