Chapter 9

, quoting one of his superb sonnets, but I think I neglected to call attention to the preface he has recently provided for his _Poems_. It is an omission that must be repaired. I can scarcely give an idea of the preface’s excellence as vigorous and beautiful prose, but aside from Santayana’s explanation that the subject of these poems is “simply my philosophy in the making,” it is just to quote this passage: “A Muse--not exactly an English Muse--actually visited me in my isolation; the same, or a ghost of the same, that visited Boethius or Alfred de Musset or Leopardi. It was literally impossible for me then not to re-echo her eloquence. When that compulsion ceased, I ceased to write verses. My emotion--for there was genuine emotion--faded into a sense that my lesson was learned and my troth plighted....” I cannot resist quoting from the closing poem, the lines on Art that count as a translation from Theophile Gautier but are actually so much more than that:

All things are doubly fair If patience fashion them And care-- Verse, enamel, marble, gem....

--All things return to dust Save beauties fashioned well. The bust Outlasts the citadel.

The gods, too, die, alas! But deathless and more strong Than brass Remains the sovereign song.

How W. E. Henley would have loved this! (But perhaps he saw it, and was not silent). Henley, whose _Poems_ in my copy are the nineteenth edition--and my copy is far from new. Henley and Francis Thompson and Kipling go on; few of us need any urge or even any reminder to re-read them; their poetry gains its fresh recruits with every season of the young men, and old men have been known to resume their youth over the pages....

Youth! That is the cargo that sails on those perilous seas forlorn we looked upon from John Keats’s casements opening on the foam. What a frank title for a first book of verse is Robert Roe’s _Here You Have Me!_ The title poem and a few others in the Whitmanesque tradition are followed by a group of poems derived from experiences as a sailor, verses that break free of any tradition known to me; and by poems ripened out of an intimate contact with the Arizona desert. I have liked some of these greatly, just as I like, for another reason, Vachel Lindsay’s _Going-to-the-Sun_, which is suitably fantastic. Some way must be devised for everyone to hear Lindsay recite or chant his verses, since in no other way can the reader possibly get more than half their effect. I think if all could hear him in a half dozen, the awakened instinct and quickened imagination in most of us would accomplish the rest. We should then be able merely to read him and feel the elixir.

In a later chapter of this book devoted to Christopher Morley there is mention of his poem, “Parson’s Pleasure,” which gives title to his new and by all odds best collection of verse. The remarkable change and growth in Morley as a prose writer has been attended by chemistries in the poet, and I expect the large popularity gained by his poems in _Chimneysmoke_ will accrue without delay to the poems in _Parson’s Pleasure_. But are you familiar with the poetry of Franklin P. Adams? I only partly mean the F. P. A. of the daily breakfast table and occasional short lyric or bit of versification heading a newspaper column. I mean the author of _Tobogganing on Parnassus_, and _Weights and Measures_, and _Overset_, and _So There!_ Light, satiric verse, most of it; but how finished and perfect in its form, how penetrating in its arrowy indirection! Whether he is penning the address of the passionate advertiser to his love or doing for Horace what Edward Fitzgerald did for a certain Persian singer, Mr. Adams is constantly curing the evils of civilisation, freeing those “baffled whims” Don Marquis tells about and generally making life more livable by making it more singable.

iv

Among studies of contemporary poets we have had none so valuable, I think, as Lloyd Morris’s _The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson_. The first and most important inspiration that came to Mr. Morris was undoubtedly the divisions of his subject, so that he brings us to the consideration of a difficult master under the headings natural to the poet, his “Men,” his use of “History,” and “Legend,” his two prose “Plays,” and as the crown, his “Ideas” or intellectual content. It is hard to see how any reader of poetry can do without this lucid discussion and exposition of one who may well be, and is by competent critics adjudged to be, the greatest living American poet. A biographical note, following the careful bibliography of Mr. Robinson’s works by W. Van R. Whitall, rounds out the usefulness of the little volume.

The popularity of anthologies of verse is now proverbial, and I expect that there will be plenty of attention for the _Anthology of American Verse_ which J. C. Squire, poet and editor of the London Mercury, has completed. The work shows the advantages gained by the onlooker’s standpoint, who can bring to bear a sense of perspective better than our own. The selection also shows Mr. Squire’s fine taste which, so far as I know, has no superior and very few equals among those whose knowledge of poetry would qualify them to be anthologists at all. Another collection of extreme importance but necessarily from a different angle has been completed by Margery Gordon and Marie B. King, and just published under the title _Verse of Our Day_. As the compilers had distinctly in mind school use of this book in a special edition, as well as the wide popular audience in an edition from which certain textbook features would be omitted, their aim was for inclusiveness and a highly representative quality above all else--though a rigid selection was inevitable, too. The result is a book presenting 347 poems, 225 by American poets and 122 by British. Ninety-two of the Americans and 42 of the British poets are modern--that is, they lie between Eugene Field and Amy Lowell on the one hand, between W. E. Henley and Alfred Noyes and John Masefield on the other. Biographies of the poets, reading lists and, in the school edition, certain guides to study have been included. The popularity of _Verse of Our Day_ ought to be sure and of some permanence.

Henry van Dyke, assisted by Hardin Craig and Asa Don Dickinson, has edited _A Book of British and American Verse_ rather from a standpoint like J. C. Squire’s. “This is not an attempt to make another historical anthology of English verse,” Dr. van Dyke explains. “I have looked only at the value and beauty of the poems themselves.” If some poets were unrepresented, it was not to be helped. “Those that seemed the best have been chosen out of many, not to illustrate a theory, but for their own sake, because they are good to read.” And for those who loved Roosevelt as well as for those who have the anthologist’s interest, there is _Roosevelt as the Poets Saw Him_, edited by Charles Hanson Towne and containing poems by Kipling, Edith Wharton, Richard Le Gallienne, William Watson, Edgar Lee Masters, Owen Wister, John Hay, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Bridges.

v

Leaving aside all disputes on the score of the drama, one of the best moments of our contemporary literature came a few years ago when it was first known that J. M. Barrie had consented to the publication of his plays. And then when the published plays began to come along, the moment enlarged itself. Here was a man who was practically inventing something, a curious but felicitous compound of novel and drama, a mixture of narrative and dialogue, something that extended far beyond the irrepressible wit and satire of G. Bernard Shaw’s stage directions, priceless as those had been. There was a feeling, with good reason, that by this step Barrie had done more to instate himself with posterity than by anything heretofore. For about the plays themselves, as plays, the controversy is already active; but about the success of the plays as published I know of no dispute or objection. _Dear Brutus_ is the eighth volume in a series which already included _A Kiss for Cinderella_, _Alice Sit-by-the Fire_, _What Every Woman Knows_, _Quality Street_, _The Admirable Crichton_ and two collections of the shorter plays, _Half Hours_ (“Pantaloon,” “The Twelve-Pound Look,” “Rosalind,” “The Will”) and _Echoes of the War_ (“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals,” “The New Word,” “Barbara’s Wedding,” “A Well-Remembered Voice”). There are good things to come yet, including _Peter Pan_, and these are in preparation; but much of the best Barrie and best-agreed-to Barrie is now ready to go on the bookshelf (where it won’t stay put very well)--and the best of Barrie is good in any company. For example, _The Admirable Crichton_, which even the most critical have found strong words to praise. The printed version avoids the fault of the 1918 stage revival in which, as has been said, Barrie dulled or allowed some one else to dull the edge of his perfect satire. For a short and appreciative yet discriminating account of Barrie the playwright, one could not do better than read the chapter upon him in John W. Cunliffe’s _English Literature During the Last Half Century_ (Macmillan: Revised Edition, 1923).

John Galsworthy, the subject of the first chapter of this book, will not, of course, be overlooked by anyone concerned in knowing the best plays of our time. His plays are to be had, complete at present, in five volumes (_Plays: First Series_; _Plays: Second Series_, etc.) and a supplementary volume, _Six Short Plays_. Or, with the exception of the six short plays, each may be had separately. Probably a consensus would select _Loyalties_, _Justice_, _Strife_, _The Silver Box_, _The Pigeon_ and _The Skin Game_ as his most important and representative dramas.

Arnold Bennett’s new play, _Don Juan de Marana_, represents one fulfilment of a threefold ambition. Don Juan, together with the legend of the Wandering Jew and the story of Tannhäuser, had attracted him for years as great subjects for drama. A good deal of preliminary work on the Wandering Jew theme was wasted by news that somebody else had written a play on the theme and obtained a production. “I put the Wandering Jew aside for ten years,” explains Bennett. “With regard to Tannhäuser, I am still wondering how to cure Elizabeth of her insipidity, and how to get into the heads of a twentieth century audience the surely obvious fact that music is not an essential ingredient of the tale.” Don Juan Tenorio proved impossible as the basis of a play, but finally Bennett came upon the other, later version of the Don Juan story. “And then I discovered what I wanted in a work on my own shelves, the plays of Dumas _père_ in twenty-five volumes. I ought to have divined that since Dumas wrote plays on everything, he must have written a play on the Don Juan de Marana variation of the Don Juan legend.”

At last all of W. Somerset Maugham’s plays are available for the reader, some ten volumes that include not only _The Circle_, but _Lady Frederick_, _The Explorer_, _Jack Straw_, etc. It should perhaps be noted here that the play _Rain_ is not a Maugham play, but an adaptation of Maugham’s tremendous short story, “Rain,” included in his book of South Sea tales, _The Trembling of a Leaf_.

John Dos Passos in his _Rosinante to the Road Again_, in the chapter on “Benavente’s Madrid,” has conveyed with clearness and much picturesqueness the style and point, the character and perfection of taste in a certain style (_lo castizo_) with which Jacinto Benavente’s dramas abound. It is this that from their Spanish viewpoint makes them of such distinction; but that would hardly account for their success outside Spain. Larger qualities--a gentle and deadly satire, a nervous vitality, wit--do that; and the visit of Señor Benavente to America a few months ago did much to attract attention to his work. Twelve of his plays, assembled in three volumes in the translations of John Garrett Underhill, are now accessible to the English reader. Benavente represents a more modern Spain than the Echegaray with whose _drame passionel_ those who read plays are sufficiently familiar. He should be read for his own sake and as a Continental dramatist much more distinctly representative of something national, something Spanish in sensibility, than are the outstanding playwrights of other European lands--excepting Russia, no doubt. One can scarcely read Ibsen for Norway, or Strindberg for a little corner of the world; Tchekov is Russia but Andreiev is humanity. Jacinto Benavente, however, is Spain without the sacrifice of those elements which are of importance to a society in any country.

The impressive success of the Theatre Guild is known everywhere, and the Theatre Guild Library is very welcome for its addition of several of the finest of recent plays to the resources of the reading table. The series has been auspiciously begun with publication of Karel Capek’s _R. U. R._, Ernest Toller’s _The Mass-Men_, and Elmer L. Rice’s _The Adding Machine_. A particularly good pick of recent successes will be found in _Contemporary American Plays_, edited by Arthur H. Quinn and containing Jesse Lynch Williams’s “Why Marry?” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” Rachel Crothers’s “Nice People,” Gilbert Emery’s “The Hero,” and George S. Kaufman’s and Marc Connelly’s “To the Ladies!”

Of recent books on the drama, Stark Young’s _The Flower in Drama: Papers on the Theatre_, has attracted wide attention and much deserved praise. Not much more than a year ago Mr. Young, previously a professor of English, began to write his papers on plays, actors, and the theatre in general in the New Republic. His articles and reviews attracted at once the attention of discriminating people interested in the theatre; their admiration was quickly developed by an attitude which showed a comprehending sympathy for what the younger men were trying to do and yet never lost sight of the drama as a developed art with certain inviolable principles. Moreover, he wrote with wit, precision and charm. There is no better reading of its sort, I think, than his “Dear Mr. Chaplin,” his “Circus,” or his “Letter to Duse,” all contained in this volume. Perhaps a note should explain the title, which is based on a sentence: “If one aims only at the beautiful, the flower is sure to appear”--a phrase drawn from Seami, 1363-1444, who, with his father, stood at the head of the No of Japan.

_18. Lost Patterns_

Collestamore was showing me his library, but a summons to the telephone had drawn him from the room and I was standing before the set of shelves between the cases containing rarities and those which held fine bindings, frankly puzzled. There were not many books ranged here and I could not make out the distinction that grouped them together. It might have been no distinction but mere accident in the case of anyone less methodical than Collestamore. With him, no; some thought or queer intention must underlie the choosing. Fiction and non-fiction, new books and some old ones, some volumes of attractive format and design and others whose homely plainness was possibly compensated by the fact of their being first editions--it meant nothing. Alphabetical arrangement by authors hadn’t been attempted and was, indeed, scarcely worth while until the little assembly grew larger. Then he returned and met my look of inquiry with:

“You’ve discovered my Lost Patterns.”

“Lost Patterns?”

“Oh,” he said, “there aren’t many of them, as yet. The fact is, I only thought of it a week ago. It rained all afternoon, so I spent a couple of hours amusing myself with them--with a beginning of them.”

“‘Lost’? But some of them are new enough.”

“It’s the only name I could think of that I rather liked,” was his explanation. “A Lost Pattern--the idea I was trying to express--may be either old or new. It has nothing to do with the edition or the binding, but everything to do with the contents of a book. Novel or essay or biography, the text ought to represent something we have not had before or since and aren’t likely to have again; something individual in the scheme or the style; something wholly personal in the flavour--in short, unique, I suppose. What James Huneker would have called a unicorn. By the way, _he_ is a Lost Pattern, probably.”

“Probably.” I was not unsympathetic to his idea. “You are anxious to get together a collection for the collection’s sake, I take it.”

“No, for the reader’s sake. It wouldn’t have any value as a collection, other than the curious, and I swear it could have no value for the person of literary practices.” I glanced at him but could detect nothing in his expression. I have always suspected Collestamore of secret literary practices, concealed efforts to put his freakish self into words. My idea is that he attempts essays and that so far he is like a fellow fond of cigarettes and learning to roll his own. He went on, more meditatively: “A fellow desiring to be a writer would waste his time if he aped these people.” All the same, I thought, I will bet that you----

“I began with a few new books,” he was saying. “New or comparatively so. The thing that started me, I guess, was Elinor Wylie’s novel.” He fingered his copy of _Jennifer Lorn_.

“I haven’t read it.”

“She has made a replica of the eighteenth century novel, a suitably fantastic story about an English aristocrat and his bride who journey to the India of the East India Company and meet with bizarre adventures. It is what you would expect of a poet enamoured with the life of that glittering period. I wonder that Max Beerbohm hasn’t done it long before this. Or Aldous Huxley.”

“I see you have them both represented here.”

“Yes, the thought of them sprang from Mrs. Wylie’s book. I took down Huxley’s _Crome Yellow_ and his _Mortal Coils_. From Max I wanted the books of his caricatures--_Rossetti and His Circle_ and that other one he calls _A Survey_. My collection of Lost Patterns was begun, then and there. The idea of what would constitute a Lost Pattern was formed--I don’t say it didn’t enlarge afterward nor that it won’t enlarge or change shape again. But, essentially, I knew what I wanted.”

“Nobody knows what he wants,” I objected. “The thing is obviously impossible. You mean you knew that you wanted to add more books to the five you had assembled.”

“Any way you like.” Collestamore’s indifference was polite, but profound. “I began looking over the other shelves. The next thing I came upon was George Moore’s _Hail and Farewell_. We shall never have a writer like George Moore, not even George Moore.” I thought to myself: With that nuance, with a phrase like that, he is deliberately imitating Beerbohm’s prose; I had better take no notice of it. His next remark startled me.

“Literary style, distinction, in the enterprise I had embarked upon was of no consequence whatever.” And seeing that this wasn’t brilliantly intelligible, he continued:

“The thing was much deeper than that--the personal twist or wrinkle was what I was after, the fly in the amber. Not a perfectly preserved fly in the amber of a choice literary expression but a wriggling insect caught on the tanglefoot of unaccustomed words would do as well.” He was fast throwing grammar overboard in the effort to lighten ship and bring his thoughts to port. “I have not, as yet, come upon an illiterate author who deserves inclusion among my Lost Patterns, but I shouldn’t hesitate to put him in.”

“I see.” After a pause: “Here you’ve got George Meredith. He’s very nearly illiterate, don’t you think so? Sometimes literacy can go too far, as in Meredith and in Henry James, whom you’ve put alongside. Maurice Hewlett is another matter.”

“Well,” said Collestamore, “I stuck them in as a matter of course. Anybody would naturally have thought of them in such a connection. The things I really pride myself upon are my detections among these single and mostly more recent books. You take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s _This Side of Paradise_, or William McFee’s _Casuals of the Sea_, or C. E. Montague’s very fetching _Fiery Particles_, or Ernest Bramah’s _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, or Don Marquis’s _Hermione_, or Alfred B. Stanford’s _The Ground Swell_”--he was half pulling them out and letting them fall back, as he enumerated them--“and tell me if I have not shown both enterprise and catholicity.”

I thought he had, but I also thought he should attempt some justificatory remarks, and said so. His point in regard to _This Side of Paradise_ was its vitality in spite of its having, as Edmund Wilson, Jr., observed, almost every conceivable fault. “It had all imaginable faults, but yet, in Wilson’s words, ‘it did not fail to live,’” Collestamore argued. I nodded, and he went on. _Casuals of the Sea_, it appeared, pleased him by a lack of anything self-conscious in the writing. He much preferred it to the too purposeful artistry of McFee’s _Command_. The singularity of those tales in _Fiery Particles_, he thought, called for no special pleading in its behalf. _The Ground Swell_ was a sea pattern unique in its simplicity; Don Marquis’s heroine and her little group of serious thinkers were the apotheosis of the Great Inane. As for _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, he was merely echoing G. K. Chesterton, Belloc and a dozen others whose judgment was respectable and might command my deference not given to his own.

“Oh, I defer,” I assured him. “You are the Lord High Executioner in this series of literary beheadings. I consider that a reign of terror has begun.”

It wasn’t beheadings, he said. He wasn’t going over the field of daisies like the Syracusan tyrant and with his sceptre, cane, stick or staff cropping off the heads of the taller blooms.

“Daisies? I thought it was a field of corn.”

As to that, he didn’t remember. It was no matter, anyway. He was not demolishing, but singling out for eminence. No whistling cane, but----

“The sceptre gently touching one here, one there, knighting him, commanding him to spring up----”

“You will observe,” in a tone of patient tolerance, “the surprising variety one gets in the shortest possible space of time at this sort of thing. Of course I thought of Jane Austen, and rather than put in _Pride and Prejudice_ I chose _The Watsons_ as completed by Miss Oulton. After all, _The Watsons_ is later work than either _Pride and Prejudice_ or _Sense and Sensibility_ and the conjecture as to why it was never finished gives it special interest. By that time I was running over my books more or less as they stand on the shelves, alphabetised by authors. The next thing, therefore, was Arnold Bennett, and I chose _The Truth About an Author_. You know, it is the one book of Bennett’s that could not, imaginably, have been written by anybody else. H. C. Bunner was next. I really don’t know whether anyone living besides myself and Franklin P. Adams now cares for Bunner; if not, so much the better!”

“I see. The more lost the Lost Pattern, the more to be prized.”

“Why not? His _Stories_ and his _Short Sixes_ are as American as, perhaps more so than, O. Henry.” He was quietly dogmatic.

“Is O. Henry here?” I looked. “Yes, to be sure. Also portions of Kipling and, I judge, Frank R. Stockton practically complete. But these were among the matter-of-courses. Let’s see: Shouldn’t you put in Frank Norris? _The Pit_, I suppose. And there’s W. W. Jacobs.”

He looked so restive that I stopped. “It’s really no way to go at the thing wholesale,” he protested. “I haven’t made up my mind as to which one or two books of Stockton’s yet; he’s there in bulk only temporarily. I suppose it had better be _Rudder Grange_.”

“Make it _Salthaven_ from W. W. Jacobs,” I urged. “Unless you strongly prefer _At Sunwich Port_.”

“I do. Probably it’s just that I read it first. After Bunner I ran against George W. Cable’s _The Grandissimes_. Then I laid hold of Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. Then John Dos Passos’s _Rosinante to the Road Again_.”

“Thomas Beer has just finished a biography of Stephen Crane. Joseph Conrad has written a preface for it,” I said, but Collestamore paid no attention. He was across the room, picking something out, and came back in a moment holding up Edmund Gosse’s _Three French Moralists_. “Just thought of Gosse. This will do to hold the place for him until I decide. Have you never read it? Then you don’t know Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere as you should know them. And you’ve missed a singularly urbane and exquisite example of English prose style.”

“You have both Compton Mackenzie’s _Carnival_ and his _Sinister Street_ in here. Make it _Carnival_. Let’s see: David Graham Phillips’s _Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise_; John Ames Mitchell’s _Amos Judd_; and that new illustrated edition of _David_ _Harum_. I guess I’d agree with your choice of each of those.” His expression remained polite but I could see it would make not the least difference whether I agreed or not. “Did you see Rodolph Valentino in ‘The Young Rajah’?” I asked, to tease him. He was good-natured about it. “I did. I have no objection to Valentino, but I much prefer the story as told in _Amos Judd_.” He was ruffling the pages of _David Harum_. “I like these text drawings, don’t you?” I said I did, adding that _David Harum_ was the kind of book that cried for illustration.

“About biography, or especially, autobiography,” he said suddenly. “Should you say Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_, for one? There’ll never be another of that pattern.” But I had a suggestion for him there. “Anyway, you must include Bouck White’s _The Book of Daniel Drew_.” He said at once, “Oh, yes!”--adding, “Autobiographical in form, anyway. White always contended that he found an actual record left by Uncle Dan’l Drew. Semi-fictional, if you like; but a grand piece of satire. And now I rather think we’re wanted to sit down to lunch. Er--how about a swallow of something first? Or is that among your lost appetites?”

_19. Joseph C. Lincoln Discovers Cape Cod_

i

On 13 February, 1870, in the town of Brewster, Massachusetts, which is on Cape Cod, there was born to Joseph Lincoln and Emily (Crosby) Lincoln a son whom they named Joseph Crosby Lincoln. The child’s father was a seaman, so had been his father’s father and his father’s father’s father; and so were all his uncles. His mother’s people followed the sea. For a mile in each direction from the plain little house of the Lincolns every house contained a Cap’n. When the boy was a year old, his father died of a fever in Charleston, South Carolina. Emily Crosby Lincoln had made voyages with her husband, whose death made it necessary to move up toward Boston. In summers, however, the boy got back to the Cape with its sand dunes and cranberry bogs, its chance to fish and swim. “He rode the old stage coach from Harwick to Chatham; he knew the lightkeepers, the fishermen, the life savers, and the cracker-box oracles in the village stores. The perfume of the green salt meadows, the pungent pines and bayberries ... the fishing boats, the dripping nets, ‘the mighty surge and thunder of the surf along the shores’ were part of his very existence.” The description is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s account of his young manhood. “I suppose if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship,” Joseph C. Lincoln says. But the day of steam had begun. He went to school at Brewster and Chelsea. As he grew up, college was seen to be out of the question. The youth and his mother went to Brooklyn and he entered a broker’s office. This work he hated. “I have always felt that they were fully as glad to get rid of me as I was to leave them.” Wishing to draw, he fell under the guidance of Henry Sandham (“Hy”) and went to Boston where, with another fellow, an office was opened for commercial work. To make a picture sell better, Lincoln sometimes wrote a verse or joke to go with it. Sometimes the verse or joke sold when the drawing did not. It was the day of universal bicycling. The League of American Wheelmen Bulletin had a circulation of over 125,000 and Sterling Elliott, its editor, offered Lincoln a job as associate editor. His verses were thus brought to the attention of a considerable public. He married in 1897 Florence E. Sargent, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, and he was writing verse, mostly in the vernacular of Cape Cod, for a number of publications. In 1899 the passion for bicycling began to wane and Lincoln definitely moved from Boston to New York to try to make a living as a writer on his own. He had written a first short story, a Cape Cod narrative, and sold it to Saturday Evening Post. That magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Youth’s Companion and Puck were taking his verse, which was sometimes in a swinging metre and sometimes humour tinctured with philosophy. In 1902 Albert Brandt, of Trenton, New Jersey, published Lincoln’s _Cape Cod Ballads_, in a yellow-backed volume with illustrations by E. W. Kemble. It was Lincoln’s first book. Now he was writing short stories in earnest and with some success and he began a novel which could only be written by labouring at it on a corner of the dining room table from midnight on Saturdays through Sunday mornings until the manuscript was completed. It was the story of three old sea captains who, despairing of their joint efforts at housekeeping, advertised for a wife. Published in 1904 as _Cap’n Eri_, this affair settled two large doubts in Lincoln’s mind; first, that he could sustain the interest of readers through a long story; second, that he could make a living by writing, and by writing books.

[Illustration: JOSEPH C. LINCOLN]

ii

Many have been the editions of _Cap’n Eri_ since its appearance, nineteen years ago. The outline of those nineteen years in Joseph C. Lincoln’s life is only pleasantly eventful. A friendship with Sewell Ford led him to become a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey. There he has built a house of “Colonial” lines, the sight of which is not good for less successful writers. A very handsome summer home stands on a terrace at Chatham, Cape Cod. In 1912 the Lincolns lived for a while in England and travelled to some extent on the Continent, visiting Switzerland. Frequently Mr. Lincoln has gone to one or another part of the United States, even unto California, to deliver, before crowded houses, his lecture on “Cape Cod Folks” or to give readings from his own books. And every year since 1904 has seen the publication of one, sometimes two, Lincoln novels.

In Hackensack Mr. Lincoln attends the Unitarian Church--he is a member of its Board of Trustees--and he was at one time a member of the Hackensack Board of Education. He used to belong to the Salmagundi Club in New York but resigned because he used the club and its privileges so little. He still belongs to The Players in New York; but in any ordinary sense of the word he is not a clubman. The family usually goes to Cape Cod in a motor car and while there Mr. Lincoln fishes and swims and sails all he can. In Hackensack golf is his principal diversion and he tries to play daily, “although there are times, particularly in my brand of golf, when there seems to be more hard work and moral strain than amusement, by a good deal.” The man is a red-cheeked, rotund and comfortable man, with a bright eye and a catching smile and a great fund of stories such as the following:

“An old salt of my acquaintance spent a recent winter in Florida and found in the fishing of the region a fascinating but pretty strenuous pastime. As a skipper of the old school he scorned modern devices for fishing, such as reels. In fact he went out to fish tarpons in good Cape Cod fashion with merely a fishing line and his own bare hands. He hooked a tarpon and for a couple of hours there was waged a terrific battle between the fish and the stubborn old Cape Codder, whose hands were torn and blistered. Proudly he exhibited his 79-pound catch to the natives. ‘Not much of a haul,’ was their comment. ‘Why, a little woman, no size at all, just brought in a tarpon that tipped the scales at 100 pounds.’ Would he like to see a real fish? ‘Thunder, no!’ roared the Cap’n. ‘Show me the woman!’”

iii

Hamlin Garland, the author of some accounts of American life which have not omitted the sombre, the discouraging, the bitter scenes and places, has written:

“Joseph Lincoln is not only a novelist of wide reputation, he is a public benefactor. His success has in it something heartening and corrective. In the midst of work which appeals to the base and cynical in human life (American city life) his clean, wholesome, humorous stories of Cape Cod sea captains and their neighbours give evidence of the fact that there is a huge public for decent and homely fiction, just as the success of his play, ‘_Shavings_,’ is evidence that there is a paying audience for a decent and homely drama. His books can be read aloud in the family circle with joy to all the members of it--I know, for I have myself read eight or ten of them to my wife and daughters. They make no pretense of being profound, or new, or ‘smart.’ They are filled with the characters and the humour which are native to the Cape. Lincoln knows these Cape towns and their inhabitants as Irving Bacheller knows his men of the North Woods, for he was raised among them and lives in their neighbourhood several months of each year. He looks like one of them, like an old skipper, hearty, unassuming and kindly. The task which he has set himself is one which calls for a keen sense of character, democracy of sentiment and a fancy which never--or very seldom--loses its hold on the solid ground of experience. His plots are sometimes negligible, but his characters, even when they seem a bit repetitious, are a joy. His prosperity is well earned.”

This undoubtedly expresses a general sentiment, although it does not express it so vividly as a sentence that appeared in the Los Angeles Express:

“One enjoys a Joe Lincoln novel as one does a long, cool, thirst-quenching drink on a hot day.”

However, before examining the novels themselves, it is proper to put down here some things that Mr. Lincoln has said, at one time or another, showing his attitude toward them. Of course his attitude toward other kinds of fiction is a part of his general attitude, and so:

“I read all sorts of books and at all times. I don’t know that I can name any particular author who may be called my favourite. I am very fond of Stevenson, for instance--but then, so I am of Kipling, except his more recent stories, which have a bit too much British Empire in them to please me,--of Mark Twain, of W. J. Locke, and many others. I think I like a story for the story’s sake. I like to like my characters or dislike them in the old-fashioned way. It is for this reason perhaps that the work of such writers as Arnold Bennett, William De Morgan, Joseph Conrad, and others, of the realistic school, so-called, does not appeal to me as much as--well, as Mr. Locke’s work, for instance. I realise,--no one can help realising--the fine literary craftsmanship in a book like _Lord Jim_. It is a wonderful piece of character mosaic, and yet in reading it I am always conscious of the literary work. I say to myself, ‘This is marvellous; see how the writer is picking his hero to pieces, thought by thought, motive by motive.’ And being so conscious of the writer, I do not lose myself in the story. This is not offered as a criticism; certainly I should not presume to criticise Mr. Bennett or Mr. Conrad. It is more of a confession of something lacking on my part. I enjoy reading _Lord Jim_, or _The Old Wives’ Tale_, but I do not return to them again and again as I do to _The Beloved Vagabond_ or _The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne_. Perhaps this is, as some of my realistically inclined friends tell me, a childish love for romance on my part. Well, perhaps it is. If it is, I can’t help it; as I said, this statement is not offered as an excuse, but a confession.

“This sort of thing shows in my own stories. It would be very hard for me to write a long story which should end dismally. It is only too true that stories in real life frequently end that way, but I don’t like my yarns to do so. So it is fair to presume that in whatever books I may hereafter write, the hero and the heroine will be united, virtue rewarded and vice punished, as has happened in those for which I am already responsible. Perhaps this same weakness for a story, a cheerful story, makes me care little for the so-called problem novel. It doesn’t mean that I am not fond of novels dealing with certain kinds of problems. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of the Cup_ I liked immensely; but the sex problem, the divorce question, and all that sort of thing does not appeal to me. A morbid lot of disagreeable people, married or otherwise, moping and quarrelling through a long story seem to me scarcely worth while. To a specialist in nervous diseases such a study might be interesting, but I really doubt if the average healthy man or woman finds it so. Certainly we should not care to associate with such people were they living near us. We should get away from them if we could.

“Perhaps I _could_ write a story with gloomy situations and an unhappy ending, but I wouldn’t like to try it. I would much rather try to make people cheerful and keep myself cheerful at the same time. There’s enough sorrow in this world without finding it in books.”

So he spoke ten years ago; so, with possibly the change of an illustration or two, would he speak today. From nine in the morning until noon or one o’clock he disappears into his workshop, frequently a place known only to himself, and either writes (with a soft, stubby pencil, on large sheets of yellow paper) or thinks about characters and the very attenuated skeleton which, for Mr. Lincoln, constitutes the “plot.”

“I know there are people who can turn out a short story in two or three hours and it will be good enough to sell, but I cannot help feeling that it would have been much better if the writer had devoted more time to it. In my case, doing work that is satisfactory to me in any degree means that I must fairly sweat it out, if I may use the expression.” There usually comes a time when he gets “a letter about once a week asking how the thing is coming along. That has been a frequent experience, especially when there are a lot of characters in my story, and I’m having more or less trouble with them. The story keeps stretching itself out. I think I may have to adopt Mark Twain’s method, and begin throwing my people down the well.” There is a genial artifice about nearly all his tales. Some years ago an interviewer for the Boston Globe touched on the subject of “specialty” writing, which was a natural topic, as all of Mr. Lincoln’s fiction is a highly specialised affair, not only in its general localisation on Cape Cod but in its characterisation and homely wit and humour. The author said:

“A man writes what he knows. If he tries anything else it must fall--show hollow. And I find that it is necessary to write to your audience--that one must consider that a large number of his readers are to be women, and he must write things that will appeal to the women of today.”

“You don’t mean that you would consider the women to the point of writing stuff that would be saleable, and refrain from writing stuff which appealed to you, but might not be saleable?”

“Well,” said Mr. Lincoln, slowly, “I haven’t any ‘message’ that I know of. I’m not much of a high-brow. I have standards, though. And if I am to do the thing I want to do, I must get my book printed. But I’ve never been satisfied--although I did like _The Postmaster_ pretty well.”

This was ten years ago, and Mr. Lincoln has gone on, unchanging. He has the most enviable record of any living American writer. No book of his has been a failure. Some have done better than others, but with no serious qualification of the statement it can be said that each book has added to his audience, so that he has for some years been an unfailing best seller. Perhaps there has been a noticeable increase in his popularity with and since _The Portygee_ (1919), which was published serially and then surprised the publishers by beating Lincoln records as a book. Or the gain may be traceable to the preceding book, “_Shavings_,” and its successful dramatisation. But in his sustained, unbroken and increasing popularity as a fictionist Mr. Lincoln has no competitor. There are others whose individual books have sold more heavily, whose total sales may be larger, but they have had lapses, and their popularity has either been impaired or lost. Even as I write the process known in the trade as “slipping” is observable, here and there, in the case of one of the most popular American authors, a person with a long record of immediate successes, one of whose work the American soldier, in 1917-18, could not apparently get enough. Time does this thing, but apparently it cannot touch, except to enhance, the passion for the work of this native of Cape Cod, who clips his words a little and sometimes says “hev” and “hed” for “have” and “had”--about whom there is even a suspicion of the Down East nasal twanging as he talks. A wholly lovable personality. He once wrote:

“Bless the children. They are the most convenient excuses in creation. Probably, if it were not for them, you wouldn’t get to the zoological gardens or the aquarium or the fairy play oftener than once a year or so. And as for the circus--but that’s an old story.”

iv

We have not finished, though, with the man’s own account of his relation to his work.

“You can’t use actual people. People aren’t as dramatic in actual life as you want them to be. Of course, you may hear a phrase, or a story--you may talk with a person and get an impression and build up your character from those things. But using an actual person wouldn’t work. Besides, it would be rather mean.

“In writing of a Cape Cod town or village, although I purposely refrain from describing it as any one town in particular, I have tried conscientiously to give the characteristics of Cape Cod towns I am acquainted with. The promontories and inlets and hills and marshes in ‘my’ Cape Cod may not be found where I have located them, but I have tried very hard to make them like those which are on the real Cape. And so with the Cape Codders in my stories. I have never knowingly drawn the exact, recognisable portrait of an individual. I have of course, received hundreds of letters from readers who inform me, in strict confidence, that they know the original of ‘Cap’n ----’ and recognised him at once. Nevertheless they are wrong. I have endeavoured always to be true to type, and in writing of the old deep-sea captain, the coasting skipper, the longshoreman or the people of the Cape villages, I have done my best to portray each as I have seen and known specimens of his or her kind. And in attempting to transcribe the habit of language I have made it a rule never to use an expression or idiom I have not heard used by a native of the old colony.”

The differentiation of the various types of seaman has been carefully made by Mr. Lincoln, and is perhaps valuable to a full appreciation of his fiction.

“The type of sea captain who figures in my stories has not necessarily an accurately corresponding type in my acquaintance. Going back to the Cape after having lived in New York and Boston, I was able to get varying angles on the lives of the men and women I had known in my childhood. The old sea captains that I remembered best as a child were of more than one character, classified according to their work. One was the dignified old man who had travelled to some far-away corner of the earth and returned prosperous, to spend the rest of his days as an autocrat among his own people. He had met strange peoples, he had been trusted with a ship, and, as in the days I write of there were no instantaneous means of talking across the oceans, he was shrewd at bargaining and, being one of the owners of the ship, he lost no chance to bring home a cargo that would bring rich returns. In other words, he was a shrewd trader as well as a sailing master. The same dignified bearing that he used in his trade followed him on land, and, though jovial in manner, he was developed in dignity and character.

“The other type of captain was more popular with the youngsters. He may have been as shrewd, and possibly made as much money, but he was filled with a greater sense of humour, and took life as a pastime. Men of this description would gather round the stove and tell wonderful stories, though all sea captains talk shop when they get together.

“Then too there were what are termed the ‘long-shore captains.’ These were mostly engaged in fishing, or in trading with coast towns and cities. They were necessarily more limited in their views, for they spent more time ashore, often working a good-sized garden, fishing when the spirit moved, and running a schooner to New York or Boston if the chance came.

“Of all the sea-captains, however, those that I knew best were those who were actually sailing in the 1870’s and 1880’s, and who were largely engaged in carrying oranges and lemons from Mediterranean ports. These men were really the last of our sailing captains. I have one friend in particular who was in the fruit trade, and his stories of how they crowded sail and took every risk to bring in their cargoes are many and thrilling. Fruit, of course, is highly perishable, and while it might be a valuable cargo one day, a week later it would be worthless; therefore the sea races and adventures.”

In an article, “Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness,” appearing in the American Magazine, Mr. Lincoln has told stories of Cape Cod captains he has known. Acuity of observation, caution joined to a quality of going in head-first if one goes in at all, and a singularly dry humour are a large part of the “shrewdness,” as Lincoln makes it out. In the course of the article he offers this admittedly serious statement:

“In all my forty-odd years of experience with Yankees I do not remember ever having met one who habitually whittled. I have, of course, known some who whittled occasionally, when they were making a ‘bow ’n’ arrer’ or a boat for one of the children. But I never knew one who whittled when he was making a trade.” _Sic transit_ the “Yankee” of one species of “fiction” and drama. But it is time to look at Mr. Lincoln’s own fiction; then, perhaps, we may revert for a closing glance at the puzzle of Yankee shrewdness.

v

The newest Lincoln novel (1923) is _Doctor Nye of North Ostable_--Mr. Lincoln has something of a gift in titles for his special kind of book. There is a comfortable assurance in knowing that one is going to read about Dr. Nye, or a place called Fair Harbour, or an individual named Keziah Coffin, or the sure-to-be-amusing process of _Extricating Obadiah_. That last has a music of the syllables; it is solitary in this respect among Lincoln titles which are also easily affected by climatic changes, so that _Galusha the Magnificent_ had to be altered in England to _The Magnificent Mr. Bangs_. But to return to our fishing--

Ephraim Nye, M.D., a “sympathetic” hero, self-sacrificing, a man with a deal of humour, has a black cloud over his past, as all North Ostable knows. The story opens with his return to that Cape Cod village. All that day Marietta Lamb (“Mary’s Lamb”) had been scrubbing away at a great rate in the old Dillingham house, so long untenanted, and Henry Ward Beecher Payson, in full working regalia of overalls and wooden leg (for “best” and Sundays he had a cork leg) was busy in the yard. Miss Althea Bemis, who lived across the road and missed nothing that went on among her neighbours, asked innumerable questions, learning nothing. Judge Copeland, Cyrenus Stone and Cap’n Mark Bearse, “natives,” and “the three most influential men in North Ostable” appeared on the scene. The Judge and Stone were bitter political enemies, always flying at each other’s throats. Stone, who owned the empty house, admitted to Cap’n Mark Bearse that the place was being made ready for someone whose coming would be a great surprise.

Then, at nightfall, Doctor Eph arrived in a ramshackle gig.

People sat up late that night in North Ostable. In the home of Shubal Bash discussion ran high as Shubal and his wife, Angelina, tried to tell deaf old Aunt Lidy the story of Ephraim Nye. After studying medicine, the young Ephraim had married Judge Copeland’s sister, Fanny, and had returned to his native town to practise. Fanny was fond of clothes and jewels and the Doctor worked hard to give them to her. Respected and liked, everyone turned against him when it was discovered that $7,200 of the $10,000 in the fund for the new meeting-house, of which he was treasurer, had been stolen. The bank had exhibited a check for $7,200 signed “Ephraim Nye, Treasurer,” and the Doctor admitted the check to be his. His wife was very ill at the time. After her death, which occurred shortly, Ephraim Nye was tried and sentenced to five years in State’s prison. Later the money began to come back in instalments until it was all paid up. Always the sums were sent through Doctor Nye’s lawyer.

The two enemies, Cyrenus Stone and Judge Copeland, have, respectively, a son and a daughter; and Tom Stone and Faith Copeland are young lovers.

The stage is now set for Mr. Lincoln’s story. And immediately, in a backward glance, one gets the rapid impression that the plot consists entirely of typhoid fever. Such an impression, however, is quite unjust. _Doctor Nye_ is one of the more carefully articulated (or more carefully complicated) Lincoln novels. In addition to the revelation forming the climax of the story and putting Ephraim Nye in a heroic light, there is a fully-constituted early love affair for the Doctor, brought back and actively developed; there is the pair of young lovers, Tom and Faith; there is the prolonged duel between Judge Copeland and the Doctor; there is a considerable variety of minor incidents essential to the movement of the tale and to its final outworking. All this, mind you, aside from the real end sought by most readers of Mr. Lincoln’s work--the exposition of “characters” and the continuous oscillation into humour.

It is the humour, then, that most deserves our scrutiny; for many of the Lincoln novels, practically plotless beside such a tale as _Doctor Nye_, have only the assets of their “characters” and humour to sustain a popular interest which they have not failed to feed. If there is any question about this, a glance at the technical “descriptions” of half a dozen of the books ought to settle the matter. Here, in a sentence, is what some of them simmer down to:

_Partners of the Tide._ Cap’n Ezra Titcomb and young Bradley Nickerson go into the wrecking business and meet with a series of surprising adventures and difficulties.

_Cy Whittaker’s Place._ Old Cy Whittaker, bachelor, adopted a little girl. He and an old crony form a “Board of Strategy” for her upbringing.

_Keziah Coffin._ Keziah Coffin, typical Cape Cod old maid, proves the good angel of the minister in his courtship. Incidentally, she turns out not to be incurably an old maid.

_The Postmaster._ Cap’n Zeb Snow is discontented with inactivity after retiring from the sea. As postmaster he finds all the activity he wants.

_Thankful’s Inheritance._ Thankful Barnes and her helper Emily lose their boarders when the house proves to be “ha’nted,” but they gain a Cape Cod sea captain and also a handsome young lawyer--for life.

“_Shavings._” The quaint, unbusinesslike windmill-maker has no success in posing as a bank robber, but his loyalty and shrewdness bring happiness to all his friends.

_The Portygee._ The temperament and “calf love” of the son of a Spanish opera singer make difficulties with his Yankee grandfather.

vi

No plots, only complications; but there must be admitted to be, within somewhat narrow bounds, a considerable display of “characters.” Although even here certain stock figures are (probably necessarily) much employed--the gossiping old maid, Mis’ Somebody-or-Other; the village comedian, like Henry Ward Beecher Payson, who periodically lapses from good behaviour and goes on sprees. One of the most interesting of Lincoln’s portrayals is Albert in _The Portygee_, a young fellow half Spanish, half New Englander, with poetic and artistic impulses. “Set there in the small hamlet, chafing at the restraints and humdrumness of the place, Albert makes a delicious contrast to the native population,” says Hildegarde Hawthorne. “We understand the passionate, temperamental boy as well as his old Grandfather, with his fury against all that sort of ‘foolishness,’ because their author understands them.” I cannot go so far as Hildegarde Hawthorne in praise of the variety or depth of Mr. Lincoln’s characters, while cheerfully granting, as I do, their frequent colour and whimsical charm. Often and inevitably, I suppose, in the work of one who has written two dozen books the “characters” are not _character_, but a selected idiosyncrasy or two. Often and inevitably in the case of one who is not the inexhaustible and fecund creator, like Dickens.

But there is the humour....

Now we have come to it. In the first place, Mr. Lincoln shows the quick faculty evidenced from the outset by Mary Roberts Rinehart of getting the humour on every page. Mrs. Rinehart has not always practised with that intention, but Mr. Lincoln has never neglected the rapid shift of the reader’s mood. To insure it, he does not hesitate to sacrifice something of his more important scenes, making them if necessary less dramatic. The common-sensicality running through his stories is a solvent to drama and a feeder to the spirit of fun; if it makes it impossible for his story ever to leave the ground, it also kills to a large extent the language, or lingo, of sentimentality so-called, that terrible jargon in which so much popular fiction is sugared and preserved. Mr. Lincoln pickles his stories in this salty common-sensibleness, rather--a breath of Cape Cod air and a dip in the ocean brine. All his “atmosphere” is as matter of fact as a dip in the ocean, and the temperature is much more unvarying and satisfactory ... unless you may find it tepid. He is a funmaker, resorting without hesitation to such crude and cheerful devices as the spree in which Henry Ward Beecher Payson breaks his “Sunday best,” or cork, leg. And yet fun warms the heart. We laugh inanely, and afterward we have the feeling of having laughed inanely, a sense of a slight immoderacy or excess, of a mild dissipation which perhaps has not really done us any good (though the harm be passing and inconsiderable); but when the moment comes we are ready to laugh again.

vii

A final note on that debateable Yankee shrewdness, then....

Can we not find its fruitful exercise in Mr. Lincoln’s own case? I think we can. Here was a man of around thirty whose observation was keen, whose caution was used to direct him in a proper self-committal, whose own personal sense of humour was of a sufficient dryness to keep him from the easy trails of self-deception. Just as his friend, Captain Lorenzo Baker, of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was able to discern in the casual remarks of a West Indian the commercial possibilities of the yellow banana, so Joseph C. Lincoln could perceive from a token or two the personal possibilities of Cape Cod as he could put it on paper. And acuteness, or, as the Yankee says, ‘cuteness, having done its work, that other trait of Yankee shrewdness, the caution which restrains and then goes in headlong, was brought into play. Mr. Lincoln committed himself wholeheartedly to his fictional enterprise. He put all his money, or rather, the energy which was his equivalent for money, on the bob-tailed nag--in a little sloop which was his own boat rather than in somebody else’s two-masted schooner. The rest was plain sailing and persistence that could have been fatally spoiled if that inner dryness of wit and clearness of perception had ever failed him. But he never forgot that it was his own little sloop, the sailing of which must be kept within the manœuvres she could execute. He has never, for example, tried to write the great American novel which, consciously or unconsciously, has brought up into the wind, all sails shaking and way lost, the craft of more than one of his fellow sailors. A Yankee and shrewd, earning many rewards, including that of a very widespread affection.

Books by Joseph C. Lincoln

1902 _Cape Cod Ballads_ 1904 _Cap’n Eri_ 1905 _Partners of the Tide_ 1906 _Mr. Pratt_ 1907 _The “Old Home House”_ 1908 _Cy Whittaker’s Place_ 1909 _Our Village_ 1909 _Keziah Coffin_ 1910 _The Depot Master_ 1911 _Cap’n Warren’s Wards_ 1911 _The Woman-Haters_ 1912 _The Postmaster_ 1912 _The Rise of Roscoe Paine_ 1913 _Mr. Pratt’s Patients_ 1914 _Cap’n Dan’s Daughter_ 1914 _Kent Knowles: Quahaug_ 1915 _Thankful’s Inheritance_ 1916 _Mary-’Gusta_ 1917 _Extricating Obadiah_ 1918 “_Shavings_” 1919 _The Portygee_ 1921 _Galusha the Magnificent_ 1922 _Fair Harbor_ 1923 _Doctor Nye of North Ostable_

All fiction, except _Cape Cod Ballads_ (verse) and _Our Village_ (sketches of life and people on the Cape).

Sources on Joseph C. Lincoln

_Joseph Crosby Lincoln._ Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.

_Joseph C. Lincoln’s America_, by Hildegarde Hawthorne. Booklet. D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.

_Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness_, by Joseph C. Lincoln. Article in AMERICAN MAGAZINE, July, 1919.

_My Types: An Interview with Joseph C. Lincoln_, by Charles Francis Reed, THE FORUM MAGAZINE, February, 1919.

_Cape Cod’s Genial Chronicler_: An Appreciation by Hamlin Garland. PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, 17 April, 1920.

_The Men Who Make Our Novels_, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY, 1919.

_Joseph Crosby Lincoln_, by Adam C. Haeselbarth. BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, 1913.

_20. Edith Wharton and the Time Spirit_

i

At just past sixty Edith Wharton’s is still a name for the literary conjuror in search of an impressive effect. She has lived a long time--in the literary sense--and comparisons are not easy; she has outlived, as a writer, most comparisons, including the one which would probably have been fatal to anyone else, the comparison with Henry James. She has outlived, in the physical sense, Henry James himself; there are no more of his frequent letters to “Dear Edith.” It is among the subtler tributes to Mrs. Wharton, the person, that the intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her “Master” is now seen in a light which considerably enhances the dignity of the woman who was once called “Pupil.” For who, after reading the correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage so nicely tinctured with snobbery? Victor Hugo permitted himself to be surrounded by those who worshipped him as a god, but Hugo posed, godlike; whereas Henry James----

Mrs. Atherton is several years older than Edith Wharton, both as person and author; Mary Johnston, born eight years later, is of almost exactly the same literary age; but the first is a superb journalist and a born storyteller and the second is a mystic and a historian. Mrs. Wharton’s journalism in fiction is pretty well confined to _The House of Mirth_ and _The Fruit of the Tree_; she invites comparison with Mary Johnston only in that ambitious novel of mediæval Italy, _The Valley of Decision_. In the two books on which Mrs. Wharton’s fame definitely rests at the present, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_, she achieves a success and an individuality only the more interesting because it finds so strikingly different expressions.

In fact, on the evidence of the two stories, it would be superficially impossible to assert that the “sterile” tragedy of New England hillsides was from the same hand that wrote the minutely detailed story of New York society in the 1870s. Considered for their meaning and origin, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_ are both seen to be tales of frustration, both tales of the America that Mrs. Wharton quitted some fifteen years ago but can’t get out of her system, and both stories in which the background is responsible for the actors themselves as well as the play.

ii

[Illustration: EDITH WHARTON]

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York, 24 January, 1862, the daughter of Frederic Jones who had married Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn. A great deal of her childhood was spent in Europe--there was one stretch of five years in which the family didn’t return to America--and education proceeded wholly with the aid of tutors and governesses. The child learned French, German and Italian. Such summers as the family devoted to America were lived in a house at Newport, on the bay, halfway out towards Fort Adams. When Miss Jones was twenty-three she became the wife of Edward Wharton, of Boston. They lived in New York and Newport and later at Lenox in the summer, frequent visits to Europe continuing. Miss Jones and Mrs. Wharton were equally interested in writing and read extensively Goethe, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Meredith and--Henry James? That last one had begun as author while Miss Jones was still in her teens. Twenty years were to pass before she started to overtake him. Mrs. Wharton was thirty-seven in the year when her first book was published, _The Greater Inclination_, containing, according to Katharine Fullerton Gerould, “two of the best stories she ever wrote” (“The Pelican” and “Souls Belated”).

Six years later came _The House of Mirth_, “the tragedy of the woman who is a little too weak to do without money and what it buys, or to earn it for herself, and a little too good to sell herself.” The story of Lily Bart had to a high degree that provocative quality which can generally be relied upon to make a novel a best-seller; and a best-seller it became. Soon afterward, with a feeling in which satisfaction, distaste, caution and physical preferences were obscurely blended, Mrs. Wharton settled in France--winter home in Provence, summer home near Paris. In 1914 she opened a workroom for skilled woman workers thrown out of employment by the miscalculations of Napoleon III. a generation earlier. She also opened restaurants where French and Belgian refugees were fed at less than cost, and lodgings where they might sleep. Mrs. Wharton took full charge of over 600 Belgian children who had been withdrawn from orphanages near Furnes and Poperinghe and established them, with the nuns who had the children’s care, in four colonies, where the girls were taught fine sewing and lace-making, in anticipation of a day when fine sewing and lace-making would again be demanded. For these services the French Government, in 1915, conferred on the American novelist the cross of the Legion of Honour. During the war Mrs. Wharton wrote little. _Fighting France_ records her visits to the French fronts; she contributed to _The Book of the Homeless_; in 1918 was published her long short story of an American boy in the war, under the title, _The Marne_; in 1920, _In Morocco_ gave an account of a visit to that country which she made with General Lyautey, by invitation of the French Government. _French Ways and Their Meaning_ appeared in 1919. The total roll of Mrs. Wharton’s non-fiction is considerable and includes _Italian Villas and Their Gardens_ (1904), _Italian Backgrounds_ (1905), _A Motor-Flight Through France_ (1908), _Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_ (1909), _The Decoration of Houses_, as well as the books just mentioned. No article on Mrs. Wharton would be complete unless mention was made of her passion for gardening and her art in developing beautiful gardens, both at her home in Hyères and at St. Brice, near Paris.

iii

We have had it all carefully explained for us by Mrs. Gerould how much more desirable it is that Mrs. Wharton should give us--as she has generally given us--studies of sophisticated people. Speaking of _Ethan Frome_, and, in fact, merely mentioning that masterpiece, for which, it would appear, she is without admiration, Mrs. Gerould says of Mrs. Wharton:

“She did not abandon her civilised and sophisticated folk, for any length of time, to deal with rustics. Let us hope that she never will abandon them. There is vital truth in the Shakesperean dictum that ‘the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.’ To put it roughly”--as a rustic, no doubt, might put it--“the people who have leisure to experience their own emotions, and the education to show them how the emotions fit into the traditions of the race, are more interesting in themselves than the people whose emotions are bound to be on a more nearly animal plane. It is less interesting, morally, to the average man to know how the sub-average man conducts himself than to know how the super-average man conducts himself. It does not in the least matter to the average intelligent citizen--except as it may touch his social conscience--how the characters in certain modern novels behave, because those characters are not the real fruit of civilisation. They are, at best, its sorry by-products. They do not help him out in his own problems; they do not stand to him for vicarious experience. Whereas it is of interest to a civilised man to know how other civilised beings, in situations his own or other, behave; even if they behave badly. Theirs are dramas that he can feel, theirs is conduct that he is competent to judge; they respond, or fail to respond, to an admitted code of moral taste. No creature was beyond the range of Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding; but when he wished to probe the human heart most deeply, he usually chose the heart of a king. The insensitive and the subnormal served him chiefly for comedy.

“So that a positive purpose is served by the competent novelist’s choosing to deal with the more fortunate classes. Inhibitions have more chance; and inhibitions are as necessary to real drama as are passions. There is also--naturally--more opportunity for satire; and satiric comment is inveterate in Mrs. Wharton’s work. If the person who has had every chance is not fine, then he is relatively uglier than the person who has had no chance at all. She does not spare her aristocrats who had an opportunity for moral fineness and neglected it. The baser emotions are more shocking in a world where there is less excuse for them. And since it is real life with which Mrs. Wharton is dealing, the baser emotions frequently appear.”

These words were written after, not before, the publication of Mrs. Wharton’s novel, _The Glimpses of the Moon_ (1922).

At sixty, one either prepares to die or one faces life anew. In the latter event one knows, if one chances to be a writer, the heavenly and earthly certitudes ... and the escape from platitudes is final. Thus, for example, it is given to understand that a reputation will at least last for the remainder of a lifetime but that markets change. And, after all, as Mrs. Wharton once remarked, cleanliness and comfort are the two most expensive things on earth--comfort implying whatever degree of luxury is essential to a state of mind in which one can do work to purchase continued comfort. At sixty, though one may now and again bounce it high in the air, the real and right concern is to keep the ball a-rolling.... Let people think what they like and say what they like (and the follies of attack and fence are always equal), the unerring perception is directed toward the next thing that is to be written. One may exercise a choice from the very limited amount of material one has or can acquire; at sixty, it is too late to acquire much additional. Of course, a finely cultivated imagination in early years might come to the rescue with a second blooming; but suppose one’s imagination has always moved in the best society? No, it doesn’t do, it most decidedly doesn’t do to speculate any longer about anything; let others pretend what they like, there is a positive relief in the knowledge that one writes what one can when one has to--and be it good, bad, indifferent or astonishing the aim was an honest aim and the result achieved was, at least, intelligent.

iv

And what could place Mrs. Wharton in a clearer, finer light than just this situation of fact? What could be more in keeping with the two traditions that have bound her life?--the tradition of an older New York and the literary tradition of France, both strict and both congenial, both so severe as by their very classicism to give the greatest possible scope to personality. The New York of the Age of Innocence into which she was born, the literary Europe of the nineteenth century to which she so early attached herself--these were the ideal forcing-beds of a personality such as hers. You come upon her expressing in vigorous words her delighted enthusiasm for the first novel of William Gerhardi: “You not only make your people live, but move and grow--and that’s the very devil to achieve. Do, for all our sakes, keep it up!” There is no flabbiness about her. She is past the pitfall of fanaticism and safe beyond the quagmire of adulation. She does not need to practise the conventional literary dishonesties which close like traps upon novelists whose fame is on the make and who still have much to lose. She can say frankly: “There are moments--to me at least--in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap, and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people are behaving as I never knew people to behave.” What heresy! Here we all are kneeling on the ground, touching foreheads and breathing the overpowering incense burnt before the shrine of Dostoievsky, and a voice is distinctly heard to remark that the literary deity is perhaps not as luminous as he should be! How many would dare such a remark, or, if they ventured it, would command from any of us the bravery of timid, relieved assents? Not many; scarcely a one.

She has not always been so free; who, indeed, is born to freedom? Saint Paul said he was, but a price had been paid formerly; it always is. Henry James, tormented to the end of his days by the fact that his books really didn’t sell, wasn’t able to pay the price. Thomas Hardy paid it at the cost of silence as a novelist after the reception accorded to _Jude the Obscure_. O. Henry, confronted with the heavy total, shivered and shuddered. Every man has his price, indeed, in quite another sense from what that saying was coined to convey; it is a price he must manage if he is to have the truth for himself or tell it about others.

Mrs. Wharton’s greatest good fortune has probably consisted, after all, in her realisation of this. Did she learn it in France, that country where truth lies at the bottom of a well ... and is not drawn up but used as a mirror? You can see the perception through nearly all of Mrs. Wharton’s work. In her long novel of eighteenth century Italy, _The Valley of Decision_, she is painting away with grand strokes on a magnificent canvas; she wants to find out if she really is suited to the execution of fictions like the _Romola_ of that George Eliot she once read so attentively. Well, no; the result satisfies her that she isn’t. So then she goes on with those short stories in the writing of which she is so proficient, and, a few years later, produces _The House of Mirth_. The result is instructive; one might almost say it was destructive. Mrs. Wharton definitely learned that here was a kind of thing she could successfully do, in terms of money and popularity. But in other terms?

This was a question less easily answered. Two years after _The House of Mirth_ came _The Fruit of the Tree_, with its highly interesting “problem” as to whether it can ever be right for a physician or nurse to accelerate and ease the death of a doomed patient. This has been called, by the Folletts, Mrs. Wharton’s “one lapse into artistic disintegration.” But Mrs. Wharton was not thinking of art, but of life. It had sharply come over her that the pursuit of art in one or another form of preciosity would land her where she didn’t wish to be landed. She might be, as was charged, the woman who of all women wrote most like a man; but she didn’t desire to write like some men. If she could have been Gustave Flaubert, perhaps ... but she saw no use in being George Moore or--Henry James? The whole contemporary French school left her unaffected; she read them, but experienced no wish to write like them; and in the midst of a freshly-running sea of Continental literature she became more than ever aware of her absolute and inescapable Americanism. In a way, it was a tragedy. To think that one could grow up in Europe, be, as it were, a part of Europe, definitely adopt Europe, and yet not to Europe belong! After steadily eyeing this situation for a while she reacted without either tears or temperament; and her reaction took the form of a short novel which is among the most perfect pieces of workmanship in English, the story of _Ethan Frome_. The “hard shapeliness” of that tale was the hard shapeliness of a full self-recognition, the so-called “sterility” was the result of an individual adjustment to the deepest personal need of her remarkable nature. What she would once have so wanted to give, she now knew she never could give to the world, and her awakened consciousness strove for the fit expression of this discovery in terms of an art of which she knew something. _Ethan Frome_, whatever else it may be (and it is many things, some strange and all beautiful) is the Magnificat of a woman in the hour of profoundest personal disappointment. Such works of fiction are especially rare, but, given the genuinely capable writer, given the one hour of a lifetime, the masterpiece is quite possible, yes, almost certain.

Ah! She had written it at last ... and she could afford to let it stand there to her credit while, with calmness and admirable fortitude she returned to the region of _The House of Mirth_ and _The Fruit of the Tree_ to add a study of divorce and parasitic marriage called _The Custom of the Country_. The resumption of the general warfare which has been the custom of Europe during odd generations for several centuries didn’t interfere with _Summer_ (1917), wherein Mrs. Wharton tried to combine her established “material” with some of the qualities of _Ethan Frome_--an experiment only moderately a success. When she came later to write _The Age of Innocence_ she was, to all appearances, in the happy position of desiring only to do a definite and modest thing, a first-rate story of very marketable quality, and then achieving something distinctly beyond that.

v

Mrs. Wharton’s new novel, _A Son at the Front_, is primarily a study of character and a portrayal of the relation between a father and his son. The father is Campton, a lame painter of some distinction living in Paris. His son, George, has just finished his education and the father is counting on a trip to Italy for the chance, at last, to get acquainted with the boy. Campton’s wife, Julia, after divorcing him, married a rich American named Brandt. The two also live in Paris and George has for some years been supported by the Brandts, spending part of his time with them. With this position when the novel opens, end of July, 1914, war intervenes, taking George from them because of his French birth. Campton and Brandt, drawn together by a common interest, pull what wires they can to secure a clerical appointment for George. The intensity of the war and initial reverses bring Campton to regret that George should have been willing to remain behind the lines. But word comes that the son is lying wounded in hospital; he has all the time been at the front but has concealed the fact in writing home. Brought back to Paris, an effort is made to keep him there, a shallow little married woman of George’s acquaintance lending what help she can; the huge compulsion of the war is too great, however, and on his return to the front George is again wounded, this time fatally. He lives to hear that America is at last in the conflict and to know that Campton and the rest have an undivided aim while the war lasts. When George dies, the others, feeling they have lost everything except the hope of victory, bend themselves to help toward that with such courage as they have left.

The record of wartime Paris, the shift of ideals and the gradual sacrifice of all lesser purposes, the resolution of smaller loyalties in a larger, the intimacy of personal emotions--these, of course, are the true substance of Mrs. Wharton’s story.

vi

You may comprehend her, in discourse with that familiar of hers, the Time Spirit, in a dialogue running somewhat as follows:

TIME SPIRIT: So, then, you’ve settled it with yourself? You haven’t too many regrets, I hope?

MRS. WHARTON: Oh, no, thank you. You can’t know what a sense of freedom, of satisfaction both outer and inner, it gives! You see, I always had, for ever so long, a few illusions--about myself and my own work, I mean.

TIME SPIRIT (_dryly_): Most writers do. But now that you are rid of them all, you aren’t finding it impossible to go on?

MRS. WHARTON: I find it far more possible to go on. I go on with ease and a lightness of heart. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t write now, that I mightn’t wake up and find myself to have written, except the kind of thing I once was determined to write. That sounds cloudy, no doubt; but what I mean is very simple: I discovered that, contrary to the old saying, it is life that is long and art that’s fleeting.

TIME SPIRIT: Yes?

MRS. WHARTON: Exactly. We live a long time, and we write for a time not so long but pretty long, too. If in those years of writing we achieve art once or twice, we are among the rare, fortunate ones.

TIME SPIRIT: And the rest of the time?

MRS. WHARTON: The rest of the time we must be industrious, but it is so much better if we are clear in our own minds about it.

TIME SPIRIT: But, you know, you are really an artist!

MRS. WHARTON: _Retro me, Sathanas!_ I beg your pardon, though; you couldn’t tempt me. I know what I know. There are things I have had, and have, to do without; but I don’t live with them; I live with what I have. Of course, all kinds of aims, and quite possibly some forms of achievement will be conferred upon me by those who practise the craft of fiction under the guise of criticism. But I am clearly not responsible for what they say, and it may not be used against me. I am only responsible for what I myself say--and that is: Nothing.

TIME SPIRIT: So you refuse to answer? On the usual ground, of course; it might tend to incriminate or degrade you?

MRS. WHARTON: I refuse to answer on the ground that it might incriminate and degrade others who write about me like this: “_The House of Mirth_, _Ethan Frome_--these are orchestral in their richly subtle clashing of overtones, a sort of infra-discordance which is among the rare improbable finenesses accessible to the artist, on condition of his readiness to take infinite pains for infinitesimal effects.”

TIME SPIRIT: Madame, permit me to deal lightly with you.

MRS. WHARTON: _Merci, monsieur._ But I think we have concluded our bargain, haven’t we? _Au ’voir._

Books by Edith Wharton

1899 _The Greater Inclination_ 1900 _The Touchstone_ 1901 _Crucial Instances_ 1902 _The Valley of Decision_ 1903 _Sanctuary_ 1904 _The Descent of Man, and Other Stories_ 1904 _Italian Villas and Their Gardens_ 1905 _Italian Backgrounds_ 1905 _The House of Mirth_ 1907 _Madame de Treymes_ 1907 _The Fruit of the Tree_ 1908 _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_ 1908 _A Motor-Flight Through France_ 1909 _Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_ 1910 _Tales of Men and Ghosts_ 1911 _Ethan Frome_ 1912 _The Reef_ 1913 _The Custom of the Country_ 1915 _The Book of the Homeless_ 1915 _Fighting France_ _The Decoration of Houses_ _The Joy of Living_ 1917 _Xingu and Other Stories_ 1917 _Summer_ 1918 _The Marne_ 1919 _French Ways and Their Meaning_ 1919 _In Morocco_ 1920 _The Age of Innocence_ 1922 _The Glimpses of the Moon_ 1923 _A Son at the Front_

Sources on Edith Wharton

_Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920_, by Carl Van Doren. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1922.

_Some Modern Novelists_, by Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett. HENRY HOLT & COMPANY, 1918. The chapter deals with Mrs. Wharton’s work up to and including _Summer_. Her novel, _The Valley of Decision_, is singled out for especial emphasis.

_Edith Wharton, A Critical Study_, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould. Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1922. A spirited exposition of what are conceived to be Mrs. Wharton’s special qualities by a woman whose interest lies particularly in Mrs. Wharton’s material.

_21. The Unclassified Case of Christopher Morley_

i

To know Christopher Morley is to be interested, amused, enthusiastic, sceptical or even secretly puzzled; but to have him for a friend is to learn the meaning of friendliness in a degree that is very exceptional. And few escape being his friends, though this is less true than formerly. There was, indeed, once a time when the friendship of Morley was among the two or three serious responsibilities of an individual’s life--like marriage, or filial duty or a conscience in regard to one’s chosen craft. Practically every day, sometimes twice in a day, the evidence of Morley’s friendliness would appear in a brief letter or hastily-penned note about this or that or the other thing under the sun.

An image arose of an ever-active, a sleepless mind; of an emotional nature more unresting than the Atlantic and quantitatively as great. This awful abstraction slowly faded out into a visual image of a “burly” man with a smiling face and a lighted pipe, and that, in turn, gave place to the fear lest so much confidence in the human race should prove fatally misplaced.... Somewhat, it has; but what we didn’t foresee was that the change, coming about gradually, would operate as a gradual salvation of (1) his friends from Morley, (2) Morley from his friends, (3) Morley’s work from Friend Morley.

Yet this beneficial and important transformation has been accomplished in the most salutary manner, with a result that may accrue with permanence and advantage to American literature.

ii

[Illustration: Christopher Morley]

As lately as 1920 one estimating American talents could observe of Morley: “His gift is purely journalistic, isn’t it?” and receive the answer from Morley’s friend: “Purely”--an answer conceived in entire truthfulness. Both the asker and the answerer were pretty certain to regard the assumed fact as a great pity. But as to the fact!--why, what further evidence was needed to establish it? Morley had been writing for several years, had averaged several books a year of prose and verse, and nowhere gave the least sign of doing work of a different character. What, then, was the character of his work in those years? He began at Oxford with a book of verse; from a more actual standpoint his beginnings had been made with _Parnassus on Wheels_, published in 1917. This really capital conceit had engendered a sequel, _The Haunted Bookshop_, published two years later. There were certain books of essays--_Shandygaff_, _Mince Pie_, _Pipefuls_--pleasant, partly serious, sometimes sentimental and showing a deplorable fondness for the pun. There were books of verse--_Songs for a_ _Little House_, _The Rocking Horse_, _Hide and Seek_. _Travels in Philadelphia_, the short story, _Kathleen_, and an unfortunate collaboration called _In the Sweet Dry and Dry_ completed the roll. It is no reflection upon these volumes to say that they gave the impression of a talent strictly journalistic; the best journalism is more than ephemeral and most of the titles enumerated are still actively in demand. The quality we call “journalism” is not an affair of perishability but something very difficult to define, something in the approach, something in the treatment rather than in the choice of subjects. In the last analysis it is probable that the effort to define it would end with hands flung out hopelessly before the mystery of a personal temperament.

The facts were these: Morley had been educated at Haverford College and Oxford; he had then come to Garden City to work for the publishing house which, principally, has published his prose, and his first enterprises as an author were precociously instructed by an “inside” acquaintance with what James Branch Cabell would call the auctorial career. The influence upon his own work of this very special knowledge is not easy to estimate. He saw, as only one in a publishing house sees, the facts of authorship after the author’s child is born. For example: the immense effect upon the fortunes of a writer’s book, or books, of the attitude toward them of the bookseller. And that attitude is quite rightly fixed by what the bookseller (1) knows he can sell, or, less frequently (2), by what he thinks he can sell.

Morley saw that books are sold through bookstores. Looking a little further, he discerned that books which are not in bookstores are, with certain class exceptions, very rarely sold. He learned, as everyone in a publishing house learns, that three-quarters of the books that are sold to retail purchasers are bought because retail purchasers have had these books thrust directly under their noses. He suffered, no doubt, the customary amazement on discovering the vast number of people who (1) either enter the bookstore with no particular book in mind, or (2), on being unable to obtain the book in mind, readily take something else. It was brought to his keen attention that, as Frank Swinnerton reiterates in his admirable brochure on “Authors and Advertising,” direct advertising, as in newspapers and magazines (the commonest mediums) does not sell books. Being a young man of alert perceptions, it cannot have been lost upon him that book reviews do not, with any reliability, sell books, either. What does sell books is talk--in some instances--but the hard rock foundation of book sales is a favourable attitude on the part of “the trade.”

To know the people in the bookstore, to have and to cultivate and to deserve their good will (for, in the long run, you must deserve it), and thus to insure the sale of your book to the bookseller and to enlist his energy and enterprise in re-selling it to his customers--this is the “favourable attitude” just mentioned. Few authors succeed in establishing it; fewer succeed in maintaining it. Mr. Morley has done both, with the result that in five years from the time of his _Parnassus on Wheels_ he has been able to publish a highly imaginative, refined and polished satire and see it become, in its field, a pronounced best seller.

iii

One would about as soon expect to see a fantasy by Lord Dunsany a best seller as witness the sale, in tens of thousands, of Morley’s _Where the Blue Begins_--if one were making one’s estimate solely on the work itself. _Where the Blue Begins_ is the story of the dog Gissing’s search for God--a search conducted in various places and circumstances parallel to human life of the present day by an animal discreetly analogued to the human animal. Such a piece of writing has ordinarily no hope except from unusual and very favourable (or acutely controversial) critical attention; and the hope from that quarter is relatively small. By “hope,” of course, is meant a hope of a considerable sale. _Where the Blue Begins_ belongs to that class of literature which is written because it has lain in the author’s