Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-10-29

teered any information about the effect
of the war on his own reading They all
were thinking of that distant and imper-
sonal thing known as "the general
reader"
And not one of the men attempted to
tell why people read at all. If this can
be discovered we shall have an answer to
the question which publishers and
authors have been talking about for the
last three or four years
The arrival in this country of Vicente
Blasco Ibanez. the distinguished Spanish
author of "'rhe Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse for a stay of six months or
six years, as pleases him best, may sug-
gest to some one that if it had not been
for the war Americans by the hundred
thousand would not be reading the "FouN
Horsemen." He would be specifically
right but fundamentally wrong.
Blasco Ibanez's great book is only acci-
dentally about the war. 1t is great
romance which happens to be staged with
the war as the scenery.
To put it in another way, as has been
done by a man with a poetic imagina-
ton, Blasco Ibanez has taken three
human beings and used them as mirrors
in which are reflected the tremendous
tragedies going on about them, and those
tragedies are colored by the nature Of
the souls OH which they react. 1t might
have been staged in the Middle Ages,
where Charles Reade put the scene Of
"The Cloister and the Hearth" and it
would still have had the same popular
appeal.
Human nature has not been changed
by the fighting which went on for four
years. If proof of this be needed it was
afforded by the action of the queen Of
the Belgians at Bryn Mawr on Monday,
when there was shown to her little baby
whose father had been killed in the
Argonne. The tender mother heart of
the queen was stirred to its depths and
she took the child in her arms, caressed
it and exclaimed with infinite pity, "You
poor dear baby!" Women felt like that
over a fatherless child centuries ago, and
they will feel the same for centuries to
come
The war has not changed human ma
ture. 1t has simnly put it in operation
under new conditions. 1t may perhaps
have brought more Of tenderness and
sympathy to the surface. but these emo
tions were there or they could not have
been evoked
If there is heart III a book people
will read it, no matter whether its set
ting is war or peace. The most popular
painting at the Columbian Fair in Chi
cago was Breaking Home Ties" Sophis-
ticated artists looked at it with contempt.
But the plain people from all over the
nation stood in front of it with tears in
their eyes simply because it showed to
them what had happened in their own
experience and what was happening in
thousands of homes every day in the
year. 1t was the mothers tragedy made
real.
No book, whether written in time of
war or of peace. will have more than an
ephemeral life if it does not lay fast hold
Of the fundamental emotions. We some
times call "Uncle Toms Cabin" Civil
War book, in spite of the fact that it was
| written several years before Fort Sumter
| was fired on. But Mrs. Stowe, up in
| Brunswick, Me-, got hold Of big idea
and she developed it in her immortal
| novel. 1t was human problem, with
| slavery as an incident. If it had been q
| mere war tract like "Mr. Britling Sees 1t
| Through" it would not have survived to
the present, nor would it have been trans
lated into scores of languages and read
! by hundreds of thousands to whom
slavery was nothing but word.
The war with Spain produced one book,
"The Red Badge of Courage" which was
! popular for while because it described
| the experiences of common soldier more
| graphically than they had ever been de-
scribed before. But it is not read now
for two reasons. One is that it dealt with
a restricted class of men and another is
| that the kind Of war through which Ste
| phen Cranes hero passed is so different
| from the kind of war that has just been
fought that its setting is all wrong for
the present generation of fighting men.
| But the Spanish War attracted attention
to Latin America and was followed by a
series of novels about that part of the
world, starting with Richard Harding
Davis's SOLDIERS of Fortune"
Of course, this war has produced thou
sands of books-fction- verse, history
and propaganda; but as soon as the armi-
stice was signed the demand for most of
them ceased instantly. They were like
last weeks newspapers, of no interest
save to the antiquarian. Others still sell
and will continue to sell. Take, for ex-
ample, Alan Seeger's verse with his re-
marks about his rendezvous with death.
There is in this bit of poetry the con-
centration of the spirit of high adven-
ture which belongs to no time and to no
season. The same quality appears in
some of the things that Rupert Brooke
wrote.
The public just now is buying Booth
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