Chapter IV: Stephen Crane (3)

The four novelettes grouped under the title, _Old New York_, are doubtless as works of art more perfect than _The Age of Innocence_, for in each case Mrs. Wharton has selected a subject as a painter might, with a feeling for the effect in certain lights and with a wish to avoid so far as possible the air of having “composed” her figures in their background. The extreme artificiality and rigidity of the society she writes about demands that at least one or two persons—the one or two in the foreground—shall possess a movement apparently unstudied. Therefore her task has been finely and ruthlessly to cut away the richly rambling growth of her recollections, the profusion in this direction or that; it has been to isolate a single crucial situation, or to expose behind the dried leaves and the withered roses of mid-century sentimentality and correctitude the reality of a heart that beat in its pathetic moment of terror or of despairing courage. These are exquisite stories; I do not think it an exaggeration to say they are the finest things Mrs. Wharton has ever done with the exception of _Ethan Frome_. Indeed, they have something that no work of hers but _Ethan Frome_ has in the same degree, the mood of stirred comprehension and compassionate pity, joined to something that no work of hers but _The Age of Innocence_ has, a rapturously perfect setting.

_False Dawn_ (_The ’Forties_) begins at a country house which overlooked Long Island Sound at a point now shabby with cliff-dwellings and gas tanks. “Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of pale yellow”—and young Lewis Raycie, who has hard work to down his punch (“perfumed fire”) is twenty-one and ready for the Grand Tour. The more tender-hearted of his sisters has a habit of going out furtively at daybreak to take comforts to poor Mrs. Poe, the very sick wife of an atheistical poet. The son, secretly in love with an ineligible girl, runs across in his travels John Ruskin, and buys Italian primitives instead of the Raphael and conventional “masters” desired by his father. For this he is cut off from a fortune and left with the collection. We have a glimpse of him and his wife and little girl embraced in poverty while the pictures are exhibited to a New York still totally unready for them. Lewis Raycie, his wife and child are dust when the “dawn” comes.

In _The Old Maid_ (_The ’Fifties_) Mrs. Wharton deals with a situation so dramatic that I feel the shocking unfairness of disclosing it prematurely to the reader. Although Delia Lovell, wife of James Ralston, and Charlotte Lovell are actually cousins, one comes to think of them as sisters. The faithful but unsparing presentation of what, essentially, is comprised in motherhood grows out of the most intimate glimpses of husband, wife, lover and mistress. “Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase ‘to obey’ in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence. And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”

Although _The Spark_ is subtitled _The ’Sixties_, it is more truly a tale of the ’Sixties reflected in the ’Nineties. Hayley Delane, whose “harsh head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain,” is the supremely good-natured, stupid husband. It is only by slow degrees that the young man who tells the story comes to understand that while Delane is intellectually no different from the other men of his social set, he is morally far in advance of them. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note Mrs. Wharton’s use of the young man as narrator not only in this story but in _New Year’s Day_, and to compare it with Willa Cather’s use of the same device in _My Antonia_ and _A Lost Lady_.

_The Spark_ is a story devoted to the exploration of character, an obscure but fascinating task resumed at intervals over the years. The secret of Delane’s character leads back, curiously and astonishingly, to his brief contact as a youth with “an old fellow in Washington” who visited the sick in the army hospitals. Otherwise Delane has never heard of Walt Whitman. I withhold the ironic and perfect ending.

A sample of Mrs. Wharton’s zestful writing comes in the first sentence of _New Year’s Day_ (_The ’Seventies_):

“‘She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother, as if the scene of the offense added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing.”

Her son’s mind flashes back to an incident when he was a boy of twelve watching, with older people, the rapid and unbecoming rush of folk from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was on fire. With her admirable technique, Mrs. Wharton at once slips quietly back to the incident itself, and we follow Lizzie Hazeldean in her progress from the scene of so much confusion—a flight, but a controlled flight. This story holds a surprise for the reader, who will not be likely to surmise Mrs. Hazeldean’s true feeling any more than Henry Prest did. The scene between these two, meeting for the first time after Charles Hazeldean’s death, is incomparably well done.

Surely these four novelettes will be read a half-century hence with as much appreciation as today! For such work, for such New York primitives, one feels there can be no false dawn. I have no doubt that the immediate effect, only partly traceable to the presence in the background of some of the same persons, like Mrs. Manson Mingot and Mr. Sillerton Jackson, will be to set everyone to re-reading _The Age of Innocence_. Which is entirely as it should be, for they will find that novel fresher, livelier, more wistful and even more beautifully satisfactory today than four years ago.

A NOTE ON EDITH WHARTON

For a full list of Edith Wharton’s books and for reference to several important discussions of her work, see the chapter on her in either _Authors of the Day_ or _American Nights Entertainment_.

_The Age of Innocence_ is a story of New York society in the ’Seventies. It was published in 1920, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, awarded by Columbia University, as the best American novel of its year (over Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_). The four novelettes called _Old New York_ were published in 1924 (separate volumes, or set) and are:

_False Dawn_ (_The ’Forties_)
_The Old Maid_ (_The ’Fifties_)
_The Spark_ (_The ’Sixties_)
_New Year’s Day_ (_The ’Seventies_)

20. Not Found Elsewhere

i

Certain books which have seemed not to drop naturally into the scheme of my other chapters are to be discussed in this; but that does not mean an entire lack of relation among them. I shall first say something about books dealing with Europe; then something about books on American subjects. Both these groups are mainly of an historical character. There will then remain for our attention a few books of a somewhat diverse but distinctive character.

Easily the most important of the European studies is promised in a two-volume work by the Earl of Birkenhead with the title, _The Inner History of British Politics, 1906-1922_, to appear early in 1925. The author first came to general attention as Frederick E. Smith, an Ulster lawyer. As Sir Frederick E. Smith he was Attorney-General under Mr. Lloyd George and later, as Viscount Birkenhead, he was Lord High Chancellor. When he retired from office with Lloyd George he was made an Earl. With Sir Andrew Carson, he was generally held to have been responsible for the gun-running in Ulster when an Irish civil war seemed in prospect in 1914; and he does not disclaim the rôle.[90] On this and other accounts he is in some quarters one of the best-hated men in British public life.

But he is also one of the most direct, uncompromising and candid. He is also much more open in his disillusion than most English public men have ventured to be—or actually were. None of the rosy colors of Mr. Lloyd George’s auroral intellect have any place in Birkenhead’s thinking. His literary style is the somewhat encumbered one of the lawyer; but if it is a little tortuous, it is precise, and leaves his meaning not vague. His “Inner History” of events between 1906 and 1922 will be most bitterly attacked, as biased, partial, misrepresentative of men and purposes. But the reader will do well to form his own judgment; and in any event it will be necessary to wring from the attacks, as you wring water from a cloth, the large amount of emotionalism with which they are certain to be saturated.

Birkenhead has, of course, certain advantages in preparing his work. Lloyd George has spoken in one book[91] and Asquith has given his account of the pre-war period.[92] Various other actors in the striking political events that began just before the Asquith Ministry and continued until Mr. Lloyd George’s defeat have been heard from. The material at Birkenhead’s disposal is far more complete than the record of history so entirely contemporary has ever been.

Arthur Hamilton Gibbs is a brother of Philip Gibbs and of Cosmo Hamilton.[93] At the beginning of the war he was just out of hospital and had gone home to England to recuperate his strength. He was under a strict injunction not to ride a horse for six months. In one month he had enlisted as a private in the British Army and was training as a cavalryman. After service in France he was commissioned, eventually becoming Major Gibbs. He also saw a long period of that morale-destroying inaction which was the lot of certain units sent to the Bulgarian front. His final period, in France, coincided with the great German drive of March, 1918.

Out of this experience he wrote a book, _Gun Fodder_, published in 1919, when the world, in sheer reaction, wouldn’t look at a war book. Yet Arthur Symons called _Gun Fodder_ one of the six best books about the war. And people on this side, like Christopher Morley, who have a faculty for personally discovering the exceptional book, read it and talked about it. When _Gun Fodder_ was republished this year (1924) it took its place as one of the very few books of war experience that will last—that have lasted—for more than the war’s own hour.

It is the only war book I shall bring to your notice; but there are one or two after-war books which deserve your attention. _The Awakening of Italy: The Fascista Regeneration_, by Luigi Villari, will of course actively interest those who may have read the chapter on Italy in Charles H. Sherrill’s _The Purple or the Red_[94] but many will go to it directly in an effort to grasp the significance of Mussolini and Fascism. They will find a singularly clear and even luminous account, as little encumbered with unfamiliar detail as a full account can be. But they will also find a story full of drama, yet told without any of the rhetoric or verbal excess and floridity which one might expect in a book on Italian politics written by an Italian. Villari is frankly an admirer and partisan of Fascism, and his opinion of Mussolini as a great leader is plain-spoken; but he is neither a mere enthusiast nor an indiscriminating historian. The defects of Fascism he records as he sees them. He does not contend that there are not grave problems ahead of Italy. But, as he says, “the mass of the people, both among the educated classes and the ignorant, are more interested in results than in theories, and no one who compares the state of Italy today with that of the days before Fascismo’s advent to power can for a moment deny the enormous improvement in every field. ‘Ora si vive,’ the people say, ‘mentre prima non si viveva piu.’ (‘Now we live, whereas before life was not possible.’)... One has the feeling that the country is really moving forward rapidly and surely, and shaking off the shackles of the bad traditions by which it had been bound for centuries.”

The Prime Ministry of Ramsay MacDonald in Great Britain makes particularly timely _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_, by Paul Blanshard. This is a short history, just what its title states, an “outline” conveying exactly what the American reader desires to know about the British Labor Party. The author is a young American with training in the field of social and political study. His book was written from material gained in England and its authenticity is attested in the introduction provided for it by Arthur Henderson, the Labor leader.

Tons of books have been written about Russia and sovietism; yet I expect there will be general agreement with me when I say that only one other man (now dead) was so qualified to write on the subject as Leon Trotzky. There can certainly be no denying the high interest of Leon Trotzky’s _Problems of Life_. The Soviet Minister of War gives a pretty complete view of the new Russia from the inside. It will possibly come as a surprise that the new Russia is more interested in home life, recreations, literature and the arts than in economics and politics. From the viewpoint of Trotzky, the foundation of the home rests on the mutual attachment of husband and wife—as always—but must be secured by the liberation of both in economic directions. Most especially must the wife and mother be aided by communal kitchens and relief from the effective slavery of cooking, washing, and other ordeals by fire and water. The ten chapters of _Problems of Life_ are discussions of the problems deemed vital in Russian reconstruction. Such chapter titles as “Not by Politics Alone Does Man Thrive,” “Reconstruction Requires Introspection,” “From the Old Family to the New,” and “Mind and Little Things” give the angle of vision.

ii

I might as well confess frankly that I am fascinated by William A. Ganoe’s _The History of the United States Army_. Therefore, if you feel it necessary, discount by a percentage for enthusiasm what I may say. These will still remain solid, incontestable merits. This is the first history of our army ever to have been written; and it has been written with a strong story sense, so that it reads like a story. It covers in a single volume the whole period from 1775 to 1923. Dates have been placed in the margin, and reference to sources are omitted so as not to interrupt the reader. There is a chronological account of a soldier’s life in the American Revolution, and the first picture of the period of military decadence after the Revolution. The truth about General von Steuben seems to have been arrived at for the first time. What the army did and did not do in the War of 1812 is told. There is a good picture of the life of the soldier in peace times, when he becomes the nation’s most important builder. The view of the Civil War is somewhat new and certainly impartial. For the first time, this book gives us a complete account of our Indian wars in chronological shape.

I think there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that one cannot know American history without having read this book. Much that has heretofore been withheld from general knowledge is told for the first time. And there are picturesque matters which are far from being affairs of general knowledge—for example, the fact that the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad was due to the army and army training, or the fact that General Winfield Scott, single-handed, saved the country three times from war.

Who is William A. Ganoe? A West Pointer commissioned in the regular army in 1907 who has served in Cuba, Hawaii, and various parts of the United States. He was instructor, and afterward assistant professor of English, and finally adjutant for four years at West Point. He was in command of a company in the first series of training camps when we entered the war, and head of a board of officers formed to edit the Infantry Drill Regulations after the war. He is now head of the military history section at the U. S. Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly (“Ruggs—R.O.T.C.”), Scribner’s, and the Yale Review. He has, of course, had access to various records and historical confirmations not available to the non-army writer.

_A History of the United States Navy_ had already been written by Edgar Stanton Maclay, and readers will welcome Mr. Maclay’s _A History of American Privateers_, which truly supplements the earlier work. For during the Revolution the number of privateers was about four times that of regular naval vessels; and the part played by the privateer in the War of 1812 has never been minimized by any historian. From before the Revolution to after the War of 1812 hundreds of respected men made their livings—and their fortunes—by sailing as licensed pirates with full powers to capture any ships of unfriendly countries. Men who were unable to go bought shares in the privateers and often, when a rich prize was captured, reaped an incredible dividend. So slight was the difference in practice between privateering and plain piracy, so enormous was the profit in both, that it is not surprising to learn that every once in a while a privateersman, having waited in vain for a “lawful” prey, attacked a ship of his own nation, or any first comer. The classic instance is that of Captain Kidd, sent out as a privateersman, hung as a pirate.

It goes without saying that Mr. Maclay’s book is romantic; it couldn’t be anything else. Its interest is equally the interest of authentic history and daring adventure; its value always that of fact. There are plenty of books giving the history of our merchant marine; Mr. Maclay had done a history of the navy; here he has filled the gap between by telling what is perhaps the most exciting story of the three.

iii

If there is one thing more important than the American Constitution, it is the United States Supreme Court. Charles Warren, formerly assistant Attorney-General of the United States, and author of _A History of the American Bar_, is a person with a remarkable capacity for hard work in research. He has that other priceless gift, the ability to digest what he has learned and to present it clearly but without the sacrifice of opulence. For this double reason his _The Supreme Court in United States History_, occupying to some extent the same field as Beveridge’s _Life of John Marshall_, is the only work worthy to be put beside Senator Beveridge’s masterpiece. The award of the $2,000 Pulitzer Prize for the year’s best book on the history of the United States, made annually or less often by Columbia University, quite naturally fell to Mr. Warren after publication of his three-volume history. “This book,” Mr. Warren says in his preface, “is not a law book. It is a narrative of that section of our national history connected with the Supreme Court, and is written for laymen and lawyers alike. As words are but ‘the skin of a living thought,’ so law cases as they appear in the law reports are but the dry bones of very vital social, political and economic contests. This book is an attempt to restore, in some degree, their contemporary surroundings to the important cases decided by the Supreme Court.”

In other words, this is the first history of the one most tremendous factor in American government, and it is written from a non-legal standpoint. After its publication Chief Justice William H. Taft and Justices Day, Van Devanter, McReynolds and Clarke joined by personal letters of praise the great voice of critical commendation which was heard from all over the country. Chief Justice Taft spoke particularly of the enormous labor involved in the reading of early American newspapers, necessary if Mr. Warren were to get the contemporary view and feeling on Supreme Court decisions. “I consider that you have put the profession, and indeed the whole country, under a heavy debt,” the Chief Justice concluded. But I submit that Mr. Warren’s perfect readability is the chief item of our indebtedness.

I spoke of the Constitution: books upon it are much in demand these days. One which has had a wide sale and praise from high sources is Thomas James Norton’s _The Constitution of the United States: Its Sources and Its Application_. Mr. Norton writes for the layman and his book has had a somewhat extensive use in Americanization work. One of those heartiest in praise of it has been the Hon. James M. Beck, Solicitor General of the United States, who says: “I know of no book which so completely and coherently explains our form of government, and I hope, indeed, for the welfare of our country that it may have the wide circulation which it so richly merits.” The generosity of this is the more appreciable when we consider that Mr. Beck’s own book, _The Constitution of the United States_, appearing about the same time, and founded on his Gray’s Inn lectures in London, was in more or less degree a rival for readers’ attention. But it is apparent that people read, if they read at all, not one but several books on the Constitution; for Mr. Beck’s volume, rewritten and considerably expanded, is just being republished as _The Constitution of the United States: Yesterday, Today—Tomorrow?_

James Myers’s _Representative Government in Industry_ and Sterling Denhard Spero’s _The Labor Movement in a Government Industry_ are volumes that, because of their specialized character, are more related to Mr. Blanshard’s _An Outline of the British Labor Movement_. But they are both on American subjects. Mr. Myers is executive secretary of the board of operatives of the Dutchess Bleachery, Inc., at Wappingers Falls, New York. This bleachery is an “industrial democracy,” or partnership enterprise, operated by the employees. Mr. Myers’s book has therefore a great advantage over most books of its sort: it records an actual experiment in successful operation, not somebody’s theories as to what ought to work. Mr. Spero’s book is adequately described by its subtitle, “a study of employee organization in the Postal Service.” After a short survey of unionism in the civil service, Mr. Spero gives the full record of its history among the United States postal employees. The book is not propaganda for any organization or group, but the work of an impartial historian with no axe to grind.

Are new books on Lincoln justified? Yes. We are only beginning to get those of enduring value, aside from certain contemporary records. “The Lincoln papers, rich in letters to Lincoln, many of them quite as important to the biographer as those written by him, have not yet been released, nor will they be available for a number of years,” points out Daniel Kilham Dodge, in the preface to his _Abraham Lincoln—Master of Words_, “and the Hay Diary, a source of the utmost importance, is still in manuscript form, to be consulted only by special permission of the Harvard Library authorities.” These are only two of the known important items. Mr. Dodge’s own new book is entirely confined to one phase of Lincoln’s life, though a phase of the greatest interest. Was he an orator? Was the Gettysburg address composed briefly on the train, in effect an impromptu? Just what was Lincoln’s genius for effective utterance?

Mr. Dodge has uncovered some interesting facts, and brought others into valuable juxtaposition. Lincoln was no natural born orator. All his life he was unable to make an extempore speech. On the day Richmond fell, Lincoln dispersed an enthusiastic crowd before the White House, telling them to come the next day when he would have a speech ready. He kept his promise. It was his last speech before his assassination.

The young Lincoln modeled himself on Henry Clay. His earliest speeches often contained the purple patches not entirely dissociable from Southern oratory. The Lincoln humor, notorious in conversation, was extremely rare in his speeches; another evidence that when he spoke his words were studied. He simply could not express himself gracefully—or effectively—on short notice. The evidence is that the Gettysburg address was as carefully prepared as anything else. Mr. Dodge has made an onerous examination of contemporary newspapers and sources to find out if anyone really did perceive the speech’s classic line and immense stature. Only about three voices were raised in acclaim.

_Abraham Lincoln—Master of Words_ is worth adding to the Lincoln shelf. But its lesson is distinctly that such eloquence as Lincoln had came from toil and care and thought—perhaps was achieved only because, so often, the need for utmost sincerity in expression, the grave consequence of an issue impending, came to his aid.

iv

It was Edmond Rostand who once said that the only Vice was inactivity (_l’inertie_), the only virtue, enthusiasm. Douglas Fairbanks long ago adopted this as his watchword. But enthusiasm is peculiarly a trait of youth. How keep this youthful enthusiasm? The answer to this question is the whole subject of Fairbanks’s new book, _Youth Points the Way_. “You may have all the machinery for a successful life,” says the actor, “education, health, intellect, and still fail to find the true zest in life because your machinery lacks the vital electric spark—enthusiasm.” It is necessary to think hard, work hard, play hard and live enthusiastically. Fresh air and exercise are “the only medicine I ever take.” Mr. Fairbanks rises in time to see the sun rise and chases his breakfast to the top of a California mountain. “Keep in motion; that is the main thing, and it matters little whether you do stunts on a flying ring or only chin yourself on an upper berth.”

How is a young man to get a start in life? That, Douglas Fairbanks says, depends entirely on what sort of a person he is; but one thing he must do, “dive in.” Fairbanks himself, on graduating from college, borrowed a thousand dollars and went to Europe. His start in life came through the strenuous way he had to work to pay that money back.

_Youth Points the Way_ is the book of a man who has kept in motion and who believes that to cease moving is to die. Some people stop after failure, some after success. Fairbanks says that either is fatal. Were he writing a scientific treatise, and not a popular, partly autobiographical, inspirational book with many anecdotes and considerable humor, he could find very important evidence in the work of physicists, physiologists, and others to prove that he is right.

Perhaps you think that so much motion will disturb your blood pressure (of which you have heard a good deal, and about which you are secretly worried at times). Well, no; at least, only beneficially. If you would like to know the truth about blood pressure—the subject of much ignorance and much uninformed discussion—you may as well read the new book by Lewellys F. Barker, M.D., LL.D., and Norman Brown Cole, M.D. Although Drs. Barker and Cole are members of the Johns Hopkins faculty, their book is equally serviceable for the physician and the general reader. Technical expressions are avoided, and a very complete glossary helps the ordinary reader where a medical name must be used for exactness. But the book should remove all sorts of misconceptions. Blood pressure is just as normal as breathing. It has certain general averages related to age and condition; marked departures from these are the danger signal. Heredity, the wear and tear of modern life, the use of alcohol, tobacco and coffee may produce exceptional blood pressures. Development of high blood pressure is a process rather than a disease; the symptoms develop rather late in its course; and preventive measures must be taken early. _Blood Pressure_ gives, in plain, comprehensible English, the information that anyone interested in longevity, or even in normal length of life, would like to have.

v

About 500 years ago there lived a Turk named Nasr-ed-Din, which means “Victory of the Faith.” He became a teacher and a magistrate in the district of Angora. As a teacher he was called “Khoja,” which means “Teacher” and is a title of respect and honor. He was the author of a series of Æsop-like fables which have come down as perhaps the most authentic and indigenous piece of Turkish literature. There is not much Turkish literature which is not an imitation of, or a borrowing from, Persian or Arabic. _The Khoja_, or Nasr-ed-Din’s stories, is today as popular and as universally read and repeated as ever.

The work has finally been translated into English with the title, _The Khoja: Tales of Nasr-ed-Din_. Henry D. Barnham is the translator, and Sir Valentine Chirol, an authority on Turkey and the East, provides an entertaining and instructive foreword. Although the wisdom in these fables is generally for young and old, it can scarcely be illustrated except by quotation. I select for that purpose, and on account of its brevity, a fable for grown-ups:

“The Khoja had two wives. He gave each of them a blue shell as a keepsake, telling each not to let anyone see it. One day they came in together and asked him, ‘Which of us do you love best? Who is your favorite?’

“‘The one,’ he answered, ‘who has my blue shell.’

“Each of the women took comfort. Each one said in her heart, ‘’Tis I he loves best,’ and looked with scornful pity upon the other.

“Clever Khoja! That is the way he managed his wives!”

For contrast, we may pick up _Sixty Years of American Humor: A Prose Anthology_, edited by Joseph Lewis French. Here are selections, and the best selections, from the best American humorous writers, from Artemus Ward to the absolutely contemporary Sam Hellman, of “Low Bridge” reputation. The selections from Josh Billings remind us that he relied for some of his effect on misspelling, just as Ring Lardner does today. Edward Eggleston’s “The Spelling-Bee”; Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras”; Bill Nye’s “Skimming the Milky Way”; and Eugene Field’s “The Cyclopeedy” are representative inclusions. More recent humorists for whom Mr. French has found place are Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Thomas L. Masson, George Horace Lorimer, Stephen Leacock, Don Marquis, Irvin S. Cobb, Ellis Parker Butler, George Fitch, Montague Glass, Christopher Ward, Robert C. Benchley and Harry Leon Wilson. _Sixty Years of American Humor_ provides considerably more than the ordinary humorous book’s quantity of diversion to the square inch.

But I come at last to the two books whose claim to inclusion in this chapter is most undeniable—two books of which it can truthfully be said, not only that they are not found elsewhere, but that they contain a thousand things not to be found elsewhere.

John Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_ is so wonderful in its completeness and its resourcefulness that although it went without revision for twenty-three years, it remained the best book of its kind and no more recent work was able to displace it. It has now been revised and enlarged by Nathan Haskell Dole, so that the new quotations included are from nearly 200 of the more important writers of the last few decades, not included before, among them Stevenson, Swinburne, Kipling and Mark Twain. This, then, is the book without which newspapermen, editors, writers, public speakers, scholars, librarians, and many, many households could not exist—at least, the households could not exist in harmony. It is the book which saves you from saying, “fresh fields and pastures new”; that tells you it should be “fresh _woods_,” and that the line is Milton’s. Is it possible that in this book of 1,400 pages, citing from nearly 1,000 authors, and with its quotations indexed and cross-indexed under their various outstanding words, so that the index has almost 50,000 entries—is it possible that there is some phrase you half-recall and yet cannot find? It is just possible. If it occurs, there is something left for you yet to do. You may try Frank J. Wilstach’s _A Dictionary of Similes_ (the new and enlarged edition).

Mr. Wilstach’s social register of similes is the only book of reference of its kind. Since its original publication, in 1916, _A Dictionary of Similes_, with its 17,000 quaint figures of speech, has become pretty nigh indispensable for writers, speakers, teachers and students. One hundred pages have been added in the new edition, as Mr. Wilstach says that similes should be kept fresh, like oysters. And the figures of speech themselves? They are drawn from the writings of a great number of authors, from Chaucer and Shakespeare, through English and American literature, to O. Henry and Irvin S. Cobb. The arrangement is alphabetical under subject headings. I have nothing against the 16,999 other comparisons in the book, though personally I shall always maintain that the best simile in the world is Irvin S. Cobb’s “no more privacy than a goldfish.” I have looked for hours in Mr. Wilstach’s masterpiece in search of a suitable comparison for _A Dictionary of Similes_.

Well, I cannot find one.

21. Frank L. Packard Unlocks a Book

i

From his home on the shore of the St. Lawrence, Frank L. Packard sent word that the title was _The Locked Book_. No details. _The Locked Book_ remained a locked book until the manuscript arrived. One had a vision of Mr. Packard going to his safe and turning the combination and swinging open the door and taking out the story, complete, released only in its entirety. Knowing his work, one has similar visions of the tales he has written unlocking themselves and stepping, full-statured, into his mind. Mr. Packard, one of the most disconcerting of men, would not be himself disconcerted by such apparitions. His is a personality full of outward contradictions and inward reconcilements. There is something gruff, even ferocious, in his speech and manner on many occasions; it melts every other moment into a really exquisite urbanity. He is alarmingly direct, dreadfully uncompromising—and he is the soul of hospitality and gentleness, a person of stainless honor. He assumes rudeness like a mask and his blue eyes and the look in them give him quite away with an utter transparency. His coat is rough, fuzzy, scratchy, yet his heart is on the sleeve of it. And his fiction? Full half of it moves in the “underworld” and is peopled with criminals; yet the thing that most markedly distinguishes Frank L. Packard from all other writers of mystery-adventure stories is his belief in a moral order. Immanuel Kant and Sherlock Holmes are commingled in him; and, though he may invent plots he really believes in miracles.

He is, as everyone must know, the author of _The Miracle Man_, a novel which George M. Cohan made into a successful play and which, as a motion picture, made millions of dollars for various persons _not_ including the author.... A moral order has some advantages over a money order.

ii

Frank Lucius Packard was born of American parents at Montreal on 2 February 1877 and was graduated from McGill University in 1897. The following year he took a postgraduate course in engineering at L’Institut Montefiore, University of Liége, Belgium. He engaged in engineering work in the United States for a number of years and when, in 1906, he began writing for various magazines, his first tales were railroad stories. _On the Iron at Big Cloud_ (1911), _The Wire Devils_ (1918), which tells of the work of a band of expert telegraphers and masters of the art of cipher codes, and _The Night Operator_ (1919) are best characterized in Mr. Packard’s own Foreword to _The Night Operator_:

“Summed up short, the Hill Division is a vicious piece of track; also, it is a classic in its profound contempt for the stereotyped equations and formulæ of engineering. And it is that way for the very simple reason that it could not be any other way. The mountains objected, and objected strenuously, to the process of manhandling. They were there first, the mountains, that was all, and their surrender was a bitter matter.

“So, from Big Cloud, the divisional point, at the eastern fringe of the Rockies, to where the foothills of the Sierras on the western side merge with the more open, rolling country, the right of way ... sweeps through the rifts in the range like a freed bird from the open door of its cage; clings to canyon edges where a hissing stream bubbles and boils eighteen hundred feet below; burrows its way into the heart of things in long tunnels and short ones; circles a projecting spur in a dizzy whirl, and swoops from the higher to the lower levels in grades whose percentages the passenger department does not deem it policy to specify in its advertising literature, but before which the men in the cabs and the cabooses shut their teeth and try hard to remember the prayers they learned at their mothers’ knees. Some parts of it are worse than others, naturally; but no part of it, to the last inch of its single-tracked mileage, is pretty—leaving out the scenery, which is _grand_. That is the Hill Division.”

So much for the setting.

“And the men who man the shops, who pull the throttles on the big, ten-wheel mountain racers, who swing the picks and shovels in the lurching cabs, who do the work about the yards, or from the cupola of a caboose stare out on a string of wriggling flats, boxes and gondolas, and, at night time, watch the high-flung sparks sail heavenward, as the full, deep-chested notes of the exhaust roar an accompaniment in their ears, are men ... whose hearts are big and right.”

The human values of these early stories of Packard’s are as sturdy today as when they were first written; whatever their shortcomings, a lack of vitality was not one of them. The man who was to become a chef of plots began by simply pitching the fat of human nature in the fire of dramatic incident. His first stories are like steaks; and if they are hastily and simply cooked, they are not cooked up. Thick, rich cuts from the flanks of actual life, burned a little at the edges, perhaps, they still are tender with juices and flavor. They nourish directly. Their protein is the example of courage, from the story of a train newsboy who averted a wreck to the tale of how Martin Bradley saved the Rat River Special.

iii

In 1910 Mr. Packard married Marguerite Pearl Macintyre, of Montreal, and the next year saw the publication of his first book, _On the Iron at Big Cloud_. In 1912 he wrote his first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_. The novel was written in Lachine, a city eight miles from Montreal, where Packard had settled and where his home is now. The outline of the story is as follows:

“Varge, the hero, was a foundling brought up by Dr. and Mrs. Merton as if he had been their own son. Their real son, Harold, kills his father in a quarrel, and begs Varge to disappear so that it will seem that he is the actual murderer. Varge goes further than that. He does not run away, but publicly shoulders the guilt for the sake, not of Harold, but of Mrs. Merton, whose heart would break if she knew that her son had killed his father. Varge believes he owes them this act of sacrifice in return for the life-long kindness of his benefactors. The story thereafter is the story of this sacrifice; his life in prison, where as a trusty he meets the warden’s daughter, Janet Rand; his love for Janet which both impels him to escape and to give himself up again—and finally his freedom as Harold Merton, dying, confesses the truth.”[95]

Here was a novel on the theme of sacrifice, a theme which had already been persistent and noticeable in Frank L. Packard’s short stories, and a theme which was to recur later, but interwoven with another idea of equal strength and beauty. The discovery of that other idea—its discovery, that is, in the necessary terms of a story—was to come in the same year in which _Greater Love Hath No Man_ was published. If you journey directly north from Montreal, you will find yourself after a while in mountainous country with summits of less height than many on the North American continent. Nevertheless the Laurentian Mountains have a distinction more interesting than altitude; they are geologically the oldest formation—older than the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, the Rockies; older than the plains. They are fundamental and as unchanging as the capacity to wonder and the will to believe in the heart of that higher insect, Man. In 1913 Packard was in the Laurentians and there and at Lachine he was engaged in writing a novel which he purposed calling “The Wrong Right Road.” When it was finished it appeared as a complete novel in Munsey’s Magazine for February, 1914. A set of advance proofs was sent to George M. Cohan, who bought the dramatic rights and changed the title. The book was arranged to appear immediately and Mr. Cohan at once set to work to fashion the play.

The scene of Packard’s story was the village of Needley, Maine. In Needley, says an outline,[96] “lives an old man—deaf, dumb and almost blind—known as the Patriarch. For many years, through the exercise of faith, he has cured the people in the neighborhood of their simple ailments. An article about him finds its way into a New York City newspaper which comes under the eye of the celebrated ‘Doc’ Madison, a quick-witted and ingenious confidence man, who at once evolves a scheme to make the Patriarch’s home a shrine to which Doc will entice all ailing humanity from far and near, and then pluck the golden hoard through his trickery.

“Among Doc’s disciples is a clever and beautiful girl named Helena Vail. Another is a dope fiend, Pale Face Harry, an artful dodger with a hacking cough. The faker that Doc Madison selects to take the star part in setting the procession of ailing ones in motion is called the Flopper. The Flopper has an uncanny control over his joints by which he can, with a single gesture, convert himself into a loathsome cripple, twisted and broken, begging in the streets, shattered in body and soul; truly a spectacle to soften the hardest heart. Doc Madison rounds up his little band of efficient scoundrels, takes them to Needley, Maine, and plants them on the sweet-souled Patriarch, whose faith in his own powers to heal is merely his faith in the influence upon man’s soul and body of love and goodness and belief in all that is worth while. Helena forces herself upon him as his grandniece, and becomes his trusted confidante. The Flopper crawls from the train through the dust of the street to the Patriarch’s threshold. Here the old man, practically blind, surrounded by a crowd of visitors and devotees from all over the country, stretches out his thin hands, and the Flopper rises from the earth a new man. At the same moment a crippled child, helpless from birth and staggering along on crutches, throws his artificial supports from him and cries aloud: ‘I can walk!’”

This supreme moment of _The Miracle Man_—book, play and picture—leads to the wreck of Doc Madison’s scheme; the crooks are self-defeated by the advent of a power they cannot understand. A valley has been exalted, a mountain and hill have been made low, the crooked has been made straight....

And Mr. Packard had made the discovery of his second idea, the theme of regeneration which is so much the most powerful manifestation known to human lives. In finding it he had unlocked more than a book, or a striking play, or an extraordinary motion picture. The camera version of this simple tale did indeed make lasting reputations for Thomas F. Meighan, Betty Compson and Lon Chaney, as well as enhance the reputation of the late George Loan Tucker, whom Mr. Meighan prodded into directing the picture; money rolled in upon the picture’s backers in a tidal wave; the success of “The Birth of a Nation” was outdone, nor has any film since surpassed the record set by Packard’s story. These phenomena are picturesque—staggering, if you like. But they came afterward; they had little to do with the author, who, perhaps, could have used some of the money but to whose work these successes could have no true relevance. What Mr. Packard had unlocked was an inwardness in himself, the fullness of his own mind. He was, perhaps, never to write well in the sense of writing with literary distinction; he was to become a master of plot and of incident, and to do stories in which characterization was to suffer from the very rush of action and the galvanization of suspense. But he was never to write a book in which the emotion was cheap or the immanent morality less than uncompromising. And with his themes of sacrifice and regeneration, intertwined, he was to arrest, enthrall and convince the thousands.

iv

The next book was _The Belovéd Traitor_ (1916. And please make three syllables of the adjective). Jean Laparde and Marie-Louise are fisher folk in a French village and are affianced. Jean, who is always modeling little figures in clay, is a genius. A wealthy American named Bliss discovers him. Jean is sent to Paris to study and his great gift ultimately causes a sensation. Bliss’s daughter makes him her conquest, for adulation has turned the sculptor’s head and he has forgotten Marie-Louise. Jean and Myrna Bliss sail for America where they are to be married at the Bliss home. Marie-Louise in her great loneliness decides to go to America. On shipboard, in the steerage one night, Jean sees Marie-Louise. His love for her returns, and with it repentance for the way he has used her. It is now a question of both sacrifice and regeneration. Regeneration comes first; and the apparent sacrifice is canceled by a far greater success; for on his return to France, Jean’s work reflects the new sincerity of his life and love.

Consider _The Sin That Was His_ (1917). Here regeneration leads to sacrifice, or willingness to sacrifice, and the story develops with a power which makes Packard’s first novel, _Greater Love Hath No Man_, appear weak and insufficiently motivated. Raymond Chapelle, alias Three-Ace Artie, a gambler, is banished from the Yukon. Later, in a little village in French Canada, in order to save himself from the consequences of a murder which he has not done, but in which circumstantial evidence would insure his conviction, he masquerades as Father Aubert, a young priest who had been hurt. The story shows the conditions that force Raymond to continue the rôle of Father Aubert; tells how he loves Valerie; how he converts an old hag named Mother Blondin and becomes the idol of the parish; how, finally, the real Father Aubert becomes the victim of that same circumstantial evidence which Raymond has tried to escape. When the real priest is tried and sentenced to death Raymond’s assumed rôle has so wrought upon him that he confesses the false part he has played—which, in the situation, involves taking the death sentence upon himself. Mother Blondin, his convert, who is really guilty of the murder, in turn saves him.

Again: _From Now On_ (1920) tells the story of Dave Henderson, who succumbs to temptation and steals $100,000. He succeeds in hiding the money before he is caught, convicted and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary. When he is released both the bookmaker who had employed him, and who is an inherent crook, and the police take up his trail. But it is a woman’s love and his love for her which finally bring Dave Henderson to the point of returning the money. Regeneration. A sacrifice.

In _Pawned_ (1921)—a story of pawned people, not pawned things—the father of Claire sacrifices his rights and privileges as a father in the effort toward regeneration. Ultimately he sacrifices his life to free her from a man more dissolute, and far more evil, than himself. Regeneration fails, but redemption takes its place. It is John Bruce, to save whose life Claire has risked everything, who is regenerated. The novel is an extraordinary achievement in plot construction, the precursor of _The Four Stragglers_ in that respect; for _Doom of the Night_ (1022) was earlier in point of composition.

In order to trace connectedly through a succession of novels the dual themes of sacrifice and regeneration which are Packard’s forte, we have omitted mention of his best-known figure, Jimmie Dale. He was introduced with _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1917), carried through _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ (1919) and not necessarily finished with _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ (1922). Mr. Packard began to write these tales of his gentleman burglar in 1914 and it is a tribute to his skill as a storyteller that, ten years afterward, people read _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ with a conviction that he will never do better stories.

Jimmie Dale is a rich young man, the inheritor of a fortune made in manufacturing safes. “It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals.... It had begun through that—but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit. He had meant to set the police by the ears.”[97] What he had been doing was to force safes as a burglar might force them. The police would find no theft, “in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime.” Partly “as an added barb,” partly “that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved,” he had made a habit of pasting conspicuously in sight (on the safe’s dial, generally) a diamond- or lozenge-shaped paper wafer, prepared with adhesive on one side and handled with tweezers to avoid leaving a finger print. The succession of crimes without theft became known as the work of the Gray Seal. Then, one night, he had been caught while at work in Maiden Lane, New York. He had wrapped a string of pearls around his wrist in a facetious moment and discovery had compelled him to a desperate dash without time to leave the jewelry behind. Not until the next day had he known that his detector was a woman. “The first letter from her had started by detailing his every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: ‘The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook, lack but one thing,’ she had naïvely written, ‘and that one thing is a leading string to guide it into channels worthy of his genius.’ In a word, _she_ would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him?”

Cold consideration convinced Jimmie Dale that not even his own father (then alive) would believe in his innocence. “And then had followed those years in which there had been _no_ temporizing, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs ... until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with.” In all this time Jimmie Dale, though communicated with by letter and telephone, had never been able to trace or identify his directress. A year before the book opens she had written: “Things are a little too warm, aren’t they Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.”