Chapter X
. contains a long and careful critical consideration of Galsworthy’s work up to and including _The Freelands_.
_Some Impressions of My Elders._ St. John G. Ervine. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. For a forceful statement from one of those who strongly criticise Mr. Galsworthy’s work, especially for its “indiscriminating pity.” Analyses at length the play, _The Fugitive_.
_John Galsworthy._ Carlton Miles, THE THEATRE MAGAZINE, December, 1922. An interview.
_A Middle-Class Family._ Joseph Conrad. THE OUTLOOK (London), March 31, 1906. A review of _The Man of Property_.
The interested reader should further consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1906.
A complete Galsworthy bibliography, to be published in England, is now in preparation by Harold A. Marrot.
2. _The Magic Carpet_
i
The Magic Carpet was one which took you far away, whisked you up and through the air (though not sensibly too fast) and brought you into a foreign but delightful country. There are books like that, taking you out of yourself, so that the preoccupation of a moment before is forgotten, tomorrow’s worries are lost, and you exist in a blissful unconsciousness that there can be anything beyond the fine pleasure of this present hour. The “travel book” attempts directly the transfer to some place else; the book of essays, more indirect in its method, is often more successful.
Aldous Huxley has been known to us hitherto as a poet and a writer of fiction. Both his poetry and his fiction have been marked with a graceful artifice and that simplicity which comes only from a completed sophistication. His new book, a collection of essays, is distinguished by those qualities. There is something about Huxley’s writing--I don’t know what it is and those who know what it is, can’t tell--which brings a gleam to the eyes of all who love literature for its own sake. In _On the Margin_ Huxley the satirist walks comfortably with Huxley the student. For Aldous Huxley is a very studious young man. Tall, with hair that bushes out from under his broad-brimmed soft hat, he walks with that slight stoop inevitably acquired by those whose heads do not pass readily under all doorways. With his clothes flapping gently around him, his glance peering through thick-lensed spectacles, he advances into a room with the surprising effect of an amiable scarecrow. A first grotesque impression is rapidly dissolved in the gentle acquaintance springing up immediately afterward; for no more likeable person lives. It is not generally known that between the ages of seventeen and nineteen it was thought he would go blind, so that he learned to read Braille type. His interest in America is keen; he would like to come here, and may. Intimates know him as one of the most learned men in England, though devoid of poses and devoted to finding pleasure in the works of Charles Dickens. His scholarliness shows itself in _On the Margin_, where Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and the devilish biographer, Mr. Strachey, divide attention with the question of love as practised in France and England, the justice of Margot Asquith’s strictures on modern feminine beauty, and the evolution of ennui.
Recently there died in his ninety-second year Frederic Harrison, who had witnessed the coronation of Victoria in 1838 and every celebration in her reign; who saw her funeral in 1901; who, though past eighty when it began, saw the war of 1914-1918 and the several years of turmoil afterward. An extraordinary life! Before it had ended this man whose span of years was matched by his breadth of knowledge and interests gathered together what he himself regarded as his last book, now published under the title _De Senectute_ and blending some of his finest literary criticism with delightful recollections of the great times in which he lived. A personal account of Victoria and Prince Albert, the “Dialogue on Old Age” which affords the title for the volume, a review of the picturesque history of Constantinople through sixteen centuries, fundamental differences between Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, the art of translation with reference to Dante and Molière, some consideration of Fielding and Smollett and Kingsley, and a final chapter upon various schools of philosophy--these are the relics of a glorious life. The book is full of brightness, its effects are sane, and the writing is alike lucid and tinctured with that peculiar zest which, as it was a quality of Frederic Harrison’s temperament, goes far to explain the length of his life as well as the grace with which he lived it.
Among essayists there are ladies. But there are not many ladies, nor men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book. I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer to be known for her fiction--those short stories, masterly in form, with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief novel, _Conquistador_. And such a preference is easily understood. _Conquistador_, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, _Modes and Morals_, published in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and still steadily sells. People constantly refer to her discussion of “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling” and the arts of persuasion are constantly brought to bear upon her to assemble another such book. If Mrs. Gerould began with something of the suddenness of a meteor, she persists with a good deal of the steady brilliance of a fixed star. It was, in fact, with the appearance of a story, “Vain Oblations,” in Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1911, that she first came to general notice. This dark and terrible piece of fictional analysis had for its principal character a New England woman missionary. Other stories followed in Scribner’s, the Atlantic and Harper’s, and a first collection, under the title _Vain Oblations_, was published in March, 1914. A second book of tales, _The Great Tradition_, was succeeded by a novelette, _A Change of Air_; by the essays comprising _Modes and Morals_; and then by the novel, _Lost Valley_. _Valiant Dust_ offered some more short tales; but with the appearance of _Conquistador_ many of us felt Mrs. Gerould for the first time to be perfectly suited in length, form and material alike. Despite her superb technique, she needs more room than the short story gives her; and although she can write of barren New England lives she can write much more effectively of richly-coloured Latin life. Although, as Stuart P. Sherman has observed, she can do dashingly the “picture of a really nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a spacious sun-flooded chamber with a Chinese rug,” her deep fictional desires are toward the richly barbaric, and neither Henry-Jamesical nor Edith-Whartonesque. In the atmosphere of Princeton, which is her home (her husband, Gordon Hall Gerould, is a member of the English faculty), she has the leisure and repose necessary to do such essays and short novels as no other living American has given evidence of an equal talent for achieving. Occasionally a bit of travel, perhaps, producing as its direct result a book like her _Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions_; but ultimately much more valuable for its indirect stimulus to her imagination, which belongs to the class of imaginations so dangerous when they are confined.
In fact, the imagination is very little understood, as if it were one of those glands whose mysterious secretions we tinker with nowadays, either not too successfully or with a success so alarming as to threaten the overthrow of all physiology. One of these days we shall have a mental thyroid extract, and then--! It remains to be observed that with most of us the imagination secretes gently, with a fresh annual activation in the direction of old woods and pastures ever-new, rather than new; a circumstance very favourable to David Grayson when, in 1907, he put forth the volume called _Adventures in Contentment_. It is difficult to think of any precise precedent for this mixture of essay, philosophy, homely observation and quiet humour with its essentially American pattern of thought. The febrile character of much American life was already marked, and the remedy of an equally feverish optimism had yet to be widely prescribed. The time was propitious, the sentiment of David Grayson had an ingratiation. When, in 1910, _Adventures in Friendship_ was published, a good many thousand people had read the earlier adventures and were alert for these. _The Friendly Road_ (1913) was succeeded by _Hempfield_ (1915) and a final volume, _Great Possessions_ (1917). A half dozen years have passed without relegating these books to the shelves of the Great Unread. As “The Library of the Open Road” they inherit an annual, rather a perennial, popularity.
ii
In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so) but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his _Baedeker’s Mediterranean_ or _Northern Italy_ or _Spain and Portugal_. Here the matters essential to accuracy were given--and only a novelist who has heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of a topographical mistake--but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most freshly revised volumes is _Baedeker’s Switzerland_; another of equal recency is the guide to Canada.
In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist, however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe. In fact, Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each volume of the series now under way. _Java and the East Indies_ and _France to Scandinavia_ (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with _The Holy Land and Syria_. _From Tangier to Tripoli_ (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the Sahara), _Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland_, _The Tail of the Hemisphere_ (Chile and Argentina) and _Cairo to Kisumu_ (Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate books.
“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921--a record that begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so, he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores, following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay, Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:
Then I had religion, then I had a vision--
and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American quest of power--religion the sanctification of one, pan-Americanism the credo of the other. It is this spiritual penetration that makes the fine distinction of Stephen Graham’s _In Quest of El Dorado_, joined to the man’s unusual literary skill, taste and sense of form. On the point of form there is something more than usually admirable in the start of the book from Madrid and Cadiz and in the conclusion (on a note of wonder) amid the ruins of Mitla, as if the quester for El Dorado would do well to seek its whereabouts in the indecipherable inscriptions placed on their massive memorials by a race that had sunk into silence long before the imperious advent of the Children of the Sun. These are the refinements of the book for the reader of philosophical or æsthetic tastes; but as such matters should be, they are entirely unobtrusive--present to those who seek them, hidden to those who are indifferent--and in externals Stephen Graham offers a first-hand travel study with cowboys and conquistadores, Indians and Mexicans, the Panama Canal and the jingle of spurs in the changing foreground.
Among those authors whose books of travel win their appreciation from the personality of the adventurer, Mary Roberts Rinehart seems to me quite plainly the foremost. The considerable time that has elapsed since the publication of _Through Glacier Park_ and _Tenting Tonight_ will sharpen many appetites for the camp fare offered in her new book, _The Out Trail_. With none of the acerbity of her own Tish, Mrs. Rinehart has to the full that lady’s derring-do. “I have roughed it,” she explains at the beginning of _The Out Trail_, “in one wilderness after another, in camp and on the trail, in the air and on water, in war abroad and in peace at home. I have been scared to death more times than I can remember. Led,” she confesses, “by the exigencies of my profession, by feminine curiosity, or by the determination not to be left at home, I have been shaken, thrown, bitten, sunburned, rained on, shot at, stone-bruised, frozen, broiled, and scared, with monotonous regularity.” And she adds that on several occasions she has been placed in situations of real danger from which she has clamoured to be extricated with all possible despatch. Two things, if we may judge by her chronicle, seem never to have failed her, in whatever emergency: her sense of drama and her sense of humour. At least, they are keenly in evidence on all the pages of _The Out Trail_, and make it easily among the most entertaining books of its kind--not infrequently exciting, too! If someone thinks that the sense of the humorous must have been missing at the time and have been recaptured later in writing of the adventures, I suspect he is mistaken; for I recall that not so long after I had written a chapter on “The Vitality of Mary Roberts Rinehart” as a novelist, I met Mrs. Rinehart. She was suffering from one of those ferocious colds which make cowards and pessimists of us all, but she only remarked: “I’m afraid you will find the vitality you have just celebrated rather low this morning.” This, I submit, is such stuff as humorists are made on.
iii
Among books of essays that successfully spread the Magic Carpet for readers I should like to draw attention to the following (in addition to those described above):
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY’S _In the Neighborhood of Murray Hill_.
J. C. SQUIRE’S _Essays at Large_ and his _Books Reviewed_.
HILAIRE BELLOC’S _On_.
Other collections of essays, chiefly on literary and philosophical subjects, are included in or listed after