Atlantic Shop-Talk

WE have never done much beyond announcing the books that proceed from the Atlantic Monthly Press; but as they come forth in a broadening stream, so many things clamor to be said about them and their authors that we are no longer going to resist the universally human impulse to talk shop.

There is no recent book better worth talking about than the Letters of William James, edited by his sou, Henry James. With a certain appropriateness, it was published as nearly on Thanksgiving Day as the exigencies of the holiday would permit. Since then a chorus of thanks for it has been raised from all parts of America, in a series, not so much of reviews, as of substantial articles on William James and the significance of his thought and life. They constitute in themselves a genuine contribution to criticism and biography. Now the reviews have begun to come from England, where the book was published in January. They go to swell the chorus of praise and thanksgiving. One of the first of them was in the Saturday Review. It ends with these words: ’James was a pioneer who always kept, his mind alert, and if ever a statue were set up to him at Harvard, he should be sculptured as trampling on a textbook and looking out at the open air.'

Were such a statue already in existence, we should be using it as a cover-design for a book we are planning to publish in April Shackled Youth, by Edward Yeomans. This volume of ‘ Comments on Schools, School People, and Other People’ contains the papers on educational topics which Mr. Yeomans has contributed to the Atlantic during the past year, with as many more of the same general character, hitherto unpublished. There are probably technical educators who would regard Mr. Yeomans as better qualified to discuss education if he were something other than a Chicago manufacturer of steam-pumps, who enjoys playing the cello, sailing a boat along the New England coast in summer, and passing the present winter in California. It is our own opinion that, if more schoolmasters will open their doors and windows to many of the sentiments he expresses, their pupils and the public will gain in health and sanity.

But perhaps the very first of our spring books will have put the schoolmen in a good humor, for it is truly a notable historical work— The Founding of New England, by James Truslow Adams. In spite of his name, Mr. Adams—he was Captain Adams in war-time—is not a New Englander; and in spite of its title, the book is much more than a local history. The author of this modern, serious, and readable book on the’oldcomers’ is a Yale Master of Arts, who left Wall Street as soon as he could, to pursue historical studies, and left them to serve his country when the war came. A part of his service was that of an expert on maps at the Paris Peace Conference. He has now returned to the pursuits of an historian.

Still another April book will be the second volume of the ' Little Gateways to Science,’ by Miss Edith M. Patch. This book of Bird Stories follows the Hexapod Stories, by Miss Patch, State Entomologist of Maine, which the Press published a year ago. The Bird Stories are addressed to somewhat older children than those for whom the Hexapod Stories were written. They have the same illustrator, Mr. Robert J. Sim, who shares Miss Patch’s intimate knowledge of nature and loving skill in depicting it in ways to which young readers instinctively respond.

Most of this shop-talk has been about new books. There are the still newer — the books that are yet in the manuscript stage. The accomplished conjurer never pulls all his tricks out. of the bag at once; and, though we are still new at the game, we do not intend to disclose our plans for more than a few months ahead. Among these plans is the production of the previously announced book on typography and usage, based on the practice of the Atlantic Monthly Office, and written by Mr. George B. Ives, of that office. Mrs. Francis King, president of the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, has in preparation a practical, illustrated book on The Little Garden. This will appear before the earlier flowers are out of bloom; and before the stream of 1921 pilgrims to Plymouth and Cape Cod is flowing at the full, we expect to place within their reach a charming little book, Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Procincetown Sketchbook, written by Miss Frances Lester Warner, an Atlantic contributor, and illustrated by Mr. Scott White.

There is a classic story of the newspaper offices, about the safety of printing editorials on Tammany Hall and the yellow dog —because they have no friends. We should have added the rattlesnake to the list, but apparently he too is not to be abused with impunity. His defender appears in the person of a reader of an extract from Mr. Samuel Scoville, Jr.’s book, Everyday Adventures, which leads her to believe that it ‘must be a very immoral book.’ Mr. Scoville describes the pinning down of a rattlesnake’s head with a forked stick. The reptilophile exclaims, ‘I wonder if the rattlesnake, looking into Mr. Scoville’s face, saw an angelic being hovering over him? If Mr. Scoville were fastened to the ground by a crotched stick over his neck, would his expression be that of a cherub?

Can anyone but the snake answer?

Mr. William McFee is best known to readers of the Atlantic by his own writings, exemplifying his own theory of the writer’s art. Not long ago he wrote us about an Atlantic book in which many readers besides Mr. McFee and ourselves have been taking a genuine pleasure — The Mutineers, by Charles Boardman Hawes. In so doing, he set down views on the writing of tales of adventure that ought not to be locked up in a private letter.
’It has long been a fad of my own to gauge a writer of adventure-tales by what I call his mastery of illusion. It is very difficult to say just where this glinting glamour comes in. If we only knew when and where to expect it, we might get past ourselves and decline to live the lives of humdrum mortals any more. Some men (they say) get it by a natural easy fortune, others strive and struggle and succeed. Personally, I am inclined to doubt the natural-born magicians. I am moved to believe that this peculiar quality is a new thing in literature, beginning, with almost startling abruptness, in Defoe. It generally selects for its medium a tale of desperate adventure and proposes, by a tour de force of verisimilitude, to carry you away captive. Simple enough —yet who can analyze the lure in that first page of Treasure Island, of Conrad’s Romance, or the extraordinary sensation of uplifting the spirit which comes with the first reading of Deerslayer? It derives in part, of course,from the author’s supreme technique and vocation, and seems to reside in some trivial detail. As, for example, when we recall the powders in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or the blind man Pew in Treasure Island, who ran to and fro in his madness, or the deep shadow of Don Ramon’s store-room in Kingston, in Romance. Byron had this quality to a much greater degree than Scott, and, had he been driven by circumstances, would have written some wonderful stories. One of the pathetic features of modern commercial literature is the frantic effort of writers to get this magic mastery of illusion by any means in the world. The popular magazines, the purveyors of red-blood stories, are forever spurring on their foam-flecked novelists to go out and get it. Crowns of gold and noble mansions are (so we understand) awaiting the lucky wight who can find the secret of a new way of getting hold of men’s hearts.
‘ A much more difficult feat is the writing of a tale to enmesh the youth. The youth with all his wits about him, realistic, romantic, secretly in love with noble deeds (though he would perish at the stake before admitting it!), is a shy bird, on whose tail it is almost despairingly difficult to lay the Attic salt of literature. To catch young ladies is the simplest thing in the world, as numerous best-sellers can tell you. They (the young ladies) are, in a literary sense, naïve creatures without a sense of shame, beings of catholic tastes and responsive to a score of conventional emotions. But who shall determine the literary reactions of a boy in his teens? Who can measure up to his scornful standard of fortitude and athletic energy? Very few, alas!
‘Mr. Charles Board man Hawes in this story of The Mutineers has done something in this line. He boldly sets out to evoke the spirit of romance without losing hold of the authentic truth. His success is astonishing. It is inevitable that comparison should be made with Stevenson, and there is no harm in admitting that Treasure Island remains the masterpiece of this kind of writing. But the present writer has a suspicion that Treasure Island is not accepted by non-literary young men quite so enthusiastically as he would like to think. He suspects a relish for this extraordinary tale is commoner among children and literati than among youths in stand-up collars. Mr. Hawes, it is positively advanced, makes a successful appeal to the last-mentioned. The tale of Benjamin Lathrop’s voyage from Salem to Canton is a cunning blend of the credible and the romantic, corresponding with admirable fidelity to the effervescing and precipitating mixture which occupies the head of a youth between sixteen and twenty. This particular member of society, the present writer predicts, will manifest an increasing affection for The Mutineers. And it is fairly safe to add that Ins mother will be glad of it, his father will tolerate it with a smile, and his sister, after the usual moment of superiority, will probably get hold of it surreptitiously and devour it as well.
‘Yours sincerely,
‘ WILLIAM MCFEE.'

Mr. McFee makes the inevitable comparison with Stevenson — which recalls a note from Mr. Hawes himself about his book soon after its appearance: ‘The way that it seems to challenge comparison with Stevenson is no end disconcerting. Whatever merits it may have, they appear like a 25W Mazda bulb in the sunshine when it is so ruthlessly treated; and the funny thing is that the comparison pops out when I least expect it. By way of expressing my gratitude to a certain sailorman who has told me stories by the hour, — and who boasts of never having spent a dollar for a book, — I gave him one of my copies. Imagine my surprise when, in a painstaking letter, he drew Treasure Island from some unsuspected cupboard of literary knowledge.’