solving to find a single unknown quantity; two are necessary if two
unknown quantities are to be ascertained; and so on. Given three unknown
quantities and only two equations, the affair is hopeless. In a perfectly
constructed mystery story, the reader is solving for several unknown
quantities—for _x_ and for _y_ and possibly for _z_—but always with one
too few equations.
When he came to write _The Four Stragglers_ (1923) Mr. Packard had had
a considerable experience in handling plots. The first eight pages of
the book show three men huddled together under a bombardment in France.
Their talk reveals them as former confederates in crime in London. There
is a fourth man lying very still on the ground, apparently dead or dying.
To make sure, one of the three shoots him. The group is in pitch darkness
except for occasional flares. One of these, coming shortly, lights the
scene fully. All three look at the spot where a murdered man should be
lying. No man is there.
The story opens three years later, in London. We see the three
confederates, a varied, effectively contrasted three, reassembled and
active. We follow them in a thrilling operation. The main thread now
begins to spin. Just as the three have planned to cease operations and
take a vacation they come to know of the existence of a treasure hid and
watched over by a madman on one of the islands or keys off the Florida
coast. The knowledge comes to each one separately, except that B and C
each knows that A knows it. And the fourth man, D?
One of the excellences of _The Four Stragglers_ is the economy of means;
there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the
action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably
to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the
madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily
intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their
bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely
inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but
with the window shades tightly drawn down:
“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected
bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere
about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there
was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner
of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor,
and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.
“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was
wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.
“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again.
‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well,
last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are
always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane
titter again....
“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking,
the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was
no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at
the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that
contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing,
but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an
extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume
almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water
rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the
tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”
The reader of _The Four Stragglers_ will say, with entire truth: “There
is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but
there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an
equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore,
a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm
indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral
order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is
death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the
possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson
from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by _The
Miracle Man_ and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”;
“a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard
could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at
his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem
unreasonable.
vi
Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant,
and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the
north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard
and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on
the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of
daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this
continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long
and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the
evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a
notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend,
the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard
insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good,
even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H.
Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New
York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the
bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there
are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club
in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours
between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact
that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the
liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing
government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has
abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.
A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North
on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of
hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise.
But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful
exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.
He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking
mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the
world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and
then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped
over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued
through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he
went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple
of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.
Again, in 1923, he went to South America.
Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the
course of his round the world trip took shape. _The Locked Book_ is in
characteristics somewhat like _The Four Stragglers_. It begins with a
yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation
to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound
in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass,
and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over
the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot
move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the
book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The
reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly
interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of
the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.
He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about
fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of
the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility”
of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his
sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and
elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution
can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of _The
Miracle Man_.
BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.
1911 _On the Iron at Big Cloud_
1913 _Greater Love Hath No Man_
1914 _The Miracle Man_
1916 _The Belovéd Traitor_
1917 _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
1917 _The Sin That Was His_
1918 _The Wire Devils_
1919 _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
1919 _The Night Operator_
1920 _From Now On_
1920 _The White Moll_
1921 _Pawned_
1922 _Doors of the Night_
1922 _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_
1923 _The Four Stragglers_
1924 _The Locked Book_
SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD
In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis,
280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.
22. All Creeds and None
i
This ought to be the most interesting chapter in this book. For it
deals with the subject of belief. Belief is of many kinds—religious,
scientific, philosophical—but when one ceases to believe in anything at
all, one dies.
In Chapter 10, I tried to indicate how the interest in religious belief
has already begun to reflect itself in current fiction. In this chapter I
am to deal with books which vary profoundly but are all straightforward
efforts to express a belief held to be worth while. For the difficulty
is not a lack of things to believe in, but a choice among them, a
reconciliation (sometimes) of one with another; and very often a search
for the thing that will mean more than life itself.
Can anything mean more than life itself? Yes. Men and women have
sacrificed their lives for such.
Are the terms of belief capable of a common expression, acceptable to all
men and women? No; at least, not yet.
Is it even necessary to know what one believes, in the sense of being
able to give it a satisfactory expression? No; not if one lives it.
Can anything be achieved by reading books on belief? Yes. I suppose you
may show surprise if I say that disagreement is often more useful than
agreement. But agreement leading to a placid inactivity is against the
very principle of life itself.
Disagreement causes thought. Thinking always enlarges our living. For
what we then do is done more consciously, more knowingly, than before. To
that extent—and in no other way is it possible—we live more fully.
Which among the books to follow you ought to read or in what order they
are for your reading, no one like myself can determine, for an answer
depends on your belief, tastes, the extent of your reading and the extent
of your thinking. Such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_
is safely commendable to anyone, anywhere. But such studies as Lord
Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, full of refinements and instinct with
intellectual subtlety, are for the scholarly taste. Dr. E. Y. Mullins’s
_Christianity at the Crossroads_ is fundamentalist in its position. Dr.
Joseph A. Leighton’s _Religion and the Mind of Today_ is the work of a
churchman who is also a philosopher and a teacher; it adopts the liberal
attitude. And a number of these books concern themselves with health, the
mind, the will and the spirit—those factors which so often determine not
only belief, but the possibility of believing in anything.
If I start with Ernest Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, a work now many years
old, I do so because this Frenchman’s extraordinary book remains
undisplaced by the current great success of Papini’s _Life of Christ_,
but also because the popularity of Papini’s book shows where the average
interest lies. For when men begin contending about the forms of creeds
and the facts behind phrases which have become sacred formulas, the
instinct of the ordinary man is to go straight to the essentials and the
beginnings. Let doctors argue the Virgin Birth; he rather asks himself
what sort of Man was this Son born of Mary. It is the assertion of this
instinct, joined to the timely appearance of the _Life of Christ_ with
its undeniable interest and eloquence, which made the success of Papini’s
volume. Such a success is fleeting. Like other converts and re-converts
to Catholicism, Papini exhibited a marked tendency toward a belief that
little had happened in the centuries preceding his accession. Not so,
Renan. To go from the Italian to the Frenchman is to pass from painted
scenery to the clear air and the sublime altitude of mountain peaks.
There is something beyond eloquence, and Renan has it. With him both
reflection and emotion are controlled; they lift him high and sustain him
there. “Disastrous to Reason the day when she should stifle religion!”
exclaimed this author of the _Life of Jesus_, adding: “Religions are
false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to define it, to incarnate
it; but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors they
import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the value of the
truth which they proclaim. The simplest of the simple, provided he
practice heart-worship, is more enlightened as to the reality of things
than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by chance or by
finite causes.”
Renan was repeatedly called an atheist; but none of the books discussed
in this chapter are atheistic. I should present any which were, but I
think it significant that none is. Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, a
strictly philosophical treatise in sequence to his _Theism and Humanism_,
is a deliberate attempt to consider whether theism—that is, belief in
God—is necessary or good. And every Balfourian conclusion is in favor of
theism. Dr. L. P. Jacks, with his marvelous simplicity of expression,
deals in _Religious Perplexities_ with the two questions that every man
asks: Why am I here? Why am I, and not some other, here and now? But the
answer to both of these questions, stated as Dr. Jacks states it, for men
of every sort, Christian and non-Christian, presupposes a God.
The three most recent books by Dr. Jacks vary considerably. _The Lost
Radiance of the Christian Religion_ is simply an address in which
he makes a moving appeal for the recapture of Christian joyousness.
_Realities and Shams_ is a series of essays produced by reflection on
events of the last nine years, continuous in the thread of their thought,
which is the few and simple tests to tell the genuine from the false;
and Dr. Jacks applies these tests to some public affairs. _A Living
Universe_ is directly related to _Religious Perplexities_; its point is
that education without religious feeling is lifeless, just as a universe
in which education does not proceed is a dead universe.
Such books as _Realities and Shams_ and _A Living Universe_ are directly
related to Felix Adler’s Hibbert lectures, now published under the title,
_The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_. The distinguished founder of
the Ethical Culture Society has never been one to deal with abstractions.
In this book he brings his spiritual ideal to bear upon the problem of
marriage, the labor problem, and the problem of a society of nations.
The essence of his teaching, which employs both Jewish and Christian
ideals of holiness, is his conception of a “weft of souls” in which each
individual soul has intrinsic worth but all share in, and contribute to,
a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency
of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard.
The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations
in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it.
And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations
seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the
principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.
_Religion and the Mind of Today_, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful
definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He
is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author
of _Man and the Cosmos_ and of an introductory book on philosophy used
in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living
evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with
a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book
consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of
religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to
culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of
Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of
ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern
life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr.
Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific
discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such
religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe,
the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of
the soul.
His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer
Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can
be said about _Contributions of Science to Religion_, it is that the
book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of
the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors
in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to
tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their
special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would
be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the
construction of the universe, the earth and man, is there any room left
for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that
“a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.”
And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific
knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it
_should_ do so.”
He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he
prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter;
and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter,
director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of
California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert
A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an
electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The
arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example,
one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons
to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but
containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.
There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific
chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone
who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr.
Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor
Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more _difficult_
than seeing electrons there.”
But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize
that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely
provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely
mystical, _Contributions of Science to Religion_ must remain all beside
the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must
not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply
that that, precisely, is what _his_ religion is for. And with many the
question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather
the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary, puts it in his _Christianity at the Crossroads_:
“Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will
it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked,
the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins argues—and without appeal
to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and
autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to
be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the
victory will lie.
ii
Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Making of Man_ has something in common with the
books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to;
but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an
after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but _Making
of Man_ is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in
evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author
then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the
soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that
what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality
of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning
to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to
be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of
this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined.
Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not
cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere,
and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.
In _Evolution: the Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has
written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply
expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains
to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and
in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make
definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of
its significance to mankind.
The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely
scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to
speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.
And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general
reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is
known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history
of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as
the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown
by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s _Men of the
Old Stone Age_ and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling
for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s _An Outline of History_. But
pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had
never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy
has done it in the two volumes of his _Human Origins: A Manual of
Pre-History_.
_Human Origins_ is a great book. It must be remembered that all we
know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years,
discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered.
I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing _Human Origins_;
its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr.
MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the
whole affair into a superlative story.
Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age,
testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear
evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while.
During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over
Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm
intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper
paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance
toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the
extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for
thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.