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, honor, 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.’”

_A Girl of the Limberlost_ “‘comes fairly close to my idea of a good book. 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.’”

Prior to the appearance of _A Daughter of the Land_ this was Mrs. Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)--emotion, pure, deep, contenting and cleansing--these will ask no more than Mrs. Porter gives them here.

The idea of _The Harvester_ was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl healed by them. “‘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.... 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 had always 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.’”

_Laddie_--“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know 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.... 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.’”

Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “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 her 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.” No argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific materials.

This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories.

“‘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 those 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 a 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 plowed 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 my 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.’”

This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, _A Daughter of the Land_, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty, from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big.

Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs. Porter’s own account of herself--but could any one do better than to present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is giving of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I don’t know much about literature, _but I know what I like_.” To be sure you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always means narrowing it) does _not_ know what he likes! He knows only what he doesn’t like--or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere and with everybody.

If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this sort is to be had for a price,--if you want to pay so much.

“‘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.’”

Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a criticism of life.” How about molding lives?

BOOKS BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER

_The Song of the Cardinal_, 1903. _Freckles_, 1904. _What I Have Done With Birds_ [_Friends in Feathers_], 1907. _At the Foot of the Rainbow_, 1908. _A Girl of the Limberlost_, 1909. _Birds of the Bible_, 1909. _Music of the Wild_, 1910. _The Harvester_, 1911. _Moths of the Limberlost_, 1912. _Laddie_, 1913. _Michael O’Halloran_, 1915. _Morning Face._ _A Daughter of the Land_, 1918. _Homing with the Birds_, 1920. _Her Father’s Daughter_, 1921. _The Fire Bird_, 1922.

_Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._