on “Benavente’s Madrid,” has conveyed with clearness and much
picturesqueness the style and point, the character and perfection of
taste in a certain style (_lo castizo_) with which Jacinto Benavente’s
dramas abound. It is this that from their Spanish viewpoint makes them
of such distinction; but that would hardly account for their success
outside Spain. Larger qualities--a gentle and deadly satire, a nervous
vitality, wit--do that; and the visit of Señor Benavente to America
a few months ago did much to attract attention to his work. Twelve
of his plays, assembled in three volumes in the translations of John
Garrett Underhill, are now accessible to the English reader. Benavente
represents a more modern Spain than the Echegaray with whose _drame
passionel_ those who read plays are sufficiently familiar. He should
be read for his own sake and as a Continental dramatist much more
distinctly representative of something national, something Spanish in
sensibility, than are the outstanding playwrights of other European
lands--excepting Russia, no doubt. One can scarcely read Ibsen for
Norway, or Strindberg for a little corner of the world; Tchekov is
Russia but Andreiev is humanity. Jacinto Benavente, however, is Spain
without the sacrifice of those elements which are of importance to a
society in any country.
The impressive success of the Theatre Guild is known everywhere, and
the Theatre Guild Library is very welcome for its addition of several
of the finest of recent plays to the resources of the reading table.
The series has been auspiciously begun with publication of Karel
Capek’s _R. U. R._, Ernest Toller’s _The Mass-Men_, and Elmer L. Rice’s
_The Adding Machine_. A particularly good pick of recent successes will
be found in _Contemporary American Plays_, edited by Arthur H. Quinn
and containing Jesse Lynch Williams’s “Why Marry?” Eugene O’Neill’s
“The Emperor Jones,” Rachel Crothers’s “Nice People,” Gilbert Emery’s
“The Hero,” and George S. Kaufman’s and Marc Connelly’s “To the Ladies!”
Of recent books on the drama, Stark Young’s _The Flower in Drama:
Papers on the Theatre_, has attracted wide attention and much deserved
praise. Not much more than a year ago Mr. Young, previously a professor
of English, began to write his papers on plays, actors, and the theatre
in general in the New Republic. His articles and reviews attracted at
once the attention of discriminating people interested in the theatre;
their admiration was quickly developed by an attitude which showed
a comprehending sympathy for what the younger men were trying to do
and yet never lost sight of the drama as a developed art with certain
inviolable principles. Moreover, he wrote with wit, precision and
charm. There is no better reading of its sort, I think, than his “Dear
Mr. Chaplin,” his “Circus,” or his “Letter to Duse,” all contained in
this volume. Perhaps a note should explain the title, which is based on
a sentence: “If one aims only at the beautiful, the flower is sure to
appear”--a phrase drawn from Seami, 1363-1444, who, with his father,
stood at the head of the No of Japan.
_18. Lost Patterns_
Collestamore was showing me his library, but a summons to the telephone
had drawn him from the room and I was standing before the set of
shelves between the cases containing rarities and those which held
fine bindings, frankly puzzled. There were not many books ranged here
and I could not make out the distinction that grouped them together.
It might have been no distinction but mere accident in the case of
anyone less methodical than Collestamore. With him, no; some thought or
queer intention must underlie the choosing. Fiction and non-fiction,
new books and some old ones, some volumes of attractive format and
design and others whose homely plainness was possibly compensated by
the fact of their being first editions--it meant nothing. Alphabetical
arrangement by authors hadn’t been attempted and was, indeed, scarcely
worth while until the little assembly grew larger. Then he returned and
met my look of inquiry with:
“You’ve discovered my Lost Patterns.”
“Lost Patterns?”
“Oh,” he said, “there aren’t many of them, as yet. The fact is, I only
thought of it a week ago. It rained all afternoon, so I spent a couple
of hours amusing myself with them--with a beginning of them.”
“‘Lost’? But some of them are new enough.”
“It’s the only name I could think of that I rather liked,” was his
explanation. “A Lost Pattern--the idea I was trying to express--may
be either old or new. It has nothing to do with the edition or the
binding, but everything to do with the contents of a book. Novel or
essay or biography, the text ought to represent something we have
not had before or since and aren’t likely to have again; something
individual in the scheme or the style; something wholly personal in the
flavour--in short, unique, I suppose. What James Huneker would have
called a unicorn. By the way, _he_ is a Lost Pattern, probably.”
“Probably.” I was not unsympathetic to his idea. “You are anxious to
get together a collection for the collection’s sake, I take it.”
“No, for the reader’s sake. It wouldn’t have any value as a collection,
other than the curious, and I swear it could have no value for the
person of literary practices.” I glanced at him but could detect
nothing in his expression. I have always suspected Collestamore of
secret literary practices, concealed efforts to put his freakish self
into words. My idea is that he attempts essays and that so far he is
like a fellow fond of cigarettes and learning to roll his own. He went
on, more meditatively: “A fellow desiring to be a writer would waste
his time if he aped these people.” All the same, I thought, I will bet
that you----
“I began with a few new books,” he was saying. “New or comparatively
so. The thing that started me, I guess, was Elinor Wylie’s novel.” He
fingered his copy of _Jennifer Lorn_.
“I haven’t read it.”
“She has made a replica of the eighteenth century novel, a suitably
fantastic story about an English aristocrat and his bride who
journey to the India of the East India Company and meet with bizarre
adventures. It is what you would expect of a poet enamoured with the
life of that glittering period. I wonder that Max Beerbohm hasn’t done
it long before this. Or Aldous Huxley.”
“I see you have them both represented here.”
“Yes, the thought of them sprang from Mrs. Wylie’s book. I took down
Huxley’s _Crome Yellow_ and his _Mortal Coils_. From Max I wanted the
books of his caricatures--_Rossetti and His Circle_ and that other one
he calls _A Survey_. My collection of Lost Patterns was begun, then and
there. The idea of what would constitute a Lost Pattern was formed--I
don’t say it didn’t enlarge afterward nor that it won’t enlarge or
change shape again. But, essentially, I knew what I wanted.”
“Nobody knows what he wants,” I objected. “The thing is obviously
impossible. You mean you knew that you wanted to add more books to the
five you had assembled.”
“Any way you like.” Collestamore’s indifference was polite, but
profound. “I began looking over the other shelves. The next thing
I came upon was George Moore’s _Hail and Farewell_. We shall never
have a writer like George Moore, not even George Moore.” I thought to
myself: With that nuance, with a phrase like that, he is deliberately
imitating Beerbohm’s prose; I had better take no notice of it. His next
remark startled me.
“Literary style, distinction, in the enterprise I had embarked upon was
of no consequence whatever.” And seeing that this wasn’t brilliantly
intelligible, he continued:
“The thing was much deeper than that--the personal twist or wrinkle was
what I was after, the fly in the amber. Not a perfectly preserved fly
in the amber of a choice literary expression but a wriggling insect
caught on the tanglefoot of unaccustomed words would do as well.” He
was fast throwing grammar overboard in the effort to lighten ship
and bring his thoughts to port. “I have not, as yet, come upon an
illiterate author who deserves inclusion among my Lost Patterns, but I
shouldn’t hesitate to put him in.”
“I see.” After a pause: “Here you’ve got George Meredith. He’s very
nearly illiterate, don’t you think so? Sometimes literacy can go too
far, as in Meredith and in Henry James, whom you’ve put alongside.
Maurice Hewlett is another matter.”
“Well,” said Collestamore, “I stuck them in as a matter of course.
Anybody would naturally have thought of them in such a connection.
The things I really pride myself upon are my detections among these
single and mostly more recent books. You take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
_This Side of Paradise_, or William McFee’s _Casuals of the Sea_, or
C. E. Montague’s very fetching _Fiery Particles_, or Ernest Bramah’s
_Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, or Don Marquis’s _Hermione_, or Alfred
B. Stanford’s _The Ground Swell_”--he was half pulling them out and
letting them fall back, as he enumerated them--“and tell me if I have
not shown both enterprise and catholicity.”
I thought he had, but I also thought he should attempt some
justificatory remarks, and said so. His point in regard to _This
Side of Paradise_ was its vitality in spite of its having, as Edmund
Wilson, Jr., observed, almost every conceivable fault. “It had all
imaginable faults, but yet, in Wilson’s words, ‘it did not fail to
live,’” Collestamore argued. I nodded, and he went on. _Casuals of the
Sea_, it appeared, pleased him by a lack of anything self-conscious in
the writing. He much preferred it to the too purposeful artistry of
McFee’s _Command_. The singularity of those tales in _Fiery Particles_,
he thought, called for no special pleading in its behalf. _The Ground
Swell_ was a sea pattern unique in its simplicity; Don Marquis’s
heroine and her little group of serious thinkers were the apotheosis
of the Great Inane. As for _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, he was merely
echoing G. K. Chesterton, Belloc and a dozen others whose judgment was
respectable and might command my deference not given to his own.
“Oh, I defer,” I assured him. “You are the Lord High Executioner in
this series of literary beheadings. I consider that a reign of terror
has begun.”
It wasn’t beheadings, he said. He wasn’t going over the field of
daisies like the Syracusan tyrant and with his sceptre, cane, stick or
staff cropping off the heads of the taller blooms.
“Daisies? I thought it was a field of corn.”
As to that, he didn’t remember. It was no matter, anyway. He was not
demolishing, but singling out for eminence. No whistling cane, but----
“The sceptre gently touching one here, one there, knighting him,
commanding him to spring up----”
“You will observe,” in a tone of patient tolerance, “the surprising
variety one gets in the shortest possible space of time at this sort
of thing. Of course I thought of Jane Austen, and rather than put
in _Pride and Prejudice_ I chose _The Watsons_ as completed by Miss
Oulton. After all, _The Watsons_ is later work than either _Pride
and Prejudice_ or _Sense and Sensibility_ and the conjecture as to
why it was never finished gives it special interest. By that time I
was running over my books more or less as they stand on the shelves,
alphabetised by authors. The next thing, therefore, was Arnold Bennett,
and I chose _The Truth About an Author_. You know, it is the one book
of Bennett’s that could not, imaginably, have been written by anybody
else. H. C. Bunner was next. I really don’t know whether anyone living
besides myself and Franklin P. Adams now cares for Bunner; if not, so
much the better!”
“I see. The more lost the Lost Pattern, the more to be prized.”
“Why not? His _Stories_ and his _Short Sixes_ are as American as,
perhaps more so than, O. Henry.” He was quietly dogmatic.
“Is O. Henry here?” I looked. “Yes, to be sure. Also portions of
Kipling and, I judge, Frank R. Stockton practically complete. But these
were among the matter-of-courses. Let’s see: Shouldn’t you put in
Frank Norris? _The Pit_, I suppose. And there’s W. W. Jacobs.”
He looked so restive that I stopped. “It’s really no way to go at
the thing wholesale,” he protested. “I haven’t made up my mind as to
which one or two books of Stockton’s yet; he’s there in bulk only
temporarily. I suppose it had better be _Rudder Grange_.”
“Make it _Salthaven_ from W. W. Jacobs,” I urged. “Unless you strongly
prefer _At Sunwich Port_.”
“I do. Probably it’s just that I read it first. After Bunner I ran
against George W. Cable’s _The Grandissimes_. Then I laid hold of
Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. Then John Dos Passos’s
_Rosinante to the Road Again_.”
“Thomas Beer has just finished a biography of Stephen Crane. Joseph
Conrad has written a preface for it,” I said, but Collestamore paid
no attention. He was across the room, picking something out, and came
back in a moment holding up Edmund Gosse’s _Three French Moralists_.
“Just thought of Gosse. This will do to hold the place for him until I
decide. Have you never read it? Then you don’t know Rochefoucauld or La
Bruyere as you should know them. And you’ve missed a singularly urbane
and exquisite example of English prose style.”
“You have both Compton Mackenzie’s _Carnival_ and his _Sinister Street_
in here. Make it _Carnival_. Let’s see: David Graham Phillips’s _Susan
Lennox: Her Fall and Rise_; John Ames Mitchell’s _Amos Judd_; and that
new illustrated edition of _David_ _Harum_. I guess I’d agree with
your choice of each of those.” His expression remained polite but I
could see it would make not the least difference whether I agreed or
not. “Did you see Rodolph Valentino in ‘The Young Rajah’?” I asked, to
tease him. He was good-natured about it. “I did. I have no objection to
Valentino, but I much prefer the story as told in _Amos Judd_.” He was
ruffling the pages of _David Harum_. “I like these text drawings, don’t
you?” I said I did, adding that _David Harum_ was the kind of book that
cried for illustration.
“About biography, or especially, autobiography,” he said suddenly.
“Should you say Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_, for one?
There’ll never be another of that pattern.” But I had a suggestion for
him there. “Anyway, you must include Bouck White’s _The Book of Daniel
Drew_.” He said at once, “Oh, yes!”--adding, “Autobiographical in form,
anyway. White always contended that he found an actual record left
by Uncle Dan’l Drew. Semi-fictional, if you like; but a grand piece
of satire. And now I rather think we’re wanted to sit down to lunch.
Er--how about a swallow of something first? Or is that among your lost
appetites?”
_19. Joseph C. Lincoln Discovers Cape Cod_
i
On 13 February, 1870, in the town of Brewster, Massachusetts, which
is on Cape Cod, there was born to Joseph Lincoln and Emily (Crosby)
Lincoln a son whom they named Joseph Crosby Lincoln. The child’s
father was a seaman, so had been his father’s father and his father’s
father’s father; and so were all his uncles. His mother’s people
followed the sea. For a mile in each direction from the plain little
house of the Lincolns every house contained a Cap’n. When the boy was
a year old, his father died of a fever in Charleston, South Carolina.
Emily Crosby Lincoln had made voyages with her husband, whose death
made it necessary to move up toward Boston. In summers, however, the
boy got back to the Cape with its sand dunes and cranberry bogs, its
chance to fish and swim. “He rode the old stage coach from Harwick to
Chatham; he knew the lightkeepers, the fishermen, the life savers,
and the cracker-box oracles in the village stores. The perfume of the
green salt meadows, the pungent pines and bayberries ... the fishing
boats, the dripping nets, ‘the mighty surge and thunder of the surf
along the shores’ were part of his very existence.” The description
is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s account of his young manhood. “I
suppose if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own
ship,” Joseph C. Lincoln says. But the day of steam had begun. He went
to school at Brewster and Chelsea. As he grew up, college was seen to
be out of the question. The youth and his mother went to Brooklyn and
he entered a broker’s office. This work he hated. “I have always felt
that they were fully as glad to get rid of me as I was to leave them.”
Wishing to draw, he fell under the guidance of Henry Sandham (“Hy”)
and went to Boston where, with another fellow, an office was opened
for commercial work. To make a picture sell better, Lincoln sometimes
wrote a verse or joke to go with it. Sometimes the verse or joke sold
when the drawing did not. It was the day of universal bicycling. The
League of American Wheelmen Bulletin had a circulation of over 125,000
and Sterling Elliott, its editor, offered Lincoln a job as associate
editor. His verses were thus brought to the attention of a considerable
public. He married in 1897 Florence E. Sargent, of Chelsea,
Massachusetts, and he was writing verse, mostly in the vernacular
of Cape Cod, for a number of publications. In 1899 the passion for
bicycling began to wane and Lincoln definitely moved from Boston to New
York to try to make a living as a writer on his own. He had written
a first short story, a Cape Cod narrative, and sold it to Saturday
Evening Post. That magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Youth’s Companion
and Puck were taking his verse, which was sometimes in a swinging
metre and sometimes humour tinctured with philosophy. In 1902 Albert
Brandt, of Trenton, New Jersey, published Lincoln’s _Cape Cod Ballads_,
in a yellow-backed volume with illustrations by E. W. Kemble. It was
Lincoln’s first book. Now he was writing short stories in earnest and
with some success and he began a novel which could only be written by
labouring at it on a corner of the dining room table from midnight on
Saturdays through Sunday mornings until the manuscript was completed.
It was the story of three old sea captains who, despairing of their
joint efforts at housekeeping, advertised for a wife. Published in 1904
as _Cap’n Eri_, this affair settled two large doubts in Lincoln’s mind;
first, that he could sustain the interest of readers through a long
story; second, that he could make a living by writing, and by writing
books.
[Illustration: JOSEPH C. LINCOLN]
ii
Many have been the editions of _Cap’n Eri_ since its appearance,
nineteen years ago. The outline of those nineteen years in Joseph C.
Lincoln’s life is only pleasantly eventful. A friendship with Sewell
Ford led him to become a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey. There he
has built a house of “Colonial” lines, the sight of which is not good
for less successful writers. A very handsome summer home stands on a
terrace at Chatham, Cape Cod. In 1912 the Lincolns lived for a while
in England and travelled to some extent on the Continent, visiting
Switzerland. Frequently Mr. Lincoln has gone to one or another part of
the United States, even unto California, to deliver, before crowded
houses, his lecture on “Cape Cod Folks” or to give readings from his
own books. And every year since 1904 has seen the publication of one,
sometimes two, Lincoln novels.
In Hackensack Mr. Lincoln attends the Unitarian Church--he is a member
of its Board of Trustees--and he was at one time a member of the
Hackensack Board of Education. He used to belong to the Salmagundi Club
in New York but resigned because he used the club and its privileges
so little. He still belongs to The Players in New York; but in any
ordinary sense of the word he is not a clubman. The family usually goes
to Cape Cod in a motor car and while there Mr. Lincoln fishes and swims
and sails all he can. In Hackensack golf is his principal diversion and
he tries to play daily, “although there are times, particularly in my
brand of golf, when there seems to be more hard work and moral strain
than amusement, by a good deal.” The man is a red-cheeked, rotund and
comfortable man, with a bright eye and a catching smile and a great
fund of stories such as the following:
“An old salt of my acquaintance spent a recent winter in Florida and
found in the fishing of the region a fascinating but pretty strenuous
pastime. As a skipper of the old school he scorned modern devices for
fishing, such as reels. In fact he went out to fish tarpons in good
Cape Cod fashion with merely a fishing line and his own bare hands. He
hooked a tarpon and for a couple of hours there was waged a terrific
battle between the fish and the stubborn old Cape Codder, whose hands
were torn and blistered. Proudly he exhibited his 79-pound catch to
the natives. ‘Not much of a haul,’ was their comment. ‘Why, a little
woman, no size at all, just brought in a tarpon that tipped the scales
at 100 pounds.’ Would he like to see a real fish? ‘Thunder, no!’ roared
the Cap’n. ‘Show me the woman!’”
iii
Hamlin Garland, the author of some accounts of American life which have
not omitted the sombre, the discouraging, the bitter scenes and places,
has written:
“Joseph Lincoln is not only a novelist of wide reputation, he is a
public benefactor. His success has in it something heartening and
corrective. In the midst of work which appeals to the base and cynical
in human life (American city life) his clean, wholesome, humorous
stories of Cape Cod sea captains and their neighbours give evidence of
the fact that there is a huge public for decent and homely fiction,
just as the success of his play, ‘_Shavings_,’ is evidence that there
is a paying audience for a decent and homely drama. His books can be
read aloud in the family circle with joy to all the members of it--I
know, for I have myself read eight or ten of them to my wife and
daughters. They make no pretense of being profound, or new, or ‘smart.’
They are filled with the characters and the humour which are native
to the Cape. Lincoln knows these Cape towns and their inhabitants
as Irving Bacheller knows his men of the North Woods, for he was
raised among them and lives in their neighbourhood several months of
each year. He looks like one of them, like an old skipper, hearty,
unassuming and kindly. The task which he has set himself is one which
calls for a keen sense of character, democracy of sentiment and a fancy
which never--or very seldom--loses its hold on the solid ground of
experience. His plots are sometimes negligible, but his characters,
even when they seem a bit repetitious, are a joy. His prosperity is
well earned.”
This undoubtedly expresses a general sentiment, although it does not
express it so vividly as a sentence that appeared in the Los Angeles
Express:
“One enjoys a Joe Lincoln novel as one does a long, cool,
thirst-quenching drink on a hot day.”
However, before examining the novels themselves, it is proper to
put down here some things that Mr. Lincoln has said, at one time or
another, showing his attitude toward them. Of course his attitude
toward other kinds of fiction is a part of his general attitude, and so:
“I read all sorts of books and at all times. I don’t know that I can
name any particular author who may be called my favourite. I am very
fond of Stevenson, for instance--but then, so I am of Kipling, except
his more recent stories, which have a bit too much British Empire in
them to please me,--of Mark Twain, of W. J. Locke, and many others. I
think I like a story for the story’s sake. I like to like my characters
or dislike them in the old-fashioned way. It is for this reason perhaps
that the work of such writers as Arnold Bennett, William De Morgan,
Joseph Conrad, and others, of the realistic school, so-called, does
not appeal to me as much as--well, as Mr. Locke’s work, for instance.
I realise,--no one can help realising--the fine literary craftsmanship
in a book like _Lord Jim_. It is a wonderful piece of character mosaic,
and yet in reading it I am always conscious of the literary work. I
say to myself, ‘This is marvellous; see how the writer is picking his
hero to pieces, thought by thought, motive by motive.’ And being so
conscious of the writer, I do not lose myself in the story. This is not
offered as a criticism; certainly I should not presume to criticise Mr.
Bennett or Mr. Conrad. It is more of a confession of something lacking
on my part. I enjoy reading _Lord Jim_, or _The Old Wives’ Tale_, but I
do not return to them again and again as I do to _The Beloved Vagabond_
or _The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne_. Perhaps this is, as some of my
realistically inclined friends tell me, a childish love for romance on
my part. Well, perhaps it is. If it is, I can’t help it; as I said,
this statement is not offered as an excuse, but a confession.