A LITTLE STORY OF HER LIFE AND WORK
For several years Doubleday, Page & Company have been receiving
repeated requests for information about the life and books of
Gene Stratton-Porter. Her fascinating nature work with bird, flower,
and moth, and the natural wonders of the Limberlost Swamp, made
famous as the scene of her nature romances, all have stirred much
curiosity among readers everywhere.
Mrs. Porter did not possess what has been called "an aptitude
for personal publicity." Indeed, up to the present, she has
discouraged quite successfully any attempt to stress the personal
note. It is practically impossible, however, to do the kind of
work she has done--to make genuine contributions to natural science
by her wonderful field work among birds, insects, and flowers,
and then, through her romances, to bring several hundred thousands
of people to love and understand nature in a way they never did
before-- without arousing a legitimate interest in her own history,
her ideals, her methods of work, and all that underlies the structure
of her unusual achievement.
Her publishers have felt the pressure of this growing interest
and it was at their request that she furnished the data for a
biographical sketch that was to be written of her. But when this
actually came to hand, the present compiler found that the author
had told a story so much more interesting than anything he could
write of her, that it became merely a question of how little need
be added.
The following pages are therefore adapted from what might be styled
the personal record of Gene Stratton-Porter. This will account
for the very intimate picture of family life in the Middle West
for some years following the Civil War.
Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his
wife, at the time of their marriage, as a "ninety-pound bit
of pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge,
having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her
life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman--Mary."
He further added that "God fashioned her heart to be gracious,
her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift
of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers." Mary Stratton
was the mother of twelve lusty babies, all of whom she reared
past eight years of age, losing two a little over that, through
an attack of scarlet fever with whooping cough; too ugly a combination
for even such a wonderful mother as she. With this brood on her
hands she found time to keep an immaculate house, to set a table
renowned in her part of the state, to entertain with unfailing
hospitality all who came to her door, to beautify her home with
such means as she could command, to embroider and fashion clothing
by hand for her children; but her great gift was conceded by all
to be the making of things to grow. At that she was wonderful.
She started dainty little vines and climbing plants from tiny
seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted things she soaked in
water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they
almost never failed to justify her expectations. She even grew
trees and shrubs from slips and cuttings no one else would have
thought of trying to cultivate, her last resort being to cut a
slip diagonally, insert the lower end in a small potato, and plant
as if rooted. And it nearly always grew!
There is a shaft of white stone standing at her head in a cemetery
that belonged to her on a corner of her husband's land; but to
Mrs. Porter's mind her mother's real monument is a cedar of Lebanon
which she set in the manner described above. The cedar tops the
brow of a little hill crossing the grounds. She carried two slips
from Ohio, where they were given to her by a man who had brought
the trees as tiny things from the holy Land. She planted both
in this way, one in her dooryard and one in her cemetery. The
tree on the hill stands thirty feet tall now, topping all others,
and has a trunk two feet in circumference.
Mrs. Porter's mother was of Dutch extraction, and like all Dutch
women she worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favoured
above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies,
dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called "blue bells,"
she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by
putting clusters, & time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined
with freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and
cutting the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. "She
could do more different things," says the author, "and
finish them all in a greater degree of perfection than any other
woman I have ever known. If I were limited to one adjective in
describing her, `capable' would be the word."
The author's father was descended from a long line of ancestors
of British blood. he was named for, and traced his origin to,
that first Mark Stratton who lived in New York, married the famous
beauty, Anne Hutchinson, and settled on Stratton Island, afterward
corrupted to Staten, according to family tradition. From that
point back for generations across the sea he followed his line
to the family of Strattons of which the Earl of Northbrooke is
the present head. To his British traditions and the customs of
his family, Mark Stratton clung with rigid tenacity, never swerving
from his course a particle under the influence of environment
or association. All his ideas were clear-cut; no man could influence
him against his better judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy,
in honour, and cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used
to say that he would rather see a child of his the author of a
book of which he could be proud, than on the throne of England,
which was the strongest way he knew to express himself. His very
first earnings he spent for a book; when other men rested, he
read; all his life he was a student of extraordinarily tenacious
memory. He especially loved history: Rollands, Wilson's Outlines,
Hume, Macauley, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he could quote
from all of them paragraphs at a time contrasting the views of
different writers on a given event, and remembering dates with
unfailing accuracy. "He could repeat the entire Bible,"
says Mrs. Stratton-Porter, "giving chapters and verses, save
the books of Generations; these he said `were a waste of gray
matter to learn.' I never knew him to fail in telling where any
verse quoted to him was to be found in the Bible." And she
adds: "I was almost afraid to make these statements, although
there are many living who can corroborate them, until John Muir
published the story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the
history of such rearing as was my father's, told of as the customary
thing among the children of Muir's time; and I have referred many
inquirers as to whether this feat were possible, to the Muir book."
All his life, with no thought of fatigue or of inconvenience to
himself, Mark Stratton travelled miles uncounted to share what
he had learned with those less fortunately situated, by delivering
sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics. To
him the love of God could be shown so genuinely in no other way
as in the love of his fellowmen. He worshipped beauty: beautiful
faces, souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals, flowers.
He loved colour: rich, bright colour, and every variation down
to the faintest shadings. He was especially fond of red, and the
author carefully keeps a cardinal silk handkerchief that he was
carrying when stricken with apoplexy at the age of seventy-eight.
"It was so like him," she comments, "to have that
scrap of vivid colour in his pocket. He never was too busy to
fertilize a flower bed or to dig holes for the setting of a tree
or bush. A word constantly on his lips was `tidy.' It applied
equally to a woman, a house, a field, or a barn lot. He had a
streak of genius in his make-up: the genius of large appreciation.
Over inspired Biblical passages, over great books, over sunlit
landscapes, over a white violet abloom in deep shade, over a heroic
deed of man, I have seen his brow light up, his eyes shine."
Mrs. Porter tells us that her father was constantly reading aloud
to his children and to visitors descriptions of the great deeds
of men. Two "hair-raisers" she especially remembers
with increased heart-beats to this day were the story of John
Maynard, who piloted a burning boat to safety while he slowly
roasted at the wheel. She says the old thrill comes back when
she recalls the inflection of her father's voice as he would cry
in imitation of the captain: "John Maynard!" and then
give the reply. "Aye, aye, sir!" His other until it
sank to a mere gasp: favourite was the story of Clemanthe, and
her lover's immortal answer to her question: "Shall we meet
again?"
To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at
intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for
years by the dire stress of Civil War, and the period immediately
following, the author was born. From childhood she recalls "thinking
things which she felt should be saved," and frequently tugging
at her mother's skirts and begging her to "set down"
what the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were
some big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in
Biblical terms; for the Bible was read twice a day before the
family and helpers, and an average of three services were attended
on Sunday.
Mrs. Porter says that her first all-alone effort was printed in
wabbly letters on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. It was entitled:
"Ode to the Moon." "Not," she comments, "that
I had an idea what an `ode' was, other than that I had heard it
discussed in the family together with different forms of poetic
expression. The spelling must have been by proxy: but I did know
the words I used, what they meant, and the idea I was trying to
convey.
"No other farm was ever quite so lovely as the one on which
I was born after this father and mother had spent twenty-five
years beautifying it," says the author. It was called "Hopewell"
after the home of some of her father's British ancestors. The
natural location was perfect, the land rolling and hilly, with
several flowing springs and little streams crossing it in three
directions, while plenty of forest still remained. The days of
pioneer struggles were past. The roads were smooth and level as
floors, the house and barn commodious; the family rode abroad
in a double carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched
team of gray horses, and sometimes the father "speeded a
little" for the delight of the children. "We had comfortable
clothing," says Mrs. Porter, "and were getting our joy
from life without that pinch of anxiety which must have existed
in the beginning, although I know that father and mother always
held steady, and took a large measure of joy from life in passing."
Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about
the time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting
at times to positive torture.
So it happened, that led by impulse and aided by an escape from
the training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a
cushion and sewing a fine seam"--the threads of the fabric
had to be counted and just so many allowed to each stitch!--this
youngest child of a numerous household spent her waking hours
with the wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and
when tired out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking
with shy creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she
pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects, and plays
she invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I
trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing
a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while
I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields,
or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time
I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised
from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."
She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree
for her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes
and lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had
time to sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and
so followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds,
locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into
the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says,
"ever taught me more than that the birds were useful, a gift
of God for our protection from insect pests on fruit and crops;
and a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly
protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must
be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over
my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird,
and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the
spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I
knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened
at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the
feet of the mother bird."
In the nature of this child of the out-of-doors there ran a fibre
of care for wild things. It was instinct with her to go slowly,
to touch lightly, to deal lovingly with every living thing: flower,
moth, bird, or animal. She never gathered great handfuls of frail
wild flowers, carried them an hour and threw them away. If she
picked any, she took only a few, mostly to lay on her mother's
pillow--for she had a habit of drawing comfort from a cinnamon
pink or a trillium laid where its delicate fragrance reached her
with every breath. "I am quite sure," Mrs. Porter writes,
"that I never in my life, in picking flowers, dragged up
the plant by the roots, as I frequently saw other people do. I
was taught from infancy to CUT a bloom I wanted. My regular habit
was to lift one plant of each kind, especially if it were a species
new to me, and set it in my wild-flower garden."
To the birds and flowers the child added moths and butterflies,
because she saw them so frequently, the brilliance of colour in
yard and garden attracting more than could be found elsewhere.
So she grew with the wild, loving, studying, giving all her time.
"I fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside
the screen of a cellar window," Mrs. Porter tells us; "doctored
all the sick and wounded birds and animals the men brought me
from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they
carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I
grew older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in
Fort Wayne. So I had the first money I ever earned."
Her father and mother had strong artistic tendencies, although
they would have scoffed at the idea themselves, yet the manner
in which they laid off their fields, the home they built, the
growing things they preserved, the way they planted, the life
they led, all go to prove exactly that thing. Their bush--and
vine-covered fences crept around the acres they owned in a strip
of gaudy colour; their orchard lay in a valley, a square of apple
trees in the centre widely bordered by peach, so that it appeared
at bloom time like a great pink-bordered white blanket on the
face of earth. Swale they might have drained, and would not, made
sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. From the home you
could not look in any direction without seeing a picture of beauty.
"Last spring," the author writes in a recent letter,
"I went back with my mind fully made up to buy that land
at any reasonable price, restore it to the exact condition in
which I knew it as a child, and finish my life there. I found
that the house had been burned, killing all the big trees set
by my mother's hands immediately surrounding it. The hills were
shorn and ploughed down, filling and obliterating the creeks and
springs. Most of the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My
old catalpa in the fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett
pear under which I had my wild-flower garden were all that was
left of the dooryard, while a few gnarled apple trees remained
of the orchard, which had been reset in another place. The garden
had been moved, also the lanes; the one creek remaining out of
three crossed the meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed
a sickly current over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks.
The whole place seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to me.
All my love and ten times the money I had at command never could
have put back the face of nature as I knew it on that land."
As a child the author had very few books, only three of her own
outside of school books. "The markets did not afford the
miracles common with the children of today," she adds. "Books
are now so numerous, so cheap, and so bewildering in colour and
make-up, that I sometimes think our children are losing their
perspective and caring for none of them as I loved my few plain
little ones filled with short story and poem, almost no illustration.
I had a treasure house in the school books of my elders, especially
the McGuffey series of Readers from One to Six. For pictures I
was driven to the Bible, dictionary, historical works read by
my father, agricultural papers, and medical books about cattle
and sheep.
"Near the time of my mother's passing we moved from Hopewell
to the city of Wabash in order that she might have constant medical
attention, and the younger children better opportunities for schooling.
Here we had magazines and more books in which I was interested.
The one volume in which my heart was enwrapt was a collection
of masterpieces of fiction belonging to my eldest sister. It contained
`Paul and Virginia,' `Undine,' `Picciola,' `The Vicar of Wakefield,'
`Pilgrim's Progress,' and several others I soon learned by heart,
and the reading and rereading of those exquisitely expressed and
conceived stories may have done much in forming high conceptions
of what really constitutes literature and in furthering the lofty
ideals instilled by my parents. One of these stories formed the
basis of my first publicly recognized literary effort."
Reared by people who constantly pointed out every natural beauty,
using it wherever possible to drive home a precept, the child
lived out-of-doors with the wild almost entirely. If she reported
promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal time, with
enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more
was asked until the Sabbath. To be taken from such freedom, her
feet shod, her body restricted by as much clothing as ever had
been worn on Sunday, shut up in a schoolroom, and set to droning
over books, most of which she detested, was the worst punishment
ever inflicted upon her she declares. She hated mathematics in
any form and spent all her time on natural science, language,
and literature. "Friday afternoon," writes Mrs. Porter,
"was always taken up with an exercise called `rhetoricals,'
a misnomer as a rule, but let that pass. Each week pupils of one
of the four years furnished entertainment for the assembled high
school and faculty. Our subjects were always assigned, and we
cordially disliked them. This particular day I was to have a paper
on `Mathematical Law.'
"I put off the work until my paper had been called for several
times, and so came to Thursday night with excuses and not a line.
I was told to bring my work the next morning without fail. I went
home in hot anger. Why in all this beautiful world, would they
not allow me to do something I could do, and let any one of four
members of my class who revelled in mathematics do my subject?
That evening I was distracted. `I can't do a paper on mathematics,
and I won't!' I said stoutly; `but I'll do such a paper on a subject
I can write about as will open their foolish eyes and make them
see how wrong they are.'"
Before me on the table lay the book I loved, the most wonderful
story in which was `Picciola' by Saintine. Instantly I began to
write. Breathlessly I wrote for hours. I exceeded our limit ten
times over. The poor Italian Count, the victim of political offences,
shut by Napoleon from the wonderful grounds, mansion, and life
that were his, restricted to the bare prison walls of Fenestrella,
deprived of books and writing material, his one interest in life
became a sprout of green, sprung, no doubt, from a seed dropped
by a passing bird, between the stone flagging of the prison yard
before his window. With him I had watched over it through all
the years since I first had access to the book; with him I had
prayed for it. I had broken into a cold sweat of fear when the
jailer first menaced it; I had hated the wind that bent it roughly,
and implored the sun. I had sung a paean of joy at its budding,
and worshipped in awe before its thirty perfect blossoms. The
Count had named it `Picciola'--the little one--to me also it was
a personal possession. That night we lived the life of our `little
one' over again, the Count and I, and never were our anxieties
and our joys more poignant.
"Next morning," says Mrs. Porter, "I dared my crowd
to see how long they could remain on the grounds, and yet reach
the assembly room before the last toll of the bell. This scheme
worked. Coming in so late the principal opened exercises without
remembering my paper. Again, at noon, I was as late as I dared
be, and I escaped until near the close of the exercises, through
which I sat in cold fear. When my name was reached at last the
principal looked at me inquiringly and then announced my inspiring
mathematical subject. I arose, walked to the front, and made my
best bow. Then I said: `I waited until yesterday because I knew
absolutely nothing about my subject'--the audience laughed--`and
I could find nothing either here or in the library at home, so
last night I reviewed Saintine's masterpiece, "Picciola."'
"Then instantly I began to read. I was almost paralyzed at
my audacity, and with each word I expected to hear a terse little
interruption. Imagine my amazement when I heard at the end of
the first page: `Wait a minute!' Of course I waited, and the principal
left the room. A moment later she reappeared accompanied by the
superintendent of the city schools. `Begin again,' she said. `Take
your time.'
"I was too amazed to speak. Then thought came in a rush.
My paper was good. It was as good as I had believed it. It was
better than I had known. I did go on! We took that assembly room
and the corps of teachers into our confidence, the Count and I,
and told them all that was in our hearts about a little flower
that sprang between the paving stones of a prison yard. The Count
and I were free spirits. From the book I had learned that. He
got into political trouble through it, and I had got into mathematical
trouble, and we told our troubles. One instant the room was in
laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who
had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. For almost
sixteen big foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to go
on and tell them more about it when I reached the last line. Never
again was a subject forced upon me."
After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her
lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the
metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme,
and two novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through
the sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last
three months of school, but, she remarks, "unlike my schoolmates,
I studied harder after leaving school than ever before and in
a manner that did me real good. The most that can be said of what
education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world
for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of
my inclinations. The others of my family had been to college;
I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances intervened
which saved my brain from being run through a groove in company
with dozens of others of widely different tastes and mentality.
What small measure of success I have had has come through preserving
my individual point of view, method of expression, and following
in after life the Spartan regulations of my girlhood home. Whatever
I have been able to do, has been done through the line of education
my father saw fit to give me, and through his and my mother's
methods of rearing me.
"My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never
saw one of the books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like
a yeast jar in July over some literary work, and if I timidly
slipped to him with a composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good
in it, and made suggestions for its betterment. When I wanted
to express something in colour, he went to an artist, sketched
a design for an easel, personally superintended the carpenter
who built it, and provided tuition. On that same easel I painted
the water colours for `Moths of the Limberlost,' and one of the
most poignant regrets of my life is that he was not there to see
them, and to know that the easel which he built through his faith
in me was finally used in illustrating a book.
"If I thought it was music through which I could express
myself, he paid for lessons and detected hidden ability that should
be developed. Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm
in his belief in me. He was half the battle. It was he who demanded
a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigours
of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten
books in ten years, five of which were on nature subjects, having
my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with
natural history, true to nature. It was he who demanded of me
from birth the finishing of any task I attempted and who taught
me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years, if necessary,
to find and secure material I wanted. It was he who daily lived
before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in `The
Harvester,' and who constantly used every atom of brain and body
power to help and to encourage all men to do the same."
Marriage, a home of her own, and a daughter for a time filled
the author's hands, but never her whole heart and brain. The book
fever lay dormant a while, and then it became a compelling influence.
It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she designed for their
home, and the books she read. When her daughter was old enough
to go to school, Mrs. Porter's time came. Speaking of this period,
she says: "I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong,
vital to the marrow, and I knew how to manage life to make it
meet my needs, thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my
mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms, and kept it immaculate.
I made most of my daughter's clothes, I kept a conservatory in
which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs every winter,
tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and washed
dishes besides three times a day. In my spare time (mark the word,
there was time to spare else the books never would have been written
and the pictures made) I mastered photography to such a degree
that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper
once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled
it. He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with
it as I did. He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia,
and have me tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the
family bathroom for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints
on turkey platters in the kitchen, I was rather put to it when
it came to giving an exhibition. It was scarcely my fault if men
could not handle the paper they manufactured so that it produced
the results that I obtained, so I said I thought the difference
might lie in the chemical properties of the water, and sent this
man on his way satisfied. Possibly it did. But I have a shrewd
suspicion it lay in high-grade plates, a careful exposure, judicious
development, with self-compounded chemicals straight from the
factory, and C.P. I think plates swabbed with wet cotton before
development, intensified if of short exposure, and thoroughly
swabbed again before drying, had much to do with it; and paper
handled in the same painstaking manner had more. I have hundreds
of negatives in my closet made twelve years ago, in perfect condition
for printing from to-day, and I never have lost a plate through
fog from imperfect development and hasty washing; so my little
mother's rule of `whatsoever thy hands find to do, do it with
thy might,' held good in photography."
Thus had Mrs. Porter made time to study and to write, and editors
began to accept what she sent them with little if any changes.
She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to
Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take charge
of the department and furnish material each month for which she
was to be paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material.
We can form some idea of the work she did under this arrangement
from the fact that she had over one thousand dollars' worth of
equipment at the end of the first year. The second year she increased
this by five hundred, and then accepted a place on the natural
history staff of Outing, working closely with Mr. Casper Whitney.
After a year of this helpful experience Mrs. Porter began to turn
her attention to what she calls "nature studies sugar coated
with fiction." Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree
of grown-up fiction, she wrote a little story entitled "Laddie,
the Princess, and the Pie."
"I was abnormally sensitive," says the author, "about
trying to accomplish any given thing and failing. I had been taught
in my home that it was black disgrace to undertake anything and
fail. My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines,
and it was not possible to conduct departments in any of them
and not have it known; but only a few people in our locality read
these publications, none of them were interested in nature photography,
or natural science, so what I was trying to do was not realized
even by my own family.
"With them I was much more timid than with the neighbours.
Least of all did I want to fail before my man Person and my daughter
and our respective families; so I worked in secret, sent in my
material, and kept as quiet about it as possible. On Outing I
had graduated from the camera department to an illustrated article
each month, and as this kept up the year round, and few illustrations
could be made in winter, it meant that I must secure enough photographs
of wild life in summer to last during the part of the year when
few were to be had.
"Every fair day I spent afield, and my little black horse
and load of cameras, ropes, and ladders became a familiar sight
to the country folk of the Limberlost, in Rainbow Bottom, the
Canoper, on the banks of the Wabash, in woods and thickets and
beside the roads; but few people understood what I was trying
to do, none of them what it would mean were I to succeed. Being
so afraid of failure and the inevitable ridicule in a community
where I was already severly criticised on account of my ideas
of housekeeping, dress, and social customs, I purposely kept everything
I did as quiet as possible. It had to be known that I was interested
in everything afield, and making pictures; also that I was writing
field sketches for nature publications, but little was thought
of it, save as one more, peculiarity, in me. So when my little
story was finished I went to our store and looked over the magazines.
I chose one to which we did not subscribe, having an attractive
cover, good type, and paper, and on the back of an old envelope,
behind the counter, I scribbled: Perriton Maxwell, 116 Nassau
Street, New York, and sent my story on its way.
"Then I took a bold step, the first in my self-emancipation.
Money was beginning to come in, and I had some in my purse of
my very own that I had earned when no one even knew I was working.
I argued that if I kept my family so comfortable that they missed
nothing from their usual routine, it was my right to do what I
could toward furthering my personal ambitions in what time I could
save from my housework. And until I could earn enough to hire
capable people to take my place, I held rigidly to that rule.
I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders
high in air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor,
slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a
box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the
men in the bank need not know what I had attempted. That was early
May; all summer I waited. I had heard that it required a long
time for an editor to read and to pass on matter sent him; but
my waiting did seem out of all reason. I was too busy keeping
my cabin and doing field work to repine; but I decided in my own
mind that Mr. Maxwell was a `mean old thing' to throw away my
story and keep the return postage. Besides, I was deeply chagrined,
for I had thought quite well of my effort myself, and this seemed
to prove that I did not know even the first principles of what
would be considered an interesting story.
"Then one day in September I went into our store on an errand
and the manager said to me: `I read your story in the Metropolitan
last night. It was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?'
"My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels,
so I said as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared
he could hear it: `No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any
spare copies? My sister might want one.'
"He supplied me, so I hurried home, and shutting myself in
the library, I sat down to look my first attempt at fiction in
the face. I quite agreed with the manager that it was `great.'
Then I wrote Mr. Maxwell a note telling him that I had seen my
story in his magazine, and saying that I was glad he liked it
enough to use it. I had not known a letter could reach New York
and bring a reply so quickly as his answer came. It was a letter
that warmed the deep of my heart. Mr. Maxwell wrote that he liked
my story very much, but the office boy had lost or destroyed my
address with the wrappings, so after waiting a reasonable length
of time to hear from me, he had illustrated it the best he could,
and printed it. He wrote that so many people had spoken to him
of a new, fresh note in it, that he wished me to consider doing
him another in a similar vein for a Christmas leader and he enclosed
my very first check for fiction.
"So I wrote: `How Laddie and the Princess Spelled Down at
the Christmas Bee.' Mr. Maxwell was pleased to accept that also,
with what I considered high praise, and to ask me to furnish the
illustrations. He specified that he wanted a frontispiece, head
and tail pieces, and six or seven other illustrations. Counting
out the time for his letter to reach me, and the material to return,
I was left with just ONE day in which to secure the pictures.
They had to be of people costumed in the time of the early seventies
and I was short of print paper and chemicals. First, I telephoned
to Fort Wayne for the material I wanted to be sent without fail
on the afternoon train. Then I drove to the homes of the people
I wished to use for subjects and made appointments for sittings,
and ransacked the cabin for costumes. The letter came on the eight
A.M. train. At ten o'clock I was photographing Colonel Lupton
beside my dining-room fireplace for the father in the story. At
eleven I was dressing and posing Miss Lizzie Huart for the princess.
At twelve I was picturing in one of my bed rooms a child who served
finely for Little Sister, and an hour later the same child in
a cemetery three miles in the country where I used mounted butterflies
from my cases, and potted plants carried from my conservatory,
for a graveyard scene. The time was early November, but God granted
sunshine that day, and short focus blurred the background. At
four o'clock I was at the schoolhouse, and in the best-lighted
room with five or six models, I was working on the spelling bee
scenes. By six I was in the darkroom developing and drying these
plates, every one of which was good enough to use. I did my best
work with printing-out paper, but I was compelled to use a developing
paper in this extremity, because it could be worked with much
more speed, dried a little between blotters, and mounted. At three
o'clock in the morning I was typing the quotations for the pictures,
at four the parcel stood in the hall for the six o'clock train,
and I realized that I wanted a drink, food, and sleep, for I had
not stopped a second for anything from the time of reading Mr.
Maxwell's letter until his order was ready to mail. For the following
ten years I was equally prompt in doing all work I undertook,
whether pictures or manuscript, without a thought of consideration
for self; and I disappointed the confident expectations of my
nearest and dearest by remaining sane, normal, and almost without
exception the healthiest woman they knew."
This story and its pictures were much praised, and in the following
year the author was asked for several stories, and even used bird
pictures and natural history sketches, quite an innovation for
a magazine at that time. With this encouragement she wrote and
illustrated a short story of about ten thousand words, and sent
it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised Mrs. Porter to
enlarge it to book size, which she did. This book is "The
Cardinal." Following Mr. Gilder's advice, she recast the
tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman
had left in the road she was travelling, in a fervour of love
for the birds and indignation at the hunter, she told the Cardinal's
life history in these pages.
The story was promptly accepted and the book was published with
very beautiful half-tones, and cardinal buckram cover. Incidentally,
neither the author's husband nor daughter had the slightest idea
she was attempting to write a book until work had progressed to
that stage where she could not make a legal contract without her
husband's signature. During the ten years of its life this book
has gone through eight different editions, varying in form and
make-up from the birds in exquisite colour, as colour work advanced
and became feasible, to a binding of beautiful red morocco, a
number of editions of differing design intervening. One was tried
in gray binding, the colour of the female cardinal, with the red
male used as an inset. Another was woodsgreen with the red male,
and another red with a wild rose design stamped in. There is a
British edition published by Hodder and Stoughton. All of these
had the author's own illustrations which authorities agree are
the most complete studies of the home life and relations of a
pair of birds ever published.
The story of these illustrations in "The Cardinal" and
how the author got them will be a revelation to most readers.
Mrs. Porter set out to make this the most complete set of bird
illustrations ever secured, in an effort to awaken people to the
wonder and beauty and value of the birds. She had worked around
half a dozen nests for two years and had carried a lemon tree
from her conservatory to the location of one nest, buried the
tub, and introduced the branches among those the birds used in
approaching their home that she might secure proper illustrations
for the opening chapter, which was placed in the South. When the
complete bird series was finished, the difficult work over, and
there remained only a few characteristic Wabash River studies
of flowers, vines, and bushes for chapter tail pieces to be secured,
the author "met her Jonah," and her escape was little
short of a miracle.
After a particularly strenuous spring afield, one teeming day
in early August she spent the morning in the river bottom beside
the Wabash. A heavy rain followed by August sun soon had her dripping
while she made several studies of wild morning glories, but she
was particularly careful to wrap up and drive slowly going home,
so that she would not chill. In the afternoon the author went
to the river northeast of town to secure mallow pictures for another
chapter, and after working in burning sun on the river bank until
exhausted, she several times waded the river to examine bushes
on the opposite bank. On the way home she had a severe chill,
and for the following three weeks lay twisted in the convulsions
of congestion, insensible most of the time. Skilled doctors and
nurses did their best, which they admitted would have availed
nothing if the patient had not had a constitution without a flaw
upon which to work.
"This is the history," said Mrs. Porter, "of one
little tail piece among the pictures. There were about thirty
others, none so strenuous, but none easy, each having a living,
fighting history for me. If I were to give in detail the story
of the two years' work required to secure the set of bird studies
illustrating `The Cardinal,' it would make a much larger book
than the life of the bird."
"The Cardinal" was published in June of 1903. On the
20th of October, 1904, "Freckles" appeared. Mrs. Porter
had been delving afield with all her heart and strength for several
years, and in the course of her work had spent every other day
for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies
of the nest of a black vulture. Early in her married life she
had met a Scotch lumberman, who told her of the swamp and of securing
fine timber there for Canadian shipbuilders, and later when she
had moved to within less than a mile of its northern boundary,
she met a man who was buying curly maple, black walnut, golden
oak, wild cherry, and other wood extremely valuable for a big
furniture factory in Grand Rapids. There was one particular woman,
of all those the author worked among, who exercised herself most
concerning her. She never failed to come out if she saw her driving
down the lane to the woods, and caution her to be careful. If
she felt that Mrs. Porter had become interested and forgotten
that it was long past meal time, she would send out food and water
or buttermilk to refresh her. She had her family posted, and if
any of them saw a bird with a straw or a hair in its beak, they
followed until they found its location. It was her husband who
drove the stake and ploughed around the killdeer nest in the cornfield
to save it for the author; and he did many other acts of kindness
without understanding exactly what he was doing or why. "Merely
that I wanted certain things was enough for those people,"
writes Mrs. Porter. "Without question they helped me in every
way their big hearts could suggest to them, because they loved
to be kind, and to be generous was natural with them. The woman
was busy keeping house and mothering a big brood, and every living
creature that came her way, besides. She took me in, and I put
her soul, body, red head, and all, into Sarah Duncan. The lumber
and furniture man I combined in McLean. Freckles was a composite
of certain ideals and my own field experiences, merged with those
of Mr. Bob Burdette Black, who, at the expense of much time and
careful work, had done more for me than any other ten men afield.
The Angel was an idealized picture of my daughter.
"I dedicated the book to my husband, Mr. Charles Darwin Porter,
for several reasons, the chiefest being that he deserved it. When
word was brought me by lumbermen of the nest of the Black Vulture
in the Limberlost, I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful
story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue
egg, and to beg back a rashly made promise not to work in the
Limberlost. Being a natural history enthusiast himself, he agreed
that I must go; but he qualified the assent with the proviso that
no one less careful of me than he, might accompany me there. His
business had forced him to allow me to work alone, with hired
guides or the help of oilmen and farmers elsewhere; but a Limberlost
trip at that time was not to be joked about. It had not been shorn,
branded, and tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should
not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had
been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical
aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every
plant, animal, and human danger known in the worst of such locations
in the Central States.
"A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well
we mired to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms
and before we reached the well I thought the conveyance would
be torn to pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started
on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The
time was late June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid
pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects,
keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at
every step, and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress
was a steady succession of prying and pulling each other to the
surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts
of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the
tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed
its unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess,
and brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
"We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in
deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every
third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little
Chicken was able to take wing. Of course we soon made a road to
the tree, grew accustomed to the disagreeable features of the
swamp and contemptuously familiar with its dangers, so that I
worked anywhere in it I chose with other assistance; but no trip
was so hard and disagreeable as the first. Mr. Porter insisted
upon finishing the Little Chicken series, so that `deserve' is
a poor word for any honour that might accrue to him for his part
in the book."
This was the nucleus of the book, but the story itself originated
from the fact that one day, while leaving the swamp, a big feather
with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling
earthward and fell in the author's path. Instantly she looked
upward to locate the bird, which from the size and formation of
the quill could have been nothing but an eagle; her eyes, well
trained and fairly keen though they were, could not see the bird,
which must have been soaring above range. Familiar with the life
of the vulture family, the author changed the bird from which
the feather fell to that described in "Freckles." Mrs.
Porter had the old swamp at that time practically untouched, and
all its traditions to work upon and stores of natural history
material. This falling feather began the book which in a few days
she had definitely planned and in six months completely written.
Her title for it was "The Falling Feather," that tangible
thing which came drifting down from Nowhere, just as the boy came,
and she has always regretted the change to "Freckles."
John Murray publishes a British edition of this book which is
even better liked in Ireland and Scotland than in England.
As "The Cardinal" was published originally not by Doubleday,
Page & Company, but by another firm, the author had talked
over with the latter house the scheme of "Freckles"
and it had been agreed to publish the story as soon as Mrs. Porter
was ready. How the book finally came to Doubleday, Page &
Company she recounts as follows:
"By the time `Freckles' was finished, I had exercised my
woman's prerogative and `changed my mind'; so I sent the manuscript
to Doubleday, Page & Company, who accepted it. They liked
it well enough to take a special interest in it and to bring it
out with greater expense than it was at all customary to put upon
a novel at that time; and this in face of the fact that they had
repeatedly warned me that the nature work in it would kill fully
half its chances with the public. Mr. F.N. Doubleday, starting
on a trip to the Bahamas, remarked that he would like to take
a manuscript with him to read, and the office force decided to
put `Freckles' into his grip. The story of the plucky young chap
won his way to the heart of the publishers, under a silk cotton
tree, 'neath bright southern skies, and made such a friend of
him that through the years of its book-life it has been the object
of special attention. Mr. George Doran gave me a photograph which
Mr. Horace MacFarland made of Mr. Doubleday during this reading
of the Mss. of `Freckles' which is especially interesting."
That more than 2,000,000 readers have found pleasure and profit
in Mrs. Porter's books is a cause for particular gratification.
These stories all have, as a fundamental reason of their existence,
the author's great love of nature. To have imparted this love
to others--to have inspired many hundreds of thousands to look
for the first time with seeing eyes at the pageant of the out-of-doors--is
a satisfaction that must endure. For the part of the publishers,
they began their business by issuing "Nature Books"
at a time when the sale of such works was problematical. As their
tastes and inclinations were along the same lines which Mrs. Porter
loved to follow, it gave them great pleasure to be associated
with her books which opened the eyes of so great a public to new
and worthy fields of enjoyment.
The history of "Freckles" is unique. The publishers
had inserted marginal drawings on many pages, but these, instead
of attracting attention to the nature charm of the book, seemed
to have exactly a contrary effect. The public wanted a novel.
The illustrations made it appear to be a nature book, and it required
three long slow years for "Freckles" to pass from hand
to hand and prove that there really was a novel between the covers,
but that it was a story that took its own time and wound slowly
toward its end, stopping its leisurely course for bird, flower,
lichen face, blue sky, perfumed wind, and the closest intimacies
of the daily life of common folk. Ten years have wrought a great
change in the sentiment against nature work and the interest in
it. Thousands who then looked upon the world with unobserving
eyes are now straining every nerve to accumulate enough to be
able to end life where they may have bird, flower, and tree for
daily companions.
Mrs. Porter's account of the advice she received at this time
is particularly interesting. Three editors who read "Freckles"
before it was published offered to produce it, but all of them
expressed precisely the same opinion: "The book will never
sell well as it is. If you want to live from the proceeds of your
work, if you want to sell even moderately, you must CUT OUT THE
NATURE STUFF." "Now to PUT IN THE NATURE STUFF,"
continues the author, "was the express purpose for which
the book had been written. I had had one year's experience with
`The Song of the Cardinal,' frankly a nature book, and from the
start I realized that I never could reach the audience I wanted
with a book on nature alone. To spend time writing a book based
wholly upon human passion and its outworking I would not. So I
compromised on a book into which I put all the nature work that
came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits
of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women
I had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way
with which I was familiar. So I said to my publishers: `I will
write the books exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish
them. I know they will sell enough that you will not lose. If
I do not make over six hundred dollars on a book I shall never
utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it should be and
leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will take
into their hearts and homes.' I altered `Freckles' slightly, but
from that time on we worked on this agreement.
"My years of nature work have not been without considerable
insight into human nature, as well," continues Mrs. Porter.
"I know its failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses,
its failures, its depth of crime; and the people who feel called
upon to spend their time analyzing, digging into, and uncovering
these sources of depravity have that privilege, more's the pity!
If I had my way about it, this is a privilege no one could have
in books intended for indiscriminate circulation. I stand squarely
for book censorship, and I firmly believe that with a few more
years of such books, as half a dozen I could mention, public opinion
will demand this very thing. My life has been fortunate in one
glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the
woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met,
lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming
number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe
in God and cherish high ideals, and it is UPON THE LIVES OF THESE
THAT I BASE WHAT I WRITE. To contend that this does not produce
a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture
true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can
do at level best.
"I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics
who proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that
my pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And
I glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives
of men and women of morals, honour, and loving kindness. They
form `idealized pictures of life' because they are copies from
life where it touches religion, chastity, love, home, and hope
of heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and
the divorce court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of
a home.
"Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun
to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book
is TRUE TO LIFE unless it is true to the WORST IN LIFE, that the
idea has infected even the women."
In 1906, having seen a few of Mrs. Porter's studies of bird life,
Mr. Edward Bok telegraphed the author asking to meet him in Chicago.
She had a big portfolio of fine prints from plates for which she
had gone to the last extremity of painstaking care, and the result
was an order from Mr. Bok for a six months' series in the Ladies'
Home Journal of the author's best bird studies accompanied by
descriptions of how she secured them. This material was later
put in book form under the title, "What I Have Done with
Birds," and is regarded as authoritative on the subject of
bird photography and bird life, for in truth it covers every phase
of the life of the birds described, and contains much of other
nature subjects.
By this time Mrs. Porter had made a contract with her publishers
to alternate her books. She agreed to do a nature book for love,
and then, by way of compromise, a piece of nature work spiced
with enough fiction to tempt her class of readers. In this way
she hoped that they would absorb enough of the nature work while
reading the fiction to send them afield, and at the same time
keep in their minds her picture of what she considers the only
life worth living. She was still assured that only a straight
novel would "pay," but she was living, meeting all her
expenses, giving her family many luxuries, and saving a little
sum for a rainy day she foresaw on her horoscope. To be comfortably
clothed and fed, to have time and tools for her work, is all she
ever has asked of life.
Among Mrs. Porter's readers "At the Foot of the Rainbow"
stands as perhaps the author's strongest piece of fiction.
In August of 1909 two books on which the author had been working
for years culminated at the same time: a nature novel, and a straight
nature book. The novel was, in a way, a continuation of "Freckles,"
filled as usual with wood lore, but more concerned with moths
than birds. Mrs. Porter had been finding and picturing exquisite
big night flyers during several years of field work among the
birds, and from what she could have readily done with them she
saw how it would be possible for a girl rightly constituted and
environed to make a living, and a good one, at such work. So was
conceived "A Girl of the Limberlost." "This comes
fairly close to my idea of a good book," she writes. "No
possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can,
and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader
in closer touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object
in each line I write. The human side of the book is as close a
character study as I am capable of making. I regard the character
of Mrs. Comstock as the best thought-out and the cleanest-cut
study of human nature I have so far been able to do. Perhaps the
best justification of my idea of this book came to me recently
when I received an application from the President for permission
to translate it into Arabic, as the first book to be used in an
effort to introduce our methods of nature study into the College
of Cairo."
Hodder and Stoughton of London published the British edition of
this work.
At the same time that "A Girl of the Limberlost" was
published there appeared the book called "Birds of the Bible."
This volume took shape slowly. The author made a long search for
each bird mentioned in the Bible, how often, where, why; each
quotation concerning it in the whole book, every abstract reference,
why made, by whom, and what it meant. Then slowly dawned the sane
and true things said of birds in the Bible compared with the amazing
statements of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Pliny, and other writers
of about the same period in pagan nations. This led to a search
for the dawn of bird history and for the very first pictures preserved
of them. On this book the author expended more work than on any
other she has ever written.
In 1911 two more books for which Mrs. Porter had gathered material
for long periods came to a conclusion on the same date: "Music
of the Wild" and "The Harvester." The latter of
these was a nature novel; the other a frank nature book, filled
with all outdoors--a special study of the sounds one hears in
fields and forests, and photographic reproductions of the musicians
and their instruments.
The idea of "The Harvester" was suggested to the author
by an editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest
in it, about the ginseng diggers in her part of the country. Mr.
Porter had bought ginseng for years for a drug store he owned;
there were several people he knew still gathering it for market,
and growing it was becoming a good business all over the country.
Mrs. Porter learned from the United States Pharmacopaeia and from
various other sources that the drug was used mostly by the Chinese,
and with a wholly mistaken idea of its properties. The strongest
thing any medical work will say for ginseng is that it is "A
VERY MILD AND SOOTHING DRUG." It seems that the Chinese buy
and use it in enormous quantities, in the belief that it is a
remedy for almost every disease to which humanity is heir; that
it will prolong life, and that it is a wonderful stimulant. Ancient
medical works make this statement, laying special emphasis upon
its stimulating qualities. The drug does none of these things.
Instead of being a stimulant, it comes closer to a sedative. This
investigation set the author on the search for other herbs that
now are or might be grown as an occupation. Then came the idea
of a man who should grow these drugs professionally, and of the
sick girl healed by them. "I could have gone to work and
started a drug farm myself," remarks Mrs. Porter, "with
exactly the same profit and success as the Harvester. I wrote
primarily to state that to my personal knowledge, clean, loving
men still exist in this world, and that no man is forced to endure
the grind of city life if he wills otherwise. Any one who likes,
with even such simple means as herbs he can dig from fence corners,
may start a drug farm that in a short time will yield him delightful
work and independence. I WROTE THE BOOK AS I THOUGHT IT SHOULD
BE WRITTEN, TO PROVE MY POINTS AND ESTABLISH MY CONTENTIONS. I
THINK IT DID. MEN THE GLOBE AROUND PROMPTLY WROTE ME THAT THEY
ALWAYS HAD OBSERVED THE MORAL CODE; OTHERS THAT THE SUBJECT NEVER
IN ALL THEIR LIVES HAD BEEN PRESENTED TO THEM FROM MY POINT OF
VIEW, BUT NOW THAT IT HAD BEEN, THEY WOULD CHANGE AND DO WHAT
THEY COULD TO INFLUENCE ALL MEN TO DO THE SAME"
Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton publish a British edition of "The
Harvester," there is an edition in Scandinavian, it was running
serially in a German magazine, but for a time at least the German
and French editions that were arranged will be stopped by this
war, as there was a French edition of "The Song of the Cardinal."
After a short rest, the author began putting into shape a book
for which she had been compiling material since the beginning
of field work. From the first study she made of an exquisite big
night moth, Mrs. Porter used every opportunity to secure more
and representative studies of each family in her territory, and
eventually found the work so fascinating that she began hunting
cocoons and raising caterpillars in order to secure life histories
and make illustrations with fidelity to life. "It seems,"
comments the author, "that scientists and lepidopterists
from the beginning have had no hesitation in describing and using
mounted moth and butterfly specimens for book text and illustration,
despite the fact that their colours fade rapidly, that the wings
are always in unnatural positions, and the bodies shrivelled.
I would quite as soon accept the mummy of any particular member
of the Rameses family as a fair representation of the living man,
as a mounted moth for a live one."
When she failed to secure the moth she wanted in a living and
perfect specimen for her studies, the author set out to raise
one, making photographic studies from the eggs through the entire
life process. There was one June during which she scarcely slept
for more than a few hours of daytime the entire month. She turned
her bedroom into a hatchery, where were stored the most precious
cocoons; and if she lay down at night it was with those she thought
would produce moths before morning on her pillow, where she could
not fail to hear them emerging. At the first sound she would be
up with notebook in hand, and by dawn, busy with cameras. Then
she would be forced to hurry to the darkroom and develop her plates
in order to be sure that she had a perfect likeness, before releasing
the specimen, for she did release all she produced except one
pair of each kind, never having sold a moth, personally. Often
where the markings were wonderful and complicated, as soon as
the wings were fully developed Mrs. Porter copied the living specimen
in water colours for her illustrations, frequently making several
copies in order to be sure that she laid on the colour enough
BRIGHTER than her subject so that when it died it would be exactly
the same shade.
"Never in all my life," writes the author, "have
I had such exquisite joy in work as I had in painting the illustrations
for this volume of `Moths of the Limberlost.' Colour work had
advanced to such a stage that I knew from the beautiful reproductions
in Arthur Rackham's `Rheingold and Valkyrie' and several other
books on the market, that time so spent would not be lost. Mr.
Doubleday had assured me personally that I might count on exact
reproduction, and such details of type and paper as I chose to
select. I used the easel made for me when a girl, under the supervision
of my father, and I threw my whole heart into the work of copying
each line and delicate shading on those wonderful wings, `all
diamonded with panes of quaint device, innumerable stains and
splendid dyes,' as one poet describes them. There were times,
when in working a mist of colour over another background, I cut
a brush down to three hairs. Some of these illustrations I sent
back six and seven times, to be worked over before the illustration
plates were exact duplicates of the originals, and my heart ached
for the engravers, who must have had Job-like patience; but it
did not ache enough to stop me until I felt the reproduction exact.
This book tells its own story of long and patient waiting for
a specimen, of watching, of disappointments, and triumphs. I love
it especially among my book children because it represents my
highest ideals in the making of a nature book, and I can take
any skeptic afield and prove the truth of the natural history
it contains."
In August of 1913 the author's novel "Laddie" was published
in New York, London, Sydney and Toronto simultaneously. This book
contains the same mixture of romance and nature interest as the
others, and is modelled on the same plan of introducing nature
objects peculiar to the location, and characters, many of whom
are from life, typical of the locality at a given period. The
first thing many critics said of it was that "no such people
ever existed, and no such life was ever lived." In reply
to this the author said: "Of a truth, the home I described
in this book I knew to the last grain of wood in the doors, and
I painted, it with absolute accuracy; and many of the people I
described I knew more intimately than I ever have known any others.
TAKEN AS A WHOLE IT REPRESENTS A PERFECTLY FAITHFUL PICTURE OF
HOME LIFE, IN A FAMILY WHO WERE REARED AND EDUCATED EXACTLY AS
THIS BOOK INDICATES. There was such a man as Laddie, and he was
as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real
thing is always better than its presentment. The only difference,
barring the nature work, between my books and those of many other
writers, is that I prefer to describe and to perpetuate the BEST
I have known in life; whereas many authors seem to feel that they
have no hope of achieving a high literary standing unless they
delve in and reproduce the WORST.
"To deny that wrong and pitiful things exist in life is folly,
but to believe that these things are made better by promiscuous
discussion at the hands of writers who FAIL TO PROVE BY THEIR
BOOKS that their viewpoint is either right, clean, or helpful,
is close to insanity. If there is to be any error on either side
in a book, then God knows it is far better that it should be upon
the side of pure sentiment and high ideals than upon that of a
too loose discussion of subjects which often open to a large part
of the world their first knowledge of such forms of sin, profligate
expenditure, and waste of life's best opportunities. There is
one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no
one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner
life and higher inspiration than they ever before have known."
Mrs. Porter has written ten books, and it is not out of place
here to express her attitude toward them. Each was written, she
says, from her heart's best impulses. They are as clean and helpful
as she knew how to make them, as beautiful and interesting. She
has never spared herself in the least degree, mind or body, when
it came to giving her best, and she has never considered money
in relation to what she was writing.
During the hard work and exposure of those early years, during
rainy days and many nights in the darkroom, she went straight
ahead with field work, sending around the globe for books and
delving to secure material for such books as "Birds of the
Bible," "Music of the Wild," and "Moths of
the Limberlost." Every day devoted to such work was "commercially"
lost, as publishers did not fail to tell her. But that was the
work she could do, and do with exceeding joy. She could do it
better pictorially, on account of her lifelong knowledge of living
things afield, than any other woman had as yet had the strength
and nerve to do it. It was work in which she gloried, and she
persisted. "Had I been working for money," comments
the author, "not one of these nature books ever would have
been written, or an illustration made."
When the public had discovered her and given generous approval
to "A Girl of the Limberlost," when "The Harvester"
had established a new record, that would have been the time for
the author to prove her commercialism by dropping nature work,
and plunging headlong into books it would pay to write, and for
which many publishers were offering alluring sums. Mrs. Porter's
answer was the issuing of such books as "Music of the Wild"
and "Moths of the Limberlost." No argument is necessary.
Mr. Edward Shuman, formerly critic of the Chicago Record-Herald,
was impressed by this method of work and pointed it out in a review.
It appealed to Mr. Shuman, when "Moths of the Limberlost"
came in for review, following the tremendous success of "The
Harvester," that had the author been working for money, she
could have written half a dozen more "Harvesters" while
putting seven years of field work, on a scientific subject, into
a personally illustrated work.
In an interesting passage dealing with her books, Mrs. Porter
writes: "I have done three times the work on my books of
fiction that I see other writers putting into a novel, in order
to make all natural history allusions accurate and to write them
in such fashion that they will meet with the commendation of high
schools, colleges, and universities using what I write as text
books, and for the homes that place them in their libraries. I
am perfectly willing to let time and the hearts of the people
set my work in its ultimate place. I have no delusions concerning
it.
"To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a
piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher
ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree
it shows him where he can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier
man, it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one
beauty in nature he never saw for himself, and leads him one step
toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book, for one
step into the miracles of nature leads to that long walk, the
glories of which so strengthen even a boy who thinks he is dying,
that he faces his struggle like a gladiator."
During the past ten years thousands of people have sent the author
word that through her books they have been led afield and to their
first realization of the beauties of nature her mail brings an
average of ten such letters a day, mostly from students, teachers,
and professional people of our largest cities. It can probably
be said in all truth of her nature books and nature novels, that
in the past ten years they have sent more people afield than all
the scientific writings of the same period. That is a big statement,
but it is very likely pretty close to the truth. Mrs. Porter has
been asked by two London and one Edinburgh publishers for the
privilege of bringing out complete sets of her nature books, but
as yet she has not felt ready to do this.
In bringing this sketch of Gene Stratton-Porter to a close it
will be interesting to quote the author's own words describing
the Limberlost Swamp, its gradual disappearance under the encroachments
of business, and her removal to a new field even richer in natural
beauties. She says: "In the beginning of the end a great
swamp region lay in northeastern Indiana. Its head was in what
is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body in Allen and Wells,
and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay The Limberlost
lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it, EXACTLY AS DESCRIBED
IN MY BOOKS. The process of dismantling it was told in, Freckles,
to start with, carried on in `A Girl of the Limberlost,' and finished
in `Moths of the Limberlost.' Now it has so completely fallen
prey to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen,
and farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory
and build a new cabin about seventy miles north, at the head of
the swamp in Noble county, where there are many lakes, miles of
unbroken marsh, and a far greater wealth of plant and animal life
than existed during my time in the southern part. At the north
end every bird that frequents the Central States is to be found.
Here grow in profusion many orchids, fringed gentians, cardinal
flowers, turtle heads, starry campions, purple gerardias, and
grass of Parnassus. In one season I have located here almost every
flower named in the botanies as native to these regions and several
that I can find in no book in my library.
"But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen
acres of forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in marsh country.
It means the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which
will provide the comforts of life for my family and furnish a
workshop consisting of a library, a photographic darkroom and
negative closet, and a printing room for me. I could live in such
a home as I could provide on the income from my nature work alone;
but when my working grounds were cleared, drained and ploughed
up, literally wiped from the face of the earth, I never could
have moved to new country had it not been for the earnings of
the novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in great
part UPON MY NATURE WORK. Based on this plan of work and life
I have written ten books, and `please God I live so long,' I shall
write ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in
northern Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and
woods legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the
best men and women I have known."