_Cargoes for Crusoes_
[Illustration]
_GRANT OVERTON_
_By_ GRANT OVERTON
_About Books and Authors_
CARGOES FOR CRUSOES
AUTHORS OF THE DAY
AMERICAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT
WHEN WINTER COMES TO MAIN STREET
THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS
WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS
_Novels_
THE THOUSAND AND FIRST NIGHT
ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT
THE ANSWERER
WORLD WITHOUT END
MERMAID
Cargoes
for Crusoes
_By_ GRANT OVERTON
[Illustration]
New York: D. Appleton & Company
New York: George H. Doran Company
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1924,
BY GRANT OVERTON
_First Printing, September, 1924._
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
Bound in Interlaken-Cloth
“_Let’s Give Him a Book._”
“_He’s Got a Book._”
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE WHO, THOUGH HAVING ONE BOOK,
SOMETIMES ENJOY ANOTHER
Preface
_Being a True Account of How a Priceless Cargo Was Delivered to a Desert
Islander_
How that I, Robinson Crusoe, came to be wrecked with others of the ship’s
company on a Desert Island, all being lost save my unworthy self, hath
in a precise manner been narrated by one D. Defoe in the book he saw fit
to entitle with my name; but his ending is indifferent. For novels like
Defoe’s must have the Happy Ending, so styled. Yet is the truth often
happier far than fiction. Being no hand to invent a tale, I am content to
set down in this place events as I humbly took part in them.
Let me declare, then, that here on my Desert Island I for long suffered
great loneliness and consequent distress of soul. This went on many days.
Howbeit, while sunk very low in my spiritual state and with expectation
nearly gone, a huge ship passing near labored painfully with a storm by
the mercy of God being compelled to throw overboard—or, as they say at
sea, to jettison—the greater part of her cargo. And being thus lightened
she stood away from the Island and went on her course safely. The same
storm cast upon the shore the rich treasure wherewith she had been laden,
so many wooden boxes or cases, packed tightly and well-lined, which for
the most part were washed up undamaged and, within, scarcely dampened
except it may be for an inch or two. Coming down to the shore the morning
after I stood transfixed with astonishment at the sight of something
lying on the sand. It was a book.
When I had a little recovered from my amaze, my joy and ecstasy knew no
way to communicate itself, and almost immediately, my eye falling on the
cases strewn along the beach, I capered with delight. I brake open the
boxes, one after the other fast as I could work. All, _all_, were brimmed
with the newest books!
Since that day I have not lacked instruction and entertainment, and deem
that Providence, at trifling expense to the maritime insurers, hath
rescued me from boredom forevermore. And this I deem the only rescue
worth a fingersnap in this life of ours, and one that a great majority
of people do never accomplish. My days and nights have been and yet
are filled with most various delights, my walks are taken with a great
company of authors and my conversations are held with them.
With such profit and satisfaction do I read that more than once, being
sighted by a vessel which then stood by to take me off my Island, I have
waved the sailors to proceed without me, which they have done with doubt
and difficulty; yet finally I have convinced them of my meaning, they
proceeding with their voyage, I with mine....
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
1 THE KNIGHTLINESS OF PHILIP GIBBS 15
2 THE TRAIL BLAZERS 28
3 THE ART OF MELVILLE DAVISSON POST 41
4 JEFFERY FARNOL’S GESTES 60
5 ADULTS PLEASE SKIP 83
6 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY GOTHIC OF ALDOUS HUXLEY 97
7 IN EVERY HOME: A CHAPTER FOR WOMEN 114
8 A GREAT IMPERSONATION BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM 126
9 G. STANLEY HALL, PSYCHOLOGIST 143
10 THE MODE IN NEW FICTION 167
11 COSMO HAMILTON’S UNWRITTEN HISTORY 182
12 LEST THEY FORGET 197
13 THAT LITERARY WANDERER, E. V. LUCAS 212
14 AMERICAN HISTORY IN FICTION 232
15 THE FIRESIDE THEATRE 252
16 A REASONABLE VIEW OF MICHAEL ARLEN 266
17 PALETTES AND PATTERNS IN PROSE AND POETRY 277
18 COMING!—COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER—COMING! 290
19 EDITH WHARTON’S OLD NEW YORK 304
20 NOT FOUND ELSEWHERE 314
21 FRANK L. PACKARD UNLOCKS A BOOK 330
22 ALL CREEDS AND NONE 348
23 J. C. SNAITH AND GEORGE GIBBS 363
24 MARY JOHNSTON’S ADVENTURE 375
INDEX OF PRICES 389
INDEX 403
Portraits
PAGE
PHILIP GIBBS 16
MELVILLE DAVISSON POST 48
JEFFERY FARNOL 64
SUSAN ERTZ 176
COSMO HAMILTON 184
E. V. LUCAS 224
EMERSON HOUGH 234
MICHAEL ARLEN 272
MARY JOHNSTON 384
_Cargoes for Crusoes_
CARGOES FOR CRUSOES
1. The Knightliness of Philip Gibbs
i
Then one said: “Rise, Sir Philip——” but the terms in which the still
young man received ennoblement were heard by none; for all were drawn
by his face in which austerity and gentleness seemed mingled. A pale
young man with a nicotine-stained third finger whom Arnold Bennett had
once warned authors against (he asks you to lunch and drives a hard
bargain over the coffee). A good reporter for Alfred Harmsworth, Lord
Northcliffe. A war correspondent with seven-league boots. A man standing
on a platform in Carnegie Hall which rings with riot “looking like a
frightfully tired Savonarola who is speaking in a trance.” His thin,
uncompromising nose; the jut of the chin; the high cheekbones and the
hollow cheeks, long upper lip and mouth with drawn-in, straight corners
(yet a compassionate mouth); the deep-set eyes; the ears placed so far
back, and the raking line of the jaw—if these were all he might be
nothing better than a fine breed of news hound with “points.” They are
nothing; but the clear shine of idealism from eye and countenance is the
whole man. Great Britain had knighted a reporter, but Philip Gibbs had
been born to knighthood.
For when chivalry would have died, he first succored and then revived it;
when men wished to forget, he compelled them to remember. He actually
proves what men have forgotten how to prove, and so have turned into a
copybook maxim. Perhaps the reason his pen is mightier than any sword is
because he wields it as if it were one.
In the eyes of the world he is the D’Artagnan of Three Musketeers who are
also three brothers. They are Philip (Hamilton) Gibbs, Cosmo Hamilton
(Gibbs), and A(rthur) Hamilton Gibbs, the mutations of name arising
from choice and even from a certain literary necessity; for an author’s
name should be distinctive and is usually better not to be too long.
The father, Henry Gibbs, was an English civil servant, a departmental
chief in the Board of Education. The mother had been Helen Hamilton. The
family at one time consisted of six boys and two girls. Henry Gibbs had
“a delicate wife, an unresilient salary, and his spirit of taking chances
had been killed by heavy responsibility, the caution and timidity growing
out of a painful knowledge of the risks and difficulties of life, and
the undermining security of having sat all his working years in the safe
cul-de-sac of a government office.”[1] It was the office in which Matthew
Arnold worked and in which an obscure temporary clerk, W. S. Gilbert,
stole moments to compose some verse called _Bab Ballads_. Henry Gibbs
was a famous after-dinner speaker and it was certainly he who preserved
the Carlyle House for London, but the nature of the case forbade him to
encourage the marked adventurous strain in his boys.
[Illustration: PHILIP GIBBS
_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood._]
Philip Gibbs was educated privately and was an editor before he was
21. He was, in fact, only 19 when he became “educational editor” for
the large English publishing firm of Cassell at a salary of a hundred
and twenty pounds a year. “With five pounds capital and that income,
I married”—Agnes Rowland, daughter of the Rev. W. J. Rowland—“with an
audacity which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much
younger, that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official
chief, who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I
sat, and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said
‘Hullo!’ I made signs to her to depart.
“‘Who’s that pretty girl?’ asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must
confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.”[2]
He was both timid and bashful; yet like many men of his stamp, he was
to show on many occasions a lion-like courage. A hundred and a thousand
times he was to pass as close to death as a man may pass and yet live;
in general, he was to be quite as badly scared as a chap can be in such
circumstances; and without exception he was to persist in what he was
doing, for there was and is in him something stronger than fear.
ii
Philip Gibbs’s earlier career differed little from that of Arnold Bennett
or the first years of dozens of Englishmen who have made their start in
Fleet Street. After several years with Cassell, he applied for and got
a job as managing editor of a large literary syndicate. In this post
he bought Bennett’s early novel, _The Grand Babylon Hotel_, and other
fiction and articles to be sold to newspapers in Great Britain and the
colonies. While with Cassell he had written his first book, _Founders
of the Empire_, a historical text still used in English schools. As
a syndicate editor he wrote articles on every conceivable subject,
particularly a weekly essay called “Knowledge is Power.” But his job was
outside of London, for which he hankered; and finally he wrote to Alfred
Harmsworth, who was later to become Lord Northcliffe and who had founded
the Daily Mail. The result was a job under a brilliant journalist, Filson
Young, whom Gibbs succeeded a few months later as editor of Page Four in
the Mail (devoted to special articles). Here he learned all about the
new journalism and had a chance to observe Northcliffe closely. In the
seventh chapter of his _Adventures in Journalism_, Philip Gibbs gives a
brief but well-etched portrait of the man who transformed the character
of the English newspaper. Northcliffe’s genius, his generosity, his
ruthlessness—which was often the result of indifference and sometimes
sprang from fatigue and bad temper—are very well conveyed in a half
dozen pages. Gibbs suffered the fate of nearly all this man’s temporary
favorites. When he was dismissed from the Daily Mail he went for a few
months to the Daily Express before beginning what was to be a long
association with the Daily Chronicle.
His connection with the Chronicle was broken by the sad experiment of the
Tribune, a newspaper founded by a melancholy young man named Franklin
Thomasson as a pious carrying out of his father’s wishes. As literary
editor of this daily, Philip Gibbs bought work by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph
Conrad and Gilbert K. Chesterton, but the paper as a whole was dull
and doomed. When it went down, Philip Gibbs thought he saw a chance to
throw off the bondage of offices. He took his wife and little son and
retreated to a coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton. “There, in a tiny
room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside
Pierrots, I wrote my novel, _The Street of Adventure_, in which I told,
in the guise of fiction, the history of the Tribune newspaper, and gave a
picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility,
and good comradeship of Fleet Street.” There was need of money, but the
novel cost Gibbs more than it earned. His narrative had not disguised
sufficiently either the newspaper or members of its late staff. The
point is a little difficult for American readers to take in, and rests
on English libel law, which is quite different from the American. In
England, “the greater the truth, the greater the libel.” A libel action
was instituted, and although it was finally withdrawn, the bills of costs
were heavy and the sale had been killed. But when published in the United
States after the war, _The Street of Adventure_ had a very good success.
“I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial
uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune,
when those mocking will-o’-the-wisps lead him through the ditches of
disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of
times did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking
the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would
not fit into my combination of circumstances, ending at 4,000 words
with a dramatic climax! How many hours have I spent glued to a seat in
Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband and
wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a man, and
finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s
nerves get ‘edgy’ and one’s imagination becomes feverish with effort, so
that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more resolutely it
eludes one.”[3]
Yet he counts himself, on the whole, to have been lucky. He was able to
earn a living and to give time and labor to “the most unprofitable branch
of literature, which is history, and my first love.” Years later he was
to have a thrill of pleasure at seeing in the windows of Paris bookshops
his _Men and Women of the French Revolution_, magnificently illustrated
with reproductions of old prints. He wrote the romantic life of _George
Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_, and discovered in the murder of Sir
Thomas Overbury “a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies,
bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cut-throats and poets,” the
incomparable material for his _King’s Favorite_. These books brought him
only a few hundred dollars apiece, though perhaps more in reputation and
friendships.
iii
He returned to journalism, eventually, as special correspondent and
descriptive writer for the Daily Chronicle. He was rather frequently in
charge of the Paris office and had all sorts of adventures in that city,
both those derived from saturating himself in French history and others
incident to his daily work. After the Portuguese revolution he was sent
to Portugal to explore the condition of those political prisoners that
the republicans had in some cases interred alive. His greatest feat was
the revelation of Dr. Cook’s fraud in claiming the discovery of the North
Pole. This was a triumph of sheer intuition, in the first instance, and
both dogged persistency and remarkable courage were necessary before
Philip Gibbs could be proved right.
It began with a late start, twenty-four hours behind the other
correspondents. When Gibbs got to Copenhagen, the vessel bringing Dr.
Cook had not arrived, owing to fogs. Through a chance meeting in a
restaurant with Mrs. Rasmussen, wife of the explorer, Gibbs got to
Elsinore and aboard a launch which was putting out to meet the delayed
ship. Thus he was the only English-speaking person present at the first
interview, on shipboard. As it happened, Dr. Cook had not yet acquired
that magnificent poise and aplomb which he was to display from the moment
he set foot ashore. His eyes evaded Gibbs, he explained that he had no
papers to prove his claim and not even a diary, and when pressed for some
sort of written record or notes he exclaimed: “You believed Nansen and
Amundsen and Sverdrup. They had only their story to tell. Why don’t you
believe me?” Later Cook had a moment of utter funk, hiding in his cabin.
It passed quickly and after that he was outwardly all that a hero should
be.
But Gibbs had had his chance. His seven-column story to the Daily
Chronicle caused him to be denounced everywhere and even put him in
jeopardy of his life in Copenhagen; yet a few weeks were to show it to
be one of the greatest exclusive newspaper stories, “beats” or “scoops,”
ever written.
iv
In September, 1912, war started in the Balkans. Gibbs went as a
correspondent and this experience, lamentable and laughable, comical and
extremely repellent, was his first direct preparation for work soon to
follow. The year following he had occasion to go to Germany and study the
state of mind, popular and official, toward England. He was, therefore,
exceptionally well fitted to be a correspondent at the front when the
World War began. It would be impossible as well as improper to try to
abbreviate here the story of his experience told so brilliantly and with
so much movement (and with far too much modesty) in his _Adventures in
Journalism_. At the outset of the war no newspaperman had any official
standing. The correspondent was unrecognized—or it would be more accurate
to say that he was recognized only as a dangerous nuisance, subject to
arrest at sight. Gibbs and two other very distinguished newspapermen,
H. M. Tomlinson and W. M. Massey, worked together for weeks and months
and were three of a small group of correspondents who risked their
lives constantly in the war zone and their liberty on every occasion
when they stepped out of it. There came a time when the game seemed to
be up. “I had violated every regulation. I had personally angered Lord
Kitchener. I was on the black books of the detectives at every port, and
General Williams solemnly warned me that if I returned to France I would
be put up against a white wall, with unpleasant consequences.”[4] The
solution came with the appointment of five official war correspondents,
of whom Gibbs was one from first to last. These men covered the war,
not for one newspaper but for the newspapers of Great Britain and
America. They were attached to General Headquarters and among the men
of distinction who were assigned to them as friends, advisers and
censors was C. E. Montague, editor of the Manchester Guardian and author
of _Disenchantment_, _Fiery Particles_, _A Hind Let Loose_, etc., a
meditative writer of exquisite prose who, at the outbreak of the war,
had dyed his white hair black, enlisted as a private, served in the
trenches, reached the rank of sergeant, finally surviving when the dugout
which sheltered him was blown up....
After the war the five correspondents received knighthood, and Philip
Gibbs is properly Sir Philip Gibbs, K. B. E. (Knight of the British
Empire). On journalistic commissions he visited Ireland and Asia Minor
and revisited most of the countries of Europe, including Russia. He came
to America twice to lecture on the war and conditions resulting from it,
and his book, _People of Destiny_, is a critical but admiring account
of America as he found it. Pope Benedict XV., against all precedent,
accorded Gibbs an interview on the reconstruction of Europe and this
interview was naturally printed in all the principal newspapers of the
world. He had become, more truly than any other man has ever been,
more fully than any other man is, the world’s reporter. His title was
splendidly established by his summarizing book on the war, _Now It Can Be
Told_, and was strikingly reëmphasized with his novel, _The Middle of the
Road_, concerning which a few words are in order.
v
Although Philip Gibbs had published, in 1919, a novel, _Wounded Souls_,
which contains much of the message of _The Middle of the Road_, the
world was not ready for what he had to tell. He therefore set to work
on a canvas which he determined should include all Europe. His visits
to Ireland, France, Germany and even Russia had placed at his disposal
an unparalleled mass of authentic firsthand material. He knew, better
than most, what existed, and what lay immediately ahead. Using fiction
frankly as a guise to present facts, both physical facts and the facts
of emotion and attitude, he wrote his story.
When the novel was published in England and the United States at the
beginning of 1923 it leaped into instant and enormous popularity. This
was partly the result of prophetic details, such as this speech of one of
the characters (from page 317 of _The Middle of the Road_):
“‘France wants to push Germany into the mud,’ said Dorothy. ‘Nothing will
satisfy her but a march into the Ruhr to seize the industrial cities and
strangle Germany’s chance of life.’”
When the novel was published the French invasion of the Ruhr had just
begun.
There was a sense of larger prophecy that hovered over the story. But
even more of the instant success of the book was due to the terrible
picture it painted, minute yet panoramic, ghastly but honest. People sat
up, literally, all night to finish the book. People read it with tears
running from their eyes, with sobs; they went about for days afterward
feeling as if a heavy blow had stunned them, a blow from which they were
only slowly recovering. Although every effort was made in advance of
publication to insure attention for the book, it is doubtful whether such
effort counted at all in the book’s success. For none who read it failed
to talk about it in a way that fairly coerced others to become Philip
Gibbs’s readers. Month after month the sale of this book rolls on. It is
not, as a piece of literary construction or considered as literary art,
a good novel; it is something much bigger than that—a piece of marvelous
reporting and a work of propaganda charged to the full with humane
indignation and pity and compassion.
vi
As if he had found his field at last in the roomy spaces and manifold
disguises of the novel, Philip Gibbs followed _The Middle of the Road_
with a very keenly-observed study of young people. _Heirs Apparent_
deals with the generation which was too young to take any active part
in the World War but which has come to a somewhat unformed maturity
since. The gayety of the novel does not prevent the author, with his
usual thoroughness, from presenting the more serious aspects of his
young people’s misbehavior. There is incidentally an exactly drawn study
of that newer, sensational journalism which Philip Gibbs tasted under
Northcliffe and which is familiar enough, though on the outside only, to
most Americans. But the delightful thing about _Heirs Apparent_ is the
author’s unfailing sympathy with his youngsters; and the optimism of the
ending—the book closes with a character’s cry: “Youth’s all right!”—is
the sincere expression of Philip Gibbs’s own perfect faith.
The tales in his new volume, _Little Novels of Nowadays_, are brothers to
_The Middle of the Road_. What proportion of these stories is fact and
what fiction is irrelevant, since in atmosphere and emotion all are true.
Each of these poignant pieces is a document of the calamitous war more
significant to humanity than the treaty sealed at Versailles. Whether in
Russia or stricken Budapest or flaming Smyrna or some far-off corner of
lonely starvation, Philip Gibbs has seen all, felt all ... and can convey
all.
vii
In fine, a bigger man than any of his books. One of the greatest
reporters the press has ever had, one of the half-dozen—if so many—best
masters of descriptive writing now alive. A chap who suffered nervous
breakdowns prior to 1914 and who turned to iron in the moment of crisis.
A militant pacifist because he has really seen war waged. A lover and
fighter for justice, and a preacher of mercy. There is about him, despite
the abolition of miracle and the rapid transformation of the world into a
factory and a machine, some of that lost radiance of a day when men set
forth to conquer in the name of their faith, or to spread a gospel which
might redeem the world.
BOOKS BY PHILIP GIBBS
FICTION:
1908 _The Individualist_
1908 _The Spirit of Revolt_
1909 _The Street of Adventure_
1910 _Intellectual Mansions, S. W._
1911 _Oliver’s Kind Women_
1912 _Helen of Lancaster Gate_
1913 _A Master of Life_
1914 _Beauty and Nick_
In England: _The Custody of the Child_
1920 _Wounded Souls_
In England: _Back to Life_
1922 _Venetian Lovers_
1923 _The Middle of the Road_
1924 _Heirs Apparent_
1924 _Little Novels of Nowadays_
HISTORICAL:
1899 _Founders of the Empire_
1906 _The Romance of Empire_
1906 _Men and Women of the French Revolution_
1908 _The Romance of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham_
1909 _King’s Favorite_
1912 _Adventures of War with Cross and Crescent_
1915 _The Soul of the War_
1917 _The Battles of the Somme_
1918 _The Struggle in Flanders_
First title: _From Bapaume to Passchendaele_
1919 _The Way to Victory_
In England: _Open Warfare_
1920 _Now It Can Be Told_
In England: _Realities of War_
1920 _People of Destiny_
1921 _More That Must Be Told_
In England: _The Hope of Europe_
1924 _Adventures in Journalism_
ESSAYS:
1903 _Knowledge Is Power_
1905 _Facts and Ideas_
1913 _The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life_
1913 _The New Man: A Portrait of the Latest Type_
SOURCES ON PHILIP GIBBS
His _Adventures in Journalism_ is autobiographical in the best sense of
the word, and only needs to be supplemented by the formal particulars
in _Who’s Who_ (England). There are interesting references in Cosmo
Hamilton’s _Unwritten History_. For a not wholly friendly reference, see
Clement K. Shorter’s page in _The Sphere_, London, for 6 October 1923.
Mr. Shorter was one of a few who believed themselves libelled in _The
Street of Adventure_, and he has had various literary feuds.
Address: Sir Philip Gibbs, Ladygate, Punch Bowl Lane, Dorking, England.
2. The Trail Blazers
i
These paths are strange and exciting. One leads into the midst of wild
beasts, another into the depths of the sea. A third goes laboriously some
few feet underground and erases three thousand years in three months.
One or two, keeping to the present, are sources of innocent merriment;
several employ the mode of fiction to vivify fact; and at least one is a
continuous pageant in colors of the American West.
There is no order in which these paths are to be taken; you may go half
across the world to follow one, or you may begin by merely stepping
outside your door. America or Arabia, ferns or fishes, dogs or diggings,
history, hunting ... outdoor books are the best of indoor sports.
The alphabet is an immense convenience and I start with Adventurousness
and America. For some time Joseph Lewis French has been busy selecting
from various American authors the best accounts of the discovery of gold
in California, the days of the pony express and the stage coach, the
cowboy, the trapper, the guide, the bad man, and other phases of our
history. He has drawn upon the works of Francis Parkman, Mark Twain,
Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Bayard Taylor, General George A. Custer,
Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Emerson Hough and a good many others in
the task. Mr. French calls his book _The Pioneer West: Narratives of the
Westward March of Empire_, and Hamlin Garland has written a foreword
for it. Also Remington Schuyler has done illustrations in color. As an
anthology, the volume has no exact parallel in my knowledge. The nuggets
it contains are otherwise for the most part found with considerable
difficulty in half a hundred somewhat inaccessible places. It is, for
example, not easy to find what you want in either Parkman or Roosevelt
without risking a long hunt; and books by other earlier writers, even one
so perfectly well-known as Bayard Taylor, are often hard to come by. It
is no wonder that Mr. Garland calls _The Pioneer West_ a real service in
recovery. Mr. French spreads a satisfactory panorama before the reader,
for his selected narratives run from the time of Lewis’s and Clark’s
discovery of Oregon down to the last of the Indian uprisings.
A projected alliance between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Russian
American Fur Company led, in 1867, to a great piece of foolishness on the
part of an American Secretary of State. Congress was induced to pay some
millions of dollars to purchase a fancy refrigerator and everyone was
scornful of “Seward’s folly.” Edison Marshall has taken the phrase for
the title of his new novel dealing with that period in Alaskan history.
_Seward’s Folly_ relates how Major Jefferson Sharp, late of the army of
the Confederate States of America, was sent to Sitka by Seward. Major
Sharp liked an aristocratic society, and he found it in Sitka where
Russians, Englishmen, Americans and Indians were colorfully combined.
He also encountered, in Molly Forest and her uncle, two Americans
undisturbed by any doubts as to the superiority of American character and
the value of American ideas of liberty and opportunity.
The fact that Major Sharp was still loyal to the spirit of the
Confederacy and had no intention of serving the Union did not tend
to simplify matters. He was, however, no scoundrel; and he came to
recognize, beneath the glitter of Alaskan surfaces, much that his nature
could not countenance. Mr. Marshall has managed an extremely good story.
But he has brightened a portion of history in doing so.
William Patterson White’s _The Twisted Foot_ and B. M. Bower’s _The
Bellehelen Mine_ are novels of the cattle rancher and the miner,
respectively. Mr. White’s story has almost every ingredient of an
exciting yarn—a love interest, an independent young woman who doesn’t
believe in explanations, a mystery, an open enemy, a set of foes whose
methods are mean and underhanded, and a couple of young men who think
quick and shoot quick. The impetuous Buff Warren, cowboy, is sent to
drive off the range a family of “nesters.” He finds that the father is
blind and that the family is making a very brave fight against severe
odds. He also meets Gillian Fair. Instead of putting the Fairs off the
range, Buff takes them under his protection. This means the loss of his
job, and when, by a trick, he gets himself made deputy sheriff, his state
of mind is not helped by the fact that all clues to a bandit who is
terrorizing the region seem to lead to Gillian Fair.
B. M. Bower tells of a silver mine named by a prospector after his two
baby daughters, one of whom, grown to womanhood, is the heroine of _The
Bellehelen Mine_. Helen Strong, left alone to carry out plans that she
and her father had made together, returns to Goldfield and assembles
a crew from among her father’s old miners. It is the beginning of an
unanticipated battle, for the Western Consolidated is determined to make
Helen Strong sell out.
_The Bellehelen Mine_ is to an extent a departure from the author’s
previous books, a story of mine-working and not of ranch life. But it
should be realized that B. M. Bower, or Mrs. Cowan, has been for some
years a mine owner and manager. It would be surprising if she did not use
this phase of her experiences in her fiction. She lives at El Picacho
Mine, Las Vegas, Nevada; and after twenty years of writing Western
fiction it is high time she gave us a mining story.
B. M. Bower is a woman but by no means a tenderfoot. Mary Roberts
Rinehart’s account of her tenderfootage, in _The Out Trail_, is the
most amusing record of a woman in the West on my shelf of recent books.
But the most amusing record of America in general is, I think, _Cobb’s
America Guyed Books_, that series of small volumes with drawings by
John T. McCutcheon, a book to each State. These attach themselves
with a burr-like tenacity to the memory in a series of epigrams. You
remember that Irvin S. Cobb said of New York City: “So far as I know,
General U. S. Grant is the only permanent resident,” and of Indiana:
“Intellectually, she rolls her own,” and of Kansas: “A trifle shy on
natural beauties, but plenty of moral Alps and mental Himalayas.” Such
priceless remarks are more to be cherished—and are more cherished—than
State mottoes; but the _Guyed Books_ have a claim to respect as well
as affection. Each presents, along with various State demerits, partly
humorous and partly real, the honest claim of the people of one section
to be considered as individual, characterizable, with a personality not
lost in the American mass. And Mr. Cobb has not failed to give the people
of each State credit for State achievement.
Yet, because they contain humor, the _Guyed Books_ will always be
classed as works of humor. A little leaven is a dangerous thing. On the
other hand, a little knowledge leaveneth the whole lump. Donald Ogden
Stewart has that little knowledge, and the result is the perfection of
his new work, _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_. It is the fault of authors
of books of family life that they almost always know too much. Mr.
Stewart (as reviewers say) has avoided this shortcoming. And in fiction,
as in any other game, the element of surprise is invaluable. Surprise,
conjecture, suspicion—especially suspicion! It was because she was above
suspicion that Caesar’s wife was not well received in the best Roman
circles. _Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad_ would have helped her.... But, all
seriousness for once aside, Mr. Stewart’s treatise on the American family
unit is masterly. It will give Americans a new status in Paris. There are
many irrelevances and illustrations throughout the book.
ii
Five—usually five and a fraction—per cent. of the people in any community
are confirmed fishermen. The greatest living authority on fishes is David
Starr Jordan, for so many years president of Leland Stanford Junior
University. He is the author of the most important book on its subject, a
piscatorial Bible, in fact, which now appears in a new revised edition.
It has forty-six chapters, and 673 illustrations, of which eighteen are
full-page plates in color. It is by Dr. Jordan, now a man past seventy.
Its title is _Fishes_. It has no other title, and no subtitle. It needs
none.
This marvellous book makes the heart leap as the trout leaps. Nothing so
delightful or complete is found elsewhere. One may know nothing about
fishes—I don’t—and yet turn these pages in a perfect enchantment. I
suppose, in a way, it is the emotion of a first youthful visit to the
Aquarium, but an emotion incredibly magnified. Dr. Jordan speaks of
his volume with what must seem to the reader a ridiculous modesty. He
says it is a non-technical book that may still be valuable to those who
are interested in the study of fishes as science. He says his chief
aim has been “to make it interesting to nature-lovers and anglers, and
instructive to all who open its pages. The fishes used as food and
those caught by anglers in America are treated fully, and proportionate
attention is paid to all the existing as well as all extinct families
of fishes.” This may be true, but it no more explains the book than a
conjuror’s account explains his magic.
Beginning with the fish as a form of life, Dr. Jordan goes through
every attribute of fishes and then, in an incomparable sequence, tells
what we know of each species. There are chapters like that on the
distribution of fishes which seem to transform the world in somewhat
the fashion in which Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo transformed it; other
chapters, like that on the fish as food, are of vital importance; and
such a chapter as that on the mythology of fishes (including the sea
serpent) have a charm irresistible and without equal. At length one
plunges into the sea, swimming through a myriad of sea creatures whose
very names—elasmobranchii or shark-like fishes, the salmonidae, the
mailed-cheek fishes, the dactyloscopidae—are as curious and as evocative
as those strange shapes that float in green water behind aquarium glass.
Dr. James A. Henshall’s _Book of the Black Bass_, an acknowledged
masterpiece, is practically a new book as the result of rewriting and
enlargement. Nearly all the illustrations, including those in color, are
new. In addition to a complete scientific and life history of the fish,
Dr. Henshall gives the last word regarding tools and tackle for catching
what is “inch for inch and pound for pound the gamest fish that swims.”
Let us continue for a little with the authorities on these very special
subjects of sport. Dr. William A. Bruette is one on dogs. He is
well-known as the editor of Forest and Stream, and various particular
books on the dog—or perhaps I should say, on particular dogs—preceded
_The Complete Dog Book_. There is not an opportunity for anything
of its sort to follow it unless some one may be moved to write a
canine encyclopædia in some number of volumes. For _The Complete Dog
Book_—illustrated with photographs, of course—describes the dogs of the
world and very fully describes all the breeds recognized by the American
Kennel Club. It is, throughout, a carefully comparative description,
giving the standards for judging each breed and the good and bad points
of each. The care of dogs in health and their treatment in disease, as
well as their training and general management are gone over in detail;
but Dr. Bruette’s prime service is his wisdom on the subject of buying
puppies. Here are the pages which will save the reader most, both in
dollars and disappointment.
Birds are hard to learn, not easy to observe, and must be taken largely
on trust for an acquaintance. On the other hand, if you will take George
Henry Tilton’s _The Fern Lover’s Companion_ with its 188 illustrations,
go over it carefully, use its glossary of terms and keep an eye about you
in your walks, you may learn the names and the chief characteristics of
our most common ferns in a single season. There is about ferns something
of the fascination there is in fishes—a great variety of form, and forms
of exquisite coloration and beauty of pattern. Mr. Tilton’s handbook is
progressive; if consulted attentively, it can be followed from beginning
to end without confusion or the need of going again over the same ground.
Ground in the book, I mean!
When it comes to covering ground, Charles C. Stoddard’s _Shanks’ Mare_
is a superior article. This book about walking—really, about the joys
of walking—moves without haste and with an easy rhythm of prose and
sentiment. It is one of the few books that have the impelling quality
of fine spring weather. As Stewart Edward White said: “That is the main
thing—to get ’em out.” The remark occurred in a letter to Dr. Claude P.
Fordyce, a letter which forms the introduction to Dr. Fordyce’s capital
book on _Trail Craft_. “I am glad you are publishing the book,” wrote
Mr. White. “All your articles on the out-of-doors life have seemed to
me practical, sensible, and the product of much experience, plus some
discriminative thought.” He followed his words about getting people out
of doors with: “If, in addition, you can give them hints that will,
through their interest or comfort, keep ’em out, the job is complete.”
_Trail Craft_ will do a finished job for a good many who read it. Dr.
Fordyce has the considerable advantage of knowing American wildernesses;
he writes with equal knowledge of practical mountaineering and desert
journeys; tenting, motor camping, the use of balloon silk in camp, camera
hunting, medical improvization, even the possibilities of leather working
for the outdoor man are included in _Trail Craft_.
What percentage of American vacations are now accomplished with the aid
of the automobile must be left for the census of 1930 to determine;
but it is large, and will be larger then. In fact, motor camping is a
distinct department of a magazine like Outers’ Recreation, attended to
along with other editorial duties by F. E. Brimmer, whose _Autocamping_
is rather more necessary than the Blue Book. For a missed road is
remediable, but a non-existent hotel isn’t. Besides, a hotel isn’t
camping.
Having lived outdoors with his family, including small children, for
as long as five consecutive months, Mr. Brimmer has met most of the
contingencies you will have to meet. _Autocamping_ is the difference
between a vacation and a disaster.
Here are two short works of fiction by one of the best living
storytellers whose subjects are drawn from sport. _A Wedding Gift_, by
John Taintor Foote, is annotated by its subtitle, “A Fishing Story.” Mr.
Foote’s _Pocono Shot_ needs no recommendation to those who know his fine
dog story, _Dumb-Bell of Brookfield_. _A Wedding Gift_ is the tale of a
confirmed fisherman, aged forty, who marries a young and beautiful girl.
The story is told by a friend whose wedding gift to the pair consisted of
hand-painted fish plates each with a picture of a trout rising to take a
fly. The bride had packed three trunks with frilly clothes in expectation
of a honeymoon at Narragansett. She was wrong. She was taken to the Maine
woods.
The narrative of what followed is of such a character that the
fisherman’s friend, having heard him out and remembering the dozen
plates, each with a trout painted on it, does not wait to meet the bride.
_A Wedding Gift_ is pure amusement, if you like, but _Pocono Shot_ is
written with an emotion that the reader feels whether he cares for
dogs or not. It has also—owing, perhaps, to its being told in the
first person—an accent of reality. The dog of the story is a black and
white setter, the best bird dog in the Pocono Hills, and better on a
scent than any hound in the country round about. It was this aptitude
which got Pocono Shot into trouble; tracking a man who had caused the
death of a girl, the setter received a terrible axe wound from the
fugitive’s father. The dog is marked by a great shoulder scar. We make
acquaintance with his history at this point, step back for a little to
learn his career, go with him in the field and find out for ourselves
his extraordinary qualities, and then follow him to his reunion with the
master who had shot to kill when the setter’s life was imperilled.
iii
Surely the most exciting trail blazed in our day was the short and
obscure one leading a few feet underground which took Howard Carter and
Lord Carnarvon into Tut-Ankh-Amen’s royal chamber. The second volume
of Howard Carter’s and A. C. Mace’s _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_, now
impending, will round out the record of a discovery which exists, and
is likely to remain, without parallel. The odds against a similar find
are too great for anyone but a mathematician to calculate, and would
be meaningless in any calculation. The first volume of _The Tomb of
Tut-Ankh-Amen_ surpassed most other official and authentic records of its
sort simply because the authors forgot they were archæologists and—told
the story. In the presence of that priceless gift of fortune, standing
where they had stood and breaching a blank wall to find it the threshold
of the inner chamber with its nested gold shrines, who could have
thought of anything but the supreme human and dramatic values of that
scene and fateful moment? Not Howard Carter, certainly. He remembered
then the six long and barren years of unrewarded searching, the first
faint hint that he might be on the right track, the mounting excitement
chilled at regular intervals by the worry of doubt and the littleness
of disappointed hopes. Yet here lay a king of Egypt, his body cased in
gold and his tomb and its seals protected by his gods. It was a story
that could not be told except in all its simplicity. One could no more
dress it up in lore and learning than permit the excesses of emotional
description. _The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen_ is the modern romance of the
conquistador.
While we are on the path of adventure in strange lands I want to draw
attention to a book which transcends the interests of sportsmen. A
fourteen-year-old boy, a circus trainer of animals, Dr. W. T. Hornaday,
of the New York Zoo, Courtney Ryley Cooper, the novelist, and in fact
persons of all ages and occupations will find themselves utterly absorbed
in the pages of A. Blayney Percival’s _A Game Ranger’s Note Book_. This
handsome book, illustrated with photographs, has been arranged and
edited by E. D. Cuming from the great mass of observations, both written
and verbal, made by Mr. Percival during nearly thirty years spent in
Africa, of which about twenty-two were passed in the Game Department of
what is now the Kenya Colony. It opens with seven chapters on the lion,
followed by one or more chapters apiece on the leopard; cheetah, serval
and caracal (one chapter); hunting dogs; hyænas; elephant; rhinoceros;
hippopotamus; buffalo; giraffe; swine; zebra, and antelope. Most of
Mr. Percival’s material about the antelope has had to be reserved for
a separate volume, so copious is it. The book closes with chapters on
hunting and photographing big game. It is utterly untechnical, extremely
modest, occasionally humorous, and as meaty with thrills as with
information about animal characteristics and habits. _A Game Ranger’s
Note Book_ deserves as a pendant in reading Fred L. M. Moir’s _After
Livingstone_, a story of adventure and hunting when big game were more
numerous than now. The story is told by one of two brothers, business men
who were pioneer traders in Africa. It has plenty of bush fighting and
Mr. Moir witnessed scenes of savage life that will probably never come
within the experience of white men again.
GOING OUT?
_Birds of America_, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, John Burroughs, Herbert
K. Job and others. Three volumes. Describes and pictures 1,000 species.
Over 300 species shown in color from New York State Museum drawings. Eggs
of 100 species in actual size and colors.
_The Outdoorsman’s Handbook_, by H. S. Watson and Capt. Paul A. Curtis,
Jr. Tested wisdom on hunting, camping, fishing and woodcraft. Indexed.
_Lake and Stream Game Fishing_, by Dixie Carroll. The author was at the
time of his death recently probably the best known fisherman in the
United States.
_Goin’ Fishin’_, by Dixie Carroll. Pungently written and especially
good on the subject of baits. Equally interesting to the expert and the
occasional angler.
_Streamcraft: An Angling Manual_, by Dr. George Parker Holden. Endorsed
by Stewart Edward White and pronounced by Henry van Dyke “the best of all
modern books on the science of trout-fishing.”
_Casting Tackle and Methods_, by O. W. Smith. Forty years’ experience
condensed by the fishing editor of Outdoor Life and author of _Trout
Lore_.
_The Salt Water Angler_, by Leonard Hulit, is an invaluable and complete
compendium of information for salt water fishermen.
_In the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands_, by J. A. McGuire. The story of an
expedition to gather museum specimens far off the beaten routes. Probably
the best authority on the game resources of the territory.
_Fishing with a Boy_, by Leonard Hulit. The tale of a city man in search
of health with, incidentally, much about the ways of the humbler fishes.
_Jist Huntin’_, by Ozark Ripley. Stories told by an expert guide who has
fished and hunted from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.
_Breaking a Bird Dog_, by Horace Lytle. Altogether unique is this
fascinating account of the process of training, from the author’s actual
experiences.
_What Bird is That?_ by Frank M. Chapman. The most recent Chapman bird
book. Handily divided according to season; every bird pictured in colors.
_Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_, by Frank M. Chapman. A
standard work, invaluable to the bird lover.
3. The Art of Melville Davisson Post
i
Who that read in the Saturday Evening Post of 18 July 1914 a short story
called “The Doomdorf Mystery” forgets it now? No one, I think; and it
was a very short story, and it appeared over ten years ago. The magazine
which published it—if one had read no others—has published 2,500 short
stories since. “The Doomdorf Mystery” is one in a thousand, literally.
The creature, Doomdorf, in his stone house on the rock brewed a
hell-brew. “The idle and the vicious came with their stone jugs, and
violence and riot flowed out.” On a certain day two men of the country
rode “through the broken spine of the mountains” to have the thing
out with Doomdorf. “Randolph was vain and pompous and given over to
extravagance of words, but he was a gentleman beneath it, and fear was an
alien and a stranger to him. And Abner was the right hand of the land.”
About the place were two persons, a circuit rider who had been rousing
the countryside against Doomdorf and who had called down fire from heaven
for the creature’s destruction. A little faded woman was the other.
In his chamber, the door bolted from the inside according to custom,
Doomdorf lay shot to death.
The circuit rider asseverated that heaven had answered his prayer. The
little, frightened, foreign woman showed a crude wax image with a needle
thrust through its heart. She had killed Doomdorf by sorcery.