Hillsboro People | Page 5

cannot but feel that Death may mean only turning
over another page.
I suppose we do not appreciate the seriousness of fiction-writing, nor
its importance to those who cannot get any nearer to real life. And yet it
is not that we are unprogressive. Our young people, returning from
college, or from visits to the city, freshen and bring up to date our ideas
on literature as rigorously as they do our sleeves and hats; but after a
short stay in Hillsboro even these conscientious young missionaries of
culture turn away from the feeble plots of Ibsen and the tame
inventions of Bernard Shaw to the really exciting, perplexing, and
stimulating events in the life of the village grocer.
In "Ghosts," Ibsen preaches a terrible sermon on the responsibility of
one generation for the next, but not all his relentless logic can move
you to the sharp throb of horrified sympathy you feel as you see Nelse
Pettingrew's poor mother run down the street, her shawl flung hastily
over her head, framing a face of despairing resolve, such as can never
look at you out of the pages of a book. Somebody has told her that
Nelse has been drinking again and "is beginning to get ugly." For
Hillsboro is no model village, but the world entire, with hateful forces
of evil lying in wait for weakness. Who will not lay down "Ghosts" to
watch, with a painfully beating heart, the progress of this living "Mrs.

Alving" past the house, pleading, persuading, coaxing the burly
weakling, who will be saved from a week's debauch if she can only get
him safely home now, and keep him quiet till "the fit goes by."
At the sight everybody in Hillsboro realizes that Nelse "got it from his
father," with a penetrating sense of the tragedy of heredity, quite as
stimulating to self-control in the future as Ibsen is able to make us feel
in "Ghosts." But we know something better than Ibsen, for Mrs.
Pettingrew is no "Mrs. Alving." She is a plain, hard-featured woman
who takes in sewing for a living, and she is quite unlettered, but she is a
general in the army of spiritual forces. She does not despair, she does
not give up like the half-hearted mother in "Ghosts," she does not waste
her strength in concealments; she stands up to her enemy and fights.
She fought the wild beast in Nelse's father, hand to hand, all his life,
and he died a better man than when she married him. Undaunted, she
fought it in Nelse as a boy, and now as a man; and in the flowering of
his physical forces when the wind of his youth blows most wildly
through the hateful thicket of inherited weaknesses she generally wins
the battle.
And this she has done with none of the hard, consistent strength and
intelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening
an example to our faltering impulses for good. She has been infinitely
human and pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and
complained and done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still
fought on, till to think of her is, for the weakest of us, like a bugle call
to high endeavor. Nelse is now a better man than his father, and we
shut up "Ghosts" with impatience that Ibsen should have selected that
story to tell out of all the tales there must have been in the village
where he lived.
Now imagine if you can ... for I cannot even faintly indicate to you ...
our excitement when Nelse begins to look about him for a wife. In the
first place, we are saved by our enforced closeness to real people from
wasting our energies in the profitless outcry of economists that people
like Nelse should be prohibited from having children. It occurs to us
that perhaps the handsome fellow's immense good-humor and

generosity are as good inheritance as the selfishness and cold avarice of
priggish young Horace Gallatin, who never drinks a drop. Perhaps at
some future date all people who are not perfectly worthy to have
children will be kept from it by law. In Hillsboro, we think, that after
such a decree the human race would last just one generation; but that is
not the point now. The question is, will Nelse find a wife who will
carry on his mother's work, or will he not?
If you think you are excited over a serial story because you can't guess
if "Lady Eleanor" really stole the diamonds or not, it is only because
you have no idea of what excitement is. You are in a condition of
stagnant lethargy compared to that of Hillsboro over the question
whether Nelse will marry Ellen Brownell, "our Ellen," or