Chapter C: N. and A. M. WILLIAMSON’S The Lady From the Air and their The (7)

Never, perhaps, has Mrs. Porter been more herself than in her latest book, _The White Flag_; although _Her Father’s Daughter_, as originally written, was overgrown. Both these books are autobiography--_Her Father’s Daughter_ of the heart, _The White Flag_ of mind and memory. If Mrs. Porter has but one story to tell, no one has succeeded in telling it so often with such freshness of feeling or such repeated success in the matter of readers. _The White Flag_ is the story of Mahala Spellman, daughter and only child of Mahlon and Elizabeth Spellman. The opening scenes are laid in the Indiana of the 1880s. The village is called Ashwater. For what seems an excessive time our attention is concentrated upon Elizabeth as a little girl and Junior Moreland as a little boy. Nothing could be more typical of Mrs. Porter than the attention she bestows upon her heroine in childhood--the exact detail of Mahala’s dress, the recorded precision of her unfailingly correct behaviour. If there is something unnatural about the child, there is everything natural to a child in Mrs. Porter’s fiction. In picturing the richest man in the village Mrs. Porter blackens his villainy to a pitch where Mr. Moreland is neither more nor less credible than some of the characters in, let us say, _Way Down East_.

Mahala, in ensuing chapters, refuses Junior Moreland in the face of the fact that his father could save her father from ruin. Her father fails, and, broken, dies. Her mother becomes an invalid. When finally Mahala can truthfully say that all is lost except self-respect and courage, a deadly blow is levelled at her self-respect. Some money is stolen. Circumstantial evidence accuses Mahala, and Ashwater shuns her.

It will not be supposed that Mrs. Porter fails to raise up a champion in her heroine’s hour of need. All along we have been in touch, in close touch, with Jason. We knew him as a boy, apparently the washerwoman’s son. We know him as a young man, springing to Mahala’s relief. There is no real reason why, in such a situation and with two such principal characters, Mrs. Porter should not work miracles. She does.... Of course her point is that the virtue, goodness and courage of Mahala and Jason earn their own ample rewards; and the thousands who are reading _The White Flag_ will accept this as so.

Books by Gene Stratton-Porter

1903 _The Song of the Cardinal_
1904 _Freckles_
1907 _What I Have Done With Birds_ (republished, 1917,
as _Friends in Feathers_)
1908 _At the Foot of the Rainbow_
1909 _A Girl of the Limberlost_
1909 _Birds of the Bible_
1910 _Music of the Wild_
1911 _The Harvester_
1912 _Moths of the Limberlost_
1913 _Laddie_
1915 _Michael O’Halloran_
1916 _Morning Face_
1918 _A Daughter of the Land_
1920 _Homing With the Birds_
1921 _Her Father’s Daughter_
1922 _The Fire Bird_
1923 _White Flag_
_Euphorbia_ appeared as a serial in Good Housekeeping:
January, February, March numbers, 1923.

Sources on Gene Stratton-Porter

_Gene Stratton-Porter, A Little Story of Her Life and Work._ This is the booklet, now out of print, published some ten years ago by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, based upon the long self-account written by Mrs. Porter and prepared by Eugene F. Saxton.

“An American Bird-Woman.” Anonymous article in CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL (London and Edinburgh. New York: International News Company), Part 46, October 1, 1914: page 636.

Private Information.

_17. Poetry and Plays_

i

If you look at the poets as they move in their procession before your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his age--the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too, after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and flavour of the poetry.” From this thought J. F. Roxburgh has written “a beginner’s introduction to English poetry” with the charming title, _The Poetic Procession_. His brief review of the poets from the Elizabethans to the men now writing is felicitous enough. But although I am sure his intention in the sentences quoted was not literal, the image of present-day poets in Homburg hats is very disconcerting. Don Marquis has probably worn one, thus inviting the visitation of insurance agents. But I am sure some of his poems have been written with the wind blowing through his hair. Such poems as “The Name,” in his _Dreams and Dust_, for example, or those “Premonitions” in his _Poems and Portraits_. It is as difficult to say, with Marquis, where the humourist stops in his poetry and the thinker steps in as to mark the same exit-entrance in the man’s prose. _Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs_ and a part of _Poems and Portraits_ are supposed to belong to Marquis the jester; but, of the second-named book, which part? “The man who has laughed lest he should weep, the clown of the seven times broken heart” is Richard Le Gallienne’s apt characterisation of Marquis. I am not sure that “The Tom Cat” in _Poems and Portraits_ is a bit less “serious” than such a poem as “Inhibition” in the same collection.

Behind the placid front of use
The baffled whims move to and fro;
We fear to let these genii go....

Sober-faced, we carry hidden within us something for which the poet has found one of those rare things in the language, the perfect phrase; it is

The golden nonsense of the heart.

Perhaps we also are like the Tom-cat and, on our occasions, “chant the hate of a million years.”

He will lie on a rug to-morrow
And lick his silky fur,
And veil the brute in his yellow eyes
And play he’s tame, and purr.

But at midnight in the alley
He will crouch again and wail,
And beat the time for his demon’s song
With the swing of his demon’s tail.

I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and God.

The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration; and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s _Dust and Light_ (1919) and his _The Black Panther_ (1922) have a beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines from “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_:

Deftly does the dust express
In mind her hidden loveliness,
And from her cool silence stream
The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream;
For the earth that breeds the trees
Breeds cities too, and symphonies.
Equally her beauty flows
Into a saviour, or a rose--
Looks down in dream, and from above
Smiles at herself in Jesus’s love.
Christ’s love and Homer’s art
Are but the workings of her heart;
Through Leonardo’s hand she seeks
Herself, and through Beethoven speaks
In holy thunderings around
The awful message of the ground.

The thought is Emersonian, but with Emerson lyricism was a doubtful and an inconstant capture. Here is “The Lion-House,” from _The Black Panther_, a poem, I cannot but think, that any poet would be proud to sign:

Always the heavy air,
The dreadful cage, the low
Murmur of voices, where
Some Force goes to and fro
In an immense despair!

As through a haunted brain--
With tireless footfalls
The Obsession moves again,
Trying the floor, the walls,
Forever, but in vain.

In vain, proud Force! A might
Shrewder than yours, did spin
Around your rage that bright
Prison of steel, wherein
You pace for my delight.

And O, my heart, what Doom
What warier Will has wrought
The cage, within whose room
Paces your burning thought,
For the delight of Whom?

The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book of poems, _Black Armour_, were not so much to match the title as to convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the parts of a suit of armour--Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up, Plumes--perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis (though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem “Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a

Liar and bragger,
He had no friend
Except a dagger
And a candle-end

and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of rhyming, was summed up when

He spoke this sentence
With a princely air:
“The noose draws tighter;
This is the end;
I’m a good fighter,
But a bad friend:
I’ve played the traitor
Over and over;
I’m a good hater,
But a bad lover.”

But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as Coleridge’s in his _Ancient Mariner_, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might have been written by a poet of a long-past century--I leave you to name him--but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine no one but Elinor Wylie writing:

Now that your eyes are shut
Not even a dusty butterfly may brush them;
My flickering knife has cut
Life from sonorous lion throats to hush them.

If pigeons croon too loud
Or lambs bleat proudly, they must come to slaughter,
And I command each cloud
To be precise in spilling silent water.

Let light forbear those lids:
I have forbidden the feathery ash to smutch them;
The spider thread that thrids
The gray-plumed grass has not my leave to touch them.

My casual ghost may slip,
Issuing tiptoe, from the pure inhuman;
The tissues of my lip
Will bruise your eyelids, while I am a woman.

ii

The title poem in Amanda Hall’s book, _The Dancer in the Shrine_, tempts to quotation, but there seems to me something unfair in reprinting it complete and to cut lines from it is to mutilate both what is taken and that which is left. There is a good deal of the life of the countryside in the book; Miss Hall’s New England is that of Thoreau but her lyrical gift is distinctly personal. A characteristic mood and treatment is shown in “I’ll Build My House of Sticks and Stones,” from which the following couplets are taken:

I’ll build my house of sticks and stones,
Of lollypops and herring bones,

None other than myself to please--
Of fine, fresh straw or green sage cheese;

I’ll build my house of this and that
To suit my pleasure and my cat--

I’ll clothe myself in cast-off rags,
In cobwebs or in barley bags,

The shabbier I am encased
The fruitier my joy will taste.

I’ll set my two lips to the air
And carol to the birds’ despair....

Some musing morning as I sing
Perhaps I’ll catch God listening,

In soft enchantment at His sill.
He’ll tell His angels to be still,

He’ll say to them in tones discreet
That there is singing in the street...

The pagan quality keeps its joyousness while transmuting it into something reverent and beautiful in such lines as “The Dancer in the Shrine.” The religious note, differently accented, may be found in the work of Alice Meynell, whose complete verse is now available in _The Poems of Alice Meynell_. Mrs. Meynell’s death has brought a sharp emphasis upon the rare character of her poetic gift. Alfred Noyes says she has left to the world a volume “containing only masterpieces,” but I like better the words of J. L. Garvin: “Not one of her poems but was the music of a thought as most of her essays were the fruit of perception.” Let me not quote “The Shepherdess,” so widely known and so self-expressive, but “Chimes” with its changing image and its “music of a thought” sung to perfection:

Brief, on a flying night,
From the shaken tower,
A flock of bells take flight,
And go with the hour.

Like birds from the cote to the gales,
Abrupt--O hark!
A fleet of bells set sails,
And go to the dark.

Sudden the cold airs swing.
Alone, aloud,
A verse of bells takes wing
And flies with the cloud.

Mrs. Meynell was one of a group of contemporary Catholic poets of whom, it may be, Aline Kilmer is the most widely known and read in America. Of the others of that group I should like especially to mention two whose new books of verse have just appeared--Sister M. Madeleva, a nun in the congregation of the Holy Cross at Holy Rosary Academy, California, and Wilfred Rowland Childe, who is English. Sister M. Madeleva’s collection called _Knights Errant_ contains verse highly spiritual in type, clear and strong in emotional expression, and admirable for the manner in which the author has adhered to subjects and thoughts strictly within the limits of her clearly defined experience. Mysticism is natural to these Catholic singers, and will be found strongly in Mr. Childe’s _The Gothic Rose_, a book of poems quite Gothic in spirit, sometimes wistful, sometimes marked with melancholy and obviously the outgrowth of a loving adoration. Although such poems as “The Dirge for Westminster” and “The Virgin of Flanders” are the body of _The Gothic Rose_, there is a range including an Oxford poem (“Idylle Oxonienne”), one or two classical subjects, such as “Daphne,” and the modern verse of “The Austrian River.”

Like Amanda Hall, Josephine Daskam Bacon is both novelist and poet, but it is as a poet that Mrs. Bacon will arrest our attention for her _Truth o’ Women_, which has been described as a _Spoon River Anthology_ for women. The book consists of a group of “Epitaphs for Women” in free verse; this one being characteristic:

I was sorry to leave you,
Because I knew you needed me.
But are there no women who are sorry to die
Because they need their husbands?
I wanted, dying, to be one of them!

Forty of these “Epitaphs” are followed by a series of dramatic monologues under the general title, “Truth o’ Women.” The monologues are spoken by the mother of Joan of Arc, Lincoln’s mother, Dante’s wife, Milton’s daughters, the wife of Judas, one of Bluebeard’s wives, the mother of Mary and Martha and the wives of Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Cadmus, Adam, Shakespeare, Socrates, Pilate and Julius Cæsar.

No, evidently realism in poetry is not through! Look, here is “an epic of insignificance” called _The Life and Death of Mrs. Tidmuss_, by Wilfrid Blair. Pursuing the Spoon River comparison for Mrs. Bacon’s book, one is on the verge of calling Blair’s work a _Main Street_ of England in verse. In subject matter it is more like John Masefield’s _Widow in the Bye Street_, I should say. We start with Selina as the young daughter of a greengrocer, see her as a slow and bashful girl leading a drab existence and wooed finally by Tom Tidmuss, who is interested in poultry-raising. He is a printer by trade. They plan to marry and get a cottage. Then, for the first time, Selina lives:

She had a ring, and roses in her cheek.

A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day.

She had no wedding bells. Her well-oiled sire
Led her in tribal veilings up the aisle
To where a curate, impatient for his hire,
Hovered, and Tom in his stiff Sunday style.
Things went through quick. It mattered not. She moved
In a mazed phantasmagoria all the while.

Thereafter births, deaths, a subdued drudgery, old age, the selling of the house and furniture and the going to live with her daughter, where she is not very happy. The poet concludes on a swift crescendo, _maestoso_:

Death sets free: it is Life that holds in thrall ...
Blow up, O trumpets of eternity!
Shout, souls of God, from starry sea to sea!
Stars, clash your shining shields--a soul is free!

iii

Of George Santayana as a poet I have incidentally spoken in Chapter 9, quoting one of his superb sonnets, but I think I neglected to call attention to the preface he has recently provided for his _Poems_. It is an omission that must be repaired. I can scarcely give an idea of the preface’s excellence as vigorous and beautiful prose, but aside from Santayana’s explanation that the subject of these poems is “simply my philosophy in the making,” it is just to quote this passage: “A Muse--not exactly an English Muse--actually visited me in my isolation; the same, or a ghost of the same, that visited Boethius or Alfred de Musset or Leopardi. It was literally impossible for me then not to re-echo her eloquence. When that compulsion ceased, I ceased to write verses. My emotion--for there was genuine emotion--faded into a sense that my lesson was learned and my troth plighted....” I cannot resist quoting from the closing poem, the lines on Art that count as a translation from Theophile Gautier but are actually so much more than that:

All things are doubly fair
If patience fashion them
And care--
Verse, enamel, marble, gem....

--All things return to dust
Save beauties fashioned well.
The bust
Outlasts the citadel.

The gods, too, die, alas!
But deathless and more strong
Than brass
Remains the sovereign song.

How W. E. Henley would have loved this! (But perhaps he saw it, and was not silent). Henley, whose _Poems_ in my copy are the nineteenth edition--and my copy is far from new. Henley and Francis Thompson and Kipling go on; few of us need any urge or even any reminder to re-read them; their poetry gains its fresh recruits with every season of the young men, and old men have been known to resume their youth over the pages....

Youth! That is the cargo that sails on those perilous seas forlorn we looked upon from John Keats’s casements opening on the foam. What a frank title for a first book of verse is Robert Roe’s _Here You Have Me!_ The title poem and a few others in the Whitmanesque tradition are followed by a group of poems derived from experiences as a sailor, verses that break free of any tradition known to me; and by poems ripened out of an intimate contact with the Arizona desert. I have liked some of these greatly, just as I like, for another reason, Vachel Lindsay’s _Going-to-the-Sun_, which is suitably fantastic. Some way must be devised for everyone to hear Lindsay recite or chant his verses, since in no other way can the reader possibly get more than half their effect. I think if all could hear him in a half dozen, the awakened instinct and quickened imagination in most of us would accomplish the rest. We should then be able merely to read him and feel the elixir.

In a later chapter of this book devoted to Christopher Morley there is mention of his poem, “Parson’s Pleasure,” which gives title to his new and by all odds best collection of verse. The remarkable change and growth in Morley as a prose writer has been attended by chemistries in the poet, and I expect the large popularity gained by his poems in _Chimneysmoke_ will accrue without delay to the poems in _Parson’s Pleasure_. But are you familiar with the poetry of Franklin P. Adams? I only partly mean the F. P. A. of the daily breakfast table and occasional short lyric or bit of versification heading a newspaper column. I mean the author of _Tobogganing on Parnassus_, and _Weights and Measures_, and _Overset_, and _So There!_ Light, satiric verse, most of it; but how finished and perfect in its form, how penetrating in its arrowy indirection! Whether he is penning the address of the passionate advertiser to his love or doing for Horace what Edward Fitzgerald did for a certain Persian singer, Mr. Adams is constantly curing the evils of civilisation, freeing those “baffled whims” Don Marquis tells about and generally making life more livable by making it more singable.

iv

Among studies of contemporary poets we have had none so valuable, I think, as Lloyd Morris’s _The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson_. The first and most important inspiration that came to Mr. Morris was undoubtedly the divisions of his subject, so that he brings us to the consideration of a difficult master under the headings natural to the poet, his “Men,” his use of “History,” and “Legend,” his two prose “Plays,” and as the crown, his “Ideas” or intellectual content. It is hard to see how any reader of poetry can do without this lucid discussion and exposition of one who may well be, and is by competent critics adjudged to be, the greatest living American poet. A biographical note, following the careful bibliography of Mr. Robinson’s works by W. Van R. Whitall, rounds out the usefulness of the little volume.

The popularity of anthologies of verse is now proverbial, and I expect that there will be plenty of attention for the _Anthology of American Verse_ which J. C. Squire, poet and editor of the London Mercury, has completed. The work shows the advantages gained by the onlooker’s standpoint, who can bring to bear a sense of perspective better than our own. The selection also shows Mr. Squire’s fine taste which, so far as I know, has no superior and very few equals among those whose knowledge of poetry would qualify them to be anthologists at all. Another collection of extreme importance but necessarily from a different angle has been completed by Margery Gordon and Marie B. King, and just published under the title _Verse of Our Day_. As the compilers had distinctly in mind school use of this book in a special edition, as well as the wide popular audience in an edition from which certain textbook features would be omitted, their aim was for inclusiveness and a highly representative quality above all else--though a rigid selection was inevitable, too. The result is a book presenting 347 poems, 225 by American poets and 122 by British. Ninety-two of the Americans and 42 of the British poets are modern--that is, they lie between Eugene Field and Amy Lowell on the one hand, between W. E. Henley and Alfred Noyes and John Masefield on the other. Biographies of the poets, reading lists and, in the school edition, certain guides to study have been included. The popularity of _Verse of Our Day_ ought to be sure and of some permanence.

Henry van Dyke, assisted by Hardin Craig and Asa Don Dickinson, has edited _A Book of British and American Verse_ rather from a standpoint like J. C. Squire’s. “This is not an attempt to make another historical anthology of English verse,” Dr. van Dyke explains. “I have looked only at the value and beauty of the poems themselves.” If some poets were unrepresented, it was not to be helped. “Those that seemed the best have been chosen out of many, not to illustrate a theory, but for their own sake, because they are good to read.” And for those who loved Roosevelt as well as for those who have the anthologist’s interest, there is _Roosevelt as the Poets Saw Him_, edited by Charles Hanson Towne and containing poems by Kipling, Edith Wharton, Richard Le Gallienne, William Watson, Edgar Lee Masters, Owen Wister, John Hay, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Bridges.

v

Leaving aside all disputes on the score of the drama, one of the best moments of our contemporary literature came a few years ago when it was first known that J. M. Barrie had consented to the publication of his plays. And then when the published plays began to come along, the moment enlarged itself. Here was a man who was practically inventing something, a curious but felicitous compound of novel and drama, a mixture of narrative and dialogue, something that extended far beyond the irrepressible wit and satire of G. Bernard Shaw’s stage directions, priceless as those had been. There was a feeling, with good reason, that by this step Barrie had done more to instate himself with posterity than by anything heretofore. For about the plays themselves, as plays, the controversy is already active; but about the success of the plays as published I know of no dispute or objection. _Dear Brutus_ is the eighth volume in a series which already included _A Kiss for Cinderella_, _Alice Sit-by-the Fire_, _What Every Woman Knows_, _Quality Street_, _The Admirable Crichton_ and two collections of the shorter plays, _Half Hours_ (“Pantaloon,” “The Twelve-Pound Look,” “Rosalind,” “The Will”) and _Echoes of the War_ (“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals,” “The New Word,” “Barbara’s Wedding,” “A Well-Remembered Voice”). There are good things to come yet, including _Peter Pan_, and these are in preparation; but much of the best Barrie and best-agreed-to Barrie is now ready to go on the bookshelf (where it won’t stay put very well)--and the best of Barrie is good in any company. For example, _The Admirable Crichton_, which even the most critical have found strong words to praise. The printed version avoids the fault of the 1918 stage revival in which, as has been said, Barrie dulled or allowed some one else to dull the edge of his perfect satire. For a short and appreciative yet discriminating account of Barrie the playwright, one could not do better than read the chapter upon him in John W. Cunliffe’s _English Literature During the Last Half Century_ (Macmillan: Revised Edition, 1923).

John Galsworthy, the subject of the first chapter of this book, will not, of course, be overlooked by anyone concerned in knowing the best plays of our time. His plays are to be had, complete at present, in five volumes (_Plays: First Series_; _Plays: Second Series_, etc.) and a supplementary volume, _Six Short Plays_. Or, with the exception of the six short plays, each may be had separately. Probably a consensus would select _Loyalties_, _Justice_, _Strife_, _The Silver Box_, _The Pigeon_ and _The Skin Game_ as his most important and representative dramas.

Arnold Bennett’s new play, _Don Juan de Marana_, represents one fulfilment of a threefold ambition. Don Juan, together with the legend of the Wandering Jew and the story of Tannhäuser, had attracted him for years as great subjects for drama. A good deal of preliminary work on the Wandering Jew theme was wasted by news that somebody else had written a play on the theme and obtained a production. “I put the Wandering Jew aside for ten years,” explains Bennett. “With regard to Tannhäuser, I am still wondering how to cure Elizabeth of her insipidity, and how to get into the heads of a twentieth century audience the surely obvious fact that music is not an essential ingredient of the tale.” Don Juan Tenorio proved impossible as the basis of a play, but finally Bennett came upon the other, later version of the Don Juan story. “And then I discovered what I wanted in a work on my own shelves, the plays of Dumas _père_ in twenty-five volumes. I ought to have divined that since Dumas wrote plays on everything, he must have written a play on the Don Juan de Marana variation of the Don Juan legend.”

At last all of W. Somerset Maugham’s plays are available for the reader, some ten volumes that include not only _The Circle_, but _Lady Frederick_, _The Explorer_, _Jack Straw_, etc. It should perhaps be noted here that the play _Rain_ is not a Maugham play, but an adaptation of Maugham’s tremendous short story, “Rain,” included in his book of South Sea tales, _The Trembling of a Leaf_.

John Dos Passos in his _Rosinante to the Road Again_, in the chapter 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.

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: