LOVE AND AUTHORSHIP

Mothers are especially methodical. Love makes them and tempers their minds in the beginning. They find out how to love each one of their little children differently, then they settle down in their maternal formulas of affection. These children grow up, their natures change, but this makes no difference. She remembers that Thomas was a sensitive little boy and had to be treated tenderly. So she goes on making allowances for his beautiful, sensitive nature, although he may have grown up into a cold-blooded wretch who has made his fortune on a widow’s mite.

By the same token, she never forgets that her other son was a normal hard-headed youngster who must be disciplined and required no petting. So she goes on giving him the lick and the promise of a sterner affection, although he may now be a broken-hearted man who has failed on account of going into business with the meaner, more excitable brother, and is very much in need of tenderness. But she apportioned her affections between them like an estate she willed them long ago. Now she is too old and _non compos mentis_ affectionally to change her will.

Authors do their work the same way. They find out how to write. They get their own method, a certain set of characters, and they stick to this method and these characters, with a few lay figures added here and there in different stories. What I mean is that their leading heroes and heroines show a marked family resemblance to one another in every succeeding book. And why not? They are all out of the same parent mind. I should recognize a certain author’s heroine anywhere on earth, even if she escapes from all the stories in which she figures. She is a young woman who usually works her way up, when the reader has every reason to believe she is bound to fall. I have not seen her lately, but she used to make me very anxious on account of her threadbare skirt and having to heat a can of tomato soup over an alcohol burner behind her washstand screen. I do hope she has kept her chastity and married well as usual these late years, since I have been too busy to keep up with her struggles. She was a model and an inspiration then to every working girl without a job. Which, when you think about it, is very high praise for her procreator.

I had been one of the most diligent unknown authors in this country for ten years before circumstances thrust me into the written rôle of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ It was then that I seemed to have found myself as an interpreter and at last capable of producing that literature of the heart which is peculiar to all of us. I am not wholly in my right mind in any other character now. She knows the very gist of everything I feel or know about men and women.

I would not attempt to tell how earnestly and unsuccessfully I have tried to be a younger, lovelier, and more attractive woman in fiction. Being a youthful, coquettish heroine is frightfully hypocritical and embarrassing. If I am compelled to play that rôle, I always put that dearer, wiser old woman in as a neighbor to the girl so that I may rest and dwell in her for a scene now and then.

I am far removed these many years from the circumstances that made the ‘Circuit Rider’s Wife.’ She was very poor and enjoyed her economies; I am now no longer poor, but cannot bring myself to commit an extravagance. She walked very softly before the Lord, and I walk even more softly before the world, on account of having attracted some attention from that quarter which she never had. She was always anxious for the peace and fate of her circuit rider; now I am lonely for the lack of these cares, and Lundy has passed away into what may be called the literature of my soul. She went to church every Sabbath day, and I do not go. Nevertheless she constrains me. Sometimes even yet the mind she had comes back to me like a song and I am tempted to sit down in the amen corner of my years, tell everything that is comforting to know, sing a hymn and try to lead us all in prayer! I seem to slip off into that same old-fashioned tenderness for men and women we used to feel for mourners kneeling about the altar during a revival.

Then the woman I am now looks about me and takes a more sensible view. What the world really needs is to have its emotional nature disciplined and trained even more carefully than we take the pains to develop the purely mental faculties. Praying will not meet this emergency.

My hope is to get at least ten strides ahead of this woman I used to be in the record I am now writing of my mind, which has changed considerably since she managed its downsittings and uprisings.

The question is whether I can do it. As we grow older it seems to me we break none of the bonds that formerly bound us; we simply add to them. I doubt very seriously if there is any such experience as liberty. It is a notion we get from not remembering for a moment the habits that bind us no less in the spirit than in our more obvious affairs.