mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places.
Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious
ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use,
the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze
Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The
Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this
more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of
hard use.
Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the
text, appear in the two volumes of _Human Origins_.
If the new book on _Haunted Houses_ did not bear the name of so
distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no
place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of
the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully
as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy
is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I
am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will
be captivated by the strange stories to be read in _Haunted Houses_.
Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome
character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados,
a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a
teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal,
the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And
after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted
Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those
associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere
credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously
haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion,
or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday
is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been
legal recognition of haunted houses.
iii
Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical
director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of
physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that
remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, _Cures_. In
_Health Through Will Power_, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which,
more than any other one thing, has been made the foundation of new and
powerful religious sects. But Dr. Walsh’s interest is in the application
and the uses of will power in the individual.
He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such
universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism,
and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in
dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to
bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to
sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.
_Health Through Will Power_ is untechnical. Anyone can read and
understand it.
_Success in a New Era_, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the
application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success
of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of
knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what
they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually
think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make
a success of life.”
Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation,
though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical
energy as great as work.
I am not sure that Dr. Walsh’s warning about reading is needed in
America. “Reading,” he says, “requires the least mental labor of almost
any pursuit, and hardly a person but sooner or later finds himself
putting off something that ought to be done by pretending that he is
accomplishing more by his reading. Reading in itself is excellent, but it
is vastly overused to excuse the inaction of weak and lazy people.” No
doubt; but of 961 people I personally know well, 857 spend every evening
listening to the radio, attending a moving picture, or playing cards and
dancing. Of the remaining 104, only eighty-one read.
Yet Dr. Walsh is dead right when he says that “the best good habit in the
world is the proper use of time”—though the acquisition of more hours in
a day would be helpful—and his _Success in a New Era_ is a singularly
honest and helpful book, free from even one patent formula for attaining
“success.”
_The Foundations of Personality_, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., though
on more general lines, is of no less value. Dr. Myerson analyzes the
elements of character—which is not, of course, the same thing as mind.
Character is intimately related to mind, as the brain and body are
intimately related. Character may be affected by both the mind and the
body; it is not dependent on either. Dr. Myerson describes the general
types of character, the tradition of each and its social heredity; and
he follows the energies of men as they expend themselves in instinct
and emotion and intelligence. Although a physician and a psychologist,
he writes from the standpoint of one who deeply shares the everyday
aspirations and conflicts of his fellows. His comments on the influences
exerted upon character, and on the expression of character in work,
play, humor, sex and religion are of acute interest. His book’s great
practical value is dual: it helps toward self-understanding and it gives
a good deal of help toward insight into the characters of others—a matter
which usually has an important part in determining our own success or
failure in life.
Simpler than _The Foundations of Personality_ because of a much narrower
scope is Arthur Holmes’s _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and
Achievement_. This popularly-written book by a professor of psychology is
almost a handbook on the subject of laziness, its causes and cure. For
not all laziness comes from the same cause, and not all apparent laziness
is laziness in fact. There is such a thing as the indolence of genius,
well-illustrated by Professor Holmes in the cases of Dr. Samuel Johnson,
Oliver Goldsmith, and the naturalist, John Muir. There is the languor of
youth, when the rapid growth of the body may produce a kind of inertia
either physical or mental. The aversion of the normal boy to study is
easily explained, Professor Holmes holds. What people have done much they
like much to do; and what they have done little they like little to do.
What the human race has not done very long is hard for individuals of the
race to do. The human race has hunted and fished for thousands of years;
it has studied for a very few centuries, and studied in the mass for only
about one century. Of course the boy will prefer to hunt or fish!
_Controlled Power_ is so entirely readable that one feels as if it should
be put in the hands of every parent and school teacher. Its wisdom could
do much for them, as well as for the child.
Teachers and many parents could read advantageously also _The Normal
Mind_, by William H. Burnham, professor of pedagogy and school hygiene in
Clark University. If our knowledge of what we call mental hygiene shows
us anything, it shows us that most people do not utilize the brains they
have. The whole purpose of mental hygiene is to teach how to make the
most of one’s inborn ability. The power to think with clearness means
usually the throwing off of bad mental habits.
Professor Burnham, teaching at G. Stanley Hall’s institution and with
a background of many years’ experience and observation, has produced a
book which most satisfactorily compends what we know about mental hygiene
to date. His presentation of the school task, of mental attitudes, of
suggestion and mental hygiene, of success and failure and discipline,
offers in practical form the wisdom we have regarding mental health and
how to attain it.
_Twelve Tests of Character_, by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D.,
has amply proven its popularity; indeed, it has for months been among the
ten best-selling books of non-fiction throughout America. Dr. Fosdick’s
tests are tests of character in action, not conventional qualities nor
abstract traits. Written with reference to Christian teaching, the book
is nevertheless one of extreme popular appeal. Nothing of the sort has
more “rush” of style and pointedness, more irresistibility in brushing
aside objections and obstacles. Undoubtedly the wealth of illustrative
instances and anecdotes has greatly enhanced its popularity.
iv
But my chapter runs too long. I have saved for the end, and will not quit
leaving unmentioned, Albert Payson Terhune’s _Now That I’m Fifty_. Is
Mr. Terhune’s outspokenness a bit brutal? I do not think so. He is fifty
and knows whereof he writes; why should he not tell what he knows? Is it
cruel to say that one should have money, such money as he can acquire,
with which to meet fifty? No, it is common sense. Is it bitter to point
out, with unmistakable instances, that fifty cannot do the things that
twenty does? Most decidedly not; for Mr. Terhune points out those other
things that twenty cannot do, and that fifty can. Fifty cannot run five
miles; twenty can. Very well; when Mr. Terhune was in his twenties and
tried to work a few hours at night after the work of the day, he went all
to pieces. But now, at fifty, he can work better than ever before in his
life; longer hours, harder work; and come out of it smiling. In fact, in
_Now That I’m Fifty_ he practically says: “Look at the things I used to
be able to do and can do no longer; and thank the Lord I can’t!” This
little book of Terhune’s, not much more than an extended essay, is so
honest, so merry, so frank and so mellow that I think fifty can safely
put it in the hands of those who aspire to be fifty.
23. J. C. Snaith and George Gibbs
i
Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material,
need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two
Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such
books as _The Coming_ and _The Undefeated_ he has had material of the
first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a
novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.
The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his
steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who
sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important
matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the
author of _Queed_, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always
doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and
this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder
how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course
entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist
on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a
man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him
of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after
all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select
a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built
body.
J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As
a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His
health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down
on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where
he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club).
But whether in the country or in town, as he says: “Outside of my work,
I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has
been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of
novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature
of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in
a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic,
exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”
It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly,
some sketch of his work. His first novel, _Broke of Covenden_ (1904) is
such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given
us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s _The End of the House
of Alard_, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s _The
Forsyte Saga_ should lose no time in reading _Broke of Covenden_. Richard
Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as
Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like
Lionel Barrymore.
_William Jordan, Junior_ (1907) shares with _The Coming_ (1907)
first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his
novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet
of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the
ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the
artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and
who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil
of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation.
_The Coming_, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure
the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War.
These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done
with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however,
unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of
the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally
been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words,
with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never
quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have
been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and
bring it to earth without shearing its wings.
The same effect is partly realized in _The Sailor_ (1916), supposed
to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the
whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a
charge of sentimentality. Yet _The Sailor_ by virtue of its extreme
realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most
fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either
_William Jordan, Junior_ or _The Coming_ in the elements of popular
interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S.
M. Hutchinson’s _If Winter Comes_; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready
belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to
freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest
hangs breathlessly throughout.
Many, and with justice, consider _The Undefeated_ (1919) the best
novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing
at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this
simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of
war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today,
perhaps, _The Undefeated_ is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith
novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person
that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could
do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had
finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works
of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was
Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred
novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so
many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many
merits in _The Undefeated_ the greatest was the restraint with which
Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H.
G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem
to utter.
There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and
the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on
the order of his _Araminta_; again it is a divertissement of youth, like
_The Principal Girl_; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means
unalloyed with admiration, of _There Is a Tide_. The title is taken, of
course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which,
taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa,
aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her
fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance,
European correspondent of the home-town newspaper, she seems destined to
fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds
friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s
novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously
likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with,
and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided;
and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and
incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though
perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this;
but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using
it for the first time.
The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of
adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel
will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory
knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good
novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark
his own work.
ii
Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of
writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and
painter-illustrator. I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I
ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with
Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem
to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly
differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a
certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious
choice.
He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular
cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator
became more important. For a long while he illustrated his own stories
and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction
developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs
let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he
has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that
his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to
painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and
evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.
George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin
Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was
an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving
as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling
was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the
United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in
favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis
he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art
Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to
writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the
magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began
to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck
to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30.
Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs
got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison
of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in
Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and
then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.
His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes.
Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, _In Search of
Mademoiselle_. After another of the same sort he struck his _metier_ with
_The Medusa Emerald_. With his next novel but one, _The Bolted Door_, he
became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went
through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided
that illustration was not the better part of valor.
He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a
thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had
long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting
different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an
amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have
suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their
work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories
perfectly!
“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as
though they had been written by another person. I got the trained
illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the
picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story,
I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will
be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give
it.”
A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power
which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W.
Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by
his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment,
it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become
steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in
the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for
character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue
and suspense, like _The Yellow Dove_, the characterization is far from
superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his
time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr.
Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their
distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr.
Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or
social stratification. _The Yellow Dove_ opens with excellent Cockney
talk; _The Secret Witness_ moves with assurance in central Europe; _The
Golden Bough_ details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; _The
Black Stone_ has scenes in Arabia; _The Splendid Outcast_ is vivid with
bits of the Paris underworld; _The House of Mohun_ chronicles the rise
and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and
its Long Island estate; and the heroine of _Fires of Ambition_ is a
red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit
concern.
A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which
he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with _Youth Triumphant_
(1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative
of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton
expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life
and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so
much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties.
The deepening treatment is noticeable in _The House of Mohun_. It is
continued in _Fires of Ambition_, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life,
asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they
in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the
maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and
most competent novel, _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.