Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

57 страница из 81

“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training—which stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of statement to drive her point home.

Even Mr. Boynton allows that Perch of the Devil contains some of Mrs. Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The character of Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth, study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.”

“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs. Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In the various stages of her development, moreover—beginning when she was the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress—I found myself meeting all American women in one. The West to-day—particularly the Northwest—embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement. They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both sophisticated and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her qualities—good and bad—grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change, even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and amusing myself speculating upon her past.”