Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him: “John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs. Burnett’s easily comprehended way too.
When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in noisome New York--you can buy things there, after all, and editors and publishers there do congregate--and then she flees to Bermuda. But not until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In Bermuda she--gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is unpretentious but charming.
To revert for a moment to _The Shuttle_, we may note something almost prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America, in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted the characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.” That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no abstract themes. She wrote:
“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.
“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation between two great countries such as the history of the world--as far as I know it--has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer to each other. That they are of the same blood--the mere fact that they speak the same tongue--makes the thing inevitable in the end.