during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the
impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of
awakening workers.
Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if
Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone:
The supply of good-tempered, cheap labor--upon which the fabric
of our contemporary ease and comfort is erected--is giving out.
The spread of information and the means of presentation in every
class and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the
prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of
the old convenient labor comes a new sort of labor, reluctant,
resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has already
gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce
the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to
a series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and
disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of
going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our
civilization, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and
decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions, of which
the first and foremost is that the wage earning laboring class,
consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a
disadvantage, is going to disappear.
That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which
"Mother" Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless
of laws and constitutions.
But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of
the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.'s have no
patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated
with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely
to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American
population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for
the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national
revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so
pronounced he says:
The area of the country is too great and the means of
communication between the workers in different parts inadequate
for a concerted rising or even for effective political action in
mass. In the worst event--and it is only in the worst event that
a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable--the
newspapers, magazines, telephones, and telegraphs, all the
apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways,
arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the materials of
warfare, will be in the hands of the property owners, and the
average of betrayal among the leaders of a class, not racially
homogeneous, embittered, suspicious, united only by their
discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will
necessarily be high.
It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present
to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this
the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself
could tell tales.
Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells's
important opinions. The book isn't really a whole: some of the essays
are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the
fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his
dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable--horrible
admission--but he is still prophetic.
In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored
the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies
of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand's workshop the
book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text
for salvation of the world.
WILLIAM L. CHENERY.
A Novelist's Review of a Novel
Vandover and the Brute, by Frank Norris. [Doubleday, Page and
Company, New York.]
"I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it.
What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for
the truth then, and I know it for the truth now."--FRANK NORRIS.
It would seem inevitable that had Frank Norris lived he would have
rewritten Vandover and the Brute. In the book, as it was rescued from
the packing box that had been through the San Francisco fire and sent to
the publisher, there is much that would have been discarded by the later
Norris. Perhaps he would have thrown it all away and written a new story
with the same theme. He was a big man and he had the courage of bigness.
He could throw fairly good work into the waste-paper basket. The decay
of man in modern society, the slow growth in him of the brute that goes
upon all fours--what a big, terrible theme! What a book the later Norris
would have made of it!
In the introduction by Charles G. Norris quotation is made from the
Frank Norris essay, The True Reward of the Novelist, in which this
sentence stands out: "To make money is not the province of the
novelist." Also it is suggested that the book was written under the
influence of Zola, and there is more than a hint of Zola's formula that
everything in life is material for literature in the way the job is
done.
As it stands, Vandover wants cutting--cutting and something else. With
that said and understood, we are glad that the book has been rescued and
that it can stand upon our book shelves. American letters cannot know
and understand too much of the spirit of Frank Norris, and just at this
time when there is much talk of the new note and some little sincere
effort toward a return to truth and honesty in the craft of writing, it
is good to have this visit from the boy Norris. He was a brave lad, an
American writing man who lived, worked, and died without once putting
his foot upon the pasteboard road that leads to easy money. "The easy
money is not for us," he said and had the manhood to write and live with
that warning in his mind. He had craft-love. With a few more writers
working in his spirit we should hear less of the new note. Norris was
the new note. He was of the undying brotherhood.
When Frank Norris wrote Vandover he was not the great artist he became,
but he was the great man; and that's why this book of his is worth
publishing and reading. The greater writer would have possessed a
faculty the boy who wrote this book had not acquired--the faculty of
selection. He would have been less intent upon telling truly unimportant
details and by elimination would have gained dramatic strength.
Read Vandover therefore not as an example of the work of Norris the
artist but as the work of a true man. It will inspire you. Its very
rawness will show you the artist in the making. It will make you
understand why Frank Norris with Mark Twain will perhaps, among all
American writers, reach the goal of immortality.
The Immigrant's Pursuit of Happiness
They Who Knock at Our Gates, by Mary Antin. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]
Shaking the Declaration of Independence in the face of all those opposed
to immigration in any form Mary Antin makes an impassioned appeal for
practically unrestricted immigration. Her motive is no doubt
praiseworthy, her enthusiasm and eloquence are admirable. She contrasts
the nature of our present-day immigrants with those who landed in the
Mayflower. The self-satisfied middle class attitude peeps through the
question: "Is immigration good for us?"
And of course it is good. The immigrants do more than three-quarters of
our bituminous coal mining. They make seven-tenths of our steel. They do
four-fifths of our woolen, nine-tenths of our cotton-mill work, nearly
all our clothing, nearly all our sugar, eighty-five per cent of all
labor in the stock-yards. You cannot but come to the same conclusions as
Mary Antin: "Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness."
On his way to happiness? One thinks of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where
immigrants are not exactly happy; or Paterson, New Jersey; or an
incident of this kind from Marysville, California, related by Inez
Haynes Gillmore in Harper's Weekly for April 4: "An English lad, the
possessor of a beautiful tenor voice, song leader of the hop pickers,
was walking along carrying a bucket of water. A deputy sheriff shot him
down." One thinks of the Michigan copper mines. Alexander Irvine told us
something about peonage in the South in his "Magyar." The New York East
Side with its 364,367[2] dark rooms and its "lung block with nearly four
thousand people, some four hundred of whom are babies. In the past nine
years alone this block has reported two hundred and sixty-five cases of
tuberculosis."[3] In Pittsburgh alone, according to The Literary Digest
of January 16, 1909, five hundred laborers are killed and an unknown
number injured every year in the steel industry. According to Dr. Peter
Roberts about eighty per cent of those suffering from rickets in Chicago
are Italians, Greeks, and Syrians. This disease is almost unknown in the
southern countries. The following is taken from an article by Henry A.
Atkinson in Harper's Weekly:
The policy of the companies has been to exclude the more
intelligent, capable English-speaking laborers by importing large
numbers from southern Europe: Greeks, Slavonians, Bulgarians,
Magyars, Montenegrins, Albanians, Turks as well as
representatives from all of the Balkan states. The Labor Bureau
charges the large corporations of the state with hiring these
men--"because they can be handled and abused with impunity."...
Louis Tikas is dead. His body riddled with fifty-one shots from
rapid fire guns, lay uncared for twenty-four hours at Ludlow
where he had been for seven months the respected chief of his
Greek countrymen. He was shot while attempting to lead the women
and children to a place of safety. At least six women and fifteen
little children died with him.
"Open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness" says Mary
Antin.
Sixty thousand illiterate women were admitted in 1911 to this country.
The president of The Woman's National Industrial League says in this
connection to the House Committee: "Syndicates exist in New York and
Boston for the purpose of supplying fresh young girls from immigrants
arriving in this country for houses of ill fame. Immigrants arriving in
New York furnish twenty thousand victims annually." Mr. Jacob Riis said
very recently: "Scarce a Greek comes here, man or boy, who is not under
contract. A hundred dollars a year is the price, so it is said by those
who know, though the padrone's cunning has put the legal proof beyond
their reach."
But these are statistics, and Mary Antin is horrified by statistics
except when she can prove that "the average immigrant family of the new
period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are
furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock."
The "happiness" that those who knock at our gates run into once they
land in our mines, factories, sweatshops, department stores, etc., might
be traced further. The real question is this: Is immigration good for
the immigrant? In view of the above facts there is but one answer so far
as the illiterate and physically weak are concerned. Twisting of facts
out of a desire to reach certain conclusions will only harm the
immigrant and the inhabitants of this country.
Mary Antin would have been Mary Antin in Russia, Turkey, or Aphganistan.
The weak and the illiterate are the ones who keep this question in the
foreground. Probably the only exception is the Russian Jew. He has no
country of his own and the New York East Side is a comparative
improvement over the Czar's empire.
WILLIAM SAPHIER.
[Footnote 2: Fifth Report of Tenement House Department, 1909. Page 102.]
[Footnote 3: Ernest Poole:--A Handbook on the Prevention of
Tuberculosis.]
The Unique James Family
Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York.]
Whatever the deprecators of Henry James's later manner may have to say
about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations,
some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost
story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two
children--the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should
like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the
gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two
of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five
degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of
guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, "I like
ambiguities, and detest great glares."
Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a
psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The
direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an
unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry
James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student
days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just
as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a
united family--the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt,
quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of
the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association
with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He
did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion
to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and
character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons'
imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced,
but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry
James says of his father:
I am not sure, indeed, that the kind of personal history most
appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should
fairly proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more
associational, less angular, less hard for others, that is less
exemplary for them (since righteousness, as mostly understood,
was in our parents' view, I think, the cruellest thing in the
world) than straight and smug and declared felicities. The
qualification here, I allow, would be his scant measure of the
difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between the
marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of
his own of appreciating failure or of not, at least, piously
rejoicing in displayed moral, intellectual, or even material
economies, which, had it not been that his humanity, his
generosity, and, for the most part, his gaiety were always, at
the worst, consistent, might sometimes have left us with our
small saving, our little exhibitions and complacencies, rather on
our hands.
Speaking of the "detached" feeling they had after returning from Europe
to settle in Newport, he says:
I remember well how, when we were all young together, we had,
under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so
rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of
our little family was not in business....
Such had never been the case with the father of any boy of our
acquaintance; the business in which the boy's father gloriously
was stood forth inveterately as the very first note of our
comrade's impressiveness. We had no note of that sort to produce,
and I perfectly recover the effect of my own repeated appeal to
our parent for some presentable account of him that would prove
us respectable. Business alone was respectable--if one meant by
it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister (we
never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think if we had had the Pope
among us we should have supposed the Pope in business, just as I
remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, at one of our
New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth about
our credentials, that the author of his being was in the business
of stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word
was fine and mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you
are, don't you see?" could but become on our lips at home a more
constant appeal.
Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and
Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming
in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have
accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn't fair, as
a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I
can't help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and
therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle's indigestion, and
what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his
philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:
I took our friend M---- to see him [Carlyle], and he came away
greatly distressed and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the
utmost pains to deny and descry and deride the idea of his having
done the least good to anybody, and to profess, indeed, the
utmost contempt for everybody who thought he had, and poor M----
being intent on giving him a plenary assurance of this fact in
his own case.
And again in a letter to Emerson:
Carlyle nowadays is a palpable nuisance. If he holds to his
present mouthing ways to the end he will find no showman là-bas
to match him.... Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that
one can hardly imagine anything able to cope with it.
An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:
Hawthorne isn't to me a prepossessing figure, nor apparently at
all an enjoying person.... But in spite of his rusticity I felt a
sympathy for him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take
my eyes off him all dinner, nor my rapt attention.... It was
heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles--in
eating his dinner and doing nothing but that, and then go home to
his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly
Father why it was that an owl couldn't remain an owl and not be
forced into the diversions of a canary!
And in the postscript of the same:
What a world, what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the
new heavens and the new earth will swim into reality.
Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were--it was a
tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a
later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of
slavery, and still hoping for a new world.
I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but
they must be read entire, with the author's comments, to place them
correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many
readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most
magnificent things about the book, however,--if I may use a large word
for a large concept--is the spirit running through it of filial and
fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent
throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in
the history of American letters.
De Morgan's Latest
When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and
Company, New York.]
Whatever else I may say about De Morgan's new book, I absolutely refuse
to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends
with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no
difference how long it is, since the writer's charm pervades it all. But
it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried
and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to
read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great
deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than
ever there was in Thackeray's day. And if we are going to spend our time
reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we
want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be
doing, or thinking, or reading.
However, one can't say very well that he greatly admires a stork, or
would if he had a short beak and short legs. De Morgan's style is his
own, and he will tell the story his own way, though we all have a
quarrel with him for leaving the most interesting bits to a short
"Pendrift" at the end. Did Given's lover contemplate taking his East
Indian poison when the newspapers announced that she was to marry an
Austrian noble? Think of cutting that episode off in a few words, while
an entire chapter is devoted to a "shortage of mud" for little Dave and
Dolly, who were making a dyke in the street! But then, De Morgan doesn't
know how to stop when he begins to talk of children. How he loves them,
and all other helpless creatures! He can't speak even of kittens without
a touch of tenderness:
Mrs. Lapping explained that she was using it (the basket) to
convey a kitten, born in her establishment, to Miss Druitt at
thirty-four opposite, who had expressed anxiety to possess it. It
was this kitten's expression of impatience with its position that
had excited Mrs. Riley's curiosity. "Why don't ye carry the
little sowl across in your hands, me dyurr?" she said, not
unreasonably, for it was only a stone's throw. Mrs. Topping added
that this was no common kitten, but one of preternatural
activities and possessed of diabolical, tentacular powers of
entanglement. "I would not undertake," said she, "to get it
across the road, ma'am, only catching hold. Nor if I got it safe
across, to onhook it, without tearing." Mrs. Riley was obliged to
admit the wisdom of the Janus basket. She knew how difficult it
is to be even with a kitten.
It is bits like this that make Mr. De Morgan's story so long, and it is
bits like this that reconcile us to its length. I believe most readers
won't care greatly whether the two poor old sisters who have been
separated so many years ever do meet again. There is no feeling of
climax when they do--merely relief that the thing has finally been put
across. It was beginning to look as if it never would happen; and though
the reader himself, as I say, doesn't greatly care, he can see that De
Morgan does; he has apparently been doing his best to bring it about,
but the cantankerous ones just wouldn't let him.
On the other hand, who can help loving Given o' the Towers--all
sweetness, beauty, and light? Only--isn't she really more of a
twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp
decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself?
Truly Victorian, however, are our "slow couple"--Miss Dickenson and Mr.
Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards,
quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing
her to have a romance at this belated hour--her charms faded and gone.
But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson's chances for
happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were "good gossips," and
would always have topics of interest in common.
The Pendrift at the end--quite the most fascinating part of the
book--tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time
sixteen years old.
"You know," says the girl, Cis,--who is new and naturally knows things,
and can tell her parents,--"you know there is never the slightest reason
for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to
discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and----"
"Shut up, Mouse!" says her father. "What's that striking?"...
The young lady says, "Well, I got it all out of a book."
One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than
the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed
that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must
necessarily be got, like Cicely's, "out of a book." The saying of De
Maupassant surely applies here--that the writer must sit down before an
object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De
Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what
most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness
toward his fellow men.
M. H. P.
The Economics of Social Insurance
Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by
I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]