Part 24

One of the excellences of _The Four Stragglers_ is the economy of means; there is not a character in the book who is not indispensable to the action. There is, too, an effect of a Monte Cristo tale, due probably to the treasure quest, the island, and the hiding-place devised by the madman’s cunning. The suspense is not only sustained but is steadily intensified; and the book has some scenes very exceptional in their bizarre character. Take this, which is imaginative and not merely inventive. The setting is an aquarium at night, brilliantly lighted, but with the window shades tightly drawn down:

“Locke blinked a little in the light as he stepped forward. It reflected bewilderingly from the glass faces of the tanks that were everywhere about. He joined the old man in the center of the aquarium. Here there was an open space from which the tanks radiated off much after the manner of the spokes of a wheel. A heavy oriental rug was on the tiled floor, and ranged around the table were a number of big easy chairs.

“From under his dressing gown now the old man took a package that was wrapped in oiled silk, and laid it on the table.

“‘Money!’ he cried out abruptly. He suddenly commenced to titter again. ‘Did I not tell you I was being followed, always being followed? Well, last night they followed a wrong scent.... They were there—they are always there—watching—eyes are always watching.’ He broke into his insane titter again....

“Subconsciously Locke was aware that the old maniac was still talking, the crazed words rising in shrieks of passionate intensity—but he was no longer paying any attention to the other. He was staring again at the glass tank, behind and a little to one side of the old madman, that contained the sea-horse. It was only a small and diminutive thing, but, unless he were the victim of an hallucination, it had taken on an extraordinary appearance. It seemed to possess _human_ eyes; to assume almost the shape of a face—only there was a shadow across it. The water rippled a little. The sea-horse moved to the opposite corner of the tank—but the eyes remained in exactly the same spot.”

The reader of _The Four Stragglers_ will say, with entire truth: “There is no principal motif of either regeneration or sacrifice here.” No, but there is another motif which Frank L. Packard has reiterated with an equal persistence—punishment for evildoing. The story has, furthermore, a distinctly more ironical quality than Mr. Packard, in his warm indignation at moral disorder, in his determined institution of a moral order, has generally been able to fall back upon. If the wages of sin is death, as his story reminds us, the reward of greed is defeat and the possession of money as money is a grim futility. It is a sharp lesson from one who has learned it—how? I think of the fortunes made by _The Miracle Man_ and feel a Jimmie Dale smile on my lips (“his lips thinned”; “a mirthless smile was on his lips”) as it occurs to me that Mr. Packard could easily have learned it from simply watching others learn it at his expense. The bill for the lesson, so presented, does not seem unreasonable.

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Frank L. Packard and his wife and boys live in a particularly pleasant, and rather a roomy, house set back from the avenue which winds along the north bank of the St. Lawrence at Lachine. In the summer Mrs. Packard and the children may go to Kennebunkport in Maine or some other spot on the seashore. Then will the husband and father spend all the hours of daylight at the Royal Montreal Golf Club, the oldest golf club on this continent, with a clubhouse whose very wide veranda is 300 feet long and whose two eighteen-hole courses are a test of good playing. In the evening he likes to get in three friends, including M. Henri B——, a notary of an old Quebec family, for bridge. Monsieur B—— and his friend, the writer, are likely to have exchanges in French, even though Packard insists that his French is somewhere short of perfection and less good, even, than in his youth when he was a student at Liége. If Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, or some other old friend from New York is a house guest he will be golfed by day and admitted to the bridge game by night. There are, also, occasions for talk ... and there are superlative meals, whether at the Royal Montreal, the University Club in Montreal, or at the Packard house. Not only these meals, but the hours between the meals, are made more grateful to many a visitor by the fact that the Province of Quebec is not dry. In fact, the Province is in the liquor business, to the exclusion of all private selling. By establishing government shops where liquor is sold in bottles only, the Province has abolished the saloon and made unnecessary a Provincial income tax.

A few years ago Robert H. Davis used to be able to lure Packard up North on camping and hunting expeditions in which a truly incredible degree of hardship was endured in the name of recreation and healthful exercise. But lately Packard has refused to go. He is content to take his healthful exercise at the Royal Montreal and have a little physical comfort with it.

He is not tall. He has a weathered face, blue eyes, and a grim-looking mouth that is never through smiling. He has been pretty much around the world. Back in 1912 (I think) he sailed from Montreal to Cape Town and then went on to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. From there he stepped over to Auckland, New Zealand, and investigated Maoriland. He continued through the Pacific, visiting Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii. At Samoa he went from Apia to one of the smaller islands, where he lived for a couple of weeks in a chief’s hut in native fashion.

Again, in 1923, he went to South America.

Twelve years Mr. Packard waited while an idea that he came upon in the course of his round the world trip took shape. _The Locked Book_ is in characteristics somewhat like _The Four Stragglers_. It begins with a yacht drifting, disabled, in Malay waters and proceeds without hesitation to the moment when Kenneth Wayne finds on a barbaric altar a book bound in leather, very old, clasped by the design of a dragon in thick brass, and locked in a strange fashion. The dragon’s tail and mouth meet over the edges and the tail is solidly brazed into the mouth. One cannot move the covers by the fraction of an inch. It seems probable that the book holds the secret of a Rajah’s treasure in gold and jewels.... The reader, after the first flush of enjoyment has passed, will be distinctly interested in analyzing Mr. Packard’s methods in the plot and his use of the plot as a vehicle for effects more important.

He believes in having a story. If you ask him to write something about fiction he will emphasize two things: the story and the character of the story, the moral character, that is, and the “moral responsibility” of those who write.[98] And once, certainly, his sense of drama and his sense of the ideal fused in a story of such simplicity and force and elevation as to be intrinsically a work of art. No faults of execution can take away that core of beauty from Frank L. Packard’s legend of _The Miracle Man_.

BOOKS BY FRANK L. PACKARD.

1911 _On the Iron at Big Cloud_ 1913 _Greater Love Hath No Man_ 1914 _The Miracle Man_ 1916 _The Belovéd Traitor_ 1917 _The Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ 1917 _The Sin That Was His_ 1918 _The Wire Devils_ 1919 _The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale_ 1919 _The Night Operator_ 1920 _From Now On_ 1920 _The White Moll_ 1921 _Pawned_ 1922 _Doors of the Night_ 1922 _Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue_ 1923 _The Four Stragglers_ 1924 _The Locked Book_

SOURCES ON FRANK L. PACKARD

In addition to those cited in the text of the chapter: Robert H. Davis, 280 Broadway, New York, N. Y.

22. All Creeds and None

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This ought to be the most interesting chapter in this book. For it deals with the subject of belief. Belief is of many kinds—religious, scientific, philosophical—but when one ceases to believe in anything at all, one dies.

In Chapter 10, I tried to indicate how the interest in religious belief has already begun to reflect itself in current fiction. In this chapter I am to deal with books which vary profoundly but are all straightforward efforts to express a belief held to be worth while. For the difficulty is not a lack of things to believe in, but a choice among them, a reconciliation (sometimes) of one with another; and very often a search for the thing that will mean more than life itself.

Can anything mean more than life itself? Yes. Men and women have sacrificed their lives for such.

Are the terms of belief capable of a common expression, acceptable to all men and women? No; at least, not yet.

Is it even necessary to know what one believes, in the sense of being able to give it a satisfactory expression? No; not if one lives it.

Can anything be achieved by reading books on belief? Yes. I suppose you may show surprise if I say that disagreement is often more useful than agreement. But agreement leading to a placid inactivity is against the very principle of life itself.

Disagreement causes thought. Thinking always enlarges our living. For what we then do is done more consciously, more knowingly, than before. To that extent—and in no other way is it possible—we live more fully.

Which among the books to follow you ought to read or in what order they are for your reading, no one like myself can determine, for an answer depends on your belief, tastes, the extent of your reading and the extent of your thinking. Such a book as L. P. Jacks’s _Religious Perplexities_ is safely commendable to anyone, anywhere. But such studies as Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, full of refinements and instinct with intellectual subtlety, are for the scholarly taste. Dr. E. Y. Mullins’s _Christianity at the Crossroads_ is fundamentalist in its position. Dr. Joseph A. Leighton’s _Religion and the Mind of Today_ is the work of a churchman who is also a philosopher and a teacher; it adopts the liberal attitude. And a number of these books concern themselves with health, the mind, the will and the spirit—those factors which so often determine not only belief, but the possibility of believing in anything.

If I start with Ernest Renan’s _Life of Jesus_, a work now many years old, I do so because this Frenchman’s extraordinary book remains undisplaced by the current great success of Papini’s _Life of Christ_, but also because the popularity of Papini’s book shows where the average interest lies. For when men begin contending about the forms of creeds and the facts behind phrases which have become sacred formulas, the instinct of the ordinary man is to go straight to the essentials and the beginnings. Let doctors argue the Virgin Birth; he rather asks himself what sort of Man was this Son born of Mary. It is the assertion of this instinct, joined to the timely appearance of the _Life of Christ_ with its undeniable interest and eloquence, which made the success of Papini’s volume. Such a success is fleeting. Like other converts and re-converts to Catholicism, Papini exhibited a marked tendency toward a belief that little had happened in the centuries preceding his accession. Not so, Renan. To go from the Italian to the Frenchman is to pass from painted scenery to the clear air and the sublime altitude of mountain peaks. There is something beyond eloquence, and Renan has it. With him both reflection and emotion are controlled; they lift him high and sustain him there. “Disastrous to Reason the day when she should stifle religion!” exclaimed this author of the _Life of Jesus_, adding: “Religions are false when they attempt to prove the infinite, to define it, to incarnate it; but they are true when they affirm it. The greatest errors they import into that affirmation are nothing compared to the value of the truth which they proclaim. The simplest of the simple, provided he practice heart-worship, is more enlightened as to the reality of things than the materialist who thinks he explains everything by chance or by finite causes.”

Renan was repeatedly called an atheist; but none of the books discussed in this chapter are atheistic. I should present any which were, but I think it significant that none is. Lord Balfour’s _Theism and Thought_, a strictly philosophical treatise in sequence to his _Theism and Humanism_, is a deliberate attempt to consider whether theism—that is, belief in God—is necessary or good. And every Balfourian conclusion is in favor of theism. Dr. L. P. Jacks, with his marvelous simplicity of expression, deals in _Religious Perplexities_ with the two questions that every man asks: Why am I here? Why am I, and not some other, here and now? But the answer to both of these questions, stated as Dr. Jacks states it, for men of every sort, Christian and non-Christian, presupposes a God.

The three most recent books by Dr. Jacks vary considerably. _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_ is simply an address in which he makes a moving appeal for the recapture of Christian joyousness. _Realities and Shams_ is a series of essays produced by reflection on events of the last nine years, continuous in the thread of their thought, which is the few and simple tests to tell the genuine from the false; and Dr. Jacks applies these tests to some public affairs. _A Living Universe_ is directly related to _Religious Perplexities_; its point is that education without religious feeling is lifeless, just as a universe in which education does not proceed is a dead universe.

Such books as _Realities and Shams_ and _A Living Universe_ are directly related to Felix Adler’s Hibbert lectures, now published under the title, _The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal_. The distinguished founder of the Ethical Culture Society has never been one to deal with abstractions. In this book he brings his spiritual ideal to bear upon the problem of marriage, the labor problem, and the problem of a society of nations. The essence of his teaching, which employs both Jewish and Christian ideals of holiness, is his conception of a “weft of souls” in which each individual soul has intrinsic worth but all share in, and contribute to, a spiritual commonwealth. He strongly opposes attacks on the permanency of marriage, and for marriage itself he insists on a loftier standard. The problem of labor seems to him one of perfecting personal relations in industry, though it be necessary to reshape industry to achieve it. And though provisional solutions of the problem of a society of nations seem to Dr. Adler inadequate and futile, he is at pains to establish the principle on which such a society can, he thinks, be founded.

_Religion and the Mind of Today_, by Joseph A. Leighton, asks for careful definition. The author is a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He is now professor of philosophy in the Ohio State University, the author of _Man and the Cosmos_ and of an introductory book on philosophy used in many colleges. Dr. Leighton, in a sense, offers himself as living evidence that acceptance of modern science is not inconsistent with a deep and satisfying religion expressed in a formal creed. His book consists of three parts. The first studies the indispensable rôle of religion in a civilization, and aims to show the relation of religion to culture and its function in human society. The second part is a study of Christianity; it argues the superior ethics of Jesus to other systems of ethics; and endeavors to apply Christian ethics to problems of modern life. The third part of the book is on the validity of religion. Dr. Leighton finds religious belief entirely compatible with scientific discovery. He also, in special chapters, does his best to clear such religious problems as the nature of faith, the origin of the universe, the incarnation of Christ, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul.

His work, which is general, leads me directly to the new book by Shailer Mathews and others, which is specific. If there is one thing which can be said about _Contributions of Science to Religion_, it is that the book gets down to bed rock. Dr. Mathews, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, one of the best known educators and editors in America, conceived the idea of getting representative scientists to tell compactly of those portions of the world, or life, which were their special provinces: He wanted to see what the resulting picture would be like. He asked bluntly: “After the scientists have explained the construction of the universe, the earth and man, is there any room left for God?” He felt, as he says in the opening sentence of this book, that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives.” And he also felt, as he says in his introduction, that “if scientific knowledge could really destroy faith in God it would do so—and it _should_ do so.”

He got thirteen chapters by some very distinguished men, to which he prefixed a chapter of his own, then writing a final summarizing chapter; and this is the book. Among the scientist contributors are W. E. Ritter, director of the Scripps Marine Biological Laboratory of the University of California, who writes on the scientific method of reaching truth; Robert A. Millikan, the physicist who was the first to succeed in isolating an electron; and Edwin S. Frost, director of the Yerkes Observatory. The arrangement of chapters is ingenious and even dramatic. For example, one goes from the contemplation of invisible atoms made up of electrons to that of a universe, made up of electrons infinitesimally small but containing bodies many million times the size of our sun.

There is neither religion nor theology in these thirteen scientific chapters, which may be read, and can most profitably be read, by anyone who seeks simply a bird’s-eye view of what science has found out. Dr. Mathews sums up ably; yet his case is practically stated in Professor Ritter’s remark that “seeing God in the Universe is no more _difficult_ than seeing electrons there.”

But in praising this striking and admirable volume, I fully recognize that its very sharpness and definiteness make it extremely provocative—though therefore all the more interesting. To the mind purely mystical, _Contributions of Science to Religion_ must remain all beside the point; and to Dr. Mathews’s assertion that “a man’s religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives,” the mystic will reply that that, precisely, is what _his_ religion is for. And with many the question does not take the form in which Dr. Mathews puts it, but rather the form in which Dr. E. Y. Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts it in his _Christianity at the Crossroads_: “Will Christianity continue its redemptive work in the world, or will it cool into a reform movement, without redemptive power?” So asked, the answer may well be different. Dr. Mullins argues—and without appeal to authority of any kind—that the Christian religion is free and autonomous, and that efforts to transform it have failed. And if it is to be Christianity against a new religion, he has no doubt as to where the victory will lie.

ii

Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Making of Man_ has something in common with the books I have discussed and some relation to the books I am coming to; but first I wish to ward off a misconception. Sir Oliver’s views of an after life, his experiments and speculations are well-known; but _Making of Man_ is not in any sense a spiritualist volume. It is a study in evolution; a short, simple account of physical science which the author then relates, so far as our knowledge permits, to the history of the soul. His own special beliefs are kept out of the way; his point is that what we know from physics and other branches of science makes immortality of the soul an irresistible conclusion. As he says: “It is beginning to seem possible that the conservation of matter and energy may have to be supplemented by the conservation of life and mind.... I feel sure of this: that the Universe is a much completer whole than we had imagined. Every kind of real existence is permanent; and our activities do not cease when we change our instrument.” The book is brief, very sincere, and of interest to readers of every class and shade of opinion.

In _Evolution: the Way of Life_, Vernon Kellogg, the zoölogist, has written a book designed for the general reader who wants exact but simply expressed knowledge concerning the theory. The author has been at pains to tie up his discussion to the evolution we all can see in ourselves and in the Nature about us. This is decidedly a book to clear up and make definite the reader’s conception of what evolution is and is not, and of its significance to mankind.

The two remaining impersonal books I have to present are both purely scientific, though almost startlingly diverse; and then I shall go on to speak of books distinctly personal to the reader.

And first I offer a work of science keenly interesting to the general reader. George Grant MacCurdy of Yale is known wherever anthropology is known. For many years he has been gathering the materials for a history of man before recorded history begins. The interest of pre-history, as the subject is called, needs no emphasis. Its appeal has been shown by the success of such books as Henry Fairfield Osborne’s _Men of the Old Stone Age_ and by the fascination most readers confess to feeling for the earlier chapters of H. G. Wells’s _An Outline of History_. But pre-history, sketched by Wells, dealt with partially by Osborne, had never been fully written in a single, up-to-date work. Dr. MacCurdy has done it in the two volumes of his _Human Origins: A Manual of Pre-History_.

_Human Origins_ is a great book. It must be remembered that all we know about prehistoric man is the discovery of the last hundred years, discovery that has come thick and fast, but which has remained scattered. I shall say nothing about the work involved in writing _Human Origins_; its immensity is apparent. But it is sheer luck that we have in Dr. MacCurdy a writer whose imagination and sense of the dramatic turn the whole affair into a superlative story.

Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. During it, in intervals of thousands of years, ice swept down over Europe and North America in four successive glaciations. The three warm intervals between these four ice epochs are the lower, middle, and upper paleolithic periods. In each, prehistoric man made some rude advance toward better tools and weapons. He even progressed in art to the extent of painting on cave walls. Then the ice came down again, and for thousands of years man lost nearly all the gain he had made.

He reappears in the New Stone Age using chipped and polished flints, mining the flints in certain places, working them in certain places. Pottery-making began, and some idea of weaving was gained. Religious ideas were first entertained. Fire was conquered and put to man’s use, the wheel was invented, animals were domesticated. Then came the Bronze Age, with its discovery of how to smelt copper, tin, gold, silver. The Iron Age arrived when man had acquired sufficient skill in smelting this more durable metal and could use it to replace all others in things of hard use.

Approximately 400 illustrations, of a fascination at least equal to the text, appear in the two volumes of _Human Origins_.