_American Nights
Entertainment_
_GRANT OVERTON_
[Illustration]
_By_ GRANT OVERTON
_About Books and Authors_
AMERICAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT
WHEN WINTER COMES TO
MAIN STREET
THE WOMEN WHO MAKE
OUR NOVELS
_Fiction_
ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT
THE ANSWERER
WORLD WITHOUT END
THE THOUSAND-AND-FIRST
NIGHT (_In Preparation_)
[Illustration]
_American Nights
Entertainment_
BY
GRANT OVERTON
_New York, 1923_
D. APPLETON & CO. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GRANT OVERTON
_First Printing, September, 1923._
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
Bound in Interlaken-Cloth
_This Book_
IS DEDICATED TO BOOKSELLERS
AND BOOKREADERS EVERYWHERE
BY THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHERS
WHO HAVE JOINED IN ITS PRODUCTION
[Illustration]
_Preface_
This book is written because of the rapid spread of the habit of
reading books, developing in its march an interest in the personalities
of authors. Indeed, the existence of this book is an evidence of the
quick contagion of the book-reading habit, since four publishing houses
have joined to make possible the pages that follow.
Few developments of the early part of this century are more encouraging
than the new attention to books. The increase in book stores, the very
large increase in the number of books sold, the multiplication of
libraries and their great patronage, the success of new book review
pages and periodicals--all are signs of the change that has come about
in recent years, and perhaps especially during and since the war of
1914-18.
And in a narrower department, no development of recent years has borne
a more cheerful promise than the resolution of four publishers to
associate themselves in an enterprise the disinterestedness of which
the reader is invited to assess for himself.
The entire responsibility for the estimates and opinions offered (where
they are not directly attributed) is mine. I have tried to tell the
truth, use my imagination legitimately, and observe good taste without
the sacrifice of valuable insights into character and work.
For example, in addition to biographical facts, in themselves
often unenlightening, I have usually tried, as in the account of
Mr. Galsworthy, to disclose the personality so carefully (albeit
high-mindedly) withheld from the writer’s books. Again, as in the
chapter on Joseph Conrad, aside from the effort at novelty and
freshness of interest by the device of adopting Conrad’s own Marlow
as the narrator, I have made bold to set down some facts never before
printed and not in the least generally known, because they seem to me a
side of the picture that it is wrong to obscure.
The wealth of material spread before me has made the task of selection
exceedingly difficult, and I cannot pretend to be satisfied with
what I have chosen in the light of my knowledge of what has had to
be left out. I owe a grateful acknowledgment to the publishers and
to individuals in the several publishing houses for their generous
assistance.
_1 August, 1923._
GRANT OVERTON.
[Illustration]
_Contents_
_1_ MR. GALSWORTHY’S SECRET LOYALTIES, _13_
_2_ THE MAGIC CARPET, _34_
_3_ A BREATHLESS CHAPTER, _51_
_4_ IN THE KINGDOM OF CONRAD, _64_
_5_ THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ARTHUR TRAIN, _91_
_6_ THE LADY OF A TRADITION, MISS SACKVILLE-WEST, _102_
_7_ HAROLD BELL WRIGHT, _119_
_8_ “AH, DID YOU ONCE SEE SHELLEY PLAIN?” _139_
_9_ ALICE IN AUTHORLAND AND PENROD’S FIVE-FOOT SHELF, _157_
_10_ THE MAN CALLED RALPH CONNOR, _178_
_11_ HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE, _189_
_12_ TOTALLING MR. TARKINGTON, _217_
_13_ A PARODY OUTLINE OF STEWART, _239_
_14_ MISS ZONA GALE, _248_
_15_ FOR THE LITERARY INVESTOR, _255_
_16_ NATURALIST VS. NOVELIST: GENE STRATTON-PORTER, _270_
_17_ POETRY AND PLAYS, _293_
_18_ LOST PATTERNS, _313_
_19_ JOSEPH C. LINCOLN DISCOVERS CAPE COD, _321_
_20_ EDITH WHARTON AND THE TIME SPIRIT, _345_
_21_ THE UNCLASSIFIED CASE OF CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, _363_
_22_ THE PROPHECIES OF LOTHROP STODDARD, _380_
INDEX, _387_
[Illustration]
_Portraits_
JOHN GALSWORTHY, _15_
JOSEPH CONRAD, _65_
ARTHUR TRAIN, _93_
V. SACKVILLE-WEST, _103_
HAROLD BELL WRIGHT, _121_
BOOTH TARKINGTON, _219_
DONALD OGDEN STEWART, _241_
JOSEPH C. LINCOLN, _323_
EDITH WHARTON, _347_
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, _365_
_American Nights Entertainment_
_American Nights_
ENTERTAINMENT
_1. Mr. Galsworthy’s Secret Loyalties_
i
In the autumn of 1922 New York began to witness a play by John
Galsworthy, called _Loyalties_. Not only the extreme smoothness of the
acting by a London company but the almost unblemished perfection of
the play as drama excited much praise. Because, of the two principals,
one was a Jew and the other was not, with consequent enhancement of
the dramatic values in several scenes, it was said (by those who
always seek an extrinsic explanation) that _Loyalties_ simply could
not have avoided being a success in New York. The same type of mind
has long been busy with the problem of Mr. Galsworthy as a novelist.
It read _The Man of Property_ and found the book explained by the fact
that the author was a Socialist. Confronted with _The Dark Flower_,
it declared this “love life of a man” sheer sentimentalism (in 1913
there was no Freudianism to fall back on). And the powerful play called
_Justice_ was accounted for by a story that quiet Mr. Galsworthy had
“put on old clothes, wrapped a brick in brown paper, stopped in front
of a tempting-looking plate-glass window” and let ’er fly. On being
“promptly arrested,” he “gave an assumed name, and the magistrate, in
his turn, gave Galsworthy six months. That’s how he found out what the
inside of English prisons was like.”
A saying has it that it is always the innocent bystander who gets
hurt; but the fate of the sympathetic bystander--and such a one John
Galsworthy has always been--is more ironic. That peculiar sprite,
George Meredith’s Comic Spirit, reading all that has been written about
Galsworthy would possibly find some adequate comment; but Meredith is
dead and the only penetrating characterisation that occurs to me is:
“Galsworthy’s the kind of man who, if he were in some other station of
life, would be a splendid subject for Joseph Conrad.”
In the middle of _Loyalties_ a character exclaims: “Prejudices--or are
they loyalties--I don’t know--criss-cross--we all cut each other’s
throats from the best of motives.” Well, in a paper written in 1917 or
earlier and included in their book, _Some Modern Novelists_, published
in January, 1918, Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett, discussing
Galsworthy’s early novels put down a now very remarkable sentence, as
follows:
“Mr. Galsworthy does not see how two loyalties that conflict can both
be right; and he is always interested in the larger loyalty.”
[Illustration: © _Eugene Hutchinson_ JOHN GALSWORTHY]
So interesting and significant a statement, buried as seed, might
easily sprout as novel or play. I have no atom of evidence that Mr.
Galsworthy ever saw the comment; but if he read it and forgot (buried?)
the words, then _Loyalties_ was written in their effectual disproof.
For in this drama, as in all his novels, as in all his other dramas,
Mr. Galsworthy is constantly seeing and portraying how conflicting
loyalties both are right; he is never interested in the larger loyalty
and cannot keep his eye on it through consecutive chapters or through a
single act; he is forever presenting the two or more sides and taking
none. He once said: “I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to
learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways.” He should have
added:“--and I have never learned it!”
ii
“Learned,” of course, in the sense of “accepted,” of becoming
reconciled to the fact. It did not need Mr. St. John Ervine to tell
us that “Mr. Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of
modern letters”; for of all modern writers the author of _Loyalties_
and _The Forsyte Saga_ is the most transparent. He is transparent
without being in the smallest degree luminous; he refracts, but he does
not magnify--a prism through which we may look at society.
Compare him for a moment with Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad is by no means
always transparent; his opacity is sometimes extraordinary, as in _The
Rescue_; and yet from the midst of obscure sentences, like a gleam
from those remarkably deep-set eyes, something luminous will shine
out, both light and heat are given forth. “In a certain cool paper,”
explains Galsworthy, “I have tried to come at the effect of the war;
but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much
more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.”
But even when telling the more poignant tale, as in _Saint’s Progress_,
the coolness is noticeable, like the air of an April night; the key
is still sober, pitched low; and the trembling passion of a melody
proclaimed by violins is quickly muted. Such is his habitual restraint,
so strong is his inhibition, that when we hear the orchestral brasses,
as we do once or twice in _Justice_ and _Loyalties_, it shocks us,
like a rowdy outburst in a refined assembly or a terse sentence in
Henry James. But it is nothing, nothing. Mr. Galsworthy has momentarily
achieved a more perfect than usual transparency; he has suddenly
surrendered to the pounce of another of those multitudinous loyalties
which give him no peace and the secret of which, except for its
continual disclosure in his works, he would most certainly carry with
him to the grave.
For he does not talk. No! “You are nearer Galsworthy in reading his
books than in a meeting.” Another keenly observant person summed up
Galsworthy’s conversational resources in the one word: “Exhausted!”
St. John Ervine: “Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has
been closely retained, and the reticence characteristic of the English
people ... is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy.... How
often have we observed in our relationships that some garrulous person,
constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal
knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips
tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr.
Galsworthy’s handsome, sensitive face, and is immediately aware of
tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things
done to him, but because of things done to others.” Mr. Galsworthy,
in a personal letter: “The fact is I cannot answer your questions.
I must leave my philosophy to my work generally, or rather, to what
people can make out of that work. The habit of trying to tabloid
one’s convictions, or lack of convictions, is a pretty fatal one;
as I have found to my distaste and discredit.” He conducts his own
cross-examination, in new books, new plays. He acknowledges, with quiet
discontent, the claims upon his sense of loyalty of a dog, a jailbird,
two “star-crossed lovers,” the wife of a possessive Forsyte, a De Levis
unjustly used. His pen moves, with a bold stroke, across the paper;
another secret is let out; his lips tighten. He is serene and indignant
and completely happy.
Why not? “My experience tells me this: An artist who is by accident
of independent means can, if he has talent, give the Public what he,
the artist, wants, and sooner or later the public will take whatever
he gives it, at his own valuation.” And he speaks of such artists as
able to “sit on the Public’s head and pull the Public’s beard, to use
the old Sikh saying.” Nothing else is worth while--for an artist. “The
artist has got to make a stand against being exploited.” But if the
artist should exploit himself, or anything more human or individual
than that impersonal entity, the Public, Mr. Galsworthy’s mouth would
become grim again; his loyalty would be forfeited, I think. There might
be a larger cause, but his concern would be with the other fellow. And
however hard you might press him for a verdict, he would bring in only
a recommendation for mercy.
iii
The Galsworthys have been in Devonshire as far back as records
go--“since the flood--of Saxons, at all events,” as John Galsworthy
once put it. His mother came of a family named Bartleet, whose county
for many centuries was Worcestershire. The boy, John, was born in
1867 at Coombe, in Surrey. “From the first,” continues the anonymous
but authorised sketch I am quoting, “his salient characteristics were
earnestness and tenacity. Not surprisingly brilliant, he was sure and
steady; his understanding, not notably quick, was notably sound. At
Harrow from 1881-1886 he did well in work and games. At New College,
Oxford, 1886-1889, he graduated with an Honour degree in Law. After
some further preparation he was called to the bar (Lincoln’s Inn) in
1890. It was natural he should have taken up the law, since his father
had done so. ‘I read,’ he says, ‘in various chambers, practised almost
not at all, and disliked my profession thoroughly.’
“In these circumstances he began to travel. His father, a successful
and unusual man in both character and intellect, was ‘not in a position
to require his son to make money’; his son, therefore, travelled,
off and on, for nearly two years, going, amongst other places, to
Russia, Canada, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, the Fiji
Islands, and South Africa. On a sailing-ship voyage between Adelaide
and the Cape he met and became a fast friend with the novelist Joseph
Conrad, then still a sailor. We do not know whether this friendship
influenced Galsworthy in becoming a writer; indeed, we believe that
he has somewhere said that it did not. But Galsworthy did take to
writing, published his first novel, _Jocelyn_, in 1899, _Villa Rubein_
in 1900, _A Man of Devon and Other Stories_ in 1901.” _Jocelyn_ has
been dropped from the list of Galsworthy’s works, _Villa Rubein_ was
revised in 1909, _The Island Pharisees_, a satire of English weaknesses
which appeared in 1904, was revised four years later; and it was not
until the publication of _The Man of Property_ in 1906 that our author
succeeded in sitting on the Public’s head and twining his fingers
firmly into the Public’s whiskers.
This was the first volume of the then-unplanned _Forsyte Saga_ and it
led Conrad, who had two years previously dedicated to Galsworthy what
remains his greatest novel (_Nostromo_), to write an article in which
he said:
“The foundation of Mr. Galsworthy’s talent, it seems to me, lies in
a remarkable power of ironic insight combined with an extremely keen
and faithful eye for all the phenomena on the surface of the life he
observes. These are the purveyors of his imagination, whose servant
is a style clear, direct, sane, illumined by a perfectly unaffected
sincerity. It is the style of a man whose sympathy with mankind is too
genuine to allow him the smallest gratification of his vanity at the
cost of his fellow-creatures ... sufficiently pointed to carry deep
his remorseless irony and grave enough to be the dignified vehicle of
his profound compassion. Its sustained harmony is never interrupted by
those bursts of cymbals and fifes which some deaf people acclaim for
brilliance. Before all it is a style well under control, and therefore
it never betrays this tender and ironic writer into an odious cynicism
of laughter and tears.
“From laboriously collected information, I am led to believe that
most people read novels for amusement. This is as it should be. But
whatever be their motives, I entertain towards all novel-readers the
feelings of warm and respectful affection. I would not try to deceive
them for worlds. Never! This being understood, I go on to declare, in
the peace of my heart and the serenity of my conscience, that if they
want amusement they shall find it between the covers of this book. They
shall find plenty of it in this episode in the history of the Forsytes,
where the reconciliation of a father and son, the dramatic and
poignant comedy of Soames Forsyte’s marital relations, and the tragedy
of Bosinney’s failure are exposed to our gaze with the remorseless
yet sympathetic irony of Mr. Galsworthy’s art, in the light of the
unquenchable fire burning on the altar of property. They shall find
amusement, and perhaps also something more lasting--if they care for
it. I say this with all the reserves and qualifications which strict
truth requires around every statement of opinion. Mr. Galsworthy will
never be found futile by anyone, and never uninteresting by the most
exacting.”
Twelve years after the appearance of _The Man of Property_, in the
volume _Five Tales_ (1918), was included a long short story, _Indian
Summer of a Forsyte_. The year 1920 saw publication of the novel, _In
Chancery_, and another long short story, _Awakening_; and the following
year brought the novel, _To Let_. These five units, separately in the
order named or together in the same chronological order in the thick
volume called _The Forsyte Saga_, compose a record of three generations
of an English family which has very justly been compared to the Esmonds
of Thackeray. The Forsytes and their associates and connections are
indeed “intensely real as individuals--real in the way that the Esmonds
were real; symbolic in their traits, of a section of English society,
and reflecting in their lives the changing moods of England in these
years.” The motif is clearly expressed by certain words of young Jolyon
Forsyte in _The Man of Property_:
“‘A Forsyte is not an uncommon animal. There are hundreds among the
members of this club. Hundreds out there in the streets; you meet
them wherever you go!... We are, of course, all of us slaves of
property, and I admit that it’s a question of degree, but what I
call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of
property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip
on property--it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or
reputation--is his hallmark.... “Property and quality of a Forsyte.
This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is
unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or
I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons
and habitats of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence
of competitive tranquillity”.... They are half England, and the better
half, too, the safe half, the three-per-cent half, the half that
counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible;
makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion,
possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but
turn them all to use, where should we be?’”
One of Galsworthy’s severest critics, St. John Ervine, calls _The
Forsyte Saga_ “his best work,” and breaks the force of many strictures
to declare: “The craftsmanship of _To Let_ is superb--this novel is,
perhaps, the most technically-correct book of our time--but its human
value is even greater than its craftsmanship. In a very vivid fashion,
Mr. Galsworthy shows the passing of a tradition and an age. He leaves
Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he does not leave him entirely
without sympathy; for this muddleheaded man, unable to win or to keep
affection on any but commercial terms, contrives in the end to win the
pity and almost the love of the reader who has followed his varying
fortunes through their stupid career. The frustrate love of Fleur and
Jon is certainly one of the tenderest things in modern fiction.”
iv
Grove Lodge, The Grove, Hampstead, London, N. W. 3, is the residence
of Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy; if you have occasion to telephone, call
Hampstead 3684. The approach to the house is described by Carlton Miles
in the Theatre Magazine (December, 1922):
“The Galsworthys live at the bottom of a long, rambling lane called The
Grove, in that part of Hampstead that looks calmly down on the crowded
chimneypots of northwestern London. To reach the house you must climb
a steep hill from the underground station and pass the stone building
in which Du Maurier wrote _Peter Ibbetson_ and to whose memory it bears
a tablet. A few minutes’ walk in one direction and you are in Church
Row with the historic cemetery in which Du Maurier and Beerbohm Tree
rest side by side. Follow the Grove walk and you arrive on Hampstead
Heath, black with thousands of workers on Bank Holiday, overlooking the
little row of cottages where Leigh Hunt and his followers established
their ‘Vale of Health.’ But, having passed the Du Maurier home, you
turn fairly to your left, descend a winding pathway that takes you by
the Admiral’s House--designated by large signs--erected 159 years ago
by an aged commander who built his home in three decks and mounted it
with guns. The guns have vanished but the Admiral’s House still is one
of the sights of Hampstead.
“At the end of the lane a small grilled iron gate shuts off the world
from a green yard and a low white house, whose rambling line suggests
many passageways and sets of rooms. A sheltered, secluded spot, the
place above all others where Galsworthy should live. Peace has been
achieved in five minutes’ walk from the noisy station. ‘The Inn of
Tranquillity.’
“A turn down a long hallway, up a short flight of steps--a bright,
flower-decked livingroom, a tea table, a dark-eyed, low-voiced hostess,
a clasping of hand by host and a bark you interpret as cautious
approval from Mark, the sheepdog, lying on the hearth rug. Mark is
named for one of Galsworthy’s characters”--Mark Lennan in _The Dark
Flower_?-- “... moments flee before you dare steal a look at the
middle-aged gentleman sitting quietly in his chair, striving with
gentle dignity to place you at the ease he feels not himself.
“Tall, grey-haired he looks astonishingly like his photographs.
Reticent to a degree about his own work, he talks freely and with the
utmost generosity about that of others. Opinion, formed slowly, is
determined. The face, with its faint smile, looks neither disheartened
nor sad, yet sometime it has met suffering. Like most Englishmen the
eagerness of youth has not been crushed.... There is nothing chill
about the novelist. He is the embodiment of easy, gracious courtesy.
Conversation is far from intimidating, a long flow of material topics
with now and then an upward leap of thought. And it is this swift
flight that betrays his mental withdrawal. As clearly as if physically
present may be seen the robed figure of his thoughts, standing behind
him in his own drawingroom. You wonder what may be their burden. About
him is the veil of remoteness.”
His humility, adorned by his presence and made disarming by what is
certainly the most beautiful head and face among the living sons
of men, does not always save him from the charge of coldness when
manifested impersonally and at a distance. Where nearly all men and
women give essential particulars of their lives, not to mention the
human touch of their preferred recreations, Mr. Galsworthy, in the
English _Who’s Who_, besides the long list of his publications, states
only the year of his birth, his residence, and his membership in the
Athenæum Club. This would hardly support Mr. Ervine’s declaration
that the Galsworthy sensitiveness “is almost totally impersonal”; and
instead of being “startled to discover how destitute of egotism Mr.
Galsworthy seems to be” the close student of mankind might be led to
speculate upon the variety of egotism he had just encountered. “It
may even be argued,” pursues Mr. Ervine, cautiously, “that his lack
of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry, that it is
impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned
about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is.” With due respect to Mr. Ervine,
this is nonsense. Whatever Mr. Galsworthy may lack, it is not interest
in himself. He has achieved countless satisfactory channels for the
extrusion of that interest through other and imaginary men, women and
beasts--that is all.
v
It is as if he had long ago said to himself, as perhaps he did: “I
am myself, but myself isn’t a subject I can decently be concerned
about or expose an interest in. Let me forget myself in someone--in
everyone--else!” And since then, if he has ever repented, the spectacle
of George Bernard Shaw, and particularly the horridly fascinating
spectacle of Herbert George Wells, have been before him, to serve
as awful warnings and lasting deterrents. Mr. Wells, in ever-new
contortions, like a circus acrobat whose nakedness was gaudily
accentuated by spangles, began seeing it through with Ann Veronica
and is still exposing the secret places of his heart, while dizzy
recollections of marriage, God and tono-bungay yet linger. Mr. Shaw has
gone back to ... evolution.
“I was,” Mr. Galsworthy has said in an uninhibited moment, “for
many years devoted to the sports of shooting and racing. I gave up
shooting because it got on my nerves. I still ride; and I would go
to a race-meeting any day if it were not for the din, for I am still
under the impression that there is nothing alive quite so beautiful as
a thoroughbred horse.” His devotion to dogs and other dumb animals is
frequently spoken of as it extrudes in _Memories_, Noel’s protection
of the rabbit in _Saint’s Progress_ and “For Love of Beasts” in _A
Sheaf_. These shifting loyalties were--what were they if not admirable
realisations of the Self? But let those who still believe Mr.
Galsworthy selfless but read the prefaces to the new and very handsome
Manaton Edition of his works. For these volumes he has provided sixteen
entirely new prefaces. I quote from the announcement of the edition:
“These”--prefaces--“are peculiarly interesting, for in them he frankly
criticises his work; in some cases, too, they reflect the response of
readers as he has sensed it. In others he tells of the thought in his
mind while writing, and of the changes through which the thought has
gone in the process. Again, he speculates on the art of writing in
general, on the forms of fiction, on emotional expression and effect in
the drama. In short, as he phrases it, ‘in writing a preface, one goes
into the confessional.’
“Of _The Country House_ he says: ‘When once Pendyce had taken the bit
between his teeth, the book ran away with me, and was more swiftly
finished than any of my novels, being written in seven months.’
“‘The germ of _The Patrician_,’ he begins the preface to that volume,
‘is traceable to a certain dinner party at the House of Commons in 1908
and the face of a young politician on the other side of the table.’
“In the preface to _Fraternity_ he says: ‘A novelist, however observant
of type and sensitive to the shades of character, _does little but
describe and dissect himself_.... In dissecting Hilary, for instance,
in this novel, _his creator feels the knife going sharply into his
own flesh, just as he could feel it when dissecting Soames Forsyte or
Horace Pendyce_.’”
The italics are my own and I think they are permissible.
Probably not enough attention has hitherto been paid to Mr. Galsworthy
as a writer of short tales, but that may be because no collection
of his stories has shown his talent so roundly as does the new book
_Captures_. This opens with the well-known story “A Feud” and offers
also such variety and such virtuosity in the short story form as
“The Man Who Kept His Form,” “A Hedonist,” “Timber,” “Santa Lucia,”
“Blackmail,” “Stroke of Lightning,” “The Broken Boot,” “Virtue,”
“Conscience,” “Salta Pro Nobis,” “Heat,” “Philanthropy,” “A Long Ago
Affair,” “Acmé,” “Late--299.” In this book, as in similar collections,
there must be put to Mr. Galsworthy’s credit his frequent practice of
the Continental notion of the short story--the sketch, the impression,
the representation of a mood which we find in French and Russian
literature and which the American short story too often sacrifices for
purely mechanical effects.
Books by John Galsworthy
1900 _Villa Rubein._ Revised Edition, 1909
1904 _The Island Pharisees._ Revised Edition,
1908
1906 _The Man of Property_
1907 _The Country House_
1908 _A Commentary_
1909 _Fraternity_
1909 _Strife._ Drama in Three Acts
1909 _The Silver Box._ Comedy in Three Acts
1909 _Joy._ Play on the Letter “I” in Three Acts
1909 _Plays._ First Series. Containing _The Silver
Box_, _Joy_, and _Strife_.
1910 _Justice._ Tragedy in Four Acts
1910 _A Motley_
1911 _The Little Dream._ Allegory in six Scenes
1911 _The Patrician_
1912 _The Inn of Tranquillity._ Studies and Essays
1912 _Moods, Songs, and Doggerels_
1912 _Memories._ Illustrated by Maud Earl
1912 _The Eldest Son._ Domestic Drama in Three
Acts
1912 _The Pigeon._ Fantasy in Three Acts
1913 _Plays._ Second Series. Containing _The
Eldest Son_, _The Little Dream_, _Justice_
1913 _The Dark Flower_
1913 _The Fugitive._ Play in Four Acts
1914 _The Mob._ Play in Four Acts
1914 _Plays._ Third Series. Containing _The Fugitive_,
_The Pigeon_, _The Mob_
1915 _The Little Man and Other Satires_
1915 _A Bit o’ Love._ Play in Three Acts
1915 _The Freelands_
1916 _A Sheaf_
1917 _Beyond_
1918 _Five Tales_
1919 _Another Sheaf_
1919 _Saint’s Progress_
1919 _Addresses in America 1919_
1920 _Tatterdemalion_
1920 _In Chancery_
1920 _Awakening_
1920 _The Skin Game._ A Tragi-comedy
1920 _The Foundations._ An Extravagant Play
1920 _Plays._ Fourth Series. Containing _A Bit o’
Love_, _The Foundations_, _The Skin Game_
1921 _To Let_
1921 _Six Short Plays._ Containing _The First and
the Last_, _The Little Man_, _Hall-marked_,
_Defeat_, _The Sun,_ and _Punch and Go_
1922 _The Forsyte Saga_
1922 _A Family Man_
1922 _Loyalties_
1923 _Windows._ Comedy in Three Acts
1923 _Plays._ Fifth Series. Containing _Loyalties_,
_Windows_, _A Family Man_
1923 _The Burning Spear_ [first published anonymously
in England in 1918]
1923 _Captures_
Sources on John Galsworthy
_John Galsworthy: A Sketch of His Life and Works._ Booklet published
by Mr. Galsworthy’s publishers, CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 1922.
_John Galsworthy._ Booklet published by Mr. Galsworthy’s English
publisher, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 1922. Valuable for its bibliography of
the English editions.
_J. G._ Pamphlet announcing the Manaton Edition of John Galsworthy’s
works. Procurable from CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS. This edition contains
some hitherto unpublished material and a rearrangement of the plays.
_The Prefaces to the Manaton Edition._ Practically the only discussion
of his own work by the author.
_Some Modern Novelists._ Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett.
HENRY HOLT & CO. Chapter X. contains a long and careful critical
consideration of Galsworthy’s work up to and including _The Freelands_.
_Some Impressions of My Elders._ St. John G. Ervine. THE MACMILLAN
COMPANY. For a forceful statement from one of those who strongly
criticise Mr. Galsworthy’s work, especially for its “indiscriminating
pity.” Analyses at length the play, _The Fugitive_.
_John Galsworthy._ Carlton Miles, THE THEATRE MAGAZINE, December,
1922. An interview.
_A Middle-Class Family._ Joseph Conrad. THE OUTLOOK (London), March
31, 1906. A review of _The Man of Property_.
The interested reader should further consult the READER’S GUIDE TO
PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1906.
A complete Galsworthy bibliography, to be published in England, is now
in preparation by Harold A. Marrot.
2. _The Magic Carpet_
i
The Magic Carpet was one which took you far away, whisked you up and
through the air (though not sensibly too fast) and brought you into
a foreign but delightful country. There are books like that, taking
you out of yourself, so that the preoccupation of a moment before is
forgotten, tomorrow’s worries are lost, and you exist in a blissful
unconsciousness that there can be anything beyond the fine pleasure of
this present hour. The “travel book” attempts directly the transfer to
some place else; the book of essays, more indirect in its method, is
often more successful.
Aldous Huxley has been known to us hitherto as a poet and a writer
of fiction. Both his poetry and his fiction have been marked with a
graceful artifice and that simplicity which comes only from a completed
sophistication. His new book, a collection of essays, is distinguished
by those qualities. There is something about Huxley’s writing--I don’t
know what it is and those who know what it is, can’t tell--which brings
a gleam to the eyes of all who love literature for its own sake. In
_On the Margin_ Huxley the satirist walks comfortably with Huxley
the student. For Aldous Huxley is a very studious young man. Tall,
with hair that bushes out from under his broad-brimmed soft hat, he
walks with that slight stoop inevitably acquired by those whose heads
do not pass readily under all doorways. With his clothes flapping
gently around him, his glance peering through thick-lensed spectacles,
he advances into a room with the surprising effect of an amiable
scarecrow. A first grotesque impression is rapidly dissolved in the
gentle acquaintance springing up immediately afterward; for no more
likeable person lives. It is not generally known that between the ages
of seventeen and nineteen it was thought he would go blind, so that
he learned to read Braille type. His interest in America is keen; he
would like to come here, and may. Intimates know him as one of the most
learned men in England, though devoid of poses and devoted to finding
pleasure in the works of Charles Dickens. His scholarliness shows
itself in _On the Margin_, where Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and the devilish
biographer, Mr. Strachey, divide attention with the question of love
as practised in France and England, the justice of Margot Asquith’s
strictures on modern feminine beauty, and the evolution of ennui.
Recently there died in his ninety-second year Frederic Harrison, who
had witnessed the coronation of Victoria in 1838 and every celebration
in her reign; who saw her funeral in 1901; who, though past eighty
when it began, saw the war of 1914-1918 and the several years of
turmoil afterward. An extraordinary life! Before it had ended this
man whose span of years was matched by his breadth of knowledge and
interests gathered together what he himself regarded as his last
book, now published under the title _De Senectute_ and blending some
of his finest literary criticism with delightful recollections of the
great times in which he lived. A personal account of Victoria and
Prince Albert, the “Dialogue on Old Age” which affords the title for
the volume, a review of the picturesque history of Constantinople
through sixteen centuries, fundamental differences between Greek and
Elizabethan tragedy, the art of translation with reference to Dante
and Molière, some consideration of Fielding and Smollett and Kingsley,
and a final chapter upon various schools of philosophy--these are
the relics of a glorious life. The book is full of brightness, its
effects are sane, and the writing is alike lucid and tinctured with
that peculiar zest which, as it was a quality of Frederic Harrison’s
temperament, goes far to explain the length of his life as well as the
grace with which he lived it.
Among essayists there are ladies. But there are not many ladies, nor
men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book.
I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer
to be known for her fiction--those short stories, masterly in form,
with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief
novel, _Conquistador_. And such a preference is easily understood.
_Conquistador_, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And
yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, _Modes and Morals_, published
in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and
still steadily sells. People constantly refer to her discussion
of “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling” and the arts of
persuasion are constantly brought to bear upon her to assemble another
such book. If Mrs. Gerould began with something of the suddenness of
a meteor, she persists with a good deal of the steady brilliance of
a fixed star. It was, in fact, with the appearance of a story, “Vain
Oblations,” in Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1911, that she first came
to general notice. This dark and terrible piece of fictional analysis
had for its principal character a New England woman missionary. Other
stories followed in Scribner’s, the Atlantic and Harper’s, and a first
collection, under the title _Vain Oblations_, was published in March,
1914. A second book of tales, _The Great Tradition_, was succeeded by
a novelette, _A Change of Air_; by the essays comprising _Modes and
Morals_; and then by the novel, _Lost Valley_. _Valiant Dust_ offered
some more short tales; but with the appearance of _Conquistador_ many
of us felt Mrs. Gerould for the first time to be perfectly suited
in length, form and material alike. Despite her superb technique,
she needs more room than the short story gives her; and although
she can write of barren New England lives she can write much more
effectively of richly-coloured Latin life. Although, as Stuart P.
Sherman has observed, she can do dashingly the “picture of a really
nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a
spacious sun-flooded chamber with a Chinese rug,” her deep fictional
desires are toward the richly barbaric, and neither Henry-Jamesical nor
Edith-Whartonesque. In the atmosphere of Princeton, which is her home
(her husband, Gordon Hall Gerould, is a member of the English faculty),
she has the leisure and repose necessary to do such essays and short
novels as no other living American has given evidence of an equal
talent for achieving. Occasionally a bit of travel, perhaps, producing
as its direct result a book like her _Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions_;
but ultimately much more valuable for its indirect stimulus to her
imagination, which belongs to the class of imaginations so dangerous
when they are confined.
In fact, the imagination is very little understood, as if it were one
of those glands whose mysterious secretions we tinker with nowadays,
either not too successfully or with a success so alarming as to
threaten the overthrow of all physiology. One of these days we shall
have a mental thyroid extract, and then--! It remains to be observed
that with most of us the imagination secretes gently, with a fresh
annual activation in the direction of old woods and pastures ever-new,
rather than new; a circumstance very favourable to David Grayson when,
in 1907, he put forth the volume called _Adventures in Contentment_.
It is difficult to think of any precise precedent for this mixture
of essay, philosophy, homely observation and quiet humour with its
essentially American pattern of thought. The febrile character of much
American life was already marked, and the remedy of an equally feverish
optimism had yet to be widely prescribed. The time was propitious,
the sentiment of David Grayson had an ingratiation. When, in 1910,
_Adventures in Friendship_ was published, a good many thousand people
had read the earlier adventures and were alert for these. _The Friendly
Road_ (1913) was succeeded by _Hempfield_ (1915) and a final volume,
_Great Possessions_ (1917). A half dozen years have passed without
relegating these books to the shelves of the Great Unread. As “The
Library of the Open Road” they inherit an annual, rather a perennial,
popularity.
ii
In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come
to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for
travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so)
but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and
their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to
know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right
entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to
know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the
spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the
unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the
View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should
be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking
no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read
Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is
a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it
is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept
another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have
known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with
a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he
felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a
quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his _Baedeker’s
Mediterranean_ or _Northern Italy_ or _Spain and Portugal_. Here the
matters essential to accuracy were given--and only a novelist who has
heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of
a topographical mistake--but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared
for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those
attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most
freshly revised volumes is _Baedeker’s Switzerland_; another of equal
recency is the guide to Canada.
In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a
good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous
guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for
the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist,
however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of
him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in
fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is
omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books
called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator
rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home
travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that
the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain
as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty
years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to
the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million
copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and
an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to
find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe. In fact,
Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience
that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official
source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at
one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of
his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made
it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each
volume of the series now under way. _Java and the East Indies_ and
_France to Scandinavia_ (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and
Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with _The Holy
Land and Syria_. _From Tangier to Tripoli_ (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis
and the Sahara), _Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland_, _The Tail of the
Hemisphere_ (Chile and Argentina) and _Cairo to Kisumu_ (Egypt, the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate
books.
“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down
Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921--a record that
begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so,
he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him
off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse
some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s
adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the
path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores,
following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in
Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s
capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New
Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay,
Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:
Then I had religion, then I had a vision--
and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply
enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the
Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American
quest of power--religion the sanctification of one, pan-Americanism the
credo of the other. It is this spiritual penetration that makes the
fine distinction of Stephen Graham’s _In Quest of El Dorado_, joined to
the man’s unusual literary skill, taste and sense of form. On the point
of form there is something more than usually admirable in the start
of the book from Madrid and Cadiz and in the conclusion (on a note of
wonder) amid the ruins of Mitla, as if the quester for El Dorado would
do well to seek its whereabouts in the indecipherable inscriptions
placed on their massive memorials by a race that had sunk into silence
long before the imperious advent of the Children of the Sun. These
are the refinements of the book for the reader of philosophical or
æsthetic tastes; but as such matters should be, they are entirely
unobtrusive--present to those who seek them, hidden to those who are
indifferent--and in externals Stephen Graham offers a first-hand travel
study with cowboys and conquistadores, Indians and Mexicans, the Panama
Canal and the jingle of spurs in the changing foreground.
Among those authors whose books of travel win their appreciation from
the personality of the adventurer, Mary Roberts Rinehart seems to me
quite plainly the foremost. The considerable time that has elapsed
since the publication of _Through Glacier Park_ and _Tenting Tonight_
will sharpen many appetites for the camp fare offered in her new book,
_The Out Trail_. With none of the acerbity of her own Tish, Mrs.
Rinehart has to the full that lady’s derring-do. “I have roughed it,”
she explains at the beginning of _The Out Trail_, “in one wilderness
after another, in camp and on the trail, in the air and on water, in
war abroad and in peace at home. I have been scared to death more
times than I can remember. Led,” she confesses, “by the exigencies
of my profession, by feminine curiosity, or by the determination not
to be left at home, I have been shaken, thrown, bitten, sunburned,
rained on, shot at, stone-bruised, frozen, broiled, and scared, with
monotonous regularity.” And she adds that on several occasions she has
been placed in situations of real danger from which she has clamoured
to be extricated with all possible despatch. Two things, if we may
judge by her chronicle, seem never to have failed her, in whatever
emergency: her sense of drama and her sense of humour. At least, they
are keenly in evidence on all the pages of _The Out Trail_, and make it
easily among the most entertaining books of its kind--not infrequently
exciting, too! If someone thinks that the sense of the humorous must
have been missing at the time and have been recaptured later in writing
of the adventures, I suspect he is mistaken; for I recall that not so
long after I had written a chapter on “The Vitality of Mary Roberts
Rinehart” as a novelist, I met Mrs. Rinehart. She was suffering from
one of those ferocious colds which make cowards and pessimists of us
all, but she only remarked: “I’m afraid you will find the vitality you
have just celebrated rather low this morning.” This, I submit, is such
stuff as humorists are made on.
iii
Among books of essays that successfully spread the Magic Carpet for
readers I should like to draw attention to the following (in addition
to those described above):
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY’S _In the Neighborhood
of Murray Hill_.
J. C. SQUIRE’S _Essays at Large_ and his _Books
Reviewed_.
HILAIRE BELLOC’S _On_.