T Two Literary Sportsmen HE Boston group of literati who in the three decades from 1840 to 1870 made the political capital of Massachusetts also a brilliant capital of the Republic of Letters are not often thought of as sportsmen. Their sharpest weapons are supposed to have been pens; their most penetrating ammunition, ink. We can picture Longfellow or Emerson seated at a mahogany writing-table surrounded by books. But can you, dear reader, imagine the author of "Hiawatha" casting a fly from a canoe in a mountain lake or the lecturer on "Representative Men" careering on horseback after the buffalo of the wild Western plains? According to literary tradition, the liveliest hours of this famous company of men of letters were those they spent at the monthly daylight dinners of the Saturday Club of Boston. For more than thirty years the members of this famous club used to gather at the Parker House and, after a two-o'clock dinner, spend the afternoon in conversation and discussion. The Club's list of members included the names of the foremost literary lights of the time-such names as Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz, Emerson, Motley, "Two Years Before the Mast" Dana, Prescott, Whittier, Charles Sumner, and Francis Parkman. "It was a brilliant group," says a New England critic, "that the last Saturday afternoon of the month brought together at 'Parker's' in the front room on the second floor-scholars, statesmen, men of law and science, poets, naturalists, doctors, college presidents and professors, artists and men of affairs." Another commentator, a member of the Club, has somewhere remarked that the new issue of that historic periodical the "Atlantic" was customarily distributed at the dinners and the members eagerly turned its pages, and those who were lucky enough to be contributors were soon absorbed each in his own brain child. The literary men of 1850 were not very different in this respect, I guess, from the literary men of 1927. In this company of immortals the most silent and reserved were undoubtedly Emerson and Francis Parkman. They were alike in delicacy of physique and in loftiness of spirit, and, while they were not unsocial, their instinctive and natural method of self-expression was not oral but literary. By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT Contributing Editor of The Outlook I have been taken to task for saying elsewhere that Emerson was essentially a humorist. Not a slap-stick guffawproducing comedian-no, a thousand times no; but a philosopher who saw through the grand comedy of human nature with its puerilities and nobilities; like the great Greek playwrights or like Dante-much sweeter and saner than Dante, I think, although doubtless not. so great an artist. Emerson's "English Traits" and his Journal are full of proofs of what the Greeks would have called, could they have known him, his comic spirit. Americans of New England blood have been so prone to take Emerson with abysmal seriousness that they are apt to overlook his genuine and comprehensive humanity. He was as pure a soul as ever lived, and yet at times he reacted against conventional morality. "Cannot," he writes in his Journal, "the stinging dialect of the sailors be domesticated? It is the best rhetoric, and for a hundred occasions those forbidden words are the only good ones." And he added that the famous sentence ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines") in his essay on "Self-Reliance" "would be better written thus: Damn consistency!" Only the other day I came across what was to me a still more surprising revelation of Emerson's many-sidedness. He was as gentle a soul as ever lived, abhorring cruelty and sorrowful at suffering. One would suppose that hunting and fishing would have been entirely cutside of the range of his thought and experience. But he once joined a group of the Saturday Club for a hunting and camping expedition in the Adirondacks when that region was a genuine and unsophisticated wilderness. Longfellow, when invited to go on the expedition, asked, "Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?" On being answered in the affirmative, he exclaimed, "Then somebody will be shot!" and declined the invitation. Emerson, however, entered into the plan with genuine interest. W. J. Stillman, the painter, art critic, and journalist, who was a member of the Saturday Club and who organized the Adirondack hunt, thus describes Emerson's reactions: His insatiability in the study of human nature was shown curiously in our first summer's camp. . . . When we were making up the cutfit for the outing, he at first refused to take a rifle; but, as the discussion of make, caliber, and quality went on, and everybody else was provided, he at length decided, though no shot, to conform, and purchased a rifle. And when the routine of camp life brought the day of the hunt, the eagerness of the hunters and the passion of the chase, the strong return to our heredity of human primeval occupation gradually involved him, and made him desire to enter into this experience as well as the rest of the forest emotions. He must understand this passion to kill. . . . He said to me later and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that ambition. ... We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he stood; and we were scarcely the boat's length from him when, Emerson being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning drive was always uncertain, I shot him . . . and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this ambition-glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident that he had failed. The guides rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsmen could comprehend them-were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen-the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action. The results of this study are embodied in these fine lines from one of the most readable of Emerson's poems: By turns we praised the stature of our guides, (Continued on page 180) NOT The Fixed Calendar at Work By DIXON MERRITT TOTHING is easier than to reform the world -on paper. Spelling, alphabets, weights and measures, languages, are some of the problems of the human mind that have been found wasteful in their present form and have been theoretically improved in a multitude of ways; but human habits are persistent and do not yield to theories. Is the proposal to scrap our calendar just another one of these theoretical reforms? Well, in principle, it is in operation today, in a large business of which every housewife has heard. A GREAT manufacturing companythe largest of its kind, I am told, in the world-has in the vestibule of its main plant in Hartford, Connecticut, an unusual statue. It is the likeness of a boar, a reproduction of the Calydonian marble that for centuries has stood in the royal Uffizi Galleries in Florence. The company is the Fuller Brush Company. The basis of its business is bristles, and the boar, consequently, is in a sense its tutelary genius. This same company has been at great pains in working out a plan for the stabilization of Sundays. What it was really concerned about was that there should be no more-and no fewer-Sundays in any month than there were Tuesdays in that same month. The necessity for such an arrangement was this: The Fuller Brush Company sells brushes by the house-to-house method exclusively. Its sales territory on this continent is divided into six divisions, those divisions are subdivided into some fifty districts, the districts are resubdivided into some two hundred offices, We asked the president of this company what he thought of this International Fixed Calendar, and he replied in a telegram as follows: This is our third year of operation on a fiscal calendar providing for thirteen four-week periods similar to the Cotsworth proposal. We find the advantages to be about what calendar-reform advocates claim. . . We fully intend to continue our plan; but if it were universally adopted it would be even more advantageous for us, removing any tendency to confusion between our plan and the one in general use. In consequence of this telegram The Outlook secured the following article.-THE EDITORS. The tutelary genius of the Fuller Brush Company and they finally into some five thousand Business is done on a competitive sales SM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Any month in the International given to divisions, districts, offices, and special prizes to salesmen. Every salesman works at making sales from Monday morning until Friday night. All of them make out their orders on Saturday and mail them to the nearest shipping warehouse of the company. All orders are made up and shipped early the following week and go onto the books as of Tuesday. Well, with a business already big and growing tremendously, the Fuller Brush Company found itself confronted with the almost impossible task of handling this mass of competitive sales on a basis equitable to everybody. Months were not months. Some of them had five Sundays and four Tuesdays, some four Sundays and five Tuesdays, either of which was sufficient to throw the machinery out of kilter. It was possible to handle a split week on a sound statistical basis-possible, if everybody connected with the transactions remembered the necessity and took sufficient pains. But frequently somebody did not. So the Fuller Brush Company found that it had to make a calendar for its own use-a calendar with four weeks in the month, and all weeks and all months alike. It hit upon the scheme of making a year of thirteen periods of four even weeks each-not the Cotsworth fixed calendar plan, the essentials of which were outlined in The Outlook recently, but one very closely resembling it, identical with it in the main features. gence of fads. It is practical, as its origin and history show. Its President, founder, and dominant personality, Alfred C. Fuller, was a farm boy of the Grand Pré region of Nova Scotia. At about seventeen years of age he came to Boston-all Nova Scotians do come to Boston, I believe-and got a job as a street-car conductor. For eighteen months he held it, and then was "fired" because, when his motorman did not show up for work, he took the car out and ran it himself. When he found himself without any way of making a living, he went down to Somerville and launched himself as a brush manufacturer. He got a room in a cellar. There, afternoons and nights, he made his brushes, twisting them with a little hand machine which he still keeps in his office, and trimming them with scissors. Mornings he went out and sold them from house to house. When he had $375 ahead, he moved to Hartford and hired a man to make brushes, so that he could himself devote most of his time to selling them. A little later he hired a stenographer, and started devoting much of his time to training salesmen. The business has grown in just that practical way. Every executive in it started as a house-to-house salesman. Most of them were college men who started selling Fuller brushes during vacation to help pay their way through school. Indeed, the Fuller Brush Company claims that it is an educational institution. Its salesmen are teachers engaged in the work of educating women in the use of brushes, and other brushes, and still other brushes. The house-to-house method of selling is regarded as an educational method, and no claim is made that any institution except an educational institution would succeed with it. And, in order to make it successful, even an educational institution may find it desirable to use the bonus and special prize method of augmenting its interest. There comes in the main reason for the fixed calendar which the Fuller Company worked out for itself. The heads of the accounting department say that in this particular part of their work one split week of the Gregorian calendarthe regular calendar-made more work than a four-week period of the Fuller four-week-month calendar does. The Outlook for October 12, 1927 179 10TH PERIOD SMTWTFS 14 15 16 17 SEP 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 OCT 25 26 27 28 29 30 1 234 56 78 9 10 11 11TH PERIOD SMTWTFS 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 OCT 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 SMTWTFS NOV 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 3RD PERIOD SMTWTFS 22 23 24 25 JUN 26 27 28 29 30 1 2 JUL 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 678 12TH PERIOD SMTWTFS 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 NOV 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 DEC 27 28 29 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 13TH PERIOD SMTWTFS 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 17 18 19 20 DEC 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 AUG 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 JAN 1 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 The 1927 calendar used by the Fuller Brush Company worth plan has some advantages over their own, particularly in setting apart the three hundred and sixty-fifth day as "year day," not attached to any month or any week. The Fuller plan is to allow this extra day to accumulate for seven years and then, for one year, to make five weeks instead of four in the first period. They would be very glad to be rid of this irregularity. Mr. Fuller says: "I suppose that 'six days shalt thou labor' is as much a part of the commandment as the injunction to rest on the seventh day, but I don't think that one extra Sabbath in the year would do anybody any harm. I'm sure it would not harm us." The one real source of trouble that the Fuller Company finds with the calendar, however, is that it must employ two calendars its own calendar for its own internal affairs and the regular calendar for all business that it transacts with other concerns. It is on a twentyeight-day-month basis with itself and on an irregular month basis with everybody else. All billing, for instance, must be done on the first day of the established month. "Our business has been greatly simplified," says Mr. Fuller, "by the adoption of this calendar for our own purposes. It would be still further simplified, of course, if other people used the same calendar that we do. We shall be very glad when the others adopt the reform, and quite ready, of course, to make whatever changes are necessary in our own method. Meanwhile, however, we shall go right on with ours as we have gone for the past several years. We do not see now how we could run the business as successfully on the old calendar basis." 180 something of the same confusion would still exist until the calendar reform should be generally adopted. People even in the Fuller plant still think somewhat in terms of twelve irregular months. The resultant confusion is not of much consequence in the very early and the very late months of the year. The First and Second Periods very nearly coincide with January and February, and the Thirteenth very nearly coincides with December. But in the other periods the confusion is of consequence, and particularly so in the middle periods, some of which split the months almost exactly in two. The Outlook for October 12, 1927 fully cognizant of the benefit which it Naturally, those who have already THE distinctive features of the Cots adopted calendar reform realize the need of it more fully than those who have not. The Fuller Company, therefore, having worked out a fixed calendar independently of the Cotsworth development, is worth plan are these: Instead of twelve, the year would have thirteen months. Instead of being sometimes twentyeight days, sometimes twenty-nine, some times thirty, sometimes thirty-one, these months would all be exactly of twentyeight days each. The first of every year and the first of every month, like the first of every week, would fall on Sunday. One day every year would fall outside of any month and of any week and would be known as Year Day-the three hundred and sixty-fifth day of the year, a special rest day. One day every four years-the additional day of Leap Years-would be inserted between the sixth and seventh months, also a special rest day. Incidentally, Easter would become a fixed festival and every holiday would fall on the same day of the week year after year preferably Monday. The advantages of this arrangement were outlined in The Outlook for September 28. Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp, To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down: Temper to face wolf, bear or catamount, And wit to trap or take him in his lair. Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent, In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides; Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired Three times ten thousand strokes from morn to eve. Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen! No city airs or arts pass current here. Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls: Perhaps Sir James Barrie had these lines in mind when he wrote that delightful play, "The Admirable Crichton." I have left myself but little space in which to speak of that other odd Harvard sportsman, Francis Parkman, although as one of the finest spirits of American literature he deserves an entire essay to himself. Parkman was twenty years younger than Emerson and graduted from Harvard twenty-one years Two Literary Sportsmen (Continued from page 177) after him, but they were both members One bull at length fell a little be- with leg and rein nearer to his side, when suddenly he did what buffalo in such circumstances will always do: he slackened his gallop, and turning towards us, with an aspect of mingled rage and distress, lowered his huge, shaggy head for a charge. Pontiac, with a snort, leaped aside in terror, nearly throwing me to the ground, as I was wholly unprepared for such an evolution. I raised my pistol in a passion to strike him on the head, but thinking better of it, fired the bullet after the bull, who had resumed his flight; then drew rein, and determined to rejoin my companions. It was high time. The breath blew hard from Pontiac's nostrils, and the sweat rolled in big drops down his sides; I myself felt as if drenched in warm water. Pledging myself to take my revenge at a future opportunity, I looked about for some indications to show me where I was and what course I ought to pursue; I might as well have looked for landmarks in the midst of the ocean. It is significant, perhaps, that the word "passion" occurs in the accounts I have quoted of the hunting exploits of these two pre-eminent Harvard intellectuals, two of the finest personalities that have been graduated from any American college. The polish of modern civilization has not wholly eradicated the instincts of primitive man. And perhaps this is just as well, for we may infer that the sophistication of modern civilization will not eradicate the instinct for honor, courage, and self-respect. K A Review of the Theatre Katharine Cornell, in the Complete Letter Writer ATHARINE CORNELL came to town last week in W. Somerset Maugham's "The Letter" a play which, according to almost all of the critics, will soon fetch in our modish theatre-goers from the best streets of every town in the country. Which may or may not turn out to be true. Certainly all Iris March's old friends, including Al Woods, were there, and all the people who had not gone to the theatre since "The Green Hat" were hurrying down Forty-fifth Street. But considered as drama "The Letter" is pretty poor stuff. The play itself is extraordinarily obvious, the writing completely undistinguished, and the only amazing thing about it is the fact that, with the exception of Mr. Atkinson of the "Times," most of the critics apparently could not escape Miss Cornell's glamour sufficiently to observe its true character. Yet-seats eight weeks in advance, crowds of cheering admirers of Miss Cornell's blocking the alleyways about the playhouse, and the twin magic of the names of Maugham and Cornell drawing the tide of frantic theatre-goers in the direction of the Morosco Theatre! Public patronage of a cheap show is nothing new. But undeserved praise from metropolitan critics is certainly a phenomenon arresting enough. "The Letter" opens with a fine bangbang, in a Malay Peninsula planter's house a lady shooting as many bullets as possible into an unknown gentleman. Subsequent events deal with the appearance of the lady's husband, the character of the gentleman deceased, the efforts of the lady to keep the truth hidden, and By FRANCIS RUFUS BELLAMY the heavy suspicions and difficulties of the husband's best friend, the lady's lawyer, as he gradually discovers that she has lied and has forgotten all about the only important evidence in the case -which, Heaven save the mark! is the letter. Finally comes the writhing revelation from the unhappy heroine of the whole story. From this description you might imagine that the play had some of the characteristics of "Mrs. Dane's Defence," plus the exotic setting of "Rain," and that it was shot through with the reality of "Of Human Bondage"-all tumultuously portrayed by Katharine Cornell right up to the moment when she announces that her retribution will be that with all her heart she still loves the man she killed. As a matter of fact, all the play really has is this last line-which we suppose was Mr. Maugham's starting-point when he wrote the original short story from which this melodrama is fashioned. To make this play Mr. Maugham has tacked together an always apparent framework of scenes which lead correctly enough to certain climaxes-though the mounting emotion to make them really effective is never there-and which keep you in your seat waiting for some sort of big moment. In the London version it may not have been so bad, for this big scene came. At the moment when the heroine told the truth the stage went black and there was enacted before you everything that took place on the fatal night. As a contrast to the dull monotony of the dialogue and the preceding scenes, all of them conventional, and filled only with platitudes and generalities which give no glimpse of the characters' realities, this may have been excellent. On the Morosco's stage Miss Cornell merely tells the story of that night. And, while she does it as well perhaps as any of our actresses could do a dramatic banality, the effect is that of a weak fictional ending to a hack piece of invention. Where truth and clear morality are concerned the curtain goes down on as unsavory a distortion as can be cooked up by our best dramatic chefs. "You have had the courage to do wrong," says the lawyer friend. "Now you will have the courage to do right." Which means, according to Mr. Maugham, that the lady will go on living with and on, and tying to her, the husband she lied to, never loved, has ruined financially, and whose heart she has broken-and in the same room where she killed her paramour, the man who attracted her physically although the emotion filled her with shame. All this apparently without one ounce of regret or spiritual regeneration or perception of any kind of truth. If this is "hard-won and bitter honesty," the meaning of the words has changed. Can it be that all of the critics are in love with Miss Cornell and the scented dreams she portrays? Since her days of the Washington Square Players and "Candida" she has come increasingly to stand for a kind of false glamour, a mirage of romance. She appears as a beautiful hothouse orchid from the garden of theatrical emotion. Increasingly she plays Katharine Cornell. To realize just how false and tawdry |