American nights entertainment

_Grant Overton_

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_By_ GRANT OVERTON

_About Books and Authors_

AMERICAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT WHEN WINTER COMES TO MAIN STREET THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS

_Fiction_

ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT THE ANSWERER WORLD WITHOUT END THE THOUSAND-AND-FIRST NIGHT (_In Preparation_)

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_American Nights Entertainment_

By Grant Overton

_New York, 1923_

D. APPLETON & CO. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Printed In The United States Of America

Copyright, 1923, By Grant Overton

_First Printing, September, 1923._

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A.

Bound in Interlaken-Cloth

_This Book_

IS DEDICATED TO BOOKSELLERS AND BOOKREADERS EVERYWHERE BY THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHERS WHO HAVE JOINED IN ITS PRODUCTION

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_Preface_

This book is written because of the rapid spread of the habit of reading books, developing in its march an interest in the personalities of authors. Indeed, the existence of this book is an evidence of the quick contagion of the book-reading habit, since four publishing houses have joined to make possible the pages that follow.

Few developments of the early part of this century are more encouraging than the new attention to books. The increase in book stores, the very large increase in the number of books sold, the multiplication of libraries and their great patronage, the success of new book review pages and periodicals--all are signs of the change that has come about in recent years, and perhaps especially during and since the war of 1914-18.

And in a narrower department, no development of recent years has borne a more cheerful promise than the resolution of four publishers to associate themselves in an enterprise the disinterestedness of which the reader is invited to assess for himself.

The entire responsibility for the estimates and opinions offered (where they are not directly attributed) is mine. I have tried to tell the truth, use my imagination legitimately, and observe good taste without the sacrifice of valuable insights into character and work.

For example, in addition to biographical facts, in themselves often unenlightening, I have usually tried, as in the account of Mr. Galsworthy, to disclose the personality so carefully (albeit high-mindedly) withheld from the writer’s books. Again, as in the chapter on Joseph Conrad, aside from the effort at novelty and freshness of interest by the device of adopting Conrad’s own Marlow as the narrator, I have made bold to set down some facts never before printed and not in the least generally known, because they seem to me a side of the picture that it is wrong to obscure.

The wealth of material spread before me has made the task of selection exceedingly difficult, and I cannot pretend to be satisfied with what I have chosen in the light of my knowledge of what has had to be left out. I owe a grateful acknowledgment to the publishers and to individuals in the several publishing houses for their generous assistance.

_1 August, 1923._

Grant Overton.

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_Contents_

_1_ Mr. Galsworthy’S Secret Loyalties, _13_

_2_ The Magic Carpet, _34_

_3_ A Breathless Chapter, _51_

_4_ In The Kingdom Of Conrad, _64_

_5_ The Documents In The Case Of Arthur Train, _91_

_6_ The Lady Of A Tradition, Miss Sackville-West, _102_

_7_ Harold Bell Wright, _119_

_8_ “Ah, DID You Once See Shelley Plain?” _139_

_9_ Alice In Authorland And Penrod’S Five-Foot Shelf, _157_

_10_ The Man Called Ralph Connor, _178_

_11_ Here, There And Everywhere, _189_

_12_ Totalling Mr. Tarkington, _217_

_13_ A Parody Outline Of Stewart, _239_

_14_ Miss Zona Gale, _248_

_15_ For The Literary Investor, _255_

_16_ Naturalist Vs. Novelist: Gene Stratton-Porter, _270_

_17_ Poetry And Plays, _293_

_18_ Lost Patterns, _313_

_19_ Joseph C. Lincoln Discovers Cape Cod, _321_

_20_ Edith Wharton And The Time Spirit, _345_

_21_ The Unclassified Case Of Christopher Morley, _363_

_22_ The Prophecies Of Lothrop Stoddard, _380_

Index, _387_

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_Portraits_

JOHN GALSWORTHY, _15_ JOSEPH CONRAD, _65_ ARTHUR TRAIN, _93_ V. SACKVILLE-WEST, _103_ HAROLD BELL WRIGHT, _121_ BOOTH TARKINGTON, _219_ DONALD OGDEN STEWART, _241_ JOSEPH C. LINCOLN, _323_ EDITH WHARTON, _347_ CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, _365_

_American Nights Entertainment_

_American Nights_ ENTERTAINMENT

_1. Mr. Galsworthy’s Secret Loyalties_

i

In the autumn of 1922 New York began to witness a play by John Galsworthy, called _Loyalties_. Not only the extreme smoothness of the acting by a London company but the almost unblemished perfection of the play as drama excited much praise. Because, of the two principals, one was a Jew and the other was not, with consequent enhancement of the dramatic values in several scenes, it was said (by those who always seek an extrinsic explanation) that _Loyalties_ simply could not have avoided being a success in New York. The same type of mind has long been busy with the problem of Mr. Galsworthy as a novelist. It read _The Man of Property_ and found the book explained by the fact that the author was a Socialist. Confronted with _The Dark Flower_, it declared this “love life of a man” sheer sentimentalism (in 1913 there was no Freudianism to fall back on). And the powerful play called _Justice_ was accounted for by a story that quiet Mr. Galsworthy had “put on old clothes, wrapped a brick in brown paper, stopped in front of a tempting-looking plate-glass window” and let ’er fly. On being “promptly arrested,” he “gave an assumed name, and the magistrate, in his turn, gave Galsworthy six months. That’s how he found out what the inside of English prisons was like.”

A saying has it that it is always the innocent bystander who gets hurt; but the fate of the sympathetic bystander--and such a one John Galsworthy has always been--is more ironic. That peculiar sprite, George Meredith’s Comic Spirit, reading all that has been written about Galsworthy would possibly find some adequate comment; but Meredith is dead and the only penetrating characterisation that occurs to me is: “Galsworthy’s the kind of man who, if he were in some other station of life, would be a splendid subject for Joseph Conrad.”

In the middle of _Loyalties_ a character exclaims: “Prejudices--or are they loyalties--I don’t know--criss-cross--we all cut each other’s throats from the best of motives.” Well, in a paper written in 1917 or earlier and included in their book, _Some Modern Novelists_, published in January, 1918, Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett, discussing Galsworthy’s early novels put down a now very remarkable sentence, as follows:

“Mr. Galsworthy does not see how two loyalties that conflict can both be right; and he is always interested in the larger loyalty.”

[Illustration: © _Eugene Hutchinson_ JOHN GALSWORTHY]

So interesting and significant a statement, buried as seed, might easily sprout as novel or play. I have no atom of evidence that Mr. Galsworthy ever saw the comment; but if he read it and forgot (buried?) the words, then _Loyalties_ was written in their effectual disproof. For in this drama, as in all his novels, as in all his other dramas, Mr. Galsworthy is constantly seeing and portraying how conflicting loyalties both are right; he is never interested in the larger loyalty and cannot keep his eye on it through consecutive chapters or through a single act; he is forever presenting the two or more sides and taking none. He once said: “I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways.” He should have added:“--and I have never learned it!”

ii

“Learned,” of course, in the sense of “accepted,” of becoming reconciled to the fact. It did not need Mr. St. John Ervine to tell us that “Mr. Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern letters”; for of all modern writers the author of _Loyalties_ and _The Forsyte Saga_ is the most transparent. He is transparent without being in the smallest degree luminous; he refracts, but he does not magnify--a prism through which we may look at society.

Compare him for a moment with Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad is by no means always transparent; his opacity is sometimes extraordinary, as in _The Rescue_; and yet from the midst of obscure sentences, like a gleam from those remarkably deep-set eyes, something luminous will shine out, both light and heat are given forth. “In a certain cool paper,” explains Galsworthy, “I have tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.” But even when telling the more poignant tale, as in _Saint’s Progress_, the coolness is noticeable, like the air of an April night; the key is still sober, pitched low; and the trembling passion of a melody proclaimed by violins is quickly muted. Such is his habitual restraint, so strong is his inhibition, that when we hear the orchestral brasses, as we do once or twice in _Justice_ and _Loyalties_, it shocks us, like a rowdy outburst in a refined assembly or a terse sentence in Henry James. But it is nothing, nothing. Mr. Galsworthy has momentarily achieved a more perfect than usual transparency; he has suddenly surrendered to the pounce of another of those multitudinous loyalties which give him no peace and the secret of which, except for its continual disclosure in his works, he would most certainly carry with him to the grave.

For he does not talk. No! “You are nearer Galsworthy in reading his books than in a meeting.” Another keenly observant person summed up Galsworthy’s conversational resources in the one word: “Exhausted!” St. John Ervine: “Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence characteristic of the English people ... is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy.... How often have we observed in our relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy’s handsome, sensitive face, and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.” Mr. Galsworthy, in a personal letter: “The fact is I cannot answer your questions. I must leave my philosophy to my work generally, or rather, to what people can make out of that work. The habit of trying to tabloid one’s convictions, or lack of convictions, is a pretty fatal one; as I have found to my distaste and discredit.” He conducts his own cross-examination, in new books, new plays. He acknowledges, with quiet discontent, the claims upon his sense of loyalty of a dog, a jailbird, two “star-crossed lovers,” the wife of a possessive Forsyte, a De Levis unjustly used. His pen moves, with a bold stroke, across the paper; another secret is let out; his lips tighten. He is serene and indignant and completely happy.

Why not? “My experience tells me this: An artist who is by accident of independent means can, if he has talent, give the Public what he, the artist, wants, and sooner or later the public will take whatever he gives it, at his own valuation.” And he speaks of such artists as able to “sit on the Public’s head and pull the Public’s beard, to use the old Sikh saying.” Nothing else is worth while--for an artist. “The artist has got to make a stand against being exploited.” But if the artist should exploit himself, or anything more human or individual than that impersonal entity, the Public, Mr. Galsworthy’s mouth would become grim again; his loyalty would be forfeited, I think. There might be a larger cause, but his concern would be with the other fellow. And however hard you might press him for a verdict, he would bring in only a recommendation for mercy.

iii

The Galsworthys have been in Devonshire as far back as records go--“since the flood--of Saxons, at all events,” as John Galsworthy once put it. His mother came of a family named Bartleet, whose county for many centuries was Worcestershire. The boy, John, was born in 1867 at Coombe, in Surrey. “From the first,” continues the anonymous but authorised sketch I am quoting, “his salient characteristics were earnestness and tenacity. Not surprisingly brilliant, he was sure and steady; his understanding, not notably quick, was notably sound. At Harrow from 1881-1886 he did well in work and games. At New College, Oxford, 1886-1889, he graduated with an Honour degree in Law. After some further preparation he was called to the bar (Lincoln’s Inn) in 1890. It was natural he should have taken up the law, since his father had done so. ‘I read,’ he says, ‘in various chambers, practised almost not at all, and disliked my profession thoroughly.’

“In these circumstances he began to travel. His father, a successful and unusual man in both character and intellect, was ‘not in a position to require his son to make money’; his son, therefore, travelled, off and on, for nearly two years, going, amongst other places, to Russia, Canada, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, and South Africa. On a sailing-ship voyage between Adelaide and the Cape he met and became a fast friend with the novelist Joseph Conrad, then still a sailor. We do not know whether this friendship influenced Galsworthy in becoming a writer; indeed, we believe that he has somewhere said that it did not. But Galsworthy did take to writing, published his first novel, _Jocelyn_, in 1899, _Villa Rubein_ in 1900, _A Man of Devon and Other Stories_ in 1901.” _Jocelyn_ has been dropped from the list of Galsworthy’s works, _Villa Rubein_ was revised in 1909, _The Island Pharisees_, a satire of English weaknesses which appeared in 1904, was revised four years later; and it was not until the publication of _The Man of Property_ in 1906 that our author succeeded in sitting on the Public’s head and twining his fingers firmly into the Public’s whiskers.

This was the first volume of the then-unplanned _Forsyte Saga_ and it led Conrad, who had two years previously dedicated to Galsworthy what remains his greatest novel (_Nostromo_), to write an article in which he said:

“The foundation of Mr. Galsworthy’s talent, it seems to me, lies in a remarkable power of ironic insight combined with an extremely keen and faithful eye for all the phenomena on the surface of the life he observes. These are the purveyors of his imagination, whose servant is a style clear, direct, sane, illumined by a perfectly unaffected sincerity. It is the style of a man whose sympathy with mankind is too genuine to allow him the smallest gratification of his vanity at the cost of his fellow-creatures ... sufficiently pointed to carry deep his remorseless irony and grave enough to be the dignified vehicle of his profound compassion. Its sustained harmony is never interrupted by those bursts of cymbals and fifes which some deaf people acclaim for brilliance. Before all it is a style well under control, and therefore it never betrays this tender and ironic writer into an odious cynicism of laughter and tears.

“From laboriously collected information, I am led to believe that most people read novels for amusement. This is as it should be. But whatever be their motives, I entertain towards all novel-readers the feelings of warm and respectful affection. I would not try to deceive them for worlds. Never! This being understood, I go on to declare, in the peace of my heart and the serenity of my conscience, that if they want amusement they shall find it between the covers of this book. They shall find plenty of it in this episode in the history of the Forsytes, where the reconciliation of a father and son, the dramatic and poignant comedy of Soames Forsyte’s marital relations, and the tragedy of Bosinney’s failure are exposed to our gaze with the remorseless yet sympathetic irony of Mr. Galsworthy’s art, in the light of the unquenchable fire burning on the altar of property. They shall find amusement, and perhaps also something more lasting--if they care for it. I say this with all the reserves and qualifications which strict truth requires around every statement of opinion. Mr. Galsworthy will never be found futile by anyone, and never uninteresting by the most exacting.”

Twelve years after the appearance of _The Man of Property_, in the volume _Five Tales_ (1918), was included a long short story, _Indian Summer of a Forsyte_. The year 1920 saw publication of the novel, _In Chancery_, and another long short story, _Awakening_; and the following year brought the novel, _To Let_. These five units, separately in the order named or together in the same chronological order in the thick volume called _The Forsyte Saga_, compose a record of three generations of an English family which has very justly been compared to the Esmonds of Thackeray. The Forsytes and their associates and connections are indeed “intensely real as individuals--real in the way that the Esmonds were real; symbolic in their traits, of a section of English society, and reflecting in their lives the changing moods of England in these years.” The motif is clearly expressed by certain words of young Jolyon Forsyte in _The Man of Property_:

“‘A Forsyte is not an uncommon animal. There are hundreds among the members of this club. Hundreds out there in the streets; you meet them wherever you go!... We are, of course, all of us slaves of property, and I admit that it’s a question of degree, but what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property--it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation--is his hallmark.... “Property and quality of a Forsyte. This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons and habitats of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of competitive tranquillity”.... They are half England, and the better half, too, the safe half, the three-per-cent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be?’”

One of Galsworthy’s severest critics, St. John Ervine, calls _The Forsyte Saga_ “his best work,” and breaks the force of many strictures to declare: “The craftsmanship of _To Let_ is superb--this novel is, perhaps, the most technically-correct book of our time--but its human value is even greater than its craftsmanship. In a very vivid fashion, Mr. Galsworthy shows the passing of a tradition and an age. He leaves Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he does not leave him entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but commercial terms, contrives in the end to win the pity and almost the love of the reader who has followed his varying fortunes through their stupid career. The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is certainly one of the tenderest things in modern fiction.”

iv

Grove Lodge, The Grove, Hampstead, London, N. W. 3, is the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy; if you have occasion to telephone, call Hampstead 3684. The approach to the house is described by Carlton Miles in the Theatre Magazine (December, 1922):

“The Galsworthys live at the bottom of a long, rambling lane called The Grove, in that part of Hampstead that looks calmly down on the crowded chimneypots of northwestern London. To reach the house you must climb a steep hill from the underground station and pass the stone building in which Du Maurier wrote _Peter Ibbetson_ and to whose memory it bears a tablet. A few minutes’ walk in one direction and you are in Church Row with the historic cemetery in which Du Maurier and Beerbohm Tree rest side by side. Follow the Grove walk and you arrive on Hampstead Heath, black with thousands of workers on Bank Holiday, overlooking the little row of cottages where Leigh Hunt and his followers established their ‘Vale of Health.’ But, having passed the Du Maurier home, you turn fairly to your left, descend a winding pathway that takes you by the Admiral’s House--designated by large signs--erected 159 years ago by an aged commander who built his home in three decks and mounted it with guns. The guns have vanished but the Admiral’s House still is one of the sights of Hampstead.

“At the end of the lane a small grilled iron gate shuts off the world from a green yard and a low white house, whose rambling line suggests many passageways and sets of rooms. A sheltered, secluded spot, the place above all others where Galsworthy should live. Peace has been achieved in five minutes’ walk from the noisy station. ‘The Inn of Tranquillity.’

“A turn down a long hallway, up a short flight of steps--a bright, flower-decked livingroom, a tea table, a dark-eyed, low-voiced hostess, a clasping of hand by host and a bark you interpret as cautious approval from Mark, the sheepdog, lying on the hearth rug. Mark is named for one of Galsworthy’s characters”--Mark Lennan in _The Dark Flower_?-- “... moments flee before you dare steal a look at the middle-aged gentleman sitting quietly in his chair, striving with gentle dignity to place you at the ease he feels not himself.

“Tall, grey-haired he looks astonishingly like his photographs. Reticent to a degree about his own work, he talks freely and with the utmost generosity about that of others. Opinion, formed slowly, is determined. The face, with its faint smile, looks neither disheartened nor sad, yet sometime it has met suffering. Like most Englishmen the eagerness of youth has not been crushed.... There is nothing chill about the novelist. He is the embodiment of easy, gracious courtesy. Conversation is far from intimidating, a long flow of material topics with now and then an upward leap of thought. And it is this swift flight that betrays his mental withdrawal. As clearly as if physically present may be seen the robed figure of his thoughts, standing behind him in his own drawingroom. You wonder what may be their burden. About him is the veil of remoteness.”

His humility, adorned by his presence and made disarming by what is certainly the most beautiful head and face among the living sons of men, does not always save him from the charge of coldness when manifested impersonally and at a distance. Where nearly all men and women give essential particulars of their lives, not to mention the human touch of their preferred recreations, Mr. Galsworthy, in the English _Who’s Who_, besides the long list of his publications, states only the year of his birth, his residence, and his membership in the Athenæum Club. This would hardly support Mr. Ervine’s declaration that the Galsworthy sensitiveness “is almost totally impersonal”; and instead of being “startled to discover how destitute of egotism Mr. Galsworthy seems to be” the close student of mankind might be led to speculate upon the variety of egotism he had just encountered. “It may even be argued,” pursues Mr. Ervine, cautiously, “that his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry, that it is impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is.” With due respect to Mr. Ervine, this is nonsense. Whatever Mr. Galsworthy may lack, it is not interest in himself. He has achieved countless satisfactory channels for the extrusion of that interest through other and imaginary men, women and beasts--that is all.

v

It is as if he had long ago said to himself, as perhaps he did: “I am myself, but myself isn’t a subject I can decently be concerned about or expose an interest in. Let me forget myself in someone--in everyone--else!” And since then, if he has ever repented, the spectacle of George Bernard Shaw, and particularly the horridly fascinating spectacle of Herbert George Wells, have been before him, to serve as awful warnings and lasting deterrents. Mr. Wells, in ever-new contortions, like a circus acrobat whose nakedness was gaudily accentuated by spangles, began seeing it through with Ann Veronica and is still exposing the secret places of his heart, while dizzy recollections of marriage, God and tono-bungay yet linger. Mr. Shaw has gone back to ... evolution.

“I was,” Mr. Galsworthy has said in an uninhibited moment, “for many years devoted to the sports of shooting and racing. I gave up shooting because it got on my nerves. I still ride; and I would go to a race-meeting any day if it were not for the din, for I am still under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as a thoroughbred horse.” His devotion to dogs and other dumb animals is frequently spoken of as it extrudes in _Memories_, Noel’s protection of the rabbit in _Saint’s Progress_ and “For Love of Beasts” in _A Sheaf_. These shifting loyalties were--what were they if not admirable realisations of the Self? But let those who still believe Mr. Galsworthy selfless but read the prefaces to the new and very handsome Manaton Edition of his works. For these volumes he has provided sixteen entirely new prefaces. I quote from the announcement of the edition:

“These”--prefaces--“are peculiarly interesting, for in them he frankly criticises his work; in some cases, too, they reflect the response of readers as he has sensed it. In others he tells of the thought in his mind while writing, and of the changes through which the thought has gone in the process. Again, he speculates on the art of writing in general, on the forms of fiction, on emotional expression and effect in the drama. In short, as he phrases it, ‘in writing a preface, one goes into the confessional.’

“Of _The Country House_ he says: ‘When once Pendyce had taken the bit between his teeth, the book ran away with me, and was more swiftly finished than any of my novels, being written in seven months.’

“‘The germ of _The Patrician_,’ he begins the preface to that volume, ‘is traceable to a certain dinner party at the House of Commons in 1908 and the face of a young politician on the other side of the table.’

“In the preface to _Fraternity_ he says: ‘A novelist, however observant of type and sensitive to the shades of character, _does little but describe and dissect himself_.... In dissecting Hilary, for instance, in this novel, _his creator feels the knife going sharply into his own flesh, just as he could feel it when dissecting Soames Forsyte or Horace Pendyce_.’”

The italics are my own and I think they are permissible.

Probably not enough attention has hitherto been paid to Mr. Galsworthy as a writer of short tales, but that may be because no collection of his stories has shown his talent so roundly as does the new book _Captures_. This opens with the well-known story “A Feud” and offers also such variety and such virtuosity in the short story form as “The Man Who Kept His Form,” “A Hedonist,” “Timber,” “Santa Lucia,” “Blackmail,” “Stroke of Lightning,” “The Broken Boot,” “Virtue,” “Conscience,” “Salta Pro Nobis,” “Heat,” “Philanthropy,” “A Long Ago Affair,” “Acmé,” “Late--299.” In this book, as in similar collections, there must be put to Mr. Galsworthy’s credit his frequent practice of the Continental notion of the short story--the sketch, the impression, the representation of a mood which we find in French and Russian literature and which the American short story too often sacrifices for purely mechanical effects.

Books by John Galsworthy

1900 _Villa Rubein._ Revised Edition, 1909

1904 _The Island Pharisees._ Revised Edition, 1908

1906 _The Man of Property_

1907 _The Country House_

1908 _A Commentary_

1909 _Fraternity_

1909 _Strife._ Drama in Three Acts

1909 _The Silver Box._ Comedy in Three Acts

1909 _Joy._ Play on the Letter “I” in Three Acts

1909 _Plays._ First Series. Containing _The Silver Box_, _Joy_, and _Strife_.

1910 _Justice._ Tragedy in Four Acts

1910 _A Motley_

1911 _The Little Dream._ Allegory in six Scenes

1911 _The Patrician_

1912 _The Inn of Tranquillity._ Studies and Essays

1912 _Moods, Songs, and Doggerels_

1912 _Memories._ Illustrated by Maud Earl

1912 _The Eldest Son._ Domestic Drama in Three Acts

1912 _The Pigeon._ Fantasy in Three Acts

1913 _Plays._ Second Series. Containing _The Eldest Son_, _The Little Dream_, _Justice_

1913 _The Dark Flower_

1913 _The Fugitive._ Play in Four Acts

1914 _The Mob._ Play in Four Acts

1914 _Plays._ Third Series. Containing _The Fugitive_, _The Pigeon_, _The Mob_

1915 _The Little Man and Other Satires_

1915 _A Bit o’ Love._ Play in Three Acts

1915 _The Freelands_

1916 _A Sheaf_

1917 _Beyond_

1918 _Five Tales_

1919 _Another Sheaf_

1919 _Saint’s Progress_

1919 _Addresses in America 1919_

1920 _Tatterdemalion_

1920 _In Chancery_

1920 _Awakening_

1920 _The Skin Game._ A Tragi-comedy

1920 _The Foundations._ An Extravagant Play

1920 _Plays._ Fourth Series. Containing _A Bit o’ Love_, _The Foundations_, _The Skin Game_

1921 _To Let_

1921 _Six Short Plays._ Containing _The First and the Last_, _The Little Man_, _Hall-marked_, _Defeat_, _The Sun,_ and _Punch and Go_

1922 _The Forsyte Saga_

1922 _A Family Man_

1922 _Loyalties_

1923 _Windows._ Comedy in Three Acts

1923 _Plays._ Fifth Series. Containing _Loyalties_, _Windows_, _A Family Man_

1923 _The Burning Spear_ [first published anonymously in England in 1918]

1923 _Captures_

Sources on John Galsworthy

_John Galsworthy: A Sketch of His Life and Works._ Booklet published by Mr. Galsworthy’s publishers, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 1922.

_John Galsworthy._ Booklet published by Mr. Galsworthy’s English publisher, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 1922. Valuable for its bibliography of the English editions.

_J. G._ Pamphlet announcing the Manaton Edition of John Galsworthy’s works. Procurable from CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS. This edition contains some hitherto unpublished material and a rearrangement of the plays.

_The Prefaces to the Manaton Edition._ Practically the only discussion of his own work by the author.

_Some Modern Novelists._ Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett. HENRY HOLT & CO. Chapter X. contains a long and careful critical consideration of Galsworthy’s work up to and including _The Freelands_.

_Some Impressions of My Elders._ St. John G. Ervine. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. For a forceful statement from one of those who strongly criticise Mr. Galsworthy’s work, especially for its “indiscriminating pity.” Analyses at length the play, _The Fugitive_.

_John Galsworthy._ Carlton Miles, THE THEATRE MAGAZINE, December, 1922. An interview.

_A Middle-Class Family._ Joseph Conrad. THE OUTLOOK (London), March 31, 1906. A review of _The Man of Property_.

The interested reader should further consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1906.

A complete Galsworthy bibliography, to be published in England, is now in preparation by Harold A. Marrot.

2. _The Magic Carpet_

i

The Magic Carpet was one which took you far away, whisked you up and through the air (though not sensibly too fast) and brought you into a foreign but delightful country. There are books like that, taking you out of yourself, so that the preoccupation of a moment before is forgotten, tomorrow’s worries are lost, and you exist in a blissful unconsciousness that there can be anything beyond the fine pleasure of this present hour. The “travel book” attempts directly the transfer to some place else; the book of essays, more indirect in its method, is often more successful.

Aldous Huxley has been known to us hitherto as a poet and a writer of fiction. Both his poetry and his fiction have been marked with a graceful artifice and that simplicity which comes only from a completed sophistication. His new book, a collection of essays, is distinguished by those qualities. There is something about Huxley’s writing--I don’t know what it is and those who know what it is, can’t tell--which brings a gleam to the eyes of all who love literature for its own sake. In _On the Margin_ Huxley the satirist walks comfortably with Huxley the student. For Aldous Huxley is a very studious young man. Tall, with hair that bushes out from under his broad-brimmed soft hat, he walks with that slight stoop inevitably acquired by those whose heads do not pass readily under all doorways. With his clothes flapping gently around him, his glance peering through thick-lensed spectacles, he advances into a room with the surprising effect of an amiable scarecrow. A first grotesque impression is rapidly dissolved in the gentle acquaintance springing up immediately afterward; for no more likeable person lives. It is not generally known that between the ages of seventeen and nineteen it was thought he would go blind, so that he learned to read Braille type. His interest in America is keen; he would like to come here, and may. Intimates know him as one of the most learned men in England, though devoid of poses and devoted to finding pleasure in the works of Charles Dickens. His scholarliness shows itself in _On the Margin_, where Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and the devilish biographer, Mr. Strachey, divide attention with the question of love as practised in France and England, the justice of Margot Asquith’s strictures on modern feminine beauty, and the evolution of ennui.

Recently there died in his ninety-second year Frederic Harrison, who had witnessed the coronation of Victoria in 1838 and every celebration in her reign; who saw her funeral in 1901; who, though past eighty when it began, saw the war of 1914-1918 and the several years of turmoil afterward. An extraordinary life! Before it had ended this man whose span of years was matched by his breadth of knowledge and interests gathered together what he himself regarded as his last book, now published under the title _De Senectute_ and blending some of his finest literary criticism with delightful recollections of the great times in which he lived. A personal account of Victoria and Prince Albert, the “Dialogue on Old Age” which affords the title for the volume, a review of the picturesque history of Constantinople through sixteen centuries, fundamental differences between Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, the art of translation with reference to Dante and Molière, some consideration of Fielding and Smollett and Kingsley, and a final chapter upon various schools of philosophy--these are the relics of a glorious life. The book is full of brightness, its effects are sane, and the writing is alike lucid and tinctured with that peculiar zest which, as it was a quality of Frederic Harrison’s temperament, goes far to explain the length of his life as well as the grace with which he lived it.

Among essayists there are ladies. But there are not many ladies, nor men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book. I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer to be known for her fiction--those short stories, masterly in form, with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief novel, _Conquistador_. And such a preference is easily understood. _Conquistador_, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, _Modes and Morals_, published in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and still steadily sells. People constantly refer to her discussion of “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling” and the arts of persuasion are constantly brought to bear upon her to assemble another such book. If Mrs. Gerould began with something of the suddenness of a meteor, she persists with a good deal of the steady brilliance of a fixed star. It was, in fact, with the appearance of a story, “Vain Oblations,” in Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1911, that she first came to general notice. This dark and terrible piece of fictional analysis had for its principal character a New England woman missionary. Other stories followed in Scribner’s, the Atlantic and Harper’s, and a first collection, under the title _Vain Oblations_, was published in March, 1914. A second book of tales, _The Great Tradition_, was succeeded by a novelette, _A Change of Air_; by the essays comprising _Modes and Morals_; and then by the novel, _Lost Valley_. _Valiant Dust_ offered some more short tales; but with the appearance of _Conquistador_ many of us felt Mrs. Gerould for the first time to be perfectly suited in length, form and material alike. Despite her superb technique, she needs more room than the short story gives her; and although she can write of barren New England lives she can write much more effectively of richly-coloured Latin life. Although, as Stuart P. Sherman has observed, she can do dashingly the “picture of a really nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a spacious sun-flooded chamber with a Chinese rug,” her deep fictional desires are toward the richly barbaric, and neither Henry-Jamesical nor Edith-Whartonesque. In the atmosphere of Princeton, which is her home (her husband, Gordon Hall Gerould, is a member of the English faculty), she has the leisure and repose necessary to do such essays and short novels as no other living American has given evidence of an equal talent for achieving. Occasionally a bit of travel, perhaps, producing as its direct result a book like her _Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions_; but ultimately much more valuable for its indirect stimulus to her imagination, which belongs to the class of imaginations so dangerous when they are confined.

In fact, the imagination is very little understood, as if it were one of those glands whose mysterious secretions we tinker with nowadays, either not too successfully or with a success so alarming as to threaten the overthrow of all physiology. One of these days we shall have a mental thyroid extract, and then--! It remains to be observed that with most of us the imagination secretes gently, with a fresh annual activation in the direction of old woods and pastures ever-new, rather than new; a circumstance very favourable to David Grayson when, in 1907, he put forth the volume called _Adventures in Contentment_. It is difficult to think of any precise precedent for this mixture of essay, philosophy, homely observation and quiet humour with its essentially American pattern of thought. The febrile character of much American life was already marked, and the remedy of an equally feverish optimism had yet to be widely prescribed. The time was propitious, the sentiment of David Grayson had an ingratiation. When, in 1910, _Adventures in Friendship_ was published, a good many thousand people had read the earlier adventures and were alert for these. _The Friendly Road_ (1913) was succeeded by _Hempfield_ (1915) and a final volume, _Great Possessions_ (1917). A half dozen years have passed without relegating these books to the shelves of the Great Unread. As “The Library of the Open Road” they inherit an annual, rather a perennial, popularity.

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In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so) but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his _Baedeker’s Mediterranean_ or _Northern Italy_ or _Spain and Portugal_. Here the matters essential to accuracy were given--and only a novelist who has heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of a topographical mistake--but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most freshly revised volumes is _Baedeker’s Switzerland_; another of equal recency is the guide to Canada.

In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist, however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe. In fact, Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each volume of the series now under way. _Java and the East Indies_ and _France to Scandinavia_ (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with _The Holy Land and Syria_. _From Tangier to Tripoli_ (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the Sahara), _Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland_, _The Tail of the Hemisphere_ (Chile and Argentina) and _Cairo to Kisumu_ (Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate books.

“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921--a record that begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so, he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores, following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay, Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:

Then I had religion, then I had a vision--

and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American quest of power--religion the sanctification of one, pan-Americanism the credo of the other. It is this spiritual penetration that makes the fine distinction of Stephen Graham’s _In Quest of El Dorado_, joined to the man’s unusual literary skill, taste and sense of form. On the point of form there is something more than usually admirable in the start of the book from Madrid and Cadiz and in the conclusion (on a note of wonder) amid the ruins of Mitla, as if the quester for El Dorado would do well to seek its whereabouts in the indecipherable inscriptions placed on their massive memorials by a race that had sunk into silence long before the imperious advent of the Children of the Sun. These are the refinements of the book for the reader of philosophical or æsthetic tastes; but as such matters should be, they are entirely unobtrusive--present to those who seek them, hidden to those who are indifferent--and in externals Stephen Graham offers a first-hand travel study with cowboys and conquistadores, Indians and Mexicans, the Panama Canal and the jingle of spurs in the changing foreground.

Among those authors whose books of travel win their appreciation from the personality of the adventurer, Mary Roberts Rinehart seems to me quite plainly the foremost. The considerable time that has elapsed since the publication of _Through Glacier Park_ and _Tenting Tonight_ will sharpen many appetites for the camp fare offered in her new book, _The Out Trail_. With none of the acerbity of her own Tish, Mrs. Rinehart has to the full that lady’s derring-do. “I have roughed it,” she explains at the beginning of _The Out Trail_, “in one wilderness after another, in camp and on the trail, in the air and on water, in war abroad and in peace at home. I have been scared to death more times than I can remember. Led,” she confesses, “by the exigencies of my profession, by feminine curiosity, or by the determination not to be left at home, I have been shaken, thrown, bitten, sunburned, rained on, shot at, stone-bruised, frozen, broiled, and scared, with monotonous regularity.” And she adds that on several occasions she has been placed in situations of real danger from which she has clamoured to be extricated with all possible despatch. Two things, if we may judge by her chronicle, seem never to have failed her, in whatever emergency: her sense of drama and her sense of humour. At least, they are keenly in evidence on all the pages of _The Out Trail_, and make it easily among the most entertaining books of its kind--not infrequently exciting, too! If someone thinks that the sense of the humorous must have been missing at the time and have been recaptured later in writing of the adventures, I suspect he is mistaken; for I recall that not so long after I had written a chapter on “The Vitality of Mary Roberts Rinehart” as a novelist, I met Mrs. Rinehart. She was suffering from one of those ferocious colds which make cowards and pessimists of us all, but she only remarked: “I’m afraid you will find the vitality you have just celebrated rather low this morning.” This, I submit, is such stuff as humorists are made on.

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Among books of essays that successfully spread the Magic Carpet for readers I should like to draw attention to the following (in addition to those described above):

ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY’S _In the Neighborhood of Murray Hill_.

J. C. SQUIRE’S _Essays at Large_ and his _Books Reviewed_.

HILAIRE BELLOC’S _On_.

Other collections of essays, chiefly on literary and philosophical subjects, are included in or listed after Chapter 15, “For the Literary Investor.”

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

A Group Of Books On Ancient Egypt And Present-Day Egyptian Explorations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Group Of Books About China.

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

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

ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS’S _Across Mongolian Plains_.

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

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

The Far East.

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

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

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

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

The Callers Of The Wild.

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

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

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

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

With Ice.

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

Mediterranean.

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

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

G. K. CHESTERTON’S _The New Jerusalem_.

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

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

South America.

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

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

Unique Books Of Travel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_3. A Breathless Chapter_

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

GABORIAU, Emile

The Most Complete Library Edition Each with new illustrated jackets

_The Count’s Millions._ 12mo. 2.00

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

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

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

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

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

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

ii

The other way of breathlessness is laughter.

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

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

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

iii

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

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

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

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

WILLIAM JOHNSTON’S _The Waddington Cipher_.

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

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

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

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

When Ghost Meets Ghost.

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

E. F. BENSON’S _Spook Stories_.

Ordeal by Water.

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

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

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

Almost Anything by HAROLD MACGRATH.

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

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

iv

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

“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]

ii

“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.

iv

“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.’”

v

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

(C) Miscellaneous Writings by Conrad

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

(C) A list of Portraits of 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_

i

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.

ii

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.

iv

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.

v

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_

i

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.”

ii

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.”

iv

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.

v

_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.

vi

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.

vii

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_

i

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 perm