American nights entertainment
scarecrow. A first grotesque impression is rapidly dissolved in the
gentle acquaintance springing up immediately afterward; for no more
likeable person lives. It is not generally known that between the ages
of seventeen and nineteen it was thought he would go blind, so that
he learned to read Braille type. His interest in America is keen; he
would like to come here, and may. Intimates know him as one of the most
learned men in England, though devoid of poses and devoted to finding
pleasure in the works of Charles Dickens. His scholarliness shows
itself in _On the Margin_, where Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and the devilish
biographer, Mr. Strachey, divide attention with the question of love
as practised in France and England, the justice of Margot Asquith’s
strictures on modern feminine beauty, and the evolution of ennui.
Recently there died in his ninety-second year Frederic Harrison, who
had witnessed the coronation of Victoria in 1838 and every celebration
in her reign; who saw her funeral in 1901; who, though past eighty
when it began, saw the war of 1914-1918 and the several years of
turmoil afterward. An extraordinary life! Before it had ended this
man whose span of years was matched by his breadth of knowledge and
interests gathered together what he himself regarded as his last
book, now published under the title _De Senectute_ and blending some
of his finest literary criticism with delightful recollections of the
great times in which he lived. A personal account of Victoria and
Prince Albert, the “Dialogue on Old Age” which affords the title for
the volume, a review of the picturesque history of Constantinople
through sixteen centuries, fundamental differences between Greek and
Elizabethan tragedy, the art of translation with reference to Dante
and Molière, some consideration of Fielding and Smollett and Kingsley,
and a final chapter upon various schools of philosophy--these are
the relics of a glorious life. The book is full of brightness, its
effects are sane, and the writing is alike lucid and tinctured with
that peculiar zest which, as it was a quality of Frederic Harrison’s
temperament, goes far to explain the length of his life as well as the
grace with which he lived it.
Among essayists there are ladies. But there are not many ladies, nor
men, either, who have taken rank in the essay with a single book.
I understand that Katharine Fullerton Gerould would rather prefer
to be known for her fiction--those short stories, masterly in form,
with which she began and such a work as her most recent, the brief
novel, _Conquistador_. And such a preference is easily understood.
_Conquistador_, a jewel with many facets, would seduce any woman. And
yet Mrs. Gerould’s collection of essays, _Modes and Morals_, published
in 1920, had an extraordinary sale for a book of its character, and
still steadily sells. People constantly refer to her discussion
of “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling” and the arts of
persuasion are constantly brought to bear upon her to assemble another
such book. If Mrs. Gerould began with something of the suddenness of
a meteor, she persists with a good deal of the steady brilliance of
a fixed star. It was, in fact, with the appearance of a story, “Vain
Oblations,” in Scribner’s Magazine for March, 1911, that she first came
to general notice. This dark and terrible piece of fictional analysis
had for its principal character a New England woman missionary. Other
stories followed in Scribner’s, the Atlantic and Harper’s, and a first
collection, under the title _Vain Oblations_, was published in March,
1914. A second book of tales, _The Great Tradition_, was succeeded by
a novelette, _A Change of Air_; by the essays comprising _Modes and
Morals_; and then by the novel, _Lost Valley_. _Valiant Dust_ offered
some more short tales; but with the appearance of _Conquistador_ many
of us felt Mrs. Gerould for the first time to be perfectly suited
in length, form and material alike. Despite her superb technique,
she needs more room than the short story gives her; and although
she can write of barren New England lives she can write much more
effectively of richly-coloured Latin life. Although, as Stuart P.
Sherman has observed, she can do dashingly the “picture of a really
nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a
spacious sun-flooded chamber with a Chinese rug,” her deep fictional
desires are toward the richly barbaric, and neither Henry-Jamesical nor
Edith-Whartonesque. In the atmosphere of Princeton, which is her home
(her husband, Gordon Hall Gerould, is a member of the English faculty),
she has the leisure and repose necessary to do such essays and short
novels as no other living American has given evidence of an equal
talent for achieving. Occasionally a bit of travel, perhaps, producing
as its direct result a book like her _Hawaii, Scenes and Impressions_;
but ultimately much more valuable for its indirect stimulus to her
imagination, which belongs to the class of imaginations so dangerous
when they are confined.
In fact, the imagination is very little understood, as if it were one
of those glands whose mysterious secretions we tinker with nowadays,
either not too successfully or with a success so alarming as to
threaten the overthrow of all physiology. One of these days we shall
have a mental thyroid extract, and then--! It remains to be observed
that with most of us the imagination secretes gently, with a fresh
annual activation in the direction of old woods and pastures ever-new,
rather than new; a circumstance very favourable to David Grayson when,
in 1907, he put forth the volume called _Adventures in Contentment_.
It is difficult to think of any precise precedent for this mixture
of essay, philosophy, homely observation and quiet humour with its
essentially American pattern of thought. The febrile character of much
American life was already marked, and the remedy of an equally feverish
optimism had yet to be widely prescribed. The time was propitious,
the sentiment of David Grayson had an ingratiation. When, in 1910,
_Adventures in Friendship_ was published, a good many thousand people
had read the earlier adventures and were alert for these. _The Friendly
Road_ (1913) was succeeded by _Hempfield_ (1915) and a final volume,
_Great Possessions_ (1917). A half dozen years have passed without
relegating these books to the shelves of the Great Unread. As “The
Library of the Open Road” they inherit an annual, rather a perennial,
popularity.
ii
In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come
to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for
travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so)
but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and
their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to
know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right
entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to
know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the
spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the
unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the
View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should
be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking
no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read
Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is
a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it
is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept
another’s description of the beauties of a place. And I really have
known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with
a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he
felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a
quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his _Baedeker’s
Mediterranean_ or _Northern Italy_ or _Spain and Portugal_. Here the
matters essential to accuracy were given--and only a novelist who has
heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of
a topographical mistake--but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared
for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those
attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most
freshly revised volumes is _Baedeker’s Switzerland_; another of equal
recency is the guide to Canada.
In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a
good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous
guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for
the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist,
however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of
him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in
fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is
omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books
called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator
rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home
travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that
the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain
as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty
years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to
the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million
copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and
an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to
find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe. In fact,
Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience
that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official
source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at
one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of
his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made
it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each
volume of the series now under way. _Java and the East Indies_ and
_France to Scandinavia_ (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and
Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with _The Holy
Land and Syria_. _From Tangier to Tripoli_ (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis
and the Sahara), _Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland_, _The Tail of the
Hemisphere_ (Chile and Argentina) and _Cairo to Kisumu_ (Egypt, the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate
books.
“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down
Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921--a record that
begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so,
he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him
off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse
some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s
adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the
path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores,
following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in
Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s
capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New
Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay,
Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:
Then I had religion, then I had a vision--
and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply
enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the
Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American