Chapter IV: Stephen Crane (2)

Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that they were “poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew clinging to them”? I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made off with my copy of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s _Ponkapog Papers_, in which there is a pleasant essay on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of course, said in his meticulous way that poetry should not be pulled up by the roots; but modern feeling does not agree with him, holding the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy freshness evidence incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not mere paper or wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who in her lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published until after her death. And then?

Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of fame, steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more read and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to Emerson,” W. P. Dawson, the English critic, says in his own anthology. “Among American poets I have named two—Poe and Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the London Spectator said not long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent anthology of American poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the finest by a woman in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his ‘perhaps.’”

Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume edition of her work! _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ contains all the verse which appeared in _Poems, First Series_, in _Poems, Second Series_, and in _Poems, Third Series_, and also those in the book brought out as recently as 1914, _The Single Hound_. The total body of Emily Dickinson’s work is therefore presented, and all in a new and proper arrangement, making the edition definitive. Emily Dickinson’s niece and biographer, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has written an introduction for the work.

Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick to it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters, the Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W. Hatfield has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are _The Complete Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily Jane Brontë_, respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and each contains a large percentage of poems never before published. I need not say anything of the romance investing the lives of these three women. Shut in a lonely parsonage in bleak moorland country, haunted by ill health and destined to die young, they made their lives one of the most extraordinary adventures in the history of the literary spirit. Their verse, of course, shows the Byronic influence.

The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an _A Book of American Verse_ with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor who selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the whole field of American literature from its beginnings and has been at once personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent collection of his own work, _Essays on Poetry_, includes short papers on Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and some others.

_Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study_, by R. L. Mégroz, is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet and prose writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the purpose of his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light and in relation to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living writer of more interest for such a study than the author of the _Memoirs of a Midget_, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet of happiest childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil age. Mr. Mégroz’s book has the charm of its subject, and more.

One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to write a good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh one be needed, is T. Earle Welby’s _A Popular History of English Poetry_. Mr. Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may have been impaired by his articles in the London Saturday Review and his other book, a critical study of Swinburne. _A Popular History of English Poetry_ is said to be the only one-volume book of its sort, but whether it is or not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs from Chaucer (there is even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to Meredith and Hardy and Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves the adjective in front of the word “History” in its title. Anyone who knows or cares about poetry at all can read with delighted ease and will learn something in every chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile knowledge and a light touch. His judgments are neither vague characterizations nor conventional utterances; he has taste and he has an opinion, and he gives you each.

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To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an exquisite color and form: _Echo de Paris_, by Laurence Housman, is a bit of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer, Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English, who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound, shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of _Echo de Paris_:

“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected. Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation, Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than even he could bear.

“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on which his reputation was built.”

Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s _Jennifer Lorn_. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the difficulty of reporting _Jennifer Lorn_. It is worth noting, though, that the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner. The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it should be so delightfully well-done.

An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this book; I saved out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it _The Wind and the Rain_; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and the best since _Limehouse Nights_ (from some standpoints it is better than that work). In _The Wind and the Rain_, Thomas Burke returns to Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway; his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”

Hugh Walpole’s critical study of _Anthony Trollope_ is welcome both because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own work used to be likened to that of the author of _Barchester Towers_. I believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The _Anthony Trollope_ by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s _Gissing_ and _R. L. Stevenson_; we have a right to hope that the fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which case he would probably select Stendhal.

But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions. It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory. Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he write a book about authors. He did. _The Doctor Looks at Literature_, with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence, its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, _Taking the Literary Pulse_, is as strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a subject which most discussion merely muddles.

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Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the anthology by F. H. Pritchard, _Essays of To-Day_. Not only are the inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes, naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a power of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of his words regarding the lyric:

“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The metal bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-point and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see it at length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”

Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short biographical note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences, the spirit of place and of holiday, and various interrelations between life and letters are the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E. Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert K. Chesterton and Edmund Gosse are some of the writers who achieve inclusion; and the variety of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic feeling, delight in places and sadness all have their moment.

Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books by some of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not miss Robert Lynd’s _The Blue Lion_. Here are some chapters dealing apparently with children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but animated by that interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human nature which is the field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.

It is, to a great extent, the field which Robert Cortes Holliday has occupied himself with since the day of his _Walking-Stick Papers_; and while the title of his new book is _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, the “other byways” are frequently the most engaging to tread. Mr. Holliday, for example, has been interviewing the ancient waiters on the subject of the golden years at a lost Delmonico’s; and he has also become an authority on nightwear. But there is plenty of contact between life and literature in _Literary Lanes_. One essay is devoted to the subject of the vamp in literature; another to books as presents; another harvests _bons mots_ from the inner circles of celebrated wits; “and,” as Mr. Holliday would say, “and so on.”

Stephen McKenna’s _By Intervention of Providence_ is a felicitous blend of diary, essay and short story, written by this novelist during an extended visit to the West Indies. The atmosphere of the West India islands is conveyed with some care, while the digressions to the essay or the short story are anecdotal, philosophical, and frequently humorous. “From day to day,” Mr. McKenna explains, “I set down whatever fancy tempted me to write. The result can only be called ‘Essays’ in the Johnsonian sense of that word. I desire no more accurate definition of what is in part a series of letters, in part a journal, in part vagrant reminiscences, in part idle reflection, in part stories which I do not ask the reader to believe.” But the potpourri, however unusual, will be welcomed alike by the traveler and the arm-chair tourist.

iv

The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, _The Middle Twenties_, which is more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his book, _Forgotten Shrines_. I do not forget _Songs for Parents_, but that is somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, _The Magic Sea Shell_, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason alone. His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other activities, have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly taken time and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much of the hardest work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has been upon the verse in _The Middle Twenties_. The result ought to satisfy him, though probably it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his own work. But all the poems in _The Middle Twenties_ keep to a high level and the volume has more than variety, it has positive and effective contrast. Whether he is most successful in the “Amaryllis” group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage pain and passion of “The Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But from the flaming “Ego,” the opening poem, to the fine understanding of such work as “War Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment, and emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.

Nellie Burget Miller’s _In Earthen Bowls_ explains its title in these lines which open the book:

So here we have our treasure in an earthen bowl,
Distorted, marred, and set to common use:
And some will never see beyond the form of clay,
And some will stoop to peer within and softly say,
“There is a wondrous radiance prisoned there,
And I heard the stir of an angel’s wing.”

Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very large—which asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a direct relation to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in which they want to be able to see the suggestion of something radiant and feel the stir of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems in her book, Mrs. Miller has not tried to build an imaginary world, but has appealed to the love of nature, and to the feelings of happiness and grief, for her lyrical expression. The evidence of her success has been recorded in several ways. She has, for one thing, been made the chairman of the literary division of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She has also been chosen poet laureate of her State, Colorado.

Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize Martha Haskell Clark’s book, _The Home Road_. Mrs. Clark has been a contributor of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to several of the enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called. Her poems are concerned, as her title indicates, chiefly with the longing, often wistful and sometimes delightful, for an old home or fireside, old friends and holidays and memories. The language is as simple as the feeling. Curtis Hidden Page, professor of English at Dartmouth and compiler of _English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, writes the preface to _The Home Road_.

Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_ seems to me of more than ordinary interest, because the author is the buyer of books for one of the largest stores in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation that one thinks of it as constantly creating book readers from the mere fact of its having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige is in an unequaled position to know what, in the way of a book, people want. Well, she does. And having found no present-day book that quite met the problem, she has made one. Her _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_ has a foreword by Christopher Morley and contains poems dealing with every imaginable subject. They are divided into sections in a natural grouping: poems about and for children, poems about fairies, about birds and other animals, about flowers and seasons; humorous poems, patriotic poems, holiday poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the classification, the range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under “Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!

How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems for recitation, and though these poems _are_ for recitation, there is nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As such, it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.

A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the new illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, _Abbé Pierre_. The great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes steadily on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather against the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like _David Harum_) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson has got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap in _Princeton Sketches_. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where the scenes of _Abbé Pierre_ are laid and has caught both the spirit and character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new dress, make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s quality.

18. Coming!—Courtney Ryley Cooper—Coming!

i

What I need at the moment is not a chapter but a billboard on which to paste with great splashy gestures a three-sheet announcement: “Coming!—The Literary Lochinvar—Coming!” Both words and pictures—yes, and muted notes from the steam calliope—are requisite to herald adequately the author of _Under the Big Top_. If I tell the story of Courtney Ryley Cooper, fiction, even his own fiction, will seem colorless beside it. Therefore read no further. The lights are off and a beam flung from the projection room high overhead shows us——

Scene. Large white canvas mushrooms growing closely together and obviously attracting swarms of the human ant. Animals in gaudy cages, the living skeleton, lemonade, spangles and paper hoops. Close-up. Fifteen-year-old boy, at once timid and bold, interviewing the master of destinies. Caption: “Boy, water the elephants!”

Scene. Amphitheatre within the largest of the tents. Several thousand faces that are all one face and that have even less significance than one face and that emit a crackling, collective sound. Clowns, masked by perpetually surprised looks painted on noses, mouths and eyebrows, in ballooning white costumes, rolling and tumbling about the arena. Thwack! Close-up. Fifteen-year-old ecstatic over the time of his life, working hard. Caption: “Spare the slap-stick and spoil the child.”

Scene. Office of the Denver Post, twelve years later. Enter Buffalo Bill, white hair pigtailed and everything. He strides up to the city editor. Caption: “Whar’s that reporter fellow——”

Flash. “Film not broken, but we have just been informed that all motion picture rights in the career of Courtney Ryley Cooper are reserved to Mr. Cooper. Please keep your seats.”

ii

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1886, the son of Baltimore Thomas Cooper and Catherine (Grenolds) Cooper. He is a descendant of the Calverts, Lords of Baltimore, and of other settlers of Maryland and Virginia. He ran away from school in Kansas City to become water-boy and clown in a circus. He also became an actor, bill distributor, property man and song and dance artist with bad repertory companies playing “East Lynne,” “In Old Kentucky,” “The James Boys in Missouri” and other classics of the road.

He has been a newsboy, a trucker, a glove salesman, a monologist in vaudeville, a circus press agent, a newspaper man, and general manager of the world’s second largest circus.

He began writing at 24, a play, “the world’s worst play,” he says. It was produced in Kansas City “and I had to sit and watch the darned thing for two weeks.” Then he began to write magazine stories. So great has been his output that at least five pen names have been necessary. They are Barney Furey, William O. Grenolds, Jack Harlow, Frederick Tierney and Leonard B. Hollister. He has written as much as 45,000 words of fiction in three days—or days and nights. As a newspaper man he has written eight columns (1,200 words to the column) in two hours. For such excesses he naturally pays in an inability to walk, eat or sleep for some immediate time afterward. It might be supposed that the work so turned out would be mere machine-made stuff, but this is not true. However, the ability to write at such speed has necessitated a small staff to gather the writer’s material.

There are several reasons why Mr. Cooper could never gather it all himself. He married, in 1916, Genevieve R. Furey, of Los Angeles, and they have a pleasant home in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Mr. Cooper gets his recreation in the mountains round about. But the stuff for the hundreds of stories he has written of circus life and jungle animal life cannot be renewed except from elsewhere. It cannot be renewed and added to sufficiently except—almost literally—from everywhere. After all, Mr. Cooper has contributed stories to more than half a hundred magazines. And if he were to stop writing to gather material——!

“I have a little circus all my own,” he explains. He knows nearly everything that is happening in all the big shows. He keeps up an uninterrupted correspondence with circus people and he has five persons on his payroll at all times. One is a man who makes a specialty of circus pictures. Another is a lion trainer who has trained as many as thirty lions in one den. Whenever he has some unusual incident of animal behavior to report, he writes to Cooper. A third member of the little staff is an all-round animal man, menagerie superintendent and “bullman.” A fourth is a highly educated woman with ten years’ experience in training lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Mr. Cooper pays her a salary and she takes “assignments,” just as if she were a reporter—which, in fact, she is in this work. She is a reporter on animals, their training, and their characteristics. The fifth employee is a circus clown who sends a regular monthly letter reporting things that happen under the big top.

There is, besides, a large number of volunteer correspondents, friends of long standing.

Mr. Cooper has used his material both directly, in the form of articles, and in stories. While he was on his way from clown to general manager of the circus, he became deeply interested in jungle animals and discovered a great many human traits (or traits parallel, if you prefer) in them. He himself, it must be remembered, has been in the training dens with leopards, lions, tigers and pumas; and he has been in with as many as six lions and tigers at one time.

He looks, in certain poses, remarkably like Eric von Stroheim, and the camera sometimes brings out the multitude of his freckles. He is bald and enjoys baldness. Better company is not to be had, and this is only partly due to the innumerable anecdotes at his command. Many of these grow out of his association with Buffalo Bill, whose personal secretary he was for a while and whose biographer (with Buffalo Bill’s widow, Mrs. W. F. Cody) he became. There is, for example, the story of the time when Cooper contracted with a clipping bureau for newspaper notices. They were to be ten cents each. They arrived—a bale—and with them a bill for $134.90. With a single exception, they consisted of 1,348 clippings about the Buffalo baseball team, which was much to the fore owing to the temporary existence of the Federal League.

Cooper also told this story at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon in New York:

“Colonel Cody arrived home unexpectedly early one morning. Going to his wife’s bedroom window he tapped on the glass, calling: ‘It’s all right; let me in.’ ‘Go away,’ said Mrs. Cody. ‘This is Buffalo Bill’s house, and I’m his wife, and I can shoot, too.’ Buffalo Bill, sore, remounted his horse and rode off to a neighboring saloon. Eventually he returned home, galloping up the driveway and on to the veranda of the house, letting out Whoops the While. As he reached the door a gentle voice greeted him from behind it: ‘Is that you, Willie dear?’”

iii

In 1918 Mr. Cooper enlisted as a private in the United States Marines. Very shortly he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to France to collate historical matter for the Marine Corps.

He has a very exceptional talent for handling people in masses, and has sometimes been requisitioned by motion picture people and others who had spectacles to produce. As the talent is coupled with a talent for creative organization at least equal, the life of a writer represents a deliberate sacrifice of money on Cooper’s part. For example:

Wild West shows, rodeos and bucking horse contests are one of his hobbies. A few years ago he ran the first Annual Round-up at Colorado Springs. In three days the show took in $19,800 gate money. And the whole show, from the announcement, building of grandstands to seat 8,000 persons, hiring of cowboys, wild horses, bucking broncos, steers for bulldogging, advertising and everything else, was put on in less than three weeks. Overtures piled in on Cooper to go into the business in other places. In the end, he refused contracts for $150,000 for two years’ work.

iv

His books have been of two principal kinds, novels of the West and the two volumes, _Under the Big Top_ and _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything!_ that spring from the circus. The novels are _The Cross-Cut_, _The White Desert_, and _The Last Frontier_, in that order. Are they simply the usual “Westerns”? No. There is in _The Cross-Cut_ that quality of humor, that enjoyment of a capital hoax, which first cut out from the stampeding herd of Western stories Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_. Almost everyone, recalling Mr. Wister’s novel, thinks of the opening scene in which the cowboys, like Little Buttercup in Mr. Gilbert’s “Pinafore,” “mixed those babies up.” That affair, so refreshingly different in its realism and sense of scandalous fun from the sentimental heroics of other Western tales, is easily recalled when most other incidents of _The Virginian_ are forgotten. Similarly one recalls with fresh amusement the ruse whereby ’Arry ’Arkins got the Blue Poppy mine unwatered. Messrs. Fairchild and ’Arkins had very little capital; but by a convincing effect of drowning in the mine, the whole community was stirred to rescue the presumed corpse of ’Arkins; machinery that the two men could not have hired was set to work pumping, and by the time the hoax was revealed, the mine was dry.

_The White Desert_ has nothing to do with sand and alkali but is a story of the bleak, white stretches of the Continental Divide, where the world is a world of precipices, blue-green ice, and snow-spray carried on the beating wings of never-resting gales. It is the tale of a lumber camp and of a highly dramatic, last ditch struggle. Mr. Cooper admits that the first chapters were from an experience of his own. On the Berthoud Pass, 11,300 feet high, his speedster broke down. Now safety speed on the roads thereabouts is possibly fifteen miles an hour. The grades sometimes run as high as eighteen and twenty per cent. With no windshield, no gears to aid his brakes, no goggles and a sprained steering gear, Mr. Cooper was towed on these mountain roads by a largely liquored gentleman in a truck at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. Mr. Cooper was bald before this happened....

Essentially, _The Cross-Cut_ and _The White Desert_ are stories; _The Last Frontier_, with no sacrifice of story interest, can stake a claim of more importance. Like certain novels of Emerson Hough’s[82] and Hal G. Evarts’s, this is an accurate and alive presentation of American history in the guise of fiction. The period is 1867-68 when, as an aftermath of the Civil War, many impoverished families sought the unsettled frontier lands. The Kansas-Pacific Railway, a link between East and West, was under construction, its every mile contested by the Indians. It was the period when Buffalo Bill made his reputation as a buffalo hunter and Indian scout; when General Custer nearly wore himself out hunting Indians; when the Battle of Beecher’s Island aroused the nation. Buffalo Bill, Custer, and the building of the railroad are the true subjects of this fine romance which ends when the great stampede has failed. “The buffalo were gone. Likewise the feathered beings who had striven to use them as a bulwark and had failed—enfiladed by scouts, volleyed by cavalry, their bodies were strewn in the valley with the carcasses of the buffalo.” Within months Custer was to come back, and in triumph. The “golden-haired general” was to ride to the battle of Washita “at the head of the greatest army of troops ever sent against the red man.... There would be other frontiers—true. But they would be sectional things, not keystones, such as this had been.”

These novels, in their order, mark a growth in the writer’s stature; and Mr. Cooper, like others who show growth, has humility as well as ambition. The thing he has in mind to do, possibly in his next novel, is more difficult than anything he has done—an attempt to take a few contemporary lives and view them in the perspective that history affords. This, of course, is very hard to do. Certainly Sinclair Lewis did not do it in _Main Street_, and no amount of exact, faithful, realistic detail accomplishes it. It can only be done by simplifying one’s material so that a few humble people are seen as typifying human endeavor. But if the effort is successful, the result will mean as much in one century as in another, and the work will live.

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Mr. Cooper’s two books based on the circus accomplish something that no one else, so far as I know, has even attempted. They make a permanent and fascinating record of a truly American institution. _Under the Big Top_ presents the circus as a whole, although five of the eleven chapters are concerned with the circus animals. _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is wholly about the menagerie.

The first of these books is a curious illustration of the breach ordinarily existing between literature and life. Although, in the complexities of a surface civilization, the circus may hold less significance for Americans today than fifty or forty or even twenty years ago, most of us were brought up to go to the circus. Or, at any rate, went. The formative influence of the circus on American character is incalculably great. Yet neither literature nor formal education took any cognizance of the circus tent. Public officials, as Mr. Cooper points out, very generally took into consideration the educational value of circus animals when fixing license fees. But that was about all the notice of value the circus got. Where were books on the circus? When was the circus reckoned with by the professional analysts of American character? How far has present-day American advertising acknowledged its immense debt to the traveling show? What Matthew Arnold or James Bryce coming to our shores to examine American character and lacking, possibly, the wisdom of the serpent acquired the Wisdom of the circus? And our psychologists busied with delicate tests on the nerve-endings of frogs; were they dumb-bells so long? They were. They went not to the circus, the sluggards; they examined not its ways.

Yet it would be true to say that the circus is the one most typical American institution. Between the American circus and the traveling shows of other lands no comparison is possible. In size, in variety, in achievements of audacity, devotion and courage, the American big tent show has no rival. It is, to begin with, playing around in a country which is to most other countries as a ten-acre field is to a city lot. Its self-reliance must be complete. Its morale, especially in the days of its greatest importance, has had to be high and unwavering; for otherwise-excellent people have been its unrelenting foes. At the same time the circus has been something much more than a spectacle; frequently it has been a coöperative enterprise. Mr. Cooper gives some idea of the innumerable occasions on which the American small boy, judiciously and fairly rewarded with a free ticket, has pulled the circus out of some insuperable physical difficulty. The circus was the original discoverer of the most important element in American psychology, the love of bigness and display, the admiration for achievement in size. It was the circus which first put in firm practice the important principle of human nature which time merely refines upon: the desire to be bunked: and the circus drew the correct line between bunk and bunco and with the fewest exceptions steered clear of bunco.

Now in _Under The Big Top_, Mr. Cooper, who naturally knows circuses, gayly gives the whole show away—a process which a good show can come out of with colors flying. And the circus does. The gist of the book, the real why of the circus, will be found in that rousing final chapter written upon the text:

RAIN OR SHINE
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHOW
WILL POSITIVELY APPEAR

Here are stories of that ultimate sheer persistence which is the spirit of the circus and, pretty nearly, the history of the nation to which it belongs.

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The chapters on animals in _Under the Big Top_ led directly to Mr. Cooper’s _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, which is the menagerie inside out. In the course of long study of caged and captive jungle creatures, and aided by the continuous study of his staff-helpers, Mr. Cooper has found no human emotion which these animals do not exhibit at some time or other in appropriate circumstances. “I have seen jealousy, insanity, hallucination, the highest kind of love including mother love, the fiercest brand of hate, trickery, cunning and revenge. I have seen gratitude. The only desire I will exclude as not being common to humans and animals is the desire for money. There is a corresponding animal desire, however. It is horse meat. Horse meat is the currency of the animal kingdom.”[83]

The extraordinary instance of Casey, a giant, black-faced chimpanzee[84] captured in infancy in the Cape Lopez district of Africa, has suggested to Mr. Cooper that something most remarkably approaching a man could be bred from a monkey in as few as four generations. Not a physical likeness, but mental, is the prospect. Enough apes of Casey’s type would be necessary to avoid inbreeding, and the first generation born in captivity would have to be subjected to wholly human contacts.[85] About 150 years would be required for the experiment.

But _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ is a book of fact, not of theories. It is most valuable, perhaps, in its contrast between the old and new methods of animal training. Mr. Cooper shows in the first chapter the transformation that has come about:

“The circus animal trainer of today is not chosen for his brutality, or his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has studied and knows animals—even to talking their various ‘languages.’ There are few real animal trainers who cannot gain an answer from their charges, talking to them as the ordinary person talks to a dog and receiving as intelligent attention. Animal men have learned that the brute isn’t any different from the human; the surest way to make him work is to pay him for his trouble. In the steel arena today ... the animals are just so many hired hands. When they do their work, they get their pay.... The present-day trainer doesn’t cow the animal or make it afraid of him.... The first thing to be eliminated is not fear on the part of the trainer, but on the part of the animal!... Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants, fish for seals, stale bread for the polar bears, a bit of honey or candy for the ordinary species of bear, pieces of apple or lumps of sugar for horses; every animal has his reward for which he’ll work a hundred times harder than ever he did in the old and almost obsolete days of fear.” With lions, tigers and leopards the trainer, imitating their own sound that expresses satisfaction, can convey to them his satisfaction with their work. And there is catnip. “To a house cat, catnip is a thing of ecstasy. To a jungle cat it holds as much allurement as morphine to a dope user, or whisky to a drunkard. The great cats roll in it, toss it about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of delight.”

Does this new method of animal training seem to remove from the circus menagerie most of its adventure and romance? Does Mr. Cooper’s account of the “Wallace act,” in which a lion impersonates an untameable lion and fights its trainer, seem to sickle over all such performances a hopeless theatricalism? The answer may be found in the pages of _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_, a chronicle of breathlessness if ever there was one. Here are stories of Mabel Stark, Captain Ricardo, Bob McPherson and many others to make the hair curl: stories of animals that remembered and men that forgot, of trained dogs and untrained leopards, of animal nature and—best of all—of human nature. How much better, this book, than the fiction which attempts to approach animals from the imaginative side! With a low bow in the direction of Mr. Kipling, it may be pointed out that the ordinary child’s sole contact with the beasts of the jungle is through the circus menagerie or the zoo. As captive animals are utterly different from wild, it is in terms of the captive existence that the child reasonably craves to know and appreciate them (I say “child,” but in this matter we are all children, regardless of age). But no one who reads _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_ will ever see an animal act again without an observation at least twice as intelligent or an interest at least doubly great.

BOOKS BY COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

_The Eagle’s Eye_ (with William J. Flynn, then Chief of the
U. S. Secret Service)
1919 _Dear Folks at Home_ (with Kemper F. Cowing)
1919 _Memories of Buffalo Bill_ (with Mrs. William F. Cody)
1921 _The Cross-Cut_
1922 _The White Desert_
1923 _The Last Frontier_
1923 _Under the Big Top_
1924 _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything_

SOURCES ON COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

Several are referred to in footnotes to the text of the chapter. The usual record will be found in _Who’s Who in America_, and there is Mr. Cooper himself (address, Idaho Springs, Colorado).

19. Edith Wharton’s Old New York

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Willa Cather once made a significant confession, to the effect that nothing which had happened to her after the age of twenty seemed to matter as material for her fiction. On the whole, the statement is strongly borne out by her work; and there is reason to believe that it is true of other women writers. Dangerous as the path of generalization may be, I am persuaded that in such cases as Miss Cather, Zona Gale, Edna Ferber and Edith Wharton, all or nearly all of the writer’s best work is traceable to contacts and impressions in those young years which alone seem to hold an inextinguishable spark for the tinder of imagination. And in the instance of Mrs. Wharton one has only to consider her early life in relation to some of her fiction to feel that she could echo Miss Cather.

For whatever the high merit of much of her fiction, its finished irony, its polished strength, its assurance and ease, where is the work of hers, leaving aside _Ethan Frome_, which has the robust vitality of her pictures of old New York? It is not a question of accuracy in historical detail; various slips have been charged up against _The Age of Innocence_. Well, the fact that Keats confused Cortez with Balboa has never diminished the splendor of a famous sonnet. Vitality has little to do with structure or detail, and everything to do with the artist’s feeling for what he is modelling, painting or writing about. Who can read _The Age of Innocence_, or the four novelettes grouped under the general title _Old New York_ (_False Dawn_, _The Old Maid_, _The Spark_, and _New Year’s Day_) and doubt that it is a return to first loves?

As everyone knows, or should know, she was born in New York in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones; and her mother was a Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.[86] In the period before her marriage at the age of twenty-three to Edward Wharton, of Boston, and in spite of much time spent abroad, she was herself one of those sensitive souls who “in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound,” who found themselves inextricably and by no means unhappily enmeshed in a “cautious world built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers,” a world where everybody “lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underneath.”[87] In this society the girl and young woman had need of imaginative sympathy as well as sharpened perceptions if she were ultimately to comprehend what went on. For few can comprehend such things as the affair of Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer,[88] or such behavior as Lizzie Hazeldean’s[89] at the time. Innocence of mind is not in question here, nor observations; it is simply that one has to be older, to have had one’s own experiences, and to be able to relate what one has seen to what one has come to know from life. Then and only then can comprehension come in terms of that sympathy which Mrs. Wharton beautifully defines as a “moved understanding.” One is no longer shackled by exact memory and one is animated by the same strong feeling, in the flood-tide of which one takes the past and fashions from it a story serviceable in meaning for mankind.

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It is tempting to speculate whether Mrs. Wharton could have written _The Age of Innocence_ in present-day New York. The thing seems improbable. Not even in the shelter of the National Arts Club, with a window overlooking Gramercy Park, or in one of the old Chelsea houses, does the feat look the least likely. Living in France she could quite readily cross the Atlantic in recollection, sit in a shabby red and gold box at the old Academy of Music and listen to Christine Nilsson singing in “Faust.” “She sang, of course, ‘_M’ama!_’ and not ‘He loves me!’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Newland Archer would be in the club box with other men, of whom Sillerton Jackson would be the undisputed social authority. He would sit at the back but Where he could see directly across the house in the box opposite the “young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stage-lovers,” May Welland. “It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal).” And then? Mrs. Wharton is not the one to avoid the delicious opening offered to review Newland Archer’s confused but hopeful visions. His masculine pride, a tender reverence he felt for her “abysmal purity,” the simple vanity which led him to wish May to be as worldly-wise and eager to please as the married woman of his acquaintance (“without, of course, any hint of the frailty which ... had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter”)—these elements of Newland Archer’s feeling are pieced together easily enough _now_ from dozens of young men one grew up with and dozens of young couples one looked on at....

The infatuation of Newland Archer for Ellen Olenska would be gradual, handicapped by the efforts of his sympathy, unaided by any quality of imagination, “to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.” The constraint, like an enormous enveloping pressure, as if everyone in the old New York society lived in the remotest depths of the sea, would overcome both Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. But, as Mrs. Wharton realized—one feels that it is these two moments for which she wrote—the time would come when Newland would look at his wife and wish she were dead, and the time would come when he would sit as the victim of tribal ceremony.

“Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance traveled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the center of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’ vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

“As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife. ‘It’s to show me,’ he thought, ‘what would happen to _me_—’ and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.”

Here, indeed, is the novel of character at its finest. One does not have to praise the character novel in a day when the turn of critical taste has caused it to be esteemed above everything. As we know this type of fiction it has passed through several mutations since Jane Austen gave it existence by her novels. Men have seized upon Miss Austen’s lesson and have wrought so prodigiously with it, as in _Vanity Fair_, in _The Egoist_, and in _The Old Wives’ Tale_, that nothing is easier than to forget that the whole business originated in a woman’s mind. But the novel of character is even yet distinctly feminine. It ignores the mysterious and unknown. It says that whatever may be the Unknowable, there is much we do and can explore and know. It baffles the typically masculine effort to reason with the mind, and yields at a touch to the typically feminine approach by sympathy and intuition, by thinking, as it were, not with the mind but with the nervous system. Among the many perversions to which it has been subjected none is more hopeless than a sort of conscientious, wholly masculine realism, a placid apprehension of surfaces, such as triumphed in the work of William Dean Howells. Mr. George Moore said in malice that Henry James went abroad and read the great Europeans, while Mr. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. It would be at least as true to suggest that Mrs. Wharton, for whatever time she was his “pupil,” chose Mr. James to escape from Mr. Howells. At home was dignity and dullness; abroad was the author of _The Portrait of a Lady_ busy with highly-disguised melodrama. Who—least of all, a woman like Mrs. Wharton—could hesitate?

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