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.

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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.

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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