Daddy-Long-Legs. Jean WebsterЧитать онлайн книгу.
As a play, even more than in book form, it did more good than a thousand tracts in pointing the need of institutional reforms. Its effect was so immediate and so widespread that the author found herself at the center of a reform movement. As a result she wrote her last published work, Dear Enemy, which, beneath the light, engaging love-story that plays about the surface, presents the last word in the care of dependent children — a book destined to do more effective service in behalf of these unfortunates than all the treatises yet published. Such is the magic of personality when combined with a seeing eye and a singing pen. The names of her characters, whimsically enough, she usually chose from the telephone-book, but the characters themselves, were always taken from life both in her fiction and in her play-writing.
She had evolved a thorough technic; she was master of the tools she wrought with; and at the time of her death she lacked only complete maturity of mind and experience to achieve the great things she was potentially capable of. As it is, what she left us will stand the test of time, I believe, as the best of its kind.
Only a few intimates know of the wide benefactions and the generous giving of time and thought that filled the days of her busy life. But those who have caught in her writings the friendliness and good humor of her attitude toward life will not be surprised to know that she lived as she wrote. And there is poignant pathos in the fact that this sturdy optimist who did so much in her later years for the cause of childhood should at the last have given her life for a little child. [D. Z. D. in The Century Magazine, November, 1916.]
It is a matter of opinion whether her writer's art was more effective in the form of the novel or the form of the play. But certain it is that she was craftsman enough to convert the one medium into the other, and with a skill that showed mastery of both. It is true that the dramatic form came to her mind the more quickly for she had been a close student of the technique of the drama, and it was her custom, at least in her later work, to first cast her plot as a play, and then convert it into the novel. It is in this wise that Daddy-Long-Legs was fashioned.
It has been said of a distinguished modem that he was too self-conscious to find the straight path to the heart of a friend. The converse of this almost epitomizes Jean Webster's habit of thought, and habit of action. Whatever her plan or purpose, whether it was in work or friendship, the straight path without shadow of self -consciousness was the one she followed. And it was this characteristic that made those who knew her best feel that all the work she had done thus far was constructive and substantial, but that the straight path led to wider fields, and that her next ten years would have revealed the real purpose to which she had directed herself.
To transilluminate the commonplace of life so that faith, hope, and love shone through was Jean Webster's special gift. Her dailyness revealed this, whether it was in starting the machinery of her household; in giving counsel to varied types of friends, for she dominated whatever group she stayed among; in furthering some alleviation of another's sorrow, or securing an adjustment for better ways in social conditions, her vision carried through any darkness, and in every situation she saw that this age-long trinity linked together made for the largest happiness to the greatest number. In short, her philosophy of life. [Elizabeth Gushing in The Vassar Quarterly, November, 1916.]
The following sonnet in memory of Jean Webster appeared in The Century Magazine, November, 1916.
TO J. W.
Ruth Comfort Mitchell
Jean Webster went in golden glowing June,
Upon a full-pulsed, warm-breathed, vital day,
With rich achievement luring her to stay.
Putting her keen, kind pen aside too soon
In the ripe promise of her ardent noon.
Yet, sturdy-souled and whimsical and gay,
I think she would have chosen it that way,
On the high-hill note of her life's clear tune.
And while gray hearts grow green again with mirth,
And wakened joy and beauty go to find
The small, blue-ginghamed lonely ones of earth,
While charm and cheer and color work their will
In the glad gospel that she left behind,
She will be living, laughing with us still.
“BLUE WEDNESDAY”
THE first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day—a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” whenever a Trustee spoke.
It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest orphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular first Wednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close. Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been making sandwiches for the asylum’s guests, and turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work. Her special care was room F, where eleven little tots, from four to seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembled her charges, straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses, and started them in an orderly and willing line toward the dining-room to engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.
Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five that morning, doing everybody’s bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervous matron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.
The day was ended—quite successfully, so far as she knew. The Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity—and a touch of wistfulness—the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one equipage then another to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring “Home” to the driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.
Jerusha had an imagination—an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that would get her into trouble if she didn’t take care—but keen as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by orphans.
Je-ru-sha Ab-bott
You are wan-ted
In the of-fice,
And I think you ’d
Better hurry up!
Tommy Dillon who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs and down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F. Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the troubles of life.
“Who wants me?” she cut into Tommy’s chant with a note of sharp anxiety.
Mrs. Lippett in the office,
And I think she's mad.
Ah-a-men!
Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Even the most hardened little orphan