When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 23

"Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.

"And something in him always trans.m.u.ted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.

"The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.

"His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--meaner conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompa.s.s all.

"Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which _makes_ the imperfect more perfect, creates _better_ than the materials permit, _forces_ real life actually to a.s.sume and _be_ what the pa.s.sionate desire for sanity and beauty demands."

There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:--

"'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness of her world--the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless, malformed, starving minds you a.n.a.lyse.... My G.o.d, Mr. Annan--are there no wholesome brains in the world you write about?'"

I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own att.i.tude toward his work.

_Eris_ will be published early in 1923, following Mr. Chambers's _The Talkers_.

=iii=

Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, the son of William Chambers and Carolyn (Boughton) Chambers. Walter Boughton Chambers, the architect, is his brother. Robert William Chambers was a student in the Julien Academy in Paris from 1886 to 1893. He married, on July 12, 1898, Elsa Vaughn Moler. He first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1889; he was an ill.u.s.trator for Life, Truth, Vogue and other magazines. His first book, _In the Quarter_, was published in 1893; and when, in the same year, a collection of stories of Paris called _The King in Yellow_ made its appearance, Robert W. Chambers became a name of literary importance.

Curiously enough, among the things persistently remembered about Mr.

Chambers to this day is a particular poem in a book of rollicking verse called _With the Band_, which he published in 1895. This cherished--by very many people scattered here and there--poem had to do with Irishmen parading. One stanza will identify it.

"Ses Corporal Madden to Private McFadden: 'Bedad yer a bad 'un!

Now turn out yer toes!

Yer belt is unhookit, Yer cap is on crookit, Yer may not be drunk, But, be jabers, ye look it!

Wan-two!

Wan-two!

Ye monkey-faced divil, I'll jolly ye through!

Wan-two!

Time! Mark!

Ye march like the aigle in Cintheral Park!'"

In the course of writing many books, Chambers has been responsible for one or two shows. He wrote for Ada Rehan, _The Witch of Ellangowan_, a drama produced at Daly's Theatre. His _Iole_ was the basis of a delightful musical comedy produced in New York in 1913. He is a member of the National Inst.i.tute of Arts and Letters.

BOOKS BY ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

IN THE QUARTER THE KING IN YELLOW THE RED REPUBLIC THE KING AND A FEW DUKES THE MAKER OF MOONS WITH THE BAND THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE LORRAINE ASHES OF EMPIRE THE HAUNTS OF MEN THE CAMBRIC MASK OUTSIDERS THE CONSPIRATORS CARDIGAN THE MAID-AT-ARMS OUTDOOR-LAND THE MAIDS OF PARADISE ORCHARD-LAND FOREST LAND IOLE THE FIGHTING CHANCE MOUNTAIN LAND THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS THE TREE OF HEAVEN THE FIRING LINE SOME LADIES IN HASTE THE DANGER MARK THE SPECIAL MESSENGER HIDE AND SEEK IN FORESTLAND THE GREEN MOUSE AILSA PAIGE BLUE-BIRD WEATHER j.a.pONETTE THE STREETS OF ASCALON ADVENTURES OF A MODEST MAN THE BUSINESS OF LIFE THE COMMON LAW THE GAY REBELLION WHO GOES THERE?

THE HIDDEN CHILDREN ATHALIE POLICE!!!

THE GIRL PHILIPPA THE BARBARIANS THE RESTLESS s.e.x THE MOONLIT WAY IN SECRET THE CRIMSON TIDE THE SLAYER OF SOULS THE LITTLE RED FOOT THE FLAMING JEWEL THE TALKERS ERIS

SOURCES ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, by Joseph Hergesheimer, GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY.

English Literature During the Last Half Century, by J. W. Cunliffe, THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

A Hugh Walpole Anthology, selected by the author. LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY.

Hugh Walpole, Master Novelist. Pamphlet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. (Out of print.)

Who's Who [In England].

CHAPTER XX

UNIQUITIES

=i=

Each of these five is a book which, either from its subject, its authorship, or its handling, is _sui generis_. I call such books "uniquities"; it sounds a little less trite than saying they are unique. I think I will let someone else speak of these books. I will look to see, and will let you see, what others have said about my uniquities.

=ii=

First we have _Our Navy at War_ by Josephus Daniels. W. B. M'Cormick, formerly of the editorial staff of the Army and Navy Journal, reviewing this book for the New York Herald (28 May 1922) said:

"Josephus Daniels always was an optimist about navy affairs while he was Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1921, and now that he has told what the navy did during the world war he demonstrates in his narrative that he is a good sport. For in spite of the many and bitter attacks that were made on him in that troubled time he does not make a single reference to any of them, nor does he wreak any such revenge as he might have done through this medium. In this respect it may be said that truly does he live up to the description of his character set down in the pages of Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske's autobiography, namely, that 'Secretary Daniels impressed me as being a Christian gentleman.'

"In its general outlines and in many of its details there is little in Mr.

Daniels's story that has not been told before in volumes devoted to single phases of the United States Navy's war operations. For example, his chapter on the extraordinary task of laying the great mine fields, known as the North Sea barrage, from Norway to the Orkneys, is much more fully described in the account written by Captain Reginald R. Belknap; the story of 'Sending Sims to Europe' is also more extensively presented in that officer's book, _The Victory at Sea_, and the same qualification can be applied to the chapter on the fighting of the marines in Belleau Wood and elsewhere, and the work of our destroyers and submarines in European waters.

"But Mr. Daniels's history has one great merit that these other books lack. This is that it tells in its 374 pages the complete story of the work of the navy in the world war, giving so many details and so much precise information about officers and their commands, ships of all cla.s.ses and just what they did, the valuable contributions made to the winning of the war by civilians, that it makes a special place for itself, a very special place, in any library or shelf devoted to war books."

=iii=

Leslie Haden Guest, a surgeon of wide experience and secretary of the British Labour Delegation to Soviet Russia, is the author of _The Struggle for Power in Europe (1917-21)_, "an outline economic and political survey of the Central States and Russia," of which E. J. C. said in the Boston Evening Transcript (4 March 1922):

"The author writes from personal observation in Russia and discloses much of the life of the day in that country which heretofore has remained undisclosed to the world. He has met and interviewed Lenine and Trotsky themselves, shows us the individuality of these great Bolshevist leaders and tells us much of the life of the people and of the social conditions and tendencies in that distressful country.

"Next he crosses to Poland, another undiscovered country, and shows us the new Poland, its aims and its struggles to emerge from a state almost of anarchy into one of a rational democracy. Very little do we of this country know of the new nation of Tcheko-Slovakia, but Dr. Guest has travelled through it also and shows us the two sections, one cultured, the other more backward, but both working together to form a modern democratic nation.

"The distressful condition of Austria and the Austrians now suffering for the sins of the Hapsburgs, is next shown forth. Vienna, once the capital of a vast empire and the seat of a great imperial court, was suddenly reduced to the level of the capital of a small agricultural, inland state, a condition productive of great suffering. The conditions here are shown to differ much from those in other countries, for the dismemberment of Austria was not brought about by the act of the Allies, but of their own people. The causes of the suffering are fully explained, as are also the causes of similar conditions in Hungary, in Roumania, in Bulgaria and in other countries affected by the economic and political upheavals following the war. That democracy in Europe will finally triumph Dr. Guest feels certain and he gives lucid reasons for the faith that is in him. He gives a broadly intelligent a.n.a.lysis of the entire situation and finds that the essential conditions of success of a democracy are peace, education and adequate nutrition. But he shows that a great problem exists which must be worked out; and he shows how it must be worked out. Dr. Guest is not alone a thinker, but an observer; not a theorist, but a man of practical understanding, who has studied a problem at first hand and shows it forth simply but comprehensively and with an eye single to the needs of humanity."

=iv=

Of _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_, by Raymond M. Weaver, Carl Van Vechten, writing in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post (31 December 1921), said:

"No biography of Melville, no important personal memorandum of the man, was published during his lifetime. It is only now, thirty years after his death and one hundred and two years after his birth, that Raymond M.

Weaver's _Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic_ has appeared.

"Under the circ.u.mstances, Mr. Weaver may be said to have done his work well. The weakness of the book is due to the conditions controlling its creation. Personal records in any great number do not exist. There are, to be sure, Melville's letters to Hawthorne, published by Julian Hawthorne, in his _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. There are a few references to Melville in the diary of Mrs. Hawthorne and in her letters to her mother.

There remain the short account given by J. E. A. Smith, a man with no kind of mental approach to his hero, a few casual memories of Richard Henry Stoddard, whose further testimony would have been invaluable had he been inclined to be more loquacious, and a few more by Dr. t.i.tus Munson Coan and Arthur Stedman; but both these men, perhaps the nearest to Melville in his later years, were agreed that he ceased to be an artist when he deserted the prescribed field of _Typee_ and _Omoo_, and they hara.s.sed his last days in their efforts to make him perceive this, much as if an admirer of Verdi's early manner had attempted to persuade the composer that work on 'Aida' and 'Otello' was a waste of time that might much better be occupied in creating another 'Trovatore.' In desperation, Melville refused to be lured into conversation about the South Seas, and whenever the subject was broached he took refuge in quoting Plato. No very competent witnesses, therefore, these. Aside from these sources, long open to an investigator, Mr. Weaver has had the a.s.sistance of Mr. Melville's granddaughter, who was not quite ten years old when Melville died, but who has in her possession Mrs. Melville's commonplace book, Melville's diary of two European excursions, and a few letters.

"Generally, however, especially for the most important periods and the most thrilling events in Melville's life, Mr. Weaver has been compelled to depend upon the books the man wrote.