American nights entertainment

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IN his new book, The Humanizing of Knowledge, the author of that fascinating study, The Mind in the Making, James Harvey Robinson, says: “Personally I have reached the conclusion, after many years of teaching, that one should choose for instruction, whether one be dealing with young or old, some phase of human interest rather than some field of scientific investigation”—and he goes on with force and plainness to point out the defect of an educational scheme in which knowledge is imparted by going in and out of great numbers of pigeonholes. He is really pleading for methods of instruction that shall take account of the ordinary man’s interest in his world, and shall proceed by the natural process of mental associations instead of by artificial and arbitrary tetherings to the post of this and that “subject.” Seldom has the difficulty been put with more brevity, simplicity and general sweetness of temper, or in a way to give such decent courage to individual self-respect. “We are not many of us interested in isolated scientific facts of any kind. That species of interest, as we have seen, is reserved for the few. But all of us are open to the effects of such new knowledge as gets under our skins. And the great art is not to exhibit our own insight and learning but really to influence those whom we are aiming to influence.” There could be no better text or opening for a chapter devoted to books of many varieties, inasmuch as books have always taken, except where restricted by school formulas, the lines of human interests and the path of some natural association of ideas. In this sense, though teaching may need to be humanised, knowledge has never been without its humanisation. A James Harvey Robinson cannot write about science without being led into the absorbing history of the mind that is slowly achieving science. A Camille Flammarion, discussing astronomy, finds it above all things natural to relate his knowledge with man’s religious ideas. An L. P. Jacks, analysing religious doubts, moves directly over the border of so-called psychology into the sphere of conduct and behaviour, because the answer lies over there. A George Santayana employs poetry to state those portions of his philosophy which prose can scarcely embody with sufficient expressiveness; bases criticism on his philosophy and distils or re-distils philosophical ideas from all the varieties of his learning.

To take M. Flammarion, for example. His new work, Dreams of an Astronomer, could without any essential inaccuracy be styled “A Humanisation of Astronomy.” Here is a book produced in this French scientist’s eighty-first year, at an age where “isolated scientific facts” had lost all fanciful meanings and were seen only in their warm and present human significance. The point with M. Flammarion was not that we live on a poor little world in a vast universe composed of worlds within worlds and flaming suns and revolving planets, nor that this universe so immense is but an item of larger immensities. The point was in the significance of these facts to the heart and mind of a man or a woman. What does it mean as regards our attempt to know God? In what perspective does it place our aspirations and our efforts toward what we sometimes call “righteousness”? Flammarion gives the richness of his physical knowledge in untechnical language; in words that summon the imagination he constructs pen pictures of other worlds than ours. That we may have the value of comparison, he describes Venus and Mars—the latter possibly inhabited by creatures millions of years ahead of us in their development. This moving and inspiring book ends with a sentence that might serve as the quiet challenge of science to much of philosophy and religion. Says M. Flammarion: “Let us not be personal, like infants or the aged, who see only their own room, let us know how to live in the infinite and in the eternal.”

But this lofty idea needs translation into the terms of our finite existence and our character of religious beliefs. It finds it in such a book as L. P. Jacks’s Religious Perplexities. Like The Humanizing of Knowledge, this is a slender book that can be read through in about an hour and it is equally a book that is likely to influence a lifetime. It is beside my point that Professor Jacks is one of the greatest living philosophers and religionists; but it is a fact of the highest relevance that he writes as no one writing on these subjects has written since William James. The same power to pierce to fundamental questions—and answer them; the same lucidity of thought and expression are characteristic of the two men. Jacks exhibits the same tolerance of the forms of religious belief; and it is only after a discussion of “Religious Perplexities in General” that he closes with a talk about “Perplexity in the Christian Religion.” He says: “Far be it from me to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity. Anyone who does that goes a long way towards forfeiting his title to be called a Christian. Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where it speaks the language he best understands.” He begins with the two ultimate questions that man asks himself: “Why are we here?” followed by, “Why am I—I, and not John Jones or James Smith—here and now?” The answer to the first is the need of the One to differentiate itself into the Many, proving its universality and its power to integrate and raise up the good. But, he shows, the answer to the second question is in the conduct of the individual. Insofar as I by my courage in the face of life justify my particular existence, I supply the reason why myself, rather than Jones or Smith, exists in my place, here and now. Faith is not a new faculty added to us, it is simply our reason grown courageous. As Carlyle repeated, we all must answer the alternative: “Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?” Professor Jacks adds: “No philosophy can relieve us from the responsibility of having to make that choice”—and religion, telling us our choice must be the heroic one, strengthens us in making it.

It is religion, I think, that George Santayana represents—Santayana who contrasts for me with that rooted countryman of his, Miguel de Unamuno. I have a love for both, the one tenacious of his soil and its traditions, the other early detached, flung into the New England of Harvard and William James, now lodged in Paris, and always with his roots feeding orchid-like on the air. It is inevitable that one like Santayana should bear his blossom in poetry and criticism and his fruit in philosophy-religion, or religious philosophy. Thus he calls his Scepticism and Animal Faith, “an introduction to a system of philosophy,” but it is so only in the literal sense probably necessary to secure the proper recognition from a too unimaginative world. The book, which has a charm unbecoming a philosophical overture, can be read independently of the volumes that are to follow it; but who reads it may be trusted to put independence on one side and “follow, follow.” Santayana as poet is possibly matter to consider in a later chapter of our book, but since, as he says in the preface to his Poems, their subject “is simply my philosophy in the making,” we should be privileged to a passing consideration here. “I see no reason why a philosopher should be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is ignorant; and his sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural and inevitable condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of his emotion. Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him on occasion. It is his only possible life, his daily response to everything”—call it religion, if you please, and regard its expression:

And to all who care for fine intellectualism neither arid of inspiration nor robbed of beauty and emotion I commend Santayana in all his books, those named and, of course, The Life of Reason, Winds of Doctrine, The Sense of Beauty, and Character and Opinion in the United States and the Soliloquies as well. For those unacquainted with the man, Little Essays Drawn from the Works of George Santayana, by Logan Pearsall Smith, may offer the readiest approach.

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The task to which James Harvey Robinson calls us has already been undertaken with the highest success by himself and some others. Among these has from the first been Edwin E. Slosson who now, with Otis W. Caldwell, the botanist and educator of Columbia University, has edited an admirable volume, Science Remaking the World. This book is so good and represents so intelligent a collaboration, that I hope it is only the forerunner of a number of similar volumes. In the dual editorship, Dr. Caldwell’s contribution was his working familiarity with every field of modern science while Dr. Slosson lent his magic touch of the born populariser. The fifteen chapters, eleven of which are contributed by specialists in various fields, deal directly along the average person’s lines of interest with such subjects as gasoline power, coal tar products, the modern idea of the atom, what we know of “infantile paralysis,” our present knowledge of tuberculosis, the lengthening of human life, the world’s health, botanical science, evolution, warfare against insects, forestation, the chemistry and economy of food, and those two basic foods, bread and the potato. Dr. Caldwell writes the general opening chapter and the chapter on lengthening human life with its special reference to Louis Pasteur’s work; as was desirable in view of the great popular success of his Creative Chemistry, Dr. Slosson contributes the discussions of gasoline power and of the miracles wrought from coal tar.

Our quest shuttles back and forth between the discoveries of man and man the discoverer. At every stage we have to consider not only what man has gained in the way of knowledge but his potentialities in respect of all knowledge. That is why we have such a succession of books as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, those books by Lothrop Stoddard which are brought to attention in Chapter 22 of this volume, and, now, Roland B. Dixon’s The Racial History of Man. The professor of anthropology at Harvard treats impressively and from a broad point of view the whole question of race. His account of race distribution and historical development is divided geographically. Beginning with Europe and a general outline of its racial history, he then takes up the separate countries or areas. In the same way he deals with Africa, Asia, Oceania, North and South America. His interesting conclusions, in some respects original and without the dogmatism that vitiates much writing on the subject, are given in a final chapter. But the best part is that this book is simply the first in a group of probably ten volumes, each to be written by a leading American authority, which is to describe, in the light of the latest investigation and discovery, the formation of worlds, the evolution of species, and the emergence and development of man.

Such books are desperately needed, to resume James Harvey Robinson’s argument, if science is to save itself. Such is the present situation that “if no precautions are taken to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and popular prejudice it may grow so wide that the researcher himself may be engulfed.” It would not be the first time in human history when light was swallowed up in darkness. How dense that darkness can be, how persistent, how ironical and, perhaps, pathetic may be learned from the slightest perusal of Dr. James J. Walsh’s astonishing and engrossing new book, called Cures. This is a history of new remedies of every sort in all ages which have cured for a while and then have failed. It will scarcely surprise us, although it may make us rather uncomfortable, to know that not Europe with its ancient and superstitious peoples but modern America has supplied the greatest number of cure delusions. Dr. Walsh puts the explanation on a charitable ground: “Americans are more enterprising and as a result we have had ever so many more successful discoveries of new”—but less permanently successful—“remedies.” The subject is not without its humorous aspects. Insofar as Dr. Walsh has occasion to treat of some forms of curing which are still much adhered to, with or without correlated religious beliefs, his book treads on live and resentful toes. As a Catholic avoiding the discussion of Lourdes and other shrines, he invites reprisals; as a physician of very distinguished service and high standing, he is well-qualified to counter them. But aside from any possible controversy, what an amazing history of human credulity and ignorance he exposes—Dowie, rattlesnake oil, magnetic iron, metallic tractors, sympathetic powders, hypnotism, mesmerism, electric belts, plasters, pads, chest protectors, psychoanalysis and spiritualistic healing along with the various forms of “New Thought” come under review. It will be observed that as a rule Dr. Walsh gives credit for cures to even the most impossible notion or contraption—at first. A cure is a cure, perhaps only the more so if the actual curative agent is suggestion.

Suggestion! Is it possible that, on a subject so bedevilled, a book could now appear of genuine usefulness, sanity and popular value? Personally I should have inclined to answer emphatically, “No!” But I cannot, for the book is before me. Dr. Louis E. Bisch, a physician practising in New York, lecturing on psychology at Columbia and directing the treatments given in mental and nervous cases at the large sanitarium in the North Carolina mountains, has been known to me hitherto by his Your Inner Self—without exception the best popular account of psychoanalysis and modern psychology I have ever seen. Now he has written The Conquest of Self, in which he expresses with the same directness and accuracy all that body of actual truth which the “How to Succeed” books build into such amazing forms of lies and nonsense. There is, of course, a certain power of accomplishment in each of us; there is a general direction for each of us to take; there are personal obstacles to overcome, and there is a power of progression to be developed. A better comprehension of one’s self, as of others, can definitely be arrived at. All these facts Dr. Bisch translates into practical detail and illustrates with concrete instances, avoiding the claptrap with which the whole subject is now so heavily overloaded. In that general enterprise of the humanisation of knowledge to which (I hope) we are all fully committed, such a book as The Conquest of Self has a special merit; for where ignorance is thickest, it lights a clear and modest path, and where pseudo-science has done and is doing the greatest havoc, it puts truth in armour for the hardest part of a difficult journey.

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If, as some contend, the purpose of fiction is entertainment—an assertion we need not either attempt to refute nor deny—then the mark of good fiction is that, while perhaps entertaining us, it does something else. And about the “something else” I should think we need not be narrow in definitions. Maybe the entertaining novel we are reading adds its unobtrusive item to our understanding of this or that; maybe it tunes up our emotional natures. Or it may accomplish its bye-purpose in other directions. We may or may not be conscious of the additional result, or, if conscious of it, we may continue (perhaps wisely) to read for the sole purpose of being entertained. I do not believe one should read fiction with the something else in mind, nor, in a brief account of some new novels, would I attempt to suggest what the something else—differing, it is likely, with the individual reader—may turn out to be. If one asks me for bread, I will not offer him a loaf of vitamins, but palatable bread from which his body may take the elements it pleases.

For examples, you may derive from John Buchan’s Midwinter your clearest idea of Dr. Samuel Johnson, or your greatest knowledge about the affections of a young lady; your own mind will satisfy its proper need. From Compton Mackenzie’s The Altar Steps and its sequel, Parson’s Progress, certain temperaments gain religious and ecclesiastical satisfactions. The modern, intimate taste for sensory impulses can be gratified in reading John Dos Passos’s unusual novel, Streets of Night; just as the correlative instinct for a fresh and daring idealism is fed by such a fine first novel as Cyril Hume’s The Wife of the Centaur. Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, with its story of a young charwoman who works for a miserly bookseller and his wife, renews the heart in its assurance of our common humanity, and offers the rich nourishment which rejoiced us in The Old Wives’ Tale. And so it goes with fiction.

We think of Brand Whitlock now as the author of Belgium, but a further thought recalls him, and with pleasure, as a writer of fiction. His new novel, J. Hardin & Son, was planned ten years and more ago and discussed with the late William Dean Howells, whose interest in it was keen. The actual writing had begun in the summer of 1914 at a small country place near Brussels when the catastrophe of war began its pre-emption upon all of the American Minister’s time and energy. Except for intervals of thinking about it and occasional notes, Mr. Whitlock could do nothing but protect the manuscript on journeyings to and fro—until the end of 1918, when, after the armistice, he resumed writing as opportunity offered. The book was progressing in earnest at Biarritz and Spa in 1922, and was completed in New York in the spring of 1923. Mr. Howells’s interest will be understood when it is explained that J. Hardin & Son takes place in a little Ohio town. The story begins when Paul Hardin, the son, is ten and accompanies him to middle age—perhaps one should say to that point in or at the beginning of middle age where, as with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a man’s character takes its final determining shape in some act or decision which controls the rest of his life. For Paul Hardin this moment comes when he recognises one of the buggies made forty years before by his father, takes hold of one of the spokes and finds it as solid, as resistant as on the day it was made. Paul had hardly liked his father, whose sternly-held and sternly-expressed views and whose passion for moral reform in the shape of prohibition seemed like a life-long and perverse obstinacy, embittering all the preludes to affection, sympathy or even understanding. Yet now! Something comes out of that spoke, something out of his father’s life that settles his behaviour toward the two women who are for him to deal with in regard to himself. Mr. Whitlock has aimed, however, at the reconstruction of a period in American life. His momentous personal problem in the life of Paul Hardin is simply the foreground for a study of American ideas in a certain kind of community in the years within his own recollection, say from 1880 on pretty well into our century. Over a hundred characters, many of them of more than passing importance, are involved in the extremely varied but entirely naturalistic incidents of the novel.

J. Hardin & Son, the work of an American at fifty, makes a contrast with the work of a Norwegian of fifty, the age at which Jonas Lie wrote his The Family at Gilje. The Norwegian novelist, whose story is just offered in a careful translation, uses a much simpler scheme. His tale opens with a picture of a home in the mountains of Norway where a father and mother are anxious to get their children married off. It ends when each child has solved his or her problem. If environment conquers in one child, individuality is sure to come out on top in another. Jonas Lie’s book, I am told, makes Norwegians feel that they are living again the scenes of early life; and at the same time the novel is full of the most modern ideas about marriage, the home and the management of children, introduced not by main strength and the hazard of fictional illusion but subtly, by an artist who shared Ibsen’s supply of “social dynamite” but whose artistry was paramount. Lie is called a realist, as, I suppose, Bojer and most of the Scandinavians would be (except Jens Jacobsen in Marie Grubbe); but what is the white magic in these writers of the white snow-countries that makes their realism so unfailingly poetic? Is it indigenous? Cannot we acquire it here in America? Shall we exile our artists to Canada, whence now comes little but the worn-out stories of strong men and their uniform primitiveness with women?

I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do you; but I do know that certain writers are simpatico in certain provinces of society—Frank Swinnerton, for example, in the stratum whence he drew his Nocturne and his Coquette and in the somewhat different middle-class level on which we meet the characters of his new story, Young Felix. Here is a satisfactory representative English novel in the mode called realism to contrast with our American and our Norwegian. I say “contrast”—for I don’t think comparisons will get us very far. What we are better employed in doing, in my opinion, is a species of addition rather than subtraction; we shall find a difference in the attitude as well as the art of Brand Whitlock, Jonas Lie, and Frank Swinnerton. Is not each worth our while? I think so. I think such a novel as Jay William Hudson’s Nowhere Else in the World is worth the while of most readers, who may, however, be a bit puzzled at first to discover how different it is from his Abbé Pierre. Mr. Hudson may possibly have written the Great Chicago Novel as Carl Sandburg is sometimes thought to have written the great Chicago hymn or chant. At least, his Nowhere Else in the World is in its essence apocalyptic. Stephen Kent, who had been enchanted by Paris after a youthful rebellion against Chicago and its blatant commercialism, lives to look upon the city of his birth as “like Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ primitive, powerful, with mighty sinews,” as “the spiritual capital of America,” as a place where he and others will join in “moulding, not paintings and statues, but a civilisation destined to be the summit of all art, of all dreams.” There is incidentally in this tense story a competent picture of American academic life which will cause squirmings. Mr. Hudson’s knowledge of American colleges is derived at first hand.

Much first hand knowledge, I happen to know, has gone into the writing of George Looms’s second novel, John-No-Brawn. The action of this rather terrible but certainly impressive piece of fiction takes place in Louisville, Kentucky, the author’s home town, and in and near Denver, Colorado. The book is one of an intensity that has already occasioned extremely divergent opinions. The story is that of a sick man, an indeterminate character trapped by the horrible and inescapable fact of disease. He comes to the conclusion that he is a hopeless drag on his young wife. Against the warnings, protests and threats of doctor and nurse, he walks out of the hospital. “They watched him near the stairway, saw him reel slightly and then reach out his hand and take hold of the banister—saw him steady himself. He paused for a moment ... and then he passed around the partition corner, out of sight.” Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be expected of the reader. It is probably an advantage in Mr. Boyd’s novel over Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers that Through the Wheat is almost entirely a story of fighting in the front line. All agree that this was war, at least, and something is gained at the outset by the setting aside of various prejudices and preconceptions. Through the Wheat, far more than Three Soldiers, contrasts with high effectiveness with Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire. Again may I plead that if the two novels, the French and the American, are to be entered in a fight by rounds, there can and should be no decision. Through the Wheat is a wonderful thing to have been plucked in Belleau Wood, at Soissons and Saint Mihiel by a boy not yet twenty.

While Mr. Whitlock is going back of our day for his Middle Western picture, Meredith Nicholson, slightly his senior, has been busy with the immediacy not only of the present day but the very hour. Mr. Nicholson’s new novel, The Hope of Happiness, like its predecessor, Broken Barriers, reckons with a social life in which, if they have not been entirely swept aside, American standards of conduct have been very much altered. The young woman who drinks too hopelessly much is put before us, but the essential story is one of a situation between father and unacknowledged son with the probable complications of men’s business and women’s love. There is an ability of characterisation and a temper and evenness in the writing which make the reader feel that Mr. Nicholson writes for a much ampler purpose than would be served by a novel of changing manners and enlarged social license. These are mere appurtenances of the story he has to tell.

Not to have a story to tell is to forfeit the best claim to consideration at the hands of most readers of fiction; and among those Americans who have never made the forfeiture I would have no hesitation in naming Irvin S. Cobb. The award of the O. Henry Memorial Prize for 1922 to the title story in Cobb’s Snake Doctor and Other Stories seems to me more or less of an irrelevance; Cobb has written so many capital stories and the award, if it had then existed, might so easily have gone to him years ago. The tales collected in Snake Doctor and Other Stories exhibit, perhaps, a greater variety than some of the earlier collections, and there is a Judge Priest story without which, I am certain, a majority of Cobb’s readers would consider the book incomplete. “Snake Doctor” itself has been criticised as being altogether mechanical. My suggestion to those who advance that criticism would be conveyed in the form of a question, or two questions: Did they get no thrill from reading the story? And if they did, was that thrill a purely mechanical effect? For the point is not whether the thing producing an effect is a mechanism, but the nature of the effect itself. Nothing is more mechanical than the theatre, but a good play is not made the less art thereby. Actors, you may say, or acting; but a scene has been “made” or destroyed more than once by that utterly mechanical detail, the stage setting.... If as has sometimes been predicted, a machine will be invented to produce upon us all the effects of good fiction, we shall none of us quarrel with the inventor nor will anyone try to destroy the device unless it be our fictioners. In the meantime, I advise no one to neglect them, lest the day of the obvious and unconcealed machine never arrive.

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To blaze a trail for the reader through the rich forest of books educational, philosophical, scientific, and withal “popular” is no easy task. I have not attempted to do more than put down the titles of some new and recent “general” books, with the authors, and sometimes a note upon the volume. But should these not be classified? Dear reader, if you will give me the classification of the things you are interested in, I will classify the books....

Note: The list of every publishing house has its special characteristics and the reader of books will naturally associate certain types of books with certain imprints; it is desirable that he should, aiding the bookseller, when possible, in the quest for publications of a special sort. I have tried to name below, as a general guide supplementing the fragmentary list above, the chief types of publications of the four houses associated in the production of this book:

D. Appleton & Company, whose long history has given them the honour of publishing important works by Charles Darwin, Haeckel, Froebel, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Max Nordau, G. Stanley Hall, Muensterberg, Flammarion, Florence Nightingale and L. Emmett Holt, publish many scientific, business, educational, technical and industrial books, military and naval textbooks; books on the Spanish language and many translations into Spanish from English, including fiction; medical books; fiction by Zona Gale, Joseph C. Lincoln, Harold Bell Wright, Edith Wharton, Brand Whitlock, etc., and general literature.

George H. Doran Company publish many books of historical importance, memoirs, biographies, etc.; contemporary politics; travel; sport; belles lettres; a very large list of religious books; spiritualistic books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others; poetry; plays; and a remarkable fiction list including Walpole, Mary Roberts Rinehart, W. Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, etc.

Doubleday, Page & Company are noted as the publishers of many garden and nature books; of important biographies and historical works; travel; poetry; belles lettres; general literature and fiction by Joseph Conrad, Booth Tarkington, Gene Stratton-Porter, Edna Ferber, Kathleen Norris, etc. They publish the works of Rudyard Kipling (except the Outward Bound Edition: Scribner).

Charles Scribner’s Sons publish works on architecture; historical and biographical books and memoirs; letters; belles lettres; books dealing with problems of race and society; sociological works; poetry; plays; books on sports; works on art and decoration, philosophy and religion; many books illustrated in colour; and fiction. In a long career the house has had the distinction of publishing the works of J. M. Barrie, Thomas Carlyle, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, Maurice Hewlett, James Huneker, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, George Meredith, Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc.

All four houses publish books for boys and girls.

Fiction.

In addition to the fiction already discussed attention may be invited to the following new and recent books (for new fiction by Galsworthy, Conrad, V. Sackville West, Arthur Train, Harold Bell Wright, Ralph Connor, Booth Tarkington, Zona Gale, Gene Stratton-Porter, Joseph C. Lincoln, Edith Wharton, Christopher Morley see respective chapters on these authors; also see Chapters 3, 15, and 18):