All of which is excellent preparation for the reader of Sophie Kerr's new novel, One Thing Is Certain. Those who read her Painted Meadows will expect and will find in this new novel the same charming background, but they will find a much more dramatic story. Since the novel is one of surprise, with an event at its close which throws everything that went before in a new, a curious, a startling and profoundly significant light, I cannot indulge in any further description of it in this place. But I do wish to quote some sentences from a letter Sophie Kerr wrote me:

"I wanted to show that when lives get out of plumb, the way to straighten them is not with a violent gesture. That when we do seize them, and try to jerk them straight again, we invariably let ourselves in for long years of unhappiness and remorse. Witness Louellen. In two desperate attempts ... she tries to change the whole current and colour of her life."

So much for the essential character of the story, but there is a question in my mind as to what, in the story, readers will consider the true essential! I think for very many it will not be the action, unusual and dramatic as that is, but the picture of a peculiar community, one typical of Maryland's Eastern Shore, where we have farmer folk in whom there lives the spirit and tradition of a landed aristocracy. The true essential with such readers, will be the individuals who are drawn with such humour and skill, the mellowness of the scene; even such a detail as the culinary triumph that was Louellen's wedding dinner. A marvellous and incomparable meal! One reads of it, his mouth watering and his stomach crying out.

ii

The House of Five Swords, by Tristram Tupper, is a gallant representative of those novels which we are beginning to get in the inevitable reaction from such realism as Main Street and Moon-Calf, a romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding hardness, and of melting pity and tenderness. It begins with the Robin, age seven, with burnished curls, viewing with awestruck delight five polished swords against the shining dark wall in Colonial House, where she had gone to deliver the Colonel's boots! She forgot the boots. She lifted two of the swords from the wall, crossed them on the floor and danced the sword dance of Scotland. From the doorway a white-haired old figure watched with narrowed eyes and tightened mouth. Then the storm broke....

The House of Five Swords is Mr. Tupper's first novel. A native of Virginia, he has done newspaper work, has tramped a good deal and was fooling with the study of law when American troops were ordered to the Mexican border. After that experience he went overseas. On his return from the war, he tried writing and met with rapid success.

iii

Readers of Baroness Orczy's novels will welcome Nicolette.

This is essentially a love story, with the scene laid in the mountains of Provence in the early days of the Restoration of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France. An ancient half-ruined chateau perches among dwarf olives and mimosa, orange and lemon groves. There is a vivid contrast between the prosperity of Jaume Deydier, a rich peasant-proprietor, and the grinding poverty of the proud and ancient family of de Ventadour, whose last scion, Bertrand, goes to seek fortune in Paris and there becomes affianced to a wealthy and beautiful heiress. Nicolette, the daughter of Jaume Deydier, whose ancestor had been a lackey in the service of the Comte de Ventadour, is passionately in love with Bertrand, but a bitter feud keeps the lovers for long apart.

There will be a new novel this autumn, Ann and Her Mother, by O. Douglas, whose Penny Plain gave great pleasure to its readers. "Penny plain," if you remember, was the way Jean described the lot of herself and her brothers whom she mothered in the Scottish cottage; but matters were somewhat changed when romance crossed the threshold in the person of the Honourable Pamela and a bitter old millionaire who came to claim the house as his own.

Ann and Her Mother is the story of a Scotch family as seen through the eyes of the mother and her daughter. The author of Penny Plain and Ann and Her Mother is a sister of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-nine Steps, The Path of the King, and many other books.

December Love, by Robert Hichens, will have a greater popularity than any of his novels since The Garden of Allah. It is a question whether this uncannily penetrative study of power and the need for love of a woman of sixty does not surpass The Garden of Allah. In Lady Sellingworth, Mr. Hichens is dealing with a brilliant woman. The theme is daring and calls for both skill and delicacy. Of the action, one really should not say very much, lest one spoil the book for the reader. The loss of the Sellingworth jewels in Paris had caused a sensation in the midst of which Lady Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody. But inexplicably—at any rate without explanation—Lady Sellingworth retired from society when Craven appeared.

Tell England by Ernest Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the opening paragraphs of the "Prologue by Padre Monty":

"In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that.

"When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray's book, Tell England, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys will idealise us!

"Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking:

"'But what am I to write about?' For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power.

"'Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?' I retorted. 'And you can't have spent five years at a great public school like Kensington without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.'"

This prologue is followed by the novel which begins with English public school life in the fashion of Sonia and other novels American readers are familiar with. The main theme of the book is Gallipoli.

The new novel by J. E. Buckrose is A Knight Among Ladies. Mrs. Buckrose says that the character of Sid Dummeris in this book is modelled upon an actual person. "He did actually live in a remote country place where I used to stay a great deal when I was a child and as he has been gone twenty years, I thought I might employ my exact memories of him without hurting anyone." This was in answer to questions asked by The Bookman (London) of a number of English writers. The London Bookman wanted to find out if novelists generally drew their characters from actual people. The replies showed that this proceeding was very rare. Mrs. Buckrose recalled only one other instance in which she had used an actual person in her fiction. Mrs. Buckrose is Mrs. Falconer Jameson. She lives at Hornsea, East Yorkshire, and says:

"My real hobby is my writing—as it was my secret pleasure from the age of nine until I was over thirty when I first attempted to publish. I look after my chickens, my house and a rather delicate husband; write my books and try to do my duty to my neighbour!"

iv

Back of the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning, Spellbinders, is the question: Has the vote and its consequent widening of the mental horizon introduced a brand new element of discord or a factor for mutual support into modern marriage? The household of the George Flandons was almost wrecked by it. That his wife should accept the opportunity to play her part in State and National affairs seemed to George Flandon a desertion of her real duty.

Mrs. Banning has written a novel which will surprise those who remember her only by her first novel, This Marrying. The surprise will be less for those who read her second novel, Half Loaves, for they must have been struck by the real understanding she showed of the married relationship and the marked increase in her skill as a writer. Spellbinders is the sort of work one looks for after such a good novel as Half Loaves.

Mrs. Banning, who was married in 1914, lives in Duluth. A graduate of Vassar, her first novel was written in one of Margaret Mayo's cottages at Harmon, New York. She is of purely Irish ancestry, related to the Plunkett family which bred both statesmen and revolutionaries for Ireland. On the other side there was a Colonel Culkin, who, Mrs. Banning says, "came over at the time of the Revolution but unfortunately fought on the wrong side, so we forget him and begin our Culkin lineage in this country with the Culkin who came over at the famous time of the 'potato-rot.'" That would be the Irish famine of 1846, no doubt.

Sunny-San, Onoto Watanna's first novel in six years, has been the signal for her re-entrance not only into the world of fiction, but the world of motion pictures and plays. Even before Sunny-San was ready as a book, the motion picture producers were on the author's track. A large sum was paid cash down for the picture rights to the novel and then the prospect of a picture was laid aside while the possibilities of a play were estimated. These were seen to be exceptionally good. Here was a story of young American boys travelling in Japan and coming upon a still younger Japanese girl, threatened with cruelty and unhappiness. The young men endowed Sunny-San, so to speak, planking down enough money to secure her protection and education. Thereupon they continued blithely on their travels and forgot all about her.

Some years later a well-educated, dainty and exceedingly attractive Japanese girl presents herself on the doorstep of a house in New York where one of the young men resides. Situation! What shall the young man do with his charming and unexpected protegee! In view of the prolonged success of Fay Bainter in the play, East Is West, it was obviously the thing to make a play out of Sunny-San. And this, I believe, is being done as I write. In the meantime Onoto Watanna, who is really Mrs. Winnifred Reeve, and who lives on a ranch near Calgary, Canada, is very busy with her Canadian stories which have excited the enthusiasm of magazine editors. I am confident that she will do a Canadian novel; the more so because she tells me that, despite the success of Sunny-San and the enormous success of her earlier Japanese stories, like A Japanese Nightingale, her interest is really centred at present in Canada, its people and backgrounds.

v

Pending Dorothy Speare's second novel, let me suggest that those who have not done so read her first, Dancers in the Dark. That a young woman just out of Smith College should write this novel, that the novel should then begin immediately selling at a great rate, and that David Belasco should demand a play constructed from the novel is altogether a sequence to cause surprise. I have had letters from older people who said frankly that they could not express themselves about Dancers in the Dark, because it dealt with a life with which they were utterly unfamiliar—which, in some cases, they did not know existed. And yet it does exist! The demand for the book, the avidity with which it has been read and the intemperance with which it has been discussed testify that in Dancers in the Dark Miss Speare wrote a book with truth in it. I suppose it might be said of her first novel—though I should not agree in saying it—that, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, it had every conceivable fault except the fatal fault; it did not fail to live. The amount of publicity that this book received was astonishing. I have handled clippings from newspapers all over the country—and not mere "items" but "spreads" with pictures—in which the epigrammatic utterances of the characters in Dancers were reprinted and their truth or falsity debated hotly. Is the modern girl an "excitement eater"? Does she "live from man to man and never kill off a man"? There was altogether too much smoke and heat in the controversy for one to doubt the existence, underneath the surface of Miss Speare's fiction, of glowing coals. And Miss Speare? Well, it is a fact that, like her heroine in Dancers, she has an exceptional voice; and I understand that she intends to cultivate the voice and to continue as a writer, both. That is a very difficult programme to lay out for one's self, but I really believe her capable of succeeding in both halves of the programme.

Another distinctly popular novel, The Moon Out of Reach, by Margaret Pedler, is the fruit of a well-developed career as a novelist. The Hermit of Far End, The House of Dreams Come True, The Lamp of Fate, and The Splendid Folly were the forerunners of this immediate and distinct success. Mrs. Pedler is the wife of a sportsman well known in the West of England, the nearest living descendant of Sir Francis Drake. They have a lovely home in the country and Mrs. Pedler, besides the joys of her writing, is a collector of old furniture and china and a devotee of driving, tennis and swimming. It is interesting that as a girl she studied at the Royal Academy of Music with a view to being a professional singer. Marriage diverted her from that, but she still retains her interest in music; and it is characteristic of such novels as The Splendid Folly and The Moon Out of Reach that a lyric appearing in the book embodies the theme of the story. These lyrics of Mrs. Pedler's have mostly been set to music.

What shall I say about Corra Harris's The Eyes of Love except that it offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the fundamental experience,—above all, imagination in experience—which made their first deep and wide impression with the publication of A Circuit Rider's Wife. I open The Eyes of Love at random and come upon such a passage as this, and then I don't wonder that men as well as women read Corra Harris and continue to read her:

"Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands. These minds are foreign countries where they discover themselves to be aliens, speaking another smaller language and practically incapable of mastering the manners and customs of that place. This is sometimes the man's fault, because his mind is not a fit place for a nice person like his wife to dwell, but more frequently it is the wife's fault, who is not willing to associate intimately with the hardships that inhabit the mind of a busy man, who has no time to ornament that area with ideas pertaining to the finer things. So it happens that both of them prefer this divorce, the man because the woman gets in the way with her scruples and emotions when he is about to do business without reference to either; the woman because it is easier to keep on the domestic periphery of her husband, where she thinks she knows him and is married to him because she knows what foods he likes, and the people he prefers to have asked to dine when she entertains, the chair that fits him, the large pillow or the small one he wants for his tired old head at night, the place where the light must be when he reads in the evening rather than talk to her, because there is nothing to talk about, since she is only the wife of his bosom and not of his head."

vi

Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcely more than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of Europe and America as well.

It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. Later Mr. Bottome came to America and for six years during Phyllis Bottome's childhood he was rector of Grace Church at Jamaica, New York. Phyllis Bottome is the wife of A. E. Forbes Dennis, who, recovering from dangerous wounds in the war, has been serving as passport officer at Vienna. They were married in 1917. Those who know Phyllis Bottome personally say that the striking thing about her is the extent of her acquaintance with people of all sorts and conditions of life and her ready and unfailing sympathy with all kinds of people. She herself says that she "has had friends who live humdrum and simple lives and friends whose stories would bring a rush of doubt to the most credulous believer in fiction." "My friendships have included workmen, bargees, actresses, clergymen, thieves, scholars, dancers, soldiers, sailors and even the manager of a bank. It would be true of me to say that as a human being I prefer life to art, even if it would at the same time be damning to admit that I know much more about it. I have no preferences; men, women, children, animals and nature under every aspect seem to me a mere choice of miracles. I have not perhaps many illusions, but I have got hold of one or two certainties. I believe in life and I know that it is very hard."

The hardness of life, its uproar, its agony, its magnificence and its duty, is the theme of Phyllis Bottome's latest and finest novel. When it was published, because it was so different from Phyllis Bottome's earlier work, I tried to draw attention to it by a letter in which I said:

"I don't know whether you read J. C. Snaith's The Sailor. People said Snaith got his suggestion from the life of John Masefield. The Sailor sold many thousands and people recall the book today, years afterward. But, as an ex-sailor and a few other things, I never found Snaith's 'Enry 'Arper half so convincing as Jim Barton in Phyllis Bottome's new novel, The Kingfisher.

"Jim, a boy of the slums, reaching toward 'that broken image of the mind of God—human love,' goes pretty deeply into me. Since reading those last words of the book—'Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash of jewelled wings, a Kingfisher fly home'—I keep going back and rereading bits....

"Won't you tackle The Kingfisher? If you'll read to the bottom of page 51, I'll take a chance beyond that. Read that far and then, if you stop there, I've no word to say."

Although this letter called for no special reply, I received dozens of replies promising to read the book and then enthusiastic comments after having read the book. I do not consider The Kingfisher the greatest book Phyllis Bottome will write, but it marks an important advance in her work and it is a novel whose positive merits will last; it will be as moving and as significant ten years from now as it is today.

vii

I come to a group of novels of which the chief aim of all except two is entertainment. The Return of Alfred, by the anonymous author of Patricia Brent, Spinster, is the diverting narrative of a man who found himself in another man's shoes. What made it particularly difficult was that the other man had been a very bad egg, indeed. And there was, as might have been feared (or anticipated), a girl to complicate matters tremendously.

E. F. Benson's Peter is the story of a young man who made a point of being different, of keeping his aloofness and paying just the amount of charm and gaiety required for the dinners and opera seats which London hostesses so gladly proffered. Then he married Silvia, not for her money exactly, but he certainly would not have asked her if she hadn't had money. No wonder E. F. Benson has a liberal and expectant audience! In Peter he shows an exquisite understanding of the quality of the love between Peter and his boyish young wife.

A. A. Milne is another name to conjure with among those who love humour and charm, gentleness and a quiet shafting of the human depths. There is his novel, Mr. Pim. Old Mr. Pim, in his gentle way, shuffled into the Mardens' charming household. Mr. Pim said a few words and went absentmindedly away,—leaving Mr. Marden with the devastating knowledge that his wife was no wife, that her first husband, instead of lying quietly in his grave in Australia, had just landed in England. In short, the Mardens had been living in sin for five years! Then Mr. Pim came back for his forgotten hat and the Marden household was again revolutionised.

Beauty for Ashes, by Joan Sutherland, is a story with a more serious theme. It really raises the question whether a man who has wrongly been named as co-respondent is in honour bound to marry the defendant. The affair of Lady Madge with Lord Desmond was an entirely innocent one, despite what London said. Lady Madge's husband, wrought upon by shame and anger, began his action for divorce; and Desmond found himself not merely face to face with dishonour but bound by conventional honour for life to a girl with whom he had simply been friendly.

William Rose Benet had been known chiefly as a poet until the publication of his first novel, The First Person Singular. The scene of The First Person Singular shifts between the kinetic panorama of modern New York and the somewhat stultifying quietude of a small Pennsylvania town. A mysterious Mrs. Ventress is the centre of its rapidly unfolding series of peculiar situations. Mrs. Ventress is a puzzle to the townspeople. They believe odd things about her. The particular family in Tupton with which she comes in contact is an eccentric one. The father is a recluse—for reasons. His adopted daughter, Bessie Gedney, is an odd character among young girls in fiction. Dr. Gedney's real daughter had disappeared years before. Why? What has become of her? This complicates the mystery.

The First Person Singular is a light novel, avowedly without the heavy "significance" and desperately drab realism of many modern novels. And yet it flashes with tragedy and implicates grim spiritual struggle without tearing any passion to tatters. The author's touch is light, the variety of his characters furnish him much diversion. The amusing side of each situation does not escape him. His style has a certain effervescent quality, but, for all that, the tragic developments of the story are not shirked.

Another treatment of a problem of marriage, a treatment sympathetic but robust, is found in the new novel of F. E. Mills Young, The Stronger Influence. Like Miss Mills Young's earlier novels, Imprudence and The Almonds of Life, the scene of The Stronger Influence is British Africa. The story is of the choice confronting a girl upon whom two men have a vital claim.

To be somebody is more ethical than to serve somebody. The individual has not only a right but an obligation to sacrifice family entanglements in the cause of a necessary personal independence. This is the attitude expressed in Richard Blaker's novel, The Voice in the Wilderness. The story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie's one defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet he was. It is probable that he never would have come out into the open to combat if he hadn't been moved constantly to interfere and save his daughter Cynthia from offering herself as a willing sacrifice to her mother. Richard Blaker is new to America, a novelist of acutely pointed characterisations and careful atmosphere.

viii

Nene, the work of an unknown French school teacher, a novel distinguished in France by the award of the Goncourt Prize as the most distinguished French novel of the year 1920, had sold at this writing 400,000 copies in France. Three months after publication, it had sold in this country less than 3,000 copies.

I am glad to say that it was sufficient to draw to the attention of Americans this deplorable discrepancy to arouse interest in the novel. People of so divergent tastes as William Lyon Phelps, Corra Harris, Ralph Connor, Walter Prichard Eaton, Mary Johnston, Dorothy Speare and Richard LeGallienne have been at pains to express the feeling to which Nene has stirred them. I have not space to quote them all, and so select as typical the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton:

"I read Nene with great interest, especially because of its relation to Maria Chapdelaine. It seems to me the two books came out most happily together. Maria Chapdelaine gives us the French peasant in the new world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. Nene gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with those old ghosts, their prejudices and their passions. I have seldom read any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people, and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh—if one himself is a writer, a sigh of envy—that Nene has a directness, a simplicity, a principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas! most of us are incapable of attaining."

The author of Carnival, Sinister Street, Plasher's Mead; of those highly comedic novels, Poor Relations and Rich Relatives; of other and still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task. His fine novel, The Altar Steps, concerns itself with a young priest of the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria—the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War—as we follow Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. The Altar Steps, it is known will be followed by a novel probably to be called The Parson's Progress. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church.

"Simon Pure," who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The Bookman (and whose identity is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie:

"I have recently seen the author of The Altar Steps upon his native heath. The Altar Steps is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to have come back to the fold of the 'serious' writers, and so the fatted calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel to be 'serious' are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place—a night of fog and fog-signals—a night of mystery, with the moon full and the water shrouded—and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a small boat called, by the owner's pleasantry, 'Watch Me' (Compton Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per motor) to Herm. I said to the skipper that I supposed there must be many dangerous submerged rocks. 'My dear fellow!' exclaimed the skipper, driven to familiarity by my naivete. And with that we reached the island. Upon the end of a pier stood a tall figure, solitary. 'My host!' thought I. Not so. Merely an advance guard: his engineer. We greeted—my reception being that of some foreign potentate—and I was led up a fine winding road that made me think of Samoa and Vailima and all the beauties of the South Seas. Upon the road came another figure—this time a young man who made a friend of me at a glance. He now took me in hand. Together we made the rest of the journey along this beautiful road, and to the cottage of residence. I entered. There was a scramble. At last I met my host, who leapt from bed to welcome me!

"From that moment my holiday was delightful. The island is really magnificent. Short of a stream, it has everything one could wish for in such a place. It has cliffs, a wood, a common fields under cultivation, fields used as pasture, caves, shell beaches, several empty cottages. Its bird life is wealthy in cuckoos and other magic-bringers; its flowers have extraordinary interest; dogs and cattle and horses give domestic life, and a boat or two may be used for excursions to Jethou, a smaller island near by. And Mackenzie has this ideal place to live in for as much of the year as he likes. None may gather there without his permission. He is the lord of the manor, and his boundaries are the sea and the sky. We walked about the islands, and saw their beauties, accompanied by a big dog—a Great Dane—which coursed rabbits and lay like a dead fish in the bottom of a small boat. And as each marvel of the little paradise presented itself, I became more and more filled with that wicked thing, envy. But I believe envy does not make much progress when the owner of the desired object so evidently appreciates it with more gusto even than the envious one. Reason is against envy in such a case. To have said, 'He doesn't appreciate it' would have been a lie so manifest that it did not even occur to me. He does. That is the secret of Mackenzie's personal ability to charm. He is filled with vitality, but he is also filled with the power to take extreme delight in the delight of others and to better it. Moreover, he gives one the impression of understanding islands. Herm has been in his possession for something more than a year, and he has lived there continuously all that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration). It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths. What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder the critics have seen fit to praise The Altar Steps as they have not praised anything of Mackenzie's for years? If they had seen Herm, they could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve."



CHAPTER XVII

THE HETEROGENEOUS MAGIC OF MAUGHAM

i

Now, I don't know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends. It is a fatal thing, like the doubly-consuming candle. Perhaps I might start with the sapience of Hector MacQuarrie, author of Tahiti Days. I am tempted to, because so many people think of W. Somerset Maugham as the author of The Moon and Sixpence. The day will come, however, when people will think of him as the man who wrote Of Human Bondage.

This novel does not need praise. All it needs, like the grand work it is, is attention; and that it increasingly gets.



ii

Theodore Dreiser reviewed Of Human Bondage for the New Republic. I reprint part of what he said:

"Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream of happy memory, a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to regret. The thing sings, it has colour. It has rapture. You wonder at the loving, patient care which has evolved it.

"Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social transcript of the utmost importance. To begin with, it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it. The thought of his lack, and the part which his disability plays in it soon becomes an obsession. He is tortured, miserable.

"Curiously the story rises to no spired climax. To some it has apparently appealed as a drab, unrelieved narrative. To me at least it is a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. There is material in its three hundred thousand or more words for many novels and indeed several philosophies, and even a religion or stoic hope. There are a series of women, of course—drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may be,—who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, sex, love, pity, passion; a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a series of men friends of a peculiarly inclusive range of intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humour. And lastly comes life itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world.

"Naturally I asked myself how such a book would be received in America, in England. In the latter country I was sure, with its traditions and the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review, it would be adequately appreciated. Imagine my surprise to find that the English reviews were almost uniformly contemptuous and critical on moral and social grounds. The hero was a weakling, not for a moment to be tolerated by sound, right-thinking men. On the other hand, in America the reviewers for the most part have seen its true merits and stated them. Need I say, however, that the New York World finds it 'the sentimental servitude of a poor fool,' or that the Philadelphia Press sees fit to dub it 'futile Philip,' or that the Outlook feels that 'the author might have made his book true without making it so frequently distasteful'; or that the Dial cries 'a most depressing impression of the futility of life'?

"Despite these dissonant voices it is still a book of the utmost import, and has so been received. Compact of the experiences, the dreams, the hopes, the fears, the disillusionments, the ruptures, and the philosophising of a strangely starved soul, it is a beacon light by which the wanderer may be guided. Nothing is left out; the author writes as though it were a labour of love. It bears the imprint of an eager, almost consuming desire to say truly what is in his heart.

"Personally, I found myself aching with pain when, yearning for sympathy, Philip begs the wretched Mildred, never his mistress but on his level, to no more than tolerate him. He finally humiliates himself to the extent of exclaiming, 'You don't know what it means to be a cripple!' The pathos of it plumbs the depths. The death of Fannie Price, of the sixteen-year-old mother in the slum, of Cronshaw, and the rambling agonies of old Ducroz and of Philip himself, are perfect in their appeal.

"There are many other and all equally brilliant pictures. No one short of a genius could rout the philosophers from their lairs and label them as individuals 'tempering life with rules agreeable to themselves' or could follow Mildred Rogers, waitress of the London A B C restaurant, through all the shabby windings of her tawdry soul. No other than a genius endowed with an immense capacity for understanding and pity could have sympathised with Fannie Price, with her futile and self-destructive art dreams; or old Cronshaw, the wastrel of poetry and philosophy; or Mons. Ducroz, the worn-out revolutionary; or Thorne Athelny, the caged grandee of Spain; or Leonard Upjohn, airy master of the art of self-advancement; or Dr. South, the vicar of Blackstable, and his wife—these are masterpieces. They are marvellous portraits; they are as smooth as a Vermeer, as definite as a Hals; as brooding and moving as a Rembrandt. The study of Carey himself, while one sees him more as a medium through which the others express themselves, still registers photographically at times. He is by no means a brooding voice but a definite, active, vigorous character.

"If the book can be said to have a fault it will lie for some in its length, 300,000 words, or for others in the peculiar reticence with which the last love affair in the story is handled. Until the coming of Sallie Athelny all has been described with the utmost frankness. No situation, however crude or embarrassing, has been shirked. In the matter of the process by which he arrived at the intimacy which resulted in her becoming pregnant not a word is said. All at once, by a slight frown which she subsequently explains, the truth is forced upon you that there has been a series of intimacies which have not been accounted for. After Mildred Rogers and his relationship with Norah Nesbit it strikes one as strange....

"One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz or Daghestan of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colours and tones. Mr. Maugham ... has suffered for the joy of the many who are to read after him. By no willing of his own he has been compelled to take life by the hand and go down where there has been little save sorrow and degradation. The cup of gall and wormwood has obviously been lifted to his lips and to the last drop he has been compelled to drink it. Because of this, we are enabled to see the rug, woven of the tortures and delights of a life. We may actually walk and talk with one whose hands and feet have been pierced with nails."

iii

I turn, for a different example of the heterogeneous magic of Maugham, including his ability to create and sustain a mood in his readers, to the words of Mr. MacQuarrie, who writes:

"It was Tahiti. With a profound trust in my discretion, or perhaps an utter ignorance of the homely fact that people have their feelings, a London friend sent us a copy of The Moon and Sixpence. This friend, actually a beautiful, well set up woman of the intelligent class in England (which is more often than not the upper fringes or spray of the bourgeoisie), wrote: 'You will be interested in this book, since quite the most charming portion of it deals with your remote island of Tahiti. I met the author last night at Lady B——'s. I think the landlady at the end, Mrs. Johnson, is a perfect darling.'

"Knowing Somerset Maugham as a dramatist, the author of that kind of play which never bored one, but rather sent one home suffused with pleasantness, I opened the book with happy anticipation. Therefore—and the title of the book, The Moon and Sixpence, gave a jolly calming reaction—I was surprised and frankly annoyed when I found myself compelled to follow the fortunes of a large red-headed man with mighty sex appeal, who barged his way through female tears to a final goal which seemed to be a spiritual achievement, and a nasty death in a native fare. I was alarmed; here was a man writing something enormously strong, when I had been accustomed to associate him with charming London nights—the theatre, perfect acting, no middle class problems, a dropping of one's women folks at their doors and a return to White's and whiskey and a soda. And furthermore, in this book of his, he had picked up Lavina, the famous landlady of the Tiare Hotel, the uncrowned queen of Tahiti, and with a few strokes of his pen, had dissected her, and exposed her to the world as she was. Here I must quote:

"'Tall and extremely stout, she would have been an imposing presence if the great good nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express anything but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her breasts like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression of almost indecent nakedness and vast chin succeeded vast chin.'

"This may seem a small matter in a great world. Tahiti is a small world, and this became a great matter. I read the book twice, decided that Somerset Maugham could no longer be regarded as a pleasant liqueur, but rather as the joint of a meal requiring steady digestion, and suppressed The Moon and Sixpence on Tahiti. The temptation to lend it to a kindred spirit was almost unbearable, but the thought of Lavina hearing of the above description of her person frightened me and I resisted. For kindred souls, on Tahiti as elsewhere, have their own kindred souls, and slowly but surely the fact that a writer had described her arms as legs of mutton (perfect!) and her breasts as huge cabbages (even better!) would have oozed its way to Lavina, sending her to bed for six days, with gloom spread over Tahiti and no cocktails.

"All of which is a trifle by the way. Yet in writing of Somerset Maugham one must gaze along all lines of vision. And it seemed to me that Tahiti in general, and Papeete in particular should supply a clear one; for here, certainly, in the days when Maugham visited the island a man could be mentally dead, spiritually naked and physically unashamed. I therefore sought Lavina one afternoon as she sat clothed as with a garment by the small side verandah of the Tiare Hotel. (Lavina was huge; the verandah was a small verandah as verandahs go; there was just room for me and a bottle of rum.)

"'Lavina,' I remarked; 'many persons who write come to Tahiti.'

"'It is true,' she admitted, 'but not as the heavy rain, rather as the few drops at the end.'

"'Do you like them?' I enquired.

"One makes that kind of remark on Tahiti. The climate demands such, since the answer can be almost anything, a meandering spreading-of-weight kind of answer.

"'These are good men,' said Lavina steadily, wandering off into the old and possibly untrue story of a lady called Beatrice Grimshaw and her dilemma on a schooner in mid-Pacific, when the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in defence of a soul in so delightful a climate.

"After which and a rum cocktail, I said: 'Lavina, did you see much of M'sieur Somerset Maugham when he was here?'

"'It is the man who writes?' she inquired lazily.

"'It is,' I returned.

"'It is the beau garcon-ta-ta, neneenha roa?' she suggested.

"'Probably not,' I said; 'I suspect you are thinking, as usual, of Rupert Brooke. M'sieur Maugham may be regarded as beau, but he is not an elderly waiter of forty-seven, therefore we may not call him a garcon.'

"'It is,' Lavina admitted; 'that I am thinking of M'sieur Rupert, he is the beau garcon.'

"'But,' I said, 'I want to know what you thought of M'sieur Somerset Maugham?'

"Once started on Rupert Brooke, and Lavina would go on for the afternoon!

"'I respect M'sieur Morn,' said Lavina.

"'Oh!' thought I; 'if she respects him, then I'm not going to get much.'

"'His French is not mixed,' she continued, referring to Maugham's Parisian accent; 'I speak much with him, and he listen, with but a small question here, and one there. It is the pure French from Paris, as M'sieur le Governeur speak, who is the pig. But when he speak much, then it is like the coral which breaks.'

"Lavina now wandered off permanently; it was impossible to bring her back. Her image of the brittle coral branches was a mild personality directed at Maugham's stutter, which seldom escapes the most sophisticated observer. For those who interview him always find well cut suitings, clean collars and the stutter, and very little else that they can lay hold of with any degree of honesty. Which only goes to prove my own opinion that Maugham, as an observer, refuses to have his own vision clogged by prying eyes at himself.

"I expect that if my French had been better, I might have got some information about Maugham in Tahiti from the bland and badly built French officials who lurk in the official club near the Pomare Palace. I was reduced, in my rather casual investigation, to questioning natives and schooner captains. Once I felt confident of gaining a picture, I asked Titi of Taunoa. (Titi is the lady who figures a trifle disgracefully in Gauguin's Noanoa, the woman he found boring after a few weeks, her French blood being insufficiently exotic to his spirit.)

"Said Titi: 'M'sieur Morn? Yes, him I know; he speak good French, and take the door down from the fare on which is the picture done by Gauguin of the lady whose legs are like thin pillows and her arms like fat ropes, very what you call strained, and funny.'

"After which her remarks centred around a lover of her sister, who had just died at the age of seventy, and Titi considered that the denouement made by Manu, the sister, was uncalled for at the death bed, since the true and faithful wife stood there surrounded by nine children, all safely born the right side of the sheet. She did mention that the removal of the door from the fare caused the wind to enter. And although I often made inquiries, I never gained much information. Tahiti, as a whole, seemed unaware of Maugham's visit.

"They may have adored him; but I suspect he was a quiet joy, the kind native Tahiti soon forgets, certainly not the kind of joy she embodies in her national songs and himines. Such are the merry drunkards, inefficient though earnest white hulahula dancers and the plain (more than everyday) sinners who cut up rough with wild jagged edges and cruel tearings.

"His occasional appearance at the French club would raise his status, removing any light touches with his junketings, perhaps turning them into dignified ceremonies. Which, for the Tahitian, approaches the end. The Tahitian never quite understands the white man who consorts with the French officials, although many do. 'For are not these men of Farane,' says the native, 'like the hen that talks without feathers?'—whatever that may mean, but it suggests at once the talkative Frenchman denuding himself on hot evenings, and wearing but the native pareu to hide portions of his bad figure.

"But although, in some ways, Maugham hid himself from the natives and pleasant half-castes, he saw them all right, and clearly, since the closing pages of the The Moon and Sixpence display a magical picture of that portion of Tahiti he found time to explore."

iv

Mr. Maugham now offers us On a Chinese Screen, sketches of Chinese life, and East of Suez, his new play.

There are fifty-eight sketches in On a Chinese Screen, portraits including European residents in China as well as native types. Here is a sample of the book, the little descriptive study with which it closes, entitled "A Libation to the Gods":

"She was an old woman, and her face was wizened and deeply lined. In her grey hair three long silver knives formed a fantastic headgear. Her dress of faded blue consisted of a long jacket, worn and patched, and a pair of trousers that reached a little below her calves. Her feet were bare, but on one ankle she wore a silver bangle. It was plain that she was very poor. She was not stout but squarely built and in her prime she must have done without effort the heavy work in which her life had been spent. She walked leisurely, with the sedate tread of an elderly woman, and she carried on her arm a basket. She came down to the harbour; it was crowded with painted junks; her eyes rested for a moment curiously on a man who stood on a narrow bamboo raft, fishing with cormorants; and then she set about her business. She put down her basket on the stones of the quay, at the water's edge, and took from it a red candle. This she lit and fixed in a chink of the stones. Then she took several joss-sticks, held each of them for a moment in the flame of the candle and set them up around it. She took three tiny bowls and filled them with a liquid that she had brought with her in a bottle and placed them neatly in a row. Then from her basket she took rolls of paper cash and paper 'shoes' and unravelled them, so that they should burn easily. She made a little bonfire, and when it was well alight she took the three bowls and poured out some of their contents before the smouldering joss-sticks. She bowed herself three times and muttered certain words. She stirred the burning paper so that the flames burned brightly. Then she emptied the bowls on the stones and again bowed three times. No one took the smallest notice of her. She took a few more paper cash from her basket and flung them in the fire. Then, without further ado, she took up her basket, and with the same leisurely, rather heavy tread, walked away. The gods were duly propitiated, and like an old peasant woman in France, who has satisfactorily done her day's housekeeping, she went about her business."

v

W. Somerset Maugham was born in 1874, the son of Robert Ormond Maugham. He married Syrie, daughter of the late Dr. Barnardo. Mr. Maugham has a daughter. His education was got at King's School, Canterbury, at Heidelberg University and at St. Thomas's Hospital, London.

Mr. Maugham's father was a comparatively prominent solicitor, responsible for the foundation of the Incorporated Society of Solicitors in England. Somerset Maugham, after studying medicine at Heidelberg, went to St. Thomas's, in the section of London known as Lambeth. He obtained his medical degree there. St. Thomas's just across the river from Westminster proved his medical ruin, and his literary birth. The hospital is situated on the border of the slum areas of South London where much that is hopeless, terrible, and wildly cheerful can be found. Persons are not wanting who hold that the slums of Battersea and Lambeth contain more misery and poverty than Limehouse, Whitechapel and the dark forest surrounding the Commercial Road combined. To St. Thomas's daily comes a procession of battered derelicts, seeking attention from the young men in white tunics who hope to be doctors on their own account some day. To St. Thomas's came Eliza of Lambeth, came Liza's mother, came Jim and Tom. Here is the genesis of Maugham's first serious work, Liza of Lambeth.

It will be simpler and less confusing to deal with Somerset Maugham in the first instance as a maker of books rather than as a playwright. One cannot help believing that, while not one of his plays can be regarded as a pot boiler, they yet but seldom display that fervent purpose found in his books. Yet in his plays, one finds a greater attention to conventional technique and "form" than one finds in books like Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence.

The first book launched by Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth, could hardly have been, considering its slight dimensions, a clearer indication of the line he was to follow. It came out at a time when Gissing was still in favour, and the odour of mean streets was accepted as synonymous with literary honesty and courage. There is certainly no lack of either about this idyll of Elizabeth Kemp of the lissome limbs and auburn hair. The story pursues its way, and one sees the soul of a woman shining clearly through the racy dialect and frolics of the Chingford beano, the rueful futility of faithful Thomas and the engaging callousness of Liza's mother.

Somerset Maugham's next study in female portraiture showed how far he could travel towards perfection. Mrs. Craddock, which is often called his best book, is a sex satire punctuated by four curtains, two of comedy and two of tragedy. This mixture of opposites should have been enough to damn it in the eyes of a public intent upon classifying everything by means of labels and of making everything so classified stick to its label like grim death. Yet the unclassified may flourish, and does, when its merit is beyond dispute. Mrs. Craddock appeared fully a decade before its time, when Victorian influences were still alive, and the modern idea for well to do women to have something to justify their existence was still in the nature of a novelty. Even in the fuller light of experience, Maugham could hardly have bettered his study of an impulsive and exigent woman, rising at the outset to the height of a bold and womanly choice in defiance of social prejudice and family tradition, and then relapsing under the disillusions of marriage into the weakest failings of her class, rising again, from a self-torturing neurotic into a kind of Niobe at the death of her baby.

The ironic key of the book is at its best, in the passage half way through—

"Mr. Craddock's principles, of course, were quite right; he had given her plenty of run and ignored her cackle, and now she had come home to roost. There is nothing like a knowledge of farming, and an acquaintance with the habits of domestic animals, to teach a man how to manage his wife."

vi

As a playwright Mr. Maugham is quite as well known as he is for his novels. The author of Lady Frederick, Mrs. Dot, and Caroline—the creator of Lord Porteous and Lady Kitty in The Circle—writes his plays because it amuses him to do so and because they supply him with an excellent income. Here is a good story:

It seems that Maugham had peddled his first play, Lady Frederick, to the offices of seventeen well-known London managers, until it came to rest in the Archives of the Court Theatre. The Court Theatre, standing in Sloane Square near the Tube station, is definitely outside the London theatre area, but as the scene of productions by the Stage Society, it is kept in the running. However, it might conceivably be the last port of call for a worn manuscript.

It so happened that Athole Stewart, the manager of the Court Theatre, found himself needing a play very badly during one season. The theatre had to be kept open and there was nothing to keep it open with. From a dingy pile of play manuscripts he chose Lady Frederick. He had no hopes of its success—or so it is said—but the success materialised. At the anniversary of Lady Frederick in London, Maugham thought of asking to dinner the seventeen managers who rejected the play, but realising that no man enjoyed being reminded of a lost opportunity he decided to forgo the pleasure.

The circumstances in which Caroline was written give an interesting reflex on Maugham as an artist. This delicious comedy was put on paper while Maugham was acting as British agent in Switzerland during the war. Some of its more amusing lines were written in some haste while a spy (of uncertain intentions toward Maugham) stood outside in the snow.

vii

Someone, probably the gifted Hector MacQuarrie, whom I fear I have guiltily been quoting in almost every sentence of this chapter, has said that Maugham writes "transcripts, not of life as a tolerable whole, but of phases which suit his arbitrary treatment." It is an enlightening comment.

But Maugham himself is the keenest appraiser of his own intentions in his work, as when he spoke of the stories in his book, The Trembling of a Leaf, as not short stories, but "a study of the effect of the Islands of the Pacific on the white man."

The man never stays still. When you think the time is ripe for him triumphally to tour America—when The Moon and Sixpence has attracted the widest attention—he insists on going immediately to China. This may be because, though well set up, black-eyed, broad-framed and excessively handsome in evening clothes, he is rather diffident.

BOOKS BY W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

NOVELS: LIZA OF LAMBETH THE MAKING OF A SAINT ORIENTATIONS THE HERO MRS. CRADDOCK THE MERRY-GO-ROUND THE LAND OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN THE BISHOP'S APRON THE EXPLORER THE MAGICIAN OF HUMAN BONDAGE THE MOON AND SIXPENCE THE TREMBLING OF A LEAF ON A CHINESE SCREEN

PLAYS: SCHIFFBRUECHIG A MAN OF HONOUR LADY FREDERICK JACK STRAW MRS. DOT THE EXPLORER PENELOPE SMITH THE TENTH MAN GRACE LOAVES AND FISHES THE LAND OF PROMISE CAROLINE LOVE IN A COTTAGE CAESAR'S WIFE HOME AND BEAUTY THE UNKNOWN THE CIRCLE EAST OF SUEZ

SOURCES ON W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Who's Who [In England].

Somerset Maugham in Tahiti: Hitherto unpublished article by Hector MacQuarrie.

THE BOOKMAN (London).

Private information.



CHAPTER XVIII

BOOKS WE LIVE BY

i

The Parallel New Testament is by Dr. James Moffatt, whose New Translation of the New Testament has excited such wide admiration and praise. The Parallel New Testament presents the Authorised Version and Professor Moffatt's translation in parallel columns, together with a brief introduction to the New Testament.

I suppose there is no sense in my expending adjectives in praise of Dr. Moffatt's translation of the New Testament. I could do so very easily. But what I think would be more effective would be to ask you to take a copy of the Authorised Version and read in it some such passage as Luke, 24th chapter, 13th verse, to the close of the chapter and then—and not before!—read the same account from Dr. Moffatt's New Translation, as follows:

"That very day two of them were on their way to a village called Emmaus about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were conversing about all these events, and during their conversation and discussion Jesus himself approached and walked beside them, though they were prevented from recognising him. He said to them, 'What is all this you are debating on your walk?' They stopped, looking downcast, and one of them, called Cleopas, answered him, 'Are you a lone stranger in Jerusalem, not to know what has been happening there?' 'What is that?' he said to them. They replied, 'All about Jesus of Nazaret! To God and all the people he was a prophet strong in action and utterance, but the high priests and our rulers delivered him up to be sentenced to death and crucified him. Our own hope was that he would be the redeemer of Israel; but he is dead and that is three days ago! Though some women of our number gave us a surprise; they were at the tomb early in the morning and could not find his body, but they came to tell us they had actually seen a vision of angels who declared he was alive. Some of our company did go to the tomb and found things exactly as the women had said, but they did not see him.' He said to them, 'Oh, foolish men, with hearts so slow to believe, after all the prophets have declared! Had not the Christ to suffer thus and so enter his glory?' Then he began with Moses and all the prophets and interpreted to them the passages referring to himself throughout the scriptures. Now they approached the village to which they were going. He pretended to be going further on, but they pressed him, saying 'Stay with us, for it is getting towards evening and the day has now declined.' So he went in to stay with them. And as he lay at the table with them he took the loaf, blessed it, broke it and handed it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, but he vanished from their sight. And they said to one another, 'Did not our hearts glow within us when he was talking to us on the road, opening up the scriptures for us?' So they got up and returned that very hour to Jerusalem, where they found the eleven and their friends all gathered, who told them that the Lord had really risen and that he had appeared to Simon. Then they related their own experience on the road and how they had recognised him when he broke the loaf. Just as they were speaking He stood among them [and said to them, 'Peace to you!']. They were scared and terrified, imagining it was a ghost they saw; but he said to them, 'Why are you upset? Why do doubts invade your mind? Look at my hands and feet. It is I! Feel me and see; a ghost has not flesh and bones as you see I have.' [With these words he showed them his hands and feet.] Even yet they could not believe it for sheer joy; they were lost in wonder. So he said to them, 'Have you any food here?' And when they handed him a piece of broiled fish, he took and ate it in their presence. Then he said to them, 'When I was still with you, this is what I told you, that whatever is written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.' Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. 'Thus,' he said, 'it is written that the Christ has to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and the remission of sins must be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. To this you must bear testimony. And I will send down on you what my Father has promised; wait in the city till you are endued with power from on high.' He led them out as far as Bethany; then, lifting his hands, he blessed them. And as he blessed them, he parted from them [and was carried up to heaven]. They [worshipped him and] returned with great joy to Jerusalem, where they spent all their time within the temple, blessing God."

I am particularly glad to say that Dr. Moffatt is at work now on a New Translation of the Old Testament. No man living is fitter for this tremendously important and tremendously difficult task than James Moffatt. Born in Glasgow in 1870, Dr. Moffatt has been Professor of Church History there since 1915. Of his many published studies in Bible literature, I now speak only of The Approach to the New Testament, which he modestly describes as "a brief statement of the general situation created by historical criticism," aiming to "bring out the positive value of the New Testament literature for the world of today as a source of guidance in social reconstruction, so that readers might be enabled to recover or retain a sense of its lasting significance for personal faith and social ideals."

ii

With Alfred Dwight Sheffield's Joining in Public Discussion was begun publication of a unique collection of books suitable alike for general reading and for use in trade union colleges. This is the Workers' Bookshelf Series. These books, in many instances, are being written by the chief authorities on their subjects—men who have dealt exhaustively with their specialties in two and three-volume treatises, and who now bring their great knowledge to a sharp focus and a simple, condensed statement in small but wholly authoritative new books.

The work of preparing these little masterpieces has been undertaken by an editorial board chosen with the aid of the Workers' Education Bureau of America. The board consists of Charles A. Beard, Miss Fannia Cohn, H. W. L. Dana, John P. Frey, Arthur Gleason, Everitt Dean Martin, Spencer Miller, Jr., George W. Perkins and Robert Wolf.

Trade union colleges now exist all over the United States, training armies of workers. The lack of suitable texts for use in these colleges has been a serious obstacle to the training they desire to give.

This obstacle the Workers' Bookshelf overcomes. The books that compose it will each be distinguished for (a) scholarship, (b) a scientific attitude toward facts, and (c) simplicity of style.

Each volume is beginning as a class outline and will receive the benefit of every suggestion, and criticism through its gradual growth into the written book.

Each book will be brief. Its references will help the reader to more detailed sources of information.

By binding the books in paper as well as in cloth, the volumes will be brought within the reach of all.

The Workers' Bookshelf will contain no volumes on vocational guidance, nor any books which give "short cuts" to moneymaking success.

The series will not be limited to any set number of volumes nor to any programme of subjects. Art, literature and the natural sciences, as well as the social sciences, will be dealt with. New titles will be added as the demand for treatment of a topic becomes apparent.

The first use of these books will be as texts to educate workers; the intermediate use of the books will be as the nucleus of workingmen's libraries, collective and personal, and the last use of the Workers' Bookshelf will be to instruct and delight all readers of serious books everywhere.

In our modern industrial society, knowledge—things to know—increases much more rapidly than our understanding. The worker finds it increasingly difficult to comprehend the world he has done most to create. The education of the worker consists in showing him in a simple fashion the interrelations of that world and all its aspects as they are turned toward him. On the education of the worker depends the future of industrialism, and, indeed, of all human society.

The author of Joining in Public Discussion is professor of rhetoric in Wellesley College and instructor in the Boston Trade Union College. His book "is a study of effective speechmaking, for members of labour unions, conferences, forums and other discussion groups." The first section is upon "Qualifying Oneself to Contribute" to any discussion and the second section is upon "Making the Discussion Group Co-operate." A brief introduction explains "What Discussion Aims to Do."

The following titles of the Workers' Bookshelf are in preparation:

Trade Union Policy, by Dr. Leo Wolman, lecturer at the New School for Social Research and instructor in the Workers' University of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Women and the Labor Movement, by Alice Henry, editor of Life and Labour, director of the Training School for Women Workers in Industry.

Labor and Health, by Dr. Emery Hayhurst of Ohio State University, author of "Industrial Health Hazards and Occupational Diseases."

Social Forces in Literature, by Dr. H. W. L. Dana, formerly teacher of comparative literature at Columbia, now instructor at Boston Trade Union College.

The Creative Spirit in Industry, by Robert B. Wolf, vice-president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, member of the Federated American Engineering Society.

Cooperative Movement, by Dr. James B. Warbasse, president of the Cooperative League of America and instructor at the Workers' University.

iii

Side by side in Esme Wingfield-Stratford's Facing Reality are chapters with these titles: "Thinking in a Passion" and "Mental Inertia." Those chapter titles seem to me to signify the chief dangers confronting the world today—perhaps confronting the world in any day—and the main reasons why we do not face reality as we should. I regard Facing Reality as an important book and I am not alone in so regarding it. What do we mean by reality? The answer is explicit in a sentence in Mr. Wingfield-Stratford's introduction, where he says:

"But if we are to get right with reality or, in the time-honoured evangelical phrase, with God, it must be by a ruthless determination to get the truth in religion, even if we have to break down Church walls to attain it."

Then the author proceeds to assess the social and ethical conditions which threaten the world with spiritual bankruptcy. As he says:

"Whether Germany can be fleeced of a yearly contribution, of doubtful advantage to the receiver, for forty years or sixty, what particular economic laws decree that Poles should be governed by Germans or vice-versa, whose honour or profit demands the possession of the town of Fiume or the district of Tetschen or the Island of Yap, why all the horses and men of the Entente are necessary to compel the Port of Dantzig to become a free city, what particular delicacy of national honour requires that the impartial distribution of colonies should be interpreted as meaning the appropriation of the whole of them by the victors—all these things are held by universal consent to be more urgent and interesting than the desperate necessity that confronts us all."

And yet, for some, reality is not immanent in the affairs of this world but only in those of the next. Among the men who, with Sir Oliver Lodge, have gone most deeply and earnestly into the whole subject we call "spiritualism," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is now the most widely known as he has always been the most persuasive. The overflowing crowds which came out to hear him lecture on psychic evidences during his recent tour of America testify to the unquenchable hope of mankind in a life beyond ours. Sir Arthur has written three books on this subject closest to his heart. The New Revelation and The Vital Message are both short books presenting the general case for spiritualists; The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, the result of a lecture tour in India and Australia, commingles incidents of travel with discussions of psychic phenomena. I believe Sir Arthur has in preparation a more extensive work, probably to be published under the title Spiritualism and Rationalism.

In recent years there has been something like a consensus honouring Havelock Ellis as the ablest living authority on the subject of sex; or perhaps I should say that Mr. Ellis and his wife are the most competent writers on this difficult and delicate subject, so beset by fraudulent theories and so much written upon by charlatans. Let me recommend to you Havelock Ellis's slender book, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, for a sane, attractive and, at the same time, authoritative handling of sex problems.

iv

Little Essays of Love and Virtue, however, is, after all, only upon a special subject, even though of extreme importance. There are others among the books we live by which I must speak of here. It is tiresome to point out that we are all self-made men or women, consciously or unconsciously, in the sense that if we gain control of our habits, to a very large extent we acquire control of our lives. If, in Some Things That Matter Lord Riddell did no more than point out this old truth, his book would not be worth mentioning. What makes it so well worth mentioning, so much more deserving of discussion than any I can enter upon here, is the fact that Lord Riddell tells how to observe, how to read, and how to think—or perhaps I should say how to develop the habit of thought. I think, so able are his instructions, so pointed and so susceptible of carrying out by any reader, that his book would carry due weight even if it were anonymous. But for those who want assurance that the author of Some Things That Matter is himself somebody who matters, let me point out that he is one of the largest newspaper proprietors in the world, a man whose grasp on affairs has twice placed him at the head of news service for two continents—once at the Peace Conference in Paris and afterward at the Disarmament Conference in Washington.

Some Things That Matter is the best book of its kind since Arnold Bennett's How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, a little book of trenchant advice to which it is a pleasure again to call attention. Of all Mr. Bennett's pocket philosophies—Self and Self-Management, Friendship and Happiness, The Human Machine, Mental Efficiency and Married Life—How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day is easily of the greatest service to the greatest number of people.

v

I read Dr. George L. Perin's Self-Healing Simplified in manuscript and enthusiastically recommended its acceptance for publication. Dr. Perin was the founder of the Franklin Square House for Girls in Boston, a home-hotel from which 70,000 girls, most of whom Dr. Perin knew personally, have gone forth all over these United States. His death at the end of 1921 was felt by thousands of people as a personal loss. He left, in the manuscript of this book, the best and simplest volume I know of on what is generally called autosuggestion. And I have examined a great many books of the sort.

Discarding all extreme claims, Dr. Perin says in the first place that the mind can heal; that it may not be able to heal alone; that obviously no form of healing can be successful without a favourable mental state; that the favourable mental state can usually be acquired by the sincere and conscious effort of the sufferer. This effort should take the form of certain affirmations.

It is at this point that the ordinary book on autosuggestion breaks down—so far as any practical usefulness is concerned. Either it degenerates into a purely technical treatise or it becomes lost in a mysticism which is to the average reader incomprehensible. What has long been needed has been a book like Self-Healing Simplified, readable by the ordinary person who has his own troubles to contend with and who knows not how to contend with them; who is willing to believe that he can do his part by cheerful resolutions and faith toward getting well, but who has no idea what to do.

Dr. Perin tells him what to do, what to say, what to think and how to order his daily life. Actually Dr. Perin does much more than this; his own confidence and personal success inspire confidence and give the impulsion toward one's own personal success. However, excellent as the book might be, it would be worthless if it were not clearly and simply expressed. It is. I remember no book of the kind so direct and so lucid.

vi

It is a pleasure to feel that his new book, Poets and Puritans, introduces T. R. Glover to a wider audience. The author of The Pilgrim, Essays on Religion, The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society, Jesus in the Experience of Man and The Jesus of History is a scholar and somewhat of a recluse whom one finds after much groping about dim halls at Cambridge. A highly individual personality! It is this personality, though, that makes the fascination of Poets and Pilgrims—a volume of studies in which the subjects are Spenser, Milton, Evelyn, Bunyan, Boswell, Crabbe, Wordsworth and Carlyle. Mr. Glover notes at the foot of the table of contents: "An acute young critic, who saw some of the proofs, has asked me, with a hint of irony, whether Evelyn and Boswell were Puritans or Poets. Any reader who has a conscience about the matter must omit these essays." There you have the flavour of the man! It is expressed further in the short preface of Poets and Puritans:—

"Wandering among books and enjoying them, I find in a certain sense that, the more I enjoy them, the harder becomes the task of criticism, the less sure one's faith in critical canons, and the fewer the canons themselves. Of one thing, though, I grow more and more sure—that the real business of the critic is to find out what is right with a great work of art—book, song, statue, or picture—not what is wrong. Plenty of things may be wrong, but it is what is right that really counts. If the critic's work is to be worth while, it is the great element in the thing that he has to seek and to find—to learn what it is that makes it live and gives it its appeal, so that, as Montaigne said about Plutarch, men 'cannot do without' it; why it is that in a world, where everything that can be 'scrapped' is 'scrapped,' is thrown aside and forgotten, this thing, this book or picture, refuses to be ignored, but captures and charms men generations after its maker has passed away.

"With such a quest a man must not be in a hurry, and he does best to linger in company with the great men whose work he wishes to understand, and to postpone criticism to intimacy. This book comes in the end to be a record of personal acquaintances and of enjoyment. But one is never done with knowing the greatest men or the greatest works of art—they carry you on and on, and at the last you feel you are only beginning. That is my experience. I would not say that I know these men, of whom I have written, thoroughly—a man of sense would hardly say that, but I can say that I have enjoyed my work, and that, whatever other people may find it, to me it has been a delight and an illumination."

Another welcome book is E. V. Lucas's Giving and Receiving, a new volume of essays. Since the appearance of Roving East and Roving West, Mr. Lucas has been looking back at America from London with its fogs and (yes!) its sunshine. The audience for his new book will include not only those readers he has had for such volumes in the past but all those personal friends that he made in a visit that took him from California to the Battery.



CHAPTER XIX

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AND THE WHOLE TRUTH

i

Once a man came to Robert W. Chambers and said words to this effect:

"You had a great gift as a literary artist and you spoiled it. For some reason or other, I don't know what, but I suppose there was more money in the other thing, you wrote down to a big audience. Don't you think, yourself, that your earlier work—those stories of Paris and those novels of the American revolution—had something that you have sacrificed in your novels of our modern day?"

Mr. Chambers listened politely and attentively. When the man had finished, Chambers said to him words to this effect:

"You are mistaken. I have heard such talk. I am not to blame if some people entertain a false impression. I have sacrificed nothing, neither for money nor popularity nor anything else.

"Sir, I am a story-teller. I have no other gift. Those who imagine that they have seen in my earlier work some quality of literary distinction or some unrealised possibility as an artist missing from my later work, are wrong.

"They have read into those stories their own satisfaction in them and their first delight. I was new, then. In their pleasure, such as it was, they imagined the arrival of someone whom they styled a great literary artist. They imagined it all; it was not I.

"A story-teller I began, and a story-teller I remain. I do pride myself on being a good story-teller; if the verdict were overwhelmingly against me as a good story-teller that would cast me down. I have no reason to believe that the verdict is against me.

"And that is the ground I myself have stood upon. I am not responsible for the delusion of those who put me on some other, unearthly pinnacle, only to realise, as the years went by, that I was not there at all. But they can find me now where they first found me—where I rather suspect they found me first with unalloyed delight."

This does not pretend to be an actual transcription of the conversation between Mr. Chambers and his visitor. I asked Mr. Chambers recently if he recalled this interview. He said at this date he did not distinctly recollect it and he added:

"Probably I said what is true, that I write the sort of stories which at the moment it amuses me to write; I trust to luck that it may also amuse the public.

"If a writer makes a hit with a story the public wants him to continue that sort of story. It does not like to follow the moods of a writer from gay to frivolous, from serious to grave, but I have always liked to change, to experiment—just as I used to like to change my medium in painting, aquarelle, oil, charcoal, wash, etc.

"Unless I had a good time writing I'd do something else. I suit myself first of all in choice of subject and treatment, and leave the rest to the gods."

As a human creature Chambers is strikingly versatile. It must always be remembered that he started life as a painter. There is a story that Charles Dana Gibson and Robert W. Chambers sent their first offerings to Life at the same time. Mr. Chambers sent a picture and Mr. Gibson sent a bit of writing. Mr. Gibson's offering was accepted and Robert W. Chambers received a rejection slip.

Not only was he a painter but Chambers has preserved his interest in art, and is a welcome visitor in the offices of curators and directors of museums because he is one of the few who can talk intelligently about paintings.

He knows enough about Chinese and Japanese antiques to enable him to detect forgeries. He knows more about armour than anyone, perhaps, except the man who made the marvellous collection of mediaeval armour for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

One of his varieties of knowledge, observable by any reader of his novels, is lepidoptery—the science of butterflies. He collects butterflies with exceeding ardour. But then, he is a good deal of an outdoor man. He knows horses and books; he has been known to hunt; he has been seen with a fishing rod in his hand.

His knowledge of out-of-the-way places in different parts of the world—Paris, Petrograd—is not usual.

Will you believe me if I add that he is something of an expert on rare rugs?

Of course, I am, to some extent, taking Rupert Hughes's word for these accomplishments; and yet they are visible in the written work of Robert W. Chambers where, as a rule, they appear without extrusion.

ii

And here is the newest Robert W. Chambers novel, Eris. Mr. Chambers's The Flaming Jewel, a melodrama of the maddest character, was published last spring. Eris is really a story of the movie world, and reaches its most definite conclusion, possibly, in a passage where the hero says to Eris Odell:

"Whether they are financing a picture, directing it, releasing it, exhibiting it, or acting in it, these vermin are likely to do it to death. Your profession is crawling with them. It needs delousing."

But I am not really anxious, in this chapter, to discuss the justice or injustice of the view of motion pictures thus forcibly presented. I have read Eris with an interest sharpened by the fact that its hero is a writer. I seem to see in what is said about and by Barry Annan expressions of Mr. Chambers's own attitude of more than casual importance.

Barry Annan is obsessed with the stupidity of the American mass and more particularly with the grossness (as he sees it) of New York City.

"Annan went on with his breakfast leisurely. As he ate he read over his pencilled manuscript and corrected it between bites of muffin and bacon.

"It was laid out on the lines of those modern short stories which had proven so popular and which had lifted Barry Annan out of the uniform ranks of the unidentified and given him an individual and approving audience for whatever he chose to offer them.

"Already there had been lively competition among periodical publishers for the work of this newcomer.

"His first volume of short stories was now in preparation. Repetition had stencilled his name and his photograph upon the public cerebrum. Success had not yet enraged the less successful in the literary puddle. The frogs chanted politely in praise of their own comrade.

"The maiden, too, who sips the literary soup that seeps through the pages of periodical publications, was already requesting his autograph. Clipping agencies began to pursue him; film companies wasted his time with glittering offers that never materialised. Annan was on the way to premature fame and fortune. And to the aftermath that follows for all who win too easily and too soon.

"There is a King Stork for all puddles. His law is the law of compensations. Dame Nature executes it—alike on species that swarm and on individuals that ripen too quickly.

"Annan wrote very fast. There was about thirty-five hundred words in the story of Eris. He finished it by half past ten.

"Re-reading it, he realised it had all the concentrated brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic role of a plaything of Chance and Fate.

"And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears.

"'That'll make 'em ruffle their plumage and gulp down a sob or two,' he reflected, his tongue in his cheek, a little intoxicated, as usual, by his own infernal facility.

"He lit a cigarette, shuffled his manuscript, numbered the pages, and stuffed them into his pocket. The damned thing was done."

And again:—

"Considering her, now, a half-smile touching his lips, it occurred to him that here, in her, he saw his audience in the flesh. This was what his written words did to his readers. His skill held their attention; his persuasive technique, unsuspected, led them where he guided. His cleverness meddled with their intellectual emotions. The more primitive felt it physically, too.

"When he dismissed them at the bottom of the last page they went away about their myriad vocations. But his brand was on their hearts. They were his, these countless listeners whom he had never seen—never would see.

"He checked his agreeable revery. This wouldn't do. He was becoming smug. Reaction brought the inevitable note of alarm. Suppose his audience tired of him. Suppose he lost them. Chastened, he realised what his audience meant to him—these thousands of unknown people whose minds he titivated, whose reason he juggled with and whose heart-strings he yanked, his tongue in his cheek."

And this further on:—

"He went into his room but did not light the lamp. For a long while he sat by the open window looking out into the darkness of Governor's Place.

"It probably was nothing he saw out there that brought to his lips a slight recurrent smile.

"The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind.

"He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles's tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan's stories."

Our young man is undergoing a variety of interesting changes:

"Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.

"And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.

"The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.

"His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind—meaner conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.

"Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which makes the imperfect more perfect, creates better than the materials permit, forces real life actually to assume and be what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands."

There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:—

"'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness of her world—the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless, malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan—are there no wholesome brains in the world you write about?'"

I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own attitude toward his work.

Eris will be published early in 1923, following Mr. Chambers's The Talkers.

iii

Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, the son of William Chambers and Carolyn (Boughton) Chambers. Walter Boughton Chambers, the architect, is his brother. Robert William Chambers was a student in the Julien Academy in Paris from 1886 to 1893. He married, on July 12, 1898, Elsa Vaughn Moler. He first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1889; he was an illustrator for Life, Truth, Vogue and other magazines. His first book, In the Quarter, was published in 1893; and when, in the same year, a collection of stories of Paris called The King in Yellow made its appearance, Robert W. Chambers became a name of literary importance.

Curiously enough, among the things persistently remembered about Mr. Chambers to this day is a particular poem in a book of rollicking verse called With the Band, which he published in 1895. This cherished—by very many people scattered here and there—poem had to do with Irishmen parading. One stanza will identify it.

"Ses Corporal Madden to Private McFadden: 'Bedad yer a bad 'un! Now turn out yer toes! Yer belt is unhookit, Yer cap is on crookit, Yer may not be drunk, But, be jabers, ye look it! Wan-two! Wan-two! Ye monkey-faced divil, I'll jolly ye through! Wan-two! Time! Mark! Ye march like the aigle in Cintheral Park!'"

In the course of writing many books, Chambers has been responsible for one or two shows. He wrote for Ada Rehan, The Witch of Ellangowan, a drama produced at Daly's Theatre. His Iole was the basis of a delightful musical comedy produced in New York in 1913. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

BOOKS BY ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

IN THE QUARTER THE KING IN YELLOW THE RED REPUBLIC THE KING AND A FEW DUKES THE MAKER OF MOONS WITH THE BAND THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE LORRAINE ASHES OF EMPIRE THE HAUNTS OF MEN THE CAMBRIC MASK OUTSIDERS THE CONSPIRATORS CARDIGAN THE MAID-AT-ARMS OUTDOOR-LAND THE MAIDS OF PARADISE ORCHARD-LAND FOREST LAND IOLE THE FIGHTING CHANCE MOUNTAIN LAND THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS THE TREE OF HEAVEN THE FIRING LINE SOME LADIES IN HASTE THE DANGER MARK THE SPECIAL MESSENGER HIDE AND SEEK IN FORESTLAND THE GREEN MOUSE AILSA PAIGE BLUE-BIRD WEATHER JAPONETTE THE STREETS OF ASCALON ADVENTURES OF A MODEST MAN THE BUSINESS OF LIFE THE COMMON LAW THE GAY REBELLION WHO GOES THERE? THE HIDDEN CHILDREN ATHALIE POLICE!!! THE GIRL PHILIPPA THE BARBARIANS THE RESTLESS SEX THE MOONLIT WAY IN SECRET THE CRIMSON TIDE THE SLAYER OF SOULS THE LITTLE RED FOOT THE FLAMING JEWEL THE TALKERS ERIS

SOURCES ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, by Joseph Hergesheimer, GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY.

English Literature During the Last Half Century, by J. W. Cunliffe, THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

A Hugh Walpole Anthology, selected by the author. LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY.

Hugh Walpole, Master Novelist. Pamphlet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. (Out of print.)

Who's Who [In England].



CHAPTER XX

UNIQUITIES

i

Each of these five is a book which, either from its subject, its authorship, or its handling, is sui generis. I call such books "uniquities"; it sounds a little less trite than saying they are unique. I think I will let someone else speak of these books. I will look to see, and will let you see, what others have said about my uniquities.

ii

First we have Our Navy at War by Josephus Daniels. W. B. M'Cormick, formerly of the editorial staff of the Army and Navy Journal, reviewing this book for the New York Herald (28 May 1922) said:

"Josephus Daniels always was an optimist about navy affairs while he was Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921, and now that he has told what the navy did during the world war he demonstrates in his narrative that he is a good sport. For in spite of the many and bitter attacks that were made on him in that troubled time he does not make a single reference to any of them, nor does he wreak any such revenge as he might have done through this medium. In this respect it may be said that truly does he live up to the description of his character set down in the pages of Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske's autobiography, namely, that 'Secretary Daniels impressed me as being a Christian gentleman.'