Dorothy Canfield Fisher

“ The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he cannot rest till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression that life has made on him. ”

“ I want them to know something bigger and freer than will ever come to them in this Old World of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, too, wish to escape from the narrowness of this provincial town where an arrogant young lieutenant swaggering about in his gold-braided white broadcloth uniform is much higher in social rank than the most learned and renowned member of the University faculty; where a rich lumber-merchant, brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political position and parade about with sash and gold chain and the insignia of the office of Mayor. ”

“ Any one of us, to the remotest cousin, can spot an Uncle Giles as far as we can see him. We know all about him, and it is not on our front porches that he comes to display his tact and loyalty, and the decorum and grace of his manners. As for allowing the faintest trace of Uncle-Gilesism to color our own lives, there is not one of us who would not rush out to earn his living by breaking stone by the road-side rather than accept even the most genuinely voluntary loan. ”

“ One day this year, as I hung over an Arthur Davies, a strange, beautiful, white-fleshed, eerie, blonde woman, placed at the side of a luminous canvas, with, so it seemed to me, more pure imaginative beauty than anything since Botticelli, I heard voices behind me. A tall, splendid-looking old man, with a great white beard, fine dark eyes, and the carriage of a king was talking to a younger man, an unimpressive, slight, fair fellow, evidently very ill at ease. ”

“ With him, as with other manifestants of the mid-century explosion of energy in America, it was as if the long generations of vegetating country-dwellers had, like other vegetating matter of by-gone ages, turned to rich veins of highly combustible material, which this descendant of theirs mined out, at top speed, and cast by great shovelfuls into the furnace of his personality. He seems always to have been incandescent, the whole six-feet-three of him, with motive-power which he could not, try as he might, use up fast enough to cool off. ”

“ Nobody ventured to make any such sanctimonious comment to caustic Octavie Moreau, fifty-four years old, weighty, powerful, utterly indifferent to other people’s opinions, her fine mind at the perfection of its maturity, her well-tempered personality like a splendid tool at the service of her will, her heart preserved from care about other people’s troubles by her biological conviction of the futility of trying to help any one not energetic enough to help himself. ”

“ To me, school and lessons in deportment seemed queerer than ever, after that great gust of stormy, ruffling wind, but the Brodard girls were used to such contrasts. They but plunged themselves deeper than ever, up to their very necks, into the atmosphere of gentility. They had caught more than their mother’s accent, they had caught her deep anxiety about their future, her passionate determination that the ideas of their father should not drag them into that impossible world of workingmen, radicals and badly dressed outcasts, which was the singular choice of their excellent poor dear Papa. ”

“ To emerge from the silent rigidity of the Purdon house into the cheerful, easy-going, affectionate noise of the Manley home, to exchange the grim looks of Grandmother Purdon for the exuberant caresses of Grandmother Manley; to leave behind all stringent admonitions to put your [Pg 156] wraps on a certain hook, and to be allowed to fling them down on the floor where you stood.... Little Pearl (she was never called Maria by the Manleys) felt herself rebounding into all the sunshine and good-nature, as a rubber ball rebounds from a hard stone wall. ”

“ He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word, told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their mouths. ”

“ The stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. ”

“ Peter enjoyed his pretty home and devoted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray leanness which, just after Miss Arling had gone away, had made people turn and look after him in the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy and successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occupation, offering no resistance to such cooking as Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow rosy and sleek, his hair from being rough and bristling, began to look smooth and glossy. ”

“ But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come. ”

“ Each year the Selectmen planning the town expenditures with the concentrated prudence born of hard necessity, cast an uneasy mental glance up Arnold Hollow way, and scringed at the thought that perhaps this was the year when money would have to be taken away from the road or the school fund to pay for Old Man Warner’s doctoring and nursing; and finally for his burial, because as the years went by, even the tenuous western granddaughter vanished: died, or moved, or something. Old Man Warner was now entirely alone in the world. ”

“ The prison camp was an enormous one in the north of Germany, a dreary clutter of rough wooden buildings thrown down on a flat, sandy plain, entangled and surrounded by miles of barbed-wire fencing. The prison-room allotted to the forty women from Tourciennes was a high, bare loft, like a part of an ill-built, hastily constructed barn. Around three walls were tiers of bunks, filled with damp, moldy straw, a couple of dirty blankets on each. In the middle of the room was a smallish stove, rather tall and thin in shape, with one hole in the top, closed by a flat lid. ”

“ Yes, the Brodard girls were an example to us all, in and out of the class in deportment, for they were as scrupulously observant of all the rules of good behavior in daily school-life as under the eye of Professor Delacour. Any chance observer would have been sure that they were preparing to enter the wealthiest and most exclusive society, an impression by no means contradicted by the aspect of their mother, a quiet, distinguished, tailored person, who brought them to school at the beginning of the term, and once in a while made the tiresome trip from Morvilliers to Paris to see them. ”

“ When you are your own author, you know all about your reader, and need never think of his limitations. He is faithful to you, flies lightly when you rise into the air, plods steadily beside you at your own pace as you slowly work your way into unfamiliar country, flashes back into the past and selects exactly what is needed from his experience, sinks with you into a golden haze of contemplation over some surprising or puzzling phenomenon, is in no nagging hurry to “get on with the story.” ”

“ But the Behrens did not seem to notice that there was anything lacking in their treatment. You never saw people more delighted than they were to be back in America.
“It was worse than I remembered,” Professor Behrens told my father. “After an experience of the free, breezy, self-respecting life in America it was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffocating! With the most ridiculous caste spirit. Rusted to a stand-still with cock-sure conservatism! An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore at any mention of new possibilities for human nature, or for human organizations. ”

“ Her bold, strong voice, her dauntless look, her masterful gesture, brought them out of their lassitude, brought them from all sides and corners of the room, where they had abandoned themselves, brought them in a compact group close about her. She went on, her steady eyes going from one to the other, “I think I know what is the first thing to do; to take a solemn vow to stick by each other loyally. You know it is said that women always quarrel among themselves, and that all French people do. We are in a desperate plight. If we quarrel ever, at all: if we are divided, we are undone. ”

“ Absorbed each in her own grief and despair, they had lain on the thin layer of straw on the floor of the freight car, at the end of their [Pg 46] strength, undone by the ignominy of their utter defenselessness before brute force. The marks of tears showed on their gray, unwashed faces, but they had no more tears to shed now. They leaned against the walls and the bunks, their knees shaking with exhaustion, and looked about them at the dreary, dirty desolation of the room which from now on was to be their world. ”

“ This is not at all because Uncle Giles ever disgraced the family or did any evil or wicked action. Quite the contrary! Uncle Giles thought that he was the only member of the entire tribe with any fineness or distinction of feeling, with any fitness for a higher sphere of activities than the grubby middle-class world of his kinsmen. Yes, that is what Uncle Giles thought, probably adding to himself that he often felt that he was a “gentleman among canaille.” To this day the family bristles rise at the mention of any one who openly professes to be a gentleman. ”

“ If they were in the yard, or on the porch, Fairfax often accepted the invitation. As we went by in the car we used to see him leaning up against the porch-railing, talking, or helping some busy woman set out her cabbage plants. But he never went indoors.
Our corner of the valley is a very cheerful one with a number of lively children to keep us from “shucking over” into middle age too soon, and the school-house is often the place where we gather for good times. The school-benches are pushed back, the lamps lighted, the fiddler tunes up, and we all dance, young and old, children and grown-ups. ”

“ And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. ”

“ The instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run out after him with warrants for his arrest. ”

“ Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to the writing of novels altogether? Personally I do not believe that the foundations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought about. But, as a matter of fact, I [Pg 16] do not in the least think that novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading public which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the writer’s. Such a body of creative-minded readers would lift the art of fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. ”

“ From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the world of words—and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and cry out and die. ”

“ Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a word. ”

“ But Old Man Warner was still not bright enough to see any reason why he should lie down on his own folks, or why he should not live in his own home. When gentle expostulations were tried, he always answered mildly that he guessed he’d rather go on living the way he was for a while longer; and when blustering was tried, he straightened up, looked the blusterer in the eye, and said he guessed there wasn’t no law in Vermont to turn a man off his own farm, s’long’s he paid his debts, and he didn’t owe any that he knew of. ”

“ Docility in human beings is always a dreadful quality, but docility in matters of taste is shameful. I sighed, and fixed my eyes on what looked like a Chardin. Oh, yes, Chardin was “in” now, I remembered. But an ordinary private family would be as little likely to own a real Chardin as a real Veermeer. I reflected that as soon as it was discovered not to be a genuine one, it would certainly be sent off to the junk shop. And yet it was a delightful canvas, apparently by some one of the period who had absorbed Chardin’s atmosphere and loved it as we do. ”