world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most
helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s _The First Days
of Man_ and _The First Days of Knowledge_. These relate the _true_ fairy
story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such
a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple
tools that man first began by making.
ii
I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the
_Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those
other books for which he made the illustrations, _The Twelve Dancing
Princesses_ and _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, I hope you will
say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be
as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures,
but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay
Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was
brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came
from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by
Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or
great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity
(bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature
received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery
work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures
you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.
Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done
much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have
Hawthorne’s _A Wonder Book_, illustrated by Rackham, or _Edmund Dulac’s
Fairy Book_, or _Stories From the Arabian Nights_, _The Sleeping Beauty
and Other Fairy Tales_, or _Stories from Hans Andersen_, each with
Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the
edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of _The Tempest_.
iii
You are old enough to be thinking about going away to school. You can’t
get too many school stories. In particular, you are keen for a new
book by Ralph Henry Barbour. Nobody writes better school sport books!
_The Fighting Scrub_, Mr. Barbour’s latest, is a picture of life at a
famous New England school; and the fellows and the incidents of the
tale are just as actual as the setting. Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble are
boys everyone can recognize among his friends, and while Loring Dean,
a cripple confined to a wheel-chair, is a new character in a story of
boys, his splendid head-work in planning a forward pass play that makes
the winning touchdown for the school is proof that a boy need not be an
athlete to count.
There are some very pretty points about _The Fighting Scrub_. It has
been usual to write only about a fellow who “made the team.” The scrub
team has been an unsung, unhonored aggregation on which the first team
sharpened its teeth. Mr. Barbour’s hero is only a scrub; but even a
scrub has been known to play in the big game and with crucial results.
Here’s another thing: people have begun to recognize the fact that we
are in danger of losing sight of football and other games as sport, and
of thinking only of winning. Nothing could show better than the history
of Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble in _The Fighting Scrub_ that the real joy
of football lies in the spirit in which you play. Every fellow can see
himself in Clif or Tom or Loring Dean.
Again, there are thousands of boys who will be able to see themselves in
Joe Kenton, the hero of Mr. Barbour’s _Follow the Ball_. Joe is a fellow
who is far from having things all his own way, but he is a sticker.
He has to earn the money to get through school, and that never made it
easier to make a record in athletics. But he shows up well, and _Follow
the Ball_ has baseball, skating, hockey and camping in its pages as well
as football.
The proved classics in the way of school stories are assuredly Owen
Johnson’s. It is sixteen years since the first publication of his first
book of Lawrenceville stories, but Hickey Hicks, Dink Stover, Doc
Macnooder, Hungry Smeed, the Gutter Pup, the Tennessee Shad and Lovely
Mead are as “generally and specifically bully” as when Booth Tarkington
hailed them. Mr. Johnson’s success in _The Prodigious Hickey_, _The
Varmint_ and _The Tennessee Shad_ is as great as Mr. Tarkington’s own
in _Penrod_; immeasurably greater than Kipling’s effort in _Stalky &
Co._ It is true to say that the Lawrenceville stories blend speed,
surprise, mischief and humor with a smoothness and a perfection untouched
by anything else of their sort. They avoid the utter priggishness and
complacency of _Tom Brown’s School Days_, while having the same positive
value of a real school, under its own name and with its own tradition,
as their background. “The only real prep school story ever written,”
said George Ade, crisply, after reading _The Varmint_. Why? No doubt
the fact that the Lawrenceville stories are semi-autobiographical has
much to do with it. For Johnson was a Lawrenceville boy in the 1890s;
there is extant a picture showing him with the original (but somewhat
older) Brian de Boru Finnegan, Turkey Reiter, the Old Roman, and the
Prodigious Hickey. Johnson himself it was who held the skeleton while
Hickey attached it to a rope hung from a ventilator. Johnson sat on the
roof when Old Ironsides—afterward a New York real estate broker—slid off
and got filled with gravel. It was Johnson who experienced the agony
of muffing a ball and being attacked by the whole baseball team, which
he has described as the Varmint’s first discouraging experience with
Lawrenceville athletics.
And after a dozen years, Mr. Johnson recently returned to the
Lawrenceville scene in _Skippy Bedelle_, which tells how Skippy planned
to invent a foot regulator for bathtubs and of certain deplorable
experiments which were to produce mosquito-proof socks. _Skippy Bedelle_
is largely the story of a sentimental progression and includes the first
dress suit and Skippy’s first girl.
In the days when professional ballplayers still had mustaches and you
could give people a thrill by riding down the post-office steps on a
high-wheel bicycle, Irvin S. Cobb was goin’ on fourteen. And in _Goin’
on Fourteen_, his new book with pictures by Worth Brehm, the artist
for Tarkington’s Penrod stories, Cobb has cut a few cross-sections out
of a year in the life of an average boy. Now without in any respect
being literal reminiscences, these chapters accurately and joyously
reflect a scene and a period and a boy most unmistakably American.
For Johnny Custer, otherwise John C. Calhoun Custer, Jr., is neither
Tom Sawyer nor Penrod Schofield—though perhaps more like Tom and Huck
Finn than Penrod—but he is as instantly recognizable and as entirely
“boy” as either. And Johnny Custer was his own trained investigator;
he did not depend upon others to tell him what would happen in
untried circumstances, no, sir! The account of how he and Mr. Simons
short-circuited the fowls of a chicken fancier should be read with
caution; it is likely to leave you in the same condition of happy
helplessness in which it left Johnny.
Albert Payson Terhune, like John Taintor Foote,[33] writes a capital
dog story, and Mr. Terhune’s stories of collies, Buff and Lad and the
others, are known wherever the dog has his due. In _The Heart of a Dog_,
Terhune’s new book, there are one or two tales in which a collie is not
the hero, but Lad and Buff and Treve and Lochinvar Bobby are familiar
friends of the breed which Mr. Terhune himself raises and takes prizes
with. Marguerite Kirmse has made the eight pictures in color and others
in black and white. This is another book that grown-ups will borrow and
neglect to return, if you don’t watch out.
Every boy and girl knows how hard it is to find a good, readable history.
The difficulty was pointed out to Sidney Dark, who set to work at once to
do something about it. And so far he has done magnificently, producing,
in _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, _The Book of England for
Young People_, and _The Book of France for Young People_, three histories
more clear and interesting to boys and girls of ten to sixteen than any
similar accounts. (I do not even except Charles Dickens’s _A Child’s
History of England_, which is one-sided in spots.) Each of Mr. Dark’s
books has sixteen illustrations from famous paintings of historic scenes.
iv
There is an Everyman’s Library—why not an Everychild’s Library? Well,
one has been begun. It is called The Beacon Hill Bookshelf and already
eight volumes are to be had. One of them, _The Boy Whaleman_, has never
been published before; the others are all established favorites stamped
with the approval of librarians and parents as well as of children
themselves. But even the old ones are printed from new type and all the
books are illustrated in color by well-known artists—five to eight color
plates apiece.
The first book on The Beacon Hill Bookshelf is the book that still is
first on children’s bookshelves everywhere throughout America. It is the
book which, in a recent wide competition conducted by The Bookman, led
all other “juveniles.” Its author was Louisa M. Alcott, and its title is
_Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_. Nowadays when you ask people
like Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton what American books they have
read they have a way of recalling at once that Louisa M. Alcott was one
of the first, and—without prejudice to other writers—has remained one of
the most memorable. The Beacon Hill _Little Women_ has pictures by Jessie
Willcox Smith, and is properly companioned in the series by its sequel,
_Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_. Reginald Birch has done
the pictures for _Little Men_.
Of the other six books, I must draw your attention especially to two:
the one which is published for the first time and one by John Masefield.
George F. Tucker’s _The Boy Whaleman_ has a place in the series because
it deals with the experiences of an American lad more than sixty years
ago—almost as far back as Richard Henry Dana’s _Two Years Before the
Mast_. Based on fact, Mr. Tucker’s book is a thrilling account of a New
Bedford boy’s three years’ voyage on a whaling ship.
Mr. Masefield’s book, _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, is illustrated
by T. C. Dugdale, and is a spirited story of a boy who served the Duke
of Monmouth in his attempt to gain the throne of James II. The tale is
therefore one of the Monmouth Rebellion, as the rebellion of 1685 in
England is most often called. Owing to the distinction with which Mr.
Masefield writes, this book is one of the very best of adventure stories
for boys’ or girls’ reading.
Besides the four books of which I have tried to tell something, the
Beacon Hill Bookshelf also holds these four to date:
_What Katy Did_, by Susan Coolidge. This is the most popular of Susan
Coolidge’s books, the story of a girl who would not let illness and
invalidism keep her from doing things.
_The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, by Allen French. Rolf avenges
his father’s murder and earns the viking’s bow in a story with incidents
drawn from the Icelandic sagas.
_Nelly’s Silver Mine_, by Helen Hunt Jackson. This book by the author of
_Ramona_ is as popular today as forty years ago. It is the story of Rob
and Nelly, twins in New England, who take a long journey to a new home in
Colorado, where Nelly finds the mine of the title.
_A Daughter of the Rich_, by Mary E. Waller. The story is a great
favorite with girls, who never fail to be interested in the account of
a year spent on a farm in Vermont by a rich young city girl. Elizabeth
Shippen Green Elliott has made the pictures in color.
AND HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS
_Billy Mink_, by Thornton W. Burgess, illustrated in color by Harrison
Cady. The first volume in a new series of Burgess books which deals with
the animals living in and around the Smiling Pool. For boys and girls of
four to twelve.
_Ruffs and Pompoms_, by Beulah King, illustrated by Maurice Day. Finney
Foo, the clown doll in the toy shop, goes out into the world to find a
smile for the little Chinese Lady and has the strangest adventures that
ever happened to a toy. For boys and girls of six to ten.
_The Valley of Color-Days_, by Helen B. Sandwell, illustrated in color by
Alice Bolam Preston. The strange adventures of Jane and David, who were
taken in charge by Burr, the fairy, while their parents were away for a
few days. For boys and girls of six to ten.
_Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, by Sarah Addington, illustrated by
Gertrude Kay. Twelve original and whimsical tales of the adventures that
happened to the Mother Goose children who lived in Pudding Lane. For boys
and girls of six to twelve.
_The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, by Harold Gaze,
illustrated in color by the author. Ruth and Norman and their Uncle
Hal are taken by the fairies to unusual regions—the heart of Japan,
Cloudland, the Arctic Circle and the Happy Isles. For boys and girls of
seven to twelve.
_The Friends of Diggeldy Dan_, by Edwin P. Norwood, illustrated in color
by A. Conway Peyton. The wonderful circus clown and his animal friends go
to visit the king of Jungleland. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.
_Fifty New Poems for Children._ Here are verses about the things
every child knows, such as dandelions, swallows, the wind, and the
scissors-grinder, mixed with poems about the things of every child’s
wish and fancy—cloud houses, magic wall-paper, goblins and ring-a-ring
fairies. The poets include Robert Graves, Katharine Tynan, Eleanor
Farjeon, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Blair and Madeleine Nightingale.
_Egyptian Tales of Magic_, by Eleanor Myers Jewett, illustrated in color
by Maurice Day. The oldest stories in the world, full of magic and
mystery, which make the kings and sailors and priests and peasants of
ancient Egypt come alive again before our eyes. For boys and girls of ten
to fifteen.
_Medicine Gold_, by Warren H. Miller. A story of adventure, of big game
hunting and fishing and life in the open in the great north woods.
Indians figure in the story and there is an exciting mystery ingeniously
solved. Mr. Miller is known as a writer of boys’ fiction and of outdoor
books for boys.
_Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, by Edward G. Cheyney. You can read this
book alone or as the fourth of a series about a young forester. Assigned
to government service in North Carolina, Scott plays an exciting part in
the settlement of a mountaineers’ feud. The author has worked with the
United States Forestry Service and is a professor in and director of the
University of Minnesota College of Forestry.
_Rat’s Castle_, by Roy Bridges. The fascination of pirate gold hangs in
the background of a slashing, well-told story.
_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by John Kenlon. The Chief of the New York Fire
Department tells the picturesque story of his boyhood and young manhood
on deep water, including shipwreck on the desolate Crozet Islands.
_The Listening Man_, by John A. Moroso. A companion volume to the
author’s _Cap Fallon: Fire Fighter_. This book shows how a retired
detective of the New York City force still takes an interest in and aids
in solving mysteries and in bringing criminals to justice. Cap Fallon
is one of the characters. Mr. Moroso is a novelist who, as a New York
newspaper reporter, covered many big police stories.
_The Boy Scout’s Own Book_, edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This gathers
into one volume those articles and stories from Volumes I-IV of _The
Boy Scouts Year Book_ having to do particularly with Scouting. A book
of especial interest to boys who expect to become Scouts. Joseph A.
Altsheler, Henry van Dyke, Robert E. Peary, Dr. Grenfell and Warren H.
Miller are a few of the authors represented in the book.
_The Boy Scouts Year Book_ (1924), edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This
year’s book features fiction, though the special article and handicraft
features are well maintained. Dan Beard’s how-to-make-it articles, and
stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Homer Croy, Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Joseph B.
Ames, Richard Connell, Raymond L. Spears and William James are included.
_David Blaize of King’s_, by E. F. Benson. The story of David Blaize,
hero of Mr. Benson’s _David Blaize_ and _David Blaize and the Blue Door_,
at Cambridge.
_The Story Key to Geographic Names_, by O. D. von Engeln and Jane
McKelway Urquhart. Takes geography out of the boredom of lists and
figures and tells the stories back of place names.
And for Parents—
_New Roads to Childhood_ and _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of
Children’s Books_, both by Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with
children in the New York Public Library; and _A Century of Children’s
Books_, by Florence V. Barry.
6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley
i
In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his
_Antic Hay_, Aldous Huxley writes:
“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like
a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend,
Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber
to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught
as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping
folds into a large glass receptacle....
“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast,
unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics,
there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests
full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments
and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans
suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living
in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing
continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by
virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....
“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the
channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at
Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had
escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion,
cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and
beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong
and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”
This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of _Limbo_, or of _Crome
Yellow_, nor even of the collection of tales called _Mortal Coils_. No,
it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man
in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind
where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and
full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass,
glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which
Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a
special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied
science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely
congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A
sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling
that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of
sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and
then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from
Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from
Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue
and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied
Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of
living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life
with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, _feuilletons_.
ii
To understand Aldous Huxley’s work it is only necessary to have been
born too late. This includes practically everybody. But to appreciate
his writing requires more of a background than is possessed by those
who would make a cult of him. He has nothing to do with cults, though
perhaps something with literary cultures. His roots are very far back,
the smallest at least as far back as the Elizabethans. Not many can
identify the passage in Marlowe from which are taken the two lines on
the titlepage of _Antic Hay_. There is more than a suspicion that the
grandson of T. H. Huxley is acquainted with Greek and Latin literature
and with the spectacles of the Renaissance. But the alcoves of the
Bodleian Library are well-lined and not too much frequented. The truth
is that Huxley is the child of the nineteenth century far more than of
the twentieth, or the seventeenth, or even the first. And the nineteenth
century is so much in the foreground as to be most unfamiliar ground
for many readers of today. Their backgrounds are too far back, and
their foreground is too far forward; the scene is lost in the middle.
One of the most significant facts about Aldous Huxley is his almost
indiscriminate fondness for the works of Charles Dickens, just as another
in his nephewship to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Consider his two grandfathers.
The renowned scientist, T. H., whose name is still anathema to the simple
fundamentalist, was yet a human, an all too human creature, who, as he
told Henry Holt, tried vegetarianism but had to abandon it because he
found he could no longer think. The father of Julia Arnold (who became
Mrs. Leonard Huxley, Aldous’s mother) was the subject of considerable
conversion and re-conversion by the Church of England and the Church
of Rome. Julia Arnold was a niece of Matthew Arnold, whose doctrine of
sweetness and light wasn’t wasted on a desert air—was, indeed, caught
up and echoed with diminishing but sympathetic outcries. As for Mary
Arnold, who became Mrs. Humphry Ward, the author of _Robert Elsmere_ was
by taste and temperament a scholar whose true monument is possibly her
encyclopædia articles on theologians in Spain.
What, then, is the character of a man barely thirty whose horoscope
belongs to 1894? His sisters and his cousins and his aunts are not to
be left out of the reckoning any more than those of W. S. Gilbert’s
admiral. Brought up to admire Wordsworth, Mr. Huxley has lived to enjoy
him;[34] a child of eminent Victorians, he has a perspicacious eye for
the limitations of Lytton Strachey as a biographer.[35] The inner truth,
of course, is something more important than these details of taste, which
might be accidental. The inner truth is itself an accident—quite possibly
an accident in design. And it is due to the shape of Huxley’s head,
not the outer shape but the shape inside—as we have said, all curious
vaultings, pointed arches, mediæval, constructed for all the rites of a
ceremonious mysticism but constrained by the circumstances of his era and
the exigencies of daily living to be used rather as a laboratory than a
cathedral. One must eat. When Grandfather Huxley gave over eating meat,
he was unable to think, and his grandson, obliged to use a beautiful
brain in journalism and letters, can hardly dedicate it to worship.