chapter I
am to deal with books which vary profoundly but are all straightforward efforts to express a belief held to be worth while. For the difficulty is not a lack of things to believe in, but a choice among them, a reconciliation (sometimes) of one with another; and very often a search for the thing that will mean more than life itself.
Can anything mean more than life itself? Yes. Men and women have sacrificed their lives for such.
Are the terms of belief capable of a common expression, acceptable to all men and women? No; at least, not yet.
Is it even necessary to know what one believes, in the sense of being able to give it a satisfactory expression? No; not if one lives it.
Can anything be achieved by reading books on belief? Yes. I suppose you may show surprise if I say that disagreement is often more useful than agreement. But agreement leading to a placid inactivity is against the very principle of life itself.
Disagreement causes thought. Thinking always enlarges our living. For what we then do is done more consciously, more knowingly, than before. To that extent—and in no other way is it possible—we live more fully.
Which among the books to follow you ought to read or in what order they are for your reading, no one like myself can determine, for an answer depends on your belief, tastes, the extent of your reading and the extent of your thinking. Such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_ is safely commendable to anyone, anywhere. But such studies as Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, full of refinements and instinct with intellectual subtlety, are for the scholarly taste. Dr. E. Y. Mullins’s _Christianity at the Crossroads_ is fundamentalist in its position. Dr. Joseph A. Leighton’s _Religion and the Mind of Today_ is the work of a churchman who is also a philosopher and a teacher; it adopts the liberal attitude. And a number of these books concern themselves with health, the mind, the will and the spirit—those factors which so often determine not only belief, but the possibility of believing in anything.
If I start with Ernest Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, a work now many years old, I do so because this Frenchman’s extraordinary book remains undisplaced by the current great success of Papini’s _Life of Christ_, but also because the popularity of Papini’s book shows where the average interest lies. For when men begin contending about the forms of creeds and the facts behind phrases which have become sacred formulas, the instinct of the ordinary man is to go straight to the essentials and the beginnings. Let doctors argue the Virgin Birth; he rather asks himself what sort of Man was this Son born of Mary. It is the assertion of this instinct, joined to the timely appearance of the _Life of Christ_ with its undeniable interest and eloquence, which made the success of Papini’s volume. Such a success is fleeting. Like other converts and re-converts to Catholicism, Papini exhibited a marked tendency toward a belief that little had happened in the centuries preceding his accession. Not so, Renan. To go from the Italian to the Frenchman is to pass from painted scenery to the clear air and the sublime altitude of mountain peaks. There is something beyond eloquence, and Renan has it. With him both reflection and emotion are controlled; they lift him high and sustain him there. “Disastrous to Reason the day when she should stifle religion!” exclaimed this author of the _Life of Jesus_, adding: “Religions are false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to define it, to incarnate it; but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors they import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the value of the truth which they proclaim. The simplest of the simple, provided he practice heart-worship, is more enlightened as to the reality of things than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by chance or by finite causes.”
Renan was repeatedly called an atheist; but none of the books discussed in this chapter are atheistic. I should present any which were, but I think it significant that none is. Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, a strictly philosophical treatise in sequence to his _Theism and Humanism_, is a deliberate attempt to consider whether theism—that is, belief in God—is necessary or good. And every Balfourian conclusion is in favor of theism. Dr. L. P. Jacks, with his marvelous simplicity of expression, deals in _Religious Perplexities_ with the two questions that every man asks: Why am I here? Why am I, and not some other, here and now? But the answer to both of these questions, stated as Dr. Jacks states it, for men of every sort, Christian and non-Christian, presupposes a God.
The three most recent books by Dr. Jacks vary considerably. _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_ is simply an address in which he makes a moving appeal for the recapture of Christian joyousness. _Realities and Shams_ is a series of essays produced by reflection on events of the last nine years, continuous in the thread of their thought, which is the few and simple tests to tell the genuine from the false; and Dr. Jacks applies these tests to some public affairs. _A Living Universe_ is directly related to _Religious Perplexities_; its point is that education without religious feeling is lifeless, just as a universe in which education does not proceed is a dead universe.
Such books as _Realities and Shams_ and _A Living Universe_ are directly related to Felix Adler’s Hibbert lectures, now published under the title, _The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_. The distinguished founder of the Ethical Culture Society has never been one to deal with abstractions. In this book he brings his spiritual ideal to bear upon the problem of marriage, the labor problem, and the problem of a society of nations. The essence of his teaching, which employs both Jewish and Christian ideals of holiness, is his conception of a “weft of souls” in which each individual soul has intrinsic worth but all share in, and contribute to, a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard. The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it. And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.
_Religion and the Mind of Today_, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author of _Man and the Cosmos_ and of an introductory book on philosophy used in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr. Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe, the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul.
His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can be said about _Contributions of Science to Religion_, it is that the book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the construction of the universe, the earth and man, is there any room left for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.” And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it _should_ do so.”
He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter; and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter, director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example, one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.
There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr. Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more _difficult_ than seeing electrons there.”
But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely mystical, _Contributions of Science to Religion_ must remain all beside the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply that that, precisely, is what _his_ religion is for. And with many the question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts it in his _Christianity at the Crossroads_: “Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked, the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins argues—and without appeal to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the victory will lie.
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Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Making of Man_ has something in common with the books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to; but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but _Making of Man_ is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined. Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere, and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.
In _Evolution: the Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of its significance to mankind.
The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.
And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s _Men of the Old Stone Age_ and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s _An Outline of History_. But pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy has done it in the two volumes of his _Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History_.
_Human Origins_ is a great book. It must be remembered that all we know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years, discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered. I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing _Human Origins_; its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr. MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the whole affair into a superlative story.
Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.
He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints, mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places. Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use, the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of hard use.
Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the text, appear in the two volumes of _Human Origins_.
If the new book on _Haunted Houses_ did not bear the name of so distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will be captivated by the strange stories to be read in _Haunted Houses_. Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados, a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal, the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion, or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been legal recognition of haunted houses.
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Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, _Cures_. In _Health Through Will Power_, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which, more than any other one thing, has been made the foundation of new and powerful religious sects. But Dr. Walsh’s interest is in the application and the uses of will power in the individual.
He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism, and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.
_Health Through Will Power_ is untechnical. Anyone can read and understand it.
_Success in a New Era_, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make a success of life.”
Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation, though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical energy as great as work.
I am not sure that Dr. Walsh’s warning about reading is needed in America. “Reading,” he says, “requires the least mental labor of almost any pursuit, and hardly a person but sooner or later finds himself putting off something that ought to be done by pretending that he is accomplishing more by his reading. Reading in itself is excellent, but it is vastly overused to excuse the inaction of weak and lazy people.” No doubt; but of 961 people I personally know well, 857 spend every evening listening to the radio, attending a moving picture, or playing cards and dancing. Of the remaining 104, only eighty-one read.
Yet Dr. Walsh is dead right when he says that “the best good habit in the world is the proper use of time”—though the acquisition of more hours in a day would be helpful—and his _Success in a New Era_ is a singularly honest and helpful book, free from even one patent formula for attaining “success.”
_The Foundations of Personality_, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., though on more general lines, is of no less value. Dr. Myerson analyzes the elements of character—which is not, of course, the same thing as mind. Character is intimately related to mind, as the brain and body are intimately related. Character may be affected by both the mind and the body; it is not dependent on either. Dr. Myerson describes the general types of character, the tradition of each and its social heredity; and he follows the energies of men as they expend themselves in instinct and emotion and intelligence. Although a physician and a psychologist, he writes from the standpoint of one who deeply shares the everyday aspirations and conflicts of his fellows. His comments on the influences exerted upon character, and on the expression of character in work, play, humor, sex and religion are of acute interest. His book’s great practical value is dual: it helps toward self-understanding and it gives a good deal of help toward insight into the characters of others—a matter which usually has an important part in determining our own success or failure in life.
Simpler than _The Foundations of Personality_ because of a much narrower scope is Arthur Holmes’s _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and Achievement_. This popularly-written book by a professor of psychology is almost a handbook on the subject of laziness, its causes and cure. For not all laziness comes from the same cause, and not all apparent laziness is laziness in fact. There is such a thing as the indolence of genius, well-illustrated by Professor Holmes in the cases of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and the naturalist, John Muir. There is the languor of youth, when the rapid growth of the body may produce a kind of inertia either physical or mental. The aversion of the normal boy to study is easily explained, Professor Holmes holds. What people have done much they like much to do; and what they have done little they like little to do. What the human race has not done very long is hard for individuals of the race to do. The human race has hunted and fished for thousands of years; it has studied for a very few centuries, and studied in the mass for only about one century. Of course the boy will prefer to hunt or fish!
_Controlled Power_ is so entirely readable that one feels as if it should be put in the hands of every parent and school teacher. Its wisdom could do much for them, as well as for the child.
Teachers and many parents could read advantageously also _The Normal Mind_, by William H. Burnham, professor of pedagogy and school hygiene in Clark University. If our knowledge of what we call mental hygiene shows us anything, it shows us that most people do not utilize the brains they have. The whole purpose of mental hygiene is to teach how to make the most of one’s inborn ability. The power to think with clearness means usually the throwing off of bad mental habits.
Professor Burnham, teaching at G. Stanley Hall’s institution and with a background of many years’ experience and observation, has produced a book which most satisfactorily compends what we know about mental hygiene to date. His presentation of the school task, of mental attitudes, of suggestion and mental hygiene, of success and failure and discipline, offers in practical form the wisdom we have regarding mental health and how to attain it.
_Twelve Tests of Character_, by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D., has amply proven its popularity; indeed, it has for months been among the ten best-selling books of non-fiction throughout America. Dr. Fosdick’s tests are tests of character in action, not conventional qualities nor abstract traits. Written with reference to Christian teaching, the book is nevertheless one of extreme popular appeal. Nothing of the sort has more “rush” of style and pointedness, more irresistibility in brushing aside objections and obstacles. Undoubtedly the wealth of illustrative instances and anecdotes has greatly enhanced its popularity.
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But my chapter runs too long. I have saved for the end, and will not quit leaving unmentioned, Albert Payson Terhune’s _Now That I’m Fifty_. Is Mr. Terhune’s outspokenness a bit brutal? I do not think so. He is fifty and knows whereof he writes; why should he not tell what he knows? Is it cruel to say that one should have money, such money as he can acquire, with which to meet fifty? No, it is common sense. Is it bitter to point out, with unmistakable instances, that fifty cannot do the things that twenty does? Most decidedly not; for Mr. Terhune points out those other things that twenty cannot do, and that fifty can. Fifty cannot run five miles; twenty can. Very well; when Mr. Terhune was in his twenties and tried to work a few hours at night after the work of the day, he went all to pieces. But now, at fifty, he can work better than ever before in his life; longer hours, harder work; and come out of it smiling. In fact, in _Now That I’m Fifty_ he practically says: “Look at the things I used to be able to do and can do no longer; and thank the Lord I can’t!” This little book of Terhune’s, not much more than an extended essay, is so honest, so merry, so frank and so mellow that I think fifty can safely put it in the hands of those who aspire to be fifty.
23. J. C. Snaith and George Gibbs
i
Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material, need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such books as _The Coming_ and _The Undefeated_ he has had material of the first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.
The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the author of _Queed_, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built body.
J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club). But whether in the country or in town, as he says: “Outside of my work, I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”
It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly, some sketch of his work. His first novel, _Broke of Covenden_ (1904) is such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s _The End of the House of Alard_, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s _The Forsyte Saga_ should lose no time in reading _Broke of Covenden_. Richard Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like Lionel Barrymore.
_William Jordan, Junior_ (1907) shares with _The Coming_ (1907) first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation. _The Coming_, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War. These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however, unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words, with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and bring it to earth without shearing its wings.
The same effect is partly realized in _The Sailor_ (1916), supposed to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a charge of sentimentality. Yet _The Sailor_ by virtue of its extreme realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either _William Jordan, Junior_ or _The Coming_ in the elements of popular interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S. M. Hutchinson’s _If Winter Comes_; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest hangs breathlessly throughout.
Many, and with justice, consider _The Undefeated_ (1919) the best novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today, perhaps, _The Undefeated_ is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many merits in _The Undefeated_ the greatest was the restraint with which Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H. G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem to utter.
There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on the order of his _Araminta_; again it is a divertissement of youth, like _The Principal Girl_; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means unalloyed with admiration, of _There Is a Tide_. The title is taken, of course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa, aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance, European correspondent of the home-town newspaper, she seems destined to fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with, and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided; and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this; but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using it for the first time.
The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark his own work.
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Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and painter-illustrator. I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious choice.
He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator became more important. For a long while he illustrated his own stories and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.
George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30. Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.
His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes. Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, _In Search of Mademoiselle_. After another of the same sort he struck his _metier_ with _The Medusa Emerald_. With his next novel but one, _The Bolted Door_, he became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided that illustration was not the better part of valor.
He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories perfectly!
“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as though they had been written by another person. I got the trained illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story, I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give it.”
A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W. Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment, it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue and suspense, like _The Yellow Dove_, the characterization is far from superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr. Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr. Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or social stratification. _The Yellow Dove_ opens with excellent Cockney talk; _The Secret Witness_ moves with assurance in central Europe; _The Golden Bough_ details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; _The Black Stone_ has scenes in Arabia; _The Splendid Outcast_ is vivid with bits of the Paris underworld; _The House of Mohun_ chronicles the rise and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and its Long Island estate; and the heroine of _Fires of Ambition_ is a red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit concern.
A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with _Youth Triumphant_ (1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties. The deepening treatment is noticeable in _The House of Mohun_. It is continued in _Fires of Ambition_, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life, asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and most competent novel, _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.
This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident and destiny in the existence of a child.
In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate, be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced hand.
BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH
1904 _Broke of Covenden_ 1906 _Henry Northcote_ 1907 _William Jordan, Junior_ 1909 _Araminta_ [republished 1923] 1910 _Fortune_ 1910 _Mrs. Fitz_ _Lady Barbarity_ _Anne Feversham_ 1912 _The Principal Girl_ 1914 _An Affair of State_ 1915 _The Great Age_ 1916 _The Sailor_ 1917 _The Coming_ 1918 _Mary Plantagenet_ _The Time Spirit_ 1919 _The Undefeated_ In England: _Love Lane_ 1920 _The Adventurous Lady_ 1922 _The Council of Seven_ 1923 _The Van Roon_ 1924 _There Is a Tide_
SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH
Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be found on page 155 _et seq._ of R. Brimley Johnson’s _Some Contemporary Novelists_ (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.
An appreciative review of _The Sailor_ forms a short chapter in S. P. B. Mais’s _Some Modern Authors_ (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 _et seq._
“J. C. Snaith,” by W. M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.
BOOKS BY GEORGE GIBBS
1900 _Pike and Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy_ 1901 _In Search of Mademoiselle_ 1903 _American Sea Fights._ Portfolio of colored drawings 1905 _The Love of Monsieur_ 1907 _The Medusa Emerald_ 1909 _Tony’s Wife_ 1911 _The Bolted Door_ 1911 _The Forbidden Way_ 1912 _The Maker of Opportunities_ 1913 _The Silent Battle_ 1913 _Madcap_ 1914 _The Flaming Sword_ 1915 _The Yellow Dove_ 1916 _Paradise Garden_ 1917 _The Secret Witness_ 1918 _The Golden Bough_ 1919 _The Black Stone_ 1920 _The Splendid Outcast_ 1921 _The Vagrant Duke_ 1921 _Youth Triumphant_ 1922 _The House of Mohun_ 1923 _Fires of Ambition_ 1924 _Sackcloth and Scarlet_
SOURCES ON GEORGE GIBBS
“Illustrates His Own Books” (article and interview), The Sun, New York, 18 February 1911.
“George Gibbs on His Work.” Interview by Francis Hill in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Date uncertain: 1912 or 1913.
“George Gibbs, a Novelist, and His Ideas.” Interview by Theodocia F. Walton in the Philadelphia Press, 21 March 1920.
_Who’s Who in America._
NOTE: George Gibbs’s prowess as a painter in oils deserves a special note. He has painted some splendid nudes which have been widely exhibited, in particular one called “The Gold Screen” which has been at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts, the St. Louis Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other exhibitions. He has done some striking marines which have been shown at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery and are now (April, 1924) on view in Baltimore. He has become a portrait painter much in demand with more commissions offered him than he cares to accept.
In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely greater than between his first few novels and such work as _The House of Mohun_ or _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.
24. Mary Johnston’s Adventure
i
There lives in the city of New York a large, blond man who knows many authors and editors and publishers and who goes between them. That is his business, and yet, in spite of this dreadful occupation he is a merry man with a childlike countenance and a cheerful and carefree manner. Insouciant words bubble from his lips while his head rolls round on his shoulders; his invariable air is one of entire helplessness even in propitious circumstances; his tone is a tone of gay despair. His attitude toward all authors is fatherly and tender, and so is his attitude toward editors and publishers; he as much as admits that literature is a deplorable affair all around, and his expressive eye and accent say: “Courage! We shall yet make the best of this situation. You, who are about to buy, salute us.” At times a strange gleam comes into his face and on more than one such occasion I have heard him murmur that some day he will turn publisher and bring out two books which were published, indeed, but not read. And one of those books is _Michael Forth_, by Mary Johnston.
Miss Johnston was read before the publication of _Michael Forth_ and she has been read since. Her best work of one kind lies before it; her best work of another and more significant kind has followed it. _Michael Forth_ is simply a chrysalis, escaping notice, from which was to come, in place of the writer of superb historical romances like _To Have and To Hold_ and historical novels like _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, an author as strange as William Blake, a woman whose proper company in American literature is Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Melville.
“She is a mystic bent upon the expressive embodiment of what eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard until she saw and heard it,” concludes an anonymous writer.[99] The account of Mary Johnston’s adventure given by this writer is as unsatisfactory as secondhand versions of a mystical experience must necessarily be. Miss Johnston may or may not write the story; Emerson said that “the highest cannot be spoken,” and, most certainly, it cannot with adequacy be written. Miss Johnston has made some attempt to put her adventure on paper, but the result so far discourages her. In what follows I am merely trying to convey the quality of her strange experience. I have not her sanction for what I say; I had rather not make the trial. But there is really no escape. If we are to understand the growth of the writer we must have some notion of the thing that befell.
ii
The child was not strong, and her Scots grandmother first, an aunt afterward, taught her. She grew up in the village of Buchanan, Botetourt County, Virginia, still in the 1870’s a place of canalboats and the stagecoach. Major John William Johnston was a Confederate veteran, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature. Naturally the house was not without books. Mary Johnston found the histories particularly engrossing. Then the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and this daughter was sent to school at Atlanta. She was then sixteen. In a few months her health compelled her to return home where, a year later, her mother died. As she was the eldest of several children the direction of the household fell to her. She suffered intermittently from illness for many years. In her twenties and while living in a New York apartment she began a romance of colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century, writing much of it in a quiet corner of Central Park, so as to be outdoors. She had been writing short stories which editors sent back to her and which she burned on the first rejection. It is said that the late Walter H. Page, at the time with Houghton Mifflin Company, discovered her.[100] The historical romance, _Prisoners of Hope_ (1898) became her first book and was successful; her second novel, _To Have and To Hold_ (1900) was a record-making best seller and had literary merits most exceptional in the flood of historical fiction then running. Miss Johnston traveled considerably in Europe in quest of better health. After the death of her father she lived for some time at 110 East Franklin Street, Richmond. Then she built a home, “Three Hills,” near Warm Springs, Virginia, where she has lived since. Knowing that her Civil War novels, _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, owe much to Major Johnston’s analyses and recollections, some Southerners have said that Mary Johnston’s father was at least equally responsible with her for the splendid performance in her earlier novels. They quite misunderstand the nature of the inspiration he undoubtedly gave her. Of direct help—which is what these people really have in mind—he gave much, as she has acknowledged; it was, however, unimportant. Direct help can as well be got from books. If today you tell Miss Johnston how well you liked such a novel of hers as _Lewis Rand_ (1908), she will probably respond: “Of course you realize that the picture of those times is idealized.” In other words, although hers is one of those natures which must seek the ideal, possess and be possessed by it, the conception of the ideal has completely changed. Where once she found it in the bright glints of an earlier American day, now she finds it in our day and every day, past or present or to be—the pure silver of the human spirit that runs in a deep if irregular vein through the worn old rock of human destiny.
For she is like silver herself, like old silver choicely patterned. The small, oval face and pointed chin are serene in expression beneath a fine forehead and crisp hair with a great deal of its blackness still in it. Her manner is reposeful, friendly, unaffected and sympathetic. She talks readily about anything and everything but you have a feeling that she is also, at moments, somewhere else—this quite without any sacrifice or lessening of her hereness and attentiveness. I now come to the personal experience which, to be intelligible to most of us, must be put in a crude and simple kind of paraphrase.
If one has suffered much from illness and pain, one is very likely to have occasional moments in which one returns to life newly-washed, like the world in trembling freshness and sunlight on a morning after storm. If one stands on a Virginia hill, or a hill anywhere, one may sometimes have a distinct awareness that the length and breadth and depth round about and below are only a kind of length and breadth and descent to a creature measuring them with his legs; even the eye seems to declare that genuine dimensions are elsewhere. Stand on the hill one day, return to it one, five or ten years afterward, standing in the same place. It is quite possible that nothing has changed in the scene about you. A certain time has passed, but you, to yourself, haven’t changed. You have grown a little older, but the essential _you_ is not anybody else. Suddenly you realize that time is not a dimension, either, any more than the length and breadth round about or the drop to the valley below; and that as long as you are _you_ and no one else, the day, the year or the century would make no genuine difference. The only distance or direction lies between the unchanging _you_ and somebody else. You are really no farther from Balboa discovering the Pacific from a Panama summit than if you were standing beside him now sharing the discovery; the direction is from your spirit to his, from his to yours, and the distance is neither lessened nor increased by race, nationality, religion, leagues or centuries.
That is, instead of merely acquiring the notion of the fourth dimension of mathematics, you have come to see that all the so-called dimensions, length, breadth, height, time and imaginable others are merely conveniences of earthly existence, or necessities of earthly existence, like eating and breathing.
As you stand on the hill, you are alone and yet not alone. The physical _you_ is alone, as always; but the unchanging _you_ is one of a company whom you can identify only to the extent of what you may have read or heard about them. In the company will be Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Spinoza, Ludwig van Beethoven, Cardinal Newman, William Blake, Walt Whitman—to mention a few of various times and countries—as well as countless others.
Then will follow the strangest part of the experience and the part most difficult to put in words. It is, however, something of which some intimation comes even to the humblest pair of lovers, just as it is the passionate fulfillment of the great, the immortal lovers of legend.
There is a feeling so intense that it can find coherent expression only in poetry which holds it securely in the rigid mold of metre and rhyme; there is another feeling, or degree of feeling either more intense or more delicate which can communicate itself only in a language of cunningly-related sounds which we call music. And there is even a pitch of feeling greater than these, higher and very tranquil and most piercing in its intensity and loveliness. This feeling has only one expression—love. The object of that love is immaterial to it. That object may be, outwardly, the body of the beloved. It may be a person or an idea. It may be anything. The effects of this feeling are almost infinitely various. You will find some of them described in William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_. The feeling itself is a religious feeling but it may not expend itself on a religious object. The feeling made Francis of Assisi the Clown of God. It brought visions to Joan of Arc and put her at the head of a victorious army. Under its influence Beethoven wrote symphonies, Blake made pictures, and Whitman wrote _Leaves of Grass_. Sometimes, when the effects are tranquil, we say that the Lover has found peace—to which has sometimes been added a phrase of further description, “the peace that passeth understanding.”
Nearly all these aspects of a continuous human experience came to Mary Johnston. There was the not unusual preliminary circumstance of invalidism. There was the loss of a father, much-loved. There were the Virginia hills she walked upon and there was frequent solitude. The sense of passing the boundaries of time and space was facilitated by two things: first, her devotion to history, and second, her strongly-developed novelist’s imagination. Shortly after she was forty, therefore, she came to a day when, for an hour or part of an hour, she had access to a state of knowledge, of sympathy, of understanding which is so sane that it infuses its sanity into every act of living and so joyous that those to whom the experience is vouchsafed can throw aside every lesser joy. After that first experience Mary Johnston waited for it to renew itself, and gradually what had come as a miracle remained as a human faculty; so that since then she has acquired the apparent power or privilege of leaning out from the gold bar of Heaven, of letting earth slip without loosing herself from earth. You know how your mind will pass behind the stars while your feet yet continue to tread firm soil as you go on walking. That is a feeble likeness to the thing.
iii
It was bound to affect her writing, and perhaps the first traces of it are in _The Witch_ (1914), but it was clearly apparent in _Foes_ (1918), where, as I have said before this, “upthrusting through the surface of a stirring historical adventure, we had the evidence of the author’s breathless personal adventure.” It is one thing to be by temperament a mystic; quite another to become, as Miss Johnston had now become, a mystic by the witness of some inner illumination. In some cases the change has brought with it a proselyting spirit of great fervor; in Miss Johnston’s there was a complete absence of any such missionary zeal. All the same she could not go on writing novels in which the picture of some bygone time was idealized simply for the sake of a charming picture. _Foes_ has been correctly described as “a dramatic story of eighteenth century Scotland with a lasting feud, a long chase, and a crescendo of hatred and peril.” But it is also a story of sublime forgiveness, as much so as John Masefield’s _The Everlasting Mercy_. In _Michael Forth_ (1919) and _Sweet Rocket_ (1920) there was, as in certain novels of Herman Melville’s, notably _Pierre_, more transcendentalism than story. It was inevitable that she should be inarticulate for a while, but it was only for a while. For in 1922 appeared her story, _Silver Cross_, a tale of England in the time of Henry VII. and of two rival religious establishments. _Silver Cross_ was both beautiful and intelligible. For the prose style I like best Stewart Edward White’s word, “stippling.” It has also been said of what was to be her mode of utterance for a book or two: “Written in a clipped sort of prose stripped of ‘a’ and ‘an’ and ‘the’ and other particles as well as articles, the text is a highly mannered English replete with cadenced sentences and animated by nervous rhythms. The very diction bears poetic surcharges, and the whole effect on the reader is to distill in his soul a delicate enchantment or else to exasperate him to death.”[101] The core of the tale is irony, irony directed at religious bigotry and religious intolerance; it lies there at the base of the flower and from it the reader may make his own bitter honey. Or, if he have no stomach for that, he may take his satisfaction and pleasure in the rich sound of ecclesiastical trumpets, the green England, the pageant of a simple world unrolled before him.
In the same year with _Silver Cross_ Miss Johnston’s _1492_ was published. The book is, of course, the story of Columbus, told with the accurate historical coloring and the poetic feeling one would expect of the author; but it uses a technical device which, while not novel, is deserving of attention from the analyst of fiction. This is the employment as narrator of the story of Jayme de Marchena, a fictional person, represented as a Jew who has been banished from Spain under the decree of exile promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella. Miss Johnston makes of him a man of philosophical mind, an “obscure Spinoza” whose thoughts are a constant commentary on the voyage from Palos and the succeeding voyages. Thus, without distorting history or creating an imaginary portrait of the Genoese sailor and discoverer, the book (in form a novel) gives us one of the great events in human affairs in a perspective that neither history nor biography affords. Again what we have is the vision of one standing on a hilltop, alone and yet not alone—of one who is at the same instant standing in the night watches on the deck of a caravel and listening to the cry from the man on lookout....
iv
Slow turns the water by the green marshes, In Virginia. Overhead the sea fowl Make silver flashes, cry harsh as peacocks. Capes and islands stand, Ocean thunders, The light houses burn red and gold stars. In Virginia Run a hundred rivers.[102]
The fine opening of Miss Johnston’s poem might serve as an evocation, except in the detail of the lighthouses, for her novel, _Croatan_ (1923). The mere fact of her return to the Virginia of colonial days must have served to entice many readers to this book—who were held, I think, by the tale itself, once they had begun it. The legend of Raleigh’s lost colony of Roanoke and of a first white child born in Virginia, “Virginia Dare,” is skilfully utilized for a romance quite the most perfect Miss Johnston had imagined. The story of the three young people who grew up together in the forest—English girl, Spanish boy and Indian youth—is one of many overtones deftly sounded. Is Miss Johnston proclaiming a creed of racial tolerance and interracial understanding? Then the proclamation is made pianissimo and with muted strings, not with brass instruments. And the forest scenes—what delicious notes from oboes!
It is very natural to contrast Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow, both Virginians and both novelists of distinction as well as contemporaries. Their very agreeable personalities are, however, markedly different. Miss Glasgow is a product of her background and her time, as much so, for example, as Edith Wharton; Miss Johnston has a great deal more likeness to, let us say, Miss May Sinclair. Where Miss Glasgow tends to concern herself with Virginia of the last half century, Miss Johnston, from going back to the beginnings of her State, is quite as likely to plunge effortlessly forward into the farthest imaginable future. For a witness of what she can do in that direction one does well to read such a short story as “There Were No More People,”[103] dealing with the extinction of man and the slow emergence of “a creature who must be classed among _aves_. He was small, two-footed, feathered and winged.... Slowly, taking aeons to do it, he put out, in addition to his wings, rudimentary arms that grew, taking a vast number of generations to accomplish it, into true arm and hand. At the same time he began, very, very slowly, to heighten and broaden his skull. Man would have thought him—as he would have thought man—a strange looking creature.... It took time, but at last there dawned self-consciousness. The old vehicle for sensation, emotion, memory and thought that had been called man was gone. But sensation, emotion, memory and thought are eternals, and a new vehicle has been wrought. It is not a perfect vehicle. In much it betters man, but it is not perfect. The new Thinker resembles the old in that he knows selfishness and greed and uses violence.... It remains to be seen if he can outwear and lay aside all that and remain—as man could not remain.”
[Illustration: MARY JOHNSTON
_Copyright, E. L. Mix._]
v
Carl Van Doren’s words about Miss Johnston, in his _Contemporary American Novelists_, 1900-1920, that she brings to the legends and traditions of the Old Dominion no fresh interpretations, have been made obsolete by _Croatan_, and are, of course, so far as they are made applicable to legends in general, denied by her last half dozen novels. It is most true, though, that Miss Johnston is an historian and a scholar in her tastes. To the series of fifty volumes interlocking to form a complete American history, and published by the Yale University Press under the general title, _The Chronicles of America_, Miss Johnston contributed the volume on _Pioneers of the Old South_. The book deals with Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia as well, but Virginia is, of course, the principal subject. The period is 1607-1735 and Miss Johnston’s short account is an admirable piece of writing, concise, accurate, uncontroversial; alive with crisp human portraits and touched with poetry and imagination in its occasional descriptive passages.
Miss Johnston’s new novel, to be published late in 1924, under the title, _The Slave Ship_, is a story of the American slave trade in the eighteenth century. David Scott, a prisoner after the battle of Culloden, is sold into slavery on the American plantations. The cruelty with which he is treated hardens his conscience, so that when he escapes he goes without much hesitation or scruple into a slave ship and then into slave trading. The novel follows with intensity and compassion the career which takes him from this most abominable traffic to an understanding of what it means. The novel is, therefore, a story (like _Foes_) of one who journeyed on the road to Damascus. But I recall no story which pictures with more vividness and power the Middle Passage of infamous memory. _The Slave Ship_ is notable, too, for the greater suavity of Miss Johnston’s prose style; the “a’s,” “an’s,” and “the’s” are recovered and there are less tangible changes—all for the better.
“Nothing can be done but by being greater than the thing to be done” is a piece of wisdom uttered in Miss Johnston’s fable, “The Return of Magic.”[104] A writer is, or should be, capable of growth in two directions—as an artisan and as a source of emotion to be communicated in terms of beauty. The number who show growth in either fashion is not large; the number who grow both ways is very small. Five years ago I had occasion to survey the work of thirty-five American women novelists, three of whom have since died. One or two others have produced no new work in the period since. With the most liberal disposition toward the thirty or so others, it does not seem to me that more than a half dozen show growth either as writers or artists. Possibly three have produced work in these five years indicative of a mind enlarging as the hand serving it has grown more certain. Mary Johnston is one of the three.[105]
BOOKS BY MARY JOHNSTON
1898 _Prisoners of Hope._ In England: _The Old Dominion_ 1900 _To Have and To Hold_ In England: _By Order of the Company_ 1902 _Audrey_ 1904 _Sir Mortimer_ 1907 _The Goddess of Reason._ Poetic drama. 1908 _Lewis Rand_ 1911 _The Long Roll_ 1912 _Cease Firing_ 1913 _Hagar_ 1914 _The Witch_ 1915 _The Fortunes of Garin_ 1917 _The Wanderers_ 1918 _Foes_ In England: _The Laird of Glenfernie_ 1919 _Michael Forth_ 1920 _Sweet Rocket_ 1922 _Silver Cross_ 1922 _1492_ In England: _Admiral of the Ocean-Sea_ 1923 _Croatan_ 1924 _The Slave Ship_
SOURCES ON MARY JOHNSTON
Besides those referred to in the text of the chapter and in footnotes, the following are suggested:
_The Women Who Make Our Novels_, by Grant Overton. Moffat, Yard, 1918, 1919, 1922; Dodd, Mead, 1924. There is a chapter on Miss Johnston.
“Silver Cross, by Mary Johnston.” Circular published by Little, Brown and Company, 1922.
Carl Brandt, Brandt & Kirkpatrick, 101 Park Avenue, New York, N. Y.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _Unwritten History_, by Cosmo Hamilton. Page 3.
[2] _Adventures in Journalism_, by Philip Gibbs. Page 84. Harper.
[3] _Adventures in Journalism._ Page 113.
[4] _Adventures in Journalism._ Pages 245-246.
[5] “The Doomdorf Mystery” is the opening story in Mr. Post’s book, _Uncle Abner, Matter of Mysteries_ (1918).
[6] Aristotle in his _Poetics_.
[7] Walter Pater.
[8] The quotations from. Mr. Post are collated from the chapter on him in Blanche Colton Williams’s _Our Short Story Writers_ (Dodd Mead).
[9] See Gilbert Murray’s _Euripides and His Age_ in the Home University Library (Holt).
[10] Blanche Colton Williams in the chapter on Mr. Post in _Our Short Story Writers_.
[11] The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page 20.
[12] Identified by a correspondent of the Boston Herald (18 October 1923) as Dago Frank, Lefty Louie, Whitey Lewis, Gyp the Blood—figures in the Becker case.
[13] “Tammany ruled through the corner saloon,” Farnol is quoted as saying, in an interview appearing in the New York Tribune, 19 October 1923. “Dear me, yes, we used to vote ever so many times. I always went out with my Hell’s Kitchen gang, and we voted for Tammany as often as we were told, changing our coats and going in time and time again. That was when we were voting against Jerome.
“I’ve surprised my American friends by saying I thought prohibition was a good thing. I’ve seen too much tragedy and sordidness, too many babies born of drunken parents. I used to love my cups as well as anybody, and I used to say that regeneration could not be forced on a drunkard by law, but now I think the law will help give him his start anyway.”
[14] Interview in Boston Herald, 18 October 1923.
[15] Interview in The Sun, New York, 21 October 1911, page 16.
[16] “‘B’gad, no!’ Yes, Mr. Farnol talks that way. He has had his characters do it for so long that it comes to him naturally and is in nowise an affectation.”—The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page 20.
“Glasses are a part of his expressive equipment, as much as ‘dammit man’ is, and probably more so than a vest which seems to have acquired a habit of coming unbuttoned.”—Interview by John Anderson in The Evening Post, New York, 23 October 1923, page 12.
[17] _R. L. Stevenson: A Critical Study_, by Frank Swinnerton. Pages 189, 190.
[18] The Book News Monthly, Philadelphia, November, 1915.
[19] A writer in the London Times, quoted in the Boston Evening Transcript, 24 November 1915.
[20] “The Romance of Jeffery Farnol,” by J. P. Collins. The Bookman, New York, July, 1920.
[21] Quoted by Henry C. Shelley in his article, “Jeffery Farnol and ‘The Broad Highway,’” in The Independent, New York, 7 September 1911.
[22] Rudyard Kipling was 23 when _Plain Tales from the Hills_ was brought out in Calcutta; recognition came a few years later. Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote _This Side of Paradise_ at 23. William De Morgan was well past sixty when _Joseph Vance_ made its success.
[23] Interview in the Boston Sunday Globe, 28 May 1912 (London correspondence printed without a date line).
[24] _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_ (1913).
[25] “A better selection than Mr. Farnol the Daily Mail could not have made,” said W. B. (“Bat”) Masterson, in The Morning Telegraph, New York, 24 July 1921. “Mr. Farnol’s narrative was not only interesting, but for the most part extremely thrilling. I would like to give the whole story as Mr. Farnol wrote it.” He does, however, quote the salient passages of Farnol’s story.
[26] Interview by John Anderson in The Evening Post, New York, 23 October 1923, page 12.
[27] Interview in The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page 20.
[28] “An Attic Salt-Shaker,” by W. Orton Tewson in The Public Ledger, Philadelphia, 3 November 1923.
[29] Interviews in The Evening Telegram, New York, 21 October 1923, page 20; in The New York Tribune, 19 October 1923; in The Boston Herald, 18 October 1923. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is laid in New York.
[30] Interview by Fay Stevenson in The Evening World, New York, 24 October 1923.
[31] “Jeffery Farnol at Home,” by Henry Keats, The Book News Monthly, September, 1911.
[32] Several of the prime favorites among authors of books for boys and girls are discussed in Chapter 14 .
[33] See