Part 7

I am not sure, indeed, that the kind of personal history most appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parents' view, I think, the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be his scant measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of his own of appreciating failure or of not, at least, piously rejoicing in displayed moral, intellectual, or even material economies, which, had it not been that his humanity, his generosity, and, for the most part, his gaiety were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have left us with our small saving, our little exhibitions and complacencies, rather on our hands.

Speaking of the "detached" feeling they had after returning from Europe to settle in Newport, he says:

I remember well how, when we were all young together, we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our little family was not in business....

Such had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; the business in which the boy's father gloriously was stood forth inveterately as the very first note of our comrade's impressiveness. We had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was respectable--if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in business, just as I remember my friend Simpson's telling me crushingly, at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth about our credentials, that the author of his being was in the business of stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play--the word was fine and mysterious; so that "What shall we tell them you are, don't you see?" could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal.

Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn't fair, as a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I can't help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle's indigestion, and what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:

I took our friend M---- to see him [Carlyle], and he came away greatly distressed and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to anybody, and to profess, indeed, the utmost contempt for everybody who thought he had, and poor M---- being intent on giving him a plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.

And again in a letter to Emerson:

Carlyle nowadays is a palpable nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he will find no showman là-bas to match him.... Carlyle's intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly imagine anything able to cope with it.

An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:

Hawthorne isn't to me a prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an enjoying person.... But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him all dinner, nor my rapt attention.... It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a canary!

And in the postscript of the same:

What a world, what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and the new earth will swim into reality.

Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were--it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world.

I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author's comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,--if I may use a large word for a large concept--is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters.

De Morgan's Latest

When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Whatever else I may say about De Morgan's new book, I absolutely refuse to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no difference how long it is, since the writer's charm pervades it all. But it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than ever there was in Thackeray's day. And if we are going to spend our time reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be doing, or thinking, or reading.

However, one can't say very well that he greatly admires a stork, or would if he had a short beak and short legs. De Morgan's style is his own, and he will tell the story his own way, though we all have a quarrel with him for leaving the most interesting bits to a short "Pendrift" at the end. Did Given's lover contemplate taking his East Indian poison when the newspapers announced that she was to marry an Austrian noble? Think of cutting that episode off in a few words, while an entire chapter is devoted to a "shortage of mud" for little Dave and Dolly, who were making a dyke in the street! But then, De Morgan doesn't know how to stop when he begins to talk of children. How he loves them, and all other helpless creatures! He can't speak even of kittens without a touch of tenderness:

Mrs. Lapping explained that she was using it (the basket) to convey a kitten, born in her establishment, to Miss Druitt at thirty-four opposite, who had expressed anxiety to possess it. It was this kitten's expression of impatience with its position that had excited Mrs. Riley's curiosity. "Why don't ye carry the little sowl across in your hands, me dyurr?" she said, not unreasonably, for it was only a stone's throw. Mrs. Topping added that this was no common kitten, but one of preternatural activities and possessed of diabolical, tentacular powers of entanglement. "I would not undertake," said she, "to get it across the road, ma'am, only catching hold. Nor if I got it safe across, to onhook it, without tearing." Mrs. Riley was obliged to admit the wisdom of the Janus basket. She knew how difficult it is to be even with a kitten.

It is bits like this that make Mr. De Morgan's story so long, and it is bits like this that reconcile us to its length. I believe most readers won't care greatly whether the two poor old sisters who have been separated so many years ever do meet again. There is no feeling of climax when they do--merely relief that the thing has finally been put across. It was beginning to look as if it never would happen; and though the reader himself, as I say, doesn't greatly care, he can see that De Morgan does; he has apparently been doing his best to bring it about, but the cantankerous ones just wouldn't let him.

On the other hand, who can help loving Given o' the Towers--all sweetness, beauty, and light? Only--isn't she really more of a twentieth-century heroine than a Victorian young lady, with her crisp decisiveness and air of being most ably able to look out for herself? Truly Victorian, however, are our "slow couple"--Miss Dickenson and Mr. Pellew. Miss Dickenson is thirty-six, and, by all Victorian standards, quite out of the running. De Morgan is extremely apologetic for allowing her to have a romance at this belated hour--her charms faded and gone. But we are betting quite heavily on Miss Dickenson's chances for happiness with the Hon. Mr. Pellew. The two were "good gossips," and would always have topics of interest in common.

The Pendrift at the end--quite the most fascinating part of the book--tells us of the daughter of this union Cicely, by this time sixteen years old.

"You know," says the girl, Cis,--who is new and naturally knows things, and can tell her parents,--"you know there is never the slightest reason for apprehension as long as there is no delusion. Even then we have to discriminate carefully between fixed and permanent delusions and----"

"Shut up, Mouse!" says her father. "What's that striking?"...

The young lady says, "Well, I got it all out of a book."

One good reason for reading De Morgan is the fact that he is older than the majority of his readers. We read so much, we hear so much acclaimed that is written by children of twenty, whose experience of life must necessarily be got, like Cicely's, "out of a book." The saying of De Maupassant surely applies here--that the writer must sit down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it. De Morgan has had the opportunity of seeing life, surely, and knowing what most of it amounts to. The result is a large tolerance and tenderness toward his fellow men.

M. H. P.

The Economics of Social Insurance

Social Insurance: With Special Reference to American Conditions, by I. M. Rubinow. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The logic of events is rapidly forcing nation after nation into what has hitherto been damned with the epithet paternalism. America, perhaps, is the last important country in the world to face the problems raised by the march of events in this direction. Social insurance, a thing accomplished and a commonplace of government functioning in so many countries, recently adopted in England, is, in this country, still a novelty outside the university class room and the lecture halls of fanatical demagogues who wish to upset the foundations of our civil government and civilization--as the elder politicians express it when their attention is drawn to these sinister activities of thought.

The author of this book in fact was the first academic lecturer on the subject to give a university course in the various forms which social insurance has taken. These lectures he delivered before the New York School of Philanthropy, and they are reprinted here in an extended form.

After giving the philosophy of the matter, the underlying social necessity for insurance, the author takes up the various forms of the activity. Accident, disease, old age, and unemployment must all be provided against, and the state, the employer, and the laborer may share the burden among them, or the two latter may be relieved--as in various types of non-contributory insurance.

Of course the old school economist will ask why the latter two are not relieved, and why the employe or private citizen is not just encouraged to insure with a private corporation. The author's answer is that, even if he were educated to the point of desiring to do that, he could not. A man insures his house because the feeling of security is worth the small premium he pays, even if that premium is larger than the actual risk involved would warrant--larger by a sum equal to the cost and profits of the business of the insurance company. But the poor man's chances of loss of employment, accident, or sickness are so much greater in proportion to the capitalized value of his job that he could never afford to pay the premium necessary for a private company to take care of him; while his old age could not be insured without taking all of his earnings--and even then he might die before he reached it.

The situation then is that an admitted necessity cannot be obtained unless the state as a whole takes steps to attain it for all the members of the state. How other states have done this, how type after type of insurance has been evolved, and how these types may be adapted to American practice is the burden of the present work.

The author writes in a clear and non-technical manner, and makes no extravagant claims for what some people may regard as a social panacea; but he is confident that the full development of the idea of social insurance will relieve the worst aspects of poverty--the aspects in which poverty is not only a hardship, but a haunting spirit, sapping the vitality of its victims until they are rendered socially useless.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

Prose Poems of Ireland

Red Hanrahan, by William Butler Yeats. New edition. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

If you believe, with Chesterton, that "should the snap dragon open its little pollened mouth and sing 'twould be no more wonderful a thing" than that a solemn little blue egg should turn into a big happy red-breasted bird; if you are of "the young men that dream dreams" or of "the old men who have visions" the songs and the tales and the wanderings and the mysteries of "Red" Owen Hanrahan will thrill you with a sense of your real nearness to "something lovelier than Heaven."

Such a group of tales of the people and by the people as Mr. Yeats has gathered together in Red Hanrahan can be nothing if not a personal matter. Frankly, I never saw a fairy, or a gnome, or a hobgoblin. I have never even had a vision worth writing a book about; but I am young yet, and if the gods continue to be kind.... In the meanwhile I shall grasp the first opportunity to read Red Hanrahan in a deep woods, at dusk--regardless of the optician's orders.

H. B. S.

To William Butler Yeats

MARGUERITE O. B. WILKINSON

As one, who, wandering down a squalid street, Where dingy buildings crowd each other high, Where all who pass have need to hurry by, Saddened and parched and fighting through the heat, Comes suddenly where pain and beauty meet, And sees a stretch of fair, unsullied sky, Covering a field of clover bloom, so I, With heart prepared to find the contrast sweet In seeking through a world of sordid prose, Where use-stained words with huddled shoulders stand In sullen, monumental, loveless rows, Have found a sudden green and sunny land Where you, O Poet, give us back lost wonder, Leisure, sweet fields, clean skies to travel under!

Sentence Reviews

[Inclusion in this category does not preclude a more extended notice.]

The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser [John Lane Company, New York], will be reviewed at length in the July issue.

Clay and Fire, by Layton Crippen. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] A provocative philosophical discussion of the basal problem of religion by an author who treats pessimism according to the homeopathic principle. Reasonable hopes are made to seem hopeless. A morbid retrospectiveness may, however, force thought into light, and the book leaves one in a strange illumination effected by spiritual fire.

At the Sign of the Van, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] These essays include The Log of the Papyrus with Other Escapades in Life and Letters. Whether he is praising Percival Pollard, explaining Whitman's cosmic consciousness--which he did to a Whitman Fellowship gathering--or wistfully telling us how he would like to have had a look in on the doings in Babylon, the amorous dallyings which Jeremiah muckraked in the name of his Comstockean Jehovah, Michael Monahan is always interesting even if he is not always as stormy as his designation "the stormy petrel of literature" would indicate. In truth it would take a number of birds of different species--but all pleasant ones--to make up the tale of the qualities which this versatile essayist exhibits in these pages.

Aphrodite and Other Poems, by John Helston. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] Mr. Helston does not write great poetry,--though he comes close to very good poetry at times,--but he writes greatly about love. His attitude is a refusal to divorce the spiritual from the earthly with which we have a hearty sympathy. No franker love poetry has been written, probably; but somehow we failed to find in it the sensuality that its critics have discovered. It is richly pagan.

Love of One's Neighbor, by Leonid Andreyev. [Albert and Charles Boni, New York.] A very excellent translation of a one-act play which will probably sell well, though coming from the author of The Seven Who Were Hanged it seems a mere trifle. The translator, Thomas Seltzer, should be urged to undertake the more worthy task of introducing Andreyev's really great work to English-speaking readers.

New Men for Old, by Howard Vincent O'Brien. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] The first novel of a new young writer, especially when he is as sincere as Mr. O'Brien and as deeply interested in the joy of Work, is a matter of importance. The book has its obvious faults technically, even psychologically, but it preaches socialism from an interesting standpoint and makes good reading.

Challenge, by Louise Untermeyer. [The Century Co., New York.] Virile and ambitious songs of the present. Caliban in the Coal Mines, Any City, Strikers, In the Subway, The Heretic, show that the poet is not a shrinker from modern life. The title poem sounds the keynote:

The quiet and courageous night, The keen vibration of the stars Call me, from morbid peace, to fight The world's forlorn and desperate wars.

John Ward, M.D., by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Seneschal sentimentality with a "modern" plot woven about the questionable science of eugenics. One of those irritating books in which one reads page after page after page in the vain endeavor to find out why Mitchell Kennerly spent his money on it.

Forum Stories, selected by Charles Vale. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] All these stories have appeared in The Forum since it came under Mr. Kennerley's management, and they are all by American writers. They represent the work not only of such well known writers as Reginald Wright Kauffman, James Hopper, Margaret Widdemer, and John S. Reed--who has a tense little narrative of the struggle toward land of two swimmers wrecked in the Pacific Ocean--but the work of several lesser known but promising authors. Among them is Miss Florence Kiper, of Chicago, who writes under the title I Have Borne My Lord a Son a most penetrating study of the psychology of motherhood.

Papa, by Zoë Akins. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] A little play which shows so much determination to be clever and very, very naughty that it's almost a pity it doesn't succeed.

Saint Louis: a Civic Masque, by Percy MacKaye. [Doubleday, Page and Company, New York.] A valuable contribution to the dramatic "spirit" of awakening civic intelligence.

Great Days, by Frank Harris. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Audacious, vivid, gripping sex experiences of the son of an immoral English innkeeper. The big rough brother of Three Weeks.

Poems, by Walter Conrad Amberg. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.] Poems written with a sure and gentle delicacy that seems forgotten by this generation of rude iconoclasts.

The True Adventures of a Play, by Louis Evan Shipman. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] The play is D'Arcy of the Guards and its author tells in full the trials and tribulations--and the eventual triumph--which met him from the moment when he offered to submit the manuscript to E. H. Sothern, and that star told him to send it along. Not only are the details of acceptances of plays, the incidental negotiations and red tape described, but the making of costume plates, the designing of the whole presentation, and the collaboration between author, producer, and actors are told with such humor and documentary fidelity to the actual transactions that the book will not only be interesting to the general reader but indispensable to the tyro playwright.

Nova Hibernia, by Michael Monahan. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.] Competent, incisive studies, sketches, and lectures dealing with "Irish poets and dramatists of today and yesterday"--Yeats, Synge, Thomas Moore, Mangan, Gerald Griffin, Callahan, Doctor Maginn, Father Prout, Sheridan, and others.

The Pipes of Clovis, by Grace Duffie Boylan. [Little, Brown, and Company, Boston.] A forester's son proficient on a magic pipe; a blue and silver-gowned princess; the invasion of Swabia by the Huns away back in the twelfth century, all woven into a romance for children and grown-ups who still love the fairies.

The Post Office, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.] A touching little idyll of a sick child who longs for a letter from the king through the post office which he can see across the road. And his dream comes true. Written in rhythmic prose.

Sanctuary, by Percy MacKaye. [Frederick A. Stokes, New York.] A bird masque performed in September, 1913, for the dedication of the bird sanctuary of the Meriden Bird Club at Meriden, N. H. A defense of birds and a defense of poetry. The theme is the conversion of a bird slaughterer. The verse is full of "birdblithesomeness."

Old World Memories, by Edward Lowe Temple. [The Page Company, Boston.] The story of a summer vacation in Europe as naïve, as full of human interest, disjoined history, and worthy indefinite advice as the after dinner "post card tour" of a just-returned Cook's traveler.

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