Chapter 15

, “For the Literary Investor.”

iv

In the matter of books of travel, some classification is necessary, and in addition to the ones just described I am glad to name the following in all their happy variety:

A GROUP OF BOOKS ON ANCIENT EGYPT AND PRESENT-DAY EGYPTIAN EXPLORATIONS.

_A History of Egypt From the Earliest Times to the Conquest of the Persians_, by JAMES HENRY BREASTED. The ninth printing has just been called for. With 200 illustrations and maps.

_History of Assyria_, by A. T. OLMSTEAD. A companion volume to Breasted’s _History of Egypt_, and equally admirable. With maps and many illustrations.

G. MASPERO’S _Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria_, his _Egyptian Art: Studies_, and his _History of Art in Egypt_. These remain standard in their field.

TERENCE GRAY’S _And in the Tomb Were Found_ and his _The Life of Hatshepsut_. The first is a series of historical studies and sketches including Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, and Rameses the Great. Some literal translations of Egyptian love songs are added. The second book is the romance of an Egyptian princess who reigns as a man; the work is cast in the form of a pageant for the sake of greater vividness.

PERCY E. MARTIN’S _Egypt Old and New_, a general account with many illustrations in colour.

PERCY EDWARD NEWBERRY’S _The Valley of the Kings_, which includes the discoveries by the late Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in a general account of thirty years’ explorations.

ARTHUR WEIGALL’S _Tut-Ankh-Amen and Other Essays_ is the work of an Egyptologist and former Inspector-General of Antiquities in Egypt. Mr. Weigall was special correspondent for the London _Daily Mail_, New York _World_ and other newspapers at the opening of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.

A GROUP OF BOOKS ABOUT CHINA.

_Audacious Angles on China_, by ELSIE MCCORMICK, introduces the reader to Chinese life as the Western resident there sees it. The humorous side of such experiences is to the fore, and one part of the book is devoted to “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby”--an American child’s view of the intimacies of Eastern life.

_Swinging Lanterns_, by ELIZABETH CRUMP ENDERS, is a vivid narrative of what an American woman saw while living and travelling in China. It contains much that is unusual, including such matters as the Yellow Llama Devil Dances, never before described. Fine illustrations.

ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS’S _Across Mongolian Plains_.

ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS’S and YVETTE BORUP ANDREWS’S _Camps and Trails in China_.

HERBERT A. GILES’S _A History of Chinese Literature_, a historical account written with much charm and taste and offering translations of the work of various Chinese writers.

THE FAR EAST.

C. M. VAN TYNE’S _India in Ferment_. Mahatma Gandhi and the general background by a scholar and skilled observer.

SIR HUGH CLIFFORD’S _A Prince of Malaya_ and his earlier book, _The Further Side of Silence_. These are stories, true, fictional and semi-fictional, that take rank as literature. The author, a friend of Joseph Conrad, at the age of twenty-one was “the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles to the British dependencies in the East.”

SYDNEY A. CLOMAN’S _Myself and a Few Moros_. An American soldier’s lively but not unhumorous administrative experiences, with a good picture of what the United States has accomplished in colonial government.

H. O. MORGENTHALER’S _Matahari_. The Frederick O’Brienish adventures of a Swiss engineer prospecting for tin in the Malayan-Siamese jungle.

THE CALLERS OF THE WILD.

ERNEST THOMPSON SETON’S _Game Animals and the Lives They Live_, Vol. I. There are to be four volumes.

WILLIAM T. HORNADAY’S _The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals_, a book of personal observations by one of the keenest living observers and one who, as director of the New York Zoological Park, has under his eye and care the most complete collection in the world.

SAMUEL A. DERIEUX’S _Animal Personalities_, including domesticated animals.

CARL AKELEY’S _Men and Animals: An Autobiography_ and MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY’S _On the Gorilla Trail_. Mr. Akeley went to the Belgian Congo on a gorilla expedition, and Mrs. Bradley, well-known as a novelist, her husband and their five-year-old daughter went, too. Each book enhances the interest of the other.

WITH ICE.

APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD’S _The Worst Journey in the World_, describing, in its two volumes, Scott’s last Antarctic expedition, 1910-13.

MEDITERRANEAN.

V. C. SCOTT O’CONNOR’S _A Vision of Morocco_, which is both historical and descriptive, and C. E. ANDREWS’S _Old Morocco and the Forbidden Atlas_, written in a distinguished prose.

C. R. ASHBEE’S _A Palestine Notebook_, the result of administrative experience in 1918-22. The book has interesting personal portraits of Sir Herbert Samuels, General Allenby, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Morley, the late Lord Northcliffe, Lord Curzon, and others.

G. K. CHESTERTON’S _The New Jerusalem_.

ERNEST PEIXOTTO’S _Through Spain and Portugal_, where the author’s illustrations are so happily wedded to the text.

ROSITA FORBES’S _The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara_.

SOUTH AMERICA.

C. REGINALD ENOCK’S _Republics of Central and South America_, his _Spanish America_ (two volumes), his _Ecuador_, his _Peru_, and his _Mexico_.

LEO E. MILLER’S _In the Wilds of South America_, an account of six years’ explorations.

UNIQUE BOOKS OF TRAVEL.

GEORGE EYRE-TODD’S _The Clans of the Scottish Highlands_. By an authority on Scots lore.

VAUGHAN CORNISH’S _A Geography of the Great Capitals_, from the “capital” of the Iroquois Indians, marked by a sacred fire, to the capitals of government, such as Rome and London, or of commerce, such as New York, and including vanished cities as well as existing ones.

THOMAS NELSON PAGE’S _Washington and Its Romance_, really a historical work. Mr. Page had been engaged upon it for several years before his death and left completed his account of the city’s early days.

S. R. ROGET’S _Travel in the Two Last Centuries of Three Generations_, a remarkable history, vivid, personal and interesting, derived from the records and letters of a single family and showing what rapid changes transportation underwent in the short period of two hundred years.

B. W. MATZ’S _Dickensian Inns and Taverns_, and his _The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick_, and also CECIL ALDRIN’S magnificent _Old Inns_--for all who hear the post horns blow and the stage coach drive up to the door.

STEPHEN GRAHAM’S _Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies_, the description of a vagabondage with Vachel Lindsay, with a report of many conversations which left the ground.

_3. A Breathless Chapter_

i

What actually took my breath away (in the first place) was an inspection of the “general catalogue” of one of our publishing houses, and a discovery therein. Now, a general catalogue, showing all the books published by a particular house and “in print”--that is, procurable new--is in itself a species of adventure. I admit all that Mr. A. Edward Newton puts forward as to the amenities of book collecting--by which, I take it, he means the joys, the sorrows, the moments of irony and the moments of amusement which fall to the lot of the collector of rare books. The quest of the book that is out of print, and must be had at second hand by diligent search and patient waiting, is an exceptional delight. Nevertheless, a special and more accessible pleasure lies in the catalogue, whether of a publisher or a bookshop. All but a handful of us are certain to come upon titles that kindle the imagination or rekindle the memory. Both were lit for me by the entry:

GABORIAU, Emile

The Most Complete Library Edition Each with new illustrated jackets

_The Count’s Millions._ 12mo. 2.00

And not only _The Count’s Millions_, but a roll of eleven others, an even dozen in all, ready to be re-read after these too many years and pleasingly freshened up by the new illustrated jackets! There they were: _Baron Trigault’s Vengeance_, _The Clique of Gold_, and a fine array of enticing titles that memory doesn’t recall--_The Champdoce Mystery_, _Within an Inch of His Life_, which has the proper ring; _The Widow Lerouge_; _Other People’s Money_, always an engrossing subject; _The Mystery of Orcival_ (illustrated by Jules Guerin) and one or two others besides (of course!) _Monsieur Lecoq_ and that famous _File No. 113_. It is desolating to reflect that there must be thousands, perhaps millions, to whom the name of Monsieur Lecoq conveys nothing and who are totally unacquainted with _File No. 113_, the most marvellous genealogical mystery story ever written, a tale in which one does not know which more to admire, the genealogy or the plot, until one grasps that the genealogy _is_ the plot, and that what is desperately needed is not a detective but an expert in the ascension of family trees. However, that is not the worst. A yet more fearful thought concerns the author himself. It is even possible that there exists a whole generation, and perhaps races of men, to whom the name of Gaboriau is nothing but part of a quatrain (though rather a famous jingle) perpetrated first by Julian Street and James Montgomery Flagg under the auspices (I think) of Franklin P. Adams (“F. P. A.”):

Said Opie Read to E. P. Roe, “How do you like Gaboriau?” “I like him very much indeed!” Said E. P. Roe to Opie Read.

Too, too flippant! Recalling Monsieur Lecoq, one exclaims: “There were detectives in those days!” And then again, such despondency is excessive. There is, now and occasionally, a detective in these days also. For proof, look at this fellow, Monsieur Jonquelle, in Melville Davisson Post’s new book of that title. Ah! M. Davisson Post! It is but to mention him to introduce a new and important subject, _n’est ce pas_?

Mr. Post is worth talking about, certainly; and assuming that you have read him, you have probably discussed what you read afterward. His reputation as a writer of detective-mystery stories was pretty well abroad before the publication of _Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries_, but that book established the reputation solidly. My recollection is that even before its appearance Mr. Post had written one or two articles in which he explained his theory and practice of story writing. I may simply remark that he went into the matter with as much technical skill and artistic nicety as Poe or de Maupassant; the man is an artist to his fingertips and his work shows it. One has the feeling of construction and the sense of ornamentation springing from fine tastes; his tales are like beautiful pieces of cabinet work in which, at first sight, the effects of form, of shapeliness and of beauty and power are felt; on a closer examination you fall to admiring the sure hand and the cunning art; and at last your exploring fingers touch a particular joint, disclosing an unsuspected drawer that flies out and reveals the story’s secret ... though not Mr. Post’s secret, which, like that of all genuine artists, remains with himself. If this has a ring of exaggeration to your ear, I need only refer you to such a perfect thing as the opening tale, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” in _Uncle Abner_. Or you may make the test on _Monsieur Jonquelle_, where likewise all the stories turn on a central character, the Prefect of Police of Paris. _Monsieur Jonquelle_ exemplifies very well Mr. Post’s method of developing the mystery and its solution side by side. The gain in movement and surprise is the compensation for a technique immensely more difficult than the usual formula, by which a mystery is first built up and then, with inevitable repetition, dispelled. Those who are interested in the mechanism of stories will also find it worth while to consider why Mr. Post varies the narrative standpoint in his new book, so that some of the tales of _Monsieur Jonquelle_ are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author.... Mr. Post is a native of West Virginia, where he lives (Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2). A lawyer by training, he became particularly interested in the possibilities that lie open for the use of the law to aid the commission of crime; and this led to his first book, _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_, in which this perversion of the law to criminal ends was the tissue of the stories.

A rural free delivery route at Lost Creek, West Virginia, has about it something pleasing in connection with a writer of breathless fiction, but the height of suitability in authors’ residences belongs to Beatrice Grimshaw, whose mystery-adventure yarns of the South Pacific begin to be as numerous as a group of Pacific Islands. Indeed, I feel it would be no surprise some day, running before the southeasterly trade wind in a longitude west of 135 degrees and a latitude exceeding 20 degrees south, to sight a succession of dark blue cloud shapes lying on the horizon and be told: “Yonder’s the Beatrice Islands of the Grimshaw group--big archipelago.” Beatrice Grimshaw lives at Port Moseby, Papua, New Guinea, and is a planter as well as an author. There is practically no place in the South Seas which she has not visited, including the cannibal country of Papua. An old and possibly untrue story recalled by Hector MacQuarrie tells of a time when, on a schooner in mid-Pacific, “the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in defence of a soul in so delightful a climate.” Anyway, the lady knows her corner of the world and the people in it, as anyone may discover by the exciting enterprise of reading such a book as _The Sands of Oro_, with its strange group of five persons bound together by necessity and ugly chance, and committed to each other’s fortunes for a term on a lonely Pacific island. Here, as in the author’s _Nobody’s Island_, the reader is at once let into the general secret with the result of a deepening mystery as to why and how and what next.

In truth, the tale which attempts breathlessness simply by the device of withheld explanations takes our breath away no longer. We have come to demand of the author that he proceed with direct and forward action, producing genuine interest instead of merely artificial suspense. He must hew to the line of his story, must _move_, letting the explanations, chips of his tough puzzle, fall where they may. Thus it has come about that the mystery story which is not also an adventure story fails to capture our interest or stir our curiosity. Of living writers, one of the earliest to grasp this was A. E. W. Mason. With others, I feared a half dozen years ago that he might have forgotten the vital principle; for his story of _The Summons_ was quite unlike the Mason who had given us _The Four Feathers_, _The Witness for the Defense_, and other superb novels. But the fear may be dissipated, for in his new book, _The Winding Stair_, Mr. Mason has written a story comparable with his best work. Like _The Four Feathers_, it is a tale of cowardice becoming ultimate bravery; and I do not recall a heroine so pitifully appealing, so desperately lovable, so admirably brave as Marguerite Lambert since Joseph Conrad gave us the girl Lena in _Victory_. Possibly the title of Mr. Mason’s newest work may, offhand, convey the wrong flavor to the incipient reader; it is not a yarn of mysterious goings-on in some old mansion but the history of a soldier and the son of a soldier, moving principally in Northern Africa; the very appropriate phrase that christens the book is quoted from no less person than Bacon, “All rising to Great Place is by a winding stair.” Seldom does one come upon a novel of adventure which is also so profoundly a novel of character or which has so direct and free an appeal to the emotions, or makes that appeal so successfully. _The Winding Stair_ is the work of a masterly storyteller, and such scenes as those of Paul Ravenel’s discovery of who he is, his rescue of Marguerite Lambert, and Marguerite’s discovery of his self-betrayal sprung from his love for her are something more than exciting drama. There is a breathlessness here that comes from a slowing-down rather than a quickening, from a pause, from a moment of perilous silence in which the only sound or sensation is the painful throbbing of the human heart.

ii

The other way of breathlessness is laughter.

“Laughter, holding both his sides,” sang Milton; and, in fact, I once knew a man who sat at a dinner or some place between Don Marquis and Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse. It is not necessary to recall what happened to him. Let us draw a veil, and proceed. Don (perhaps you recall it) was under the necessity of conducting a guessing contest in a New York newspaper. The purpose was to guess his real name. People refused to believe that he could be Don Marquis. The Supreme Court, in a case brought as a test, has since decided that such incredulity is not a sign of moral turpitude. Even Donald Robert Perry Marquis, held the Court (seven to two; Holmes, J., and Brandeis, J., dissenting), does not sound sufficiently possible, especially when the evidence shows that he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois. The Court ruled that Don was conceivably a literary hoax, but that his play, _The Old Soak_, was the real thing and within the Amendment. Popular rather than judicial cognisance has extended to the other and uncollected works of Don Marquis, such as _Prefaces_, his stories in _Carter and Other People_, his truth-telling about a young woman called _Hermione_, his newly rededicated record of _The Cruise of the Jasper B._, his iliad of _Noah an’ Jonah an’ Captain John Smith_, his poetry in _Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs_, etc., etc. You have read Anatole France’s _The Revolt of the Angels_, but are you familiar with Don’s _The Revolt of the Oyster_, I ask you? Or _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, by Christopher Morley, writing under the auspices of Don Marquis? Or _The Almost Perfect State_, a vision vouchsafed exclusively to Mr. Marquis?

The truth is, there is a good deal of Mark Twain in Don Marquis. Don is usually as good as ever Mark was and in some cases a good deal superior--and throughout, more genuine. When I make the comparison I am thinking of the best Mark Twain, the satirist and not too easily satisfied thinker; neither the embittered and savage pessimist of those final years nor the facile (too facile) humourist. Marquis, who can sustain the severer comparison with Twain, can also well sustain the comparison on the lighter side; for Don is a humourist, too. The point is in the “too.” And the exemplification may be sought in (let us say) _The Almost Perfect State_. “No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly perfect enough unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years.... In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living.” A place of pay-as-you-enter wars; a heaven where everyone is an aristocrat and there are no professional reformers--in short, a Marquisate. Where Don differs from Mark Twain is in being a poet who sometimes uses poetry as the medium of his expression--see _Dreams and Dust_ and his _Poems and Portraits_. Christopher Morley (whose essay on Don Marquis, in _Shandygaff_, deserves to be read) has coaxed Don into a Frank R. Stocktonish enterprise in _Pandora Lifts the Lid_, with its narrative of seven young women snatched from the shades of a young ladies’ seminary and--. But as I write, Pandora has lifted the lid on a crack only.

P. G. Wodehouse is another matter, a chap over whose books thousands of people have found themselves unable to keep straight faces. Yet, not long ago, writing in the London Sphere, Clement K. Shorter declared he had never read a single one of the more than twenty Wodehouse yarns. He had never read _Jeeves_, or that new one, _Leave It to Psmith_, or _Mostly Sally_, or _Three Men and a Maid_, or _The Little Warrior_, or A _Damsel in Distress_, or _Piccadilly Jim_--think of it! Or no, don’t think of it. It won’t bear thinking of, it won’t really. The Wodehouse novels, though in most respects like those jolly things he writes to go with music by Jerome Kern, have now and then a page that dips far below the surface of fun into something very deep and true to the inwardness of human nature. Such are some bits in _The Little Warrior_, and such are the more tragic moments for Sally in _Mostly Sally_; and yet Mr. Wodehouse brings his story up again quickly like a diver clutching a pearl and rising up through clear water to sparkling and sunlit air. It is the prettiest talent imaginable, and I can think of no other contemporary writer of light fiction who has the same dexterity.

iii

There is no formula for achieving breathlessness. Those who are most susceptible to what may be loosely called Plot will find an enviable difficulty in breathing while they peruse, besides the stories already mentioned, some of the following tales:

JOHN BUCHAN’S _Midwinter_ and his _Huntingtower_. Buchan is a master of suspense and a humourist of very exceptional quality. His stories are rightly called “the grandest of grand yarns.” Have you ever read _Greenmantle_? The literary merit of these books (quite incidental) is far above the average of their kind.

FRANK L. PACKARD’S _The Four Stragglers_, an “unguessable” story with a steady acceleration of excitement, and his new one, _The Locked Book_.

WILLIAM GARRET’S _Friday to Monday_, which will give you the liveliest week-end of your possibly rich experience. Black pearls, a Chinaman, torture, a fight in the dark, a rocky cavern of the sea and an airplane are used.

WILLIAM JOHNSTON’S _The Waddington Cipher_.

H. C. MCNEILE’S _The Dinner Club_. The six members had each to tell two stories worthy of the dinner, and did! Also H. C. McNeile’s _The Black Gang_, with its further adventures of Bulldog Drummond.

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE’S _The Amateur Inn_, remarkable not only for its mystery puzzle but for the presence of an irresistible maiden lady who says: “A person not ashamed to lock a door with a key, need not be ashamed to lock his mind with a lie.”

CAROLYN WELL’S _Wheels Within Wheels_, another story with Penny Wise as the detective. The village idiot is a protagonist.

C. N. and A. M. WILLIAMSON’S _The Lady From the Air_ and their _The Night of the Wedding_.

When Ghost Meets Ghost.

The “borderland” in F. BRITTEN AUSTEN’S _On the Borderland_ is the region between the conscious and the subconscious, assuming that such a neutral zone exists. The book offers twelve weird stories striking in their ingenuity.

E. F. BENSON’S _Spook Stories_.

Ordeal by Water.

TRISTRAM TUPPER’S _Adventuring_ is entirely off the beaten track of adventure fiction--the story of a middle-aged, ordinary man whose love for the songs of the Grecian Sappho quickens his imagination to a dream of her beauty and leads him into an homeric sea adventure.

A. HYATT VERRILL’S _The Real Story of the Pirate_. A fascinating book about those fellows whose colouring is perhaps a little faded in spite of their being scoundrels of the deepest dye; although (as you may not know) Kidd was by no means so black as he was hanged for being.

A. HYATT VERRILL’S _The Real Story of the Whaler_. More thrills for all of us who had ’em as we watched the film, “Down to the Sea in Ships.”

Almost Anything by HAROLD MACGRATH.

His _The World Outside_, or, if you haven’t read them:

_The Ragged Edge_ _The Pagan Madonna_ _The Man With Three Names_ _The Drums of Jeopardy_

iv

Let us approach the subject of humour circumspectly. In addition to the Works of DON MARQUIS, _passim_, as the reference books say, and the Works of P. G. WODEHOUSE, both before-mentioned, and the Works of DONALD OGDEN STEWART (see