Chapter III: Part 3

Yet perhaps a healthy cynicism is an excellent antidote for smugness. It is only when cynicism masquerades as realism that it becomes dangerous. And that this is the underlying principle of much of the realistic fiction of the day a careful study will corroborate. Not truth, but an unhappy, warped, and incomplete view of life. Not only an emphasis and exaltation of the material as opposed to the spiritual, but a cynical denial of the spiritual.

This is not realism. True realism would see in the human individual something more than the creature of his environment and the slave of his physical body. It would yield him his abject surrenders, but grant him his kinship with God.

That there has arisen, then, a mainly young, frankly cynical and disillusioned school of writing is a grave commentary on the times in which we are living. Its followers are honest in their convictions. They are writing life as it appears to them, without uplift, without much hope. They will not cater to the public taste, which has cried for happiness. They maintain, and they are right, that life does not deal in happy endings. But life is a fluid thing. It has its high moments and its low. Neither one does more than come and pass along. From the standpoint of reality one is as incorrect as the other. It is from the standpoint of cynicism that they choose the low note.

In their desire to avoid idealization, too, they are sometimes as guilty of underdrawing as the wildest idealist is of exaggeration. Not life, nor life plus, but life minus, must be charged to their account. And here again we have the misplaced emphasis. They are obsessed not only with the ugliness of life but with the importance of _things_. They stress the life of the body, insistent and often sordid, and with a sort of indecent honesty they violate the sanctuary of the human mind, and expose it in print. It is analysis, not synthesis; it is dissection, not creation.

But the dissecting room deals with disease. Have we no health?

Is it extraordinary that there has arisen, in a frantic effort to restore the balance, to paint the high lights in the picture, a school which goes to the other extreme and with exasperating smugness cries that all is always well with the world? Giving us cloying sweetness to take the bad taste of this one-sided realism out of our mouths?

The saddening part of this rising cult of non-idealizationists is that behind them lies more conviction. When they write us morbid, introspective, and materialistic books, it is because they themselves are morbid, introspective, and materialistic. There are no hypocrisies for the makers of books. As an author is drab or colorful, sordid or gay, so will his book be. If he does not feel, the emotion in his book reveals itself spurious. If his view of life be jaundiced, the book will be jaundiced, and more than that, may turn a multitude liverish over night. If he sees, in the group he is depicting, only their frailties, their miseries, only their frustrations, it is because he himself is frail, miserable, and frustrated.

There is no such thing as the complete detachment of an author from his work. His subconscious mind is stronger than his will.

Possibly this is a phase that will pass. Certainly we have no survival of non-idealistic literature from the past. Men do not preserve their failures, but they do preserve their dreams. And the great dream of the world is the movement toward perfection. The reach of the human hand and soul toward something above and beyond it is the only progress. Any cynical theory of life which teaches that this reach is futile and absurd is pernicious. And any theory of life which does not show that this reach may fail its object and yet have gained by its aspiration, is a denial of fact.

Any attempt to depict life by things, to emphasize the material at the expense of the spiritual, any conception of the human soul which sees it only groveling and not aspiring, may be two-dimensional truth. A part of the truth. But it is not life, and it is not necessarily art.

There is one hope, however. Cynicism is a fault of youth. Here we have a young school, and young writers. When what Hugh Walpole calls the Gloomy Clever Ones have mellowed with experience; when they have lived and suffered; when they have found that they may write life from a materialistic angle but that they cannot live it without ideals, nor help others to live it; when they have learned that a dead cat in an alley is not only a stench but is also a pitiful thing; when they have discovered that every man has moments when he ceases to be the thing he has made himself and becomes the man God made him--then we shall have a school of great realists.

_Hildegarde Hawthorne_

Mrs. John Oskison (Hildegarde Hawthorne) is a daughter of Julian, a granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She is a brisk woman, with a deep throaty quick laugh and snapping eyes. She knows personally most of the successful writers of America and regards them with friendly if somewhat seeing eyes. She seems to be a woman without poses and with few prejudices. She has been a book reviewer for many years, and she has published volumes of travel and occasional essays. She is conservative in her estimates of books; but she has long watched the psychology of the reading public and she understands it about as well as any human being can. Her clever analysis of Harold Bell Wright’s place among American writers is proof of this. She carries on the New England tradition without wearing it hung from her bosom by a chain. A woman worth knowing, she is, whose judgment on what’s good to read is not to be neglected.

THE WRIGHT AMERICAN

In the canteen I ran in France there was a bookshelf containing some twenty or thirty volumes, a haphazard collection made up of the leavings of units passing through, of a small boxful obtained with difficulty from Y headquarters, and of occasional wandering volumes arriving from across the seas. The boys patronized the shelf eagerly enough, and most of the time it was almost empty, volumes of religious advice being the sole survivors of the demands made upon it. But though practically everything in the nature of a novel or story went well, I soon came to know that ten out of a dozen of the boys who asked for a book would say first:

“Got anything by Harold Bell Wright?”

If I had, they took it. If I had not, they took anything else. It was Harold Bell Wright against the field, with Wright winning every time. There were only four of his books in my library, and they were on the go unceasingly.

Now, I had never read one of them. Neither had anyone I knew--knew, at least, in that old life which seemed so far away and long ago during the war. Practically everyone in that literary past had told me how bad they were, how fearful was the English in which they were written, how false, vapid, and sentimental were their contents. And I wondered at the passionate longing for the things displayed by the American doughboy in his thousands. And not only the doughboy--the officers, when they dropped in to see if there was something to read, usually made the same request.

“They may be darned good fighters”, was my thought, “but they certainly have a mighty poor taste in literature.”

There, of course, was where I made my mistake. They had no taste at all for literature. Literature was not what they were after. They were not even seeking a just estimate of human nature or of life. Probably none of them had so much as a streak of the artist in him, and to appreciate literature there must be a trace of that creature in your makeup. As to their fellow men and life as they met it, they doubtless sized up both in a manner satisfactory to themselves. What they wanted when they read--well, was what they found in Harold Bell Wright.

What did they find, what are they finding, in his work?

One morning I asked one of the boys, a lad from a small town in Pennsylvania who had brought back the last of the four, having read the rest one after the other, why he liked Harold Bell Wright so much. He was not used to expressing his critical convictions, but finally he came out with:

“I don’t know as it’s the story so much, but you see, he kind of gets at what I’ve tried to think about, and writes it so’s I can get hold of it. And he sure does know a lot of nice American girls!”

At the time I thought no more of the problem of Harold Bell Wright and his vast public. There were other matters to be attended to.

Yet there is something interesting here. Something it seems worth while to pursue. The war is long over, the doughboys scattered. But all over America Wright’s latest book is being read by hundreds of thousands of copies. Remembering my experience as a librarian in a Y hut in France, I feel sure that a large proportion of this public is young men--young men who don’t care very much about reading any other books.

Wondering on the subject, I read this latest book myself. It was the first one of Wright’s books that I had read, and judgment on an author should not be passed on the authority of a single volume. But I am not seeking to pass judgment; what I want to do is to get an explanation. I think this one book will suffice for that. The book is not a book for me. It doesn’t hold what I seek in a book. But it is not addressed to me. It is, however, addressed to America; and America takes it to her heart with enthusiasm.

In reading the story I found that the criticisms passed on Wright by people who had never read him were inaccurate. The English he uses is good English. Good, clear, strong English, with no taint of fine writing. Nor was the book false or vapid, though it did not escape sentimentality. But the sentimentality had nothing of the gross or maudlin. It reminded me of the sentimentality I have met in small town people who have had no wide contacts with life, and who accept face values as realities--a mother is to them something inherently noble and selfless, for instance, and even the fact that they have personally known bad and selfish mothers will not modify this preconceived stand. Such persons are shrewd and alert enough in the affairs of daily life, but they have a certain number of rubber stamps passing as beliefs, and become beliefs for them. There is a great deal of this sort of sentimentality in America, and possibly elsewhere.

It is not this that makes Mr. Wright so popular in his country, however. There are plenty of books written that are ten times as sentimental as his, and which have no vogue at all; books that tell more thrilling stories than he tells, too. For it is not the story they tell that makes them to be demanded. These matters help, but are not _it_. No. As I read, I remembered what the Pennsylvania boy had said. He had found thoughts which he had tried to put into words himself, tried to get clear in his mind, doubtless, expressed by his author, expressed so that they became his own, expressed as he would like to have expressed them himself.

The average American is not a thinker. He does not reflect upon life. Books that are written for those who do think, who do reflect, plays that are produced for such, do not interest him. They are not in his field. Now, Wright is not a literary man. He does not wish to be one. But he does reflect upon life, upon the obvious life with which the public comes into contact. It is not individual experience he seeks to express, it is not the growth of character in conflict with life as it is found in this or that man or woman. Mr. Wright is a preacher. What he wants to do, and does do, is to expound basic problems of right and wrong in a manner that will reach the greatest possible number of persons. He works toward this with the utmost sincerity and in the clutch of an immense conviction. He has a theme to teach. And he believes to a passionate degree in America and the American, believes that if only certain things can be set right, then our ship of state, our nation, will make the port of the millennium or something almost as good. There is a moving quality in a belief like this, a beauty; it is certainly one of the causes of Mr. Wright’s tremendous popularity.

Let there be no mistake as to Mr. Wright’s quality as a workman. There is nothing ill considered or sloppy in his methods. When he has finished a book he has put into it the best work of which he is capable, and taken an infinite amount of pains. He gets his basic theme first, as clear as possible in his mind, and hangs on to this until it begins to call for exploitation. Thereupon he sets to work at his foundations, making a pattern of his idea, with its darks and lights, its good and bad, its conflict and outcome. He chooses a symbol that shall express the main thought of the book. In “Helen of the Old House”, for instance, he wished to make clear that coöperation between the men who work and the men who think is necessary in this world. So he has for his leading character a man who is a helpless cripple but who is wise, full of love and justice. Associated with this man is his friend and servant, a creature strong physically, but mentally weak and undeveloped. Between them they work out a satisfactory existence, and influence the entire book. In this way Mr. Wright plans out his sermon, presents his lesson. His characters are chosen to exploit his theme and he selects them, not for their human value, but for their value in putting into story form the theme in his mind. Last, he proceeds to write his book in a manner that will appeal to the largest possible public. He wants the shopgirl and the clerk, the factory hand and the traction man, the cowboy and the village postmistress to read it, and he writes it in the way he believes they will like best--he writes it to meet the popular taste.

You may say that this is not the way of an artist. To this Mr. Wright retorts that a man who succeeds in his aim, who puts his idea into a form that will appeal to the public for whom he writes, even though that public is numbered by the millions, is still an artist. He is attacking problems that beset his readers, putting them into words that they have not for themselves, thinking for them the thoughts they want to but do not know how to think. He is a preacher of democracy speaking to a public obsessed by bread and butter problems because it has to be, and trying to show the best road to the solution of the difficulties of these problems; he is speaking to a public that prefers types to individuals, and that wants in a book the kind of story that it wishes for itself. If this writer is criticized by another public for not proceeding in a manner which would alienate this special, this large audience, the criticism is based on a misconception of the entire affair.

Wright’s solutions are sane, sound, and kindly. The guidance he offers is safe. He has horse sense and his appeal is to horse sense, perhaps slightly sublimated. If the young American is reading him, he is reading what will help to clarify and steady himself. Also, it is to be remembered that many of those who read him are not readers at all, in the broad sense. If he did not write they would read nothing. But reading him, they begin to form the habit of reading, and in time they will take another book than his when one of his is not to be had. In fact, he is training readers in a nation which, in spite of our multiplicity of papers and magazines, is emphatically not a nation of readers.

He is making thinkers too. Don’t be too ready to laugh at that. He may not make you think, but you are a mere fraction of America. If you want to know America in the bulk read one of Wright’s books, and try to get back of it to the men and women who ask for him in their millions, who want him because he expresses what they need to have expressed. Wright understands them, and he may help you to understand them. They have nothing to do with literature and its standards, but they have a whole lot to do with America and her standards. Wright’s creative energy is directed toward them, and the book he writes is a mere instrument to his end, shaped to fit it to its use. That is why he is so popular: not because he cannot give a literary public what it cries for, but because he can give his own public what it really needs.

_Arthur Bartlett Maurice_

With a memory for literary facts that is overpowering, Arthur Bartlett Maurice has long been known to the book loving public for his “Chronicle and Comment.” This was famous in +The Bookman+ years past, and now appears in the literary supplement of the New York “Herald”, which Mr. Maurice is editing. It is his wont to remember obscure facts about the authors of a generation past, though he, himself, is a youngish man. He has written books of such reminiscings as “The New York of the Novelist”, “The London of the Novelists”, etc., etc. For sixteen years he was connected with +The Bookman+, for nine of those he was its editor. His contact with writers was constant and broad. He brought to the magazine at a time when the United States had not awakened vividly to an understanding of its own writers, the charm of enthusiasm and personality. Mr. Maurice is an indefatigable worker. He pursues a literary fact with eagerness and purpose. Usually he downs it. He has an exceptional editorial sense. From a journalistic standpoint his supplement is the liveliest in the country. Maurice is a Princeton man, and a loyal one. He spends much time there. He was, in fact, born as well as educated in New Jersey and has lived for some years in East Orange. Mr. Maurice is an able editor and journalist, a rapid and engaging conversationalist, a companion of rare wit and charm.

A LANDMARK PASSES

The Pension Vauquer is no more! Till yesterday, the structure which Henry James felicitously described as “the most portentous setting of the scene in all the literature of fiction” had, for a full hundred years, remained substantially true to the picture that Honoré de Balzac drew in the pages of “Père Goriot”. The house and the garden with its well and graveled walk were there for the contemplation of the literary pilgrim. Over all there was the brooding silence of ten decades. But that was yesterday. There is little silence there to-day. For where Trompe-la-Mort whispered his cunning temptations in the ear of Eugène de Rastignac; where Goriot, the Lear of French fiction, wept over the ingratitude of his daughters; where, of an eventful evening, there came the tramping of feet, the clang of muskets against the pavement, and the ominous command: “In the name of the King and the Law!” now honks, not the horn of regal Renault or pompous Panhard, but the horn of the ubiquitous Ford, or of its French equivalent, the Citroen. The “most portentous setting of the scene in all the literature of fiction” has become an auto-service station.

“Mme. Vauquer (_née_ de Conflams) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel”. These are the opening words of the novel that posterity seems to have accepted as Balzac’s masterpiece, the most glorious stone of that vast edifice which is the Comédie Humaine. The house stood at the lower end of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the street begins to slope down to the Rue de l’Arbalète. Balzac, in his day, found the quarter the ugliest and the least known of all the quarters of Paris. Ugly and unknown it remained all through the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. To find it to-day is like finding one’s way to the heart of a maze. That remoteness had the virtue of preserving it till the last from the invasion of the modern Hun, the apartment constructing architect. Ugly as it is, it possesses an amazing fascination. With the dirt and squalor and gloom the glamour of the dark old world is there. Here is no Haussmannized Paris, but a vestige of the ancient Lutetia that knew the Valois. The shades of the Villon of history and of the Quasimodo of Hugo’s fantastic imagination, lurk in such streets as the Rue Saint-Médard and the Rue Mouffetard.

Balzac identified the Pension Vauquer as being in the Rue Sainte-Genevieve. But the names of Paris streets are subject to frequent changes, and long ago the Rue Sainte-Genevieve became the Rue Tournefort. The actual number of what was till yesterday, by reason of its unchanged state, its romantic appearance, and its vivid associations, the show place among all the shrines of French fiction, was 24. From that doorway Eugène de Rastignac went forth in the night to make his way to the heights of the cemetery of Père Lachaise, and from its eminence to shake his fist at the city spread out beneath him with the ringing cry of defiance: “A nous deux maintenant!”

_Arthur E. Bostwick_

One of the best known librarians in America, Arthur E. Bostwick, is also editor, encyclopedist and author. White-haired, tall, powerful, kindly, he has a sense of humor that is dry, keen and tempered by years of wise study of life. Is there any better way to study life than through mankind’s approach to books? Dr. Bostwick was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He spends his summers there now. He was graduated from Yale University, where he was also a post-graduate student, an instructor and a proctor. In his editorial capacity he has been associated with “The Forum”, “The Literary Digest” and various dictionaries. He is now chief of the St. Louis Public Library. His books are numerous. I have seen him address a large group of his fellow librarians, and he has the courage to tell stories on them as well as about them. He has been active in his interest in politics, religion and the public efforts of various communities. A serious-minded citizen whose interest in books is abiding, and whose knowledge of them is profound.

THE CHURCH AND THE LIBRARY

There was a time when to be literary was to be ecclesiastical. Ability to read was sufficient proof of exemption from the jurisdiction of the civil courts; collections of books were exclusively housed in buildings subject to ecclesiastical control--churches, monasteries, colleges. Literature owes its preservation to the church of the Middle Ages, and the church, in its turn, drew much of its vitality and influence from its connection with letters.

This state of things no longer exists. Literacy is not for the clergy alone, but for the citizen. The state teaches us to read, and it assembles and distributes books. Schools and libraries are still maintained by religious bodies, but we are agreed as never before that everybody must be able to read and that illiteracy is a disgrace to the community where it exists.

Thus the public library has become a lay concern. It has little to do with the church, and the church, with some exceptions, does not heed it. It is the great neutral public institution, storing and making accessible recorded opinions but favoring none. And the odd thing is that in so far as it ignores the church the library is nullifying in one place its latest step in advance, which is to work with, in, and for groups within the community; while by turning a cold shoulder to the public library the church is refusing to make use of one of the most powerful aids that could be offered her for the fulfilment of her mission.

The modern library began to work with groups when it began its work with children. Since that day, quite within the memory of most of us, it has taken on teachers, the foreign born, the industries, business men, hospitals, the military service, and many others. Group service has been rapidly and successfully extended until it forms a network over the whole field of the community.

Contact with groups has been facilitated both by the feeling that initiative in service could properly be assumed by the library, and by the discovery that library service by no means ends with the provision of books or even of material in print, that it is a matter of social contact. Many librarians have become so thoroughly adjusted to the social contact of the library with groups that they are almost ready to throw overboard the old name of library altogether, and consider that they are conducting community clubs, whose chief aim must be to encourage mental contacts and reactions, and to store and distribute what must always be the chief tools through which these contacts and reactions are made effective--namely, books.

The purely experimental manner in which this group service has developed is evident from the fact that no comprehensive plan of it has ever been made. The group closest in contact, and therefore the one that was pressing hardest, has always been the one to receive attention--to be given room, supplies, and service. The groups that were already fairly well able to take care of themselves did not need, of course, to exert this pressure, hence service was extended to them later, or it still remains to be extended. Now the churches have always been among our best organized groups, and they have themselves felt, equally and at the same time with the library, the impulse toward socialization. The institutional church is the response--it is an American response, just as that of the library is. The older heads are as much scandalized to see dancing and eating, and community singing and politico-social discussion going on in the churches, as they were to witness the same things in libraries. It is because the church and the library have thus moved on parallel lines, that they have been so long in coming into contact. A denominational body, however, is limited on all sides in this social effort, in a way that can never be felt by a public institution like the library. In the last analysis every man has his own religion, just as he has his own philosophy--his mind is an isolated point in the field of belief. Churches are groups of these points so near each other as to feel sympathetic attraction. Some day we may have this sympathetic nearness throughout the whole field. Until it exists, we must rely on other means to get minds and spirits into universal contact, and this means the public library is now furnishing to a greater extent than either churchmen or non-churchmen yet realize.

There is one valuable piece of work that can be done by church and library together, and that is to labor for Christian unity. I do not mean by this a state of things where all Christian bodies think alike or do alike, much less an organic union, but a condition of affiliation, acknowledged or not, where they are willing to work side by side. There are not wanting plenty of practical evidences that this kind of unity is already here in some degree, and that more of it is on its way. There is the University of Toronto, an aggregation of denominational colleges--Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist--each a residential and teaching institution, while the university itself gives all the degrees and instructs in purely non-religious subjects such as mathematics or logic. There are the religious houses going up in connection with many of our western universities. Originally social in their nature, a combination of dormitory and club house, these are beginning to assume also teaching functions, with the consent and approval of the universities. For example, Wesley House at Urbana, Illinois, an admirable and beautiful collegiate structure, is about to offer religious or semi-religious courses, for which the University of Illinois will give credits. The war drives, in which Catholic and Protestant bodies took part jointly, will occur to all. The library cannot afford to be left behind in such a movement, and indeed it has itself been a pioneer in some localities. The New York Public Library has several branches that originated as church libraries--both Catholic and Protestant--and sensibly no effort has been made to remove the religious element. Why should we not cater to strong regional church groups as well as to regional groups of industrials or scholars? In St. Louis one of our sub-branches is the Catholic Free Library, given over to our care by the Archbishop himself. I see no reason why branches should not specialize in Methodist or Unitarian literature. They do in Jewish literature, through the accident that the Jews are a racial and to some extent a linguistic as well as a religious group. One cannot well purchase a Hebrew collection without buying works on Jewish faith and practice. This is to a lesser extent true of other linguistic groups in which the overwhelming majority are of one faith, as with the Greeks, the Russians, the Italians, or the Spanish.

The odd, the almost unbelievable thing is, that most religious groups in this country seem to be as unaware of the public library as we are of them. I will make but two exceptions--the Roman Catholic and the Christian Scientists. The Roman Catholics have been active in public library matters ever since I have known anything about public libraries. They have operated public libraries of their own and they have not hesitated to affiliate with tax-supported libraries, or to become merged in them. There are Roman Catholics who shun the public library or who look askance at it, but of those who seek it and work with it, as I have known them, I must say that their attitude has been liberal. They object to violent or scurrilous attacks on their faith, and ask to have books containing these removed from the shelves. I do not blame them. But they do not want a purely religious collection.

The Christian Scientists apprehend the library intensively in limited directions. They have committees whose business it is to see that all libraries are well supplied with “Science and Health”, and they encourage the purchase of some other books. I have never known them to protest against the presence in a library of attacks on their faith, although there are some pretty stiff ones. But they are very persistent in their objections to the classification of such attacks under Christian Science. There is something to be said in favor of such a view, but so long as we put critiques of Comte under positivism and agnostic treatises under religion, we shall have to treat all controversial books in the same way. Occasionally a high-church Episcopalian will object to our use of the word “Catholic”, or to our treating pre-Reformation liturgical material as if it belonged only to the Roman branch of the church.

Outside of these evidences of religious interest, I have never known, from my library contacts with readers, whether they were Baptists or Mohammedans, Buddhists or Methodists. I account this a fault of my own. It is strange that the religious group is the only body that the librarian has not gone out to seek with some activity. We long ago ceased to blame plumbers, or manufacturers of textiles, or Hungarians, or business men, if they did not use the library. We are recognizing that such failure is our failure. It may be theirs too; but we can mend our own ways rather more quickly than other people’s, and so we soon learned to go out after these gentry and to return with more or less willing bunches of them. But who ever heard of a librarian going out after a Methodist, or a United Presbyterian, or a Congregationalist? The very suggestion makes one smile; and yet some of these are quite as good game as engineers, or aviators, or students of Gaelic.

Here I may anticipate an interruption: “How about the Sunday Schools?” We have long been treating Sunday Schools as groups, but not as religious groups. The old Sunday School library was a joke. In my boyhood, “Sunday School book” meant unreadable, mock-pious stuff of the variety turned out by the ton from the mills of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in London, and from other similar ones in our own fair land. This type of library is not yet extinct--more’s the pity--but it has been altered or greatly modified, largely, I believe, by the influence of the public library. In some cases the part of the library devoted to general reading has been abandoned, the children being sent to the public library. In others, the type of book distributed has been improved. So far, however, the influence of the public library has been away from religious instruction rather than in aid of it. I see no reason why the Sunday School group should not be given the aid that is not withheld from other groups, and why a branch library should not contain a small collection of instructional religious works. These would include general titles and also books for the special use of the denominations whose churches are in the immediate vicinity. This might well form part of a general effort to supply more books on denominational subjects.

Our libraries are generally deficient in religious reference books. We buy lists of English peers and of American dealers in plumbing supplies, but we neglect the official clergy lists of our churches. Every library of good size should include what I may call the official literature of each church--its yearbook with a list of its clergy, its fundamental law, whatever that may be termed in each case, its statement of doctrine, its liturgy if it has any, and its authorized book or books of hymns. If extended to all the principal denominations this collection alone would constitute a very respectable library; its limits, of course, will be determined by the necessities of the case. Most of it may be bought once for all; the annuals should be purchased as they appear. To these should also be added, however, considerable unofficial material: the history of the denomination, the lives and chief works of its principal divines, plans and descriptions of some of its noteworthy church buildings, and so on.

Much of this will introduce the librarian to men, doctrines, and events that he never heard of before, although probably they are no more remote from his ordinary life than the contents of Maxwell’s “Electricity” or a grammar of the Gaelic tongue. We buy these, not because we know and appreciate them ourselves, but because somebody else does. When we think that the religious groups are worth attracting and attaching as well as the electricians and the philologists, we shall at least divide our attention.

All these things will be parts of the library’s contribution toward Christian unity, as I understand that much abused term and as I am using it here. The first thing that we need, here as elsewhere, is a survey of faith and order; and with all the work done toward unification of Christianity, I cannot see that this has ever been touched, perhaps not even sensed as a necessary element. Yet how can we reconcile Presbyterian and Baptist, Protestant and Catholic--nay, look abroad and ask how we can bring together Buddhist and Mohammedan, Tao and Shinto, unless we know what now separates them? Much of this is on record, but it is nowhere assembled. What Christian bodies believe in justification by faith? Which have more than one order in the ministry? Which are Congregational in government? Which have bishops? Which believe in the apostolic succession? Do all accept the Apostles’ Creed exactly as most of us recite it? I need not go on. The fact is that no one Christian body knows exactly how near or how far it is from others. It fails to recognize its closest neighbor.

The first step toward a general, intelligent recognition of points of agreement and difference is the assemblage of material, and it is such an assemblage that the library would be making, if it should proceed as I advise. I do not advise for this purpose filling the shelves with controversy, and buying works intended to convert Protestants to Catholicism and Unitarians to Methodism; but I do think that we ought to have the facts. It is a fact that a body of persons believe in a stated thing, whether that thing is true or not; and for purposes of record, of survey, these facts we must and should have somewhere.

Of the inspirational literature of religion, I need scarcely speak. We are less derelict in our duty here, probably, than in any other branch of the subject. Much of it is not denominational--it is merely Christian. It is in the realm of feeling rather than in that of reason that men first get together. Here we have already the Christian unity of the spirit. “The Imitation of Christ”, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”--these and a hundred other religious classics we have on our shelves already. Yes; and what do we do with them? Will the librarian who recommends to a reader the “Journal of John Woolman”, of which she herself never heard until we knew that dear old President Eliot liked it, recommend also “De Imitatione Christi”? If not, why not? Did any librarian ever urge anyone to read the Bible? Must we not force ourselves to realize that religion is qualified to bear a larger part in the lives of most of our readers than even the Theory of Groups or the fate of the Lost Digamma? Even Mr. Wells, who thinks the American Civil War of only sufficient world significance to warrant the expenditure of a paragraph, and Abraham Lincoln as not worth mention, spends many a page on Buddha, and Mohammed, and even on Jesus Christ. No, religion is still a world force! Librarians cannot be the universal educators--the union of social forces--that they aspire to be, without working with it and toward it. If there is

One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,

the library must perforce move with it.

_Aline Kilmer_

In “The Bookman Anthology of Poetry” I wrote the following of Aline Kilmer:

“The first night that I met Aline Kilmer was at her house in Larchmont, just before the children, Michael, Deborah and Christopher, went to bed. Kenton was away at school. It was these unusual children who moved with quaint grace through her early poems. Fair-haired, wide-eyed, with the movements of an elf and the shyness of a faun, little Michael is like a cherub stolen for an earthly visit. I had only just met the father, Joyce Kilmer, shortly before he entered the army, and had just missed seeing him again in France shortly before he was killed in action. The children have inherited their mother’s gentleness and wistfulness, and their father’s dreaming eyes. It is a family over which there seems to fall the beauty, mysticism and faith of the Roman church, with an especial benediction.”

This worried her. She likes to be considered more practical than I have made her seem to be. She is. A good housewife, and a hard working one, too, an earnest student, a whimsical essayist, and, in the main, not a dreamer. However, any sketch of Aline Kilmer must include a description of that very unusual manner of hers, that quite undeniable charm, whether she likes it or no.

ON WORKS OF REFERENCE

Lalage, who lives with me, is occasionally moved to bitter lamentations. Anyone who lived with me would lament bitterly on occasion. As a philosopher I can realize this without undue heartburning. But I claim that Lalage is unreasonable in doing this, because she does not lament those things that are really lamentable.

Her chief cause of complaint is that my library contains no works of reference. In vain I tell her that I have a dictionary, the finest of all dictionaries. She only asks me coldly to produce it, and I--I cannot. And she will not accept my unsupported word. I am unable to produce the evidence because of all my books that dictionary is the most butterfly-like. It settles now here, now there, and remains so short a time in each place that Lalage, who has lived with me for eight months, claims with apparent sincerity that she has never seen it. When I have seen it myself I cannot say that I have paid much attention to it except to experience a pleasantly possessive thrill. I never consult it. I never need to. Usually I can grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar word by the context and as for spelling--well, I am a good speller. On those rare occasions when I really need to look up a word, my dictionary being so much the will-o’-the-wisp, I have a better and more informative way of looking it up. I take some book that I feel sure will somewhere or other contain the word and I read through it until my search is rewarded. In this way I refresh my memory of books that I have read and even sometimes read books that otherwise I never should have read.

Recently I have been informed that this practice of mine is one of the many admirable methods of the Chinese. To find the proper use of a word they search the classics. If that word does not appear in the classics, so much the worse for the word. It dies.

From the actual use I have made of my dictionary I have got little but sorrow. Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning. There is the tragic case of “hectic”. I had always considered it a highly expressive word. I had used it joyously for years to mean a convenient combination of “nervous”, “excitable”, “feverish”. One ill-starred day I looked it up and I have never been able to use it since. Its actual meaning is so far removed from its meaning as used by me and the vulgar generally that I cannot even remember what it was. No one could be expected to remember it. It simply has nothing to do with the case.

But it is not only a dictionary that Lalage would have me possess. She thinks I should have an encyclopædia. Now this is really the height of folly. She knows that I have not sufficient room for those books that I already own. An encyclopædia is ugly and cumbersome. Also it is an expensive thing.

And to an encyclopædia there is the same serious objection that applies to most works of reference. It is too practical and too detailed. What information the average human mind might conceivably be able to grasp is smothered under a mass of technicalities and so lost.

I have, for instance, read the article on navigation in an encyclopædia. It was, doubtless, sound and, as such articles go, well constructed. Far be it from me to offer any impertinent, half baked criticism upon it. But the fact remains that not one shred of it clung in my mind. What knowledge I have of seamanship, and it is ample for my needs, I got from “The Hunting of the Snark”. From a work like that you learn indelibly. You learn with the Bellman. In company with that intelligent but untrained gentleman, I never knew whether an east wind blew from the east or to the east. It is not a thing one can easily inquire about. One might safely guess at it if it were not for the technical terms. The phrase “due east” is certainly confusing if not deliberately misleading. But after one reading of “The Hunting of the Snark” the truth is fixed in your mind.

I do not think I am peculiar in this. Is there anyone who has not learned more history from historical romances than from the pages of histories themselves? I believe not.

It might be possible, with a little research, to draw up a list of such substitutes to fill the places of all dull reference books on library shelves. Dozens of delectable ones flash into my mind. But I hold my hand because if I presented this list I should then be in the despicable position of having perpetrated a work of reference. This I have vowed I shall never do.

So I claim that Lalage is unreasonable. But I think privately that it is better so. Unreason never annoys me. I have with it unfailing patience. If Lalage came to me and complained that my housekeeping compared unfavorably with that of Mrs. Jellyby--if in these benighted days there are many who do not recognize Mrs. Jellyby I am glad of that, because they won’t know what I mean--if she pointed out that I begin a thousand things that I never finish, if she showed me that though I am potentially a capable person I never accomplish anything, she would be perfectly right. Reason would be all on her side. But then I should be very angry.

_Floyd Dell_

Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Illinois; but literary Chicago claims him as her own. He is a slight, shy, sensitive man, essentially the poet in temperament; but turned irrevocably novelist. His education, which was never formal after early high school days, is broad, and in some respects, deep. A voracious reader, he has taught himself what many academicians do not know how to teach: the ability to think constructively. His training as a writer began with reporting days in Davenport, Iowa. Later, in Chicago, he became associate, then editor of the Literary Page of the Chicago “Evening Post.” Since then he has been connected in one way or another with “The Masses” and “The Liberator” but he likes to feel that his active editorial days are past, and that practically all of his time can now be devoted to work on his novels. His critical viewpoint is well shown by the essay I use here. As a novelist he is more emotional. Any one of his three stories displays that. He is a conservative by nature, I believe, but intellectually a radical. He believes, however, that “politics have nothing to do with letters”. For that reason he has turned his political ideas into channels of literary criticism. Dell is keen, fearless and just. For a time he was somewhat biased by his great interest in psychoanalysis; but even this is wearing off and he has again become the thoroughly tolerant and wise young man. He is a born parent, and though he has his own son to instruct, he still enjoys the rôle of preceptor. To this position, however, he does not elect himself, and those who seek his advice are fortunate.

CRITICISM AND BAD MANNERS

When I was twenty-two years old, and had just become the associate literary editor of a Chicago newspaper, I had a painful experience. The year was 1909, and in that year Hamilton Mabie, Richard Watson Gilder, and Henry van Dyke still set the standards to which American literary culture conformed; Dreiser had been suppressed and was, by all but a few, forgotten; Mencken was just beginning to be heard of as the writer of a caustic column in the Baltimore “Sun”; Sinclair Lewis had just graduated from Yale and got a job as a reporter somewhere; and Sherwood Anderson was an advertising man who dreamed of writing a novel. In those days Winston Churchill represented the sober dignity of literature to the American public. And in poetry--well, nobody paid much attention to poetry anyway, in those days; there were real poets, such as Vaughn Moody and Anna Hempstead Branch, but they were overshadowed by the colossal fame of James Whitcomb Riley. The voices of Vachel Lindsay, Louis Untermeyer, Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, were yet to be heard. And it was in connection with poetry that the painful incident I am about to tell happened to me.

There was an American poet--and I hope he will forgive me for telling the story--who shared the universal neglect accorded to poetry at that time, and yet, or so it was said among those who knew, was an authentically great poet. He had been acclaimed abroad. Foreign praise has always weighed heavily in the American scale of critical opinion; it weighed with me. It happened that I had not read any of this great poet’s works; but I was prepared to be his American discoverer.

At this point, through a friend, the poet himself heard of my interest in him, and sent me a complete set of his works, each volume being inscribed: “From an older to a younger poet.” Here I must confess that the poet had been shown some of my youthful verses, and was reported to have praised them; and perhaps it was his good opinion of my poetry which made me so ready to have a good opinion of his.

Then--alas--I read his works. They represented, to my mind, the banal old; and, whether or not they were as banal as I thought, they were certainly unlike what I wanted American poetry to be. And I found myself in a painful situation. If I wrote what I thought about this poet, it would be bad manners; if I refrained from writing anything at all, that would be cowardly; and if I wrote anything less than the truth, I would be in league with error.

The result was that, with a feeling of desperate heroism, I wrote the whole truth, as I saw it--mercilessly, and at considerable length; two columns of damnation, as bitter and incisive as only a young critic in a virtuous mood could make it. I hate to think how the poet must have felt, reading that review without any preliminary warning!

I can find many excuses for my young cruelty; but they amount to a plea of ignorance. Not that I think I was wrong about the poet; at least, the younger generation of critics agreed with me, and among us we blazed a way for the new American poetry. I do not go back on my youthful opinions; but I do regret my youthful manners, and I make in my behalf the plea of ignorance.

I did not know how it hurts to be criticized like that, for one thing. I have learned since then. Furthermore, I did not know how great an advantage a reviewer has over an author. The young reviewer feels--at least I did--that he is St. George attacking the Dragon. But that is scarcely the case. The Dragon of Error is usually a well meaning old Dragon; and St. George is not merely, as he thinks of himself, a boy from the provinces who must needs exert all his powers--he has, in his newspaper, a modern machine of efficient destruction, and he is really firing from a battleship upon helpless villages. The authors haven’t newspapers to fight back in; and besides, it is not their business to fight back.

I did not realize, then, that it is no crime against truth and beauty to write bad poetry or bad fiction. Goodness knows, the bad writers, no less than the good ones, are usually dedicated to truth and beauty, as sincerely as any young critic. They are doing the best they can. Who--including Harold Bell Wright--would not be glad to write a book which the young critics would place in the pantheon of literature? And who--including the late Henry James--would not have been glad to be able to write a best seller? One writes what one can.