Chapter II: Part 2

The egotism of most authors stalks in front of them as they enter the room. I have yet to discover such a thing round about the person of Hugh Walpole. He is the most modest author I know; yet, somehow, the most confident. He believes in his books; but he does not expect you to believe in them. If you do, he is glad. If you do not--well, then, there will always be another book, another chance for you to believe. Walpole is tall, broad-shouldered, practically always smiling. He has a wide forehead. He wears glasses. His platform manner is excellent, and he speaks, as he writes, with care and distinction. Walpole’s work is rich in background, as well as in a rare understanding of humanity without an overlarding of the sentimental. He is wise, tolerant, and youthful in his freshness of interest in life. He was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a son of the Bishop of Edinburgh. As a boy, he lived in America and attended a private school on Washington Square. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he wrote two novels. One of them, “The Wooden Horse”, was his first published story. Before this, however, at the age of twelve, he is said to have written a novel concerning Guy Fawkes for the delectation of the family cook. For a time he worked as a journalist on “The London Standard”. Now, both in England and in the United States, he is the greatly popular young novelist of recognized worth. His attitude toward America is far more cordial than that of most English writers. Any differences of opinion he regrets and, as can be seen by his little tiff with Mr. Mencken, he is anxious to act as mediator. Socially popular, invited everywhere in London and New York, the real Walpole, I imagine, is the one who secludes himself in the little Cornish village of Polperro, walks among the fishermen, works long and diligently on his novels.

AN OPEN LETTER TO H. L. MENCKEN

My dear Mencken,

I have been intending to write to you for some months past a personal and private letter with nothing more urgent in it than an affectionate greeting and a strong appeal to you to come over here as soon as possible and share my excellent Irish whisky, but there have been certain utterances of yours in “The Smart Set” during the past few months that have led me to make this letter a public one, because the matter of it seems to me of general interest.

I know that you are set tight in your own opinions like a toad in its hole, and you know how greatly, in the past, I have admired many of those same dogmatisms. It is only because I admire so greatly your critical mind and feel that you are doing a most important work for English as well as American letters, that I write to you as I do. There is little hope of changing you, but it is time that someone on this side of the Atlantic challenged some of your absurd views about the English novel and, above all, about English contemporary criticism.

In these recent numbers of “The Smart Set” you have returned again and again to the main charges; one, that the English critics are engaged in a sort of conspiracy against the contemporary American novel; the other, that the same English critics are busied with log-rolling in connection with their favorite novelists. You make distinct charges, for instance, that no American novelist, save Hergesheimer, and Edith Wharton, is treated with any respect over here: that is, that we deliberately and of malice aforethought despise and condemn James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Ben Hecht and the rest, and that we praise the works of, in your opinion, poor novelists like Frank Swinnerton and Michael Sadleir, and neglect the genius of such an author as W. L. George. You also imply that the American public is paying too much attention to the contemporary English novel and is neglecting the brilliant new American novel now arising. Why, you ask, should the Americans flatter the English in this way when the English so utterly neglect the American?

My dear Mencken, it is really time that you paid a visit to this happy little island of ours. I should be very sorry indeed were you to come just at the time of my visit to America. I look forward to eating, if not drinking, with you in Baltimore, but even at the risk of missing your most engaging company, I do beg you to come over. I regard it as a matter of the utmost importance that the English and American novelists should just at this time go hand in hand together. There is a new American novel of the greatest interest and individualism, just as there is a new language. It has already certain characteristics most definitely of its own, yielding nothing to past tradition, English or other, standing strongly on its own feet, the most interesting movement, I think, in American letters of the last fifty years.

There is no reason however why, because of this new and splendid phenomenon, the American critics should decide that the American public has no more use for the English novel. The more individual and distinctive the American novel becomes, the more different will it be from the English and the more enjoyable will both be in comparison and in friendly rivalry. It is quite impossible, for instance (to take one or two recent examples), for any Englishman to father such books as “Main Street”, “Moon-Calf”, “Miss Lulu Bett”, “Cytherea”, or “Three Soldiers”, just as it would be equally impossible for “To Let” or “Dangerous Ages” or “The Death of Society” or “Crome Yellow” to have come from an American talent. Surely this is a good thing. Instead of both countries producing, as they were engaged in doing twenty years ago, insipid historical romances that might have come from anywhere, the younger generations of both peoples are now working on their own grounds, cultivating most happily their own gardens.

That brings me directly to your charge that the English critics are neglecting the more recent American novelists. You except Edith Wharton and Joseph Hergesheimer, so I will not speak of them, only hinting in parenthesis that if you imagine that Hergesheimer’s art is European rather than American, you are making the greatest mistake of your young critical life; but is it true for a single moment that Cabell, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Miss Cather and the others are passed over here? That their novels do not command great sales here is perfectly true. For some reason, the American novel presents English readers with conditions that are very difficult for them to understand. Part of the difficulty is beyond question this problem of the new American language. Take “Main Street” or “Three Soldiers” or “Moon-Calf”, and you will find pages of those books peppered with phrases that to nine Englishmen out of ten are quite unintelligible. When you get to the words of Don Marquis or Ring Lardner they might, for most English readers, be just as readily written in Russian or Chinese. But it is not only difficulty of language. American conditions simply have no parallel in this country. The majority of Englishmen have not visited the United States, and many of those who have been there have penetrated no farther than the wilds of New York and Chicago.

Such a book as one of the very finest of all American novels, “My Ántonia”, is simply not intelligible to the ordinary English reader, and the small sales of “Main Street” over here are entirely due to the fact that we have nothing in our country at all parallel with the cultural conditions of your own small towns. It would be in many ways much better for us if we had.

That these writers are critically neglected, is simply untrue. You mention Cabell’s name. The limited edition of “Jurgen” that John Lane published over here has been one of the great successes of the autumn. The 3,000 copies of that edition were sold out within the first fortnight, and booksellers are besieged with requests for it. That book had columns of reviews in all the leading literary journals. The only important paper that treated it with contempt was “The London Mercury”, whose notices of fiction are by far its weakest section. “Figures of Earth”, which has just appeared here, has again been treated with the most serious attention. Sherwood Anderson has hitherto been presented in England by his weakest work only, and it is not the fault of the English critics if they do not yet realize how considerable an artist he is. Such a book as Ben Hecht’s “Erik Dorn” has not, I think, yet been published here, but in any case you would not, I imagine, wish to have that represented as the finest flower of American contemporary genius. Booth Tarkington has had critical attention here for years. “The Narrow House” by Evelyn Scott received any number of reviews, and “Miss Lulu Bett” was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm.

The fact, however, remains that the American novel is at present dealing with conditions unknown to the English reader, while the English novel is speaking of manners and customs that have been known for generations to American visitors.

I come to your second charge, which is that the English reviewer is a fellow of small cliques and coteries who is engaged in praising only the works of his own set. Never was there anything falser. You instance certain names, Frank Swinnerton, Michael Sadleir and others. The fact of the matter is that there is a very wholesome tendency among English critics here to knock any novelist on the head as soon as he shows signs of getting above himself. This is an admirable and most natural instinct in human nature, peculiar not only to the English. You will remember that Henry James in some articles in the “Times” just before the war collected certain young novelists together and either patted them on the head or rapped them on the knuckles according to the way in which you interpreted his rather mysterious prose. In any case, he gave them undue prominence, they having but just then chipped the egg, having the whole of their young literary lives in front of them. They have suffered from this paternal blessing ever since, and in their case, at any rate, there have been no logs rolled. Neither W. L. George nor Frank Swinnerton was mentioned by Henry James. Mr. George has had, it is true, some severe criticism for his last two or three novels, but that is because they are provocative and argumentative, they were pacifist in tendency during the war, and have on one occasion at least been concerned with backgrounds that were not perhaps the atmospheres in which his talent could work most naturally.

Frank Swinnerton, until after the publication of “Nocturne”, had universal praise from the critics. After “Nocturne” he became a public figure, a definite representative of the younger English novel and therefore a legitimate Aunt Sally. “Coquette”, one of his very best novels and certainly one of the best English novels of the last ten years, received a very mixed press indeed, and you are quite wrong if you imagine that he is being praised unduly. He is working most wisely in a small corner of contemporary English life that he knows absolutely, that is his own by right of mastery, and if you think “Nocturne”, “Coquette”, “On the Staircase”, and “The Happy Family” are poor novels, I can only reply to you that you don’t know the English life of which he is writing.

As to Michael Sadleir, of whose “Privilege” you spoke with a contemptuous sniff, there has, in his case, been no conspiracy to praise. The reviews of that book were very divided. I would not have expected you to be in sympathy with it. It is a romantic work both definitely and deliberately, and has for its most ancient ancestor the highly colored Mrs. Radcliffe whose fiction I suspect you of never having read.

But these are mere matters of opinion. What I want to say to you is that there is no evidence anywhere of log-rolling in the reviewing of fiction in England today. With regard to modern poetry I am not so sure, but I can speak there with no authority.

What it comes to, my dear Mencken, is that we want you over here for a little while. Aren’t you conscious yourself of an increasing tinge of provincialism in your critical utterances? Don’t you really think that there is plenty of room for the contemporary English and American novels to walk hand in hand? What we want over here is some definite authority who will speak to us about the present development of the American novel. You’re the man for that. Come over and help us. I can promise you a most cordial welcome.

Yours ever,

+Hugh Walpole+.

_H. L. Mencken_

That a violent critic should ever prove other than the most mild mannered of men is unthinkable. Mencken, the bitter, the cynical, the terrible, is in reality a large, healthy, Germanic figure who lives in a white house with green blinds in Baltimore, his home town, with his mother. He is thoroughly domestic and exceedingly fond of beer. There you have him! He is clever in his speech, though not so quick to the attack as his co-editor, George Jean Nathan. His complexion is florid, his manners sturdy, his gestures broad. His life has been devoted to journalism and to a hearty public dislike of American politics, and the more obvious “booberies” of the American scene. Yet he is an earnest ballyboo for such idiosyncrasies as the so-called American language, on which he has written a huge tome which must have involved much painstaking research. He is, in the main, anti-British, though he seems to have enjoyed himself when he was in London last season. At heart he is a sentimentalist. This he has learned to conceal; but he has never been able to destroy all copies of “Ventures into Verse” published in 1901. That and the quality of “The Smart Set” poetry betray him. As a critical force he has had large influence in molding the younger writers of America. He is often a champion for uncompromising realism. He is far more interested in life problems, however, than in the technique of writing. By nature a philosopher and a politician, he has become by accident an editor and critic. With his co-editor he is now engaged in a new venture, the establishing of a new monthly magazine, “The American Mercury.”

MR. MENCKEN REPLIES

My dear Walpole:

The facts, alas, confound you. During the past year I have reviewed exactly 25 novels in “The Smart Set”, setting aside mere notices. Of these, 7 were English and 18 were American. Of the English novels, I anointed 3 with praise, or 43%; of the American novels, 9, or 50%. Two of the English novels I denounced as garbage, and 5 of the American--28.5% and 27.7% respectively. Regarding two of the English novels and four of the American I was in doubt--28.5% and 22.3% respectively.

Certainly these figures show no chauvinistic bias. I receive about 350 novels every year--a great many more than any man could read. I pick out for review those that seem most likely to be interesting or significant. Is it remarkable that an American should find 2-4/7 times as many of these among American books as among English books? What English reviewer, in the other direction, shows a score so high, or even half so high? Or so close a correspondence between the two series of percentages?

The log-rolling I complain of has its chief scene in the United States, not in England. It takes the form of extravagant efforts to promote the American sale of books by Englishmen of a small group, most of them bad. It is carried on partly by publishing houses dealing in English goods, and partly by touring propagandists and literary bagmen. It is aided by certain American journals that practise a puerile and slimy Anglophilism. It has become a public nuisance, and when I deal with it at all I treat it as such. The English opinion upon which it is presumably based seems to me to be incompetent, and, in part at least, disingenuous. It is a body of opinion that is ignorantly and incurably anti-American.

I need not tell you, my dear Walpole, that when I chance to take a hack at such a fraud it is done without the slightest messianic purpose. I am entirely devoid of public spirit, and it would give me no more joy to see log-rolling stopped than it would give me to see baptism by total immersion stopped. But it diverts me to chase mountebanks, and so I occasionally yield to the vice. Now you jump into the arena and get in my way. Back to your place! Specifically, back to the bar under the grandstand, where I’ll be delighted presently to join you and drink a _Humpen_ with you, for you are not a mountebank but an honest artist (as I have more than once declared in print), and you no more belong among the zanies I pursue than I belong among the syndics of the Y. M. C. A.

I refuse absolutely to talk about the American novel when I get to England, or about anything else so depressing. But I have some amusing scandal for you, and you may rest assured that I’ll not neglect your Irish _Schnapps_.

Yours----

+H. L. Mencken+.

_Charles Henry Meltzer_

A dramatic critic who flayed John Drew in his youth and has reached a mellow old age without losing his enthusiasm for carping over fine points in the theatre, Charles Henry Meltzer is a dignified figure. His contact with both American and continental theatres has been long and intimate. Born in England, of Russian extraction, he is an accomplished linguist. He has written plays in French as well as in English. He has made many opera librettos. He has acted as foreign correspondent for various New York newspapers in numerous foreign capitals. He was dramatic and musical critic for both the New York “Herald” and “World.” A precise yet entertaining gentleman, meticulous, courteous, widely read, a type that one does not often meet in theatrical circles of today.

SARAH BERNHARDT

I am old enough to have been under the spell of Sarah Bernhardt when she was in her prime; and young enough to have kept the enthusiasm which she awoke in me till the last days of her long life drew near. To most reviewers of the hour here in New York, with their near backgrounds, Bernhardt has sometimes seemed a tedious legend. But to those of us who were fortunate enough to applaud her at the Théâtre-Français on great nights gone by, she will be always dear and an unfading glory.

It is not, though, to the actress who has passed on to another stage that I ask permission to pay tribute--the poor tribute of a friend who knew her closely, at her best and worst, and who, despite her human faults and human frailties, admired her always and believed her a great woman. Beside her even Duse, a rare artist, seems rather trifling to the writer of these lines. While of the “stars”, so called, to whom most here bow down, who has a scintilla of her brightness?

She was an artist, of the finest, highest kind. But she was first a character--a woman of compelling will and force, individual, all herself, a burning flame. Incidentally, but only in a small way, she was in turn sculptor, painter, and writer. She had invented several plays, some of which were never acted, while one was seen and rather well received at the Paris Odéon. She had also now and then dashed off some novels. Of these the last, I think, was “Petite Idole”, published here last year as “The Idol of Paris”. It is largely autobiographical.

If any person in the world has proved the truth of the perhaps misleading dictum which defines genius as the art of taking infinite pains, Bernhardt surely has. She was an honest, tireless, never resting worker in her chosen field. Her art was the one god she always worshipped. And to that art she gave up all her strength. She had no patience with her many gifted rivals who were content with being charming and inspired. Unless they worked to make the utmost of their gifts, she would condemn them. Thanks to her patience, her intelligence and honesty, her artistic honesty, when she was seventy she could still delight her audiences. Behind all her most amazing exhibitions, we could perceive the great technique which made them possible. Her technique helped her to the very end. It overcame, at times, the tragic handicap of an actress who had lost one of her limbs. It enabled her, only a few years ago, to play the death scene in “La Dame aux Camélias” as touchingly as in her early days. Her devotion to the technique of her art shamed our young “stars”. But our reviewers only saw in her--a woman: a woman maimed and aging, and not beautiful, perhaps, who fought with passion to retain her envied queenship.

For she had been--and she still was--a queen. I can recall a certain night when Paris crowned her, and when the critics of New York, at my petition, sent her a message to express their admiration. And I remember her reply--the gracious telegram in which she thanked them for their tribute. She was not young then. She was growing old. Yet her vitality and will were so surprising that for almost twenty years after that night she kept her grip on Paris. Not till a year or two ago, indeed, did she begin to realize--or to confess--how old she was. When I last talked with her, in her familiar home near the Place Wagram, I noticed that she was ceasing to disguise her age. White locks were mingled with her tawny hair and, to my sorrow, she was slightly hard of hearing. We lunched together. She was full of life, as usual. She talked of everything: the stage, the world, and art. She referred to Charlie Chaplin and to Arbuckle (who, she protested, was too fat to be a criminal). But I could see that it was only by an effort that she kept pace with life. The coquetries and graces which had charmed me many times at her own table were less natural. And they all vanished when a retainer came to carry her upstairs--poor tortured soul--on a chair or litter. I turned away then, for I dreaded to embarrass her, but she rebuked me, saying, “Oh, you needn’t mind me!”

She had been a friend to me, and in her way an ideal, since my young student days at the Sorbonne. And when she chose, she could be a kind friend. Yet caprices were not foreign to her nature, and, if it pleased her, she could be a dangerous foe. She never, I think, wholly forgave Duse for challenging her supremacy, or quite forgot what she regarded--even if she did not say so--as Duse’s ingratitude. It was at Bernhardt’s theatre (then the Renaissance) that Duse had appeared for the first time in Paris. Soon after that, the two “stars” had been parted.

However tragic she might be upon the boards, in private--with her friends--Bernhardt dropped tragedy. She had the gaiety and lightness of a comédienne, though only twice, in great ways, did she reveal this fact--in “Francillon” and in “Frou-frou”. It was a privilege and joy to be her guest, as I have often been. To her the theatre seemed a part, not all, of life. When she was touring in this country, she would miss no chance, if her train stopped here or there, of getting out and driving madly through the neighborhood, till “All aboard!” was heard and she rode on again. Her interest in life was inexhaustible. It was not confined to drama or to those other arts in which she played her part. It embraced religion, science, sociology, politics, and literature.

At our last meeting, she presented me with a copy of her novel “Petite Idole”, which she had written “_pour passer le temps_” when she was “resting” in her Belle-Ile seaside home. “Read this,” she said. “I think you will like it. Much in the book, as you will see, concerns myself.”

I have not forgotten many other things she said to me, especially as to the folly, as she thought it, of allowing oneself to cease working before one was exhausted. At eighty or thereabouts, the most popular and remarkable journalist of his time in France, Emile de Girardin, had announced to her his intention of retiring. “Don’t do that”, she had answered, “or you’ll--die!” But he persisted. And he lived six weeks.

No matter who might be the guests she was entertaining--royalties had foregathered with her--when she was due at a performance or a rehearsal she would leave them. Art and her public meant much more to her than royalty. Once, when I was among her visitors at Les Poulains (her first Belle-Ile house, off the coast of Brittany) she received a telegram. It reminded her that she had promised to be present at the unveiling of some statue in the north of France. In a moment she began packing. Next morning we were whirled away in a dreadful express train to Paris. A promise of that kind was not mere piecrust to this spoilt tragédienne.

Her leisure? Well, she spent it in reading plays, in writing stories, or in painting, studying parts, and toying with sculpture. She had a quick wit and she liked amusing anecdotes. Her humor helped to sustain her in adversity.

Adversity. It dogged her. Even in the heydey of her career she was in financial difficulties. She had been “sold up” in one of her Paris homes--in the Avenue de Villiers. Her possessions had been scattered. She was constantly in debt. For, though she had earned millions, she had spent freely. Money was much to her. Yet she treated it as if it meant little. I am told (I do not know how truly) that, but for her indebtedness to the United States Internal Revenue Department, she would have returned to America, for the last of her farewell tours. It may have been just as well that she did not return.

Time was, in the days of “Le Sphinx” and “L’Etrangère” at the Théâtre-Français, when it was Sarah Bernhardt’s wish, they say, to be buried at Père-la-Chaise (where she now rests), next to her long popular comrade and rival, Croizette. Later we heard that she had determined she would prefer her tomb to be erected on one of the huge rocks on the dark coastline of Belle-Ile. There the roaring waves and peeping sea gulls would have sung to her an appropriate threnody. And there, perhaps, long after those who loved and applauded her had gone to their accounts, pilgrims would have stared and wondered at her monument.

_Abbie Farwell Brown_

A meeting at the Boston Authors’ Club is something to remember. The faces one sees are largely of New England. It is as if one had stepped back to a different period when English blood in America had not quite so great a foreign infusion. In this Colonial, or perhaps Victorian atmosphere, Abbie Farwell Brown is a gay, active figure. It was in this atmosphere that Josephine Preston Peabody Marks was beloved and influential. They were great friends. Miss Abbie Brown has written many books for children. She has written short stories. She has published volumes of poems. Her muse is a fanciful one. It springs from the sources of the Cambridge School. It is gentle, quiet, and not without its charm. Its place in America cannot yet be shaken by the Menckens and the Untermeyers.

JOSEPHINE PEABODY, “THE PIPER”

In the summer of 1910 I streaked across Ireland and half England on a joyful errand. I had already crossed the Atlantic toward the same end. For it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the prize performance of Josephine Peabody’s “Piper” was one of the significant events in modern English letters: an American triumph in a new field.

Was it not amazing that an American, and a woman, should win a prize offered by Shakespeare’s own town and open to the English speaking world, for the best poetic drama? There were three hundred competitors sending manuscripts. Imagine the astonishment of those English men of letters who were the judges when they found that “The Piper” was conceived in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England), and that the author was the wife of a Harvard professor, being indeed that fair young poet of whom Austin Dobson had written when she first visited England:

She came to my poor garden bower,
She bloomed like a new garden flower;
I know not how the time was spent,
I know she came ... I know she went.

The prize, three hundred pounds, carried with it the promise that the successful play should be given a performance at the Stratford Memorial Festival during the spring of 1910. I think it was this promise that chiefly attracted J. P. For Shakespeare was the hero of her worship, and Stratford her Mecca, though she loved festivals for any sake. She had already in 1900 published a one act play founded on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes”. She knew her Stratford well, through a lonely girlhood pilgrimage to that shrine. And she dared believe that her dramatic fancy, making of the old Pied Piper legend a beautiful biting arraignment of materialism, might be worthy of the high company at a Shakespeare Memorial. I believe she was confident from the first that fate was with her in this dear desire. Her self-confidence was one of her strongest assets in a life of counter-circumstance.

It was a tense year for my friend. “The Piper” was already in print, though not yet published (it was written in 1907, the year following her marriage), when she heard almost by chance of the prize offer. Having ascertained that a printed book was eligible, she sent it off, just barely in time to get by. Then came weeks of eager waiting. She heard from headquarters that “The Piper” was still among the final half dozen plays in the survival of the fittest. Then, that there was but one other rival. At this juncture J. P., as usual in a crisis, consulted her Shakespeare oracle. The final judge in the contest was the Duke of Argyle. And the page chosen at random from “Midsummer Night’s Dream” declared cryptically, “_All that I will tell you is that the Duke hath dined!_” This sounded promising. But when on his return that night J. P. showed the oracle to her husband, he turned to the page that followed, and found this, in the same speech of Bottom: “_For the short and the long is, our play is preferred.... And I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy!_” No more anxiety.

She resolved to be present at the performance and receive the prize in person. But the public announcement of the prize winner found her absorbed in her newest poem, a wee Lionel Marks Junior. A less spirited adventurer might have hesitated. But she took the eight weeks old baby and her tiny daughter and made the voyage alone. She confessed afterward that she almost died on the journey. But her courage never wavered.

Arrived in Stratford she met disappointment, hope deferred. For early in May King Edward fell ill, and died on the very eve of the day announced for the performance of “The Piper”. All England went into mourning, of course. No chance for a spring festival at Stratford. Everything postponed till midsummer. It was to be a midsummer night’s dream, after all! Meanwhile, with her two small babies, and with the gay little frocks that she loved, J. P. was obliged to go into official mourning, and to possess her soul in as much patience as a poet can summon under such circumstances.

One pleasant thing at least happened in that trying interval of waiting. Little Lionel was baptized in old Stratford church, in the very same font where Shakespeare himself had been baptized 345 years earlier. By such intimate and picturesque association between life and symbolism J. P. loved to vary the course of her earthly pilgrimage. As she once expressed it, “Every day ought to be a festival for one reason or another.” Another favorite slogan was: “Let us turn routine into rhythm!” She believed passionately in life as a thrilling adventure. Tragic it might be at times, painful or cruel. But she could not for a moment have allowed it to be dull. The Piper says:

It keeps me searching. ’Tis so glad and sad
And strange to find out, What-Will-Happen-Next!

The performance itself turned out a personal triumph for J. P. as well as an artistic triumph for the play and its distinguished actors. Marion Terry--sister of Ellen Terry, who was in the audience--took the chief woman’s part, and F. R. Benson, veteran actor and manager, had the title rôle and produced the play. Violet Farebrother, Eric Maxon, and other favorites shared the honors. A brilliant audience had gathered in Stratford town from all parts of England for the unique occasion. As scene followed beautiful scene in the tender, whimsical drama, Bottom’s prophecy was verified. It was indeed a “sweet comedy”. Gradually unfolded the symbolic meaning of the captured children and their rainbow, the little lame boy with his winged shoes, the one mother who understood, the Lonely Man, and the selfless idealist, the Piper, bent on setting things right. The Piper was, of course, Josephine Peabody herself speaking in character:

For all who wear the motley in the heart
Or on the body, for all cagèd glories,
And trodden wings, and sorrows laughed to scorn.

Throughout her life J. P. could truly say, as she said in this play:

’Twas not the thousand guilders that I wanted--
Life, life I wanted! Safety, sun and wind!
And but to show them how their daily fear
They call their faith, is made of blasphemies
That would put out the Sun and Moon and Stars
Early, for some last judgment!--And the Lord,
Where would He get His harpers and singing men
And them that laugh for joy? From Hamelin guilds?

I shall never forget the surprised thrill that rippled over the tense audience when, after the play was over and acclaimed, J. P. stepped out to receive her prize in its handsome silver box. She was so young and beautiful in her white wedding gown: scarcely, I imagine, the preconceived British idea of an American _bas bleu_. Amazing her poise and gracious dignity. And when she spoke her voice, with its honey sweetness, its clear inflections void of Yankee twang, must have been still more of a surprise. She made the most graceful little speech, apparently offhand, though of course it had been most carefully considered. For she had a message to deliver. She told those British folk (there were few Americans to share my pride) what most of them probably had never thought before. That she came not as a stranger to Stratford, for Shakespeare was _our_ Shakespeare, too. That we had as great a pride as our British kin in the development of our common literature. (She might well have added that our country was founded by folk who left England just after Shakespeare died, bringing hither his idiom, still current in certain Yankee seaboard hamlets--and perhaps nowhere else.)

It was a new Declaration--not of Independence but of Heirship. They cheered her with rapture. And I feel sure that this acceptance of her dictum by at least one representative British audience was the beginning of a new rapprochement with American letters. Perhaps this victory made easier the way and more cordial the welcome to still “newer” poets who came flocking very shortly. Robert Frost, for instance, was hailed and understood and published there as early as 1912, before he was known in his own country. Why do we make so little of our literary assets, when we grow hysterical so easily over things that count for much less? Had Josephine Peabody been a Frenchwoman her proud country would never have let this victory be forgotten by anyone. Had “The Piper” been the name of a winning yacht, our cup defender, it would have captured the public imagination and have become a watchword. Had J. P. been a Marathon runner or a heavyweight champion, her success would have filled the daily press, and her recent passing (with half a dozen unfinished plays in her fertile brain) would have sent a nation into mourning.

She achieved the climax of her “success” with that performance of “The Piper”. And few persons, I doubt, have had so unsullied a triumph. Certainly I have never seen a face so radiant with happiness as was hers that night. It was no doubt a disappointment that her plays were not thereafter sought out for stage presentation by her own country. “The Piper” had a short run in New York. This and her other nine volumes are read and loved by many. But her best dramatic work in “Marlowe”, nobly conceived and skilfully handled, remains still like her “Nightingale,--_Unheard_”. “The Wolf of Gubbio”, a moving and picturesque drama most originally developed, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes”, and “Wings”--each brimming with lovely poetry and dramatic effectiveness--have waited all these years for their professional chance. “The Portrait of Mrs. W.” (that cleverest dramatic study in prose of Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle) is still untried after the first year of its life, which was the last year of our poet.

Poetic drama was her chosen medium, and she stuck valiantly to her ideal in the face of all temptation to more popular and lucrative expression. At the end of her busy life she could “proudly boast, I never wrote just for money”. For, as the Piper declares again:

When we sell our hearts
We buy us nothing.

The taste of her time and the physical difficulties in the way of producing the kind of play she elected to make; the prejudice of the average producer, manager, and actor, and the unintelligence of the modern audience in respect to spoken poetry--she discounted all these, and was willing to bide the renascence of opportunity for the poet with a dramatic imagination. There are some who feel that maybe the time is not distant when her plays will emerge as a fresh and delightful surprise to audiences who are tired of things so very, very different.

She was always a master of poetic technique. I don’t know how or where she acquired it. But when I first knew her, a school girl, she was already publishing graceful, musical lyrics in the accepted forms. They were unusually thoughtful, if rather youthfully melancholy. She had not yet realized the power of her gayer, at times almost mischievous muse, which was quite as characteristic of herself. From the publishing of her first book “The Wayfarers”, her reaction to her fellow men and women developed rapidly through a too brief but eventful life. Out of a rather detached young disciple of æsthetic and spiritual beauty, she became a passionate and militant apostle of the beauty spelled in human justice and sympathy. The whole burden of her later books was a sense of responsibility toward folk less fortunate than herself.

“You four walls, wall not in my heart!”

Though she clung to traditional poetic forms she was no reactionary in spirit. She was indeed, as one realizes with some surprise on considering the whole content of her ten volumes, more revolutionary than many of the “newer” poets. No stanza perhaps expresses with more direct simplicity and good humor her spiritual challenge to her times than this song, again of the Piper:

Out of your cage,
Come out of your cage,
And take your soul on a pilgrimage!
Peas in your shoes, an if you must!
But out and away before you’re dust!
Scribe and Stay-at-home
Saint and Sage,
Out of your cage,
Out of your cage!

_Keith Preston_

Keith Preston is a Latin professor with a sense of humor. In my experience this is a usual combination. I have known two others, but neither of them conducted colyums nor wrote humorous verses and essays. Mr. Preston is a native of Chicago, he is a graduate of the University of Chicago, he teaches in Northwestern University. He is small, quick of movement, highly entertaining--a most diverting luncheon companion. He is an enthusiastic member of the Chicago group of writers, eats with them at their luncheons, boosts them when he can; but seems never quite to lose his sense of humor about it all. His verse is gay, pointed, graceful. His paragraphs are considered by many persons to be the best written in the country. As a story-teller he is unexcelled, though his wit has a mordant touch which is alarming in large companies. A person of great vitality, wit, and buoyancy, he yet is domestic and thoroughly tame when seen in the atmosphere of Evanston, Illinois, where he lives. In this cynical bit which he wrote for me on H. G. Wells, he shows his colors. His laughter at the world is often a little bitter; but at the same time it rings with wholesome reproof.

THE DICKENS OF IT

Swinging along through the ages with H. G. Wells, no more than any other reader could we pause to reflect or question. Not until we came to page 676 of the second volume of “The Outline of History” did we recall that in the back of our head a still small something had been a-troubling of us for some time. What could it be, and when did it start? After much knitting of the brows and scratching of the head, we recalled that our subliminal bedevilment had begun on page 530 of the first volume, with the following text:

If the prominent men of this or that British or Gallic city lacked
any profound Greek culture themselves, they could always turn to
some slave or other, whose learning had been guaranteed of the
highest quality by the slave-dealer, to supply the deficiency.

Here it was that we were first reminded of the experts who had assisted at the birth of “The Outline of History” and who hide their diminished heads in the footnotes of the same. Was Mr. Wells quite respectful to his experts? Where, in the first place, did he derive his conception of experts? This last seemed after all to be the main question, and on this we concentrated with complete success. We find that Mr. Wells owes his conception of experts to the immortal Mr. Boffin in Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend”.

Like H. G. Wells, Mr. Boffin had achieved the highest success in a practical line. At the peak of this practical triumph, Mr. Boffin conceived a cultural project of the first magnitude, a course of historical reading which should include the most solid and serious thought upon man, his achievements, and his destiny. Certain difficulties of time and mechanical equipment at first seemed to interfere. How did Mr. Boffin meet these difficulties? By the idea of experts. In his own words:

“Now, it’s too late for me to begin shoveling and sifting at
alphabeds and grammar books. I’m getting to be an old bird, and I
want to take it easy. But I want some reading.... How can I get
that reading, Wegg? By,” tapping him on the breast with the head of
his thick stick, “paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an
hour (say two-pence) to come and do it.”

The reader must beware of forcing an attractive analogy, especially of forcing it beyond the point where it flatters Mr. Wells. It is all very well to admire the economy of time and the enlargement of scope secured by the employment of experts, whether the beneficiary be a Boffin or a Wells. But Mr. Boffin was entirely too deferential to Mr. Silas Wegg, his expert, _with_ a wooden leg.

“I don’t”, said Boffin, in a free-handed manner, “want to tie a literary man--_with_ a wooden leg--down too tight.”

Mr. Wells has tied his experts (with no wooden legs to tax his compassion) in double bowknots; he has trussed them and stowed them in the footnotes. Still more must the reader beware of applying to our author phrases used only of the expert:

“A certain loftiness, likewise, took possession of Mr. Wegg; a condescending sense of being in request as an official expounder of mysteries.”

Mr. Boffin, a humble sort of person, was unable to defend himself against the arrogance of his expert. Mr. Wells, a man of independent thought, has guarded himself against expert impositions; he has sternly repressed that tendency to oppose facts against ideas which is the first and probably the greatest danger in the employment of literal-minded experts.

The legitimate applications of our analogy are, after all, sufficiently numerous. Taking the classical period, with which Boffin started, we find that both Boffin and Wells relied chiefly on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. The set used by Boffin and Wegg was in “8 wollumes”; exact data on Mr. Wells’s edition are lacking. Both Wells and Boffin were apparently familiar with Polybius, “pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr. Boffin to be a Roman virgin”. In this connection we would note that both Wells and Boffin seem to have had certain scandalous interpretations imposed upon them by their experts. In the case of Mr. Wells, this is particularly apparent in the account of Julius Cæsar.

“There can be little doubt”, says Mr. Wells, “that he was a dissolute and extravagant young man--the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn in Bithynia.”

Mr. Wells likewise refers delicately if not darkly to Cæsar’s “amorous pleasantries with Cleopatra”, hints that the hussy followed Julius to Rome, and concludes:

“Such complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist or sentimentalist--he was fifty-four at the commencement of the _affaire_--rather than the master-ruler of men.”

Now we are not so much concerned with defending the late Julius (though, hussies or no hussies, we are still convinced that he was a very able person), as we are with inquiring whether Mr. Wells’s judgment in this matter accords with his judgment in his novels. Were Mr. Wells’s fictional heroes subject to such discipline? Not as we remember. What is the difference between novels and history?

“The difference, sir?” says Mr. Wegg. “There you place me in a difficulty, Mr. Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs. Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs. Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!”

The truth is that Mr. Wells, possibly on advice of his particular Mr. Wegg, or some other among the council of experts, seems in “The Outline of History” abnormally concerned with Mrs. Boffin, or Mrs. Grundy, or Mrs. Potter. Rereading our “Outline of History” we frequently feel the presence of Mrs. Boffin. Under her eye Mr. Wells has been as unfair to Cæsar, Napoleon, and some others as we, in this little paper, have tried to be to Wells. For Boffinizing history is a game that two can play at, and the reader must be on his guard against taking the results too seriously.

_Mary Roberts Rinehart_

Mrs. Rinehart works swiftly and she works constantly. Her life has been a succession of amazing successes; but they have come as a result of a genius for understanding the public mind, a fine ability for story-telling, an excellent sense of characterization, an unusual executive sense, and a gift of fortune--luck, if you like. Mrs. Rinehart became a nurse when she was very young. In the hospital she met Dr. Rinehart. At nineteen, she was married to him. It was not until after her three sons were born that she started writing. Her first efforts were children’s poems, which she tells you were exceedingly bad. Then she wrote short stories with some success. From then on her progress has been steady. Her first novel, “The Circular Staircase”, was immediately popular. She has never since written a failure. Her attitude toward the war was remarkably sane. Her work for the Department of Justice was secret, brave and successful. To meet Mrs. Rinehart in her Washington home is to see a hostess of charm, and to hear a _raconteur_ of ability. She has the rare gift of dramatizing truth so that it has the thrill of a mystery story. Fresh, dark, faultlessly dressed, with graceful hands and the deep eyes that are at once penetrating and sympathetic, she is a beautiful and a forceful woman. In “The Unreality of Modern Realism” she states clearly her literary creed. The great strength of her books lies in the fact that human beings find in them stories about other human beings like themselves, who have similar difficulties, and who find, often, a solution to life’s problem.

THE UNREALITY OF MODERN REALISM

Realism: _In literature and art, the principle of depicting persons and scenes as they exist, without any attempt at idealization._

The quest for the ideal, the striving after perfection, is the finest single attribute of the human heart. It comprehends all the higher emotions; it differentiates man from the animal; the search for it has given him his religions, his laws, and his progress. Without it he is a creature; with it he is man created in the image of God.

So insistent has been this belief in the ideal that it has colored all his created works. By reality he has lived. By ideality he has climbed. Out of his dream of perfection he has wrought his paintings and his cathedrals, and has written his idealistic literature. And strangely, only that which has been founded on his dream has survived.

Opposed to idealism is realism. It deals only with the tangible, the scientifically demonstrable. It discounts the visionary and the imaginative. It sees things only as they appear to the physical eye. It is neither idealistic nor sceptic. In architecture it builds office buildings instead of cathedrals, and in literature it reports life and becomes a form of journalism.

Yet the simple reporting of the life of a period is important. It may not be art; indeed, it is doubtful whether such reporting has any of the æsthetic quality of art. But it is making a gesture toward truth as well as fact. It may bear much the same relation to real literature that the photograph does to the painting; it may be the least difficult of all forms of creative writing, since it depicts life only, and not life plus. But at least it makes its gesture toward truth.

If there is much to be said for realism, then, there is not much to say against it. But there _is_ much to be said against the present day tendency to prostitute it to pure mechanism. Worse even than that, to pure materialism; the attempt to portray a three-dimensional world in two. To take the human individual of soul, mind, and body, and strip him to body and mind. And to do this in the name of truth.

Just what is the province of creative literature? To lead men on and up? To depict them as they are? Or to drag them down? To hold forth the ideal of perfection? To give a surface interpretation of life? Or cynically to depict life as cheaper, more drab, less worth while than it is in actuality?

Granted that a writer sees life only as cheap, drab, and not worth while, is it his province to spread broadcast this conviction? The writer has a much greater responsibility than merely the egoistic attempt to interpret the world about him in his own terms. The ruthless iconoclast, destroying ideals the world has carefully preserved, is the Hun of literature. What if the fabric be built of illusions, of happy misconceptions, of small vanities and prides? Are not these the fine hypocrisies by which men clothe their nakedness?

Yet it should do no man grave harm to see himself as he is. It may, indeed, be a benefit. But let the mirror in which he views himself be an accurate one. The writer, reflecting mankind to itself, may do so without protest, providing he reflect accurately. If the realism be truth, then let us have truth, and neither a portion of it nor a distortion of it.

To write life without idealization may be only a portion of it. It is at least a failure of responsibility. But to write life cynically is a distortion. Cynicism is not truth. It is insolent self-righteousness. It has a contempt for the virtues and generosities. It is pessimistic, despondent, astigmatic. It has a biased view. Seeing crookedly, it sees a crooked world.