Page images
PDF
EPUB

but our great need is intense, not broad, vision. We could learn more truth in a ten-acre lot than we get by rushing around the globe. We see only the surface of its life, and return with a lot of knowledge that isn't so-with many confused and unreliable impressions. Great men and women are not made that way. They establish their center and settle down upon it and find each year a wider circumference. Beating about the world accomplishes little. Always the great men and women have stayed at home. How much travel do you suppose Shakespeare had? The trip from Stratford up to London and a little way, a very little way, out in the near provinces. Never in all his life, probably, did he travel so far as we go in a round trip from New York to Boston. The same is true of Milton. Who saw so far and so deeply as those two? The men of approved greatness lived before wide travel was possible. The most extended journey of our own Lincoln was from Springfield to New York. We are notoriously a nation of fun chasers racing around the world. It is one of the things that is killing our home life. We should learn that he who has a home and sticks to it gets farthest in the race of life.

"We like to believe that we are independent, and in a sense we are, but as we have prospered the graces and manners of the Old World have had an increasing power over us. We have borrowed our fashions from France and our manners from England. Now under Edward VII the manners and morals of England underwent a serious change. He had, I think, overvalued commercial success a good thing in its way, but not a big one. It bulks large, but it is really a thing of small importance. Edward was much impressed by it. Iron-makers, railway presidents, bankers, brewers, oil magnates, mine develop ers, became baronets and lords. It was their reward for making England preeminent in the world's commerce. The King ate and drank with them and patted their backs.

[graphic]

He was a most

popular King, but he had extended the circumference of the circle of fashion until it embraced some of the most common clay in the Empire. The old aristocracy of England, which, say what else you may of it, had maintained a high standard of manners and set its face against all vulgarity, was now appalled. They frowned upon the newcomers and snubbed them. They shoved the hot stinger of their contempt into 'the long-eared mule who was trying to be a charger. The mule resented it. He started a revolt against the ancient standards and conventions. It expressed itself in shallow wit and bold irreverence and sometimes through shocking indecency.

"But the change of manners and of spirit which we have suffered cannot be wholly charged to our imitation of cheap aristocracy, or to the indifference of our men, or the incapacity of our

STEPHEN LEACOCK

Next week's Outlook will contain Mr. Leacock's "Stories and StoryTellers." It is a delightful comparison between the divergent methods of spinning a yarn in Canada and the United States and in the land from which our American culture sprang. Whether we have improved on the British methods we leave to readers of Mr. Leacock's article to decide

All

Often

ingenuity of Henry Ford. Think of the non-skid rubber footprints in the sands of time! Almost every day for years the American home has been packed into a flivver and vigorously shaken up and dumped into the nearest village and electrified with sundry exhibitions of ingenious crime and amusing violence and high-volted love-making, and packed up again and returned to the hated quiet of the countryside. Now the dooryard has a hundred square miles in it. the allurements of the town and the village are as handy as the croquet ground and the swimming-hole. No more reading under the evening lamp! after the day's end the house is silent, dark, and deserted. It is a dead home. When the lights are aglow of an evening, you may hear the barbaric yawp of canned inebriacy and sex passion sounding on the phonograph while the young dance. No more Pull for the Shore, Sailor,' no more Watts and Bliss and Moody and Sankey! Perhaps this new condition is a part of the ruin of war. Some two million of our boys lived a long time without law save that of the soldier. Many of them brought to their homes a reckless, dare-devil spirit and gave it to their sisters and brothers. In the most unexpected places we find the lawless cruelty of No Man's Land. We find everywhere a growing disrespect for law and decency. I think it is due largely to the fact that women have not been equal to the task they have lightly taken upon themselves in assuming the reins of government at home, and yet men are more at fault than women.

"In my youth we had a minister down there in the village who was a man of

[blocks in formation]

the street respected him. Every day he was going from house to house. He knew all the young people by name. Most of them he had baptized. He kept watch of them. He knew what they

had been doing in and out of school. He was the shepherd of the flock. If one of them had committed a folly, somehow he had found it out. He would graciously invite the foolish one to his study; when the culprit arrived, no hard words would be spoken.

"My child,' he would say, 'I am your shepherd. I love you. I cannot let you go astray. It is my duty to watch over you. I want you to know that you can bring your doubts and troubles to me and I will do what I can to help you. That is my business. It may be a matter of which you would not wish to speak to your mother or father. Do not fail to bring it to me, because I am the shepherd of the flock, and I will be a light to your feet, my child.'

"Where is the shepherd of the flock? Perhaps it is my fault, but somehow these days I do not see him-at least, his flock would seem to have gone astray. Has he, too, been tempted by the rewards of business?"

S

HALL we allow commerce to monopolize the heart and intellect of humanity?

Let us not be misled. Your palaces and mills and sky-scrapers are, after all, very little things. The real wealth of the world is stored in the spirit of man. Is it not time to demand an accounting which shall tell us how many great men we have and how many fools, and, above all, what is the mental and moral condition of our average individual?

[merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic]

IT

THE LIFE OF HERMAN MELVILLE'

A REVIEW BY LLOYD R. MORRIS

T was perhaps in a mood not altogether devoid of prophetic insight that Herman Melville, while seeing "Moby Dick" through the press, wrote to his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne: "All fame is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What 'reputation' H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, anyway; but to go down as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'! When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all likelihood. "Typee' will be given them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities."

Mr. Weaver's brilliant and vividly written biography of Melville makes a substantial contribution to our knowledge of one of the most significant artists, and surely one of the most interesting figures, in American literature. It is, moreover, fascinating reading; a book which has all the intellectual keenness and finely edged wit of Mr. Strachey's "Queen Victoria" and is served besides by a quickened critical insight.

Melville's career, viewed retrospectively, is as beguiling in its unrealized potentialities as in its actual accomplishment. Before his twenty-fifth year Melville had been a merchant-sailor in the transatlantic trade, a whaler in the Pacific, had been for three months a resident of the Marquesas Islands, had been a prisoner in Tahiti as the result of a mutiny, and returned to the United States by way of South America as an "ordinary seaman" on an American man-of-war. In 1846 he published "Typee," the record of his stay in the Marquesas, which brought him immediate popularity in the United States and in England. This was followed by "Omoo," "Redburn," and "White Jacket," and in 1851 by his finest work, "Moby Dick." The following year brought forth a much-misunderstood novel, "Pierre," and in 1857 Melville practically renounced literature. From then on until his death in 1891 he was the willing tenant of a remote corner of oblivion.

"At the age of thirty-two," says Mr. Weaver, "so brilliant, so intense, so crowded, had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors][merged small]

utter night. Nearly forty years before his death he had come to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American writers. From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigor and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but blazed charred avenues to despair."

Melville himself seems to have had a premonition of waning power, for in the letter to Hawthorne previously quoted he wrote: "The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches." And with a touch of humor

he adds: "I'm rather sore, perhaps, in this letter."

Being of an uncompromising turn of mind, Melville did not write the "other way;" instead, he wrote what is possibly one of the least known books by any American writer of importance, "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," a novel roundly abused by the contemporary critics and almost wholly forgotten by the posterity of which Melville was so contemptuous. In "Pierre," Mr. Weaver tells us, "Melville coiled down into the night of his soul to write an anatomy of despair." "The subtlety of the analysis," he continues, "is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the most recent findings in psychology. . . . In the winding ambiguities of 'Pierre' Melville attempts to reveal man's fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves whose origins we never suspect. 'In reserves men build imposing characters,' Melville says; 'not in revelations.' 'Pierre' is not conspicuous for its reserves."

Melville's disillusion reached a climax in "Pierre" which left him little to say even on the subject of disillusion itself. And he turned more and more completely to metaphysical speculation. Mr. Weaver shows that Melville's interest in metaphysics had its genesis in the Marquesas, where he came first to speculate as to the possible advantages of conferring Christian civilization upon the "humane, gentlemanly, and amiable set of epicures" who constituted their population. The publication of "Omoo" brought Melville into controversy with the London Missionary Society over his plea for forbearance and charity to the islanders; later this controversy bore fruit in an ironic theory that in this world a wise man resigns himself to the world's ways. "Resigned to the insight that while on earth no man aims at heaven except by a virtuous expediency," says Mr. Weaver, "he accepted the London Missionary Society as one of the evils inherent in the universe, and, leaving it to its own fate, looked prophetically forward to the InterChurch World Movement. In 'The Confidence Man' he makes one the characters say: 'Missions I would quicken with the Wall Street spirit. For if, confessedly, certain spiritual ends are to be gained but through the auxiliary agency of worldly means, then, to the surer gaining of such spiritual ends, the example of worldly policy in worldly projects should not by spiritual projectors be slighted. In brief, the conversion of the heathen, so far, at least, as depend

[graphic]

150

ing on human effort, would, by the world's charity, be let out on contract. So much by bid for converting India, so much for Borneo, so much for Africa. You see this doing good in the world by driblets is just nothing. I am for doing good in the world with a will. Do but think of the eddies and maelstroms of pagans in China. People here have no conception of it. Of a frosty morning in Hongkong, pauper pagans are found dead in the streets like so many nipped peas in a bin of peas. To be an immortal being in China is no more distinction than to be a snowflake in a snowsquall. What are a score or two of missionaries to such a people? I am for sending ten thousand missionaries and converting the Chinese en masse within six months of the debarkation. thing is then done, and turn to something else.'" Such was the ironic temper of Melville's mood in 1857.

The

Of the four books which he published after that date two were privately printed in limited editions and three As Mr. contained exclusively verse. family Weaver observes, "Melville's seem all to have been more skeptical of

FICTION

his verse than they were of his prose. In 1859 Mrs. Melville wrote to her mother, 'Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around.' Mrs. Melville was too optimistic: her husband's indiscreet practice is still pretty much a secret to the world at large." Most of these poems, and they are sufficiently quoted by Mr. Weaver, deal with the speculative divagations which preoccupied Melville's long period of silence. Mr. Weaver quotes Melville's verdict on "Clarel," the longest and most revealing of his poems: "A metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity." "Though this is completely true," says Mr. Weaver, "Melville used in 'Clarel' more irony, vividness, and intellect than the whole congregation of practicing poets of the present day (a few notable names excepted) could muster in aggregate. Yet with all this wealth of the stuff of poetry, the poem never quite fulfills itself." And, with the exception of "Moby Dick," the statement seems equally well to apply to the bulk of Melville's writing.

THE NEW BOOKS

Translated NOVELS OF TURGENEV (THE). from the Russian by Constance Garnett. $2. The Macmillan Company, New York. The store of good material in Turgenev's writings seems inexhaustible. Some of his short stories appeared fifteen years ago in this excellent collective edition, with the same translator and publisher. The tales in this volume are strange, dramatically tense, but with the tragedy there is often intermingled a humorous strain.

SHERIDAN ROAD MYSTERY (THE). By Paul and Mabel Thorne. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $1.75.

A detective story well carried on until the end approaches, when the villain's villainy is so excessive that the reader ceases to believe in him.

Illus

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY AMERICAN HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT. By Matthew Page Andrews, M.A. trated. The J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia. $2.

A remarkably complete and wellwritten account of our country's history from its beginnings to the present time. The reading of the book will interest and stimulate every one who is at all familiar with our life as a nation and A the problems that have beset it. Southern slant will undoubtedly be felt by the Northern reader in some of the chapters (notably in the account of Brooks's assault on Senator Sumner), but on the whole the author's attempt to present an unbiased narrative is fairly successful, and his point of view is always interesting and skillfully put.

BIG FOUR AND OTHERS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE (THE). By Robert Lansing. Mifflin Company, Houghton [llustrated. Boston. $2.50. We have already spoken at some length about Mr. Lansing's remarkable en portrait of President Wilson in his

[blocks in formation]

Written by Irish men and women in a spirit of sympathy with the nationalistic aspirations of their race, this book nevertheless deals largely with other than political themes. The story of Ireland's early civilization receives full treatment, and much of this portion of the book will be new to most American readers. As a whole, the volume presents a somewhat somber picture of a race whose future at the present time seems luminous with hope.

MISCELLANEOUS

SOUL OF AN IMMIGRANT (THE). By Constantine M. Panunzio. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.

This book has attracted deserved attention because, like the narrative of personal experience written years ago by Mary Antin, it brings close to the reader's mind the feelings and impressions of an immigrant who enters this country with a deep love of liberty. In this case the sailor boy described had unhappy and unfortunate experiences, was ill treated, but still struggled on, and in the end became an American citizen of the kind we like to have.

[merged small][graphic]

"—and the men would lean their guns up against the wall, handy—

and then all would join in prayer; though the man next the aisle didn't kneel-he kinda stood guard."

PIOUS souls, they were in those days

—quaint Mississippi River days and vigilant all the while. For the ownership of a disputed calf could never be settled until the family of one or the other contender was exterminated. Can you picture the people of the river towns the river pilot, as romantic a figure as American history produced; brawling deckhands, picturesque traveling mendicants, levee darkies-the craft that plied the shifting bed of the Father of Waters? Not until you have read the man who lived the life, knew its spirit and caught its humor-Mark Twain. As far back as you can remember you have heard of Mark Twain as a story-teller. You have read many of his imperishable works. But did you know that this great story-teller had written his conception of how a story should be told? This he has done, and you may have it FREE. Merely clip the coupon and we shall send you the free booklet which contains Mark Twain's delightful instructive essay, "How to Tell a Story." The booklet also contains a complete reprint of one of the funniest stories the great humorist ever wrote. We have included in this same little book interesting and valuable information about the Author's National Edition of the Works of

MARK TWAIN

This is the only complete edition of Mark
Twain's writings. Here you join "Huck" Finn
and Tom Sawyer in their boyish pranks-you
live the quaint life of steamboat days and the
Far West-you see foreign lands and people
through the eye of the master humorist-you
thrill to every wholesome human emotion.
Mark Twain's versatile mind gave to the world
a perfectly balanced library of humor, adventure,

HOW TELL A STORY

philosophy, and inspiration. You should at least know something about this famous author's works. The free booklet tells. Send for it to-day.

Send for this Free Booklet

[blocks in formation]

1922

WHEN YOUR INSURANCE DOLLAR PUTS ON ITS OVERALLS

S

BY FORREST F. DRYDEN

TAND some morning in the office of large life insurance company when the mail is opened. See the great stacks of letters brought in and emptied on the receiving tables, and let your imagination busy itself with the stories that lie behind these envelopes. Here is a money order from a crossroads post office-only a few dollars, yet a husband and wife have sacrificed for a month to purchase the protection it represents. Here is a check for thousands-a corporation has insured the life of its president, in order that the business may be protected in the event of his loss.

Stiff, formal envelopes and poor, shabby envelopes-some addressed in typewriting, some in ink, some with lead pencil in letters hardly legible, but every one a magnificent testimony to human faith. For the people from whom these envelopes come have never seen the office of the insurance company nor met its officers; they are intrusting the dearest thing in the world-the protection of their wives and children-to men whose names even are almost unknown to them. Surely there is no more solemn trust than this. I pity the insurance man, no matter how familiar the sight may be to him, who can watch the morning mail being opened without feeling a renewed and deepened sense of obligation at this vast, silent ritual of Confidence and Faith.

Now what becomes of these millions that are sent to the insurance companies from families all over the world? Are they kept piled up in banks? Some of them are, for sound insurance practice dictates that the company shall always have a large reserve in cash. No one knows when a catastrophe or an epidemic may come, making thousands of families suddenly dependent-the insurance company must be always prepared.

But what of the rest-the millions and millions which will not be needed by the policy-holders for years?

In St. Paul's Cathedral in London there is a simple slab marking the burial-place of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of the great edifice. Upon it is this inscription in Latin, "If you would see his monument, look about you." The same inscription might be written of the dollar which you, and you, and you, have intrusted to your insurance company as a protection for the future. If you would see that dollar, you have only to look about you. It is not lying idle in some vault far away: it is invested and at work close at hand.

You pick up the telephone receiver and are connected with a friend in another part of your city. It is a miracle that would amaze us more if it were not so common. Your insurance dollar has helped to work that miracle; for the

[blocks in formation]

3-in-One

The Universal High Quality Oil

Men often buy 3-in-One for firearms and learn from the Dictionary that it is the proper lubricant for tools, office chairs, typewriters, magnetos, Ford Commutators, and a hundred other light mechanisms.

Women buy 3-in-One for sewing machines and discover that it is exactly right for all the other household machinery-vacuum cleaners, player pianos, talking machines, locks, clocks-also that it cleans and polishes furniture and prevents rust on all metals.

Boys and girls find lots of uses for 3-in-One that they never even dreamed of.

Save the Dictionary that comes with your next bottle of 3-in-One or write for another today.

At all good stores in 1-oz., 3-oz. and 8-oz. botties and in 3-oz Handy Oil Cans.

13

REGISTERED

[blocks in formation]

IN

D249C

[blocks in formation]

TRADE-HARA

[graphic]
« PreviousContinue »