Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“I read _The Broad Highway_ with avidity, and recognized at once—as who would not have done?—that here was a striking addition to picaresque romances, that the author had not read _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and the best stories by Defoe and Fielding for nothing, nor had he walked along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any more than had the creator of _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_. For the vast multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: ‘Every age must write its own books.’ It is of no use for the pedantic critic to affirm, with pontifical fervor, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined to win the favor of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol has entered into his kingdom.... _The Broad Highway_ sold in hundreds of thousands. It is a breezy, healthy book, as unpretentious as it is sincere. Neither its author nor his friends need to worry themselves as to whether it is a masterpiece of literature. For our day, at least, it has added to the stock of harmless pleasures. To the critic who complains that ‘it is but an exercise in archæology,’ and that the author ‘has never felt what he has written but has gathered it up from books, one can reply in the language of Goldsmith’s Mr. Burchell, ‘Fudge.’ It is still possible in England, in spite of its railway trains and its mechanical development, to feel the impulse which inspired Charles Dickens, George Borrow and all the masters of the picaresque romance, who have in days gone by traveled with delight through the countryside, seeking adventures and finding them. ‘I felt some desire,’ says Lavengro, ‘to meet with one of those adventures which, upon the roads of England, are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.’ Mr. Farnol has a talent for recreating such adventures, and he is perfectly frank with his readers, anticipating a certain type of criticism. ‘Whereas the writing of books was once a painful art,’ he makes Peter Vibart say in _The Broad Highway_, ‘it has of late become a trick very easy of accomplishment, requiring no regard for probability and little thought, so long as it is packed sufficiently full of impossible incidents through which a ridiculous heroine and a more absurd hero duly sigh their appointed way to the last chapters. Whereas books were once a power, they are of late degenerated into things of amusement, with which to kill an idle hour, and be promptly forgotten the next.’”

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. On a famous occasion the late Maurice Hewlett tore to shreds the historicity of the work of James Branch Cabell, and Mr. Cabell completely lost his temper. Mr. Farnol’s hero in _Beltane the Smith_ “finds himself in an England which from the internal evidence of friars, bowmen, arms and armor we might vaguely describe as Edwardian (Edward I., II., III.)—the pikes he appears to have borrowed from a later period. And yet it is not Edwardian either; for there is no hint of a king in it all, and never, never was there such an anarchical England, save in the reign of Stephen of Blois.”[19] Mr. Farnol’s Latin, says J. P. Collins, “gives one the shivers. He mixes his _thee’s_ and his _ye’s_, and precisians may murmur at his forms of archaic diction. But ... if Farnol makes a slip in the way of detail, or lapses into excess, he preserves the most important thing, and that is atmosphere.”[20] Everyone will recall Scott’s inaccuracies in _Ivanhoe_, of which the most serious was the depiction of a state of feeling between the Saxons and Normans existing a century earlier than the time of the novel.

Mr. Shorter has made us longer; it remains to say that _The Broad Highway_, accepted in England, was offered by the English publisher in America, in one instance to Dodd, Mead & Company, who again declined it. Little, Brown and Company were the acceptors, learning for the first time of the actor’s delinquency a few years earlier. The book was published on both sides of the ocean and sprang into instant success. In the midst of the smother of applause, appeals, money and golden prospects Mr. Farnol had a moment. He ejaculated: “Just think! I’ve lost four years of my life!”[21]

v

He was 33—ten years older than it has been done, and thirty years younger than it has been done, also.[22] Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison achieved _Queed_ at 31, Sinclair Lewis was 35 when _Main Street_ appeared. On the whole, the four years seem not an excessive price to have paid for a coup, nor thirty-three years long to have found oneself. The point was neither in the success nor the time taken to reach it; it was in Mr. Farnol’s ability to keep his head on his shoulders. This he proceeded to do; although he sold, while yet unwritten, the serial rights to his next work, pressure upon him did not prevent his destroying ten unsatisfactory chapters, as has been related, and although as he said at the time, “I really cannot blame the magazine people,” he was emphatic in saying, “I never wish to undergo such an experience again.”[23] Two years elapsed after the publication of _The Broad Highway_ before the appearance of _The Amateur Gentleman_; and except for the publication of a piece of work written before _The Broad Highway_[24] and his effort to help in the war (_Great Britain at War_), he has had only nine books brought out in the dozen years since he raised the curtain. And of these one, _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, a romance in prose, blank verse and rhyme, is a novelty written for his daughter, Gillian, published because what had entertained one girl might very conceivably entertain others. Mr. Farnol’s method of keeping his head on his shoulders has been to practise industry without becoming industrial. Although homesick at first on his return to England, he settled in Kent, at Lee, with a den at the top of the house where he could work from midnight to breakfast. Old English books lined two walls of this refuge; another wall was given up to a collection of old pistols and sabres; and on the desk there usually lay a dictionary of slang dated 1812. More recently the Farnols have lived at the seashore at Brighton, but the winters are generally spent at Ospedaletti, which is on the Italian Riviera.

Except for a short visit to report for the London Daily Mail the fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921,[25] Mr. Farnol had not revisited America until autumn, 1923. At that time visitors met a shortish man, anything but a figure of romance, whose outstanding trait was his genuine friendliness, “a friendliness which is not an affectation with which he tries to put strangers at their ease, but an actual part of him.”[26] To see him rehearse and enact, rather than merely outline, his next novel was an exceptional experience, for at such times he suits his voice to his characters and displays a considerable range of dramatic skill. Interviewers developed evidences of a struggle in the romancer’s mind between the type of woman he writes about and the types more usual today; however, chivalry, or perhaps the romantic vision, enabled him to come through the ordeal by newsprint without dishonor. He denied the possibility of platonic love and friendships. “After a certain point, such friendships are bound to be no longer platonic. Mark me! I know they wouldn’t be in my case, anyway.”[27] A subject he did not tire of discussing was the wonder of America.[28] To several who talked with him he expressed the intention of writing another novel about New York City.[29] “New York should be called ‘The City of Great Adventures,’” he said, with characteristic enthusiasm, “because anything _might_ happen in New York.”[30]

More expressive of the man is the story of how his slightest novel came to be published. He was discussing with his mother the advisability of bringing out work written before _The Broad Highway_. “Look here,” he said to her, “why not rout out _Mr. Tawnish_? You have been very good to me, and I can never properly repay you, but if you can do anything with _Mr. Tawnish_ you shall have it.” The tale—one that reminds most readers of Tarkington’s _Monsieur Beaucaire_—was taken out of a drawer, touched up and added to, and accepted for book publication. The advance royalties, constituting a generous gift, were handed over to Mrs. Henry Farnol. This was in the autumn of 1913.

vi

In an article appearing at the height of Mr. Farnol’s first success, Henry Keats wrote: “_The Broad Highway_ has seemed to the critics to invite comparison with so many different masters of the English novel—George Borrow, Blackmore, Le Sage, Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray, to mention a few—that I asked him about his ‘foster-father.’ Mr. Farnol smiled. ‘I would not know my own literary parent if I met him out here in the broad highway of Kent,’ he exclaimed. Judging from his subsequent confessions, the creator of Peter Vibart and Charmian is under greater indebtedness to Laurence Sterne than to any of the immortals named above. And that was owing to the friend of his ‘boyish ambitions,’ to whom _The Broad Highway_ is dedicated. Mr. Shirley Byron Jevons was the first, some years since, to call Mr. Farnol’s attention to the supreme difficulty of writing a book dealing with the abstract, citing, as a rare example of success in that line, Sterne’s _Tristram Shandy_. A copy of that unusual book was speedily procured by Mr. Farnol, and he recalls as though an impression of yesterday the manner in which he was ‘enthralled’ by its pages. ‘Then,’ he adds, ‘I went on to The Spectator and The Tatler, the reading of which showed me how great is the loss of those who are unacquainted with the Queen Anne essayists.’”[31] This settles the matter of style.

Certain books by Mr. Farnol—_The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, _Great Britain at War_, and _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, each outside the true succession of his work—have been incidentally characterized. A descriptive note on his principal novels may perhaps fittingly conclude this account.

_The Broad Highway_ (1911) has probably already been sufficiently described, as it must be familiar to many who may read these lines. _The Amateur Gentleman_ (1913) has for hero Barnabas, son of a retired and famous boxing champion of England. Having come into a legacy, the young man resolves to journey to London to become a gentleman. The period is that of the Prince Regent. There is a rapid series of adventures on the journey; Barnabas meets Cleone, the heroine; he acquires a valet and establishes himself with the quality, and the fashionable world loses him, for he returns home again. _Beltane the Smith_ (1915) concerns a golden-haired giant and matchless swordsman whose odyssey of adventure is lived in a much earlier England. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is the story of a young New Yorker whose wealth has taken from him all incentive to action. For want of a definite object in life he is toying with the thought of suicide when he surprises a youthful burglar in the act of entering his rooms. Then, as “Mr. Geoffrey,” he takes up lodgings with the housebreaker in the old Hell’s Kitchen district of New York—which was the region between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and west of Sixth Avenue. _Our Admirable Betty_ (1918) is a return to the dimension of _The Broad Highway_ and _The Amateur Gentleman_. _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_ (1920) and _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_ (1921) are tales of piracy and the Spanish Main, the second novel completing the first. _Peregrine’s Progress_ (1922) more closely than any other book approximates the scenes and action of _The Broad Highway_; it is laid in Kent, it relates a boy’s adventurings on the road and by the roadside, and it reintroduces the Tinker. _Sir John Dering_ (1923) keeps to the same period. A skilled swordsman who has incurred the enmity of the Lady Herminia Barrasdaile is forced to fight duel after duel which she has instigated in the hope that he will meet his death.

The dictum of Mr. Shorter best fits the case of this friendly writer and honest workman. We have already quoted the words: “The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined to win the favor of the crowd.” The love of a fairy tale, delight in action, pleasure in such characterizations as Black George, the Tinker, and the Ancient—picturesque; in outline broadly simple—have been potent. Stevenson was dead; the good as well as the bad of his legacy had been swallowed up in a flood wherein the sound could no longer be distinguished from the meretricious; what we loosely call realism was in the ascendant. Years were to go by before “realism” could be seen to be the necessary clearing of paths to an exploration of the romantic impulse more intelligent as well as more subtle. In the meantime an age-old thirst found these draughts to quench itself. On the porch of the “Bull” at Sissinghurst the readers of Mr. Farnol have sat for many an afternoon, washing the dust from their throats with a pleasant ale and enjoying the surprising procession of knights, scholars, gipsies, gallants, pirates and simple maids and ladies of fashion which has passed before them, coming from and returning to a world without end, truly.

BOOKS BY JEFFERY FARNOL

1907 _My Lady Caprice_
In England: _The Chronicles of the Imp_
1911 _The Broad Highway_
_The Money Moon._ Earlier, in point of composition, than
_The Broad Highway_.
1913 _The Amateur Gentleman_
1913 _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_. Earlier, in point of composition,
than _The Broad Highway_.
1915 _Beltane the Smith_
1917 _The Definite Object_
1918 _Great Britain at War_
In England: _Some War Impressions_
1918 _Our Admirable Betty_
1920 _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_
1920 _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_
1921 _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_
1922 _Peregrine’s Progress_
1923 _Sir John Dering_

SOURCES ON JEFFERY FARNOL

_The Novels of Jeffery Farnol._ Booklet published by LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY, Boston, 1923.

_The Country of “The Broad Highway,”_ by Henry C. Shelley. THE BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, October, 1912.

_Jeffery Farnol’s Life and Career_, by Herbert F. Jenkins. THE BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, September, 1911.

_How I Began_, by Jeffery Farnol. Booklet published by SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY, LTD., London. The text is reprinted from T. P.’s Weekly of 14 February 1913.

_Love Still Ruling Motive in Life of the Modern Youth and Maiden_. Interview by Marguerite Dean in The Evening World, New York, 28 June 1921. Note especially: “As a matter of fact I knew a charming fellow who did, in real life, just what my hero did in _The Definite Object_—took a little girl from the New York slums, educated her, loved and married her.”

Other references will be found in the footnotes to the text of this chapter. They do not include, by any means, all the interviews in newspapers.

5. Adults Please Skip[32]

i

Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason for not keeping youthful.

There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe better. And there’s something in books like _Little Women_ that you keep coming back to....

S’pose we’d better begin with the Bedtime Story Man. Half the children in the United States of America are willing to call it a day when Thornton W. Burgess says the word. Mr. Burgess owes his success to the fact that he was born in a place called Sandwich in the State of Massachusetts. It made him realize that something was needed “between the dark and the daylight,” as Longfellow said. Having splendid eyesight and some excellent connections, he was able to enter the best animal circles, and early met Peter Rabbit, Lightfoot the Deer, and loads of others. The way to meet them is by all means under Mr. Burgess’s auspices, in _The Burgess Animal Book for Children_. Sammy Jay, Bob White and the feathered companions who have more or less dealings with Striped Chipmunk and Johnny Chuck are introduced in _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_. It is a point of honor with Mr. Burgess always to let his animal friends tell their own stories. Louis Agassiz Fuertes illustrates these books with pictures in full colors. For example, he shows fifty-eight birds in all their glory. _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_ brought cries of joy from Dr. W. T. Hornaday, who is America’s leading naturalist and who presides over more animals at the New York Zoo than went into the ark with Noah. But wait! Here’s a third volume to put with these two, _The Burgess Flower Book for Children_, also illustrated in color and black and white and showing 103 flowers. You should see the color pictures, for instance, of the yellow adder’s-tongue and the wild columbine! Let it be stressed: the books by Burgess are the most popular and most successful published for _little_ children. Their interest and joy is communicable to the child of four years—and they are read and re-read by boys and girls up to twelve, and sometimes by their elders.

Rose Fyleman, with _Fairies and Chimneys_, _The Fairy Flute_, and _The Fairy Green_, won some time ago chief honors as the children’s poet; and now she seems to be on the path to distinguished honors for her prose stories. _The Rainbow Cat_, whose color scheme included orange hind legs and a red, red tail, gave the greatest satisfaction, and so will _Forty Good Night Tales_, in which errant fairies explain themselves. But probably the most ambitious book is the new _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_. Rose Fyleman for fairies, as the advertisers would say.

Did you see _Number One Joy Street_, ever? At any rate, you will see _Number Two Joy Street_, won’t you? Like the first book, it has a jolly cover and endpapers, and plenty of illustrations in color and otherwise. The collection of prose and verse for boys and girls in _Number Two Joy Street_ is from writers whose names will make even older people prick up their ears—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Hilaire Belloc, Hugh Walpole, Laurence Housman and Rose Fyleman are some of them. With such an array of contributors, you will have very hard work to keep your copy of this book for your very own. It will be necessary to speak nicely but firmly to older people.

You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna Geister’s new book, _What Shall We Play_. Grownups are almost certain to think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them without help or direction, and at sight. _Let’s Play_ is another one of her game books written especially for boys and girls. _It Is To Laugh_ is a little more grown-up (not a great deal).

_The Velveteen Rabbit_, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures. As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone, which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is _Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport, who also wrote _Tales Told by the Gander_ and _Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe_. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog. They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the many illustrations, some of them in color.

_The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories_, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies, and their kin.

Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in _The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays_, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music and costumes, please!

For seriousness, and in moments when you want to know more about the world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s _The First Days of Man_ and _The First Days of Knowledge_. These relate the _true_ fairy story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple tools that man first began by making.

ii

I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the _Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those other books for which he made the illustrations, _The Twelve Dancing Princesses_ and _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, I hope you will say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures, but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity (bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.

Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have Hawthorne’s _A Wonder Book_, illustrated by Rackham, or _Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book_, or _Stories From the Arabian Nights_, _The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales_, or _Stories from Hans Andersen_, each with Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of _The Tempest_.

iii

You are old enough to be thinking about going away to school. You can’t get too many school stories. In particular, you are keen for a new book by Ralph Henry Barbour. Nobody writes better school sport books! _The Fighting Scrub_, Mr. Barbour’s latest, is a picture of life at a famous New England school; and the fellows and the incidents of the tale are just as actual as the setting. Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble are boys everyone can recognize among his friends, and while Loring Dean, a cripple confined to a wheel-chair, is a new character in a story of boys, his splendid head-work in planning a forward pass play that makes the winning touchdown for the school is proof that a boy need not be an athlete to count.

There are some very pretty points about _The Fighting Scrub_. It has been usual to write only about a fellow who “made the team.” The scrub team has been an unsung, unhonored aggregation on which the first team sharpened its teeth. Mr. Barbour’s hero is only a scrub; but even a scrub has been known to play in the big game and with crucial results. Here’s another thing: people have begun to recognize the fact that we are in danger of losing sight of football and other games as sport, and of thinking only of winning. Nothing could show better than the history of Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble in _The Fighting Scrub_ that the real joy of football lies in the spirit in which you play. Every fellow can see himself in Clif or Tom or Loring Dean.

Again, there are thousands of boys who will be able to see themselves in Joe Kenton, the hero of Mr. Barbour’s _Follow the Ball_. Joe is a fellow who is far from having things all his own way, but he is a sticker. He has to earn the money to get through school, and that never made it easier to make a record in athletics. But he shows up well, and _Follow the Ball_ has baseball, skating, hockey and camping in its pages as well as football.

The proved classics in the way of school stories are assuredly Owen Johnson’s. It is sixteen years since the first publication of his first book of Lawrenceville stories, but Hickey Hicks, Dink Stover, Doc Macnooder, Hungry Smeed, the Gutter Pup, the Tennessee Shad and Lovely Mead are as “generally and specifically bully” as when Booth Tarkington hailed them. Mr. Johnson’s success in _The Prodigious Hickey_, _The Varmint_ and _The Tennessee Shad_ is as great as Mr. Tarkington’s own in _Penrod_; immeasurably greater than Kipling’s effort in _Stalky & Co._ It is true to say that the Lawrenceville stories blend speed, surprise, mischief and humor with a smoothness and a perfection untouched by anything else of their sort. They avoid the utter priggishness and complacency of _Tom Brown’s School Days_, while having the same positive value of a real school, under its own name and with its own tradition, as their background. “The only real prep school story ever written,” said George Ade, crisply, after reading _The Varmint_. Why? No doubt the fact that the Lawrenceville stories are semi-autobiographical has much to do with it. For Johnson was a Lawrenceville boy in the 1890s; there is extant a picture showing him with the original (but somewhat older) Brian de Boru Finnegan, Turkey Reiter, the Old Roman, and the Prodigious Hickey. Johnson himself it was who held the skeleton while Hickey attached it to a rope hung from a ventilator. Johnson sat on the roof when Old Ironsides—afterward a New York real estate broker—slid off and got filled with gravel. It was Johnson who experienced the agony of muffing a ball and being attacked by the whole baseball team, which he has described as the Varmint’s first discouraging experience with Lawrenceville athletics.

And after a dozen years, Mr. Johnson recently returned to the Lawrenceville scene in _Skippy Bedelle_, which tells how Skippy planned to invent a foot regulator for bathtubs and of certain deplorable experiments which were to produce mosquito-proof socks. _Skippy Bedelle_ is largely the story of a sentimental progression and includes the first dress suit and Skippy’s first girl.

In the days when professional ballplayers still had mustaches and you could give people a thrill by riding down the post-office steps on a high-wheel bicycle, Irvin S. Cobb was goin’ on fourteen. And in _Goin’ on Fourteen_, his new book with pictures by Worth Brehm, the artist for Tarkington’s Penrod stories, Cobb has cut a few cross-sections out of a year in the life of an average boy. Now without in any respect being literal reminiscences, these chapters accurately and joyously reflect a scene and a period and a boy most unmistakably American. For Johnny Custer, otherwise John C. Calhoun Custer, Jr., is neither Tom Sawyer nor Penrod Schofield—though perhaps more like Tom and Huck Finn than Penrod—but he is as instantly recognizable and as entirely “boy” as either. And Johnny Custer was his own trained investigator; he did not depend upon others to tell him what would happen in untried circumstances, no, sir! The account of how he and Mr. Simons short-circuited the fowls of a chicken fancier should be read with caution; it is likely to leave you in the same condition of happy helplessness in which it left Johnny.

Albert Payson Terhune, like John Taintor Foote,[33] writes a capital dog story, and Mr. Terhune’s stories of collies, Buff and Lad and the others, are known wherever the dog has his due. In _The Heart of a Dog_, Terhune’s new book, there are one or two tales in which a collie is not the hero, but Lad and Buff and Treve and Lochinvar Bobby are familiar friends of the breed which Mr. Terhune himself raises and takes prizes with. Marguerite Kirmse has made the eight pictures in color and others in black and white. This is another book that grown-ups will borrow and neglect to return, if you don’t watch out.

Every boy and girl knows how hard it is to find a good, readable history. The difficulty was pointed out to Sidney Dark, who set to work at once to do something about it. And so far he has done magnificently, producing, in _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, _The Book of England for Young People_, and _The Book of France for Young People_, three histories more clear and interesting to boys and girls of ten to sixteen than any similar accounts. (I do not even except Charles Dickens’s _A Child’s History of England_, which is one-sided in spots.) Each of Mr. Dark’s books has sixteen illustrations from famous paintings of historic scenes.

iv

There is an Everyman’s Library—why not an Everychild’s Library? Well, one has been begun. It is called The Beacon Hill Bookshelf and already eight volumes are to be had. One of them, _The Boy Whaleman_, has never been published before; the others are all established favorites stamped with the approval of librarians and parents as well as of children themselves. But even the old ones are printed from new type and all the books are illustrated in color by well-known artists—five to eight color plates apiece.

The first book on The Beacon Hill Bookshelf is the book that still is first on children’s bookshelves everywhere throughout America. It is the book which, in a recent wide competition conducted by The Bookman, led all other “juveniles.” Its author was Louisa M. Alcott, and its title is _Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_. Nowadays when you ask people like Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton what American books they have read they have a way of recalling at once that Louisa M. Alcott was one of the first, and—without prejudice to other writers—has remained one of the most memorable. The Beacon Hill _Little Women_ has pictures by Jessie Willcox Smith, and is properly companioned in the series by its sequel, _Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_. Reginald Birch has done the pictures for _Little Men_.

Of the other six books, I must draw your attention especially to two: the one which is published for the first time and one by John Masefield. George F. Tucker’s _The Boy Whaleman_ has a place in the series because it deals with the experiences of an American lad more than sixty years ago—almost as far back as Richard Henry Dana’s _Two Years Before the Mast_. Based on fact, Mr. Tucker’s book is a thrilling account of a New Bedford boy’s three years’ voyage on a whaling ship.

Mr. Masefield’s book, _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, is illustrated by T. C. Dugdale, and is a spirited story of a boy who served the Duke of Monmouth in his attempt to gain the throne of James II. The tale is therefore one of the Monmouth Rebellion, as the rebellion of 1685 in England is most often called. Owing to the distinction with which Mr. Masefield writes, this book is one of the very best of adventure stories for boys’ or girls’ reading.

Besides the four books of which I have tried to tell something, the Beacon Hill Bookshelf also holds these four to date:

_What Katy Did_, by Susan Coolidge. This is the most popular of Susan Coolidge’s books, the story of a girl who would not let illness and invalidism keep her from doing things.

_The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, by Allen French. Rolf avenges his father’s murder and earns the viking’s bow in a story with incidents drawn from the Icelandic sagas.

_Nelly’s Silver Mine_, by Helen Hunt Jackson. This book by the author of _Ramona_ is as popular today as forty years ago. It is the story of Rob and Nelly, twins in New England, who take a long journey to a new home in Colorado, where Nelly finds the mine of the title.

_A Daughter of the Rich_, by Mary E. Waller. The story is a great favorite with girls, who never fail to be interested in the account of a year spent on a farm in Vermont by a rich young city girl. Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott has made the pictures in color.

AND HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS

_Billy Mink_, by Thornton W. Burgess, illustrated in color by Harrison Cady. The first volume in a new series of Burgess books which deals with the animals living in and around the Smiling Pool. For boys and girls of four to twelve.

_Ruffs and Pompoms_, by Beulah King, illustrated by Maurice Day. Finney Foo, the clown doll in the toy shop, goes out into the world to find a smile for the little Chinese Lady and has the strangest adventures that ever happened to a toy. For boys and girls of six to ten.

_The Valley of Color-Days_, by Helen B. Sandwell, illustrated in color by Alice Bolam Preston. The strange adventures of Jane and David, who were taken in charge by Burr, the fairy, while their parents were away for a few days. For boys and girls of six to ten.

_Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, by Sarah Addington, illustrated by Gertrude Kay. Twelve original and whimsical tales of the adventures that happened to the Mother Goose children who lived in Pudding Lane. For boys and girls of six to twelve.

_The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, by Harold Gaze, illustrated in color by the author. Ruth and Norman and their Uncle Hal are taken by the fairies to unusual regions—the heart of Japan, Cloudland, the Arctic Circle and the Happy Isles. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.

_The Friends of Diggeldy Dan_, by Edwin P. Norwood, illustrated in color by A. Conway Peyton. The wonderful circus clown and his animal friends go to visit the king of Jungleland. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.

_Fifty New Poems for Children._ Here are verses about the things every child knows, such as dandelions, swallows, the wind, and the scissors-grinder, mixed with poems about the things of every child’s wish and fancy—cloud houses, magic wall-paper, goblins and ring-a-ring fairies. The poets include Robert Graves, Katharine Tynan, Eleanor Farjeon, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Blair and Madeleine Nightingale.

_Egyptian Tales of Magic_, by Eleanor Myers Jewett, illustrated in color by Maurice Day. The oldest stories in the world, full of magic and mystery, which make the kings and sailors and priests and peasants of ancient Egypt come alive again before our eyes. For boys and girls of ten to fifteen.

_Medicine Gold_, by Warren H. Miller. A story of adventure, of big game hunting and fishing and life in the open in the great north woods. Indians figure in the story and there is an exciting mystery ingeniously solved. Mr. Miller is known as a writer of boys’ fiction and of outdoor books for boys.

_Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, by Edward G. Cheyney. You can read this book alone or as the fourth of a series about a young forester. Assigned to government service in North Carolina, Scott plays an exciting part in the settlement of a mountaineers’ feud. The author has worked with the United States Forestry Service and is a professor in and director of the University of Minnesota College of Forestry.

_Rat’s Castle_, by Roy Bridges. The fascination of pirate gold hangs in the background of a slashing, well-told story.

_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by John Kenlon. The Chief of the New York Fire Department tells the picturesque story of his boyhood and young manhood on deep water, including shipwreck on the desolate Crozet Islands.

_The Listening Man_, by John A. Moroso. A companion volume to the author’s _Cap Fallon: Fire Fighter_. This book shows how a retired detective of the New York City force still takes an interest in and aids in solving mysteries and in bringing criminals to justice. Cap Fallon is one of the characters. Mr. Moroso is a novelist who, as a New York newspaper reporter, covered many big police stories.

_The Boy Scout’s Own Book_, edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This gathers into one volume those articles and stories from Volumes I-IV of _The Boy Scouts Year Book_ having to do particularly with Scouting. A book of especial interest to boys who expect to become Scouts. Joseph A. Altsheler, Henry van Dyke, Robert E. Peary, Dr. Grenfell and Warren H. Miller are a few of the authors represented in the book.

_The Boy Scouts Year Book_ (1924), edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This year’s book features fiction, though the special article and handicraft features are well maintained. Dan Beard’s how-to-make-it articles, and stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Homer Croy, Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Joseph B. Ames, Richard Connell, Raymond L. Spears and William James are included.

_David Blaize of King’s_, by E. F. Benson. The story of David Blaize, hero of Mr. Benson’s _David Blaize_ and _David Blaize and the Blue Door_, at Cambridge.

_The Story Key to Geographic Names_, by O. D. von Engeln and Jane McKelway Urquhart. Takes geography out of the boredom of lists and figures and tells the stories back of place names.

And for Parents—

_New Roads to Childhood_ and _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books_, both by Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library; and _A Century of Children’s Books_, by Florence V. Barry.

6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley

i

In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his _Antic Hay_, Aldous Huxley writes:

“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle....

“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....

“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”

This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of _Limbo_, or of _Crome Yellow_, nor even of the collection of tales called _Mortal Coils_. No, it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass, glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, _feuilletons_.

ii

To understand Aldous Huxley’s work it is only necessary to have been born too late. This includes practically everybody. But to appreciate his writing requires more of a background than is possessed by those who would make a cult of him. He has nothing to do with cults, though perhaps something with literary cultures. His roots are very far back, the smallest at least as far back as the Elizabethans. Not many can identify the passage in Marlowe from which are taken the two lines on the titlepage of _Antic Hay_. There is more than a suspicion that the grandson of T. H. Huxley is acquainted with Greek and Latin literature and with the spectacles of the Renaissance. But the alcoves of the Bodleian Library are well-lined and not too much frequented. The truth is that Huxley is the child of the nineteenth century far more than of the twentieth, or the seventeenth, or even the first. And the nineteenth century is so much in the foreground as to be most unfamiliar ground for many readers of today. Their backgrounds are too far back, and their foreground is too far forward; the scene is lost in the middle. One of the most significant facts about Aldous Huxley is his almost indiscriminate fondness for the works of Charles Dickens, just as another in his nephewship to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Consider his two grandfathers. The renowned scientist, T. H., whose name is still anathema to the simple fundamentalist, was yet a human, an all too human creature, who, as he told Henry Holt, tried vegetarianism but had to abandon it because he found he could no longer think. The father of Julia Arnold (who became Mrs. Leonard Huxley, Aldous’s mother) was the subject of considerable conversion and re-conversion by the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Julia Arnold was a niece of Matthew Arnold, whose doctrine of sweetness and light wasn’t wasted on a desert air—was, indeed, caught up and echoed with diminishing but sympathetic outcries. As for Mary Arnold, who became Mrs. Humphry Ward, the author of _Robert Elsmere_ was by taste and temperament a scholar whose true monument is possibly her encyclopædia articles on theologians in Spain.

What, then, is the character of a man barely thirty whose horoscope belongs to 1894? His sisters and his cousins and his aunts are not to be left out of the reckoning any more than those of W. S. Gilbert’s admiral. Brought up to admire Wordsworth, Mr. Huxley has lived to enjoy him;[34] a child of eminent Victorians, he has a perspicacious eye for the limitations of Lytton Strachey as a biographer.[35] The inner truth, of course, is something more important than these details of taste, which might be accidental. The inner truth is itself an accident—quite possibly an accident in design. And it is due to the shape of Huxley’s head, not the outer shape but the shape inside—as we have said, all curious vaultings, pointed arches, mediæval, constructed for all the rites of a ceremonious mysticism but constrained by the circumstances of his era and the exigencies of daily living to be used rather as a laboratory than a cathedral. One must eat. When Grandfather Huxley gave over eating meat, he was unable to think, and his grandson, obliged to use a beautiful brain in journalism and letters, can hardly dedicate it to worship.

“Worship.” The word may seem strange to be used in speaking of the author of Antic Hay, in which there is much genial blasphemy; but what the careless reader may not see is the bitter cry beneath the surface of a stony contempt. The cry is there, nor is it always embittered. “God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right,” reflected Theodore Gumbril Junior. “But God as truth, God as 2 plus 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right.”[36] And a few moments later the young man is recalling, with passion and pain, the death of his mother. Those familiar with the story of the two dwarfs, Sir Hercules and Filomena, in _Crome Yellow_[37] know what pathos and tenderness Huxley can command in a narrative of entire simplicity undisturbed by the self-conscious tendency of much of his work. For it is true, as Michael Sadleir said some time ago, that there are (have been?) several Huxleys.[38] But although the artificer in words who is “almost omnipresent” will never vanish, the “amateur in garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in ragtime, the fastidious sensualist” are numbered of days. The young man in his twenties who provoked “consternation and respect” knows as well as Mr. Sadleir that he has no time to waste. His position is clear, being that of a man whose time is being wasted, not by himself but by others; and a man whose impatience is becoming very great. The portrait of Coleman in _Antic Hay_ is perhaps the most concentrated expression of that ... impatience. Of the several attitudes assumed in the world today by gifted writers whose core of feeling is mystical, Huxley’s, I think, has the most courage to commend it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis clicks the shutter of a mental camera; Mr. James Branch Cabell tries to glue our eyes to a series of romantically-colored stereoscopic slides; Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer paints in oils; Mr. James Joyce uses chalk on the sidewalks or even on the walls of less advertised, but not less public, places. Huxley, however, has learned from Dickens the art of caricature. As he draws, his really vast erudition comes crowding through the aisles of his strange and beautiful mind. Like little imps, like twisted gargoyles come to life, figures of the past fling themselves on the haft of his pen, to move it this way and that. A heavier stroke here, to show the semblance of a satyr; this curve a little thinned by pity; a blot here for the spirit made flesh.... So you have gradually assembled his company, grotesque, exaggerated, wretched, bizarre, inhuman-human, like drawings by Cruikshank or Phiz, like illustrations to a new _Nicholas Nickleby_, or _Pickwick_, repulsively true, their meaninglessness carrying their deepest meaning. That meaning is so significant that only a mystic can be expected to grasp it. It goes back to the struggle between paganism and Christianity which led into what we call the Dark Ages. Mr. Huxley has looked at his world and seen with disgust—but also with anguish and pity—how the wheel has come full circle, how for the mystical mind a Dark Age is again come upon us. Must, then, the old and crucial warfare be waged all over again? If we are to worship at Greek shrines, he will remind us that Priapus was the god of gardens. And he quotes the Latin of Odo of Cluny[39] to show how excess breeds counter-excess. The whole point with Huxley is his perfect grasp of the historical analogy to the present mood and tense—or tension. He is savage in his picture of London, the modern city, in _Antic Hay_; unsparing in his representation of the manifestations of the spirit we affect—jazz, prevailing dances, rages in new art, stupidities in experimental science. Possibly his comprehension of the last is his most relentlessly hostile view; he is the grandson of a scientist, a very great thinker, pathetically dependent upon a flesh diet for intellectual accomplishment. Grandfather’s thinking, though possibly not futile, seems to have got no farther than the God of 2 plus 2 = 4. For such a God, the grandson has little use; for such an age as impends over us, he has even less.

This young man has been everywhere and seen everything. He writes, not that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run. He subtly, but more and more urgently, invites us to flee—the wrath to come? No, the madness already here. Does his generation fancy itself as pagans and revel in its paganism? He will show them their precedents and quote for them their texts—which they may ponder before passing out to the vomitorium. One might divide Aldous Huxley’s work to date into two classes: and if one class is juvenilia, most certainly the other division, led by _Antic Hay_, is Juvenalia. The Goth laid waste, even as this young Goth from Oxford is laying waste; and then the Goth built churches. They are the incomparable, those edifices. The son of the Arnolds and the Huxleys, the Oxford scholar, the pupil of London, is preparing for us his twentieth century Gothic.

iii

“Huxley, Aldous Leonard, writer,” recites _Who’s Who_, “born 26 July 1894; third son of Leonard Huxley, whom see, and Julia Arnold; married, 1919, Maria Nys; one son. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Worked on the editorial staff of the Athenæum, 1919-1920; dramatic critic of the Westminster Gazette, 1920-1921. Publications: _The Burning Wheel_, 1916; _The Defeat of Youth_, 1918; _Limbo_, 1920; _Leda_, 1920; _Crome Yellow_, 1921; _Mortal Coils_, 1922. Recreation: reading. Club: Athenæum.”

A short private letter dated 13. vii. 22 adds one or two details. “I was educated very conventionally at Eton & at Oxford (the only break in the process being two or three years of partial blindness, from 17 to 19½, when I learned to read Braille embossed writing). I took English Literature at Oxford, under the professorship of the late Sir Walter Raleigh. I have worked on a good many papers—doing literary journalism, art criticism, music criticism & dramatic criticism. I am a close student of French literature & have many acquaintances in Paris. I travel as much as I can—which is not nearly so much as I should like. My ideal at the moment is to be completely idle for three years—but, alas, I see no prospect of its being fulfilled!” The letter also says, in answer to a specific inquiry about _Mortal Coils_: “_Mortal Coils_, like _Crome Yellow_, was chiefly written in Italy last summer (tho’ there are two stories in it of considerably earlier date)—in extreme heat by the Mediterranean.”

Here is a reminiscence of Huxley written in June, 1922:

“Aldous Huxley had tea with me at the Savoy in February, 1922, when London was being raided by a series of particularly nasty fogs. All the salt exhaled by the neighboring sea is sucked in by these fogs, which apply it patiently to the eyes of London, causing the people sore eyes and a weary outlook. Out of one of these fogs Huxley stepped into the writing room of the hotel, where I instantly recognized him. He is very tall and thin, walks with a visible stoop, and looks about him with the uncertainty of those who are new to the extreme of near-sightedness. One of his eyes is almost all white.