Arts and Letters

When Ellen Glasgow died in November, 1945, she had fully carried out a plan that she formed as a girl. This was to write in prose fiction a social history of her native state from the decade before the Confederacy through her own lifetime. Born in the house in which she died, in Richmond, the Queenborough of her novels, in April, 1874, she shared the racial intermixture that had made Thomas Jefferson the type of the Virginian a century before her. For she too was descended from the Randolphs of the "tidewater" region as well as from the Scotch-Irish of her Vein of Iron. Thus she had an inherited knowledge of the countless phases of Virginian life that appeared in the complex panorama of her twenty novels, while her work possessed a continuity and a constancy of attitude that one scarcely found elsewhere in the American fiction of her time. Ellen Glasgow was always distinguished for her deep sense of the significance of life, for her power of persistent effort, so rare with our writers, and a gift of unwavering development that was rarer still.

It has often been said that with Ellen Glasgow a whole new literature began in the South, where a mournful nostalgia had governed the minds of writers. To defend the lost, as she said in a preface, had become the sole purpose and obligation of the Southern novelist since the Civil War, while the living tradition of the South had lapsed into sentimentality and a sort of evasive idealism that challenged her mind. As a young girl she had said to herself, "Life is not like this," and "Why must novels be false to experience?" The standard pattern of the Southern romance was the story of the gallant young Northern invader who rescues the spirited yet clinging Southern belle—the belle, one might say the professional beauty, who lingered on the scene and whom Ellen Glasgow herself commemorated later. For she felt the charm of the old South, which she conveyed in time with far more actuality than the earlier romancers, passionately in revolt as she was against its stranglehold over the mind, as against the pretentious and the stereotyped in Southern writing. She knew and loved the old Virginia as much as Thomas Nelson Page—she was herself as much as he inside it—and she described it with brilliance and power in her Civil War novel, The Battle-Ground, with its picture of the Lightfoots of Chericote in all their glory. How well she portrayed the "golden years" of the old Virginia cousinhood, the duelling young men who rode off merrily to the war, the old bucks and gallants whose cure for their gout was to take another glass of port, while they recited Byron with the zest of a schoolboy.

She liked to recall the spacious days when a great-aunt Griselda came for a visit, hung up her bombazine skirts in the closet of her chamber, ordered green tea and toast and settled herself for the remainder of her days, during which she was always treated as an honored guest. When Ellen Glasgow chose to dwell on the scenes of the old romancers, she did so more faithfully and as lovingly as any of them, and with all her feeling for the "vein of iron" that came from her Presbyterian stock she liked the pleasure-loving strain of Virginia too. She said that Southerners were distinguished from Northerners in believing that pleasure was worth more than toil and certainly a great deal more than profit.

It was not therefore against the past that Ellen Glasgow was in revolt, it was only against the elegiac tradition in letters, and this emphasis on a dying culture seemed to her all the more futile at a time when her world of the present was so vibrant and exciting. The "new" South, the changing South, was passing through phase after phase that offered great opportunities, as she saw, for writers, and, tough-minded as she was among so many who were tender-minded, she observed with a devouring curiosity the developing scene. She said the South needed "blood and irony" as a cure for its mental anemia and the sentimental decay of its traditional ideas, and she proceeded to supply this tonic in the long series of novels that began in 1897 with The Descendant. An eager student of Darwin and Mill, she watched the economic changes and the social and political changes in the world about her, where the poor farmer and the working classes were rapidly rising to power and the old caste-idols were going down before them. Temperamentally, as she said, on the side of the disinherited, she was also on the side of energy, on the side of life, when energy and life were in conflict with the moribund and the static, and in two novels, The Voice of the People and The Romance of a Plain Man, she followed the upward course of two leaders from the ranks. One was the story of a bright farm-boy who becomes a great governor of the state, a theme that recurred in another novel, One Man in His Time, which opens with Gideon Vetch in the governor's mansion. While in every case Ellen Glasgow delighted in showing to the best advantage the virtues and charm of the "quality" who were losing in the race, she delighted still more in the native strength and the sympathetic imagination of these men who have broken away from their "station in life." She delighted most of all in showing the gentry helping the rising poor, as the great General Bolingbroke helped Ben Starr, who was finally chosen to succeed him as president of the railroad, as old Judge Bassett adopted Nick Burr, who had taken Jefferson as his model, encouraging his passion for study and his political ambitions. In both these cases, Ellen Glasgow, far from attacking the past or tradition, exhibited tradition at its best, placing itself at the service of the actual, of life, as Asa Timberlake also showed it, in the later novel, In This Our Life, when he lent books to the ambitious young Negro Parry. Like the self-made governor, Nick Burr, the old clergyman in Virginia is killed in the act of defending threatened Negroes, thanks to his feeling of responsibility for any creature who had belonged to him or whose forebears had toiled in his service. In her instinctive feeling for politics, Ellen Glasgow was a reincarnation of the famous political women of the older South.

In one way or another, this conflict of the two regimes was the general theme of Ellen Glasgow's novels—the agrarian regime in its twilight hour and the rising industrial system that was largely in the hands of the despised and rejected of the past. There were few phases of her age of transition that Ellen Glasgow failed to touch in the numberless characters and scenes of her various novels, which covered the customs of the farm and the village, the changing fashions of the towns and the ways of all the social orders. Always on the side of life, she sided with the new life only when it was more generous, more abundant than the old, for she had small use for the new regime when the sordid and the narrow spoke for it, her grubby industrialist, for instance, Cyrus Treadwell. When other things were equal, her liking for the new was obvious enough, and her "old families" again and again showed themselves in their brightest light as admirers, supporters, or lovers of the rising and the risen. Sally Mickleborough is the first and the last to stand by Starr in his ups and downs, as Stephen Culpeper, whose father's ideas have turned to stone, understands the "poor white" governor and his daughter Patty. But Ellen Glasgow saw the value of the family pride that obliged the Ordways to take the brother back who had been sent to prison, though they made his life unbearable after they did so, and she was ready to do more than justice to certain types of the old regime whom she could never have admired altogether. With an apparently equal sympathy she presented the "perfect lady" of the past, the women who were "orthodox believers in the claims of blood," the young girl of the jazz age who cared only for "joy, if one could ever find it," and the aging Edmonia who flaunted her brazen past. She had the true comic sense that saw this lady in the same relief as old Cousin Priscilla who "clung to the habits of her ancestors under the impression that she was clinging to their ideals," sharing for the moment the point of view of the young people of Annabel's age who flocked about Judge Honeywell's reprobate sister. "They treated her scarlet letter less as a badge of shame than as some foreign decoration for distinguished service."

If Ellen Glasgow liked Edmonia, this was for obvious reasons, for she too was realistic and a proof that the so-called bad when they are bold often do less harm than the so-called good when they are soft. What Ellen Glasgow detested most was the "tyranny of weakness," the softness that wrecks or smothers so many lives, while Edmonia, who scouted the "sanctified fallacies" that stood in the way of the vital and the real, had, moreover, her own "vein of iron." This was the firm fighting strength that Ellen Glasgow so revered and that formed the core of the characters she loved above all. It was Dorinda's leading trait in the harsh world of Barren Ground, it was this that supported Gabriella in her struggle for survival, the "primordial instinct" that "prompted her… not to yield," that never failed John Fincastle, the great theologian who is driven to the wall, that gave Emily Brooke the power to win back the plantation. For the rest, in her reaffirmation of reality and life against what used to be called the dead hand of tradition, Ellen Glasgow was a part of the world-movement of her time, just as one feels that her Virginian scene is, in fact, a wider scene, the all-American scene of two generations. For the characters, especially of her later novels, while Southern recognizably, are also the Americans we have known wherever we have lived, type for type, that is, and group for group. Thus Ellen Glasgow, the first novelist to show us the true Southern life, was also the first to take the South out of the South and give it in fiction a touch of the universal. For this and other reasons she has a secure and honored place in the history of letters in this country.