American nights entertainment
and a hope is held out for their eventual happiness together. This
theme, of the utmost delicacy, is the occasion for a considerable
display of virtuosity by Miss Gale. By means of deft and distinct
individualisation of her characters--each Crumb, for instance, standing
out as a complete fiery particle--she orchestrates the melodic
fragment of Leda and Barnaby in a sort of free treatment (but with
careful working out), as a composer might do in setting a quartette
for strings. May this musical simile be helpful! The clipped style of
_Miss Lulu Bett_ is here carried a step further, until Miss Gale almost
seems to out-Sinclair Miss May Sinclair. The style has been called
precious, which is the technical word for what the ordinary person
calls “affected”; and, on the other hand, one able critic has declared
that it is not the style that is precious but Miss Gale’s material.
One thing is certain, the treatment is as far removed as possible from
the literalness of such a novel as _Main Street_, and this is natural
to expect when we remember that Miss Gale is, after all and perhaps
fundamentally, a poet. Her poems published in book form are to a great
extent inferior to her best poems, which, so far as I know, still
repose in some old files of the Smart Set magazine.
The point, however, is not the merit or demerit of _Faint Perfume_,
nor the relative values of Miss Gale’s three books here discussed. The
point is Zona Gale, her undeniable artistry, her literary maturity and
her manifest power ... and the importance of her work to come.
Books by Zona Gale
1906 _Romance Island_
1907 _The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_
1908 _Friendship Village_
1909 _Friendship Village Love Stories_
1911 _Mothers to Men_
1912 _Christmas_
1913 _When I Was a Little Girl_
1914 _Neighborhood Stories_
1915 _Heart’s Kindred_
1917 _A Daughter of Tomorrow_
1918 _Birth_
1919 _Peace in Friendship Village_
1920 _Miss Lulu Bett_
1920 _Neighbors_ (play)
1921 _Miss Lulu Bett_ (play)
1923 _Faint Perfume_
Sources on Zona Gale
_The Women Who Make Our Novels_ (second or third edition, 1919 or
1922). MOFFAT YARD & COMPANY.
The Literary Spotlight, XVIII: Zona Gale, in THE BOOKMAN for April,
1923. This article now forms a chapter in the book, _The Literary
Spotlight_, with an introduction by John Farrar.
_Zona Gale, An Artist in Fiction_, by WILSON FOLLETT. Booklet
published by D. Appleton & Company.
_15. For the Literary Investor_
i
As in the world of finance there are varieties of investment, so in
reading. A delicate parallel would be between individual authors and,
let us say, the mortgage field; whereas the reader who chooses books
included in undertakings like the Lambskin Library, the Murray Hill
Library or the Modern Student’s Library is like the man adventuring
among well-seasoned bonds. The individual author is the bolder
risk, less easily to be abandoned, lacking (usually) the element
of diversification; the certainty of interest from those carefully
selected Library volumes is somewhat greater and the investment in them
is more readily marketable in the discovery that your commitment is
shared with the other fellow, who also knows and has read them. Then
there is among books that type of investment for which men constantly
seek when trying to place their money--the unlisted and almost
unheard-of, lonely, isolated enterprise which one may, and probably
will, have all to himself....
What follows is a series of what, in the money world, would be called
“offerings.” These literary offerings are not necessarily in the least
related to each other, although here and there you may find features
in common. Each stands on the foundation of its own “attractiveness”
to you as an individual; but there is none which has not given a
good return to some group of readers, large or less large. Some are
well-seasoned; others, although new, show their intrinsic worth for
such time and attention as you may commit to them.
ii
J. C. Snaith, novelist. John Collis Snaith, born in 1876, in
Nottinghamshire of Yorkshire stock. Athletic in his youth, before
his health became impaired, playing cricket, football and hockey on
county teams. Always in the middle of a novel, either at Skegness or
in London, where he may with difficulty be tracked down at the Garrick
Club, hidden among W. J. Locke, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason, Hugh
Walpole, Arnold Bennett, E. Temple Thurston, etc. His novels exhibit
constant variety. Richard Mansfield was always hoping for a play from
Snaith’s _Broke of Covenden_ so that he might act as Broke. _The
Sailor_, supposed to have been suggested by John Masefield’s career,
was a great popular success (1916) and is read and remembered widely
today. _The Coming_, an exquisite and powerful story in which the
reappearance of Jesus Christ in present-day England is suggested,
made an extraordinary impression. On the whole it is perhaps Snaith’s
own favourite. _The Undefeated_, a story of England in wartime, had
a large sale and gives promise of more permanence than any similar
book, including H. G. Wells’s _Mr. Britling_. A recent novel, _The
Van Roon_, is a lighter story written around the theft of a famous
painting. Snaith’s _Araminta_, which is being freshly brought out this
year, is a whimsical romance of a country girl who comes to London
and is sued for by two noblemen. Snaith says: “Each novel I write is
in the nature of an experiment. To me a good novel is a mental tonic,
exhilarating, educative, humanising.” He is both versatile and in the
quality of his work of unusual excellence.
W. B. Maxwell, novelist. English. A writer who has reached undeniable
greatness at times and who, when possessing the finest material, need
ask no odds of any living novelist. His most recent story, _The Day’s
Journey_, is a beautifully-conceived and beautifully-written story of
the friendship between two men enduring throughout their lives. The
differences in character, the obstacles arising in the course of that
friendship, the antagonisms and fallings-apart and the renewals of
these two old comrades are put on paper with a fidelity of observation,
a tenderness and an avoidance of sentimentality that would be difficult
to overpraise. Maxwell’s novels are of great variety; attention is
particularly called to _In Cotton Wool_, the story of a weakling. _Mrs.
Thompson_, _The Devil’s Garden_ and _Spinster of This Parish_ are also
highwater marks in his writing.
Hugh Walpole. Perhaps no living novelist has shown so uniform a quality
or so progressive an excellence. He resembles a stock which, starting
at a modest price and unfailingly paying dividends, has gone steadily
upward to par and is now quoted at a premium. His great success, _The
Cathedral_, is now followed by _Jeremy and Hamlet_, which, although
not a “sequel,” is a companion volume to _Jeremy_ (most popular of
all Walpole’s stories before the appearance of _The Cathedral_). As
_Jeremy_ dealt with the history of a little boy--most singularly
resembling the Hugh of Mr. Walpole’s own boyhood--so _Jeremy and
Hamlet_ presents the adventures of that boy accompanied by the only
proper companion for a small boy, a dog.
Rudyard Kipling. For a discussion of Kipling’s new work, _The Irish
Guards in the Great War_, see Chapter 8. The best exposition of
Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s _Three Studies
in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare_ (translated
by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her _Modes and
Morals_, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,”
offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral
influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let
these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of _Plain Tales from
the Hills_, of _Kim_ and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy”
and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged”
securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost
universal currency.
Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed
by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not
only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that
belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century.
But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate
connection between poetry and real life which was established by the
naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in
Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.”
Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has
the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as
national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of
Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.”
Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf is like
sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral.... Afterward, one does not
know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he
has been on holy ground.” The best approach is possibly through _The
Story of Gösta Berling_. Her other great novels are _Jerusalem_, woven
from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land,
and _The Emperor of Portugallia_. Her _Nils_ stories for children
are mentioned in Chapter 9. Complete works are best procured in the
Northland Edition.
iii
A convenient size and a beautiful binding are more than desiderata.
Who, wishing Bram Stoker’s grim masterpiece, _Dracula_, would not now
prefer a new copy in the handy leather of the Lambskin Library? If
one is out to acquire a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s _The Moon and
Sixpence_, will he not choose it in its plum-coloured leather and
gilt top of the Murray Hill Library? If I go forth to buy _Pride and
Prejudice_, I am as certain as anything to ask for it from the volumes
of the Modern Student’s Library, because this will give me William Dean
Howells’s introduction to the novel.
There is a further advantage of these collections in that they give
ready and inexpensive access to exceptional books that are otherwise
out of print. I might have excessive trouble, for example, to get
hold of _Dracula_ elsewhere. Yet the commonest advantage of such
sets is probably as a guide in reading. A publisher does not put a
book into his Lambskin Library, or his Murray Hill Library, or his
Modern Student’s Library unless the book is one of proved worth
and established permanence and continuing popularity. The Library,
therefore, offers a convenient and trustworthy solution to those who,
among books not freshly published, are unable to see the trees for the
forest. A word about these collections is in order.
The Lambskin Library at present comprises nearly fifty volumes,
chiefly fiction, although Lawrence F. Abbott’s _Impressions of
Theodore Roosevelt_, Helen Keller’s _The Story of My Life_, Booker
T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_ and Franklin’s _Autobiography_ lay
a massive foundation for biographies. Conrad, Frank Norris, Selma
Lagerlöf, O. Henry, Dumas, Scott, Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Ellen
Glasgow, Zola and Rider Haggard are some of the authors represented.
Many of the books have interesting prefatory notes and among the
contributors of these are William Lyon Phelps, Christopher Morley,
William Allen White, John Macy and William Dean Howells.
The Modern Student’s Library is ultimately to include as many as
possible of the books one would wish to read in a comprehensive survey
of English and American literature. Both the general reader and the