INTELLECTUAL INDULGENCE

IT

T was a Victorian writer, Charles Kingsley, who wrote contemptuously of those who let "I dare not" wait upon "I would", but we have nowadays a strange extension of the habit. With the common form — that of a shivering interest in salacious stories we are already familiar. We find it in timid and suppressed natures, incurably adolescent, full of animosity. The newer variety is something different. It dates from the time when Freud became proper reading for young men and women, and when books of "healthy sexual instruction" were snatched up eagerly as pornography. It resolves itself into an absorbing interest in sex as a subject of conversation. The young of all ages and all sexes (for the older assumption that there were only two sexes has long been destroyed) have discovered sex as a topic; and they never get far away from it. In couples, in parties, at home, at dances, at functions, they find it unfailing and inexhaustible. As Sir Robert Walpole said, "After dinner I

always talk bawdy, so that all can join in!" Only this is a new and solemn form of bawdiness. It is not that the talkers practise what they preach in fact. One lady, indeed, whose work and conversation are alike full of her obsession, was once asked by a thoughtless girl visitor whether she had ever had an "affair". She replied with a shocked and stony silence. No, the talkers talk. They talk and they think, as if unwinkingly. One may see the habit reflected in many modern novels. In these the characters talk sex heavily for many pages; but their energy, it appears, is all absorbed in their conversation. Such novels, though dull, are true to fact. It would not be just to say that they are true to life. All pseudo-intellectuals at the present time are talking and thinking sex, not in a robust animalish way, but solemnly, pretentiously, foolishly. What is the good of it? By their endless discussion of sexual formulæ they render the real beauty and passion of life dull. To them all is sterile and mechanical. In vain they try to stimulate desire by this form of conversa

Camp died in his sleep at a New York hotel. This famous football man and coach, chooser of all-American teams, arbiter of Yale athletic destinies, inventor of the daily dozen, was a sturdy and praiseworthy figure in a special but important field of American writing. In these days of impassioned revelation in both fiction and biography, when some health magazines are obviously designed to appeal to desires other than that for muscle building, we must remember that men like Walter

He

different category from Bernarr Macfadden. Walter Camp worshiped the usefulness, not the beauty, of the body. It was an experience to watch his keen eyes peering over a football field. demanded in a game precision of the mind coupled with functioning of the body. He knew boy nature and man as well; his personality influenced not alone the men of the Yale campus but those interested in clean living all over the world. Nor was there too much of the preacher in him. He was practical, knowing, and forthright. Like the death of Percy Haughton, his going marks a loss not only to American field athletics but also to the literature of clean sport.

WHAT PRICE AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

HE precise age at which a man or

for frankness and real helpfulness in discussions of the care of the body. If we are becoming too frank in our regard of the abuses of the body, we surely cannot reveal too much of the way to maintain its maximum usefulness. Though we may laugh at our own American characteristics of organization, both of abstract principles and practicalities, we cannot but praise highly this organization of the health ideal. Dwight L. Moody and others organized religion. The Morgans and the Harrimans created the big business ideal. The advertising pages of the great magazines and their clients have spread the gospel of tooth brush, mouth wash, soap, and luxurious bathing facilities. It was Walter Camp who created a symbol for men and women of a trim, careful age, of days begun neatly and forcefully. At sixty six he looked fifty. His ideal was Spartan rather than Athenian, thus establishing him in a

a

autobiography has never been defined, nor is it possible even to approximate such an auspicious moment in an individual's existence. But it should be apparent that the age limit when such a feat of self engrossment seems (as Henry James would put it) so beautifully right, has been considerably lowered during recent years. In the not so distant past an individual considered it necessary to have reached what he regarded as the culminating point of his career before he turned his eyes back to that survey of his days and ways, his achievements and perplexities, his failures and reactions. In other words, he made it a point to reach some sort of perspective before he tacitly judged himself. Several phenomena of recent seasons seem to show that the winds of ego are blowing autobiographical straws in another direction. Nowadays the young au

thor occasionally holds up a restraining hand at his career (which, it is to be presumed, is still champing furiously at the bit) and murmurs, "Pause, I prithee, while I get my autobiography off my chest. Then we will proceed as per schedule."

And so the young man sits down and reviews his past with a deal of sage shaking of the head. He dips his pen in honey or wormwood as the case may be and then, with occasional Homeric nods, measures and justifies his way to God and man. He lights upon certain episodes. He grows lyrical. Like Denis in Mr. Huxley's "Crome Yellow", he stares back through the mists of six months, sighs, and mutters, "What genius I had then!" Perhaps it was Max Beerbohm who created this juvenile motif in the art of living, that Max who collected six of his essays when he was in his early twenties, issued them as a book, and called the book "The Works of Max Beerbohm". Just so do some of our younger authors grow autobiographical, collecting their twenty-odd summers into a generous sized tome and calling it "The Life of So-and-So". Of course, it is the life of So-and-So. The patient public desiring the life of Somebody begins to grow dubious.

But, after all, is comparative youth any reason why a man should not indulge in an autobiography if he can get a publisher to issue it? It all depends. If John Keats had written his autobiography the year before he died (and he died in his early twenties) his book would be, if not a masterpiece, at least an extraordinary production and one of infinite importance. To end on a cordial note, the autobiography always depends on the man inside it. If his qualities are sufficiently unique and his impress on his generation sufficiently individual, he may, with only a few

qualms, embark upon such a book. And as he continues to live he may add chapters and sections to the work, thus bringing it up to date. But alas for those young men who outlive their autobiographies and discover forty years later that they died forty years before!

A TASK FOR OUR AMERICAN NOVELISTS

Whears people of taste assert that

ITH an increasing frequency one

the greatest lack in the work of our American novelists is on the side of richness, of texture, and of color. No one can deny that we have on our side the qualities of vitality, strength, and variety. It is the indefinable, shimmering quality for which there is no name that is most often missing in novels otherwise admirable. may be achieved is a difficult problem; one can only say that most good English novels have it and have always had it.

How this

It is the quality which gives a novel at once a sense of life and a sense of enduring values. It has been said that our novels are barren because our own national life is barren, but such an assertion is obviously a false one in a country where there is a vast amount of good music, good pictures, and good books. There is, to be sure, a lack of that rich tradition which is the blessing and sometimes the curse of Europe, but this cannot be the sole reason. One is inclined to believe that the lack lies in the authors themselves.

How is this warmth, this texture, this depth to be achieved? One suspects that it is a thing which arises from cultivation, from wide knowledge, from sophistication. It is a commonplace that the average American uni

versity man is far more poorly equipped on the cultural side than his English brother. It is a commonplace that almost any Englishman can write well, that a second rate English novel is frequently very good entertainment where a second class American novel is, to the person of intelligence and penetration, unreadable. The difference is one of warmth and texture as well as actual ability to write.

In the United States it is, perhaps, too easy to attain the publication of a novel. The publishers are too willing to print half baked novels on a chance of the things which the author may be able to do later on. None of us are forced into learning to write well; if any of us write well it is because we have a conscientious passion for doing so. It is, after all, the artist alone who loves the cadence of his sentences, the mass of his detail, the form of his work.

We, in America, have the vitality and the material; it remains for us to supply only the richesse which comes alone from the brain and soul of the writer. At the moment there are too many "thin" novels, too many novels of which one can say, "It is just another book."

that the hemlock is not first administered to ourselves.

I am introduced to Mrs. X. In the progression of our bridge she becomes one of the four at our table. Sweet as honey comes her question, "In what month were you born?" Then the trap is sprung: "What date?" "What time of day or night?" Instantly there is revealed the astrological circumstances which control the sort of person I am; my ability to keep the wolf from the door; to lavish affection or to lower temperature; even to bid wisely or to remove a doubled "three no trumps" from the danger zone.

Or it may be Mr. X, the gentleman with a radio complex, who makes me linger on the vision of that vacant chair at home beneath the reading lamp surrounded by an area of blissful quiet or the agreeable chatter of one's brilliant wife. It may be some other Mr. or Mrs. X with still other complexes, controlling precious hours by some self acknowledged right to impose upon unwilling listeners. So many human beings seem to run amuck! Large doses of superficial information upon specialized subjects are absorbed and unburdened upon old friends or casual acquaintances.

There must be some point to this diatribe on public nuisances in private places. It will be without effect, but the simple truth is that most of us sadly neglect that quite essential science the study of our audience. I have a passing interest in astrology, in radio, in golf scores, in baseball heroes, the latest "best seller"; but why should I be obliged (obliged, mind you) to be victimized on any of these subjects? Possibly I am quite wrong, but it would seem rather out of place, to say the least, for me to attempt to sell snow plows in Miami or to engage in nautical conversation someone without knowl

edge of seas and ships and with no more than passing interest in them.

And yet, similar things are done, and by those whose birth and training would seem to have instilled that courtesy which forbids one's being a bore of which there are two main sorts, abundantly prevalent: one carries "coals to Newcastle" where coal is too familiar to be raved about; the other carries coal to places where they burn whale blubber or gushing oil. Would it be too indelicate to ask "By any chance, by the wildest stretch of imagination, are you interested in coal?"

HORNET OR BUTTERFLY?

PRES

RESENT day criticism, like the old grey mare, "ain't what she usta be". Many of our recognized critics of literature and the drama, if measured by strict academic standards, would be utterly discredited. Still, we seem to get along very well with what we have, finding in journalistic criticism an ever widening outlook. If journalistic critical writing has done anything for the world of books and men - and few of us will deny that it has done a great deal it has certainly broadened and humanized what was once confined to dry and scholastic observation.

It has,

in very fact, shown us the flesh, blood, and brain of an author through his works. One may contend that newspaper and magazine writing of this sort lacks permanency because it must of necessity be hasty and superficial. But the energetic men and women who produce it daily, weekly, or monthly

know good writing when they see it and they have a genuine desire to give it to the widest possible audience.

On the fringe of this group, however, cling the wits and wags of the town, people with little real critical perception whose flair for getting themselves in print has often been confounded with the proportions of true authority. We wonder whether this parasitic group, living as they do in the shadow of vigorous minds, ever really read the books they laud or damn. Anyone who follows the accounts of metropolitan "literary" perambulations might well conclude that these people spend their time eating, drinking, and chatting with boon companions of the cinema and musical comedy stage. Nevertheless, they have several times been responsible for the sale of certain books, more often books that contribute little to the great stream of native thought but gain momentary attention through appeal to a taste that is at once false and affected. One is sometimes tempted to state that books are sold on the playing fields of Manhattan. For these literary butterflies, in their frivolous and epigrammatic pilgrimage from studio party to supper club, actually do influence the thought of thousands of readers, far from their playtime haunts, who believe in their judgment and regard their lightest quip as learned criticism. If the metropolitan centres have any baleful influence on the thought of the country, then they exert it through this fringe of pseudo-criticism, this "smart" group who care less for books than for dancing, and prefer risqué after dinner patter to sound literary criticism.