Thirteen Tarkingtons*

Miniatures of Young Love and Old, Done in Quiet Humor The Story. For his latest volume Mr. Tarkington has collected thirteen stories in his lighter vein. For the setting of these amusing tales he selects a large middle western city (presumably Indianapolis), or one of the growing middle western towns.

In The Party, Willamilla, You, The Tiger, the chief characters are three children, Daisy Mears, Elsie Threamer, Laurence Coy. At Laurence's party Daisy, a plain little girl, insists on playing with Laurence, tripping him up, creating the impression that she is his " girl"; but Laurence worships Elsie, a lovely little girl who delights in tormenting him (though pretending to be aloof), making the other children spank him, getting him into trouble, and then looking perfectly innocent.

In Ladies' Ways Daisy's older brother, in love with brilliant, sophisticated Muriel Eliot realizes that with grown-ups just as with children, a girl torments her lover because she loves him.

In You Muriel's romantic ideals about men are shattered by her finding that the melancholy " painter " is only a house painter, and so she is willing to marry the quiet but excellent Renfrew Mears.

The Fascinating Stranger is a tramp who steals a lawnmower, gets a platinum ring in a " swap," sells it for $750, buys an $18 lawnmower, which he returns to the astonished householder, and lives one glorious week on his money, content that for once he has enjoyed life.

The Only Child shows how easily a child may be spoiled by a romantic mother. The cure is effected by sensible Lucius Brutus Allen, a comfortable town philosopher, who appears also in The Spring Concert, where he wooes unsuccessfully the beautiful Mary Ricketts. Philosophically he makes a match between her and young Perley; and in Maytime in Marlow meets a former sweetheart, now a widow with two children. He alone can manage the children, and so at last he succeeds in love.

In Jeannette a staid young man is insane from a sudden shock. On his recovery many years later he goes to a dance given by his niece; but the wildness of the younger generation renews the shock and his former malady.

In The Hundred Dollar Bill a young lawyer loses trust money at poker, but the bitter experience brings him closer to his wife.

The Significance. Mr. Tarkington is important as an interpreter of the humorous side of the Middle West, and a writer of amusing stories in which children are delightfully pictured. Mr. Tarkington shows the sunny leisure and the small daily happenings of a growing town. None of these stories rises to greatness, or pretends to do so. Some are mere sketches, some full-length, none are wholly serious. All abound in laughing observation of the antics of children and young lovers, all are excellent in the reproduction of Negro dialect and children's prattle. None is profound or disturbing, keeping the level of a quiet humor. The critics. The New York Times: " It is as if Mr. Tarkington kept a day book of observations--drawn from a very nice neighborhood." Robert Cortes Holiday: "Mr. Tarkington seems to present himself as a rather playful neurologist. Something like a scientific interest may be discerned running through the collection." The Author. Booth Tarkington is one of the first representatives of the Hoosier school of fiction. His books rarely stray from scenes in the Middle West. His important books are: Monsieur Beaucaire, The Turmoil, Seventeen, The Gentleman from Indiana. He won the Pulitzer prize for the best American novel published in 1919 with The Magnificent Ambersons, and in 1922 with Alice Adams.

Names That Live

Is History Tricked by Literary Focality? Perhaps George F. Babbitt of Zenith had it coming to him. He was an enormously ignorant, ineffectual, and complacent man. His tribe of hemen, go-getters and parasites upon public cupidity and gullibility deserved to be pilloried by Sinclair Lewis. But his more talented cousins--the big business man, the financier, the military leader, the engineer, the scientist, the inventor --have a more genuine grievance against the world. They have erected the edifice of modern civilization, they are responsible for Progress with a capital P, but fame and immortality go to the artists. Because they can paint, write, compose, the artists have been able to project themselves before posterity as the supermen of the race; because they can only build, invent, organize, the business man, the war lord and the scientist must pass into early obscurity. A hundred years from now Stinnes, Basil Zaharoff, James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan and Judge Gary will be familiar to antiquarians only, while the fame of Keats and Shelley, Dostoevsky and Goethe will persist to annoy and fascinate hundreds of generations of school children. Even such a recent cataclysm as the World War did not seriously disturb the order of rank in the international hall of fame. For all of their "saving of the world" and their "redemption of democracy." Foch, Clemenceau, Wilson and the organizing and technical genius that managed the enterprise were unable to displace Anatole France, Maxim Gorky, Bernard Shaw. That the crux of the matter is literary or artistic ability, can be demonstrated by an interesting test. A man without these gifts has seldom blazed out very brightly in the march of the Immortals through history, whatever his real achievements, and no man possessing them has ever been quite forgotten, although his major vocation in life was neither art nor literature. Who remembers Arkwright, Crompton and Stephenson, the chief pioneers in the industrial revolution which ushered in the entire mechanism of modern civilization? How long before the Wrights of the aeroplane, Bell of the telephone, Marconi of the wireless will be mere signposts marking the evolution of mechanical progress? They could not press agent themselves in immortal language and their memory will perish. But Dr. Johnson had a press agent in Boswell, Darwin had one in Huxley, and Benjamin Franklin, like Goethe, Leonardo, Dante and Cellini, was his own press agent. If you would have fame, "that last infirmity of noble minds," give up building skyscrapers, railroads, empires, military machines, and write an immortal song or a book of witty epigrams.

* THE FASCINATING STRANGER--Booth Tarkington--Doubleday ($2.00).