Oh! Let Us Be Joyful!

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IF you have read Miss Agnes Repplier’s delightful essay on ‘Little Pharisees in Fiction’ you will remember her description of the atmosphere of gloom which these young people created. ‘Every page,’ she tells us, in speaking especially of the Elsie Books, ‘Every page is drenched in tears.’

We have with us now a new type of ‘Little Pharisee,’ who in her influence is more gloom-producing than were the originals. It is, I think we may say, a psychological truth that if you force one particular emotion or point of view too violently upon the human mind there comes an inevitable but natural reaction, usually to the very antithesis. We have all shivered delightfully over the England that followed after the Puritan rule. By this same law, with the dreary little Pharisees of whom Miss Repplier tells us one would be forced to take a cheerful point of view in self-defense. But with their modern descendants this escape is impossible. They live in such an atmosphere of over-heated, forced, hothouse joy that one rushes to the ‘Night’ that covered Mr. Henley, ’Black as the pit from pole to pole,’ in sheer need for some, any, relief. Their sunshine, one is convinced, is reckoned in so many thousand candle-power, and one wonders nervously just how the dynamos can keep up the strain. The tales in which they figure might be called the ‘ Oh, be joyful!’ books. Immediately that line of Walter Savage Landor flashes into one’s mind, ‘That word, that sad word, Joy,’ and one begins to realize the full meaning of the adjective as one never has before.

Pollyanna is, of course, the first and chief offender. But there are many others, all of them living on that easy philosophy, —

Most of us are quite willing to assent to the first line, but those of us who have had any experience of life are not so ready to agree with the second. It is rather in spite of the fact that ‘God’s in his Heaven’ that we have to explain the world as it is. Certainly in this year of grace there does not seem to be much connection between the world and God, and it would indeed be a brave man who would venture to assert, ‘All’s right with the world.’ Browning, in that poem, was expressing no more than a mood — the mood of early morning, of easy laughter and high hopes, the exuberant mood of youth. The moment you dignify this into a philosophy, you destroy all its charm for you destroy its truth.

But it is on that kind of easy optimism, of refusal to look things in the face, that the ‘Glad’ books are based. Pollyanna by her influence reforms a hypochondriac of years’ standing, prevents some unhappily married couples from rushing into divorce, brings her maiden aunt’s blighted romance to a happy end, and finally shows the minister how to deal with his congregation: quite a list of achievements for a young person eleven years old. Miss Repplier may object to the alacrity and confidence with which her gloomy young people ‘set about the correction of their parents’ faults.’ These ‘little sunshines ’ of the modern writers do not confine their efforts only to their families; whole towns are not safe from their uplifting influence. As one of the characters tells us of Pollyanna, —

‘Ever since last June that blessed child has just been makin’ the whole town glad.’

Pollyanna, however, is not alone in her iniquity; if she lives in an atmosphere of ‘overwhelming, unquenchable gladness for everything that has happened or is going to happen,’ so too does Mrs. Wiggs. Mrs. Wiggs was the mother of Pollyanna. How she was so careless as to mislay her child as she did, I don’t know; but one has only to read her first speech to realize at once the close relationship between them: —

'"My, but it’s nice an’ cool this mornin’! The thermometer’s done fell up to zero.” ’ ‘ Mrs. Wiggs,’ the author adds, ‘was a philosopher, and the sum and substance of her philosophy lay in keeping the dust off her rose-colored spectacles.’ She is, however, more human than Pollyanna, for when her boy, Jim, dies, she is overwhelmed with sorrow and never thinks for a moment of being ‘ glad ’ about anything. One cannot escape the conviction that even in the loss of her dearest, Pollyanna could have found something to be glad about. Remember, she tells us that ‘the game was to just find something about everything to be glad about and the harder ’t is, the more fun ’t is to get them out.’ Mary Carey is still more human, though she is not quite free from the mark of the beast. ‘“I won’t be unhappy. I just won’t. I have n’t enough other blessings.”’ And that last clause is her salvation, for of course neither Pollyanna nor Mrs. Wiggs would have admitted that her cup was not overflowing.

One great flaw in all these professional sunshine-makers is a lack of all sense of proportion, of relative values. Pollyanna, a child of eleven, is quite capable of changing the minister’s whole philosophy of life. Mary Carey is better able to run the orphan asylum than those in charge. Mary Carey, at twelve, is clever enough to realize that the look in Miss Katherine’s face is a ‘remembrance,’ and to ascribe it to a possible lost sweetheart. Mary Carey also gives a most adequate reproof to the rude, rich lady; she has the presence of mind, when caught in a heinous offense, to exclaim, ‘Let us pray! ’ Mrs. Wiggs has the same capacity for meeting situations. Mrs. Wiggs, of course, has had at least the experience of living, — an advantage over this intellectual offspring of hers, —but her unfailing self-possession in the face of difficulties is too good to be true.

It is this lack of truth that most strikingly characterizes Molly MakeBelieve and the heroine of Everybody’s Lonely. Molly Make-Believe, as you know, is a young person who makes a business of cheering people up through the medium of letters written to them by an imaginary correspondent. Imagine making a business of being cheerful! Manufactured sunshine would be about as convincing a product as are artificial flowers. In the course of her profession she comes across a young man ill of rheumatic fever to whom she plays, by way of the postman, the ideal fiancée. Her letters and presents somewhat strain our credulity, but when she suddenly appears one night in his rooms and we are asked to believe that a well-bred young girl calls upon a young man of whom she knows absolutely nothing, and without his showing any curiosity in the matter announces that she loves him, it is almost too much for even our simple-mindedness.

Yet Molly Make-Believe is an extremely popular book. Who says the Age of Faith has gone by? Certainly the age of miracles is still with us when the realization of the obvious truth that ‘Everybody’s Lonely’ teaches an unsophisticated, and — breathe it low — uninteresting little country girl to converse on terms of easy intimacy with the great ones of the earth. You and I know that it needs more than gentleness and sympathy to unlock the hearts of the mighty; tact, charm, understanding of human nature are also necessary, and above all, social experience; qualities not to be found in quite inexperienced country girls. Alas! Mrs. Laughlin to the contrary, the mere knowledge that ‘Everybody’s Lonely’ does not at once endow you with every social grace.

Simply as joy-makers, however, Gene Stratton Porter’s people are the best of all, for they have so little hesitancy in discussing their emotions. No matter what they may be feeling or may think they are feeling, unblushingly they tell you all about it; reticence is unknown to them. It is, however, surely true that one can no more talk about great joys than about great sorrows; they are both equally sacred. How can you drag your overwhelming happiness into the light of common day that unsympathetic eyes may fall upon it and fail to appreciate its beauty?

Not so these people. Edith Carr chooses the middle of a ball-room as the appropriate place for breaking her engagement, which, in keeping with her usual delicacy, she does by throwing the ring at the young man’s feet. In a certain type of story that is the accepted formula. I wonder if it has ever been done in real life? When Mr. Pryor asks Little Sister why her family are always singing, she answers unblushingly, ‘Oh, just joy! Gladness that we are alive, that we have things to do, — what we like, — and praising the Lord.’ And Laddie announces to the father of the girl he loves that ‘ she has only to give him one gesture of invitation to find him before her, six feet of the worst demoralized beefsteak a woman ever undertook to handle.’

When we find Laddie solemnly telling his little sister not to cry,— ‘The way to be happy is to be good,’ — we begin to realize the cause for this lack of truthfulness, of proportion, of understanding, of reticence; we can trace them every one to the greatest lack of all, the lack of a sense of humor. It is at the bottom of the difficulty with all the ‘Oh, be joyful!’ books. It seems strange enough that these books, written with the sole purpose of cheering people up, should be without humor; but so it undoubtedly is. There is hardly a quotation in this paper that, whatever else it may exemplify, does not illustrate equally well a missing sense of humor. How could we be given all those touching pictures of Mary Carey, Pollyanna, and Leon reforming their elders, the incredible behavior of Molly Make-Believe and the heroine of ‘Everybody’s Lonely,’ if their creators had any feeling for absurdity at all? And the language they choose, especially Mrs. Porter’s creations— Laddie’s ‘six feet of demoralized beefsteak!’ Ah no, the Comic Spirit is never clumsy. These are the antics of clowns, and what have clowns to do with humor?

One could go on forever telling of these professional joy-makers. In every magazine we find among its book reviews such sentences as, ‘This new book is called the cheerful book,’ or, ‘The book will prove an uplift and an inspiration.’ The world must indeed be ‘full o’ sairousness,’ as Miss Repplier tells us the Ettrick Shepherd thinks, if it needs such an appalling amount of cheering up. And with the usual human perverseness, surfeited on sunshine, we long for gloom, and with Pollyanna’s aunt we cry, —

‘ Will you stop using that everlasting word “glad!” It’s “glad,” “glad,” “glad,” from morning till night until I think I shall go wild!’