errand. Three days after reaching the city he had bought a cottage.
Now he owns eighty acres outside Tucson and has built a new home,
a comfortable but by no means pretentious house with a garden
transplanted from the neighbouring desert. The scale of living is
modest. Wright and his wife take care of the grounds and house, to
a large extent; and there is usually not more than one servant. Mr.
Wright has a motor car that he has driven for six years and will
continue to drive for some years yet. He is fond of horseback riding
and spends as much time camping as at home. Two or three tents, the
car, some tinned stuff and staples and plenty of ammunition are all Mr.
and Mrs. Wright need, for both are good marksmen. They shoot for food,
but Wright will not kill a deer.
The stories are frequently written, or largely written, on these
expeditions into the desert. Because he is not an artist, Wright has
a sadly difficult time. He will submit a story like _The Winning of
Barbara Worth_ to five engineers in order that they may check up
his account of the irrigation of the desert. A long time was spent
in worrisome “looking over the ground,” visiting factory towns,
interviewing employers and workmen, before _Helen of the Old House_
took even preliminary shape. As a rule, the incidents Wright uses are
transcribed from life, producing the effect of extreme incredibility
of which his readers sometimes complain. Being his readers, they are
silenced when he tells them of the actual occurrence.
Hildegarde Hawthorne has pointed out the very great and incontestable
service of Wright: He creates book readers. It requires very little
examination of the facts to discover that thousands whose reading has
been nothing but newspapers and magazines have been led by Wright’s
stories into the habit of reading a book occasionally. That is an
accomplishment of an importance hard to overrate.
As for the man, there is one story I like better than any he has
written. Some years ago, riding horseback on a narrow trail, Wright was
struck by an automobile that came suddenly around a corner of rock.
Horse and rider were pitched into a gully; the horse was killed and
Wright’s particularly bad lung so suffered by the fall that everyone
assured him there was nothing left but to die. He said: “I won’t die.”
Because he couldn’t be moved, a tent had to be erected over him there
in the gully, so that he might die in the shade. Lying there under the
tent, he fulfilled his purpose by getting well. He also, under the same
tent and in the same place, wrote _When a Man’s a Man_.... And now he
is again in good physical shape, riding his horses after the day’s work
is over through the desert or up into the foothills of the Catalina
Mountains.
The preacher he began, the preacher he must probably remain. There may,
perhaps, be something pitiful in the spectacle of a man struggling
with the palette of words, as there is something bizarre in the voice
proceeding from the wilderness with a perfectly mundane message: That
every valley had better be filled, every mountain and hill nicely
graded; the crooked carefully straightened, the rough ways ... paved
with asphalt.
Books by Harold Bell Wright
1903 _That Printer of Udell’s_
1907 _The Shepherd of the Hills_
1909 _The Calling of Dan Matthews_
1910 _The Uncrowned King_
1911 _The Winning of Barbara Worth_
1912 _Their Yesterdays_
1914 _The Eyes of the World_
1916 _When a Man’s a Man_
1919 _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_
1921 _Helen of the Old House_
1923 _The Mine With the Iron Door_
Sources on Harold Bell Wright
_Harold Bell Wright._ Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
_Harold Bell Wright, the Man Behind the Novels_, by HILDEGARDE
HAWTHORNE. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
Private Information
_8. “Ah, Did You Once See Shelley Plain?”_
i
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
BROWNING: _Memorabilia_
The four lines, and, indeed, the twelve remaining lines of this
one of Robert Browning’s shorter poems illustrate very well the
man’s superlative faculty of drama. With a little of our Edwin
Arlington Robinson, he mixed a little of our Eugene O’Neill; and,
on occasion, expressed himself with point and passion. Such was his
simplicity that he appeared (it is now laughable to remember) rather
especially unintelligible. Not far distant yet are the days when we
banded together to understand him. But the number of Browning Clubs
now surviving must be very few. How curious that we never thought
to try to understand the man himself! How queer that we didn’t
concentrate, as he would have concentrated in a similar instance,
upon the thirteen years that unlock his life; but we didn’t. We
generalised about him concerning whom, of all men of his day, it
was least safe to generalise. It has remained for Frances M. Sim
in her _Robert Browning, The Poet and the Man: 1833-1846_ to do the
thing that has so needed doing. She has very wisely avoided the form
of the full biography and equally the form, which would be sterile
in this instance, of a full-length critique. Her book is at once a
freely-handled and intensive study of the years that lay between the
publication of Browning’s first poem, “Pauline,” and his marriage
with Elizabeth Barrett. She starts with “Pauline,” accompanies him to
Russia and with him brings back “Paracelsus,” goes with him to Italy
and recreates “Sordello.” Then, with almost no preliminaries, we are
into the love affair. When that has been lived again to its fruition,
we are in possession of “the poet and the man” in the only possible
fashion apart from the body of his work. Frances M. Sim has given us
a valuable and interesting study, and simply by obeying the wisdom in
Arthur Waugh’s words: “Browning’s marriage, in short, was the last
stage in his artistic education”--words that open a fascinating path of
speculative insights into the lives of how many of the world’s artists!
Contrast, if you will, the temperamental difference between such a man
as Robert Browning, who had his early and well-nigh fatal intoxication
from reading the poetry of Shelley, and a fellow like Joseph Farington,
the painter, whose death occurred when Browning was a lad of nine.
No literary discovery in years has made half the sensation of the
finding of _The Farington Diary_, and quite rightly, for what could be
compared to the disclosure of a contemporary account in which Boswell,
Burke, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, the Thrales, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons,
Nelson, Howe, Mirabeau, Marat, Napoleon, Hoppner, Turner, Pitt, Warren
Hastings, Lady Hamilton and Robert Burns were intimately noted? And yet
Farington, ruler of the Royal Academy though a most indifferent artist,
came into touch with all these personages and was apparently never for
one moment carried off his feet. I think it is quite true, as Robert
Cortes Holliday suggests in a review of _The Farington Diary_ (The
Bookman, June, 1923) that Farington saw only the surface of that great
age, that he was devoid of humour and lacked the malice which a diarist
should feel. He was sane, not to say stupid; but as a conscientious
accumulator of facts I can think of no one who is his equal. Amid
riches and grandeur, intriguery and wars and revolutions, surrounded
by a glittering society in which one knew not which to worship, genius
or scintillance, Joseph Farington scrupulously set down all the
diseases of people he knew, all the dishes served at a dinner, how much
everything cost and the money that everyone made, inherited, bequeathed
or borrowed. It was only accidentally, that matters touched with
human interest flowed from the point of his pen; but in a fairly long
lifetime the number of such leakages runs high, and the result, despite
every exasperation and handicap, is to make a book of very great and
most indubitable value. The first volume of _The Farington Diary_,
covering the years 1793-1802, is the most complete portrait album we
have of its time; the remaining volumes, which, it is understood, go
on to Farington’s death in 1821, should not be less valuable.
ii
Great times, in producing great men, produce great books as well. In
the lifetime of Walter H. Page, publisher, business man and American
Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the number of persons who
had any comprehension of his greatness was singularly small. Those
who had the fine fortune to be associated with him in the day’s work
knew, of course, the stature of the man; but it was scarcely possible
to impress their knowledge on others. When Mr. Page at last became
conspicuous in the public service it was at a post where his work and
the character enforcing it were necessarily almost completely obscured.
An American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s at the present time
may conceivably bring himself into a good deal of notice; it is not
impossible to be done and the opportunities for doing it legitimately
are not infrequent; but Mr. Page was never one for that sort of thing,
and I doubt whether, even if the war had not hidden him in its drifting
mists as he steered the ship, he would have come in all his lifetime to
our not always intelligently directed attention. There are some men,
and among them our greatest, whom death alone fully discloses. Such
was Walter H. Page, and in the magnificent biography wrought by Burton
J. Hendrick, _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, the subject is
handled with a justness and a careful proportioning for which praise
should not be stinted, and has not been. Unquestionably this is one
of the great American books in the biographical field; this life and
these letters have something so vital that one hunts a ready comparison
in vain. At times they seem to paint the man with rich colour and a
splendid handling of light; at other times they carve and sculpture
him in some detail of a rare personality; but the figure fails before
the ruddiness, the mobile vigour and the unresting intellect which
the book sets forth. In a day when the state of America is rather
often canvassed and most often with pessimistic conclusions, it is
significant that _The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page_, a fairly
expensive work in two volumes, has sold half a hundred thousand copies
and now, a year after its publication, continues to lead in sales of
non-fiction.
It is but one, of course, of a number of great books yielded by the
times we have lived in. _The Irish Guards in the Great War_, by Rudyard
Kipling, is surely another. Mr. Kipling has not always been regarded
as a sympathetic and understanding friend of Irishmen. His son, John
Kipling, was an officer of the Irish Guards and, as such, gave his
life. The choice of Mr. Kipling as the historian of the regiment was
one which only the resultant chronicle would justify; but to my mind
there is no possible question that the work justifies and more than
justifies. The reviewer for the London Times puts the matter pithily
when he says: “The true gold of Mr. Kipling is to be found unalloyed
in this memorial.” The temptation to embitteredness, the impulse to
“handle” and fashion his material or to give it stylistic treatment
and the natural inclination to fix the point of view have all been
quietly laid aside; and we have a book of continuous vividness that
results from the inner perspective to which Mr. Kipling rigidly holds
his account. He constantly uses the sentences on the lips of his
Irishmen and we are seldom conscious of a narrator--then only when
some Kiplingesque epithet or phrase carries us above the trench and,
as it were, above the battle. The London Times reviewer speaks of
the “wealth of detail, varied, terrible, and sometimes grotesque, as
in the best Gothic” in the presentation of which Kipling manages to
preserve a clean simplicity of outline and a unity or totality of
effect; but this is merely a way of saying that the book is epically
written. Mere largeness of subject has nowadays a way of being taken
for “epic” treatment, although the word should properly be confined to
a treatment in which a great mass of detail is not allowed to obscure
the simplicity of the whole. But I do not think anyone can fail in
appreciation of _The Irish Guards_, and to any who may be tempted to
forgo the reading of the history let me quote these closing words: “Of
all these things nothing but the memory would remain. And, as they
moved--little more than a company strong--in the wake of their seniors,
one saw, here and there among the wounded in civil kit, young men with
eyes that did not match their age, shaken beyond speech or tears by the
splendour and the grief of that memory.”
The final distinction of Mr. Kipling’s book is, to be sure, that it
is the work of a man who knows how to write. This distinction it
shares with the fewest possible number of contemporary histories,
but _The World Crisis_, by Winston Churchill, must be admitted within
the slender group. Perhaps we had rather forgotten Winston Churchill,
the young journalist in Africa during the Boer War (and the hero,
incidentally, of one of the greatest prisoner escapes to be found in
all history). There may also be some heredity in Winston Churchill’s
literary gift, as in his other brilliant personal endowments. But
that’s no matter. As a former British Home Secretary, First Lord of
the Admiralty, 1911-15, and Minister of Munitions in 1917--above
all, perhaps, as the man chiefly held responsible for the Gallipoli
venture--Mr. Churchill’s account would be of the very first interest
and importance were he never so unskilful among words. But _The World
Crisis_ makes apparent what some of us had suspected before, that among
leading statesmen there has rarely been one whose ability to defend
his course and make other courses appear small has equalled Winston
Churchill’s. The sense of scale amid vastness in sums of money, tonnage
of ships and lives of men that Mr. Churchill possesses is laid by some
commentators to his American blood. “He savours hugeness like a dainty;
and when he writes of carnage or battle he dips his pen in blood,” says
Filson Young, adding, “But he never for a moment loses his grip of the
subject, or his sense of ever-marching destiny; and he never fails to
thrill the reader with the sense of the human tragedy lurking in its
every step.” Mr. Young thinks _The World Crisis_ places its author
“in the very first rank of British historians; and I think it places
him in very nearly the first rank of British statesmen.” The two most
famous living British statesmen, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith,
flank Mr. Churchill’s book with what went before and what may come
after. The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith’s _The Genesis of the
War_ contains, of course, many noteworthy pen portraits; no doubt these
will make the most immediate appeal to readers; yet his disclosures
regarding the British War Book, begun in 1910 and his exposition of
“the purposes and methods of British policy” in the pre-war years
are the book’s greatest justification and its strongest historical
importance. Mr. Lloyd George, characteristically, is far less concerned
about the past than about the future. In _Where Are We Going?_ he moves
alertly over troubled ground of European affairs, discussing the League
of Nations, Russian republicanism, Socialism, national armaments, the
Irish Treaty, the position of France, England’s war debt, prohibition,
the disclosure of war secrets, “the next war” and many other topics.
His preface is particularly interesting.
iii
Naturally, the climax of interest is reached when we can say: “This
man has written of himself.” G. Stanley Hall’s _Life and Confessions
of a Psychologist_ is an autobiography of which one feels a keen
anxiety lest the many whom it can reward may somehow miss reading it.
“I am far older than my years”--he is seventy-seven--“for I have laid
aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations
with which I started than most.” These simple and striking words
define his attitude. The truly popular result of a work that has been
undertaken and carried through in such a spirit ought to be emphasised.
Dr. Hall is the author of important treatises on _Adolescence_ and
_Senescence_, exhaustive in character and highly technical in their
bearing; but I have yet to read anything of his which was not to a very
large extent “popularly written” as well as scientifically valuable.
Certainly his _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ deserves the
wider audience. It begins on a New England farm with some chapters that
reflect with ampleness and feeling and charm the life of New England
in the 1850s; it continues through the various stages of an unusually
rounded education; in its record of teaching and college executiveship
the book constitutes a sort of history of the American college in
the last half-century, and this is enlarged and given the value of
ripened conclusions by a longer chapter near the close of the book.
There is also a tremendous chapter covering “Process in Psychology”
and practically constituting a history of the science in Dr. Hall’s
long lifetime--one might almost say since psychology was recognised
as a science at all. But these points, while they demonstrate easily
enough that the book is one no teacher or psychologist can afford
to omit attending, do not make the case for the book as a sample of
autobiography or as a work of popular interest. Then let some of the
contents make it! Here is the report of an American who has known Mark
Hopkins, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft,
Treitschke, Wundt, Helmholtz, William James, Lord Kelvin, Jowett,
Pasteur and many others; an American who can write of his boyhood with
something of the charm of W. H. Hudson and much the same feeling for
nature; who can write with frankness of the _vita sexualis_ in the New
England of Emerson; who can--we fall back upon it--write!
A fellow-scientist of Dr. Hall’s though in quite another field has
also written his autobiography, and the extraordinary circumstances
of Michael Idvorsky Pupin’s life will be enough to attract popular
attention to his _From Immigrant to Inventor_. Forty-eight years ago a
Serbian boy who hadn’t a cent and who couldn’t speak a word of English
landed in New York. Since 1901 this immigrant has been professor of
electro-mechanics at Columbia University; he is the inventor of the
Pupin coil, which, by reducing the necessary diameter of copper wire,
has saved millions of dollars, and he also invented the device for
tuning which many people use daily on radio sets. Michael Pupin was
born at Idvor, Banat, Hungary, in a little community of Serbs rewarded
for their services against the Turks by the gift of some land and
political rights. In assessing his performance it must be borne in
mind that he had the handicap of an utterly alien race and culture and
speech to overcome in a far greater degree than Jacob A. Riis, who was
Danish, or Edward Bok, who came from Holland. Pupin’s autobiography is
of manifold interest; for one thing, he seems completely in sympathy
with an American tradition which so many immigrants have never been
able whole-heartedly to accept; for another, he traces the developments
of electrical science by the bright thread of his interest and
participation in them, and he does actually succeed in making some very
difficult scientific achievements quite simple and beautifully plain.
iv
Very different, if possible more magical, has been the career of the
Russian glovemaker whose adopted surname is now known everywhere that
motion pictures are exhibited--Samuel Goldwyn. It is only about nine
years since he paid ten cents to see a two-reel picture in depressing
surroundings on Broadway, and came home to tell his brother-in-law,
Jesse Lasky, that a fortune could be made in five-reel pictures!
Samuel Goldwyn’s book, _Behind the Screen_, showing on every page the
fine journalistic skill of his collaborator, Corinne Lowe, is less
an autobiography than a personal record of the people of the screen.
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Garden, Pauline
Frederick, Geraldine Farrar and plenty of others are here described
with an intimacy and a frankness and a general wit and good humour that
it isn’t easy to imagine will be soon surpassed. The popular appeal
of such a series of “closeups” should be as limitless as the movie
audience, but the book will serve a less immediate and more important
purpose to the reader whose interest, not fervidly personal, goes
into the general subject of the films--how they came about, what and
why they are, what may come of them. I do not mean that Mr. Goldwyn
concerns himself directly with any of these questions, for he scarcely
touches them; and yet I think that the indirect light he throws may
be more finally enlightening than anything else that has come out of
Hollywood--certainly more so than would be likely to be got by any
outsider who might go there in a direct search. But let that pass. The
book, as a book, is irresistible reading.
v
The boundaries between history, biography, autobiography, memoirs and
the best journalism are often uncertain and are better so. It does not
matter except to formal minds whether an interest begins with a person
or an event, or in what direction it proceeds; for the mind, like the
body, has its own system of nutrition, and within pretty broad limits
should be allowed its own dietary. The suggestions below are additional
to those books already discussed and the classifications need not be
taken as anything more than a general convenience:
Historical.
ADMIRAL SIMS’S _The Victory at Sea_ (World War).
BRAND WHITLOCK’S _Belgium_ (World War).
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S _Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement_.
_Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story_ (World War).
_Memories of a Turkish Statesman_, 1913-1919, by DJEMAL PASHA. A
very spirited account, well-written; almost unique as a book from the
Turkish side. Interesting in its contradictions of Morgenthau.
_An Ambassador’s Memoirs_, by MAURICE PALEOLOGUE. By the last French
Ambassador to Russia. Volume I. covers July 3, 1914-June 2, 1915;
Volume II. continues to August 18, 1916.
LAURANCE LYON’S _The Pomp of Power_ and his _When There Is No Peace_,
both published anonymously. The author is in close touch with French
policy.
_Old Diplomacy and New: 1876-1922: From Salisbury to Lloyd George_, by
A. L. KENNEDY.
_The Drama of Sinn Fein_, by SHAW DESMOND. A new and pretty complete
history.
_The Life of Sir William Harcourt_, by A. G. GARDINER. Harcourt was
born before Victoria ascended the throne and he outlived her; Mr.
Gardiner brings unusual talents to what becomes less a biography of one
man than a portrayal of an era.
_Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie_, by COMTE FLEURY. Here likewise the
historical interest is as strong as the biographical.
_Lady Palmerston and Her Times_, by MABELL, COUNTESS OF AIRLIE. Of
value for its picture of the period from George III. to the middle of
the Nineteenth Century.
PAUL VAN DYKE’S _Catherine de Medici_, in two volumes, now in its third
printing, is distinguished by lucidity, an avoidance of easy ornament
and floridity, and by great literary charm.
More Purely Personal.
_The Letters of Lord and Lady Wolseley_, edited by SIR GEORGE ARTHUR.
The intimacies of a great soldier and his brilliant wife, with many
glimpses of British society from 1870 to 1911.
_Margot Asquith: An Autobiography._ Volumes III. and IV., although
dealing with British war politics, are chiefly personal in interest.
_Memories of Later Years_, by OSCAR BROWNING. By a much-travelled
Englishman, a friend of Queen Mary, Lord Curzon and Lloyd George, now
past eighty. He deals principally with persons and events since 1897.
Arthur Bartlett Maurice, reviewing the book in the New York Herald,
speaks of the book as “a narrative which gives the flavor of Europe of
yesterday, of a world that is gone.” The volume is a mine of anecdotes
of the great.
_Post Mortem_, by C. MACLAURIN, M.D., somewhat resembles Dr. Joseph
Collins’s _The Doctor Looks at Literature_--only in this case
historical figures are the persons dissected. Henry VIII., the
historian Gibbon, Joan of Arc, and Samuel Pepys are some of the
subjects.