2. The Magic Carpet
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THE Magic Carpet was one which took you far away, whisked you up and through the air (though not sensibly too fast) and brought you into a foreign but delightful country. There are books like that, taking you out of yourself, so that the preoccupation of a moment before is forgotten, tomorrow’s worries are lost, and you exist in a blissful unconsciousness that there can be anything beyond the fine pleasure of this present hour. The “travel book” attempts directly the transfer to some place else; the book of essays, more indirect in its method, is often more successful.
Aldous Huxley has been known to us hitherto as a poet and a writer of fiction. Both his poetry and his fiction have been marked with a graceful artifice and that simplicity which comes only from a completed sophistication. His new book, a collection of essays, is distinguished by those qualities. There is something about Huxley’s writing—I don’t know what it is and those who know what it is, can’t tell—which brings a gleam to the eyes of all who love literature for its own sake. In On the Margin Huxley the satirist walks comfortably with Huxley the student. For Aldous Huxley is a very studious young man. Tall, with hair that bushes out from under his broad-brimmed soft hat, he walks with that slight stoop inevitably acquired by those whose heads do not pass readily under all doorways. With his clothes flapping gently around him, his glance peering through thick-lensed spectacles, he advances into a room with the surprising effect of an amiable scarecrow. A first grotesque impression is rapidly dissolved in the gentle acquaintance springing up immediately afterward; for no more likeable person lives. It is not generally known that between the ages of seventeen and nineteen it was thought he would go blind, so that he learned to read Braille type. His interest in America is keen; he would like to come here, and may. Intimates know him as one of the most learned men in England, though devoid of poses and devoted to finding pleasure in the works of Charles Dickens. His scholarliness shows itself in On the Margin, where Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and the devilish biographer, Mr. Strachey, divide attention with the question of love as practised in France and England, the justice of Margot Asquith’s strictures on modern feminine beauty, and the evolution of ennui.
Recently there died in his ninety-second year Frederic Harrison, who had witnessed the coronation of Victoria in 1838 and every celebration in her reign; who saw her funeral in 1901; who, though past eighty when it began, saw the war of 1914-1918 and the several years of turmoil afterward. An extraordinary life! Before it had ended this man whose span of years was matched by his breadth of knowledge and interests gathered together what he himself regarded as his last book, now published under the title De Senectute and blending some of his finest literary criticism with delightful recollections of the great times in which he lived. A personal account of Victoria and Prince Albert, the “Dialogue on Old Age” which affords the title for the volume, a review of the picturesque history of Constantinople through sixteen centuries, fundamental differences between Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, the art of translation with reference to Dante and Molière, some consideration of Fielding and Smollett and Kingsley, and a final chapter upon various schools of philosophy—these are the relics of a glorious life. The book is full of brightness, its effects are sane, and the writing is alike lucid and tinctured with that peculiar zest which, as it was a quality of Frederic Harrison’s temperament, goes far to explain the length of his life as well as the grace with which he lived it.
Among essayists there are ladies. But there are not many ladies, nor men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book. I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer to be known for her fiction—those short stories, masterly in form, with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief novel, Conquistador. And such a preference is easily understood. Conquistador, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, Modes and Morals, published in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and still steadily sells. People constantly refer to her discussion of “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling” and the arts of persuasion are constantly brought to bear upon her to assemble another such book. If Mrs. Gerould began with something of the suddenness of a meteor, she persists with a good deal of the steady brilliance of a fixed star. It was, in fact, with the appearance of a story, “Vain Oblations,” in Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1911, that she first came to general notice. This dark and terrible piece of fictional analysis had for its principal character a New England woman missionary. Other stories followed in Scribner’s, the Atlantic and Harper’s, and a first collection, under the title Vain Oblations, was published in March, 1914. A second book of tales, The Great Tradition, was succeeded by a novelette, A Change of Air; by the essays comprising Modes and Morals; and then by the novel, Lost Valley. Valiant Dust offered some more short tales; but with the appearance of Conquistador many of us felt Mrs. Gerould for the first time to be perfectly suited in length, form and material alike. Despite her superb technique, she needs more room than the short story gives her; and although she can write of barren New England lives she can write much more effectively of richly-coloured Latin life. Although, as Stuart P. Sherman has observed, she can do dashingly the “picture of a really nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a spacious sun-flooded chamber with a Chinese rug,” her deep fictional desires are toward the richly barbaric, and neither Henry-Jamesical nor Edith-Whartonesque. In the atmosphere of Princeton, which is her home (her husband, Gordon Hall Gerould, is a member of the English faculty), she has the leisure and repose necessary to do such essays and short novels as no other living American has given evidence of an equal talent for achieving. Occasionally a bit of travel, perhaps, producing as its direct result a book like her Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions; but ultimately much more valuable for its indirect stimulus to her imagination, which belongs to the class of imaginations so dangerous when they are confined.
In fact, the imagination is very little understood, as if it were one of those glands whose mysterious secretions we tinker with nowadays, either not too successfully or with a success so alarming as to threaten the overthrow of all physiology. One of these days we shall have a mental thyroid extract, and then—! It remains to be observed that with most of us the imagination secretes gently, with a fresh annual activation in the direction of old woods and pastures ever-new, rather than new; a circumstance very favourable to David Grayson when, in 1907, he put forth the volume called Adventures in Contentment. It is difficult to think of any precise precedent for this mixture of essay, philosophy, homely observation and quiet humour with its essentially American pattern of thought. The febrile character of much American life was already marked, and the remedy of an equally feverish optimism had yet to be widely prescribed. The time was propitious, the sentiment of David Grayson had an ingratiation. When, in 1910, Adventures in Friendship was published, a good many thousand people had read the earlier adventures and were alert for these. The Friendly Road (1913) was succeeded by Hempfield (1915) and a final volume, Great Possessions (1917). A half dozen years have passed without relegating these books to the shelves of the Great Unread. As “The Library of the Open Road” they inherit an annual, rather a perennial, popularity.
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In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so) but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his Baedeker’s Mediterranean or Northern Italy or Spain and Portugal. Here the matters essential to accuracy were given—and only a novelist who has heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of a topographical mistake—but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most freshly revised volumes is Baedeker’s Switzerland; another of equal recency is the guide to Canada.
In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist, however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe. In fact, Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each volume of the series now under way. Java and the East Indies and France to Scandinavia (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with The Holy Land and Syria. From Tangier to Tripoli (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the Sahara), Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland, The Tail of the Hemisphere (Chile and Argentina) and Cairo to Kisumu (Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate books.
“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921—a record that begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so, he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores, following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay, Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:
and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American quest of power—religion the sanctification of one, pan-Americanism the credo of the other. It is this spiritual penetration that makes the fine distinction of Stephen Graham’s In Quest of El Dorado, joined to the man’s unusual literary skill, taste and sense of form. On the point of form there is something more than usually admirable in the start of the book from Madrid and Cadiz and in the conclusion (on a note of wonder) amid the ruins of Mitla, as if the quester for El Dorado would do well to seek its whereabouts in the indecipherable inscriptions placed on their massive memorials by a race that had sunk into silence long before the imperious advent of the Children of the Sun. These are the refinements of the book for the reader of philosophical or æsthetic tastes; but as such matters should be, they are entirely unobtrusive—present to those who seek them, hidden to those who are indifferent—and in externals Stephen Graham offers a first-hand travel study with cowboys and conquistadores, Indians and Mexicans, the Panama Canal and the jingle of spurs in the changing foreground.
Among those authors whose books of travel win their appreciation from the personality of the adventurer, Mary Roberts Rinehart seems to me quite plainly the foremost. The considerable time that has elapsed since the publication of Through Glacier Park and Tenting Tonight will sharpen many appetites for the camp fare offered in her new book, The Out Trail. With none of the acerbity of her own Tish, Mrs. Rinehart has to the full that lady’s derring-do. “I have roughed it,” she explains at the beginning of The Out Trail, “in one wilderness after another, in camp and on the trail, in the air and on water, in war abroad and in peace at home. I have been scared to death more times than I can remember. Led,” she confesses, “by the exigencies of my profession, by feminine curiosity, or by the determination not to be left at home, I have been shaken, thrown, bitten, sunburned, rained on, shot at, stone-bruised, frozen, broiled, and scared, with monotonous regularity.” And she adds that on several occasions she has been placed in situations of real danger from which she has clamoured to be extricated with all possible despatch. Two things, if we may judge by her chronicle, seem never to have failed her, in whatever emergency: her sense of drama and her sense of humour. At least, they are keenly in evidence on all the pages of The Out Trail, and make it easily among the most entertaining books of its kind—not infrequently exciting, too! If someone thinks that the sense of the humorous must have been missing at the time and have been recaptured later in writing of the adventures, I suspect he is mistaken; for I recall that not so long after I had written a chapter on “The Vitality of Mary Roberts Rinehart” as a novelist, I met Mrs. Rinehart. She was suffering from one of those ferocious colds which make cowards and pessimists of us all, but she only remarked: “I’m afraid you will find the vitality you have just celebrated rather low this morning.” This, I submit, is such stuff as humorists are made on.
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Among books of essays that successfully spread the Magic Carpet for readers I should like to draw attention to the following (in addition to those described above):
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY’S In the Neighborhood
of Murray Hill.
J. C. SQUIRE’S Essays at Large and his Books
Reviewed.
HILAIRE BELLOC’S On.
Other collections of essays, chiefly on literary and philosophical subjects, are included in or listed after Chapter 15, “For the Literary Investor.”
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In the matter of books of travel, some classification is necessary, and in addition to the ones just described I am glad to name the following in all their happy variety:
A Group of Books on Ancient Egypt and
Present-day Egyptian Explorations.
A History of Egypt From the Earliest Times to the Conquest of the Persians, by JAMES HENRY BREASTED. The ninth printing has just been called for. With 200 illustrations and maps.
History of Assyria, by A. T. OLMSTEAD. A companion volume to Breasted’s History of Egypt, and equally admirable. With maps and many illustrations.
G. MASPERO’S Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria, his Egyptian Art: Studies, and his History of Art in Egypt. These remain standard in their field.
TERENCE GRAY’S And in the Tomb Were Found and his The Life of Hatshepsut. The first is a series of historical studies and sketches including Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, and Rameses the Great. Some literal translations of Egyptian love songs are added. The second book is the romance of an Egyptian princess who reigns as a man; the work is cast in the form of a pageant for the sake of greater vividness.
PERCY E. MARTIN’S Egypt Old and New, a general account with many illustrations in colour.
PERCY EDWARD NEWBERRY’S The Valley of the Kings, which includes the discoveries by the late Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in a general account of thirty years’ explorations.
ARTHUR WEIGALL’S Tut-Ankh-Amen and Other Essays is the work of an Egyptologist and former Inspector-General of Antiquities in Egypt. Mr. Weigall was special correspondent for the London Daily Mail, New York World and other newspapers at the opening of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
A Group of Books About China.
Audacious Angles on China, by ELSIE MCCORMICK, introduces the reader to Chinese life as the Western resident there sees it. The humorous side of such experiences is to the fore, and one part of the book is devoted to “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby”—an American child’s view of the intimacies of Eastern life.
Swinging Lanterns, by ELIZABETH CRUMP ENDERS, is a vivid narrative of what an American woman saw while living and travelling in China. It contains much that is unusual, including such matters as the Yellow Llama Devil Dances, never before described. Fine illustrations.
ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS’S Across Mongolian Plains.
ROY CHAPMAN ANDREWS’S and YVETTE BORUP ANDREWS’S Camps and Trails in China.
HERBERT A. GILES’S A History of Chinese Literature, a historical account written with much charm and taste and offering translations of the work of various Chinese writers.
The Far East.
C. M. VAN TYNE’S India in Ferment. Mahatma Gandhi and the general background by a scholar and skilled observer.
SIR HUGH CLIFFORD’S A Prince of Malaya and his earlier book, The Further Side of Silence. These are stories, true, fictional and semi-fictional, that take rank as literature. The author, a friend of Joseph Conrad, at the age of twenty-one was “the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles to the British dependencies in the East.”
SYDNEY A. CLOMAN’S Myself and a Few Moros. An American soldier’s lively but not unhumorous administrative experiences, with a good picture of what the United States has accomplished in colonial government.
H. O. MORGENTHALER’S Matahari. The Frederick O’Brienish adventures of a Swiss engineer prospecting for tin in the Malayan-Siamese jungle.
The Callers of the Wild.
ERNEST THOMPSON SETON’S Game Animals and the Lives They Live, Vol. I. There are to be four volumes.
WILLIAM T. HORNADAY’S The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, a book of personal observations by one of the keenest living observers and one who, as director of the New York Zoological Park, has under his eye and care the most complete collection in the world.
SAMUEL A. DERIEUX’S Animal Personalities, including domesticated animals.
CARL AKELEY’S Men and Animals: An Autobiography and MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY’S On the Gorilla Trail. Mr. Akeley went to the Belgian Congo on a gorilla expedition, and Mrs. Bradley, well-known as a novelist, her husband and their five-year-old daughter went, too. Each book enhances the interest of the other.
With Ice.
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD’S The Worst Journey in the World, describing, in its two volumes, Scott’s last Antarctic expedition, 1910-13.
Mediterranean.
V. C. SCOTT O’CONNOR’S A Vision of Morocco, which is both historical and descriptive, and C. E. ANDREWS’S Old Morocco and the Forbidden Atlas, written in a distinguished prose.
C. R. ASHBEE’S A Palestine Notebook, the result of administrative experience in 1918-22. The book has interesting personal portraits of Sir Herbert Samuels, General Allenby, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Morley, the late Lord Northcliffe, Lord Curzon, and others.
G. K. CHESTERTON’S The New Jerusalem.
ERNEST PEIXOTTO’S Through Spain and Portugal, where the author’s illustrations are so happily wedded to the text.
ROSITA FORBES’S The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara.
South America.
C. REGINALD ENOCK’S Republics of Central and South America, his Spanish America (two volumes), his Ecuador, his Peru, and his Mexico.
LEO E. MILLER’S In the Wilds of South America, an account of six years’ explorations.
Unique Books of Travel.
GEORGE EYRE-TODD’S The Clans of the Scottish Highlands. By an authority on Scots lore.
VAUGHAN CORNISH’S A Geography of the Great Capitals, from the “capital” of the Iroquois Indians, marked by a sacred fire, to the capitals of government, such as Rome and London, or of commerce, such as New York, and including vanished cities as well as existing ones.
THOMAS NELSON PAGE’S Washington and Its Romance, really a historical work. Mr. Page had been engaged upon it for several years before his death and left completed his account of the city’s early days.
S. R. ROGET’S Travel in the Two Last Centuries of Three Generations, a remarkable history, vivid, personal and interesting, derived from the records and letters of a single family and showing what rapid changes transportation underwent in the short period of two hundred years.
B. W. MATZ’S Dickensian Inns and Taverns, and his The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick, and also CECIL ALDRIN’S magnificent Old Inns—for all who hear the post horns blow and the stage coach drive up to the door.
STEPHEN GRAHAM’S Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies, the description of a vagabondage with Vachel Lindsay, with a report of many conversations which left the ground.