further, he discerned that books which are not in bookstores are, with
certain class exceptions, very rarely sold. He learned, as everyone in
a publishing house learns, that three-quarters of the books that are
sold to retail purchasers are bought because retail purchasers have had
these books thrust directly under their noses. He suffered, no doubt,
the customary amazement on discovering the vast number of people who
(1) either enter the bookstore with no particular book in mind, or (2),
on being unable to obtain the book in mind, readily take something
else. It was brought to his keen attention that, as Frank Swinnerton
reiterates in his admirable brochure on “Authors and Advertising,”
direct advertising, as in newspapers and magazines (the commonest
mediums) does not sell books. Being a young man of alert perceptions,
it cannot have been lost upon him that book reviews do not, with any
reliability, sell books, either. What does sell books is talk--in some
instances--but the hard rock foundation of book sales is a favourable
attitude on the part of “the trade.”
To know the people in the bookstore, to have and to cultivate and
to deserve their good will (for, in the long run, you must deserve
it), and thus to insure the sale of your book to the bookseller
and to enlist his energy and enterprise in re-selling it to his
customers--this is the “favourable attitude” just mentioned. Few
authors succeed in establishing it; fewer succeed in maintaining it.
Mr. Morley has done both, with the result that in five years from the
time of his _Parnassus on Wheels_ he has been able to publish a highly
imaginative, refined and polished satire and see it become, in its
field, a pronounced best seller.
iii
One would about as soon expect to see a fantasy by Lord Dunsany a
best seller as witness the sale, in tens of thousands, of Morley’s
_Where the Blue Begins_--if one were making one’s estimate solely
on the work itself. _Where the Blue Begins_ is the story of the dog
Gissing’s search for God--a search conducted in various places and
circumstances parallel to human life of the present day by an animal
discreetly analogued to the human animal. Such a piece of writing
has ordinarily no hope except from unusual and very favourable (or
acutely controversial) critical attention; and the hope from that
quarter is relatively small. By “hope,” of course, is meant a hope of
a considerable sale. _Where the Blue Begins_ belongs to that class
of literature which is written because it has lain in the author’s
heart to write it, regardless of its fate after it lies on paper. In
the case of Mr. Morley, the work has received merited praise; but it
would be naïve to suppose that this notice and commendation sold the
book; and the book trade might even justifiably be indignant at such
a supposition. Did not they, the booksellers, buy _Where the Blue
Begins_ because it was Morley’s new book? And did not they and their
clerks “push” the book for the same reason? The Ayes have it, to both
questions, and unanimously.
On the other hand, the sceptical soul who argues that Chris Morley
wrote _Parnassus on Wheels_, in the first place, because it was a
story about a bookseller calculated to “get him in right” with the
trade--that man does not know Morley and shows that he does not know
him. It is possible to detect in the character of Morley’s work, in
the circumstance of its publication and in the accessories provided
for that publication evidences of a singularly intelligent literary
campaign; it is possible to detect them and believe them to be such;
but it is not possible to over-estimate the part played by Morley’s own
naïveté, affectionate nature and formerly unchecked and indiscriminate
enthusiasm.
Such an attitude is always open to misconstruction. But it takes real
intelligence to go beneath the surface; and among Morley’s friends were
many who could do that. These perceived his genuineness without being
in the least able to predict the outcome of his generosity. Ours is
a world thus and thus and so and so. The ultimate effect upon Morley
himself of a disposition which he would unquestionably see suffer
and change was the problem. It would be very easy for him to come a
tremendous cropper of any one of several sorts; and then should we have
a soured, an embittered young man? Prophecy was worthless.
Meanwhile, with the auspicious beginning of _Parnassus on Wheels_, the
young man went gaily on. His first book of verse (barring the Oxford
experiment) was published in the same year under the valuable title,
_Songs for a Little House_; and at once the small beginnings of a
Morley vogue were faintly perceptible. The suspicion that such a title
harboured a spirit committed to the sentimental attitude toward life
was confirmed within a year by the publication of a book of essays,
_Shandygaff_, named after a reputed or actual beverage and got up with
a deliberately quaint title page. One was left in no doubt that Morley
liked Stevenson, was affectionately fond of Robert Cortes Holliday, and
worshipped the genius of Don Marquis. The seeds of literary jealousy
were sown, to be harvested several years later in accusations of
log-rolling[2] that were levelled at others a-plenty besides Morley.
Here, however, it should be explained that Morley had come from Oxford
to go to work, at the age of twenty-three, at Garden City; that while
learning the publishing business he had married Miss Helen Booth
Fairchild, a New York girl whom he had met in England. If, therefore,
he modestly undertook to become the American poet of domesticity with
his songs for households “of two or more,” the guilt should by no means
be made personal to him, but may justly be laid at the door of the race.
[2] The term is borrowed from the Congress of the United States, where
it has long been employed, quite unofficially, to describe an exchange
of favors among Congressmen, some voting for another’s bill in exchange
for his favorable vote upon their pet measures. As here used, it refers
to the alleged praise of one writer by another in tacit exchange for
similar praise back; the public being expected to take both encomiums
at face value and without any discounting for personal friendship, etc.
Whether the public has ever quite done so is possibly to be doubted;
but, at any rate, in the winter of 1921-22, New York and some other
literary circles were so openly under suspicion of log-rolling that
the suspects were not able to ignore the charges openly made. The
boldest method of counter-attack adopted was that of Heywood Broun,
who ridiculed the accusation, not quite successfully from every
standpoint. There was, however, an immediate and noticeable diminution
of enthusiasm among some of the younger writers for each other’s
work, publicly expressed. Morley himself, discussing the matter of
log-rolling, explained that the accusers had the cart before the horse;
that commonly one liked another man’s work and praised it, and in
consequence thereof came into a personal acquaintance. This is without
doubt frequently the true situation.
The year following _Shandygaff_ witnessed the appearance of another
book of verse, _The Rocking Horse_; the sequel to _Parnassus on
Wheels_, entitled _The Haunted Bookshop_; and a book done in
collaboration with Bart Haley. Called _In the Sweet Dry and Dry_, this
is quite exceptional among Morley books, and not too common among any
books, for its badness. An extravaganza on the subject of prohibition,
the plot may be said to have resided mainly in incessant and outrageous
puns, at that time a pronounced Morley weakness. But again it is
necessary to point out a detail which, taken in one light, and, as I
think, the proper light, reflects great personal credit on Mr. Morley;
he has never disowned the bad book. He could not do so openly, of
course--copies probably exist--but he has not done so tacitly, as
he might have without question or comment. I have in mind a little
booklet on Christopher Morley published in 1922 and concluding with a
bibliography. There it stands: “_In the Sweet Dry and Dry_, Boni and
Liveright, 1919. (In collaboration with Bart Haley, out of print.)” The
book, no doubt. George Moore and Henry James, not to mention other men
of literary genius, have had occasion to be ashamed of their work and
to drop it quietly from the roll. I like Mr. Morley for not doing so.
iv
Christopher Darlington Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania,
5 May, 1890, of parents both English by birth but long Americans
by residence. Dr. Frank Morley, an English Quaker of Woodbridge,
Suffolk--the home of Edward Fitzgerald--was graduated at Cambridge
and came to Haverford in 1887 as professor of mathematics. His wife
was Lilian Janet Bird, of Hayward’s Heath, in Sussex, a woman of some
musical and poetical gifts, the daughter of a man at one time with the
London publishing house of Chapman and Hall. CDM frequently praises
her cooking, which blended as an influence on his boyhood with the
Haverford campus, where cricket is played. In 1900 Professor Morley
went to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins. His son entered Haverford in 1906,
was graduated in 1910 and, in the same year, was chosen as Rhodes
Scholar representing Maryland. The three years at Oxford were spent
at New College. In the title-poem of a new book of verse, _Parson’s
Pleasure_--the name of the old bathing pool on the Cherwell at
Oxford--occur the lines:
Two breeding-places I have known
Where germinal my heart was sown;
Two places from which I inherit
The present business of my spirit:
Haverford, Oxford, quietly
May make a poet out of me.
The confused exigencies of his native land, however, were, more
immediately, to make something else out of him. Repairing to
Garden City, he interviewed Mr. F. N. Doubleday, otherwise FND
(“Effendi”) on the matter of a job. Mr. Doubleday has preserved
the record of that interview in an amusing account which fully
displays the youth, eagerness, enthusiasm and amiable audacity of the
twenty-three-year-old. The noted Effendi, whose philosophy of life
is not without its Oriental suggestions and whose sense of humour
is at such times gently active, was feeling “a little weighted down
that morning with the difficulties of the job which the President of
Doubleday, Page & Company takes as a daily routine,” and therefore
finally told Morley “to go to work at all his manifold plans and
literary philanderings, reserving the right to restrain his commitments
if necessary.”
It was Morley who discovered William McFee. English sheets of that
long and very fine novel, _Casuals of the Sea_, had been submitted
to the firm for consideration and possible purchase. Ultimately
it became necessary to set up type for the novel in America. “We
were accustomed,” Mr. Doubleday explains, “to hold what we called a
‘book-meeting,’ when each member of the staff gave his suggestion about
authors and books. For months when it came Christopher’s turn to speak
he always began, ‘Now, about McFee--we don’t appreciate what a comer he
is’ and so on for five minutes without taking a breath until finally
it became the joke of the meeting that nothing could be done until
Morley’s McFee speech had been made. Our jibes influenced him not at
all. His only reply to our efforts in humour was to bring on a look of
great seriousness and the eternal phrase, ‘Now, about McFee.’”
In leaving Garden City after a stay of nearly four years to become, in
his own phrase, one of the “little group of wilful men who edit the
Ladies’ Home Journal,” CDM departed from the well-established tradition
under which so many men in the book publishing business have fallen. It
is some kind of a tribute to Doubleday, Page & Company that the house
has been the training-place of a considerable number of the heads in
other publishing houses. In Philadelphia a term on the Ladies’ Home
Journal was followed by work as a columnist on the Evening Public
Ledger, the direct preliminary to Morley’s column on the editorial
page of the New York Evening Post, with which he has been since 1920.
The book, _Travels in Philadelphia_; the personal acquaintance of A.
Edward Newton, author of _The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred
Affections_; and a deepened interest in Walt Whitman, are some of
the concomitants of the Philadelphia period. Also, I think, Morley’s
gradual disillusionment began then. The collection of essays called
_Mince Pie_ was published late in 1919 and there were still to appear,
in 1920, certain overflowings of the Morley of the first period--the
story of an Oxford undergraduate prank, called _Kathleen_; a book of
verse, _Hide and Seek_; and more essays in _Pipefuls_. But that was
to be about all. Something very definite had happened to the young
man who was so friendly with everybody, who was forever talking about
William McFee, who wrote forty-leven letters and notes a day, who had
made a cult of quaintness and who liked to be called Kit and to have
the resemblance of his name to that of Christopher Marlowe’s stretched
into a fanciful resemblance of personalities and writing. Some lone
reviewer, speaking harshly; or some slight wound received in the house
of one of his friends; or the shifts and vicissitudes of commercial
enterprise--dissatisfaction with what he had already done, a thirtieth
birthday, a wish to do something he had yet to do--together or singly
may have been the agents of the change. Only the change itself matters.
And what was that? It was not that Chris became less friendly, or
autographed fewer dozens of copies of a new book of his, or loved
the Elizabethans less or the work of Theodore Dreiser more. But a
retractation took place, an alteration of ideas went on ... aided, it
may be, by the uniformity with which American magazine editors rejected
a short story called “Referred to the Author,” one of the contents of
Morley’s book _Tales from a Rolltop Desk_--a story which Morley himself
thinks marks the definite line between his old work and new.
v
Those who care for the poet of “households of two or more” will find
him most readily now in the volume called _Chimneysmoke_ (1921), which
is a representative selection from the earlier books of verse, _Songs
for a Little House_, _The Rocking Horse_, and _Hide and Seek_. Vincent
O’Sullivan has said that the Morley here represented belongs with
“the English intimists, Herrick, George Herbert, Cowper, Crabbe.”
Writing an introduction for the English edition of _Chimneysmoke_, E.
V. Lucas remarked: “Domesticity has had many celebrants, but I cannot
remember any one work in which such a number of the expressions of
Everyman, in his capacity as householder, husband and father, have
been touched upon, and touched upon so happily and with such deep and
simple sincerity. The poet of ‘The Angel in the House’ was, I suppose,
a predecessor; but Coventry Patmore was a mystic and a rhapsodist,
whereas Mr. Morley keeps on a more normal plane and puts in verse,
thoughts and feelings and excitements that most of us have known but
have lacked the skill or will to epigrammatise. If we are to look in
literature for a kindred spirit to Mr. Morley’s we find it rather in
the author of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’”
Morley’s new book of essays, _The Powder of Sympathy_, shows the man
changed and changing. It would be impossible to detect any loss of
humour or cheerfulness in such papers as those on Sir Kenelm Digby or
the Morley automobile, Dame Quickly (to be succeeded some day by the
more impressive Dean Swift). But the satire in “The Story of Ginger
Cubes” is not less complete or sharp for being throughout good-natured;
and in his piece on “The Unknown Citizen” Morley seems to me to strike
a single magnificent chord in which satire and humour are simply notes
underlain by the deep bass of pathos and truth. The new book of poems,
_Parson’s Pleasure_, shows that where there was so much _Chimneysmoke_
a fire burns also. This book has an inspiring and inspiriting essay
for preface--one far too quotable; I must resist it. Instead, let me
give the first sonnet in the “Memoranda for a Sonnet Sequence”:
The herb Lunaria, old books aver,
If gathered thus and so, in moony patches,
Has property of mystic opener
When laid upon the fastest locks and latches.
In this respect, the moonplant duly matches
The magic of the poets, who bestir
Their art to loosen spirit’s careful catches
And split our secret bolts like gossamer.
To sprinkle moonseed on the tight-locked soul
Bidding it open, or stand soft ajar--
To sprinkle moonseed, gathered thus and so,
This is the poet’s honourable rôle.
Like some old Tudor captain bound afar
I hear him crying _Inward! Inward Ho!_
Books by Christopher Morley
1912 _The Eighth Sin._ Oxford: B. H. BLACKWELL. Out of print
1917 _Parnassus on Wheels_
1917 _Songs for a Little House_
1918 _Shandygaff_
1919 _The Rocking Horse_
1919 _The Haunted Bookshop_
1919 _In the Sweet Dry and Dry._ Written in collaboration with
Bart Haley. Out of print
1919 _Mince Pie_
1920 _Travels in Philadelphia._ DAVID MCKAY COMPANY
1920 _Kathleen_
1920 _Hide and Seek_
1920 _Pipefuls_
1921 _Tales from a Rolltop Desk_
1921 _Plum Pudding_
1921 _Chimneysmoke_
1921 _Modern Essays_ (an anthology, selected and with an introduction
and biographical notes by Christopher Morley). HARCOURT,
BRACE & COMPANY
1922 _Thursday Evening_ (a one-act play). STEWART & KIDD COMPANY
1922 _Translations from the Chinese_
1922 _Where the Blue Begins_
1922 _Rehearsal_ (a one-act play), included in _A Treasury of Plays
for Women_, edited by Frank Shay. LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY
1923 _The Powder of Sympathy_
1923 _Pandora Lifts the Lid_ (with DON MARQUIS)
1923 _Parson’s Pleasure_
Sources on Christopher Morley
_Christopher Morley: A Biographical Sketch._ Booklet published by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO., 1922.
Private Information.
_22. The Prophecies of Lothrop Stoddard_
i
Prophecy is a very old business. It has become our habit to think of
ourselves as a people without prophets; and yet there was never a time
when mankind had more seers or more interesting ones. What is H. G.
Wells but a prophesier, and from whom do we receive counsel if not from
Mr. Chesterton? Mr. Shaw is our Job’s comforter, and George Horace
Lorimer, on the editorial page of Saturday Evening Post, calls us to
repentance. A few years ago I had the adventure of reading Madison
Grant’s _The Passing of the Great Race_, an impassioned proclamation of
the merits of the blond Nordic race, and a lamentation over its decay.
At that time such a book was in the nature of a revelation whether you
gave faith to its assertions and proofs or scoffed at them. The thing
that struck me was the impossibility (as it seemed to me) of any reader
remaining unmoved; I thought him bound to be carried to a high pitch
of enthusiastic affirmation or else roused to fierce resentment and
furious denial. And so, in the event, I believe it mainly turned out.
At that time, although he was the author of several books, I had not
heard of Lothrop Stoddard, unless as a special writer and correspondent
for magazines. It was not until April, 1920, that _The Rising Tide of
Color Against White World-Supremacy_ was published. Even so, attention
is not readily attracted to a book of this type. Many who have since
read it with excitement knew nothing of the volume until, in a speech
at Birmingham, Alabama, on 26 October, 1921, President Harding said:
“Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s
book on _The Rising Tide of Color_ ... must realise that our race
problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that
the whole world confronts.” The late Lord Northcliffe, returning from a
trip around the world, declared: “Two far-seeing books, _The New World
of Islam_ and _The Rising Tide of Color_, should be in the library
of every one who wants to know something about the world of 1950.”
Several months before he died, Northcliffe spoke again to a newspaper
correspondent: “Have you read _The Rising Tide of Color_? Then I want
you to read it. I want every white man to read it.”
ii
_The New World of Islam_ followed _The Rising Tide of Color_ from Mr.
Stoddard’s pen, or more probably, as authors work nowadays, from his
typewriter. It brings out with detail and vividness a situation which
Hilaire Belloc made vivid also in his American lectures in the spring
of 1923, when he remarked that, after all, we must remember it was
only two hundred years since the armies of Mohammed stood outside the
walls of Vienna. But Mr. Belloc in a lecture had no time for details;
he stressed the remarkable spiritual unity (something beyond merely
religious unity) of Islam, tending to match the condition of Europe in
those centuries when it was possible to lead Crusade after Crusade. Mr.
Stoddard, however, is a master of detail. His book on the Mohammedan
world is compact of facts and figures, and concludes with one of the
most significant maps the world allows to be drawn today. For it is not
a day of satisfactory map-making; too much is changing; but the great
patches of green on the chart at the close of _The New World of Islam_
do not change. The day is never past when some dark-skinned Mahdi,
like that false one in Lytton Strachey’s portrait of “Chinese” Gordon,
may sit his horse “letting the scene grow under his eyes,” watching
the assembly of turbulent but vast and unanimous armies, looking down
upon the thousands of upturned, fanatical faces, in a scene “dark and
violent and beautiful” ... and of enormous import to the peoples of the
earth.
His study of the coloured races and their gradual predominance and
his account of Islam seem to me to be but preparatory, however, to
Mr. Stoddard’s book on _The Revolt Against Civilization_. This has
already passed through many editions, like the two preceding volumes.
“The reason why _The Revolt Against Civilization_ has attracted such
an extraordinary amount of attention is not far to seek,” comments the
Saturday Evening Post. “It is, so far as we know, the first successful
attempt to present a scientific explanation of the worldwide epidemic
of unrest that broke out during the Great War and still rages in both
hemispheres.” The book is a considered and noteworthily documented
argument against the Underman--to be conceived of as the opposite of
Nietzsche’s Superman. It was Macaulay who remarked that if civilization
is again overthrown it will not be by the barbarian from without but
by the barbarian within--and Mr. Stoddard’s case is, quite simply,
that we have in our civilisation an immense mass of inferior men, of
Undermen, who will drag us down and whom we cannot lift up. Nor is he
among those who advocate terrorism. He would grant and secure to those
whom he regards as the foes of civilisation a wider freedom of thought
and speech than would many who share his view of the actual situation.
And as a prophet is not allowed any longer to prophesy unless he is
prepared with a programme--must not cry, “Woe! Woe!” unless he does so
constructively--Mr. Stoddard closes his book with two chapters in which
he disregards with something like a surgeon’s magnificence and coolness
the rooted prejudices and inherited opinions of ordinary men and women.
This, he says very clearly and with precision, is the path out; and he
suggests that we go to no further compromise than may be absolutely
inevitable in our mixed circumstances. Nothing is more admirable in
this American prophet than his daring unless it is the level admixture
of his common sense.
iii