_Cargoes for Crusoes_

[Illustration]

_GRANT OVERTON_




_By_ GRANT OVERTON


_About Books and Authors_

    CARGOES FOR CRUSOES
    AUTHORS OF THE DAY
    AMERICAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT
    WHEN WINTER COMES TO MAIN STREET
    THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS
    WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

_Novels_

    THE THOUSAND AND FIRST NIGHT
    ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT
    THE ANSWERER
    WORLD WITHOUT END
    MERMAID




                                 Cargoes
                               for Crusoes

                           _By_ GRANT OVERTON

                             [Illustration]

                     New York: D. Appleton & Company
                    New York: George H. Doran Company
                   Boston: Little, Brown, and Company

                 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

                            COPYRIGHT, 1924,
                            BY GRANT OVERTON

                   _First Printing, September, 1924._

                                Press of
                       J. J. Little & Ives Company
                           New York, U. S. A.

                        Bound in Interlaken-Cloth




“_Let’s Give Him a Book._”

“_He’s Got a Book._”

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE WHO, THOUGH HAVING ONE BOOK,
SOMETIMES ENJOY ANOTHER




Preface

_Being a True Account of How a Priceless Cargo Was Delivered to a Desert
Islander_


How that I, Robinson Crusoe, came to be wrecked with others of the ship’s
company on a Desert Island, all being lost save my unworthy self, hath
in a precise manner been narrated by one D. Defoe in the book he saw fit
to entitle with my name; but his ending is indifferent. For novels like
Defoe’s must have the Happy Ending, so styled. Yet is the truth often
happier far than fiction. Being no hand to invent a tale, I am content to
set down in this place events as I humbly took part in them.

Let me declare, then, that here on my Desert Island I for long suffered
great loneliness and consequent distress of soul. This went on many days.
Howbeit, while sunk very low in my spiritual state and with expectation
nearly gone, a huge ship passing near labored painfully with a storm by
the mercy of God being compelled to throw overboard—or, as they say at
sea, to jettison—the greater part of her cargo. And being thus lightened
she stood away from the Island and went on her course safely. The same
storm cast upon the shore the rich treasure wherewith she had been laden,
so many wooden boxes or cases, packed tightly and well-lined, which for
the most part were washed up undamaged and, within, scarcely dampened
except it may be for an inch or two. Coming down to the shore the morning
after I stood transfixed with astonishment at the sight of something
lying on the sand. It was a book.

When I had a little recovered from my amaze, my joy and ecstasy knew no
way to communicate itself, and almost immediately, my eye falling on the
cases strewn along the beach, I capered with delight. I brake open the
boxes, one after the other fast as I could work. All, _all_, were brimmed
with the newest books!

Since that day I have not lacked instruction and entertainment, and deem
that Providence, at trifling expense to the maritime insurers, hath
rescued me from boredom forevermore. And this I deem the only rescue
worth a fingersnap in this life of ours, and one that a great majority
of people do never accomplish. My days and nights have been and yet
are filled with most various delights, my walks are taken with a great
company of authors and my conversations are held with them.

With such profit and satisfaction do I read that more than once, being
sighted by a vessel which then stood by to take me off my Island, I have
waved the sailors to proceed without me, which they have done with doubt
and difficulty; yet finally I have convinced them of my meaning, they
proceeding with their voyage, I with mine....




Contents


    CHAPTER                                               PAGE

     1 THE KNIGHTLINESS OF PHILIP GIBBS                     15

     2 THE TRAIL BLAZERS                                    28

     3 THE ART OF MELVILLE DAVISSON POST                    41

     4 JEFFERY FARNOL’S GESTES                              60

     5 ADULTS PLEASE SKIP                                   83

     6 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GOTHIC OF ALDOUS HUXLEY        97

     7 IN EVERY HOME: A CHAPTER FOR WOMEN                  114

     8 A GREAT IMPERSONATION BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM      126

     9 G. STANLEY HALL, PSYCHOLOGIST                       143

    10 THE MODE IN NEW FICTION                             167

    11 COSMO HAMILTON’S UNWRITTEN HISTORY                  182

    12 LEST THEY FORGET                                    197

    13 THAT LITERARY WANDERER, E. V. LUCAS                 212

    14 AMERICAN HISTORY IN FICTION                         232

    15 THE FIRESIDE THEATRE                                252

    16 A REASONABLE VIEW OF MICHAEL ARLEN                  266

    17 PALETTES AND PATTERNS IN PROSE AND POETRY           277

    18 COMING!—COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER—COMING!               290

    19 EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK                        304

    20 NOT FOUND ELSEWHERE                                 314

    21 FRANK L. PACKARD UNLOCKS A BOOK                     330

    22 ALL CREEDS AND NONE                                 348

    23 J. C. SNAITH AND GEORGE GIBBS                       363

    24 MARY JOHNSTON’S ADVENTURE                           375

       INDEX OF PRICES                                     389

       INDEX                                               403




Portraits


                                                          PAGE

       PHILIP GIBBS                                         16

       MELVILLE DAVISSON POST                               48

       JEFFERY FARNOL                                       64

       SUSAN ERTZ                                          176

       COSMO HAMILTON                                      184

       E. V. LUCAS                                         224

       EMERSON HOUGH                                       234

       MICHAEL ARLEN                                       272

       MARY JOHNSTON                                       384




_Cargoes for Crusoes_




CARGOES FOR CRUSOES




1. The Knightliness of Philip Gibbs


i

Then one said: “Rise, Sir Philip——” but the terms in which the still
young man received ennoblement were heard by none; for all were drawn
by his face in which austerity and gentleness seemed mingled. A pale
young man with a nicotine-stained third finger whom Arnold Bennett had
once warned authors against (he asks you to lunch and drives a hard
bargain over the coffee). A good reporter for Alfred Harmsworth, Lord
Northcliffe. A war correspondent with seven-league boots. A man standing
on a platform in Carnegie Hall which rings with riot “looking like a
frightfully tired Savonarola who is speaking in a trance.” His thin,
uncompromising nose; the jut of the chin; the high cheekbones and the
hollow cheeks, long upper lip and mouth with drawn-in, straight corners
(yet a compassionate mouth); the deep-set eyes; the ears placed so far
back, and the raking line of the jaw—if these were all he might be
nothing better than a fine breed of news hound with “points.” They are
nothing; but the clear shine of idealism from eye and countenance is the
whole man. Great Britain had knighted a reporter, but Philip Gibbs had
been born to knighthood.

For when chivalry would have died, he first succored and then revived it;
when men wished to forget, he compelled them to remember. He actually
proves what men have forgotten how to prove, and so have turned into a
copybook maxim. Perhaps the reason his pen is mightier than any sword is
because he wields it as if it were one.

In the eyes of the world he is the D’Artagnan of Three Musketeers who are
also three brothers. They are Philip (Hamilton) Gibbs, Cosmo Hamilton
(Gibbs), and A(rthur) Hamilton Gibbs, the mutations of name arising
from choice and even from a certain literary necessity; for an author’s
name should be distinctive and is usually better not to be too long.
The father, Henry Gibbs, was an English civil servant, a departmental
chief in the Board of Education. The mother had been Helen Hamilton. The
family at one time consisted of six boys and two girls. Henry Gibbs had
“a delicate wife, an unresilient salary, and his spirit of taking chances
had been killed by heavy responsibility, the caution and timidity growing
out of a painful knowledge of the risks and difficulties of life, and
the undermining security of having sat all his working years in the safe
cul-de-sac of a government office.”[1] It was the office in which Matthew
Arnold worked and in which an obscure temporary clerk, W. S. Gilbert,
stole moments to compose some verse called _Bab Ballads_. Henry Gibbs
was a famous after-dinner speaker and it was certainly he who preserved
the Carlyle House for London, but the nature of the case forbade him to
encourage the marked adventurous strain in his boys.

[Illustration: PHILIP GIBBS

_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood._]

Philip Gibbs was educated privately and was an editor before he was
21. He was, in fact, only 19 when he became “educational editor” for
the large English publishing firm of Cassell at a salary of a hundred
and twenty pounds a year. “With five pounds capital and that income,
I married”—Agnes Rowland, daughter of the Rev. W. J. Rowland—“with an
audacity which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much
younger, that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official
chief, who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I
sat, and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said
‘Hullo!’ I made signs to her to depart.

“‘Who’s that pretty girl?’ asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must
confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.”[2]

He was both timid and bashful; yet like many men of his stamp, he was
to show on many occasions a lion-like courage. A hundred and a thousand
times he was to pass as close to death as a man may pass and yet live;
in general, he was to be quite as badly scared as a chap can be in such
circumstances; and without exception he was to persist in what he was
doing, for there was and is in him something stronger than fear.


ii

Philip Gibbs’s earlier career differed little from that of Arnold Bennett
or the first years of dozens of Englishmen who have made their start in
Fleet Street. After several years with Cassell, he applied for and got
a job as managing editor of a large literary syndicate. In this post
he bought Bennett’s early novel, _The Grand Babylon Hotel_, and other
fiction and articles to be sold to newspapers in Great Britain and the
colonies. While with Cassell he had written his first book, _Founders
of the Empire_, a historical text still used in English schools. As
a syndicate editor he wrote articles on every conceivable subject,
particularly a weekly essay called “Knowledge is Power.” But his job was
outside of London, for which he hankered; and finally he wrote to Alfred
Harmsworth, who was later to become Lord Northcliffe and who had founded
the Daily Mail. The result was a job under a brilliant journalist, Filson
Young, whom Gibbs succeeded a few months later as editor of Page Four in
the Mail (devoted to special articles). Here he learned all about the
new journalism and had a chance to observe Northcliffe closely. In the
seventh chapter of his _Adventures in Journalism_, Philip Gibbs gives a
brief but well-etched portrait of the man who transformed the character
of the English newspaper. Northcliffe’s genius, his generosity, his
ruthlessness—which was often the result of indifference and sometimes
sprang from fatigue and bad temper—are very well conveyed in a half
dozen pages. Gibbs suffered the fate of nearly all this man’s temporary
favorites. When he was dismissed from the Daily Mail he went for a few
months to the Daily Express before beginning what was to be a long
association with the Daily Chronicle.

His connection with the Chronicle was broken by the sad experiment of the
Tribune, a newspaper founded by a melancholy young man named Franklin
Thomasson as a pious carrying out of his father’s wishes. As literary
editor of this daily, Philip Gibbs bought work by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph
Conrad and Gilbert K. Chesterton, but the paper as a whole was dull
and doomed. When it went down, Philip Gibbs thought he saw a chance to
throw off the bondage of offices. He took his wife and little son and
retreated to a coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton. “There, in a tiny
room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside
Pierrots, I wrote my novel, _The Street of Adventure_, in which I told,
in the guise of fiction, the history of the Tribune newspaper, and gave a
picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility,
and good comradeship of Fleet Street.” There was need of money, but the
novel cost Gibbs more than it earned. His narrative had not disguised
sufficiently either the newspaper or members of its late staff. The
point is a little difficult for American readers to take in, and rests
on English libel law, which is quite different from the American. In
England, “the greater the truth, the greater the libel.” A libel action
was instituted, and although it was finally withdrawn, the bills of costs
were heavy and the sale had been killed. But when published in the United
States after the war, _The Street of Adventure_ had a very good success.

“I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial
uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune,
when those mocking will-o’-the-wisps lead him through the ditches of
disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of
times did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking
the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would
not fit into my combination of circumstances, ending at 4,000 words
with a dramatic climax! How many hours have I spent glued to a seat in
Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband and
wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a man, and
finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s
nerves get ‘edgy’ and one’s imagination becomes feverish with effort, so
that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more resolutely it
eludes one.”[3]

Yet he counts himself, on the whole, to have been lucky. He was able to
earn a living and to give time and labor to “the most unprofitable branch
of literature, which is history, and my first love.” Years later he was
to have a thrill of pleasure at seeing in the windows of Paris bookshops
his _Men and Women of the French Revolution_, magnificently illustrated
with reproductions of old prints. He wrote the romantic life of _George
Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_, and discovered in the murder of Sir
Thomas Overbury “a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies,
bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cut-throats and poets,” the
incomparable material for his _King’s Favorite_. These books brought him
only a few hundred dollars apiece, though perhaps more in reputation and
friendships.


iii

He returned to journalism, eventually, as special correspondent and
descriptive writer for the Daily Chronicle. He was rather frequently in
charge of the Paris office and had all sorts of adventures in that city,
both those derived from saturating himself in French history and others
incident to his daily work. After the Portuguese revolution he was sent
to Portugal to explore the condition of those political prisoners that
the republicans had in some cases interred alive. His greatest feat was
the revelation of Dr. Cook’s fraud in claiming the discovery of the North
Pole. This was a triumph of sheer intuition, in the first instance, and
both dogged persistency and remarkable courage were necessary before
Philip Gibbs could be proved right.

It began with a late start, twenty-four hours behind the other
correspondents. When Gibbs got to Copenhagen, the vessel bringing Dr.
Cook had not arrived, owing to fogs. Through a chance meeting in a
restaurant with Mrs. Rasmussen, wife of the explorer, Gibbs got to
Elsinore and aboard a launch which was putting out to meet the delayed
ship. Thus he was the only English-speaking person present at the first
interview, on shipboard. As it happened, Dr. Cook had not yet acquired
that magnificent poise and aplomb which he was to display from the moment
he set foot ashore. His eyes evaded Gibbs, he explained that he had no
papers to prove his claim and not even a diary, and when pressed for some
sort of written record or notes he exclaimed: “You believed Nansen and
Amundsen and Sverdrup. They had only their story to tell. Why don’t you
believe me?” Later Cook had a moment of utter funk, hiding in his cabin.
It passed quickly and after that he was outwardly all that a hero should
be.

But Gibbs had had his chance. His seven-column story to the Daily
Chronicle caused him to be denounced everywhere and even put him in
jeopardy of his life in Copenhagen; yet a few weeks were to show it to
be one of the greatest exclusive newspaper stories, “beats” or “scoops,”
ever written.


iv

In September, 1912, war started in the Balkans. Gibbs went as a
correspondent and this experience, lamentable and laughable, comical and
extremely repellent, was his first direct preparation for work soon to
follow. The year following he had occasion to go to Germany and study the
state of mind, popular and official, toward England. He was, therefore,
exceptionally well fitted to be a correspondent at the front when the
World War began. It would be impossible as well as improper to try to
abbreviate here the story of his experience told so brilliantly and with
so much movement (and with far too much modesty) in his _Adventures in
Journalism_. At the outset of the war no newspaperman had any official
standing. The correspondent was unrecognized—or it would be more accurate
to say that he was recognized only as a dangerous nuisance, subject to
arrest at sight. Gibbs and two other very distinguished newspapermen,
H. M. Tomlinson and W. M. Massey, worked together for weeks and months
and were three of a small group of correspondents who risked their
lives constantly in the war zone and their liberty on every occasion
when they stepped out of it. There came a time when the game seemed to
be up. “I had violated every regulation. I had personally angered Lord
Kitchener. I was on the black books of the detectives at every port, and
General Williams solemnly warned me that if I returned to France I would
be put up against a white wall, with unpleasant consequences.”[4] The
solution came with the appointment of five official war correspondents,
of whom Gibbs was one from first to last. These men covered the war,
not for one newspaper but for the newspapers of Great Britain and
America. They were attached to General Headquarters and among the men
of distinction who were assigned to them as friends, advisers and
censors was C. E. Montague, editor of the Manchester Guardian and author
of _Disenchantment_, _Fiery Particles_, _A Hind Let Loose_, etc., a
meditative writer of exquisite prose who, at the outbreak of the war,
had dyed his white hair black, enlisted as a private, served in the
trenches, reached the rank of sergeant, finally surviving when the dugout
which sheltered him was blown up....

After the war the five correspondents received knighthood, and Philip
Gibbs is properly Sir Philip Gibbs, K. B. E. (Knight of the British
Empire). On journalistic commissions he visited Ireland and Asia Minor
and revisited most of the countries of Europe, including Russia. He came
to America twice to lecture on the war and conditions resulting from it,
and his book, _People of Destiny_, is a critical but admiring account
of America as he found it. Pope Benedict XV., against all precedent,
accorded Gibbs an interview on the reconstruction of Europe and this
interview was naturally printed in all the principal newspapers of the
world. He had become, more truly than any other man has ever been,
more fully than any other man is, the world’s reporter. His title was
splendidly established by his summarizing book on the war, _Now It Can Be
Told_, and was strikingly reëmphasized with his novel, _The Middle of the
Road_, concerning which a few words are in order.


v

Although Philip Gibbs had published, in 1919, a novel, _Wounded Souls_,
which contains much of the message of _The Middle of the Road_, the
world was not ready for what he had to tell. He therefore set to work
on a canvas which he determined should include all Europe. His visits
to Ireland, France, Germany and even Russia had placed at his disposal
an unparalleled mass of authentic firsthand material. He knew, better
than most, what existed, and what lay immediately ahead. Using fiction
frankly as a guise to present facts, both physical facts and the facts
of emotion and attitude, he wrote his story.

When the novel was published in England and the United States at the
beginning of 1923 it leaped into instant and enormous popularity. This
was partly the result of prophetic details, such as this speech of one of
the characters (from page 317 of _The Middle of the Road_):

“‘France wants to push Germany into the mud,’ said Dorothy. ‘Nothing will
satisfy her but a march into the Ruhr to seize the industrial cities and
strangle Germany’s chance of life.’”

When the novel was published the French invasion of the Ruhr had just
begun.

There was a sense of larger prophecy that hovered over the story. But
even more of the instant success of the book was due to the terrible
picture it painted, minute yet panoramic, ghastly but honest. People sat
up, literally, all night to finish the book. People read it with tears
running from their eyes, with sobs; they went about for days afterward
feeling as if a heavy blow had stunned them, a blow from which they were
only slowly recovering. Although every effort was made in advance of
publication to insure attention for the book, it is doubtful whether such
effort counted at all in the book’s success. For none who read it failed
to talk about it in a way that fairly coerced others to become Philip
Gibbs’s readers. Month after month the sale of this book rolls on. It is
not, as a piece of literary construction or considered as literary art,
a good novel; it is something much bigger than that—a piece of marvelous
reporting and a work of propaganda charged to the full with humane
indignation and pity and compassion.


vi

As if he had found his field at last in the roomy spaces and manifold
disguises of the novel, Philip Gibbs followed _The Middle of the Road_
with a very keenly-observed study of young people. _Heirs Apparent_
deals with the generation which was too young to take any active part
in the World War but which has come to a somewhat unformed maturity
since. The gayety of the novel does not prevent the author, with his
usual thoroughness, from presenting the more serious aspects of his
young people’s misbehavior. There is incidentally an exactly drawn study
of that newer, sensational journalism which Philip Gibbs tasted under
Northcliffe and which is familiar enough, though on the outside only, to
most Americans. But the delightful thing about _Heirs Apparent_ is the
author’s unfailing sympathy with his youngsters; and the optimism of the
ending—the book closes with a character’s cry: “Youth’s all right!”—is
the sincere expression of Philip Gibbs’s own perfect faith.

The tales in his new volume, _Little Novels of Nowadays_, are brothers to
_The Middle of the Road_. What proportion of these stories is fact and
what fiction is irrelevant, since in atmosphere and emotion all are true.
Each of these poignant pieces is a document of the calamitous war more
significant to humanity than the treaty sealed at Versailles. Whether in
Russia or stricken Budapest or flaming Smyrna or some far-off corner of
lonely starvation, Philip Gibbs has seen all, felt all ... and can convey
all.


vii

In fine, a bigger man than any of his books. One of the greatest
reporters the press has ever had, one of the half-dozen—if so many—best
masters of descriptive writing now alive. A chap who suffered nervous
breakdowns prior to 1914 and who turned to iron in the moment of crisis.
A militant pacifist because he has really seen war waged. A lover and
fighter for justice, and a preacher of mercy. There is about him, despite
the abolition of miracle and the rapid transformation of the world into a
factory and a machine, some of that lost radiance of a day when men set
forth to conquer in the name of their faith, or to spread a gospel which
might redeem the world.


BOOKS BY PHILIP GIBBS

FICTION:

    1908 _The Individualist_
    1908 _The Spirit of Revolt_
    1909 _The Street of Adventure_
    1910 _Intellectual Mansions, S. W._
    1911 _Oliver’s Kind Women_
    1912 _Helen of Lancaster Gate_
    1913 _A Master of Life_
    1914 _Beauty and Nick_
             In England: _The Custody of the Child_
    1920 _Wounded Souls_
             In England: _Back to Life_
    1922 _Venetian Lovers_
    1923 _The Middle of the Road_
    1924 _Heirs Apparent_
    1924 _Little Novels of Nowadays_

HISTORICAL:

    1899 _Founders of the Empire_
    1906 _The Romance of Empire_
    1906 _Men and Women of the French Revolution_
    1908 _The Romance of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_
    1909 _King’s Favorite_
    1912 _Adventures of War with Cross and Crescent_
    1915 _The Soul of the War_
    1917 _The Battles of the Somme_
    1918 _The Struggle in Flanders_
             First title: _From Bapaume to Passchendaele_
    1919 _The Way to Victory_
             In England: _Open Warfare_
    1920 _Now It Can Be Told_
             In England: _Realities of War_
    1920 _People of Destiny_
    1921 _More That Must Be Told_
             In England: _The Hope of Europe_
    1924 _Adventures in Journalism_

ESSAYS:

    1903 _Knowledge Is Power_
    1905 _Facts and Ideas_
    1913 _The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life_
    1913 _The New Man: A Portrait of the Latest Type_


SOURCES ON PHILIP GIBBS

His _Adventures in Journalism_ is autobiographical in the best sense of
the word, and only needs to be supplemented by the formal particulars
in _Who’s Who_ (England). There are interesting references in Cosmo
Hamilton’s _Unwritten History_. For a not wholly friendly reference, see
Clement K. Shorter’s page in _The Sphere_, London, for 6 October 1923.
Mr. Shorter was one of a few who believed themselves libelled in _The
Street of Adventure_, and he has had various literary feuds.

Address: Sir Philip Gibbs, Ladygate, Punch Bowl Lane, Dorking, England.




2. The Trail Blazers


i

These paths are strange and exciting. One leads into the midst of wild
beasts, another into the depths of the sea. A third goes laboriously some
few feet underground and erases three thousand years in three months.
One or two, keeping to the present, are sources of innocent merriment;
several employ the mode of fiction to vivify fact; and at least one is a
continuous pageant in colors of the American West.

There is no order in which these paths are to be taken; you may go half
across the world to follow one, or you may begin by merely stepping
outside your door. America or Arabia, ferns or fishes, dogs or diggings,
history, hunting ... outdoor books are the best of indoor sports.

The alphabet is an immense convenience and I start with Adventurousness
and America. For some time Joseph Lewis French has been busy selecting
from various American authors the best accounts of the discovery of gold
in California, the days of the pony express and the stage coach, the
cowboy, the trapper, the guide, the bad man, and other phases of our
history. He has drawn upon the works of Francis Parkman, Mark Twain,
Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Bayard Taylor, General George A. Custer,
Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Emerson Hough and a good many others in
the task. Mr. French calls his book _The Pioneer West: Narratives of the
Westward March of Empire_, and Hamlin Garland has written a foreword
for it. Also Remington Schuyler has done illustrations in color. As an
anthology, the volume has no exact parallel in my knowledge. The nuggets
it contains are otherwise for the most part found with considerable
difficulty in half a hundred somewhat inaccessible places. It is, for
example, not easy to find what you want in either Parkman or Roosevelt
without risking a long hunt; and books by other earlier writers, even one
so perfectly well-known as Bayard Taylor, are often hard to come by. It
is no wonder that Mr. Garland calls _The Pioneer West_ a real service in
recovery. Mr. French spreads a satisfactory panorama before the reader,
for his selected narratives run from the time of Lewis’s and Clark’s
discovery of Oregon down to the last of the Indian uprisings.

A projected alliance between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Russian
American Fur Company led, in 1867, to a great piece of foolishness on the
part of an American Secretary of State. Congress was induced to pay some
millions of dollars to purchase a fancy refrigerator and everyone was
scornful of “Seward’s folly.” Edison Marshall has taken the phrase for
the title of his new novel dealing with that period in Alaskan history.
_Seward’s Folly_ relates how Major Jefferson Sharp, late of the army of
the Confederate States of America, was sent to Sitka by Seward. Major
Sharp liked an aristocratic society, and he found it in Sitka where
Russians, Englishmen, Americans and Indians were colorfully combined.
He also encountered, in Molly Forest and her uncle, two Americans
undisturbed by any doubts as to the superiority of American character and
the value of American ideas of liberty and opportunity.

The fact that Major Sharp was still loyal to the spirit of the
Confederacy and had no intention of serving the Union did not tend
to simplify matters. He was, however, no scoundrel; and he came to
recognize, beneath the glitter of Alaskan surfaces, much that his nature
could not countenance. Mr. Marshall has managed an extremely good story.
But he has brightened a portion of history in doing so.

William Patterson White’s _The Twisted Foot_ and B. M. Bower’s _The
Bellehelen Mine_ are novels of the cattle rancher and the miner,
respectively. Mr. White’s story has almost every ingredient of an
exciting yarn—a love interest, an independent young woman who doesn’t
believe in explanations, a mystery, an open enemy, a set of foes whose
methods are mean and underhanded, and a couple of young men who think
quick and shoot quick. The impetuous Buff Warren, cowboy, is sent to
drive off the range a family of “nesters.” He finds that the father is
blind and that the family is making a very brave fight against severe
odds. He also meets Gillian Fair. Instead of putting the Fairs off the
range, Buff takes them under his protection. This means the loss of his
job, and when, by a trick, he gets himself made deputy sheriff, his state
of mind is not helped by the fact that all clues to a bandit who is
terrorizing the region seem to lead to Gillian Fair.

B. M. Bower tells of a silver mine named by a prospector after his two
baby daughters, one of whom, grown to womanhood, is the heroine of _The
Bellehelen Mine_. Helen Strong, left alone to carry out plans that she
and her father had made together, returns to Goldfield and assembles
a crew from among her father’s old miners. It is the beginning of an
unanticipated battle, for the Western Consolidated is determined to make
Helen Strong sell out.

_The Bellehelen Mine_ is to an extent a departure from the author’s
previous books, a story of mine-working and not of ranch life. But it
should be realized that B. M. Bower, or Mrs. Cowan, has been for some
years a mine owner and manager. It would be surprising if she did not use
this phase of her experiences in her fiction. She lives at El Picacho
Mine, Las Vegas, Nevada; and after twenty years of writing Western
fiction it is high time she gave us a mining story.

B. M. Bower is a woman but by no means a tenderfoot. Mary Roberts
Rinehart’s account of her tenderfootage, in _The Out Trail_, is the
most amusing record of a woman in the West on my shelf of recent books.
But the most amusing record of America in general is, I think, _Cobb’s
America Guyed Books_, that series of small volumes with drawings by
John T. McCutcheon, a book to each State. These attach themselves
with a burr-like tenacity to the memory in a series of epigrams. You
remember that Irvin S. Cobb said of New York City: “So far as I know,
General U. S. Grant is the only permanent resident,” and of Indiana:
“Intellectually, she rolls her own,” and of Kansas: “A trifle shy on
natural beauties, but plenty of moral Alps and mental Himalayas.” Such
priceless remarks are more to be cherished—and are more cherished—than
State mottoes; but the _Guyed Books_ have a claim to respect as well
as affection. Each presents, along with various State demerits, partly
humorous and partly real, the honest claim of the people of one section
to be considered as individual, characterizable, with a personality not
lost in the American mass. And Mr. Cobb has not failed to give the people
of each State credit for State achievement.

Yet, because they contain humor, the _Guyed Books_ will always be
classed as works of humor. A little leaven is a dangerous thing. On the
other hand, a little knowledge leaveneth the whole lump. Donald Ogden
Stewart has that little knowledge, and the result is the perfection of
his new work, _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_. It is the fault of authors
of books of family life that they almost always know too much. Mr.
Stewart (as reviewers say) has avoided this shortcoming. And in fiction,
as in any other game, the element of surprise is invaluable. Surprise,
conjecture, suspicion—especially suspicion! It was because she was above
suspicion that Caesar’s wife was not well received in the best Roman
circles. _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_ would have helped her.... But, all
seriousness for once aside, Mr. Stewart’s treatise on the American family
unit is masterly. It will give Americans a new status in Paris. There are
many irrelevances and illustrations throughout the book.


ii

Five—usually five and a fraction—per cent. of the people in any community
are confirmed fishermen. The greatest living authority on fishes is David
Starr Jordan, for so many years president of Leland Stanford Junior
University. He is the author of the most important book on its subject, a
piscatorial Bible, in fact, which now appears in a new revised edition.
It has forty-six chapters, and 673 illustrations, of which eighteen are
full-page plates in color. It is by Dr. Jordan, now a man past seventy.
Its title is _Fishes_. It has no other title, and no subtitle. It needs
none.

This marvellous book makes the heart leap as the trout leaps. Nothing so
delightful or complete is found elsewhere. One may know nothing about
fishes—I don’t—and yet turn these pages in a perfect enchantment. I
suppose, in a way, it is the emotion of a first youthful visit to the
Aquarium, but an emotion incredibly magnified. Dr. Jordan speaks of
his volume with what must seem to the reader a ridiculous modesty. He
says it is a non-technical book that may still be valuable to those who
are interested in the study of fishes as science. He says his chief
aim has been “to make it interesting to nature-lovers and anglers, and
instructive to all who open its pages. The fishes used as food and
those caught by anglers in America are treated fully, and proportionate
attention is paid to all the existing as well as all extinct families
of fishes.” This may be true, but it no more explains the book than a
conjuror’s account explains his magic.

Beginning with the fish as a form of life, Dr. Jordan goes through
every attribute of fishes and then, in an incomparable sequence, tells
what we know of each species. There are chapters like that on the
distribution of fishes which seem to transform the world in somewhat
the fashion in which Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo transformed it; other
chapters, like that on the fish as food, are of vital importance; and
such a chapter as that on the mythology of fishes (including the sea
serpent) have a charm irresistible and without equal. At length one
plunges into the sea, swimming through a myriad of sea creatures whose
very names—elasmobranchii or shark-like fishes, the salmonidae, the
mailed-cheek fishes, the dactyloscopidae—are as curious and as evocative
as those strange shapes that float in green water behind aquarium glass.

Dr. James A. Henshall’s _Book of the Black Bass_, an acknowledged
masterpiece, is practically a new book as the result of rewriting and
enlargement. Nearly all the illustrations, including those in color, are
new. In addition to a complete scientific and life history of the fish,
Dr. Henshall gives the last word regarding tools and tackle for catching
what is “inch for inch and pound for pound the gamest fish that swims.”

Let us continue for a little with the authorities on these very special
subjects of sport. Dr. William A. Bruette is one on dogs. He is
well-known as the editor of Forest and Stream, and various particular
books on the dog—or perhaps I should say, on particular dogs—preceded
_The Complete Dog Book_. There is not an opportunity for anything
of its sort to follow it unless some one may be moved to write a
canine encyclopædia in some number of volumes. For _The Complete Dog
Book_—illustrated with photographs, of course—describes the dogs of the
world and very fully describes all the breeds recognized by the American
Kennel Club. It is, throughout, a carefully comparative description,
giving the standards for judging each breed and the good and bad points
of each. The care of dogs in health and their treatment in disease, as
well as their training and general management are gone over in detail;
but Dr. Bruette’s prime service is his wisdom on the subject of buying
puppies. Here are the pages which will save the reader most, both in
dollars and disappointment.

Birds are hard to learn, not easy to observe, and must be taken largely
on trust for an acquaintance. On the other hand, if you will take George
Henry Tilton’s _The Fern Lover’s Companion_ with its 188 illustrations,
go over it carefully, use its glossary of terms and keep an eye about you
in your walks, you may learn the names and the chief characteristics of
our most common ferns in a single season. There is about ferns something
of the fascination there is in fishes—a great variety of form, and forms
of exquisite coloration and beauty of pattern. Mr. Tilton’s handbook is
progressive; if consulted attentively, it can be followed from beginning
to end without confusion or the need of going again over the same ground.
Ground in the book, I mean!

When it comes to covering ground, Charles C. Stoddard’s _Shanks’ Mare_
is a superior article. This book about walking—really, about the joys
of walking—moves without haste and with an easy rhythm of prose and
sentiment. It is one of the few books that have the impelling quality
of fine spring weather. As Stewart Edward White said: “That is the main
thing—to get ’em out.” The remark occurred in a letter to Dr. Claude P.
Fordyce, a letter which forms the introduction to Dr. Fordyce’s capital
book on _Trail Craft_. “I am glad you are publishing the book,” wrote
Mr. White. “All your articles on the out-of-doors life have seemed to
me practical, sensible, and the product of much experience, plus some
discriminative thought.” He followed his words about getting people out
of doors with: “If, in addition, you can give them hints that will,
through their interest or comfort, keep ’em out, the job is complete.”
_Trail Craft_ will do a finished job for a good many who read it. Dr.
Fordyce has the considerable advantage of knowing American wildernesses;
he writes with equal knowledge of practical mountaineering and desert
journeys; tenting, motor camping, the use of balloon silk in camp, camera
hunting, medical improvization, even the possibilities of leather working
for the outdoor man are included in _Trail Craft_.

What percentage of American vacations are now accomplished with the aid
of the automobile must be left for the census of 1930 to determine;
but it is large, and will be larger then. In fact, motor camping is a
distinct department of a magazine like Outers’ Recreation, attended to
along with other editorial duties by F. E. Brimmer, whose _Autocamping_
is rather more necessary than the Blue Book. For a missed road is
remediable, but a non-existent hotel isn’t. Besides, a hotel isn’t
camping.

Having lived outdoors with his family, including small children, for
as long as five consecutive months, Mr. Brimmer has met most of the
contingencies you will have to meet. _Autocamping_ is the difference
between a vacation and a disaster.

Here are two short works of fiction by one of the best living
storytellers whose subjects are drawn from sport. _A Wedding Gift_, by
John Taintor Foote, is annotated by its subtitle, “A Fishing Story.” Mr.
Foote’s _Pocono Shot_ needs no recommendation to those who know his fine
dog story, _Dumb-Bell of Brookfield_. _A Wedding Gift_ is the tale of a
confirmed fisherman, aged forty, who marries a young and beautiful girl.
The story is told by a friend whose wedding gift to the pair consisted of
hand-painted fish plates each with a picture of a trout rising to take a
fly. The bride had packed three trunks with frilly clothes in expectation
of a honeymoon at Narragansett. She was wrong. She was taken to the Maine
woods.

The narrative of what followed is of such a character that the
fisherman’s friend, having heard him out and remembering the dozen
plates, each with a trout painted on it, does not wait to meet the bride.

_A Wedding Gift_ is pure amusement, if you like, but _Pocono Shot_ is
written with an emotion that the reader feels whether he cares for
dogs or not. It has also—owing, perhaps, to its being told in the
first person—an accent of reality. The dog of the story is a black and
white setter, the best bird dog in the Pocono Hills, and better on a
scent than any hound in the country round about. It was this aptitude
which got Pocono Shot into trouble; tracking a man who had caused the
death of a girl, the setter received a terrible axe wound from the
fugitive’s father. The dog is marked by a great shoulder scar. We make
acquaintance with his history at this point, step back for a little to
learn his career, go with him in the field and find out for ourselves
his extraordinary qualities, and then follow him to his reunion with the
master who had shot to kill when the setter’s life was imperilled.


iii

Surely the most exciting trail blazed in our day was the short and
obscure one leading a few feet underground which took Howard Carter and
Lord Carnarvon into Tut-Ankh-Amen’s royal chamber. The second volume
of Howard Carter’s and A. C. Mace’s _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_, now
impending, will round out the record of a discovery which exists, and
is likely to remain, without parallel. The odds against a similar find
are too great for anyone but a mathematician to calculate, and would
be meaningless in any calculation. The first volume of _The Tomb of
Tut-Ankh-Amen_ surpassed most other official and authentic records of its
sort simply because the authors forgot they were archæologists and—told
the story. In the presence of that priceless gift of fortune, standing
where they had stood and breaching a blank wall to find it the threshold
of the inner chamber with its nested gold shrines, who could have
thought of anything but the supreme human and dramatic values of that
scene and fateful moment? Not Howard Carter, certainly. He remembered
then the six long and barren years of unrewarded searching, the first
faint hint that he might be on the right track, the mounting excitement
chilled at regular intervals by the worry of doubt and the littleness
of disappointed hopes. Yet here lay a king of Egypt, his body cased in
gold and his tomb and its seals protected by his gods. It was a story
that could not be told except in all its simplicity. One could no more
dress it up in lore and learning than permit the excesses of emotional
description. _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_ is the modern romance of the
conquistador.

While we are on the path of adventure in strange lands I want to draw
attention to a book which transcends the interests of sportsmen. A
fourteen-year-old boy, a circus trainer of animals, Dr. W. T. Hornaday,
of the New York Zoo, Courtney Ryley Cooper, the novelist, and in fact
persons of all ages and occupations will find themselves utterly absorbed
in the pages of A. Blayney Percival’s _A Game Ranger’s Note Book_. This
handsome book, illustrated with photographs, has been arranged and
edited by E. D. Cuming from the great mass of observations, both written
and verbal, made by Mr. Percival during nearly thirty years spent in
Africa, of which about twenty-two were passed in the Game Department of
what is now the Kenya Colony. It opens with seven chapters on the lion,
followed by one or more chapters apiece on the leopard; cheetah, serval
and caracal (one chapter); hunting dogs; hyænas; elephant; rhinoceros;
hippopotamus; buffalo; giraffe; swine; zebra, and antelope. Most of
Mr. Percival’s material about the antelope has had to be reserved for
a separate volume, so copious is it. The book closes with chapters on
hunting and photographing big game. It is utterly untechnical, extremely
modest, occasionally humorous, and as meaty with thrills as with
information about animal characteristics and habits. _A Game Ranger’s
Note Book_ deserves as a pendant in reading Fred L. M. Moir’s _After
Livingstone_, a story of adventure and hunting when big game were more
numerous than now. The story is told by one of two brothers, business men
who were pioneer traders in Africa. It has plenty of bush fighting and
Mr. Moir witnessed scenes of savage life that will probably never come
within the experience of white men again.


GOING OUT?

_Birds of America_, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, John Burroughs, Herbert
K. Job and others. Three volumes. Describes and pictures 1,000 species.
Over 300 species shown in color from New York State Museum drawings. Eggs
of 100 species in actual size and colors.

_The Outdoorsman’s Handbook_, by H. S. Watson and Capt. Paul A. Curtis,
Jr. Tested wisdom on hunting, camping, fishing and woodcraft. Indexed.

_Lake and Stream Game Fishing_, by Dixie Carroll. The author was at the
time of his death recently probably the best known fisherman in the
United States.

_Goin’ Fishin’_, by Dixie Carroll. Pungently written and especially
good on the subject of baits. Equally interesting to the expert and the
occasional angler.

_Streamcraft: An Angling Manual_, by Dr. George Parker Holden. Endorsed
by Stewart Edward White and pronounced by Henry van Dyke “the best of all
modern books on the science of trout-fishing.”

_Casting Tackle and Methods_, by O. W. Smith. Forty years’ experience
condensed by the fishing editor of Outdoor Life and author of _Trout
Lore_.

_The Salt Water Angler_, by Leonard Hulit, is an invaluable and complete
compendium of information for salt water fishermen.

_In the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands_, by J. A. McGuire. The story of an
expedition to gather museum specimens far off the beaten routes. Probably
the best authority on the game resources of the territory.

_Fishing with a Boy_, by Leonard Hulit. The tale of a city man in search
of health with, incidentally, much about the ways of the humbler fishes.

_Jist Huntin’_, by Ozark Ripley. Stories told by an expert guide who has
fished and hunted from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.

_Breaking a Bird Dog_, by Horace Lytle. Altogether unique is this
fascinating account of the process of training, from the author’s actual
experiences.

_What Bird is That?_ by Frank M. Chapman. The most recent Chapman bird
book. Handily divided according to season; every bird pictured in colors.

_Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, by Frank M. Chapman. A
standard work, invaluable to the bird lover.




3. The Art of Melville Davisson Post


i

Who that read in the Saturday Evening Post of 18 July 1914 a short story
called “The Doomdorf Mystery” forgets it now? No one, I think; and it
was a very short story, and it appeared over ten years ago. The magazine
which published it—if one had read no others—has published 2,500 short
stories since. “The Doomdorf Mystery” is one in a thousand, literally.

The creature, Doomdorf, in his stone house on the rock brewed a
hell-brew. “The idle and the vicious came with their stone jugs, and
violence and riot flowed out.” On a certain day two men of the country
rode “through the broken spine of the mountains” to have the thing
out with Doomdorf. “Randolph was vain and pompous and given over to
extravagance of words, but he was a gentleman beneath it, and fear was an
alien and a stranger to him. And Abner was the right hand of the land.”

About the place were two persons, a circuit rider who had been rousing
the countryside against Doomdorf and who had called down fire from heaven
for the creature’s destruction. A little faded woman was the other.

In his chamber, the door bolted from the inside according to custom,
Doomdorf lay shot to death.

The circuit rider asseverated that heaven had answered his prayer. The
little, frightened, foreign woman showed a crude wax image with a needle
thrust through its heart. She had killed Doomdorf by sorcery.

Randolph exclaimed with incredulity. Murder had been done; he was an
officer of justice. But Abner pointed out that when the shot was fired,
by evidence of Doomdorf’s watch, the circuit rider was on his way to the
place, the woman on the mountain among the peach trees. The door was
bolted from the inside, the dust on the casings of the two windows was
undisturbed and the windows gave on an hundred-foot precipice as smooth
as a sheet of glass. Had Doomdorf killed himself? And then got up and put
the gun back carefully into the two dogwood forks that held it to the
wall? Says Abner: “The murderer of Doomdorf not only climbed the face of
that precipice and got in through the closed window, but he shot Doomdorf
to death and got out again through the closed window without leaving a
single track or trace behind, and without disturbing a grain of dust or
a thread of cobweb.... Randolph, let us go and lay an ambush for this
assassin. He is on the way here.”

This masterly tale, so far as the explanation is concerned, could
doubtless have been chanced upon by Melville Davisson Post in those old
records which he, a lawyer, would need to consult. Its kernel or nubbin
could spring from the simplest scientific knowledge, the acquisition of
any boy in high school. Its marvellous art is another affair. One might
have the explanatory fact and make no more of it than a curious coroner’s
case. One could narrate it without any use of imagination and the result
would be a coincidence without meaning.

The manner of Doomdorf’s assassination depends very greatly upon
coincidence. But given the series of coincidences, it was due to the
operation of a natural law. Mr. Post had, initially, two difficulties to
overcome. The first was fiction’s rule of plausibility. The second was
art’s demand for emotional significance, a more-than-meets-the-eye, a
meaning.


ii

Truth is stranger than fiction dares to be. Truth compels belief,
fiction must court it. To overcome the handicap imposed by the manner
of Doomdorf’s killing with its conspiracy of chances, Mr. Post plunges
his reader[5] at once into coincidences far more improbable—the presence
on the scene of the circuit rider, the double confession of circuit
rider and the woman to having killed Doomdorf. He storms the reader’s
stronghold of unbelief, the wall is breached, and no Trojan Horse is
necessary later to bring his secret into the city. In fiction, there
is no plausibility of cause and effect outside human behavior. The
implausible (because unmeaning) manner of Doomdorf’s death is superbly
supported by two flanks, the behavior of the evangelist and the behavior
of a terrified, superstitious and altogether childlike woman.

Art’s demand for meaning requires much more than a certain plausibility
of occurrence. The manner of Doomdorf’s death need not have been
dependent on his evildoing; it must be made to seem so. The glass water
bottle standing on the great oak table in the chamber where he slumbered
and died could as easily have held water as his own raw and fiery liquor.
There are two kinds of chance or coincidence in the world. One kind is
meaningless; our minds perceive no cause and effect. The other kind is
that in which we see a desired cause and effect. The writer of fiction
must avoid or overcome the first kind if he is to write plausibly and
acceptably; but upon his ability or inability to discern and employ the
second kind depends his fortune as an artist.

In other particulars “The Doomdorf Mystery” exemplifies the artistry
of the author. If I have not emphasized them, it is because they are
cunning of hand and brain, craftsmanship, things to be learned, technical
excellences which embellish but do not disclose the secret of inspiring
art. The story is compactly told; tension is established at once and
is drawn more tightly with every sentence; and the element of drama is
much enhanced by the forward movement. Doomdorf is dead, but “Randolph,”
says Abner, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. _He is on
the way here._” Not what has happened but what is to happen constitutes
the true suspense. The prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat
Biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of
impending justice, of a divine retribution upon the evildoer. But it is
also a prose that lends itself to little pictures, as of the circuit
rider, sitting his big red-roan horse, bare-headed, in the court before
the stone house; or of the woman, half a child, who thought that with
Doomdorf’s death evil must have passed out of the world; or of Doomdorf
in his coffin with the red firelight from the fireplace “shining on the
dead man’s narrow, everlasting house.” The comparative loneliness, the
wildness, and the smiling beauty of these mountains of western Virginia
are used subtly in the creation of that thing in a story which we call
“atmosphere” and the effect of which is to fix our mood. The tale is most
economically told; the simplest and fewest means are made to produce an
overwhelming effect. I have dwelt on it at length because it so perfectly
illustrates the art of Melville Davisson Post, so arrestingly different
from that of any of his contemporaries—different, perhaps, from anyone’s
who has ever written.


iii

Mr. Post is one of the few who believe the plot’s the thing. He has
said: “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader. If,
while it entertains, it also ennobles him this fiction becomes a work of
art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or
instruct him. The writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery
to be untangled will be offering those qualities in his fiction which
are of the most nearly universal appeal. A story should be clean-cut and
with a single dominating germinal incident upon which it turns as a door
upon a hinge, and not built up on a scaffolding of criss-cross stuff.
Under the scheme of the universe it is the tragic things that seem the
most real. ‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life
... the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy.’[6] The short
story, like any work of art, is produced only by painstaking labor and
according to certain structural rules. The laws that apply to mechanics
and architecture are no more certain or established than those that apply
to the construction of the short story. ‘All art does but consist in the
removal of surplusage.’[7] And the short story is to our age what the
drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea
common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit
the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.”[8]

Mr. Post takes his stand thus definitely against what is probably the
prevailing literary opinion. For there is a creed, cardinal with many if
not most of the best living writers, which says that the best art springs
from characterization and not from a series of organized incidents,
the plot;—which says, further, that if the characters of a story be
chosen with care and presented with conviction, they will make all the
plot that is necessary or desirable by their interaction on each other.
An excellent example of this is such a novel as Frank Swinnerton’s
_Nocturne_ or Willa Cather’s _A Lost Lady_. Yet it is not possible to
refute Mr. Post by citing such books for he could easily point to other
novels and stories if modesty forbade him to name his own work. Though
there cannot and should not be any decision in this matter, for both the
novel of character and the novel of incident are proper vehicles, it is
interesting to consider plot as a means to an end.

The Greeks used plot in a manner very different from our use today.
At a certain stage toward the close of a Greek tragedy the heavens
theoretically opened and a god or goddess intervened, to rescue some, to
doom others of the human actors. The purpose was to show man’s impotence
before heaven, but also to show his courage, rashness, dignity and other
qualities in the face and under the spell of overwhelming odds. The
effect aimed at by the spectacle of Greek tragedy was one of emotional
purification, a purging away in the minds of the beholders of all petty
and little things, the celebrated _katharsis_ as it was called.[9] To
the extent that modern fiction aims to show man’s impotence in the hands
of destiny or fate, his valiance or his weak cowering or his pitiful but
ineffectual struggle, the use of plot in our day is identical with that
of the Greeks. One may easily think of examples in the work of Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others. The trend has been toward pessimism
as an inscrutable destiny has replaced a set of scrutable, jealous,
all-too-human deities in the Olympian pantheon.

With Edgar Allan Poe the attempt was begun—indeed, was successfully
made, for the time being, at least—to replace the divine with a human
agency. Although the Greek drama had perished, all through the Middle
Ages and afterward the effort had kept up to preserve the essence of
miracle as an invaluable element in human drama. There were both miracles
and miracle plays. In place of the Greek _deus ex machina_, “the god
from the machine” with his interventions in human affairs, the world
had its Francis of Assisi and its Joan of France. But for whatever
reason the divine agency was gradually discredited, the force called
Providence or destiny came increasingly to be ignored, and even so great
a dramatist-poet as Shakespeare, unable or unwilling to open the heavens
to defeat Shylock, could only open a lawbook instead.

What men do not feel as a force in their lives cannot safely be invoked
in an appeal to their feelings, and Poe, a genius, knew it. In some of
his stories he used in place of the Greek _deus ex machina_ the vaguely
supernatural, impressive because vague. In other stories he took the
human intelligence, sharpened it, and in the person of Monsieur Dupin
made it serve his purpose. M. Dupin, not being a god, could not be
omniscient; as the next best thing, Poe made his detective omniscient
after the event. If the emotional effect of a Dupin remorselessly
exposing the criminal is not as ennobling as retributive justice
administered by a god from Olympus, or wrought by Christian miracle, the
fault is not Poe’s. It is we who limit the terms of an appeal.

[Illustration: MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

_Copyright by The Amon Studio, Clarksburg, W. Va._]

Mr. Post has himself commented on the flood of detective stories that
followed Poe’s “until the stomach of the reader failed.” Disregarding
merely imitative work, let us have a look at such substitutes as have
been managed for divinity and fate. We commonly call one type of
story a detective story simply because the solution of the mystery is
assigned to some one person. He may be amateur or professional; from the
standpoint of fictional plausibility he had, in most cases, better be a
professional. Poe had his M. Dupin, Gaboriau, his M. Lecoq; Conan Doyle,
his Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Post has Abner, his M. Jonquelle, prefect of
police of Paris; his Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard; his Captain
Walker, chief of the United States Secret Service. If we are looking for
Mr. Post’s difference from Poe and others we shall not find it here. The
use of a detective is not inevitable; when there is none we call the tale
a mystery story. The method of telling is not fixed; and it is doubtful
if anyone will surpass the extreme ingenuity and plausibility of Wilkie
Collins in a book like _The Moonstone_, where successive contributed
accounts by the actors unfold the mystery at last. One of the few
American writers whose economy of words suggests a comparison with Mr.
Post was O. Henry. And O. Henry was also a believer in plots, even if the
plot consisted, as sometimes it did, in little more than a few minutes
of mystification.

Poe had replaced the god from the machine with the man from the detective
bureau, but further progress seemed for some time to be blocked. All that
anyone was able to do was to produce a crime and then solve it, to build
up a mystery and then explain it. This inevitably caused repetition.
The weakness was so marked that many writers tried to withhold the
solution or explanation until the very end, even at the cost of making
it confused, hurried, improbable. Even so, no real quality of drama
characterized the period between the crime at the commencement and the
disclosure at the finish of the tale. I do not know who was the first
to discover that the way to achieve drama was to have the crime going
on, to make the tale a race between the detective and the criminal. The
method can, however, be very well observed in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s
first novel, _The Circular Staircase_ (1908); and of course it is
somewhat implied in the operations of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s
_The Woman in White_, many years earlier. But this discovery constituted
the only technical advance of any importance since Poe. As a noticeable
refinement upon this discovery Melville Davisson Post has invented the
type of mystery or detective-mystery tale in which the mysteriousness and
the solution are developed together. Not suitable for the novel, which
must have action, this formula of Mr. Post’s is admirable for the short
story, in which there is no room for a race with crime but only for a few
moments of breathlessness before a dénouement.

This refinement of Mr. Post’s whereby repetition is avoided, the
development of the mystery and its solution side by side, is usually
hailed as his greatest achievement. I happen to think that he has in
certain of his tales achieved something very much greater. It seems to
me that in some of his work Mr. Post has put the _deus ex machina_ back
in place, has by a little lifted the mere detective story to the dignity
of something like the old Greek tragedy, and in so doing has at least
partially restored to the people the purge of pity and the cleansing of a
reverent terror.


iv

For whatever tribute one may pay him on the technical side, and every
book of his increases the tribute that is his due, the thing that has
remained unsaid is his use of plot for ennobling the heart and mind
of the reader. He is right, of course, when he says that the primary
business of the writer must be to entertain; but more rightly right when
he adds that it is possible to do the something more in a work which
may aspire to be called a work of art. Anna Katharine Green once wrote:
“Crime must touch our imagination by showing people like ourselves but
incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive.” The author of _The
Leavenworth Case_ and all those other novels which have entertained
their hundreds of thousands, despite appalling technical shortcomings
which she never ceased to struggle with but was never able to overcome,
was one of the terribly few to command our respect and our admiration
in this crucial affair. She was one of the few with whom plot was never
anything but a means to an end, and that end, the highest. Of others, it
is easy to think at once of O. Henry; it is in this that I would compare
him with Mr. Post, and not in any lesser detail such as the power to
tell a story with the fewest possible words. All the emphasis that has
been put on short story construction in America, all the trumpeting that
has proclaimed American writers as the masters of the short story on the
technical side will ultimately go for nothing if the fact is lost sight
of that a short story is a cup to be brimmed with feeling. And as to the
feelings poured into these slender chalices, by their effects shall ye
know them.

There is a curious parallel between Mr. Post and another contemporary
American writer, Arthur Train. Both began as lawyers, and both showed
unusual ability in the practice of the law. Both are the authors of books
in which the underlying attitude toward the law is one of that peculiar
disdain which, perhaps, only an experienced lawyer can feel. Mr. Train’s
stories of Ephraim Tutt display an indignation that is hot enough under
their surface of weathered philosophy and levity and spirit of farce.
But as long ago as 1896 Mr. Post had published _The Strange Schemes of
Randolph Mason_, his first book of all and one that must detain us a
moment.

His career up to that time may be dealt with briefly. Born in Harrison
County, West Virginia, 19 April 1871, the son of Ira Carper Post and
Florence May Davisson Post, he was graduated (A.B.) from West Virginia
University in 1891 and received his LL.B. from the same institution
the year following. He was very shortly admitted to the bar of the
Supreme Court of West Virginia, of the United States Circuit Court of
Appeals, and of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served as a
Presidential elector and secretary of the Electoral College in 1892. A
young man not yet twenty-five, he conceived that “the high ground of the
field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The
book stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans
whereby the detective or ferreting power of the State might be baffled.
But, prodigious marvel! No writer has attempted to construct tales based
upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.”
And he reflected that the true drama would lie in a duel with the law. He
thereupon created the figure of Randolph Mason, a skilled, unscrupulous
lawyer who uses the law to defeat the ends of justice. Of these stories
the masterpiece is probably “The Corpus Delicti.” Well-constructed,
powerful, immensely entertaining, surely these dramas are of the essence
of tragedy, surely they replace Poe’s detective with somebody far more
nearly approaching the Greek god from the machine. In considering the
effects of these remarkable tales we can hardly lose sight of their moral
purge of pity and terror, their sense of the law man makes as a web
which man may slip through or break or brush aside. Why, a true god from
the machine, Mr. Post implies, is not necessary to us; we can destroy
ourselves; heaven has only to leave us alone. This, in its turn, produces
the much stronger secondary effect: the cry for a true god to order and
reward and punish us.

_Uncle Abner_ (1918) has been well contrasted with _The Strange Schemes
of Randolph Mason_. “He has demonstrated that wrong may triumph over
man-made laws, which are imperfect after all the centuries; but that
right must win under the timeless Providence of God.”[10] In _Uncle
Abner_ the _deus ex machina_ is fully restored. When it was known how
Doomdorf had died, “Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended.
‘It is a world,’ he said, ‘filled with the mysterious joinder of
accident!’ ‘It is a world,’ replied Abner, ‘filled with the mysterious
justice of God!’”


v

Mr. Post married, in 1903, Ann Bloomfield Gamble, of Roanoke, Virginia.
Mrs. Post died in 1919. The political career which seemed possibly to
be opening before him in his twenties has been neglected for one more
fascinating as an author; although he has served as a member of the
board of regents of State Normal schools, as chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Committee for West Virginia in 1898, and as a member of
the advisory committee of the National Economic League on the question
of efficiency in the administration of justice (1914-15). He lives at
The Chalet, Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2, West Virginia, rides horseback and
enjoys the company of his dog, and reads the classics. He is the author
of other books besides _Uncle Abner_ which reveal his love for the West
Virginia countryside and his power to make his stories take root and grow
in that setting. Of his _Dwellers in the Hills_ (1901) Blanche Colton
Williams says, in _Our Short Story Writers_: “To read it is to ride in
memory along a country road bordered by sedge and ragweed; to note the
hickories trembling in their yellow leaves; to hear the partridges’ call,
the woodpecker’s tap, and the ‘golden belted bee booming past’; to cross
the stream fringed with bulrushes; to hear men’s voices ‘reaching half
a mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs’; to meet a neighbor’s
boy astride a bag of corn, on his way to the grist mill; to stop at
the blacksmith’s, there to watch the forging of a horseshoe; or at the
wagoner’s to assist in the making of a wheel; to taste sweet corn pone
and the striped bacon, and to roast potatoes in the ashes....”

With the exchange of West Virginia for Kentucky, this is also the
background and the mood of _The Mountain School-Teacher_ (1922), but this
short novel is an allegory of the life of Christ. A young schoolteacher
appears in a mountain village. We first see him striding up a trail on
the mountain, helping a little boy who is having trouble with an ox laden
with a bag of corn. In the village the schoolteacher finds men and women
of varied character. Some welcome him, and they are for the most part
the poor and lowly; some regard him with suspicion and hate. The action
parallels the life of Christ and is lived among people who are, despite
nineteen centuries, singularly like the people of Christ’s time. In the
end comes the trial of the schoolteacher on trumped-up charges. “If He
came again,” the author seems to say, “it would happen as before.”

Such fiction does not come from a man who is primarily interested in
railroads and coal, education and politics, nor from one whose final
interest is to provide entertaining fiction.


vi

In recent books Mr. Post has allowed his fiction to follow him on his
travels about the earth. _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_ (1919) has
settings in Paris, Nice, Cairo, Ostend, London, New York and Washington;
the war of 1914-18 is used with discretion as an occasional background.
Mr. Poe’s mysticism can be quickly perceived in certain stories; the
tragic quality is ascendant in such tales as “The Stolen Life” and
“The Baron Starkheim”; and humor is not absent from “Lord Winton’s
Adventure” and “The Witch of Lecca.” A story of retributive justice
will be found in “The New Administration.” The scenes of most of the
episodes in _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_ (1920) are in America;
the central figure about whom all the cases turn is Sir Henry Marquis,
chief of the investigation department of Scotland Yard. The material is
extremely colorful—from all over the world, in fact. _Monsieur Jonguelle,
Prefect of Police of Paris_ (1923) has the same characteristics with the
difference of the central figure and with various settings. The reader
will observe in these books that the narrative standpoint is altered
from story to story; to take _Monsieur Jonquelle_, some of the tales
are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the
author. The reason for the selection inheres in each affair and is worth
some contemplation as you go on. _Walker of the Secret Service_ (1924) is
pivoted upon a character who appears in “The Reward” in _The Sleuth of
St. James’s Square_.

This new book of Mr. Post’s is a brilliant example of his technical skill
throughout; it has also a special interest in the fact that the first
six chapters are really a compressed novel. Walker, of the U. S. Secret
Service, is introduced as a mere boy of vigorous physique who falls
under the influence of two expert train robbers. The several exploits
he had a share in are related with a steady crescendo of interest. At
the end of the sixth chapter we have a clear picture of the fate of the
two chiefs he served. The peculiar circumstances in which young Walker
was taken into the Secret Service are shown; and the rest of the book
records some of the famous cases he figured in. The motivation is that of
_Uncle Abner_. “‘Crime always fails. There never was any man able to get
away with it.... Sooner or later something turns up against which he is
wholly unable to protect himself ... as though there were a power in the
universe determined on the maintenance of justice.’”

Two of the most striking stories, “The Expert Detective” and “The
‘Mysterious Stranger’ Defense,” are developed from courtroom
scenes—indeed, “The Expert Detective” is a single cross-examination of
a witness. Probably this tale and one called “The Inspiration” must be
added to the shorter roll of Mr. Post’s finest work, along with “The
Corpus Delicti” and “The Doomdorf Mystery.”

The general method has been said, correctly, to combine the ratiocination
of Poe’s stories with the dramatic method of the best French tellers of
tales. The details of technique will bear and repay the closest scrutiny.
But in certain stories Melville Davisson Post has put his high skill to a
larger use than skill can accomplish; for those of his accomplishments an
endowment and not an acquisition was requisite. When one says that of the
relatively few American writers with that endowment in mind and heart he
was able to bring to the enterprise in hand a skill greater than any of
the others, one has indeed said all.


BOOKS BY MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

    1896 _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_
    1897 _The Man of Last Resort_
    1901 _Dwellers in the Hills_
    1909 _The Corrector of Destinies_
    1910 _The Gilded Chair_
    1912 _The Nameless Thing_
    1918 _Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries_
    1919 _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_
    1920 _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_
    1922 _The Mountain School-Teacher_
    1923 _Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris_
    1924 _Walker of the Secret Service_


SOURCES ON MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

Mr. Post’s own two articles on the short story are of the highest value,
not only to an understanding of his method, but as a contribution to the
theory of literary structure—a contribution, unlike most, allied to and
realized in practice.

His first article appeared under the title, “The Blight,” in the Saturday
Evening Post for 26 December 1914. A shorter article on “The Mystery
Story” appeared in the same magazine, 27 February 1915.

In April, 1924, while in New York for a short time Mr. Post dictated the
following notes which amplify a little his written articles:

“The modern plan for the mystery or detective story can no longer
follow the old formula invented by Poe and adopted by Gaboriau, Conan
Doyle, etc. All life has grown quicker, the mind of the reader acts
more quickly, our civilization is impatient at delays. In literature,
and especially literature of this type, the reader will not wait for
explanations. All explanations must be given to him in advance of the
solution of the mystery.

“It became apparent upon a very careful study of the mystery story that
something must be done to eliminate the obvious and to get rid of the
delay in action and the detailed and tiresome explanation in the closing
part. It occurred to me that these defects could be eliminated by folding
together the arms of the Poe formula. Instead of giving the reader the
mystery and then going over the same ground with the solution, the
mystery and its solution might be given together. The developing of the
mystery and the development toward the solution would go forward side by
side; and when all the details of the mystery were uncovered the solution
also would be uncovered and the end of the story arrived at. This is the
plan which I followed in my later mystery-detective stories—the _Uncle
Abner_ series, _Monsieur Jonquelle_, and _Walker of the Secret Service_.
This new formula, as will at once be seen, very markedly increases the
rapidity of action in a story, holds the reader’s interest throughout,
and eliminates any impression of moving at any time over ground
previously covered.

“It requires a greater care and more careful technique, for _every
explanation which the reader must receive in order to understand either
the mystery or the solution must be slipped into the story as it proceeds
without any delay in its action_. There can be no pause for explanation.
Each explanation must be a natural sequence and a part of the action
and movement. The reader must never be conscious that he is being
delayed for an explanation, and the elements of explanation must be so
subtly suggested that one receives them as he receives the details of a
landscape in an adventure scene, without being conscious of it.

“In undertaking to build up a story on this modern formula, one must
first have a germinal or inciting incident upon which the whole story
may turn as upon a hinge. Out of this controlling incident, the writer
must develop both the mystery and its solution and must present them side
by side to the reader in the direct movement of the story to the end.
When the mystery is finally explained, the story is ended. There can be
no further word or paragraph; there can be no added explanation. If a
sufficient explanation has not preceded this point, the story has failed.
If the reader has been compelled to pause at any point in the story long
enough to realize that he is receiving an explanation, the story has
failed.

“But it will not be enough if the writer of the mystery-detective story
is able cleverly to work out his story according to this formula. He must
be able to give this type of story the same literary distinction that can
be given to any type of story. To do this he has only to realize a few
of the primary rules of all literary structure. He must remember that
everything, every form of character, has a certain dignity. This dignity
the writer must realize and respect. Flaubert told Maupassant that in
order to be original he had only to look at the thing which he wished
to describe long enough and with such care that he saw in it something
which no one had seen in it before. That rule ought to be amended to
require the writer to look at every character and every situation long
enough and with sufficient care to realize the dignity in it—that element
of distinction which it invariably possesses in some direction—and when
he has grasped that, to respect and convey it in his story.

“It may as well be said that no one form of literary structure is
superior to another. The story dealing with the life and action of
our highest types does not in itself result in any better literature
than the story dealing with the lowest or most abandoned types; nor
are physical adventures to be graded below metaphysical adventures.
The mystery-detective story may be structurally so excellent and its
workmanship so good that it is the equal of any form of literature.

“The obvious is at the base of all boredom. The thing that provides our
perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us
cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next
hour, the next day that we live to solve. If by any mental process we
could ascertain the arrival of events ahead, no human being could endure
the boredom of life. Something of this mystery, this uncertainty, must be
caught up for the reader in the short story if his interest is to abide
to the end. The skill of the author in preserving this uncertainty and
mystery in events—in this imitation of life—will indicate the place to be
assigned to him in the art he has undertaken.”

To an interviewer (by letter) who asked for the principal events of his
life, Mr. Post once made a suitably whimsical answer:

“I was born like the sons of Atreus in the pasture land of horses. I
was reared by a black woman who remembered her grandmother boiling a
warrior’s head in a pot. I was given a degree by a college of unbeautiful
nonsense. I have eaten dinner with a god. And I have kissed a princess in
a land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”




4. Jeffery Farnol’s Gestes


i

A geste is a great exploit or an heroic achievement; the thing that has
today pretty generally dwindled to a gesture. But although the fiction
of Jeffery Farnol is full of gestures—of ladies who cry, “La!” and of
ladies who swoon; of gentlemen who draw swords as naturally as they
draw breath, or even more so—the succession of his work is a series of
gestes. For one point, he followed his bent in the teeth of literary
fashion and scored, at the outset, an enormous popular success. For
another point, he kept his head when success was upon him. Although a
favorite scene in his stories is one full of lightning fence, swifter
guard and dexterous riposte, the true portrait of the author is decidedly
different: It shows him in the patient and laborious attitudes of his own
Black George, in the toil the young Farnol was himself committed to for
a period in his youth, the heavy work of the forge and the foundry, the
slow heating to malleability and the shape hammered out before cooling.
After _The Broad Highway_ had captured the fancy of England and America,
in an incautious moment Farnol the smith, Farnol the patient artificer,
contracted to furnish his next tale as a serial in an American magazine.
The editor blithely began publication with only part of the manuscript
in hand. Dissatisfied with his work, the author at one stage tore up ten
completed chapters. For several months he worked under pressure. In the
end he kept the editor supplied. The experience did not lead him into
the misconception that his smithy was a Ford factory. Nor has the fact
that he can write one kind of tale ever led him to suppose that he ought
to succeed with another variety; he followed _The Definite Object_ with
_Our Admirable Betty_. It is surprising to reflect that he made his first
hit by reviving a species of romance when romance of that species, and of
pretty nearly every species, was justly considered to have breathed its
last; but it is vastly more surprising to realize that he has continued
to succeed by the same tactics. Almost ten years later another young
man, similarly self-willed, was to score an equal success in America
(though not in England) by the same sort of reckless behavior, only the
title of the book was to be _Main Street_ and not _The Broad Highway_.
But Sinclair Lewis, although unaware of his advantage, was setting a
fashion, not defying one. Both Mr. Lewis’s novel and Mr. Farnol’s were
the products of that kind of saturation which, while it cannot be relied
upon to produce enduring literature, can nearly always be counted upon
to produce literary phenomena. Such a phenomenon, certainly, was the
Kentish tale of Peter Vibart, Charmian, the Tinker, Black George, and the
Ancient, appearing as a book early in 1911 and rolling rapidly up to a
sale of 500,000 copies in England and America. And though perhaps not a
portent, as _Main Street_ has been a portent, it was a sign of far more
significance than the appearance on the scene of a new individual writer.
But let us tell the story of that story in orderly fashion.


ii

It begins with two little boys in their nightshirts listening furtively
but eagerly outside the door of a room in which their father was reading
aloud to their mother, whose eyes were on her needle. The book was _The
Count of Monte Cristo_. The name of the older boy—he was eight—was John
Jeffery Farnol; of the younger, who was to fall in the Boer War, Ewart
Farnol. The family had removed from Birmingham, where Jeffery was born,
to Lee, in Kent. The reading proceeded until a sneeze betrayed the boys.
But after that they were admitted for an extra hour to the evening
readings. The senior Farnol read excellently, varying his voice to suit
the characters. He made the stories live, for Jeffery at least. From
Cooper, Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray and Stevenson heard at home,
Jeffery became a schoolboy who invented tales to entertain his fellows;
in particular he started a story which he carried on for three months,
winding it up with the close of term. When he had finished school he
wanted to become a writer, but as there was not money to send him to one
of the universities, his father thought the ambition foolish, and at
17 the boy was set to work in Birmingham with a firm of engineers and
brassfounders. Manual labor at the forge was varied by a great deal of
fighting with fists. He was short and thickset; he spent the lunch hour
either telling stories to the other men, “stories from the classics,”
as he says, “vividly touched up, no doubt, or making a rough drawing of
some scowling diffident sitter.” As he sat drawing one noon, a man of
the crowd looking over his shoulder remarked: “Ah, that’s all very well,
but drawing ain’t manliness.” A test of manliness, inquiry developed,
was the feat of a chap who had climbed up the inside of the big chimney.
Farnol laid five shillings to half a crown that he could duplicate the
deed. Says one account: “The chimney towered up, one hundred and twenty
feet of blackness, choked with the soot of four years and with insecure
stanchions, several of them broken.” He fastened his handkerchief at the
top for all to see; it is easy to believe that the worst of the thing
was the climb down with soot tumbling in his eyes. The men refused to
pay their bets, he had to fight one of them, though sick and giddy, and
was beaten. But a climax was near at hand. Farnol kept a note-book in
which he was forever jotting down ideas and impressions. The foreman most
reasonably objected to these interruptions of work. There were blows.
Leaving the foreman “reclining in a daze against an anvil”—the words
aren’t Farnol’s—the last Farnol saw of the place was his handkerchief
fluttering from the chimney top.

“No good for work, always writing.” How singularly right the foreman’s
verdict had been, some years were required to prove. For a time Farnol
stayed at home and wrote stories, poems, whatnot. A few stories got
printed. His father was unimpressed, except by the unanimity of family
relatives in declaring that he was encouraging Jeffery to grow into
an idle fellow. It seemed as if something might be constructed from
his son’s natural aptitude for drawing. Jeffery began the study of
line and figure drawing under Loudon at the Westminster Art School. He
found everybody else at the school so much more clever that he became
discouraged.

“I think I’ll write.”

“You can’t write,” said his father. “You’ve not had a University
education.”

He went into his father’s business, but as he continued to write stories,
and as some of them continued to get accepted, this arrangement was a
failure. At this time his favorite recreation was cycling. “All the
highroads and byroads of Kent, Surrey and Sussex became familiar to
me. I wheeled between the flowery hedgerows and quenched my thirst at
the wayside taverns. It was then, while watching villagers wending
their way to church, that I first saw the Ancient. There he was, tall
hat, smock-frock, shrewd, wrinkled face, and gnarled hands grasping his
knobbly staff just as I have described him in _The Broad Highway_. And
that was the first inception of the book, though it was not until several
years afterward that it came to be written.” Black George was fashioned
out of his own time spent at the Birmingham forge.

Farnol wasn’t yet twenty-one when he married Blanche Hawley, daughter
of F. Hughson Hawley, a New York artist. The pair set out for America.
The bride of seventeen had been sent to England on a visit. It was hoped
that Mr. Hawley would take the news well. It was also hoped that Jeffery
might sell stories more successfully in the United States. He had a
negligible amount of money. The seven, and more than seven, lean years
were beginning.


iii

Mr. Hawley received them well. In an interview a year ago[11] Mr. Farnol,
recalling the New York period, is quoted as saying:

“I hadn’t a cent in the world. My wife had paid for the wedding ring and
the honeymoon, and it seemed to me that after that it was up to me to
do something. It has been said that her father remained adamant when we
arrived, but that isn’t true. I’m expecting a knock on the bean from him
when he reads that. On the contrary, I found him a delightful old cove,
and we were forgiven.

[Illustration: JEFFERY FARNOL

_Photograph by E. Hoppé, London._]

“After that I went to work, living alone in a room at Thirty-eighth
Street and Tenth Avenue. One night, about 3 o’clock in the morning, I
came across a man down by the river whose face was all covered with blood.

“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.

“‘I’m dying, kid, I’m dying!’ he told me.

“I took him home and fixed him up. It turned out that he was the leader
of a notorious gang. I’ve never known a finer chap than he. I’ve found
out in this life that if you scratch deep enough you’ll always find true
worth.

“About a week after that night he came around and took me to a notorious
saloon. He took me into the back room and introduced me to the bunch.
Several of them have gone to the chair since, but they were good
fellows.[12] I’ve gone into that saloon without a nickel in my pocket,
and looking it. I’ve had one of the gang say to me: ‘Stony up against it,
kid? Will a fiver help?’ and before I could know what happened the gang
would have taken up a collection of $25 and given it to me.[13]

“My wife was living with her family at that time, but often she would
come to bring me baskets with chicken and all sorts of delightful little
delicacies. The neighborhood was a terrible one in those days, and I was
afraid at first to have her come there. I told some of the boys about it.
They told me never to worry again. They arranged that an unseen bodyguard
should follow her from the street car and escort her to my room and back
again when she was ready to leave.... She believed in me even then when
it meant more to me than anything in the world. People don’t know it, but
I am naturally a timid man. She gave me confidence in myself, and with it
came the ability to succeed.”

The room at Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue was a studio, “dismal,
rat-haunted,” where a job as a painter of theatrical scenery compelled
him to spend a great many of his nights and days. In intervals of
scene-painting he began _The Broad Highway_. “I met O. Henry several
times in the offices of Ainslee’s Magazine. I think it was Will Irwin
who introduced us. O. Henry was unusually taciturn for an American, and
I—well, I am an Englishman. So though we saw each other frequently, never
more than ‘How d’ ye do’ passed between us.

“The pleasantest recollections I have of those old days was the time I
spent in dabbling in painting and theatricals at the old Astor Theatre.
One day a down-and-out young man got past the doorkeeper and strolled on
the stage. ‘I’ve got a fortune here in my pocket,’ he said. ‘We all have
that,’ I replied.

“The young fellow said he had been a cub reporter in Chicago, but now he
was hungry and looking for a job. Finally he got the attention of the
producer at the theatre. He pulled out a manuscript and began reading.
The producer at first paid no attention, but gradually became more and
more interested. When the first act had been read the producer said,
‘All right, I’ll take it.’ The starving dramatist was Eugene Walter and
the manuscript was that of ‘Paid in Full.’”[14]

Farnol wrote in the studio and also at Mr. Hawley’s home, in Englewood,
New Jersey. When _The Broad Highway_ was the best seller, Mr. Hawley
rounded out the picture of the New York period.[15] “Farnol,” he said,
“is a dreamer and a bookworm, and has just about as much practical
idea of time and money as that type is popularly supposed to have. He
kept right on writing, and night was the time he had to do it. Many a
time when I’ve been detained late with a press of work I’d get home at
midnight or thereabouts to find a light supper waiting for me and Jeffery
up working, only waiting to be called to entertain me while I ate. For
he is the most entertaining talker I’ve ever known and loves to talk.
His natural speech is the phraseology in _The Broad Highway_.[16] It has
become natural to him through many years of living with the characters in
the books of that period he loves so well. And he is a born storyteller.
He always kept us sitting overtime at meals, just as he used to keep me
sitting up till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning on the occasion of the
midnight suppers. When he gets to spinning a yarn, whether telling it or
writing it, he loses all knowledge of the flight of time. Often when I’ve
come down to breakfast before catching my early train to New York I’ve
found him just finishing his night’s work, fresh and enthusiastic. Even
when his days are full of leisure he likes best to work at night. Then,
he says, his brain is clearer, and there are no interruptions. His power
of concentration and absorption is the most marvellous thing I’ve ever
encountered. I remember once taking him to the Players Club with me for
luncheon. After luncheon he wandered into the library and was delighted
to see the work of Aphra Behn, an early writer I’d never heard of, but
belonging to his favorite period and well known to him. I left him there
renewing her acquaintance with delight. I forgot all about him, but
chancing to go back for dinner, on entering the library to my amazement I
saw him sitting there in exactly the same posture in which I’d left him
hours before. He didn’t know whether ten minutes or as many hours had
elapsed.”

Farnol succeeded in selling a number of short stories and had some work
as an illustrator. He wrote two light romances, _My Lady Caprice_ and
_The Money Moon_, which magazines bought. For two years he put all his
spare time on _The Broad Highway_, the history of which is among the
curiosities of book publishing.


iv

Like _Main Street_ a decade later, _The Broad Highway_ was possibly
conceived and certainly executed in a spirit of revolt. Such rebellions
are common, and the only wisdom that can be uttered in respect of them
is embodied in that proverb which says that one man’s meat is another
man’s poison. Editors and publishers endeavor to give the public what
the public wants. The public, very naturally, never knows what it wants
until it tastes it. The public is like a husband sitting down to his
wife’s dinner. He may like everything or nothing; he may enormously
relish the unexpected, placed before him with inward perturbation and
in a spirit of desperate doubt. He may pounce with appetite upon, and
sing loudly the praise of, some dish denounced by him and refused by
his palate the week before. If a writer attempt to please editors or
publishers, who, in turn, are attempting to please their publics, he will
be successful with the entrepreneurs and possibly with the audiences.
And his temperament may make such a course the very best thing. If his
temperament is otherwise, sooner or later he will please himself; and if
he can then get published a large public may just possibly discover that
he greatly pleases them.

The completed manuscript of _The Broad Highway_ was submitted to the
Century Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, both of whom
failed to come to terms and returned it shortly. It was then submitted to
Dodd, Mead & Company, who indicated a conditional acceptance and asked
the author to come in and discuss possible changes. The firm’s readers
offered their suggestions and Farnol took notes. The principal result
was that he cut 20,000 words out of the book, which still remained of
200,000-word length, or twice the length of the usual “full-length”
novel. The alterations were not enough to give the publisher the
necessary confidence; the year was 1907, the year of the money panic;
and the manuscript was finally returned to Farnol with a definite
declination. The reasons were sound: There had been a bad slump in
Wall Street, the book was formidably long, the author was unknown, the
interest of the tale might be almost wholly for English readers. But
there was another reason in the nature of the novel to which a few words
should be devoted.

Robert Louis Stevenson had died in 1894. His work spawned a school of
historical fiction, much of it pseudo-historical, which had dominated the
American book market for years. The public taste did not discriminate
during that decade between the good and the bad; _To Have and To Hold_
and _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ were equally hailed as masterpieces
and alike elevated to the top of the heap. From that day, indeed, dates
the name and the peculiarity of the “best seller.” The term remains, but
it has only in very recent years begun to undergo a transformation of
meaning, the idea of relativity having crept in. With a truer perception
and a better sense of proportion, we now tend to speak of a book as a
best seller _in its class_, or in relation to the literary merit of the
work or the record of the author or generally with an eye to what sale
could be expected in the circumstances. The fact of a sale in so many
figures remains; but the estimation in which the fact is held is quite
different. A sale of 20,000 copies that would have passed unregarded
twenty years ago is now likely to be accounted as of the greatest
significance.

What was fundamentally the trouble in 1907 was not to be stated with
vigor until 1914, when Frank Swinnerton’s critique of Stevenson[17]
was to appear with such concluding sentences as these: “Stevenson ...
created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
costume-chest.... If romance rests upon no better base than this, if
romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson
killed it.” Such, even in 1907, was in various quarters uneasily felt
to be the fact. In 1907, it is true, George Meredith was spending his
declining years in poetry, and Thomas Hardy was at work on _The Dynast_;
but _The Way of All Flesh_ had been published four years earlier, Shaw’s
plays were being staged, the dead George Gissing was at last coming into
attention, Mr. Galsworthy had just given us _The Man of Property_, Mr.
Wells was brewing _Tono-Bungay_, and Mr. Bennett was at work on _The
Old Wives’ Tale_. If the lid of the costume-chest was still raised, it
had every appearance of being propped most insecurely. All cogent and
immediate reasons aside, the publisher of books had every psychological
and intuitive reason for doubting the appeal of a volume of 500 closely
printed pages, much of it in dialect and all of it concerned with Kentish
scenes of a hundred years earlier.

To return to _The Broad Highway_: An actor with whom the author had
become acquainted at the Astor Theatre was about to play an engagement
in Boston, and offered to show the manuscript to friends in the office
of Little, Brown and Company. Farnol waited for some word in vain; after
several months he learned that the actor had returned to New York, and
sought him out. The actor had visited the publishing house but had
completely forgotten the manuscript.... It was taken from the bottom of
his trunk, where it had lain all the while, and Farnol was minded, first
to sell it, with all rights, for $500. Mr. Hawley said Farnol would do
no such thing, “if I have to buy it myself.” Farnol’s next impulse was
to burn the cumbersome bundle. He finally gave it to his wife, and Mrs.
Farnol sent it to her husband’s mother in England. Shirley Byron Jevons,
at that time editor of The Sportsman, was the next to see it. He took it
to the publishing house of Sampson Low, Marston & Company, introducing it
with: “Here is another _Lorna Doone_”—Blackmore’s novel having been the
firm’s greatest fiction success. The publishing house accepted the book
and had drawn an agreement with Mr. Jevons as Mr. Farnol’s agent when
the author appeared unexpectedly. In fact, Farnol, discouraged by his
fortunes in America, had simply got on the boat with his wife and little
daughter. A new agreement was drawn with him direct, and signed. Then,
but some time before the book was set up in type, the publisher showed it
to Clement K. Shorter, editor of The Sphere, whose devotion to the work
of George Borrow was well known. Mr. Shorter’s account of the incident
embodies an interesting estimate of the book:[18]

“I read _The Broad Highway_ with avidity, and recognized at once—as who
would not have done?—that here was a striking addition to picaresque
romances, that the author had not read _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and
the best stories by Defoe and Fielding for nothing, nor had he walked
along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any
more than had the creator of _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_. For the vast
multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: ‘Every
age must write its own books.’ It is of no use for the pedantic critic
to affirm, with pontifical fervor, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe
are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in
comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into
reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer
who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize
it is destined to win the favor of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol
has entered into his kingdom.... _The Broad Highway_ sold in hundreds
of thousands. It is a breezy, healthy book, as unpretentious as it is
sincere. Neither its author nor his friends need to worry themselves as
to whether it is a masterpiece of literature. For our day, at least, it
has added to the stock of harmless pleasures. To the critic who complains
that ‘it is but an exercise in archæology,’ and that the author ‘has
never felt what he has written but has gathered it up from books, one can
reply in the language of Goldsmith’s Mr. Burchell, ‘Fudge.’ It is still
possible in England, in spite of its railway trains and its mechanical
development, to feel the impulse which inspired Charles Dickens, George
Borrow and all the masters of the picaresque romance, who have in days
gone by traveled with delight through the countryside, seeking adventures
and finding them. ‘I felt some desire,’ says Lavengro, ‘to meet with one
of those adventures which, upon the roads of England, are as plentiful
as blackberries in autumn.’ Mr. Farnol has a talent for recreating such
adventures, and he is perfectly frank with his readers, anticipating
a certain type of criticism. ‘Whereas the writing of books was once a
painful art,’ he makes Peter Vibart say in _The Broad Highway_, ‘it has
of late become a trick very easy of accomplishment, requiring no regard
for probability and little thought, so long as it is packed sufficiently
full of impossible incidents through which a ridiculous heroine and a
more absurd hero duly sigh their appointed way to the last chapters.
Whereas books were once a power, they are of late degenerated into things
of amusement, with which to kill an idle hour, and be promptly forgotten
the next.’”

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. On a famous occasion the
late Maurice Hewlett tore to shreds the historicity of the work of James
Branch Cabell, and Mr. Cabell completely lost his temper. Mr. Farnol’s
hero in _Beltane the Smith_ “finds himself in an England which from the
internal evidence of friars, bowmen, arms and armor we might vaguely
describe as Edwardian (Edward I., II., III.)—the pikes he appears to
have borrowed from a later period. And yet it is not Edwardian either;
for there is no hint of a king in it all, and never, never was there
such an anarchical England, save in the reign of Stephen of Blois.”[19]
Mr. Farnol’s Latin, says J. P. Collins, “gives one the shivers. He mixes
his _thee’s_ and his _ye’s_, and precisians may murmur at his forms of
archaic diction. But ... if Farnol makes a slip in the way of detail, or
lapses into excess, he preserves the most important thing, and that is
atmosphere.”[20] Everyone will recall Scott’s inaccuracies in _Ivanhoe_,
of which the most serious was the depiction of a state of feeling between
the Saxons and Normans existing a century earlier than the time of the
novel.

Mr. Shorter has made us longer; it remains to say that _The Broad
Highway_, accepted in England, was offered by the English publisher in
America, in one instance to Dodd, Mead & Company, who again declined it.
Little, Brown and Company were the acceptors, learning for the first time
of the actor’s delinquency a few years earlier. The book was published on
both sides of the ocean and sprang into instant success. In the midst of
the smother of applause, appeals, money and golden prospects Mr. Farnol
had a moment. He ejaculated: “Just think! I’ve lost four years of my
life!”[21]


v

He was 33—ten years older than it has been done, and thirty years younger
than it has been done, also.[22] Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison achieved
_Queed_ at 31, Sinclair Lewis was 35 when _Main Street_ appeared. On the
whole, the four years seem not an excessive price to have paid for a
coup, nor thirty-three years long to have found oneself. The point was
neither in the success nor the time taken to reach it; it was in Mr.
Farnol’s ability to keep his head on his shoulders. This he proceeded to
do; although he sold, while yet unwritten, the serial rights to his next
work, pressure upon him did not prevent his destroying ten unsatisfactory
chapters, as has been related, and although as he said at the time, “I
really cannot blame the magazine people,” he was emphatic in saying, “I
never wish to undergo such an experience again.”[23] Two years elapsed
after the publication of _The Broad Highway_ before the appearance of
_The Amateur Gentleman_; and except for the publication of a piece of
work written before _The Broad Highway_[24] and his effort to help in
the war (_Great Britain at War_), he has had only nine books brought
out in the dozen years since he raised the curtain. And of these one,
_The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, a romance in prose, blank verse and rhyme,
is a novelty written for his daughter, Gillian, published because what
had entertained one girl might very conceivably entertain others. Mr.
Farnol’s method of keeping his head on his shoulders has been to practise
industry without becoming industrial. Although homesick at first on his
return to England, he settled in Kent, at Lee, with a den at the top of
the house where he could work from midnight to breakfast. Old English
books lined two walls of this refuge; another wall was given up to a
collection of old pistols and sabres; and on the desk there usually lay
a dictionary of slang dated 1812. More recently the Farnols have lived
at the seashore at Brighton, but the winters are generally spent at
Ospedaletti, which is on the Italian Riviera.

Except for a short visit to report for the London Daily Mail the fight
between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921,[25] Mr. Farnol had
not revisited America until autumn, 1923. At that time visitors met a
shortish man, anything but a figure of romance, whose outstanding trait
was his genuine friendliness, “a friendliness which is not an affectation
with which he tries to put strangers at their ease, but an actual part
of him.”[26] To see him rehearse and enact, rather than merely outline,
his next novel was an exceptional experience, for at such times he suits
his voice to his characters and displays a considerable range of dramatic
skill. Interviewers developed evidences of a struggle in the romancer’s
mind between the type of woman he writes about and the types more usual
today; however, chivalry, or perhaps the romantic vision, enabled him
to come through the ordeal by newsprint without dishonor. He denied the
possibility of platonic love and friendships. “After a certain point,
such friendships are bound to be no longer platonic. Mark me! I know
they wouldn’t be in my case, anyway.”[27] A subject he did not tire of
discussing was the wonder of America.[28] To several who talked with
him he expressed the intention of writing another novel about New York
City.[29] “New York should be called ‘The City of Great Adventures,’” he
said, with characteristic enthusiasm, “because anything _might_ happen in
New York.”[30]

More expressive of the man is the story of how his slightest novel came
to be published. He was discussing with his mother the advisability of
bringing out work written before _The Broad Highway_. “Look here,” he
said to her, “why not rout out _Mr. Tawnish_? You have been very good
to me, and I can never properly repay you, but if you can do anything
with _Mr. Tawnish_ you shall have it.” The tale—one that reminds most
readers of Tarkington’s _Monsieur Beaucaire_—was taken out of a drawer,
touched up and added to, and accepted for book publication. The advance
royalties, constituting a generous gift, were handed over to Mrs. Henry
Farnol. This was in the autumn of 1913.


vi

In an article appearing at the height of Mr. Farnol’s first success,
Henry Keats wrote: “_The Broad Highway_ has seemed to the critics
to invite comparison with so many different masters of the English
novel—George Borrow, Blackmore, Le Sage, Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray,
to mention a few—that I asked him about his ‘foster-father.’ Mr. Farnol
smiled. ‘I would not know my own literary parent if I met him out here
in the broad highway of Kent,’ he exclaimed. Judging from his subsequent
confessions, the creator of Peter Vibart and Charmian is under greater
indebtedness to Laurence Sterne than to any of the immortals named above.
And that was owing to the friend of his ‘boyish ambitions,’ to whom _The
Broad Highway_ is dedicated. Mr. Shirley Byron Jevons was the first, some
years since, to call Mr. Farnol’s attention to the supreme difficulty of
writing a book dealing with the abstract, citing, as a rare example of
success in that line, Sterne’s _Tristram Shandy_. A copy of that unusual
book was speedily procured by Mr. Farnol, and he recalls as though an
impression of yesterday the manner in which he was ‘enthralled’ by its
pages. ‘Then,’ he adds, ‘I went on to The Spectator and The Tatler,
the reading of which showed me how great is the loss of those who are
unacquainted with the Queen Anne essayists.’”[31] This settles the matter
of style.

Certain books by Mr. Farnol—_The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, _Great
Britain at War_, and _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, each outside the
true succession of his work—have been incidentally characterized. A
descriptive note on his principal novels may perhaps fittingly conclude
this account.

_The Broad Highway_ (1911) has probably already been sufficiently
described, as it must be familiar to many who may read these lines. _The
Amateur Gentleman_ (1913) has for hero Barnabas, son of a retired and
famous boxing champion of England. Having come into a legacy, the young
man resolves to journey to London to become a gentleman. The period is
that of the Prince Regent. There is a rapid series of adventures on the
journey; Barnabas meets Cleone, the heroine; he acquires a valet and
establishes himself with the quality, and the fashionable world loses
him, for he returns home again. _Beltane the Smith_ (1915) concerns a
golden-haired giant and matchless swordsman whose odyssey of adventure
is lived in a much earlier England. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is the
story of a young New Yorker whose wealth has taken from him all incentive
to action. For want of a definite object in life he is toying with the
thought of suicide when he surprises a youthful burglar in the act of
entering his rooms. Then, as “Mr. Geoffrey,” he takes up lodgings with
the housebreaker in the old Hell’s Kitchen district of New York—which
was the region between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and
west of Sixth Avenue. _Our Admirable Betty_ (1918) is a return to the
dimension of _The Broad Highway_ and _The Amateur Gentleman_. _Black
Bartlemy’s Treasure_ (1920) and _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_ (1921) are
tales of piracy and the Spanish Main, the second novel completing the
first. _Peregrine’s Progress_ (1922) more closely than any other book
approximates the scenes and action of _The Broad Highway_; it is laid in
Kent, it relates a boy’s adventurings on the road and by the roadside,
and it reintroduces the Tinker. _Sir John Dering_ (1923) keeps to the
same period. A skilled swordsman who has incurred the enmity of the Lady
Herminia Barrasdaile is forced to fight duel after duel which she has
instigated in the hope that he will meet his death.

The dictum of Mr. Shorter best fits the case of this friendly writer and
honest workman. We have already quoted the words: “The great reading
public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who
have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some
element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined
to win the favor of the crowd.” The love of a fairy tale, delight in
action, pleasure in such characterizations as Black George, the Tinker,
and the Ancient—picturesque; in outline broadly simple—have been
potent. Stevenson was dead; the good as well as the bad of his legacy
had been swallowed up in a flood wherein the sound could no longer be
distinguished from the meretricious; what we loosely call realism was in
the ascendant. Years were to go by before “realism” could be seen to be
the necessary clearing of paths to an exploration of the romantic impulse
more intelligent as well as more subtle. In the meantime an age-old
thirst found these draughts to quench itself. On the porch of the “Bull”
at Sissinghurst the readers of Mr. Farnol have sat for many an afternoon,
washing the dust from their throats with a pleasant ale and enjoying the
surprising procession of knights, scholars, gipsies, gallants, pirates
and simple maids and ladies of fashion which has passed before them,
coming from and returning to a world without end, truly.


BOOKS BY JEFFERY FARNOL

    1907 _My Lady Caprice_
             In England: _The Chronicles of the Imp_
    1911 _The Broad Highway_
         _The Money Moon._ Earlier, in point of composition, than
             _The Broad Highway_.
    1913 _The Amateur Gentleman_
    1913 _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_. Earlier, in point of composition,
             than _The Broad Highway_.
    1915 _Beltane the Smith_
    1917 _The Definite Object_
    1918 _Great Britain at War_
             In England: _Some War Impressions_
    1918 _Our Admirable Betty_
    1920 _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_
    1920 _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_
    1921 _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_
    1922 _Peregrine’s Progress_
    1923 _Sir John Dering_


SOURCES ON JEFFERY FARNOL

_The Novels of Jeffery Farnol._ Booklet published by LITTLE, BROWN &
COMPANY, Boston, 1923.

_The Country of “The Broad Highway,”_ by Henry C. Shelley. THE BOOK NEWS
MONTHLY, October, 1912.

_Jeffery Farnol’s Life and Career_, by Herbert F. Jenkins. THE BOOK NEWS
MONTHLY, September, 1911.

_How I Began_, by Jeffery Farnol. Booklet published by SAMPSON LOW,
MARSTON & COMPANY, LTD., London. The text is reprinted from T. P.’s
Weekly of 14 February 1913.

_Love Still Ruling Motive in Life of the Modern Youth and Maiden_.
Interview by Marguerite Dean in The Evening World, New York, 28 June
1921. Note especially: “As a matter of fact I knew a charming fellow who
did, in real life, just what my hero did in _The Definite Object_—took
a little girl from the New York slums, educated her, loved and married
her.”

Other references will be found in the footnotes to the text of this
chapter. They do not include, by any means, all the interviews in
newspapers.




5. Adults Please Skip[32]


i

Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels
and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never
growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason
for not keeping youthful.

There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and
Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe
better. And there’s something in books like _Little Women_ that you keep
coming back to....

S’pose we’d better begin with the Bedtime Story Man. Half the children in
the United States of America are willing to call it a day when Thornton
W. Burgess says the word. Mr. Burgess owes his success to the fact that
he was born in a place called Sandwich in the State of Massachusetts.
It made him realize that something was needed “between the dark and
the daylight,” as Longfellow said. Having splendid eyesight and some
excellent connections, he was able to enter the best animal circles, and
early met Peter Rabbit, Lightfoot the Deer, and loads of others. The
way to meet them is by all means under Mr. Burgess’s auspices, in _The
Burgess Animal Book for Children_. Sammy Jay, Bob White and the feathered
companions who have more or less dealings with Striped Chipmunk and
Johnny Chuck are introduced in _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_. It
is a point of honor with Mr. Burgess always to let his animal friends
tell their own stories. Louis Agassiz Fuertes illustrates these books
with pictures in full colors. For example, he shows fifty-eight birds in
all their glory. _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_ brought cries of
joy from Dr. W. T. Hornaday, who is America’s leading naturalist and who
presides over more animals at the New York Zoo than went into the ark
with Noah. But wait! Here’s a third volume to put with these two, _The
Burgess Flower Book for Children_, also illustrated in color and black
and white and showing 103 flowers. You should see the color pictures, for
instance, of the yellow adder’s-tongue and the wild columbine! Let it be
stressed: the books by Burgess are the most popular and most successful
published for _little_ children. Their interest and joy is communicable
to the child of four years—and they are read and re-read by boys and
girls up to twelve, and sometimes by their elders.

Rose Fyleman, with _Fairies and Chimneys_, _The Fairy Flute_, and _The
Fairy Green_, won some time ago chief honors as the children’s poet; and
now she seems to be on the path to distinguished honors for her prose
stories. _The Rainbow Cat_, whose color scheme included orange hind
legs and a red, red tail, gave the greatest satisfaction, and so will
_Forty Good Night Tales_, in which errant fairies explain themselves. But
probably the most ambitious book is the new _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_.
Rose Fyleman for fairies, as the advertisers would say.

Did you see _Number One Joy Street_, ever? At any rate, you will see
_Number Two Joy Street_, won’t you? Like the first book, it has a jolly
cover and endpapers, and plenty of illustrations in color and otherwise.
The collection of prose and verse for boys and girls in _Number Two Joy
Street_ is from writers whose names will make even older people prick up
their ears—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Hilaire
Belloc, Hugh Walpole, Laurence Housman and Rose Fyleman are some of them.
With such an array of contributors, you will have very hard work to keep
your copy of this book for your very own. It will be necessary to speak
nicely but firmly to older people.

You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna
Geister’s new book, _What Shall We Play_. Grownups are almost certain to
think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the
fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says
so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations
for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them
without help or direction, and at sight. _Let’s Play_ is another one of
her game books written especially for boys and girls. _It Is To Laugh_ is
a little more grown-up (not a great deal).

_The Velveteen Rabbit_, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures.
As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone,
which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust
hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other
books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or
two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is _Mother
Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport,
who also wrote _Tales Told by the Gander_ and _Adventures in the Old
Woman’s Shoe_. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one
of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished
tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she
knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know
nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog.
They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for
and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who
was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his
owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the
many illustrations, some of them in color.

_The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories_, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book
with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies,
and their kin.

Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think
you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in _The Magic Sea
Shell and Other Plays_, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the
garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot
down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music
and costumes, please!

For seriousness, and in moments when you want to know more about the
world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most
helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s _The First Days
of Man_ and _The First Days of Knowledge_. These relate the _true_ fairy
story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such
a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple
tools that man first began by making.


ii

I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the
_Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those
other books for which he made the illustrations, _The Twelve Dancing
Princesses_ and _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, I hope you will
say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be
as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures,
but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay
Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was
brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came
from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by
Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or
great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity
(bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature
received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery
work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures
you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.

Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done
much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have
Hawthorne’s _A Wonder Book_, illustrated by Rackham, or _Edmund Dulac’s
Fairy Book_, or _Stories From the Arabian Nights_, _The Sleeping Beauty
and Other Fairy Tales_, or _Stories from Hans Andersen_, each with
Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the
edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of _The Tempest_.


iii

You are old enough to be thinking about going away to school. You can’t
get too many school stories. In particular, you are keen for a new
book by Ralph Henry Barbour. Nobody writes better school sport books!
_The Fighting Scrub_, Mr. Barbour’s latest, is a picture of life at a
famous New England school; and the fellows and the incidents of the
tale are just as actual as the setting. Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble are
boys everyone can recognize among his friends, and while Loring Dean,
a cripple confined to a wheel-chair, is a new character in a story of
boys, his splendid head-work in planning a forward pass play that makes
the winning touchdown for the school is proof that a boy need not be an
athlete to count.

There are some very pretty points about _The Fighting Scrub_. It has
been usual to write only about a fellow who “made the team.” The scrub
team has been an unsung, unhonored aggregation on which the first team
sharpened its teeth. Mr. Barbour’s hero is only a scrub; but even a
scrub has been known to play in the big game and with crucial results.
Here’s another thing: people have begun to recognize the fact that we
are in danger of losing sight of football and other games as sport, and
of thinking only of winning. Nothing could show better than the history
of Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble in _The Fighting Scrub_ that the real joy
of football lies in the spirit in which you play. Every fellow can see
himself in Clif or Tom or Loring Dean.

Again, there are thousands of boys who will be able to see themselves in
Joe Kenton, the hero of Mr. Barbour’s _Follow the Ball_. Joe is a fellow
who is far from having things all his own way, but he is a sticker.
He has to earn the money to get through school, and that never made it
easier to make a record in athletics. But he shows up well, and _Follow
the Ball_ has baseball, skating, hockey and camping in its pages as well
as football.

The proved classics in the way of school stories are assuredly Owen
Johnson’s. It is sixteen years since the first publication of his first
book of Lawrenceville stories, but Hickey Hicks, Dink Stover, Doc
Macnooder, Hungry Smeed, the Gutter Pup, the Tennessee Shad and Lovely
Mead are as “generally and specifically bully” as when Booth Tarkington
hailed them. Mr. Johnson’s success in _The Prodigious Hickey_, _The
Varmint_ and _The Tennessee Shad_ is as great as Mr. Tarkington’s own
in _Penrod_; immeasurably greater than Kipling’s effort in _Stalky &
Co._ It is true to say that the Lawrenceville stories blend speed,
surprise, mischief and humor with a smoothness and a perfection untouched
by anything else of their sort. They avoid the utter priggishness and
complacency of _Tom Brown’s School Days_, while having the same positive
value of a real school, under its own name and with its own tradition,
as their background. “The only real prep school story ever written,”
said George Ade, crisply, after reading _The Varmint_. Why? No doubt
the fact that the Lawrenceville stories are semi-autobiographical has
much to do with it. For Johnson was a Lawrenceville boy in the 1890s;
there is extant a picture showing him with the original (but somewhat
older) Brian de Boru Finnegan, Turkey Reiter, the Old Roman, and the
Prodigious Hickey. Johnson himself it was who held the skeleton while
Hickey attached it to a rope hung from a ventilator. Johnson sat on the
roof when Old Ironsides—afterward a New York real estate broker—slid off
and got filled with gravel. It was Johnson who experienced the agony
of muffing a ball and being attacked by the whole baseball team, which
he has described as the Varmint’s first discouraging experience with
Lawrenceville athletics.

And after a dozen years, Mr. Johnson recently returned to the
Lawrenceville scene in _Skippy Bedelle_, which tells how Skippy planned
to invent a foot regulator for bathtubs and of certain deplorable
experiments which were to produce mosquito-proof socks. _Skippy Bedelle_
is largely the story of a sentimental progression and includes the first
dress suit and Skippy’s first girl.

In the days when professional ballplayers still had mustaches and you
could give people a thrill by riding down the post-office steps on a
high-wheel bicycle, Irvin S. Cobb was goin’ on fourteen. And in _Goin’
on Fourteen_, his new book with pictures by Worth Brehm, the artist
for Tarkington’s Penrod stories, Cobb has cut a few cross-sections out
of a year in the life of an average boy. Now without in any respect
being literal reminiscences, these chapters accurately and joyously
reflect a scene and a period and a boy most unmistakably American.
For Johnny Custer, otherwise John C. Calhoun Custer, Jr., is neither
Tom Sawyer nor Penrod Schofield—though perhaps more like Tom and Huck
Finn than Penrod—but he is as instantly recognizable and as entirely
“boy” as either. And Johnny Custer was his own trained investigator;
he did not depend upon others to tell him what would happen in
untried circumstances, no, sir! The account of how he and Mr. Simons
short-circuited the fowls of a chicken fancier should be read with
caution; it is likely to leave you in the same condition of happy
helplessness in which it left Johnny.

Albert Payson Terhune, like John Taintor Foote,[33] writes a capital
dog story, and Mr. Terhune’s stories of collies, Buff and Lad and the
others, are known wherever the dog has his due. In _The Heart of a Dog_,
Terhune’s new book, there are one or two tales in which a collie is not
the hero, but Lad and Buff and Treve and Lochinvar Bobby are familiar
friends of the breed which Mr. Terhune himself raises and takes prizes
with. Marguerite Kirmse has made the eight pictures in color and others
in black and white. This is another book that grown-ups will borrow and
neglect to return, if you don’t watch out.

Every boy and girl knows how hard it is to find a good, readable history.
The difficulty was pointed out to Sidney Dark, who set to work at once to
do something about it. And so far he has done magnificently, producing,
in _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, _The Book of England for
Young People_, and _The Book of France for Young People_, three histories
more clear and interesting to boys and girls of ten to sixteen than any
similar accounts. (I do not even except Charles Dickens’s _A Child’s
History of England_, which is one-sided in spots.) Each of Mr. Dark’s
books has sixteen illustrations from famous paintings of historic scenes.


iv

There is an Everyman’s Library—why not an Everychild’s Library? Well,
one has been begun. It is called The Beacon Hill Bookshelf and already
eight volumes are to be had. One of them, _The Boy Whaleman_, has never
been published before; the others are all established favorites stamped
with the approval of librarians and parents as well as of children
themselves. But even the old ones are printed from new type and all the
books are illustrated in color by well-known artists—five to eight color
plates apiece.

The first book on The Beacon Hill Bookshelf is the book that still is
first on children’s bookshelves everywhere throughout America. It is the
book which, in a recent wide competition conducted by The Bookman, led
all other “juveniles.” Its author was Louisa M. Alcott, and its title is
_Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_. Nowadays when you ask people
like Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton what American books they have
read they have a way of recalling at once that Louisa M. Alcott was one
of the first, and—without prejudice to other writers—has remained one of
the most memorable. The Beacon Hill _Little Women_ has pictures by Jessie
Willcox Smith, and is properly companioned in the series by its sequel,
_Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_. Reginald Birch has done
the pictures for _Little Men_.

Of the other six books, I must draw your attention especially to two:
the one which is published for the first time and one by John Masefield.
George F. Tucker’s _The Boy Whaleman_ has a place in the series because
it deals with the experiences of an American lad more than sixty years
ago—almost as far back as Richard Henry Dana’s _Two Years Before the
Mast_. Based on fact, Mr. Tucker’s book is a thrilling account of a New
Bedford boy’s three years’ voyage on a whaling ship.

Mr. Masefield’s book, _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, is illustrated
by T. C. Dugdale, and is a spirited story of a boy who served the Duke
of Monmouth in his attempt to gain the throne of James II. The tale is
therefore one of the Monmouth Rebellion, as the rebellion of 1685 in
England is most often called. Owing to the distinction with which Mr.
Masefield writes, this book is one of the very best of adventure stories
for boys’ or girls’ reading.

Besides the four books of which I have tried to tell something, the
Beacon Hill Bookshelf also holds these four to date:

_What Katy Did_, by Susan Coolidge. This is the most popular of Susan
Coolidge’s books, the story of a girl who would not let illness and
invalidism keep her from doing things.

_The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, by Allen French. Rolf avenges
his father’s murder and earns the viking’s bow in a story with incidents
drawn from the Icelandic sagas.

_Nelly’s Silver Mine_, by Helen Hunt Jackson. This book by the author of
_Ramona_ is as popular today as forty years ago. It is the story of Rob
and Nelly, twins in New England, who take a long journey to a new home in
Colorado, where Nelly finds the mine of the title.

_A Daughter of the Rich_, by Mary E. Waller. The story is a great
favorite with girls, who never fail to be interested in the account of
a year spent on a farm in Vermont by a rich young city girl. Elizabeth
Shippen Green Elliott has made the pictures in color.


AND HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS

_Billy Mink_, by Thornton W. Burgess, illustrated in color by Harrison
Cady. The first volume in a new series of Burgess books which deals with
the animals living in and around the Smiling Pool. For boys and girls of
four to twelve.

_Ruffs and Pompoms_, by Beulah King, illustrated by Maurice Day. Finney
Foo, the clown doll in the toy shop, goes out into the world to find a
smile for the little Chinese Lady and has the strangest adventures that
ever happened to a toy. For boys and girls of six to ten.

_The Valley of Color-Days_, by Helen B. Sandwell, illustrated in color by
Alice Bolam Preston. The strange adventures of Jane and David, who were
taken in charge by Burr, the fairy, while their parents were away for a
few days. For boys and girls of six to ten.

_Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, by Sarah Addington, illustrated by
Gertrude Kay. Twelve original and whimsical tales of the adventures that
happened to the Mother Goose children who lived in Pudding Lane. For boys
and girls of six to twelve.

_The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, by Harold Gaze,
illustrated in color by the author. Ruth and Norman and their Uncle
Hal are taken by the fairies to unusual regions—the heart of Japan,
Cloudland, the Arctic Circle and the Happy Isles. For boys and girls of
seven to twelve.

_The Friends of Diggeldy Dan_, by Edwin P. Norwood, illustrated in color
by A. Conway Peyton. The wonderful circus clown and his animal friends go
to visit the king of Jungleland. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.

_Fifty New Poems for Children._ Here are verses about the things
every child knows, such as dandelions, swallows, the wind, and the
scissors-grinder, mixed with poems about the things of every child’s
wish and fancy—cloud houses, magic wall-paper, goblins and ring-a-ring
fairies. The poets include Robert Graves, Katharine Tynan, Eleanor
Farjeon, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Blair and Madeleine Nightingale.

_Egyptian Tales of Magic_, by Eleanor Myers Jewett, illustrated in color
by Maurice Day. The oldest stories in the world, full of magic and
mystery, which make the kings and sailors and priests and peasants of
ancient Egypt come alive again before our eyes. For boys and girls of ten
to fifteen.

_Medicine Gold_, by Warren H. Miller. A story of adventure, of big game
hunting and fishing and life in the open in the great north woods.
Indians figure in the story and there is an exciting mystery ingeniously
solved. Mr. Miller is known as a writer of boys’ fiction and of outdoor
books for boys.

_Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, by Edward G. Cheyney. You can read this
book alone or as the fourth of a series about a young forester. Assigned
to government service in North Carolina, Scott plays an exciting part in
the settlement of a mountaineers’ feud. The author has worked with the
United States Forestry Service and is a professor in and director of the
University of Minnesota College of Forestry.

_Rat’s Castle_, by Roy Bridges. The fascination of pirate gold hangs in
the background of a slashing, well-told story.

_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by John Kenlon. The Chief of the New York Fire
Department tells the picturesque story of his boyhood and young manhood
on deep water, including shipwreck on the desolate Crozet Islands.

_The Listening Man_, by John A. Moroso. A companion volume to the
author’s _Cap Fallon: Fire Fighter_. This book shows how a retired
detective of the New York City force still takes an interest in and aids
in solving mysteries and in bringing criminals to justice. Cap Fallon
is one of the characters. Mr. Moroso is a novelist who, as a New York
newspaper reporter, covered many big police stories.

_The Boy Scout’s Own Book_, edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This gathers
into one volume those articles and stories from Volumes I-IV of _The
Boy Scouts Year Book_ having to do particularly with Scouting. A book
of especial interest to boys who expect to become Scouts. Joseph A.
Altsheler, Henry van Dyke, Robert E. Peary, Dr. Grenfell and Warren H.
Miller are a few of the authors represented in the book.

_The Boy Scouts Year Book_ (1924), edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This
year’s book features fiction, though the special article and handicraft
features are well maintained. Dan Beard’s how-to-make-it articles, and
stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Homer Croy, Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Joseph B.
Ames, Richard Connell, Raymond L. Spears and William James are included.

_David Blaize of King’s_, by E. F. Benson. The story of David Blaize,
hero of Mr. Benson’s _David Blaize_ and _David Blaize and the Blue Door_,
at Cambridge.

_The Story Key to Geographic Names_, by O. D. von Engeln and Jane
McKelway Urquhart. Takes geography out of the boredom of lists and
figures and tells the stories back of place names.

And for Parents—

_New Roads to Childhood_ and _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of
Children’s Books_, both by Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with
children in the New York Public Library; and _A Century of Children’s
Books_, by Florence V. Barry.




6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley


i

In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his
_Antic Hay_, Aldous Huxley writes:

“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like
a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend,
Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber
to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught
as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping
folds into a large glass receptacle....

“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast,
unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics,
there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests
full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments
and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans
suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living
in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing
continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by
virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....

“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the
channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at
Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had
escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion,
cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and
beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong
and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”

This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of _Limbo_, or of _Crome
Yellow_, nor even of the collection of tales called _Mortal Coils_. No,
it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man
in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind
where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and
full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass,
glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which
Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a
special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied
science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely
congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A
sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling
that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of
sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and
then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from
Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from
Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue
and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied
Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of
living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life
with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, _feuilletons_.


ii

To understand Aldous Huxley’s work it is only necessary to have been
born too late. This includes practically everybody. But to appreciate
his writing requires more of a background than is possessed by those
who would make a cult of him. He has nothing to do with cults, though
perhaps something with literary cultures. His roots are very far back,
the smallest at least as far back as the Elizabethans. Not many can
identify the passage in Marlowe from which are taken the two lines on
the titlepage of _Antic Hay_. There is more than a suspicion that the
grandson of T. H. Huxley is acquainted with Greek and Latin literature
and with the spectacles of the Renaissance. But the alcoves of the
Bodleian Library are well-lined and not too much frequented. The truth
is that Huxley is the child of the nineteenth century far more than of
the twentieth, or the seventeenth, or even the first. And the nineteenth
century is so much in the foreground as to be most unfamiliar ground
for many readers of today. Their backgrounds are too far back, and
their foreground is too far forward; the scene is lost in the middle.
One of the most significant facts about Aldous Huxley is his almost
indiscriminate fondness for the works of Charles Dickens, just as another
in his nephewship to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Consider his two grandfathers.
The renowned scientist, T. H., whose name is still anathema to the simple
fundamentalist, was yet a human, an all too human creature, who, as he
told Henry Holt, tried vegetarianism but had to abandon it because he
found he could no longer think. The father of Julia Arnold (who became
Mrs. Leonard Huxley, Aldous’s mother) was the subject of considerable
conversion and re-conversion by the Church of England and the Church
of Rome. Julia Arnold was a niece of Matthew Arnold, whose doctrine of
sweetness and light wasn’t wasted on a desert air—was, indeed, caught
up and echoed with diminishing but sympathetic outcries. As for Mary
Arnold, who became Mrs. Humphry Ward, the author of _Robert Elsmere_ was
by taste and temperament a scholar whose true monument is possibly her
encyclopædia articles on theologians in Spain.

What, then, is the character of a man barely thirty whose horoscope
belongs to 1894? His sisters and his cousins and his aunts are not to
be left out of the reckoning any more than those of W. S. Gilbert’s
admiral. Brought up to admire Wordsworth, Mr. Huxley has lived to enjoy
him;[34] a child of eminent Victorians, he has a perspicacious eye for
the limitations of Lytton Strachey as a biographer.[35] The inner truth,
of course, is something more important than these details of taste, which
might be accidental. The inner truth is itself an accident—quite possibly
an accident in design. And it is due to the shape of Huxley’s head,
not the outer shape but the shape inside—as we have said, all curious
vaultings, pointed arches, mediæval, constructed for all the rites of a
ceremonious mysticism but constrained by the circumstances of his era and
the exigencies of daily living to be used rather as a laboratory than a
cathedral. One must eat. When Grandfather Huxley gave over eating meat,
he was unable to think, and his grandson, obliged to use a beautiful
brain in journalism and letters, can hardly dedicate it to worship.

“Worship.” The word may seem strange to be used in speaking of the author
of Antic Hay, in which there is much genial blasphemy; but what the
careless reader may not see is the bitter cry beneath the surface of a
stony contempt. The cry is there, nor is it always embittered. “God as a
sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the
eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right,” reflected
Theodore Gumbril Junior. “But God as truth, God as 2 plus 2 = 4—that
wasn’t so clearly all right.”[36] And a few moments later the young man
is recalling, with passion and pain, the death of his mother. Those
familiar with the story of the two dwarfs, Sir Hercules and Filomena, in
_Crome Yellow_[37] know what pathos and tenderness Huxley can command
in a narrative of entire simplicity undisturbed by the self-conscious
tendency of much of his work. For it is true, as Michael Sadleir said
some time ago, that there are (have been?) several Huxleys.[38] But
although the artificer in words who is “almost omnipresent” will never
vanish, the “amateur in garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in ragtime,
the fastidious sensualist” are numbered of days. The young man in his
twenties who provoked “consternation and respect” knows as well as Mr.
Sadleir that he has no time to waste. His position is clear, being that
of a man whose time is being wasted, not by himself but by others; and
a man whose impatience is becoming very great. The portrait of Coleman
in _Antic Hay_ is perhaps the most concentrated expression of that ...
impatience. Of the several attitudes assumed in the world today by gifted
writers whose core of feeling is mystical, Huxley’s, I think, has the
most courage to commend it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis clicks the shutter of a
mental camera; Mr. James Branch Cabell tries to glue our eyes to a series
of romantically-colored stereoscopic slides; Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer
paints in oils; Mr. James Joyce uses chalk on the sidewalks or even
on the walls of less advertised, but not less public, places. Huxley,
however, has learned from Dickens the art of caricature. As he draws, his
really vast erudition comes crowding through the aisles of his strange
and beautiful mind. Like little imps, like twisted gargoyles come to
life, figures of the past fling themselves on the haft of his pen, to
move it this way and that. A heavier stroke here, to show the semblance
of a satyr; this curve a little thinned by pity; a blot here for the
spirit made flesh.... So you have gradually assembled his company,
grotesque, exaggerated, wretched, bizarre, inhuman-human, like drawings
by Cruikshank or Phiz, like illustrations to a new _Nicholas Nickleby_,
or _Pickwick_, repulsively true, their meaninglessness carrying their
deepest meaning. That meaning is so significant that only a mystic can
be expected to grasp it. It goes back to the struggle between paganism
and Christianity which led into what we call the Dark Ages. Mr. Huxley
has looked at his world and seen with disgust—but also with anguish and
pity—how the wheel has come full circle, how for the mystical mind a
Dark Age is again come upon us. Must, then, the old and crucial warfare
be waged all over again? If we are to worship at Greek shrines, he will
remind us that Priapus was the god of gardens. And he quotes the Latin
of Odo of Cluny[39] to show how excess breeds counter-excess. The whole
point with Huxley is his perfect grasp of the historical analogy to the
present mood and tense—or tension. He is savage in his picture of London,
the modern city, in _Antic Hay_; unsparing in his representation of the
manifestations of the spirit we affect—jazz, prevailing dances, rages in
new art, stupidities in experimental science. Possibly his comprehension
of the last is his most relentlessly hostile view; he is the grandson of
a scientist, a very great thinker, pathetically dependent upon a flesh
diet for intellectual accomplishment. Grandfather’s thinking, though
possibly not futile, seems to have got no farther than the God of 2 plus
2 = 4. For such a God, the grandson has little use; for such an age as
impends over us, he has even less.

This young man has been everywhere and seen everything. He writes, not
that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run. He subtly,
but more and more urgently, invites us to flee—the wrath to come? No,
the madness already here. Does his generation fancy itself as pagans
and revel in its paganism? He will show them their precedents and
quote for them their texts—which they may ponder before passing out
to the vomitorium. One might divide Aldous Huxley’s work to date into
two classes: and if one class is juvenilia, most certainly the other
division, led by _Antic Hay_, is Juvenalia. The Goth laid waste, even
as this young Goth from Oxford is laying waste; and then the Goth built
churches. They are the incomparable, those edifices. The son of the
Arnolds and the Huxleys, the Oxford scholar, the pupil of London, is
preparing for us his twentieth century Gothic.


iii

“Huxley, Aldous Leonard, writer,” recites _Who’s Who_, “born 26 July
1894; third son of Leonard Huxley, whom see, and Julia Arnold; married,
1919, Maria Nys; one son. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford.
Worked on the editorial staff of the Athenæum, 1919-1920; dramatic critic
of the Westminster Gazette, 1920-1921. Publications: _The Burning Wheel_,
1916; _The Defeat of Youth_, 1918; _Limbo_, 1920; _Leda_, 1920; _Crome
Yellow_, 1921; _Mortal Coils_, 1922. Recreation: reading. Club: Athenæum.”

A short private letter dated 13. vii. 22 adds one or two details. “I
was educated very conventionally at Eton & at Oxford (the only break in
the process being two or three years of partial blindness, from 17 to
19½, when I learned to read Braille embossed writing). I took English
Literature at Oxford, under the professorship of the late Sir Walter
Raleigh. I have worked on a good many papers—doing literary journalism,
art criticism, music criticism & dramatic criticism. I am a close student
of French literature & have many acquaintances in Paris. I travel as
much as I can—which is not nearly so much as I should like. My ideal at
the moment is to be completely idle for three years—but, alas, I see no
prospect of its being fulfilled!” The letter also says, in answer to
a specific inquiry about _Mortal Coils_: “_Mortal Coils_, like _Crome
Yellow_, was chiefly written in Italy last summer (tho’ there are two
stories in it of considerably earlier date)—in extreme heat by the
Mediterranean.”

Here is a reminiscence of Huxley written in June, 1922:

“Aldous Huxley had tea with me at the Savoy in February, 1922, when
London was being raided by a series of particularly nasty fogs. All the
salt exhaled by the neighboring sea is sucked in by these fogs, which
apply it patiently to the eyes of London, causing the people sore eyes
and a weary outlook. Out of one of these fogs Huxley stepped into the
writing room of the hotel, where I instantly recognized him. He is very
tall and thin, walks with a visible stoop, and looks about him with the
uncertainty of those who are new to the extreme of near-sightedness. One
of his eyes is almost all white.

“He is very much interested in America and professes to envy us our
exuberance and Henry L. Mencken, which seems to me sheer affectation.
He also entertains the view that the invasion of Europe by American
soldiery during the late war has caused a revolution in European social
intercourse, which is a little more reasonable. I have made a complete
record of this conversation in a manuscript book of mine entitled ‘In
Georgian England,’ which is unlikely ever to find a publisher.

“About him personally I know only what one can gather from a purely
impersonal discussion. He has a slight income, and that was why he was
leaving for Italy with his wife, and that was why he was very anxious
about an American market, and that was why he was writing some plays
which, judging by some play work of his I saw, must be pretty bad. But it
should interest you to know that at a luncheon of young Oxford poets to
which I was invited he was referred to several times as the most learned
man in England.”[40]

Huxley’s personal appearance and agreeable manner have been frequently
described[41] and his conversational gift is not aptly epitomized by
that very famous English novelist who recently said of him: “He looks
clever. He says nothing—he has no need to say anything. It suffices for
him to sit silent, looking clever.” The same novelist, a very penetrating
analyst of literary powers, added: “But this young man is almost the
only ‘white hope’ in English literature at present.” Huxley is at his
best, conversationally, in a small company. One of his close friends is
Frank Swinnerton whose judgment of Huxley’s gifts as a writer strongly
confirms the novelist’s estimate just quoted.


iv

_The Burning Wheel_ (1916) and _The Defeat of Youth_ (1918) were
volumes of poems, as was _Leda_ (1920). Only _Leda_ has been published
in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr.
Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held
at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular
item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly
not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is
something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living
writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.

The title poem of _Leda_ is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic
pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as
a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in
narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s
disguise as a swan:

                    Couched on the flowery ground
    Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
    The swan’s proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
    And over her the swan shook slowly free
    The folded glory of his wings, and made
    A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
    To be her veil and keep her from the shame
    Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.

The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are
among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of
the futility of science:

    But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
    Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
    Is still umbilical to earth.

The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up
to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:

    Bubble-breasted swells the dome
    Of this my spiritual home,
    From whose nave the chandelier,
    Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
    We in the round balcony sit,
    Lean o’er and look into the pit
    Where feed the human bears beneath,
    Champing with their gilded teeth.
    What negroid holiday makes free
    With such priapic revelry?
    What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
    What gods like wooden stalagmites?
    What steam of blood or kidney pie?
    What blasts of Bantu melody?
    Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band
    Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
    And there we sit in blissful calm,
    Quietly sweating palm to palm.

A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special
effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in _Can Grande’s
Castle_—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only
one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the
record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent,
and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental
conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the
one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s
memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of
thinking ill of oneself”:

    “Misery,” he said, “to have no chin,
    Nothing but brains and sex and taste:
    Only omissively to sin,
    Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.”

But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned
around the nursery couplet:

    Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
    As full of apples as can be.

From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds
are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in
turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down
there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the
great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the
midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that
mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s
resembles a shop on Bond Street.


v

Much unwisdom has been uttered concerning Huxley’s prose. The applausive
enthusiasm of the ordinary Huxley devotee may be dismissed without
comment; superficiality (not to say shallowness) may call for pity but
certainly not for censure. A misapprehension of what the author was
doing in _Antic Hay_, though common enough and a more serious matter,
will rectify with time. A comparison of such poetry as “Leda” to Keats
is better ignored than made the subject of delicate differentiation;
but what shall we say of these? “The wittiest man, after Beerbohm, now
writing in English.”[42] “His humor is hot as well as shining.”[43] “He
is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting.”[44] “There’s
no doubt about it. Huxley is brilliant.”[45] Mr. Clement K. Shorter, in
the London Sphere, pronouncing _Mortal Coils_ the best book Huxley had
yet written, said: “There’s a great deal of brilliancy in it, although
one or two of the stories are too chaotic for my taste, and one, ‘Nuns
at Luncheon,’ is too morbid. The best are ‘The Gioconda Smile’ and ‘The
Tillotson Banquet.’... One thing is clear, that Mr. Aldous Huxley has a
career in front of him and some of his gifts are hereditary.... Mrs. T.
H. Huxley had distinct gifts as a poet, and I have a volume of her verse
I highly value. The son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, is a man of varied talent
and the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s talents
have taken a widely different turn, but they should carry him far.” If
they are to carry him much farther, one grieves for Mr. Shorter, already
lagging a little. It was commonly remarked that _Crome Yellow_ derived
from Peacock—a modernized _Headlong Hall_ with the slap-stick eliminated
and the addition of overtones on the (then) current sex motif.

Let us glance at the prose and test some of these characterizations.

_Limbo_ opens with a novelette, “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,”
the account of a young man whose mental hermaphroditism explained the
fact that in certain states he was Pearl Bellairs, a highly sentimental
novelist. The lady takes increasing possession of his faculties; he dies,
a conscientious objector to war service, engaged in writing perfervid
patriotic appeals to the girls and women of England. “Happily Ever
After” deals with an inveterate feminine propensity toward the disguise
of love by allurements. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” is
a historical precedent offered to Cubists and other innovators in art.
“Happy Families,” “Cynthia,” and “The Death of Lully” are all studies in
the immature, adolescent attitude toward sex and love; and “The Bookshop”
is a study in pity.

In _Mortal Coils_, “The Gioconda Smile” deals with Miss Spence, who
poisons her rival quite vainly. “Permutations Among the Nightingales,”
in form a play, is a study in promiscuity. “The Tillotson Banquet,”
though longer, is of the same genre as “The Bookshop” in _Limbo_. “Green
Tunnels” is the episode of a young girl’s heartbreaking disappointment.
“Nuns at Luncheon” is the effective portrait of a writer of fiction whose
god of realism identifies himself to the worshipper only in his aspect of
brute. The original, like most Huxley originals, is a composite. For Mr.
Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as in hitting what is in
the heads.

The novels, _Crome Yellow_ and _Antic Hay_ exhibit the same
characteristics and underlying intention as the shorter pieces; they have
the added value of unity of form (in _Crome Yellow_, of time and place
as well). _Crome Yellow_ is more varied in its emotional presentation
as well as lenient; _Antic Hay_ is sterner, more peremptory—the rapier
driven home. But where is the likeness in all this or in any of this, to
Max Beerbohm? Mr. Huxley is witty—incidentally. His humor, described as
“hot as well as shining,” is no more humor than the work of Mark Twain
in _The Mysterious Stranger_. No doubt his prose is a “finished” prose;
but “fastidious, sophisticated and diverting”! The picture conjured
up by such adjectives is one of an elegant trifler. Yet hardly a man
writing can use such uncompromising, Old-Testamentary speech; and if the
bulk of Huxleyana is diversion, then Savonarola should be considered
with reference to his possibilities as a vaudeville entertainer. And
“brilliant.” It is a word from the outermost darkness, spreading darkness
around.


vi

Perhaps as a result of these singular misapprehensions, the remark was
general, when Huxley’s book of essays, _On the Margin_, appeared, that
here was a volume which might be the work of any gifted young man. Not
quite. The display of learning was rather too great for gifted young
men to manage, as it were, without parade. Yet the very ones who made
the comment—and this writer must number himself among them—could have
learned more concerning what a conventional biographer would love calling
“the real Aldous Huxley” from a re-perusal of _On the Margin_ than from
any other of his books. Said one reviewer: “Mr. Huxley can be fantastic
enough, though his is never the fantasy of the cloudy dreamer, but the
fantasy of a thinker whose mind is enchanted by the logical development
of a happy thought; but his clarity was never better shown than in this
collection.... Even in his lesser marginalia, he has a winning and
graceful conversational manner, whether he be commenting on a quaint
book, on pantomime songs, on the contrast between amorous poetry (of the
second class) in French and in English, or upon boredom as a literary
inspiration through the ages.... The one thing which Mr. Huxley cannot
stand is mistiness and insincerity; and what he means by clarity and
sincerity he amply shows in his essays on Edward Thomas, Sir Christopher
Wren, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and the centenary of Shelley’s death.”[46]
Here is a greater degree of percipience than has been shown since Mr.
Sadleir offered his criticism (now perhaps obsolescent, but penetrating
at the time). In fact, the essay on “Sir Christopher Wren” in _On the
Margin_ is the single most self-illuminatory bit of writing Mr. Huxley
has offered us. Like the great architect of London, Aldous Huxley is a
designer who prizes in his work a quality peculiar and individualizing;
and as with Wren, the quality is not æsthetic but moral.

It is explicit, for all its unobtrusiveness, in the title story of his
new collection, _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_. Comedy and irony
in various proportions are the material of five of the six tales, but
the principal story, in length a novelette, is a charming narrative of
a child in Italy, a child with a beautiful forehead and eyes that could
flash ripples like the sunshine on clear pale lakes. The young Guido
showed an extraordinary penchant for music; but when he was a little
older, like Archimedes, his mind turned to the theorems of mathematics;
it was evident that his genius was larger. The tragedy of his life in
the hands of a grasping woman is told with an affectionate sadness.
Undoubtedly this piece of his fiction, austere and tender, will give to
thousands of readers a new conception of Aldous Huxley. They will perhaps
see that the mind of the child, Guido, is a miniature of the mind of the
one who writes about him; and that there is even a profound likeness
between both those minds and the one of which Emerson wrote:

    The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
    And groined the walls of Christian Rome,
    Wrought in a sad sincerity....


BOOKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY

    1916 _The Burning Wheel._ Published in England only.
    1918 _The Defeat of Youth._ Published in England only.
    1920 _Limbo_
    1920 _Leda_
    1921 _Crome Yellow_
    1922 _Mortal Coils_
    1923 _On the Margin_
    1923 _Antic Hay_
    1924 _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_
             In England: _Little Mexican and Other Stories_.


SOURCES ON ALDOUS HUXLEY

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in
footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL
LITERATURE for the years since 1920.




7. In Every Home: A Chapter for Women


i

In addressing this chapter to you, I do what I can to notify other men
that they may find it uninteresting. Indeed, as you and I know, if all
the truth were told they would find it, many of them, most unpalatable
reading. There are things we need not go into, such as the indubitable
fact that the success of the home depends solely upon the woman. A man
may contribute to it, but he cannot make it; and whatever his behavior,
if the woman is steadfast, he cannot absolutely wreck it. The home is a
form of government and a form of human society. We are familiar with the
larger forms of government men have tried, the best of them only partly
successful. But the home has been a complete success, times innumerable.
Men may call it a benevolent despotism, but the fact remains. It is
perhaps significant that the government of the home is not conducted
by the use of the Australian or the Massachusetts ballot. Women have
accepted the vote and will use it; but their grasp of certain essentials
of society is more clear than men’s, and if the ballot cannot safeguard
the home, and the health and welfare and opportunity of children, then
government will have to be transformed into something that will.

But this is understood; my purpose is simply to tell of a few books which
are, in type, indispensable to the homemaker. The types are really only
two: the cook book and the handbook of motherhood. It so happens that
there is one volume of each type so complete, so thoroughly tested, so
practically perfect that it stands alone on an eminence above all others
of its sort—and the best of the others make no pretensions to do more
than add wings, columns, buttresses, and chapels to the main edifice.
If I could talk about _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ and _The
Care and Feeding of Children_ in the same breath, I should do so. I can,
anyway, talk about them in the same chapter!

_The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first
appeared in 1896 and was most recently revised last year. It has over
800 pages and still is a volume of little more than ordinary size, no
thicker than a rather long novel. The 122 illustrations are so treated
as to be intelligible—and if you have ever tried photographing food, you
will appreciate what this means. The pictures have been used to show what
the words of the text could not make so clear; one sees at a glance the
differences between kidney lamb chops, rib chops and French chops, or
the precise effect of capon in aspic, rather elaborately garnished with
cooked yolks and whites of eggs cut in fancy shapes, pistachio nuts, and
truffles.

The book opens with a simple scientific account of the kinds of food
(food being “anything which nourishes the body”) and follows with a
chapter on cookery including invaluable timetables. After a chapter on
beverages with its recipes there are chapters on everything from bread
to ice cream, from soup to jam and jelly-making and drying fruits. Then
comes a long selection of menus, a chapter on food values with the
necessary tables, and a forty-eight page index which has all the utility
of an absolute, all-inclusive bill-of-fare.

The chief thing, of course, is that every teaspoonful and every direction
in the book is exact, and standard. Nor, without going into the more
recondite French cookery, or into special Italian, Spanish, German and
other foreign dishes, is it possible to think of any dish which _The
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ omits. The variety of each kind of dish
is often extraordinary. For example, I have just counted seventy hot
puddings. In every case there is first the table of ingredients, then
the simple directions. If a personal word will add anything to the force
of what has been said, I will say that the superb cook who honored me
by becoming my wife tells me that in no case when following _The Boston
Cooking-School Cook Book_ formula has she failed to cook with success.

Specialized, or partly specialized, cook books are many, and one of the
best and most recent is _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_, by Fannie Ferber Fox,
with the assistance of Lavinia S. Schwartz. Mrs. Fox is a sister of Edna
Ferber, and the novelist has written an introduction for _Fannie Fox’s
Cook Book_ which has all the richly human interest of her own fiction.
In a paragraph which need hurt no feelings, Miss Ferber points out the
tendency to over-emphasis in one or another direction which characterizes
the cookery of most lands; and she gives with humorous eloquence her
personal tribute to the toothsome torte, that cake of rich and crumbling
particles which is included in Mrs. Fox’s recipes. This is a cook book
that covers all kinds of foods but is distinctive by its preservation of
the finest recipes from Jewish cookery.

Another valuable addition to the kitchen bookshelf is Bertha E. L.
Stockbridge’s _Practical Cook Book_, in which a notable feature is the
great number of practical suggestions for menus.


ii

_The Care and Feeding of Children_ appeared in 1894 and was also revised
last year. More than a million mothers have used it, and beyond question
it has saved thousands of lives in infancy. Within the last half-dozen
years, a generation which was raised on the book has, in turn, begun to
raise its own children with its aid. It constituted its author, Dr. L.
Emmett Holt, the foremost authority on babies in America; and as the
years passed he returned to the book, in its various revisions, the
fruit of a wonderful experience which its prestige had brought to him.
Physicians have for years bought _The Care and Feeding of Children_ in
quantity to present to their patients. The hundreds of questions that
every mother must have answered are all answered in this marvelous work.
Bathing, nursing, artificial feeding, changes in food, substitutes for
milk, under-nourishment, health habits, weaning, diet after weaning,
the training of older children, children’s diseases—nothing is left
out. This, to be sure, is largely possible because of the nation-wide
and prolonged use of the book, and the constant additions and slight
reconstructions it has undergone. The book has always been kept of handy
size and at a low price. The thought of what Dr. Holt’s book has done and
is doing tempts to eloquence; but the only eloquence which is tolerable
is the eloquence of the immense fact. We talk about services to humanity;
but the writing and publishing of this book was possibly the greatest
service to humanity in our time.

_The Home Care of Sick Children_, by Dr. Emelyn Lincoln Coolidge, is
likely to be as helpful to mothers who have the care and feeding of sick
children as Dr. Holt’s book has been to mothers generally. Dr. Coolidge
lived for many years in the Babies’ Hospital, New York, and worked there
under the personal direction of Dr. Holt. As editor of the department on
babies of the Ladies’ Home Journal she has had an enormous correspondence
with mothers throughout America and even in foreign countries. And _The
Home Care of Sick Children_ has one great merit: it does not stop where
most other books of its kind stop, with: “Give a dose of castor oil, and
call a doctor.” It tells in every instance what a mother can and should
do, and it invariably tells when to call the doctor in. Not only does
it avoid calling the doctor unnecessarily, but it gives many detailed
instructions that a physician generally has not time to give. Recipes to
tempt the sick child’s appetite, amusement, clothing and the hygiene of
the sick-room are all dwelt upon.

There is a book with which it would be wise to precede Dr. Holt’s.
_Healthy Mothers_ is by Dr. S. Josephine Baker, consulting director,
Children’s Bureau, United States Department of Labor, an authority on
babies, whose articles regularly appear in the Ladies’ Home Journal and
who is constantly asked for advice by women throughout the country.
_Healthy Mothers_ deals almost entirely with the mother’s care of
herself, and tells explicitly how she may best meet her responsibility
to her baby, how she may have better health for herself, and the finer
mental attitude that comes with physical well-being. The relation of a
mother to her unborn child implies a responsibility greater than that
entailed in any other human relationship. It is very largely within
the power of the mother to determine not only her own condition and
future health, but to decide whether or not her baby is to be healthy
and strong. _Healthy Mothers_, without going into technical discussion,
sufficiently explains the general course of pregnancy and childbirth so
that the mother may have an intelligent understanding of how to care for
herself, safeguard her child, and make every requisite preparation.


iii

And the growing child? _Child Training_, by Angelo Patri, is the book for
parents who look unhappily at the child and ask themselves despondently:
“What in the world makes him do that?” Or, “What is the matter with
her now?” Or, “Why does he disobey me?” Or, “Why does she have such
bad manners?” Or, “Why doesn’t he study?” And, at one or another time,
practically all parents are faced with these questions.

Angelo Patri has been training children, and helping fathers and mothers
to train them, for twenty-five years. He is principal of Public School
45, New York. This school faces a garden centered about a sun dial and
fed by a tiny greenhouse. Across the street is a whole block given over
to a playground, its cinder floor padded firm by the play-winged feet of
thousands of children who play on it every day. The school is unusual
in having a great variety of shops and workrooms as well as the usual
classrooms; a swimming pool; and a library. It is constantly visited by
teachers from all over the world, men and women who are anxious to see
the principal and talk with him. Some of them have heard him talk to
audiences, big and little; some have read his widely published articles
on children; others merely know of the remarkable way in which he has
brought home and school together, so that parents constantly come to him
to work out the problem of their child.

There are about two hundred chapters or sections—chapterettes, rather—in
Angelo Patri’s _Child Training_. Each of them is so short that it can
be read in five minutes or less. Each carries pointed wisdom about the
child, and not only for the father or mother but for the uncle, aunt,
teacher, or anyone having to do with children. Very often the point is
conveyed by an anecdote—there are a good many smiles and chuckles in the
book. But Mr. Patri can speak out with definiteness. Perhaps his finest
wisdom is shown in a point that he makes more than once: children do
certain things that bother us because it is time for them to do these
things. When this is true, Mr. Patri is bent on showing just what should
be done to help the youngster over a hard place. _Talks to Mothers_ is
another treasury of Mr. Patri’s helpful wisdom.

Another new book on child training which will appeal to all those who
believe in the power of suggestion is _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_,
by R. C. Waters, lecturer in English to the Nancy School of Applied
Psychology. This is a practical book on the application of Emil Coué’s
method. The technique to be used is explained clearly and simply. The
possibilities of Coué’s method of auto-suggestion when applied to the
correction of habits, to disease, to education and play are set forth and
examples are cited. _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_ has been translated
into French by Mme. Coué and has been adopted by the Coué School as a
text.


iv

Every home should have one or more books on keeping well. The old
family medical book, a chamber of horrors, has been made obsolete by
a few general books with, thank heaven, a greatly different emphasis.
But among recent books on the art of keeping well, I know of none more
satisfactory than Dr. S. M. Rinehart’s _The Commonsense of Health_. Dr.
Rinehart, who is the husband of Mary Roberts Rinehart, was a general
practitioner in Pittsburgh for over twenty years. Later he was in charge
of tuberculosis hospitals in western Pennsylvania, and during the war
he was put in charge of all army tuberculosis hospitals in the United
States. Recently he has been in the United States Public Health Service.
His book is wholly popular in character, cheerful, good-natured, and not
in the least afraid of an occasional joke. It is precisely the thing for
general reading by both sexes at all ages. Common and worrisome ailments,
such as colds, are dealt with, as well as certain fairly common and
serious diseases, like pneumonia and tuberculosis. But the range of the
book is wide, and there are discussions of nerves, how hard one should
work, and besetting fears. The information is sound and the style is
entertaining. One class of unfortunate will be particularly helped by the
book—the unhappy man or woman termed by Dr. Rinehart a “symptom hunter.”
We each know at least one!


v

I cannot close this chapter without a short word about books and the
home. You who make the home, you women who are overwhelmingly the book
readers of America, know how necessary books are to make the home
complete. Read yourself, and discuss what you read. Never urge or compel
a child to read a book. If you read the right books and talk about them
afterward (they ought to move you to talk about them) the boy or girl
will read them also. Buy books. In general, never buy them in “sets.” You
ought to know an author, even a classic author, a little better than to
have to do that. Keep abreast of the new books—one of the easiest things
in the world to do, and one of the most fascinating. It is fair that you
should ask that at least as much money go into the purchase of books for
the home as goes into the purchase of magazines, or radio apparatus, or
as is expended in mere diversions such as the picture shows. Last year
thirty cents per person was spent for books in America—far too little.
You can change all that, and no simple change that I can think of will
pay you better.


BOOKS FOR THE HOMEMAKER

_Choice Recipes for Clever Cooks_, by Lucy G. Allen. More than 500
original recipes for those who already know how to cook and appreciate
the best in food and flavor. By the director of the Boston School of
Cookery. Illustrated.

_Table Service_, by Lucy G. Allen. A concise exposition of the waitress’s
duties by the director of the Boston School of Cookery. New revised
edition, with illustrations and diagrams.

_The Candy Cook Book_, by Alice Bradley. A new edition, revised,
containing over 300 recipes and covering the subject completely. By the
principal of Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery. Illustrated.

_One-Piece Dinners_, by Mary D. Chambers. Recipes for dinners where the
meat, vegetables and other accessories are cooked all together and make
a complete, well-balanced and sufficient meal. Directions are also given
for optional salads and fruit desserts. Illustrated.

_Cooking for Two: A Handbook for Young Housekeepers_, by Janet McKenzie
Hill. Instructions for young housekeepers and a collection of practical
recipes for two, grouped according to food values. Fully illustrated.

_Colette’s Best Recipes: A Book of French Cookery_, by Marie Jacques.
This new cook book, by a Breton whose culinary achievements have won
her renown in France, contains recipes for the most delicious and
palate-tickling dishes, from French consomme to the French pastries, of
crispness or creaminess unsurpassed. Illustrated.

_The Science of Eating_, by Alfred W. McCann. A comprehensive book by an
authority on foods; what to eat and why.

_What to Eat and How to Prepare It_, by Elizabeth A. Monaghan. This
combines very definite information on food values with many recipes and
instructions for cooking.

_What to Drink_, by Bertha E. L. Stockbridge. Recipes for several hundred
beverages—ades, punches, fizzes, shrubs, milk drinks, icecreams, sundaes,
sherbets, etc.

_Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent_, by Fannie Merritt
Farmer. A book for those whose duty it is to care for the sick, and
of equal importance to those who see in correct nutrition the way of
preventing much of the illness about us. Important chapters on infant
and child feeding and suggestions as to diet in special diseases. By the
author of _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_. Illustrated.

_Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making_, by Janet McKenzie Hill. “Aims
to present the latest ideas on the subject using the methods found to
be simplest and shortest by the experiments of the U. S. Department of
Agriculture, State universities, and cooking experts.”—Booklist of the
American Library Association. Illustrated.

_Marketing and Housework Manual_, by S. Agnes Donham. Clear and concise
information on these everyday subjects.

_Spending the Family Income_, by S. Agnes Donham. “A guide to wise use
of the family or personal income by means of a carefully thought-out
and tested budget. Principles are laid down which apply equally well to
large and small incomes.”—Booklist of the American Library Association.
Illustrated with eight pages of charts in color.

_The Prospective Mother_, by J. Morris Slemons, M.D. Written especially
for women who have no knowledge of medicine by a physician who has made
this subject his specialty. Food, exercise, clothing, the adaptation of
daily work, and recreation are fully covered.

_Healthy Babies_, by S. Josephine Baker, M.D., Consulting Director,
Children’s Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor. The methods and advice
given are intended to be used in keeping babies well, from the minute
they are born until they are past the babyhood stage. The book shows
how mother-love can be directed into the wisest and sanest channels. It
contains three sets of baby record forms. Illustrated.

_Healthy Children_, by S. Josephine Baker, M.D., Consulting Director,
Children’s Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor. Deals with the period
of childhood between babyhood and school age. As its purpose is to
accentuate health, it shows the mother how she may give the child of
pre-school age the same health care available for the baby. Illustrated.

_The Mothercraft Manual_, by Mary L. Read. A young mother’s guide written
by the former director of the School of Mothercraft, Peoria. Some of the
chapters are on heredity and eugenics, the care and feeding of children,
home nursing, education of the child, games, toys, and story telling for
children. Illustrated.

_Nutrition and Growth in Children_, by William R. P. Emerson, M.D. Dr.
Emerson has won nation-wide recognition by his pioneer work in organizing
nutrition clinics in American cities. His study of the mal-nourished
child is of the highest importance alike to the mother, the social worker
and the public official. Illustrated.

_How to Know Your Child_, by Miriam Finn Scott. “A book that should
be in every home where there are children. It is comprehensive and
authoritative, and represents years of experience and study by a
foremost expert. The very best manual on its subject obtainable at any
price.”—Ladies’ Home Journal.

_A Text-Book of Nursing_, by Clara S. Weeks-Shaw. A book on home nursing
which gives the non-professional nurse full directions for the hygiene
of the sick-room, bathing, observance of symptoms, medicines and their
administration, disinfection, surgical nursing, the care of sick
children, etc. Illustrated.

_Sewing and Textiles_, by Annabel Turner. All the stitches, seams and
finishes which go to make up the fundamentals of good sewing. Patching,
sewing and darning are taught on samplers, but otherwise the methods
are applied on useful garments. Materials are also studied and tests
for shoddy are given. The author is instructor in home economics in the
University of Wisconsin.

_Tinkering With Tools_, by Henry H. Saylor. Comment on tools and their
care, with many suggestions as to their use for those who like to set
their hands to such crafts as woodworking, painting, plumbing, masonry,
electric wiring, etc. With illustrations and diagrams.




8. A Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim


i

The other evening I picked up a novel called _The Lighted Way_, which,
although it was published in May, 1912, I hadn’t chanced ever to read.
The page blurred slightly before my eyes, I think, because in going back
over it some of the names and particulars seemed entirely changed. But
this, as I took it in first, was the way it ran:

“Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, sole proprietor of the firm of E. Phillips
Oppenheim & Nobody, wholesale entertainers of London and Europe, paused
suddenly on his way from his private office to the street. There was
something which until that second had entirely slipped his memory. It
was not his title, for that, tastefully chosen, was already under his
arm. Nor was it the Plot, for that, together with the first chapter, was
sticking out of his overcoat pocket, the shape of which it completely
ruined. As a matter of fact, it was more important than either of
these—it was a commission from his conscience.

“Very slowly he retraced his steps until he stood outside the
glass-enclosed cage where twelve of the hardest-worked clerks in London
bent over their ledgers and invoicing. With his forefinger—a fat, pudgy
forefinger—he tapped upon a pane of glass, and an anxious errand boy
bolted through the doorway.

“‘Tell Mr. Reader to step this way,’ his employer ordered.

“Mr. Reader heard the message and came hurrying out. He was an undersized
man, with somewhat prominent eyes concealed by gold-rimmed spectacles.
He was possessed of extraordinary zest for the details of the business,
and was withal an expert and careful adviser. Hence his hold upon the
confidence of his employer.

“The latter addressed him with a curious and altogether unusual
hesitation in his manner.

“‘Mr. Reader,’ he began, ‘there is a matter—a little matter—upon which
I—er—wish to consult you.’

“‘Those American serial rights——’

“‘Nothing to do with business at all,’ Mr. Oppenheim interrupted,
ruthlessly. ‘A little private matter.’

“‘Indeed, sir?’”

Now as I say, at this point I went back and found to my bewilderment at
first, but perfect satisfaction afterward, that Mr. Oppenheim seemed to
be Mr. Weatherley, a worthy provisioner; the title, an umbrella; the
Plot, a copy of the London Times; and the alarming commission from Mr.
Oppenheim’s conscience, a possibly no less embarrassing commission from
Mr. Weatherley’s wife. Thereupon everything went smoothly and excitingly
through thirty-seven chapters. But afterward it occurred to me that
perhaps, after all, my blunder, visual or mental, was not an unnatural
one. Who has not had in his mind’s eye a picture of Mr. Oppenheim with a
Plot, or Plots, bulging from his pockets, and with as many titles in his
mental wardrobe as most men have neckties? And what one of his readers
has not felt himself, time and again, personally summoned by the author
to the consideration of a matter—a little matter—a quite private matter
just then upon the author’s conscience....


ii

It is the secret of Mr. Oppenheim’s success, not detected as such by his
readers, very probably not a trifle of which he himself is consciously
aware. This engaging gift of confiding something, this easy air, this
informality of his beginnings, disarms us and interests us as could no
elaborately staged effort to arrest our attention and intrigue our minds.
Even when he commences his story dramatically with such a confrontation
as that which opens his _The Wrath to Come_, the air of naturalness is
upon the scene. And the source of this effect? It comes from the fact
that Mr. Oppenheim is imparting to you all that he himself knows at
the given moment. Yes, literally. For our notion of him as a man with
plots distending his pockets is entirely a mistaken notion. He has no
plots; at least, he has no ready-made plots; he does not, so to say,
plot his plots. “Just the first chapter, and an inkling of something
to follow,” was his answer to some one who asked him how much of his
leading character he saw when he began a novel.[47] What other method,
when you stop to reflect upon it, would be possible for the author of
eighty-six published novels? Certainly no one could map out his tales,
even in essentials, and then write them to that number, not if he were
to do the plots one by one, as occasion arose. He would be a slave,
and the book, as written, would soon come to be lifeless. Nor, by such
a method, would thirty-eight years afford time. In thirty-eight years
the pace would be lost. Only spontaneity is capable of guaranteeing
such a record as stands to Mr. Oppenheim’s credit. “Two or three people
in a crowded restaurant may arouse my interest, and the atmosphere is
compelling. I start weaving a story around them—the circumstances and the
people gradually develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual
thoughts about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and
their surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere—then
the rest is easy.”[48] And again:

“Writing for the movies is a ghastly business. I speak from experience.
I shall never do it again. The picture people came to me and said, ‘Next
time you have a novel in your head, why not, instead of writing 80,000
words, write a 5,000-word synopsis and let us have it? Then write your
novel from the synopsis.’

“Well, they paid well and I did it. I wrote the synopsis first and then
set to work on the novel. I have never had a harder job in my life. Some
writers, no doubt, do sketch out their plots beforehand, but I never
work that way. When I start a story I never know just how it is going to
end. All I have to start with is an idea. As I go along the idea grows
and develops. So do the characters. I sort of live with them through the
story and work out their salvation as it goes along. It is like a game.

“But when you write for the movies you have to reverse the process. In my
case, it is fatal. Novels, even the kind that I write—and they are solely
for amusement—must have some soul, something that gives them a human
quality. This the author puts into the story as he goes along. When,
however, he writes a synopsis and then sits down to enlarge and expand
it into a novel, the spell is broken. He has a cold and rigid plan to
follow. It nearly killed me to novelize my first scenario.”[49]

He dictates his novels, revising the sheets as they come from the
typewriter, sometimes re-dictating a passage or chapter. In summer he
works outdoors; in winter he may pace up and down his study. “Many a
time, earlier in life, when I used to write my stories with my own
hand, I have found that my ideas would come so much faster than my
fingers could work that I have prayed for some more speedy method of
transmission. My present method is not only an immense relief to me, but
it enables me to turn out far more work than would have been possible
by any other means.”[50] Story-writing, he believes, is an original
instinct, “just as it is an original instinct with a sporting dog to
sniff about in every bush he passes for a rabbit. One writes stories
because if one left them in the brain one would be subject to a sort of
mental indigestion. As to plots, there are only about a score in the
world, and when you have used them all, from A to Z”—which he pronounced
“Zed,” for this was in an after-dinner speech—“you can turn around and
use them from Z to A.”[51] A favorite illustration with him is taken
from a day’s walk in London. “You can take the same walk every day in
the year and you will meet a different crowd of people. These people
contain the backgrounds of 365 stories a year.” One person a day will
keep the typewriter in play, for “I create one more or less interesting
personality, try to think of some dramatic situation in which he or
she might be placed, and use that as the opening of a nebulous chain of
events.”

What he said of himself at 55 is still, two years later, true without
abatement. “Even if, like one of the heroes of fiction, I should make a
million dollars out of a ten-cent piece in Wall Street, I should still
continue to write stories so long as I can sit in an easy chair and my
voice will carry as far as my secretary before a typewriter.” Which is
reminiscent of Hugh Walpole’s remark in conversation the same year, that
he was perfectly sure if a beam fell on his head and made him imbecile,
he would continue to write novels for the pleasure of writing them.


iii

Mr. Oppenheim was born in 1866 and went from school into his father’s
leather business at Leicester—but he had started writing stories before
that. He began to write them at fifteen, and showed his first to the
headmaster of the school, “who, instead of giving me the birching I
deserved, wished me luck and encouraged me to persevere.” The leather
business was successful and was bought up by Blumenthals, a large
American and Paris leather firm, who appointed young Oppenheim their
director at Leicester. “His experience in that trade,” asserts Mr. A.
St. John Adcock in his _Gods of Modern Grub Street_,[52] “has proved
immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his
tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had
his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought
him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the
proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt,
for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather
company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of
those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely
in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner
of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers,
some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a
habit of weaving stories around the more striking personalities in the
cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Dead Rat.”

He was eighteen years old when his first short story was published,
and only twenty when his first novel appeared. Before he was thirty he
married Miss Elsie Hopkins, of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mr. Oppenheim and
his wife called their cottage in Sheringham, Norfolk, “Winnisimmet,”
which was the Indian name of her Massachusetts home town. The house
overlooked the North Sea. Perhaps this detail, as much as another,
led the author to the construction in the years before the world war
of that series of stories in which, as an element of his plots, Mr.
Oppenheim kept repeating Germany in the rôle of the villain. Legend
has it that during the war itself his name was on the list of Britons
to be shot if captured, although lists of that sort are usually myths.
“There was one period,” he has commented since, “in the autumn of 1918,
when a well-directed bomb upon the Ministry of Information might have
cleared the way for the younger novelists at the expense of Arnold
Bennett, John Buchan, Dion Calthrop, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole
and myself.”[53] He visited America in 1911 and again in 1922, when
Mrs. Oppenheim came with him. On the latter occasion he made by far the
wittiest comment of any visitor in reply to the usual question: what he
thought of prohibition. “My only fear,” with a smile, “is that it may
make me a drunkard.”[54] Those who met the victim of this reasonable
dread saw a sturdy, broad-shouldered figure developed by air and outdoor
exercise; and those who played golf with him respected his handicap of
seven strokes only. His large, florid face seemed to kindle into laughter
from the constant humorous gleam in his blue eyes. Among his own titles
he confessed to a fondness for _A Maker of History_, _The Double Life
of Mr. Alfred Burton_, _The Great Impersonation_ and—perhaps influenced
a little by its then impending publication—_The Great Prince Shan_.
At this time he was subjected to one of those sets of questions from
the answers to which one may construct a totally wrong picture of the
person. However, we may note that his idea of happiness was tied up with
his work, and that he gave as his notion of unhappiness, “No ideas.”
His particular aversion, he said, was fog.[55] Fog? Yet he has said: “I
would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my days in London. Half
a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants,
the people whom one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for
the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.”[56]
He describes himself as no great traveller; he has, though, been in most
European countries, and he pretty regularly spends his winters at his
villa in Cagnes on the Riviera. He divides his time in England between
the house in Norfolk and his rooms in London.


iv

Mr. Oppenheim does not take himself seriously in the rôle of prophet.
“Large numbers of people have noted the fact that in certain of my
earlier novels I prophesied wars and world events that actually did come
to pass. In _The Mysterious Mr. Sabin_, I pictured the South African
Boer war seven years before it occurred. In _The Mischief Maker_, _The
Great Secret_, and _A Maker of History_ I based plots upon the German
menace and the great war that did actually occur. The romance of secret
diplomacy has enthralled me for years. In writing my novels I have
had no particular advance knowledge of world affairs. I have reasoned
to myself, ‘This nation is aiming toward this,’ and ‘That nation is
aiming toward that’; then I have invented my puppets representing these
conflicting ambitions and set them in action. It was the story first of
all that appealed to me, and not any burning desire to express political
convictions and lay bare great conspiracies.”[57]

He takes himself seriously only in the rôle of entertainer, of
storyteller. “If you tell him you like his books,” says Gerald
Cumberland, in _Written in Friendship_, “he is frankly pleased; but
if you pay him high-flown compliments he will begin to yawn.” There
need be no paying of compliments in a consideration of Mr. Oppenheim’s
work, but no analysis of his method could fairly withhold considerable
praise. We have spoken of his confidential, easy manner with the reader
as a secret of his toward establishing plausibility for the things he
is about to tell. But there is more to be noted. Like the best writers
of his sort among his countrymen—and like far too few Americans in
the same field—he is unhurried. He is never afraid to pause for the
amplification of sentiment, the communication of the moment’s feeling,
a bit of characterization or a passage of pure description. And these
are the matters which give an effect of rondure, and not infrequently
touches of charm, to a story of whatever sort. At the moment I can
think of only one American—Hulbert Footner—who has had the wisdom, or
perhaps the temperament, to follow British practice in this by no means
negligible affair of workmanship; and it is significant that Mr. Footner,
an American, has so far had a better reception in England than in his own
country. Apparently we value this certain leisureliness when it comes to
us from abroad, for Mr. Footner, re-exported to us, is making distinct
headway. What the American writer generally does is to accelerate his
action to the pitch of implausibility (if he only knew it). This does
very well, and may be indispensable, for all I know, with the readers of
a certain type of American magazines; unfortunately the habitual buyers
and readers of books demand something more careful.

The other interesting point of excellence in Oppenheim’s work derives
from his method of spontaneity. He once said: “The lure of creation
never loses its hold. Personally I cannot account for the fact. Perhaps
it springs from the inextinguishable hope that one day there will be
born the most wonderful idea that has ever found its way into the brain
of a writer of fiction.”[58] For the creator, the superlative never
arrives; but certainly for the reader Mr. Oppenheim has materialized more
than one wonderful idea. _The Great Impersonation_, deservedly one of
his most successful books, is a fairly recent illustration. But I would
like to call particularly to attention an earlier story, both for what
seems to me to be its astonishing merit and for its interesting light on
the method of spontaneity which is Oppenheim’s special technique. This
is _The Way of These Women_, now ten years old. That it still sells is
evidence that its merit is recognized; that one never hears mention of it
in any offhand mention of its author’s work shows that the recognition is
by no means wide enough.

Sir Jermyn Annerley, a young man of fine taste and high honor, though
certainly inclined toward priggishness, is a playwright of the
intellectual type. Sybil Cluley, the actress who has aroused London by
her performance in Jermyn’s drama, comes to Annerley Court as his weekend
guest. They are to discuss his new play in which Sybil is to appear.
Aynesworth, Marquis of Lakenham and Jermyn’s second cousin, chances
to pay a visit at the same time. Another distant cousin of Jermyn’s,
Lucille, who has divorced a French nobleman, is Jermyn’s hostess. Lucille
is in love with Jermyn. During the visit Jermyn surrenders to his love
for Sybil; they announce their engagement to the others. Sybil is
obviously afraid of Lakenham to a degree not to be accounted for by his
reputation for excesses, and after some time Lakenham confirms and shares
with Lucille his knowledge of a discreditable episode in Sybil’s career
before her success on the stage.

Lakenham is murdered at Annerley Court. Suspicion points directly to
Sybil, but Lucille has aided Sybil and Jermyn in the removal of very
incriminating evidence. As the price for protecting Sybil, Lucille
requires Jermyn to marry her within two months.

The story is developed with admirable intervals and suspense. The point
of the first quarter of the book is Lakenham’s knowledge of something in
Sybil’s past, and Lucille’s determination to fight Sybil for Jermyn. Then
Lakenham is killed. Almost half the book lies between the murder and its
solution. It is evident that as he wrote Mr. Oppenheim saw (what he may
not have grasped at the beginning) that Lucille was his most striking
character. As the novel proceeded he became absorbed in the possibilities
Lucille offered; if, as may well be the case, he vaguely contemplated
solving the murder and bringing Sybil and Jermyn happily together for a
quick “curtain,” he deliberately abandoned so conventional and easy an
ending. Jermyn and Lucille are married under the hateful terms Lucille
has imposed as the price of Sybil’s safety.

It is this that lifts _The Way of These Women_ out of the run of Mr.
Oppenheim’s work. Did Sybil kill Lakenham? If she did not, who did she
think killed him? If Lucille used fraud with Jermyn, why not annul the
marriage for fraud and bring down the curtain? (And in putting these
questions I decline responsibility for your wrong inferences as to the
answers.) In any case, the solution of the murder would seem to end the
story. But something larger and more fateful, something of very near
universal significance, had by this time lodged in Mr. Oppenheim’s mind.
The “wonderful idea” had come. The last quarter of _The Way of These
Women_ is the material, intrinsically, for a very great novel. And Mr.
Oppenheim handles it with touches of greatness. He could, of course, by
slashing off most he had already written, by adopting some such technical
device as W. B. Maxwell used in _The Devil’s Garden_, have made it a
masterpiece, for his knowledge of his theme and his appreciation of
its character are plain to be seen. I do not know whether this novel
has ever been dramatized, but it is incredible that it should not have
been dramatized; the possibilities of Lucille are greater than those of
Camille, for they are less artificial and they are not either sentimental
or cheap. Why did Mr. Oppenheim not rework it; why did he let it go as
the book is, a mixture? Of several possible extenuations, I think the
best is that by leaving it alone he probably was able to take the reader
who sought merely to be entertained into a very high place whither that
reader could not have been lured directly. And it is an elevation to
which the writer of ready-made plots never leads.


BOOKS BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

NOTE: The reader is referred to the bibliography by Mr. Hulings C. Brown
appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 5 May 1923. Mr. Brown’s
arrangement of the titles is alphabetical (including both English and
American titles). His list includes Mr. Oppenheim’s five serials of book
length, not given below because not published in book form. Mr. Brown
also gives the publisher (except in a few cases where no record exists).
In the list below books that have been published in America are starred;
those that have been published in America and were recorded by Mr.
Brown as in print are double-starred. Books written under the pseudonym
“Anthony Partridge” are so indicated.

    1887 _Expiation_
    1894 _A Monk of Cruta_
    1895 **_A Daughter of the Marionis._ First title in America
             was _To Win the Love He Sought_.
    1895 _The Peer and the Woman_
    1896 _False Evidence_
    1896 _A Modern Prometheus_
    1896 *_The Mystery of Mr. Bernard Brown_
    1896 _The Wooing of Fortune_
    1897 _The Amazing Judgment_
    1898 *_As a Man Lives._ First title in America was _The Yellow House_.
    1898 _A Daughter of Astrea_
    1898 *_Mysterious Mr. Sabin_
    1899 *_Mr. Marx’s Secret_
    1899 _The Postmaster of Market Deighton_
    1899 **_The Man and His Kingdom_
    1900 *_A Millionaire of Yesterday_
    1900 *_The World’s Great Snare_
    1901 **_The Survivor_
    1902 **_A Sleeping Memory_
             In England: _The Great Awakening_
    1902 *_Enoch Strone_
             In England: _Master of Men_
    1903 *_The Traitors_
    1903 **_A Prince of Sinners_
    1903 **_The Yellow Crayon_
    1904 **_Anna the Adventuress_
    1904 **_The Betrayal_
    1905 **_A Maker of History_
    1905 **_The Master Mummer_
    1906 *_A Lost Leader_
    1906 _The Tragedy of Andrea_
    1907 **_The Malefactor_
             In England: _Mr. Wingrave, Millionaire_
    1907 *_Berenice_
    1908 *_The Avenger_
             In England: _The Conspirators_
    1908 **_The Great Secret_
             In England: _The Secret_
    1908 *_The Distributors_, “by Anthony Partridge”
             In England: _Ghosts of Society_. Another title in America
             was _The Plunderers_
    1908 *_Passers-By_, “by Anthony Partridge”
    1909 *_The Governors_
    1909 **_The Missioner_
    1909 **_Jeanne of the Marshes_
    1909 *_The Kingdom of Earth_, “by Anthony Partridge”
             In England: _The Black Watcher_
    1910 *_The Long Arm of Manister_
             In England: _The Long Arm_
    1910 **_The Illustrious Prince_
    1910 **_The Lost Ambassador_
             In England: _The Missing Delora_
    1911 *_The Moving Finger_
             In England: _A Falling Star_
    1911 *_The Golden Web_, “by Anthony Partridge”
    1911 **_Havoc_
    1912 **_Peter Ruff and the Double Four_
             In England: _The Double Four_
    1912 **_The Lighted Way_
    1912 *_Those Other Days_ (short stories)
    1912 *_The Court of St. Simon_, “by Anthony Partridge”
    1913 **_The Mischief Maker_
    1913 *_For the Queen_ (short stories)
    1913 _Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures_
    1913 **_The Tempting of Tavernake_
             In England: _The Temptation of Tavernake_
    1914 _The Amazing Partnership_
    1914 *_The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_
    1914 **_The Way of These Women_
    1915 *_An Amiable Charlatan_
             In England: _The Game of Liberty_
    1915 **_Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo_
    1915 *_The Black Box_
    1915 **_A People’s Man_
    1916 _The Mysteries of the Riviera_
    1916 **_The Vanished Messenger_
    1917 **_The Hillman_
    1917 **_The Kingdom of the Blind_
    1918 **_The Double Traitor_
    1918 **_The Cinema Murder_
             In England: _The Other Romilly_
    1918 **_The Pawns Count_
    1918 **_The Zeppelin’s Passenger_
             In England: _Mr. Lessingham Goes Home_
    1919 **_The Wicked Marquis_
    1919 **_The Curious Quest_
    1920 **_The Great Impersonation_
    1920 **_The Box with the Broken Seals_
             In England: _The Strange Case of Mr. Jocelyn Thew_
    1920 **_The Devil’s Paw_
    1920 _Aaron Rod, Diviner_
    1920 _Ambrose Lavendale, Diplomat_
    1920 _Hon. Algernon Knox, Detective_
    1921 **_Jacob’s Ladder_
    1921 **_The Profiteers_
    1921 **_Nobody’s Man_
    1922 **_The Great Prince Shan_
    1922 **_The Evil Shepherd_
    1923 **_The Seven Conundrums_
    1923 **_The Mystery Road_
    1923 **_Michael’s Evil Deeds_
    1924 **_The Wrath to Come_
    1924 **_The Passionate Quest_


SOURCES ON E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

In addition to those referred to in the text and in footnotes, the reader
is urged to consult the full-page interview and account appearing in the
Boston Evening Transcript for 8 March 1924 (“Oppenheim the Master Maker
of Plots,” by James Walter Smith). This is by all odds the best and most
interesting single article. It quotes Mr. Oppenheim’s amanuensis as
saying that he dictates 5,000 words a day on good days and about 4,000
words on an average day—a phenomenal speed. “In summer he dictates out of
doors and I take it down in my note-book. In winter, he dictates direct
to the machine. He likes a low easy-chair while working. It’s amazing to
me how sure he is in his dictation, and what a grip he has on his plots.
Occasionally he has two or more stories moving at the same time, but no
matter what the number of characters or of the places where the action
occurs, he rarely becomes confused. When he is held up, sometimes by a
trifling detail, or by the more important one of getting a character out
of a difficulty, he simply says: ‘Three dots’ ... like that, and moves
on. This may happen several times in the course of a sitting, and I
usually can divine, as the story proceeds, when I’m going to hear that
‘three dots.’ When the dictation is finished, he goes out for a game
of golf, perhaps. Then next day he takes up the typescript where the
suspension points appear and unerringly fills in the bits which bothered
him. This would be easy if the case were single, but where there are
several ‘three dot’ cases it demands skill and concentration to get out
of the bunker.”




9. G. Stanley Hall, Psychologist


i

In describing a novel course he gave at Clark University and which he
called psychogenesis—the birth and evolution of the soul—G. Stanley Hall
remarks in his autobiography, _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_:
“Interest, like steam in an engine, must be developed over a large
surface, although when put to work it has to be applied to a small one.”
That is true of this chapter. The large surfaces of Dr. Hall’s long and
unusual career can be depended on, I think, to develop interest in my
reader; although whether that interest will apply itself to psychology,
methods of teaching, child study, or the central figure of the Christian
faith is uncertain and perhaps immaterial. A developed interest, before
passing on to any of these things, does well to linger for some time on
the man himself, who had so many vicissitudes and whose account of his
life, outside and inside, is the best of a certain type since Benjamin
Franklin’s, which it most nearly resembles.

Both Franklin and Dr. Hall were Yankees; both were much abroad and
transcended their Puritan beginnings on the intellectual side, though
in the sphere of conduct each was a tree inclined as the twig had been
bent. Both were zestful of every human experience; each alike, though
for a somewhat differing purpose, has gone far and deep in the matter of
self-examination, writing down his confessions and conclusions for the
world to read. If Franklin is more clear and practical and personal, Dr.
Hall takes the reader to greater levels and to vistas of

    “fresh woods and pastures new.”

His _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is a book of more than
ordinary account simply for this reason. It has distinct faults. Its
material is a little diffuse and not too well organized; it is far from
lucid in places and lapses into technical language where it need not do
so. In addition, Dr. Hall’s particular interests are allowed to override
the literary, and sometimes the human, interest. The introductory chapter
perplexes and dismays the ordinary reader with a series of conclusions
couched in scientific lingo; the second chapter repels him with its
dullness. Yet, if he persist, he will soon find himself unable to stop
until the book is finished; certain chapters and parts of chapters will
absorb his whole attention; and in the end he will have a sense of having
had glimpses into many mansions, all spacious; of having come in touch
with largeness and nobility of soul.


ii

Granville Stanley Hall, who died on 24 April 1924, was born 1 February
1846 in Ashfield, Massachusetts. His father was of impetuous temperament,
his mother a rather submissive and devoutly pious woman. There were
three children, all brought up on a farm. From the first, Stanley Hall
was keenly interested in animals. But he was also one of those boys
whose imagination is strongly exercised by the figures of frost on a
windowpane, the broken march of clouds across the sky, the shapes and
images seen in dancing firelight and the visions excited by musical
sounds. He was sensitive and both brave and timid; pacifistic by temper,
he could persist in a course once taken. He was essentially a lonely
child, as such children often are, and this loneliness was to become more
pronounced as he grew older, developing a habit of isolation which was to
be his salvation in the greatest crisis in his career.

His schooling culminated in Williams College, which gave him his A. B.
in 1867. He was a classmate of Hamilton Wright Mabie. Mark Hopkins—he
of whom it was said that “a university was Mark Hopkins on one end of a
log and a student on the other”—was president of the college and also
“professor of moral and intellectual philosophy.” An important friendship
of this time was with Charles Eliot Norton.

A single year in New York followed. Young Hall was a student at the
Union Theological Seminary, but he was also twenty-one, in New York for
the first time, full of a healthy curiosity and bound to satisfy it. He
went to the theatre as well as all manner of churches and was one of a
number employed by the City Missionary Society to invite women of the
street to attend the midnight mission. Through the friendly act of Henry
Ward Beecher money was provided for Hall to go abroad and study, the
lender being Henry Sage, the benefactor of Cornell University. It was
already apparent that Hall had no vocation to the ministry. He dreamed
of becoming a professor. Darwin, Spencer and Tyndall, Renan, Strauss,
Emerson and Carlyle had profoundly influenced him. In the summer of 1868
he went to Germany, first to the University of Bonn and then to that
of Berlin. Here he dabbled in all manner of subjects, from theology
to surgery and mental clinics. On his return to America he wished to
teach the history of philosophy but was unable to lest he should, in the
opinion of a college president, “unsettle men and teach them to hold no
opinions.”

Private tutoring was followed by a spell of teaching at Antioch College,
Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was at this time that the first volume of
Wundt’s _Physiological Psychology_ was published. In a sense, psychology
as we know it began with this work, so definite in its experiments
and conclusions. Here was something one could lay hold of! Hall read
it, was amply fascinated, and left Antioch, resolved to go to Leipzig
and study under Wundt. But at Cambridge he was met by the offer of an
instructorship at Harvard and stopped to teach for a year, going on
to Leipzig in 1876. He spent a year in Berlin, some time in Paris and
England, and came home to resume his friendship with William James
and others, to lecture on education under Harvard auspices, and to
cast about. He was much in debt and had no prospects. He had married.
Having spent three years in Germany between the ages of 22 and 25,
and three more from 32 to 35, “the narrow, inflexible orthodoxy, the
Puritan eviction of the joy that comes from amusements, from life, the
provincialism of our interests, our prejudice against continental ways of
living and thinking, the crudeness of our school system, the elementary
character of the education imparted in our higher institutions of
learning—all these seemed to me depressing, almost exasperating. I fairly
loathed and hated so much that I saw about me that I now realize more
clearly than ever how possible it would have been for me to have drifted
into some, perhaps almost any, camp of radicals and to have come into
such open rupture with the scheme of things as they were that I should
have been stigmatized as dangerous, at least for any academic career,
where the motto was Safety First.” But he must teach or go back to the
farm.


iii

Luck was with him. In 1881 he was invited to lecture on psychology at the
Johns Hopkins University, toward which all ambitious young professors
were looking wistfully. He was then asked to teach a half year after
which he was appointed full professor for five years at a salary then
very generous. The seven fat years—for he remained until 1888—had begun.
The great Gilman was president of the university, Gildersleeve taught
Greek and Rowland taught physics; Simon Newcomb, astronomy; Spencer,
Huxley, Kelvin, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, Freeman the historian, James
Russell Lowell, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and William James were visitors
and, for the most part, lecturers. Among Dr. Hall’s pupils were John
Dewey, J. McKeen Cattell, Joseph Jastrow, James H. Hyslop and one young
man who took a long Sunday afternoon walk with the professor “in which he
debated with me the question of majoring in psychology, although I felt
that his mind was already made up not to do so, for his previous studies
and his Southern instincts and family traditions already inclined him too
strongly toward the historical and political field.” This was Woodrow
Wilson. “Had he chosen psychology,” comments Dr. Hall, “he might never
have been President; but, on the other hand, if he had, he might have
learned to do better teamwork and have been more ready to compromise and
concede.”

When he was just forty-two Dr. Hall’s lean years began—lean in the sense
that he gave up highly congenial work and surroundings and a maximum
salary which was offered him to embark on a new and untried enterprise,
in which he was to endure a degree of distress and anxiety and an amount
of difficulty and odium hard to describe. The history of his relations
with Clark University, first publicly told in Chapter VII of his _Life
and Confessions of a Psychologist_, is likely without a parallel.
Certainly it throws more light on human nature than any psychologist
could hope to do by a lifetime of experiment and reasoning. Briefly, this
was what happened:

Jonas Gilman Clark (1815-1900), a successful wagonmaker, had made a
fortune in California in 1849 by selling mining implements. He was one of
the active Vigilantes and a friend of Leland Stanford. After attaining
importance in San Francisco he moved to New York and increased his wealth
by dealing in real estate; but with the passage of years he returned to
his native county in Massachusetts. The example of Leland Stanford, his
own childlessness, and a desire to do something for his native county led
him to resolve to found Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr.
Hall was asked to be president and accepted the post.

Mr. Clark immediately gave a building and grounds and his note for
$600,000 for the university, with a note of $100,000 for a library. This,
a total value of something like $1,000,000, was the largest single gift
that had ever been made to education in New England. The outlook was of
unprecedented brilliance, for Mr. Clark’s expressed intention was to
leave all his wealth to the institution, and his fortune was variously
estimated at from $8,000,000 to $18,000,000 or even $20,000,000. The
founder readily agreed to Dr. Hall’s suggestion that he, Dr. Hall, spend
a year abroad studying the universities of the world.

Surely no one has ever had an opportunity equalling the year which
followed. Dr. Hall omitted to visit no university of importance in
Europe. The mere recital of the places he saw is impressive enough;
when the imagination tries to take in the educational panorama unrolled
before his eyes the task becomes impossible. One small cloud darkened the
horizon. Mr. Clark had instructed him to bring to this side several of
the best German professors. Dr. Hall was put in a painful situation by
engaging Von Holst of Freiburg and then having his act disowned. He did
not suspect that it was to be only the first of a series of bitter and
terrible disappointments.

Clark was opened as a university for graduate students only with few
pupils but high hopes and splendid prospects on 2 October 1889. A few
simple figures, as Dr. Hall remarks, give the key to the near-tragedy
that followed. “During the first year we spent for salaries and
equipment, $135,000; the second year, Mr. Clark contributed $50,000
above the income of the $600,000 that had actually been transferred to
the board of trustees, making a total income of $92,000; the third year,
he gave $26,000, making it $68,000; the fourth year, $12,000, making it
$54,000; and the fifth and subsequent years of his life he gave nothing,
so that the whole institution subsisted upon the income of its funds,
namely, the $600,000 for the University and $100,000 for the library.”
What was wrong?

Mr. Clark couldn’t or wouldn’t say. He seems to have been a singularly
inarticulate individual. Whether he lost heavily in the misfortunes that
overtook the British firm of Baring Brothers, or on his own account,
remains uncertain. It may be that he had, all along, much less money
than was supposed; or it may be that a university cost more than he
expected. There was consternation over his dwindling annual gifts and
a deeper anxiety over his failure to add to the permanent endowment.
Collectively and individually the trustees implored him to say what the
university might expect; at least, they would know where they stood;
but Mr. Clark remained silent. “He sanctioned every engagement and knew
exactly the liabilities we were incurring, and the optimistic view,”
says Dr. Hall, “was that he could not possibly bring men here or start
departments and then fail to sustain them.” It was too optimistic. Men
were let go because there was no money to keep them. After a personal
quarrel with a professor, Clark compelled the board to request the
man’s resignation, which they did. The founder would smilingly listen
to instructors who asked for supplies, refer them to Dr. Hall, and then
order Dr. Hall to deny the requests. A personal tragedy at the beginning
of this time befell Dr. Hall as he was convalescent from an attack of
diphtheria so severe that for weeks he could not speak, but had to write
on a slate. He had been sent to the country when, one night, through an
accident in a gas fixture, his wife and the younger of his two children,
aged six, were smothered to death.

“As the second year drew to a close and the trustees fully realized that
Mr. Clark would almost certainly not maintain expenditures on the basis
on which they had been begun, and as there was already much discontent in
the faculty, their anxiety focused on the future, and I was instructed to
do everything possible not to alienate Mr. Clark to such a degree that he
would bestow elsewhere the remainder of his fortune, still believed to be
very large. To this end I must, with what grace and tact I could, accept
the situation; and when asked, as I often was when I was trying to get
his wishes carried through with the faculty as a whole or individually,
whether it was my will or the founder’s that I was trying to enforce,
must give them to understand it was my own and thus shield Mr. Clark.
This was most humiliating to my honor and even to my conscience but the
situation demanded nothing less, for the entire future of the institution
seemed to hang upon this.” The foreseen result was a faculty revolt; a
majority of the staff offered their resignations because they had lost
confidence in Dr. Hall. The trustees left the affair in Dr. Hall’s hands,
but as those hands were tied by the necessity of keeping a close secret
the financial situation and by the necessity of “shielding” Clark from
censure, he could explain but lamely.

At this point President Harper of the new University of Chicago came to
Worcester, secretly engaged a majority of the faculty at double the Clark
salaries, and then tried to hire Dr. Hall for a salary larger than he
was receiving. Under Dr. Hall’s threat to make the facts public and to
appeal to John D. Rockefeller himself—Mr. Rockefeller being Chicago’s
backer—Harper receded a little. Dr. Hall managed to salvage a few of his
men from the raid. Clark University was now reduced to living on the
four per cent. income from its $600,000 and waiting for its founder to
die, “when it would be clear to us whether we must close up, live along
feebly, or enter upon the realization of our large and high initial hopes
by finding that, after all, he had vast means and had not diverted them
to other sources.”

Andrew Carnegie promised $100,000 if an equal amount were raised; when
only $37,000 could be raised and Mr. Carnegie was told why he dropped
the condition and gave his $100,000 outright. Somehow, the next half
dozen years were got through. There was a continuous false position for
Dr. Hall and continuous and heavy censure to be borne. He had to suppose
that the end would justify the means; and the end, when it came, gave him
only partial satisfaction. Clark had got to spend a good deal of time in
Europe, perhaps as an aid to his disgusting reticence. He was at outs
with the trustees, all men of distinction and all sustaining Dr. Hall as
well as they could. The founder was also in disagreement with Dr. Hall
over a collegiate department, which he wanted and which Dr. Hall—one
would think, very naturally, in the acutely trying circumstances—didn’t
want. The tenth anniversary of Clark was celebrated with a brave spirit
in 1899. It was that darkest hour before the dawn. The perverse Clark
died the year following leaving a nasty will with five codicils and
expensive litigious possibilities, most of which were realized. In
the last of the codicils Clark revoked certain strictures upon Dr.
Hall contained in the will itself. However, a collegiate department
was provided and university and college came at once into possession
of nearly the whole estate, the rest to follow at Mrs. Clark’s death.
Dr. Hall, who had been teaching and lecturing and worrying, was free
at last from his scapegoat rôle. Four years later he was to publish in
two volumes his masterly study of _Adolescence_; and every few years
after that were to see an important book come from his hands. He was
in his fifties and at last comparatively free and unhampered. Not
only his interest in child study but his wide knowledge of methods of
teaching (pedagogy), of psychology and philosophy, of the vast amount of
experimental work in hand everywhere and his novel conceptions of the
soul’s progress were to bear fruit.


iv

He had always been interested in genetics—beginnings. His psychology,
as it matured in a long lifetime of study and reflection, is different
from the psychology of other men chiefly in this respect. The one word
of science which always had the power to fire Dr. Hall’s imagination
is “evolution.” Let not the fundamentalist rage, at this point of this
chapter, nor the reader imagine a vain thing. It is greatly doubtful
if, deep in his heart, G. Stanley Hall cared two sticks about Darwinian
evolution as such. But evolution as an idea was to him a psychic reality.

Let me explain, as well as I can, in the simplest terms.

A psychic reality is something in which one’s faith is so strong that one
neither needs nor wishes proofs. It is what you firmly believe; what you
believe in so firmly that, so far as you are concerned, it exists. The
thing may not exist, but if it did you would order your life just as you
do now. Those who live under the shadow of such a belief need no umbrella
of evidence spread over them.

To take an important and timely instance: One of the main points in Dr.
Hall’s work, _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_ (1917) bears
directly on the controversy now active between the fundamentalists and
the liberals. That dispute has been hottest on two points: the virgin
birth of Christ and the Resurrection. Dr. Hall holds that both sides
are living and disputing in a pre-psychological age; that they are both
right in all that they affirm, wish and mean, and are both wrong in all
that they deny. He says that both the virgin birth and the Resurrection
are psychic realities to great numbers of people. He believed in both
himself. As a scientist familiar with physiology, the issues offered as
many obstacles to his mind as they can possibly offer to any human mind.
Nevertheless, he believed; to him the virgin birth and the Resurrection
are both psychic realities. “There are psychic realities that are truer
than fact, and I wonder if it would not degrade rather than spiritualize
faith if we were to discover a motion picture of the Resurrection.”

Now whether Darwin was right or not, whether the law of natural selection
is true, false or meaningless, “evolution” is the word to cover Dr.
Hall’s idea of what has happened and what is happening to the spirit of
man. Although he studied under Wundt, he thought it unfortunate that
one whose influence has been so farreaching was trained in physics and
physiology chiefly. Biology, says Dr. Hall, would have given Wundt
and his disciples less positiveness; they would have been less set on
explaining all things of the spirit by occurrences in and to the body;
and the idea of growth and change would have been more elastic and more
hopeful. Again, Dr. Hall was one of the few American psychologists
of standing who had gone deeply and impartially into the discoveries
of Freud and the whole field of modern psychoanalysis. What are his
conclusions on this fascinating development of science?

Freud has himself said that there are three great culture epochs
marked for us, so far, by what we call science. The first dawned with
Copernicus’s discovery that the sun, not the earth, was the center of
our universe. The second was initiated by Darwin. The third is Freud’s
own work. Dr. Hall was by no means an extreme or convinced Freudian, but
seemed inclined to believe that Freud’s estimate of his work may not
be much out of the way. Copernicus revolutionized our ideas of space;
Darwin transformed the concept of time; Freud is dealing with our idea of
eternity. For the world that Freud may be said to have discovered, the
world of the unconscious, is a piece of eternity and the only piece that
science can lay claim to having captured. If it exists at all, it exists
and has existed forever.

In the main the Freudian theories seemed to Dr. Hall “genetic and vital.”
They put beginnings farther back than we have been used to put them; many
of the explanations really do explain, and Dr. Hall was convinced that
they saved several of the most gifted of his pupils from mental wreck.
“If the Freudian claims of the all-dominance of sex were excessive, as
they certainly seem to me to be, it was only a natural reaction to the
long taboo and prudery that would not look facts in the face. If the
gross and morbid phenomena here were taken as the point of departure, the
conclusions here drawn were from a solid and wide basis of clinical facts
which no one could dispute, however much they might criticize the methods
and interpretations.” There was, however, always the danger of measuring
the normal mind and spirit by standards got from studying abnormal minds.
And Dr. Hall did not believe in the methods of healing practised by
Freudian physicians. Such psychoanalytic treatment, he thought, leaves
the patient often unduly sexually-minded. Where a cure or real benefit
results, he believed, it is not the result of a confession of dreams,
etc., tortured into this or that meaning. It is because the patient has
come to the conclusion that he is a dead giveaway, that everybody sees
in him what the psychoanalyst sees; shame, dread, and modesty assert
themselves and make him do better.

But the emphasis of Freud’s teachings is on feeling. It is not a
psychology of muscular twitchings as that of Wundt and his followers
tended to be. There is a theory, brilliantly expounded by William James
and called the Lange-James theory, which explained that we feel sorry
because we cry. There is also what is called the psychophysic law, which
says that a sensation is increased by a constant amount when the stimulus
is increased by a constant multiplication. But the psychophysic law broke
down at extremes. For example, a very slight increase in tickling doubles
and redoubles the sensation felt; it almost seems as if the law were
then the other way about. And the sorry-because-we-cry theory cannot be
proved where thoughts only are in question. A. murders B. Very likely
he murders him in thought before he does so in fact. Now possibly the
murder-in-thought is preceded by some microscopic or passing changes in
A.’s brain. But it is yet to prove, and it is very likely unprovable. In
the same way, men are now engrossed with their dawning discoveries about
the glands of the human body. As Dr. Hall pointed out, the attempt is
now well under way to make psychology a mere matter of secretions. The
thyroid gland does this, the pituitary gland controls that. The thing
will be carried too far and we shall have to retrace many of our steps
and, to some extent, start all over again toward fresh conclusions.

We make these mistakes, said Dr. Hall, because we are too eager to find
a solution for the mystery of the soul. We want to believe that the mind
can be understood from the body. But the explanation of the mind must
be sought in the things of the mind. It is likely that history, for
example, with its record of human institutions, throws at least as much
light on the human mind that made the institutions as anything we can get
in a dissecting room. Like James Harvey Robinson, Dr. Hall was unhappy
over the increasing tendency of psychologists and other students to go
off in a corner and never thereafter to relate what they are doing to
the rest of knowledge. The genetic nature of everything bearing on the
mind is constantly overlooked. Why? Well, men have fallen into a habit
of thinking that psychology must be handled as fossil bones are handled.
From a thigh bone found in the ground we can reconstruct, perhaps, the
entire skeleton of some prehistoric animal. It is not possible, however,
from this experiment or that to reconstruct, infer or measure the mind.
This is because the mind is creative, or, at least, reproductive. It can
only be studied from what it begets. The child’s revolt from the parent
both explains and is explained by the historic revolutions and revolts
against authority. Hysteria is an escape from some intolerable reality.
Certain men have a dread of being shut in by beliefs and opinions because
earliest man had a dread of being shut in his cave in the rocks. But
every man must have something to believe in, though it change from time
to time, because his remote ancestor, when challenged, sought a wall at
his back. What, then, is the hope of being exact or final in psychology?
None. Would it be desirable to be exact or final? No.

The reader may inquire: What about the tests that are increasingly
popular for everything from marriage to hunting the proper job? Dr. Hall
refrained from using the short and ugly word. I will use it for him: they
are bunk. But I will quote his own recorded experience with them.

“Some fifty years ago as an impecunious student I paid $5 to have my
bumps charted at the Fowler and Wells phrenological institute, then on
lower Broadway. Mr. Sizer, who did the job, told me that he would rather
feel for five minutes through a cat-hole the skull of a girl he thought
of marrying than court her five years. His findings were so pleasing to
my self-esteem that two or three years later I went again, with even more
satisfaction, so that I had the exhilarating sense that in the interim I
had ‘every day and in every way’ been growing wiser and abler.

“Some thirty years later I chanced to meet the great Cheiro, handsome,
magnetic, and in his day the pet of the New York ‘Four Hundred,’ and I
submitted my palm to him. But this time with very depressing results.
He found my life-line so broken that I should have been dead about that
time; the line of intellect was very faint, indicating low mentality; by
my wealth line I ought to be rich (and from his fee he probably thought
me so). I was an incorrigible bachelor[59] and my character was a complex
of incongruities. In a word, my hand gave the flat lie to what my bumps
had said.

“Lombroso has several score of physical and psychic traits which he deems
characteristic of criminals, and of these I was found to have seven more
or less well developed. At the Bernheim Institute in Paris I had my
finger-tips taken and interpreted. Later yet a Blackfordist tested me on
all the, I think, twenty-one points in that system and at the close asked
me if it was worth $10. It was. In Portland, Oregon, I found an expert
who had worked years with the MacAuliffe-Sorel group of anthropologists.
I began to psychoanalyze myself but, finding the task too hard, called
in an expert to finish the work, with results which nothing would ever
tempt me to tell.

“Still far too ignorant of the one I ought to know best, I took all
the Yerkes army tests and the dozen or so shorter series devised for
adults, and even put myself through the Binet-Simon series and their
modifications by Terman; also the de Sanctis fool-finding series and at
least a score of the tests for special avocations. In fact my friends
have spoken rather slightingly of my passion for collecting and trying
out tests, of which I have some hundreds. Judged by the Edison stunts,
I was a near-moron, and in the Stenquist series much below the average;
while I cannot even yet understand the Royce Ring. Some college entrance
tests would bar me from entering the freshman class, while in many of the
simpler ones my intelligence quotient indicated a mental age of at least
100.

“In Harman’s test of the higher mental processes and the Bonser reasoning
test, for example, I was surpassed by a girl of eleven. The results of
all seem, thus, so confusing that I recall the chameleon which, when
placed on a red cloth turned red, on blue, green and yellow, turned these
colors, but when placed on a bit of Scotch plaid died trying to make
good.”

Time-limit tests are not only the hardest but tend to discredit the
slow-but-sure type of person who really does so much of the world’s best
work. The tests merely test a kind of superficial mental quickness.
They do not, and cannot be made to, exclude accidental advantages due
to special experience or special knowledge. We have no way of testing
the testers, some of whom have only enough brains to ask questions and
write down other people’s answers. There is no way of testing native
ability. Persons old enough to take the tests have acquired much of their
abilities from experience; and there is no way of separating what they
were born with from what they have learned or acquired.

Dr. Hall says, on the other hand, that the tests he found trustworthy in
estimating a young man’s chances for success are these:

1. Health. It is true that Darwin fought neurasthenia all his life, that
Nietzsche was always fighting megalomania, that Spencer was everlastingly
coddling himself, that Stevenson contended with tuberculosis. But
health was required to make the fight—great, excessive vital force—and
particularly was the psychic health exceptional and the psychic force
strong so to have held off the bodily enemy while great work was done.
“The study of 200 biographies shows that the list of great original minds
who were supernormal in health is about fourteen times as large as the
list of great invalids.”

2. Second breath. Corresponds to “second wind” in athletics. A state of
mental exaltation, inspiration or ease, often coming after we have worked
long and hard and past our usual hour of sleep at night. No one is likely
to succeed who does not learn while young to tap this mental reservoir.

3. The ability to pass quickly and easily from one extreme of feeling
to the other. What is called the “pleasure-pain scale” extends all the
way from despair and suicide up to the most transcendent happiness.
Settled moods of long duration are bad. If the soul cannot run up
and down the scale frequently, swiftly and flexibly it will have its
pressures relieved in some other way, usually by setting up a dual
personality—jekyll-hydeism, insanity, etc.

4. Sympathy. Confucius called it “reciprocity”; Buddha, pity; Aristotle,
friendship; Plato, friendship; Jesus, love; Paul, charity; Adam Smith
and Darwin, sympathy; Comte, altruism; Renan, the enthusiasm of humanity;
Kropotkin, mutual aid; Matthew Arnold, humanism; Giddings, consciousness
of mankind; Trotter, the herd instinct. It is a power to feel for others
and must be sufficiently strong to influence action at times.

5. Love of nature. This is the root. There are many flowers—poetry,
music, literature, art of whatever form, religion. The mind first feels
love and awe, then worship, then a desire for cold, outward study—the
order is always the same. But in spite of the mind’s insistence on going
to extremes, the feeling must be kept alive and must be adequately fed.

6. Sublimation. Teeth, lips and tongue were created or developed to eat
with; we have made them serve us to speak with, also. The senses first
served to warn us of danger and to find and test food; we now use them in
a thousand ways. Anger began as blind rage, but we have gone some way to
control and direct it. We cannot be too angry if we are angry aright. As
for love, which began on the physical plane, “every real interest sets a
back-fire to lust.”

7. Activity as against passivity. Although a given person or nation may
be predominantly active or passive, doers or knowers, leaders or led,
the two forces must be controlled and balanced for success. Do not make
the mistake of thinking that activity is all to the good; energy without
intelligence is worthless.

8. Loyalty or fidelity. In the first instance, this is loyalty to
oneself, creating self-respect. The various loyalties to parents, husband
or wife, children, friends, country, etc., follow.

These tests cannot be applied to large groups. They are tests of the
individual. They cannot be made within set time limits. They cannot be
made by asking a man or woman questions and writing down the answers.
They require observation in favorable circumstances and these cannot
always be secured by prearrangement. But they are the only tests worth
making. They require in the tester something which psychology requires
very much, in Dr. Hall’s estimation, in many psychologists—common sense.


v

Dr. Hall’s attitude toward educational theory and practice was derived
from his special interest in child study. “In the nature of childhood
itself and its different stages of development,” he says, “must be found
the norm for all the method and matter of teaching.” One very general
defect of our schools is that the teacher does not teach enough, but
gives, or is required to give, too much attention to setting, hearing,
and marking lessons. He thought the weakest spot in the American system
to be from about the fourth to the ninth grades. Drill and authority can
really do most with the child just at this stage. Whatever may be the
possibilities eugenics offers in the future, it is a far-off future; for
a long time to come we must depend on education to make the best of our
child-material. Although it was necessary to exclude religious teaching
from the schools, it should be restored as soon as a gradually widening
tolerance makes that possible. Education without it lacks heart and soul.
“Protestant though I am, I would far rather a child of mine should be
trained to be a good Catholic, Jew, or even Buddhist, Confucianist, or
Mohammedan than allowed to grow up with no religion at all and made an
early skeptic toward all faiths. Not absolute truth but efficiency for
the conduct of life is the supreme criterion of all values here. The
highest interpretation of the most vital human experiences must always
take the religious form.”

Motion pictures have more cultural possibilities, wrote Dr. Hall, than
anything since the invention of printing; but we have not learned to
develop them. Broadcasting may have similar possibilities; but the
educational value of our newspapers has deteriorated.

The general problem of education as stated by Dr. Hall is somewhat as
follows:

Over-population and a use of the earth’s resources so wasteful that we
can now date the exhaustion of many of them are the first term of the
problem. There is not now in the world one one-hundredth of the wealth
necessary to satisfy the demand for it. “As civilization advances, it
costs not only more money but more time and effort to keep people happy.”
And “the average individual wants all that is coming to him now and here,
and uses every means in his power (fair and sometimes foul) to get it.
Thus he plunges on toward the bankruptcy of his hopes in their present
form.” Wise minds realize that either men must restrict their desires,
which is not likely, or must transform and redirect them—in technical
language, must sublimate them, or find more internal surrogates for their
gratification. Our industrial system is less than 200 years old. Our
political institutions are only a few thousand years old. The mind of man
is far, far older. Such men as James Harvey Robinson would adapt the mind
of man to these juvenile institutions or phases of knowledge. Dr. Hall
said the adjustment will have to be the other way about. It does seem
likely. If it is to be made, psychology must make it.

“I know,” he wrote, “no class of men quite so hard-boiled and
uninteresting and, indeed, unintelligent outside the hard and fast and
often narrow limits of their own interests as the American millionaires.
Each man has a normal amount of wealth as he has a normal weight of body
on which he can best thrive. If I were sentenced to be rich now I should
grow neurotic over insurance risks, problems of competition, fluctuation
of prices and markets, labor problems, anxieties about special
legislation, tariff rates, new fields of fruitful investment, and perhaps
efforts to reform our present industrial system.”

In his own case, Dr. Hall found happiness through his work, which has
never included that “curse of the industrial world today,” having to do,
for pay, work that he hated. For it must be remembered that the false
situation at Clark University was more than offset by the delight he had
as a teacher of graduate students. But, work aside, perhaps the next
greatest source of happiness and satisfaction to him has been the trait
which Walt Whitman perfectly phrased when he exclaimed:

    “In me the caresser of life, wherever moving.”

For this psychologist and teacher, who was also for some time president
of the New England Watch and Ward Society, a voluntary censorship which
asserts itself chiefly over books and plays and in opposition to the
social evil, always had “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side
of life. I have never missed an opportunity to attend a prize fight if
I could do so unknown and away from home. Thrice I have taken dancing
lessons from experts sworn to secrecy, and tried to learn the steps of
ancient and some of the tabooed modern dances—just enough to know the
feel of them—up to some six years ago, although I have always been known
as a non-dancer.” In Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York and San
Francisco he found guides to take him through the underworld by night. In
an institution for the blind, he blindfolded himself for an entire day;
he learned the deaf mute alphabet; he had seen three executions, visited
morgues, revival meetings, anarchist meetings. Paupers, criminals,
wayward children, circus freaks were among his hobbies. “I believe that
such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part of the preparation
of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to understand human nature as it
is.” And as, probably, it will continue to be for a while to come.


BOOKS BY G. STANLEY HALL

    1874 _Hegel as the National Philosopher of Germany._ Translated
             from the German of Dr. Karl Rosenkrans
    1881 _Aspects of German Culture_
    1883 _Methods of Teaching History_
    1886 _Hints Towards a Select and Descriptive Bibliography of
             Education_ (with John M. Mansfield)
    1904 _Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to
             Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,
             Religion and Education._ Two volumes
    1906 _Youth, Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene._ An abridgement
             of _Adolescence_
    1907 _Aspects of Child Life and Education_
    1911 _Educational Problems._ Two volumes
    1912 _Founders of Modern Psychology_
    1917 _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology._ Two volumes
    1920 _Morale: The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct_
    1920 _Recreations of a Psychologist._ Stories, reminiscences and
             sketches
    1922 _Senescence: The Last Half of Life_
    1923 _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_
    1923 _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology._ One volume
             edition

NOTE: An extended list of articles, some of them popularly-written, will
be found in the bibliography appended to _Life and Confessions of a
Psychologist_.


SOURCES ON G. STANLEY HALL

His autobiographical _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is of the
first importance.

_How You Can DO More and BE More_, by Bruce Barton. An interview with G.
Stanley Hall. In the American Magazine for November, 1923.

“Stanley Hall: A Memory,” by A. E. Hamilton in the American Mercury for
July, 1924.

Article by Dr. Joseph Jastrow on Dr. Hall in the Literary Review of The
Evening Post, New York, 28 June 1924.




10. The Mode in New Fiction


i

If only books were like hats and gowns it would simplify matters a good
deal. I could say: “Ostrich feathers are being much used,” or “Egotism is
usually the center of the design.” But although there is an observable
tendency to buy books like clothes, because some novel or other is all
the rage, the tendency grows weaker from year to year, I think; and if in
the title of this chapter I use the word “mode” it is phrasemaking.

Phrasemaking has its excuse in convenience, but it must be abandoned in
the discussion of some of the fiction I am going to talk about. Among
these books just one is a first novel. Because it has this distinction,
because of its human quality, and because it borders a theme of great
significance, I want to speak at once of Marjorie Barkley McClure’s _High
Fires_. Mrs. McClure, the daughter of a Detroit clergyman, has laid
her story principally in that city, in the period from 1905 to about
the present. Angus Stevenson is a minister of the gospel who sticks by
the letter of a somewhat rigid, old-fashioned creed. His sons and his
daughter are young people of today. They cannot see why they should
not do what other boys and girls of their age are doing. But their
father will not for one moment countenance such things as dancing and
card-playing and Sunday baseball.

The struggle is tempered and made human by Angus Stevenson’s goodness.
He loves his children; especially is his daughter the apple of his
eye. But he cannot sacrifice one inch of his principles. They are just
as effectual in one direction as another. He voluntarily reduces his
own salary when it seems to him that the act is called for. If he is
intolerant, he is Christ-like.

Of several crises, the one that cuts into him most deeply is his
daughter’s falling in love with a young man whom Angus Stevenson is
constrained to regard as an atheist and an infidel. I have said that he
loves his children; I should add that even when they are most rebellious
against their father, they love him no less. The intensity and depth of
Mrs. McClure’s portrait of Angus Stevenson fully realizes the feeling
on all sides. You are made to see and to acknowledge the claim to
justice of conflicting creeds, the rare courage and noble faith and
life-long devotion of the father, the right to happiness and a certain
self-fulfillment of the children. I know scarcely a novel of this year in
which the human element is so strong; none in which it is stronger; none
in which the lessons of a right feeling are more clearly conveyed or are
more capable of a direct application in the lives of ordinary Americans.

    Here lies the flesh that tried
    To follow the spirit’s leading;
    Fallen at last, it died,
    Broken, bruised and bleeding,
    Burned by the high fires
    Of the spirit’s desires.

Mrs. McClure’s novel is of interest, too, for its evidence that religion
is quickening in the American mind. I am using “religion” in the sense
of personal faith, which is at the present hour having a difficult time
with established creeds, on the one hand, and life’s machinery of motion
on the other. There were evidences before _High Fires_ was published, in
the huge sale of a new life of Christ and in the fundamentalist-liberal
controversy in the churches, that something deeply disquieting was
coming to the surface. Almost simultaneously with the publication of
_High Fires_, a first novel by Lyon Montross, _Half Gods_, by means of
the highly realistic presentation of American small town life, tried to
disclose the trouble. Mr. Montross’s story implied what is probably true:
the wine of a strong belief in anything is no longer fermented in most of
us; we half-worship, or, at best, only worship half-heartedly.

Now the business of a novelist, or his art, is, as Joseph Conrad said,
“a form of imagined life clearer than reality.” It is to show you
something more plainly than life shows it you; a good novel is a beacon,
not a bonfire. Thus in the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning (the
most ambitious work she has so far done), the heroine, after a life of
vicissitudes, comes to realize that she is, in the Scriptural phrase of
the title, but a “handmaid of the Lord.” Veronica is a sensitive girl
brought up in depressing though scarcely unusual circumstances. She
marries a man whose business career takes her to a social height, both
in America and, for a time, in England. Her church, which should mean
so much to her constantly, affects her life only at intervals. When the
crash comes she finds herself separated from her husband by his struggle
to keep afloat. She goes back to her home town. It seems as though she
were back where she had started, with little difference except in the
perplexity of an uncomprehended experience. So it is that finally she
comes to a measure of understanding, to an unquiet peace. She sees that
things will go on, though not in her way nor in any way of her choosing.
_A Handmaid of the Lord_, like _High Fires_ and _Half Gods_, does
something to get at the trouble that is in us.

To show what is, including what is wrong, is the novelist’s object; to
show what came right is also sometimes possible. Dealing with the subject
of religion, it has taken that very able novelist, Compton Mackenzie,
three books in sequence to show the history of Mark Lidderdale. _The
Altar Steps_ gave the young man’s background and the story of his life up
to his ordination in the Church of England. In _The Parson’s Progress_ we
see him as a priest of the English Church constantly beset by doubts and
difficulties. These are by no means solved when the third novel of the
trilogy, _The Heavenly Ladder_, opens; but they find their solution as it
ends. Mark, as a convert in Rome, finds a happiness that Mr. Mackenzie
has expressed with the utmost simplicity and with a restrained but lofty
fervor.

With a simplicity different but equally honest, Ralph Connor writes his
novels of men in a newer country. “Imagine,” he said, when asked to
tell briefly about his new book, “a man of vitality and power who has
given and taken heavy blows in the struggle of human life, who finds
himself cornered by forces he cannot subdue. Suddenly he realizes that
his back is against the wall, that no further retreat is possible.
Spiritually, mentally, physically there is a last stand to be made—a hold
on the essentials of life to be groped for and seized. It is this last
stand, this fighting chance that I have made the theme of _Treading the
Winepress_.” The scenes of the story are laid in Nova Scotia.


ii

If there is no single preoccupation common to the new fiction of other
authors, readers will be highly content to find thoroughly characteristic
new work by such favorites as Joseph C. Lincoln, Hugh Walpole, Mary
Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand W. Sinclair, Susan Ertz,
Robert Hichens, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell.

Both Joseph C. Lincoln and Hugh Walpole—and different as they are—seem
to me to have surpassed themselves. Mr. Lincoln’s _Rugged Water_ is not
basically different from his other Cape Cod novels. Perhaps in the loose
chronology of his stories it is more nearly contemporaneous with _Cap’n
Eri_ than with his more recent books. It is a story of a Coast Guard
Station in the days when the Coast Guard was the Life Saving Service.
The chief character is Calvin Homer, Number One man of the crew, brave,
honest, and shy of women. In temporary command of the Station, he does
gallant rescue work which should place him in line for promotion to
Keeper of the Station. But in the same storm, Benoni Bartlett, of a
nearby Station, stands out more conspicuously as the sole survivor of a
brave crew. Benoni is made Keeper over Homer.

These two men, Benoni Bartlett and Homer; Myra Fuller, to whom Homer
became engaged before he quite knew what was happening; Norma Bartlett,
daughter of the former Keeper and the young woman with whom Homer
eventually discovers himself to be in love, are the main persons of the
novel. It is difficult to regard them as Mr. Lincoln’s real subject,
for the life of the Station and the drama of shipwreck asserts itself
constantly in pages that teem with humor and with other qualities of
human nature less easy of superficial exhibition.

In other words, the largeness of what he is essentially dealing with has
seized upon Mr. Lincoln, and without the sacrifice of his lesser drama,
or any of the picturesqueness that has made him so beloved, he has caught
something of the loneliness of the Station, the whisper and thunder of
the surf, the struggle of men in an “overmatched littleness” under a
black sky in the tempest of waters. To me, these captures make _Rugged
Water_ the best novel he has written.

As for Mr. Walpole in _The Old Ladies_, my verdict, arrived at on
different grounds, is equally affirmative and emphatic. Here is a short
novel to stand beside Edith Wharton’s _Ethan Frome_. There is bleakness
as well as sunniness about the story; no haze; no sentimentality, though
sentiment a-plenty and a deep, clear feeling. Three women, Lucy Amorest,
May Beringer, and Agatha Payne, all seventy, live together in the top
of a “rain-bitten” old house in Polchester. All are very poor. Lucy has
a cousin who _may_ leave her money, and a son in America from whom she
has not heard for a couple of years. May Beringer, close to penury, is
a weak, stupid, kind creature always terrified of life. Agatha Payne is
sensual and strong. There has never, in my knowledge, been a picture
more honest or more terribly pathetic of what old age sometimes means.
Mr. Walpole has not evaded an inch of the truth or the tragedy; and the
measured happiness accorded at last to Lucy Amorest comes not in the
least as a concession toward a “happy ending” but solely as a reprieve of
pity for her—and for the reader also.

The stories in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s _Temperamental People_ represent
her most recent work and have a unity as interesting as their wide
range. Each shows the force of temperament—that quality in people which
makes the drama of life. But who are the temperamental people? A queen,
a cowboy, a famous singer, a wife, a great sculptor and a business man’s
secretary are some of them. People as diverse as life; but all of them
have temperament, and each story is a revelation of human emotion in
action. As one of the characters says (it is the opening of the story of
the sculptor, “Cynara”): “I suppose once in every creative life there
comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but
from without there comes the onrush of true greatness.” These records of
that moment and that hour are among the best things Mrs. Rinehart has
done.

The title of Arnold Bennett’s new collection, _Elsie and the Child and
Other Stories_, should be notice enough to the thousands who revelled in
_Riceyman Steps_ that the new book is one they may not miss. Yes, it is
Elsie, the humble but lovable heroine of Clerkenwell, who figures again
in this volume. It will be remembered that at the close of _Riceyman
Steps_, Elsie, about to marry Joe, weakly consented to go to work as a
servant for Mrs. Raste, while Joe (it was arranged) should resume his
rôle as Dr. Raste’s handy man. This was due to the pleading of young
Miss Raste; Elsie was never one to resist children. And so “Elsie and
the Child” begins approximately where _Riceyman Steps_ left off. It is
a novelette in length, a most satisfactory morsel left over from the
novel’s feast. With the very first page the feeling of _Riceyman Steps_
in its more blissful moments is restored to the reader. The dozen shorter
tales in the book are all from Mr. Bennett’s most recent work.

Bertrand W. Sinclair’s _The Inverted Pyramid_ is work of such
proportions and of a sufficient dignity to take him quite out of the
group of “Western” writers. This is not to rate down the cowboy story,
but it is to recognize that such work as Mr. Sinclair’s is something
far more consequential. The inverted pyramid of the title is the
social structure of a family set up by entailed wealth. Hawk’s Nest,
on Big Dent, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, is the home of
the Norquay family, founded in 1809 by a roving pioneer fur trader who
obtained the immense tract of land from the Indians for a pittance. He
held it intact and it has come down unspoiled to the fifth generation
of Norquays—Dorothy, Roderick, Phil and Grove. Luck and ability has
aggregated a huge fortune from the natural resources of the estate, which
Roderick’s grandfather converted into a corporation, seventy per cent. of
income going to the oldest son, the rest being divided among the others.

In the fifth generation various destinies open before the three brothers.
Money, in the sense of finance (money plus power); love; the call of
adventure; the quest of romance exert themselves on the three. The
very structure of the family, however, makes it quite impossible that
the destinies of one should not react in an exceptional degree upon
the others. The responsibility for the maintenance of family standing,
financial, social, moral, is interlocking. The old question: “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” was never asked under a colder compulsion to return an
affirmative answer: yes, because he is a fellow director on the board.

I have said nothing about the daughter, Dorothy, and will only say that
her rôle in the novel is important. It is enough, I think, to indicate
the largeness and the serious character of _The Inverted Pyramid_, and to
hail it as a sign that Mr. Sinclair will give us other books as good or
even better, to stand with this, his finest so far.

Susan Ertz’s _Nina_ is at once more brilliant and more profound than
her _Madame Claire_ (a novel which sells better today than when it was
first published). _Nina_ is the study of a girl whose love, once given,
cannot be revoked by any act or will of her own. Brought up by her aunt,
Nina Wadsworth falls in love with Morton Caldwell, adopted as a boy by
that same aunt. Morton is extraordinarily handsome, good-hearted, and
hopelessly susceptible to women. Tony Fielding has the qualities of
fidelity and devotion which Morton lacks. Henri Bouvier, the son of a
French family in England, is a playmate in childhood. Miss Ertz deals
directly only with Nina and Morton after their marriage; what has gone
before is cleverly reflected in the scenes put before the reader. As in
_Madame Claire_, a delightful feature is the points of view from which
the story is told. Much of it is seen through the eyes of Henri, grown
to manhood, French in his ideas, sophisticated, and almost equally
sympathetic and discreet. His comments, both spoken and unspoken, are
delicious. They do much to enliven a situation at bottom profoundly
tragic by reason of Morton’s limitations as a husband and Nina’s
tenacious love.

The novel is as unusual as it is competent, and the unusualness springs
from the author’s competence. And when I say competence, I am not
thinking only of the writing, which is admirable, but of the wisdom in
human nature which underlies the tale. Every woman will be charmed with
this novel because it is veracious in its feminine psychology, as most
novels by men are not—and as most novels by women would be if women
could avoid sentimentality as cleanly as Miss Ertz does. Yes, women
will be engrossed by _Nina_ because they will find in it those accents
and indications which are their tests of the reality of men and women in
intimate relation to each other, especially in the relations of love and
marriage.

The depths of feminine psychology have been delicately sounded many times
by Robert Hichens, whose new novel, _After the Verdict_, is of great
length and painstaking detail. Here also we have an extremely dramatic
story. Clive Baratrie, as the story opens, is on trial for the murder
of Mrs. Sabine, a woman older than himself with whom he had a prolonged
affair that began when Clive was a patient in her nursing home after the
war. The young man is engaged to marry Vivian Denys, a girl of his own
age, a splendid, fresh, outdoor person and one of the best tennis players
in England. Miss Denys has stuck to Clive through his ordeal, and after
his acquittal they are married. Clive’s mother, who lives to see him
acquitted and for some time afterward, is the only other person of first
importance in the 500-odd pages.

Is Clive guilty or innocent? He has been acquitted, true. And if
innocent, of what avail to him? Must not his whole life be lived under
the dark shadow of the crime? Must he not suffer as surely one way as the
other? One goes four-fifths of the way through this novel in a state of
tortured suspense. One does not know what to think as to Clive’s guilt
or innocence, nor is there a definite clue in his uncertain behavior.
The fact, when revealed, stuns by its impact. Mr. Hichens tells me that
he had long had it in mind to study a man resting under the cloud of a
murder charge; but he had another and greater thing in mind. “I wanted,”
he says, “to show that in such a marriage as Clive’s and Vivian’s an
absolute sincerity must exist between the two people.” But it is the
studies of the women in _After the Verdict_ which will impress and
entrance the reader.

[Illustration: SUSAN ERTZ]

Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose popular novels have been of a light
character, has also been led to a study of a woman capable of ordering
her world and ruling it. The title of her new novel, _A White Stone_, is
from the second half of the seventeenth verse in the Book of Revelation:
“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will
give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man
knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” To Joyce Evers, the white stone
at first was her diamond engagement ring. Later it is the great rock
on the mountain where she takes her woes for quieting and consolation.
It is long before she finds the unseen, intangible white stone of the
mystical passage. A homely little girl, she had been the center of a
marvelous romance when Duval, one of the world’s great pianists, asked
her to marry him. In the chapters which show the gradual increase in
Joyce of that power which is to be her salvation, Ruth Comfort Mitchell
has done much abler work than in any story of hers before. Two somewhat
unusual characters—Hannah Hills Blade, a novelist, and Chung, a Chinese
servant—do a good deal to differentiate _A White Stone_ from the run
of novels. Chung is picturesque and is an excellent example of a
certain fresh invention which is felt throughout the book. There is a
strongly-written love story.


iii

In an interesting article on the work of Concha Espina,[60] Mr. James
Fletcher Smith speaks of _Dulce Nombre_ as “such a notable novel that it
cried for instant translation.” The translation has been accomplished and
under the title, _The Red Beacon_, this impressive story is now available
to English readers. (The Spanish title is the name of the heroine,
simply—Dulce Nombre de Maria, Sweet Name of Mary, which was shortened by
use to Sweet Name.)

Who is Concha Espina? The question does us no credit, but our general
lack of information about European writers makes a brief answer
necessary. Concha Espina was born at Santander, Spain, in 1877. She
is therefore of the Northern seaboard and the mountain country. _The
Red Beacon_, for instance, is laid in the Cantabrian Mountains. Concha
Espina’s title to be considered the foremost living woman novelist of her
country seems to be undisputed. Possibly her two finest works are _The
Red Beacon_ and an earlier novel, _La Esfinga Maragata_ (_The Maragatan
Sphinx_; it was brought out in English as _Mariflor_). Although she has
lived for some years in Madrid, Concha Espina remains unmistakably a
Northerner. She married very young and went to South America (Chile)
where affairs went badly and where she began writing as a newspaper
correspondent to earn money.

_The Red Beacon_ is a dramatic and somewhat tragic story of the people
of her native region. Dulce Nombre, the heroine, is the daughter of a
miller and the godchild of an hidalgo or nobleman, Nicolas Hornedo.
Nicolas’s interest serves to educate her above her own station but not
up to his; yet when she falls in love with a countryman, a lad named
Manuel, Nicolas, distressed, aids a rich man in buying the young fellow
off and getting him out of the country. The rich man, much older than
Dulce Nombre, succeeds in getting her in marriage. His hope is that she
will come to love him, but she does not. The marriage is the beginning of
a long ordeal for the girl, an ordeal of waiting which nothing can hasten
nor prevent. The story proceeds with well-sustained interest to a crisis
supervening some years later, when with her husband’s death Dulce Nombre
is again confronted with a difficult choice and a situation provocative
of final despair. But happiness is in her destiny; Concha Espina shows us
how it is realized at last.

A story written with an intimate knowledge of the heroine and with great,
though restrained, feeling. It will be of more than ordinary interest to
watch its reception by American readers.


NEW AND VARIED FICTION

_A Conqueror Passes_, by Larry Barretto. An after the war story—perhaps
the best of them all—showing the reactions in business and social life
of the returned soldier, restless, discontented, missing the excitement
and tension of war. Told without either hysterics or despairing cynicism.
A noteworthy book and a first novel by a writer who deserves close
attention.

_The Book of Blanche_, by Dorothy Richardson. The love story, half
earthly, half spiritual, of a beautiful violinist and a hospital surgeon;
unique for its word pictures of the psychic phenomena of anæsthesia, and
introducing a new American novelist of brilliance.

_Blue Blood_, by Owen Johnson. The story of a reckless society girl who
sold herself to save her father’s honor—then waited in suspense for the
order to deliver herself.

_Pandora Lifts the Lid_, by Christopher Morley and Don Marquis. An
extravagant, light romance which opens with the kidnapping of six
daughters of the rich from a girl’s seminary on Long Island and continues
with a dashing yacht.

_Semi-Attached_, by Anne Parrish. A more serious novel than _A Pocketful
of Poses_, but told with the same lively sense of the humorous moments
in life. The story of a delightful girl who had to be converted to the
idea of marriage.

_The Show-Off_, by William Almon Wolff, from the play by George Kelly.
Aubrey Piper, the show-off, with his wing collar and bow tie, flower in
his button-hole and patent leather shoes, is a character who will appeal
universally because we all know him and laugh at him in everyday life. A
realistic American novel, a satire that is full of humor and pathos.

_Rôles_, by Elizabeth Alexander. What happened when a discontented
wealthy young wife changed places with her double, a hard-working
actress—the kind of story one reads at a sitting, anxious to find out
“how it will all come out,” and very much surprised by the dénouement.
Witty.

_Deep in the Hearts of Men_, by Mary E. Waller. A story of the deeper
human interests, especially of a man’s coming into spiritual light out of
darkness, its scenes laid chiefly in a New Hampshire manufacturing town
and the coal fields of West Virginia.

_Tomorrow and Tomorrow_, by Stephen McKenna. A novel of English inner
political circles after the war, in which some of the characters of the
author’s famous novel, _Sonia_, make their final appearance.

_Humdrum House?_ by Maximilian Foster. An exciting mystery story with
both serious and farcical complications. You won’t, however, for a
considerable time know which is which!

_The Brute_, by W. Douglas Newton. A mystery-adventure story of rapid
movement with scenes in South America and a beautiful and wealthy English
girl as the heroine. By a novelist who writes with more than ordinary
skill in characterization.

_The Thirteenth Letter_, by Natalie Sumner Lincoln. Opens with a strange
midnight marriage followed soon by a mysterious murder, and centers
around the disappearance of a famous diamond worth $250,000. The author
is an experienced hand in stories of this type, and the final solution
depends upon a remarkable cipher.

_The Laughing Rider_, by Laurie Yorke Erskine. William O’Brien Argent,
otherwise Smiling Billy Argent, is the central figure of this romantic
adventure story which runs from the Texas plains to the Canadian
Northwest.

_A City Out of the Sea_, by Alfred Stanford. The story of Michael
Ballard, who is a lawyer for the people of New York’s waterfront,
and who is attached to them because he finds them “hard and fair and
wild.” His growth through certain violent episodes until the love of a
beautiful woman matures his personality and power as an artist is the
theme. The novel is the work of a young writer whose work is stamped with
distinction. The story suggests Jack London, but is written with more
finesse if with no less power.

_Cuddy of the White Tops_, by Earl Chapin May. An exhilarating tale of a
college boy who discovers, on his father’s death, that the family fortune
is all invested in a circus. He quits college and takes charge of the
show—and finds he has a three-ring performance on his hands. Good love
story.

_After Harvest_, by Charles Fielding Marsh. An English love story of the
wind-swept Norfolk country, contrasting with, but of the same type as,
Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex stories. In Priscilla, John Thirtle of Brent
Fen Farm, and the shepherd, Reuben Gladden, the author exhibits something
common to all humanity and clearly expressed in the simple lives and deep
passions of country folk.

_Many Waters_, by Elinor Chipp. A love story of present-day New England
which begins when Marian Pritchard, Mark Wetherell, and Donald Callender
are playmates. Marian, however, and Mark as well have a great ordeal to
undergo before achieving mutual happiness.

_The Quenchless Light_, by Agnes C. Laut. A novel based on the lives
of the Christian Apostles, vividly written, and of the general type of
Sienkiewicz’s _Quo Vadis_ and F. Marion Crawford’s _Via Crucis_.

_Low Bridge and Punk Pungs_, by Sam Hellman. Mirth-provoking stories for
bridge fiends and mah-jongg fans by the newest popular American humorist.
With pictures by Tony Sarg.




11. Cosmo Hamilton’s Unwritten History


i

    Cosmo! He meets ’em one and all,
    The Douglas Fairbanks in his hall,
      The Lloyd George in his den!
    Cosmo! He meets ’em low and high;
    He holds ’em with his glittering eye
      And draws ’em with his pen.

    ...

    Cosmo! He meets ’em in the flesh!
    All his celebrities are fresh!
      No has-been like Frank Harris!
    He keeps his contacts up to date!
    Cosmo! The great and the near-great
      From Hollywood to Paris!

              _—Keith Preston in the Chicago Daily News._

He was the brother to whose early literary success Philip Gibbs looked
up with admiration; while Philip Gibbs grew more and more to look like
an ascetic, “a tired Savonarola,” Cosmo Hamilton (Gibbs) continued to be
impressively good-looking, so that today he is not infrequently called
the handsomest of male authors. And his looks are no deception, for in
ease, urbanity, savoir faire few authors excel him—perhaps none. He can
make an agreeable speech, talk interestingly, write a play or a novel
with dexterity and a finished effect. It is true that in his lively
memoirs, _Unwritten History_, he has embedded an occasional groan about
the labors of authorship, and tells of one instance in which an indolent
writer was led back to the paths of virtuous industry. But for all that,
in his own case, it has probably never been as hard work as sometimes it
seemed to himself; while as for anyone else, the association of Cosmo
Hamilton with toil must forever be an act of mental violence.

No! No photograph exists showing him with the dampened towel binding his
brows, the cup of strong black coffee at his lips. It is even doubtful
if, were one produced, any but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would accept its
authenticity.

The fact that he made a success so young—he was scarcely twenty-one
when his first novel was published—and the fact that this success
was immediately followed by others more marked is, no doubt, as much
responsible as anything. But the feeling that he managed easily what most
men contrive with the most desperate struggle is not lessened by such
words as these of his brother’s:

“Among my literary friends as a young man,” writes Philip Gibbs in his
_Adventurers in Journalism_,[61] “was, first and foremost—after my
father, who was always inspiring and encouraging—my own brother, who
reached the heights of success (dazzling and marvelous to my youthful
eyes) under the name of Cosmo Hamilton.[62] After various flights and
adventures, including a brief career on the stage, he wrote a book called
_Which Is Absurd_, and after it had been rejected by many publishers,
placed it on the worst possible terms with Fisher Unwin. It made an
immediate hit, and refused to stop selling. After that success he went
straight on without a check, writing novels, short stories, and dramatic
sketches which established him as a new humorist, and then, achieving
fortune as well as fame, entered the musical comedy world with ‘The Catch
of the Season,’ ‘The Beauty of Bath,’ and other great successes, which
he is still maintaining with unabated industry and invention. He and
I were close ‘pals,’ as we still remain, and, bad form as it may seem
to write about my brother, I honestly think there are few men who have
his prodigality of imagination, his overflowing storehouse of plots,
ideas, and dramatic situations, his eternal boyishness of heart—which
has led him into many scrapes, given him hard knocks, but never taught
him the caution of age, or moderated his sense of humor—his wildness of
exaggeration, his generous good nature, or the sentiment and romance
which he hides under the laughing mask of a cynic. In character he and I
are poles apart, but I owe him much in the way of encouragement, and his
praise has always been first and overwhelming when I have made any small
success. As a young man I used to think him the handsomest fellow in
England, and I fancy I was not far wrong.”

[Illustration: COSMO HAMILTON

_Photograph by Lewis Smith, Chicago._]


ii

When Cosmo Hamilton was eighteen, he hid himself in Dieppe, France, for
a month. It was necessary to convince his family, and most particularly
his father, that he meant to write and could make some kind of figure at
writing. There, in the Hotel of the Chariot of Gold, he did the story,
_Which Is Absurd_, and saw occasionally Edward VII., then Prince of
Wales, who was enjoying a vacation as plain Mr. Smith. After he had lost
money he could ill spare one night, a dazzling person with large violet
eyes told him to follow her, and he did with a five-franc piece, winning
back all he had lost and 100 francs besides. She was Lily Langtry.
Back in London and waiting for the publication of his story, he seized
on a novel of Robert Barr’s and made it into a four-act play. Compton
Mackenzie’s father, the actor, Edward Compton, played it in the English
provinces for a year (after drastic alterations) and it made enough money
to enable Hamilton to take rooms in London. Whereupon, for a while,
everything he wrote came back with a rejection slip.

_Which Is Absurd_, whatever its demerits, had the quality of provocation.
An evening paper, reviewing it, asked: “Who is Cosmo Hamilton?” and
answered: “Either a very bitter old man who is bankrupt of every hope,
or an unkissed girl in a boarding school who ought to be spanked with a
brush.” Now with the fewest exceptions, book reviews do not sell books;
but this is the type of review that infallibly sells a book. And shortly
Mr. Hamilton found himself writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, along with
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Alice Meynell, and others well-known and doing a
syndicated London letter which required his presence in the high places.

His play, “The Wisdom of Folly,” lived two weeks, and after a spell as
editor of a short-lived weekly paper he became one of a brilliant company
of contributors to the World. William Archer as dramatic critic, Richard
Dehan as fictionist, Robert Hichens as dialogist, Gilbert Frankau, Philip
Gibbs and Max Beerbohm were some of the staff. Before Cosmo Hamilton was
thirty he was to become editor of this paper. But meanwhile a variety of
fates awaited him. He dramatized Kipling’s _The Story of the Gadsbys_
in a fashion satisfactory to the author; had a close shave from dishonor
as one of the directors of a speculative mineral exploration enterprise
which had trapped various well-known names to aid it; and faced
bankruptcy. This last adventure resulted from the failure of his first
wife, the actress, Beryl Faber, in a theatrical season; and after Mr.
Hamilton had taken on the debts he retired to the country to cope with
them by writing.

What then occurred was dramatic enough, as life has a fashion of being.
A telegram came from a man Hamilton didn’t know. It read: “Kindly see me
tomorrow twelve o’clock Savoy Hotel Charles Frohman.” Mr. Hamilton kept
the appointment, which marked the beginning of a long association with
the famous American theatrical manager. In five consecutive years there
was no time when one or more of his plays was not running in London.
Probably the best-remembered is “The Belle of Mayfair,” in which Edna May
was succeeded by Billie Burke, and which ran for three years.


iii

At a time when he most urgently needed money, Mr. Hamilton had had a
series of conversations with an actor manager known on both sides of
the Atlantic. This man needed a new play and Hamilton had the necessary
idea, but there was a difficulty. “If I were prepared to give him all the
best scenes, all the best lines and build the play not round the boy and
girl but all about himself, make him suffer as the boy was to suffer,
love as the girl was to love, and, as he was to be a clergyman, undergo
a momentary shattering of faith which would give him a first-class
opportunity to show how supremely he could touch the tragic note, a
check on account of royalties would be paid at once and a contract
signed.” Mr. Hamilton refused, thereby sacrificing all future chances
in this quarter, but “when that play was offered to the public in 1911
word for word as I had described it to the man who subsequently forgot my
face, it was called ‘The Blindness of Virtue.’ Can’t you imagine how I
love to say that it has been running ever since?”[63]

It was first written as a novel, however, under that title. The novel was
well-received and when Mr. Hamilton’s younger brother, Arthur Hamilton
Gibbs, came down from Oxford for some golf he suggested that a play be
done from the novel. Cosmo’s reply can be imagined, but the old idea took
instant hold, and the manuscript of the play was ready precisely when an
actor who had taken the lease of the Adelphi Theatre, meeting Hamilton
on the street, asked: “Why don’t you make a play of _The Blindness of
Virtue_?” C. H.’s reply was to hand him the typed play.

This novel and play mark a decisive point in the author’s career. It
appeared in 1911 and the following year Mr. Hamilton made his first visit
to America. On his return he was inevitably asked: “Are you going to
use your novels for the ventilation of vital questions or are you going
to revert to the entertaining novel of society life?” He answered: “I
believe that I have now lived long enough, suffered enough, observed
enough and studied enough to try and rise a little above the level of a
merely entertaining writer,—one content to give his readers satirical
pictures of men and women of the world, their surroundings, their little
quarrels and their little love affairs. I believe that I have it in me to
put into my work something that is of value apart from any pretensions
to literary merit that it may have; that will cause the people who
read it to ask themselves whether the world and the social system is
as perfect as they imagined it to be, if they ever thought about these
things. I don’t think I can better describe my intentions than by saying
that I am going to write human stories for human beings and no longer
light sketches of people who are afraid to think and do not desire to
remember their great and grave responsibilities.”

Book, play and motion picture must have made everyone familiar with _The
Blindness of Virtue_ as a sermon on sex education powerfully implied by
the engrossing story of an innocence that was merely ignorance. A glance
at Mr. Hamilton’s succeeding novels will show how consistently he has
stuck to his determination not to write mere light fiction.

_The Door That Has No Key_ (1913) is a story of married life. A man has
given a woman his name but has never found the key to her mind. _The
Miracle of Love_ (1915) is the story of an English duke with a conscience
and a sense of duty. He faces the necessity of marrying for money in
order to restore family fortunes, although he is already in love with
a girl whom it is quite impossible for him to marry, even though he
sacrifice, for her sake, title and estates. _The Sins of the Children_
(1916) is more strictly in succession to _The Blindness of Virtue_.
This is a novel of American family life illustrating the danger to
young people coming from ignorance of sex truths, and showing that the
children’s sins are principally due to the failure of parents to tell
them what they should know.

_Scandal_ (1917) is an exceptionally good illustration of Cosmo
Hamilton’s ability to write a dramatically interesting story, freighted
with moral and ethical teachings, but fictionally buoyant, and with
the story uppermost all the time. Beatrix Vanderdyke is the beautiful
daughter of wealthy parents. She is also the typical American spoiled
child. A flirtation in which she throws conventions aside gives the
occasion for scandalous talk; and to enable her to cope with the
situation she asks Pelham Franklin, an acquaintance, not to show her up
when she announces that he and she have been secretly married. Franklin
has his own idea as to the lesson she needs; he at once acknowledges her
as his wife and proceeds to treat her as if she were. It is the way, with
such a girl, to a happy ending.

_Who Cares_ (1919) is the story of a boy and girl, high-spirited,
healthy, normal and imaginative, flung suddenly upon their own resources,
buying their own experiences, and coming finally out of a serious
adventure hurt and with a price to pay, but not damaged because of the
inherent sense of cleanness that belongs to both. _His Friend and His
Wife_ (1920) describes the tragic repercussions in tranquil homes of one
moral misstep. _The Blue Room_ (1920) is the story of a young man whose
reformation took place too late to avoid giving a shock of keen mental
anguish to his prospective bride on the eve of their marriage. These two
people achieve happiness not without scars, and the novel is a sharp
stroke at the double standard of morality or sex ethics.

_The Rustle of Silk_ (1922) is a presentation of political and social
life in after-war London. Lola Breezy, a reincarnation in a shabby, lower
middle class environment of the famous and alluring Madame de Breze of
eighteenth century France, lifts herself out of her surroundings by sheer
force of personality and becomes the friend and confidante of England’s
Home Secretary, the “coming” statesman.

_Another Scandal_ (1923) is an extension of _Scandal_ and deals with
Beatrix Vanderdyke and Pelham Franklin after their marriage. Mr.
Hamilton, describing the genesis of the novel, explains: “Here was this
astounding creature, Beatrix, not only married but about to have a
baby. Sentimental cynic that I am, I hoped that she had settled down.
At the same time, I dreaded a tangent. I hadn’t long to wait. Hardly
had Franklin II. time enough to open his eyes when Beatrix suffered
the inevitable reaction, finding that the ‘girl stuff,’ as she had an
irritating way of calling that pathetic-tragic-romantic thing in her, had
not worked itself out.” There is some extremely sound philosophy on the
whole subject of marriage in this novel.


iv

_Scandal_, like _The Blindness of Virtue_, made an effective play;
the number who will recall Francine Larrimore in the rôle of Beatrix
Vanderdyke is large. Rather better, except for those who have the empty
prejudice against reading plays, than any of Mr. Hamilton’s novels is
his _Four Plays_ (1924), containing “The New Poor,” “Scandal,” “The
Silver Fox,” and “The Mother Woman.” It is amusing to read the note in
connection with “The Mother Woman”: “Misproduced in New York under the
title of ‘Danger’ in 1922.” Mr. Hamilton, in a long experience with
the theater, has suffered much and most of it with sportsmanship and
cheerfulness; he is entitled to this calm and rather deadly comment.

“The New Poor” is social satire, a comedy in which actors impersonate
the servants; but the other three plays are in line with Mr. Hamilton’s
recent novels. “The Silver Fox” is a comedy of marriage and divorce;
but unquestionably the most powerful play of the collection is “The
Mother Woman.” Dealing with the question of children in a marriage which
is a social contract rather than a sacrament, at least, from the wife’s
viewpoint, its strength lies in the hardness and the consistency with
which the wife is characterized. In its thesis the play bears wholly in
one direction—not a weakness in the theatre, of course; but Mr. Hamilton
has the wisdom to give Violet Scorrier good speeches and to let her walk
off the stage, at the end of the last act, unchanged, unchanging, and
satisfied with her unshared ego.

The history of these plays and various others, together with much of
the history of his novels will be found in Mr. Hamilton’s extremely
readable _Unwritten History_. This, if it must be classed, can only be
put into the list of informal and anecdotal autobiographies. It has
all the good humor, the respect for human interest and the relative
disregard for the claims of mere importance which should pervade a book
of its sort. In other words, it has the exhilaration of talk devoted to
one’s liveliest recollections, with no special regard for chronology and
with only the spur of mood. And the mood? It is throughout humorous,
even self-humorous, democratic and impartial. Mr. Hamilton does not go
out of his way to express his opinions, but neither does he dodge a
natural comment when the occasion comes. You gather, for example, his
very definite and not favorable view of David Lloyd George. The book is
exceptional for its range of portraits. In anything from a sentence or
two to several pages there is something about Kipling, Barrie, Conrad,
Sinclair Lewis, Coningsby Dawson, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heywood Broun
and W. J. Locke among writers; the King and Queen, Lord Roberts, Colonel
E. M. House, Mr. Asquith, Admiral Beatty, J. Pierpont Morgan, Lord
Balfour, Melville Stone and the Prince of Wales among the figures of
public life; John Drew, Owen Davis, Pinero, Augustus Thomas, George
Arliss, William Archer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie
Chaplin and Granville Barker among the people of the theater. The twelve
caricatures, particularly those of Bernard Shaw, Charles Frohman, George
Grossmith, Sir Martin Harvey, Mr. Lloyd George and Lytton Strachey are
the first public disclosure of Cosmo Hamilton’s decided talent as an
artist.

But perhaps the interest and engaging quality of _Unwritten History_ can
best be shown by quoting, not an anecdote of some personage, but some
such incident as that of the first trip Mr. Hamilton made to this side:

“Before the ship had left Southampton I was flattered by the attention
of an extremely good-looking, athletic, well-groomed youngish man, who
insisted on walking the deck with me. He took the trouble to let me know,
very shortly after we had broken the ice, that although that trip was
not his maiden one he had only made the Western crossing once. But when,
an hour before the bugle sounded for dinner, the purser touched me on
the arm as I was following him into the smoking-room and murmured the
one word ‘card-sharp,’ I still went on utterly disbelieving this brutal
summing up of a delightful man’s profession. Those were the old bad days
when America was free, and never dreamed of interfering with the rights
of foreign vessels, and so we had a sherry and bitters together in what
is now an easy though a criminal way of encouraging an appetite. After
which, his hand closing familiarly on a box of dice, he suggested with
a naïve smile that we should kill an awkward half an hour by throwing
for five pound notes, and I saw, in a disappointed flash, the reason of
his flattery. The purser was right, as pursers have a knack of being.
And so as much to retrieve myself from his obvious assumption that I was
an ‘easy mark,’ as to be able to continue a pleasant acquaintanceship
without having again to back out of future invitations of the same
expensive sort, I made ready to dodge a knockout blow and told him that
I not only had no spare fivers to lose but had a peculiar aversion to
losing them to a card-sharp. After a second or two of extreme surprise
at my character reading and temerity he burst out laughing, and we
walked the deck together with perfect affability during the whole of the
rest of the voyage. He was one of the most interesting men that I have
ever met, a student of Dickens and Thackeray with a strong penchant for
the Brontës, and as devoted a lover of Italy as Lucas is, with much of
the same feeling for its beauty and its treasures. At no cost at all I
greatly enjoyed his company and when, six months later, I met him by
accident in Delmonico’s, with the ruddy color that comes from sea air and
shuffleboard, I was charmed by his eager acceptance of my invitation to
dine. In the meantime he had read _Duke’s Son_ and although he liked my
story very much and said so generously enough, at the same time assuring
me that he was not much of a hand at modern books, he wound up by
regretting that I had not met him before I wrote about cheating at cards,
because he could have put me right on several points. He died fighting
gallantly, and probably as humorously, in the war.”


v

Readers of _Unwritten History_ may look upon a photograph of Mr.
Hamilton’s home, an English cottage of that idyllic air which seems to
be the special property of all English cottages belonging to all English
authors. Mr. Hamilton and a young son (now somewhat older) are on the
brick steps that lead to the house, for the cottage is on a hill. Beside
the steps and in front of the house is what we call an “old-fashioned
garden”—flowers and plants in a profuse, unordered growth, with the tall
spikes of flowering hollyhocks making the garden three-dimensional. Mr.
Hamilton’s second marriage, after the death of Beryl Faber, was with a
Californian; and he now resides here rather more than abroad, although he
endeavors to spend his summers in England and on the Continent. In the
war, of course, he was in service, first with the anti-aircraft corps
(when he was finally detailed to Sandringham, for the protection of the
King and Queen during their stay) and then as a British publicist and
propagandist in America. American audiences like him, and he reciprocates.

There is, indeed, about him personally a simplicity, directness and
fundamental unsophistication that may be perceived in his fiction but
which is missed by the casual reader and auditor and observer and
acquaintance. Accident, marked talents and a variety of surface tastes
and social interests have constantly brought him into what has been well
described as “the world where one bores oneself to death unless one is in
mischief.” But both boredom and mischief are impossible if one continues,
as C. H. has continued, to care only for the same handful of essentials.
One thinks of him, for example, as the very antithesis of W. L. George.
Less poetic than his brother, Philip Gibbs, he has his share of the same
moral earnestness (a family trait) and gifts as great or greater as a
storyteller, especially a story of drama all compact.


BOOKS BY COSMO HAMILTON

         _Which Is Absurd_
         _Adam’s Clay_
         _Brummell_
         _Duke’s Son_ (also adapted as a play in French, written with
             Mme. Pierre Burton, and produced in Paris under the title,
             “Bridge”)
         _Plain Brown—A Summer Story_
         _The Infinite Capacity_
         _Keepers of the House_
    1911 _The Blindness of Virtue_
    1912 _The Outpost of Eternity_
    1912 _A Plea for the Younger Generation_
    1913 _The Door That Has No Key_
    1915 _The Miracle of Love_
    1916 _The Sins of the Children_
    1917 _Scandal_
    1919 _Who Cares?_
    1920 _His Friend and His Wife_
    1920 _The Blue Room_
    1922 _The Rustle of Silk_
    1923 _Another Scandal_
    1924 _Unwritten History_ (autobiographical)
    1924 _Four Plays: The New Poor, Scandal, The Silver Fox, and The
             Mother Woman_


SOURCES ON COSMO HAMILTON

_Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton. Autobiographical throughout.
A list of Mr. Hamilton’s plays will be found on page 351 of his _Four
Plays_, to which the plays in the volume must be added. The history of
most of them is given in _Unwritten History_.

“Cosmo Hamilton, the Man.” Booklet published (1923) by Little, Brown and
Company.

“Cosmo Hamilton: His Ambitions and His Achievements.” Booklet published
(1916) by Little, Brown and Company.

Reference is made in a footnote to the text of this chapter to Philip
Gibbs’s _Adventures in Journalism_.




12. Lest They Forget


i

In the short preface to his _Eminent Victorians_, Mr. Lytton Strachey
speaks of the great biological tradition of the French, of “their
incomparable _éloges_, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold
existences of men.” And he speaks of biography as “the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing.” The tribute of a
distinguished master of biographical literature was recalled to me as I
read André Maurois’s _Ariel, The Life of Shelley_, so ably translated
by Ella D’Arcy. Here are a comparatively few, but gloriously shining
pages. This biography has burst upon us with an effect as surprising and
luminous as Shelley himself. It is written on gauze and its transparency
shows opaline colors. The picture it gives us is of Matthew Arnold’s
“beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his wings in a luminous void”;
but I should delete the word “ineffectual.” If Shelley was ineffectual,
then the soul goes out of the world.

It needed a Frenchman, perhaps, to do the subject justice. Mr. Strachey,
as Aldous Huxley has remarked, is congenitally incapable of penetrating
the mystical mind. André Maurois was already known to some English
and American readers by the humorous and profound novels studying an
inarticulate English army officer. No one who read _The Silences of
Colonel Bramble_ can have forgotten its delicate portraiture. But such
fiction was a pastime beside _Ariel_.

I could, of course, quote the praise of Arnold Bennett and other acute
judges, but it seems to me a lame thing to do. Nor is there space to
quote from Maurois’s book, and it hurts me not to be able to transcribe
some things he has written. Any attempt to convey the quality of his
book reduces me to despair; and yet I am used—perhaps too well used—to
such attempts. Maurois is gleeful, tender, ironical; he recalls in his
delicate but firm art Mr. Strachey more than anyone else, but he is more
sympathetic, and so more just, than Strachey. This perhaps is because
he has that side which Strachey, with his Voltaire-like intellect,
quite lacks. Shelley’s pathetic youth, his three-cornered marriage, his
elopement with Mary Godwin, his few life-long friendships, his strange
contacts with Byron, the brief happiness in Italy and the ultimate,
tragic release of the captive soul to its flight in immortality—all
these are told with a sense of proportion and an effect unsurpassable.
The incidental portrait of Byron is more clear than any—yes, any!—of the
ponderous biographies that have saluted his centenary.


ii

Besides the large number of sketches and impressions of Woodrow Wilson
embedded in various recent books, there have already been published
several biographies; but _The True Story of Woodrow Wilson_, by David
Lawrence, seems to me distinctly the best of these, and probably the best
immediate life of Wilson we shall have. Mr. Lawrence sat under Mr. Wilson
when Wilson was professor of jurisprudence and politics at Princeton;
he was with him at the time of nomination for Governor of New Jersey;
he knew intimately the dissension at Princeton over the Wilson policies
as President of the University; and from the time of Mr. Wilson’s
nomination for the Presidency of the United States, Mr. Lawrence saw him
continuously and at close range. For the younger man had quickly become
one of the most brilliant of the Washington correspondents. His daily
despatches then, as now, appeared in newspapers throughout America. He
was in Washington, covering the White House, during Mr. Wilson’s terms;
went with him on his campaign tours; went with him through Europe and
watched him at Versailles; and finally was with him on the tour on which
Mr. Wilson suffered the physical collapse leading to his death. The
result of this prolonged contact is a book in which nothing relevant
is omitted or evaded. Mr. Lawrence begins with a striking chapter
summarizing the paradoxical qualities of the war President—in some
respects the most satisfactory portrait yet painted. He continues with
the same impartiality and a frankness which no one else has ventured;
and not the least valuable feature is the correspondent’s ability to
throw light on certain public acts of Wilson which have heretofore gone
unexplained.

One or two other volumes in which the political interest is predominant
deserve mention while our minds are on recent history. Maurice Paleologue
was the last French ambassador to the Russian Court, serving about
two years, from 3 July 1914 to mid-1916. The three volumes of his _An
Ambassador’s Memoirs_ constitute the most interesting account we have
had of the imperial decline, chiefly because M. Paleologue, with all
the genius of French writing, pictures the slow downfall with a kind of
terrible fidelity. The despairing vividness of this history is mitigated
by many delightful asides on aspects of Russian character and psychology,
art and life, written with an equal brilliance and a keen enjoyment.

_Twelve Years at the German Imperial Court_, by Count Robert
Zedlitz-Trützschler, is by the former controller of the household of
William II., then German Emperor. Its predominant interest is its
gradually built up character portrait of the ex-Emperor in the days of
his power. I say “gradually built up,” for the book consists simply of
private memoranda made by Zedlitz-Trützschler through the years of his
service. It seems that the unhappy Count felt keenly the inability to say
what he thought or to express his real feelings with safety to anybody.
At first, like every one else, he was fascinated by his royal and
imperial master. As he says in his preface: “There is a tendency today to
underrate the intellect of the Emperor very seriously. There can be no
dispute that his personality was a dazzling one.... He could, whenever it
seemed to him worth while, completely bewitch not only foreign princes
and diplomats, but even sober men of business.” The spell waned because
William lost interest. Zedlitz-Trützschler’s book is the soberest and
in some respects the frankest book about William that I have seen. Its
publication has put the author in hot water with his family and all his
class.

Charles Hitchcock Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_, based on personal
interviews with Mussolini of Italy, Horthy of Hungary, Primo de Riveira
of Spain and other statesmen, as well as most of the surviving European
monarchs, contains much interesting material about after-war Europe. It
is ultra-conservative in its political attitude, but General Sherrill
makes an effective case for his idea that the Crown, in European
countries, has served as a rallying point for patriotism and by its place
above factions has been a bulwark against revolution with bloodshed.


iii

Two very exceptional autobiographies are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
_Memories and Adventures_ and Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_.
Both are ample, lavishly illustrated volumes; and far apart as are the
lives they record, I hesitate to say that either exceeds the other in
charm.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes is a big, amiable man, a person of great
simplicity of manner and almost naïve in his enjoyment of people, places
and events. His book is inevitably one of a very wide popular appeal,
the more so as Sir Arthur is entirely without conceit. In _Memories and
Adventures_ he tells of his education at Stoneyhurst, in Germany, and in
Edinburgh, where he got his doctor’s degree. He relates his early medical
experiences and tells of his first attempts at writing. A memorable
voyage to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon, his earlier religious ideas
and beliefs and the changes they underwent, and his marriage are all
dealt with.

Then comes the story of his first real success as an author, made with
the novel, _A Study in Scarlet_. He had resounding subsequent successes
with _Micah Clarke_, _The Sign of the Four_, and _The White Company_. The
creation of Sherlock Holmes was a great milestone in Conan Doyle’s life.
This is without question the most famous character in English fiction.
Visits to America and Egypt and political adventures are chronicled.
There are reminiscences and anecdotes of Roosevelt, George Meredith,
Kitchener, Lloyd George, Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Henry Irving, Kipling,
Bernard Shaw, Barrie and many others, living and dead, sprinkled through
these extremely readable chapters. The closing chapter is devoted to the
author’s amazing experiences in psychical research; and it must be said
for him that he writes more persuasively of his experiences and beliefs
in this affair than anyone else has ever managed to do. Altogether
_Memories and Adventures_ will engross anyone who opens it.

Very different, with its own style and an accent of enthusiasm
throughout, is Constantin Stanislavsky’s _My Life in Art_. This man has
been the stage director of the Moscow Art Theater since its establishment
in 1898; and although that theater is now known throughout the world, and
is frequently hailed as the world’s foremost playhouse, Stanislavsky’s
reputation outside Russia has naturally been confined to the circles of
dramatic art. His autobiography depended for its American publication
wholly on the intrinsic interest of what he had to tell. You may infer
that that interest is considerable. It is.

I spoke of the book’s style. It is peculiar, individual; sincere and
unskilled, awkward and yet masterful; admirable because so evidently a
part of the author. Born in 1863, the son of a wealthy Russian merchant
family and the grandson of a French actress, Stanislavsky as a boy
showed stage talents in family theatricals; and though he later slaved
over accounts in his father’s counting-house, his nights were nights of
feverish absorption in the theater. His birth placed him in the thick
of the social and intellectual life of Moscow, for he belonged to the
class which has created the arts of Russia. At twenty-five he became
director of the Society of Art and Literature, a group of young people
with serious ideas about the stage and a great dissatisfaction with the
current Russian theater. When Stanislavsky met Nemirovich-Danchenko, the
Moscow Art Theater was founded.

The first half of _My Life in Art_ is therefore chiefly personal, a rich
slice of Russian life with plum-like impressions and reminiscences of
Rubinstein, Tolstoy, Tommaso Salvini the elder and other great artists
of that time. The second half deals with the Moscow Art Theater, in
which Stanislavsky made for himself a reputation as one of Russia’s
greatest actors, particularly in the rôles of Othello, Brutus, and Ivan
the Terrible. This part of _My Life in Art_ is crammed with material of
interest and value not only to those who follow the theater but to all
whose great interest is art. Chekhov, Tolstoy, Maeterlinck and others
in person are delightfully mixed with interpretative experience in
their plays and in the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, Pushkin and other
immortals. The book closes with a description of the present work of the
Moscow Art Theater, including the Soviet régime in Russia and the visit
to America.

At last we have a biography of Clyde Fitch, achieved in that most
satisfactory of ways, by means of his letters. Mr. Montrose J. Moses
and Miss Virginia Gerson, who edited the memorial edition of Clyde
Fitch’s plays, have been engaged for some time in collecting the Fitch
letters and the result of their labor is now published in one volume.
_Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ reflects well a personality which people
never forgot, since meeting him was, as some one said, like meeting a
figure in fiction. Fitch had a genius for friendship. His letters were
always unstudied, without pretension to literary style, and brimful of
a strongly impressionist reaction to the place or the event. He dashed
them off as the spirit prompted—on board ship, by an open window of
a Continental hotel, on the terraces of his country house; notes of
appreciation, notes of invitation, long, impulsive descriptions of
European festivities (some processional in Spain or some picturesque
account of Venetian gondoliering). They breathe, these letters, of
his warm association with the novelist, Robert Herrick; they show a
light-hearted friendship with Maude Adams and Kate Douglas Wiggin; they
show interchanges of appreciation between Fitch and William Dean Howells.
Again, the reader sees the evidence of the personal concern and interest
Fitch showed in the actors and actresses engaged for his plays. From
the incipient idea of a plot for a play to the play’s first night, the
letters enable the reader to follow breathlessly the climb of Clyde Fitch
to the position of America’s most successful playwright. But he remained
a simple, unaffected sort of person.

One cannot say more, I suppose, than that from the day when Richard
Mansfield asked him to write “Beau Brummell” to the day of Clyde Fitch’s
death, when he had taken “The City” abroad for a final polishing which
death prevented, _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_ is full of the live rush
of the man. A very sane and fundamentally enthusiastic attitude was his
toward American life, and those who read the book will not miss that part
of it.


iv

Of two books by women, one, _Sunlight and Song_, by Maria Jeritza, is the
great singer’s autobiography; while Frances Parkinson Keyes’s _Letters
from a Senator’s Wife_ is autobiographical only incidentally.

Mme. Jeritza is not only the foremost feminine personality in grand
opera in America today, but by her concert tours she has become known
throughout the United States. Her _Sunlight and Song_ is a book pretty
certain to interest everyone who has heard her—or heard of her. It is
written with directness, in a thoroughly popular vein, and is utterly
free from affectations or pose. An Austrian by birth, she sang in Olmütz
while in her teens, living on the hope of an engagement in Vienna. At
length she came to the capital and waited her turn in the trying-out
of voices. She was engaged for the municipal opera and afterward for
the Court Opera House. Her rôles from operas by Richard Strauss and
Puccini were rehearsed under the personal direction of the composers;
she met Caruso and dozens of other musical celebrities; she sang before
and met the Emperor; and in 1921 she came to America. One of the most
interesting bits of her book concerns a rehearsal of “Tosca” at which
she slipped and fell. She sang “Vissi d’arte” where she lay, exciting
Puccini’s enthusiasm. He exclaimed that always he had needed something
to make the aria stand out and command attention; and this did it! When
it was announced that Jeritza was to sing in “Tosca” in New York, there
was a noticeable wave of hostility from those who associated the rôle
exclusively with Geraldine Farrar. It vanished after she had appeared.

Among the photographs with which Jeritza’s book is illustrated are many
extremely beautiful pictures of the singer in her various rôles. The
chapters on “How an Opera Singer Really Lives,” “Studying with Sembrich,”
“Singing for the Phonograph,” and “Some Guest Performances” will
especially repay students of the voice.

The book by Mrs. Keyes, wife of the United States Senator from New
Hampshire, is in a class by itself. _Letters from a Senator’s Wife_
consists entirely of actual letters written to old friends who were some
distance away from Washington and who had a full feminine curiosity about
life there. Taken as they stand, Mrs. Keyes’s letters form a pretty
complete record of social and political life in the capital as seen
from the inner official circle. Beginning with her first impressions of
Washington, Mrs. Keyes goes on to describe the Harding inauguration, the
burial of the Unknown Soldier, the arms conference, the agricultural
conference in 1922 and the industrial conference in 1923; the dedication
of the Lincoln Memorial; the presentation of a gram of radium to Madame
Curie; the diplomatic and New Year’s receptions at the White House; the
convention of women’s organizations at which Lady Astor was conspicuous;
dinners, teas, an afternoon cruise as Mrs. Harding’s guest on the
Mayflower and social affairs innumerable.

The result is a picture of Washington exactly as a woman in Mrs. Keyes’s
place would be privileged to see it; women readers will have a sense of
participating in the things described. It is, I should say, exclusively a
woman’s book; but no one who appreciates the average woman’s enjoyment of
social detail will underestimate what Mrs. Keyes has accomplished. But in
addition to telling the reader what she would have to do, whom she would
meet, and what functions she would attend if she were in the Washington
circle, the book does really constitute an attractive record of current
history in the making and as made. Women who read it can scarcely fail to
become more intelligent than before.


v

Fortunately Maurice Francis Egan, one of the most beloved of Americans,
lived to complete for us his _Recollections of a Happy Life_. The author
of _Everybody’s St. Francis_, _Ten Years Near the German Frontier_,
_Confessions of a Book-Lover_ and other volumes had a scroll of memories
which began in Philadelphia in the 1850s and which included political
and social Washington in the Civil War period. In _Recollections of a
Happy Life_ the New York of the Henry George era is touched in with
delightful anecdotes of Richard Watson Gilder and the group that
surrounded him; there is a crisp picture of Indiana where Dr. Egan was
professor of English at Notre Dame; and the book fairly launches itself
with a full record of life in Washington and of the author’s close
association with Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, under
the last three of whom Dr. Egan held the post of Minister to Denmark.
Scholar, poet, critic, and most winning of companions, Dr. Egan’s
autobiography reflects a good deal of America in the past half-century as
well as his own varied experiences here and abroad.

Of even more definitely literary interest is _C. K. S. An Autobiography_,
by Clement K. Shorter. An indefatigable book collector whose library is
rich in first editions, original manuscripts, and autograph letters, Mr.
Shorter is probably best known as an editor and dramatic critic. He has
had thirty years in each rôle, and still writes weekly causeries which
carry, on occasion, a provocative sting. George Meredith, Stevenson,
Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy, and Gissing each are the subject of a chapter
founded primarily on personal impressions of the man.

Such personal impressions, mixed with estimates of the writer’s work,
form the substance of _The Literary Spotlight_, edited, with an
introduction, by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman. These anonymous
literary portraits have been aptly called “Mirrors of Literature.”
The anonymity has made possible a great deal of frankness, humor, and
penetration worth having, and Mr. Farrar has added bibliographies,
biographical facts and such data as make the volume handy for reference.
Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Mary
Johnston, Edwin Arlington Robinson and others of high contemporary
interest are presented.


THE TRUTH AT LAST!

_Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography_, by John A. Steuart.
Two volumes. This new biography, by an English writer, will throw much
new light on Stevenson. From unpublished documents in Edinburgh and
elsewhere, and from several people who knew Stevenson, Mr. Steuart has
obtained facts never before printed—so the portrait he draws is somewhat
different from those which have already appeared. This biography will
be of much interest to the many admirers of Stevenson’s work who are
not afraid to see the man as he actually was in his strength and his
weakness, his gaiety and his gloom. Photogravure frontispieces.

_The Truth at Last_, by Charles Hawtrey, edited, with an introduction,
by W. Somerset Maugham. The amusing, frankly self-revealing memoirs of
a famous English actor, well remembered in America for his tours in “A
Message from Mars” and “The Man from Blankley’s.” Illustrated.

_Forty Years in Washington_, by David S. Barry. Reminiscences of
Presidents, Cabinet members, Senators and Congressmen, by the
Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, who was Washington correspondent of The
Sun, New York, when Charles A. Dana was its editor. Illustrated.

_The Life of Olive Schreiner_, by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. The
biography, by her husband, of the brilliant author of _Dreams_ and _The
Story of an African Farm_, a woman of extraordinary personality who was
not only a writer of genius but a pioneer advocate of woman’s freedom.
Illustrated.

_Remembered Yesterdays_, by Robert Underwood Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s
reminiscences are unusually entertaining and novel, and their diversity
is exceptional. As a stripling he went to New York to join the staff
of Scribner’s Monthly, afterward known as the Century Magazine, with
which he was connected for forty years, as associate editor and as
editor-in-chief. Highly interesting are his touch-and-go reminiscences of
famous Americans and foreign visitors, his anecdotes of travel abroad,
and the account of his service as Ambassador to Italy in Wilson’s second
term. The portraits of American men of letters from the Civil War to the
present are vividly drawn. No recent volume of American recollections
keeps the reader in a more tolerant and gracious atmosphere. Illustrated.

_Three Generations_, by Maud Howe Elliott. A charming book of
reminiscences by the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, covering the life and
events of the past six decades. After her marriage to John Elliott, the
artist, she lived for long periods in Rome, and to her salon came hosts
of travelers and world-famous celebrities. It is a volume of memoirs of
international interest and a fascinating account of the most interesting
people in the world, in literature, art, drama, diplomacy and society,
covering sixty years of “glorious life.” Illustrated.

_Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr_, by Sisley Huddleston. Raymond Poincaré,
twice French Prime Minister and wartime President of the French Republic,
has been the storm center of Continental politics in connection with
the French occupation of the Ruhr. The author gives a vivid account of
his career, his strength and his limitations, brightly written, with a
considerable spice of wit. Frontispiece.

_A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D._, edited by
Agnes C. Vietor. The story of a woman whose courage and perseverance
probably did more than was accomplished by any other single person to
open the medical profession to women. Dr. Zakrzewska was born in 1829,
of Polish-German ancestry, and came to America when she was twenty-four.
She had already, in Germany, made her way against bitter and unceasing
opposition; in America she was to find herself without any standing at
all. After a period of struggle she met Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell who gave
her encouragement and in the face of every imaginable difficulty, Marie
Zakrzewska studied medicine at Cleveland. She was refused admission
at Harvard, but met Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker
and other noted men and women. Eventually she founded the New England
Hospital for Women and Children. Her autobiography is of profound
interest and considerable historical importance.

_The Life of Anne Boleyn_, by Philip W. Sergeant. A full and carefully
documented biography of the mother of Queen Elizabeth, written with charm
of style and sincerity, and constituting a vindication of Anne. Its view
of her is therefore exactly antithetical to the one advanced in the first
essay in _Post Mortem: Essays, Historical and Medical_, by C. MacLaurin.

_Robert Owen_, by Frank Podmore. The incomparable story of the shop boy
who became a rich and famous inventor of machines that revolutionized
the cotton mills, a mill owner, and a business builder—but whose eager
spirit caused him to found an Utopia in America, to work for labor
betterment and world peace, to question religious creeds and to become
a spiritualist. Few lives show so well the industrial and intellectual
transformation that went on in the nineteenth century.

_The Truth About My Father_, by Count Leon L. Tolstoi. By the one son
who sympathized with his father to the extent of accepting his doctrines
and endeavoring to work them out. The author says that his mother was
the source of his father’s greatest happiness and the real author of
his greatness; in old age, a will, secretly made under the influence of
Tchertkoff, came between the parents (more as a matter of deceit than of
the alienation of property).

_The Manuscript of St. Helena_, translated by Willard Parker. This is the
document mentioned in Napoleon’s will. He disavowed it as his work. It
must, however, have been inspired if not dictated by him. It reads like
a private diary, telling of Napoleon’s life and achievements in a terse,
clear style and showing him as he saw and judged himself. The document
was published in French in 1817 but has never before been translated into
English.

_The Letters of Madame, 1661-1708_, by Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria,
edited and translated by Gertrude Scott Stevenson. “Madame” was the usual
way of referring to Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, a sturdy,
outspoken German girl who, at nineteen, was married to Philippe, Duc
d’Orleans, only brother of Louis XIV. of France. Philippe was thirty-one,
effeminate, extravagant, and debauched; suspected of complicity in the
supposed poisoning of his first wife. “Madame” was the most prodigious
letter writer of an age fond of correspondence, a keen observer, and
much franker than most others dared to be. Her letters are not only a
great source for historians but breath-taking reading in themselves. The
picture of the court of Louis XIV. is unmatched except in the pages of
Saint-Simon.

_David Wilmot, Free Soiler_, by Charles Buxton Going. At last we have an
adequate account of the author of the Wilmot Proviso, offered in 1846 and
barring slavery in territory acquired from Mexico—the chief political
issue from then to the Civil War, and the chief instrument in creating
the Republican Party. Lincoln wrote that he had voted for the Wilmot
Proviso more than forty times while he was in Congress, and on becoming
President he offered Wilmot a place in his Cabinet.

_Servant of Sahibs_, by Ghulam Rassul Galwan, with an introduction by Sir
Francis Younghusband. Written in quaint English by a man who accompanied
Younghusband and who has worked for many years in the service of English
and American travelers in the Himalayas, Central Asia, and Tibet. An
adventurous and novel book which will delight everyone who cares for
Kipling’s fiction or for tales of India.

_Nell Gwyn_, by Lewis Melville. Her career from orange girl to King’s
favorite; her youthful troubles, her lovers, her stage success, her
rivals in royal favor, her vast popularity and later years in Pall Mall.
Illustrated in color.




13. That Literary Wanderer, E. V. Lucas


i

For a man whose air is so leisurely—whose literary air, that is, gives
every aspect of leisure—Edward Verrall Lucas has written a perplexingly
large number of books. Perhaps he is the living witness of the efficacy
of making haste slowly. If one were a murderer, for example, one would do
well to move away without haste (circumstances at all permitting) from
the scene of his crime. How often is haste, or even the appearance of
haste, fatal! In the unchanging words of the changing Fire Commissioners
of the City of New York, in case of murder, walk, do not run, to the
nearest exit.

Mr. Lucas’s murder was committed at the outset of his career and he
has been traveling from it by easy stages ever since. After close on
thirty years, the dark moment may be said to be below the horizon. But
in his literary youth he called in and slew his first book, a volume of
poems. And although the number and variety of his books since is such
that he has had to put them, for the reader’s guidance, under eight
classifications, he has still to give us a book of his own verse.

What, then, has he given us? What not were more quickly answered. His ten
novels, being of a special character, he very fittingly designates as
ENTERTAINMENTS, his thirteen volumes of ESSAYS slightly outnumber his
books in any other class; he has compiled eight ANTHOLOGIES and written
eight BOOKS FOR CHILDREN; has four collections of SELECTED WRITINGS,
two EDITED WORKS and five works of BIOGRAPHY to his account; and is the
author of seven books of TRAVEL, the well-known “Wanderer” series. The
most scholarly of his fifty-seven books—total as above—is _The Life of
Charles Lamb_, which is definitive. The most popular must be _A Wanderer
in London_ and _More Wanderings in London_, unless it be his first
published book of all, the anthology called _The Open Road_, put forth in
1899 and republished in England and America in 1923. The most amusing—?
There could be no agreement, though it is possible that later a majority
might decide upon his newest novel, _Advisory Ben_.

(Something is wrong with the reckoning. For the total of fifty-seven
and the eight classes do not contain the little treatise on _Vermeer of
Delft_, with its charming reproductions of paintings by Vermeer. There
is, besides, no way at hand of accounting for at least fifty-seven more
books in which Mr. Lucas has had some hand[64]—as, for one instance,
the English edition of Christopher Morley’s _Chimneysmoke_, where Lucas
provided the striking preface. However!)

Very evidently the work of E. V. Lucas must be examined in categories
and by considering one or two examples under several of the heads; and
then, perhaps, the glimpse of his personality afforded us may be lit from
within as well as without. It will perhaps clear the ground if we point
out in preliminary that Mr. Lucas is one of the editors of Punch and has
for long been a publisher’s reader and adviser for the English publishing
firm of Methuen & Company, Ltd.—a house of much distinction. He has done
much journalistic work. As would be inferred from _Vermeer of Delft_, he
is something of a connoisseur of painting, and as will be shown he is
much more distinctly a connoisseur of literary curiosities.


ii

In providing his “entertainments,” as he terms his novels, Mr. Lucas has
had in mind a structure always consistent, always graceful, generally
amusing but of very real strength. His fictions may be compared to
trellises set up with care to support as a rule no more serious burden
than rambler roses or some other innocent vine. But it has occasionally
happened that the trellis has been climbed upon by a plant of more
rugged growth and heavier weight, and the trellis has never failed to
sustain the spreading story. It might be apter to say that the plant has
sometimes put forth an unexpected flower—instead of the unpretending
rambler blossom a rose more disdainful—and still the frame has seemed
eminently in keeping with the whole design. For there is this about such
brightly elaborated, cheerfully artificial story structures: like the
trellis they are never concealed, though completely hid, their outline or
form remains exposed to every eye; yet both the eye and the mind receive
them naturally. The truth is, of course, that their absence or apparent
absence would throw us off. A climbing vine unsupported and unformed, its
tendrils thrown about distractedly and frozen in mid-air, would freeze
us with repulsion. And an ingenious, expanding, flowering tale without
its evident slight pretexts, its amiable excuse of ingenuity, would be an
equal monstrosity. Even artifice may be an art.

Characteristic is the device employed by Mr. Lucas in his most recent
book of this sort, _Advisory Ben_. Benita Stavely is an attractive girl
who struggles with cooks and other domestic matters until her father
remarries, when she finds herself free to select an occupation. She
starts an advisory bureau to assist harassed householders. The Beck
and Call, as her office is styled, soon justifies Ben’s venture by its
popularity. It is approached through a bookshop below and to it come
all manner of persons for counsel as to dogs, cooks, birthday presents
and matrimony. The bookshop is kept by two young men. Ben’s crowning
performance before she says “Yes” to one of the young men in the bookshop
is the finding and furnishing in three weeks of a large house for a rich
American. Now there are present in this engaging novel the two requisites
of Mr. Lucas’s art as a fictioner: first, the amiable pretext or excuse
for the tale, the slight but bright invention, which is of course the
notion of The Beck and Call itself, and second, the strength, erectile,
tensile and otherwise in the elaborated structure. For although the
scheme of the story is slender and the design of a gay simplicity, the
situations developed by Ben’s venture sometimes enable the author to
touch considerable depths of human feeling. But the airy scheme, the
graceful trellis, does not break. I do not mean that no strength is due
to the character portrayal; much is due to it. Obviously, if Ben were a
flitter-brain, if Mr. Lucas could give her no depth of feeling or not
enough personal sincerity, his story would crash. But Ben without The
Beck and Call would be Ben without opportunities to enable us to realize
her quality. An idea is at the bottom of all.

The same virtue of idea or scheme is the technical triumph of _The
Vermilion Box_, in which Mr. Lucas uses the familiar red letter box of
England as his device. He says, secretly, Open Sesame, and the mail box
opens to give us a series of letters between friends, acquaintances,
lovers, relatives who are all entangled in the web of the World War.
“Through these documents we meet the boy who will falsify his age, so
eager is he to serve his country; the ‘slacker’ who is eager to serve his
country by staying at home and drawing a salary for being secretary to a
league to enforce economy—but finds the office routine very irksome to
his artistic spirit. We meet the unoccupied clubman who has nothing to
do but listen to rumors of spies in the Cabinet and disaffection in the
field—and who writes of his discoveries to the papers; the old ladies who
work and save, and who wait for war office telegrams telling the fate of
the sons they have given to England. And then we meet the young English
officer who, jokingly, ran an advertisement asking women to correspond
with him: who realized the bad taste of his joke when a bereaved mother
sent him the letter she had partly written to her soldier son when the
news of his death came, but who thanked the fates for his folly when it
brought the acquaintance of Portia Grey.... But this is much more than a
love tale told in letters; behind that and behind the often occurring and
charming humor of the book there is a seriously conceived and accurately
painted picture of public opinion and feeling. A correspondent has been
telling of a clergyman friend who has enlisted as a combatant, but who
intends to resume his clerical duties after the war is over. The writer
has composed some verses satirizing the view that Christianity is
something thus to be put off or on, as circumstances dictate:

“‘Three or four men to whom I have shown these verses have complimented
me on the effort which they make to get at the truth. But none of these
men would sign a document calling for a close time for the creeds until
the war is over, or suggesting that our archbishops were not at the
moment earning their not inconsiderable salaries. That is one of the odd
things about England—that private conscience and the public conscience
are so different. In France a typical private individual’s view of things
is, when multiplied indefinitely, also the view of the State. Not so
here, where as individuals we practice or subscribe to many liberties
which would not be good for the general public.’”[65]


iii

_Verena in the Midst_ also employed effectively the device of
interchanged letters to develop the tale, and surely not even the
expedient of The Beck and Call in _Advisory Ben_ is more well-conceived
than the tale of the adventures of Uncle Cavanagh in giving away his
wife’s property (_Genevra’s Money_). There are bits about the Barbizon
school of painting and there is a surprising deal about religious
concepts in _Genevra’s Money_, but I have yet to hear it said that this
informative and speculative matter obtrudes itself or overweights the
book. It dwells comfortably alongside the high comedy of Uncle Giles
(whose sole intellectual accomplishment is the verdict, general and
specific, upon persons he doesn’t understand: “He’s a nasty feller”)
because Mr. Lucas had the courage, not of his convictions but of his
ingenuity.

That he has convictions can scarcely be doubted by the careful reader;
the nature of them can scarcely be missed by the thoughtful one. They
may now and then be stated more plainly in his books of essays, for
the nature of the essay exacts that, but they cannot be put with more
poignancy. In the excellent Introduction to his _Essays of To-Day: An
Anthology_, (itself a worthy essay), Mr. F. H. Pritchard reminds us of
Montaigne’s instruction that an essay must be “consubstantial” with its
author, of Mr. Gosse’s dictum that its style must be “confidential,” and
adds—what is true and striking—that the lyric and the essay are both “the
most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.”
He adds: “The difference, indeed, is one of temperature.”[66] But the
material, or at least its base, is identical.

It would not be difficult—it would, in fact, be ignobly easy—to indicate
this essay of Mr. Lucas’s as typical of his power of pathos, that
one as showing the exercise of comedy, another as the evidence of a
controlled irony which is his. So one might make a swift and triumphant
recapitulation of the gifts and qualities of a literary personality among
the most rounded of its time. But I had rather not be facile, for the
sake, if possible, of going more surely. “Most of the other essays are
exceedingly light in texture,” observes Arnold Bennett, in a comment
on _One Day and Another_. “They leave no loophole for criticism, for
their accomplishment is always at least as high as their ambition. They
are serenely well done.” But—“it could not have been without intention
that he put first in this new book an essay describing the manufacture
of a professional criminal.”[67] Nor, I think, was it without intention
that _Giving and Receiving_ closes with that quietly-expressed but
piercing account of a bullfight, “Whenever I See a Grey Horse....” The
word “whimsical” has come to have a connotation exclusively buoyant
or cheerful, although the habit of fancy—it is far more habit than
gift—may be indulged in any direction congenial to one’s nature. Mr.
Lucas is whimsical enough in the series of tiny fables (“Once Upon a
Time”) composing the last section of _Cloud and Silver_. But one of his
“whimsies” is savage in its scorn of the hunters of pheasants, another
calmly reckons the totals of five years’ expenditure on cloak-room fees
for a hat and stick, and a third of the twenty, called “Progress,” is so
brief it is better quoted than characterized:

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who asked his father if Nero was
a bad man.

“‘Thoroughly bad,’ said his father.

“Once upon a time, many years later, there was another little boy who
asked his father if Nero was a bad man.

“‘I don’t know that one should exactly say that,’ replied his father:
‘we ought not to be quite so sweeping. But he certainly had his less
felicitous moments.’”

This, like much of Mr. Lucas’s expression in the essay, is far too
perfect to be spoiled by an embroidery of analytical adjectives. Mr.
Llewellyn Jones very properly cites the opening paragraph of the
essay, “Of Plans for One More Spring” (_Cloud and Silver_) as a fine
illustration of “what an emotional effect Mr. Lucas can achieve from the
simplest materials.”[68] The essay was written in February, 1915:

“It is much on my mind just now that I must not waste a minute of the
spring that is coming. We have waited for it longer than for any before,
and the world has grown so strange and unlovely since spring was here
last. Life has become so cheap, human nature has become so cruel and
wanton, that all sense of security has gone. Hence this spring must be
lived, every moment of it.”

It will be found that in his moments of most entire abandonment to
comedy Mr. Lucas is clearly engrossed in the problem of human nature.
“The Battle of the Mothers,” in _Giving and Receiving_, is laughable
throughout; but the recollection is deepened by the very gentleness of
the satire. An Archdeacon enters a Club and explains to friends that he
has been on a motor tour with his mother, who is ninety-one and “in the
pink of condition” and delights in motoring.

“‘Well,’ said the testy man, ‘you needn’t be so conceited about it. You
are not the only person with an elderly mother. I have a mother too.’

“We switched round to this new center of surprise. It was even more
incredible that this man should have a mother than the Archdeacon. No one
had ever suspected him of anything so extreme, for he had a long white
beard and hobbled with a stick.”

The highly diverting dialogue ensuing would be forgotten as quickly as
read were it not the quintessence of that amiable self-conceit common
to us all. A similar effect is the secret of “The Snowball,” in _Luck
of the Year_, where a man wonders what to do with a good luck chain
letter—pooh-poohs it, figures its rapid and enormous multiplication in a
week, ponders the letter’s promise of good fortune, begins to jot down
the names of nine friends, reaches toward the wastebasket, draws back
his hand—. Occasionally, indeed, these essays of Mr. Lucas’s compose
themselves perfectly as short stories; if, as I suppose, the work of
Katherine Mansfield and others has taught us that a short story need
not be the jack-in-box plot. Such, in _Luck of the Year_, is “The Human
Touch,” which deals with a single horse cab driver among the battalions
of taxicabs. “When the express arrived he galvanized his horse and began
to make alluring signs and sounds as the passengers emerged; but one and
all repulsed him.” Equally a short story, and a very good one, is “A
Study in Symmetry,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, where the conceit of
a painter of portraits is gently punctured.

I suppose such pieces as “Scents,” in _Luck of the Year_; “Davy Jones,”
in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_; and “Signs and Avoirdupois,” in _Giving
and Receiving_ are essays in the strict sense of Mr. Pritchard’s
definition that I have quoted. Certainly the catalogue at the close of
“Scents” is an “intimate revelation of personality” and it borders on the
lyrical:

“What are the most delicious scents? Every one could make a list. Rupert
Brooke made one in one of his poems; but it was not exhaustive. I know
what mine would contain, even if it failed to include all. Sweet-briar in
the air, so vague and elusive that search cannot trace the source. Pine
trees in the air on a hot day. Lime blossoms in the air. (‘Such a noisy
smell!’ as a small child said, thinking of the murmur of bees that always
accompanies it.) Brake fern crushed. Walnut leaves crushed. Mint sauce.
Newly split wood in a copse. Any kind of gardener’s rubbish fire. An
unsmoked brier pipe. Cinnamon. Ripe apples. Tea just opened. Coffee just
ground. A racing stable. A dairy farm. A shrubbery of box. Cedar pencils.
Cigars in the box. A hot day on the South Downs when a light wind brings
the thyme with it. The under side of a turf. A circus.

“And I have said nothing of flowers!”


iv

Taste. It is underlying quality with Lucas, after all. I do not say
“catholicity of taste,” for it seems to me redundant. A taste which
should allow itself to be fenced in would soon shrivel and die for lack
of exercise; for what is taste but the faculty of selection constantly
exerted and how can one have it except by its unremitting use? Like all
other qualities abstracted into words, such as honor, integrity, virtue,
and the rest, taste itself is no abstraction. A man cannot have honor,
except as he shows he has it, nor virtue except as he behaves virtuously
in this or that situation; and his possession of taste must depend upon
what he chooses in thoughts, words, actions and objects. I say _what_ he
chooses, and leave the _how_ to the psychologists, who have still a few
years, or perhaps centuries, to spend on investigation of this very nice
problem.

His taste, then, distinguishes Mr. Lucas as a connoisseur of literary
curiosities, which, when taste is shown, become also human concerns.
“The Innocent’s Progress,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, a description
of an obsolete book of manners for the young, is a lesser example of
Mr. Lucas’s taste; his candid rejection of English slang, because it
is undescriptive, and acceptance of American slang because it applies
and illustrates is the application of excellent taste to a strictly
contemporary point.[69]—and no test of taste is more exacting. The essays
on “Breguet,” the great French watch-maker, in _Giving and Receiving_,
and on Hans Christian Andersen[70] and John Leech[71] are to many readers
of more importance than a modern topic, like “Telephonics.”[72] For while
taste must choose, and help us to choose, among the things of the hour,
its service in the rescue of the past is an education in taste as well as
an enrichment of the present.

Mr. Lucas (to illustrate) never practised his literary connoisseurship
to a more humane and generous end than when he gave us, in 1916, _The
Hausfrau Rampant_. This, like his edition of Charles and Mary Lamb, is an
edited work. Julius Stinde (1841-1905), a native of Holstein, Germany,
was originally a chemist and the author of an elaborate treatise on
_Wasser und Seife (Water and Soap)_, to which he affixed the name of
his charwoman, Frau Wilhelmine Buchholz, as author. Later it occurred
to Stinde to write a satire on the typical middle-class Berlin family
with marriageable daughters; he elevated Frau Wilhelmine to the ranks
of the bourgeoisie and began a book, or rather a series of books, which
became as popular in Germany as Dickens in England. England, France
and America all uttered praise of _The Buchholz Family_ in the 1880s,
and with good reason. The work, outside of Germany, had been lost sight
of for nearly thirty years when Lucas, rendered sleepless by a struggle
with mosquitoes one night in Venice, came upon the first volume of the
English translation in his landlord’s library. The quality was such as to
make him hunt up the other three English volumes; and from the work as a
whole he selected the most entertaining passages, “joining them together
with some explanatory cement.” This is _The Hausfrau Rampant_. It was, of
course, with a purpose that Mr. Lucas published _The Hausfrau Rampant_
at a time when feeling in England and America ran high against the
country of Stinde. The purpose will be obvious to anyone reading Lucas’s
Introduction to the book. No imaginable eloquence could be so effective
as the word portrait of Herr Stinde there presented. The possession of
taste carries its own courage with it.

[Illustration: E. V. LUCAS]


v

One could go on, as it were, indefinitely, but with Mr. Lucas as guide
never indefinably. Such an anthology as _The Open Road_ knows what many
an anthology never knows—readers who return to it again and again because
it is inclusive without being indiscriminate. The impressions of India,
Japan, and America in _Roving East and Roving West_ are among the most
valuable any traveler has put down because they are single impressions
and because, with Mr. Lucas, to see is to choose, as with a painter. It
is when he comes to consider work where a fine talent has already seen
and chosen, as in his _Vermeer of Delft_, that he becomes singularly
luminous; with the ground cleared, he can give his enthusiasm rein. His
_Wanderer_ books on London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Holland are
digressive in the sense that the longest way ’round is the shortest
way home—in other words, the associations of a scene are the shortest
cut to enabling us really to see it. And now Mr. Lucas has united his
taste for fine painting with his Wanderer’s talent: _Little Wanderings
Among the Great Masters_, in six illustrated volumes, and _A Wanderer
Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries of Europe_, with its many
reproductions of famous masterpieces, are his new volumes. The set of
six, dealing with Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Frans Hals, Murillo,
Chardin and Rembrandt, are the best brief popular accounts I know,
blending as they do essential biographical facts and the elements of
esthetic enjoyment of the artists’ work. One hopes the little volumes may
be added to by a similar treatment of other great painters. _A Wanderer
Among Pictures_ is, of course, a thing far more ambitious, a compact
treasure delicately plundered from collections in fifteen of Europe’s
chief cities. But how delicious to have these great paintings described
by one who knows how to write and who has a gift for conveying such
beauty with literary art and verbal simplicity!

But a few words must be said about E. V. Lucas, the man.

“A youngish fifty, perhaps,” wrote Robert Cortes Holliday, meeting him
in 1919 or 1920 in Chicago. “Rather tall. A good weight, not over heavy.
Light on his feet, like a man who has taken his share in active field
games. Something of a stoop. A smile, good, natural, but sly. Dark
hair, shot with gray. Noble prow of a nose. Most striking note of all,
that ruddy complexion, ruddy to a degree which (as I reflect upon the
matter) seems to be peculiar to a certain type of Englishman.”[73] Mr.
Lucas spent several days in Chicago on this visit, but only about four
persons knew it at the time. Mr. Holliday noted that Lucas studied his
menu card “with deep attention” and was particular about the service of
the dinner when it came. He was not on a lecture tour and inquired about
recent literary visitors from England, appearing to be “much amused at
the number of them.” He punned twice, badly, spoke admiringly of American
humor and especially of the work of Don Marquis,[74] and spoke of the
number of American words “which mean so much, and mean nothing at all,
like ‘cave-man’ and ‘mother love.’” It also appeared that Lucas could do
no writing in a hotel room.

Like nearly all authors, he has an inexhaustible store of gossip about
other authors.

His biographical sketch in _Who’s Who_ (the information for which is
supplied by the subject) omits all the usual personal data, such as the
date and place of birth, parentage, schooling, etc. It even omits his
recreations, which most Englishmen are careful to give. There are his
name and his occupations—“writer and publisher’s reader”—followed by a
partial list of his books, his address in London and the rich array of
his clubs, which include the Athenæum, the Garrick, the Burlington Fine
Arts and the National Sporting Club. This outdoes Mr. Galsworthy, who
mentions the year of his birth, though the Athenæum is his only club.

“He has a kind of mischievous cruelty in his dissection of humanity,” a
distinguished novelist once remarked, speaking of Lucas’s conversation.
“But he is extremely good company,” came in the next breath. This
observer added: “I always think that the best picture of Lucas’s
character is to be found in Bennett’s _Books and Persons_.” Here it is:

“Mr. Lucas is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be
mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come,
with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further,
and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic
critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably
encounter rock. Only here and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas
allow us to glimpse a certain powerful and sardonic harshness in him,
indicative of a mind that has seen the world and irrevocably judged it in
most of its manifestations. I could believe that Mr. Lucas is an ardent
politician, who, however, would not deign to mention his passionately
held views save with a pencil on a ballot-paper—if then!... Immanent in
the book is the calm assurance of a man perfectly aware that it will be a
passing hard task to get change out of _him_!”[75]

And here is more testimony, to the same general effect:

“E. V. Lucas always reminds me of Kipling’s ‘cat that walked by itself.’
He knows everybody, but I have often wondered whether anybody really
knows him. He is an amazingly busy man—the assistant editor of Punch,
the literary director of Methuen’s, the writer of almost countless
charming and distinguished essays, to say nothing of novels and travel
books. As a writer he has the appealing urbanity of Charles Lamb, of
whom he has written far and away the best biography in the language. But
I do not think that there is much of Lamb’s urbanity in E. V. Lucas the
man, the gentle-voiced, modern, rather weary man of the world. The humor
of the Lucas essays is sunny and kindly. The humor of Lucas himself is
cynically tolerant.

“I have said that Lucas knows everybody. The only circles into which he
never goes are literary circles. Where professional writers are gathered
together, there you will never find E. V. Lucas. He prefers actors and
prize-fighters. There is a story that Lucas once gave a dinner party at
the Athenæum Club to which he invited Georges Carpentier and Harry Tate.
I do not altogether disbelieve that story, but a bishop ought to have
been included in the dinner party to make it complete.

“Lucas loves cricket, and is a good man to dine with. His talk is
stimulating and his taste in wine perfection.”[76]

Possibly E. V. Lucas’s closest personal friends among writers in
America—certainly his closest temperamental affinities—are Don Marquis
and Christopher Morley. Occupationally, as the sociologist would say,
he is allied with such fellow editors as E. T. Raymond and A. A. Milne
and with such publishers’ literary advisers as—not to go back to George
Meredith, who read for Chapman and Hall—Frank Swinnerton, who reads for
Chatto & Windus, and J. D. Beresford, reader for Collins.


BOOKS BY E. V. LUCAS

For a full list of books written, compiled, edited by and contributed to
by Mr. Lucas, write to Methuen & Co., Ltd., 36 Essex Street, London, W.C.
2. About 130 titles are comprised.

ANTHOLOGIES:

    1899 _The Open Road_
    1903 _The Friendly Town_
    1907 _The Gentlest Art_
    1908 _Her Infinite Variety_
    1909 _Good Company_
    1910 _The Second Post_
    1914 _Remember Louvain_
    1923 _The Best of Lamb_

BIOGRAPHY:

    1905 _The Life of Charles Lamb_
    1907 _A Swan and Her Friends_
    1907 _The Hambledon Men_
    1913 _The British School_
    1921 _The Life and Work of E. A. Abbey, R.A._
    1922 _Vermeer of Delft_
    1924 _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters._ Six volumes

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN:

    1897 _A Book of Verses for Children_
    1903 _The “Original Verses” of Ann and Jane Taylor_
    1906 _Forgotten Tales of Long Ago_
    1907 _Another Book of Verses for Children_
    1908 _Runaways and Castaways_
    1908 _Anne’s Terrible Good-Nature_
    1910 _The Slowcoach_
    —— _More Forgotten Stories_

EDITED WORKS:

    1903 _The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb_
    1916 _The Hausfrau Rampant_

ENTERTAINMENTS:

    1906 _Listener’s Lure_
    1908 _Over Bemerton’s_
    1910 _Mr. Ingleside_
    1912 _London Lavender_
    1914 _Landmarks_
    1916 _The Vermilion Box_
    1920 _Verena in the Midst_
    1921 _Rose and Rose_
    1922 _Genevra’s Money_
    1924 _Advisory Ben_

ESSAYS:

    1906 _Fireside and Sunshine_
    1907 _Character and Comedy_
    1909 _One Day and Another_
    1911 _Old Lamps for New_
    1913 _Loiterer’s Harvest_
    1916 _Cloud and Silver_
    1917 _A Boswell of Baghdad_
    1918 _Twixt Eagle and Dove_
    1919 _The Phantom Journal_
    1920 _Adventures and Enthusiasms_
    1921 _Roving East and Roving West_
    1922 _Giving and Receiving_
    1923 _Luck of the Year_

SELECTED WRITINGS:

    1911 _A Little of Everything_
    1911 _Harvest Home_
    1916 _Variety Lane_
    1919 _Mixed Vintages_

TRAVEL:

    1904 _Highways and Byways in Sussex_
    1905 _A Wanderer in Holland_
    1906 _A Wanderer in London_
    1909 _A Wanderer in Paris_
    1912 _A Wanderer in Florence_
    1914 _A Wanderer in Venice_
    1916 _More Wanderings in London_
             In England: London Revisited
    1924 _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries
             of Europe_

AND ALSO (WRITTEN WITH C. L. GRAVES):

    1903 _Wisdom While You Wait_


SOURCES ON E. V. LUCAS

“Unless my judgment is much at fault, there has written in English, since
the death of R. L. Stevenson, no one so proficient in the pure art of
the essayist as Mr. E. V. Lucas,” says Edmund Gosse at the beginning of
his “The Essays of Mr. Lucas,” in his volume, _Books on the Table_. This
essay on an essayist should be consulted either in Mr. Gosse’s own volume
(page 105) or in F. H. Pritchard’s _Essays of To-Day: An Anthology_, in
which it is included (page 249). No more authoritative or more charmingly
stated estimate of Mr. Lucas as an essayist is known to me.

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in
footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL
LITERATURE for the years since 1913 and the files of The Bookman (London)
for the years since 1908.




14. American History in Fiction


The use of history in fiction is at once an aid and a handicap to the
writer. Where he is using historical persons, he may count upon a certain
delight of recognition from some or all of his readers; offset by
disappointment if the portrait doesn’t closely resemble a preconceived
ideal. The use of an historical period is on the whole far more
satisfactory, and an exact setting is the most satisfactory of all. For
fiction is written to express a sense of meaning and to convey a feeling.
Like all forms of faith, it creates its own facts. And, as in some other
types of illumination, the most effective treatment of historical figures
and occurrences by the fictioner is often—indirect lighting.

The three writers I am going to talk principally about in this chapter
have certain resemblances and a marked divergence. Although two of them
are no longer alive, their audiences were never greater than now. All
three belong to the South and West, and two of them wrote novels which
have been transformed into motion pictures of enormous influence and
success. The third is usually spoken of as a writer for boys, although
the boys who read him are, many of them, long past their teens. Both
Emerson Hough and Thomas Dixon wrote books which are partly or mainly
propaganda. Joseph A. Altsheler, avoiding any suggestion of such a thing,
was remarkable for the accuracy of historical detail in his stories.
Perhaps the most striking quality in common among these three writers—I
won’t undertake to give it a name—is the fact that each, on more than one
occasion, has had his huge audience waiting in line to get his book.


I. EMERSON HOUGH

The author of _The Covered Wagon_ was born in Newton, Iowa, 28 June
1857, and died 30 April 1923, when the motion picture fashioned from his
novel was the sensation of Broadway—indeed, of America. The first class
graduated from the little Iowa high school had three members, Hough
being one. (It is perhaps not out of place to say that he pronounced his
surname “Huff”). After a brief experience teaching a country school,
the boy entered Iowa State University and was graduated with the class
of 1880. “I had a university education, perfectly good and perfectly
worthless,” he said in later years. His father, Joseph Bond Hough, had
been a Virginia schoolmaster, and saw education in terms of a classical
course leading to one of the professions. The young man read law in
Newton and was admitted to the bar there.

Life began for him then. He went to White Oaks, New Mexico, half a cow
town and half a mining camp, about eighty miles west of Socorro in the
mountain region between the Rio Grande and the Pecos Rivers. Mr. Hough’s
_North of 36_ has been attacked as lacking in authenticity because,
when he came to White Oaks, “the frontier epoch had ended.” To which
the novelist William MacLeod Raine has made reply: “Interesting, if
true. Particularly interesting to me, because it was in 1881 that my
father brought his family into the Southwest from England and went into
the cattle business (with side lines of tie-making and lumbering). The
nearest village was 30 miles away. I and my small brothers used to ride
twenty miles to get the mail once a week. That outpost of civilization
my memory can make the setting of a score of dramatic incidents. The
frontier was not a hard and fast condition which can be defined as having
vanished on a specific date. Civilization lapped forward here and there,
leaving pockets which did not yield to its influence for many years.” And
Hough himself said simply: “In this rugged field, among these splendid
and sterling men, in an atmosphere not too law-abiding, but always just
and broad, I got my first actual impression of life; learned to respect a
man for what he really is.”

He became a sportsman from the first—the practice of law in White Oaks
was not exacting—and all his life he was a great hunter and traveler. His
father failed in business and something had to be done to make a living
for the family. Journalism seemed to be Emerson Hough’s only chance;
he had already sold fugitive pieces. After a little time in Des Moines
and work on a newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, he got, in 1889, the job of
looking after the Chicago office of Forest and Stream. The job paid $15
a week. But he combined with it work for daily newspapers and for a
newspaper syndicate. Most of his writing had to do with sport.

There were some bitter times. But, in fact, nearly all his life until
within a few years of his death was to be a mixture of hardships and
happiness. The hardships concerned money, except those physical hardships
he endured out of doors in what were undoubtedly the happiest hours of
his life. Out of doors journalism took him into almost every State of the
Union and almost every Province of Canada; to Alaska, also. Sometimes he
used to wonder if he had ever slept thirty consecutive nights under one
roof. Desperately worried at times, he would say with a sigh of relief:
“It is impossible to fret over things when you are wading a trout stream,
following a good dog, or riding a good horse.” Within five years of his
death intimate friends saw him, suffering from ill health, in tears over
uncertainties regarding his work and discouraging certainties regarding
his income; yet he lived through the swift, dramatic turn of his fortunes
to taste the satisfaction of his very great ambition and to reap a
substantial part of the money reward.

[Illustration: EMERSON HOUGH

_Photograph by Moffett, Chicago._]

In 1895 he explored the Yellowstone Park in winter, going on skis, and an
Act of Congress protecting the Park buffalo was due to this adventure. By
speech and by his writings he did much all his life to aid the protection
and study of wild life and to support the system of national parks. The
America he had known in the flush of his youth was really a passion with
him. One day after he had finished a series of short stories on the old
trails for his out of doors department in the Saturday Evening Post the
editor, George Horace Lorimer, suggested that he take either the Overland
or the Oregon trail as the subject of a novel. The suggestion was in
itself the most magnificent of trails to such a mind as Hough’s. He
wrote, then, _The Covered Wagon_.

His first book, _The Singing Mouse Stories_, which had to do with out of
doors, appeared when he was 38; he was forty when, in 1897, he married
Charlotte A. Cheesbro, of Chicago, and published _The Story of the
Cowboy_, praised by Theodore Roosevelt. His first novel came three years
later, and with his second, _The Mississippi Bubble_ (1902), he attracted
nation-wide attention. It is amusing to recall that he made five copies
of _The Mississippi Bubble_ and despatched them simultaneously to five
publishers, each of whom sent an acceptance.

When he died, Mr. Hough left several completed books. Three of them were
novels and the first of these, _Mother of Gold_, has just been published.
A story of the present day, woven around the old legend of the lost mine
of Montezuma, it has to a curious degree the pioneer zest and spirit of
Hough’s romances of earlier times.

Of his earlier novels, _The Mississippi Bubble_ and _Fifty-four Forty or
Fight_ are the ones that seem likely to be read longest; of his later
novels probably _The Magnificent Adventure_ (1915), dealing with the
Lewis and Clark expedition and with Aaron Burr’s daughter as its heroine,
_The Covered Wagon_, and _North of 36_, the story of the Texas cattle
trail, have the best chance of permanence—always premising that work as
yet unpublished may take its place with these.


II. JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

To Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York
Public Library, I am indebted for the best picture of what Joseph A.
Altsheler’s work signifies. Both at the time of his death and since, he
was and has been and is the most popular author of books for boys in
America. He is more popular than James Fenimore Cooper, to whose work his
own is probably most closely allied. He wrote over again, as Miss Moore
has pointed out, the tales of our pioneer life and struggle “with a fresh
sense of their reality.” His “deep love of nature, the ability to select
from historical sources subjects of strong human interest, a natural
gift for storytelling, and great modesty” were other qualities which the
youthful reader senses and appreciates. “Boys who clamor for Altsheler,”
says Miss Moore, “read history and biography as a natural and necessary
accompaniment. Nor do they neglect _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_,
or _The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain_. Never in the history of writing for
boys has an author attained universal popularity on so broad a foundation
of allied interests in reading.”[77]

Cooper wrote when American history was brief; another century and the
breadth of a continent unrolled itself before Altsheler, who set about
in quiet patience to make all that spaciousness and all those crowding
events intelligible for the American boy. And because in modesty and
patience he had gone far to achieve just that—taking the average boy
into the wilderness, as Miss Moore says, “so that he may realize his
heritage in the history of his country and take his place there more
intelligently”—his death is a sharp loss. Miss Moore has told how, on 7
June 1919, boys came all day long to the New York Public Library, some
with clippings from the newspapers telling of their favorite’s death.
There they could look upon a full set of all his works, and his picture.
Said a 17-year-old:

“He looks young in that picture but he could have lived all through
American history—he makes it so true. You couldn’t do better than to
read his books. You can even answer some of the Regents’ questions out
of Altsheler’s books. I read every one of them and I got an A-1 mark for
history.”

Eyes roved along the shelves over the volumes of the Young Trailers’
Series, the Texan Series, the French and Indian War Series, the Civil War
Series, and the rest. They picked out individual titles—always simple
and always touched with the imagination of a man who knew supremely how
to kindle the youthful mind. Altsheler, indeed, surpassed himself in the
titles of the eight books of his Civil War Series, a beautiful crescendo:

    _The Guns of Bull Run_
    _The Guns of Shiloh_
    _The Scouts of Stonewall_
    _The Sword of Antietam_
    _The Star of Gettysburg_

and then the point of rest, on a great chord, followed by a resolution
and a final cadence:

    _The Rock of Chickamauga_
    _The Shades of the Wilderness_
    _The Tree of Appomattox_

—guns, scouts, sword, star, rock! The words sing. Then the shades of
anguish, weariness, impending defeat, and at last the peace of the
spreading tree....

Joseph Alexander Altsheler was born at Three Springs, Kentucky, 29 April
1862. As a boy he would lie on his back in the woods of the Daniel Boone
country and dream of the pioneers until they came to have as strong a
fascination for him as the myths of Greece have had for other minds.
There were not many books, but he heard over and over again the stories
of woodsmen and fighters, for he was descended on his mother’s side from
Virginia and Kentucky borderers. And as a boy he knew personally Civil
War veterans, both blue and gray, such as General Simon Bolivar Buckner,
General Don Carlos Buell, and General Frank Wolford. The one writer who
captivated him completely and to whom he afterward said he owed the most
was Francis Parkman.

He was educated at Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky, and at Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, Tennessee. Then he went to work on the Louisville
Evening Post. A year later he moved over to Henry Watterson’s
Courier-Journal, for which he became the political reporter and
legislative correspondent at Frankfort, the State capital.

After service as city editor of the Courier-Journal and as an editorial
writer, he joined the staff of the World, New York. He covered the
World’s Fair in Chicago and the events attending the dethronement of
Liliuokalani in Hawaii, and then became editor and manager of the
tri-weekly edition of the World, a job he continued to hold until his
death. His first book of consequence was _The Sun of Saratoga_ (1897),
which still sells. The first of his boys’ books, so-called, was _The
Young Trailers_ (1906), written when his own son was eleven or twelve
years old. But he made it a practice never to allow thought of the age of
his readers to affect his treatment of a subject; and while this accounts
for the number of older readers who enjoy his books, it probably also
goes far to account for the success of his books with boys. He never
wrote down to them.

His accuracy and his sense of reality are beyond praise. But the finest
tribute to him is the fact that, as Miss Moore testifies, he is the only
author whom older boys absolutely insist on having, for whose books they
wait in line in the library, refusing to be put off with other titles.


III. THOMAS DIXON

Although Thomas Dixon’s new novel, _The Black Hood_ (1924), is a story
of the Ku Klux Klan of 1870, and so a companion volume to _The Clansman_
(1905), it is customary to speak of _The Leopard’s Spots_ (1902), _The
Clansman_, and _The Traitor_ (1907) as a trilogy of the Reconstruction
period at the South. Of those who admired this series perhaps the best
known and certainly the most unqualifiedly enthusiastic was Max Nordau,
who hailed the novels as undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and
giving the deferred answer to _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Similarly, _The One
Woman_ (1903), _Comrades_ (1909), and _The Root of Evil_ (1911) are
grouped together as a trilogy of Socialism, pleading for the development
of individual character and opposing the Socialistic remedies for the
ills of society.

Thomas Dixon was born at Shelby, North Carolina, 11 January 1864, the
son of the Reverend Thomas Dixon and Amanda Elizabeth (McAfee) Dixon.
The father was a Baptist clergyman. At 19 the son was graduated from
Wake Forest College, North Carolina, with a scholarship admitting him as
a special student in history and politics at Johns Hopkins University.
A year later he became a student at the Greensboro (North Carolina)
Law School. About the same time he was elected to the North Carolina
legislature. He got his law degree, dabbled in politics, was admitted to
practice in the North Carolina and United States courts, including the
United States Supreme Court, had a part in two conspicuous murder trials
of the day, and then, before he was 23, and some months after marrying
Harriet Bussey, of Columbus, Georgia, resigned from the legislature to
enter the Baptist ministry.

He held a pastorate for a year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for a year
in Boston before coming to the People’s Temple in New York. He preached
in New York for ten years, 1889-1899. At the same time he became a lyceum
lecturer and he continued to lecture until 1903. His outspokenness in
the pulpit was coupled with a certain disregard of clerical custom; for
example, he enjoyed going hunting. He began to publish books of sermons
at least as early as 1891. He was 35 when he quitted the pulpit and
turned to fiction.

Three of his novels are centered upon outstanding figures of the Civil
War. _The Southerner_ (1913) is constructed about Lincoln, _The Victim_
(1914), about Jefferson Davis; _The Man in Gray_ (1921), about Robert
E. Lee. _A Man of the People_ is a Lincoln play; _The Fall of a Nation_
depicts the conquest of the United States by the Imperial Nation. Such a
novel as _The Way of a Man_ is more or less related to the novels dealing
with Socialism; _The Sins of the Father_, a study of the results of
miscegenation, belongs with _The Clansman_ group.

It was in 1915, ten years after the sensational success of _The
Clansman_, that David Wark Griffith produced his film based on the novel
under the title, “The Birth of a Nation.”

The new novel of the Klan, _The Black Hood_, is concerned with the time
when the original Ku Klux Klan had accomplished the work for which it was
organized and was becoming more or less of a menace to the liberty of the
Southerners among whom it flourished. Mr. Dixon’s hero opposes the Klan’s
methods as being false to the spirit in which the Klan was founded. He
is successful in his stand after many exciting adventures. There is a
romantic interest interwoven in the story.


IV. STEPHEN CRANE

The author of _The Red Badge of Courage_ has lately been the subject
of a brilliant biography. Mr. Thomas Beer’s _Stephen Crane: A Study
in American Letters_ has the color and the abiding fascination of its
subject, if sometimes a trifle too cryptic and oracular. The point of
_The Red Badge of Courage_ is its record of war as the experience of the
individual, any war in any age. The book, a product of purely imaginative
experience by a youth of twenty-two to twenty-four, lights up its single
theme as completely as a Verrey flare exposes some small corner of a
battle. Reading either Crane’s work or Mr. Beer’s study, one can no more
doubt that Crane was a genius. He had the intense, piercing, personal
vision of the isolated, unexplained (and unexplainable) artist. Such a
figure is not to be produced by any sedulous process of education; it
is not a triumphant burbank of literary cultivation. Although people
remember, or, at least, generally have heard of, _The Red Badge of
Courage_, there is a sharp need for republication of most of Crane’s work
in a good edition; for _The Open Boat_ and _The Bride Comes to Yellow
Sky_ are of the utmost importance, the first on the evidence of Joseph
Conrad, the second on the evidence of Stephen Crane. If one were asked to
pick the American authors of most interesting significance to literature
at large, one would do well, I think, to let both Poe and Hawthorne wait
at one side while one weighed carefully Herman Melville, Walt Whitman,
and Stephen Crane.

       *       *       *       *       *

Other authors whose use of American history in fiction has interested
huge audiences are Everett T. Tomlinson, Elmer Russell Gregor, Frederick
Trevor Hill and Bernard Marshall. It is perhaps natural that their
fiction should be spoken of, as Altsheler’s is often spoken of, as
“stories for boys.” There is conclusive evidence, however, that about
half of the readers of Altsheler are adults; and the percentage of adult
readers for the books by Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Gregor, Mr. Hill and Mr.
Marshall is heavy. This might be inferred easily enough from the simple
fact that between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 copies of Mr. Tomlinson’s books
have been sold.

Everett T. Tomlinson, born in 1859, had a boyish passion for natural
history and another for baseball. From Williams College he went into
teaching, becoming headmaster of a boys’ school, where he still played
ball. For twenty-three years he was pastor of a church in Elizabeth,
New Jersey. He was appointed a member of the New Jersey Public Library
Commission when it was formed in 1901, and became its chairman in 1921.
His first book appeared thirty years ago. Besides many fictions, such as
_The Mysterious Rifleman_ and _Scouting on the Border_, he is the author
of a _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_ and such books
as _Places Young Americans Want to Know_ and _Fighters Young Americans
Want to Know_. His new book (1924) is called _Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_.

Elmer Russell Gregor, born in 1878, was graduated from a military academy
and spent twenty-four hours in the drygoods business, six months in
real estate, and more successful periods as a farmer and stock raiser,
and in lumbering, quarrying and mining. His real job since 1910 has
been writing, but, as he says, his hobbies are Indians (foremost),
ornithology, natural history, forestry, hunting and fishing, and breeding
prize-winning dogs, chickens and pigeons, so “you see I don’t have much
time for work.” He lives in Southport, Connecticut, but has traveled much
and “my circle of intimate acquaintances includes cowboys, ‘sour-doughs’
(miners), Injuns, mountaineers, and lumberjacks—all good fellows.” The
books that have been most popular with his readers are stories of young
Indian chiefs, divided into two series, the Western Indian Stories and
the Eastern Indian Stories, and, most recently, the Jim Mason series,
which follows the fortunes of a white frontiersman in the days of the
French and Indian wars. _Captain Jim Mason_ (1924) is his latest work.

Frederick Trevor Hill, born in 1866, a graduate of Yale and a graduate in
law at Columbia, on the staff of General Pershing and cited by Pershing,
is the author of very widely-known books on the law, both as fact and
as material for fiction. His interest in American history has led him
to study the three or four outstanding figures in such books as _On the
Trail of Grant and Lee_, _On the Trail of Washington_, and _Washington
The Man of Action_. Why, it may be asked, two books on the Father of
his country? And the response must be that _On the Trail of Washington_
is, as the subtitle explains, “a narrative of Washington’s boyhood and
manhood, based on his writings and other authentic documents,” and is
concerned with the growth of early years; whereas _Washington The Man of
Action_ is an attempt to portray the mature man as he really was, not as
the plaster saint of his earliest biographers.

Bernard Marshall was born on a farm twenty miles south of Boston, one
of a family fond of books and music. Having resolved to be a writer, he
thought he could play in orchestras and make a living until he had his
foothold as an author. Thereupon twenty years were passed as a musician,
a legal stenographer, a writer of technical articles and in advertising
work. Then, after trying to help build ships to win the war, Mr. Marshall
settled in Berkeley, California, a half mile from the university, and
began to write historical romances, _Walter of Tiverton_, _Cedric the
Forester_, and _The Torch Bearers_. The last two and his new American
historical romance, _Redcoat and Minute Man_, form a Liberty Series,
showing three crucial points in the history of the Anglo-Saxon struggle
for popular liberties, Magna Charta (_Cedric the Forester_), Oliver
Cromwell (_The Torch Bearers_), and the American Revolution (_Redcoat and
Minute Man_).


BOOKS BY EMERSON HOUGH

    1895 _The Singing Mouse Stories_
    1897 _The Story of the Cowboy_
    1900 _The Girl at the Half-Way House_
    1902 _The Mississippi Bubble_
    1903 _The Way to the West_
    1904 _The Law of the Land_
    1905 _Heart’s Desire_
    1906 _The King of Gee Whiz_
    1906 _The Story of the Outlaw_
    1907 _The Way of a Man_
    1909 _Fifty-Four Forty or Fight_
    1909 _The Sowing_
    1910 _The Young Alaskans_
    1911 _The Purchase Price_
    1912 _John Rawn—Prominent Citizen_
    1913 _The Lady and the Pirate_
    1913 _The Young Alaskans in the Rockies_
    1914 _The Young Alaskans on the Trail_
    1915 _The Magnificent Adventure_
    1916 _The Man Next Door_
    1917 _The Broken Gate_
    1918 _The Young Alaskans in the Far North_
    1918 _The Way Out_
    1919 _The Sagebrusher_
    1919 _The Web_
    1922 _The Covered Wagon_
    1923 _North of 36_
    1924 _Mother of Gold_


SOURCES ON EMERSON HOUGH

_The Men Who Make Our Novels_, by George Gordon. Moffat, Yard and
Company. Page 140 _et seq._ This book now published by Dodd, Mead and
Company.

Autobiographical article in the American Magazine: 1918 or earlier.

Editorial article in the Saturday Evening Post, April or May, 1923.

“A Defense of the American Tradition,” by William MacLeod Raine, in the
Author and Journalist, Denver, Colorado, 1923.


BOOKS BY JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

THE YOUNG TRAILERS SERIES: Frontier Life in the Revolution. Two boys,
Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, and three scouts are the chief characters:

    _The Young Trailers_
    _The Forest Runners_
    _The Free Rangers_
    _The Eyes of the Woods_
    _The Keepers of the Trail_
    _The Riflemen of the Ohio_
    _The Scouts of the Valley_
    _The Border Watch_

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR SERIES. The period is from 1754 to 1763 and
the central characters are Robert Lennox, an American boy; Tayoga, an
Onondaga Indian; and David Willet, a hunter:

    _The Hunters of the Hills_
    _The Shadow of the North_
    _The Rulers of the Lakes_
    _The Masters of the Peaks_
    _The Lords of the Wild_
    _The Sun of Quebec_

THE TEXAN SERIES. Three stories of the Texas struggle for independence,
with an American boy, Ned Fulton, in the foreground:

    _The Texan Star_
    _The Texan Scouts_
    _The Texan Triumph_

THE CIVIL WAR SERIES. The principal battles of the Civil War are covered.
In four of the stories Dick Mason, who fights for the North, is the
leading character; in the other four his cousin, Harry Kenton, fighting
on the Southern side, is featured:

    _The Guns of Bull Run_
    _The Guns of Shiloh_
    _The Scouts of Stonewall_
    _The Sword of Antietam_
    _The Star of Gettysburg_
    _The Rock of Chickamauga_
    _The Shades of the Wilderness_
    _The Tree of Appomattox_

INDIAN WARS OF THE WEST AND SOUTHWEST. Not a series:

    _Apache Gold_
    _The Last of the Chiefs_ (Custer’s defeat)
    _The Quest of the Four_ (Mexican War)

THE GREAT WEST SERIES:

    _The Great Sioux Trail_
    _The Lost Hunters_

THE WORLD WAR SERIES. John Scott, a young American in Germany when the
war opens, and Phillip Lannes, a young French friend, are the central
figures:

    _The Guns of Europe_
    _The Hosts of the Air_
    _The Forest of Swords_

HISTORICAL ROMANCES. More definitely for older readers. Not in series:

    _A Soldier of Manhattan_ (French and Indian War)
    _The Sun of Saratoga_ (Burgoyne’s surrender)
    _The Wilderness Road_ (Pioneers west of the Alleghenies)
    _My Captive_ (Revolutionary romance)
    _A Herald of the West_ (War of 1812)
    _In Circling Camps_ (Civil War)
    _The Last Rebel_
    _The Candidate_ (the romance of a political campaign)


SOURCES ON JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER

“Joseph A. Altsheler and American History,” by Anne Carroll Moore.
Pamphlet published by D. Appleton & Company.

Article by Anne Carroll Moore in The Bookman for November, 1918.
Reprinted in _Roads to Childhood_, by Anne Carroll Moore.

“Some Worthwhile Books,” by Robert Page Lincoln in The Review.

“A Kentucky Writer of Historical Novels,” by John Wilson Townsend, in the
Lexington (Kentucky) Leader for 18 May 1912.


BOOKS BY THOMAS DIXON

    1891 _Living Problems in Religion and Social Science_
    1894 _Sermons on Ingersoll_
    1897 _The Failure of Protestantism in New York_
    1902 _What Is Religion?_
    1902 _The Leopard’s Spots_
    1903 _The One Woman_
    1905 _The Clansman_
    1905 _The Life Worth Living_
    1907 _The Traitor_
    1909 _Comrades_
    1911 _The Root of Evil_
    1912 _The Sins of the Father_
    1913 _The Southerner_ (Abraham Lincoln)
    1914 _The Victim_ (Jefferson Davis)
    1915 _The Foolish Virgin_
    1916 _The Fall of a Nation_
    1918 _The Way of a Man_
    1920 _A Man of the People._ Play. (Abraham Lincoln)
    1921 _The Man in Gray_ (Robert E. Lee)
    1924 _The Black Hood_


SOURCES ON THOMAS DIXON

“The Men Who Make Our Novels,” by George Gordon, page 249. Moffat, Yard
and Company (now published by Dodd, Mead and Company).

Articles on the photoplay, “The Birth of a Nation,” made from _The
Clansman_ are too numerous to be cited. The reader may consult the
READERS’ GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for 1915-16.


BOOKS BY STEPHEN CRANE

    1895 _The Red Badge of Courage_


SOURCES ON STEPHEN CRANE

_Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters_, by Thomas Beer. Alfred A.
Knopf: 1923.


BOOKS BY EVERETT T. TOMLINSON

(For more complete list, see _Who’s Who in America_: 1924-25)

    1908 _Scouting with Mad Anthony_
    1915 _Places Young Americans Want to Know_
    1916 _The Trail of the Mohawk Chief_
    1917 _The Story of General Pershing_
    1918 _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_
    1920 _The Pursuit of the Apache Chief_
    1920 _Scouting on the Border_
    1921 _The Mysterious Rifleman_
    1921 _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_
    1923 _Scouting on the Old Frontier_
    1923 _Stories of the American Revolution_
    1924 _Scouting in the Wilderness_
    1924 _The Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_


SOURCES ON EVERETT T. TOMLINSON

“The Historical Story for Boys,” by Everett T. Tomlinson. Booklet
published by D. Appleton & Company.

_Who’s Who in America._


BOOKS BY ELMER RUSSELL GREGOR

JIM MASON STORIES. The hero is a young frontiersman.

    1923 _Jim Mason, Backwoodsman_
    1923 _Jim Mason, Scout_
    1924 _Captain Jim Mason_

WESTERN INDIAN STORIES. The hero is White Otter, a young Sioux chief:

    1917 _White Otter_
    1920 _The War Trail_
    1922 _Three Sioux Scouts_

EASTERN INDIAN STORIES. The hero is Running Fox, a young chief of the
Delawares:

    1918 _Running Fox_
    1920 _The White Wolf_
    1922 _Spotted Deer_


BOOKS BY FREDERICK TREVOR HILL

(For more complete list, see _Who’s Who in America_)

    1909 _On the Trail of Washington_
    1911 _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_
    1914 _Washington the Man of Action_


BOOKS BY BERNARD MARSHALL

    1921 _Cedric the Forester_
    1923 _The Torch Bearers_
    1923 _Walter of Tiverton_
    1924 _Redcoat and Minute Man_




15. The Fireside Theatre


i

As the cost of the theater mounts up—the price of seats, the price of
achieving Broadway productions—the Fireside Theater audience is steadily
recruited. If there has existed a prejudice against reading plays, it
is melting. The mere force of conditions would tend to destroy such a
prejudice. The path to Broadway becomes steadily more difficult and the
path away from Broadway narrower—all because it costs too much to produce
a play on Broadway, and far too much to take the play, once so produced,
on the road. Soon the Broadway theater will survive as the horse
survives; and Broadway productions, inspired by the same motives as the
production of horse races, will be nobly upheld by the same justificatory
excuse—it will be argued that they improve the breed of plays.

It does no harm to have a few horse shows or to have a few Broadway
productions; but the truth must be stated that the theater in America
no longer depends upon the amusement business in the vicinity of
Forty-second Street. To an extent never before equaled, plays are now
published in America regardless of their production; are bought and read;
are read aloud for an exceptional evening’s entertainment; and are acted
under license, and with payment of very moderate fees, by people to whom
a play is a play and not a pair of high-priced tickets.

For amateur actors, many of them amazingly capable, there are now
available plays of every length and of every conceivable variety of type,
settings, and casts; of extreme, moderate and very slight demands upon
the actors’ skill; tragic, comedic, farcical. And for readers of plays
there are certain immutable advantages that have been pointed out before
but will bear stressing again, such as that the performance always begins
on time, and at _your_ chosen time, and that the actors, being your own
creatures, are always ideal.

I shall try to speak first of some anthologies of plays, then of plays by
individual authors, and finally of a few books about the drama and the
theater.


ii

First I would put Montrose J. Moses’s ample works. His _Representative
British Dramas: Victorian and Modern_ is not only a complete history of
the British stage, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1914;
it presents the complete texts of twenty-one English and Irish plays
superbly representative of its century. _Representative Continental
Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional_ does much the same thing for
Europe as a whole. Eight European countries are represented in this
anthology, which contains the complete texts of fifteen plays, with a
general survey of the development of Continental drama and individual
bibliographies. But the greatest demand is for anthologies of one-act
plays; a demand richly met by the following standard works:

_Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors_, compiled by Margaret
G. Mayorga, contains the complete texts of twenty-four, all of which have
been produced in Little Theaters. Among the dramatists included are
Percy Mackaye, Stuart Walker, Jeannette Marks, George Middleton, Susan
Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Beulah Marie Dix.

_Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_ edited by Frank Shay and Pierre
Loving, is an international selection of astonishing variety and
exceptional merit.

_Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American_, edited by Frank Shay, is an
anthology which affords variety of choice for acting and ample variety
for the reader.

Barrett H. Clark’s _Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish
Authors_ contains complete texts of twenty one-act plays. Some of the
authors are Pinero, Jones, Arnold Bennett, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Granville
Barker and Lord Dunsany. Mr. Moses is the compiler of _Representative
One-Act Plays by Continental Authors_. Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler,
Strindberg, Andreyev, Franz Wedekind, Sudermann, von Hofmannsthal,
Lavedan are some of the playwrights whose work is included; and the book
is equipped with bibliographies.

Frank Shay is the compiler of _Twenty-Five Short Plays: International_,
in which is much exotic work—plays from Bengal and Burma, China and
Japan and Uruguay, as well as from countries with whose drama we have
more contact. But as an example of Mr. Shay’s selections we may note,
from among the writers whose work is fairly familiar, that Austria is
represented by a Schnitzler piece, Italy by one of Robert Bracco’s
comedies, Hungary by Lajos Biro’s “The Bridegroom,” Russia by an example
of Chekhov and Spain by Echegaray.

I may at this point advantageously call attention to Mr. Shay’s _One
Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre_, and his new _One Thousand
and One Longer Plays_—not anthologies, but exhaustive lists. The plays
are listed alphabetically by authors and by organizations, and the title,
nature of the work, number of men and women characters, publisher, and
price of each play is given.

Certain other books, though offering a number of one-act plays, have too
few inclusions to be described as anthologies. Such are _One-Act Plays
from the Yiddish_, translated by Etta Block and presenting half a dozen
effective pieces; _Three Modern Japanese Plays_, translated by Yozan
T. Iwasaki and Glenn Hughes, and showing the direct result of Western
influences on the Japanese theatre; and _Double Demon and Other One-Act
Plays_, by A. P. Herbert and others, one of the British Drama League
series.

Colin Campbell Clements, whose _Plays for a Folding Theatre_ is known
to most amateurs, has a new book this season called _Plays for Pagans_,
containing five entertaining short plays, all easy of stage production.
Another such group is to be found in _Garden Varieties_, by Kenyon
Nicholson, six plays, most of them farcical and amusing.

Certain other one-act plays I shall speak of later in this chapter. But
the record of excellent anthologies is not yet completed. _A Treasury
of Plays for Children_, by Mr. Moses, provides fourteen dramas with the
abundance of incident and action which young people demand but with
considerable literary merit besides. Mr. Shay, again, is the compiler of
_A Treasury of Plays for Women_, eighteen in all, requiring only women to
cast or containing only such male characters as may easily be enacted by
women; and also of _A Treasury of Plays for Men_, twenty-one altogether,
which men may stage without feminine help. _A Treasury of Plays for
Men_ also offers a working library list for the Little Theater and a
bibliography of other anthologies.


ii

In coming to the work of individual playwrights, I am afraid the method
of conscientious enumeration must to a great extent go on. Granville
Barker’s work is almost too well-known to require special comment.
His plays, some one of which is almost certain to be found in any
comprehensive anthology, are published in seven volumes, each a single
drama except the _Three Short Plays_. Anatol, to be sure, is simply Mr.
Barker’s splendid version of Arthur Schnitzler’s gay satire on a gilded
youth of Vienna. Probably _Waste_, at once intimate in its discussions
and intensely serious, is the best-known drama by Barker; but _The
Madras House_, with its humors of feminine psychology, and _The Voysey
Inheritance_, that fine study of middle-class English family life, are
both popular. The others are _The Marrying of Ann Leete_, at once a
comedy and a satire, and the three-act play called _The Secret Life_, a
play of present-day England touched with philosophy and mysticism and
occasional cynicism, but of the same distinctive quality as Barker’s
other work.

Three plays by Lewis Beach have been published. _A Square Peg_ presents
the tragic results of a mother’s unflinching rule of her family. _The
Goose Hangs High_ is a comedy of family loyalty and affection which
brings the younger generation face to face with its elders; it has been
a success of the last New York season. But the one to which I want to
direct attention especially is _Ann Vroome_, a play in seven scenes
giving the story of a girl’s long wait for happiness when she postpones
marriage to care for her parents. This play has a very fine acceleration
of dramatic interest, of emotional intensity; and its literary quality
is of a high order. It is evident that Mr. Beach does nothing badly.

The history of Owen Davis has been told many times, but I do not suppose
its impression of the extraordinary is ever lessened. He wrote, for
years, melodramas of the “Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model” order; I am
by no means sure he did not write “Nellie.” In those days he supplied
the theaters of the Bowery and other avenues no better as to art if less
notorious. It should be said that however cheap were these works, they
were infinitely more respectable and of a better moral character than
some pretentious affairs playing uptown. Mr. Davis had two reasonable
purposes—to learn play writing and to make necessary money. When he
had accomplished both, being still a young man, he turned to work of a
different description. His play, _The Detour_ (1921), the story of a
woman’s never-dying aspiration and hope, was one of the finest things
of its season. Clear-cut, dramatic, with comedy and pathos interwoven,
it depicted mental and spiritual force pitted against solely material
ambition in a way that those who saw or read it did not forget. The
evidence was clear that a new American dramatist of the first rank had
been born. _Icebound_ (1922), had immediate attention and very marked
critical praise, crowned by the award to it of the Pulitzer Prize by
Columbia University as the best American play of the year.

The most successful American playwright of his day, Clyde Fitch was also
one of the ablest. The Memorial Edition of the _Plays of Clyde Fitch_,
edited, with introductions, by Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, and
published in four volumes is a gallant and important affair. The edition
is definitive and contains three plays that were never before in print,
“The Woman in the Case,” “Lovers’ Lane,” and that most important of the
Fitch plays, “The City.” The fourth volume of this edition contains Mr.
Fitch’s address on “The Play and the Public.”[78]

The four volumes of _Representative Plays by Henry Arthur Jones_, edited,
with historical, biographical, and critical introductions, by Clayton
Hamilton, assemble in a splendid library edition the most interesting
work of the British dramatist. Henry Arthur Jones wrote some sixty or
seventy plays, printed mainly in pamphlet form—“scrips”—for the use,
primarily, of actors, professional and amateur. These Mr. Hamilton
sifted, at the same time making an effort to indicate the range and
variety of Jones’s work. As a consequence, _Representative Plays_ opens
with a celebrated old-time melodrama, “The Silver King,” and illustrates
the stages in the author’s progress until he arrived, in the composition
of “The Liars,” at a really great accomplishment as a master of modern
English comedy. Mr. Hamilton’s introductions carry the reader’s attention
from play to play along a continuous current of historical, biographical
and critical comment. Probably the best-known inclusions are the plays in
the third volume: “Michael and His Lost Angel,” “The Liars,” “Mrs. Dane’s
Defence,” and “The Hypocrites.”

Of Cosmo Hamilton’s _Four Plays_ I have already made mention[79] and
perhaps I should have spoken of Percival Wilde when dealing with
one-act plays. Mr. Wilde’s work is itself an anthology of the one-act
play. This New Yorker was for a while in the banking business; on the
publication of his first story he received so many requests to allow its
dramatization that he thought he would investigate the drama himself.
That was not more than a dozen years ago; yet now Percival Wilde is
commonly said to have had more plays produced—or rather, to have had a
greater number of productions—in American Little Theaters than any other
playwright.

His books to date (of this sort) are five. _Eight Comedies for Little
Theatres_ contains “The Previous Engagement,” “The Dyspeptic Ogre,”
“Catesby,” “The Sequel,” “In the Net,” “His Return,” “The Embryo,” and “A
Wonderful Woman.” Then there are his other collections—_Dawn, and Other
One-Act Plays of Life Today_ (six), _A Question of Morality, and Other
Plays_ (five), and _The Unseen Host, and Other War Plays_ (five), and
_The Inn of Discontent and Other Fantastic Plays_ (five).

George Kelly, a young American born in a suburb of Philadelphia, had
the daring to satirize the Little Theater movement in America in “The
Torch-Bearers,” which had a New York success. In this past season his
play, _The Show-Off_, has not only been a memorable success but has
perhaps had more unqualified praise than any drama in years. “I might as
well begin boldly and say that _The Show-Off_ is the best comedy which
has yet been written by an American,” writes Heywood Broun in his preface
to the published play; and this does not much exaggerate the note of the
general chorus. The committee named to recommend a play for the award of
the annual Pulitzer Prize selected _The Show-Off_; and the overruling
of their choice by the Columbia University authorities was the subject
of considerable controversy not entirely free from indignant feeling.
What is this play? “A transcript of life, in three acts,” the titlepage
truthfully calls it. The chief character, Aubrey Piper, liar, braggart,
egoist, is almost dreadfully real. It is perhaps possible, however
depressing, to regard him as a symbol of all mankind, bringing us to
realize the toughness of human fiber, as Mr. Broun suggests. But it seems
to me much more likely that the play’s great merit and supreme interest
lies in another point that Mr. Broun makes: there is no development
of character in Aubrey, but only in ourselves, the audience, who come
to know him progressively better, and finally to know him to the last
inescapable dreg. Most critics have tended, I think, to overlook the
splendid characterization of Mrs. Fisher, Aubrey’s perspicacious and
unrelenting mother-in-law. The play is too true for satire, too serious
for comedy, too humanly diverting for tears. It is certainly not to be
missed.

_The Lilies of the Field_, a comedy by John Hastings Turner, author of
several novels, including that very engaging story, _Simple Souls_, is
one of the British Drama League series and will probably have a New
York production this season. The desire of twin daughters of an English
village clergyman to become the wives of young men met in London—young
men who toil not, neither do they spin except at dances—produces the
complications, which are both entertaining and somewhat satirical. Of
the other British Drama League plays, _The Prince_, by Gwen John, deals
with Queen Elizabeth, and is “a study of character, based on contemporary
evidence,” while Laurence Binyon’s _Ayuli_ is drama in verse, telling
a picturesque story of Eastern Asia. Mr. Binyon has made studies of
Oriental art and his drama is of quite exceptional literary quality.

Of novel interest is _The Sea Woman’s Cloak and November Eve_, a volume
containing two plays by the American writer, Amelie Rives (Princess
Troubetzkoy), that are as Irish as work by Lady Gregory, Yeats, or J.
M. Synge. “The Sea Woman’s Cloak” is based on an old legend of Ganore’s
mating with a mortal; “November Eve” tells how Ilva, who is fairy-struck,
saves a soul the godly folk won’t risk their own souls to save.

_Dragon’s Glory_, a play in four scenes by Gertrude Knevels, is based on
an old Chinese legend, and makes very amusing reading and a most actable
comedy. Yow Chow has purchased the finest coffin in China (“Dragon’s
Glory”) and the action of the piece centers about this treasure, in which
the estimable Yow Chow reposes until a crisis which is the climax of the
play.

The two series known respectively as the Modern Series and the Little
Theatre Series consist of plays published in pamphlet form at a low
price for the convenience of amateur theatrical organizations. Included
in these series are separate plays by such authors as Booth Tarkington,
Christopher Morley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Stuart
Walker, Floyd Dell, Rupert Brooke, and others, to a present total
of thirty titles. The Modern Series, edited by Frank Shay, has two
particularly striking new titles in _Lord Byron_ and _Autumn_.

_Lord Byron_, a play in seven scenes by Maurice Ferber, is of the genre
of Drinkwater’s _Abraham Lincoln_ and Mr. Eaton’s and Mr. Carb’s _Queen
Victoria_. Byron is one of the most dramatic of the possible subjects for
a biographical play, and Mr. Ferber’s work will undoubtedly be frequently
staged and very much read at this time of the Byron centenary.

_Autumn_, in four acts, by Ilya Surguchev, translated by David A.
Modell, is the picture of jealousy between a young wife and an adopted
daughter. “This is one of the strongest plays I have ever read,” says
Frank Shay. It is our first introduction to the work of the Russian
author and part of its novelty consists in the last act, which “achieves
a monotony that is real and genuine. It does not bring husband and wife
together in happiness, but shows that there is nothing else for them to
do but to go on.”

But the other new titles in the Modern Series deserve brief mention.
_Words and Thoughts_, by Don Marquis, presents John and Mary Speaker,
who utter the usual banalities of the world, and John and Mary Thinker,
who utter their true and less pleasant thoughts. John L. Balderston’s _A
Morality Play for the Leisure Class_ pictures a rich collector’s boredom
in heaven when he finds that his treasures there have no monetary value.
There is an O. Henry twist to the ending. Walter McClellan’s _The Delta
Wife_ is a genre play of the Mississippi River mouth, in type resembling
_Hell-Bent fer Heaven_. _The Lion’s Mouth_, by George Madden Martin and
Harriet L. Kennedy, deals with the relations of blacks and whites. A
white doctor ignores a black child in his efforts to save a white baby.
An old mammy has an invaluable herb cure; but finding that the doctor
cares nothing for her grandson’s life, she refuses to save the white
infant. Wilbur Daniel Steele’s _The Giant’s Stair_ is a study in mood
and atmosphere, like many of his short stories. Before the play opens a
man has been murdered. A terrific storm is raging. The scene is between
the widow and her demented sister and the sheriff. _Action!_ by Holland
Hudson is a swift-moving, melodramatic comedy. The son of a silk dealer
returns from selling airplanes to protest that the life of a silk
salesman is dull. His objections are interrupted by the entry of two
silk loft burglars and two bootleggers—followed by Federal officers and
policemen with drawn weapons.

The new titles in the Little Theatre Series, edited by Grace Adams,
include Edna St. Vincent Millay’s _Aria da Capo_ and her _The Lamp and
the Bell_.

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work is known throughout America. _The Lamp and
the Bell_, a Shakespearean play written for a Vassar College anniversary,
has for its theme woman’s friendship, and is very nearly unique among
compositions for an occasion in having solid literary and dramatic merit.
Its fresh, vigorous, creative quality is enriched by some lovely lyrical
inclusions. _Aria da Capo_, Miss Millay’s bitterly ironic, beautiful and
interesting one-act fantasy, has been played, one is tempted to believe,
everywhere; and will for years be played again and again. No contemporary
Pierrot and Columbine composition excels it, if, indeed, any matches it.

Mary MacMillen’s _Pan or Pierrot_ is a play for children, to be acted out
of doors. And I must again call attention to John Farrar’s charming plays
for children in _The Magic Sea Shell_.


iii

Books about the theater are various, of course, ranging from æsthetic
studies down to the most practical handbook for amateurs. Of the latter,
I should certainly put first Barrett H. Clark’s _How to Produce Amateur
Plays_, now in a new and revised edition. This manual is as nearly
indispensable to amateur actors as anything can be. It tells how to
choose a play, how to organize, the principles of casting, and the
methods of rehearsing. It gives very necessary information about the
stage itself, lighting, scenery and costumes, and makeup. There is also a
list of good amateur plays and information about copyright and royalty.

Another book that will be particularly welcomed by schools and social
organizations is Claude Merton Wise’s _Dramatics for School and
Community_, which covers much the same fields as Mr. Clark’s work.

I have already spoken of Percival Wilde’s astonishing success as an
author of one-act plays; it makes his book on _The Craftsmanship of the
One-Act Play_ the last word on the subject. But the special value of
Mr. Wilde’s book is that it considers everything having to do with the
construction of the one-act play from the point of view of the stage
director as well as that of the author.

Granville Barker’s _The Exemplary Theatre_, though by one of the
best-known men of the group interested in and influencing modern dramatic
theory and esthetics, is preëminently a practical book. It considers the
theater as a civic institution and has a valuable chapter on the inner
and outer organization of a repertory theater; but the chapters on a
director’s duties, choosing the best plays, training the company, scenery
and lighting, and audiences are of widespread applicability.

A mention of books about the theater is fated to omit many excellent
volumes, but can scarcely fail to include a series of books which give
a complete circumspection of contemporary drama. The most recent volume
in the series is _The Contemporary Drama of Russia_, by Leo Wiener,
professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard. This entirely
new study is likely to create a commotion, for it belies utterly the
conclusions generally arrived at as to the relative value of the work
of such playwrights as Chekhov, Gorki, Andreyev, Solugub, Evreinov and
others, and it brings into prominence many names never heard of before
outside of Russia. Its picture of the origin and development of the
Moscow Art Theater is not the one of popular legend, and should probably
be narrowly compared with that given by Constantin Stanislavsky in his
_My Life in Art_[80] and with other accounts. Professor Wiener has
relied, however, upon letters, theatrical annals, and other contemporary
records. His bibliographies contain fairly full accounts of plays from
Ostrovski to the present, lists of books and articles on the contemporary
Russian drama, and lists of all English translations of plays.

_The Contemporary Drama of England_, by Thomas H. Dickinson, covers
adequately the history of the English stage since 1866. Ernest Boyd’s
_The Contemporary Drama of Ireland_ presents the Irish literary movement
and the work of Irish dramatists. _The Contemporary Drama of Italy_, by
Lander MacClintock, traces the development of the modern Italian theater
from its inception down to the present day, and has interesting chapters
on Gabriele d’Annunzio and the writers now popular in Italy. Frank W.
Chandler’s _The Contemporary Drama of France_, a longer work than the
three preceding, presents a survey and interpretation of French drama for
three decades, from the opening of the Theatre-Libre of Antoine to the
conclusion of the world war.




16. A Reasonable View of Michael Arlen


i

There is a book called _These Charming People_. In making this statement
I pause for an uncertain time. It is necessary to allow a little interval
for readers—quite as necessary as it is for the orator to give his
audience its innings. Readers do not create the same interruption for a
writer, and that is in itself a pity. That fact defeats much writing; for
the writer has rushed on before the reader’s mind has had a chance to
seethe a little and settle, passing on to a comparatively calm acceptance
of the next assertion.

But you can take anybody’s word for _These Charming People_—anybody’s,
that is, who has read it; and the number of persons who have read it
is very large and increases steadily. The truth is, this book and its
author have become fashionable; and when a book and an author have become
fashionable, some persons will go to any length. Now it is known that
Michael Arlen is the author of _These Charming People_, but who knows who
Michael Arlen may be? Is there a View of Michael Arlen? In the favorite
adjective of one of Mr. Arlen’s characters, is there a reasonable view of
the presumptively charming person?

Yes.

The main perspective is before us. Looking down it, we discern that two
years (and less than two years) ago, nobody in America who was anybody
in America (or anywhere else) had heard of Michael Arlen. I will not
conceal the dark fact that two books of his, entitled _A London Venture_
and _The Romantic Lady_, had been published in America.

However, two years ago (as I write) there was published in America a
novel called “_Piracy_.” No reason existed why people should buy it
and read it, apart from the usual totally inadequate one of the book’s
merits. Yet people did buy it and read it. People said: “This is rather
nice!” “_Piracy_” sold. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Spanish
Main. If it took life—and perhaps it did take a life or two, socially
speaking—it did so, in Mrs. Wharton’s words describing the methods of old
New York society, “without effusion of blood.”

And early this year (1924) there was published a book called _These
Charm_—Exactly.

Well, it was so gay, so well-mannered, so witty, so far more than so-so
that women of the most varied taste (and even strong prejudices) raved
over it, and men of the most invariable taste bought as many as six to a
dozen copies to give away to their friends.

The success of Michael Arlen’s new novel, _The Green Hat_, has thus been
rendered a mere matter of dispersing the good news. It will not do to
broadcast it; one must be a little particular in matters of this sort. At
the most, it is permitted casually to mention the fact that a new novel
by Michael Arlen is about. Quite of course, one cannot decently say more
than that _The Green Hat_ is a well-polished affair; for still more of
course, it isn’t the hat but the head beneath it which counts.

The head belongs to Michael Arlen.

(As far as _The Green Hat_ goes, the woman of the green hat was Iris
March, “enchanting, unshakeably true in friendship, incorrigibly loose
in love,” as the disturbed reviewer for the _London Times_ puts it.
“Everything she does has an unnatural elegance and audacity,” he went on.
But what had she done? She had broken a good many hearts before marriage
and one afterward; she had turned a lover into a husband and then into
a cynic; and what she did to Napier Harpenden and his young wife should
have been unpardonable. _Should._ “It is with a sense of having been
cheated that we witness her final whitewashing.” You see how upset he is,
though one cannot say he is outraged, can one, when he talks about a lady
like that?...)


ii

Londoners apparently know him as a dark, handsome, suave person who
circulates in Mayfair. Travellers away from London report his presence at
the correct season in Paris, Monte Carlo, and Biskra (not to mention the
Riviera). He is outwardly one of the gay rout. He is inwardly—— Well, I
don’t know whether he would want me to mention.

Librarians (some librarians) are relentless persons, however charming.
They ferret. They discover things, and then they root them out. Or at any
rate, they make Records. Among other things of which they make Records
are the True Names of Authors. Was Mr. Tarkington, in infancy, Newton
Booth Tarkington? Then it goes on the librarian’s card. Was Joseph Conrad
born Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski? Then no well-trained librarian
ever completely ignores the fact. An author, in the circumstances, cannot
take too much pains to be born and christened aright.

Occasionally the librarians make a grievous mistake—as when they
identified Rebecca West as Regina Miriam Bloch. Caught in this astounding
error, I believe they have now insisted that she is Cecily Fairfield.
Yet they must be aware that both in England and America the law permits
anyone to change his name at will. If he be consistent in the change,
and if he use the new name and induce those who know him to use it, it
becomes his lawful name. The sole purpose of going to court about a
change of name is to make it a matter of public record—important when the
title to property comes up for search. Rebecca West is—simply Rebecca
West.

All this is to a point, for already the librarians have rushed to affix
to Michael Arlen the name Dikran Kuyumjian. Not only do they tack this
name on him, they give it preference. I have before me a clipping from
a periodical which is widely relied upon by librarians in making their
records and buying their books. And this periodical begins a notice of
_These Charming People_ as follows:

KUYUMJIAN, DIKRAN (MICHAEL ARLEN, pseud.)

Where they got it, goodness, or rather badness, only knows. I suppose
they chanced to learn that Michael Arlen is of Armenian blood. I have
nothing to say against Dikran Kuyumjian as an excellent Armenian name.
But I imagine Mr. Arlen may have something to say to the founders,
editors and reporters of this periodical. I can only hope that, as his
English is polite and polished, and as they appear to be versed in a
foreign tongue, he will say it in Armenian.


iii

Of course, the fact that he _is_ an Armenian lends a joyous piquancy to
one of the tales in _These Charming People_. You remember the one where
Mr. Michael Wagstaffe impersonated greatly? It is called “The Man With
the Broken Nose,” and as your copy of the book has been borrowed and
never returned, I will quote it for you:

“The dark stranger walked silently but firmly. He was a tall young man
of slight but powerful build; his nose, which was of the patrician sort,
would have been shapely had it not once been broken in such a way that
forever after it must noticeably incline to one side; and, though his
appearance was that of a gentleman, he carried himself with an air of
determination and assurance which would, I thought, make any conversation
with him rather a business. There was any amount of back-chat in his dark
eyes. His hat, which was soft and had the elegance of the well-worn, he
wore cavalierly. Shoes by Lobb.

“At last a picture rose before our eyes, a large picture, very blue. Now
who shall describe that picture which was so blue, blue even to the grass
under the soldiers’ feet, the complexions of the soldiers’ faces and the
rifles in the soldiers’ hands? Over against a blue tree stood a man, and
miserably blue was his face, while the soldiers stood very stiffly with
their backs to us, holding their rifles in a position which gave one no
room to doubt but that they were about to shoot the solitary man for some
misdemeanor. He was the loneliest looking man I have ever seen.

“‘Manet,’ said Tarlyon.

“The dark young stranger was absorbed; he pulled his hat a little lower
over his left eye, so that the light should not obtrude on his vision....

“‘Come on,’ I whispered to Tarlyon, for we seemed to be intruding—so that
I was quite startled when the stranger suddenly turned from the picture
to me.

“‘You see, sir,’ he said gravely, ‘I know all about killing. I have
killed many men....’

“‘Army Service Corps?’ inquired Tarlyon.

“‘No, sir,’ snapped the stranger. ‘I know nothing of your Corps. I am a
Zeytounli.’

“‘Please have patience with me,’ I begged the stranger. ‘What is a
Zeytounli?’

“He regarded me with those smoldering dark eyes; and I realized vividly
that his nose had been broken in some argument which had cost the other
man more than a broken nose.

“‘Zeytoun,’ he said, ‘is a fortress in Armenia. For five hundred years
Zeytoun has not laid down her arms, but now she is burnt stones on
the ground. The Zeytounlis, sir, are the hill-men of Armenia. I am an
Armenian.’

“‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Tarlyon murmured.

“‘Why?’ snarled the Armenian.

“‘Well, you’ve been treated pretty badly, haven’t you?’ said Tarlyon.
‘All these massacres and things....’

“The stranger glared at him, and then he laughed at him. I shall remember
that laugh. So will Tarlyon. Then the stranger raised a finger and, very
gently, he tapped Tarlyon’s shoulder.

“‘Listen,’ said he. ‘Your manner of speaking bores me. Turks have slain
many Armenians. Wherefore Armenians have slain many Turks. You may take
it from me that, by sticking to it year in and year out for five hundred
years, Armenians have in a tactful way slain more Turks than Turks have
slain Armenians. That is why I am proud of being an Armenian. And you
would oblige me, gentlemen, by informing your countrymen that we have
no use for their discarded trousers, which are anyway not so good in
quality as they were, but would be grateful for some guns.’

“He left us.

“‘I didn’t know,’ I murmured, ‘that Armenians were like that. I have been
misled about Armenians. And he speaks English very well....’

“‘Hum,’ said Tarlyon thoughtfully. ‘But no one would say he was Armenian
if he wasn’t, would he?’”


iv

One of the six most famous American men novelists wrote about Michael
Arlen a year or so ago, as follows:

“He is one of the phenomena of our time. You may or may not like
phenomena”—this seems a little gratuitous. “But anyway, you probably like
an original story, so in Michael Arlen’s case you can compromise on that.
He himself does not compromise on anything, though he did once say that
‘discretion is the better part of literature.’ Since then, however, his
novel, ‘_Piracy_,’ in which half London society figures, has run into
many editions. The other half is no doubt wondering what he will say next.

“Michael Arlen is 25 years old; and, having served the usual terms at
an English public school and University he is, so he says, entirely
self-educated. There was also a war. And yet, though no human eye has
ever seen him at work, he has written four successful books.

“The first, which he published at the age of twenty, was his memoirs
and confessions, for he thought that he would be done with them at the
beginning. Many people thought that the book, _A London Venture_, was
by George Moore under a pseudonym; some papers stated the fact with
authority. Since then he has been more frequently compared to Guy de
Maupassant.

[Illustration: MICHAEL ARLEN

_Photograph by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, London._]

“Michael Arlen believes in working hard and living hard. He lives in
Mayfair. Most of the summer he spends between Deauville and Biarritz, and
most of the winter he may be found on the Riviera. The spring he spends
in Venice. He also likes dancing and baccarat, and is a tournament tennis
player.

“It is his considered opinion that if one had no enemies one would have
no time to do any writing at all. So he has collected quite a number,
whom he embitters by the amount of good work he does, while he amuses
himself and his friends by never appearing to do any at all. That is, of
course, a pose; but it is not a pose that everyone has the ability to
wear. Try it and see.

“The New Statesman has called him ‘the romantic comedian of our time’;
adding that he has no present equal in ‘the _dandysme_ of the soul.’
While the Daily Telegraph has said of him: ‘He concerns himself with
people who are bored to death unless they are in some sort of mischief.
The ladies carry their frailty as the gentlemen carry their drink—like
gentlemen. Michael Arlen writes with the truculence of a Mohawk and the
suavity of a Beau Nash....’

“This young man is among the last of those who believe that manners are
worth while as manners. The chivalry of daily life is to him the king of
indoor sports. And he has written that ‘a gentleman is a man who is never
_unintentionally_ rude to anyone.’”[81]

Now who is the famous American novelist who could have written thus and
thus of Mr. Arlen? Tell it not in Gath; publish it not in Main Street,
Ascalon. We are not allowed to reveal his chaste identity. If he had an
Armenian name, perhaps....

As a matter of fact, Michael Arlen was born in a Bulgarian village on
the Danube. When he was five years old his parents decided to move to
England. After he had been at an English public school the usual term of
years he went to Switzerland to learn English. He was then seventeen.
After he had been seventeen for some months, his parents called him back
to Manchester, where they lived. He got as far as London. His parents
then abandoned him with rather less than the customary shilling. He
started to write. His first book, _A London Venture_, was a book of
confessions, as at eighteen he had nothing else to write about. His
confessions confessed little except poverty and loneliness.

He was foreign, young, careless of literary cliques, stayed up dancing
all night and worked all day. London got to hear about him. He got a
name in Fleet Street by never going to see an editor in his office.
Michael Arlen always asked the editor to come outside and face him over a
cocktail.

_The Romantic Lady_ arrived, greatly disappointing the publishers, as she
was a book of short stories. Arlen said she would get on and she did, in
moderation.

“_Piracy_” was perhaps the book of a young man who had lived hard and
fought hard, with his tailors. It enabled him to pay them; but it was
Arlen’s opinion that he had not yet begun to write. In an interview he
said that so far he had been playing scales in public. _These Charming
People_ came on, but the author was writing his big novel, _The Dark
Angel_, and gave little heed to anything else. _The Dark Angel_ took him
a year. He destroyed it. He realized that it was not the advance on
“_Piracy_” which he and the most intelligent part of his public expected.
_The Green Hat_ more nearly satisfies him.


v

But already there is a word minted. “_These Charming People_,” observes
Mr. Philip Page, in some nondescript London newspaper cutting, “is very
Arlenesque.” Mr. Page preferred it to “_Piracy_”—and it is indeed better
work—although he missed the fun which “_Piracy_” afforded “of celebrity
spotting, and the satisfaction of being able to say to myself, with a
glowing feeling of being in the swim: ‘Here is Lady Diana Cooper!’ or
‘Here is Mr. Eddie Marsh!’” It is to be feared that most Americans cannot
have Mr. Page’s warm sensation of culture, but in our uncultured way it
is quite possible for us to enjoy such a portrait as the following, from
“_Piracy_”—for we have him in America, too:

“The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often good, for his was a
delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to
appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad,
for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young
poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually
begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be
‘_too_ cruel’ to them, for they were so sensitive and worthwhile. To see
and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting,
sometimes—which was just as well, since he was always in every room that
happened to be crowded, saying: ‘Isn’t it a marvellous party?’ He gave
all his women friends beautifully bound copies of _Tristram Shandy_,
which he said was _the only_ book.”

And now—what shall I say? I could quote the processional of admiring,
envious and rapturous adjectives applied to Mr. Arlen’s work. I could
quote other notes of his fashionable progress as a person as well as a
writer; but it would be repetitious. Besides, you will prefer to form
your own adjectives and perfect your own legend; which is right and
proper, and ever so charming of you. Kindly note that the correct name
and address is Mr. Michael Arlen, 14, Queen Street, Mayfair, London, W.
1. Ask to be put through to Grosvenor 2275. But only in the Season, only
in the Season.


BOOKS BY MICHAEL ARLEN

    1920 _A London Venture_
    1921 _The Romantic Lady_
    1923 _“Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days_
    1924 _These Charming People_
    1924 _The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People_


SOURCES ON MICHAEL ARLEN

Review of _These Charming People_ by Arthur Waugh in the Daily Telegraph,
London, for 6 July 1923.

Curtis Brown, Curtis Brown Ltd., 6, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden,
London, W. C. 2.




17. Palettes and Patterns in Prose and Poetry


i

Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that they were
“poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew clinging to them”?
I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made off with my copy of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich’s _Ponkapog Papers_, in which there is a pleasant essay
on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of course, said in his meticulous way that
poetry should not be pulled up by the roots; but modern feeling does
not agree with him, holding the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy
freshness evidence incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not
mere paper or wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who
in her lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published
until after her death. And then?

Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of fame,
steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more read
and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to Emerson,” W. P.
Dawson, the English critic, says in his own anthology. “Among American
poets I have named two—Poe and Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the
London Spectator said not long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent
anthology of American poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the
finest by a woman in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his
‘perhaps.’”

Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume edition of
her work! _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ contains all the verse
which appeared in _Poems, First Series_, in _Poems, Second Series_, and
in _Poems, Third Series_, and also those in the book brought out as
recently as 1914, _The Single Hound_. The total body of Emily Dickinson’s
work is therefore presented, and all in a new and proper arrangement,
making the edition definitive. Emily Dickinson’s niece and biographer,
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has written an introduction for the work.

Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick to
it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters, the
Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W. Hatfield
has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are _The Complete
Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily Jane Brontë_,
respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and each contains a
large percentage of poems never before published. I need not say anything
of the romance investing the lives of these three women. Shut in a lonely
parsonage in bleak moorland country, haunted by ill health and destined
to die young, they made their lives one of the most extraordinary
adventures in the history of the literary spirit. Their verse, of course,
shows the Byronic influence.

The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an _A Book of
American Verse_ with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor who
selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the whole
field of American literature from its beginnings and has been at once
personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent collection of
his own work, _Essays on Poetry_, includes short papers on Matthew
Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and some others.

_Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study_, by R. L. Mégroz,
is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet and prose
writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the purpose of
his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light and in relation
to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living writer
of more interest for such a study than the author of the _Memoirs of a
Midget_, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet of happiest
childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil age. Mr. Mégroz’s
book has the charm of its subject, and more.

One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to write a
good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh one be
needed, is T. Earle Welby’s _A Popular History of English Poetry_. Mr.
Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may have been impaired
by his articles in the London Saturday Review and his other book, a
critical study of Swinburne. _A Popular History of English Poetry_ is
said to be the only one-volume book of its sort, but whether it is or
not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs from Chaucer (there is
even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to Meredith and Hardy and
Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves the adjective in front of the
word “History” in its title. Anyone who knows or cares about poetry
at all can read with delighted ease and will learn something in every
chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile knowledge and a light touch.
His judgments are neither vague characterizations nor conventional
utterances; he has taste and he has an opinion, and he gives you each.


ii

To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an
exquisite color and form: _Echo de Paris_, by Laurence Housman, is a bit
of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I
think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection
as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible
thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer,
Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English,
who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound,
shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of
_Echo de Paris_:

“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café
near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and
from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected.
Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his
audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him
legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation,
Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from
the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which
he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional
situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal
disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward
the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended
him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes
on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he
has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon
which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than
even he could bear.

“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s
conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel
that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his
comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual
paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on
which his reputation was built.”

Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl
Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s
_Jennifer Lorn_. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an
equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth
century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it
deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long
before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in
enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you
tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the
difficulty of reporting _Jennifer Lorn_. It is worth noting, though, that
the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to
purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner.
The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century
format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it
should be so delightfully well-done.

An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this book; I saved
out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and
the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it _The Wind
and the Rain_; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and
the best since _Limehouse Nights_ (from some standpoints it is better
than that work). In _The Wind and the Rain_, Thomas Burke returns to
Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early
years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of
spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He
recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway;
his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the
Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the
street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and
being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his
friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of
literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he
was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long
recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone
who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”

Hugh Walpole’s critical study of _Anthony Trollope_ is welcome both
because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own
work used to be likened to that of the author of _Barchester Towers_. I
believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather
the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole
best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his
gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The
_Anthony Trollope_ by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s
_Gissing_ and _R. L. Stevenson_; we have a right to hope that the
fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better
than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very
probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which
case he would probably select Stendhal.

But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions.
It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some
reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory.
Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary
hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the
rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he
write a book about authors. He did. _The Doctor Looks at Literature_,
with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence,
its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of
James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be
missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, _Taking the Literary Pulse_, is as
strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting
because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood
Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the
uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a
subject which most discussion merely muddles.


iii

Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the
anthology by F. H. Pritchard, _Essays of To-Day_. Not only are the
inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary
English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his
Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes,
naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply
how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations of
personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a power
of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of his words
regarding the lyric:

“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the
recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a
lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn
together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is
one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The metal
bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-point
and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see it at
length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”

Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short biographical
note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences, the spirit of place
and of holiday, and various interrelations between life and letters are
the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett, E. V.
Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E.
Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert
K. Chesterton and Edmund Gosse are some of the writers who achieve
inclusion; and the variety of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic
feeling, delight in places and sadness all have their moment.

Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books by some
of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not miss Robert
Lynd’s _The Blue Lion_. Here are some chapters dealing apparently with
children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but animated by that
interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human nature which is the
field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.

It is, to a great extent, the field which Robert Cortes Holliday has
occupied himself with since the day of his _Walking-Stick Papers_; and
while the title of his new book is _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, the
“other byways” are frequently the most engaging to tread. Mr. Holliday,
for example, has been interviewing the ancient waiters on the subject
of the golden years at a lost Delmonico’s; and he has also become an
authority on nightwear. But there is plenty of contact between life and
literature in _Literary Lanes_. One essay is devoted to the subject of
the vamp in literature; another to books as presents; another harvests
_bons mots_ from the inner circles of celebrated wits; “and,” as Mr.
Holliday would say, “and so on.”

Stephen McKenna’s _By Intervention of Providence_ is a felicitous blend
of diary, essay and short story, written by this novelist during an
extended visit to the West Indies. The atmosphere of the West India
islands is conveyed with some care, while the digressions to the essay or
the short story are anecdotal, philosophical, and frequently humorous.
“From day to day,” Mr. McKenna explains, “I set down whatever fancy
tempted me to write. The result can only be called ‘Essays’ in the
Johnsonian sense of that word. I desire no more accurate definition of
what is in part a series of letters, in part a journal, in part vagrant
reminiscences, in part idle reflection, in part stories which I do not
ask the reader to believe.” But the potpourri, however unusual, will be
welcomed alike by the traveler and the arm-chair tourist.


iv

The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me
speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, _The Middle Twenties_, which is
more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his
serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his book,
_Forgotten Shrines_. I do not forget _Songs for Parents_, but that is
somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, _The Magic Sea
Shell_, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason alone.
His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other activities,
have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly taken time
and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much of the hardest
work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has been upon the verse in
_The Middle Twenties_. The result ought to satisfy him, though probably
it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his own work. But all the poems
in _The Middle Twenties_ keep to a high level and the volume has more
than variety, it has positive and effective contrast. Whether he is most
successful in the “Amaryllis” group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage
pain and passion of “The Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But
from the flaming “Ego,” the opening poem, to the fine understanding of
such work as “War Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment,
and emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.

Nellie Burget Miller’s _In Earthen Bowls_ explains its title in these
lines which open the book:

    So here we have our treasure in an earthen bowl,
    Distorted, marred, and set to common use:
    And some will never see beyond the form of clay,
    And some will stoop to peer within and softly say,
    “There is a wondrous radiance prisoned there,
    And I heard the stir of an angel’s wing.”

Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very large—which
asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a direct relation
to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in which they want to
be able to see the suggestion of something radiant and feel the stir
of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems in her book, Mrs. Miller
has not tried to build an imaginary world, but has appealed to the love
of nature, and to the feelings of happiness and grief, for her lyrical
expression. The evidence of her success has been recorded in several
ways. She has, for one thing, been made the chairman of the literary
division of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She has also been
chosen poet laureate of her State, Colorado.

Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize Martha
Haskell Clark’s book, _The Home Road_. Mrs. Clark has been a contributor
of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to several of the
enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called. Her poems are concerned,
as her title indicates, chiefly with the longing, often wistful and
sometimes delightful, for an old home or fireside, old friends and
holidays and memories. The language is as simple as the feeling. Curtis
Hidden Page, professor of English at Dartmouth and compiler of _English
Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, writes the preface to _The Home Road_.

Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s _Recitations—Old and
New for Boys and Girls_ seems to me of more than ordinary interest,
because the author is the buyer of books for one of the largest stores
in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation that one thinks
of it as constantly creating book readers from the mere fact of its
having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige is in an unequaled
position to know what, in the way of a book, people want. Well, she
does. And having found no present-day book that quite met the problem,
she has made one. Her _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_
has a foreword by Christopher Morley and contains poems dealing with
every imaginable subject. They are divided into sections in a natural
grouping: poems about and for children, poems about fairies, about
birds and other animals, about flowers and seasons; humorous poems,
patriotic poems, holiday poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the
classification, the range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under
“Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!

How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their
interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for
recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of
authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems
for recitation, and though these poems _are_ for recitation, there is
nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As such,
it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.

A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the new
illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, _Abbé Pierre_. The
great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes steadily
on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather against
the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like _David
Harum_) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson has
got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and
the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become
familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap
in _Princeton Sketches_. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where
the scenes of _Abbé Pierre_ are laid and has caught both the spirit and
character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully
reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new dress,
make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s quality.




18. Coming!—Courtney Ryley Cooper—Coming!


i

What I need at the moment is not a chapter but a billboard on which
to paste with great splashy gestures a three-sheet announcement:
“Coming!—The Literary Lochinvar—Coming!” Both words and pictures—yes, and
muted notes from the steam calliope—are requisite to herald adequately
the author of _Under the Big Top_. If I tell the story of Courtney Ryley
Cooper, fiction, even his own fiction, will seem colorless beside it.
Therefore read no further. The lights are off and a beam flung from the
projection room high overhead shows us——

Scene. Large white canvas mushrooms growing closely together and
obviously attracting swarms of the human ant. Animals in gaudy cages,
the living skeleton, lemonade, spangles and paper hoops. Close-up.
Fifteen-year-old boy, at once timid and bold, interviewing the master of
destinies. Caption: “Boy, water the elephants!”

Scene. Amphitheatre within the largest of the tents. Several thousand
faces that are all one face and that have even less significance than
one face and that emit a crackling, collective sound. Clowns, masked by
perpetually surprised looks painted on noses, mouths and eyebrows, in
ballooning white costumes, rolling and tumbling about the arena. Thwack!
Close-up. Fifteen-year-old ecstatic over the time of his life, working
hard. Caption: “Spare the slap-stick and spoil the child.”

Scene. Office of the Denver Post, twelve years later. Enter Buffalo Bill,
white hair pigtailed and everything. He strides up to the city editor.
Caption: “Whar’s that reporter fellow——”

Flash. “Film not broken, but we have just been informed that all motion
picture rights in the career of Courtney Ryley Cooper are reserved to Mr.
Cooper. Please keep your seats.”


ii

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1886, the son of
Baltimore Thomas Cooper and Catherine (Grenolds) Cooper. He is a
descendant of the Calverts, Lords of Baltimore, and of other settlers
of Maryland and Virginia. He ran away from school in Kansas City to
become water-boy and clown in a circus. He also became an actor, bill
distributor, property man and song and dance artist with bad repertory
companies playing “East Lynne,” “In Old Kentucky,” “The James Boys in
Missouri” and other classics of the road.

He has been a newsboy, a trucker, a glove salesman, a monologist in
vaudeville, a circus press agent, a newspaper man, and general manager of
the world’s second largest circus.

He began writing at 24, a play, “the world’s worst play,” he says. It was
produced in Kansas City “and I had to sit and watch the darned thing for
two weeks.” Then he began to write magazine stories. So great has been
his output that at least five pen names have been necessary. They are
Barney Furey, William O. Grenolds, Jack Harlow, Frederick Tierney and
Leonard B. Hollister. He has written as much as 45,000 words of fiction
in three days—or days and nights. As a newspaper man he has written eight
columns (1,200 words to the column) in two hours. For such excesses he
naturally pays in an inability to walk, eat or sleep for some immediate
time afterward. It might be supposed that the work so turned out would be
mere machine-made stuff, but this is not true. However, the ability to
write at such speed has necessitated a small staff to gather the writer’s
material.

There are several reasons why Mr. Cooper could never gather it all
himself. He married, in 1916, Genevieve R. Furey, of Los Angeles, and
they have a pleasant home in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Mr. Cooper gets his
recreation in the mountains round about. But the stuff for the hundreds
of stories he has written of circus life and jungle animal life cannot
be renewed except from elsewhere. It cannot be renewed and added to
sufficiently except—almost literally—from everywhere. After all, Mr.
Cooper has contributed stories to more than half a hundred magazines. And
if he were to stop writing to gather material——!

“I have a little circus all my own,” he explains. He knows nearly
everything that is happening in all the big shows. He keeps up an
uninterrupted correspondence with circus people and he has five persons
on his payroll at all times. One is a man who makes a specialty of
circus pictures. Another is a lion trainer who has trained as many as
thirty lions in one den. Whenever he has some unusual incident of animal
behavior to report, he writes to Cooper. A third member of the little
staff is an all-round animal man, menagerie superintendent and “bullman.”
A fourth is a highly educated woman with ten years’ experience in
training lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Mr. Cooper pays her a
salary and she takes “assignments,” just as if she were a reporter—which,
in fact, she is in this work. She is a reporter on animals, their
training, and their characteristics. The fifth employee is a circus clown
who sends a regular monthly letter reporting things that happen under the
big top.

There is, besides, a large number of volunteer correspondents, friends of
long standing.

Mr. Cooper has used his material both directly, in the form of articles,
and in stories. While he was on his way from clown to general manager of
the circus, he became deeply interested in jungle animals and discovered
a great many human traits (or traits parallel, if you prefer) in them.
He himself, it must be remembered, has been in the training dens with
leopards, lions, tigers and pumas; and he has been in with as many as six
lions and tigers at one time.

He looks, in certain poses, remarkably like Eric von Stroheim, and the
camera sometimes brings out the multitude of his freckles. He is bald and
enjoys baldness. Better company is not to be had, and this is only partly
due to the innumerable anecdotes at his command. Many of these grow out
of his association with Buffalo Bill, whose personal secretary he was
for a while and whose biographer (with Buffalo Bill’s widow, Mrs. W. F.
Cody) he became. There is, for example, the story of the time when Cooper
contracted with a clipping bureau for newspaper notices. They were to be
ten cents each. They arrived—a bale—and with them a bill for $134.90.
With a single exception, they consisted of 1,348 clippings about the
Buffalo baseball team, which was much to the fore owing to the temporary
existence of the Federal League.

Cooper also told this story at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon in New York:

“Colonel Cody arrived home unexpectedly early one morning. Going to his
wife’s bedroom window he tapped on the glass, calling: ‘It’s all right;
let me in.’ ‘Go away,’ said Mrs. Cody. ‘This is Buffalo Bill’s house, and
I’m his wife, and I can shoot, too.’ Buffalo Bill, sore, remounted his
horse and rode off to a neighboring saloon. Eventually he returned home,
galloping up the driveway and on to the veranda of the house, letting out
Whoops the While. As he reached the door a gentle voice greeted him from
behind it: ‘Is that you, Willie dear?’”


iii

In 1918 Mr. Cooper enlisted as a private in the United States Marines.
Very shortly he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to
France to collate historical matter for the Marine Corps.

He has a very exceptional talent for handling people in masses, and has
sometimes been requisitioned by motion picture people and others who
had spectacles to produce. As the talent is coupled with a talent for
creative organization at least equal, the life of a writer represents a
deliberate sacrifice of money on Cooper’s part. For example:

Wild West shows, rodeos and bucking horse contests are one of his
hobbies. A few years ago he ran the first Annual Round-up at Colorado
Springs. In three days the show took in $19,800 gate money. And the
whole show, from the announcement, building of grandstands to seat
8,000 persons, hiring of cowboys, wild horses, bucking broncos, steers
for bulldogging, advertising and everything else, was put on in less
than three weeks. Overtures piled in on Cooper to go into the business
in other places. In the end, he refused contracts for $150,000 for two
years’ work.


iv

His books have been of two principal kinds, novels of the West and the
two volumes, _Under the Big Top_ and _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything!_
that spring from the circus. The novels are _The Cross-Cut_, _The
White Desert_, and _The Last Frontier_, in that order. Are they simply
the usual “Westerns”? No. There is in _The Cross-Cut_ that quality of
humor, that enjoyment of a capital hoax, which first cut out from the
stampeding herd of Western stories Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_. Almost
everyone, recalling Mr. Wister’s novel, thinks of the opening scene in
which the cowboys, like Little Buttercup in Mr. Gilbert’s “Pinafore,”
“mixed those babies up.” That affair, so refreshingly different in its
realism and sense of scandalous fun from the sentimental heroics of other
Western tales, is easily recalled when most other incidents of _The
Virginian_ are forgotten. Similarly one recalls with fresh amusement the
ruse whereby ’Arry ’Arkins got the Blue Poppy mine unwatered. Messrs.
Fairchild and ’Arkins had very little capital; but by a convincing effect
of drowning in the mine, the whole community was stirred to rescue the
presumed corpse of ’Arkins; machinery that the two men could not have
hired was set to work pumping, and by the time the hoax was revealed, the
mine was dry.

_The White Desert_ has nothing to do with sand and alkali but is a story
of the bleak, white stretches of the Continental Divide, where the world
is a world of precipices, blue-green ice, and snow-spray carried on the
beating wings of never-resting gales. It is the tale of a lumber camp and
of a highly dramatic, last ditch struggle. Mr. Cooper admits that the
first chapters were from an experience of his own. On the Berthoud Pass,
11,300 feet high, his speedster broke down. Now safety speed on the roads
thereabouts is possibly fifteen miles an hour. The grades sometimes run
as high as eighteen and twenty per cent. With no windshield, no gears to
aid his brakes, no goggles and a sprained steering gear, Mr. Cooper was
towed on these mountain roads by a largely liquored gentleman in a truck
at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. Mr. Cooper was bald before this
happened....

Essentially, _The Cross-Cut_ and _The White Desert_ are stories; _The
Last Frontier_, with no sacrifice of story interest, can stake a claim of
more importance. Like certain novels of Emerson Hough’s[82] and Hal G.
Evarts’s, this is an accurate and alive presentation of American history
in the guise of fiction. The period is 1867-68 when, as an aftermath of
the Civil War, many impoverished families sought the unsettled frontier
lands. The Kansas-Pacific Railway, a link between East and West, was
under construction, its every mile contested by the Indians. It was
the period when Buffalo Bill made his reputation as a buffalo hunter
and Indian scout; when General Custer nearly wore himself out hunting
Indians; when the Battle of Beecher’s Island aroused the nation. Buffalo
Bill, Custer, and the building of the railroad are the true subjects of
this fine romance which ends when the great stampede has failed. “The
buffalo were gone. Likewise the feathered beings who had striven to
use them as a bulwark and had failed—enfiladed by scouts, volleyed by
cavalry, their bodies were strewn in the valley with the carcasses of
the buffalo.” Within months Custer was to come back, and in triumph. The
“golden-haired general” was to ride to the battle of Washita “at the head
of the greatest army of troops ever sent against the red man.... There
would be other frontiers—true. But they would be sectional things, not
keystones, such as this had been.”

These novels, in their order, mark a growth in the writer’s stature;
and Mr. Cooper, like others who show growth, has humility as well as
ambition. The thing he has in mind to do, possibly in his next novel,
is more difficult than anything he has done—an attempt to take a few
contemporary lives and view them in the perspective that history affords.
This, of course, is very hard to do. Certainly Sinclair Lewis did not do
it in _Main Street_, and no amount of exact, faithful, realistic detail
accomplishes it. It can only be done by simplifying one’s material so
that a few humble people are seen as typifying human endeavor. But if the
effort is successful, the result will mean as much in one century as in
another, and the work will live.


v

Mr. Cooper’s two books based on the circus accomplish something that no
one else, so far as I know, has even attempted. They make a permanent and
fascinating record of a truly American institution. _Under the Big Top_
presents the circus as a whole, although five of the eleven chapters are
concerned with the circus animals. _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is
wholly about the menagerie.

The first of these books is a curious illustration of the breach
ordinarily existing between literature and life. Although, in the
complexities of a surface civilization, the circus may hold less
significance for Americans today than fifty or forty or even twenty years
ago, most of us were brought up to go to the circus. Or, at any rate,
went. The formative influence of the circus on American character is
incalculably great. Yet neither literature nor formal education took any
cognizance of the circus tent. Public officials, as Mr. Cooper points
out, very generally took into consideration the educational value of
circus animals when fixing license fees. But that was about all the
notice of value the circus got. Where were books on the circus? When
was the circus reckoned with by the professional analysts of American
character? How far has present-day American advertising acknowledged its
immense debt to the traveling show? What Matthew Arnold or James Bryce
coming to our shores to examine American character and lacking, possibly,
the wisdom of the serpent acquired the Wisdom of the circus? And our
psychologists busied with delicate tests on the nerve-endings of frogs;
were they dumb-bells so long? They were. They went not to the circus, the
sluggards; they examined not its ways.

Yet it would be true to say that the circus is the one most typical
American institution. Between the American circus and the traveling
shows of other lands no comparison is possible. In size, in variety, in
achievements of audacity, devotion and courage, the American big tent
show has no rival. It is, to begin with, playing around in a country
which is to most other countries as a ten-acre field is to a city lot.
Its self-reliance must be complete. Its morale, especially in the days
of its greatest importance, has had to be high and unwavering; for
otherwise-excellent people have been its unrelenting foes. At the same
time the circus has been something much more than a spectacle; frequently
it has been a coöperative enterprise. Mr. Cooper gives some idea of the
innumerable occasions on which the American small boy, judiciously and
fairly rewarded with a free ticket, has pulled the circus out of some
insuperable physical difficulty. The circus was the original discoverer
of the most important element in American psychology, the love of
bigness and display, the admiration for achievement in size. It was the
circus which first put in firm practice the important principle of human
nature which time merely refines upon: the desire to be bunked: and the
circus drew the correct line between bunk and bunco and with the fewest
exceptions steered clear of bunco.

Now in _Under The Big Top_, Mr. Cooper, who naturally knows circuses,
gayly gives the whole show away—a process which a good show can come
out of with colors flying. And the circus does. The gist of the book,
the real why of the circus, will be found in that rousing final chapter
written upon the text:

                        RAIN OR SHINE
                  THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHOW
                   WILL POSITIVELY APPEAR

Here are stories of that ultimate sheer persistence which is the spirit
of the circus and, pretty nearly, the history of the nation to which it
belongs.


vi

The chapters on animals in _Under the Big Top_ led directly to Mr.
Cooper’s _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, which is the menagerie
inside out. In the course of long study of caged and captive jungle
creatures, and aided by the continuous study of his staff-helpers, Mr.
Cooper has found no human emotion which these animals do not exhibit at
some time or other in appropriate circumstances. “I have seen jealousy,
insanity, hallucination, the highest kind of love including mother love,
the fiercest brand of hate, trickery, cunning and revenge. I have seen
gratitude. The only desire I will exclude as not being common to humans
and animals is the desire for money. There is a corresponding animal
desire, however. It is horse meat. Horse meat is the currency of the
animal kingdom.”[83]

The extraordinary instance of Casey, a giant, black-faced chimpanzee[84]
captured in infancy in the Cape Lopez district of Africa, has suggested
to Mr. Cooper that something most remarkably approaching a man could
be bred from a monkey in as few as four generations. Not a physical
likeness, but mental, is the prospect. Enough apes of Casey’s type would
be necessary to avoid inbreeding, and the first generation born in
captivity would have to be subjected to wholly human contacts.[85] About
150 years would be required for the experiment.

But _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is a book of fact, not of theories.
It is most valuable, perhaps, in its contrast between the old and new
methods of animal training. Mr. Cooper shows in the first chapter the
transformation that has come about:

“The circus animal trainer of today is not chosen for his brutality, or
his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has studied
and knows animals—even to talking their various ‘languages.’ There are
few real animal trainers who cannot gain an answer from their charges,
talking to them as the ordinary person talks to a dog and receiving as
intelligent attention. Animal men have learned that the brute isn’t any
different from the human; the surest way to make him work is to pay him
for his trouble. In the steel arena today ... the animals are just so
many hired hands. When they do their work, they get their pay.... The
present-day trainer doesn’t cow the animal or make it afraid of him....
The first thing to be eliminated is not fear on the part of the trainer,
but on the part of the animal!... Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants,
fish for seals, stale bread for the polar bears, a bit of honey or candy
for the ordinary species of bear, pieces of apple or lumps of sugar for
horses; every animal has his reward for which he’ll work a hundred times
harder than ever he did in the old and almost obsolete days of fear.”
With lions, tigers and leopards the trainer, imitating their own sound
that expresses satisfaction, can convey to them his satisfaction with
their work. And there is catnip. “To a house cat, catnip is a thing of
ecstasy. To a jungle cat it holds as much allurement as morphine to a
dope user, or whisky to a drunkard. The great cats roll in it, toss it
about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of
delight.”

Does this new method of animal training seem to remove from the circus
menagerie most of its adventure and romance? Does Mr. Cooper’s account
of the “Wallace act,” in which a lion impersonates an untameable lion and
fights its trainer, seem to sickle over all such performances a hopeless
theatricalism? The answer may be found in the pages of _Lions ’n’ Tigers
’n’ Everything_, a chronicle of breathlessness if ever there was one.
Here are stories of Mabel Stark, Captain Ricardo, Bob McPherson and many
others to make the hair curl: stories of animals that remembered and men
that forgot, of trained dogs and untrained leopards, of animal nature
and—best of all—of human nature. How much better, this book, than the
fiction which attempts to approach animals from the imaginative side!
With a low bow in the direction of Mr. Kipling, it may be pointed out
that the ordinary child’s sole contact with the beasts of the jungle is
through the circus menagerie or the zoo. As captive animals are utterly
different from wild, it is in terms of the captive existence that the
child reasonably craves to know and appreciate them (I say “child,” but
in this matter we are all children, regardless of age). But no one who
reads _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ will ever see an animal act again
without an observation at least twice as intelligent or an interest at
least doubly great.


BOOKS BY COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

         _The Eagle’s Eye_ (with William J. Flynn, then Chief of the
             U. S. Secret Service)
    1919 _Dear Folks at Home_ (with Kemper F. Cowing)
    1919 _Memories of Buffalo Bill_ (with Mrs. William F. Cody)
    1921 _The Cross-Cut_
    1922 _The White Desert_
    1923 _The Last Frontier_
    1923 _Under the Big Top_
    1924 _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_


SOURCES ON COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

Several are referred to in footnotes to the text of the chapter. The
usual record will be found in _Who’s Who in America_, and there is Mr.
Cooper himself (address, Idaho Springs, Colorado).




19. Edith Wharton’s Old New York


i

Willa Cather once made a significant confession, to the effect that
nothing which had happened to her after the age of twenty seemed to
matter as material for her fiction. On the whole, the statement is
strongly borne out by her work; and there is reason to believe that it
is true of other women writers. Dangerous as the path of generalization
may be, I am persuaded that in such cases as Miss Cather, Zona Gale, Edna
Ferber and Edith Wharton, all or nearly all of the writer’s best work is
traceable to contacts and impressions in those young years which alone
seem to hold an inextinguishable spark for the tinder of imagination.
And in the instance of Mrs. Wharton one has only to consider her early
life in relation to some of her fiction to feel that she could echo Miss
Cather.

For whatever the high merit of much of her fiction, its finished irony,
its polished strength, its assurance and ease, where is the work of
hers, leaving aside _Ethan Frome_, which has the robust vitality of
her pictures of old New York? It is not a question of accuracy in
historical detail; various slips have been charged up against _The Age
of Innocence_. Well, the fact that Keats confused Cortez with Balboa has
never diminished the splendor of a famous sonnet. Vitality has little
to do with structure or detail, and everything to do with the artist’s
feeling for what he is modelling, painting or writing about. Who can
read _The Age of Innocence_, or the four novelettes grouped under the
general title _Old New York_ (_False Dawn_, _The Old Maid_, _The Spark_,
and _New Year’s Day_) and doubt that it is a return to first loves?

As everyone knows, or should know, she was born in New York in 1862,
Edith Newbold Jones; and her mother was a Rhinelander. One grandparent
was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.[86] In the period before her
marriage at the age of twenty-three to Edward Wharton, of Boston, and in
spite of much time spent abroad, she was herself one of those sensitive
souls who “in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played
without a sound,” who found themselves inextricably and by no means
unhappily enmeshed in a “cautious world built up on the fortunes of
bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers,” a world where
everybody “lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never
stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underneath.”[87] In this
society the girl and young woman had need of imaginative sympathy as well
as sharpened perceptions if she were ultimately to comprehend what went
on. For few can comprehend such things as the affair of Ellen Olenska and
Newland Archer,[88] or such behavior as Lizzie Hazeldean’s[89] at the
time. Innocence of mind is not in question here, nor observations; it
is simply that one has to be older, to have had one’s own experiences,
and to be able to relate what one has seen to what one has come to
know from life. Then and only then can comprehension come in terms
of that sympathy which Mrs. Wharton beautifully defines as a “moved
understanding.” One is no longer shackled by exact memory and one is
animated by the same strong feeling, in the flood-tide of which one takes
the past and fashions from it a story serviceable in meaning for mankind.


ii

It is tempting to speculate whether Mrs. Wharton could have written _The
Age of Innocence_ in present-day New York. The thing seems improbable.
Not even in the shelter of the National Arts Club, with a window
overlooking Gramercy Park, or in one of the old Chelsea houses, does the
feat look the least likely. Living in France she could quite readily
cross the Atlantic in recollection, sit in a shabby red and gold box
at the old Academy of Music and listen to Christine Nilsson singing in
“Faust.” “She sang, of course, ‘_M’ama!_’ and not ‘He loves me!’ since
an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that
the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be
translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking
audiences.” Newland Archer would be in the club box with other men, of
whom Sillerton Jackson would be the undisputed social authority. He would
sit at the back but Where he could see directly across the house in
the box opposite the “young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed
on the stage-lovers,” May Welland. “It was only that afternoon that
May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated
phrase of maiden avowal).” And then? Mrs. Wharton is not the one to avoid
the delicious opening offered to review Newland Archer’s confused but
hopeful visions. His masculine pride, a tender reverence he felt for her
“abysmal purity,” the simple vanity which led him to wish May to be as
worldly-wise and eager to please as the married woman of his acquaintance
(“without, of course, any hint of the frailty which ... had disarranged
his own plans for a whole winter”)—these elements of Newland Archer’s
feeling are pieced together easily enough _now_ from dozens of young men
one grew up with and dozens of young couples one looked on at....

The infatuation of Newland Archer for Ellen Olenska would be gradual,
handicapped by the efforts of his sympathy, unaided by any quality of
imagination, “to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska
had lived and suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.” The
constraint, like an enormous enveloping pressure, as if everyone in the
old New York society lived in the remotest depths of the sea, would
overcome both Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. But, as Mrs. Wharton
realized—one feels that it is these two moments for which she wrote—the
time would come when Newland would look at his wife and wish she were
dead, and the time would come when he would sit as the victim of tribal
ceremony.

“Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd
imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and
ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.
As his glance traveled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw
all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a
band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right
as the center of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast
flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame
Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’
vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center
of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he
understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between
himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now
the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption
that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the
occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to
take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’:
the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed
decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred
than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

“As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a
prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and
guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over
the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife.
‘It’s to show me,’ he thought, ‘what would happen to _me_—’ and a deathly
sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action,
and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the
family vault.”

Here, indeed, is the novel of character at its finest. One does not have
to praise the character novel in a day when the turn of critical taste
has caused it to be esteemed above everything. As we know this type of
fiction it has passed through several mutations since Jane Austen gave
it existence by her novels. Men have seized upon Miss Austen’s lesson
and have wrought so prodigiously with it, as in _Vanity Fair_, in _The
Egoist_, and in _The Old Wives’ Tale_, that nothing is easier than to
forget that the whole business originated in a woman’s mind. But the
novel of character is even yet distinctly feminine. It ignores the
mysterious and unknown. It says that whatever may be the Unknowable,
there is much we do and can explore and know. It baffles the typically
masculine effort to reason with the mind, and yields at a touch to the
typically feminine approach by sympathy and intuition, by thinking, as
it were, not with the mind but with the nervous system. Among the many
perversions to which it has been subjected none is more hopeless than a
sort of conscientious, wholly masculine realism, a placid apprehension
of surfaces, such as triumphed in the work of William Dean Howells. Mr.
George Moore said in malice that Henry James went abroad and read the
great Europeans, while Mr. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.
It would be at least as true to suggest that Mrs. Wharton, for whatever
time she was his “pupil,” chose Mr. James to escape from Mr. Howells. At
home was dignity and dullness; abroad was the author of _The Portrait of
a Lady_ busy with highly-disguised melodrama. Who—least of all, a woman
like Mrs. Wharton—could hesitate?


iii

The four novelettes grouped under the title, _Old New York_, are
doubtless as works of art more perfect than _The Age of Innocence_, for
in each case Mrs. Wharton has selected a subject as a painter might,
with a feeling for the effect in certain lights and with a wish to avoid
so far as possible the air of having “composed” her figures in their
background. The extreme artificiality and rigidity of the society she
writes about demands that at least one or two persons—the one or two in
the foreground—shall possess a movement apparently unstudied. Therefore
her task has been finely and ruthlessly to cut away the richly rambling
growth of her recollections, the profusion in this direction or that;
it has been to isolate a single crucial situation, or to expose behind
the dried leaves and the withered roses of mid-century sentimentality
and correctitude the reality of a heart that beat in its pathetic moment
of terror or of despairing courage. These are exquisite stories; I do
not think it an exaggeration to say they are the finest things Mrs.
Wharton has ever done with the exception of _Ethan Frome_. Indeed, they
have something that no work of hers but _Ethan Frome_ has in the same
degree, the mood of stirred comprehension and compassionate pity, joined
to something that no work of hers but _The Age of Innocence_ has, a
rapturously perfect setting.

_False Dawn_ (_The ’Forties_) begins at a country house which overlooked
Long Island Sound at a point now shabby with cliff-dwellings and gas
tanks. “Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large
strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of
pale yellow”—and young Lewis Raycie, who has hard work to down his punch
(“perfumed fire”) is twenty-one and ready for the Grand Tour. The more
tender-hearted of his sisters has a habit of going out furtively at
daybreak to take comforts to poor Mrs. Poe, the very sick wife of an
atheistical poet. The son, secretly in love with an ineligible girl, runs
across in his travels John Ruskin, and buys Italian primitives instead
of the Raphael and conventional “masters” desired by his father. For
this he is cut off from a fortune and left with the collection. We have
a glimpse of him and his wife and little girl embraced in poverty while
the pictures are exhibited to a New York still totally unready for them.
Lewis Raycie, his wife and child are dust when the “dawn” comes.

In _The Old Maid_ (_The ’Fifties_) Mrs. Wharton deals with a situation
so dramatic that I feel the shocking unfairness of disclosing it
prematurely to the reader. Although Delia Lovell, wife of James Ralston,
and Charlotte Lovell are actually cousins, one comes to think of them as
sisters. The faithful but unsparing presentation of what, essentially,
is comprised in motherhood grows out of the most intimate glimpses of
husband, wife, lover and mistress. “Afterward: why, of course, there
was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies
of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return
for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of
seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through
the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and
Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase ‘to obey’ in the
glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed
distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the
insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers
in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations
through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a
fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence. And then, the babies; the
babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t—though
they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was
that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”

Although _The Spark_ is subtitled _The ’Sixties_, it is more truly a tale
of the ’Sixties reflected in the ’Nineties. Hayley Delane, whose “harsh
head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain,” is the supremely
good-natured, stupid husband. It is only by slow degrees that the
young man who tells the story comes to understand that while Delane is
intellectually no different from the other men of his social set, he is
morally far in advance of them. Parenthetically, it is interesting to
note Mrs. Wharton’s use of the young man as narrator not only in this
story but in _New Year’s Day_, and to compare it with Willa Cather’s use
of the same device in _My Antonia_ and _A Lost Lady_.

_The Spark_ is a story devoted to the exploration of character, an
obscure but fascinating task resumed at intervals over the years. The
secret of Delane’s character leads back, curiously and astonishingly,
to his brief contact as a youth with “an old fellow in Washington” who
visited the sick in the army hospitals. Otherwise Delane has never heard
of Walt Whitman. I withhold the ironic and perfect ending.

A sample of Mrs. Wharton’s zestful writing comes in the first sentence of
_New Year’s Day_ (_The ’Seventies_):

“‘She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’
said my mother, as if the scene of the offense added to the guilt of the
couple whose past she was revealing.”

Her son’s mind flashes back to an incident when he was a boy of twelve
watching, with older people, the rapid and unbecoming rush of folk from
the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was on fire. With her admirable technique,
Mrs. Wharton at once slips quietly back to the incident itself, and
we follow Lizzie Hazeldean in her progress from the scene of so much
confusion—a flight, but a controlled flight. This story holds a surprise
for the reader, who will not be likely to surmise Mrs. Hazeldean’s
true feeling any more than Henry Prest did. The scene between these
two, meeting for the first time after Charles Hazeldean’s death, is
incomparably well done.

Surely these four novelettes will be read a half-century hence with as
much appreciation as today! For such work, for such New York primitives,
one feels there can be no false dawn. I have no doubt that the immediate
effect, only partly traceable to the presence in the background of some
of the same persons, like Mrs. Manson Mingot and Mr. Sillerton Jackson,
will be to set everyone to re-reading _The Age of Innocence_. Which
is entirely as it should be, for they will find that novel fresher,
livelier, more wistful and even more beautifully satisfactory today than
four years ago.


A NOTE ON EDITH WHARTON

For a full list of Edith Wharton’s books and for reference to several
important discussions of her work, see the chapter on her in either
_Authors of the Day_ or _American Nights Entertainment_.

_The Age of Innocence_ is a story of New York society in the ’Seventies.
It was published in 1920, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, awarded by
Columbia University, as the best American novel of its year (over
Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_). The four novelettes called _Old New
York_ were published in 1924 (separate volumes, or set) and are:

    _False Dawn_ (_The ’Forties_)
    _The Old Maid_ (_The ’Fifties_)
    _The Spark_ (_The ’Sixties_)
    _New Year’s Day_ (_The ’Seventies_)




20. Not Found Elsewhere


i

Certain books which have seemed not to drop naturally into the scheme
of my other chapters are to be discussed in this; but that does not
mean an entire lack of relation among them. I shall first say something
about books dealing with Europe; then something about books on American
subjects. Both these groups are mainly of an historical character. There
will then remain for our attention a few books of a somewhat diverse but
distinctive character.

Easily the most important of the European studies is promised in a
two-volume work by the Earl of Birkenhead with the title, _The Inner
History of British Politics, 1906-1922_, to appear early in 1925. The
author first came to general attention as Frederick E. Smith, an Ulster
lawyer. As Sir Frederick E. Smith he was Attorney-General under Mr. Lloyd
George and later, as Viscount Birkenhead, he was Lord High Chancellor.
When he retired from office with Lloyd George he was made an Earl. With
Sir Andrew Carson, he was generally held to have been responsible for the
gun-running in Ulster when an Irish civil war seemed in prospect in 1914;
and he does not disclaim the rôle.[90] On this and other accounts he is
in some quarters one of the best-hated men in British public life.

But he is also one of the most direct, uncompromising and candid. He is
also much more open in his disillusion than most English public men have
ventured to be—or actually were. None of the rosy colors of Mr. Lloyd
George’s auroral intellect have any place in Birkenhead’s thinking. His
literary style is the somewhat encumbered one of the lawyer; but if it
is a little tortuous, it is precise, and leaves his meaning not vague.
His “Inner History” of events between 1906 and 1922 will be most bitterly
attacked, as biased, partial, misrepresentative of men and purposes. But
the reader will do well to form his own judgment; and in any event it
will be necessary to wring from the attacks, as you wring water from a
cloth, the large amount of emotionalism with which they are certain to be
saturated.

Birkenhead has, of course, certain advantages in preparing his work.
Lloyd George has spoken in one book[91] and Asquith has given his account
of the pre-war period.[92] Various other actors in the striking political
events that began just before the Asquith Ministry and continued
until Mr. Lloyd George’s defeat have been heard from. The material at
Birkenhead’s disposal is far more complete than the record of history so
entirely contemporary has ever been.

Arthur Hamilton Gibbs is a brother of Philip Gibbs and of Cosmo
Hamilton.[93] At the beginning of the war he was just out of hospital
and had gone home to England to recuperate his strength. He was under
a strict injunction not to ride a horse for six months. In one month
he had enlisted as a private in the British Army and was training as
a cavalryman. After service in France he was commissioned, eventually
becoming Major Gibbs. He also saw a long period of that morale-destroying
inaction which was the lot of certain units sent to the Bulgarian front.
His final period, in France, coincided with the great German drive of
March, 1918.

Out of this experience he wrote a book, _Gun Fodder_, published in 1919,
when the world, in sheer reaction, wouldn’t look at a war book. Yet
Arthur Symons called _Gun Fodder_ one of the six best books about the
war. And people on this side, like Christopher Morley, who have a faculty
for personally discovering the exceptional book, read it and talked about
it. When _Gun Fodder_ was republished this year (1924) it took its place
as one of the very few books of war experience that will last—that have
lasted—for more than the war’s own hour.

It is the only war book I shall bring to your notice; but there are one
or two after-war books which deserve your attention. _The Awakening of
Italy: The Fascista Regeneration_, by Luigi Villari, will of course
actively interest those who may have read the chapter on Italy in
Charles H. Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_[94] but many will go to it
directly in an effort to grasp the significance of Mussolini and Fascism.
They will find a singularly clear and even luminous account, as little
encumbered with unfamiliar detail as a full account can be. But they will
also find a story full of drama, yet told without any of the rhetoric or
verbal excess and floridity which one might expect in a book on Italian
politics written by an Italian. Villari is frankly an admirer and
partisan of Fascism, and his opinion of Mussolini as a great leader is
plain-spoken; but he is neither a mere enthusiast nor an indiscriminating
historian. The defects of Fascism he records as he sees them. He does
not contend that there are not grave problems ahead of Italy. But, as he
says, “the mass of the people, both among the educated classes and the
ignorant, are more interested in results than in theories, and no one who
compares the state of Italy today with that of the days before Fascismo’s
advent to power can for a moment deny the enormous improvement in every
field. ‘Ora si vive,’ the people say, ‘mentre prima non si viveva piu.’
(‘Now we live, whereas before life was not possible.’)... One has the
feeling that the country is really moving forward rapidly and surely, and
shaking off the shackles of the bad traditions by which it had been bound
for centuries.”

The Prime Ministry of Ramsay MacDonald in Great Britain makes
particularly timely _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_, by Paul
Blanshard. This is a short history, just what its title states, an
“outline” conveying exactly what the American reader desires to know
about the British Labor Party. The author is a young American with
training in the field of social and political study. His book was written
from material gained in England and its authenticity is attested in the
introduction provided for it by Arthur Henderson, the Labor leader.

Tons of books have been written about Russia and sovietism; yet I
expect there will be general agreement with me when I say that only
one other man (now dead) was so qualified to write on the subject as
Leon Trotzky. There can certainly be no denying the high interest of
Leon Trotzky’s _Problems of Life_. The Soviet Minister of War gives a
pretty complete view of the new Russia from the inside. It will possibly
come as a surprise that the new Russia is more interested in home life,
recreations, literature and the arts than in economics and politics. From
the viewpoint of Trotzky, the foundation of the home rests on the mutual
attachment of husband and wife—as always—but must be secured by the
liberation of both in economic directions. Most especially must the wife
and mother be aided by communal kitchens and relief from the effective
slavery of cooking, washing, and other ordeals by fire and water. The ten
chapters of _Problems of Life_ are discussions of the problems deemed
vital in Russian reconstruction. Such chapter titles as “Not by Politics
Alone Does Man Thrive,” “Reconstruction Requires Introspection,” “From
the Old Family to the New,” and “Mind and Little Things” give the angle
of vision.


ii

I might as well confess frankly that I am fascinated by William A.
Ganoe’s _The History of the United States Army_. Therefore, if you feel
it necessary, discount by a percentage for enthusiasm what I may say.
These will still remain solid, incontestable merits. This is the first
history of our army ever to have been written; and it has been written
with a strong story sense, so that it reads like a story. It covers in
a single volume the whole period from 1775 to 1923. Dates have been
placed in the margin, and reference to sources are omitted so as not to
interrupt the reader. There is a chronological account of a soldier’s
life in the American Revolution, and the first picture of the period of
military decadence after the Revolution. The truth about General von
Steuben seems to have been arrived at for the first time. What the army
did and did not do in the War of 1812 is told. There is a good picture
of the life of the soldier in peace times, when he becomes the nation’s
most important builder. The view of the Civil War is somewhat new and
certainly impartial. For the first time, this book gives us a complete
account of our Indian wars in chronological shape.

I think there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that one cannot
know American history without having read this book. Much that has
heretofore been withheld from general knowledge is told for the first
time. And there are picturesque matters which are far from being affairs
of general knowledge—for example, the fact that the construction of the
Union Pacific Railroad was due to the army and army training, or the fact
that General Winfield Scott, single-handed, saved the country three times
from war.

Who is William A. Ganoe? A West Pointer commissioned in the regular army
in 1907 who has served in Cuba, Hawaii, and various parts of the United
States. He was instructor, and afterward assistant professor of English,
and finally adjutant for four years at West Point. He was in command
of a company in the first series of training camps when we entered the
war, and head of a board of officers formed to edit the Infantry Drill
Regulations after the war. He is now head of the military history section
at the U. S. Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He has written
for the Atlantic Monthly (“Ruggs—R.O.T.C.”), Scribner’s, and the Yale
Review. He has, of course, had access to various records and historical
confirmations not available to the non-army writer.

_A History of the United States Navy_ had already been written by
Edgar Stanton Maclay, and readers will welcome Mr. Maclay’s _A History
of American Privateers_, which truly supplements the earlier work. For
during the Revolution the number of privateers was about four times
that of regular naval vessels; and the part played by the privateer in
the War of 1812 has never been minimized by any historian. From before
the Revolution to after the War of 1812 hundreds of respected men made
their livings—and their fortunes—by sailing as licensed pirates with
full powers to capture any ships of unfriendly countries. Men who were
unable to go bought shares in the privateers and often, when a rich
prize was captured, reaped an incredible dividend. So slight was the
difference in practice between privateering and plain piracy, so enormous
was the profit in both, that it is not surprising to learn that every
once in a while a privateersman, having waited in vain for a “lawful”
prey, attacked a ship of his own nation, or any first comer. The classic
instance is that of Captain Kidd, sent out as a privateersman, hung as a
pirate.

It goes without saying that Mr. Maclay’s book is romantic; it couldn’t be
anything else. Its interest is equally the interest of authentic history
and daring adventure; its value always that of fact. There are plenty of
books giving the history of our merchant marine; Mr. Maclay had done a
history of the navy; here he has filled the gap between by telling what
is perhaps the most exciting story of the three.


iii

If there is one thing more important than the American Constitution, it
is the United States Supreme Court. Charles Warren, formerly assistant
Attorney-General of the United States, and author of _A History of the
American Bar_, is a person with a remarkable capacity for hard work in
research. He has that other priceless gift, the ability to digest what
he has learned and to present it clearly but without the sacrifice of
opulence. For this double reason his _The Supreme Court in United States
History_, occupying to some extent the same field as Beveridge’s _Life
of John Marshall_, is the only work worthy to be put beside Senator
Beveridge’s masterpiece. The award of the $2,000 Pulitzer Prize for the
year’s best book on the history of the United States, made annually or
less often by Columbia University, quite naturally fell to Mr. Warren
after publication of his three-volume history. “This book,” Mr. Warren
says in his preface, “is not a law book. It is a narrative of that
section of our national history connected with the Supreme Court, and
is written for laymen and lawyers alike. As words are but ‘the skin of
a living thought,’ so law cases as they appear in the law reports are
but the dry bones of very vital social, political and economic contests.
This book is an attempt to restore, in some degree, their contemporary
surroundings to the important cases decided by the Supreme Court.”

In other words, this is the first history of the one most tremendous
factor in American government, and it is written from a non-legal
standpoint. After its publication Chief Justice William H. Taft and
Justices Day, Van Devanter, McReynolds and Clarke joined by personal
letters of praise the great voice of critical commendation which was
heard from all over the country. Chief Justice Taft spoke particularly of
the enormous labor involved in the reading of early American newspapers,
necessary if Mr. Warren were to get the contemporary view and feeling on
Supreme Court decisions. “I consider that you have put the profession,
and indeed the whole country, under a heavy debt,” the Chief Justice
concluded. But I submit that Mr. Warren’s perfect readability is the
chief item of our indebtedness.

I spoke of the Constitution: books upon it are much in demand these days.
One which has had a wide sale and praise from high sources is Thomas
James Norton’s _The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and
Its Application_. Mr. Norton writes for the layman and his book has had
a somewhat extensive use in Americanization work. One of those heartiest
in praise of it has been the Hon. James M. Beck, Solicitor General of
the United States, who says: “I know of no book which so completely and
coherently explains our form of government, and I hope, indeed, for the
welfare of our country that it may have the wide circulation which it
so richly merits.” The generosity of this is the more appreciable when
we consider that Mr. Beck’s own book, _The Constitution of the United
States_, appearing about the same time, and founded on his Gray’s Inn
lectures in London, was in more or less degree a rival for readers’
attention. But it is apparent that people read, if they read at all,
not one but several books on the Constitution; for Mr. Beck’s volume,
rewritten and considerably expanded, is just being republished as _The
Constitution of the United States: Yesterday, Today—Tomorrow?_

James Myers’s _Representative Government in Industry_ and Sterling
Denhard Spero’s _The Labor Movement in a Government Industry_ are volumes
that, because of their specialized character, are more related to Mr.
Blanshard’s _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_. But they are
both on American subjects. Mr. Myers is executive secretary of the board
of operatives of the Dutchess Bleachery, Inc., at Wappingers Falls,
New York. This bleachery is an “industrial democracy,” or partnership
enterprise, operated by the employees. Mr. Myers’s book has therefore
a great advantage over most books of its sort: it records an actual
experiment in successful operation, not somebody’s theories as to what
ought to work. Mr. Spero’s book is adequately described by its subtitle,
“a study of employee organization in the Postal Service.” After a short
survey of unionism in the civil service, Mr. Spero gives the full record
of its history among the United States postal employees. The book is not
propaganda for any organization or group, but the work of an impartial
historian with no axe to grind.

Are new books on Lincoln justified? Yes. We are only beginning to get
those of enduring value, aside from certain contemporary records. “The
Lincoln papers, rich in letters to Lincoln, many of them quite as
important to the biographer as those written by him, have not yet been
released, nor will they be available for a number of years,” points
out Daniel Kilham Dodge, in the preface to his _Abraham Lincoln—Master
of Words_, “and the Hay Diary, a source of the utmost importance, is
still in manuscript form, to be consulted only by special permission
of the Harvard Library authorities.” These are only two of the known
important items. Mr. Dodge’s own new book is entirely confined to one
phase of Lincoln’s life, though a phase of the greatest interest. Was
he an orator? Was the Gettysburg address composed briefly on the train,
in effect an impromptu? Just what was Lincoln’s genius for effective
utterance?

Mr. Dodge has uncovered some interesting facts, and brought others into
valuable juxtaposition. Lincoln was no natural born orator. All his life
he was unable to make an extempore speech. On the day Richmond fell,
Lincoln dispersed an enthusiastic crowd before the White House, telling
them to come the next day when he would have a speech ready. He kept his
promise. It was his last speech before his assassination.

The young Lincoln modeled himself on Henry Clay. His earliest speeches
often contained the purple patches not entirely dissociable from
Southern oratory. The Lincoln humor, notorious in conversation, was
extremely rare in his speeches; another evidence that when he spoke his
words were studied. He simply could not express himself gracefully—or
effectively—on short notice. The evidence is that the Gettysburg address
was as carefully prepared as anything else. Mr. Dodge has made an onerous
examination of contemporary newspapers and sources to find out if anyone
really did perceive the speech’s classic line and immense stature. Only
about three voices were raised in acclaim.

_Abraham Lincoln—Master of Words_ is worth adding to the Lincoln shelf.
But its lesson is distinctly that such eloquence as Lincoln had came from
toil and care and thought—perhaps was achieved only because, so often,
the need for utmost sincerity in expression, the grave consequence of an
issue impending, came to his aid.


iv

It was Edmond Rostand who once said that the only Vice was inactivity
(_l’inertie_), the only virtue, enthusiasm. Douglas Fairbanks long ago
adopted this as his watchword. But enthusiasm is peculiarly a trait of
youth. How keep this youthful enthusiasm? The answer to this question
is the whole subject of Fairbanks’s new book, _Youth Points the Way_.
“You may have all the machinery for a successful life,” says the actor,
“education, health, intellect, and still fail to find the true zest in
life because your machinery lacks the vital electric spark—enthusiasm.”
It is necessary to think hard, work hard, play hard and live
enthusiastically. Fresh air and exercise are “the only medicine I ever
take.” Mr. Fairbanks rises in time to see the sun rise and chases his
breakfast to the top of a California mountain. “Keep in motion; that is
the main thing, and it matters little whether you do stunts on a flying
ring or only chin yourself on an upper berth.”

How is a young man to get a start in life? That, Douglas Fairbanks says,
depends entirely on what sort of a person he is; but one thing he must
do, “dive in.” Fairbanks himself, on graduating from college, borrowed a
thousand dollars and went to Europe. His start in life came through the
strenuous way he had to work to pay that money back.

_Youth Points the Way_ is the book of a man who has kept in motion and
who believes that to cease moving is to die. Some people stop after
failure, some after success. Fairbanks says that either is fatal.
Were he writing a scientific treatise, and not a popular, partly
autobiographical, inspirational book with many anecdotes and considerable
humor, he could find very important evidence in the work of physicists,
physiologists, and others to prove that he is right.

Perhaps you think that so much motion will disturb your blood pressure
(of which you have heard a good deal, and about which you are secretly
worried at times). Well, no; at least, only beneficially. If you would
like to know the truth about blood pressure—the subject of much ignorance
and much uninformed discussion—you may as well read the new book by
Lewellys F. Barker, M.D., LL.D., and Norman Brown Cole, M.D. Although
Drs. Barker and Cole are members of the Johns Hopkins faculty, their
book is equally serviceable for the physician and the general reader.
Technical expressions are avoided, and a very complete glossary helps the
ordinary reader where a medical name must be used for exactness. But the
book should remove all sorts of misconceptions. Blood pressure is just as
normal as breathing. It has certain general averages related to age and
condition; marked departures from these are the danger signal. Heredity,
the wear and tear of modern life, the use of alcohol, tobacco and coffee
may produce exceptional blood pressures. Development of high blood
pressure is a process rather than a disease; the symptoms develop rather
late in its course; and preventive measures must be taken early. _Blood
Pressure_ gives, in plain, comprehensible English, the information that
anyone interested in longevity, or even in normal length of life, would
like to have.


v

About 500 years ago there lived a Turk named Nasr-ed-Din, which means
“Victory of the Faith.” He became a teacher and a magistrate in the
district of Angora. As a teacher he was called “Khoja,” which means
“Teacher” and is a title of respect and honor. He was the author of a
series of Æsop-like fables which have come down as perhaps the most
authentic and indigenous piece of Turkish literature. There is not much
Turkish literature which is not an imitation of, or a borrowing from,
Persian or Arabic. _The Khoja_, or Nasr-ed-Din’s stories, is today as
popular and as universally read and repeated as ever.

The work has finally been translated into English with the title, _The
Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din_. Henry D. Barnham is the translator, and
Sir Valentine Chirol, an authority on Turkey and the East, provides an
entertaining and instructive foreword. Although the wisdom in these
fables is generally for young and old, it can scarcely be illustrated
except by quotation. I select for that purpose, and on account of its
brevity, a fable for grown-ups:

“The Khoja had two wives. He gave each of them a blue shell as a
keepsake, telling each not to let anyone see it. One day they came in
together and asked him, ‘Which of us do you love best? Who is your
favorite?’

“‘The one,’ he answered, ‘who has my blue shell.’

“Each of the women took comfort. Each one said in her heart, ‘’Tis I he
loves best,’ and looked with scornful pity upon the other.

“Clever Khoja! That is the way he managed his wives!”

For contrast, we may pick up _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose
Anthology_, edited by Joseph Lewis French. Here are selections, and
the best selections, from the best American humorous writers, from
Artemus Ward to the absolutely contemporary Sam Hellman, of “Low Bridge”
reputation. The selections from Josh Billings remind us that he relied
for some of his effect on misspelling, just as Ring Lardner does today.
Edward Eggleston’s “The Spelling-Bee”; Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of
Calaveras”; Bill Nye’s “Skimming the Milky Way”; and Eugene Field’s “The
Cyclopeedy” are representative inclusions. More recent humorists for whom
Mr. French has found place are Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Thomas
L. Masson, George Horace Lorimer, Stephen Leacock, Don Marquis, Irvin
S. Cobb, Ellis Parker Butler, George Fitch, Montague Glass, Christopher
Ward, Robert C. Benchley and Harry Leon Wilson. _Sixty Years of American
Humor_ provides considerably more than the ordinary humorous book’s
quantity of diversion to the square inch.

But I come at last to the two books whose claim to inclusion in this
chapter is most undeniable—two books of which it can truthfully be said,
not only that they are not found elsewhere, but that they contain a
thousand things not to be found elsewhere.

John Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_ is so wonderful in its completeness
and its resourcefulness that although it went without revision for
twenty-three years, it remained the best book of its kind and no more
recent work was able to displace it. It has now been revised and enlarged
by Nathan Haskell Dole, so that the new quotations included are from
nearly 200 of the more important writers of the last few decades, not
included before, among them Stevenson, Swinburne, Kipling and Mark Twain.
This, then, is the book without which newspapermen, editors, writers,
public speakers, scholars, librarians, and many, many households could
not exist—at least, the households could not exist in harmony. It is the
book which saves you from saying, “fresh fields and pastures new”; that
tells you it should be “fresh _woods_,” and that the line is Milton’s. Is
it possible that in this book of 1,400 pages, citing from nearly 1,000
authors, and with its quotations indexed and cross-indexed under their
various outstanding words, so that the index has almost 50,000 entries—is
it possible that there is some phrase you half-recall and yet cannot
find? It is just possible. If it occurs, there is something left for you
yet to do. You may try Frank J. Wilstach’s _A Dictionary of Similes_ (the
new and enlarged edition).

Mr. Wilstach’s social register of similes is the only book of reference
of its kind. Since its original publication, in 1916, _A Dictionary of
Similes_, with its 17,000 quaint figures of speech, has become pretty
nigh indispensable for writers, speakers, teachers and students. One
hundred pages have been added in the new edition, as Mr. Wilstach
says that similes should be kept fresh, like oysters. And the figures
of speech themselves? They are drawn from the writings of a great
number of authors, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, through English and
American literature, to O. Henry and Irvin S. Cobb. The arrangement is
alphabetical under subject headings. I have nothing against the 16,999
other comparisons in the book, though personally I shall always maintain
that the best simile in the world is Irvin S. Cobb’s “no more privacy
than a goldfish.” I have looked for hours in Mr. Wilstach’s masterpiece
in search of a suitable comparison for _A Dictionary of Similes_.

Well, I cannot find one.




21. Frank L. Packard Unlocks a Book


i

From his home on the shore of the St. Lawrence, Frank L. Packard sent
word that the title was _The Locked Book_. No details. _The Locked Book_
remained a locked book until the manuscript arrived. One had a vision of
Mr. Packard going to his safe and turning the combination and swinging
open the door and taking out the story, complete, released only in its
entirety. Knowing his work, one has similar visions of the tales he has
written unlocking themselves and stepping, full-statured, into his mind.
Mr. Packard, one of the most disconcerting of men, would not be himself
disconcerted by such apparitions. His is a personality full of outward
contradictions and inward reconcilements. There is something gruff,
even ferocious, in his speech and manner on many occasions; it melts
every other moment into a really exquisite urbanity. He is alarmingly
direct, dreadfully uncompromising—and he is the soul of hospitality
and gentleness, a person of stainless honor. He assumes rudeness like
a mask and his blue eyes and the look in them give him quite away with
an utter transparency. His coat is rough, fuzzy, scratchy, yet his
heart is on the sleeve of it. And his fiction? Full half of it moves
in the “underworld” and is peopled with criminals; yet the thing that
most markedly distinguishes Frank L. Packard from all other writers of
mystery-adventure stories is his belief in a moral order. Immanuel Kant
and Sherlock Holmes are commingled in him; and, though he may invent
plots he really believes in miracles.

He is, as everyone must know, the author of _The Miracle Man_, a novel
which George M. Cohan made into a successful play and which, as a motion
picture, made millions of dollars for various persons _not_ including the
author.... A moral order has some advantages over a money order.


ii

Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2
February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The
following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut
Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work
in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began
writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories.
_On the Iron at Big Cloud_ (1911), _The Wire Devils_ (1918), which tells
of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of
cipher codes, and _The Night Operator_ (1919) are best characterized in
Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to _The Night Operator_:

“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also,
it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations
and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason
that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected
strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the
mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.

“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of
the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side
merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps
through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of
its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils
eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things
in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy
whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose
percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify
in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and
the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they
learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others,
naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked
mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is _grand_. That is the
Hill Division.”

So much for the setting.

“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big,
ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the
lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a
caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas,
and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the
full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their
ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”

The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today
as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of
vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots
began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic
incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and
simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks
of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are
tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is
the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a
wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.


iii

In 1910 Mr. Packard married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre, of Montreal, and
the next year saw the publication of his first book, _On the Iron at Big
Cloud_. In 1912 he wrote his first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_. The
novel was written in Lachine, a city eight miles from Montreal, where
Packard had settled and where his home is now. The outline of the story
is as follows:

“Varge, the hero, was a foundling brought up by Dr. and Mrs. Merton as if
he had been their own son. Their real son, Harold, kills his father in a
quarrel, and begs Varge to disappear so that it will seem that he is the
actual murderer. Varge goes further than that. He does not run away, but
publicly shoulders the guilt for the sake, not of Harold, but of Mrs.
Merton, whose heart would break if she knew that her son had killed his
father. Varge believes he owes them this act of sacrifice in return for
the life-long kindness of his benefactors. The story thereafter is the
story of this sacrifice; his life in prison, where as a trusty he meets
the warden’s daughter, Janet Rand; his love for Janet which both impels
him to escape and to give himself up again—and finally his freedom as
Harold Merton, dying, confesses the truth.”[95]

Here was a novel on the theme of sacrifice, a theme which had already
been persistent and noticeable in Frank L. Packard’s short stories, and a
theme which was to recur later, but interwoven with another idea of equal
strength and beauty. The discovery of that other idea—its discovery, that
is, in the necessary terms of a story—was to come in the same year in
which _Greater Love Hath No Man_ was published. If you journey directly
north from Montreal, you will find yourself after a while in mountainous
country with summits of less height than many on the North American
continent. Nevertheless the Laurentian Mountains have a distinction
more interesting than altitude; they are geologically the oldest
formation—older than the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, the Rockies; older
than the plains. They are fundamental and as unchanging as the capacity
to wonder and the will to believe in the heart of that higher insect,
Man. In 1913 Packard was in the Laurentians and there and at Lachine he
was engaged in writing a novel which he purposed calling “The Wrong Right
Road.” When it was finished it appeared as a complete novel in Munsey’s
Magazine for February, 1914. A set of advance proofs was sent to George
M. Cohan, who bought the dramatic rights and changed the title. The book
was arranged to appear immediately and Mr. Cohan at once set to work to
fashion the play.

The scene of Packard’s story was the village of Needley, Maine. In
Needley, says an outline,[96] “lives an old man—deaf, dumb and almost
blind—known as the Patriarch. For many years, through the exercise of
faith, he has cured the people in the neighborhood of their simple
ailments. An article about him finds its way into a New York City
newspaper which comes under the eye of the celebrated ‘Doc’ Madison, a
quick-witted and ingenious confidence man, who at once evolves a scheme
to make the Patriarch’s home a shrine to which Doc will entice all ailing
humanity from far and near, and then pluck the golden hoard through his
trickery.

“Among Doc’s disciples is a clever and beautiful girl named Helena
Vail. Another is a dope fiend, Pale Face Harry, an artful dodger with
a hacking cough. The faker that Doc Madison selects to take the star
part in setting the procession of ailing ones in motion is called the
Flopper. The Flopper has an uncanny control over his joints by which he
can, with a single gesture, convert himself into a loathsome cripple,
twisted and broken, begging in the streets, shattered in body and soul;
truly a spectacle to soften the hardest heart. Doc Madison rounds up his
little band of efficient scoundrels, takes them to Needley, Maine, and
plants them on the sweet-souled Patriarch, whose faith in his own powers
to heal is merely his faith in the influence upon man’s soul and body of
love and goodness and belief in all that is worth while. Helena forces
herself upon him as his grandniece, and becomes his trusted confidante.
The Flopper crawls from the train through the dust of the street to the
Patriarch’s threshold. Here the old man, practically blind, surrounded by
a crowd of visitors and devotees from all over the country, stretches out
his thin hands, and the Flopper rises from the earth a new man. At the
same moment a crippled child, helpless from birth and staggering along on
crutches, throws his artificial supports from him and cries aloud: ‘I can
walk!’”

This supreme moment of _The Miracle Man_—book, play and picture—leads
to the wreck of Doc Madison’s scheme; the crooks are self-defeated by
the advent of a power they cannot understand. A valley has been exalted,
a mountain and hill have been made low, the crooked has been made
straight....

And Mr. Packard had made the discovery of his second idea, the theme
of regeneration which is so much the most powerful manifestation known
to human lives. In finding it he had unlocked more than a book, or a
striking play, or an extraordinary motion picture. The camera version
of this simple tale did indeed make lasting reputations for Thomas F.
Meighan, Betty Compson and Lon Chaney, as well as enhance the reputation
of the late George Loan Tucker, whom Mr. Meighan prodded into directing
the picture; money rolled in upon the picture’s backers in a tidal wave;
the success of “The Birth of a Nation” was outdone, nor has any film
since surpassed the record set by Packard’s story. These phenomena are
picturesque—staggering, if you like. But they came afterward; they had
little to do with the author, who, perhaps, could have used some of the
money but to whose work these successes could have no true relevance.
What Mr. Packard had unlocked was an inwardness in himself, the fullness
of his own mind. He was, perhaps, never to write well in the sense of
writing with literary distinction; he was to become a master of plot and
of incident, and to do stories in which characterization was to suffer
from the very rush of action and the galvanization of suspense. But he
was never to write a book in which the emotion was cheap or the immanent
morality less than uncompromising. And with his themes of sacrifice and
regeneration, intertwined, he was to arrest, enthrall and convince the
thousands.


iv

The next book was _The Belovéd Traitor_ (1916. And please make three
syllables of the adjective). Jean Laparde and Marie-Louise are fisher
folk in a French village and are affianced. Jean, who is always modeling
little figures in clay, is a genius. A wealthy American named Bliss
discovers him. Jean is sent to Paris to study and his great gift
ultimately causes a sensation. Bliss’s daughter makes him her conquest,
for adulation has turned the sculptor’s head and he has forgotten
Marie-Louise. Jean and Myrna Bliss sail for America where they are to
be married at the Bliss home. Marie-Louise in her great loneliness
decides to go to America. On shipboard, in the steerage one night, Jean
sees Marie-Louise. His love for her returns, and with it repentance for
the way he has used her. It is now a question of both sacrifice and
regeneration. Regeneration comes first; and the apparent sacrifice is
canceled by a far greater success; for on his return to France, Jean’s
work reflects the new sincerity of his life and love.

Consider _The Sin That Was His_ (1917). Here regeneration leads to
sacrifice, or willingness to sacrifice, and the story develops with
a power which makes Packard’s first novel, _Greater Love Hath No
Man_, appear weak and insufficiently motivated. Raymond Chapelle,
alias Three-Ace Artie, a gambler, is banished from the Yukon. Later,
in a little village in French Canada, in order to save himself from
the consequences of a murder which he has not done, but in which
circumstantial evidence would insure his conviction, he masquerades as
Father Aubert, a young priest who had been hurt. The story shows the
conditions that force Raymond to continue the rôle of Father Aubert;
tells how he loves Valerie; how he converts an old hag named Mother
Blondin and becomes the idol of the parish; how, finally, the real Father
Aubert becomes the victim of that same circumstantial evidence which
Raymond has tried to escape. When the real priest is tried and sentenced
to death Raymond’s assumed rôle has so wrought upon him that he confesses
the false part he has played—which, in the situation, involves taking the
death sentence upon himself. Mother Blondin, his convert, who is really
guilty of the murder, in turn saves him.

Again: _From Now On_ (1920) tells the story of Dave Henderson, who
succumbs to temptation and steals $100,000. He succeeds in hiding the
money before he is caught, convicted and sentenced to five years in the
penitentiary. When he is released both the bookmaker who had employed
him, and who is an inherent crook, and the police take up his trail.
But it is a woman’s love and his love for her which finally bring Dave
Henderson to the point of returning the money. Regeneration. A sacrifice.

In _Pawned_ (1921)—a story of pawned people, not pawned things—the father
of Claire sacrifices his rights and privileges as a father in the effort
toward regeneration. Ultimately he sacrifices his life to free her from
a man more dissolute, and far more evil, than himself. Regeneration
fails, but redemption takes its place. It is John Bruce, to save whose
life Claire has risked everything, who is regenerated. The novel is an
extraordinary achievement in plot construction, the precursor of _The
Four Stragglers_ in that respect; for _Doom of the Night_ (1022) was
earlier in point of composition.

In order to trace connectedly through a succession of novels the dual
themes of sacrifice and regeneration which are Packard’s forte, we have
omitted mention of his best-known figure, Jimmie Dale. He was introduced
with _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1917), carried through _The Further
Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1919) and not necessarily finished with
_Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ (1922). Mr. Packard began to write
these tales of his gentleman burglar in 1914 and it is a tribute to
his skill as a storyteller that, ten years afterward, people read _The
Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ with a conviction that he will never do better
stories.

Jimmie Dale is a rich young man, the inheritor of a fortune made in
manufacturing safes. “It had begun really through his connection with his
father’s business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy
the cleverest criminals.... It had begun through that—but at the bottom
of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit. He had meant to set the
police by the ears.”[97] What he had been doing was to force safes as a
burglar might force them. The police would find no theft, “in the last
analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime.” Partly “as
an added barb,” partly “that no innocent bystander of the underworld,
innocent for once, might be involved,” he had made a habit of pasting
conspicuously in sight (on the safe’s dial, generally) a diamond- or
lozenge-shaped paper wafer, prepared with adhesive on one side and
handled with tweezers to avoid leaving a finger print. The succession of
crimes without theft became known as the work of the Gray Seal. Then, one
night, he had been caught while at work in Maiden Lane, New York. He had
wrapped a string of pearls around his wrist in a facetious moment and
discovery had compelled him to a desperate dash without time to leave
the jewelry behind. Not until the next day had he known that his detector
was a woman. “The first letter from her had started by detailing his
every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: ‘The
cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook, lack but one
thing,’ she had naïvely written, ‘and that one thing is a leading string
to guide it into channels worthy of his genius.’ In a word, _she_ would
plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or
else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair
appeal to him?”

Cold consideration convinced Jimmie Dale that not even his own father
(then alive) would believe in his innocence. “And then had followed those
years in which there had been _no_ temporizing, in which every plan was
carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable,
bewildering affairs ... until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure
with.” In all this time Jimmie Dale, though communicated with by letter
and telephone, had never been able to trace or identify his directress.
A year before the book opens she had written: “Things are a little too
warm, aren’t they Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”

Mr. Packard opens, in masterly fashion, at this point; it is the
technique of Conan Doyle in the case of Sherlock Holmes (to quote no
other examples). One establishes one’s detective or criminal—or other
exceptional character who tests plausibility—by raising the curtain on
him in full career. The way to begin is—not to plunge, but just to slip
casually into the middle of things. At first our interest is centered
on Jimmie Dale’s successive adventures—extremely well-constructed—but
as the book develops, the importance and interest of the woman back
of Jimmie Dale asserts itself. Jimmie Dale is led into a series of
adventures strictly on her behalf; and what has been in effect a
chain of connected short stories becomes virtually a novel. But one
characteristic stands out in every chapter. Other writers have shown,
though only rarely, an equal ingenuity; no one that I can now recall
has shown the same fundamental concerns, the same intense preoccupation
under his melodramatic structure. For the exploits of Jimmie Dale, those
bizarre and disconnected enterprises to which he is ordered, are Robin
Hood exploits, rightings of wrongs, crimes of form and philanthropies
of intention. So, later, are the struggles into which Jimmie Dale is
precipitated on behalf of the woman whom, no longer mysterious, he deeply
loves. Simply, Frank L. Packard is a man who cannot abide the spectacle
of a world unless it is the philosopher’s world, erected about the steel
framework of a moral order. He indulges in crime for morality’s sake.


v

In algebra, as you may remember, one equation suffices if you are
solving to find a single unknown quantity; two are necessary if two
unknown quantities are to be ascertained; and so on. Given three unknown
quantities and only two equations, the affair is hopeless. In a perfectly
constructed mystery story, the reader is solving for several unknown
quantities—for _x_ and for _y_ and possibly for _z_—but always with one
too few equations.

When he came to write _The Four Stragglers_ (1923) Mr. Packard had had
a considerable experience in handling plots. The first eight pages of
the book show three men huddled together under a bombardment in France.
Their talk reveals them as former confederates in crime in London. There
is a fourth man lying very still on the ground, apparently dead or dying.
To make sure, one of the three shoots him. The group is in pitch darkness
except for occasional flares. One of these, coming shortly, lights the
scene fully. All three look at the spot where a murdered man should be
lying. No man is there.

The story opens three years later, in London. We see the three
confederates, a varied, effectively contrasted three, reassembled and
active. We follow them in a thrilling operation. The main thread now
begins to spin. Just as the three have planned to cease operations and
take a vacation they come to know of the existence of a treasure hid and
watched over by a madman on one of the islands or keys off the Florida
coast. The knowledge comes to each one separately, except that B and C
each knows that A knows it. And the fourth man, D?

One of the excellences of _The Four Stragglers_ is the economy of means;
there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the
action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably
to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the
madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily
intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their
bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely
inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but
with the window shades tightly drawn down:

“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected
bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere
about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there
was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner
of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor,
and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.

“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was
wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.

“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again.
‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well,
last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are
always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane
titter again....

“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking,
the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was
no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at
the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that
contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing,
but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an
extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume
almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water
rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the
tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”

The reader of _The Four Stragglers_ will say, with entire truth: “There
is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but
there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an
equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore,
a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm
indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral
order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is
death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the
possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson
from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by _The
Miracle Man_ and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”;
“a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard
could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at
his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem
unreasonable.


vi

Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant,
and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the
north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard
and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on
the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of
daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this
continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long
and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the
evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a
notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend,
the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard
insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good,
even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H.
Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New
York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the
bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there
are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club
in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours
between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact
that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the
liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing
government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has
abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.

A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North
on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of
hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise.
But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful
exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.

He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking
mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the
world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and
then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped
over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued
through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he
went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple
of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.

Again, in 1923, he went to South America.

Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the
course of his round the world trip took shape. _The Locked Book_ is in
characteristics somewhat like _The Four Stragglers_. It begins with a
yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation
to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound
in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass,
and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over
the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot
move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the
book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The
reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly
interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of
the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.

He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about
fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of
the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility”
of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his
sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and
elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution
can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of _The
Miracle Man_.


BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.

    1911 _On the Iron at Big Cloud_
    1913 _Greater Love Hath No Man_
    1914 _The Miracle Man_
    1916 _The Belovéd Traitor_
    1917 _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
    1917 _The Sin That Was His_
    1918 _The Wire Devils_
    1919 _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
    1919 _The Night Operator_
    1920 _From Now On_
    1920 _The White Moll_
    1921 _Pawned_
    1922 _Doors of the Night_
    1922 _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_
    1923 _The Four Stragglers_
    1924 _The Locked Book_


SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD

In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis,
280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.




22. All Creeds and None


i

This ought to be the most interesting chapter in this book. For it
deals with the subject of belief. Belief is of many kinds—religious,
scientific, philosophical—but when one ceases to believe in anything at
all, one dies.

In Chapter 10, I tried to indicate how the interest in religious belief
has already begun to reflect itself in current fiction. In this chapter I
am to deal with books which vary profoundly but are all straightforward
efforts to express a belief held to be worth while. For the difficulty
is not a lack of things to believe in, but a choice among them, a
reconciliation (sometimes) of one with another; and very often a search
for the thing that will mean more than life itself.

Can anything mean more than life itself? Yes. Men and women have
sacrificed their lives for such.

Are the terms of belief capable of a common expression, acceptable to all
men and women? No; at least, not yet.

Is it even necessary to know what one believes, in the sense of being
able to give it a satisfactory expression? No; not if one lives it.

Can anything be achieved by reading books on belief? Yes. I suppose you
may show surprise if I say that disagreement is often more useful than
agreement. But agreement leading to a placid inactivity is against the
very principle of life itself.

Disagreement causes thought. Thinking always enlarges our living. For
what we then do is done more consciously, more knowingly, than before. To
that extent—and in no other way is it possible—we live more fully.

Which among the books to follow you ought to read or in what order they
are for your reading, no one like myself can determine, for an answer
depends on your belief, tastes, the extent of your reading and the extent
of your thinking. Such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_
is safely commendable to anyone, anywhere. But such studies as Lord
Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, full of refinements and instinct with
intellectual subtlety, are for the scholarly taste. Dr. E. Y. Mullins’s
_Christianity at the Crossroads_ is fundamentalist in its position. Dr.
Joseph A. Leighton’s _Religion and the Mind of Today_ is the work of a
churchman who is also a philosopher and a teacher; it adopts the liberal
attitude. And a number of these books concern themselves with health, the
mind, the will and the spirit—those factors which so often determine not
only belief, but the possibility of believing in anything.

If I start with Ernest Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, a work now many years
old, I do so because this Frenchman’s extraordinary book remains
undisplaced by the current great success of Papini’s _Life of Christ_,
but also because the popularity of Papini’s book shows where the average
interest lies. For when men begin contending about the forms of creeds
and the facts behind phrases which have become sacred formulas, the
instinct of the ordinary man is to go straight to the essentials and the
beginnings. Let doctors argue the Virgin Birth; he rather asks himself
what sort of Man was this Son born of Mary. It is the assertion of this
instinct, joined to the timely appearance of the _Life of Christ_ with
its undeniable interest and eloquence, which made the success of Papini’s
volume. Such a success is fleeting. Like other converts and re-converts
to Catholicism, Papini exhibited a marked tendency toward a belief that
little had happened in the centuries preceding his accession. Not so,
Renan. To go from the Italian to the Frenchman is to pass from painted
scenery to the clear air and the sublime altitude of mountain peaks.
There is something beyond eloquence, and Renan has it. With him both
reflection and emotion are controlled; they lift him high and sustain him
there. “Disastrous to Reason the day when she should stifle religion!”
exclaimed this author of the _Life of Jesus_, adding: “Religions are
false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to define it, to incarnate
it; but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors they
import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the value of the
truth which they proclaim. The simplest of the simple, provided he
practice heart-worship, is more enlightened as to the reality of things
than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by chance or by
finite causes.”

Renan was repeatedly called an atheist; but none of the books discussed
in this chapter are atheistic. I should present any which were, but I
think it significant that none is. Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, a
strictly philosophical treatise in sequence to his _Theism and Humanism_,
is a deliberate attempt to consider whether theism—that is, belief in
God—is necessary or good. And every Balfourian conclusion is in favor of
theism. Dr. L. P. Jacks, with his marvelous simplicity of expression,
deals in _Religious Perplexities_ with the two questions that every man
asks: Why am I here? Why am I, and not some other, here and now? But the
answer to both of these questions, stated as Dr. Jacks states it, for men
of every sort, Christian and non-Christian, presupposes a God.

The three most recent books by Dr. Jacks vary considerably. _The Lost
Radiance of the Christian Religion_ is simply an address in which
he makes a moving appeal for the recapture of Christian joyousness.
_Realities and Shams_ is a series of essays produced by reflection on
events of the last nine years, continuous in the thread of their thought,
which is the few and simple tests to tell the genuine from the false;
and Dr. Jacks applies these tests to some public affairs. _A Living
Universe_ is directly related to _Religious Perplexities_; its point is
that education without religious feeling is lifeless, just as a universe
in which education does not proceed is a dead universe.

Such books as _Realities and Shams_ and _A Living Universe_ are directly
related to Felix Adler’s Hibbert lectures, now published under the title,
_The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_. The distinguished founder of
the Ethical Culture Society has never been one to deal with abstractions.
In this book he brings his spiritual ideal to bear upon the problem of
marriage, the labor problem, and the problem of a society of nations.
The essence of his teaching, which employs both Jewish and Christian
ideals of holiness, is his conception of a “weft of souls” in which each
individual soul has intrinsic worth but all share in, and contribute to,
a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency
of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard.
The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations
in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it.
And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations
seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the
principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.

_Religion and the Mind of Today_, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful
definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He
is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author
of _Man and the Cosmos_ and of an introductory book on philosophy used
in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living
evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with
a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book
consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of
religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to
culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of
Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of
ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern
life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr.
Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific
discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such
religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe,
the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of
the soul.

His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer
Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can
be said about _Contributions of Science to Religion_, it is that the
book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of
the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors
in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to
tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their
special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would
be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the
construction of the universe, the earth and man, is there any room left
for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that
“a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.”
And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific
knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it
_should_ do so.”

He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he
prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter;
and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter,
director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of
California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert
A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an
electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The
arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example,
one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons
to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but
containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.

There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific
chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone
who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr.
Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor
Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more _difficult_
than seeing electrons there.”

But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize
that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely
provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely
mystical, _Contributions of Science to Religion_ must remain all beside
the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must
not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply
that that, precisely, is what _his_ religion is for. And with many the
question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather
the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary, puts it in his _Christianity at the Crossroads_:
“Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will
it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked,
the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins argues—and without appeal
to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and
autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to
be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the
victory will lie.


ii

Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Making of Man_ has something in common with the
books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to;
but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an
after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but _Making
of Man_ is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in
evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author
then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the
soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that
what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality
of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning
to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to
be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of
this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined.
Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not
cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere,
and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.

In _Evolution: the Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has
written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply
expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains
to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and
in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make
definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of
its significance to mankind.

The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely
scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to
speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.

And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general
reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is
known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history
of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as
the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown
by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s _Men of the
Old Stone Age_ and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling
for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s _An Outline of History_. But
pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had
never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy
has done it in the two volumes of his _Human Origins: A Manual of
Pre-History_.

_Human Origins_ is a great book. It must be remembered that all we
know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years,
discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered.
I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing _Human Origins_;
its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr.
MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the
whole affair into a superlative story.

Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age,
testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear
evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while.
During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over
Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm
intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper
paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance
toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the
extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for
thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.

He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints,
mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places.
Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious
ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use,
the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze
Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The
Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this
more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of
hard use.

Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the
text, appear in the two volumes of _Human Origins_.

If the new book on _Haunted Houses_ did not bear the name of so
distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no
place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of
the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully
as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy
is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I
am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will
be captivated by the strange stories to be read in _Haunted Houses_.
Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome
character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados,
a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a
teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal,
the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And
after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted
Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those
associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere
credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously
haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion,
or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday
is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been
legal recognition of haunted houses.


iii

Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical
director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of
physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that
remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, _Cures_. In
_Health Through Will Power_, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which,
more than any other one thing, has been made the foundation of new and
powerful religious sects. But Dr. Walsh’s interest is in the application
and the uses of will power in the individual.

He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such
universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism,
and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in
dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to
bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to
sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.

_Health Through Will Power_ is untechnical. Anyone can read and
understand it.

_Success in a New Era_, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the
application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success
of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of
knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what
they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually
think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make
a success of life.”

Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation,
though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical
energy as great as work.

I am not sure that Dr. Walsh’s warning about reading is needed in
America. “Reading,” he says, “requires the least mental labor of almost
any pursuit, and hardly a person but sooner or later finds himself
putting off something that ought to be done by pretending that he is
accomplishing more by his reading. Reading in itself is excellent, but it
is vastly overused to excuse the inaction of weak and lazy people.” No
doubt; but of 961 people I personally know well, 857 spend every evening
listening to the radio, attending a moving picture, or playing cards and
dancing. Of the remaining 104, only eighty-one read.

Yet Dr. Walsh is dead right when he says that “the best good habit in the
world is the proper use of time”—though the acquisition of more hours in
a day would be helpful—and his _Success in a New Era_ is a singularly
honest and helpful book, free from even one patent formula for attaining
“success.”

_The Foundations of Personality_, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., though
on more general lines, is of no less value. Dr. Myerson analyzes the
elements of character—which is not, of course, the same thing as mind.
Character is intimately related to mind, as the brain and body are
intimately related. Character may be affected by both the mind and the
body; it is not dependent on either. Dr. Myerson describes the general
types of character, the tradition of each and its social heredity; and
he follows the energies of men as they expend themselves in instinct
and emotion and intelligence. Although a physician and a psychologist,
he writes from the standpoint of one who deeply shares the everyday
aspirations and conflicts of his fellows. His comments on the influences
exerted upon character, and on the expression of character in work,
play, humor, sex and religion are of acute interest. His book’s great
practical value is dual: it helps toward self-understanding and it gives
a good deal of help toward insight into the characters of others—a matter
which usually has an important part in determining our own success or
failure in life.

Simpler than _The Foundations of Personality_ because of a much narrower
scope is Arthur Holmes’s _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and
Achievement_. This popularly-written book by a professor of psychology is
almost a handbook on the subject of laziness, its causes and cure. For
not all laziness comes from the same cause, and not all apparent laziness
is laziness in fact. There is such a thing as the indolence of genius,
well-illustrated by Professor Holmes in the cases of Dr. Samuel Johnson,
Oliver Goldsmith, and the naturalist, John Muir. There is the languor of
youth, when the rapid growth of the body may produce a kind of inertia
either physical or mental. The aversion of the normal boy to study is
easily explained, Professor Holmes holds. What people have done much they
like much to do; and what they have done little they like little to do.
What the human race has not done very long is hard for individuals of the
race to do. The human race has hunted and fished for thousands of years;
it has studied for a very few centuries, and studied in the mass for only
about one century. Of course the boy will prefer to hunt or fish!

_Controlled Power_ is so entirely readable that one feels as if it should
be put in the hands of every parent and school teacher. Its wisdom could
do much for them, as well as for the child.

Teachers and many parents could read advantageously also _The Normal
Mind_, by William H. Burnham, professor of pedagogy and school hygiene in
Clark University. If our knowledge of what we call mental hygiene shows
us anything, it shows us that most people do not utilize the brains they
have. The whole purpose of mental hygiene is to teach how to make the
most of one’s inborn ability. The power to think with clearness means
usually the throwing off of bad mental habits.

Professor Burnham, teaching at G. Stanley Hall’s institution and with
a background of many years’ experience and observation, has produced a
book which most satisfactorily compends what we know about mental hygiene
to date. His presentation of the school task, of mental attitudes, of
suggestion and mental hygiene, of success and failure and discipline,
offers in practical form the wisdom we have regarding mental health and
how to attain it.

_Twelve Tests of Character_, by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D.,
has amply proven its popularity; indeed, it has for months been among the
ten best-selling books of non-fiction throughout America. Dr. Fosdick’s
tests are tests of character in action, not conventional qualities nor
abstract traits. Written with reference to Christian teaching, the book
is nevertheless one of extreme popular appeal. Nothing of the sort has
more “rush” of style and pointedness, more irresistibility in brushing
aside objections and obstacles. Undoubtedly the wealth of illustrative
instances and anecdotes has greatly enhanced its popularity.


iv

But my chapter runs too long. I have saved for the end, and will not quit
leaving unmentioned, Albert Payson Terhune’s _Now That I’m Fifty_. Is
Mr. Terhune’s outspokenness a bit brutal? I do not think so. He is fifty
and knows whereof he writes; why should he not tell what he knows? Is it
cruel to say that one should have money, such money as he can acquire,
with which to meet fifty? No, it is common sense. Is it bitter to point
out, with unmistakable instances, that fifty cannot do the things that
twenty does? Most decidedly not; for Mr. Terhune points out those other
things that twenty cannot do, and that fifty can. Fifty cannot run five
miles; twenty can. Very well; when Mr. Terhune was in his twenties and
tried to work a few hours at night after the work of the day, he went all
to pieces. But now, at fifty, he can work better than ever before in his
life; longer hours, harder work; and come out of it smiling. In fact, in
_Now That I’m Fifty_ he practically says: “Look at the things I used to
be able to do and can do no longer; and thank the Lord I can’t!” This
little book of Terhune’s, not much more than an extended essay, is so
honest, so merry, so frank and so mellow that I think fifty can safely
put it in the hands of those who aspire to be fifty.




23. J. C. Snaith and George Gibbs


i

Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material,
need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two
Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such
books as _The Coming_ and _The Undefeated_ he has had material of the
first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a
novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.

The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his
steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who
sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important
matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the
author of _Queed_, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always
doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and
this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder
how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course
entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist
on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a
man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him
of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after
all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select
a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built
body.

J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As
a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His
health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down
on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where
he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club).
But whether in the country or in town, as he says: “Outside of my work,
I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has
been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of
novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature
of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in
a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic,
exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”

It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly,
some sketch of his work. His first novel, _Broke of Covenden_ (1904) is
such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given
us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s _The End of the House
of Alard_, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s _The
Forsyte Saga_ should lose no time in reading _Broke of Covenden_. Richard
Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as
Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like
Lionel Barrymore.

_William Jordan, Junior_ (1907) shares with _The Coming_ (1907)
first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his
novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet
of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the
ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the
artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and
who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil
of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation.
_The Coming_, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure
the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War.
These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done
with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however,
unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of
the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally
been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words,
with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never
quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have
been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and
bring it to earth without shearing its wings.

The same effect is partly realized in _The Sailor_ (1916), supposed
to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the
whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a
charge of sentimentality. Yet _The Sailor_ by virtue of its extreme
realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most
fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either
_William Jordan, Junior_ or _The Coming_ in the elements of popular
interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S.
M. Hutchinson’s _If Winter Comes_; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready
belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to
freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest
hangs breathlessly throughout.

Many, and with justice, consider _The Undefeated_ (1919) the best
novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing
at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this
simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of
war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today,
perhaps, _The Undefeated_ is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith
novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person
that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could
do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had
finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works
of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was
Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred
novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so
many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many
merits in _The Undefeated_ the greatest was the restraint with which
Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H.
G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem
to utter.

There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and
the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on
the order of his _Araminta_; again it is a divertissement of youth, like
_The Principal Girl_; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means
unalloyed with admiration, of _There Is a Tide_. The title is taken, of
course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which,
taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa,
aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her
fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance,
European correspondent of the home-town newspaper, she seems destined to
fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds
friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s
novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously
likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with,
and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided;
and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and
incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though
perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this;
but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using
it for the first time.

The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of
adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel
will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory
knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good
novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark
his own work.


ii

Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of
writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and
painter-illustrator. I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I
ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with
Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem
to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly
differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a
certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious
choice.

He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular
cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator
became more important. For a long while he illustrated his own stories
and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction
developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs
let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he
has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that
his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to
painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and
evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.

George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin
Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was
an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving
as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling
was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the
United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in
favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis
he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art
Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to
writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the
magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began
to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck
to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30.
Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs
got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison
of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in
Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and
then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.

His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes.
Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, _In Search of
Mademoiselle_. After another of the same sort he struck his _metier_ with
_The Medusa Emerald_. With his next novel but one, _The Bolted Door_, he
became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went
through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided
that illustration was not the better part of valor.

He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a
thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had
long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting
different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an
amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have
suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their
work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories
perfectly!

“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as
though they had been written by another person. I got the trained
illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the
picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story,
I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will
be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give
it.”

A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power
which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W.
Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by
his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment,
it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become
steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in
the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for
character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue
and suspense, like _The Yellow Dove_, the characterization is far from
superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his
time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr.
Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their
distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr.
Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or
social stratification. _The Yellow Dove_ opens with excellent Cockney
talk; _The Secret Witness_ moves with assurance in central Europe; _The
Golden Bough_ details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; _The
Black Stone_ has scenes in Arabia; _The Splendid Outcast_ is vivid with
bits of the Paris underworld; _The House of Mohun_ chronicles the rise
and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and
its Long Island estate; and the heroine of _Fires of Ambition_ is a
red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit
concern.

A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which
he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with _Youth Triumphant_
(1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative
of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton
expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life
and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so
much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties.
The deepening treatment is noticeable in _The House of Mohun_. It is
continued in _Fires of Ambition_, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life,
asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they
in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the
maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and
most competent novel, _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.

This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a
responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and
progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried
and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity
which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene
moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story
proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly
in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is
works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the
three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book
does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference
between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident
and destiny in the existence of a child.

In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of
resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes
than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate,
be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced
hand.


BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH

    1904 _Broke of Covenden_
    1906 _Henry Northcote_
    1907 _William Jordan, Junior_
    1909 _Araminta_ [republished 1923]
    1910 _Fortune_
    1910 _Mrs. Fitz_
         _Lady Barbarity_
         _Anne Feversham_
    1912 _The Principal Girl_
    1914 _An Affair of State_
    1915 _The Great Age_
    1916 _The Sailor_
    1917 _The Coming_
    1918 _Mary Plantagenet_
         _The Time Spirit_
    1919 _The Undefeated_
             In England: _Love Lane_
    1920 _The Adventurous Lady_
    1922 _The Council of Seven_
    1923 _The Van Roon_
    1924 _There Is a Tide_


SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH

Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be
found on page 155 _et seq._ of R. Brimley Johnson’s _Some Contemporary
Novelists_ (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.

An appreciative review of _The Sailor_ forms a short chapter in S. P. B.
Mais’s _Some Modern Authors_ (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 _et
seq._

“J. C. Snaith,” by W. M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.


BOOKS BY GEORGE GIBBS

    1900 _Pike and Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy_
    1901 _In Search of Mademoiselle_
    1903 _American Sea Fights._ Portfolio of colored drawings
    1905 _The Love of Monsieur_
    1907 _The Medusa Emerald_
    1909 _Tony’s Wife_
    1911 _The Bolted Door_
    1911 _The Forbidden Way_
    1912 _The Maker of Opportunities_
    1913 _The Silent Battle_
    1913 _Madcap_
    1914 _The Flaming Sword_
    1915 _The Yellow Dove_
    1916 _Paradise Garden_
    1917 _The Secret Witness_
    1918 _The Golden Bough_
    1919 _The Black Stone_
    1920 _The Splendid Outcast_
    1921 _The Vagrant Duke_
    1921 _Youth Triumphant_
    1922 _The House of Mohun_
    1923 _Fires of Ambition_
    1924 _Sackcloth and Scarlet_


SOURCES ON GEORGE GIBBS

“Illustrates His Own Books” (article and interview), The Sun, New York,
18 February 1911.

“George Gibbs on His Work.” Interview by Francis Hill in the Philadelphia
Public Ledger. Date uncertain: 1912 or 1913.

“George Gibbs, a Novelist, and His Ideas.” Interview by Theodocia F.
Walton in the Philadelphia Press, 21 March 1920.

_Who’s Who in America._

NOTE: George Gibbs’s prowess as a painter in oils deserves a special
note. He has painted some splendid nudes which have been widely
exhibited, in particular one called “The Gold Screen” which has been at
the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts,
the St. Louis Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other
exhibitions. He has done some striking marines which have been shown at
the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery and are now (April,
1924) on view in Baltimore. He has become a portrait painter much in
demand with more commissions offered him than he cares to accept.

In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady
progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference
between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely
greater than between his first few novels and such work as _The House of
Mohun_ or _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.




24. Mary Johnston’s Adventure


i

There lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many
authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his
business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry
man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner.
Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his
shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in
propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude
toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude
toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is
a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say:
“Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are
about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face
and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day
he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published,
indeed, but not read. And one of those books is _Michael Forth_, by Mary
Johnston.

Miss Johnston was read before the publication of _Michael Forth_ and
she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her
best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. _Michael
Forth_ is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come,
in place of the writer of superb historical romances like _To Have and
To Hold_ and historical novels like _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_,
an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company
in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
Margaret Fuller and Melville.

“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath
not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard it,” concludes
an anonymous writer.[99] The account of Mary Johnston’s adventure
given by this writer is as unsatisfactory as secondhand versions of a
mystical experience must necessarily be. Miss Johnston may or may not
write the story; Emerson said that “the highest cannot be spoken,” and,
most certainly, it cannot with adequacy be written. Miss Johnston has
made some attempt to put her adventure on paper, but the result so far
discourages her. In what follows I am merely trying to convey the quality
of her strange experience. I have not her sanction for what I say; I had
rather not make the trial. But there is really no escape. If we are to
understand the growth of the writer we must have some notion of the thing
that befell.


ii

The child was not strong, and her Scots grandmother first, an aunt
afterward, taught her. She grew up in the village of Buchanan, Botetourt
County, Virginia, still in the 1870’s a place of canalboats and the
stagecoach. Major John William Johnston was a Confederate veteran, a
lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature. Naturally the house
was not without books. Mary Johnston found the histories particularly
engrossing. Then the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and this
daughter was sent to school at Atlanta. She was then sixteen. In a few
months her health compelled her to return home where, a year later, her
mother died. As she was the eldest of several children the direction of
the household fell to her. She suffered intermittently from illness for
many years. In her twenties and while living in a New York apartment she
began a romance of colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century, writing
much of it in a quiet corner of Central Park, so as to be outdoors. She
had been writing short stories which editors sent back to her and which
she burned on the first rejection. It is said that the late Walter H.
Page, at the time with Houghton Mifflin Company, discovered her.[100]
The historical romance, _Prisoners of Hope_ (1898) became her first book
and was successful; her second novel, _To Have and To Hold_ (1900) was
a record-making best seller and had literary merits most exceptional in
the flood of historical fiction then running. Miss Johnston traveled
considerably in Europe in quest of better health. After the death of her
father she lived for some time at 110 East Franklin Street, Richmond.
Then she built a home, “Three Hills,” near Warm Springs, Virginia,
where she has lived since. Knowing that her Civil War novels, _The Long
Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, owe much to Major Johnston’s analyses and
recollections, some Southerners have said that Mary Johnston’s father was
at least equally responsible with her for the splendid performance in her
earlier novels. They quite misunderstand the nature of the inspiration
he undoubtedly gave her. Of direct help—which is what these people really
have in mind—he gave much, as she has acknowledged; it was, however,
unimportant. Direct help can as well be got from books. If today you
tell Miss Johnston how well you liked such a novel of hers as _Lewis
Rand_ (1908), she will probably respond: “Of course you realize that the
picture of those times is idealized.” In other words, although hers is
one of those natures which must seek the ideal, possess and be possessed
by it, the conception of the ideal has completely changed. Where once she
found it in the bright glints of an earlier American day, now she finds
it in our day and every day, past or present or to be—the pure silver of
the human spirit that runs in a deep if irregular vein through the worn
old rock of human destiny.

For she is like silver herself, like old silver choicely patterned. The
small, oval face and pointed chin are serene in expression beneath a fine
forehead and crisp hair with a great deal of its blackness still in it.
Her manner is reposeful, friendly, unaffected and sympathetic. She talks
readily about anything and everything but you have a feeling that she
is also, at moments, somewhere else—this quite without any sacrifice or
lessening of her hereness and attentiveness. I now come to the personal
experience which, to be intelligible to most of us, must be put in a
crude and simple kind of paraphrase.

If one has suffered much from illness and pain, one is very likely to
have occasional moments in which one returns to life newly-washed, like
the world in trembling freshness and sunlight on a morning after storm.
If one stands on a Virginia hill, or a hill anywhere, one may sometimes
have a distinct awareness that the length and breadth and depth round
about and below are only a kind of length and breadth and descent to a
creature measuring them with his legs; even the eye seems to declare that
genuine dimensions are elsewhere. Stand on the hill one day, return to
it one, five or ten years afterward, standing in the same place. It is
quite possible that nothing has changed in the scene about you. A certain
time has passed, but you, to yourself, haven’t changed. You have grown a
little older, but the essential _you_ is not anybody else. Suddenly you
realize that time is not a dimension, either, any more than the length
and breadth round about or the drop to the valley below; and that as long
as you are _you_ and no one else, the day, the year or the century would
make no genuine difference. The only distance or direction lies between
the unchanging _you_ and somebody else. You are really no farther from
Balboa discovering the Pacific from a Panama summit than if you were
standing beside him now sharing the discovery; the direction is from your
spirit to his, from his to yours, and the distance is neither lessened
nor increased by race, nationality, religion, leagues or centuries.

That is, instead of merely acquiring the notion of the fourth dimension
of mathematics, you have come to see that all the so-called dimensions,
length, breadth, height, time and imaginable others are merely
conveniences of earthly existence, or necessities of earthly existence,
like eating and breathing.

As you stand on the hill, you are alone and yet not alone. The physical
_you_ is alone, as always; but the unchanging _you_ is one of a company
whom you can identify only to the extent of what you may have read or
heard about them. In the company will be Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc,
Spinoza, Ludwig van Beethoven, Cardinal Newman, William Blake, Walt
Whitman—to mention a few of various times and countries—as well as
countless others.

Then will follow the strangest part of the experience and the part most
difficult to put in words. It is, however, something of which some
intimation comes even to the humblest pair of lovers, just as it is the
passionate fulfillment of the great, the immortal lovers of legend.

There is a feeling so intense that it can find coherent expression
only in poetry which holds it securely in the rigid mold of metre and
rhyme; there is another feeling, or degree of feeling either more
intense or more delicate which can communicate itself only in a language
of cunningly-related sounds which we call music. And there is even a
pitch of feeling greater than these, higher and very tranquil and most
piercing in its intensity and loveliness. This feeling has only one
expression—love. The object of that love is immaterial to it. That
object may be, outwardly, the body of the beloved. It may be a person
or an idea. It may be anything. The effects of this feeling are almost
infinitely various. You will find some of them described in William
James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_. The feeling itself is a
religious feeling but it may not expend itself on a religious object.
The feeling made Francis of Assisi the Clown of God. It brought visions
to Joan of Arc and put her at the head of a victorious army. Under its
influence Beethoven wrote symphonies, Blake made pictures, and Whitman
wrote _Leaves of Grass_. Sometimes, when the effects are tranquil, we say
that the Lover has found peace—to which has sometimes been added a phrase
of further description, “the peace that passeth understanding.”

Nearly all these aspects of a continuous human experience came to
Mary Johnston. There was the not unusual preliminary circumstance of
invalidism. There was the loss of a father, much-loved. There were
the Virginia hills she walked upon and there was frequent solitude.
The sense of passing the boundaries of time and space was facilitated
by two things: first, her devotion to history, and second, her
strongly-developed novelist’s imagination. Shortly after she was forty,
therefore, she came to a day when, for an hour or part of an hour, she
had access to a state of knowledge, of sympathy, of understanding which
is so sane that it infuses its sanity into every act of living and so
joyous that those to whom the experience is vouchsafed can throw aside
every lesser joy. After that first experience Mary Johnston waited for it
to renew itself, and gradually what had come as a miracle remained as a
human faculty; so that since then she has acquired the apparent power or
privilege of leaning out from the gold bar of Heaven, of letting earth
slip without loosing herself from earth. You know how your mind will pass
behind the stars while your feet yet continue to tread firm soil as you
go on walking. That is a feeble likeness to the thing.


iii

It was bound to affect her writing, and perhaps the first traces of it
are in _The Witch_ (1914), but it was clearly apparent in _Foes_ (1918),
where, as I have said before this, “upthrusting through the surface of
a stirring historical adventure, we had the evidence of the author’s
breathless personal adventure.” It is one thing to be by temperament
a mystic; quite another to become, as Miss Johnston had now become, a
mystic by the witness of some inner illumination. In some cases the
change has brought with it a proselyting spirit of great fervor; in Miss
Johnston’s there was a complete absence of any such missionary zeal. All
the same she could not go on writing novels in which the picture of some
bygone time was idealized simply for the sake of a charming picture.
_Foes_ has been correctly described as “a dramatic story of eighteenth
century Scotland with a lasting feud, a long chase, and a crescendo of
hatred and peril.” But it is also a story of sublime forgiveness, as
much so as John Masefield’s _The Everlasting Mercy_. In _Michael Forth_
(1919) and _Sweet Rocket_ (1920) there was, as in certain novels of
Herman Melville’s, notably _Pierre_, more transcendentalism than story.
It was inevitable that she should be inarticulate for a while, but it
was only for a while. For in 1922 appeared her story, _Silver Cross_,
a tale of England in the time of Henry VII. and of two rival religious
establishments. _Silver Cross_ was both beautiful and intelligible. For
the prose style I like best Stewart Edward White’s word, “stippling.” It
has also been said of what was to be her mode of utterance for a book
or two: “Written in a clipped sort of prose stripped of ‘a’ and ‘an’
and ‘the’ and other particles as well as articles, the text is a highly
mannered English replete with cadenced sentences and animated by nervous
rhythms. The very diction bears poetic surcharges, and the whole effect
on the reader is to distill in his soul a delicate enchantment or else
to exasperate him to death.”[101] The core of the tale is irony, irony
directed at religious bigotry and religious intolerance; it lies there at
the base of the flower and from it the reader may make his own bitter
honey. Or, if he have no stomach for that, he may take his satisfaction
and pleasure in the rich sound of ecclesiastical trumpets, the green
England, the pageant of a simple world unrolled before him.

In the same year with _Silver Cross_ Miss Johnston’s _1492_ was
published. The book is, of course, the story of Columbus, told with the
accurate historical coloring and the poetic feeling one would expect
of the author; but it uses a technical device which, while not novel,
is deserving of attention from the analyst of fiction. This is the
employment as narrator of the story of Jayme de Marchena, a fictional
person, represented as a Jew who has been banished from Spain under the
decree of exile promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella. Miss Johnston
makes of him a man of philosophical mind, an “obscure Spinoza” whose
thoughts are a constant commentary on the voyage from Palos and the
succeeding voyages. Thus, without distorting history or creating an
imaginary portrait of the Genoese sailor and discoverer, the book (in
form a novel) gives us one of the great events in human affairs in a
perspective that neither history nor biography affords. Again what we
have is the vision of one standing on a hilltop, alone and yet not
alone—of one who is at the same instant standing in the night watches on
the deck of a caravel and listening to the cry from the man on lookout....


iv

    Slow turns the water by the green marshes,
    In Virginia.
    Overhead the sea fowl
    Make silver flashes, cry harsh as peacocks.
    Capes and islands stand,
    Ocean thunders,
    The light houses burn red and gold stars.
    In Virginia
    Run a hundred rivers.[102]

The fine opening of Miss Johnston’s poem might serve as an evocation,
except in the detail of the lighthouses, for her novel, _Croatan_ (1923).
The mere fact of her return to the Virginia of colonial days must have
served to entice many readers to this book—who were held, I think, by the
tale itself, once they had begun it. The legend of Raleigh’s lost colony
of Roanoke and of a first white child born in Virginia, “Virginia Dare,”
is skilfully utilized for a romance quite the most perfect Miss Johnston
had imagined. The story of the three young people who grew up together
in the forest—English girl, Spanish boy and Indian youth—is one of many
overtones deftly sounded. Is Miss Johnston proclaiming a creed of racial
tolerance and interracial understanding? Then the proclamation is made
pianissimo and with muted strings, not with brass instruments. And the
forest scenes—what delicious notes from oboes!

It is very natural to contrast Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow, both
Virginians and both novelists of distinction as well as contemporaries.
Their very agreeable personalities are, however, markedly different. Miss
Glasgow is a product of her background and her time, as much so, for
example, as Edith Wharton; Miss Johnston has a great deal more likeness
to, let us say, Miss May Sinclair. Where Miss Glasgow tends to concern
herself with Virginia of the last half century, Miss Johnston, from
going back to the beginnings of her State, is quite as likely to plunge
effortlessly forward into the farthest imaginable future. For a witness
of what she can do in that direction one does well to read such a short
story as “There Were No More People,”[103] dealing with the extinction
of man and the slow emergence of “a creature who must be classed among
_aves_. He was small, two-footed, feathered and winged.... Slowly, taking
aeons to do it, he put out, in addition to his wings, rudimentary arms
that grew, taking a vast number of generations to accomplish it, into
true arm and hand. At the same time he began, very, very slowly, to
heighten and broaden his skull. Man would have thought him—as he would
have thought man—a strange looking creature.... It took time, but at
last there dawned self-consciousness. The old vehicle for sensation,
emotion, memory and thought that had been called man was gone. But
sensation, emotion, memory and thought are eternals, and a new vehicle
has been wrought. It is not a perfect vehicle. In much it betters man,
but it is not perfect. The new Thinker resembles the old in that he knows
selfishness and greed and uses violence.... It remains to be seen if he
can outwear and lay aside all that and remain—as man could not remain.”

[Illustration: MARY JOHNSTON

_Copyright, E. L. Mix._]


v

Carl Van Doren’s words about Miss Johnston, in his _Contemporary American
Novelists_, 1900-1920, that she brings to the legends and traditions of
the Old Dominion no fresh interpretations, have been made obsolete by
_Croatan_, and are, of course, so far as they are made applicable to
legends in general, denied by her last half dozen novels. It is most
true, though, that Miss Johnston is an historian and a scholar in her
tastes. To the series of fifty volumes interlocking to form a complete
American history, and published by the Yale University Press under the
general title, _The Chronicles of America_, Miss Johnston contributed the
volume on _Pioneers of the Old South_. The book deals with Maryland, the
Carolinas and Georgia as well, but Virginia is, of course, the principal
subject. The period is 1607-1735 and Miss Johnston’s short account is an
admirable piece of writing, concise, accurate, uncontroversial; alive
with crisp human portraits and touched with poetry and imagination in its
occasional descriptive passages.

Miss Johnston’s new novel, to be published late in 1924, under the
title, _The Slave Ship_, is a story of the American slave trade in the
eighteenth century. David Scott, a prisoner after the battle of Culloden,
is sold into slavery on the American plantations. The cruelty with which
he is treated hardens his conscience, so that when he escapes he goes
without much hesitation or scruple into a slave ship and then into slave
trading. The novel follows with intensity and compassion the career
which takes him from this most abominable traffic to an understanding of
what it means. The novel is, therefore, a story (like _Foes_) of one who
journeyed on the road to Damascus. But I recall no story which pictures
with more vividness and power the Middle Passage of infamous memory. _The
Slave Ship_ is notable, too, for the greater suavity of Miss Johnston’s
prose style; the “a’s,” “an’s,” and “the’s” are recovered and there are
less tangible changes—all for the better.

“Nothing can be done but by being greater than the thing to be done”
is a piece of wisdom uttered in Miss Johnston’s fable, “The Return
of Magic.”[104] A writer is, or should be, capable of growth in two
directions—as an artisan and as a source of emotion to be communicated
in terms of beauty. The number who show growth in either fashion is not
large; the number who grow both ways is very small. Five years ago I had
occasion to survey the work of thirty-five American women novelists,
three of whom have since died. One or two others have produced no new
work in the period since. With the most liberal disposition toward the
thirty or so others, it does not seem to me that more than a half dozen
show growth either as writers or artists. Possibly three have produced
work in these five years indicative of a mind enlarging as the hand
serving it has grown more certain. Mary Johnston is one of the three.[105]


BOOKS BY MARY JOHNSTON

    1898 _Prisoners of Hope._
             In England: _The Old Dominion_
    1900 _To Have and To Hold_
             In England: _By Order of the Company_
    1902 _Audrey_
    1904 _Sir Mortimer_
    1907 _The Goddess of Reason._ Poetic drama.
    1908 _Lewis Rand_
    1911 _The Long Roll_
    1912 _Cease Firing_
    1913 _Hagar_
    1914 _The Witch_
    1915 _The Fortunes of Garin_
    1917 _The Wanderers_
    1918 _Foes_
             In England: _The Laird of Glenfernie_
    1919 _Michael Forth_
    1920 _Sweet Rocket_
    1922 _Silver Cross_
    1922 _1492_
             In England: _Admiral of the Ocean-Sea_
    1923 _Croatan_
    1924 _The Slave Ship_


SOURCES ON MARY JOHNSTON

Besides those referred to in the text of the chapter and in footnotes,
the following are suggested:

_The Women Who Make Our Novels_, by Grant Overton. Moffat, Yard, 1918,
1919, 1922; Dodd, Mead, 1924. There is a chapter on Miss Johnston.

“Silver Cross, by Mary Johnston.” Circular published by Little, Brown and
Company, 1922.

Carl Brandt, Brandt & Kirkpatrick, 101 Park Avenue, New York, N. Y.




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton. Page 3.

[2] _Adventures in Journalism_, by Philip Gibbs. Page 84. Harper.

[3] _Adventures in Journalism._ Page 113.

[4] _Adventures in Journalism._ Pages 245-246.

[5] “The Doomdorf Mystery” is the opening story in Mr. Post’s book,
_Uncle Abner, Matter of Mysteries_ (1918).

[6] Aristotle in his _Poetics_.

[7] Walter Pater.

[8] The quotations from. Mr. Post are collated from the chapter on him in
Blanche Colton Williams’s _Our Short Story Writers_ (Dodd Mead).

[9] See Gilbert Murray’s _Euripides and His Age_ in the Home University
Library (Holt).

[10] Blanche Colton Williams in the chapter on Mr. Post in _Our Short
Story Writers_.

[11] The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page 20.

[12] Identified by a correspondent of the Boston Herald (18 October 1923)
as Dago Frank, Lefty Louie, Whitey Lewis, Gyp the Blood—figures in the
Becker case.

[13] “Tammany ruled through the corner saloon,” Farnol is quoted as
saying, in an interview appearing in the New York Tribune, 19 October
1923. “Dear me, yes, we used to vote ever so many times. I always went
out with my Hell’s Kitchen gang, and we voted for Tammany as often as we
were told, changing our coats and going in time and time again. That was
when we were voting against Jerome.

“I’ve surprised my American friends by saying I thought prohibition was
a good thing. I’ve seen too much tragedy and sordidness, too many babies
born of drunken parents. I used to love my cups as well as anybody, and I
used to say that regeneration could not be forced on a drunkard by law,
but now I think the law will help give him his start anyway.”

[14] Interview in Boston Herald, 18 October 1923.

[15] Interview in The Sun, New York, 21 October 1911, page 16.

[16] “‘B’gad, no!’ Yes, Mr. Farnol talks that way. He has had his
characters do it for so long that it comes to him naturally and is in
nowise an affectation.”—The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923,
page 20.

“Glasses are a part of his expressive equipment, as much as ‘dammit man’
is, and probably more so than a vest which seems to have acquired a habit
of coming unbuttoned.”—Interview by John Anderson in The Evening Post,
New York, 23 October 1923, page 12.

[17] _R. L. Stevenson: A Critical Study_, by Frank Swinnerton. Pages 189,
190.

[18] The Book News Monthly, Philadelphia, November, 1915.

[19] A writer in the London Times, quoted in the Boston Evening
Transcript, 24 November 1915.

[20] “The Romance of Jeffery Farnol,” by J. P. Collins. The Bookman, New
York, July, 1920.

[21] Quoted by Henry C. Shelley in his article, “Jeffery Farnol and ‘The
Broad Highway,’” in The Independent, New York, 7 September 1911.

[22] Rudyard Kipling was 23 when _Plain Tales from the Hills_ was brought
out in Calcutta; recognition came a few years later. Mr. F. Scott
Fitzgerald wrote _This Side of Paradise_ at 23. William De Morgan was
well past sixty when _Joseph Vance_ made its success.

[23] Interview in the Boston Sunday Globe, 28 May 1912 (London
correspondence printed without a date line).

[24] _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_ (1913).

[25] “A better selection than Mr. Farnol the Daily Mail could not have
made,” said W. B. (“Bat”) Masterson, in The Morning Telegraph, New York,
24 July 1921. “Mr. Farnol’s narrative was not only interesting, but for
the most part extremely thrilling. I would like to give the whole story
as Mr. Farnol wrote it.” He does, however, quote the salient passages of
Farnol’s story.

[26] Interview by John Anderson in The Evening Post, New York, 23 October
1923, page 12.

[27] Interview in The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page
20.

[28] “An Attic Salt-Shaker,” by W. Orton Tewson in The Public Ledger,
Philadelphia, 3 November 1923.

[29] Interviews in The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page
20; in The New York Tribune, 19 October 1923; in The Boston Herald, 18
October 1923. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is laid in New York.

[30] Interview by Fay Stevenson in The Evening World, New York, 24
October 1923.

[31] “Jeffery Farnol at Home,” by Henry Keats, The Book News Monthly,
September, 1911.

[32] Several of the prime favorites among authors of books for boys and
girls are discussed in Chapter 14.

[33] See Chapter 2.

[34] See _On the Margin_, page 32, bottom, _et seq._ and page 150 _et
seq._

[35] _On the Margin_, page 166 _et seq._

[36] See _Antic Hay_, page 8.

[37] See _Crome Yellow_, page 121 _et seq._

[38] See _When Winter Comes to Main Street_ (Grant Overton), page 34 _et
seq._

[39] _Antic Hay_, page 305.

[40] Letter of Samuel Roth, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, 28 June 1922.

[41] _American Nights Entertainment_ (Grant Overton), pages 34 and 35.

[42] Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

[43] Mr. Henry L. Mencken.

[44] The New Republic.

[45] Mr. John V. A. Weaver.

[46] The London Times, 3 May 1923.

[47] Literary news note in The Indianapolis Star, 20 March 1922.

[48] _Gods of Modern Grub Street_, by A. St. John Adcock. (Stokes.) Page
267.

[49] Interview in The Evening Post, New York, 1922 (3 March?)

[50] “E. Phillips Oppenheim,” by Himself. Brentano’s Book Chat, April,
1921.

[51] The New York Times, New York Herald, and The World, New York, 5
March 1922, reporting a Lotos Club dinner to Mr. Oppenheim.

[52] Page 266.

[53] “E. Phillips Oppenheim,” by Himself. Brentano’s Book Chat, April,
1921.

[54] In Boston Evening Transcript for 23 February 1922.

[55] “Mental Photo of E. Phillips Oppenheim,” in The New York American
for 6 March 1922.

[56] “E. Philips Oppenheim,” by Himself, in Brentano’s Book Chat for
April, 1921.

[57] “Fiction and Prophecy,” by E. Phillips Oppenheim, in The New York
Times, Sunday book or magazine section (March, 1922?)

[58] “E. Phillips Oppenheim,” by Himself, in Brentano’s Book Chat, April,
1921.

[59] Dr. Hall married twice.

[60] “The Foremost Woman Novelist in Spain,” in The Boston Evening
Transcript for 12 April 1924.

[61] Pages 153-154.

[62] “In a spirit of youthful independence, I had lopped off my father’s
patronymic.”—_Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton, page 8. The father,
Mr. Gibbs, had opposed Cosmo’s literary ambitions. See also the chapter
on Philip Gibbs in this book.

[63] _Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton, page 89.

[64] As long ago as 1916, writing of Lucas’s work, Mr. Llewellyn Jones,
literary editor of The Chicago Evening Post, said: “It sounds incredible,
but Mr. Lucas has put his name—as author, editor or introducer—on about
108 titlepages.” See pamphlet, “E. V. Lucas: Novelist, Essayist, Friendly
Wanderer,” published at the time by George H. Doran Company, New York.

[65] See pamphlet, “E. V. Lucas: Novelist, Essayist, Friendly Wanderer,”
published in 1916, the excerpt being taken from Mr. Llewellyn Jones’s
article therein.

[66] “The metal bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to
melting-point and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the
mold or see it at length but an amorphous splash at your feet.” This
vivid metaphor of Mr. Pritchard’s is surely one of the most inspired
explanations and justifications of poetic form ever set down. It can
hardly be cited except by the supporters of traditional verse forms, as
in a preceding sentence of his eloquent passage Mr. Pritchard speaks of
“rime” and “metre” as well as of rhythm.

[67] _Books and Persons_, page 153. The notice first appeared in The New
Age, London, 7 October 1909.

[68] See pamphlet, “E. V. Lucas: Novelist, Essayist, Friendly Wanderer.”

[69] “Of Slang—English and American,” in _Cloud and Silver_.

[70] “The True Wizard of the North,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_.

[71] “Thackeray’s Schoolfellow,” in _Adventures and Enthusiasms_.

[72] In _Adventures and Enthusiasms_.

[73] _Men and Books and Cities_, by Robert Cortes Holliday, pages 196-197.

[74] See also “Stories and Humorists,” in _Roving East and Roving
West_, page 136 _et seq._, and also “Chicago,” in the same volume. Mr.
Holliday’s full account is in _Men and Books and Cities_, pages 196-203,
inclusive, and also page 206.

[75] _Books and Persons_, pages 153-154. First appeared as a notice of
Mr. Lucas’s _One Day and Another_ in The New Age, London, 7 October 1909.

[76] A writer in John o’ London’s Weekly, London. Reprinted in the Boston
Evening Transcript of 3 March 1923.

[77] Article by Anne Carroll Moore in The Bookman for November, 1918.
Reprinted in her _Roads to Childhood_.

[78] See Chapter 12 for an account of _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_, by
Mr. Moses and Miss Gerson.

[79] See Chapter 11.

[80] See Chapter 12.

[81] Yes, in _These Charming People_; but it is a remarkable coincidence
that the identical _mot_ appeared conspicuously in Donald Ogden Stewart’s
_Perfect Behavior_, published in America in autumn, 1922. (_These
Charming People_ appeared in England in early summer, 1923.)

[82] See Chapter 14.

[83] “Animals Love, Hate and Become Angry, Just Like Human Beings, Says
Expert.” Interview by Jane Dixon in The Evening Telegram, New York, 23
January 1922.

[84] W. T. Hornaday, curator of the New York Zoölogical Gardens, is
quoted in _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ as saying: “Casey was a
mystery. I am frank to say that I could not put my finger on his exact
classification. Of course, he was an ape. But just what kind—that is the
question.”

[85] “He’d Make a Man of a Monkey—and in Four Generations.” Feature
article in The Gazette Times, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7 May 1922.

[86] See the chapter on Mrs. Wharton either in _Authors of the Day_ or
_American Nights Entertainment_ (both Grant Overton).

[87] The quotations are from the first two pages of _The Old Maid_.

[88] _The Age of Innocence._

[89] In _New Year’s Day_.

[90] “I admit most fully that I myself proceeded with Lord Carson to
great lengths—and would even have proceeded to greater—in order to
prevent the forcible inclusion of the Northern provinces in a Parliament
sitting at Dublin.”—The Earl of Birkenhead in _America Revisited_ (1924)
page 40.

[91] _Where Are We Going?_ (1923), by the Right Hon. David Lloyd George.

[92] _The Genesis of the War_ (1923), by the Right Hon. Herbert H.
Asquith.

[93] See Chapters 1 and 11.

[94] See Chapter 12.

[95] Quoted from the article, “Progress of Frank L. Packard,” in the
Argosy-Allstory Weekly for 3 February 1923.

[96] See article, “Progress of Frank L. Packard,” in the Argosy-Allstory
Weekly for 3 February 1923.

[97] _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_, page 20.

[98] “The Story—The Precious Corner Stone,” by Frank L. Packard in The
Photodramatist for November (1923?)

[99] “The Literary Spotlight: Mary Johnston,” in The Bookman for July,
1922. Reprinted in _The Literary Spotlight_ (book published 1924).

[100] “What You Should Know About American Authors: Mary Johnston,” in
the New York Herald for 21 June 1922 (book section).

[101] See “The Literary Spotlight: Mary Johnston” in The Bookman for
July, 1922. Reprinted in _The Literary Spotlight_ (book published 1924).

[102] Opening lines of “Virginiana,” by Mary Johnston, in The Reviewer
for February, 1922.

[103] In The Reviewer. Reprinted in The World Tomorrow for February, 1924.

[104] In The Reviewer for April, 1922.

[105] It must be premised that “growth” in an artist is a term upon which
agreement as to definition is probably impossible. Nevertheless it is
loosely used by all of us to denote a certain progression in the work
of such a writer as Henry James or Thomas Hardy. It may or may not, I
suspect, mean greater or more enduring work, but it almost invariably
must mean work of a more marked idiosyncrasy, more stamped with the
personality of the author, and probably written with a noticeable idiom
of style. Subject is hardly a safe test.




INDEX OF PRICES

NOTE: Prices given are net and are subject to change. Inquiry should be
made of a bookseller for titles not listed.


  ADDINGTON, SARAH,
    _Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, $2.00

  ADLER, FELIX,
    _The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_, $1.50

  ALCOTT, LOUISA M.,
    _Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_, $1.50
    _Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_, $1.50

  ALEXANDER, ELIZABETH,
    _Rôles_, $2.00

  ALLEN, LUCY G.,
    _Choice Recipes for Clever Cooks_, $2.00
    _Table Service_, $1.75

  ALTSHELER, JOSEPH A.,
    _Apache Gold_, $1.75
    _Border Watch, The_, $1.75
    _Candidate, The_, $1.75
    _Eyes of the Woods, The_, $1.75
    _Forest Runners, The_, $1.75
    _Forest of Swords, The_, $1.75
    _Free Rangers, The_, $1.75
    _Great Sioux Trail, The_, $1.75
    _Guns of Bull Run, The_, $1.75
    _Guns of Europe, The_, $1.75
    _Guns of Shiloh, The_, $1.75
    _Herald of the West, A_, $1.75
    _Hosts of the Air, The_, $1.75
    _Hunters of the Hills, The_, $1.75
    _In Circling Camps_, $1.75
    _Keepers of the Trail, The_, $1.75
    _Last of the Chiefs, The_, $1.75
    _Last Rebel, The_, $1.75
    _Lords of the Wild, The_, $1.75
    _Lost Hunters, The_, $1.75
    _Masters of the Peaks, The_, $1.75
    _My Captive_, $1.75
    _Quest of the Four, The_, $1.75
    _Riflemen of the Ohio, The_, $1.75
    _Rock of Chickamauga, The_, $1.75
    _Rulers of the Lakes, The_, $1.75
    _Scouts of Stonewall, The_, $1.75
    _Scouts of the Valley, The_, $1.75
    _Shades of the Wilderness, The_, $1.75
    _Shadow of the North, The_, $1.75
    _Soldier of Manhattan, A_, $1.75
    _Star of Gettysburg, The_, $1.75
    _Sun of Saratoga, The_, $1.75
    _Sun of Quebec, The_, $1.75
    _Sword of Antietam, The_, $1.75
    _Texan Scouts, The_, $1.75
    _Texan Star, The_, $1.75
    _Texan Triumph, The_, $1.75
    _Tree of Appomattox, The_, $1.75
    _Young Traders_, The, $1.75

  ARLEN, MICHAEL,
    _The Green Hat_, $2.50
    _These Charming People_, $2.50
    “_Piracy_,” $2.50

  ASQUITH, HERBERT HENRY,
    _The Genesis of the War_, $6.00


  BAKER, S. JOSEPHINE, M.D.,
    _Healthy Babies_, $1.25
    _Healthy Children_, $1.25
    _Healthy Mothers_, $1.25

  BALDERSTON, JOHN L.,
    _A Morality Play for the Leisure Class_, 50c

  BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES,
    _Theism and Thought_, $4.00
    _Theism and Humanism_, $1.75

  BANNING, MARGARET CULKIN,
    _A Handmaid of the Lord_, $2.00

  BARBOUR, RALPH HENRY,
    _The Fighting Scrub_, $1.75
    _Follow the Ball_, $1.75

  BARKER, GRANVILLE,
    _Anatol_, $1.50
    _Exemplary Theatre, The_, $2.00
    _Madras House, The_, $1.50
    _Marrying of Ann Leete, The_, $1.50
    _Secret Life, The_, $1.50
    _Three Short Plays: Rosco, Vote by Ballot, Farewell to the
        Theatre_, $1.50
    _Voysey Inheritance, The_, $1.50
    _Waste_, $1.50

  BARKER, LEWELLYS F., M.D., AND COLE, N. B., M.D.,
    _Blood Pressure_, $1.25

  BARNHAM, HENRY D.,
    _The Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din_, $2.50

  BARRETTO, LARRY,
    _A Conqueror Passes_, $2.00

  BARTLETT, JOHN,
    _Familiar Quotations_, $4.50

  BARRY, DAVID S.,
    _Forty Years in Washington_, $3.50

  BARRY, FLORENCE V.,
    _A Century of Children’s Books_, $2.00

  BEACH, LEWIS,
    _Ann Vroome_, $1.50
    _A Square Peg_, $1.50
    _Goose Hangs High, The_, $1.50

  BECK, JAMES M.,
    _The Constitution of the United States: Yesterday, Today—Tomorrow?_
        $3.00

  BENNETT, ARNOLD,
    _Elsie and the Child_, $2.50
    _Riceyman Steps_, leather, $2.50; cloth, $2.00

  BENSON, E. F.,
    _David Blaize of King’s_, $2.00

  BINYON, LAURENCE,
    _Ayuli_, $1.50

  BIRKENHEAD, EARL OF
    _The Inner History of British Politics_, Vol. I, $6.00

  BLOCK, ETTA,
    _One-Act Plays from the Yiddish_, $2.00

  BOWER, B. M.,
    _The Bellehelen Mine_, $2.00

  BOYD, ERNEST,
    _The Contemporary Drama of Ireland_, $2.50

  BRADLEY, ALICE,
    _The Candy Cook Book_, $1.75

  BRIDGES, ROY,
    _Rat’s Castle_, $1.75

  BRIMMER, F. E.,
    _Autocamping_, $2.00

  BRUETTE, W. A.,
    _The Complete Dog Book_, $3.00

  BUCK, CHARLES E.,
    _The Business Letter-Writer’s Manual_, $3.00

  BURGESS, THORNTON W.,
    _Billy Mink_, $1.50
    _Burgess Animal Book for Children, The_, $3.00
    _Burgess Bird Book for Children, The_, $3.00
    _Burgess Flower Book for Children_, $3.00

  BURKE, THOMAS,
    _The Wind and the Rain_, $2.00

  BURROUGHS, JOHN, AND OTHERS,
    _Birds of America_


  CARROLL, DIXIE,
    _Goin’ Fishin’_, $3.00
    _Lake and Stream Game Fishing_, $3.00

  CARTER, HOWARD, and A. C. MACE,
    _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_, $5.00

  CHAMBERS, MARY D.,
    _One-Piece Dinners_, $2.00

  CHANDLER, FRANK W.,
    _The Contemporary Drama of France_, $2.50

  CHAPMAN, FRANK M.,
    _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, $4.00
    _What Bird Is That?_, $1.50

  CHESTERTON, G. K., AND OTHERS,
    _Number Two Joy Street_, $2.50

  CHEYNEY, EDWARD G.,
    _Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, $1.75

  CHIPP, ELINOR,
    _Many Waters_, $2.00

  CLARK, BARRETT H.,
    _How to Produce Amateur Plays_, $1.75
    _Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors_, $3.00

  CLARK, MARTHA HASKELL,
    _The Home Road_, $1.25

  CLEMENTS, COLIN CAMPBELL,
    _Plays for a Folding Theatre_, $2.00
    _Plays for Pagans_, $2.00

  COBB, IRVIN S.,
    _Goin’ on Fourteen_, $2.50
    _Cobb’s America Guyed Books_: _Indiana_, _Kansas_, _Kentucky_,
        _Maine_, _New York_, _North Carolina_, each 50 cents

  CODY, LOUISA F., AND COOPER, COURTNEY RYLEY,
    _Memories of Buffalo Bill_, $2.50

  CONNOR, RALPH,
    _Treading the Winepress_, $2.00

  COOLIDGE, EMELYN L., M.D.,
    _The Home Care of Sick Children_, $1.25

  COOLIDGE, SUSAN,
    _What Katy Did_, $1.75

  COOPER, COURTNEY RYLEY,
    _Cross Cut, The_, $2.00
    _Last Frontier, The_, $2.00
    _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, $2.00
    _Under the Big Top_, $2.00
    _White Desert, The_, $2.00

  CRANE, STEPHEN,
    _Red Badge of Courage, The_, $2.00

  CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER, S. C.,
    _The Life of Olive Schreiner_, $5.00

  CURTIS, CAPT. PAUL A., JR.,
    _The Outdoorsman’s Handbook_, $1.50


  DARK, SIDNEY,
    _The Book of England for Young People_, $2.50
    _The Book of France for Young People_, $2.50
    _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, $2.50

  DAVENPORT, EVE, and MAUDE RADFORD WARREN,
    _Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, $2.50
    _Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe_, $2.50
    _Tales Told by the Gander_, $2.50

  DAVIS, OWEN,
    _Icebound_, $1.50
    _The Detour_, $1.50

  DE LA MARE, WALTER, AND OTHERS,
    _Number Two Joy Street_, $2.50

  DICKINSON, EMILY,
    _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_, $3.50

  DICKINSON, THOMAS H.,
    _The Contemporary Drama of England_, $2.50

  DIXON, THOMAS,
    _Black Hood, The_, $2.00
    _Fall of a Nation, The_, $2.00
    _Foolish Virgin, The_, $2.00
    _Man in Gray, The_, $2.00
    _Man of the People, A_, $1.75
    _Sins of the Father, The_, $2.00
    _Southerner, The_, $2.00
    _Way of a Man, The_, $2.00

  DODGE, DANIEL KILHAM,
    _Abraham Lincoln, Master of Words_, $1.50

  DONHAM, S. AGNES,
    _Marketing and Housework Manual_, $2.00
    _Spending the Family Income_, $1.75

  DOYLE, A. CONAN,
    _Memories and Adventures_, $4.50

  DULAC, EDMUND (Illustrator),
    _Tales from Hans Andersen_, $3.50
    _Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book_, $3.75
    _Shakespeare’s Comedy of “The Tempest_,” $3.50
    _The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales from the Old French_,
        $3.50


  EGAN, MAURICE FRANCIS,
    _Recollections of a Happy Life_, $5.00

  ELLIOTT, MAUD HOWE,
    _Three Generations_, $4.00

  EMERSON, WILLIAM, R.P., M.D.,
    _Nutrition and Growth in Children_, $2.50

  ERSKINE, LAURIE YORKE,
    _The Laughing Rider_, $1.75

  ERTZ, SUSAN,
    _Madame Clair_, $2.00
    _Nina_, $2.00

  ESPINA, CONCHA,
    _The Red Beacon_, $2.00


  FAIRBANKS, DOUGLAS,
    _Youth Points the Way_, $1.25

  FARMER, FANNIE MERRITT,
    _Boston Cooking School Cook Book, The_, $2.50
    _Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent_, $2.50

  FARNOL, JEFFERY,
    _Amateur Gentleman, The_, $2.00
    _Beltane, the Smith_, $2.00
    _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_, $2.00
    _Broad Highway, The_, $2.00
    _Definite Object, The_, $2.00
    _Geste of Duke Jocelyn, The_, $2.00
    _Great Britain at War_, $1.25
    _Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, The, $1.25
    _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_, $2.00
    _Our Admirable Betty_, $2.00
    _Peregrine’s Progress_, $2.00
    _Sir John Dering_, $2.00

  FARRAR, JOHN,
    _The Middle Twenties_, $1.50
    _The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays for Children_, $1.50
    _The Literary Spotlight_, $2.50

  FERBER, MAURICE,
    _Lord Byron, a Play_, 50c

  FLAMMARION, CAMILLE,
    _Haunted Houses_, $3.00

  FOOTE, JOHN TAINTOR,
    _A Wedding Gift_, $1.00
    _Dumbbell of Brookfield_, $2.00
    _Pocono Shot_, $1.25

  FORDYCE, CLAUDE P.,
    _Trail Craft_, $2.50

  FOSTER, MAXIMILIAN,
    _Humdrum House?_ $1.75

  FOX, FANNIE FERBER,
    _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_, $2.50

  FRENCH, ALLEN,
    _The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, $2.00

  FRENCH, JOSEPH LEWIS,
    _The Pioneer West: Narratives of the Western March of Empire_,
        $2.50
    _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose Anthology_, $2.50

  FYLEMAN, ROSE,
    _Forty Good-Night Tales_, $2.00
    _Fairies and Chimneys_, $1.25
    _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_, $3.50
    _The Rainbow Cat_, $2.00
    _The Fairy Flute_, $1.25
    _The Fairy Green_, $1.25


  GAIGE, GRACE,
    _Recitations_, $2.50

  GALWAN, GHULAM RASSUL,
    _Servants of Sahibs_, $2.50

  GANOE, MAJOR W. A.,
    _The History of the United States Army_, $5.00

  GAZE, HAROLD,
    _The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, $2.00

  GEISTER, EDNA,
    _What Shall We Play_, $2.50
    _The Fun Book_, $1.25
    _Let’s Play_, $1.25
    _It Is To Laugh_, $1.25

  GIBBS, A. HAMILTON,
    _Gun Fodder_, $2.50

  GIBBS, GEORGE,
    _Black Stone, The_, $2.00
    _Fires of Ambition_, $2.00
    _Golden Bough, The_, $2.00
    _House of Mohun, The_, $2.00
    _Madcap_, $2.00
    _Maker of Opportunities, The_, $2.00
    _Sackcloth and Scarlet_, $2.00
    _Secret Witness, The_, $2.00
    _Splendid Outcast, The_, $2.00
    _Vagrant Duke, The_, $2.00
    _Yellow Dove, The_, $2.00
    _Youth Triumphant_, $2.00

  GIBBS, PHILIP,
    _Heirs Apparent_, $2.00
    _Little Novels of Nowadays_, $2.00
    _Middle of the Road_, The, $2.00

  GOING, CHARLES BUXTON,
    _David Wilmot, Free Soiler_, $6.00

  GREGOR, ELMER RUSSELL, Stories, each $1.75
    _Captain Jim Mason_,
    _Jim Mason, Backwoodsman_,
    _Jim Mason, Scout_,
    _Running Fox_,
    _Spotted Deer_,
    _Three Sioux Scouts_,
    _War Trail, The_,
    _White Otter_,
    _White Wolf, The_.


  HALL, G. STANLEY,
    _Adolescence_, $10.00
    _Aspects of Child Life and Education_, $2.00
    _Educational Problems_, $10.00
    _Founders of Modern Psychology_, $3.00
    _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, $7.50
    _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_, $5.00
    _Morale_, $3.00
    _Recreations of a Psychologist_, $2.50
    _Senescence: The Last Half of Life_, $5.00
    _Youth_, $2.00

  HAMILTON, COSMO,
    _Another Scandal_, $2.00
    _Blindness of Virtue, The_, $2.00
    _Blue Room, The_, $2.00
    _Door That Has No Key, The_, $2.00
    _Four Plays: The New Poor, Scandal, The Silver Fox, The Mother
        Woman_, $2.50
    _His Friend and His Wife_, $2.00
    _Miracle of Love, The_, $2.00
    _Rustle of Silk, The_, $2.00
    _Scandal_, $2.00
    _Sins of the Children, The_, $2.00
    _Unwritten History_, $4.00
    _Who Cares_, $2.00

  HAWTREY, CHARLES,
    _The Truth at Last_, $5.00

  HELLMAN, SAM,
    _Low Bridge and Punk Pungs_, $1.25

  HENDERSON, HELEN W.,
    _A Loiterer in London_, $5.00
    _A Loiterer in Paris_, $5.00
    _A Loiterer in New England_, $5.00
    _A Loiterer in New York_, $5.00

  HENSHALL, JAMES A., M.D.,
    _The Book of the Black Bass_, $4.50,
    _Bass, Pike, Perch and Other Game Fishes_, $3.00

  HERBERT, A. P., AND OTHERS,
    _Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays_, $2.00

  HICHENS, ROBERT,
    _After the Verdict_, $2.00
    _Last Time, The_, $2.00

  HILL, FREDERICK TREVOR,
    _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_, $2.00
    _On the Trail of Washington_, $2.50
    _Washington, the Man of Action_, $6.00

  HILL, JANET MCKENZIE,
    _Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making_, $1.75
    _Cooking for Two: A Handbook for Young Housekeepers_, $2.25

  HOLDEN, DR. GEORGE PARKER,
    _Streamcraft: An Angling Manual_, $2.50

  HOLLIDAY, ROBERT CORTES,
    _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, $2.00
    _Walking-Stick Papers_, $2.00

  HOLMES, A.
    _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and Achievement_, $1.75

  HOLT, L. EMMETT, M. D.,
    _The Care and Feeding of Children_, $1.25

  HOUGH, EMERSON,
    _Broken Gate, The_, $2.00
    _Covered Wagon, The_, $2.00
    _Girl at the Half-Way House, The_, $2.00
    _Man Next Door, The_, $2.00
    _Magnificent Adventure, The_, $2.00
    _Mother of Gold_, $2.00
    _North of 36_, $2.00
    _Story of the Cowboy, The_, $2.00
    _Way Out, The_, $2.00

  HOUSMAN, LAURENCE,
    _Echo de Paris_, $1.00

  HUDDLESTON, SISLEY,
    _Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr_, $2.50

  HUDSON, HOLLAND,
    _Action_, 50 cents

  HUDSON, WILLIAM JAY,
    _Abbé Pierre_, illustrated gift edition, $3.00
    _Abbé Pierre_, regular edition, $2.00

  HULIT, LEONARD,
    _Fishing with a Boy_, $2.00
    _Salt Water Angler, The_, $3.50

  HUXLEY, ALDOUS,
    _Antic Hay_, $2.00
    _On the Margin_, $2.00
    _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_, $2.00
    _Crome Yellow_, leather, $2.50; cloth, $2.00
    _Mortal Coils_, $2.00
    _Leda and Other Poems_, $2.00
    _Limbo_, $2.00


  IWASAKI, Y. T., AND HUGHES, GLEN,
    _Three Modern Japanese Plays_, $1.50


  JACKS, L. P.,
    _A Living Universe_, $1.00
    _Religious Perplexities_, $1.00
    _Realities and Shams_, $1.50
    _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_, 50 cents

  JACKSON, HELEN HUNT,
    _Nelly’s Silver Mine_, $2.00
    _Ramona_, $2.00

  JACQUES, MARIE,
    _Colette’s Best Recipes: A Book of French Cookery_, $2.00

  JERITZA, MARIA,
    _Sunlight and Song_, $3.00

  JEWETT, ELEANOR MYERS,
    _Egyptian Tales of Magic_, $2.00

  JOB, HERBERT K., AND OTHERS,
    _Birds of America_, 3 vols., $17.50

  JOHN, GWEN,
    _The Prince_, $1.50

  JOHNSON, OWEN,
    _Blue Blood_, $1.75
    _Prodigious Hickey, The_, $1.75
    _Skippy Bedelle_, $1.75
    _Tennessee Shad, The_, $1.75
    _Varmint, The_, $1.75

  JOHNSON, ROBERT UNDERWOOD,
    _Remembered Yesterdays_, $5.00

  JOHNSTON, MARY,
    _Croatan_, $2.00
    _1492_, $2.00
    _Silver Cross_, $2.00
    _Slave Ship, The_, $2.00

  JONES, HENRY ARTHUR,
    _Representative Plays_, 4 Vols., $10.00

  JORDAN, DAVID STARR,
    _Fishes_, $7.50


  KELLOGG, VERNON,
    _Evolution_, $2.00

  KELLY, GEORGE,
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INDEX


  _Abbé Pierre_, Jay William Hudson, 288, 289

  _Abraham Lincoln—Master of Words_, Daniel Kilham Dodge, 323, 324

  _Action!_ Holland Hudson, 262

  Addington, Sarah, _Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, 94

  Adler, Felix, _The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Idea_, 352

  _Adolescence_, G. Stanley Hall, 152, 165

  _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, E. V. Lucas, 221, 223, 230

  _Adventures in Journalism_, Philip Gibbs, 17, 18, 20, 22, 27

  _Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe_, Maude Radford Warren and Eve
        Davenport, 85

  _Adventures of Jimmie Dale, The_, Frank L. Packard, 340, 347

  _Advisory Ben_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 215, 217, 230

  _After Harvest_, Charles Fielding Marsh, 181

  _After Livingston_, Fred L. M. Moir, 39

  _After the Verdict_, Robert Hichens, 176, 177

  _Age of Innocence, The_, Edith Wharton, 304, 305, 306, 309, 310, 313

  Alcott, Louisa M., 91;
    _Little Men_, 92;
    _Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_, 92

  Alexander, Elizabeth, _Rôles_, 180

  Allen, Lucy G., _Choice Recipes for Clever Cooks_, 122;
    _Table Service_, 122

  _Altar Steps, The_, Compton Mackenzie, 170

  Altsheler, Joseph A., _see_ Chapter xiv, 236-239;
    _The Guns of Bull Run_, 238, 247;
    _The Guns of Shiloh_, 238, 247;
    _The Rock of Chickamauga_, 238, 247;
    _The Scouts of Stonewall_, 238, 247;
    _The Shades of the Wilderness_, 238, 247;
    _The Star of Gettysburg_, 238, 247;
    _The Sun of Saratoga_, 239, 248;
    _The Sword of Antietam_, 238, 247;
    _The Tree of Appomattox_, 238, 247;
    _The Young Trailer_, 239, 246

  _Amateur Gentleman, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 75, 79, 81

  _An Ambassador’s Memoirs_, Maurice Paleologue, 199

  Andersen, Hans, _Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, 87

  Andreyev, 254, 265

  _Ann Vroome_, Lewis Beach, 256

  _Another Scandal_, Cosmo Hamilton, 189, 195

  _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_, Paul Blanshard, 317, 322

  _Anthony Trollope_, Hugh Walpole, 282

  _Antic Hay_, Aldous Huxley, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 109, 110, 111, 113

  _Araminta_, J. C. Snaith, 367, 373

  _Aria da Capo_, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 263

  _Ariel, The Life of Shelley_, André Maurois, 197

  Arlen, Michael, _see_ Chapter xvi, 266-276;
    _Piracy_, 267, 272, 274, 275, 276;
    _The Green Hat_, 267, 276;
    _The London Venture_, 272, 276;
    _The Romantic Lady_, 267, 276;
    _These Charming People_, 266, 269, 274, 276

  _Autocamping_, F. E. Brimmer, 36

  _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_, R. C. Waters, 120

  _Autumn_, Ilya Surguchev, 261

  _Awakening of Italy, The; The Fascista Regeneration_, Luigi Villari,
        316

  _Ayuli_, Laurence Binyon, 260


  Baker, S. Josephine, M. D., _Healthy Babies_, 123;
    _Healthy Children_, 124;
    _Healthy Mothers_, 118

  Balderston, John L., _A Morality Play for the Leisure Class_, 262

  Balfour, Lord, _Theism and Thought_, 350, 351

  Banning, Margaret Culkin, _A Handmaid of the Lord_, 169, 170

  Barbour, Ralph Henry, 83, 88;
    _Follow The Ball_, 88, 89;
    _The Fighting Scrub_, 88

  Barker and Cole, Drs., _Blood Pressure_, 326

  Barker, Granville, 254, 256;
    _The Exemplary Theatre_, 264;
    _The Madras House_, 256;
    _The Marrying of Ann Leete_, 256;
    _The Secret Life_, 256;
    _The Voysey Inheritance_, 256;
    _Three Short Plays_, 256;
    _Waste_, 256

  Barretto, Larry, _A Conqueror Passes_, 179

  Barry, David S., _Forty Years in Washington_, 208

  Bartlett, John, _Familiar Quotations_, 328

  Beach, Lewis, _Ann Vroome_, 256;
    _A Square Peg_, 256;
    _The Goose Hangs High_, 256

  Beck, _The Constitution of the United States: Yesterday,
        Today—Tomorrow?_ 322

  Belknap, Maitland, _Princeton Sketches_, 289

  _Bellehelen Mine, The_, B. M. Bower, 30, 31

  _Belovéd Traitor, The_, Frank L. Packard, 338, 347

  _Beltane the Smith_, Jeffery Farnol, 74, 79, 81

  Bennett, Arnold, 171, 197, 254, 283;
    _Elsie and the Child and Other Stories_, 173;
    _Riceyman Steps_, 173

  Benson, E. F., _David Blaize of King’s_, 96

  _Billy Mink_, Thornton W. Burgess, 93

  Binyon, Laurence, _Ayuli_, 260

  _Birds of America_, ed. by T. Gilbert Pearson, John Burroughs,
        Herbert K. Job, 39

  Birkenhead, Earl of, _The Inner History of English Politics_, 314

  _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_, Jeffery Farnol, 79, 81

  _Black Hood, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 241, 249

  _Black Stone, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 374

  Blanshard, Paul, _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_, 317

  _Blindness of Virtue, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 187, 188, 190, 195

  _Blood Pressure_, Barker and Cole, Drs., 326

  _Blue Blood_, Owen Johnston, 179

  _Blue Lion, The_, Robert Lynd, 284

  _Blue Room, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 189, 195

  _Bolted Door, The_, George Gibbs, 370, 374

  _Book of American Verse, A_, J. C. Squire, 278

  _Book of Blanche, The_, Dorothy Richardson, 179

  _Book of England for Young People, The_, Sidney Dark, 91

  _Book of France for Young People, The_, Sidney Dark, 91

  _Book of Scotland for Young People, The_, Sidney Dark, 91

  _Book of the Black Bass_, Dr. James A. Henshall, 33

  _Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, The_, Fannie Merritt Farmer, 115,
        116

  Bower, B. M., _The Bellehelen Mine_, 30, 31

  Boyd, Ernest, _The Contemporary Drama of Ireland_, 265

  _Boy Scouts’ Own Book, The, ed._ Franklin K. Mathiews, 95

  _Boy Scouts’ Year Book, The, ed._ Franklin K. Mathiews, 95

  _Boy Whaleman, The_, George F. Tucker, 91, 92

  Bradley, Alice, _The Candy Cook Book_, 122

  _Breaking a Bird Dog_, Horace Lytle, 40

  _Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The_, Stephen Crane, 242

  Bridges, Roy, _Rat’s Castle_, 95

  Brimmer, F, E., _Autocamping_, 36

  _Broad Highway, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71,
        72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81

  _Broke of Covenden_, J. C. Snaith, 365, 373

  Brontë, Anne, _The Complete Poems of_, 278

  Brontë, Charlotte, _The Complete Poems of_, 278

  Brontë, Emily Jane, _The Complete Poems of_, 278

  Bruette, Dr. William A., _The Complete Dog Book_, 34

  _Brute, The_, W. Douglas Newton, 180

  Buck, _The Khoja_, 327

  _Burgess Animal Book for Children, The_, Thornton W. Burgess, 83

  _Burgess Bird Book for Children, The_, Thornton W. Burgess, 84

  _Burgess Flower Book for Children, The_, Thornton W. Burgess, 84

  Burgess, Thornton W., 83, 84;
    _Billy Mink_, 93;
    _The Burgess Animal Book for Children_, 83;
    _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_, 84;
    _The Burgess Flower Book for Children_, 84

  Burke, Thomas, 281;
    _Limehouse Nights_, 282;
    _The Wind and the Rain_, 282

  Burnham, William H., _The Normal Mind_, 362

  _Burning Wheel, The_, Aldous Huxley, 104, 106, 113

  _By Intervention of Providence_, Stephen McKenna, 285


  _Candy Cook Book, The_, Alice Bradley, 122

  _Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making_, Janet McKenzie Hill, 123

  _Cap’n Eri_, Joseph C. Lincoln, 171

  _Captain Jim Mason_, Elmer R. Gregor, 244, 250

  _Care and Feeding of Children, The_, Dr. L. Emmett Holt, 115, 117

  Carroll, Dixie, _Goin’ Fishin’?_ 39;
    _Lake and Stream Game Fishing_, 39

  Carter, Howard, and Mace, A. C., _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_, 37, 38

  _Casting Tackle and Methods_, O. W. Smith, 39

  _Cease Firing_, Mary Johnston, 377, 378, 389

  _Cedric the Forester_ Bernard Marshall, 245, 251

  Chambers, Mary D., _One-Piece Dinners_, 122

  Chandler, Frank W., _The Contemporary Drama of France_, 265

  Chapman, Frank M., _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, 40;
    _What Bird is That?_, 40

  Cheyney, Edward G., _Scott Burton, in the Blue Ridge_, 95

  _Child Training_, Angelo Patti, 119, 120

  Chipp, Elinor, _Many Waters_, 181

  _Choice Recipes for Clever Cooks_, Lucy G. Allen, 122

  _Christianity at the Crossroads_, Dr. E. Y. Mullins, 350, 355

  _City Out of the Sea, A_, Alfred Stanford, 181

  _C. K. S., An Autobiography_, Clement K. Shorter, 207

  _Clansman, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 241, 249

  Clark, Barrett H., 254;
    _How to Produce Amateur Plays_, 263

  Clark, Martha Haskell, _The Home Road_, 287

  Clements, Colin C., _Plays for a Folding Theatre_, 255;
    _Plays for Pagans_, 255

  _Cloud and Silver_, E. V. Lucas, 219, 220, 230

  _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_, Clyde Fitch, 203, 204

  Cobb, Irvin S., 31, 83, 328, 329, 330;
    _Cobb’s America Guyed Books_, 31;
    _Goin’ On Fourteen_, 90

  _Cobb’s America Guyed Books_, Irvin S. Cobb, 31

  _Colette’s Best Recipes: A Book of French Cookery_, Marie Jacques, 122

  Collins, Dr., _Taking the Literary Pulse_, 283

  _Complete Dog Book, The_, Dr. William A. Bruette, 34

  _Coming, The_, J. C. Snaith, 364, 366, 373

  _Commonsense of Health, The_, Dr. S. M. Rinehart, 121

  _Comrades_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 249

  Connor, Ralph, _Treading the Winepress_, 170

  _Conqueror Passes, A_, Larry Barretto, 179

  _Constitution of the United States, The: Its Sources and Its
        Application_, Thomas James Norton, 322

  _Constitution of the United States, The: Yesterday, Today—Tomorrow?_
        Beck, 322

  _Contemporary Drama of England, The_, Thomas H. Dickinson, 265

  _Contemporary Drama of France, The_, Frank W. Chandler, 265

  _Contemporary Drama of Ireland, The_, Ernest Boyd, 265

  _Contemporary Drama of Italy, The_, Lander MacClintock, 265

  _Contemporary Drama of Russia, The_, Leo Wiener, 264

  _Contributions of Science to Religion_, Shailer Mathews, 353, 355

  _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and Achievement_, Arthur
        Holmes, 361

  _Cooking for Two: A Handbook for Young Housekeepers_, Janet McKenzie
        Hill, 122

  Coolidge, Dr. Emelyn Lincoln, _The Home Care of Sick Children_, 117,
        118

  Coolidge, Susan, _What Katy Did_, 93

  Cooper, Courtney Ryley, _see_ Chapter xviii, 38, 290-303;
    _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything!_, 295, 297, 299, 300, 302, 303;
    _The Cross-Cut_, 295, 296, 302;
    _The Last Frontier_, 295, 296, 303;
    _The White Desert_, 295, 296, 302;
    _Under the Big Top_, 290, 295, 297, 299, 303

  _Covered Wagon, The_, Emerson Hough, 233, 235, 236, 246

  _Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play, The_, Percival Wilde, 264

  Crane, Stephen, _The Bride Comes to Open Sky_, 242;
    _The Open Boat_, 242;
    _The Red Badge of Courage_, 242, 249

  _Croatan_, Mary Johnston, 385, 387, 389

  _Crome Yellow_, Aldous Huxley, 98, 101, 104, 109, 110, 111, 113

  Cronwright-Schreiner, S. C., _The Life of Olive Schreiner_, 208

  _Cross-Cut, The_, Courtney R. Cooper, 295, 296, 302

  _Cuddy of the White Tops_, Earl, Chapin May, 181

  _Cures_, James J. Walsh, 359


  Dana, Richard Henry, _Two Years Before The Mast_, 92

  Dark, Sidney, _The Book of England for Young People_, 91;
    _The Book of France for Young People_, 91;
    _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, 91

  _Daughter of the Rich, A_, Mary E. Waller, 93

  _David Blaize of King’s_, E. F. Benson, 96

  _David Wilmot, Free Soiler_, Charles Buxton Going, 211

  Davis, Owen, _Icebound_, 257;
    _The Detour_, 257

  _Dawn, and Other One-Act Plays of Life Today_, Percival Wilde, 259

  De la Mare, Walter, 85

  _Deep in the Hearts of Men_, Mary E. Waller, 180

  _Defeat of Youth, The_, Aldous Huxley, 104, 106, 113

  _Definite Object, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 61, 79, 81

  _Delta Wife, The_, Walter McClellan, 262

  _Detour, The_, Owen Davis, 257

  Dickens, Charles, _A Child’s History of England_, 91

  Dickinson, Emily, _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_, 277, 278

  Dickinson, Thomas H., _The Contemporary Drama of England_, 265

  _Dictionary of Similes, A_, Frank J. Wilstach, 329, 330

  Dix, Beulah Marie, 254

  Dixon, Thomas, _see_ Chapter xiv, 240-241;
    _A Man of the People_, 241, 249;
    _Comrades_, 240, 249;
    _The Black Hood_, 240, 241, 249;
    _The Clansman_, 240, 241, 249;
    _The Fall of A Nation_, 241, 249;
    _The Leopard’s Spots_, 240, 249;
    _The Man in Gray_, 241, 249;
    _The One Woman_, 240, 249;
    _The Root of Evil_, 240, 249;
    _The Sins of the Father_, 241, 249;
    _The Southerner_, 241, 249;
    _The Traitor_, 240, 249;
    _The Victim_, 241, 249;
    _The Way of a Man_, 241, 249

  _Doctor Looks at Literature, The_, Dr. Joseph Collins, 283

  Dodge, Daniel Kilham, _Abraham Lincoln—Master of Words_, 323, 324

  Donham, S. Agnes, _Marketing and Housework Manual_, 123;
    _Spending the Family Income_, 123

  _Doors of the Night_, Frank L. Packard, 339, 348

  _Door That Has No Key, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 188, 195

  _Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays_, A. P. Herbert, 255

  _Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 133,
        140

  Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, _A Study in Scarlet_, 201;
    _Micah Clarke_, 201;
    _Memories and Adventures_, 201, 202;
    _The Sign of the Four_, 201;
    _The White Company_, 201

  _Dragon’s Glory_, Gertrude Knevels, 261

  _Dramatics for School and Community_, Claude Merton Wise, 264

  _Duke’s Son_, Cosmo Hamilton, 193, 195

  Dulac, Edmund, _Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book_, 87

  _Dumb-Bell of Brookfield_, John T. Foote, 36

  _Dwellers in the Hills_, Melville Davisson Post, 53, 56


  _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, 87

  Eaton and Carb, _Queen Victoria_, 261

  _Echo de Paris_, Laurence Housman, 280

  _Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book_, 87

  Egan, Maurice F., _Confessions of A Book-Lover_, 206;
    _Everybody’s St. Francis_, 206;
    _Recollections of a Happy Life_, 206, 207;
    _Ten Years Near the German Frontier_, 206

  Eggleston, Edward, 328

  _Egyptian Tales of Magic_, Eleanor Myers Jewett, 94

  _Eight Comedies for Little Theatres_, Wilde, 259

  Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, _The Letters of Madame_, 211

  Elliot, Maud Howe, _Three Generations_, 308

  _Elsie and the Child and Other Stories_, Arnold Bennett, 173

  Emerson, Wm. R. P., M. D., _Nutrition and Growth in Children_, 124

  _English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, compiled, Curtis Hidden
        Page, 287

  Erskine, Laurie Yorke, _The Laughing Rider_, 180

  Ertz, Susan, 171;
    _Madame Claire_, 175;
    _Nina_, 175

  Espina, Concha, _Mariflor_, 178;
    _The Red Beacon_, 177

  _Essays of Today_, F. H. Pritchard, 283

  _Essays on Poetry_, J. C. Squire, 278

  _Exemplary Theatre, The_, Granville Barker, 264


  Fairbanks, Douglas, _Youth Points the Way_, 325

  _Fairies and Chimneys_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Fairy Flute, The_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Fairy Green, The_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, 87

  _Fall of a Nation, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _False Dawn_, Edith Wharton, 305, 310, 313

  _Familiar Quotations_, John Bartlett, 328

  _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_, Fannie Ferber Fox, 116

  Farmer, Fannie Merritt, _Food and Cookery for the Sick and
        Convalescent_, 123;
    _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_, 115, 116

  Farnol, Jeffery, _see_ Chapter iv, 60-82;
    _Beltane the Smith_, 74, 79, 81;
    _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_, 79, 81;
    _Great Britain at War_, 75, 78, 81;
    _The Honorable Mr. Tawnish_, 77, 78, 81;
    _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_, 79, 81;
    _My Lady Caprice_, 68, 81;
    _Our Admirable Betty_, 61, 79, 81;
    _Peregrine’s Progress_, 79, 81;
    _Sir John Dering_, 80, 81;
    _The Amateur Gentleman_, 75, 79, 81;
    _The Broad Highway_, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
        77, 78, 79, 81;
    _The Definite Object_, 61, 79, 81;
    _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, 75, 78, 81;
    _The Money Moon_, 68, 81

  Farrar, John, 86;
    _Forgotten Shrines_, 286;
    _Songs for Parents_, 286;
    _The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays_, 86, 263, 286;
    _The Middle Twenties_, 286

  Ferber, Maurice, _Lord Byron_, 261

  _Fern Lover’s Companion, The_, George Henry Tilton, 34

  Field, Eugene, 328

  _Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_, ed., Frank Shay and Pierre
        Loving, 254

  _Fifty-four Forty or Fight_, Emerson Hough, 236, 245

  _Fifty New Poems for Children_, 94

  _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_, Everett Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Fighting Scrub, The_, Ralph Henry Barbour, 88

  _Fires of Ambition_, George Gibbs, 371, 372, 374

  _First Days of Knowledge, The_, Frederic Arnold Kummer, 86

  _First Days of Man, The_, Frederic Arnold Kummer, 86

  _Fishes_, David Starr Jordan, 32

  _Fishing with a Boy_, Leonard Hulit, 40

  Fitch, Clyde, _Clyde Fitch and His Letters_, 203, 204;
    _Plays of Clyde Fitch_, 257

  Flammarion, M. Camille, _Haunted Houses_, 358

  _Foes_, Mary Johnston, 382, 383, 387, 389

  _Follow the Ball_, Ralph Henry Barbour, 88, 89

  Foote, John Taintor, 36, 91;
    _A Wedding Gift_, 36;
    _Dumb-Bell of Brookfield_, 36;
    _Pocono Shot_, 36

  _Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent_, Fannie Merritt
        Farmer, 123

  Fordyce, Dr. Claude P., _Trail Craft_, 35

  _Forgotten Shrines_, John Farrar, 286

  _Forty Good Night Tales_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Forty Years in Washington_, David S. Barry, 208

  Fosdick, Rev. Harry Emerson, D.D., _Twelve Tests of Character_, 362

  Foster, Maximilian, _Humdrum House?_ 180

  _Foundations of Personality, The_, Abraham Myerson, M. D., 360, 361

  _Founders of the Empire_, Philip Gibbs, 18, 26

  _Four Plays_, Cosmo Hamilton, 190, 195, 258

  _Four Stragglers, The_, Frank L. Packard, 339, 342, 343, 344, 346, 348

  _Fourteen Years a Sailor_, John Kenlon, 95

  Fox, Fannie F., _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_, 116

  French, Allen, _The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, 93

  French, Joseph Lewis, 28, 29;
    _Pioneer West, The_, 28, 29

  _Friends of Diggeldy Dan, The_, Edwin P. Norwood, 94

  _From Now On_, Frank L. Packard, 339, 348

  _Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale, The_, Frank L. Packard, 340, 348

  Fyleman, Rose, _Fairies and Chimneys_, 84;
    _Forty Good Night Tales_, 84;
    _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_, 84;
    _The Fairy Flute_, 84;
    _The Fairy Green_, 84;
    _The Rainbow Cat_, 84


  Gaige, Grace, _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_, 287, 288

  Galwan, Ghulam Rassul, _Servant of Sahibs_, 211

  _Game Ranger’s Note Book, A_, A. Blayney Percival, 38, 39

  Ganoe, William A., _A History of the United States Army_, 318, 319

  _Garden Varieties_, Kenyon Nicholson, 255

  Gaze, Harold, _The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_,
        94

  Geister, Edna, _It Is To Laugh_, 85;
    _Let’s Play_, 85;
    _What Shall We Play_, 85

  _Genevra’s Money_, E. V. Lucas, 217, 230

  _George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_, Philip Gibbs, 20, 26

  _Geste of Duke Jocelyn, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 75, 78, 81

  _Giant’s Stair, The_, Wilbur Daniel Steele, 262

  Gibbs, Arthur Hamilton, 315;
    _Gun Fodder_, 316

  Gibbs, George, _see_ Chapter xxiii, 364-375;
    _Fires of Ambition_, 371, 372, 374;
    _In Search of Mademoiselle_, 370, 374;
    _The Medusa Emerald_, 370, 374;
    _Sackcloth and Scarlet_, 372, 374;
    _The Black Stone_, 371, 374;
    _The Bolted Door_, 370, 374;
    _The Golden Bough_, 371, 374;
    _The House of Mohun_, 371, 372, 374;
    _The Secret Witness_, 371, 374;
    _The Splendid Outcast_, 371, 374;
    _The Yellow Dove_, 371, 374;
    _Youth Triumphant_, 371, 374

  Gibbs, Philip, _see_ Chapter i, 15-27, 315;
    _Adventures in Journalism_, 17, 18, 20, 22, 27;
    _Founders of the Empire_, 18, 26;
    _George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_, 20, 26;
    _Heirs Apparent_, 25, 26;
    _King’s Favorite_, 20, 26;
    _Little Novels of Nowadays_, 25, 26;
    _Men and Women of the French Revolution_, 20, 26;
    _Now It Can Be Told_, 23, 27;
    _People of Destiny_, 23, 27;
    _The Middle of the Road_, 23, 24, 25, 26;
    _The Street of Adventure_, 19, 26;
    _Wounded Souls_, 23, 26

  _Gissing_, Frank Swinnerton, 282

  _Giving and Receiving_, E. V. Lucas, 219, 220, 221, 223, 230

  _Goblin’s Glen, The: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, Harold Gaze,
        94

  Going, Charles Buxton, _David Wilmot, Free Soiler_, 211

  _Goin’ Fishin’_, Dixie Carroll, 39

  _Goin’ On Fourteen_, Irvin S. Cobb, 90

  _Golden Bough, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 374

  _Goose Hangs High, The_, Lewis Beach, 256

  _Great Britain at War_, Jeffery Farnol, 75, 78, 81

  _Greater Love Hath No Man_, Frank L. Packard, 334, 335, 338, 347

  _Great Impersonation, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 133, 136, 141

  _Great Prince Shan, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 133, 141

  _Great Secret, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 134, 139

  _Green Hat, The_, Michael Arlen, 267, 276

  Gregor, Elmer Russell, 243, 244;
    _Captain Jim Mason_, 244, 250

  _Gun Fodder_, Arthur Hamilton Gibbs, 316

  _Guns of Bull Run, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  _Guns of Shiloh, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247


  _Half Gods_, Lyon Montross, 169

  Hall, G. Stanley, _see_ Chapter ix, 143-166;
    _Adolescence_, 152, 165;
    _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, 153, 166;
    _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_, 143, 144, 148, 166

  Hamilton, Cosmo, _see_ Chapter xi, 182-196, 315;
    _Another Scandal_, 189, 195;
    _Duke’s Son_, 193, 195;
    _Four Plays_, 190, 195, 258;
    _His Friend and His Wife_, 189, 195;
    _Scandal_, 188, 190, 195;
    _The Blindness of Virtue_, 187, 188, 190, 195;
    _The Blue Room_, 189, 195;
    _The Door That Has No Key_, 188, 195;
    _The Miracle of Love_, 188, 195;
    _The Rustle of Silk_, 189, 195;
    _The Sins of the Children_, 188, 195;
    _Unwritten History_, 182, 191, 192, 193, 195;
    _Which Is Absurd_, 183, 184, 185, 195;
    _Who Cares_, 189, 195

  _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, Frank M. Chapman, 40

  _Handmaid of the Lord, A_, Margaret Culkin Banning, 169, 170

  _Haunted Houses_, M. Camille Flammarion, 358

  _Hausfrau Rampant, The_, E. V. Lucas, 223, 234, 230

  Hawthorne, _A Wonder Book_, 87

  Hawtrey, Charles, _The Truth at Last_, 208

  _Health Through Will Power_, James J. Walsh, 359

  _Healthy Babies_, S. Josephine Baker, M. D., 123

  _Healthy Children_, S. Josephine Baker, M. D., 124

  _Healthy Mothers_, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, 118

  _Heart of a Dog, The_, Albert Payson Terhune, 91

  _Heavenly Ladder, The_, Compton Mackenzie, 170

  _Heirs Apparent_, Philip Gibbs, 25, 26

  Hellman, Sam, 378;
    _Low Bridge and Punk Pungs_, 181

  Henshall, Dr. James A., 33, 34;
    _Book of the Black Bass_, 33

  Herbert, A. P., _Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays_, 255

  Hichens, Robert, _After the Verdict_, 176, 177

  _High Fires_, Marjorie Barkley McClure, 167, 169, 170

  Hill, Frederick Trevor, 244;
    _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_, 244, 251;
    _On the Trail of Washington_, 244, 251;
    _Washington, The Man of Action_, 244, 251

  Hill, Janet McKenzie, _Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making_, 123;
    _Cooking for Two_, 122

  _His Friend and His Wife_, Cosmo Hamilton, 189, 195

  _History of American Privateers, A_, Maclay, 320

  _History of the American Bar, A_, Charles Warren, 321

  _History of the United States Army, A_, William A. Ganoe, 318, 319

  Holden, Dr. George Parker, _Streamcraft: An Angling Manual_, 39

  Holliday, Robert Cortes, _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, 285;
    _Walking-Stick Papers_, 285

  Holmes, Arthur, _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and
        Achievement_, 361

  Holt, Dr. L. Emmett, _Care and Feeding of Children_, 115, 117

  _Home Care of Sick Children, The_, Dr. Emelyn Lincoln Coolidge, 117,
        118

  _Home Road, The_, Martha Haskell Clark, 287

  _Honorable Mr. Tawnish, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 77, 78, 81

  Hough, Emerson, _see_ Chapter xiv, 28, 233-236;
    _Fifty-four Forty or Fight_, 236, 245;
    _Mother of Gold_, 236, 246;
    _North of 36_, 233, 236, 246;
    _The Covered Wagon_, 233, 235, 236, 246;
    _The Magnificent Adventure_, 236, 245;
    _The Mississippi Bubble_, 235, 236, 246;
    _The Singing Mouse Stories_, 235, 245;
    _The Story of the Cowboy_, 235, 245

  _House of Mohun, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 372, 374

  Housman, Laurence, 85;
    _Echo de Paris_, 280

  _How to Know Your Child_, Miriam Finn Scott, 124

  _How to Produce Amateur Plays_, Barrett H. Clark, 263

  Huddleston Sisley, _Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr_, 209

  Hudson, Holland, _Action!_ 262

  Hudson, Jay William, _Abbé Pierre_, 288, 289

  Hulit, Leonard, 39, 40;
    _Fishing with a Boy_, 40;
    _The Salt Water Angler_, 39

  _Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History_, MacCurdy, 357, 358

  _Humdrum House?_ Maximilian Foster, 180

  Huxley, Aldous, _see_ Chapter vi, 97-113, 197;
    _Antic Hay_, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 109, 110, 111, 113;
    _Crome Yellow_, 98, 101, 104, 109, 110, 111, 113;
    _Leda_, 104, 106, 113;
    _Limbo_, 98, 104, 110, 113;
    _Mortal Coils_, 98;
    _On the Margin_, 111, 112, 113;
    _The Burning Wheel_, 104, 106, 113;
    _The Defeat of Youth_, 104, 106, 113;
    _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_, 112, 113


  _Icebound_, Owen Davis, 257

  _In Earthen Bowls_, Nellie Burget Miller, 286

  _In Evolution: The Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, 356

  _Inner History of English Politics, The_, Earl of Birkenhead, 314

  _Inn of Discontent and Other Fantastic Plays, The_, Percival Wilde,
        259

  _In Search of Mademoiselle_, George Gibbs, 370, 374

  _In the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands_, J. A. McGuire, 40

  _Inverted Pyramid, The_, Bertrand W. Sinclair, 173, 174

  _It Is To Laugh_, Edna Geister, 85


  Jacks, L. P., _A Living Universe_, 352;
    _Realities and Sham_, 352;
    _Religious Perplexities_, 350, 351, 352;
    _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_, 352

  Jackson, Helen Hunt, _Nelly’s Silver Mine_, 93

  Jacques, Marie, _Colette’s Best Recipes: A Book of French Cookery_,
        122

  _Jennifer Lorn_, Elinor Wylie, 281

  Jeritza, Maria, _Sunlight and Song_, 204

  _Jesus the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, G. Stanley Hall, 153,
        166

  Jewett, Eleanor Myers, _Egyptian Tales of Magic_, 94

  _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_, Frank L. Packard, 340, 348

  _Jist Huntin’_, Ozark Ripley, 40

  John, Gwen, _The Prince_, 260

  Johnson, Owen, 83, 89, 90;
    _Blue Blood_, 179;
    _Skippy Bedelle_, 90;
    _The Prodigious Hickey_, 89;
    _The Tennessee Shad_, 89;
    _The Varmint_, 89

  Johnson, Robert Underwood, _Remembered Yesterdays_, 208

  Johnston, Mary, _see_ Chapter xxiv, 208, 376-389;
    _Cease Firing_, 377, 378, 389;
    _Croatan_, 385, 387, 389;
    _Foes_, 382, 383, 387, 389;
    _Lewis Rand_, 379, 388;
    _Michael Forth_, 376, 383, 389;
    _Pioneers of the Old South_, 387;
    _Prisoners of Hope_, 378, 388;
    _Silver Cross_, 383, 384, 389;
    _Sweet Rocket_, 383, 389;
    _The Long Roll_, 377, 378, 389;
    _The Slave Ship_, 387, 389;
    _The Witch_, 382, 389;
    _To Have and To Hold_, 377, 378, 388

  Jones, Henry Arthur, 254, 258

  Jordan, David Starr, 32, 33;
    _Fishes_, 32


  Kellogg, Vernon, _In Evolution: The Way of Life_, 356

  Kelly, George, _The Show-Off_, 259

  Kenlon, John, _Fourteen Years a Sailor_, 95

  Keyes, Frances Parkinson, _Letters From a Senator’s Wife_, 204

  _Khoja, The_, Buck, 327

  King, Beulah, _Ruffs and Pompoms_, 93

  _King’s Favorite_, Philip Gibbs, 20, 26

  Knevels, Gertrude, _Dragon’s Glory_, 261

  Kummer, Frederic Arnold, 86;
    _The First Days of Knowledge_, 86;
    _The First Days of Man_, 86


  _Labor Movement in a Government Industry, The_, Sterling Denhard
        Spero, 322

  _Lake and Stream Game Fishing_, Dixie Carroll, 39

  _Lamp and the Bell, The_, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 263

  _Last Frontier, The_, Courtney R. Cooper, 295, 296, 303

  _Laughing Rider, The_, Laurie Yorke Erskine, 180

  Laut, Agnes C., _The Quenchless Light_, 181

  Lawrence, David, _The True Story of Woodrow Wilson_, 198

  _Leda_, Aldous Huxley, 104, 106, 113

  Leighton, Dr. Joseph A., _Man and the Cosmos_, 353;
    _Religion and the Mind of Today_, 350, 353

  _Leopard’s Spots, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 249

  _Let’s Play_, Edna Geister, 85

  _Letters of Madame, The_, Elizabeth-Charlotte of Bavaria, 211

  _Letters from a Senator’s Wife_, Frances Parkinson Keyes, 204

  _Lewis Rand_, Mary Johnston, 379, 388

  _Life and Confession of a Psychologist_, G. Stanley Hall, 143, 144,
        148, 166

  _Life of Anne Boleyn, The_, Philip W. Sergeant, 210

  _Life of Charles Lamb, The_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 229

  _Life of Jesus_, Ernest Renan, 350, 351

  _Life of John Marshall_, Beveridge, 321

  _Life of Olive Schreiner, The_, S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, 208

  _Lighted Way, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 126, 140

  _Lilies of the Field, The_, John Hastings Turner, 260

  _Limbo_, Aldous Huxley, 98, 104, 110, 113

  Lincoln, Joseph C., _Cap’n Eri_, 171;
    _Rugged Water_, 171, 172

  Lincoln, Natalie Sumner, _The Thirteenth Letter_, 180

  _Lion’s Mouth, The_, George Madden Martin, Harriet L. Kennedy, 262

  _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, Courtney R. Cooper, 295, 297, 299,
        300, 302, 303

  _Listening Man, The_, John A. Moroso, 95

  _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, Robert C. Holliday, 285

  _Literary Spotlight, The_, edited by John Farrar, 207

  _Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_, Louisa M. Alcott, 92

  _Little Novels of Nowadays_, Philip Gibbs, 25, 26

  _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters_, E. V. Lucas, 225, 229

  _Little Women: or Meg, Joe, Beth and Amy_, Louisa M. Alcott, 83, 92

  _Living Universe, A_, Jacks, 352

  _Locked Book, The_, Frank L. Packard, 331, 346, 348

  Lodge, Sir Oliver, _Making of Man_, 355

  _London Venture, A_, Michael Arlen, 272, 276

  _Long Roll, The_, Mary Johnston, 377, 378, 389

  _Lord Byron_, Maurice Ferber, 261

  _Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion, The_, Jacks, 352

  _Low Bridge and Punk Pungs_, Sam Hellman, 181

  Lucas, E. V., _see_ Chapter xiii, 212-231, 284;
    _Adventures and Enthusiasms_, 221, 223, 230;
    _Advisory Ben_, 213, 215, 217, 230;
    _A Wanderer Among Pictures: A Guide to the Great Galleries of
        Europe_, 225, 231;
    _A Wanderer in London_, 213, 230;
    _Cloud and Silver_, 219, 220, 230;
    _Genevra’s Money_, 217, 230;
    _Giving and Receiving_, 219, 220, 221, 223, 230;
    _Little Wanderings Among the Great Masters_, 225, 229;
    _Luck of the Year_, 221, 230;
    _More Wanderings in London_, 213, 231;
    _One Day and Another_, 219, 230;
    _Roving East and Roving West_, 224, 230;
    _The Hausfrau Rampant_, 223, 224, 230;
    _The Life of Charles Lamb_, 213, 229;
    _The Open Road_, 213, 224, 229;
    _The Vermilion Box_, 216, 230;
    _Verena, in the Midst_, 217, 230;
    _Vermeer of Delft_, 213, 214, 229

  _Luck of the Year_, E. V. Lucas, 221, 230

  Lynd, Robert, _The Blue Lion_, 284

  Lytle, Horace, _Breaking a Bird Dog_, 40


  MacClintock, Lander, _The Contemporary Drama of Italy_, 265

  MacCurdy, _Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History_, 357, 358

  Mackenzie, Compton, _The Altar Steps_, 170;
    _The Heavenly Ladder_, 170;
    _The Parson’s Progress_, 170

  Maclay, _A History of American Privateers_, 320

  MacMillen, Mary, _Pan or Pierrot_, 263

  _Madame Claire_, Susan Ertz, 175

  _Madras House, The_, Granville Barker, 256

  _Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays, The_, John Farrar, 86, 263, 286

  _Magnificent Adventure, The_, Emerson Hough, 236, 245

  _Maker of History, A_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 133, 134, 139

  _Making of Man_, Sir Oliver Lodge, 355

  _Man and the Cosmos_, Joseph A. Leighton, 353

  _Man in Gray, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _Man of the People, A_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _Manuscript of St. Helena, The_, Willard Parker, 210

  _Many Waters_, Elinor Chipp, 181

  _Mariflor_, Concha Espina, 178

  _Marketing and Housework Manual_, S. Agnes Donham, 123

  Marks, Jeannette, 254

  Marlowe, Mabel, _The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories_, 86

  Marquis, Don, 328;
    _Words and Thoughts_, 262

  _Marrying of Ann Leete, The_, Granville Barker, 256

  Marshall, Bernard, 244, 245;
    _Cedric the Forester_, 245, 251;
    _Redcoat and Minute Man_, 245, 251;
    _The Torch Bearers_, 245, 251;
    _Walter of Tiverton_, 245, 251

  Marshall, Edison, 29, 30;
    _Seward’s Folly_, 29

  Marsh, Charles Fielding, _After Harvest_, 181

  _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_, Jeffery Farnol, 79, 81

  Martin, Geo. M., Harriet L. Kennedy, _The Lion’s Mouth_, 262

  _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, Masefield, 92

  Masefield, John, _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, 92

  Mathews, Shailer, _Contributions of Science to Religion_, 353, 355

  Maurois, André, 197, 198;
    _Ariel, The Life of Shelley_, 197;
    _The Silences of Colonel Bramble_, 197

  May, Earl Chapin, _Cuddy of the White Tops_, 181

  McCann, Alfred W., _The Science of Eating_, 123

  McClellan, Walter, _The Delta Wife_, 262

  McClure, Marjorie Barkley, _High Fires_, 167, 169, 170

  McGuire, J. A., _In the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands_, 40

  McKenna, Stephen, _By Intervention of Providence_, 285;
    _Tomorrow and Tomorrow_, 180

  _Medicine Gold_, Warren H. Miller, 94

  _Medusa Emerald, The_, George Gibbs, 370, 374

  Mégroz, R. L., _Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical
        Study_, 279

  Melville, Lewis, _Nell Gwynn_, 211

  _Memoirs of a Midget_, Mégroz, 279

  _Memories and Adventures_, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 201, 202

  _Men and Women of the French Revolution_, Philip Gibbs, 20, 26

  _Men of the Old Stone Age_, Henry Fairfield Osborne, 356

  _Michael Forth_, Mary Johnston, 376, 383, 389

  _Middle of the Road, The_, Philip Gibbs, 23, 24, 25, 26

  Middleton, George, 254

  _Middle Twenties, The_, John Farrar, 286

  Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 261;
    _Aria da Capo_, 263;
    _The Lamp and The Bell_, 263

  Miller, Nellie Burget, _In Earthen Bowls_, 286

  Miller, Warren H., _Medicine Gold_, 94, 95

  _Miracle Man, The_, Frank L. Packard, 332, 336, 345, 347

  _Miracle of Love, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 188, 195

  _Mischief Maker, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 134, 140

  _Mississippi Bubble_, Emerson Hough, 235, 236, 245

  Mitchell, Ruth Comfort, 171;
    _A White Stone_, 177

  Moir, Fred L. M., _After Livingston_, 39

  Monaghan, Elizabeth A., _What to Eat and How to Prepare It_, 123

  _Money Moon, The_, Jeffery Farnol, 68, 81

  _Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris, Melville Post_, 55,
        57, 58

  Montross, Lynn, _Half Gods_, 169

  Moore, Anne Carroll, _New Roads to Childhood_, 96;
    _Roads to Childhood_, 96

  _Morality Play for the Leisure Class, A_, John L. Balderston, 262

  _More Wanderings in London_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 231

  Morley, Christopher, 261, 288, 316;
    _and_ Don Marquis, _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, 179

  Moroso, John A., _The Listening Man_, 95

  _Mortal Coils_, Aldous Huxley, 98

  Moses, _A Treasury of Plays for Children_, 255

  Moses, Montroses J., _Representative British Dramas: Victorian and
        Modern_, 253;
    _Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and
        Transitional_, 253

  _Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, Maude Radford Warren _and_ Eve
        Davenport, 85

  _Mother of Gold_, Emerson Hough, 236, 246

  _Mothercraft Manual, The_, Mary L. Read, 124

  _Mountain School-Teacher, The_, Melville Post, 54, 57

  _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_, Donald Ogden Stewart, 32

  Mullins, Dr. E. G., _Christianity at the Crossroads_, 350, 355

  _My Lady Caprice_, Jeffery Farnol, 68, 81

  _My Life in Art_, Constantin Stanislavsky, 201, 202, 203, 265

  Myers, James, _Representative Government in Industry_, 322

  Myerson, Abraham, M. D., _The Foundations of Personality_, 360, 361

  _Mysterious Mr. Sabin, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 134, 139

  _Mysterious Rifleman, The_, Everett Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Mystery at the Blue Villa, The_, Melville Post, 54, 56


  _Nell Gwynn_, Lewis Melville, 211

  _Nelly’s Silver Mine_, Helen Hunt Jackson, 93

  _New Roads to Childhood_, Anne Carroll Moore, 96

  _New Year’s Day_, Edith Wharton, 305, 312, 313

  Newton, W. Douglas, _The Brute_, 180

  Nicholson, Kenyon, _Garden Varieties_, 255

  _Night Operator, The_, Frank L. Packard, 332, 348

  _Nina_, Susan Ertz, 175

  _Normal Mind, The_, William H. Burnham, 362

  _North of 36_, Emerson Hough, 233, 236, 246

  Norton, Thomas James, _The Constitution of the United States: Its
        Sources and Its Application_, 322

  Norwood, Edwin P., _The Friends of Diggeldy Dan_, 94

  _Now That I’m Fifty_, Albert Payson Terhune, 363

  _Now It Can Be Told_, Philip Gibbs, 23, 27

  _Number One Joy Street_, Collected Stories, 84

  _Number Two Joy Street_, Collected Stories, 84

  _Nutrition and Growth in Children_, William R. P. Emerson, M. D., 124


  O. Henry, 293

  _Old Ladies, The_, Walpole, 172

  _Old Maid, The_, Edith Wharton, 305, 311, 313

  _Old New York_ (_False Dawn_, _The Old Maid_, _The Spark_, and _New
        Year’s Day_), Edith Wharton, 305, 309, 313

  O’Neill, Eugene, 254, 261

  _On the Iron at Big Cloud_, Frank L. Packard, 332, 334, 347

  _On the Margin_, Aldous Huxley, 111, 112, 113

  _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_, Frederick T. Hill, 244, 251

  _On the Trail of Washington_, Frederick T. Hill, 244, 251

  _One-Act Plays from the Yiddish_, _trans._, Etta Block, 255

  _One Day and Another_, E. V. Lucas, 219, 230

  _One-Piece Dinners_, Mary D. Chambers, 122

  _One Thousand and One Longer Plays_, compiled by Frank Shay, 254

  _One Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre_, compiled by
        Frank Shay, 254

  _One Woman, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 249

  _Open Boat, The_, Stephen Crane, 242

  _Open Road, The_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 224, 229

  Oppenheim, E. Phillips, _see_ Chapter viii, 126-142;
    _A Maker of History_, 133, 134, 139;
    _The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_, 133, 140;
    _The Great Impersonation_, 133, 136, 141;
    _The Great Prince Shan_, 133, 141;
    _The Great Secret_, 134, 139;
    _The Lighted Way_, 126, 140;
    _The Mischief Maker_, 134, 140;
    _The Mysterious Mr. Sabin_, 134, 139;
    _The Way of These Women_, 136, 140;
    _The Wrath to Come_, 128, 141

  Osborne, Henry Fairfield, _Men of the Old Stone Age_, 356

  _Our Admirable Betty_, Jeffery Farnol, 61, 79, 81

  _Out Trail, The_, Mary Roberts Rinehart, 31

  _Outdoorsman’s Handbook, The_, by H. S. Watson, _and_ Capt. Paul A.
        Curtis, Jr., 39


  Packard, Frank L., _see_ Chapter xxi, 331-348;
    _Doors of the Night_, 339, 348;
    _From Now On_, 339, 348;
    _Greater Love Hath No Man_, 334, 335, 338, 347;
    _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_, 340, 348;
    _On the Iron at Big Cloud_, 332, 334, 347;
    _Pawned_, 339, 348;
    _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_, 340, 347;
    _The Belovéd Traitor_, 338, 347;
    _The Four Stragglers_, 339, 342, 343, 344, 346, 348;
    _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_, 340, 348;
    _The Locked Book_, 331, 346, 348;
    _The Miracle Man_, 332, 336, 345, 347;
    _The Night Operator_, 332, 348;
    _The Sin That Was His_, 338, 347;
    _The Wire Devils_, 332, 348

  Paleologue, Maurice, _An Ambassador’s Memoirs_, 199

  _Pan or Pierrot_, Mary MacMillen, 263

  _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, Christopher Morley _and_ Don Marquis, 179

  Parker, Willard, _The Manuscript of St. Helena_, 210

  Parkman, Francis, 28, 29

  Parrish, Anne, _Semi-Attached_, 179

  _Parson’s Progress, The_, Compton Mackenzie, 170

  Patri, Angelo, _Child Training_, 119, 120;
    _Talks to Mothers_, 120

  _Pawned_, Frank L. Packard, 339, 348

  _People of Destiny_, Philip Gibbs, 23, 27

  Percival, A. Blayney, _A Game Ranger’s Note Book_, 38, 39

  _Peregrine’s Progress_, Jeffery Farnol, 79, 81

  _Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_, Everett Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Pioneer West, The: Narratives of the Westward March of Empire_,
        Joseph Lewis French, 28, 29

  _Pioneers of the Old South_, Mary Johnston, 387

  “_Piracy,_” Michael Arlen, 267, 272, 274, 275, 276

  _Plays for a Folding Theatre_, Colin Campbell Clements, 255

  _Plays for Pagans_, Colin C. Clements, 255

  _Plays of Clyde Fitch_, Clyde Fitch, 257

  _Places Young Americans Want to Know_, Everett Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Pocono Shot_, John T. Foote, 36

  Podmore, Frank, _Robert Owen_, 210

  _Poincaré: The Man of the Ruhr_, Sisley Huddleston, 209

  _Popular History of English Poetry, A_, T. Earle Welby, 279

  Post, Melville Davisson, _see_ Chapter iii, 41-59;
    _Dwellers in the Hills_, 53, 56;
    _Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris_, 55, 57, 58;
    _The Mountain School-Teacher_, 54, 57;
    _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_, 54, 56;
    _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_, 55, 56;
    _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_, 51, 52, 56;
    _Uncle Abner_, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58;
    _Walker of the Secret Service_, 55, 57, 58

  _Practical Cook Book_, Bertha E. L. Stockbridge, 116

  _Prince, The_, Gwen John, 260

  _Princeton Sketches_, Maitland Belknap, 289

  _Principal Girl, The_, J. C. Snaith, 367, 373

  _Prisoners of Hope_, Mary Johnston, 378, 388

  Pritchard, F. H., _Essays of Today_, 283

  _Problems of Life_, Leon Trotsky, 317, 318

  _Prodigious Hickey, The_, Owen Johnston, 89

  _Prospective Mother, The_, J. Morris Slemons, M. D., 123

  _Purple or the Red, The_, Charles Hitchcock Sherrill, 200, 316


  _Queen Victoria_, Eaton and Carb, 261

  _Quenchless Light, The_, Agnes C. Laut, 181

  _Question of Morality, and Other Plays, A_, Percival Wilde, 259


  _Rainbow Cat, The_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Rat’s Castle_, Roy Bridges, 95

  Read, Mary L., _The Mothercraft Manual_, 124

  _Realities and Shams_, Jacks, 352

  _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_, Grace Gaige, 287, 288

  _Recollections of a Happy Life_, Maurice Francis Egan, 206, 207

  _Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal, The_, Felix Adler, 352

  _Red Badge of Courage, The_, Stephen Crane, 242, 249

  _Redcoat and Minute Man_, Bernard Marshall, 245, 251

  _Red Beacon, The_, Concha Espina, 177

  _Religion and the Mind of Today_, Dr. Joseph A. Leighton, 350, 353

  _Religious Perplexities_, L. P. Jacks, 350, 351, 352

  _Remembered Yesterdays_, Robert Underwood Johnson, 208

  Renan, Ernest, _Life of Jesus_, 350, 351

  _Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern_, Montroses J.
        Moses, 253

  _Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional_,
        Montroses J. Moses, 253

  _Representative Government in Industry_, James Myers, 322

  _Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors, compiled_,
        Margaret G. Mayorga, 253

  _Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors_, 254

  _Representative One-Act Plays by Continental Authors_, 254

  _Representative Plays by Henry Arthur Jones_, 258

  _Riceyman Steps_, Arnold Bennett, 173

  Richardson, Dorothy, _The Book of Blanche_, 179

  Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 31, 171;
    _Temperamental People_, 172;
    _The Out Trail_, 31

  Rinehart, Dr. S. M., _The Commonsense of Health_, 121

  Ripley, Ozark, _Jist Huntin’_, 40

  Rives, Amelie, _The Sea Woman’s Cloak and November Eve_, 261

  _R. L. Stevenson_, Frank Swinnerton, 282

  _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books_, Anne
        Carroll Moore, 96

  _Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography_, A. Stewart, 208

  _Robert Owen_, Frank Podmore, 210

  _Rock of Chickamauga, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  _Rôles_, Elizabeth Alexander, 180

  _Romantic Lady, The_, Michael Arlen, 267, 276

  _Root of Evil, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 249

  _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_, Rose Fyleman, 84

  _Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, Sarah Addington, 94

  _Roving East and Roving West_, E. V. Lucas, 224, 230

  _Ruffs and Pompoms_, Beulah King, 93

  _Rugged Water_, Joseph C. Lincoln, 171, 172

  _Rustle of Silk, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 189, 195


  _Sackcloth and Scarlet_, George Gibbs, 372, 374

  _Sailor, The_, J. C. Snaith, 366, 373

  _Salt Water Angler, The_, Leonard Hulit, 39

  Sandwell Helen B., _The Valley of Color-Days_, 94

  Saylor, Henry H., _Tinkering With Tools_, 125

  _Scandal_, Cosmo Hamilton, 188, 190, 195

  _Science of Eating, The_, Alfred W. McCann, 123

  _Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, Edward G. Cheyney, 95

  Scott, Miriam Finn, _How to Know Your Children_, 124

  _Scouting on the Border_, Everett Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Scouts of Stonewall, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  _Sea Woman’s Cloak and November Eve, The_, Amelie Rives, 261

  _Secret Life, The_, Granville Barker, 256

  _Secret Witness, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 374

  _Semi-Attached_, Anne Parrish, 179

  Sergeant, Philip W., _Life of Anne Boleyn_, 210

  _Servant of Sahibs_, Ghulam Rassul Galwan, 211

  _Seward’s Folly_, Edison Marshall, 29

  _Sewing and Textiles_, Annabel Turner, 124

  _Shades of the Wilderness, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  Shakespeare, _The Tempest_, 87

  _Shank’s Mare_, Charles C. Stoddard, 35

  Sherrill, Charles Hitchcock, _The Purple or the Red_, 200, 316

  Shorter, Clement K., _C. K. S., An Autobiography_, 207

  _Show-Off, The_, George Kelly, 259

  _Show-Off, The_, William Almon Wolff, 180

  _Silences of Colonel Bramble, The_, André Maurois, 197

  _Silver Cross_, Mary Johnston, 383, 384, 389

  _Simple Souls_, John Hastings Turner, 260

  Sinclair, Bertrand W., 171;
    _The Inverted Pyramid_, 173, 174

  _Singing Mouse Stories, The_, Emerson Hough, 235, 245

  _Sins of the Children, The_, Cosmo Hamilton, 188, 195

  _Sins of the Father, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _Sin That Was His, The_, Frank L. Packard, 338, 347

  _Sir John Dering_, Jeffery Farnol, 80, 81

  _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose Anthology_, ed. Joseph Lewis
        French, 328

  _Skippy Bedelle_, Owen Johnson, 90

  _Slave Ship, The_, Mary Johnston, 387, 389

  _Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales, The_, 87

  Slemons, J. Morris, M. D., _The Prospective Mother_, 123

  _Sleuth of St. James’s Square, The_, Melville Post, 55, 56

  Smith, O. W., _Casting Tackle and Methods_, 39;
    _Trout Lore_, 39

  Snaith, J. C., _see_ Chapter xxiii, 364-375;
    _Araminta_, 367, 373;
    _Broke of Covenden_, 365, 373;
    _The Coming_, 364, 366, 373;
    _The Principal Girl_, 367, 373;
    _There Is a Tide_, 367, 373;
    _The Sailor_, 366, 373;
    _The Undefeated_, 364, 367, 373;
    _William Jordan Junior_, 365, 366, 373

  _Songs for Parents_, John Farrar, 286

  _Southerner, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _Spark, The_, Edith Wharton, 305, 312, 313

  _Spending the Family Income_, S. Agnes Donham, 123

  Spero, Sterling Denhard, _The Labor Movement in a Government
        Industry_, 322

  _Splendid Outcast, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 374

  _Square Peg, A_, Lewis Beach, 256

  Squire, J. C., _A Book of American Verse_, 278;
    _Essays on Poetry_, 278

  Stanford, Alfred, _A City Out of the Sea_, 181

  Stanislavsky, Constantin, _My Life in Art_, 201, 202, 203, 265

  _Star of Gettysburg, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  Steele, Wilbur Daniel, _The Giant’s Stair_, 262

  Stewart, A., _Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography_, 208

  Stewart, Donald Ogden, _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_, 32

  Stockbridge, Bertha, E. L., _Practical Cook Book_, 116;
    _What to Drink_, 123

  Stoddard, Charles C., _Shank’s Mare_, 35;
    _Stories From the Arabian Nights_, 87

  _Story Key to Geographic Names, The_, O. D. von Engeln, _and_ Jane
        McKelway Urquhart, 96

  _Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow, The_, Allen French, 93

  _Story of the Cowboy, The_, Emerson Hough, 235, 245

  _Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, The_, Melville Post, 51, 52, 56

  _Steamcraft: An Angling Manual_, George Parker Holden, 39

  _Street of Adventure, The_, Philip Gibbs, 19, 26

  _Success in a New Era_, Dr. Walsh, 359, 360

  _Sunlight and Song_, Maria Jeritza, 204

  _Sun of Saratoga, The_, Altsheler, 239, 248

  _Supreme Court in United States History, The_, Charles Warren, 321

  Surguchev, Ilya, _Autumn_, 261

  _Sweet Rocket_, Mary Johnston, 383, 389

  Swinnerton, Frank, 92;
    _Gissing_, 282;
    _R. L. Stevenson_, 282

  _Sword of Antietam, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247


  _Table Service_, Lucy G. Allen, 122

  _Taking the Literary Pulse_, Dr. Collins, 283

  _Tales Told by the Gander_, Maude Radford Warren _and_ Eve Davenport,
        85

  _Talks to Mothers_, Angelo Patri, 120

  _Temperamental People_, Mary Roberts Rinehart, 172

  _Tempest, The_, Shakespeare, 87

  _Tennessee Shad, The_, Johnson Owen, 89

  Terhune, Albert Payson, 91;
    _Now That I’m Fifty_, 363;
    _The Heart of a Dog_, 91

  _Text-Book of Nursing, A_, Clara S. Weeks-Shaw, 124

  _Theism and Thought_, Lord Balfour, 350, 351

  _There Is a Tide_, J. C. Snaith, 367, 373

  _These Charming People_, Michael Arlen, 266, 269, 274, 276

  _Thirteenth Letter, The_, Natalie Sumner Lincoln, 180

  _Three Generations_, Maud Howe Elliott, 209

  _Three Modern Japanese Plays_, trans., Yozan G. Iwasaki, _and_ Glenn
        Hughes, 255

  _Three Short Plays_, Granville Barker, 256

  Tilton, George Henry, 34, 35;
    _The Fern Lover’s Companion_, 34

  _Tinkering With Tools_, Henry H. Saylor, 125

  _To Have and To Hold_, Mary Johnston, 377, 378, 388

  Tolstoi, Count Leon L., _The Truth About My Father_, 210

  _Tom Brown’s School Days_, 89

  _Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, The_, Howard Carter _and_ A. C. Mace, 37, 38

  Tomlinson, Everett T., 243;
    _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_, 243, 250;
    _Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_, 243, 250;
    _Places Young Americans Want to Know_, 243, 250;
    _Scouting on the Border_, 243, 250;
    _The Mysterious Rifleman_, 243, 250;
    _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_, 243, 250

  _Tomorrow and Tomorrow_, Stephen McKenna, 180

  _Torch Bearers, The_, Bernard Marshall, 245, 251

  _Trail Craft_, Dr. Claude P. Fordyce, 35

  _Traitor, The_, Thomas Dixon, 240, 249

  _Treading the Winepress_, Ralph Connor, 170

  _Treasury of Plays for Children, A_, Moses, 255

  _Treasury of Plays for Men, A_, compiled by Fran Shay, 255

  _Treasury of Plays for Women, A_, compiled by Frank Shay, 255

  _Tree of Appomattox, The_, Altsheler, 238, 247

  Trotsky, Leon, _Problems of Life_, 317, 318

  _Trout Lore_, O. W. Smith, 39

  _True Story of Woodrow Wilson, The_, David Lawrence, 198

  _Truth About My Father, The_, Count Leon L. Tolstoi, 210

  _Truth at Last, The_, Charles Hawtrey, 208

  Tucker, George F., _The Boy Whaleman_, 91, 92

  Turner, Annabel, _Sewing and Textiles_, 124

  Turner, John Hastings, _Simple Souls_, 260;
    _The Lilies of the Field_, 260

  _Twelve Dancing Princesses, The_, 87

  _Twelve Tests of Character_, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, D. D., 362

  _Twelve Years at the German Imperial Court_, Count Robert
        Zedlitz-Trützschler, 200

  _Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American_, ed. Frank Shay, 254

  _Twenty-Five Short Plays: International_, compiled, Frank Shay, 254

  _Twisted Foot, The_, William Patterson White, 30

  _Two Years Before the Mast_, Richard H. Dana, 92


  _Uncle Abner_, Melville Post, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58

  _Undefeated, The_, John C. Snaith, 364, 367, 373

  _Under the Big Top_, Courtney R. Cooper, 290, 295, 297, 299, 303

  _Unseen Host, and Other War Plays, The_, Percival Wilde, 259

  _Unwritten History_, Cosmo Hamilton, 182, 191, 192, 193, 195


  _Valley of Color-Days, The_, Helen B. Sandwell, 94

  _Varmint, The_, Owen Johnson, 89

  _Velveteen Rabbit, The_, Margery Williams, 85

  _Verena in the Midst_, E. V. Lucas, 217, 230

  _Vermeer of Delft_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 214, 229

  _Vermilion Box, The_, E. V. Lucas, 216, 230

  _Victim, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  Villari, Luigi, _The Awakening of Italy: The Fascista Regeneration_,
        316

  von Engeln, O. D., _and_ Jane McKelway Urquhart, _The Story Key to
        Geographic Names_, 96

  _Voysey Inheritance, The_, Granville Barker, 256


  _Walker of the Secret Service_, Melville Post, 55, 57, 58

  Walker, Stuart, 254, 261

  _Walking-Stick Papers_, Robert Cortes Holliday, 285

  Waller, Mary E., _A Daughter of the Rich_, 93;
    _Deep in the Hearts of Men_, 180

  Walpole, Hugh, 85, 92, 171;
    _Anthony Trollope_, 282;
    _The Old Ladies_, 172

  Walsh, James J., _Cures_, 359;
    _Health Through Will Power_, 359;
    _Success in a New Era_, 359, 360

  _Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study_, R. L. Mégroz,
        279

  _Walter of Tiverton_, Bernard Marshall, 245, 251

  _Wanderer Among Pictures, A: A Guide to the Great Galleries of
        Europe_, E. V. Lucas, 225, 231

  _Wanderer in London, A_, E. V. Lucas, 213, 230

  Warren, Charles, _A History of the American Bar_, 321;
    _The Supreme Court in United States History_, 321

  Warren, Maude Radford _and_ Eve Davenport, _Adventures in the Old
        Woman’s Shoe_, 85;
    _Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, 85;
    _Tales Told by the Gander_, 85

  _Washington, The Man of Action_, Frederick T. Hill, 244, 251

  _Waste_, Granville Barker, 256

  Waters, R. C., _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_, 120

  Watson, H. S., _and_ Capt. Paul A. Curtis, Jr., _The Outdoorsman’s
        Handbook_, 39

  _Way of a Man, The_, Thomas Dixon, 241, 249

  _Way of These Women, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 136, 140

  _Wedding Gift, The_, John Taintor Foote, 36

  Weeks-Shaw, Clara S., _A Text-Book of Nursing_, 124

  Welby, T. Earle, _A Popular History of English Poetry_, 279

  Wells, H. G., _An Outline of History_, 356

  Wharton, Edith, _see_ Chapter xix, 283, 304-313;
    _Ethan Frome_, 172, 304, 310;
    _False Dawn_, 305, 310, 313;
    _New Year’s Day_, 305, 312, 313;
    _Old New York_ (_False Dawn_, _The Old Maid_, _The Spark_, and _New
        Year’s Day_), 305, 309, 313;
    _The Age of Innocence_, 304, 305, 306, 309, 310, 313;
    _The Old Maid_, 305, 311, 313;
    _The Spark_, 305, 312, 313

  _What Bird Is That?_ Frank M. Chapman, 40

  _What Katy Did_, Susan Coolidge, 93

  _What to Drink_, Bertha E. L. Stockbridge, 123

  _What to Eat and How to Prepare It_, Elizabeth A. Monaghan, 123

  _What Shall We Play_, Edna Geister, 85

  _Which Is Absurd_, Cosmo Hamilton, 183, 184, 185, 195

  _White Desert, The_, Courtney R. Cooper, 295, 296, 302

  _White Stone, A_, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, 177

  White, William Patterson, 30;
    _The Twisted Foot_, 30

  _Who Cares_, Cosmo Hamilton, 189, 195

  Wiener, Leo, _The Contemporary Drama of Russia_, 264

  _Wiggly, Weasel and Other Stories, The_, Mabel Marlowe, 86

  Wilde, Oscar, 254, 280

  Wilde, Percival, 258;
    _A Question of Morality and Other Plays_, 259;
    _Dawn and Other One-Act Plays of Life Today_, 259;
    _Eight Comedies for Little Theatre_, 259;
    _The Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play_, 264;
    _The Inn of Discontent and Other Fantastic Plays_, 259;
    _The Unseen Host and Other War Plays_, 259

  _William Jordan, Junior_, J. C. Snaith, 365, 366, 373

  Williams, Margery, 85;
    _The Velveteen Rabbit_, 85

  Wilstach, Frank J., _A Dictionary of Similes_, 329, 330

  _Wind and the Rain, The_, Thomas Burke, 282

  _Wire Devils, The_, Frank L. Packard, 332, 348

  Wise, Claude Merton, _Dramatics for School and Community_, 264

  _Witch, The_, Mary Johnston, 382, 389

  Wolff, William Almon, _The Show-Off_, 180

  _Woman’s Quest, A: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M. D._, ed. Agnes
        C. Vietor, 209

  _Wonder Book, A_, Hawthorne, 87

  _Words and Thoughts_, Don Marquis, 262

  _Wounded Souls_, Philip Gibbs, 23, 26

  _Wrath to Come, The_, E. Phillips Oppenheim, 128, 141

  Wylie, Elinor, 280, 281;
    _Jennifer Lorn_, 281


  Yeats, 254, 261, 279, 284

  _Yellow Dove, The_, George Gibbs, 371, 374

  _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_, Aldous Huxley, 112, 113

  _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_, Everett
        Tomlinson, 243, 250

  _Young Trailer, The_, Altsheler, 239, 246

  _Youth Points the Way_, Douglas Fairbanks, 325

  _Youth Triumphant_, George Gibbs, 371, 374


  Zedlitz-Trützschler, Count Robert, _Twelve Years at the German
        Imperial Court_, 200