PEARL K. BELL
251
they may appear, are not grotesques. With the affectionate grace
and meticulous observation that shaped her style, Miss Jewett paid
tribute to the precious individuality of these country folk, whose
modest dignity and natural sense of community had not yet entirely
succumbed to an increasingly impersonal industrial age . As one of
Miss Jewett's innumerable bright old ladies remarks, "What a lot of
queer folks there used to be about here, anyway, when we was
young .. .. Everybody's just like everybody else now." And no
one is any longer young. In all her work we can feel Sarah Jewett
quietly recoiling from the bustling clatter of a modern world that is
rapidly destroying the serenity of a life defined by nature . But it
could not disappear completely as long as there were writers who
understood the imperatives of memory.
It scarcely needs saying that with all her acutely rendered con–
sciousness of the old-fashioned ways, Miss Jewett's Emersonian vi–
sion of man in nature neglected a less winning side of the nature of
man. As F . O. Matthiessen , the great scholar of the American Re–
naissance , pointed out in his youthfully florid biography of Miss
Jewett, published in 1929 when he was still in his twenties:
She always paints the gentler emotions: blinding hates and
jealousies, the fever of lust and the thirst of avarice never throb
there . . .. There is a stark New England Sarah Jewett does not
show, morbid, bleak, and mean of spirit. She looked at nature in
its milder moods, and at mankind in its more subdued states of
tenderness and regret.
It is so often summertime in her stories , or a benign day in
autumn or spring. The crippling severity of the New England winter
is rarely mentioned , and although she was by no means blind to
poverty in such stories as "Going to Shrewsbury" and "The Flight of
Betsey Lane," she did not often confront head-on the demeaning
squalor and helplessness of the destitute , as she did, for example, in
"The Town Poor." But even in that chilling story , she took the sting
out by ending on a cheerful note of hope. The bitterness and suspi–
cion that Mary Wilkins Freeman, a far less gifted writer of the same
generation, revealed in her novels about small towns in New Eng–
land are not to be found in Miss Jewett's work. As for passion, she
ventured no further than the response of an adolescent girl to a
dashing sportsman, in "A White Heron," written a decade before the
