J. Hartley Manners is the husband of Laurette Taylor and the author of plays in some of which she appears. His drama The Harp of Life has as its theme the love of two women, his mother and a courtesan, for a nineteen-year-old boy, and their willing self-sacrifice that he may go forward unbroken and unsmirched. The interesting thing, aside from the strength of the play and its vivid study of adolescence, is the portrait of the mother. And now his play, The National Anthem, which caused so much discussion, is procurable in book form.
Here I have been talking about East of Suez and The Love Match and have said nothing about The Circle or Milestones! But I suppose everyone knows that The Circle is by Maugham and was markedly successful when it was produced in New York; and surely everyone must know that Milestones is by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch—one of the great plays of the last quarter century. I must take a moment to speak of Sidney Howard’s four act play, Swords. I think the best thing to do is to give what Kenneth Macgowan, an exceptionally able critic of the drama, said about the play:
“Swords is as remarkable a play as America has ever produced. It is a drama of action on a par with The Jest, fused with the ecstasy of inspiration and the mysticism of the spirit and the body of woman. It sets Ghibelline and Guelph, Pope and Emperor, two nobles and a dog of the gutters fighting for a lady of strange and extraordinary beauty who is the bride of one noble and the hostage of the other. With the passions, the cruelties, and spiritual vision of the middle ages to build upon Swords sweeps upward to a scene of sudden, flashing conflict shot with the mystic and triumphant ecstasy which emanates from this glorious woman.”
American lovers of the drama have a special interest in the two volumes of The Plays of Hubert Henry Davies. At the time of his first success Mr. Davies was working in San Francisco, whither he had come from England. It was Frohman who made him an offer that brought him to New York and began the series of productions which ended only with his death in 1917 in Paris. These two volumes, very beautiful examples of fine bookmaking, contain the successes: Cousin Kate, Captain Drew on Leave, and The Mollusc. Among the other plays included are: A Single Man, Doormats, Outcasts, Mrs. Gorringe’s Necklace, and Lady Epping’s Lawsuit. Hugh Walpole has contributed a very touching introduction.
Chapter XXIII
THE BOOKMAN FOUNDATION AND THE BOOKMAN
“Thank you very much for the May Bookman,” writes Hugh Walpole (June, 1922). “I have been reading The Bookman during the last year and I congratulate Mr. Farrar most strongly upon it. The paper has now a personality unlike any other that I know and it is the least dull of all literary papers! I like especially the more serious articles, the series of sketches of literary personalities seeming especially excellent to me.” Mr. Walpole evidently had in mind the feature of The Bookman called “The Literary Spotlight.”
“The Bookman is alive. If there is a better quality in the long run for a general literary magazine to try for, I do not know what it is,” writes Carl Van Doren, literary editor of The Nation.