Part 17
After service as city editor of the Courier-Journal and as an editorial writer, he joined the staff of the World, New York. He covered the World’s Fair in Chicago and the events attending the dethronement of Liliuokalani in Hawaii, and then became editor and manager of the tri-weekly edition of the World, a job he continued to hold until his death. His first book of consequence was _The Sun of Saratoga_ (1897), which still sells. The first of his boys’ books, so-called, was _The Young Trailers_ (1906), written when his own son was eleven or twelve years old. But he made it a practice never to allow thought of the age of his readers to affect his treatment of a subject; and while this accounts for the number of older readers who enjoy his books, it probably also goes far to account for the success of his books with boys. He never wrote down to them.
His accuracy and his sense of reality are beyond praise. But the finest tribute to him is the fact that, as Miss Moore testifies, he is the only author whom older boys absolutely insist on having, for whose books they wait in line in the library, refusing to be put off with other titles.
III. THOMAS DIXON
Although Thomas Dixon’s new novel, _The Black Hood_ (1924), is a story of the Ku Klux Klan of 1870, and so a companion volume to _The Clansman_ (1905), it is customary to speak of _The Leopard’s Spots_ (1902), _The Clansman_, and _The Traitor_ (1907) as a trilogy of the Reconstruction period at the South. Of those who admired this series perhaps the best known and certainly the most unqualifiedly enthusiastic was Max Nordau, who hailed the novels as undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Similarly, _The One Woman_ (1903), _Comrades_ (1909), and _The Root of Evil_ (1911) are grouped together as a trilogy of Socialism, pleading for the development of individual character and opposing the Socialistic remedies for the ills of society.
Thomas Dixon was born at Shelby, North Carolina, 11 January 1864, the son of the Reverend Thomas Dixon and Amanda Elizabeth (McAfee) Dixon. The father was a Baptist clergyman. At 19 the son was graduated from Wake Forest College, North Carolina, with a scholarship admitting him as a special student in history and politics at Johns Hopkins University. A year later he became a student at the Greensboro (North Carolina) Law School. About the same time he was elected to the North Carolina legislature. He got his law degree, dabbled in politics, was admitted to practice in the North Carolina and United States courts, including the United States Supreme Court, had a part in two conspicuous murder trials of the day, and then, before he was 23, and some months after marrying Harriet Bussey, of Columbus, Georgia, resigned from the legislature to enter the Baptist ministry.
He held a pastorate for a year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and for a year in Boston before coming to the People’s Temple in New York. He preached in New York for ten years, 1889-1899. At the same time he became a lyceum lecturer and he continued to lecture until 1903. His outspokenness in the pulpit was coupled with a certain disregard of clerical custom; for example, he enjoyed going hunting. He began to publish books of sermons at least as early as 1891. He was 35 when he quitted the pulpit and turned to fiction.
Three of his novels are centered upon outstanding figures of the Civil War. _The Southerner_ (1913) is constructed about Lincoln, _The Victim_ (1914), about Jefferson Davis; _The Man in Gray_ (1921), about Robert E. Lee. _A Man of the People_ is a Lincoln play; _The Fall of a Nation_ depicts the conquest of the United States by the Imperial Nation. Such a novel as _The Way of a Man_ is more or less related to the novels dealing with Socialism; _The Sins of the Father_, a study of the results of miscegenation, belongs with _The Clansman_ group.
It was in 1915, ten years after the sensational success of _The Clansman_, that David Wark Griffith produced his film based on the novel under the title, “The Birth of a Nation.”
The new novel of the Klan, _The Black Hood_, is concerned with the time when the original Ku Klux Klan had accomplished the work for which it was organized and was becoming more or less of a menace to the liberty of the Southerners among whom it flourished. Mr. Dixon’s hero opposes the Klan’s methods as being false to the spirit in which the Klan was founded. He is successful in his stand after many exciting adventures. There is a romantic interest interwoven in the story.
IV. STEPHEN CRANE
The author of _The Red Badge of Courage_ has lately been the subject of a brilliant biography. Mr. Thomas Beer’s _Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters_ has the color and the abiding fascination of its subject, if sometimes a trifle too cryptic and oracular. The point of _The Red Badge of Courage_ is its record of war as the experience of the individual, any war in any age. The book, a product of purely imaginative experience by a youth of twenty-two to twenty-four, lights up its single theme as completely as a Verrey flare exposes some small corner of a battle. Reading either Crane’s work or Mr. Beer’s study, one can no more doubt that Crane was a genius. He had the intense, piercing, personal vision of the isolated, unexplained (and unexplainable) artist. Such a figure is not to be produced by any sedulous process of education; it is not a triumphant burbank of literary cultivation. Although people remember, or, at least, generally have heard of, _The Red Badge of Courage_, there is a sharp need for republication of most of Crane’s work in a good edition; for _The Open Boat_ and _The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky_ are of the utmost importance, the first on the evidence of Joseph Conrad, the second on the evidence of Stephen Crane. If one were asked to pick the American authors of most interesting significance to literature at large, one would do well, I think, to let both Poe and Hawthorne wait at one side while one weighed carefully Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane.
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Other authors whose use of American history in fiction has interested huge audiences are Everett T. Tomlinson, Elmer Russell Gregor, Frederick Trevor Hill and Bernard Marshall. It is perhaps natural that their fiction should be spoken of, as Altsheler’s is often spoken of, as “stories for boys.” There is conclusive evidence, however, that about half of the readers of Altsheler are adults; and the percentage of adult readers for the books by Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Gregor, Mr. Hill and Mr. Marshall is heavy. This might be inferred easily enough from the simple fact that between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 copies of Mr. Tomlinson’s books have been sold.
Everett T. Tomlinson, born in 1859, had a boyish passion for natural history and another for baseball. From Williams College he went into teaching, becoming headmaster of a boys’ school, where he still played ball. For twenty-three years he was pastor of a church in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was appointed a member of the New Jersey Public Library Commission when it was formed in 1901, and became its chairman in 1921. His first book appeared thirty years ago. Besides many fictions, such as _The Mysterious Rifleman_ and _Scouting on the Border_, he is the author of a _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_ and such books as _Places Young Americans Want to Know_ and _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_. His new book (1924) is called _Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_.
Elmer Russell Gregor, born in 1878, was graduated from a military academy and spent twenty-four hours in the drygoods business, six months in real estate, and more successful periods as a farmer and stock raiser, and in lumbering, quarrying and mining. His real job since 1910 has been writing, but, as he says, his hobbies are Indians (foremost), ornithology, natural history, forestry, hunting and fishing, and breeding prize-winning dogs, chickens and pigeons, so “you see I don’t have much time for work.” He lives in Southport, Connecticut, but has traveled much and “my circle of intimate acquaintances includes cowboys, ‘sour-doughs’ (miners), Injuns, mountaineers, and lumberjacks—all good fellows.” The books that have been most popular with his readers are stories of young Indian chiefs, divided into two series, the Western Indian Stories and the Eastern Indian Stories, and, most recently, the Jim Mason series, which follows the fortunes of a white frontiersman in the days of the French and Indian wars. _Captain Jim Mason_ (1924) is his latest work.
Frederick Trevor Hill, born in 1866, a graduate of Yale and a graduate in law at Columbia, on the staff of General Pershing and cited by Pershing, is the author of very widely-known books on the law, both as fact and as material for fiction. His interest in American history has led him to study the three or four outstanding figures in such books as _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_, _On the Trail of Washington_, and _Washington The Man of Action_. Why, it may be asked, two books on the Father of his country? And the response must be that _On the Trail of Washington_ is, as the subtitle explains, “a narrative of Washington’s boyhood and manhood, based on his writings and other authentic documents,” and is concerned with the growth of early years; whereas _Washington The Man of Action_ is an attempt to portray the mature man as he really was, not as the plaster saint of his earliest biographers.
Bernard Marshall was born on a farm twenty miles south of Boston, one of a family fond of books and music. Having resolved to be a writer, he thought he could play in orchestras and make a living until he had his foothold as an author. Thereupon twenty years were passed as a musician, a legal stenographer, a writer of technical articles and in advertising work. Then, after trying to help build ships to win the war, Mr. Marshall settled in Berkeley, California, a half mile from the university, and began to write historical romances, _Walter of Tiverton_, _Cedric the Forester_, and _The Torch Bearers_. The last two and his new American historical romance, _Redcoat and Minute Man_, form a Liberty Series, showing three crucial points in the history of the Anglo-Saxon struggle for popular liberties, Magna Charta (_Cedric the Forester_), Oliver Cromwell (_The Torch Bearers_), and the American Revolution (_Redcoat and Minute Man_).
BOOKS BY EMERSON HOUGH
1895 _The Singing Mouse Stories_ 1897 _The Story of the Cowboy_ 1900 _The Girl at the Half-Way House_ 1902 _The Mississippi Bubble_ 1903 _The Way to the West_ 1904 _The Law of the Land_ 1905 _Heart’s Desire_ 1906 _The King of Gee Whiz_ 1906 _The Story of the Outlaw_ 1907 _The Way of a Man_ 1909 _Fifty-Four Forty or Fight_ 1909 _The Sowing_ 1910 _The Young Alaskans_ 1911 _The Purchase Price_ 1912 _John Rawn—Prominent Citizen_ 1913 _The Lady and the Pirate_ 1913 _The Young Alaskans in the Rockies_ 1914 _The Young Alaskans on the Trail_ 1915 _The Magnificent Adventure_ 1916 _The Man Next Door_ 1917 _The Broken Gate_ 1918 _The Young Alaskans in the Far North_ 1918 _The Way Out_ 1919 _The Sagebrusher_ 1919 _The Web_ 1922 _The Covered Wagon_ 1923 _North of 36_ 1924 _Mother of Gold_
SOURCES ON EMERSON HOUGH
_The Men Who Make Our Novels_, by George Gordon. Moffat, Yard and Company. Page 140 _et seq._ This book now published by Dodd, Mead and Company.
Autobiographical article in the American Magazine: 1918 or earlier.
Editorial article in the Saturday Evening Post, April or May, 1923.
“A Defense of the American Tradition,” by William MacLeod Raine, in the Author and Journalist, Denver, Colorado, 1923.
BOOKS BY JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER
THE YOUNG TRAILERS SERIES: Frontier Life in the Revolution. Two boys, Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, and three scouts are the chief characters:
_The Young Trailers_ _The Forest Runners_ _The Free Rangers_ _The Eyes of the Woods_ _The Keepers of the Trail_ _The Riflemen of the Ohio_ _The Scouts of the Valley_ _The Border Watch_
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR SERIES. The period is from 1754 to 1763 and the central characters are Robert Lennox, an American boy; Tayoga, an Onondaga Indian; and David Willet, a hunter:
_The Hunters of the Hills_ _The Shadow of the North_ _The Rulers of the Lakes_ _The Masters of the Peaks_ _The Lords of the Wild_ _The Sun of Quebec_
THE TEXAN SERIES. Three stories of the Texas struggle for independence, with an American boy, Ned Fulton, in the foreground:
_The Texan Star_ _The Texan Scouts_ _The Texan Triumph_
THE CIVIL WAR SERIES. The principal battles of the Civil War are covered. In four of the stories Dick Mason, who fights for the North, is the leading character; in the other four his cousin, Harry Kenton, fighting on the Southern side, is featured:
_The Guns of Bull Run_ _The Guns of Shiloh_ _The Scouts of Stonewall_ _The Sword of Antietam_ _The Star of Gettysburg_ _The Rock of Chickamauga_ _The Shades of the Wilderness_ _The Tree of Appomattox_
INDIAN WARS OF THE WEST AND SOUTHWEST. Not a series:
_Apache Gold_ _The Last of the Chiefs_ (Custer’s defeat) _The Quest of the Four_ (Mexican War)
THE GREAT WEST SERIES:
_The Great Sioux Trail_ _The Lost Hunters_
THE WORLD WAR SERIES. John Scott, a young American in Germany when the war opens, and Phillip Lannes, a young French friend, are the central figures:
_The Guns of Europe_ _The Hosts of the Air_ _The Forest of Swords_
HISTORICAL ROMANCES. More definitely for older readers. Not in series:
_A Soldier of Manhattan_ (French and Indian War) _The Sun of Saratoga_ (Burgoyne’s surrender) _The Wilderness Road_ (Pioneers west of the Alleghenies) _My Captive_ (Revolutionary romance) _A Herald of the West_ (War of 1812) _In Circling Camps_ (Civil War) _The Last Rebel_ _The Candidate_ (the romance of a political campaign)
SOURCES ON JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER
“Joseph A. Altsheler and American History,” by Anne Carroll Moore. Pamphlet published by D. Appleton & Company.
Article by Anne Carroll Moore in The Bookman for November, 1918. Reprinted in _Roads to Childhood_, by Anne Carroll Moore.
“Some Worthwhile Books,” by Robert Page Lincoln in The Review.
“A Kentucky Writer of Historical Novels,” by John Wilson Townsend, in the Lexington (Kentucky) Leader for 18 May 1912.
BOOKS BY THOMAS DIXON
1891 _Living Problems in Religion and Social Science_ 1894 _Sermons on Ingersoll_ 1897 _The Failure of Protestantism in New York_ 1902 _What Is Religion?_ 1902 _The Leopard’s Spots_ 1903 _The One Woman_ 1905 _The Clansman_ 1905 _The Life Worth Living_ 1907 _The Traitor_ 1909 _Comrades_ 1911 _The Root of Evil_ 1912 _The Sins of the Father_ 1913 _The Southerner_ (Abraham Lincoln) 1914 _The Victim_ (Jefferson Davis) 1915 _The Foolish Virgin_ 1916 _The Fall of a Nation_ 1918 _The Way of a Man_ 1920 _A Man of the People._ Play. (Abraham Lincoln) 1921 _The Man in Gray_ (Robert E. Lee) 1924 _The Black Hood_
SOURCES ON THOMAS DIXON
“The Men Who Make Our Novels,” by George Gordon, page 249. Moffat, Yard and Company (now published by Dodd, Mead and Company).
Articles on the photoplay, “The Birth of a Nation,” made from _The Clansman_ are too numerous to be cited. The reader may consult the READERS’ GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE for 1915-16.
BOOKS BY STEPHEN CRANE
1895 _The Red Badge of Courage_
SOURCES ON STEPHEN CRANE
_Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters_, by Thomas Beer. Alfred A. Knopf: 1923.
BOOKS BY EVERETT T. TOMLINSON
(For more complete list, see _Who’s Who in America_: 1924-25)
1908 _Scouting with Mad Anthony_ 1915 _Places Young Americans Want to Know_ 1916 _The Trail of the Mohawk Chief_ 1917 _The Story of General Pershing_ 1918 _Fighters Young Americans Want to Know_ 1920 _The Pursuit of the Apache Chief_ 1920 _Scouting on the Border_ 1921 _The Mysterious Rifleman_ 1921 _Young People’s History of the American Revolution_ 1923 _Scouting on the Old Frontier_ 1923 _Stories of the American Revolution_ 1924 _Scouting in the Wilderness_ 1924 _The Pioneer Scouts of Ohio_
SOURCES ON EVERETT T. TOMLINSON
“The Historical Story for Boys,” by Everett T. Tomlinson. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company.
_Who’s Who in America._
BOOKS BY ELMER RUSSELL GREGOR
JIM MASON STORIES. The hero is a young frontiersman.
1923 _Jim Mason, Backwoodsman_ 1923 _Jim Mason, Scout_ 1924 _Captain Jim Mason_
WESTERN INDIAN STORIES. The hero is White Otter, a young Sioux chief:
1917 _White Otter_ 1920 _The War Trail_ 1922 _Three Sioux Scouts_
EASTERN INDIAN STORIES. The hero is Running Fox, a young chief of the Delawares:
1918 _Running Fox_ 1920 _The White Wolf_ 1922 _Spotted Deer_
BOOKS BY FREDERICK TREVOR HILL
(For more complete list, see _Who’s Who in America_)
1909 _On the Trail of Washington_ 1911 _On the Trail of Grant and Lee_ 1914 _Washington the Man of Action_
BOOKS BY BERNARD MARSHALL
1921 _Cedric the Forester_ 1923 _The Torch Bearers_ 1923 _Walter of Tiverton_ 1924 _Redcoat and Minute Man_
15. The Fireside Theatre
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As the cost of the theater mounts up—the price of seats, the price of achieving Broadway productions—the Fireside Theater audience is steadily recruited. If there has existed a prejudice against reading plays, it is melting. The mere force of conditions would tend to destroy such a prejudice. The path to Broadway becomes steadily more difficult and the path away from Broadway narrower—all because it costs too much to produce a play on Broadway, and far too much to take the play, once so produced, on the road. Soon the Broadway theater will survive as the horse survives; and Broadway productions, inspired by the same motives as the production of horse races, will be nobly upheld by the same justificatory excuse—it will be argued that they improve the breed of plays.
It does no harm to have a few horse shows or to have a few Broadway productions; but the truth must be stated that the theater in America no longer depends upon the amusement business in the vicinity of Forty-second Street. To an extent never before equaled, plays are now published in America regardless of their production; are bought and read; are read aloud for an exceptional evening’s entertainment; and are acted under license, and with payment of very moderate fees, by people to whom a play is a play and not a pair of high-priced tickets.
For amateur actors, many of them amazingly capable, there are now available plays of every length and of every conceivable variety of type, settings, and casts; of extreme, moderate and very slight demands upon the actors’ skill; tragic, comedic, farcical. And for readers of plays there are certain immutable advantages that have been pointed out before but will bear stressing again, such as that the performance always begins on time, and at _your_ chosen time, and that the actors, being your own creatures, are always ideal.
I shall try to speak first of some anthologies of plays, then of plays by individual authors, and finally of a few books about the drama and the theater.
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First I would put Montrose J. Moses’s ample works. His _Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern_ is not only a complete history of the British stage, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1914; it presents the complete texts of twenty-one English and Irish plays superbly representative of its century. _Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional_ does much the same thing for Europe as a whole. Eight European countries are represented in this anthology, which contains the complete texts of fifteen plays, with a general survey of the development of Continental drama and individual bibliographies. But the greatest demand is for anthologies of one-act plays; a demand richly met by the following standard works:
_Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors_, compiled by Margaret G. Mayorga, contains the complete texts of twenty-four, all of which have been produced in Little Theaters. Among the dramatists included are Percy Mackaye, Stuart Walker, Jeannette Marks, George Middleton, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Beulah Marie Dix.
_Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_ edited by Frank Shay and Pierre Loving, is an international selection of astonishing variety and exceptional merit.
_Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American_, edited by Frank Shay, is an anthology which affords variety of choice for acting and ample variety for the reader.
Barrett H. Clark’s _Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors_ contains complete texts of twenty one-act plays. Some of the authors are Pinero, Jones, Arnold Bennett, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Granville Barker and Lord Dunsany. Mr. Moses is the compiler of _Representative One-Act Plays by Continental Authors_. Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Strindberg, Andreyev, Franz Wedekind, Sudermann, von Hofmannsthal, Lavedan are some of the playwrights whose work is included; and the book is equipped with bibliographies.
Frank Shay is the compiler of _Twenty-Five Short Plays: International_, in which is much exotic work—plays from Bengal and Burma, China and Japan and Uruguay, as well as from countries with whose drama we have more contact. But as an example of Mr. Shay’s selections we may note, from among the writers whose work is fairly familiar, that Austria is represented by a Schnitzler piece, Italy by one of Robert Bracco’s comedies, Hungary by Lajos Biro’s “The Bridegroom,” Russia by an example of Chekhov and Spain by Echegaray.
I may at this point advantageously call attention to Mr. Shay’s _One Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre_, and his new _One Thousand and One Longer Plays_—not anthologies, but exhaustive lists. The plays are listed alphabetically by authors and by organizations, and the title, nature of the work, number of men and women characters, publisher, and price of each play is given.
Certain other books, though offering a number of one-act plays, have too few inclusions to be described as anthologies. Such are _One-Act Plays from the Yiddish_, translated by Etta Block and presenting half a dozen effective pieces; _Three Modern Japanese Plays_, translated by Yozan T. Iwasaki and Glenn Hughes, and showing the direct result of Western influences on the Japanese theatre; and _Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays_, by A. P. Herbert and others, one of the British Drama League series.
Colin Campbell Clements, whose _Plays for a Folding Theatre_ is known to most amateurs, has a new book this season called _Plays for Pagans_, containing five entertaining short plays, all easy of stage production. Another such group is to be found in _Garden Varieties_, by Kenyon Nicholson, six plays, most of them farcical and amusing.
Certain other one-act plays I shall speak of later in this chapter. But the record of excellent anthologies is not yet completed. _A Treasury of Plays for Children_, by Mr. Moses, provides fourteen dramas with the abundance of incident and action which young people demand but with considerable literary merit besides. Mr. Shay, again, is the compiler of _A Treasury of Plays for Women_, eighteen in all, requiring only women to cast or containing only such male characters as may easily be enacted by women; and also of _A Treasury of Plays for Men_, twenty-one altogether, which men may stage without feminine help. _A Treasury of Plays for Men_ also offers a working library list for the Little Theater and a bibliography of other anthologies.
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