THE VIRGINIA EDITION OF THE WORKS OF ELLEN GLASGOW.
In Twelve Volumes, with Photogravure Frontispiece to Each Volume.
Edition Limited to 810 copies.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $140

By J. Donald Adams

 

 

The Prefaces which Miss Glasgow has provided for this collected edition of her work have a threefold value. They are, first of all, an illuminating commentary on the novels they introduce and on the art of fiction itself; they present the fully matured point of view of one of the finest intelligences which has pursued that art in this country; and they reflect, as do the novels themselves, the complete integrity with which, for 40 years, she has practiced her craft. Like Edith Wharton and Henry James, she has been gripped always by an overmastering interest in the technique of her art, and, with the exception of James himself, none of our novelists has provided us with a similar blueprint of his growth and attitude.

Growth has assuredly been hers. The history of American fiction, especially within the span of years covered by Miss Glasgow's work, is crowded with unfulfilled beginnings, with brilliant promise never brought to fruition. In spite of the fact that Ellen Glasgow belongs among the born novelists, her early work gave no clear indication of the stature she would eventually assume. One reason, perhaps, for the inadequate recognition which even up to now has been hers lies in the fact that her flowly ripening powers prolonged unduly her apprenticeship. Her growth, though steady, was so gradual that it was insufficiently perceived. As the Prefaces testify, she is herself fully aware of this slow development; she is indeed, an extraordinarily objective observer of her own completed work, and of the 19 books she has written seven have been omitted from this edition.

The 12 novels here included are arranged, not in the order of their writing, but in three groups within which a chronological order is followed, according to the period covered in each novel. The first consists of three novels of the Virginia countryside ("Barren Ground," "The Miller of Old Church" and "Vein of Iron"); the second, of three novels of the city ("The Sheltered Life," "The Romantic Comedians" and "They Stooped to Folly"), and the third, of six novels ("The Battleground," "The Deliverance," "Virginia," "The Voice of the People," The Romance of a Plain Man" and "Life and Gabriella"), which constitute a social history of Virginia from 1850 to 1912, later supplemented by the six novels in the other groups.

As a young girl, revolting against the rosewater romances of the Old South which she had read ad nauseam, Miss Glasgow determined that she would write of Southern Life form a realistic approach. She was the first writer so to do, and the first to include within her scope all the social classes of her region. She set for herself the task of reflecting in her novels a social structure in its entirety; and not a static picture, but one which was to take account of the forces of dissolution and change, a dynamic presentation of life evolving under the impact of time. As her work broadened and deepened, as her grasp of her material became surer, her novels transcended their regional and documentary character: their Virginian origin became an accident of birth; they became, essentially, a mature and wise reading of life, marked by those flashes of illumination which can be had from fiction only on its higher levels.

It was with "Virginia," I think, written midway in her career, that Miss Glasgow definitely lifted herself to those higher levels. She was, briefly, to drop below them, but beginning again with "Barren Ground" in 1925, all that she has since published meets the test which she herself applies to the art of fiction--that it shall illuminate experience. "Virginia," though she has in more recent years surpassed it several times, remains one of her best novels. It contains one of her most memorable scenes, handled with superb restraint and understanding--the meeting between Virginia and the Mistress of her husband. There is the portrait of a lady of her time and place--and of that something which belongs to neither--which has not been excelled in the American novel. "Virginia," too, marks for me the definite emergence of Miss Glasgow's style. Its iron was not yet full blown, its perfection of phrase not yet fully attained; but the firmness is there, the structure is forming--an unmistakable distinction is present.

Humor she has always had, although she has not always given it play. It was deliberately excluded from "Barren Ground," which sustains a mood with greater intensity than any of her books. Time has sharpened the edge of her comic sense, and it is a long way from the pastoral comedy of "The Miller of Old Church" to the probing wit of "The Romantic Comedians" and "They Stooped to Folly." But even when wit is in the ascendant, the comic sense in Ellen Glasgow never gives way completely before the tragic sense of life--how could it when she is so acutely aware of their close afinity--and, as she rightly observes of "The Romantic Comedians," there is tragedy in the theme, "though it is a tragedy running like the 'divine things' of Nietzsche, 'on light feet'." For as one critic observed, "the story is the illusion of perpetual youth, and Judge Honeywell is man eternal."

When I say that Miss Glasgow has the tragic sense of life, I am simply saying, of course, that she views life without illusions. That has been a main source of her strength as a novelist. She has learned not to expect too much of life or of people. For her, courage is the best and most lasting of the virtues, and those who have it, though they may be tricked and betrayed by life, remain undefeated. It is a virtue with which she has more frequently endowed her women than her men, and not unjustly, perhaps, as the sex more schooled in fortitude. It is the distinguishing trait of nearly all her most memorable women, beginning even with Betty Ambler of "The Battleground," down to its incarnate presence in Dorinda Oakley of "Barren Ground." Even Mrs. Birdsong of "The Sheltered Life," slipping through life without looking it in the face, has a muted sort of courage, which flares forth in her last and tragic act.

Miss Glasgow's women, with few exceptions, are the realists, her men the poets and philosophers (speaking, to some degree, in a figurative sense), and that, putting the more primitive impulses aside, is coming pretty close to one of the essential differences between the sexes. Miss Glasgow sees men more clearly, I think, than any contemporary woman novelist, and her old gentlemen, with General Archibald of "The Sheltered Life" as perhaps her finest delineation, are one of her best contributions to the novel.

My own choice of Miss Glasgow's finest single achievement would lie between "Barren Ground" and "The Sheltered Life." Both are technically outstanding, both are profound in their reading of life. In "Barren Ground" an unforgettable record of indomitable spirit comes to us solely through the transmitted experience of a single person, through whose sensibilities the entire narrative takes its course.

"The Sheltered Life" is built up from two contrasting points of view. As Miss Glasglow herself explains, "Age and youth look on the same scenes, the same persons, the same events and occasions, the same tragedy in the end. Between these conflicting points of view the story flows on, as a stream flows in a narrow valley. Nothing happens that is not seen, on one side, through the steady gaze of the old man seeing life as it is, and on the other side, by the troubled eyes of the young girl, seeing life as she would wish it to be." Out of this method emerges a deeply moving portrayal of eager anticipation of life on the part of youth, and philosophic acceptance of its reality on the part of age. These are books with timeless themes, without the least dependence on "trends" in the novel, nor is their setting of the slightest consequence, they are human experience illuminated through the art of fiction. And as such, their tenure of life should be long.

I wish that every beginning novelist in the United States might read these prefaces and profit by their sanity and penetration. If the art of fiction is to go forward, if the younger realists are to grow beyond the merely transcriptive rendering of life which nearly all of our serious fiction is, they cannot afford to neglect such a rational and suggestive record of one novelist's growth.

Regarding the future of the novel, she recognizes that it must "at last turn either toward a more promising vista or into a blind alley," and although doubtful of the outcome, it is characteristic of her that she should close these prefaces on a note of expectancy of her own work. Life has been for her, she says somewhere in these pages, in spite of its disappointments and disillusionment, a continual "becoming," and so she can write that "because I have in my time, accumulated resources of as yet untouched material. I may affirm, in conclusion, that this final preface is not a valediction to the past, but only the prelude to the new and more happy beginning."

Ellen Glasgow has not entombed herself in these handsome volumes. She lives and works still in the spirit of those lines from Wordsworth's "Prelude" with which she prefaced "Vein of Iron":

Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

Whatever may be added to this body of work, it stands now as likely to be one of the most enduring achievements in American fictions. Ellen Glasgow is of our best, and I hope that some day the Nobel Prize will bring her that wider recognition she has so richly deserved.