Chapter C: N. and A. M. WILLIAMSON’S The Lady From the Air and their The (4)

Once upon a time there was a Scotsman of Clan Gordon, those Highlanders ye ken of Blair Athol in the North Country, properly named with a God-fearing name, Daniel, and a fine, stirring preacher, too. Fire was on his lips but the flame burning in his heart was tender and you should have lived to hear him piping “Lochaber No More.” The pibrochs sounded something beautiful as he played; and when he stopped piping it was to begin relating wonderful old stories; he kenned them all. Away back in the 1840s it was he came out to Canada with other folk from the North of Scotland and fetched up in a Highland settlement in Ontario, Glengarry, in the Indian Lands. Full twenty years this man of God spent in Glengarry, taking a wife from among the Robertsons. Her father had come to New England first, moving on to Sherbrooke in the Province of Quebec. I could tell you a deal about her family; there was a cousin, Andrew Murray, of Clairvaux, led the Dutch Reformed South African Church; ye’ll have heard of Robertson Smith and he was another cousin; the writer M. M. Robertson was a sister. Mary Robertson taught philosophy as a lass of twenty in Mount Holyoke College in New England. They offered to make her principal on the death of Mary Lyons and she was duly considering for a while. She was of the Robertsons of Aberdeen, ye ken, and twenty-two years aged. But there was this young Highlander, Daniel Gordon of Glengarry in the Indian Lands, who was swaying congregations. Well, then, she turned her small, straight back on the principalship and married him, and went away from that pleasant place and company and fine position that stood waiting for her to live in the backwoods of Canada, a rare wild parish with the railway twenty-five miles off and a long journey to everywhere. She was a remarkable woman. Daniel Gordon took her to his home in the woods. In the year 1860 she bore him a son; they named the boy Charles. The laddie played about the square brick house with wide verandas that stood in a natural park of pines and maples, with a glebe of some twenty-four acres and forest all about. Two miles by a path through the woods took him to school in a clearing, and two miles back. They played games in the shadows of the pines. There was a rich green darkness and a curious coolness and a curious warmth there for them; the tops of the pines murmured like distant bagpipes and everything smelt sharp and sweet.

On a day when the boy was eleven Daniel Gordon went to sway another congregation in Western Ontario, taking his wife and the boy along, for that there were better schools for Charley to go to. What with this, and high school in a neighbouring town, the lad makes ready for Toronto and the University. He didna do badly at the University, though he was no sober-sided student. He sang in the glee club and played quarterback at Rugby football in the champion team for Western Ontario. Some honours in classics he got and went on to the study of theology at Knox College. He was not too strong in those years and capturing scholarships and prizes in the three years’ courses at Knox College did him no good bodily. So then it was settled he should take a year abroad, spent mostly in Edinburgh, where he could walk along gay Princes Street and see the grand sight of Castle Rock, or climb to Arthur’s Seat and look over the Firth of Forth with its speckle of green islands and white sails and the bare country of the Kingdom of Fife, or pace slowly down the Royal Mile to Holyrood, with every step a threefold memory and an historic lesson. I’ll not say this did him any harm, maybe, and what it lacked in one way he made up on his return to Canada, taking his brother and travelling deep into the forest on Lake Nipissing, they seeing no other white man for three months. To crown these journeyings and to confirm the habit of health Charles Gordon spent two more years at Banff. There, in the heart of the Rockies, he climbed mountains and rejoiced in wildness. “Yes, I ought to have been an Indian!” he used to exclaim.

ii

He was ripe to receive his call at last, and it came. It took him to a life of rough hardship as a missioner in the North-West, all among lumbermen and miners with a congregation to be gathered first, and sore deeficult to sway in assembly. He came well-shod to the work of treading out the harvest in the Lord’s vineyard. He could go into the woods and come out again, or face a man mad with drink, or comfort a sick mother. A tall, slender, well set up young missioner with no very much ruddiness of complexion and a thoughtful, serious face that could yet smile, for a’ that, with crinkles in the eye corners. You would know him for Scots by his look, but the rest is puir American. And he loved those men among whom his work lay. When, along in 1894 and him just well into his thirties, he was asked to a city church, he didna want to respond favourably until he saw where his duty lay. Well, then, he came to Winnipeg and to the ministry of St. Stephen’s because it offered him the grand chance to help those roughened men whose needs he knew. Ye ken, perhaps, Mr. J. A. MacDonald of the Toronto Globe newspaper. MacDonald had been a classmate of Charley Gordon’s and a year or two after Charley Gordon came as preacher to St. Stephen’s, MacDonald was owner of a new little paper called The Westminster and concerned with Canadian Presbyterianism--a frank experiment. Into the office of The Westminster dropped Charley Gordon one fine day. He was in a great heat for money to put into the foothills and the mountain camps. They needed missions out there; I’m burning up with the wish to write an article telling about those men in the pines and along the upland lakes, Charley Gordon tells MacDonald. I’ve facts and figures. MacDonald was quick to say, if Charley wanted to bring home his message to people and loosen the purse-strings, he had a duty to write the thing as a tale, paint a picture with lifelike figures and a warm feeling running through it all. Gordon minded himself of what he had seen and heard in such good plenty; and he went home and sat down to write a story of Christmas Eve among the lumbermen in the Selkirk mountains. When he was fair into it, he found himself carried back and away, so much so that in reading it through after he didna see what brother clergymen might make out of the ringing speech of some of his characters. MacDonald agreed, but sent to find out what name to put on the story. Gordon invented a name, Cannor, out of the first letters of “Canada” and “North-West.” MacDonald picked up the reply telegram and snorted disdain. Cannor, he commented, what sort of a name is that! I’ll make it Connor. And where’s a first name? Frank? Fred? Chris? No. Ralph? Aye, we’ll make it that. This was the birth and christening together, ye’ll ken. The tale of the lumbermen’s Christmas Eve in the mountains was later to become the first chapter of the novel, _Black Rock_, the first novel by Ralph Connor, that was read everywhere.

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I’ll not have to be telling you what it was in _Black Rock_ won so many readers for Ralph Connor. Humour and pathos are bound up in the lives the young minister of St. Stephen’s was writing about; ye could lay hold quickly of his sympathy for those men who were in some ways as helpless as bairns and were half-brutalised by their work and surroundings. It’s the effect they have on each other, too. Them picking up _Black Rock_ to read were struck with something fresh and wild and clean, withal. They sensed a tenderness about the feeling of the story, like heather softening the bare hillside, and more than a morsel of the everlasting hope in which men endure hard and lonely toils. The same held true of the books that followed _Black Rock_; for there had to be other books. Ye mind _The Sky Pilot_ and _The Man From Glengarry_ and _The Foreigner_ and _Corporal Cameron_ and _The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_. Take _The Foreigner_. On the edge of Winnipeg, Charles Gordon found a Settlement of Slavs--Ruthenians, Russians, Galicians and who not. They lived in a grim little collection of huts, a dozen in a room, all huddled up, drinking and dirty and violent; and on them was still the shadow of tyrannies in the Old Country. Drinking and dirty and violent with a violence dark and beautiful, Charles Gordon found them. Aye, he found the huts and the men, and Ralph Connor that was in him found a story. Ralph Connor took the splendid young heart in Kalmar, the son of a nihilist, and brought it to fight its way out of the ruck of aliens and make for the new country beyond the Saskatchewan, where there is prairie and where the lakes lie on the surface of the prairie like jewels on a woman’s breasts. Then, in _Corporal Cameron_, was Connoring the first grand tale of the North-West Mounted Police, by a man who kenned them, as followers in his tracks scarce can be said to. A richt fine love story is this of the lad who was born in a Scottish glen and came to ride out in the Canadian blizzards; it’s furthered in _The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_, which makes use of the half-breed and Indian rebellion of Louis Riel. But there’s a muckle I love in the book besides the adventure--Cameron and his gold-haired, plucky wife and the hesitant wonder of the first fine feeling of the lover. It fashes me how a man says what’s down in the hearts of such a many other men and women. Give me to understand how it’s done! Here’s the Reverend Charles Gordon dwelling this quarter century and longer in Winnipeg, building up St. Stephen’s and seeing it transformed from a plain chapel of wood into a handsome church of stone, with a church house where the young men without homes can live, and where there’s sewing and amateur acting and films and bowling every night of the week. In the daytime the Reverend Gordon will maybe attend court to help get some boy straightened out and become a guardian to him; or he’ll be at meetings in his church where revolutionary agitators are spouting the downfall of all institutions and then voting thanks to the preacher because, as they put it, he has given us an absolutely square deal. And after supper you would find him in his home at evening prayers with the three youngsters who appeared to enjoy their devotions. There’s no stiltedness in the man at all. He reads from Scripture concerning Paul taking Timothy with him to learn what were the problems of that day. And he closes the book on his finger to remark what a sensible, canny thing for Paul to do. Some of our theological seminaries, adds the father, shut a man out from contact with life, shut him up with professors, and when he comes out of his cloister he canna recognise a social problem if it walks up to him on the street. The trouble with me, he finishes, when I had gotten out of the seminary.

But he’s generous to a fault sore in a son of Scots folk. If his right hand is earning moneys with a pen, his left hand is spending lavish and free. There’s his salary as minister to the kirk goes flowing out several times over in gifts and helpings to people. I mind the year quite long back when the Presbyterian General Assembly of Canada was meeting in Toronto and Doctor the Reverend Gordon put down $10,000 so every missionary minister and his wife in the breadth of Canada might attend the General Assembly, expenses paid. Some of these men and their wives hadn’t been out of the woods in years. Ralph Connor knew what this meant.

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Then, when the Great War came thundering, our sky pilot stood up and said Canada must send a half million men. Many scoffed at him; but he was right, and we sent the half million and over sixty thousand didna come back. From St. Stephen’s there was an enlistment of close on four hundred, including the minister and five members of the Session. The dominie went in the spring of 1915 after the congregation had confirmed his leave of absence--Major Charles W. Gordon, chaplain to the Forty-third Battalion Cameron Highlanders of Canada. Many St. Stephen’s men were enrolled in this battalion and one of the members of the Session, Robert McDonald Thomson, was their first colonel. It was the Western Front--from the Ypres Salient, Sanctuary Wood, the bloodshed of the Somme and back again to Arras. In that time Ralph Connor saw the regiment shrunk from full strength to two officers and sixty-five men. He knelt down amid the roar of guns and the hailing of machine gun bullets to do last rites for his own men and comrades. Among them was Colonel Thomson. On the eighth day of October, 1916, the outfit stormed the Regina Trench on the Somme. Unable to advance, they wouldna retreat. So they died where they stood.

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_The Major_ and _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_ are books ye’ll verra well recollect; likewise the novel of twa years back, _To Him That Hath_. Since ye hanna read it, it’s the new novel from the pen of Ralph Connor, I’ll just speak a word of to ye. He calls it _The Gaspards of Pine Croft_ and explains it is “a romance of the Windermere Valley.” A story of the life and moulding of Paul Gaspard, it is. Here’s a mon with two powerful strains mixed and fighting for mastery of him. From his mither, Paul inherits a rare sense of the presence of God; his father gifted him with a fine artist sense, and a bounding spirit, a passion for life to the full. The clash of the two men in the boy grows with him to manhood, so that after the death of his mither he stands between two women, who beckon different ways. Then when a great decision is put before him the mon takes upon himself a burden and a responsibility that test him body and soul. ’Tis a life and death struggle set in the grand country Ralph Connor makes his own. There’s the valley of the Windermere before you with the Gaspard ranch, Pine Croft, flanked on one side by a great bend of the Columbia River and on the other by a mountain wall of virgin forest. In this mysterious wilderness, the figures of Indians do come and go, touching the lives of the white people with disaster, with dread--with an unco beauty as well.

Books by Ralph Connor

_Beyond the Marshes_
1898 _Black Rock_
1899 _The Sky Pilot_
_Ould Michael_
1901 _The Man from Glengarry_
1902 _Glengarry School Days_
_Breaking the Record_
1904 _The Prospector_
_The Pilot of Swan Creek_
_Gwen_
1906 _The Doctor of Crow’s Nest_
_The Life of Dr. James Robertson_
1909 _The Foreigner; A Tale of Saskatchewan_
_The Angel and the Star_
_The Dawn by Galilee_
_The Recall of Love_
1912 _Corporal Cameron of the North-West Mounted Police:
A Tale of the MacLeod Trail_
1914 _The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_
1917 _The Major_
1919 _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_
1921 _To Him That Hath_
1923 _The Gaspards of Pine Croft_

Sources on Ralph Connor

_Ralph Connor, the Well-Beloved._ Booklet published in 1914 by George H. Doran Company. Now out of print.

_Silver Jubilee, 1895-1920, of St. Stephen’s, Winnipeg._ Booklet published by the congregation of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

_II. Here, There and Everywhere_

i

In his new book, _The Humanizing of Knowledge_, the author of that fascinating study, _The Mind in the Making_, James Harvey Robinson, says: “Personally I have reached the conclusion, after many years of teaching, that one should choose for instruction, whether one be dealing with young or old, _some phase of human interest rather than some field of scientific investigation_”--and he goes on with force and plainness to point out the defect of an educational scheme in which knowledge is imparted by going in and out of great numbers of pigeonholes. He is really pleading for methods of instruction that shall take account of the ordinary man’s interest in his world, and shall proceed by the natural process of mental associations instead of by artificial and arbitrary tetherings to the post of this and that “subject.” Seldom has the difficulty been put with more brevity, simplicity and general sweetness of temper, or in a way to give such decent courage to individual self-respect. “We are not many of us interested in isolated scientific facts of any kind. That species of interest, as we have seen, is reserved for the few. But all of us are open to the effects of such new knowledge as gets under our skins. And the great art is not to exhibit our own insight and learning but really to influence those whom we are aiming to influence.” There could be no better text or opening for a chapter devoted to books of many varieties, inasmuch as books have always taken, except where restricted by school formulas, the lines of human interests and the path of some natural association of ideas. In this sense, though teaching may need to be humanised, knowledge has never been without its humanisation. A James Harvey Robinson cannot write about science without being led into the absorbing history of the mind that is slowly achieving science. A Camille Flammarion, discussing astronomy, finds it above all things natural to relate his knowledge with man’s religious ideas. An L. P. Jacks, analysing religious doubts, moves directly over the border of so-called psychology into the sphere of conduct and behaviour, because the answer lies over there. A George Santayana employs poetry to state those portions of his philosophy which prose can scarcely embody with sufficient expressiveness; bases criticism on his philosophy and distils or re-distils philosophical ideas from all the varieties of his learning.

To take M. Flammarion, for example. His new work, _Dreams of an Astronomer_, could without any essential inaccuracy be styled “A Humanisation of Astronomy.” Here is a book produced in this French scientist’s eighty-first year, at an age where “isolated scientific facts” had lost all fanciful meanings and were seen only in their warm and present human significance. The point with M. Flammarion was not that we live on a poor little world in a vast universe composed of worlds within worlds and flaming suns and revolving planets, nor that this universe so immense is but an item of larger immensities. The point was in the significance of these facts to the heart and mind of a man or a woman. What does it mean as regards our attempt to know God? In what perspective does it place our aspirations and our efforts toward what we sometimes call “righteousness”? Flammarion gives the richness of his physical knowledge in untechnical language; in words that summon the imagination he constructs pen pictures of other worlds than ours. That we may have the value of comparison, he describes Venus and Mars--the latter possibly inhabited by creatures millions of years ahead of us in their development. This moving and inspiring book ends with a sentence that might serve as the quiet challenge of science to much of philosophy and religion. Says M. Flammarion: “Let us not be personal, like infants or the aged, who see only their own room, let us know how to live in the infinite and in the eternal.”

But this lofty idea needs translation into the terms of our finite existence and our character of religious beliefs. It finds it in such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_. Like _The Humanizing of Knowledge_, this is a slender book that can be read through in about an hour and it is equally a book that is likely to influence a lifetime. It is beside my point that Professor Jacks is one of the greatest living philosophers and religionists; but it is a fact of the highest relevance that he writes as no one writing on these subjects has written since William James. The same power to pierce to fundamental questions--and answer them; the same lucidity of thought and expression are characteristic of the two men. Jacks exhibits the same tolerance of the forms of religious belief; and it is only after a discussion of “Religious Perplexities in General” that he closes with a talk about “Perplexity in the Christian Religion.” He says: “Far be it from me to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity. Anyone who does that goes a long way towards forfeiting his title to be called a Christian. Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where it speaks the language he best understands.” He begins with the two ultimate questions that man asks himself: “Why are we here?” followed by, “Why am I--I, and not John Jones or James Smith--here and now?” The answer to the first is the need of the One to differentiate itself into the Many, proving its universality and its power to integrate and raise up the good. But, he shows, the answer to the second question is in the conduct of the individual. Insofar as I by my courage in the face of life justify my particular existence, I supply the reason why myself, rather than Jones or Smith, exists in my place, here and now. Faith is not a new faculty added to us, it is simply our reason grown courageous. As Carlyle repeated, we all must answer the alternative: “Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?” Professor Jacks adds: “No philosophy can relieve us from the responsibility of having to make that choice”--and religion, telling us our choice must be the heroic one, strengthens us in making it.

It is religion, I think, that George Santayana represents--Santayana who contrasts for me with that rooted countryman of his, Miguel de Unamuno. I have a love for both, the one tenacious of his soil and its traditions, the other early detached, flung into the New England of Harvard and William James, now lodged in Paris, and always with his roots feeding orchid-like on the air. It is inevitable that one like Santayana should bear his blossom in poetry and criticism and his fruit in philosophy-religion, or religious philosophy. Thus he calls his _Scepticism and Animal Faith_, “an introduction to a system of philosophy,” but it is so only in the literal sense probably necessary to secure the proper recognition from a too unimaginative world. The book, which has a charm unbecoming a philosophical overture, can be read independently of the volumes that are to follow it; but who reads it may be trusted to put independence on one side and “follow, follow.” Santayana as poet is possibly matter to consider in a later chapter of our book, but since, as he says in the preface to his _Poems_, their subject “is simply my philosophy in the making,” we should be privileged to a passing consideration here. “I see no reason why a philosopher should be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is ignorant; and his sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural and inevitable condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of his emotion. Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him on occasion. It is his only possible life, his daily response to everything”--call it religion, if you please, and regard its expression:

O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invisible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

And to all who care for fine intellectualism neither arid of inspiration nor robbed of beauty and emotion I commend Santayana in all his books, those named and, of course, _The Life of Reason_, _Winds of Doctrine_, _The Sense of Beauty_, and _Character and Opinion in the United States_ and the _Soliloquies_ as well. For those unacquainted with the man, _Little Essays Drawn from the Works of George Santayana_, by Logan Pearsall Smith, may offer the readiest approach.

ii

The task to which James Harvey Robinson calls us has already been undertaken with the highest success by himself and some others. Among these has from the first been Edwin E. Slosson who now, with Otis W. Caldwell, the botanist and educator of Columbia University, has edited an admirable volume, _Science Remaking the World_. This book is so good and represents so intelligent a collaboration, that I hope it is only the forerunner of a number of similar volumes. In the dual editorship, Dr. Caldwell’s contribution was his working familiarity with every field of modern science while Dr. Slosson lent his magic touch of the born populariser. The fifteen chapters, eleven of which are contributed by specialists in various fields, deal directly along the average person’s lines of interest with such subjects as gasoline power, coal tar products, the modern idea of the atom, what we know of “infantile paralysis,” our present knowledge of tuberculosis, the lengthening of human life, the world’s health, botanical science, evolution, warfare against insects, forestation, the chemistry and economy of food, and those two basic foods, bread and the potato. Dr. Caldwell writes the general opening chapter and the chapter on lengthening human life with its special reference to Louis Pasteur’s work; as was desirable in view of the great popular success of his _Creative Chemistry_, Dr. Slosson contributes the discussions of gasoline power and of the miracles wrought from coal tar.

Our quest shuttles back and forth between the discoveries of man and man the discoverer. At every stage we have to consider not only what man has gained in the way of knowledge but his potentialities in respect of all knowledge. That is why we have such a succession of books as Madison Grant’s _The Passing of the Great Race_, those books by Lothrop Stoddard which are brought to attention in Chapter 22 of this volume, and, now, Roland B. Dixon’s _The Racial History of Man_. The professor of anthropology at Harvard treats impressively and from a broad point of view the whole question of race. His account of race distribution and historical development is divided geographically. Beginning with Europe and a general outline of its racial history, he then takes up the separate countries or areas. In the same way he deals with Africa, Asia, Oceania, North and South America. His interesting conclusions, in some respects original and without the dogmatism that vitiates much writing on the subject, are given in a final chapter. But the best part is that this book is simply the first in a group of probably ten volumes, each to be written by a leading American authority, which is to describe, in the light of the latest investigation and discovery, the formation of worlds, the evolution of species, and the emergence and development of man.

Such books are desperately needed, to resume James Harvey Robinson’s argument, if science is to save itself. Such is the present situation that “if no precautions are taken to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and popular prejudice it may grow so wide that the researcher himself may be engulfed.” It would not be the first time in human history when light was swallowed up in darkness. How dense that darkness can be, how persistent, how ironical and, perhaps, pathetic may be learned from the slightest perusal of Dr. James J. Walsh’s astonishing and engrossing new book, called _Cures_. This is a history of new remedies of every sort in all ages which have cured for a while and then have failed. It will scarcely surprise us, although it may make us rather uncomfortable, to know that not Europe with its ancient and superstitious peoples but modern America has supplied the greatest number of cure delusions. Dr. Walsh puts the explanation on a charitable ground: “Americans are more enterprising and as a result we have had ever so many more successful discoveries of new”--but less permanently successful--“remedies.” The subject is not without its humorous aspects. Insofar as Dr. Walsh has occasion to treat of some forms of curing which are still much adhered to, with or without correlated religious beliefs, his book treads on live and resentful toes. As a Catholic avoiding the discussion of Lourdes and other shrines, he invites reprisals; as a physician of very distinguished service and high standing, he is well-qualified to counter them. But aside from any possible controversy, what an amazing history of human credulity and ignorance he exposes--Dowie, rattlesnake oil, magnetic iron, metallic tractors, sympathetic powders, hypnotism, mesmerism, electric belts, plasters, pads, chest protectors, psychoanalysis and spiritualistic healing along with the various forms of “New Thought” come under review. It will be observed that as a rule Dr. Walsh gives credit for cures to even the most impossible notion or contraption--at first. A cure is a cure, perhaps only the more so if the actual curative agent is suggestion.

Suggestion! Is it possible that, on a subject so bedevilled, a book could now appear of genuine usefulness, sanity and popular value? Personally I should have inclined to answer emphatically, “No!” But I cannot, for the book is before me. Dr. Louis E. Bisch, a physician practising in New York, lecturing on psychology at Columbia and directing the treatments given in mental and nervous cases at the large sanitarium in the North Carolina mountains, has been known to me hitherto by his _Your Inner Self_--without exception the best popular account of psychoanalysis and modern psychology I have ever seen. Now he has written _The Conquest of Self_, in which he expresses with the same directness and accuracy all that body of actual truth which the “How to Succeed” books build into such amazing forms of lies and nonsense. There is, of course, a certain power of accomplishment in each of us; there is a general direction for each of us to take; there are personal obstacles to overcome, and there is a power of progression to be developed. A better comprehension of one’s self, as of others, can definitely be arrived at. All these facts Dr. Bisch translates into practical detail and illustrates with concrete instances, avoiding the claptrap with which the whole subject is now so heavily overloaded. In that general enterprise of the humanisation of knowledge to which (I hope) we are all fully committed, such a book as _The Conquest of Self_ has a special merit; for where ignorance is thickest, it lights a clear and modest path, and where pseudo-science has done and is doing the greatest havoc, it puts truth in armour for the hardest part of a difficult journey.

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If, as some contend, the purpose of fiction is entertainment--an assertion we need not either attempt to refute nor deny--then the mark of good fiction is that, while perhaps entertaining us, it does something else. And about the “something else” I should think we need not be narrow in definitions. Maybe the entertaining novel we are reading adds its unobtrusive item to our understanding of this or that; maybe it tunes up our emotional natures. Or it may accomplish its bye-purpose in other directions. We may or may not be conscious of the additional result, or, if conscious of it, we may continue (perhaps wisely) to read for the sole purpose of being entertained. I do not believe one should read fiction with the something else in mind, nor, in a brief account of some new novels, would I attempt to suggest what the something else--differing, it is likely, with the individual reader--may turn out to be. If one asks me for bread, I will not offer him a loaf of vitamins, but palatable bread from which his body may take the elements it pleases.

For examples, you may derive from John Buchan’s _Midwinter_ your clearest idea of Dr. Samuel Johnson, or your greatest knowledge about the affections of a young lady; your own mind will satisfy its proper need. From Compton Mackenzie’s _The Altar Steps_ and its sequel, _Parson’s Progress_, certain temperaments gain religious and ecclesiastical satisfactions. The modern, intimate taste for sensory impulses can be gratified in reading John Dos Passos’s unusual novel, _Streets of Night_; just as the correlative instinct for a fresh and daring idealism is fed by such a fine first novel as Cyril Hume’s _The Wife of the Centaur_. Arnold Bennett’s _Riceyman Steps_, with its story of a young charwoman who works for a miserly bookseller and his wife, renews the heart in its assurance of our common humanity, and offers the rich nourishment which rejoiced us in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And so it goes with fiction.

We think of Brand Whitlock now as the author of _Belgium_, but a further thought recalls him, and with pleasure, as a writer of fiction. His new novel, _J. Hardin & Son_, was planned ten years and more ago and discussed with the late William Dean Howells, whose interest in it was keen. The actual writing had begun in the summer of 1914 at a small country place near Brussels when the catastrophe of war began its pre-emption upon all of the American Minister’s time and energy. Except for intervals of thinking about it and occasional notes, Mr. Whitlock could do nothing but protect the manuscript on journeyings to and fro--until the end of 1918, when, after the armistice, he resumed writing as opportunity offered. The book was progressing in earnest at Biarritz and Spa in 1922, and was completed in New York in the spring of 1923. Mr. Howells’s interest will be understood when it is explained that _J. Hardin & Son_ takes place in a little Ohio town. The story begins when Paul Hardin, the son, is ten and accompanies him to middle age--perhaps one should say to that point in or at the beginning of middle age where, as with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a man’s character takes its final determining shape in some act or decision which controls the rest of his life. For Paul Hardin this moment comes when he recognises one of the buggies made forty years before by his father, takes hold of one of the spokes and finds it as solid, as resistant as on the day it was made. Paul had hardly liked his father, whose sternly-held and sternly-expressed views and whose passion for moral reform in the shape of prohibition seemed like a life-long and perverse obstinacy, embittering all the preludes to affection, sympathy or even understanding. Yet now! Something comes out of that spoke, something out of his father’s life that settles his behaviour toward the two women who are for him to deal with in regard to himself. Mr. Whitlock has aimed, however, at the reconstruction of a period in American life. His momentous personal problem in the life of Paul Hardin is simply the foreground for a study of American ideas in a certain kind of community in the years within his own recollection, say from 1880 on pretty well into our century. Over a hundred characters, many of them of more than passing importance, are involved in the extremely varied but entirely naturalistic incidents of the novel.

_J. Hardin & Son_, the work of an American at fifty, makes a contrast with the work of a Norwegian of fifty, the age at which Jonas Lie wrote his _The Family at Gilje_. The Norwegian novelist, whose story is just offered in a careful translation, uses a much simpler scheme. His tale opens with a picture of a home in the mountains of Norway where a father and mother are anxious to get their children married off. It ends when each child has solved his or her problem. If environment conquers in one child, individuality is sure to come out on top in another. Jonas Lie’s book, I am told, makes Norwegians feel that they are living again the scenes of early life; and at the same time the novel is full of the most modern ideas about marriage, the home and the management of children, introduced not by main strength and the hazard of fictional illusion but subtly, by an artist who shared Ibsen’s supply of “social dynamite” but whose artistry was paramount. Lie is called a realist, as, I suppose, Bojer and most of the Scandinavians would be (except Jens Jacobsen in _Marie Grubbe_); but what is the white magic in these writers of the white snow-countries that makes their realism so unfailingly poetic? Is it indigenous? Cannot we acquire it here in America? Shall we exile our artists to Canada, whence now comes little but the worn-out stories of strong men and their uniform primitiveness with women?

I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do you; but I do know that certain writers are _simpatico_ in certain provinces of society--Frank Swinnerton, for example, in the stratum whence he drew his _Nocturne_ and his _Coquette_ and in the somewhat different middle-class level on which we meet the characters of his new story, _Young Felix_. Here is a satisfactory representative English novel in the mode called realism to contrast with our American and our Norwegian. I say “contrast”--for I don’t think comparisons will get us very far. What we are better employed in doing, in my opinion, is a species of addition rather than subtraction; we shall find a difference in the attitude as well as the art of Brand Whitlock, Jonas Lie, and Frank Swinnerton. Is not each worth our while? I think so. I think such a novel as Jay William Hudson’s _Nowhere Else in the World_ is worth the while of most readers, who may, however, be a bit puzzled at first to discover how different it is from his _Abbé Pierre_. Mr. Hudson may possibly have written the Great Chicago Novel as Carl Sandburg is sometimes thought to have written the great Chicago hymn or chant. At least, his _Nowhere Else in the World_ is in its essence apocalyptic. Stephen Kent, who had been enchanted by Paris after a youthful rebellion against Chicago and its blatant commercialism, lives to look upon the city of his birth as “like Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ primitive, powerful, with mighty sinews,” as “the spiritual capital of America,” as a place where he and others will join in “moulding, not paintings and statues, but a civilisation destined to be the summit of all art, of all dreams.” There is incidentally in this tense story a competent picture of American academic life which will cause squirmings. Mr. Hudson’s knowledge of American colleges is derived at first hand.

Much first hand knowledge, I happen to know, has gone into the writing of George Looms’s second novel, _John-No-Brawn._ The action of this rather terrible but certainly impressive piece of fiction takes place in Louisville, Kentucky, the author’s home town, and in and near Denver, Colorado. The book is one of an intensity that has already occasioned extremely divergent opinions. The story is that of a sick man, an indeterminate character trapped by the horrible and inescapable fact of disease. He comes to the conclusion that he is a hopeless drag on his young wife. Against the warnings, protests and threats of doctor and nurse, he walks out of the hospital. “They watched him near the stairway, saw him reel slightly and then reach out his hand and take hold of the banister--saw him steady himself. He paused for a moment ... and then he passed around the partition corner, out of sight.” Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, _Through the Wheat_, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be expected of the reader. It is probably an advantage in Mr. Boyd’s novel over Dos Passos’s _Three Soldiers_ that _Through the Wheat_ is almost entirely a story of fighting in the front line. All agree that this was war, at least, and something is gained at the outset by the setting aside of various prejudices and preconceptions. _Through the Wheat_, far more than _Three Soldiers_, contrasts with high effectiveness with Henri Barbusse’s _Under Fire_. Again may I plead that if the two novels, the French and the American, are to be entered in a fight by rounds, there can and should be no decision. _Through the Wheat_ is a wonderful thing to have been plucked in Belleau Wood, at Soissons and Saint Mihiel by a boy not yet twenty.

While Mr. Whitlock is going back of our day for his Middle Western picture, Meredith Nicholson, slightly his senior, has been busy with the immediacy not only of the present day but the very hour. Mr. Nicholson’s new novel, _The Hope of Happiness_, like its predecessor, _Broken Barriers_, reckons with a social life in which, if they have not been entirely swept aside, American standards of conduct have been very much altered. The young woman who drinks too hopelessly much is put before us, but the essential story is one of a situation between father and unacknowledged son with the probable complications of men’s business and women’s love. There is an ability of characterisation and a temper and evenness in the writing which make the reader feel that Mr. Nicholson writes for a much ampler purpose than would be served by a novel of changing manners and enlarged social license. These are mere appurtenances of the story he has to tell.

Not to have a story to tell is to forfeit the best claim to consideration at the hands of most readers of fiction; and among those Americans who have never made the forfeiture I would have no hesitation in naming Irvin S. Cobb. The award of the O. Henry Memorial Prize for 1922 to the title story in Cobb’s _Snake Doctor and Other Stories_ seems to me more or less of an irrelevance; Cobb has written so many capital stories and the award, if it had then existed, might so easily have gone to him years ago. The tales collected in _Snake Doctor and Other Stories_ exhibit, perhaps, a greater variety than some of the earlier collections, and there is a Judge Priest story without which, I am certain, a majority of Cobb’s readers would consider the book incomplete. “Snake Doctor” itself has been criticised as being altogether mechanical. My suggestion to those who advance that criticism would be conveyed in the form of a question, or two questions: Did they get no thrill from reading the story? And if they did, was that thrill a purely mechanical effect? For the point is not whether the thing producing an effect is a mechanism, but the nature of the effect itself. Nothing is more mechanical than the theatre, but a good play is not made the less art thereby. Actors, you may say, or acting; but a scene has been “made” or destroyed more than once by that utterly mechanical detail, the stage setting.... If as has sometimes been predicted, a machine will be invented to produce upon us all the effects of good fiction, we shall none of us quarrel with the inventor nor will anyone try to destroy the device unless it be our fictioners. In the meantime, I advise no one to neglect them, lest the day of the obvious and unconcealed machine never arrive.

iv

To blaze a trail for the reader through the rich forest of books educational, philosophical, scientific, and withal “popular” is no easy task. I have not attempted to do more than put down the titles of some new and recent “general” books, with the authors, and sometimes a note upon the volume. But should these not be classified? Dear reader, if you will give me the classification of the things you are interested in, I will classify the books....

_Christ or Mars?_ by WILL IRWIN. A passionate but documented indictment. Mr. Irwin says we do not want peace hard enough; the mood of man must be changed before peace can come about. He believes it can be done. “We are trying to hide in squirrel-holes from God. And the church, which purports to interpret to our world His intentions, is hiding too.”

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER’S _Building the American Nation_ is a series of lectures on Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, John Marshall, Webster, Jackson and Lincoln.

_The Ideals of Theodore Roosevelt_, by EDWARD H. COTTON. The book deals especially with Roosevelt’s religious beliefs and his creed as expressed in a life of action. Theodore Roosevelt’s sister, Corinne Roosevelt, writes the preface.

_The Spirit of Islam_, by SYED AMEER ALI. Recognised as the one authoritative work in English for use in Moslem centres of instruction. Of especial interest in connection with Lothrop Stoddard’s _The New World of Islam_.

_Man and the Attainment of Immortality_, by JAMES Y. SIMPSON. After a careful outline of biological evolution, the author interprets Christianity as the most important stage in the evolution which, from being physical, is tending more and more to become a mental and spiritual process.

G. STANLEY HALL’S _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, an interpretation of what we know of Christ in the light of present-day psychological knowledge, is now procurable in one volume.

A new and useful introduction to the study of philosophy is JOSEPH A. LEIGHTON’S _The Field of Philosophy_.

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON’S _The Humanizing of Knowledge_, discussed above, is one of the volumes of the Workers’ Bookshelf series, books primarily planned for use in American trades union colleges but of varying general interest. Other books in the series are _Joining in Public Discussion_, _The Control of Wages_, _Women in the Labour Movement_, etc. (by various authors).

_The Greek View of Life_, by G. LOWES DICKINSON, a book of charm and permanence, should possibly rather be assigned to Chapter 15 of this book.

_The Making of the Western Mind_, by F. MELIAN STAWELL and F. S. MARVIN. A short survey of the leading elements of the European cultural inheritance from the days of classical Greece to our own day.

_Suggestion and Mental Analysis_, by WILLIAM BROWN. Takes into account Coué and Badouin and psychoanalysis, and culminates in an exposition of Bergson’s philosophy.

_The Dominant Sex_, by MATHILDE and MATHIAS VAERTING, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Argues that there are no distinctively “masculine” traits but that the traits so-called have been characteristic of either sex when dominant in a particular society; with evidence to support the theory.

_The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination_, by RICHARD GOLDSCHMIDT, translated by W. J. Dakin. Remarkable breeding experiments carried out with insects; intersexuality; a subsection deals with man. A book of importance to biologists.

_How to Sing_, by LUISA TETRAZZINI. Practical advice by the great coloratura singer.

_The Art of the Prima Donna_, by FREDERICK H. MARTENS. Discussions by Bori, Calve, Easton, Farrar, Galli-Curci, Hempel, Homer, Jeritza, Schumann-Heink and others are the feature of the book.

_Public Speaking_, by FRANK H. KIRKPATRICK. Those interested in this subject will probably want also ALFRED DWIGHT SHEFFIELD’S _Joining in Public Discussion_.

_The Process and Practice of Photo-Engraving_, by H. O. GROESBECK, JR. There has hitherto been no handbook and manual.

_Construction of the Small House_, by H. VANDERVOORT WALSH. For the architect and the layman alike.

As an example of the finest type of book in one of many special fields, there may be mentioned ARTHUR T. BOLTON’S _The Architecture of Robert and James Adam_, in two volumes with about 700 illustrations, folio size, $60.00.

_The Book of Building and Interior Decorating_, edited by REGINALD T. TOWNSEND. Practical advice from experts.

_Interior Decoration_, by FRANK ALVAH PARSONS. A standard work.

_The Psychology of Dress: Life Expressed in Clothes_, by FRANK ALVAH PARSONS, is a history of costume made still more interesting by illustrations.

The Amateur’s Book of the Garden Series, edited by LEONARD BARRON, offers:

_The Vegetable Garden_, by ADOLPH KRUHM
_Planning Your Garden_, by W. S. ROGERS
_Lawns_, by LEONARD BARRON
_House Plants_, by PARKER T. BARNES
_The Flower Garden_, by IDA D. BENNETT

For the owner of the greenhouse there is _Gardening Under Glass_, by F. F. ROCKWELL; SYDNEY MITCHELL’S _Gardening in California_ is a guide for the amateur on the Pacific slope; and _Adventures in My Garden and Rock Garden_, by LOUISE BEEBE WILDER (author of _My Garden_ and _Colour in My Garden_) is the descriptive history of a piece of land hardly more than an acre in size.

_The Plain Sailing Cook Book_, by SUSANNA SHANKLIN BROWNE. Simple recipes for beginners.

_A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House_, by JESSIE CONRAD. With a preface by her husband, Joseph Conrad. This was the meat on which our Cæsar fed and grew so great.

_A Pocket Bridge Book_, by WALTER CAMP. For those who must have their daily dummy.

_Modern Auction, 1923_, by GRACE G. MONTGOMERY. The new edition of a standard work.

_Singles and Doubles_, by W. T. TILDEN, 2D., world’s tennis champion, 1920, 1921.

_The Gist of Golf_, by HARRY VARDON. Vardon writes most readably and gives a chapter to each club. Pictures.

_Field Soccer and Hockey for Women_, by HELEN FROST and HAZEL J. CUBBERLEY. Pictures and diagrams.

_Ski-ing Turns_, by VIVIAN CAULFIELD. With card diagrams that can be removed from the book.

_How to Box_, by NORMAN CLARK. With 61 photographs.

_Training for Power and Leadership_, by GRENVILLE KLEISER.

_The Making of an Executive_, by A. HAMILTON CHURCH. Personal qualifications and the special knowledge required.

_Creative Selling_, by CHARLES HENRY MACKINTOSH. Making and keeping customers.

_The Law of Sales_, by JAMES BURTON READ. The law relating to the transfer of personal property for considerations.

_Advertising for the Retailer_, by LLOYD DALLAS HERROLD. Complete information on every type of advertising used by the retailer. Illustrations of layouts, window decorations, show cards, letters, etc.

_The Leadership of Advertised Brands_, by GEORGE BURTON HOTCHKISS and RICHARD B. FRANKEN. Successful advertising and marketing methods.

EDWARD H. SCHULZE’S _Making Letters Pay_ covers business letters from the viewpoint of “better results, in less time, at lower cost”; while CARL A. NAETHER’S _The Business Letter_ offers thoroughgoing practice in making good business letters a habit. SALLIE B. TANNAHILL’S _Ps and Qs: A Book on the Art of Letter Arrangement_ is concerned with personal letters.

_Funds and Their Uses_, by FREDERICK A. CLEVELAND. Now available in a revised edition. Methods, instruments and institutions of modern financial transactions. The revision adds chapters on the United States Treasury, commercial banks, the Federal Reserve system, trust companies, investment bankers and agricultural credit institutions.

_Cotton and the Cotton Market_, by W. HUSTACE HUBBARD. Production, marketing, the future contract system, the speculative factor; a pretty complete survey.

_Reminiscences of a Stock Operator_, by EDWIN LEFEVRE. The chief appeal of this book is the appeal of fiction, although it is obviously founded on the facts of one or more Wall Street careers. Much market wisdom.

_Co-operative Marketing_, by HERMAN STEEN.

_Historic Textile Fabrics_, by RICHARD GLAZIER. More than 200 varieties are illustrated.

_The Business of Writing_, by ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY and ALEXANDER VAN RENSSELAER. A trustworthy book on marketing the writer’s product.

_Writing to Sell_, by EDWIN WILDMAN. What will be marketable and why, from short pieces for household periodicals to special feature articles for monthly magazines.

_The Community Newspaper_, by EMERSON P. HARRIS and FLORENCE HARRIS HOOKE. Developing the newspaper to the community’s benefit and the owners’ profit.

Readers interested in the subject of JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON’S _The Humanizing of Knowledge_ will be interested in ABRAHAM FLEXNER’S new book, _A Modern College and a Modern School_.

_Modern Industrialism_, by FRANK L. MCVEY, presents in very full outline and from the examples of many countries present-day industrial organisation.

_Trade Unionism in the United States_, by ROBERT F. HOXIE. A revised edition is ready.

_Everybody’s Business_, by FLOYD PARSONS. A readable survey of America’s natural resources and the story of the development of our major industries.

_The Great Game of Politics_, by FRANK R. KENT.

_Too Much Government--Too Much Taxation_, by CHARLES NORMAN FAY.

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