American nights entertainment
seems to be extended too far. If I compare one novel with another the
impression arises that I am comparing them in every respect. I compare
two books, and it is assumed that I am comparing the two authors.
Perhaps the two books have a single resemblance and the authors
both have blue eyes. Very well, then! I was about to speak of John
Galsworthy’s work in _The Forsyte Saga_.
That history of a family is discussed elsewhere in this book. My
present point is that it is the history of an English family whose main
inheritance was the property instinct, a blending of acquisitiveness
and tenaciousness, “to have and to hold.” Mr. Train’s _His Children’s
Children_ is the history of an American family whose main inheritance
was a most characteristically American one, the wish to “get on.”
Tenacity was strong in the Forsytes, it is undeveloped in the Kaynes. A
Forsyte has not much to acquire, but a Kayne is always two up and three
to play; the effort to acquire is his breath and he is somehow always
afflicted with the feeling of short-windedness. Each in his quite
distinctive way, these two novelists have concerned themselves with the
situation arising from an age of materialism--the age that culminated
in the Great War. I choose my words. I do not say that the Great War
was a product of a materialistic age, though there is a brief for that
and I think quite possibly Mr. Train would consent to argue it. But the
Great War did come in our age of a materialistic civilisation, and,
if not at the end of it, nearer to the end than to the beginning. When
did our materialistic age begin? At the end of Mrs. Wharton’s _Age of
Innocence_, of course.
Mr. Train’s motif is the dominant characteristic of an age we all lived
in, and what that characteristic led to. He writes, of course, about
old Peter B. Kayne, “The Pirate,” and his children and grandchildren;
these are the little group of people in the immediate foreground.
They are the larger world in little, people who set the fashion
and make the pace, watched and aped by thousands. Their ambitions,
their discontents, their achievements in every direction, including
sensation, scandal and disgrace are the best commentary on--themselves
as individuals? Not at all; on certain forces and tendencies more
powerful than they.
So considered, _His Children’s Children_ is a perfectly documented
study of the third generation since the beginning of the era of “big
business” in America. To the Forsytes the termination came with a sign,
“To Let.” With us it has more frequently come with some such scene as
that closing Mr. Train’s able novel; I mean old Peter B. Kayne, ill and
helpless upstairs, and the auctioneer at his stand below. To the once
redoubtable Pirate comes the sound of a rising murmur from down there;
he manages to get up and struggle feebly to a place where he can look
upon the alien affair going on in the house--in his, Peter B. Kayne’s,
house. The auctioneer’s voice is lifted above the rest, in a louder
smoothness, in an accent of barter; ambitions and ideals, so far as
realised, are here knocked down to the highest bidder. What price are
we offered on certain tangible results of a desire to get on? To the
highest bidder.... Perhaps, after all, Peter B. Kayne’s was the high
bid.
iv
A “documented” study; I chose my word there, also. For an immense
amount of work went into _His Children’s Children_. You may take my
word for it, as much as went into the authorship of _Indictment No.
1_. Or, no, you need not take my word. Take a fact, instead. Mr.
Train is now at work upon a very remarkable novel of which it is
not my privilege to speak here except to say that its first chapter
exemplifies his infinitely painstaking method to-day. In common with a
very few other novelists, he likes to derive clearly through several
antecedent generations his principal characters. His writing undergoes
many corrections but in his first draft he gives himself full rein. In
the novel that is to follow _His Children’s Children_, he spent much
time on the first chapter. By a “cut-back” he traced his hero’s family
from about the year 1790 to the opening of the story, in the present.
This, mind you, was with the deliberate intention that the first
chapter should ultimately be of not much, if any, more than ordinary
chapter length--perhaps thirty typewritten pages.
Well, he knew he had written a good deal, but the first chapter,
first draft, was written and he sent it to be typed. The manuscript
had been returned to him on a day when I called; it made exactly 184
typewritten pages--about half the length of an ordinary full-length
novel, maybe somewhat more.
v
Arthur (Cheney) Train was born in Boston, 6 September 1875, the son
of Charles Russell Train and Sarah M. (Cheney) Train. His father
was Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 1873-1880. Arthur Train was
graduated from Harvard (A.B.) in 1896 and received the law degree three
years later. In 1897 he married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin P.
Kissam, of New York. Mrs. Train, also a writer, died in the spring of
1923. Her book, _“Son” and Other Stories of Childhood and Age_ is being
published posthumously.
Arthur Train went almost immediately into the District Attorney’s
office in New York. He never entirely sacrificed his connection with it
until 1916, when he became a member of the firm of Perkins & Train. As
a special deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York, in 1910,
he brought about the indictment of over one hundred persons, political
offenders in Queens County, in the city of New York. He is a member
of the Century, University and Harvard Clubs of New York, and of the
Downtown Association. In his attractive home, at 113 East Seventy-third
street, New York, there is a room, up one flight, occupying the
whole width of the front of the house, with southerly windows,
book-lined walls, an ample desk, and a roomy davenport confronting a
fireplace. The fireplace is fenced about and the top of the fence is
leather-cushioned, making a comfortable seat. Nothing could be more
pleasant than to sink into the davenport and face Mr. Train, who has
seated himself on the fireplace fence and lighted a cigarette.
“But don’t you mind the interruptions?” you ask him. “Suppose you are
in the middle of a novel and a big case comes along----”
“That’s very refreshing,” he answers. “I come back to the novel as from
a vacation.”
And you recall the early writing, done, so to speak, between telephone
calls.
There _has_ been a change; Mr. Train freely acknowledges it. “I can’t
say exactly when it occurred. It was during the war. I felt differently
about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of
me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt--_Tutt and Mr.
Tutt_, you know. I think those were possibly the first stories I had
written which made me feel emotion.”
It is easy to see why, easier, perhaps, in Mr. Train’s new collection
of these tales, _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_, than in the first book. For the
emphasis upon Ephraim Tutt’s attitude is more pronounced as we see
him deliberately employing the tricks of the law in the interests of
justice. Himself moved by that most permanent of human emotions, the
desire for the just, and by that most continual of human delights, the
extraction of good from evil or even good wreaked by means of evil, and
moved also by that human protest against the application of general
rules to individual dilemmas, Mr. Tutt would be strange if he did not
arouse in his creator the emotion inseparable from any act of art.
Once felt, never without. The practise of law seems less important
than once it did to Arthur Train. The number of cases that really are
interesting--are they growing fewer? There is something about private
practise ... duller than the old court work, less stimulating....
He has “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” It has been proven.
There, I think, our case rests.
Books by Arthur Train
1905 _McAllister and His Double_
1906 _The Prisoner at the Bar_
1908 _True Stories of Crime_
1909 _The Butler’s Story_
1909 _Mortmain_
1909 _Confessions of Artemas Quibble_
1910 _C. Q., or In the Wireless House_
1911 _Courts, Criminals and the Camorra_
1914 _The “Goldfish.”_ This book, published
anonymously, caused a sensation by its
satirisation of American social life
1915 _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ (with
ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD)
1917 _The World and Thomas Kelly_
1918 _The Earthquake_
1920 _Tutt and Mr. Tutt_
1921 _By Advice of Counsel_
1921 _The Hermit of Turkey Hollow_
1923 _His Children’s Children_
1923 _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_
_6. The Lady of a Tradition, Miss Sackville-West_
i
There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the
house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows
best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediæval village. It
is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the
grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity
against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn
give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees
in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the
roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a
considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass
of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak
which is the clock-tower with its pointed roof; it might be the spire
of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediæval village.
At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead
black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent,
with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights
I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and
heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.”
Such is the opening page of V. Sackville-West’s volume, _Knole and the
Sackvilles_, a handsomely printed and illustrated account of the seat
of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset. Authentic record of the family goes
not beyond that Herbrand de Sackville who came to England with William
the Conqueror. Knole, bought by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456, and held
by Cardinal Morton, Cranmer, Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary and
Elizabeth, was granted, in 1586 by Elizabeth, to Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, first Earl of Dorset. The name “West” enters with the
marriage of Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the fourth Duke, to
John West, Earl de la Warr.
The house, of seven courts to correspond with the days of the week,
fifty-two staircases matching the weeks of the year and 365 rooms
answering to the days of the year[1] “is gentle and venerable. It has
the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been
beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come
and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt
an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an
English house.” The garden side is the gay, the princely side. When,
in summer, the great oak doors of the second gatehouse were left open,
“it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting
hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no
barrier checked him.”
[1] “I cannot truthfully say,” writes Miss Sackville-West in _Knole and
the Sackvilles_, “that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be
that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend;
but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I