Part 10

1887 _Expiation_ 1894 _A Monk of Cruta_ 1895 **_A Daughter of the Marionis._ First title in America was _To Win the Love He Sought_. 1895 _The Peer and the Woman_ 1896 _False Evidence_ 1896 _A Modern Prometheus_ 1896 *_The Mystery of Mr. Bernard Brown_ 1896 _The Wooing of Fortune_ 1897 _The Amazing Judgment_ 1898 *_As a Man Lives._ First title in America was _The Yellow House_. 1898 _A Daughter of Astrea_ 1898 *_Mysterious Mr. Sabin_ 1899 *_Mr. Marx’s Secret_ 1899 _The Postmaster of Market Deighton_ 1899 **_The Man and His Kingdom_ 1900 *_A Millionaire of Yesterday_ 1900 *_The World’s Great Snare_ 1901 **_The Survivor_ 1902 **_A Sleeping Memory_ In England: _The Great Awakening_ 1902 *_Enoch Strone_ In England: _Master of Men_ 1903 *_The Traitors_ 1903 **_A Prince of Sinners_ 1903 **_The Yellow Crayon_ 1904 **_Anna the Adventuress_ 1904 **_The Betrayal_ 1905 **_A Maker of History_ 1905 **_The Master Mummer_ 1906 *_A Lost Leader_ 1906 _The Tragedy of Andrea_ 1907 **_The Malefactor_ In England: _Mr. Wingrave, Millionaire_ 1907 *_Berenice_ 1908 *_The Avenger_ In England: _The Conspirators_ 1908 **_The Great Secret_ In England: _The Secret_ 1908 *_The Distributors_, “by Anthony Partridge” In England: _Ghosts of Society_. Another title in America was _The Plunderers_ 1908 *_Passers-By_, “by Anthony Partridge” 1909 *_The Governors_ 1909 **_The Missioner_ 1909 **_Jeanne of the Marshes_ 1909 *_The Kingdom of Earth_, “by Anthony Partridge” In England: _The Black Watcher_ 1910 *_The Long Arm of Manister_ In England: _The Long Arm_ 1910 **_The Illustrious Prince_ 1910 **_The Lost Ambassador_ In England: _The Missing Delora_ 1911 *_The Moving Finger_ In England: _A Falling Star_ 1911 *_The Golden Web_, “by Anthony Partridge” 1911 **_Havoc_ 1912 **_Peter Ruff and the Double Four_ In England: _The Double Four_ 1912 **_The Lighted Way_ 1912 *_Those Other Days_ (short stories) 1912 *_The Court of St. Simon_, “by Anthony Partridge” 1913 **_The Mischief Maker_ 1913 *_For the Queen_ (short stories) 1913 _Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures_ 1913 **_The Tempting of Tavernake_ In England: _The Temptation of Tavernake_ 1914 _The Amazing Partnership_ 1914 *_The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_ 1914 **_The Way of These Women_ 1915 *_An Amiable Charlatan_ In England: _The Game of Liberty_ 1915 **_Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo_ 1915 *_The Black Box_ 1915 **_A People’s Man_ 1916 _The Mysteries of the Riviera_ 1916 **_The Vanished Messenger_ 1917 **_The Hillman_ 1917 **_The Kingdom of the Blind_ 1918 **_The Double Traitor_ 1918 **_The Cinema Murder_ In England: _The Other Romilly_ 1918 **_The Pawns Count_ 1918 **_The Zeppelin’s Passenger_ In England: _Mr. Lessingham Goes Home_ 1919 **_The Wicked Marquis_ 1919 **_The Curious Quest_ 1920 **_The Great Impersonation_ 1920 **_The Box with the Broken Seals_ In England: _The Strange Case of Mr. Jocelyn Thew_ 1920 **_The Devil’s Paw_ 1920 _Aaron Rod, Diviner_ 1920 _Ambrose Lavendale, Diplomat_ 1920 _Hon. Algernon Knox, Detective_ 1921 **_Jacob’s Ladder_ 1921 **_The Profiteers_ 1921 **_Nobody’s Man_ 1922 **_The Great Prince Shan_ 1922 **_The Evil Shepherd_ 1923 **_The Seven Conundrums_ 1923 **_The Mystery Road_ 1923 **_Michael’s Evil Deeds_ 1924 **_The Wrath to Come_ 1924 **_The Passionate Quest_

SOURCES ON E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

In addition to those referred to in the text and in footnotes, the reader is urged to consult the full-page interview and account appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 8 March 1924 (“Oppenheim the Master Maker of Plots,” by James Walter Smith). This is by all odds the best and most interesting single article. It quotes Mr. Oppenheim’s amanuensis as saying that he dictates 5,000 words a day on good days and about 4,000 words on an average day—a phenomenal speed. “In summer he dictates out of doors and I take it down in my note-book. In winter, he dictates direct to the machine. He likes a low easy-chair while working. It’s amazing to me how sure he is in his dictation, and what a grip he has on his plots. Occasionally he has two or more stories moving at the same time, but no matter what the number of characters or of the places where the action occurs, he rarely becomes confused. When he is held up, sometimes by a trifling detail, or by the more important one of getting a character out of a difficulty, he simply says: ‘Three dots’ ... like that, and moves on. This may happen several times in the course of a sitting, and I usually can divine, as the story proceeds, when I’m going to hear that ‘three dots.’ When the dictation is finished, he goes out for a game of golf, perhaps. Then next day he takes up the typescript where the suspension points appear and unerringly fills in the bits which bothered him. This would be easy if the case were single, but where there are several ‘three dot’ cases it demands skill and concentration to get out of the bunker.”

9. G. Stanley Hall, Psychologist

i

In describing a novel course he gave at Clark University and which he called psychogenesis—the birth and evolution of the soul—G. Stanley Hall remarks in his autobiography, _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_: “Interest, like steam in an engine, must be developed over a large surface, although when put to work it has to be applied to a small one.” That is true of this chapter. The large surfaces of Dr. Hall’s long and unusual career can be depended on, I think, to develop interest in my reader; although whether that interest will apply itself to psychology, methods of teaching, child study, or the central figure of the Christian faith is uncertain and perhaps immaterial. A developed interest, before passing on to any of these things, does well to linger for some time on the man himself, who had so many vicissitudes and whose account of his life, outside and inside, is the best of a certain type since Benjamin Franklin’s, which it most nearly resembles.

Both Franklin and Dr. Hall were Yankees; both were much abroad and transcended their Puritan beginnings on the intellectual side, though in the sphere of conduct each was a tree inclined as the twig had been bent. Both were zestful of every human experience; each alike, though for a somewhat differing purpose, has gone far and deep in the matter of self-examination, writing down his confessions and conclusions for the world to read. If Franklin is more clear and practical and personal, Dr. Hall takes the reader to greater levels and to vistas of

“fresh woods and pastures new.”

His _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is a book of more than ordinary account simply for this reason. It has distinct faults. Its material is a little diffuse and not too well organized; it is far from lucid in places and lapses into technical language where it need not do so. In addition, Dr. Hall’s particular interests are allowed to override the literary, and sometimes the human, interest. The introductory chapter perplexes and dismays the ordinary reader with a series of conclusions couched in scientific lingo; the second chapter repels him with its dullness. Yet, if he persist, he will soon find himself unable to stop until the book is finished; certain chapters and parts of chapters will absorb his whole attention; and in the end he will have a sense of having had glimpses into many mansions, all spacious; of having come in touch with largeness and nobility of soul.

ii

Granville Stanley Hall, who died on 24 April 1924, was born 1 February 1846 in Ashfield, Massachusetts. His father was of impetuous temperament, his mother a rather submissive and devoutly pious woman. There were three children, all brought up on a farm. From the first, Stanley Hall was keenly interested in animals. But he was also one of those boys whose imagination is strongly exercised by the figures of frost on a windowpane, the broken march of clouds across the sky, the shapes and images seen in dancing firelight and the visions excited by musical sounds. He was sensitive and both brave and timid; pacifistic by temper, he could persist in a course once taken. He was essentially a lonely child, as such children often are, and this loneliness was to become more pronounced as he grew older, developing a habit of isolation which was to be his salvation in the greatest crisis in his career.

His schooling culminated in Williams College, which gave him his A. B. in 1867. He was a classmate of Hamilton Wright Mabie. Mark Hopkins—he of whom it was said that “a university was Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other”—was president of the college and also “professor of moral and intellectual philosophy.” An important friendship of this time was with Charles Eliot Norton.

A single year in New York followed. Young Hall was a student at the Union Theological Seminary, but he was also twenty-one, in New York for the first time, full of a healthy curiosity and bound to satisfy it. He went to the theatre as well as all manner of churches and was one of a number employed by the City Missionary Society to invite women of the street to attend the midnight mission. Through the friendly act of Henry Ward Beecher money was provided for Hall to go abroad and study, the lender being Henry Sage, the benefactor of Cornell University. It was already apparent that Hall had no vocation to the ministry. He dreamed of becoming a professor. Darwin, Spencer and Tyndall, Renan, Strauss, Emerson and Carlyle had profoundly influenced him. In the summer of 1868 he went to Germany, first to the University of Bonn and then to that of Berlin. Here he dabbled in all manner of subjects, from theology to surgery and mental clinics. On his return to America he wished to teach the history of philosophy but was unable to lest he should, in the opinion of a college president, “unsettle men and teach them to hold no opinions.”

Private tutoring was followed by a spell of teaching at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was at this time that the first volume of Wundt’s _Physiological Psychology_ was published. In a sense, psychology as we know it began with this work, so definite in its experiments and conclusions. Here was something one could lay hold of! Hall read it, was amply fascinated, and left Antioch, resolved to go to Leipzig and study under Wundt. But at Cambridge he was met by the offer of an instructorship at Harvard and stopped to teach for a year, going on to Leipzig in 1876. He spent a year in Berlin, some time in Paris and England, and came home to resume his friendship with William James and others, to lecture on education under Harvard auspices, and to cast about. He was much in debt and had no prospects. He had married. Having spent three years in Germany between the ages of 22 and 25, and three more from 32 to 35, “the narrow, inflexible orthodoxy, the Puritan eviction of the joy that comes from amusements, from life, the provincialism of our interests, our prejudice against continental ways of living and thinking, the crudeness of our school system, the elementary character of the education imparted in our higher institutions of learning—all these seemed to me depressing, almost exasperating. I fairly loathed and hated so much that I saw about me that I now realize more clearly than ever how possible it would have been for me to have drifted into some, perhaps almost any, camp of radicals and to have come into such open rupture with the scheme of things as they were that I should have been stigmatized as dangerous, at least for any academic career, where the motto was Safety First.” But he must teach or go back to the farm.

iii

Luck was with him. In 1881 he was invited to lecture on psychology at the Johns Hopkins University, toward which all ambitious young professors were looking wistfully. He was then asked to teach a half year after which he was appointed full professor for five years at a salary then very generous. The seven fat years—for he remained until 1888—had begun. The great Gilman was president of the university, Gildersleeve taught Greek and Rowland taught physics; Simon Newcomb, astronomy; Spencer, Huxley, Kelvin, Matthew Arnold, James Bryce, Freeman the historian, James Russell Lowell, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and William James were visitors and, for the most part, lecturers. Among Dr. Hall’s pupils were John Dewey, J. McKeen Cattell, Joseph Jastrow, James H. Hyslop and one young man who took a long Sunday afternoon walk with the professor “in which he debated with me the question of majoring in psychology, although I felt that his mind was already made up not to do so, for his previous studies and his Southern instincts and family traditions already inclined him too strongly toward the historical and political field.” This was Woodrow Wilson. “Had he chosen psychology,” comments Dr. Hall, “he might never have been President; but, on the other hand, if he had, he might have learned to do better teamwork and have been more ready to compromise and concede.”

When he was just forty-two Dr. Hall’s lean years began—lean in the sense that he gave up highly congenial work and surroundings and a maximum salary which was offered him to embark on a new and untried enterprise, in which he was to endure a degree of distress and anxiety and an amount of difficulty and odium hard to describe. The history of his relations with Clark University, first publicly told in Chapter VII of his _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_, is likely without a parallel. Certainly it throws more light on human nature than any psychologist could hope to do by a lifetime of experiment and reasoning. Briefly, this was what happened:

Jonas Gilman Clark (1815-1900), a successful wagonmaker, had made a fortune in California in 1849 by selling mining implements. He was one of the active Vigilantes and a friend of Leland Stanford. After attaining importance in San Francisco he moved to New York and increased his wealth by dealing in real estate; but with the passage of years he returned to his native county in Massachusetts. The example of Leland Stanford, his own childlessness, and a desire to do something for his native county led him to resolve to found Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Hall was asked to be president and accepted the post.

Mr. Clark immediately gave a building and grounds and his note for $600,000 for the university, with a note of $100,000 for a library. This, a total value of something like $1,000,000, was the largest single gift that had ever been made to education in New England. The outlook was of unprecedented brilliance, for Mr. Clark’s expressed intention was to leave all his wealth to the institution, and his fortune was variously estimated at from $8,000,000 to $18,000,000 or even $20,000,000. The founder readily agreed to Dr. Hall’s suggestion that he, Dr. Hall, spend a year abroad studying the universities of the world.

Surely no one has ever had an opportunity equalling the year which followed. Dr. Hall omitted to visit no university of importance in Europe. The mere recital of the places he saw is impressive enough; when the imagination tries to take in the educational panorama unrolled before his eyes the task becomes impossible. One small cloud darkened the horizon. Mr. Clark had instructed him to bring to this side several of the best German professors. Dr. Hall was put in a painful situation by engaging Von Holst of Freiburg and then having his act disowned. He did not suspect that it was to be only the first of a series of bitter and terrible disappointments.

Clark was opened as a university for graduate students only with few pupils but high hopes and splendid prospects on 2 October 1889. A few simple figures, as Dr. Hall remarks, give the key to the near-tragedy that followed. “During the first year we spent for salaries and equipment, $135,000; the second year, Mr. Clark contributed $50,000 above the income of the $600,000 that had actually been transferred to the board of trustees, making a total income of $92,000; the third year, he gave $26,000, making it $68,000; the fourth year, $12,000, making it $54,000; and the fifth and subsequent years of his life he gave nothing, so that the whole institution subsisted upon the income of its funds, namely, the $600,000 for the University and $100,000 for the library.” What was wrong?

Mr. Clark couldn’t or wouldn’t say. He seems to have been a singularly inarticulate individual. Whether he lost heavily in the misfortunes that overtook the British firm of Baring Brothers, or on his own account, remains uncertain. It may be that he had, all along, much less money than was supposed; or it may be that a university cost more than he expected. There was consternation over his dwindling annual gifts and a deeper anxiety over his failure to add to the permanent endowment. Collectively and individually the trustees implored him to say what the university might expect; at least, they would know where they stood; but Mr. Clark remained silent. “He sanctioned every engagement and knew exactly the liabilities we were incurring, and the optimistic view,” says Dr. Hall, “was that he could not possibly bring men here or start departments and then fail to sustain them.” It was too optimistic. Men were let go because there was no money to keep them. After a personal quarrel with a professor, Clark compelled the board to request the man’s resignation, which they did. The founder would smilingly listen to instructors who asked for supplies, refer them to Dr. Hall, and then order Dr. Hall to deny the requests. A personal tragedy at the beginning of this time befell Dr. Hall as he was convalescent from an attack of diphtheria so severe that for weeks he could not speak, but had to write on a slate. He had been sent to the country when, one night, through an accident in a gas fixture, his wife and the younger of his two children, aged six, were smothered to death.

“As the second year drew to a close and the trustees fully realized that Mr. Clark would almost certainly not maintain expenditures on the basis on which they had been begun, and as there was already much discontent in the faculty, their anxiety focused on the future, and I was instructed to do everything possible not to alienate Mr. Clark to such a degree that he would bestow elsewhere the remainder of his fortune, still believed to be very large. To this end I must, with what grace and tact I could, accept the situation; and when asked, as I often was when I was trying to get his wishes carried through with the faculty as a whole or individually, whether it was my will or the founder’s that I was trying to enforce, must give them to understand it was my own and thus shield Mr. Clark. This was most humiliating to my honor and even to my conscience but the situation demanded nothing less, for the entire future of the institution seemed to hang upon this.” The foreseen result was a faculty revolt; a majority of the staff offered their resignations because they had lost confidence in Dr. Hall. The trustees left the affair in Dr. Hall’s hands, but as those hands were tied by the necessity of keeping a close secret the financial situation and by the necessity of “shielding” Clark from censure, he could explain but lamely.

At this point President Harper of the new University of Chicago came to Worcester, secretly engaged a majority of the faculty at double the Clark salaries, and then tried to hire Dr. Hall for a salary larger than he was receiving. Under Dr. Hall’s threat to make the facts public and to appeal to John D. Rockefeller himself—Mr. Rockefeller being Chicago’s backer—Harper receded a little. Dr. Hall managed to salvage a few of his men from the raid. Clark University was now reduced to living on the four per cent. income from its $600,000 and waiting for its founder to die, “when it would be clear to us whether we must close up, live along feebly, or enter upon the realization of our large and high initial hopes by finding that, after all, he had vast means and had not diverted them to other sources.”

Andrew Carnegie promised $100,000 if an equal amount were raised; when only $37,000 could be raised and Mr. Carnegie was told why he dropped the condition and gave his $100,000 outright. Somehow, the next half dozen years were got through. There was a continuous false position for Dr. Hall and continuous and heavy censure to be borne. He had to suppose that the end would justify the means; and the end, when it came, gave him only partial satisfaction. Clark had got to spend a good deal of time in Europe, perhaps as an aid to his disgusting reticence. He was at outs with the trustees, all men of distinction and all sustaining Dr. Hall as well as they could. The founder was also in disagreement with Dr. Hall over a collegiate department, which he wanted and which Dr. Hall—one would think, very naturally, in the acutely trying circumstances—didn’t want. The tenth anniversary of Clark was celebrated with a brave spirit in 1899. It was that darkest hour before the dawn. The perverse Clark died the year following leaving a nasty will with five codicils and expensive litigious possibilities, most of which were realized. In the last of the codicils Clark revoked certain strictures upon Dr. Hall contained in the will itself. However, a collegiate department was provided and university and college came at once into possession of nearly the whole estate, the rest to follow at Mrs. Clark’s death. Dr. Hall, who had been teaching and lecturing and worrying, was free at last from his scapegoat rôle. Four years later he was to publish in two volumes his masterly study of _Adolescence_; and every few years after that were to see an important book come from his hands. He was in his fifties and at last comparatively free and unhampered. Not only his interest in child study but his wide knowledge of methods of teaching (pedagogy), of psychology and philosophy, of the vast amount of experimental work in hand everywhere and his novel conceptions of the soul’s progress were to bear fruit.

iv

He had always been interested in genetics—beginnings. His psychology, as it matured in a long lifetime of study and reflection, is different from the psychology of other men chiefly in this respect. The one word of science which always had the power to fire Dr. Hall’s imagination is “evolution.” Let not the fundamentalist rage, at this point of this chapter, nor the reader imagine a vain thing. It is greatly doubtful if, deep in his heart, G. Stanley Hall cared two sticks about Darwinian evolution as such. But evolution as an idea was to him a psychic reality.

Let me explain, as well as I can, in the simplest terms.

A psychic reality is something in which one’s faith is so strong that one neither needs nor wishes proofs. It is what you firmly believe; what you believe in so firmly that, so far as you are concerned, it exists. The thing may not exist, but if it did you would order your life just as you do now. Those who live under the shadow of such a belief need no umbrella of evidence spread over them.