Yet Another Babbitt*

Mr. Pinney's Motto is "We Strive to Please"

The Story. Mr. Pinney lived in a stifling suburb, did his inadequate best in the fancy goods business, lost a good deal at poker, ate three meals a day, drank coffee with a mustache cup, came perilously close to the verge of bankruptcy, escaped by a stroke of luck--and that is all.

Mr. Pinney and his immediate family are rather carefully than well observed. Mrs. Chapman completes her sketch in the first chapter. The rest of the book is predictable. But on she goes, stabbing her victims with repeated thrusts of her vindictive hatpin. Not that it isn't a sympathetic picture. You feel sorry for Mr. Pinney, bristling and blustering, with his eawing laugh and his spoon cracking in the mustache cup and his pocket comb and his self-inflated pride and obtrusive optimism.

Mr. Pinney's family consists first of his wife, "the mollusk," fat, superstitious, whose voice "held the habitual tone of a bagpipe collapsing." Then there is Mrs. Crum, hard-working mother-in-law, whose voice was "an echo of the spirit of '76," a not altogether unamiable creature. Young Eddie follows the general literary pattern of small boys. He tries to chloroform the cat, gets bad marks at school, is beloved. The daughter, Adelaide, is the high spot of the Pinney family. She is gifted with a budding intelligence which begins to blossom under the beneficent influence of her pleasant if uninteresting romance with a book agent whom she finally marries. Adelaide is the Carol Kennicott, the Lulu Bett, the Leda Perrin of Poor Pinney. She gropes vaguely for something outside the stuffy household of her youth.

There is another love story on the side, between the rising young financier of the town and a visiting beauty who proves to be handicapped with another husband. Steps will be taken to overcome the handicap.

It is through the assistance of the young financier and by the happy invention of a new eyeglass clip that Mr. Pinney's shattered fortunes are providentially retrieved at the last moment. And it is also in large measure due to the little spark of pompous courage which continues to burn in his insignificant bosom. He is a contemptible figure, is Mr. Pinney. But he is not wholly ignoble.

The Significance. Mr. Pinney is a definite addition to family portraits of the Babbitt clan. He is a spectacle intolerable in his noisy stupidity. But he is pathetic in his back-slapping assumption of confidence. He has built for himself a legend of his own magnificence, only at times shattered by the cold contact of reality. Mrs. Pinney, too, is perfect in her way. She is the unmistakable, corpulent complement of all Pinneys. But the author has gone no further. The entire book is devoted to a repetitious chronicle of the unimportant doings of the Pinneys. It never rises much above the shrewd cataloguing of the minutiae of vulgarity. And too much reliance is placed on phonetic reproduction of the Pinney jargon.

The Critics. Poor Pinney has been received with a critical acclaim rarely accorded a first novel. Says Henry Walker, writing in The New York Herald: "There is no reason in the nature of things . . . why this story should not repeat the experiences of Main Street and Miss Lulu Bett." Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff in The New York Tribune praises it extravagantly--"vitality of its char- acters," "a book to laugh and cry over." F. P. A. of The New York World has cast upon it the eye of his approval.

The Author. Mrs. Chapman has had an uneventful life. She is married and her family life is a completely happy one. She has a dog, of which she is fond. Her home is in New York. Poor Pinney she dedicates to "my three children (my husband, my mother and my sister)."

Heroes and Hero-Worship

The Decline of the Superman in Fiction

In the old days there were giants. In the exact center of any well-constituted novel of a century ago moved a mighty and shadowy figure. Folk just a little too good for a mortal and fallible earth lived in the pages of fiction. Heroes were heroes indeed. Heroines were delicately colored flowers whose chief merit, one felt sure, was that they could never have stooped to tread the common earth without Sir Walter's intermediary cloak.

The timorous clerk, going his sedentary way through the pale shadows of the counting house, soared to golden heights of romance. Anaemic maidens leaned their heads back on lace antimaeassars and dreamed of majestic beings with well-turned calves neatly encased in silken hose, bestowing ornate proposals of marriage in words never under eight syllables and in never under three pages of minute type.

The days of the rhetorical superman are gone. In place of the black- browed man with a secret sorrow and a Byronic collar, we have Babbitts and Pinneys with no brows at all, sorrows that might better be kept secret, Arrow collars.

The yearning girl of today can do very little satisfactory sighing for Mr. Babbitt. The weary office boy can hardly raise to mysterious pinnacles of delighted admiration the rather bewildering manufacturer of second-rate washing-machines who considers the possibilities of multiple marriage in Mr. Sherwood Anderson's recent volume. The naive sweetness of Arnold Bennett's Lilian, while unquestionably there, is a little elusive.

There remain a few heroes of the old stamp. There are the mighty men of Zane Grey, elaborately clad in six guns; there are the somewhat muscle-bound cronies of Tarzan, living advertisements for the Daily Dozen; there are the polished intrigue-hounds of E. Phillips Oppenheim.

But the great days may not wholly be recalled. Heroes haloed with ele- gance and sinewed with nobility grow fewer and fewer as our books grow shorter and shorter. As the triple-decked novels of yore give way to the "admirable economy of words" of today, so do the triple-decked supermen of yore give way to the judiciously and sparingly selected virtues of our fictionary ideals.

A Great Novelist to Visit the United States

Joseph Conrad, rover of the seven seas, has never set foot in the United States. Now he is coming. At about the end of this month the man who holds probably the most exalted position in contemporary English letters is to arrive here for a visit which it is hoped will last through May.

Mr. Conrad's trip is undertaken for rest and change, but he looks forward to it in a spirit of adventure. Despite all the countries and seas of the world which he has made his own and presented to his readers, he has never come closer to this coast than on the first voyage of his sea-life in 1875, which took him through the Florida Channel to the West Indies. Seeking rest, it is not Mr. Conrad's wish to make a triumphal and formal tour of the country. It may not be the privilege of his many admirers here to see or hear him, but it will be their especial opportunity to respect his altogether reasonable desire for privacy.

Mr. Conrad is married and has two sons. His wife has recently published in this country a cookbook. He vouches for her culinary artistry. He was born of Polish parentage in the Ukraine (South Poland) in 1857. As a boy, he felt an inexplicable call to the sea which he had never seen, and at the age of sixteen he forsook his land-locked country to become a British seaman. Ten years later (after learning the science of navigation and, incidentally, the English language) he became a Master in the British Merchant Service. Twenty-nine years ago, his health weakened by a fever contracted in the heart of Africa, he left the exacting service of ships for the no less exacting one of art. In his handbag he bore the unfinished manuscript of Almayer's Folly, his first novel.

Lord Jim has heretofore been conceded by popular favor to be Mr. Conrad's masterpiece, although Nostrom, his largest canvas, may eventually, in the changing view of generations, be accepted as his greatest achievement. Personally, Mr. Conrad eschews favoritism among his works. But of The Nigger of the Narcissus he states specifically that "it is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall."

Among his short stories, Youth and Heart of Darkness are best.

James Gibbons Huneker called his the only name which may be linked with the immortal company of Meredith, Hardy and Henry James.

Good Books

The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

THE STEP ON THE STAIR--Anna Katherine Green -- Dodd, Mead ($2.00). Anna Katherine Green may be considered the inventor of the detective story as we know it. She is an old woman now, but she has not lost the knack that caused her name to be for so many years practically synonymous with a certain type of mystery story. This one has all the old ingredients shaken up with all the old vigor.

STICKFULS, THE COMPOSITIONS OF A NEWSPAPER MINION--Irvin S. Cobb --Doran ($2.00). Aside from being one of the most characteristic and uproarious of American humorists, Mr. Cobb has been an eminently successful newspaper man. In this account of journalistic adventure he takes pains to upset a few cherished fallacies regarding life in the city room.

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN PLAYS --Edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn-- Scribner's ($2.00). There is a good deal of satisfaction in holding post mortems on printed plays a year or so after seeing them. Reprints are of even greater value to those who for one reason or another have missed the original presentation. The plays selected for this volume are all Broadway successes of recent date. Probably the most interesting is Eugene O'Neill's remarkable experiment, The Emperor Jones. The other four are Why Marry?, Nice People, The Hero, To the Ladies!

FOUR OF A KIND--J. P. Marquand --Scribner's ($1.75). This volume is made up of four swift-moving, active, unpretentious tales. They are a little longer than short stories, not long enough to be called novels. Their chief merit rests in the young author's vigor of presentation, his quick eye for externals, a certain freshness of viewpoint. One of the four is concerned with a prizefighter; another with a debutante; the third story is set in an advertising office; the last is a tale of horses and the riding thereof.

LITTLE LIFE STORIES--Sir Harry Johnston--Macmillan ($2.00). Sir Harry, explorer, scientist and novelist, has at last elected to stand on his own literary feet. And he is much more successful than when he chose simply to bask in the light of the illustrious--as in The Gay-Dombeys and Mrs. Warren's Daughter. He gives us here a succession of little skeletons, grinning and staring. They are little not in their power but in Sir Harry's manner toward them. He is like a good-natured child playing with dynamite. Bitter, ironic outlines these, which are passed out as amiably as tea-table gossip.

* Poor Pinney. Marian Chapman. Boni. ($2.00).