Chapter IV: Stephen Crane (4)

Mr. Packard opens, in masterly fashion, at this point; it is the technique of Conan Doyle in the case of Sherlock Holmes (to quote no other examples). One establishes one’s detective or criminal—or other exceptional character who tests plausibility—by raising the curtain on him in full career. The way to begin is—not to plunge, but just to slip casually into the middle of things. At first our interest is centered on Jimmie Dale’s successive adventures—extremely well-constructed—but as the book develops, the importance and interest of the woman back of Jimmie Dale asserts itself. Jimmie Dale is led into a series of adventures strictly on her behalf; and what has been in effect a chain of connected short stories becomes virtually a novel. But one characteristic stands out in every chapter. Other writers have shown, though only rarely, an equal ingenuity; no one that I can now recall has shown the same fundamental concerns, the same intense preoccupation under his melodramatic structure. For the exploits of Jimmie Dale, those bizarre and disconnected enterprises to which he is ordered, are Robin Hood exploits, rightings of wrongs, crimes of form and philanthropies of intention. So, later, are the struggles into which Jimmie Dale is precipitated on behalf of the woman whom, no longer mysterious, he deeply loves. Simply, Frank L. Packard is a man who cannot abide the spectacle of a world unless it is the philosopher’s world, erected about the steel framework of a moral order. He indulges in crime for morality’s sake.

v

In algebra, as you may remember, one equation suffices if you are solving to find a single unknown quantity; two are necessary if two unknown quantities are to be ascertained; and so on. Given three unknown quantities and only two equations, the affair is hopeless. In a perfectly constructed mystery story, the reader is solving for several unknown quantities—for _x_ and for _y_ and possibly for _z_—but always with one too few equations.

When he came to write _The Four Stragglers_ (1923) Mr. Packard had had a considerable experience in handling plots. The first eight pages of the book show three men huddled together under a bombardment in France. Their talk reveals them as former confederates in crime in London. There is a fourth man lying very still on the ground, apparently dead or dying. To make sure, one of the three shoots him. The group is in pitch darkness except for occasional flares. One of these, coming shortly, lights the scene fully. All three look at the spot where a murdered man should be lying. No man is there.

The story opens three years later, in London. We see the three confederates, a varied, effectively contrasted three, reassembled and active. We follow them in a thrilling operation. The main thread now begins to spin. Just as the three have planned to cease operations and take a vacation they come to know of the existence of a treasure hid and watched over by a madman on one of the islands or keys off the Florida coast. The knowledge comes to each one separately, except that B and C each knows that A knows it. And the fourth man, D?

One of the excellences of _The Four Stragglers_ is the economy of means; there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but with the window shades tightly drawn down:

“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor, and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.

“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.

“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again. ‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well, last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane titter again....

“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking, the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing, but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”

The reader of _The Four Stragglers_ will say, with entire truth: “There is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore, a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by _The Miracle Man_ and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”; “a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem unreasonable.

vi

Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant, and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend, the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good, even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.

A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise. But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.

He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.

Again, in 1923, he went to South America.

Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the course of his round the world trip took shape. _The Locked Book_ is in characteristics somewhat like _The Four Stragglers_. It begins with a yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass, and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.

He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility” of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of _The Miracle Man_.

BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.

1911 _On the Iron at Big Cloud_
1913 _Greater Love Hath No Man_
1914 _The Miracle Man_
1916 _The Belovéd Traitor_
1917 _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
1917 _The Sin That Was His_
1918 _The Wire Devils_
1919 _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_
1919 _The Night Operator_
1920 _From Now On_
1920 _The White Moll_
1921 _Pawned_
1922 _Doors of the Night_
1922 _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_
1923 _The Four Stragglers_
1924 _The Locked Book_

SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD

In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis, 280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.

22. All Creeds and None

i

This ought to be the most interesting chapter in this book. For it deals with the subject of belief. Belief is of many kinds—religious, scientific, philosophical—but when one ceases to believe in anything at all, one dies.

In Chapter 10, I tried to indicate how the interest in religious belief has already begun to reflect itself in current fiction. In this chapter I am to deal with books which vary profoundly but are all straightforward efforts to express a belief held to be worth while. For the difficulty is not a lack of things to believe in, but a choice among them, a reconciliation (sometimes) of one with another; and very often a search for the thing that will mean more than life itself.

Can anything mean more than life itself? Yes. Men and women have sacrificed their lives for such.

Are the terms of belief capable of a common expression, acceptable to all men and women? No; at least, not yet.

Is it even necessary to know what one believes, in the sense of being able to give it a satisfactory expression? No; not if one lives it.

Can anything be achieved by reading books on belief? Yes. I suppose you may show surprise if I say that disagreement is often more useful than agreement. But agreement leading to a placid inactivity is against the very principle of life itself.

Disagreement causes thought. Thinking always enlarges our living. For what we then do is done more consciously, more knowingly, than before. To that extent—and in no other way is it possible—we live more fully.

Which among the books to follow you ought to read or in what order they are for your reading, no one like myself can determine, for an answer depends on your belief, tastes, the extent of your reading and the extent of your thinking. Such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_ is safely commendable to anyone, anywhere. But such studies as Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, full of refinements and instinct with intellectual subtlety, are for the scholarly taste. Dr. E. Y. Mullins’s _Christianity at the Crossroads_ is fundamentalist in its position. Dr. Joseph A. Leighton’s _Religion and the Mind of Today_ is the work of a churchman who is also a philosopher and a teacher; it adopts the liberal attitude. And a number of these books concern themselves with health, the mind, the will and the spirit—those factors which so often determine not only belief, but the possibility of believing in anything.

If I start with Ernest Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, a work now many years old, I do so because this Frenchman’s extraordinary book remains undisplaced by the current great success of Papini’s _Life of Christ_, but also because the popularity of Papini’s book shows where the average interest lies. For when men begin contending about the forms of creeds and the facts behind phrases which have become sacred formulas, the instinct of the ordinary man is to go straight to the essentials and the beginnings. Let doctors argue the Virgin Birth; he rather asks himself what sort of Man was this Son born of Mary. It is the assertion of this instinct, joined to the timely appearance of the _Life of Christ_ with its undeniable interest and eloquence, which made the success of Papini’s volume. Such a success is fleeting. Like other converts and re-converts to Catholicism, Papini exhibited a marked tendency toward a belief that little had happened in the centuries preceding his accession. Not so, Renan. To go from the Italian to the Frenchman is to pass from painted scenery to the clear air and the sublime altitude of mountain peaks. There is something beyond eloquence, and Renan has it. With him both reflection and emotion are controlled; they lift him high and sustain him there. “Disastrous to Reason the day when she should stifle religion!” exclaimed this author of the _Life of Jesus_, adding: “Religions are false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to define it, to incarnate it; but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors they import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the value of the truth which they proclaim. The simplest of the simple, provided he practice heart-worship, is more enlightened as to the reality of things than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by chance or by finite causes.”

Renan was repeatedly called an atheist; but none of the books discussed in this chapter are atheistic. I should present any which were, but I think it significant that none is. Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, a strictly philosophical treatise in sequence to his _Theism and Humanism_, is a deliberate attempt to consider whether theism—that is, belief in God—is necessary or good. And every Balfourian conclusion is in favor of theism. Dr. L. P. Jacks, with his marvelous simplicity of expression, deals in _Religious Perplexities_ with the two questions that every man asks: Why am I here? Why am I, and not some other, here and now? But the answer to both of these questions, stated as Dr. Jacks states it, for men of every sort, Christian and non-Christian, presupposes a God.

The three most recent books by Dr. Jacks vary considerably. _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_ is simply an address in which he makes a moving appeal for the recapture of Christian joyousness. _Realities and Shams_ is a series of essays produced by reflection on events of the last nine years, continuous in the thread of their thought, which is the few and simple tests to tell the genuine from the false; and Dr. Jacks applies these tests to some public affairs. _A Living Universe_ is directly related to _Religious Perplexities_; its point is that education without religious feeling is lifeless, just as a universe in which education does not proceed is a dead universe.

Such books as _Realities and Shams_ and _A Living Universe_ are directly related to Felix Adler’s Hibbert lectures, now published under the title, _The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_. The distinguished founder of the Ethical Culture Society has never been one to deal with abstractions. In this book he brings his spiritual ideal to bear upon the problem of marriage, the labor problem, and the problem of a society of nations. The essence of his teaching, which employs both Jewish and Christian ideals of holiness, is his conception of a “weft of souls” in which each individual soul has intrinsic worth but all share in, and contribute to, a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard. The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it. And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.

_Religion and the Mind of Today_, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author of _Man and the Cosmos_ and of an introductory book on philosophy used in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr. Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe, the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul.

His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can be said about _Contributions of Science to Religion_, it is that the book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the construction of the universe, the earth and man, is there any room left for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.” And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it _should_ do so.”

He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter; and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter, director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example, one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.

There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr. Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more _difficult_ than seeing electrons there.”

But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely mystical, _Contributions of Science to Religion_ must remain all beside the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply that that, precisely, is what _his_ religion is for. And with many the question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts it in his _Christianity at the Crossroads_: “Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked, the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins argues—and without appeal to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the victory will lie.

ii

Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Making of Man_ has something in common with the books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to; but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but _Making of Man_ is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined. Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere, and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.

In _Evolution: the Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of its significance to mankind.

The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.

And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s _Men of the Old Stone Age_ and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s _An Outline of History_. But pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy has done it in the two volumes of his _Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History_.

_Human Origins_ is a great book. It must be remembered that all we know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years, discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered. I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing _Human Origins_; its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr. MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the whole affair into a superlative story.

Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.

He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints, mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places. Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use, the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of hard use.

Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the text, appear in the two volumes of _Human Origins_.

If the new book on _Haunted Houses_ did not bear the name of so distinguished a scientist as M. Camille Flammarion, it would find no place, I am afraid, in this chapter. M. Flammarion is fully aware of the skepticism he must encounter, and is at pains to refute it as fully as possible in his book. But great as the interest of this controversy is, I think most readers will find the mere subject irresistible, and I am certain that everyone, even he who pooh-poohs all the evidence, will be captivated by the strange stories to be read in _Haunted Houses_. Dwellings that are variously authenticated for their troublesome character are discussed in chapter after chapter—a chateau at Calvados, a habitation in Auvergne, the house of La Constantine, a parsonage, a teacher’s house, the fantastic villa of Comedada at Coimbra in Portugal, the maleficent ceiling at Oxford, Pierre Loti’s mosque at Rochefort. And after so much, a chapter providing “A General Excursion Among Haunted Houses”! Flammarion then classes the phenomena as of two kinds—those associated with the dead and those not so attributable. But he is no mere credulous believer in haunting. He devotes a chapter to houses spuriously haunted. His book concludes with a search for causes and an assertion, or reassertion, of belief in certain evidence; “the unknown of yesterday is the truth of tomorrow.” It is interesting to note that there has been legal recognition of haunted houses.

iii

Two of the personal books before me are by Dr. James J. Walsh, medical director of Fordham University’s School of Sociology, professor of physiological psychology at Cathedral College, and author of that remarkable history of fakes and faith-wrought miracles, _Cures_. In _Health Through Will Power_, Dr. Walsh is dealing with a subject which, more than any other one thing, has been made the foundation of new and powerful religious sects. But Dr. Walsh’s interest is in the application and the uses of will power in the individual.

He therefore shows the preventive and curative power of the will in such universal ailments as coughs and colds, intestinal disorders, rheumatism, and the like. But most importantly he shows the rôle of the will in dealing with mental disturbances and in a therapeutic application to bad habits as diverse as self-pity, yielding to pain or succumbing to sentimentalism in sympathy, and irregular and insufficient exercise.

_Health Through Will Power_ is untechnical. Anyone can read and understand it.

_Success in a New Era_, Dr. Walsh’s other book, shows that the application of the will is the most important factor in achieving success of any kind. Is education important? Yes, but “it is not for lack of knowledge but for lack of will power that men fail to accomplish what they want to. Men have powers or energies far beyond what they usually think, and the men who use them up to something like their capacity make a success of life.”

Next to will power comes work; and work must be offset by recreation, though proper recreation calls for the expenditure of mental or physical energy as great as work.

I am not sure that Dr. Walsh’s warning about reading is needed in America. “Reading,” he says, “requires the least mental labor of almost any pursuit, and hardly a person but sooner or later finds himself putting off something that ought to be done by pretending that he is accomplishing more by his reading. Reading in itself is excellent, but it is vastly overused to excuse the inaction of weak and lazy people.” No doubt; but of 961 people I personally know well, 857 spend every evening listening to the radio, attending a moving picture, or playing cards and dancing. Of the remaining 104, only eighty-one read.

Yet Dr. Walsh is dead right when he says that “the best good habit in the world is the proper use of time”—though the acquisition of more hours in a day would be helpful—and his _Success in a New Era_ is a singularly honest and helpful book, free from even one patent formula for attaining “success.”

_The Foundations of Personality_, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., though on more general lines, is of no less value. Dr. Myerson analyzes the elements of character—which is not, of course, the same thing as mind. Character is intimately related to mind, as the brain and body are intimately related. Character may be affected by both the mind and the body; it is not dependent on either. Dr. Myerson describes the general types of character, the tradition of each and its social heredity; and he follows the energies of men as they expend themselves in instinct and emotion and intelligence. Although a physician and a psychologist, he writes from the standpoint of one who deeply shares the everyday aspirations and conflicts of his fellows. His comments on the influences exerted upon character, and on the expression of character in work, play, humor, sex and religion are of acute interest. His book’s great practical value is dual: it helps toward self-understanding and it gives a good deal of help toward insight into the characters of others—a matter which usually has an important part in determining our own success or failure in life.

Simpler than _The Foundations of Personality_ because of a much narrower scope is Arthur Holmes’s _Controlled Power: A Study of Laziness and Achievement_. This popularly-written book by a professor of psychology is almost a handbook on the subject of laziness, its causes and cure. For not all laziness comes from the same cause, and not all apparent laziness is laziness in fact. There is such a thing as the indolence of genius, well-illustrated by Professor Holmes in the cases of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and the naturalist, John Muir. There is the languor of youth, when the rapid growth of the body may produce a kind of inertia either physical or mental. The aversion of the normal boy to study is easily explained, Professor Holmes holds. What people have done much they like much to do; and what they have done little they like little to do. What the human race has not done very long is hard for individuals of the race to do. The human race has hunted and fished for thousands of years; it has studied for a very few centuries, and studied in the mass for only about one century. Of course the boy will prefer to hunt or fish!

_Controlled Power_ is so entirely readable that one feels as if it should be put in the hands of every parent and school teacher. Its wisdom could do much for them, as well as for the child.

Teachers and many parents could read advantageously also _The Normal Mind_, by William H. Burnham, professor of pedagogy and school hygiene in Clark University. If our knowledge of what we call mental hygiene shows us anything, it shows us that most people do not utilize the brains they have. The whole purpose of mental hygiene is to teach how to make the most of one’s inborn ability. The power to think with clearness means usually the throwing off of bad mental habits.

Professor Burnham, teaching at G. Stanley Hall’s institution and with a background of many years’ experience and observation, has produced a book which most satisfactorily compends what we know about mental hygiene to date. His presentation of the school task, of mental attitudes, of suggestion and mental hygiene, of success and failure and discipline, offers in practical form the wisdom we have regarding mental health and how to attain it.

_Twelve Tests of Character_, by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, D.D., has amply proven its popularity; indeed, it has for months been among the ten best-selling books of non-fiction throughout America. Dr. Fosdick’s tests are tests of character in action, not conventional qualities nor abstract traits. Written with reference to Christian teaching, the book is nevertheless one of extreme popular appeal. Nothing of the sort has more “rush” of style and pointedness, more irresistibility in brushing aside objections and obstacles. Undoubtedly the wealth of illustrative instances and anecdotes has greatly enhanced its popularity.

iv

But my chapter runs too long. I have saved for the end, and will not quit leaving unmentioned, Albert Payson Terhune’s _Now That I’m Fifty_. Is Mr. Terhune’s outspokenness a bit brutal? I do not think so. He is fifty and knows whereof he writes; why should he not tell what he knows? Is it cruel to say that one should have money, such money as he can acquire, with which to meet fifty? No, it is common sense. Is it bitter to point out, with unmistakable instances, that fifty cannot do the things that twenty does? Most decidedly not; for Mr. Terhune points out those other things that twenty cannot do, and that fifty can. Fifty cannot run five miles; twenty can. Very well; when Mr. Terhune was in his twenties and tried to work a few hours at night after the work of the day, he went all to pieces. But now, at fifty, he can work better than ever before in his life; longer hours, harder work; and come out of it smiling. In fact, in _Now That I’m Fifty_ he practically says: “Look at the things I used to be able to do and can do no longer; and thank the Lord I can’t!” This little book of Terhune’s, not much more than an extended essay, is so honest, so merry, so frank and so mellow that I think fifty can safely put it in the hands of those who aspire to be fifty.

23. J. C. Snaith and George Gibbs

i

Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material, need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such books as _The Coming_ and _The Undefeated_ he has had material of the first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.

The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the author of _Queed_, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built body.

J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club). But whether in the country or in town, as he says: “Outside of my work, I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”

It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly, some sketch of his work. His first novel, _Broke of Covenden_ (1904) is such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s _The End of the House of Alard_, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s _The Forsyte Saga_ should lose no time in reading _Broke of Covenden_. Richard Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like Lionel Barrymore.

_William Jordan, Junior_ (1907) shares with _The Coming_ (1907) first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation. _The Coming_, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War. These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however, unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words, with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and bring it to earth without shearing its wings.

The same effect is partly realized in _The Sailor_ (1916), supposed to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a charge of sentimentality. Yet _The Sailor_ by virtue of its extreme realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either _William Jordan, Junior_ or _The Coming_ in the elements of popular interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S. M. Hutchinson’s _If Winter Comes_; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest hangs breathlessly throughout.

Many, and with justice, consider _The Undefeated_ (1919) the best novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today, perhaps, _The Undefeated_ is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many merits in _The Undefeated_ the greatest was the restraint with which Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H. G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem to utter.

There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on the order of his _Araminta_; again it is a divertissement of youth, like _The Principal Girl_; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means unalloyed with admiration, of _There Is a Tide_. The title is taken, of course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa, aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance, European correspondent of the home-town newspaper, she seems destined to fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with, and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided; and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this; but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using it for the first time.

The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark his own work.

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Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and painter-illustrator. I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious choice.

He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator became more important. For a long while he illustrated his own stories and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.

George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30. Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.

His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes. Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, _In Search of Mademoiselle_. After another of the same sort he struck his _metier_ with _The Medusa Emerald_. With his next novel but one, _The Bolted Door_, he became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided that illustration was not the better part of valor.

He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories perfectly!

“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as though they had been written by another person. I got the trained illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story, I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give it.”

A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W. Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment, it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue and suspense, like _The Yellow Dove_, the characterization is far from superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr. Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr. Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or social stratification. _The Yellow Dove_ opens with excellent Cockney talk; _The Secret Witness_ moves with assurance in central Europe; _The Golden Bough_ details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; _The Black Stone_ has scenes in Arabia; _The Splendid Outcast_ is vivid with bits of the Paris underworld; _The House of Mohun_ chronicles the rise and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and its Long Island estate; and the heroine of _Fires of Ambition_ is a red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit concern.

A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with _Youth Triumphant_ (1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties. The deepening treatment is noticeable in _The House of Mohun_. It is continued in _Fires of Ambition_, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life, asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and most competent novel, _Sackcloth and Scarlet_.

This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident and destiny in the existence of a child.

In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate, be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced hand.

BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH