Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

“He is very much interested in America and professes to envy us our exuberance and Henry L. Mencken, which seems to me sheer affectation. He also entertains the view that the invasion of Europe by American soldiery during the late war has caused a revolution in European social intercourse, which is a little more reasonable. I have made a complete record of this conversation in a manuscript book of mine entitled ‘In Georgian England,’ which is unlikely ever to find a publisher.

“About him personally I know only what one can gather from a purely impersonal discussion. He has a slight income, and that was why he was leaving for Italy with his wife, and that was why he was very anxious about an American market, and that was why he was writing some plays which, judging by some play work of his I saw, must be pretty bad. But it should interest you to know that at a luncheon of young Oxford poets to which I was invited he was referred to several times as the most learned man in England.”[40]

Huxley’s personal appearance and agreeable manner have been frequently described[41] and his conversational gift is not aptly epitomized by that very famous English novelist who recently said of him: “He looks clever. He says nothing—he has no need to say anything. It suffices for him to sit silent, looking clever.” The same novelist, a very penetrating analyst of literary powers, added: “But this young man is almost the only ‘white hope’ in English literature at present.” Huxley is at his best, conversationally, in a small company. One of his close friends is Frank Swinnerton whose judgment of Huxley’s gifts as a writer strongly confirms the novelist’s estimate just quoted.

iv

_The Burning Wheel_ (1916) and _The Defeat of Youth_ (1918) were volumes of poems, as was _Leda_ (1920). Only _Leda_ has been published in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr. Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.

The title poem of _Leda_ is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s disguise as a swan:

Couched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan’s proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
And over her the swan shook slowly free
The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.

The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of the futility of science:

But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
Is still umbilical to earth.

The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:

Bubble-breasted swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home,
From whose nave the chandelier,
Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
We in the round balcony sit,
Lean o’er and look into the pit
Where feed the human bears beneath,
Champing with their gilded teeth.
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What steam of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.

A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in _Can Grande’s Castle_—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of thinking ill of oneself”:

“Misery,” he said, “to have no chin,
Nothing but brains and sex and taste:
Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.”

But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned around the nursery couplet:

Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
As full of apples as can be.

From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s resembles a shop on Bond Street.

v

Much unwisdom has been uttered concerning Huxley’s prose. The applausive enthusiasm of the ordinary Huxley devotee may be dismissed without comment; superficiality (not to say shallowness) may call for pity but certainly not for censure. A misapprehension of what the author was doing in _Antic Hay_, though common enough and a more serious matter, will rectify with time. A comparison of such poetry as “Leda” to Keats is better ignored than made the subject of delicate differentiation; but what shall we say of these? “The wittiest man, after Beerbohm, now writing in English.”[42] “His humor is hot as well as shining.”[43] “He is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting.”[44] “There’s no doubt about it. Huxley is brilliant.”[45] Mr. Clement K. Shorter, in the London Sphere, pronouncing _Mortal Coils_ the best book Huxley had yet written, said: “There’s a great deal of brilliancy in it, although one or two of the stories are too chaotic for my taste, and one, ‘Nuns at Luncheon,’ is too morbid. The best are ‘The Gioconda Smile’ and ‘The Tillotson Banquet.’... One thing is clear, that Mr. Aldous Huxley has a career in front of him and some of his gifts are hereditary.... Mrs. T. H. Huxley had distinct gifts as a poet, and I have a volume of her verse I highly value. The son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, is a man of varied talent and the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s talents have taken a widely different turn, but they should carry him far.” If they are to carry him much farther, one grieves for Mr. Shorter, already lagging a little. It was commonly remarked that _Crome Yellow_ derived from Peacock—a modernized _Headlong Hall_ with the slap-stick eliminated and the addition of overtones on the (then) current sex motif.

Let us glance at the prose and test some of these characterizations.

_Limbo_ opens with a novelette, “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” the account of a young man whose mental hermaphroditism explained the fact that in certain states he was Pearl Bellairs, a highly sentimental novelist. The lady takes increasing possession of his faculties; he dies, a conscientious objector to war service, engaged in writing perfervid patriotic appeals to the girls and women of England. “Happily Ever After” deals with an inveterate feminine propensity toward the disguise of love by allurements. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” is a historical precedent offered to Cubists and other innovators in art. “Happy Families,” “Cynthia,” and “The Death of Lully” are all studies in the immature, adolescent attitude toward sex and love; and “The Bookshop” is a study in pity.

In _Mortal Coils_, “The Gioconda Smile” deals with Miss Spence, who poisons her rival quite vainly. “Permutations Among the Nightingales,” in form a play, is a study in promiscuity. “The Tillotson Banquet,” though longer, is of the same genre as “The Bookshop” in _Limbo_. “Green Tunnels” is the episode of a young girl’s heartbreaking disappointment. “Nuns at Luncheon” is the effective portrait of a writer of fiction whose god of realism identifies himself to the worshipper only in his aspect of brute. The original, like most Huxley originals, is a composite. For Mr. Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as in hitting what is in the heads.

The novels, _Crome Yellow_ and _Antic Hay_ exhibit the same characteristics and underlying intention as the shorter pieces; they have the added value of unity of form (in _Crome Yellow_, of time and place as well). _Crome Yellow_ is more varied in its emotional presentation as well as lenient; _Antic Hay_ is sterner, more peremptory—the rapier driven home. But where is the likeness in all this or in any of this, to Max Beerbohm? Mr. Huxley is witty—incidentally. His humor, described as “hot as well as shining,” is no more humor than the work of Mark Twain in _The Mysterious Stranger_. No doubt his prose is a “finished” prose; but “fastidious, sophisticated and diverting”! The picture conjured up by such adjectives is one of an elegant trifler. Yet hardly a man writing can use such uncompromising, Old-Testamentary speech; and if the bulk of Huxleyana is diversion, then Savonarola should be considered with reference to his possibilities as a vaudeville entertainer. And “brilliant.” It is a word from the outermost darkness, spreading darkness around.

vi

Perhaps as a result of these singular misapprehensions, the remark was general, when Huxley’s book of essays, _On the Margin_, appeared, that here was a volume which might be the work of any gifted young man. Not quite. The display of learning was rather too great for gifted young men to manage, as it were, without parade. Yet the very ones who made the comment—and this writer must number himself among them—could have learned more concerning what a conventional biographer would love calling “the real Aldous Huxley” from a re-perusal of _On the Margin_ than from any other of his books. Said one reviewer: “Mr. Huxley can be fantastic enough, though his is never the fantasy of the cloudy dreamer, but the fantasy of a thinker whose mind is enchanted by the logical development of a happy thought; but his clarity was never better shown than in this collection.... Even in his lesser marginalia, he has a winning and graceful conversational manner, whether he be commenting on a quaint book, on pantomime songs, on the contrast between amorous poetry (of the second class) in French and in English, or upon boredom as a literary inspiration through the ages.... The one thing which Mr. Huxley cannot stand is mistiness and insincerity; and what he means by clarity and sincerity he amply shows in his essays on Edward Thomas, Sir Christopher Wren, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and the centenary of Shelley’s death.”[46] Here is a greater degree of percipience than has been shown since Mr. Sadleir offered his criticism (now perhaps obsolescent, but penetrating at the time). In fact, the essay on “Sir Christopher Wren” in _On the Margin_ is the single most self-illuminatory bit of writing Mr. Huxley has offered us. Like the great architect of London, Aldous Huxley is a designer who prizes in his work a quality peculiar and individualizing; and as with Wren, the quality is not æsthetic but moral.

It is explicit, for all its unobtrusiveness, in the title story of his new collection, _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_. Comedy and irony in various proportions are the material of five of the six tales, but the principal story, in length a novelette, is a charming narrative of a child in Italy, a child with a beautiful forehead and eyes that could flash ripples like the sunshine on clear pale lakes. The young Guido showed an extraordinary penchant for music; but when he was a little older, like Archimedes, his mind turned to the theorems of mathematics; it was evident that his genius was larger. The tragedy of his life in the hands of a grasping woman is told with an affectionate sadness. Undoubtedly this piece of his fiction, austere and tender, will give to thousands of readers a new conception of Aldous Huxley. They will perhaps see that the mind of the child, Guido, is a miniature of the mind of the one who writes about him; and that there is even a profound likeness between both those minds and the one of which Emerson wrote:

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
And groined the walls of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity....

BOOKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY

1916 _The Burning Wheel._ Published in England only.
1918 _The Defeat of Youth._ Published in England only.
1920 _Limbo_
1920 _Leda_
1921 _Crome Yellow_
1922 _Mortal Coils_
1923 _On the Margin_
1923 _Antic Hay_
1924 _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_
In England: _Little Mexican and Other Stories_.

SOURCES ON ALDOUS HUXLEY

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for the years since 1920.

7. In Every Home: A Chapter for Women

i

In addressing this chapter to you, I do what I can to notify other men that they may find it uninteresting. Indeed, as you and I know, if all the truth were told they would find it, many of them, most unpalatable reading. There are things we need not go into, such as the indubitable fact that the success of the home depends solely upon the woman. A man may contribute to it, but he cannot make it; and whatever his behavior, if the woman is steadfast, he cannot absolutely wreck it. The home is a form of government and a form of human society. We are familiar with the larger forms of government men have tried, the best of them only partly successful. But the home has been a complete success, times innumerable. Men may call it a benevolent despotism, but the fact remains. It is perhaps significant that the government of the home is not conducted by the use of the Australian or the Massachusetts ballot. Women have accepted the vote and will use it; but their grasp of certain essentials of society is more clear than men’s, and if the ballot cannot safeguard the home, and the health and welfare and opportunity of children, then government will have to be transformed into something that will.

But this is understood; my purpose is simply to tell of a few books which are, in type, indispensable to the homemaker. The types are really only two: the cook book and the handbook of motherhood. It so happens that there is one volume of each type so complete, so thoroughly tested, so practically perfect that it stands alone on an eminence above all others of its sort—and the best of the others make no pretensions to do more than add wings, columns, buttresses, and chapels to the main edifice. If I could talk about _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ and _The Care and Feeding of Children_ in the same breath, I should do so. I can, anyway, talk about them in the same chapter!

_The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first appeared in 1896 and was most recently revised last year. It has over 800 pages and still is a volume of little more than ordinary size, no thicker than a rather long novel. The 122 illustrations are so treated as to be intelligible—and if you have ever tried photographing food, you will appreciate what this means. The pictures have been used to show what the words of the text could not make so clear; one sees at a glance the differences between kidney lamb chops, rib chops and French chops, or the precise effect of capon in aspic, rather elaborately garnished with cooked yolks and whites of eggs cut in fancy shapes, pistachio nuts, and truffles.

The book opens with a simple scientific account of the kinds of food (food being “anything which nourishes the body”) and follows with a chapter on cookery including invaluable timetables. After a chapter on beverages with its recipes there are chapters on everything from bread to ice cream, from soup to jam and jelly-making and drying fruits. Then comes a long selection of menus, a chapter on food values with the necessary tables, and a forty-eight page index which has all the utility of an absolute, all-inclusive bill-of-fare.

The chief thing, of course, is that every teaspoonful and every direction in the book is exact, and standard. Nor, without going into the more recondite French cookery, or into special Italian, Spanish, German and other foreign dishes, is it possible to think of any dish which _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ omits. The variety of each kind of dish is often extraordinary. For example, I have just counted seventy hot puddings. In every case there is first the table of ingredients, then the simple directions. If a personal word will add anything to the force of what has been said, I will say that the superb cook who honored me by becoming my wife tells me that in no case when following _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ formula has she failed to cook with success.

Specialized, or partly specialized, cook books are many, and one of the best and most recent is _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_, by Fannie Ferber Fox, with the assistance of Lavinia S. Schwartz. Mrs. Fox is a sister of Edna Ferber, and the novelist has written an introduction for _Fannie Fox’s Cook Book_ which has all the richly human interest of her own fiction. In a paragraph which need hurt no feelings, Miss Ferber points out the tendency to over-emphasis in one or another direction which characterizes the cookery of most lands; and she gives with humorous eloquence her personal tribute to the toothsome torte, that cake of rich and crumbling particles which is included in Mrs. Fox’s recipes. This is a cook book that covers all kinds of foods but is distinctive by its preservation of the finest recipes from Jewish cookery.

Another valuable addition to the kitchen bookshelf is Bertha E. L. Stockbridge’s _Practical Cook Book_, in which a notable feature is the great number of practical suggestions for menus.

ii

_The Care and Feeding of Children_ appeared in 1894 and was also revised last year. More than a million mothers have used it, and beyond question it has saved thousands of lives in infancy. Within the last half-dozen years, a generation which was raised on the book has, in turn, begun to raise its own children with its aid. It constituted its author, Dr. L. Emmett Holt, the foremost authority on babies in America; and as the years passed he returned to the book, in its various revisions, the fruit of a wonderful experience which its prestige had brought to him. Physicians have for years bought _The Care and Feeding of Children_ in quantity to present to their patients. The hundreds of questions that every mother must have answered are all answered in this marvelous work. Bathing, nursing, artificial feeding, changes in food, substitutes for milk, under-nourishment, health habits, weaning, diet after weaning, the training of older children, children’s diseases—nothing is left out. This, to be sure, is largely possible because of the nation-wide and prolonged use of the book, and the constant additions and slight reconstructions it has undergone. The book has always been kept of handy size and at a low price. The thought of what Dr. Holt’s book has done and is doing tempts to eloquence; but the only eloquence which is tolerable is the eloquence of the immense fact. We talk about services to humanity; but the writing and publishing of this book was possibly the greatest service to humanity in our time.

_The Home Care of Sick Children_, by Dr. Emelyn Lincoln Coolidge, is likely to be as helpful to mothers who have the care and feeding of sick children as Dr. Holt’s book has been to mothers generally. Dr. Coolidge lived for many years in the Babies’ Hospital, New York, and worked there under the personal direction of Dr. Holt. As editor of the department on babies of the Ladies’ Home Journal she has had an enormous correspondence with mothers throughout America and even in foreign countries. And _The Home Care of Sick Children_ has one great merit: it does not stop where most other books of its kind stop, with: “Give a dose of castor oil, and call a doctor.” It tells in every instance what a mother can and should do, and it invariably tells when to call the doctor in. Not only does it avoid calling the doctor unnecessarily, but it gives many detailed instructions that a physician generally has not time to give. Recipes to tempt the sick child’s appetite, amusement, clothing and the hygiene of the sick-room are all dwelt upon.

There is a book with which it would be wise to precede Dr. Holt’s. _Healthy Mothers_ is by Dr. S. Josephine Baker, consulting director, Children’s Bureau, United States Department of Labor, an authority on babies, whose articles regularly appear in the Ladies’ Home Journal and who is constantly asked for advice by women throughout the country. _Healthy Mothers_ deals almost entirely with the mother’s care of herself, and tells explicitly how she may best meet her responsibility to her baby, how she may have better health for herself, and the finer mental attitude that comes with physical well-being. The relation of a mother to her unborn child implies a responsibility greater than that entailed in any other human relationship. It is very largely within the power of the mother to determine not only her own condition and future health, but to decide whether or not her baby is to be healthy and strong. _Healthy Mothers_, without going into technical discussion, sufficiently explains the general course of pregnancy and childbirth so that the mother may have an intelligent understanding of how to care for herself, safeguard her child, and make every requisite preparation.

iii

And the growing child? _Child Training_, by Angelo Patri, is the book for parents who look unhappily at the child and ask themselves despondently: “What in the world makes him do that?” Or, “What is the matter with her now?” Or, “Why does he disobey me?” Or, “Why does she have such bad manners?” Or, “Why doesn’t he study?” And, at one or another time, practically all parents are faced with these questions.

Angelo Patri has been training children, and helping fathers and mothers to train them, for twenty-five years. He is principal of Public School 45, New York. This school faces a garden centered about a sun dial and fed by a tiny greenhouse. Across the street is a whole block given over to a playground, its cinder floor padded firm by the play-winged feet of thousands of children who play on it every day. The school is unusual in having a great variety of shops and workrooms as well as the usual classrooms; a swimming pool; and a library. It is constantly visited by teachers from all over the world, men and women who are anxious to see the principal and talk with him. Some of them have heard him talk to audiences, big and little; some have read his widely published articles on children; others merely know of the remarkable way in which he has brought home and school together, so that parents constantly come to him to work out the problem of their child.

There are about two hundred chapters or sections—chapterettes, rather—in Angelo Patri’s _Child Training_. Each of them is so short that it can be read in five minutes or less. Each carries pointed wisdom about the child, and not only for the father or mother but for the uncle, aunt, teacher, or anyone having to do with children. Very often the point is conveyed by an anecdote—there are a good many smiles and chuckles in the book. But Mr. Patri can speak out with definiteness. Perhaps his finest wisdom is shown in a point that he makes more than once: children do certain things that bother us because it is time for them to do these things. When this is true, Mr. Patri is bent on showing just what should be done to help the youngster over a hard place. _Talks to Mothers_ is another treasury of Mr. Patri’s helpful wisdom.

Another new book on child training which will appeal to all those who believe in the power of suggestion is _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_, by R. C. Waters, lecturer in English to the Nancy School of Applied Psychology. This is a practical book on the application of Emil Coué’s method. The technique to be used is explained clearly and simply. The possibilities of Coué’s method of auto-suggestion when applied to the correction of habits, to disease, to education and play are set forth and examples are cited. _Auto-Suggestion for Mothers_ has been translated into French by Mme. Coué and has been adopted by the Coué School as a text.

iv

Every home should have one or more books on keeping well. The old family medical book, a chamber of horrors, has been made obsolete by a few general books with, thank heaven, a greatly different emphasis. But among recent books on the art of keeping well, I know of none more satisfactory than Dr. S. M. Rinehart’s _The Commonsense of Health_. Dr. Rinehart, who is the husband of Mary Roberts Rinehart, was a general practitioner in Pittsburgh for over twenty years. Later he was in charge of tuberculosis hospitals in western Pennsylvania, and during the war he was put in charge of all army tuberculosis hospitals in the United States. Recently he has been in the United States Public Health Service. His book is wholly popular in character, cheerful, good-natured, and not in the least afraid of an occasional joke. It is precisely the thing for general reading by both sexes at all ages. Common and worrisome ailments, such as colds, are dealt with, as well as certain fairly common and serious diseases, like pneumonia and tuberculosis. But the range of the book is wide, and there are discussions of nerves, how hard one should work, and besetting fears. The information is sound and the style is entertaining. One class of unfortunate will be particularly helped by the book—the unhappy man or woman termed by Dr. Rinehart a “symptom hunter.” We each know at least one!

v

I cannot close this chapter without a short word about books and the home. You who make the home, you women who are overwhelmingly the book readers of America, know how necessary books are to make the home complete. Read yourself, and discuss what you read. Never urge or compel a child to read a book. If you read the right books and talk about them afterward (they ought to move you to talk about them) the boy or girl will read them also. Buy books. In general, never buy them in “sets.” You ought to know an author, even a classic author, a little better than to have to do that. Keep abreast of the new books—one of the easiest things in the world to do, and one of the most fascinating. It is fair that you should ask that at least as much money go into the purchase of books for the home as goes into the purchase of magazines, or radio apparatus, or as is expended in mere diversions such as the picture shows. Last year thirty cents per person was spent for books in America—far too little. You can change all that, and no simple change that I can think of will pay you better.

BOOKS FOR THE HOMEMAKER

_Choice Recipes for Clever Cooks_, by Lucy G. Allen. More than 500 original recipes for those who already know how to cook and appreciate the best in food and flavor. By the director of the Boston School of Cookery. Illustrated.

_Table Service_, by Lucy G. Allen. A concise exposition of the waitress’s duties by the director of the Boston School of Cookery. New revised edition, with illustrations and diagrams.

_The Candy Cook Book_, by Alice Bradley. A new edition, revised, containing over 300 recipes and covering the subject completely. By the principal of Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery. Illustrated.

_One-Piece Dinners_, by Mary D. Chambers. Recipes for dinners where the meat, vegetables and other accessories are cooked all together and make a complete, well-balanced and sufficient meal. Directions are also given for optional salads and fruit desserts. Illustrated.

_Cooking for Two: A Handbook for Young Housekeepers_, by Janet McKenzie Hill. Instructions for young housekeepers and a collection of practical recipes for two, grouped according to food values. Fully illustrated.

_Colette’s Best Recipes: A Book of French Cookery_, by Marie Jacques. This new cook book, by a Breton whose culinary achievements have won her renown in France, contains recipes for the most delicious and palate-tickling dishes, from French consomme to the French pastries, of crispness or creaminess unsurpassed. Illustrated.

_The Science of Eating_, by Alfred W. McCann. A comprehensive book by an authority on foods; what to eat and why.

_What to Eat and How to Prepare It_, by Elizabeth A. Monaghan. This combines very definite information on food values with many recipes and instructions for cooking.

_What to Drink_, by Bertha E. L. Stockbridge. Recipes for several hundred beverages—ades, punches, fizzes, shrubs, milk drinks, icecreams, sundaes, sherbets, etc.

_Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent_, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. A book for those whose duty it is to care for the sick, and of equal importance to those who see in correct nutrition the way of preventing much of the illness about us. Important chapters on infant and child feeding and suggestions as to diet in special diseases. By the author of _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_. Illustrated.

_Canning, Preserving and Jelly Making_, by Janet McKenzie Hill. “Aims to present the latest ideas on the subject using the methods found to be simplest and shortest by the experiments of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, State universities, and cooking experts.”—Booklist of the American Library Association. Illustrated.

_Marketing and Housework Manual_, by S. Agnes Donham. Clear and concise information on these everyday subjects.

_Spending the Family Income_, by S. Agnes Donham. “A guide to wise use of the family or personal income by means of a carefully thought-out and tested budget. Principles are laid down which apply equally well to large and small incomes.”—Booklist of the American Library Association. Illustrated with eight pages of charts in color.

_The Prospective Mother_, by J. Morris Slemons, M.D. Written especially for women who have no knowledge of medicine by a physician who has made this subject his specialty. Food, exercise, clothing, the adaptation of daily work, and recreation are fully covered.

_Healthy Babies_, by S. Josephine Baker, M.D., Consulting Director, Children’s Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor. The methods and advice given are intended to be used in keeping babies well, from the minute they are born until they are past the babyhood stage. The book shows how mother-love can be directed into the wisest and sanest channels. It contains three sets of baby record forms. Illustrated.

_Healthy Children_, by S. Josephine Baker, M.D., Consulting Director, Children’s Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor. Deals with the period of childhood between babyhood and school age. As its purpose is to accentuate health, it shows the mother how she may give the child of pre-school age the same health care available for the baby. Illustrated.

_The Mothercraft Manual_, by Mary L. Read. A young mother’s guide written by the former director of the School of Mothercraft, Peoria. Some of the chapters are on heredity and eugenics, the care and feeding of children, home nursing, education of the child, games, toys, and story telling for children. Illustrated.

_Nutrition and Growth in Children_, by William R. P. Emerson, M.D. Dr. Emerson has won nation-wide recognition by his pioneer work in organizing nutrition clinics in American cities. His study of the mal-nourished child is of the highest importance alike to the mother, the social worker and the public official. Illustrated.

_How to Know Your Child_, by Miriam Finn Scott. “A book that should be in every home where there are children. It is comprehensive and authoritative, and represents years of experience and study by a foremost expert. The very best manual on its subject obtainable at any price.”—Ladies’ Home Journal.

_A Text-Book of Nursing_, by Clara S. Weeks-Shaw. A book on home nursing which gives the non-professional nurse full directions for the hygiene of the sick-room, bathing, observance of symptoms, medicines and their administration, disinfection, surgical nursing, the care of sick children, etc. Illustrated.

_Sewing and Textiles_, by Annabel Turner. All the stitches, seams and finishes which go to make up the fundamentals of good sewing. Patching, sewing and darning are taught on samplers, but otherwise the methods are applied on useful garments. Materials are also studied and tests for shoddy are given. The author is instructor in home economics in the University of Wisconsin.

_Tinkering With Tools_, by Henry H. Saylor. Comment on tools and their care, with many suggestions as to their use for those who like to set their hands to such crafts as woodworking, painting, plumbing, masonry, electric wiring, etc. With illustrations and diagrams.

8. A Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

i

The other evening I picked up a novel called _The Lighted Way_, which, although it was published in May, 1912, I hadn’t chanced ever to read. The page blurred slightly before my eyes, I think, because in going back over it some of the names and particulars seemed entirely changed. But this, as I took it in first, was the way it ran:

“Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, sole proprietor of the firm of E. Phillips Oppenheim & Nobody, wholesale entertainers of London and Europe, paused suddenly on his way from his private office to the street. There was something which until that second had entirely slipped his memory. It was not his title, for that, tastefully chosen, was already under his arm. Nor was it the Plot, for that, together with the first chapter, was sticking out of his overcoat pocket, the shape of which it completely ruined. As a matter of fact, it was more important than either of these—it was a commission from his conscience.

“Very slowly he retraced his steps until he stood outside the glass-enclosed cage where twelve of the hardest-worked clerks in London bent over their ledgers and invoicing. With his forefinger—a fat, pudgy forefinger—he tapped upon a pane of glass, and an anxious errand boy bolted through the doorway.

“‘Tell Mr. Reader to step this way,’ his employer ordered.

“Mr. Reader heard the message and came hurrying out. He was an undersized man, with somewhat prominent eyes concealed by gold-rimmed spectacles. He was possessed of extraordinary zest for the details of the business, and was withal an expert and careful adviser. Hence his hold upon the confidence of his employer.

“The latter addressed him with a curious and altogether unusual hesitation in his manner.

“‘Mr. Reader,’ he began, ‘there is a matter—a little matter—upon which I—er—wish to consult you.’

“‘Those American serial rights——’

“‘Nothing to do with business at all,’ Mr. Oppenheim interrupted, ruthlessly. ‘A little private matter.’

“‘Indeed, sir?’”

Now as I say, at this point I went back and found to my bewilderment at first, but perfect satisfaction afterward, that Mr. Oppenheim seemed to be Mr. Weatherley, a worthy provisioner; the title, an umbrella; the Plot, a copy of the London Times; and the alarming commission from Mr. Oppenheim’s conscience, a possibly no less embarrassing commission from Mr. Weatherley’s wife. Thereupon everything went smoothly and excitingly through thirty-seven chapters. But afterward it occurred to me that perhaps, after all, my blunder, visual or mental, was not an unnatural one. Who has not had in his mind’s eye a picture of Mr. Oppenheim with a Plot, or Plots, bulging from his pockets, and with as many titles in his mental wardrobe as most men have neckties? And what one of his readers has not felt himself, time and again, personally summoned by the author to the consideration of a matter—a little matter—a quite private matter just then upon the author’s conscience....

ii

It is the secret of Mr. Oppenheim’s success, not detected as such by his readers, very probably not a trifle of which he himself is consciously aware. This engaging gift of confiding something, this easy air, this informality of his beginnings, disarms us and interests us as could no elaborately staged effort to arrest our attention and intrigue our minds. Even when he commences his story dramatically with such a confrontation as that which opens his _The Wrath to Come_, the air of naturalness is upon the scene. And the source of this effect? It comes from the fact that Mr. Oppenheim is imparting to you all that he himself knows at the given moment. Yes, literally. For our notion of him as a man with plots distending his pockets is entirely a mistaken notion. He has no plots; at least, he has no ready-made plots; he does not, so to say, plot his plots. “Just the first chapter, and an inkling of something to follow,” was his answer to some one who asked him how much of his leading character he saw when he began a novel.[47] What other method, when you stop to reflect upon it, would be possible for the author of eighty-six published novels? Certainly no one could map out his tales, even in essentials, and then write them to that number, not if he were to do the plots one by one, as occasion arose. He would be a slave, and the book, as written, would soon come to be lifeless. Nor, by such a method, would thirty-eight years afford time. In thirty-eight years the pace would be lost. Only spontaneity is capable of guaranteeing such a record as stands to Mr. Oppenheim’s credit. “Two or three people in a crowded restaurant may arouse my interest, and the atmosphere is compelling. I start weaving a story around them—the circumstances and the people gradually develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual thoughts about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and their surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere—then the rest is easy.”[48] And again:

“Writing for the movies is a ghastly business. I speak from experience. I shall never do it again. The picture people came to me and said, ‘Next time you have a novel in your head, why not, instead of writing 80,000 words, write a 5,000-word synopsis and let us have it? Then write your novel from the synopsis.’

“Well, they paid well and I did it. I wrote the synopsis first and then set to work on the novel. I have never had a harder job in my life. Some writers, no doubt, do sketch out their plots beforehand, but I never work that way. When I start a story I never know just how it is going to end. All I have to start with is an idea. As I go along the idea grows and develops. So do the characters. I sort of live with them through the story and work out their salvation as it goes along. It is like a game.

“But when you write for the movies you have to reverse the process. In my case, it is fatal. Novels, even the kind that I write—and they are solely for amusement—must have some soul, something that gives them a human quality. This the author puts into the story as he goes along. When, however, he writes a synopsis and then sits down to enlarge and expand it into a novel, the spell is broken. He has a cold and rigid plan to follow. It nearly killed me to novelize my first scenario.”[49]

He dictates his novels, revising the sheets as they come from the typewriter, sometimes re-dictating a passage or chapter. In summer he works outdoors; in winter he may pace up and down his study. “Many a time, earlier in life, when I used to write my stories with my own hand, I have found that my ideas would come so much faster than my fingers could work that I have prayed for some more speedy method of transmission. My present method is not only an immense relief to me, but it enables me to turn out far more work than would have been possible by any other means.”[50] Story-writing, he believes, is an original instinct, “just as it is an original instinct with a sporting dog to sniff about in every bush he passes for a rabbit. One writes stories because if one left them in the brain one would be subject to a sort of mental indigestion. As to plots, there are only about a score in the world, and when you have used them all, from A to Z”—which he pronounced “Zed,” for this was in an after-dinner speech—“you can turn around and use them from Z to A.”[51] A favorite illustration with him is taken from a day’s walk in London. “You can take the same walk every day in the year and you will meet a different crowd of people. These people contain the backgrounds of 365 stories a year.” One person a day will keep the typewriter in play, for “I create one more or less interesting personality, try to think of some dramatic situation in which he or she might be placed, and use that as the opening of a nebulous chain of events.”

What he said of himself at 55 is still, two years later, true without abatement. “Even if, like one of the heroes of fiction, I should make a million dollars out of a ten-cent piece in Wall Street, I should still continue to write stories so long as I can sit in an easy chair and my voice will carry as far as my secretary before a typewriter.” Which is reminiscent of Hugh Walpole’s remark in conversation the same year, that he was perfectly sure if a beam fell on his head and made him imbecile, he would continue to write novels for the pleasure of writing them.

iii

Mr. Oppenheim was born in 1866 and went from school into his father’s leather business at Leicester—but he had started writing stories before that. He began to write them at fifteen, and showed his first to the headmaster of the school, “who, instead of giving me the birching I deserved, wished me luck and encouraged me to persevere.” The leather business was successful and was bought up by Blumenthals, a large American and Paris leather firm, who appointed young Oppenheim their director at Leicester. “His experience in that trade,” asserts Mr. A. St. John Adcock in his _Gods of Modern Grub Street_,[52] “has proved immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving stories around the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Dead Rat.”

He was eighteen years old when his first short story was published, and only twenty when his first novel appeared. Before he was thirty he married Miss Elsie Hopkins, of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mr. Oppenheim and his wife called their cottage in Sheringham, Norfolk, “Winnisimmet,” which was the Indian name of her Massachusetts home town. The house overlooked the North Sea. Perhaps this detail, as much as another, led the author to the construction in the years before the world war of that series of stories in which, as an element of his plots, Mr. Oppenheim kept repeating Germany in the rôle of the villain. Legend has it that during the war itself his name was on the list of Britons to be shot if captured, although lists of that sort are usually myths. “There was one period,” he has commented since, “in the autumn of 1918, when a well-directed bomb upon the Ministry of Information might have cleared the way for the younger novelists at the expense of Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, Dion Calthrop, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole and myself.”[53] He visited America in 1911 and again in 1922, when Mrs. Oppenheim came with him. On the latter occasion he made by far the wittiest comment of any visitor in reply to the usual question: what he thought of prohibition. “My only fear,” with a smile, “is that it may make me a drunkard.”[54] Those who met the victim of this reasonable dread saw a sturdy, broad-shouldered figure developed by air and outdoor exercise; and those who played golf with him respected his handicap of seven strokes only. His large, florid face seemed to kindle into laughter from the constant humorous gleam in his blue eyes. Among his own titles he confessed to a fondness for _A Maker of History_, _The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_, _The Great Impersonation_ and—perhaps influenced a little by its then impending publication—_The Great Prince Shan_. At this time he was subjected to one of those sets of questions from the answers to which one may construct a totally wrong picture of the person. However, we may note that his idea of happiness was tied up with his work, and that he gave as his notion of unhappiness, “No ideas.” His particular aversion, he said, was fog.[55] Fog? Yet he has said: “I would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my days in London. Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants, the people whom one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.”[56] He describes himself as no great traveller; he has, though, been in most European countries, and he pretty regularly spends his winters at his villa in Cagnes on the Riviera. He divides his time in England between the house in Norfolk and his rooms in London.

iv

Mr. Oppenheim does not take himself seriously in the rôle of prophet. “Large numbers of people have noted the fact that in certain of my earlier novels I prophesied wars and world events that actually did come to pass. In _The Mysterious Mr. Sabin_, I pictured the South African Boer war seven years before it occurred. In _The Mischief Maker_, _The Great Secret_, and _A Maker of History_ I based plots upon the German menace and the great war that did actually occur. The romance of secret diplomacy has enthralled me for years. In writing my novels I have had no particular advance knowledge of world affairs. I have reasoned to myself, ‘This nation is aiming toward this,’ and ‘That nation is aiming toward that’; then I have invented my puppets representing these conflicting ambitions and set them in action. It was the story first of all that appealed to me, and not any burning desire to express political convictions and lay bare great conspiracies.”[57]

He takes himself seriously only in the rôle of entertainer, of storyteller. “If you tell him you like his books,” says Gerald Cumberland, in _Written in Friendship_, “he is frankly pleased; but if you pay him high-flown compliments he will begin to yawn.” There need be no paying of compliments in a consideration of Mr. Oppenheim’s work, but no analysis of his method could fairly withhold considerable praise. We have spoken of his confidential, easy manner with the reader as a secret of his toward establishing plausibility for the things he is about to tell. But there is more to be noted. Like the best writers of his sort among his countrymen—and like far too few Americans in the same field—he is unhurried. He is never afraid to pause for the amplification of sentiment, the communication of the moment’s feeling, a bit of characterization or a passage of pure description. And these are the matters which give an effect of rondure, and not infrequently touches of charm, to a story of whatever sort. At the moment I can think of only one American—Hulbert Footner—who has had the wisdom, or perhaps the temperament, to follow British practice in this by no means negligible affair of workmanship; and it is significant that Mr. Footner, an American, has so far had a better reception in England than in his own country. Apparently we value this certain leisureliness when it comes to us from abroad, for Mr. Footner, re-exported to us, is making distinct headway. What the American writer generally does is to accelerate his action to the pitch of implausibility (if he only knew it). This does very well, and may be indispensable, for all I know, with the readers of a certain type of American magazines; unfortunately the habitual buyers and readers of books demand something more careful.

The other interesting point of excellence in Oppenheim’s work derives from his method of spontaneity. He once said: “The lure of creation never loses its hold. Personally I cannot account for the fact. Perhaps it springs from the inextinguishable hope that one day there will be born the most wonderful idea that has ever found its way into the brain of a writer of fiction.”[58] For the creator, the superlative never arrives; but certainly for the reader Mr. Oppenheim has materialized more than one wonderful idea. _The Great Impersonation_, deservedly one of his most successful books, is a fairly recent illustration. But I would like to call particularly to attention an earlier story, both for what seems to me to be its astonishing merit and for its interesting light on the method of spontaneity which is Oppenheim’s special technique. This is _The Way of These Women_, now ten years old. That it still sells is evidence that its merit is recognized; that one never hears mention of it in any offhand mention of its author’s work shows that the recognition is by no means wide enough.

Sir Jermyn Annerley, a young man of fine taste and high honor, though certainly inclined toward priggishness, is a playwright of the intellectual type. Sybil Cluley, the actress who has aroused London by her performance in Jermyn’s drama, comes to Annerley Court as his weekend guest. They are to discuss his new play in which Sybil is to appear. Aynesworth, Marquis of Lakenham and Jermyn’s second cousin, chances to pay a visit at the same time. Another distant cousin of Jermyn’s, Lucille, who has divorced a French nobleman, is Jermyn’s hostess. Lucille is in love with Jermyn. During the visit Jermyn surrenders to his love for Sybil; they announce their engagement to the others. Sybil is obviously afraid of Lakenham to a degree not to be accounted for by his reputation for excesses, and after some time Lakenham confirms and shares with Lucille his knowledge of a discreditable episode in Sybil’s career before her success on the stage.

Lakenham is murdered at Annerley Court. Suspicion points directly to Sybil, but Lucille has aided Sybil and Jermyn in the removal of very incriminating evidence. As the price for protecting Sybil, Lucille requires Jermyn to marry her within two months.

The story is developed with admirable intervals and suspense. The point of the first quarter of the book is Lakenham’s knowledge of something in Sybil’s past, and Lucille’s determination to fight Sybil for Jermyn. Then Lakenham is killed. Almost half the book lies between the murder and its solution. It is evident that as he wrote Mr. Oppenheim saw (what he may not have grasped at the beginning) that Lucille was his most striking character. As the novel proceeded he became absorbed in the possibilities Lucille offered; if, as may well be the case, he vaguely contemplated solving the murder and bringing Sybil and Jermyn happily together for a quick “curtain,” he deliberately abandoned so conventional and easy an ending. Jermyn and Lucille are married under the hateful terms Lucille has imposed as the price of Sybil’s safety.