Chapter 3 of 12 · 21550 words · ~108 min read

Chapter 13

, “A Parody Outline of Stewart”), and the Works of IRVIN S. COBB in many places, the reader may be well advised to consult at the outset _Tom_ _Masson’s Annual for 1923_, a humorous anthology; KATHARINE DAYTON’S _Loose Leaves_, IRVIN COBB’S collection of the best humorous stories he has ever met, _A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away_, and--oh, yes!--the Works of OLIVER HERFORD, including _Neither Here Nor There_ and _This Giddy Globe_. A word of warning in regard to a couple of others:

FRANCIS B. KEENE’S _Lyrics of the Links_. This is not a humorous book on days when you are off your game. Still, you can’t afford to miss Grantland Rice’s foreword to the lyrics.

THOMAS L. MASON’S _That Silver Lining_, although written largely in a humorous vein, is an honest-to-goodness book about new thought, mental healing, psycho-analysis and so forth, by a survivor of twenty-eight years of Life.

_4. In the Kingdom of Conrad_

“I once knew such a man,” declared Marlow. I don’t believe any of us felt moved to reply. To have indicated, by a syllable or two, a polite interest, would have been fatal. Marlow, in the presence of anything but an aloof skepticism or a cynical reserve, becomes tiresome in his pursuit of metaphysical abstraction. He seems to think it can be caught in the butterfly-net of words.... Now he sat, sucking his pipe (he always cools it before re-filling) and looking attentively at each of us as the sparks of cigars momentarily threw a faint gleam on our faces. At length:

“You all know him, too,” he pronounced. “Chap named Conrad, Joseph Conrad. Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski. That Polish sailor; writes novels. But he has a master’s ticket. Got blackwater fever or something down at the Congo; he was out East before that. Then he settled in Kent, in a little house, where I once went to see him. Of course you’ve read _Lord Jim_; I don’t think a lot of it. Give me _Victory_ or _Youth_, or, best of all, _Nostromo_----”

“Personally, Marlow, I always look at the end first, to see how it comes out. Since you are beginning in the middle----”

“I? I’m not, but Conrad was. Did you ever read _Nostromo_? Talk about beginning a story in the middle!”

“Well, if you want to talk about _that_,” sighed a voice. “My impression was, Marlow, that you were undertaking to tell us about a man who knew himself--shall we say?--singularly well.”

“Exactly.” Marlow uttered the word with something that might have been reluctance. He repeated it, “Exactly.” It was time to re-fill his pipe and he made a long job of it. When he had it drawing nicely and began to speak again his voice was veiled, his choice of words was frequently made with a certain hesitation, and we listened without comment or any other interruption than the occasional shifting of a foot on the deck. At least, I can recall nothing; and I know we borrowed our matches by signs--when we thought to borrow them.

[Illustration: JOSEPH CONRAD]

“As you have heard something of him, I won’t waste my breath on the bare biographical record,” Marlow informed us. “I believe you all know he was born in the Ukraine in 1857; sixth of December happened to be the day. His father and mother were Polish patriots and Russian exiles and their death left the boy in the hands of his mother’s brother, who used him affectionately and engaged a very capable tutor to fit the young Korzeniowski for the University of Cracow. It is pertinent, I think, that the father had been a man of scholarly tastes and occupation. He had succeeded in translating Shakespeare into Polish. The legendary figure of a great-uncle, whom, however, the boy had seen, made a great impression. Mr. Nicholas B., as Conrad calls him in his book, _A Personal Record_, was in the retreat from Moscow and had the strange misfortune to share in eating a Lithuanian dog. Did you ever read _Falk_? Mr. Nicholas B. transmuted into fiction, I should say. The one had eaten a dog, the other was credited with having eaten human flesh; but the effect is the same. Then there’s that other story, _Heart of Darkness_--the one all the authorities acclaim as among the half-dozen greatest stories in English. I have heard Conrad narrate the actual incident as it befell him down at the Congo; I have also read, and heard him read aloud, his tale. Very interesting. Let us admit that truth is frequently stranger than fiction; what then? Why truth is so often unintelligible, void of significance, without meaning. Whereas fiction is the real truth--all we can grasp, anyway. How we abuse words! It is facts, or apparent facts, that are stranger than so-called fiction. Not truth! Let us save that word for finer purposes. The conquest of brute facts? Well, maybe.

“This Polish boy I am telling you about had an incomprehensible wish. I understand that nowadays there is no such animal as an incomprehensible wish. All wishes are fulfilled, or something of the sort. The boy’s wish I am speaking of was fulfilled, safe enough, but its comprehensibility is still in doubt. At any rate, he wanted to go to sea. As almost all boys wish urgently to go to sea, this might not appear abnormal. Perhaps, after all the oddity lay chiefly in the attitude of his uncle and tutor, which was strongly adverse; also, to some extent, in the fact that Poland is (or then was) purely an interior country without ships or the enticing sight of sailors to tempt a boy. A country of farmers. And he left it. He has told in _A Personal Record_ of the last stand made by the tutor and his uncle. The sight of an Englishman in the Alps had the mysterious effect of making the lad more set in his purpose than ever. Why, as I say, is not comprehensible, unless by those serious scientists who exist in Vienna and play jokes on the rest of the world.

“When he had got clean away, with a sorrowful blessing, he fared to the Mediterranean. He wanted to become not merely a sailor but a British sailor; he knew no English. French, of course, he knew, as befitted a Pole of a good family and some education. It was not so difficult to get berths on Mediterranean vessels. Being in his teens, he was looking for excitement and adventure. This, too, _mare nostrum_ provides. It does not really matter, I take it, where one sows his wild oats, provided only he sows thickly; and the waters of the Mediterranean received a bushel or two from Poland (a strictly agricultural land). One harvests such a crop from the sea uncertainly and at a long interval, but the sea’s return is often curious and beautiful. Fragments, if you like, but of a loveliness not yielded by the soil of the shore; mother-of-pearl’d, glistening. And out of that uncouth time and those bizarre experiences the man Conrad has got back certain pages in _The Mirror of the Sea_, pages that we all remember. _The Arrow of Gold_, also, is the return of those years when he was irregularly employed in smuggling and gun-running out of Marseilles to the loosely-guarded shores of Spain.

“There is a woman in _The Arrow of Gold_, Rita, you know ... but it is useless to speculate about women. In a preface provided for the new uniform edition of his works, J. C. explains that the slightly demure Antonia Avellanos, in the pages of _Nostromo_, sprang from the recollection, tenderly cherished, of a young girl, a schoolmate of his back there in Poland. But I would like to know where he got Lena, in _Victory_. If I were Somerset Maugham and came unexpectedly upon Lena in another man’s novel there would be no limit to my jealousy. One does not expect a sailor to understand women and I cannot for the life of me comprehend how J. C. got in the way of knowing the sex. Perhaps, for some time, he didn’t. Disregarding the mysteries of feminine nature, if he observed any, the youth persisted in his weird determination to become one of the great race of sailors. He shipped on English ships. Richard Curle’s book, _Joseph Conrad: A Study_, will even tell you just which English ships. For example, the story called _Youth_ with its vessel, the Judæa, harks back to a passage on a hulk called the Palestine. And so on. But what are such things to you and me? I have read Curle’s book and I give you my _parole d’honneur_ that I found it extraordinarily confusing when not simply rhapsodical. I did! As if J. C. were not, in himself, serious enough to require close attention and profound enough to merit it and pellucid enough to reward our most earnest scrutiny. Along comes Curle and roils up the surface of that clear, deep stream. I have no forgiveness for such a man, upon my word, I have not! May his excellent intentions pave the road to ... but I suppose they do force one to re-read Conrad if only to get straightened out again.

“Anyway, he stuck to ships, this foreign blighter. You will find all that is pertinent diffused through the pages of _A Personal Record_. Even to the examination in which he passed for his master’s ticket. What was he reading in those years? One would give something to have the tally; but certainly he did not neglect the French masters. Those who find in the earlier books, including _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, a style ‘too florid,’ or ‘too consciously sonorous’ say it was because J. C. was long in understanding that English prose cannot display the crystal resonance of French. Mind you, I don’t in the least accept their premise; to me, _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ is so perfect that when I came upon it I was seized with a most violent nostalgia. I wanted, in a foolish, incredible way, to be back in the fo’c’s’le or on the deck of a certain squarerigger called the Wayfarer which carried me around Cape Stiff in--how long ago?--in 1909. It seems a century. Youth! The splendid, the immortal time!

“The ships bore him eastward. Only the thoughtless, griped by the vain longing for empire or inflated with a nauseating self-importance, will go west. One goes east when one is in search of wisdom, and this man was. The greatest piece of wisdom is the knowledge of oneself; seek that in India or China or the ocean islands, whichever you please; the road lies eastward. You see, he had already acquired some self-knowledge; not a great deal, perhaps, but beyond the average. Or was he born with it? At a surprisingly early age he had known that he must, as the saying is, ‘follow the sea.’ This senseless conviction must be put down to the score of self-knowledge. When a man is not misled by that logical apparatus, his brain, it is astonishing to what clearness of perception he may attain. Do you recall that gentle, highly ironic sentence Conrad uses in _The Rescue_ about d’Alcacer? ‘Mr. d’Alcacer, being a Latin, was not afraid of introspection.’ Exactly. J. C. isn’t a Latin but neither is he afflicted like us, who shrink from a look inward in a way to arouse the recording angel’s darkest suspicion. The best advice, I believe, is that which counsels a man to look into his heart and write. The best advice extant, but it can be bettered. J. C. looked into his heart a long time before he began writing.

“All that he saw there we have had steadily reflected in the succession of novels and tales of a surprisingly varied character and a deep, a very deep, inner relevance to the discovered self within him. Externals do not matter. And yet they have taken aback visitors to J. C., persons already acquainted with the true person and who should therefore have known better. They found, in a cottage in Kent, a man quitting middle age, the victim of an atrocious rheumatism (or what seemed to be rheumatism) who dosed himself with all sorts of concoctions that he had heard of, until the house looked like a laboratory of disused patent medicine bottles. Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration. Tall and broadly ample Jessie Conrad beamed on the very infrequent visitors and would sometimes confide to them, with a giggle: ‘You know, they say in London that Conrad lives in the country with his cook!’ But she, Jessie, Mrs. Conrad, was a great deal more than just an excellent cook, a capable mother, all that. She was, in J. C.’s words, ‘the fortune of the house,’ a pair of eyes that guarded watchfully over this unhappy man when, for eighteen months, hardly knowing whether he ate or slept, and sitting all day long at a table, he struggled desperately for ‘the breath of life’ which had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, ‘Latin and Saxon, Jew and Gentile’ who people the pages of that miraculous novel, _Nostromo_. That book is unique. You may get some idea of its cost in toil and sheer creative effort from J. C.’s own words in _A Personal Record_. Just so; but then an American editor comes along, some years later, and finds Conrad as nervous as a cat. Actually! The editor particularly noticed that Conrad would never turn his back upon him while they were together in that room and always sat so as to face, or partly face, the door. He appeared like a man who wanted to feel the wall at his back; and with his deep-set eyes and the overhang of his forehead, the Slav contour of the cheekbones, the greying beard, the silences and the restlessness, the jumpiness--everything--J. C. made on the American editor a memorable and fantastic impression. That editor came away convinced that J. C. had seen some wild goings-on and been in some devilish tight places in his seafaring days; and altogether was spending his later years like Stevenson’s chap at the Admiral Benbow, waiting for some old, blind, tap-tap-tapping Pew to come along and tip him the black spot. Fact! But the editor carried no black spot, only large sums of American money which he was prepared to part with in exchange for the very best English fiction, both spot and future delivery. J. C. was then busy writing the novel called _Victory_, and gave it to the American to read. The next morning the American ripped it to pieces, on certain plot details. His, the American’s, account of that interview is instructive. He says Conrad sat, fingers clawing the arms of his chair, speechless and infuriated, for nearly an hour, while our editor stressed the importance of the return of the shawl that belonged to Mrs. Schomberg in the story and other matters that the meticulous would find fault with. And finally, I suppose when he was able to speak at all, the editor tells that J. C. came around, ending up by quite handsomely admitting the editor to be right, and promising to make the necessary changes. What I cannot get over is the fact that after, as the story goes, Conrad had re-written 70,000 words and added 60,000 more, in order to run _Victory_ complete in a single number, the American cut out of it everything but the conversation and the shooting. The resulting skeleton was, to some readers at least, very imperfectly articulated. That manuscript had a curious history and certainly deserves a place in a Museum. I heard lately that Gabriel Wells, the American collector, has got hold of it. J. C. had made alterations in black ink, the magazine editor had gashed it horribly in red; and when the book publisher came to restore the mangled corpus he could do so, intelligibly for the printer, only by an extravagant use of green ink. You see, there was no duplicate copy of the original. Always make duplicates. If you don’t, and if you are a writer of J. C.’s size, your manuscripts may some day be priceless. Even though they are typewritten; for the fact that they are not in handwriting is offset by the touching fact that perhaps your wife got up in the middle of the night to type them off, so you could see how they would look in the neat similitude of printed words.

iii

“But there! Let us not talk about the value of manuscripts. That is adventitious, a sort of excrescence on the process of moneygetting, which, in turn, perhaps, is an excrescence on all the forms of art. Do I sound like one of those absurd persons who wail because an artist must make money? If so, I beg your pardon, I do, humbly. Perhaps you would like me to do it kneeling here on the deck. My knees are bent. I would no more absolve the artist from the urgence of making a living than I would absolve him from the necessity of drawing breath to live. After all, isn’t it the same thing? So surely as you breathe, you must suffer; and what is the wage problem but a visitation, like sickness, or misfortune, or mental anguish inseparable from the act of living? If art cannot triumph over these things, if a novelist could not continue to write novels in spite of the awful pangs of rheumatism, the element of struggle would be lost and all our values would exist in a vacuum. It is their merit, and sometimes their sole merit, that they exist in the air under atmospheric pressures averaging fifteen pounds to the square inch and of only the very slightest variation. The need to make money is the atmosphere in which we all live. By a sublime law of nature, of human nature, I should say, the more we make, the more we need. Human nature abhors a vacuum. But, as I was saying--

“What a pill it would be to a man engaged in writing his first few great novels if he had seriously to consider the fact that, some years later but yet within his lifetime, these blackened pages would be worth a modest fortune. Such a consideration might well drive him quite off his head. What actually steadies him is the indisputable fact that _this_ book has simply got to earn him enough to live on for a whole year, including the younger boy’s annual six pairs of shoes. Then, when the book doesn’t, a way is provided. Don’t snort, please. I admit that, on the face of it, such a solution is improbable. The answer to that objection is: The solution arrives. Take J. C. He came ashore with the remnants of this tropical fever infesting him and a definite medical mandate enjoining him from all future notion of following the sea. When a chap is nearing forty and has spent all his life from boyhood working up to a master’s ticket and a ship to command, a decree of that sort is calculated to knock him out completely. He is in splendid shape to be counted out in a prostrate condition, lying prone and never recovering consciousness. J. C. had no more idea what to do----. He dug up the manuscript of that tentative story or novel he had been working on at intervals for about five years. The one which, to the extent of about the first nine chapters, he had shown to a young Englishman on a passage between Adelaide and the Cape. This was a young Cambridge student, named Jacques, who was aboard as a passenger. You remember that Jacques handed the manuscript back and J. C. ventured to ask if the story seemed worth finishing. Jacques answered. ‘Distinctly.’ So the beginnings of _Almayer’s Folly_ escaped being thrown overboard to puzzle the fishes.

“Ashore, J. C. finished the thing and it got published. No appreciable sum of money rewarded him, of course, and he has told how he wondered whatever he should do afterward, and he submitted his dilemma to Edward Garnett one evening after the publication of _Almayer’s Folly_. Finally Garnett brought forth a suggestion which, in its unoriginality, was a piece of the most authentic inspiration. ‘Why don’t you write another?’ he asked. But, of course, that is the only safe suggestion to make to a person who has written one novel. J. C. admits that from the moment those words crossed Garnett’s lips, _An Outcast of the Islands_ was merely a matter of time. All the same, he had to live. Shortly, he was marrying, and at suitable intervals Boris and John were added to the family unit. Capel House was a Kentish cottage but there were rates to pay. For some years the pension provided by the Civil List was an affair of serious importance. There is a man or two now living and a man or two now dead who could throw light on this phase of J. C.’s special problem. Conrad’s present American publisher dropped in one day on the late William Heinemann in London, with his usual question of what, or more accurately whom, Heinemann had got. The reply was: A comparatively new writer who would some day be as important as Kipling. However, it appeared that in order to attain this importance he would have to live. ‘Suppose,’ suggested Heinemann, with every aspect of intense earnestness, ‘you and I back him. He has a novel he wants to do. I think if we both put in ten pounds--fifty dollars--a month----.’ For a moment it seemed as if this blithe proposal might terminate the interview. And, after all, a publisher, who has to foot the cost of a book anyway on what is often the slenderest chance, might well draw back before the prospect of investing $50 a month for a year or two as a preliminary to risking as much more. But it was done. In the end, J. C. told them frankly that he could not give them the book. He had got seven-eighths of the way through and he was unable to bring the story out. Stuck for an ending would be the other way of stating the case. The two, Heinemann and Frank N. Doubleday, accepted this disappointment with a most commendable calmness. J. C. went on to write other things, _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, _Lord Jim_, since so widely hailed and at the time so little heeded and so immensely unlucrative; _Nostromo_. James B. Pinker (you knew Pinker, the author’s agent) handled the stuff. In the American phrase, Pinker ‘grubstaked’ Conrad; and among long-term investments of the very highest grade J. C. has been one of the very best in the world. Ah, yes! He has! No one who ever invested in Conrad and held on, held ‘for the rise,’ has ever lost a penny--or failed to make an enormous per cent. Why, take Heinemann and F. N. D. They, in effect, bought at away below par twenty-year bonds that matured and were paid off at par. For after twenty years J. C. picked up the all-but-finished novel, put it through in triumphant fashion and gave it to them under the title of _The Rescue_. By that time, he was made. He was selling in America practically seventeen times as many copies as when they put their money in--maybe more. And any publisher in America or England would, by then, have given his upper and lower teeth to possess Conrad. The Civil List was at liberty to take care of someone else and lucky if it found another half so rewarding.

“Do I give the impression that this result was brought about in the least meteorically? That would be inexcusable on my part. Let me see: There were _Almayer’s Folly_ and _An Outcast of the Islands_ and _The Nigger_ and _Lord Jim_ and _Nostromo_ and _The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_. Seven novels, not counting the two he wrote with Ford Madox Hueffer and four or five books of short stories. I am speaking now of the nineteen years that lay between Conrad’s first book and his novel, _Chance_; and I am avoiding all exaggeration when I tell you flatly that in all those nineteen years not one single book--not the succession of all those books--made enough money for the reasonable needs of himself and his family. Oh, I don’t say that he was entirely dependent on these books and the far-sightedness of men like those investors I have mentioned. W. E. Henley serialised _The Nigger_; in America, the North American Review serialised _Under Western Eyes_; there was a bit of money, now and again from the magazine sale of one of the short-stories, no doubt. I stick to my point: The income from the books was not enough. By the way, he also wrote in those years the two autobiographical books, _The Mirror of the Sea_ and _A Personal Record_. H’m. The American publishers of _A Personal Record_ printed it from type. You know; print a few and throw the type away.

“_Chance_ was published in 1914 and sold 20,000 copies in England and the long ordeal was over.

“One ordeal, that is. Ordeals, as such, are never over. After the trial by water, the trial by fire; and you are not to suppose that because one has survived the trial of the spirit he will therefore triumph easily over the trials of the flesh. Not at all. What is the malady of rheumatism beside the torture of shyness? And Conrad has always been distinctly shy. His American publisher, for a long time, did not meet him; J. C. backed out of it, until, finally, a perfectly reasonable impatience seized upon Mr. Doubleday, who said to himself, in a mild tone: ‘Confound it all. This sort of thing has got to stop.’ And that sort of thing did stop. J. C. at length was induced to come to a London hotel and shake hands--about all he did do, in fact, for at once a severe attack of shyness set in. For quite a while that interview went--very badly? Goodness knows it did not even go badly; it simply did not go at all. But then, as he knew Conrad was planning a new book, Mr. Doubleday asked a few questions natural to a person who has something at stake in a prospective venture. J. C. answered with entire willingness, began explaining what he had in mind and--pouf! Where was that shyness any longer? They parted as very good friends and have remained such ever since. So it came about that at last J. C. visited America as the guest of Mr. Doubleday. As you can imagine, lecture bureaus, societies and every sort of outfit had been after J. C. for years to speak in public. He had always turned down such offers, but before coming to America he explained to Mr. Doubleday that he should like to tell a few people, not more than a dozen, over the luncheon table of his Congo experience, and then read to them from his story, _Heart of Darkness_, the same affair as it came out in fiction. ‘If I am able to interest those few,’ J. C. went on, ‘perhaps I might try the same thing with a larger number, say fifty or even a hundred; I don’t think I could ever address more than a hundred.’ You see, he knew himself. He is the kind of man who is at his best in an intimate surrounding. Perhaps you have noticed the very special quality of intimacy achieved in his stories under practically all conditions. He inhabits other people’s breasts. A self-conscious tendency as great as his own or greater excites his friendly compassion. I know an American novelist, at one time editor of an American magazine and then in England meeting people and questing material. Several people were present but Conrad noticed the extreme ill-ease of the American editor. J. C. got up and came over and sat beside the stranger, who then lost some of his discomfort and eventually plucked up enough to say to J. C. that he would like to get some short stories from him. ‘Ah! Short stories,’ J. C. commented with that markedly foreign accent or intonation. He paused. ‘I do not pick short stories out of my sleeve.’ It was said with an inflection pleasantly humorous that did not conceal the seriousness of the fact. He simply wasn’t that kind of a conjuror. This was not the editor who handled _Victory_. American editors, according to my impression, are a varied lot. The mixture they make is a literary cocktail which appears to go to the heads of so many American authors. I know an American editor who bought a Conrad novel as a serial when all his--confrères’?--had rejected the story because of the impossible length. This man printed the 147,000 words without the sacrifice of one. This was after _Victory_ and as the editor in question knew nothing of that case, his was an unconscious as well as a vicarious atonement. But let that pass. We are not concerned with American editors, and neither, except momentarily, has Conrad been. His preoccupation has been unbrokenly with the problem of a sufficient self-knowledge. Must he not know himself better than any other possibly could? Of course, and for two imperative purposes: In the first place to write, in the second place, to keep his courage. It is no use being able to write unless you can keep your courage. Too, the world is full of brave souls who have bravery and ... nothing else. No gift, I mean. Nothing in the world is so cheap as courage, so common. But look you!--if a man undertakes self-examination, his courage goes. The scale of values is hopelessly deranged and either the self rises to sublime heights of despair or sinks into a hopeless, sticky complacency. J. C. is not an unblemished exception to this general law, or deplorable result--whichever term you prefer. He had gone to revisit Poland and was there when the Great War unleashed itself. The story of how he got out of Europe has never been told and, in fact, I don’t see how it can be. Or, well, why not? What do a few bribes matter, in a good cause? Some fairly influential persons, including an American Ambassador, were called upon to extricate Conrad from the extremely troublesome complications caused by the fact that he, a Pole by race and a Russian subject by birth, was a naturalised Englishman. The American Ambassador, appointed in the first place because of his large personal means, enabling him to support an Ambassadorship in the style to which it had been accustomed, may have used his private pocketbook; but in my judgment the matter was one to which he could quite conscientiously have devoted the public funds. Let that pass, too. They say that J. C. hates Russians and is frequently irascible. He also understands Russians, as any disbeliever may discover by reading _Under Western Eyes_. As for his irascibility, the results of self-examination justify any reasonable amount of irritation. If it had been one of you who had written seven-eighths of _The Rescue_ and found himself stuck for an ending I daresay the detonations would have been terrific. A volcano can blow its head off but an artist must not be permitted to let a little steam escape! What sort of a doctrine is that? J. C., of late years, has lost a good deal of his nervousness. He has written his _Lord Jim_ long ago. He has accomplished the most satisfactory definition we possess of the novel--where he calls it ‘a conviction of our fellowmen’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality.’ I call your attention to the last three words. If the ‘form of imagined life’ is not clearer to us than life as we observe it, there is no novel. Now, life is never clear unless we hold a little fragment of it in front of the mirror of each one of us, his own heart. Always, then, something different from what we expected is then clear, recognisable. J. C. has never done anything else. The story of _The Secret Sharer_, that chap who haunted the captain’s cabin and persisted in the captain’s thoughts, is the symbol of all Conrad’s work. I believe he has called it his favourite story; does anyone need to ask why? Giorgio Viola in _Nostromo_, Mrs. Gould in the same novel, the nigger in the story of the Narcissus, Haldin in _Under Western Eyes_, our friend, the anarchist, in _The Secret Agent_; Captain MacWhirr in _Typhoon_ and Jim in _Lord Jim_; Axel Heyst in _Victory_; Flora de Barral and others in _Chance_--you know as well as I do that these are simply persons we encounter and depreciate or else dismiss as incomprehensible. But Conrad holds them up to the mirror of his own heart and behold! they are reflected in new shapes, pathetic shapes, heroic shapes, twisted and tortured shapes, but shapes that are unfailingly intelligible. It is not quite the same thing as saying: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Joseph Conrad.’ It is equivalent, perhaps, to saying: ‘Here, by the grace of God, is the affinity with Joseph Conrad.’ The meaning of the universe is, as the Spaniards say, with God; but what we feel about it is of perpetual fascination and very real importance. J. C. has found that out, in the course of a fairly long and extremely surprising lifetime. The world is a ship that will never make port, it is fair to assume, in our lifetimes; its exact position, then, as witnessed to by the sun and the stars, is of little moment. But those who are aboard--let us have a clear understanding about them, if we can.

“To do that, one must feel the deck beneath his feet, like that old fellow Peyrol, in Conrad’s newest novel which you will so soon be reading. Coming after _The Rescue_--how long it has been! Three years after!--_The Rover_ has surprised me with an unexpected simplicity of strain, like a clear little thread of blue in a riot of scarlet, the bright background of Revolutionary France and Napoleon’s day. Peyrol, I ought to tell you, was a French waif whose sea exile led him to the coast of India and to membership in the strange fraternity of pirates who called themselves Brothers of the Coast. But this was all before; we open upon the return of Peyrol to France and an inconspicuous repose in a little farmhouse where dwell an old woman, a bloodthirsty scarecrow, and a young girl whose eyes, having looked upon the spurting blood of the Terror, can remain fixed on nothing for consecutive instants since. And there’s a young French officer sent to the farm on duty connected with the blockade. Far down below the rim of the horizon, you understand, sails the fleet commanded by Lord Nelson. The complete affair is one of those episodes in which a handful of people are wholly at the mercy of destiny if a single one of them fails to sustain his illusion, whether of love, of wrath, of mercy, of hope, or, perhaps, of a sublime despair. Despair? Why, certainly; from what other sentiment could old Peyrol have acted as he did, in the grand emergency, cutting the knot that bound up together those few lives, whose only importance was the supreme importance of the insignificant and humble? Peyrol, the ex-pirate, flashing out over the water to his final earthly adventure is the latest and most beautiful incarnation of that old sailor whom Conrad knew in the flesh and has translated so often--the ‘Ulysses’ we meet in _The Mirror of the Sea_, who is also Nostromo, who appears under his actual name and in his true rôle in _The Arrow of Gold_. In the closing pages of The Rover we get a brief glimpse of the great Nelson, but he does not dwarf Peyrol.

“A Mediterranean story, a tale of that sea which is ‘the charmer and deceiver of audacious men,’ like Life itself, which also keeps ‘the secret of its fascination.’”

Marlow ceased to speak. It was beautifully dark. The river, in our stretch of it, was composed to the beauty of that darkness and won to the felicity of a nearly perfect silence. I can’t speak for the others, of course. Personally I was absorbed in trying to remember the man Conrad’s exact words--in the so long suppressed preface to _The Nigger_. You must have read them:

“The artist appeals to that part of our being that is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not a mere acquisition--and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Books by Joseph Conrad

NOVELS:

1895 _Almayer’s Folly_ 1896 _An Outcast of the Islands_ 1898 _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ [first published in America as _The Children of the Sea_] 1900 _Lord Jim_ 1903 _Nostromo_ 1907 _The Secret Agent_ 1911 _Under Western Eyes_ 1914 _Chance_ 1915 _Victory_ 1917 _The Shadow Line: A Confession_ 1919 _The Arrow of Gold_ 1920 _The Rescue_ 1923 _The Rover_

NOVELS IN COLLABORATION WITH FORD MADOX HUEFFER:

1901 _The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story_ 1903 _Romance_

TALES AND SHORT STORIES:

1898 _Tales of Unrest_ 1902 _Youth: A Narrative_; _Heart of Darkness_; _The End of the Tether_ 1903 _Typhoon and Other Stories_ [in America _Typhoon_ is published separately and the volume is _Folk and Other Stories_] 1908 _A Set of Six_ 1912 _’Twixt Land and Sea_ 1916 _Within the Tides_

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL:

1906 _The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions_ 1912 _A Personal Record_ [published in England as _Some Reminiscences_]

CRITICAL:

1921 _Notes on Life and Letters_

Sources on Joseph Conrad

_Joseph Conrad: His Romantic-Realism_, by RUTH M. STAUFFER (Boston: Four Seas Company, 1922). This study of Conrad is of first importance because of its thirty pages of appendices, consisting of:

I. Conrad Bibliographies

II. Conrad’s Works

(A) Chronological List of Novels and Tales (with Original Editions)

(B) Alphabetical List of Short Stories

III. Criticisms of Conrad

(A) Books on Conrad. With a paragraph of characterisation of each.

(B) Articles About Conrad. With notes as to the character of each article. There is given a “first,” a “second” and a “third” list, according to the estimate of an article’s value.

IV. Book Reviews. Described as a “partial list only,” but recording fully 200 reviews in principal English and American magazines and newspapers.

V. Miscellaneous

(A) Brief Articles on the Personality of Conrad

(B) Poems to Conrad

All of Conrad’s short stories are credited to their respective volumes, serial publication is invariably noted, etc.

_Joseph Conrad--The Man_, by Elbridge L. Adams, in THE OUTLOOK for 18 April, 1923. One of the most complete accounts of a visit and report of the everyday Conrad.

The chapter on Joseph Conrad, by Leland Hall, in _English Literature During the Last Half Century_, by JOHN W. CUNLIFFE. The Macmillan Company, revised edition, 1923.

_Some Modern Novelists_, by HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT and WILSON FOLLETT. Henry Holt & Company, 1918.

_Joseph Conrad, A Study_, by RICHARD CURLE. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914.

Private Information.

The reader may consult the references available in the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, and should also consult the annual READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE especially since 1914. He should also consult the map showing the locations of Conrad’s stories, printed as an end-paper in some editions of his books, particularly _Victory_.

_5. The Documents in the Case of Arthur Train_

The first and most important is a volume of over two hundred pages--very large pages, somewhat larger, in fact, than those of Cosmopolitan magazine, a trifle smaller than those of Vanity Fair. The volume is bound in heavy yellow paper which says, in neat letters at the upper left, “Indictment No. 1.” Inside the cover is a long table of contents; the printed pages that follow are made either more enlightening or more alarming, according to your variety of intelligence, by the presence of charts and diagrams. One such, when unfolded, shows green, red and black inks. The purpose is to make it easier for the eye to trace the intricate handlings of certain considerable sums of money....

This mysterious book, possessed of no title-page and honouring no one as its author, represents the capacity of Arthur Train for hard work. In 1914 Henry Siegel, a New York merchant and banker, was to be prosecuted, and Arthur Train was entrusted with the prosecution. Counsel for Siegel secured a change of venue and the trial was transferred to Geneseo, New York. The case for the prosecution, in its mathematical and extremely complicated demonstration, seemed only too likely to be lost before a jury of farmers completely unfamiliar with Mr. Siegel’s affairs. Mr. Siegel was in banking companies, merchandising corporations, realty corporations, a securities company, an express company and other enterprises. It was quite necessary to explore the labyrinth; something like $50,000 was expended by Arthur Train, the explorer, and the printed and bound book, _Indictment No. 1_, was a mere preliminary to the battle in court.

In 1914 Arthur Train was already the author of quite a number of books of fiction. In a general way, they represented pleasant recreation.

Other documents are these books and stories of his, the work of leisure intervals and an active imagination. Some of them were done by dictation, dictation interrupted by telephone calls, by days in court, by this or that or the other. He acquired the faculty of dropping and picking up again in the middle of a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. He didn’t worry over the stuff; he didn’t fuss about it, as some men do about their golf, when they’re off their game. The business of life was transacted in the gloomy chambers of the Criminal Courts Building, New York, where the air is bad, the light poor, but the saturation with human nature, perfect. To prepare a case was rather frequently interesting, to try a case was scarcely ever without its thrill. And the cases, despite the common misconception of them, were not assorted East Side vendettas or Chinatown murders. A large percentage of them were always on that shadowy borderline where a District Attorney must stop and ask himself if a crime has been committed, if, after all, the remedy is not to be sought in an action brought in the civil courts. And every little while there would be a case of proportions, of an almost inscrutable complexity, like that which led to the publication (in a strictly limited edition with a deluxity of coloured inks) of _Indictment No. 1_.

[Illustration: ARTHUR TRAIN]

Arthur Train is the most agreeable of men, not tall, suave, exceedingly friendly, a good talker and with all the requisite human approaches and contacts, but if you really wish to make yourself tiresome to him you can do it by suggesting that he is a “criminal lawyer.” Now there have been and are among “criminal lawyers” many men of eminence. The defence of persons accused of crime is possibly that branch of the law in which talent or genius shows most conspicuously. As a matter of fact, however, the most ingenious brains of the legal profession have preferred, for a generation past, to remain in offices and nurse the young and growing corporation or correct the adult corporation’s errors in diet and underwear. Corporation law is the thing in our day and there is some very good evidence that Arthur Train is an excellent corporation lawyer.

What about the evidence that he is a novelist? Your Honours, I am coming to that directly.

iii

The document now to our purpose is his latest novel, _His Children’s Children_. It represents Mr. Train’s most serious work to date. To give it its proper background of purpose, I should like to make a literary comparison. My trouble is that any sort of literary comparison seems to be extended too far. If I compare one novel with another the impression arises that I am comparing them in every respect. I compare two books, and it is assumed that I am comparing the two authors. Perhaps the two books have a single resemblance and the authors both have blue eyes. Very well, then! I was about to speak of John Galsworthy’s work in _The Forsyte Saga_.

That history of a family is discussed elsewhere in this book. My present point is that it is the history of an English family whose main inheritance was the property instinct, a blending of acquisitiveness and tenaciousness, “to have and to hold.” Mr. Train’s _His Children’s Children_ is the history of an American family whose main inheritance was a most characteristically American one, the wish to “get on.” Tenacity was strong in the Forsytes, it is undeveloped in the Kaynes. A Forsyte has not much to acquire, but a Kayne is always two up and three to play; the effort to acquire is his breath and he is somehow always afflicted with the feeling of short-windedness. Each in his quite distinctive way, these two novelists have concerned themselves with the situation arising from an age of materialism--the age that culminated in the Great War. I choose my words. I do not say that the Great War was a product of a materialistic age, though there is a brief for that and I think quite possibly Mr. Train would consent to argue it. But the Great War did come in our age of a materialistic civilisation, and, if not at the end of it, nearer to the end than to the beginning. When did our materialistic age begin? At the end of Mrs. Wharton’s _Age of Innocence_, of course.

Mr. Train’s motif is the dominant characteristic of an age we all lived in, and what that characteristic led to. He writes, of course, about old Peter B. Kayne, “The Pirate,” and his children and grandchildren; these are the little group of people in the immediate foreground. They are the larger world in little, people who set the fashion and make the pace, watched and aped by thousands. Their ambitions, their discontents, their achievements in every direction, including sensation, scandal and disgrace are the best commentary on--themselves as individuals? Not at all; on certain forces and tendencies more powerful than they.

So considered, _His Children’s Children_ is a perfectly documented study of the third generation since the beginning of the era of “big business” in America. To the Forsytes the termination came with a sign, “To Let.” With us it has more frequently come with some such scene as that closing Mr. Train’s able novel; I mean old Peter B. Kayne, ill and helpless upstairs, and the auctioneer at his stand below. To the once redoubtable Pirate comes the sound of a rising murmur from down there; he manages to get up and struggle feebly to a place where he can look upon the alien affair going on in the house--in his, Peter B. Kayne’s, house. The auctioneer’s voice is lifted above the rest, in a louder smoothness, in an accent of barter; ambitions and ideals, so far as realised, are here knocked down to the highest bidder. What price are we offered on certain tangible results of a desire to get on? To the highest bidder.... Perhaps, after all, Peter B. Kayne’s was the high bid.

A “documented” study; I chose my word there, also. For an immense amount of work went into _His Children’s Children_. You may take my word for it, as much as went into the authorship of _Indictment No. 1_. Or, no, you need not take my word. Take a fact, instead. Mr. Train is now at work upon a very remarkable novel of which it is not my privilege to speak here except to say that its first chapter exemplifies his infinitely painstaking method to-day. In common with a very few other novelists, he likes to derive clearly through several antecedent generations his principal characters. His writing undergoes many corrections but in his first draft he gives himself full rein. In the novel that is to follow _His Children’s Children_, he spent much time on the first chapter. By a “cut-back” he traced his hero’s family from about the year 1790 to the opening of the story, in the present. This, mind you, was with the deliberate intention that the first chapter should ultimately be of not much, if any, more than ordinary chapter length--perhaps thirty typewritten pages.

Well, he knew he had written a good deal, but the first chapter, first draft, was written and he sent it to be typed. The manuscript had been returned to him on a day when I called; it made exactly 184 typewritten pages--about half the length of an ordinary full-length novel, maybe somewhat more.

Arthur (Cheney) Train was born in Boston, 6 September 1875, the son of Charles Russell Train and Sarah M. (Cheney) Train. His father was Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 1873-1880. Arthur Train was graduated from Harvard (A.B.) in 1896 and received the law degree three years later. In 1897 he married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin P. Kissam, of New York. Mrs. Train, also a writer, died in the spring of 1923. Her book, _“Son” and Other Stories of Childhood and Age_ is being published posthumously.

Arthur Train went almost immediately into the District Attorney’s office in New York. He never entirely sacrificed his connection with it until 1916, when he became a member of the firm of Perkins & Train. As a special deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York, in 1910, he brought about the indictment of over one hundred persons, political offenders in Queens County, in the city of New York. He is a member of the Century, University and Harvard Clubs of New York, and of the Downtown Association. In his attractive home, at 113 East Seventy-third street, New York, there is a room, up one flight, occupying the whole width of the front of the house, with southerly windows, book-lined walls, an ample desk, and a roomy davenport confronting a fireplace. The fireplace is fenced about and the top of the fence is leather-cushioned, making a comfortable seat. Nothing could be more pleasant than to sink into the davenport and face Mr. Train, who has seated himself on the fireplace fence and lighted a cigarette.

“But don’t you mind the interruptions?” you ask him. “Suppose you are in the middle of a novel and a big case comes along----”

“That’s very refreshing,” he answers. “I come back to the novel as from a vacation.”

And you recall the early writing, done, so to speak, between telephone calls.

There _has_ been a change; Mr. Train freely acknowledges it. “I can’t say exactly when it occurred. It was during the war. I felt differently about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt--_Tutt and Mr. Tutt_, you know. I think those were possibly the first stories I had written which made me feel emotion.”

It is easy to see why, easier, perhaps, in Mr. Train’s new collection of these tales, _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_, than in the first book. For the emphasis upon Ephraim Tutt’s attitude is more pronounced as we see him deliberately employing the tricks of the law in the interests of justice. Himself moved by that most permanent of human emotions, the desire for the just, and by that most continual of human delights, the extraction of good from evil or even good wreaked by means of evil, and moved also by that human protest against the application of general rules to individual dilemmas, Mr. Tutt would be strange if he did not arouse in his creator the emotion inseparable from any act of art.

Once felt, never without. The practise of law seems less important than once it did to Arthur Train. The number of cases that really are interesting--are they growing fewer? There is something about private practise ... duller than the old court work, less stimulating....

He has “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” It has been proven. There, I think, our case rests.

Books by Arthur Train

1905 _McAllister and His Double_ 1906 _The Prisoner at the Bar_ 1908 _True Stories of Crime_ 1909 _The Butler’s Story_ 1909 _Mortmain_ 1909 _Confessions of Artemas Quibble_ 1910 _C. Q., or In the Wireless House_ 1911 _Courts, Criminals and the Camorra_ 1914 _The “Goldfish.”_ This book, published anonymously, caused a sensation by its satirisation of American social life 1915 _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ (with ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD) 1917 _The World and Thomas Kelly_ 1918 _The Earthquake_ 1920 _Tutt and Mr. Tutt_ 1921 _By Advice of Counsel_ 1921 _The Hermit of Turkey Hollow_ 1923 _His Children’s Children_ 1923 _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_

_6. The Lady of a Tradition, Miss Sackville-West_

There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediæval village. It is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak which is the clock-tower with its pointed roof; it might be the spire of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediæval village. At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent, with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.”

[Illustration: V. SACKVILLE-WEST]

Such is the opening page of V. Sackville-West’s volume, _Knole and the Sackvilles_, a handsomely printed and illustrated account of the seat of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset. Authentic record of the family goes not beyond that Herbrand de Sackville who came to England with William the Conqueror. Knole, bought by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456, and held by Cardinal Morton, Cranmer, Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary and Elizabeth, was granted, in 1586 by Elizabeth, to Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, first Earl of Dorset. The name “West” enters with the marriage of Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the fourth Duke, to John West, Earl de la Warr.

The house, of seven courts to correspond with the days of the week, fifty-two staircases matching the weeks of the year and 365 rooms answering to the days of the year[1] “is gentle and venerable. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house.” The garden side is the gay, the princely side. When, in summer, the great oak doors of the second gatehouse were left open, “it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.”

[1] “I cannot truthfully say,” writes Miss Sackville-West in _Knole and the Sackvilles_, “that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he could bring courts, stairs and rooms up to that satisfactory total.”

In 1825 the duchess Arabella Diana died and her estate devolved upon her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as has been told, became the wife of Lord de la Warr. Dying in 1870 she left Buckhurst to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was Miss Sackville-West’s grandfather. He was eighty and she perhaps eight, and as he shared “the family failing of unsociability” it fell to the child’s lot to show the house to visitors. In this, as in more natural ways, she became highly familiar with Knole and from her earliest years must have loved the place. On receipt of a telegram that people were coming, Grandpapa would take the next train for London, “returning in the evening when the coast was clear.” The Cartoon Gallery, the Leicester Gallery, the Brown Gallery; Lady Betty Germaine’s bedchamber; the three principal bedrooms, the Spangled Room, the Venetian Ambassador’s and the King’s chamber, “the only vulgar room in the house” with furniture made entirely in silver and articles of silver, “even to a little eye-bath”--the procession of the days and years was not more certain than the procession of the curious, the inquisitive and the wonder-struck through these. You will fashion your own picture of the daughter of the Sackvilles standing before the portrait of Lady Margaret Sackville (over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting room) and endeavouring, quite vainly, to do her own hair in the elaborate manner of young Lady Margaret’s. Or, it may be, she had been naughty that day, and had hid herself inside the pulpit of the Chapel of the Archbishops, where, in spite of private steps leading out of her bedroom straight into the Family Pew, “they never found me.” Grandpapa was “a queer and silent old man,” as Miss Sackville-West remembers him. “He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave demoiselle cranes.... He and I, who so often shared the house alone between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand a child.... When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him--and never knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me--and sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy, and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London; of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but ‘my Lord’ and ‘my Lady.’ I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to bed....”

iii

At the age of thirteen Miss Sackville-West wrote “an enormous novel” about the figure of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, who seemed to her the embodiment of Cavalier romance. And perhaps he was. “He had the advantage of starting with the Vandyck portrait in the hall, the flame-coloured doublet, the blue Garter, the characteristic swaggering attitude, the sword, the love-locks, the key of office painted dangling from his hip and the actual key dangling on a ribbon from the frame of the picture.” The dashing career of this follower of King Charles, who fought a duel with Lord Bruce and whose younger son was murdered by the Roundheads, became “a source of rich romance to a youthful imagination nourished on _Cyrano_ and _The Three Musketeers_.” The half-grown girl re-examined certain old nail-studded trunks in the attics, mute witnesses to Cromwellian violence, some of them curved to fit the roof of a barouche. “The battered trunks were stacked near the entrance to the hiding-place, which, without the smallest justification save an old candlestick and a rope-ladder found therein, I peopled with the fugitive figures of priests and Royalists. I peeped into the trunks: they contained only a dusty jumble of broken ironwork, some old books, some bits of hairy plaster fallen from the ceiling, some numbers of Punch for 1850. Nevertheless, there were the gaping holes where the locks had been prised off the trunks, and the lid forced back upon the hinges by an impatient hand. Down in the Poets’ Parlour, where I lunched with my grandfather, taciturn unless he happened to crack one of his little stock-in-trade of jokes, Cromwell’s soldiers had held their Court of Sequestration. The Guard Room was empty of arms or armour, save for a few pikes and halberds, because Cromwell’s soldiers had taken all the armour away. The past mingled with the present in constant reminder; and out in the summer-house, after luncheon, with the bees blundering among the flowers of the Sunk Garden and the dragon-flies flashing over the pond, I returned to the immense ledger in which I was writing my novel, while Grandpapa retired to his little sitting-room and whittled paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes, and thought about--Heaven knows what _he_ thought about.”

Miss Sackville-West is writing of Knole, of course, in her long story called _The Heir_. The manor of Blackboys with its peacocks is not Knole; I suppose no one makes the mistake of literal identification of people and places in fiction; at least, none should do so. What is truly identifiable is never anything tangible at all; it is merely an emotion. When we read _The Heir_, subtitled “A Love Story,” and acquaint ourselves in a leisurely sufficience with the fellow Chase we should be stupid indeed if we grasped at the substance and neglected the shadow. It is shadow and its correspondent sunlight for which, after all, mankind lives a life wherein the things of substance are the final unreality....

But her first book, which was brought to the attention of the American publisher by Hugh Walpole, was a novel called _Heritage_, an unusual story of young lovers. The breath of distinction upon the tale more than redeemed its faults of construction, of which, perhaps, after all, the most serious was merely the device of a letter immensely longer than any epistle probable to be written. Then, in point of publication, at least, came _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_, also a novel. Some two years elapsed before the appearance of her third novel, _Challenge_, a piece of work of such a character as to demand our earnest scrutiny. _Challenge_ is being followed by _Grey Wethers_ and _The Heir_.

I have been speaking of American publication; in England Miss Sackville-West first came to notice as a poet. Her _Poems of West and East_ was followed by another collection called _Orchard and Vineyard_. Her work in verse exhibited austerity of expression joined to an emotional and descriptive power difficult to appraise. Although it may be, as has been said, that the chief use of poetry, written when one is young, is to produce a finer prose when one is older.

Of _The Heir_ it is best to say little since a few betraying words can so easily spoil its secret for the reader. In the same volume appear _The Christmas Party_, _Patience_, _Her Son_ and _The Parrot_, a vignette dedicated to “H. G. N.” All the qualities present in _The Heir_ may be found in the other tales, so varyingly shorter--delicacy, precision, dramatic power and a perception of beauty translated almost without the use of a single emotional word. In _The Christmas Party_ we have the deferred revenge of a woman, a theatrical costumer, upon her strait-minded family; _Patience_ is an elderly man’s recollection, in perfectly domesticated surroundings, of his youthful affair; _Her Son_ is the inevitable cruelty inflicted upon a mother by the passage of the years; the story of _The Parrot_ points to the only escape from the ... cage.

The “H. G. N.” of its dedication is the Honourable Harold G. Nicolson. Except as an author, the lady of Knole is no longer Victoria Sackville-West but the Honourable Mrs. Harold G. Nicolson.

_Challenge_, a novel that may instructively be compared with Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_, had the curious fortune to be published first in America and--what is more remarkable--only in America. It might seem altogether extraordinary that one of the most noteworthy novels by an Englishwoman in years should not only not be published first in England but should not be published there at all. It might seem very extraordinary; and it is. The circumstances were perhaps without a precedent and, it may be hoped, will be without a duplication. In 1920 an English publisher had accepted _Challenge_ and prepared it for issuance. That is to say, type had been set, plates had been cast, the sheets of the novel had been printed, folded and sewed. Nothing remained but to encase them in cloth--a matter of a week, usually--when the book would be ready to go on sale. It was the eleventh hour; 11.59 to be precise. Then fate intervened.

It transpired (or was allowed to transpire) that Miss Sackville-West had written her novel about an actual family, portraying that family in general and possibly in particular. The family was part of her own, or shall we say, connected with her own; and it was not without influence. This influence was immediately exerted to secure the suppression of _Challenge_. How far the influence succeeded, by virtue of its own force and considerations, and how far it was aided by the peculiarity of the English libel law, which recognises technical libel, I am unable to say; but succeed it did. _Challenge_ remained unbound and the English house either put it down as a loss or, with a sanguineness born of much publishing experience, carried it in its inventory. There were all those folded and sewed sheets constituting a very fair-sized edition, as English editions go, packed away in some sufficiently dry place. At Knole and in Cornwall and it may be in other places Miss Sackville-West continued writing.

Probably the only challenge to the suppressors of the novel in England lay in the single figurative word of the title. Miss Sackville-West could be said to be writing of the actual family only in the same sense that we can say, in alluding to the manor of Blackboys in _The Heir_, that she writes of Knole. Some South American republic, indeed, any South American republic, would be equally justified in beginning suit for libel against Conrad for the picture of Costaguana in _Nostromo_--could a court be discovered in which such a suit would be justiciable? It is charitable to suppose that the suppressors beheld themselves mirrored in the pages of _Challenge_ because they were victims of a narcism complex. However, the interesting disabilities of these people were of no serious importance on this side of the Atlantic; Miss Sackville-West had done no work of such importance as the unborn _Challenge_; and after all those unbound sheets had lain untouched for two years or longer the day came when an American publisher took the whole lot, together with the plates to enable him to print more, and _Challenge_ saw the light in the United States early in 1923.

It is still unpublishable in England and seems destined indefinitely to remain so. Not indignation nor ridicule is likely to alter this state of affairs, since the prototypes of Miss Sackville-West’s Davenants must be conceived of as resembling Galsworthy’s Forsytes in one respect: They are almost certainly impervious to the wrath or derision of any except their own kind, and this will hardly be forthcoming.

_Challenge_, admirable in its technique, begins with an epilogue, giving us through the eyes of disinterested bystanders a glimpse of Julian Davenant many years afterward. We see him with his wife at a great affair in London. He has power, wealth, distinction; and his wife is perfectly equipped for her rôle. Many people expect that Davenant will be the next Viceroy; he has already been in the Cabinet. A cynical man, who believes in nothing--and a philanthropist, really. His face, or his eyes, give one the impression that he has “learnt all the sorrow of the world”; they are inexpressibly weary. And the two onlookers, a man and a woman, recall that there was some “crazy adventure” in Julian Davenant’s youth. “Very romantic, but we all start by being romantic until we have outgrown it.”

The three parts which follow narrate in a strictly chronological order the details of that “crazy adventure.” Julian Davenant was the young son of a house of English Levantines, that is to say, an English family established for several generations in the Levant and possessing, at the time of the story, besides much land, the site of valuable vineyards, prestige and influence and political power. It will be recalled that the Goulds of Costaguana in _Nostromo_ constituted a similar clan. Such English exoterics (not to say exotics) are only moderately rare. It is not proper to speak of them as hybrids, since in their marriages they are careful to avoid a non-English admixture and their sons are invariably sent to England for their education. Without in any essential degree sacrificing a single one of those peculiarly tenacious English traits of character and without any alteration of the English habit of thought, they are in most other matters assimilated to the country of their holdings. They come to understand it, its ways, its habit of thought and policy of conduct and instinct of behaviour with a completeness that amounts to perfection and reposes, as a rule and deep down, on a sincere distaste. They are really marvellous, whether Goulds in South America or Davenants in Greece. And their young men....

In any comparison of _Nostromo_ and _Challenge_ it will be found that the most obvious likenesses are purely superficial. In _Nostromo_ we have the son, Charles Gould, determined to avenge, by a patient commercialism and a silent political sagacity, the fate of his Uncle Harry and the killing worry of his father; the instrumentality to his hand is the silver of the mine. In _Challenge_ young Julian Davenant is the victim of the romantic impulse which causes him to respond, at any cost, to the patriotic appeal of the Islands lying off the coast and unwillingly a part of the tiny republic of Herakleion. The girl, Eve, and the woman, Kato, a native of the Islands and a famous singer, are the personal contending forces in the struggle over Julian Davenant. Eve is Julian’s cousin. In the developing story of her love for Julian, in its culminating struggle and final disaster a precise comparison with _Nostromo_--even in respect of the tragedy that befell Linda Viola--is a waste of our attention.

What may profitably be compared in Mr. Conrad’s acknowledged masterpiece and Miss Sackville-West’s dramatic novel is the identity of method and art. I say “identity” without any hesitation, for in both cases I think the artist has achieved a proportionately impressive and living and beautiful result. As to method, the reader will observe for himself that either novel might have been written by either author. In each case the actual knowledge of a totally foreign country is perhaps the same, and in neither case is it very great or very important. Again, in each case, the imaginative creation is on a plane so much above the level attained in other (and very excellent) novels that the book must definitely be set in a class apart. One accounts for the intense imaginative insight of _The Old Wives’ Tale_ and _My Antonia_ (to choose two especially fine examples) by saying that, after all, both Arnold Bennett and Willa Cather had the immeasurable aid of childhood’s unblunted perceptiveness; and in so partially accounting for the sheer fact, one does quite rightly. But neither memory nor the deepest well of sympathy serves to explain _Nostromo_ and _Challenge_; in these two novels the imagination had to create something _de novo_ and actively body it forth; memories, hearsay, would be an actual interference and the existence of an outer world a positive interruption. They are both novels of a perfectly valid idea recreated in terms of the subconscious personality. If that is too cloudy an explanation I will ask you to think of the subconscious mind as a happily benevolent oyster, of the germ-idea as an infinitesimal particle of irritant sand, and of the accomplished story as the resulting pearl. It is as near as I can come to conveying what I mean ... and know to be at least subjectively true.

Abandoning this difficult region and ascending to the surface on which most art and literary method lies, the comparison becomes so easy that one feels superfluous in making it. Have we not the same complexity of persons presented in an intimate relation to each other and composing a little world, complete socially, politically and in their attitudes; so that we can perfectly conceive them in any set of circumstances? Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present? the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art, exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions of the reader. He is led to feel amusement, ridicule, sympathy, indignation, dismay, horror and grief; because never is it intimated to him that it is his duty to feel any of these things.

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The new novel, _Grey Wethers_, taking its name from those ancient sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story, traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s _Heritage_, but is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....

“What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss Sackville-West’s story of _The Heir_. “What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your heart leaps.

Books by V. Sackville-West

_Poems of West and East_ [in England] 1921 _Orchard and Vineyard_ [in England] 1918 _Heritage_ 1920 _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_ 1923 _Knole and the Sackvilles_ 1923 _Challenge_ [withdrawn in England prior to publication, 1920] 1923 _Grey Wethers_ 1924 _The Heir and Other Stories_

Sources on V. Sackville-West

_Knole and the Sackvilles_, generally, and also pages 11, 17, 68, 82, 83, 219 and 220

_Who’s Who_ [in England]

Private Information

7. _Harold Bell Wright_

From _Who’s Who in America_, 1922-1923 (Volume 12):

“WRIGHT, HAROLD BELL, author: born, Rome, Oneida County, New York, May 4, 1872; son, William A. Wright and Alma T. (Watson) Wright; student two years, preparatory department, Hiram College, Ohio; married, Frances E. Long, of Buffalo, New York, July 18, 1899; married, second, Mrs. Winifred Mary Potter Duncan, of Los Angeles, California, August 5, 1920. Painter and decorator, 1887-92; landscape painter, 1892-7; pastor, Christian (Disciples) Church, Pierce City, Missouri, 1897-8, Pittsburg, Kansas, 1898-1903, Forest Avenue Church, Kansas City, Missouri, 1903-5, Lebanon, Missouri, 1905-7, Redlands, California, 1907-8; retired from ministry, 1908. Author: _That Printer of Udell’s_, 1903; _The Shepherd of the Hills_, 1907; _The Calling of Dan Matthews_, 1909; _The Uncrowned King_, 1910; _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, 1911; _Their Yesterdays_, 1912; _The Eyes of the World_, 1914; _When A Man’s a Man_, 1916; _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, 1919; _Helen of the Old House_, 1921. Home: Tucson, Arizona.”

Such is the outline derived by the compilers of an invaluable work of reference whose method is to ask of the individual certain standard questions which he may answer in his discretion and which he may supplement--in the editor’s discretion--by further information about himself. The latitude allowed in such a work as _Who’s Who in America_, is necessarily rather small; it would, however, have permitted Mr. Wright to say that the sales of his fiction exceed those of any other living American writer--perhaps those of any other living writer anywhere. He did not say it. The impression given by the words “landscape painter” may be misleading, for Mr. Wright at that time made his living by sign painting and house painting; but also he made sketches and water colors which he sold as he went along. Let this tiny matter be as a warning that, on his own terms and in his own fashion of speech, Harold Bell Wright is to be taken literally.

[Illustration: HAROLD BELL WRIGHT]

Always! Is there metaphor in his writing? Was there metaphor in _Pilgrim’s Progress_? Are there parables in the Bible? Do sermons contain allegories? We know that allegories embody sermons. Mr. Wright has never concealed the purpose behind his novels, stories. It is to say plainly some word that he believes will be of help, if uttered, to men and women. In his strange personal history lies the seed of a novel more absorbing, if less credible, than any he has written. The poor boy, the boy left motherless at ten, the man out of work, the man with an empty stomach and no means of filling it, the man who has been told that “the rock pile was intended for fellows like you!”--and through it all the sleazy thread of ill-health, down-right sickness, and the bright scarlet stain of disease.... Two years at a little college, cut short by illness; two years financed by hard work and ground down in disappointment. Then the haphazard wandering, the tramping afoot outdoors, the small painting jobs, the inability to find work at times, the hardships of climate--and at last he finds himself in the Ozark Mountains looking for ... what? For the chance to live, first of all. It was there that he preached his first sermon, and there he found a background and a setting for some of the stories he was eventually to write. They were very far off, then, those stories, below the horizon, out of sight as were so many other things that were to dawn on his life when he should be thirty.

In any consideration of Harold Bell Wright as an author, the usual approaches are of no value, and not only of no value but so without meaning as to be absurd. Almost he raises the fundamental question: What is an author, anyway? Of course the word does apply to all whose writing achieves publication, especially as a book or books; and perhaps it may be used of a person who remains unpublished. But, as always, there is here a meaning within a meaning; the word generally carries with it some suggestion of literary skill or a pretension thereto--as “doctor” implies a medical training, or “lawyer” admission to practise at the bar. However, Mr. Wright neither possesses any literary skill nor ever pretended to have any, comparatively speaking. He has more than once uttered an emphatic disclaimer, but like other very popular writers his sensitiveness to adverse criticism is keen.

He is a moralist, a fabulist, a preacher of sermons, a Sayer, and an Utterer. There is in the impoverished English language no word for his rôle. The English language, so full of words for things that do not exist, has none for this type of man who has always existed among the English-speaking peoples though rather sparsely among other peoples. When forced to recognise his existence as a power for evil in politics, we borrow the word demagogue; if his activity is rather indefinitely “religious,” we affix the word evangelist. There is a common factor in John Bunyan, Theodore Roosevelt, James Whitcomb Riley, Harold Bell Wright easily recognised in whatever field it operates. In the case of Mr. Wright, it has been said that he appeals “to the thousands upon thousands who crave to see their humble doings, their paper fantasies exalted and made memorable in the bright guise of a seeming romance.” Unfortunately for the success of this diagnosis, it is not the great masses of mankind who are sentimental, but the minority who have accustomed themselves to the contemplation of mankind in great masses. If Mr. Roosevelt had addressed himself to the “thousands upon thousands” he would have been almost without influence; and Mr. Riley’s verses are most noteworthy for their intimate personal appeal. Such a Sayer as Walt Whitman, speaking to men _en masse_, receives from men small attention. One can neither speak, write, paint, carve or build for the thousands; one must do it for the individual every time. In a short study of Roosevelt some years ago the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick, admirably indicated Roosevelt’s real achievement, which was--not that he moulded national policies but that he made the homegoing day labourer, sitting in a trolley car, his empty lunch pail beside him, trace with a stubby forefinger in the evening newspaper the simple precept for that day, whether a command against race suicide or a “Don’t flinch! Don’t foul! Hit the line hard!” He who would speak to many men and women must always address each one; he must not make the mistake of appealing to a lowest common intelligence and he must perfectly understand that what is called “sentimentality” is not a weakness but a sign of health--pink thoughts like pink cheeks.

iii

“She stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young womanhood.”

“He was really a fine looking young man with the appearance of being exceptionally well-bred and well-kept. Indeed the most casual of observers would not have hesitated to pronounce him a thoroughbred and a good individual of the best type that the race has produced....”

These sentences, from Wright’s novel, _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, have been quoted with the comment that Wright himself is that casual observer and that, to the more thoughtful, Abraham Lincoln, who “was anything but a thoroughbred, anything but well-kept” is the best type of individual that the race has produced. Mr. Wright could crushingly reply that Lincoln was not a type; but the failure in perception goes much deeper. The critic of the passage quoted must know very well that the respect of mankind for appearances is well-founded. Appearances can be arrived at and kept up, being thus one of the few things definitely within our powers of accomplishment and control; for what lies under the appearance may be beyond our power to make or change. It is not instinct, or even reason, but a solid regard for fact that prizes appearance. Further, in the affair in question, two subjects for a possible mating, the usual man or woman is as unromantic and unsentimental as possible in his or her satisfaction at the good looks of hero and heroine. Those good looks and good manners are something to go upon. Each has an asset with the other and there is some chance for the children, if any. Only a dangerous sentimentalist would wish the man to be a mongrel. Mr. Wright knows all this; so do we all of us; why, then, is he called a sentimentalist?

Because, I suppose, an inveterate tradition of the minority brands the majority as sentimental. Were they so, they could not live. The majority, not being victims of self-delusion, go through life, eating, sleeping, working and feeling. The capacity to feel has not in them been weakened. They may be robbed of their cheeks’ pinkness, but it is more difficult to take away the pinkness of their thoughts (the mere mental accompaniments of their feelings). Indeed, it has so far proved impossible to enslave them by any intellectual system, as they have been enslaved by this or that economic system. If it were possible to persuade these men and women that physical mongrelism should take the place of Mr. Wright’s hero’s thoroughbreeding, the world would have become sentimental with a vengeance likely to recoil on the heads of those who wrought the persuasion. The French Revolution would be as nothing to the new era then dawning.

In other words, the young man used to advertise linen collars (and Mr. Wright, at the young man’s age, might easily have served as the model) is the people’s proper hero. He represents, to a considerable extent, something within the average power to become. No more suggestive antithesis can be imagined than between a novel like _The Shepherd of the Hills_ and such a work of fiction as Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_, crammed with the things beyond the average power to alter. It is the interesting inevitability of the visitor to humble homes in out of the way American places to encounter, on the parlour table or its equivalent, a Bible, a “gift” edition of Longfellow’s Poems, _The Wreck of the “Titanic”_ (with complete horrors, last words of all on board, and full text of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as played by the ship’s band) and a copy of _The Shepherd of the Hills_, or, perhaps, _When a Man’s a Man_. But _Main Street_? That, if it was ever in the house, has gone the way of all wood pulp very quickly. For these people have none of that difficulty experienced by the literary critic in distinguishing books, and their applied canons are not matters of taste or sentiment or intellectual theory, but principles of living as they are compelled to practise them daily, personal and intimate, directed toward the best appearance, unsentimental, unintellectual, individual, healthful, sensibly ambitious, emotionally direct and ... free.

Suppose, instead of audibly deploring Mr. Wright, and uttering in their assaults upon him an unconscionable amount of twaddle, the literary critics were to transform themselves into students of the popular psychology. In such case they would see at once how the usual person unsentimentally proceeds through life with the assistance of attainable ideals. Of course, definitions of sentimentality may and do differ. My idea here is simply that to espouse the shadowy ideal is to come much more under the charge of being sentimental than to aspire to wear the newest style of linen collar, or acquire good manners. I think at once, too, of a writer whose best work meets the severe tests applied by the critic of literature, Mr. Arnold Bennett. What is _The Old Wives’ Tale_, what is _Clayhanger_, each a work of accepted art, but a faithful transcription of the average person’s utter unsentimentality and complete devotion to the attainable ideal? Mr. Bennett made the same veracious observation as Mr. Wright makes; it is only the presentation that is different--objective in the case of Bennett, immersed in the case of Wright. For Bennett’s purpose literary art is essential, for Wright’s, literary art is a handicap. Moreover, the identification is unlike. The people Bennett writes about, with the exception of Clayhanger, would not recognise themselves in his two novels; the people of Mr. Wright, would. Why? Because Wright expresses them in their own fractions--known to themselves. Bennett carries them out to a decimal repetend--·142857142857142857 and so on, instead of ⅐, subscribed by Mr. Wright. Virtue, vice, greed, ambition, youth and the like are the simple fractions in which Mr. Wright’s characters are stated. Whatever realities these names represent, it had better be realised that they are in themselves the simplest, most necessary conventions. And as such, and as such only, has Wright used them.

His method of work was, I think, the innocent source of the general misunderstanding surrounding him in the discussions of the minority. It is well-known that before writing a novel he prepares a short argument, as other writers prepare an outline or plot. “The system I use,” he has explained, “may have been used for centuries, or it may be no one else has ever used it. I have wondered whether it is old or new. Whichever it may be, here it is: When I start to write a novel, the first thing I do is to figure out why I am going to write it. Not what is the story, but why? I mull this over a while, and when it is pretty straight in my mind, I write out an argument. No suggestion of plot, you see. No incidents, scenes, location, nothing done at first except the argument, but it is the heart and soul of the novel. The novel is merely this argument presented through the medium of characters, plot, incidents, and the other properties of the story. Next come the characters, each standing for some element or factor in the argument. Up to the last copying of _The Eyes of the World_, not a character had been named. They were called in the copy, Greed, Ambition, Youth, or whatever they represented to me in the writing of the story.” This simple explanation has been derided by asserting that “Mr. Wright seeks to prove some abstract notion of his own concerning good and evil by means of a picked assembly of human beings.” But how so? They are not picked human beings at all, but like Bunyan’s characters, expressions of the One. They prove nothing and are intended to prove nothing, being merely expository, fabulous, moralistic, and the natural presentation of no easy notion but some familiar fact--far from abstract! Take _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, one of Wright’s least satisfactory books to its author and to many readers and released by Wright with great reluctance. An abstract notion is the last thing in the world it touches upon; all is simple, vivid, commonplace, centred around the actuality that, with another chance, many a man can set his life straight.

If there is any shortcoming it arises from Wright’s personal strength. The man who can do what he has done, persistently fighting tuberculosis, risking public opinion in several matters and adhering to his method in spite of a great change of personal attitude and a personal revolution in ideas--that man is no weakling. It would be interesting to survey the personal change in Mr. Wright but as it nowhere extrudes in his work, there is no justification for an inquest. But the very circumstance has its positive value in establishing him for what he is not, namely, an artist. But there is another aspect of Mr. Wright as phenomenon (not as person) and his success cannot be understood without examining that aspect.

Wright’s boyhood, to the age of ten when he lost her, was focussed about the personality of his mother. When she died he lost, if not perhaps his only friend, his strongest. Before he could read she had told him the Hiawatha legends, had read aloud to him the stories of the Bible (the King James version), had retold Shakespeare for him. Her death made him clutch to his heart these books, as well as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and the portions of Ruskin they had read and re-read together in the home--which, by the way, was really at Wrightstown, just outside Rome, New York, though Wright’s birthplace is spoken of as “Rome.” A feeling that these books of his mother’s were as sacred books was fixed in the boy’s mind. Wright has never ceased to read them, nor to try to pour himself into those molds; and in conversation he sometimes lets slip a phrase from one of them. Without literary aptitude and with a very ragged species of formal education, he speaks in his extraordinary fashion and the millions hearken. So much so that his success from the outset may be said to have entirely reconstructed--for the purpose of merchandising his books--the retail machinery of book-selling.

The author of _That Printer of Udell’s_ had the means of reaching the folks in little villages and on isolated farms, people who could scarcely be reached by any of the books ordinarily being published. The very inadequate machinery of retail distribution serving the book trade was insufficient for his purpose. It is insufficient for most purposes, but its insufficiency in the case of Harold Bell Wright was painful and intolerable. With the most remarkable courage, effort and persistence the publishers constructed a new and complete retail mechanism to serve the special need. Those who have no knowledge of the problems of merchandising will be unable to appreciate what they did. A few details are in order. First, the larger book publishers in the United States seldom sell directly to retailers in cities of less than 50,000; smaller publishers seldom enter cities of less than 100,000. The needs of bookstores in little cities and towns, mixed and important only in the aggregate, are taken care of by jobbers. There are possibly 1,000 first-rate bookstores to serve a nation of well over 100,000,000 people--of whom, however, some 20,000,000 are incapable of ever reading a book of any importance in an understanding way. There are cities of 50,000 in which no first-rate bookstore exists. On the other hand a magazine like Pictorial Review, solidly established on the demand for dress patterns, or a magazine like Saturday Evening Post, promulgating fiction patterns, penetrates into places where no new book is ever seen. So, too, do certain denominational religious papers. And in vast areas of the Middle and Far West, there is a seepage from those reservoirs of modern merchandising, the mail order houses, the Roosevelt Dams of commerce, constantly seeking, more and more achieving the reclamation of the deserts of trade.

The “producers,” in stage parlance, of Harold Bell Wright determined to utilise all these channels. It was a great risk of judgment and money at the outset but it succeeded. This is no place to go into the history of a unique performance in merchandising but the results have a distinct place in any record of the author exploited. For one thing, it may be asked if the success with Wright is of value in selling other authors, and while there can be no dogmatic answer to the question it is probable that in most cases it is not. And another phase of the results throws a significant light on the nature of Wright’s work, confirming what we have said about the terms of his appeal to his readers. When a Wright novel is published the orders pile in from stores and places with which a publisher has ordinarily no contact; and the order from a hamlet in North Carolina is likely to exceed the order from Brentano’s in New York.

This means two things. It means, naturally, that with the heavy campaigns of advertising in all sorts of periodicals from Saturday Evening Post to Zion’s Herald, the publishers reach the people who buy a book a year or less often. But also it means that Wright is the moralist, the fabulist and the Sayer we have termed him. On the technical side, perhaps the most instructive detail of this selling performance is the way in which it is initiated. Six months before a new Wright story is to be published, thousands of tradespeople all over the United States know that the story is to be published, and when, and with what enormous advertising placed in forty specified periodicals and several dozen newspapers it will be “pushed”; and then begins the steady succession of personal letters and even telegrams, circulars and placards and posters, honest-minded persons in remote settlements discuss with enthusiasm and awe the prodigious sum of money to be expended on “just this one book, a _book_,” librarians grow anxious and advertising men eager, preachers prepare sermons, in thousands upon thousands of homes the Christmas gift to Mother is pre-determined,--until at last, in a wide-rolling wave of excitement, a vast surge of the people of simple faith and worthy ideals, the day comes when the book is born....

It has been said that Wright is of magnetic personality, with fine, clean, inspiring ideals, a man of tireless endeavour, a person who “stirs in one emotions of which one is not ashamed.” Also that “he radiates a Lincolnian type of rugged honesty” ... and much more of the same sort. All such lingo is meaningless outside the atmosphere of Wright’s books. The language of those novels is not one of literary conventions but of certain inalterable thought-conventions; and so, necessarily, is language addressed to those who read Wright. “She stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young womanhood.”... “It is his almost clairvoyant power of reading the human soul that has made Mr. Wright’s books among the most remarkable of the present age.” These two statements are demonstrably true to the many whose minds, struck by such sentences, give back the ring of silver. They are not true in themselves; but then, we know no things that are. To be “true” is simply to signify enough, at a given time, in particular circumstances, to some individual or individuals.

That truth Mr. Wright has had enormously, and still has. His newest novel, _The Mine With the Iron Door_, although in no way an elaboration of the traditional tale of that mine--it was supposed to be a wonder mine, where the old Spanish Fathers got the gold that enriched their splendid altars--weaves the old legend through its texture of incident. This gives to the novel a colour beyond the colour it has from its Arizona setting; but the point with Mr. Wright is something like this: Every life has its “mine with the iron door,” its dreams that can never come true, its hopes that belong to a past that is forever dead. Nevertheless, he will have you believe, though the lost mine may never be found nor the iron door opened, some riches of happiness is still possible. Were it not for this element, this presentation of something that at a given time and in particular circumstances can signify truth to many, many people, Mr. Wright’s new novel would be no more than a picturesque and exciting adventure narrative of the Arizona desert.

vii

Mr. Wright went to Tucson, Arizona, some ten years ago on a business errand. Three days after reaching the city he had bought a cottage. Now he owns eighty acres outside Tucson and has built a new home, a comfortable but by no means pretentious house with a garden transplanted from the neighbouring desert. The scale of living is modest. Wright and his wife take care of the grounds and house, to a large extent; and there is usually not more than one servant. Mr. Wright has a motor car that he has driven for six years and will continue to drive for some years yet. He is fond of horseback riding and spends as much time camping as at home. Two or three tents, the car, some tinned stuff and staples and plenty of ammunition are all Mr. and Mrs. Wright need, for both are good marksmen. They shoot for food, but Wright will not kill a deer.

The stories are frequently written, or largely written, on these expeditions into the desert. Because he is not an artist, Wright has a sadly difficult time. He will submit a story like _The Winning of Barbara Worth_ to five engineers in order that they may check up his account of the irrigation of the desert. A long time was spent in worrisome “looking over the ground,” visiting factory towns, interviewing employers and workmen, before _Helen of the Old House_ took even preliminary shape. As a rule, the incidents Wright uses are transcribed from life, producing the effect of extreme incredibility of which his readers sometimes complain. Being his readers, they are silenced when he tells them of the actual occurrence.

Hildegarde Hawthorne has pointed out the very great and incontestable service of Wright: He creates book readers. It requires very little examination of the facts to discover that thousands whose reading has been nothing but newspapers and magazines have been led by Wright’s stories into the habit of reading a book occasionally. That is an accomplishment of an importance hard to overrate.

As for the man, there is one story I like better than any he has written. Some years ago, riding horseback on a narrow trail, Wright was struck by an automobile that came suddenly around a corner of rock. Horse and rider were pitched into a gully; the horse was killed and Wright’s particularly bad lung so suffered by the fall that everyone assured him there was nothing left but to die. He said: “I won’t die.” Because he couldn’t be moved, a tent had to be erected over him there in the gully, so that he might die in the shade. Lying there under the tent, he fulfilled his purpose by getting well. He also, under the same tent and in the same place, wrote _When a Man’s a Man_.... And now he is again in good physical shape, riding his horses after the day’s work is over through the desert or up into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains.

The preacher he began, the preacher he must probably remain. There may, perhaps, be something pitiful in the spectacle of a man struggling with the palette of words, as there is something bizarre in the voice proceeding from the wilderness with a perfectly mundane message: That every valley had better be filled, every mountain and hill nicely graded; the crooked carefully straightened, the rough ways ... paved with asphalt.

Books by Harold Bell Wright

1903 _That Printer of Udell’s_ 1907 _The Shepherd of the Hills_ 1909 _The Calling of Dan Matthews_ 1910 _The Uncrowned King_ 1911 _The Winning of Barbara Worth_ 1912 _Their Yesterdays_ 1914 _The Eyes of the World_ 1916 _When a Man’s a Man_ 1919 _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_ 1921 _Helen of the Old House_ 1923 _The Mine With the Iron Door_

Sources on Harold Bell Wright

_Harold Bell Wright._ Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company

_Harold Bell Wright, the Man Behind the Novels_, by HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company

Private Information

_8. “Ah, Did You Once See Shelley Plain?”_

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new! BROWNING: _Memorabilia_

The four lines, and, indeed, the twelve remaining lines of this one of Robert Browning’s shorter poems illustrate very well the man’s superlative faculty of drama. With a little of our Edwin Arlington Robinson, he mixed a little of our Eugene O’Neill; and, on occasion, expressed himself with point and passion. Such was his simplicity that he appeared (it is now laughable to remember) rather especially unintelligible. Not far distant yet are the days when we banded together to understand him. But the number of Browning Clubs now surviving must be very few. How curious that we never thought to try to understand the man himself! How queer that we didn’t concentrate, as he would have concentrated in a similar instance, upon the thirteen years that unlock his life; but we didn’t. We generalised about him concerning whom, of all men of his day, it was least safe to generalise. It has remained for Frances M. Sim in her _Robert Browning, The Poet and the Man: 1833-1846_ to do the thing that has so needed doing. She has very wisely avoided the form of the full biography and equally the form, which would be sterile in this instance, of a full-length critique. Her book is at once a freely-handled and intensive study of the years that lay between the publication of Browning’s first poem, “Pauline,” and his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett. She starts with “Pauline,” accompanies him to Russia and with him brings back “Paracelsus,” goes with him to Italy and recreates “Sordello.” Then, with almost no preliminaries, we are into the love affair. When that has been lived again to its fruition, we are in possession of “the poet and the man” in the only possible fashion apart from the body of his work. Frances M. Sim has given us a valuable and interesting study, and simply by obeying the wisdom in Arthur Waugh’s words: “Browning’s marriage, in short, was the last stage in his artistic education”--words that open a fascinating path of speculative insights into the lives of how many of the world’s artists!

Contrast, if you will, the temperamental difference between such a man as Robert Browning, who had his early and well-nigh fatal intoxication from reading the poetry of Shelley, and a fellow like Joseph Farington, the painter, whose death occurred when Browning was a lad of nine. No literary discovery in years has made half the sensation of the finding of _The Farington Diary_, and quite rightly, for what could be compared to the disclosure of a contemporary account in which Boswell, Burke, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, the Thrales, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Nelson, Howe, Mirabeau, Marat, Napoleon, Hoppner, Turner, Pitt, Warren Hastings, Lady Hamilton and Robert Burns were intimately noted? And yet Farington, ruler of the Royal Academy though a most indifferent artist, came into touch with all these personages and was apparently never for one moment carried off his feet. I think it is quite true, as Robert Cortes Holliday suggests in a review of _The Farington Diary_ (The Bookman, June, 1923) that Farington saw only the surface of that great age, that he was devoid of humour and lacked the malice which a diarist should feel. He was sane, not to say stupid; but as a conscientious accumulator of facts I can think of no one who is his equal. Amid riches and grandeur, intriguery and wars and revolutions, surrounded by a glittering society in which one knew not which to worship, genius or scintillance, Joseph Farington scrupulously set down all the diseases of people he knew, all the dishes served at a dinner, how much everything cost and the money that everyone made, inherited, bequeathed or borrowed. It was only accidentally, that matters touched with human interest flowed from the point of his pen; but in a fairly long lifetime the number of such leakages runs high, and the result, despite every exasperation and handicap, is to make a book of very great and most indubitable value. The first volume of _The Farington Diary_, covering the years 1793-1802, is the most complete portrait album we have of its time; the remaining volumes, which, it is understood, go on to Farington’s death in 1821, should not be less valuable.

Great times, in producing great men, produce great books as well. In the lifetime of Walter H. Page, publisher, business man and American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the number of persons who had any comprehension of his greatness was singularly small. Those who had the fine fortune to be associated with him in the day’s work knew, of course, the stature of the man; but it was scarcely possible to impress their knowledge on others. When Mr. Page at last became conspicuous in the public service it was at a post where his work and the character enforcing it were necessarily almost completely obscured. An American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the present time may conceivably bring himself into a good deal of notice; it is not impossible to be done and the opportunities for doing it legitimately are not infrequent; but Mr. Page was never one for that sort of thing, and I doubt whether, even if the war had not hidden him in its drifting mists as he steered the ship, he would have come in all his lifetime to our not always intelligently directed attention. There are some men, and among them our greatest, whom death alone fully discloses. Such was Walter H. Page, and in the magnificent biography wrought by Burton J. Hendrick, _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, the subject is handled with a justness and a careful proportioning for which praise should not be stinted, and has not been. Unquestionably this is one of the great American books in the biographical field; this life and these letters have something so vital that one hunts a ready comparison in vain. At times they seem to paint the man with rich colour and a splendid handling of light; at other times they carve and sculpture him in some detail of a rare personality; but the figure fails before the ruddiness, the mobile vigour and the unresting intellect which the book sets forth. In a day when the state of America is rather often canvassed and most often with pessimistic conclusions, it is significant that _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, a fairly expensive work in two volumes, has sold half a hundred thousand copies and now, a year after its publication, continues to lead in sales of non-fiction.

It is but one, of course, of a number of great books yielded by the times we have lived in. _The Irish Guards in the Great War_, by Rudyard Kipling, is surely another. Mr. Kipling has not always been regarded as a sympathetic and understanding friend of Irishmen. His son, John Kipling, was an officer of the Irish Guards and, as such, gave his life. The choice of Mr. Kipling as the historian of the regiment was one which only the resultant chronicle would justify; but to my mind there is no possible question that the work justifies and more than justifies. The reviewer for the London Times puts the matter pithily when he says: “The true gold of Mr. Kipling is to be found unalloyed in this memorial.” The temptation to embitteredness, the impulse to “handle” and fashion his material or to give it stylistic treatment and the natural inclination to fix the point of view have all been quietly laid aside; and we have a book of continuous vividness that results from the inner perspective to which Mr. Kipling rigidly holds his account. He constantly uses the sentences on the lips of his Irishmen and we are seldom conscious of a narrator--then only when some Kiplingesque epithet or phrase carries us above the trench and, as it were, above the battle. The London Times reviewer speaks of the “wealth of detail, varied, terrible, and sometimes grotesque, as in the best Gothic” in the presentation of which Kipling manages to preserve a clean simplicity of outline and a unity or totality of effect; but this is merely a way of saying that the book is epically written. Mere largeness of subject has nowadays a way of being taken for “epic” treatment, although the word should properly be confined to a treatment in which a great mass of detail is not allowed to obscure the simplicity of the whole. But I do not think anyone can fail in appreciation of _The Irish Guards_, and to any who may be tempted to forgo the reading of the history let me quote these closing words: “Of all these things nothing but the memory would remain. And, as they moved--little more than a company strong--in the wake of their seniors, one saw, here and there among the wounded in civil kit, young men with eyes that did not match their age, shaken beyond speech or tears by the splendour and the grief of that memory.”

The final distinction of Mr. Kipling’s book is, to be sure, that it is the work of a man who knows how to write. This distinction it shares with the fewest possible number of contemporary histories, but _The World Crisis_, by Winston Churchill, must be admitted within the slender group. Perhaps we had rather forgotten Winston Churchill, the young journalist in Africa during the Boer War (and the hero, incidentally, of one of the greatest prisoner escapes to be found in all history). There may also be some heredity in Winston Churchill’s literary gift, as in his other brilliant personal endowments. But that’s no matter. As a former British Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, 1911-15, and Minister of Munitions in 1917--above all, perhaps, as the man chiefly held responsible for the Gallipoli venture--Mr. Churchill’s account would be of the very first interest and importance were he never so unskilful among words. But _The World Crisis_ makes apparent what some of us had suspected before, that among leading statesmen there has rarely been one whose ability to defend his course and make other courses appear small has equalled Winston Churchill’s. The sense of scale amid vastness in sums of money, tonnage of ships and lives of men that Mr. Churchill possesses is laid by some commentators to his American blood. “He savours hugeness like a dainty; and when he writes of carnage or battle he dips his pen in blood,” says Filson Young, adding, “But he never for a moment loses his grip of the subject, or his sense of ever-marching destiny; and he never fails to thrill the reader with the sense of the human tragedy lurking in its every step.” Mr. Young thinks _The World Crisis_ places its author “in the very first rank of British historians; and I think it places him in very nearly the first rank of British statesmen.” The two most famous living British statesmen, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith, flank Mr. Churchill’s book with what went before and what may come after. The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith’s _The Genesis of the War_ contains, of course, many noteworthy pen portraits; no doubt these will make the most immediate appeal to readers; yet his disclosures regarding the British War Book, begun in 1910 and his exposition of “the purposes and methods of British policy” in the pre-war years are the book’s greatest justification and its strongest historical importance. Mr. Lloyd George, characteristically, is far less concerned about the past than about the future. In _Where Are We Going?_ he moves alertly over troubled ground of European affairs, discussing the League of Nations, Russian republicanism, Socialism, national armaments, the Irish Treaty, the position of France, England’s war debt, prohibition, the disclosure of war secrets, “the next war” and many other topics. His preface is particularly interesting.

iii

Naturally, the climax of interest is reached when we can say: “This man has written of himself.” G. Stanley Hall’s _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is an autobiography of which one feels a keen anxiety lest the many whom it can reward may somehow miss reading it. “I am far older than my years”--he is seventy-seven--“for I have laid aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations with which I started than most.” These simple and striking words define his attitude. The truly popular result of a work that has been undertaken and carried through in such a spirit ought to be emphasised. Dr. Hall is the author of important treatises on _Adolescence_ and _Senescence_, exhaustive in character and highly technical in their bearing; but I have yet to read anything of his which was not to a very large extent “popularly written” as well as scientifically valuable. Certainly his _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ deserves the wider audience. It begins on a New England farm with some chapters that reflect with ampleness and feeling and charm the life of New England in the 1850s; it continues through the various stages of an unusually rounded education; in its record of teaching and college executiveship the book constitutes a sort of history of the American college in the last half-century, and this is enlarged and given the value of ripened conclusions by a longer chapter near the close of the book. There is also a tremendous chapter covering “Process in Psychology” and practically constituting a history of the science in Dr. Hall’s long lifetime--one might almost say since psychology was recognised as a science at all. But these points, while they demonstrate easily enough that the book is one no teacher or psychologist can afford to omit attending, do not make the case for the book as a sample of autobiography or as a work of popular interest. Then let some of the contents make it! Here is the report of an American who has known Mark Hopkins, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft, Treitschke, Wundt, Helmholtz, William James, Lord Kelvin, Jowett, Pasteur and many others; an American who can write of his boyhood with something of the charm of W. H. Hudson and much the same feeling for nature; who can write with frankness of the _vita sexualis_ in the New England of Emerson; who can--we fall back upon it--write!

A fellow-scientist of Dr. Hall’s though in quite another field has also written his autobiography, and the extraordinary circumstances of Michael Idvorsky Pupin’s life will be enough to attract popular attention to his _From Immigrant to Inventor_. Forty-eight years ago a Serbian boy who hadn’t a cent and who couldn’t speak a word of English landed in New York. Since 1901 this immigrant has been professor of electro-mechanics at Columbia University; he is the inventor of the Pupin coil, which, by reducing the necessary diameter of copper wire, has saved millions of dollars, and he also invented the device for tuning which many people use daily on radio sets. Michael Pupin was born at Idvor, Banat, Hungary, in a little community of Serbs rewarded for their services against the Turks by the gift of some land and political rights. In assessing his performance it must be borne in mind that he had the handicap of an utterly alien race and culture and speech to overcome in a far greater degree than Jacob A. Riis, who was Danish, or Edward Bok, who came from Holland. Pupin’s autobiography is of manifold interest; for one thing, he seems completely in sympathy with an American tradition which so many immigrants have never been able whole-heartedly to accept; for another, he traces the developments of electrical science by the bright thread of his interest and participation in them, and he does actually succeed in making some very difficult scientific achievements quite simple and beautifully plain.

Very different, if possible more magical, has been the career of the Russian glovemaker whose adopted surname is now known everywhere that motion pictures are exhibited--Samuel Goldwyn. It is only about nine years since he paid ten cents to see a two-reel picture in depressing surroundings on Broadway, and came home to tell his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, that a fortune could be made in five-reel pictures! Samuel Goldwyn’s book, _Behind the Screen_, showing on every page the fine journalistic skill of his collaborator, Corinne Lowe, is less an autobiography than a personal record of the people of the screen. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Garden, Pauline Frederick, Geraldine Farrar and plenty of others are here described with an intimacy and a frankness and a general wit and good humour that it isn’t easy to imagine will be soon surpassed. The popular appeal of such a series of “closeups” should be as limitless as the movie audience, but the book will serve a less immediate and more important purpose to the reader whose interest, not fervidly personal, goes into the general subject of the films--how they came about, what and why they are, what may come of them. I do not mean that Mr. Goldwyn concerns himself directly with any of these questions, for he scarcely touches them; and yet I think that the indirect light he throws may be more finally enlightening than anything else that has come out of Hollywood--certainly more so than would be likely to be got by any outsider who might go there in a direct search. But let that pass. The book, as a book, is irresistible reading.

The boundaries between history, biography, autobiography, memoirs and the best journalism are often uncertain and are better so. It does not matter except to formal minds whether an interest begins with a person or an event, or in what direction it proceeds; for the mind, like the body, has its own system of nutrition, and within pretty broad limits should be allowed its own dietary. The suggestions below are additional to those books already discussed and the classifications need not be taken as anything more than a general convenience:

Historical.

ADMIRAL SIMS’S _The Victory at Sea_ (World War).

BRAND WHITLOCK’S _Belgium_ (World War).

RAY STANNARD BAKER’S _Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement_.

_Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story_ (World War).

_Memories of a Turkish Statesman_, 1913-1919, by DJEMAL PASHA. A very spirited account, well-written; almost unique as a book from the Turkish side. Interesting in its contradictions of Morgenthau.

_An Ambassador’s Memoirs_, by MAURICE PALEOLOGUE. By the last French Ambassador to Russia. Volume I. covers July 3, 1914-June 2, 1915; Volume II. continues to August 18, 1916.

LAURANCE LYON’S _The Pomp of Power_ and his _When There Is No Peace_, both published anonymously. The author is in close touch with French policy.

_Old Diplomacy and New: 1876-1922: From Salisbury to Lloyd George_, by A. L. KENNEDY.

_The Drama of Sinn Fein_, by SHAW DESMOND. A new and pretty complete history.

_The Life of Sir William Harcourt_, by A. G. GARDINER. Harcourt was born before Victoria ascended the throne and he outlived her; Mr. Gardiner brings unusual talents to what becomes less a biography of one man than a portrayal of an era.

_Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie_, by COMTE FLEURY. Here likewise the historical interest is as strong as the biographical.

_Lady Palmerston and Her Times_, by MABELL, COUNTESS OF AIRLIE. Of value for its picture of the period from George III. to the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

PAUL VAN DYKE’S _Catherine de Medici_, in two volumes, now in its third printing, is distinguished by lucidity, an avoidance of easy ornament and floridity, and by great literary charm.

More Purely Personal.

_The Letters of Lord and Lady Wolseley_, edited by SIR GEORGE ARTHUR. The intimacies of a great soldier and his brilliant wife, with many glimpses of British society from 1870 to 1911.

_Margot Asquith: An Autobiography._ Volumes III. and IV., although dealing with British war politics, are chiefly personal in interest.

_Memories of Later Years_, by OSCAR BROWNING. By a much-travelled Englishman, a friend of Queen Mary, Lord Curzon and Lloyd George, now past eighty. He deals principally with persons and events since 1897. Arthur Bartlett Maurice, reviewing the book in the New York Herald, speaks of the book as “a narrative which gives the flavor of Europe of yesterday, of a world that is gone.” The volume is a mine of anecdotes of the great.

_Post Mortem_, by C. MACLAURIN, M.D., somewhat resembles Dr. Joseph Collins’s _The Doctor Looks at Literature_--only in this case historical figures are the persons dissected. Henry VIII., the historian Gibbon, Joan of Arc, and Samuel Pepys are some of the subjects.

_A Nineteenth Century Romance_, by MAJOR C. H. DUDLEY WARD. A love story in two generations based on authentic letters and beginning in the days of Napoleon the Great with the love letters of Dora Best to George Brett and continuing with the love affair of their son who, in 1897, became Viscount Esher.

_Lady Rose Weigall_, by RACHEL WEIGALL. Lady Rose was the favourite niece of the great Duke of Wellington. Her long life (1834-1921) brought her in contact with Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein, Jenny Lind, Bismarck, Browning, Disraeli, Lord Palmerston, Dickens, the Empress Eugenie and many royalties. Not the least interesting things are her letters exchanged with Germany during the World War.

_“Indiscretions” of Lady Susan_, by LADY SUSAN TOWNLEY. Entertaining and well-edged gossip by the wife of a diplomat who was stationed in many countries.

_The Literary Spotlight_, with an introduction by JOHN FARRAR. Personal portraits of contemporary American writers, first published in The Bookman, and anonymous to permit greater candour. Louis Untermeyer, Mary Johnston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Sinclair Lewis, Owen Johnson, Edna Ferber, Amy Lowell and others are included.

Unusual Biographies and Autobiographies.

_Thomas Nelson Page: A Memoir of a Virginia Gentleman_, by ROSWELL PAGE.

_All in a Lifetime_, by HENRY MORGENTHAU.

_My Life and Work_, by HENRY FORD in collaboration with SAMUEL CROWTHER.

_My Boyhood_, by JOHN BURROUGHS.

_Lord Northcliffe: a Memoir_, by MAX PEMBERTON.

_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by JOHN KENLON. The Chief of the New York Fire Department in a naïve and pleasing account of his Irish boyhood.

_The Life of an American Sailor: Admiral William Hemsley Emory_, from his letters and memoirs edited by ADMIRAL ALBERT GLEAVES.

_Mr. Lloyd George_, by E. T. RAYMOND.

_The Americanization of Edward Bok_, by EDWARD W. BOK. One of the most widely read of American autobiographies and still in strong demand.

_A Man From Maine_, by EDWARD W. BOK. A biography of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, head of the Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia.

_From McKinley to Harding: Personal Recollections of Our Presidents_, by H. H. KOHLSAAT. The political interest is strong.

_The Print of My Remembrance_, by AUGUSTUS THOMAS. For all who are interested in the theatre and its people.

WALTER DAMROSCH’S _My Musical Life_ begins with a childhood in Germany and aside from its autobiographical interest constitutes to some extent a history of orchestral music in America.

_My Memories of Eighty Years_, by CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. About evenly personal and political in interest.

_Letters of James Gibbons Huneker_, edited by JOSEPHINE HUNEKER, and MR. HUNEKER’S _Steeplejack_ (autobiographical). The record of one of our most brilliant critics, versatile in all the arts.

_John H. Patterson: The Pioneer in Industrial Welfare_, by SAMUEL CROWTHER. Of a similar interest with HENRY FORD’S _My Life and Work_.

_The Editorials of Henry Watterson_, edited by ARTHUR KROCK. They complete his own account of himself in “_Marse Henry_.” The political interest is naturally the main thing and is exceedingly vivid (1868-1921).

_The Life of Lord Rosebery_, by E. T. RAYMOND. Analytical biography.

_C. K. S., An Autobiography_, by CLEMENT K. SHORTER. The author is a veteran English critic and writer.

_The Life of William Schwenk Gilbert_, by SIDNEY DARK. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, “The Mikado,” “H. M. S. Pinafore,” etc.

FRANK SWINNERTON’S _George Gissing: A Critical Study_, and his _Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study_. The interest is literary rather than biographical.

_Tennyson: A Modern Portrait_, by HUGH I’ANSON FAUSSET. Both literary and biographical in its interest. Richard Le Gallienne, in the New York Times, says: “The manner of this portrait is very attractive. Biography and criticism are artfully and suggestively blended, and the influence of Tennyson’s environment throughout his life on the development of his character and his poetry is vividly and for the most part convincingly illuminated.”

_The Life of William Hazlitt_, by P. P. HOWE. The only biography we have of a remarkable literary figure.

_Victor Hugo: His Work and Love_, by ANDREW C. P. HAGGARD. A new account. The romantic element in Hugo’s life is emphasised, although not unduly.

_Embassies I Have Known_, by WALBURGA, LADY

PAGET. The English, German and Austrian Courts in the last half-century.

Two Books About English Seats.

_Knole and the Sackvilles_, by V. SACKVILLE-WEST. See