were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?"
He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new
theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by
radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first
use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel
with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so
clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.
A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind--mankind in the bulk,
groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new
conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction,
coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and
then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story,
transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the
mass of mankind,--a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his
memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,--but for the
most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and
vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical
difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a
moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified
with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal
pride.
Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches
from the cave man through the "chuckle-headed youth" to the dying
professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it
to their hand. "Ye auld red thing ..." we say with the chuckle-headed
youth, "We'll have you _yet_!" And the dying prophet cries for each of
us to the setting orb:
"Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the
individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my
billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common
purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me,
well may you cower...."
EUNICE TIETJENS.
A $10,000 Novel
_Diane of the Green Van_, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and
Britton Company, Chicago.]
About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a
Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: "May I
call upon you Thursday afternoon?" The telegram was the result of the
$10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned
early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the
winner by the three judges--S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N.
Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr.
Reilly's telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied
calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr.
Reilly's eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather
a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for
an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented
the check she remained calm--though she is only twenty-eight years old
and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she
had another novel which she hoped might interest him--but he took the
words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a
contract for it!
So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. _Diane of the Green Van_
is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it
because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple
loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes
jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper
clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break
away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon.
Not all "best sellers" have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its
freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written
in six weeks for the contest.
Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to
"entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance." Usually that type
of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at
the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing
her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their
shortcomings to treatment, not to material--"since there is absolutely
no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good
taste in a novel." She has also stated that in her opinion the modern
woman is over-sexed--a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which
we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.
Slime and the Breath of Life
_The Russian Novel_, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M.
de Vogüe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company,
New York.]
Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin,
Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible
to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact
one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910,
did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the
religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us
the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy,
however--"probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen
since Goethe"--the book closes.
The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula
which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which
succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin--a romanticism which disappeared in
1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives
Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction--a
leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian,
adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel
involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of
those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of
expression.
In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth
and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret
of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the
author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that
human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the
breath of life, it is barren.
Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a
standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with
the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal
allegiance--the Protestant bible. In fact, De Vogüe goes so far as to
say that some of her writing, for instance "the meeting between Dinah
and Lisbeth," is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have
been written by the hand that gave us _Ruth_.
This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of
Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation
with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the
preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things
of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to
painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of
renunciation in Tolstoy.
And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians "disentangled
themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a
superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed
of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels"--because
of this De Vogüe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force
that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.
The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a
sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves--namely, read
comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us;
whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in
terms.
LLEWELLYN JONES.
A Drama of the Two Generations
_Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts_, by George
Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour
through all the smaller cities of the country in _Nowadays_. It would be
the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those
slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary
life--and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it
shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf
between the generations--the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading
objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary
renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the
Irish Players.
Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family--a father, mother, son,
and daughter--and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably
been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper
young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother
understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who
made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to
the daughter's idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will
be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first
visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to
spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to
live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father.
The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even
a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of
any type.
Diana's father refuses to think about woman suffrage. "I don't have to
think about something I _feel_. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage,
women would all vote like their husbands."
"They say it would double the ignorant vote," answers Diana's friend,
Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.
"He's a good-natured old fossil," Peter says later to Diana. And when
the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, "I love
radishes, but they don't agree with me. If he had a new idea he'd die of
dropsy."
The result of Diana's visit is to produce certain rebellions in her
mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that
lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter.
Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good "comedy";
also it's tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all
the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so
bravely through traditions and inheritances.
But _Nowadays_ has another value besides that of its story. It is made
of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre
shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall
talk more about this in another issue.
Our Mr. Wrenn and Us
_Our Mr. Wrenn_, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New
York.]
The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more
threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of _Our Mr. Wrenn_,
a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the
idea under the book.
They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the
book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to
classify it--under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so
expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical
vision, that no one has thought to say "Here is a new American writer.
What is in his soul?"
Let me prove the point. "Our Mr. Wrenn" is a mouse-like little clerk in
the office of a New York novelty company. He is called "Our Mr. Wrenn"
in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is
overshadowed by "the job." He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp's
downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures
from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the
author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and
satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.
Mr. Wrenn is not always "Our." He becomes his own in the gorgeously
illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually
he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is "Bill Wrenn" and licks
a tough. He meets adventures--Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes
him because he's real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above
him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again,
falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and
"settles down." All these things the critics have told us.
But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says
"Gee!" when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn't only the little
things of the book that twist our smiles.
There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of
the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling
out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his
own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of
the world--this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our
own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he
sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a
conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the
high places of our own spirits.
Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of
that conventionally "happy ending" has escaped the critics. The drab,
the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That's
the frightful part of it. It's very like what appears to happen to
everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and
forgetting his flags in sunsets.
It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one
cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to
understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of
American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to
entertain or to "teach a lesson."
GILBERT ALDEN.
Lantern Gleams
_Little Essays in Literature and Life_, by Richard Burton. [The
Century Company, New York.]
Readers of _The Bellman_ will welcome in this permanent form many little
lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this
unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.
Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us
loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening
his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning
gleam over some political or social morass.
When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its
depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us.
Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we
all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort,
and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do
the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we
do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the
individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is
discreet on such points.
More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on
literature. Under "Books and Men" the author deplores the tendency which
characterized Chaucer ("Farewell my books and my devotion") of drawing
an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life.
Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is
an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used
to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.
ILLIAM DHONE.
About Nietzsche
_Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism_, by Paul Carus.
[The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]
Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples
with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a
poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far
as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.
Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal
sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest
named _Zarathustra_ is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme
nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative.
He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the
matter.
Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus's work is
delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in
the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of
things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus's
stated or implied world view.
He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him,
mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great
pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he
classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his _Confessions
of a Young Man_. Of more value than that is his consideration of the
philosophy of Stirner--mainly because Stirner is not so well known as
Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.
One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection
of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which
Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a
positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr.
Carus's cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush
of Nietzsche will at least interest him.
ILLIAM DHONE.
Feminism and New Music
_Anthony the Absolute_, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company,
New York.]
It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous
masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel
Merwin, ever since the old days of _A Short Line War_ and _Calumet K._,
written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards
women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in _The
Citadel_, _The Charmed Life of Miss Austin_, and even more strongly in
this latest book, _Anthony the Absolute_, he has become a determined
feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at
the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as
he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career
and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: "The man
who deliberately stops a woman's growth--no matter what his traditions;
no matter what his fears for her--is doing a monstrous thing, a thing
for which he must some day answer to the God of all life." He is still
the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.
None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all
clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little
nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony
and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting
musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying
primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect
close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the "barbarous" half
and whole tones of the piano scale.
Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the
exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial
form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement
which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a
certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the
tension of the plot, _Anthony the Absolute_ is a decided falling below
the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for
himself in _The Citadel_.
EUNICE TIETJENS.
Of all our funny little Pantheon the absurd little god who gets
the least of my service is the one labeled "Personal
Dignity."--_Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody._
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
Is it true that a Chicago woman's club recently declared any book to be
immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn't invite into your
home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated,
because all novels except the ROLLO BOOKS are labeled immoral, and we
needn't worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the
daughters of this particular woman's club are sheltered as carefully as
they should be, having been brought up by such mothers.
I'm afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this
fear of "immoral" books is getting to be. The most significant American
novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by
two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is "too
frank." The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought
to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most
authors under similar circumstances, won't modify the book. He says
he'll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won't change a word.
And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of
"pandering to commercialism."
Don't blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined
hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing _Hagar
Revelly_--a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock,
who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens
to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of
work for his thunderbolts--and he is a government official in the post
office department. You can't tell what he is going to do next. Everybody
remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas's delicate and
inoffensive little _September Morn_; yet in every cheap picture-store
window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph
of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty.
Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not
read. _The Watch and Ward Society_, a group of puritans backed up by the
blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical
undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The
booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to
act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along
which anybody "suspects," it is put before the joint committee, and if
that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. _The
Devil's Garden_ only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the
end of the book and labeled it "religious." In other words, it teaches a
lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner's _Tiger_.
Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The
_Metropolitan_ was recently held up by the post office because it
contained photographs of nude statuary--from the winter exhibition of
the National Academy!
We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting
enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in
public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal
clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the
tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is
necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that
such and such a book or play "oughtn't to be allowed." He is always
wanting to protect "the young," or somebody else, although he rarely
reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own
often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable
of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen
so many "musical comedies." He would be shocked by the statement that
passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be
reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be
done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence
Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don't know what the
world is like, don't want to know, and don't think anybody should be
allowed to know.