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Wharton, Miss Sinclair, Tarkington, Galsworthy, or Wells. It should not long be so in a creative generation. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not merely didactic, the advantage is all with the youngsters. But they waste it. They have learned to criticize their elders, but not themselves.
Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at the end of the book.
Holliday just when it was that he attended courses at that institution. He frankly said that he could not remember. A "queer feller," indeed, as Mr. Tarkington has called him. He may have been a footpad during that period. I have often thought to write to the dean of the university and check the matter up. It may be that entertaining anecdotes of our hero's college career could be spaded up.
William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing her stories of Arkansas life for Scribners but had published only one book. Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except perhaps that from Mr.
Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been wiser not to. Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation. His style is still swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to the vernacular.
One or two minor personalities, however, are clearly drawn, and the dramatic element forcefully developed. It would be difficult to hit upon a novelist who shows wider divergences in his work than Booth Tarkington, not because he gives in it any special evidence of versatility a word which implies something like genius, or at least talent.
It is evident that ink, piety and copious speech circulated in the veins of his clan, for at least two of his grandfathers were parsons, and one of them, Dr. Ferdinand Cortez Holliday, was the author of a volume called "Indiana Methodism" in which he was the biographer of the Rev. Joseph Tarkington, the grandfather of Newton B. Tarkington, sometimes heard of as Booth Tarkington, a novelist.
Of these happy days Booth Tarkington wrote at the time of my brother's death: "To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the 'beau ideal of jeunesse doree, a sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but already an editor already publishing books!
Tarkington's plot drags the cub back to normality. Both processes are the same. Perhaps Mr. Tarkington would not deliberately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent offenses, but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he may with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other solution than in the end to reduce them to the ranks.
"It would seem that whenever Nature had a man of letters up her sleeve, the first gift with which she has felt necessary to dower him has been a preacher sire." R.C.H. of N.B. Tarkington. Mr. Holliday was born in Indianapolis on July 18, 1880.
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