Chapter 3 of 25 · 18300 words · ~92 min read

Chapter 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. Coming!—Courtney Ryley Cooper—Coming!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOKS BY COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

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

SOURCES ON COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

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

19. Edith Wharton’s Old New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A NOTE ON EDITH WHARTON

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

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

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

20. Not Found Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the only war book I shall bring to your notice; but there are one or two after-war books which deserve your attention. _The Awakening of Italy: The Fascista Regeneration_, by Luigi Villari, will of course

## actively interest those who may have read the chapter on Italy in

Charles H. Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_[94] but many will go to it directly in an effort to grasp the significance of Mussolini and Fascism. They will find a singularly clear and even luminous account, as little encumbered with unfamiliar detail as a full account can be. But they will also find a story full of drama, yet told without any of the rhetoric or verbal excess and floridity which one might expect in a book on Italian politics written by an Italian. Villari is frankly an admirer and

## partisan of Fascism, and his opinion of Mussolini as a great leader is

plain-spoken; but he is neither a mere enthusiast nor an indiscriminating historian. The defects of Fascism he records as he sees them. He does not contend that there are not grave problems ahead of Italy. But, as he says, “the mass of the people, both among the educated classes and the ignorant, are more interested in results than in theories, and no one who compares the state of Italy today with that of the days before Fascismo’s advent to power can for a moment deny the enormous improvement in every field. ‘Ora si vive,’ the people say, ‘mentre prima non si viveva piu.’ (‘Now we live, whereas before life was not possible.’)... One has the feeling that the country is really moving forward rapidly and surely, and shaking off the shackles of the bad traditions by which it had been bound for centuries.”

The Prime Ministry of Ramsay MacDonald in Great Britain makes

## particularly timely _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_, by Paul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps you think that so much motion will disturb your blood pressure (of which you have heard a good deal, and about which you are secretly worried at times). Well, no; at least, only beneficially. If you would like to know the truth about blood pressure—the subject of much ignorance and much uninformed discussion—you may as well read the new book by Lewellys F. Barker, M.D., LL.D., and Norman Brown Cole, M.D. Although Drs. Barker and Cole are members of the Johns Hopkins faculty, their

## book is equally serviceable for the physician and the general reader.

Technical expressions are avoided, and a very complete glossary helps the ordinary reader where a medical name must be used for exactness. But the book should remove all sorts of misconceptions. Blood pressure is just as normal as breathing. It has certain general averages related to age and condition; marked departures from these are the danger signal. Heredity, the wear and tear of modern life, the use of alcohol, tobacco and coffee may produce exceptional blood pressures. Development of high blood pressure is a process rather than a disease; the symptoms develop rather late in its course; and preventive measures must be taken early. _Blood Pressure_ gives, in plain, comprehensible English, the information that anyone interested in longevity, or even in normal length of life, would like to have.

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

The work has finally been translated into English with the title, _The Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din_. Henry D. Barnham is the translator, and Sir Valentine Chirol, an authority on Turkey and the East, provides an entertaining and instructive foreword. Although the wisdom in these fables is generally for young and old, it can scarcely be illustrated except by quotation. I select for that purpose, and on account of its brevity, a fable for grown-ups:

“The Khoja had two wives. He gave each of them a blue shell as a keepsake, telling each not to let anyone see it. One day they came in together and asked him, ‘Which of us do you love best? Who is your favorite?’

“‘The one,’ he answered, ‘who has my blue shell.’

“Each of the women took comfort. Each one said in her heart, ‘’Tis I he loves best,’ and looked with scornful pity upon the other.

“Clever Khoja! That is the way he managed his wives!”

For contrast, we may pick up _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose Anthology_, edited by Joseph Lewis French. Here are selections, and the best selections, from the best American humorous writers, from Artemus Ward to the absolutely contemporary Sam Hellman, of “Low Bridge” reputation. The selections from Josh Billings remind us that he relied for some of his effect on misspelling, just as Ring Lardner does today. Edward Eggleston’s “The Spelling-Bee”; Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras”; Bill Nye’s “Skimming the Milky Way”; and Eugene Field’s “The Cyclopeedy” are representative inclusions. More recent humorists for whom Mr. French has found place are Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Thomas L. Masson, George Horace Lorimer, Stephen Leacock, Don Marquis, Irvin S. Cobb, Ellis Parker Butler, George Fitch, Montague Glass, Christopher Ward, Robert C. Benchley and Harry Leon Wilson. _Sixty Years of American Humor_ provides considerably more than the ordinary humorous book’s quantity of diversion to the square inch.

But I come at last to the two books whose claim to inclusion in this

## chapter is most undeniable—two books of which it can truthfully be said,

not only that they are not found elsewhere, but that they contain a thousand things not to be found elsewhere.

John Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_ is so wonderful in its completeness and its resourcefulness that although it went without revision for twenty-three years, it remained the best book of its kind and no more recent work was able to displace it. It has now been revised and enlarged by Nathan Haskell Dole, so that the new quotations included are from nearly 200 of the more important writers of the last few decades, not included before, among them Stevenson, Swinburne, Kipling and Mark Twain. This, then, is the book without which newspapermen, editors, writers, public speakers, scholars, librarians, and many, many households could not exist—at least, the households could not exist in harmony. It is the book which saves you from saying, “fresh fields and pastures new”; that tells you it should be “fresh _woods_,” and that the line is Milton’s. Is it possible that in this book of 1,400 pages, citing from nearly 1,000 authors, and with its quotations indexed and cross-indexed under their various outstanding words, so that the index has almost 50,000 entries—is it possible that there is some phrase you half-recall and yet cannot find? It is just possible. If it occurs, there is something left for you yet to do. You may try Frank J. Wilstach’s _A Dictionary of Similes_ (the new and enlarged edition).

Mr. Wilstach’s social register of similes is the only book of reference of its kind. Since its original publication, in 1916, _A Dictionary of Similes_, with its 17,000 quaint figures of speech, has become pretty nigh indispensable for writers, speakers, teachers and students. One hundred pages have been added in the new edition, as Mr. Wilstach says that similes should be kept fresh, like oysters. And the figures of speech themselves? They are drawn from the writings of a great number of authors, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, through English and American literature, to O. Henry and Irvin S. Cobb. The arrangement is alphabetical under subject headings. I have nothing against the 16,999 other comparisons in the book, though personally I shall always maintain that the best simile in the world is Irvin S. Cobb’s “no more privacy than a goldfish.” I have looked for hours in Mr. Wilstach’s masterpiece in search of a suitable comparison for _A Dictionary of Similes_.

Well, I cannot find one.

21. Frank L. Packard Unlocks a Book

From his home on the shore of the St. Lawrence, Frank L. Packard sent word that the title was _The Locked Book_. No details. _The Locked Book_ remained a locked book until the manuscript arrived. One had a vision of Mr. Packard going to his safe and turning the combination and swinging open the door and taking out the story, complete, released only in its entirety. Knowing his work, one has similar visions of the tales he has written unlocking themselves and stepping, full-statured, into his mind. Mr. Packard, one of the most disconcerting of men, would not be himself disconcerted by such apparitions. His is a personality full of outward contradictions and inward reconcilements. There is something gruff, even ferocious, in his speech and manner on many occasions; it melts every other moment into a really exquisite urbanity. He is alarmingly direct, dreadfully uncompromising—and he is the soul of hospitality and gentleness, a person of stainless honor. He assumes rudeness like a mask and his blue eyes and the look in them give him quite away with an utter transparency. His coat is rough, fuzzy, scratchy, yet his heart is on the sleeve of it. And his fiction? Full half of it moves in the “underworld” and is peopled with criminals; yet the thing that most markedly distinguishes Frank L. Packard from all other writers of mystery-adventure stories is his belief in a moral order. Immanuel Kant and Sherlock Holmes are commingled in him; and, though he may invent plots he really believes in miracles.

He is, as everyone must know, the author of _The Miracle Man_, a novel which George M. Cohan made into a successful play and which, as a motion picture, made millions of dollars for various persons _not_ including the author.... A moral order has some advantages over a money order.

Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2 February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories. _On the Iron at Big Cloud_ (1911), _The Wire Devils_ (1918), which tells of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of cipher codes, and _The Night Operator_ (1919) are best characterized in Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to _The Night Operator_:

“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.

“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is _grand_. That is the Hill Division.”

So much for the setting.

“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big, ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas, and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”

The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.

iii

In 1910 Mr. Packard married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre, of Montreal, and the next year saw the publication of his first book, _On the Iron at Big Cloud_. In 1912 he wrote his first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_. The novel was written in Lachine, a city eight miles from Montreal, where Packard had settled and where his home is now. The outline of the story is as follows:

“Varge, the hero, was a foundling brought up by Dr. and Mrs. Merton as if he had been their own son. Their real son, Harold, kills his father in a quarrel, and begs Varge to disappear so that it will seem that he is the actual murderer. Varge goes further than that. He does not run away, but publicly shoulders the guilt for the sake, not of Harold, but of Mrs. Merton, whose heart would break if she knew that her son had killed his father. Varge believes he owes them this act of sacrifice in return for the life-long kindness of his benefactors. The story thereafter is the story of this sacrifice; his life in prison, where as a trusty he meets the warden’s daughter, Janet Rand; his love for Janet which both impels him to escape and to give himself up again—and finally his freedom as Harold Merton, dying, confesses the truth.”[95]

Here was a novel on the theme of sacrifice, a theme which had already been persistent and noticeable in Frank L. Packard’s short stories, and a theme which was to recur later, but interwoven with another idea of equal strength and beauty. The discovery of that other idea—its discovery, that is, in the necessary terms of a story—was to come in the same year in which _Greater Love Hath No Man_ was published. If you journey directly north from Montreal, you will find yourself after a while in mountainous country with summits of less height than many on the North American continent. Nevertheless the Laurentian Mountains have a distinction more interesting than altitude; they are geologically the oldest formation—older than the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, the Rockies; older than the plains. They are fundamental and as unchanging as the capacity to wonder and the will to believe in the heart of that higher insect, Man. In 1913 Packard was in the Laurentians and there and at Lachine he was engaged in writing a novel which he purposed calling “The Wrong Right Road.” When it was finished it appeared as a complete novel in Munsey’s Magazine for February, 1914. A set of advance proofs was sent to George M. Cohan, who bought the dramatic rights and changed the title. The book was arranged to appear immediately and Mr. Cohan at once set to work to fashion the play.

The scene of Packard’s story was the village of Needley, Maine. In Needley, says an outline,[96] “lives an old man—deaf, dumb and almost blind—known as the Patriarch. For many years, through the exercise of faith, he has cured the people in the neighborhood of their simple ailments. An article about him finds its way into a New York City newspaper which comes under the eye of the celebrated ‘Doc’ Madison, a quick-witted and ingenious confidence man, who at once evolves a scheme to make the Patriarch’s home a shrine to which Doc will entice all ailing humanity from far and near, and then pluck the golden hoard through his trickery.

“Among Doc’s disciples is a clever and beautiful girl named Helena Vail. Another is a dope fiend, Pale Face Harry, an artful dodger with a hacking cough. The faker that Doc Madison selects to take the star

## part in setting the procession of ailing ones in motion is called the

Flopper. The Flopper has an uncanny control over his joints by which he can, with a single gesture, convert himself into a loathsome cripple, twisted and broken, begging in the streets, shattered in body and soul; truly a spectacle to soften the hardest heart. Doc Madison rounds up his little band of efficient scoundrels, takes them to Needley, Maine, and plants them on the sweet-souled Patriarch, whose faith in his own powers to heal is merely his faith in the influence upon man’s soul and body of love and goodness and belief in all that is worth while. Helena forces herself upon him as his grandniece, and becomes his trusted confidante. The Flopper crawls from the train through the dust of the street to the Patriarch’s threshold. Here the old man, practically blind, surrounded by a crowd of visitors and devotees from all over the country, stretches out his thin hands, and the Flopper rises from the earth a new man. At the same moment a crippled child, helpless from birth and staggering along on crutches, throws his artificial supports from him and cries aloud: ‘I can walk!’”

This supreme moment of _The Miracle Man_—book, play and picture—leads to the wreck of Doc Madison’s scheme; the crooks are self-defeated by the advent of a power they cannot understand. A valley has been exalted, a mountain and hill have been made low, the crooked has been made straight....

And Mr. Packard had made the discovery of his second idea, the theme of regeneration which is so much the most powerful manifestation known to human lives. In finding it he had unlocked more than a book, or a striking play, or an extraordinary motion picture. The camera version of this simple tale did indeed make lasting reputations for Thomas F. Meighan, Betty Compson and Lon Chaney, as well as enhance the reputation of the late George Loan Tucker, whom Mr. Meighan prodded into directing the picture; money rolled in upon the picture’s backers in a tidal wave; the success of “The Birth of a Nation” was outdone, nor has any film since surpassed the record set by Packard’s story. These phenomena are picturesque—staggering, if you like. But they came afterward; they had little to do with the author, who, perhaps, could have used some of the money but to whose work these successes could have no true relevance. What Mr. Packard had unlocked was an inwardness in himself, the fullness of his own mind. He was, perhaps, never to write well in the sense of writing with literary distinction; he was to become a master of plot and of incident, and to do stories in which characterization was to suffer from the very rush of action and the galvanization of suspense. But he was never to write a book in which the emotion was cheap or the immanent morality less than uncompromising. And with his themes of sacrifice and regeneration, intertwined, he was to arrest, enthrall and convince the thousands.

The next book was _The Belovéd Traitor_ (1916. And please make three syllables of the adjective). Jean Laparde and Marie-Louise are fisher folk in a French village and are affianced. Jean, who is always modeling little figures in clay, is a genius. A wealthy American named Bliss discovers him. Jean is sent to Paris to study and his great gift ultimately causes a sensation. Bliss’s daughter makes him her conquest, for adulation has turned the sculptor’s head and he has forgotten Marie-Louise. Jean and Myrna Bliss sail for America where they are to be married at the Bliss home. Marie-Louise in her great loneliness decides to go to America. On shipboard, in the steerage one night, Jean sees Marie-Louise. His love for her returns, and with it repentance for the way he has used her. It is now a question of both sacrifice and regeneration. Regeneration comes first; and the apparent sacrifice is canceled by a far greater success; for on his return to France, Jean’s work reflects the new sincerity of his life and love.

Consider _The Sin That Was His_ (1917). Here regeneration leads to sacrifice, or willingness to sacrifice, and the story develops with a power which makes Packard’s first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_, appear weak and insufficiently motivated. Raymond Chapelle, alias Three-Ace Artie, a gambler, is banished from the Yukon. Later, in a little village in French Canada, in order to save himself from the consequences of a murder which he has not done, but in which circumstantial evidence would insure his conviction, he masquerades as Father Aubert, a young priest who had been hurt. The story shows the conditions that force Raymond to continue the rôle of Father Aubert; tells how he loves Valerie; how he converts an old hag named Mother Blondin and becomes the idol of the parish; how, finally, the real Father Aubert becomes the victim of that same circumstantial evidence which Raymond has tried to escape. When the real priest is tried and sentenced to death Raymond’s assumed rôle has so wrought upon him that he confesses the false part he has played—which, in the situation, involves taking the death sentence upon himself. Mother Blondin, his convert, who is really guilty of the murder, in turn saves him.

Again: _From Now On_ (1920) tells the story of Dave Henderson, who succumbs to temptation and steals $100,000. He succeeds in hiding the money before he is caught, convicted and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. When he is released both the bookmaker who had employed him, and who is an inherent crook, and the police take up his trail. But it is a woman’s love and his love for her which finally bring Dave Henderson to the point of returning the money. Regeneration. A sacrifice.

In _Pawned_ (1921)—a story of pawned people, not pawned things—the father of Claire sacrifices his rights and privileges as a father in the effort toward regeneration. Ultimately he sacrifices his life to free her from a man more dissolute, and far more evil, than himself. Regeneration fails, but redemption takes its place. It is John Bruce, to save whose life Claire has risked everything, who is regenerated. The novel is an extraordinary achievement in plot construction, the precursor of _The Four Stragglers_ in that respect; for _Doom of the Night_ (1022) was earlier in point of composition.

In order to trace connectedly through a succession of novels the dual themes of sacrifice and regeneration which are Packard’s forte, we have omitted mention of his best-known figure, Jimmie Dale. He was introduced with _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1917), carried through _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1919) and not necessarily finished with _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ (1922). Mr. Packard began to write these tales of his gentleman burglar in 1914 and it is a tribute to his skill as a storyteller that, ten years afterward, people read _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ with a conviction that he will never do better stories.

Jimmie Dale is a rich young man, the inheritor of a fortune made in manufacturing safes. “It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals.... It had begun through that—but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit. He had meant to set the police by the ears.”[97] What he had been doing was to force safes as a burglar might force them. The police would find no theft, “in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime.” Partly “as an added barb,” partly “that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved,” he had made a habit of pasting conspicuously in sight (on the safe’s dial, generally) a diamond- or lozenge-shaped paper wafer, prepared with adhesive on one side and handled with tweezers to avoid leaving a finger print. The succession of crimes without theft became known as the work of the Gray Seal. Then, one night, he had been caught while at work in Maiden Lane, New York. He had wrapped a string of pearls around his wrist in a facetious moment and discovery had compelled him to a desperate dash without time to leave the jewelry behind. Not until the next day had he known that his detector was a woman. “The first letter from her had started by detailing his every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: ‘The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook, lack but one thing,’ she had naïvely written, ‘and that one thing is a leading string to guide it into channels worthy of his genius.’ In a word, _she_ would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him?”

Cold consideration convinced Jimmie Dale that not even his own father (then alive) would believe in his innocence. “And then had followed those years in which there had been _no_ temporizing, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs ... until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with.” In all this time Jimmie Dale, though communicated with by letter and telephone, had never been able to trace or identify his directress. A year before the book opens she had written: “Things are a little too warm, aren’t they Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”

Mr. Packard opens, in masterly fashion, at this point; it is the technique of Conan Doyle in the case of Sherlock Holmes (to quote no other examples). One establishes one’s detective or criminal—or other exceptional character who tests plausibility—by raising the curtain on him in full career. The way to begin is—not to plunge, but just to slip casually into the middle of things. At first our interest is centered on Jimmie Dale’s successive adventures—extremely well-constructed—but as the book develops, the importance and interest of the woman back of Jimmie Dale asserts itself. Jimmie Dale is led into a series of adventures strictly on her behalf; and what has been in effect a chain of connected short stories becomes virtually a novel. But one characteristic stands out in every chapter. Other writers have shown, though only rarely, an equal ingenuity; no one that I can now recall has shown the same fundamental concerns, the same intense preoccupation under his melodramatic structure. For the exploits of Jimmie Dale, those bizarre and disconnected enterprises to which he is ordered, are Robin Hood exploits, rightings of wrongs, crimes of form and philanthropies of intention. So, later, are the struggles into which Jimmie Dale is precipitated on behalf of the woman whom, no longer mysterious, he deeply loves. Simply, Frank L. Packard is a man who cannot abide the spectacle of a world unless it is the philosopher’s world, erected about the steel framework of a moral order. He indulges in crime for morality’s sake.

In algebra, as you may remember, one equation suffices if you are solving to find a single unknown quantity; two are necessary if two unknown quantities are to be ascertained; and so on. Given three unknown quantities and only two equations, the affair is hopeless. In a perfectly constructed mystery story, the reader is solving for several unknown quantities—for _x_ and for _y_ and possibly for _z_—but always with one too few equations.

When he came to write _The Four Stragglers_ (1923) Mr. Packard had had a considerable experience in handling plots. The first eight pages of the book show three men huddled together under a bombardment in France. Their talk reveals them as former confederates in crime in London. There is a fourth man lying very still on the ground, apparently dead or dying. To make sure, one of the three shoots him. The group is in pitch darkness except for occasional flares. One of these, coming shortly, lights the scene fully. All three look at the spot where a murdered man should be lying. No man is there.

The story opens three years later, in London. We see the three confederates, a varied, effectively contrasted three, reassembled and

## active. We follow them in a thrilling operation. The main thread now

begins to spin. Just as the three have planned to cease operations and take a vacation they come to know of the existence of a treasure hid and watched over by a madman on one of the islands or keys off the Florida coast. The knowledge comes to each one separately, except that B and C each knows that A knows it. And the fourth man, D?

One of the excellences of _The Four Stragglers_ is the economy of means; there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the

## action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably

to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but with the window shades tightly drawn down:

“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor, and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.

“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.

“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again. ‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well, last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane titter again....

“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking, the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing, but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”

The reader of _The Four Stragglers_ will say, with entire truth: “There is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore, a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by _The Miracle Man_ and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”; “a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem unreasonable.

Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant, and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend, the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good, even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.

A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise. But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.

He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.

Again, in 1923, he went to South America.

Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the course of his round the world trip took shape. _The Locked Book_ is in characteristics somewhat like _The Four Stragglers_. It begins with a yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass, and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.

He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility” of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of _The Miracle Man_.

BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.

1911 _On the Iron at Big Cloud_ 1913 _Greater Love Hath No Man_ 1914 _The Miracle Man_ 1916 _The Belovéd Traitor_ 1917 _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ 1917 _The Sin That Was His_ 1918 _The Wire Devils_ 1919 _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ 1919 _The Night Operator_ 1920 _From Now On_ 1920 _The White Moll_ 1921 _Pawned_ 1922 _Doors of the Night_ 1922 _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ 1923 _The Four Stragglers_ 1924 _The Locked Book_

SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD

In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis, 280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.

22. All Creeds and None

This ought to be the most interesting chapter in this book. For it deals with the subject of belief. Belief is of many kinds—religious, scientific, philosophical—but when one ceases to believe in anything at all, one dies.

In Chapter 10 , I tried to indicate how the interest in religious belief has already begun to reflect itself in current fiction. In this