I The Portrait of a Banker T is hard to understand why his- to captains of industry. They have given us no end of portraits of kings, soldiers, statesmen, explorers, and men of letters; but financiers, merchants, and manufacturers have seemed to interest them little. Perhaps this is because the great English historians were classicists and followed classical models, and in the days of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Xenophon, and Plutarch there were no captains of industry as we understand the term. A singular example of this historical negligence of the industrialist is found in the case of Lord Macaulay. The famous third chapter of his "History of England," in which he describes the industrial, economic, social, and agricultural conditions of the English people in the time of Charles II, is one of the most vivid and human stories that any historian ever wrote. Yet one may search Macaulay's essays and papers in vain to find any reference to the great economic and political revolution produced by his own contemporary, George Stephenson, the father of the steam railway, whose influence on the course of English history was as great, although not so violent, as that of Oliver Cromwell. Adam Smith and Walter Bagehot are the two most prominent among the few English literary men who have believed in the profound historical influence of the accumulation of wealth and the development of capital by individuals. The study of any great accumulator of riches by a writer trained in the analysis of human motives, ambitions, and sentiments, who has no ax to grind, who is affected by neither a spirit of eulogy on the one hand nor a spirit of malignity on the other, is always worth reading from the historical point of view. Such By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT Contributing Editor of The Outlook studies are not common. It is with unusual interest, therefore, that I have just read one of the recently published biographies, entitled "The Portrait of a Banker." It is a character sketch of James Stillman, who, although not the founder, was in a very real sense the re-creator of the National City Bank, the largest and most powerful institution of its kind in the United States. The author is Anna Robeson Burr, of Philadelphia, a writer who has been well trained in the art of novel writing. The spirit in which she has approached her task is discovered in her preface: The prevalent type of 1880-1910 was the capitalist so-called, as we see him in magazines, in books, and on the stage. He appears, for example, in the novels of Frank Norris and as the hero of such dramas as "The Lion and the Mouse" or "Les Affaires sont les Affaires." Even Ibsen could not resist him. And when we examine more nearly this strong silent Master of Capital, we notice that he is a composite photograph of two men, John Pierpont Morgan and James Stillman. For reasons which it is hoped this book may make clear, this composite portrait is dominated by the features of the latter. The author started with one view of the main character and ended with another. In this, she followed the experience of every one who came in contact with him in the ordinary way of life, and who found, as she has done, that there was no pigeonholing this personality. A manner entirely direct and simple, veiling a character so extremely complex, offered a perpetual enigma to the world and challenge to the biographer. . . . Herein lies the value of such a study. It is not the purpose of this article to 1 The Portrait of a Banker: James Stillman. By Anna Robeson Burr. Duffield & Co., New York. furnish any solution of the enigma, but merely to point out the fact that James Stillman, like most men of determined ambition and powerful character, had an amazing appreciation of the gentler side of life which he concealed from the general public. In his day the three great figures of American finance were J. Pierpont Morgan, E. H. Harriman, and himself. Of these three, the popular impression was that James Stillman was wholly cold and inexorable and often ruthless. That he had a side of loyal and generous friendship I personally knew, for he was solely through friendship, for several years a minority stockholder of The Outlook. It was during a period when The Outlook's attitude toward and ut terances on the financial and industria tendencies of the day must have ru counter to his most profound conviction and most important interests. But neve once did he indicate his dissent or see to influence our editorial opinion. Th cynic may say that this was because h did not consider The Outlook's opinio important enough to bother about. was, however, as James Stillman we knew, important enough to bring The dore Roosevelt to its staff in 1909, whic created a temporary journalistic tempe in a teapot because the ex-President ha joined the staff of a periodical "com trolled by Wall Street." The Outloo of course, stated the exact facts of M Stillman's connection with the pap which were highly creditable to his ge erous friendship. But the only comme he made was in the following passa from a letter to his mother, of which learned for the first time from the pa of Miss Burr's biography: "It was ve nice of Dr. Abbott to allude in T Outlook in such an appreciative way (Continued on page 36) enigma, that Ja determine ter, bada gentler s m the figures pont M mself. ession T Speaking of Books A New Literary Department Edited by FRANCES LAMONT ROBBINS What Everybody Is Reading HE books in greatest demand are usually those most discussed. The following list is compiled from the lists of the ten best-selling volumes sent us by wire by eight book-shops each week. These particular book-shops were chosen because we think that they reflect the tastes of the more representative readers. These shops are as follows: New York-Brentano's. Boston-Old Corner Book Store. Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Co. "Death Comes for the Archbishop," by Willa Cather. A. A. Knopf. This imaginative biography of a French missionary bishop to the Southwest is fine in spiritual concept, rich in beautiful description and moving characterization. Reviewed October 26. y cold "Kitty," by Warwick Deeping. A. A. Knopf. A The us fri hee or seve r of riod d and: indust have young wife's struggle against her dominating mother-in-law for the possession of her husband, set in post-war England. You will enjoy it if you like a machine-turned story with humor and wholesome sentiment. viewed last week. Re "Red Sky at Morning," by Margaret Kennedy. Doubleday, Page & Co. the storm foreshadowed by their lurid herThe overtaking by itage of an enchanting and haplessly enchanted pair, the children of a poet tried for murder. You will find the qualities which made 'The Constant Nymph" such delightful reading present in this book. vember 23. Reviewed No Non-Fiction onvico Trader Horn," by Alfred Aloysius Horn and But be Ethelreda Lewis. romantic story of an ancient adventurer, full Simon & Schuster. The of poetry, guileless wisdom, action, information, and color. Reviewed November 16. "Bismarck," by Emil Ludwig. Co. This splendid biography by a master Little, Brown & craftsman is unhesitatingly recommended_to any one with a taste for solid reading. Reviewed November 9. "Napoleon," by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright. You will find this engrossing biography a fine foot-note to the Napoleonic period. Reviewed November 9. "We," by Charles A. Lindbergh. G. P. Putnam's Sons. The young hero's story of his life is a 9, direct, simply expressed, and often moving permanent place temp dent alc Outlo s of par his g account. It deserves a among boys' books. Reviewed August 17. "Count Luckner, the Sea Devil," by Lowell Thomas. Doubleday, Page & Co. See below. pass of The Sea Devil OME weeks ago Lowell Thomas's story of "Count Luckner, the Sea Devil," appeared on the best-selloming list in this magazine, and was spoken as being a fine book for boys. Others which may have said the same thing of it, for hepere it is again, this time in Christmas Week, Many boys have been given a vas in nice present. Lowell Thomas knows how to tell a story. We learned that in his book on Lawrence, but he probably anuary 4, 1928 sticks pretty close to the truth, and his books are as reliable as to facts as any books of true adventures, and far more entertaining than most. Count Luckner is, of course, the German sea captain. who turned an old schooner into a raider, Seeadler, sailed her through the blockade tricked out as a Norwegian lumber boat, and sank fourteen Allied ships, up and down the South Atlantic and the Pacific, and, finally, in extremity, sailed hundreds of miles in an open long-boat, to escape internment. Thomas, intent upon finding a German hero to match Lawrence, chose Luckner. The choice was good. He is the classic hero of boyhood romance, gallant and courteous, brave and proud, swearing and laying about with a marlinspike. The son of a noble family, he ran away to sea and served before the mast for seven years, besides finding time to be a prize-fighter in Queensland, a kangaroo hunter in Australia, a barboy in Hoboken. If there are lingering personal antagonisms against Germany among the young, Thomas's book should do much to allay them. Count Luckner never took an innocent life in his raids. His successes were bloodless. When he sank an Allied boat, he took all hands aboard his own ship and gave them a treat. He never sank a ship without first running up the German flag on his raider and putting on his German uniform-no sneaking about him. Everything he did had the fine flavor of the gentleman-pirate. Only one thing against him-the publishers of Lowell Thomas's book say that Count Luckner is lecturing in America this winter. Have You Seen These? With a London Label By Ruth Suckow THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1927 and the YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY. Edited by Edward J. O'Brien. Dodd, Mead & Co. Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" is by all odds the most striking story in Mr. O'Brien's collection this year. It is followed by Sherwood Anderson's "Another Wife;" but Mr. Anderson's highly personal methods are by this time too well known and widely copied to yield any startling sense of originality. Mr. KERMATH Here is your ideal boat engine. Simple to operatenothing to get out of order -surprisingly economical. Rugged construction-built of quality materials. Each Kermath is a beautiful clean-cut piece of modern engineering. Thousands of satisfied users. If you want the last word in an up-todate marine motor, get the facts about the famous Kermath. Write for catalog. Scientific Facts About Diet CONDENSED book on diet entitled A "Eating for Health and Efficiency" has been published for free distribution by the Health Extension Bureau of Battle Creek, Mich. Contains set of health rules, many of which may be easily followed right at home or while traveling. You will find in this book a wealth of information about food elements and their relation to physical welfare. This book is for those who wish to keep physically fit and maintain normal weight. Not intended as a guide for chronic invalids as all such cases require the care of a competent physician. Name and address on card will bring it without cost or obligation. HEALTH EXTENSION BUREAU GOOD HEALTH BLDG. Hemingway's story does startle, and by sheer technical virtuosity, by an economy of words that is sometimes fairly grudging in its masculine taciturnity, and by a closeness to the cadence and phraseology of more than ordinary conversation that almost reproduces the tones of the voice. Nevertheless I feel that there is a ripeness and warmth about Mr. Anderson's far more discursive sketch that suggests the difference between the brilliant performance of a concerto for the sake of technical effect and the softer, dreamier improvisations And the Lady Wildcats of a player none too well equipped, but S. S. CANADA......from New York Jan. 10 Itinerary-Azores - Madeira - Lisbon - Algiers- 17 State Street, New York or Local Agents lost in his music; and I almost prefer "Another Wife." There are a number of other good stories in the book, and two or three that I should call very bad, particularly that dreadfully flowery outgrowth of the good soil of Kansas yclept "Persephone." But what I miss is any vivid, living sense of the rich and racy abundance of the human life that teems within the American scene. Here are the American stories, but where are the Americans? Certain of the odder species appear, but the rank and file are missing. I catch an echo of their voices in Mr. Hemingway's story. I get a brief pathetic glimpse of them in the two henpecked husbands that figure in the stories by Harold Brecht and James Hopper. Three stories deal with Southern poor whites and mountaineers, three with primitive Negroes, one with an Indian, one with an Italian, one with a French governess, one with an English remittance man, and one with a cultivated English author so tragically married to an American author. This is all legitimate enough, but the volume, taken as a whole, gives only the thinnest, most diluted sense of the vigorous American scene. Mr. O'Brien says in his introduction that American short-story writers since the days of Poe have tended toward abstraction. But it is not wholly that dread monster Plot that is responsible for the human leanness of this volume. Mr. O'Brien also speaks of the "sterile inbreeding of American art and letters" among our young expatriates in Paris. But it seems to me that Mr. O'Brien is speaking from the inside room of a glass house. The introduction itself is stamped "London." Similar introductions for the last few years have borne that postmark. Not long ago I read Mr. O'Brien's introduction to "The Best British Short Stories," much more detailed, much more sympathetic-the plea of an advocate, in fact. I cannot help feeling that Mr. O'Brien is at present more in touch with that "living current" which he desires in literary England than in literary America. Exactly half of his American selections use an English technique, the first-person innocentbystander device, as rooted in English fiction as the plot device in our own. In method, tone, and view-point-as in "Good-morning, Major," which turns on the idea that a hard-boiled army general is a man but "not a gentleman"-the same influence is visible. I certainly have no desire to emulate an irate citizen and pluck out these stories for the burning. But I do think that Mr. O'Brien has been so long absent, both in person and in sympathies, from the scene of American fiction that it has become as much of an abstraction to him as to the authors of whom he speaks, and that this is not well for the editor of "The Yearbook of the American Short Story." appropriate, and she would have liked his picture of her as she was a grown up tomboy; very noisy, very trouble some to the right-minded citizenry, very entertaining (if she didn't stay too long) to the anti-social, very silly. She began acting when she was a little thing, and she kept on acting until the demands o her part absorbed her wholly and ceased to be except when she was the stage playing the big, bold, woman rôle. The other lady Wildcats in Mr. Ak man's book are mostly milder edition of Jane. Carrie Nation, whose war whoopings have somehow the same ton quality, although presumably they wer not stimulated by the same spirits, very like Calamity Jane. Pearl Hart actly Sooner or Later YOU Are Going to Read this Book by innow certi rate for hat bo he s A January 4, 1928 a regular bad-boy bandit. Belle Story is a horse thief who, true to her era, rode to her dastardly deeds on a sidesaddle in a trailing Victorian habit. Jacket Design of "Calamity Jane" Only Mme. Mustache, lady gambler, has any exotic qualities. Lola Montez is included in the collection of Wildcats, but she does not belong there. She is of another species. If she was a virago, if she appeared in the panorama of the Wild West, that was incidental. Her career was her sex and she was the prototype of the moving-picture vamp. To the other women in Duncan Aikman's book the incidental thing was that they were women. In imagination, if not in fact, they played male rôles. They were little girls imitating their brothers, being horrid-bad. To find their prototypes you might go at eleven or twelve in the evening to a café on the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris and sit for an hour or so. At the tables near you will see girls sitting in couples-short-haired girls in velveteen suits, smoking their cigarettes through long holders, drinking Cressonée or Fine, talking in whispers, intense, agonized. They are little girls being horrid-bad. Three Tales and One Climax THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. By Thornton Wilder. Albert and Charles Boni. "Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan." So mused Brother Juniper when he saw the Bridge "divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below." Brother Juniper's subsequent deductions along the same line ended in the auto da fé. But, however disastrous or futile such speculations on the possible intention or pattern of this our mortal life, it is evident that Mr. Wilder's highly original device for bringing five lives into focus is intention of the most definite, and one which he carries out with admirable craftsmanship. This book is called a novel only because of our passion for classification; rather is it three separate tales having the same tragic climax. Although the actress La Perichole appears in each story, it is not until the final tale of Uncle Pio that she emerges as a figure of particular significance. She is not the first favorite of Court and stage who, weary of the world, assumes a "languid Magdalenism," or even repents in all sincerity behind convent walls. Uncle Pio is the eternal Pagliaccio, though in this reincarnation he is not the husband of the lady. The eccentric Marchesa de Montemayor, a sort of Peruvian Madame de Sévigné writing letters to her daughter "for posterity," is perhaps the most striking of Mr. Wilder's personages, though all have a certain disturbing quality like people in a dream. Reality seems to play no large part in the au thor's intentions. Perhaps no writer of the day does more exactly what he means to do. Mr. Wilder's style has been extrava gantly praised. He has been compared more or less felicitously to Walter Pater Anatole France, George Moore, and "points west," including Aldous Huxley and Carl Van Vechten. He seems more certainly the cousin in art of Elinor Wylie. There is a similar deliberate artificiality of theme and virtuosity of performance. He shows a fine technique in leading his five characters to one death. Those five lives diverge almos to the final moment, but each move inevitably toward the Bridge. The Portrait of a Banker (Continued from page 32) the help I rendered in the early days of the paper. Please tell him so for me when you see him." One of James Stillman's friends and associates once said, "You see, there were two James Stillmans-I knew them both." There was the James Stillman who appeared to be absorbed by the power of money. When one of his boys spoke impulsively about college friendships, his father answered only, "Forget all that! Your friends will be the men you do business with." And during his last illness he remarked: ""Twasn't the money we were after, 'twas the power. It was a great game." But there was also the James Stillman who could be moved by the most delicate phases of friendship. This is indicated by many passages in Miss Burr's book, of which the following is typical: The friendship with Morgan had increased rather than lessened during these years. Now that they were both out of it, they could enjoy the common interest of surveying the past together and, all competition laid aside, could philosophize over their battles and their victories. When the great financier appeared in Europe it always brought pleasure to James Stillman-who was never irritated by those idiosyncrasies which caused a witty Archbishop to bestow on the elder man the nickname of Pierpontifex Maximus. We have one or two amusing glimpses of the pair, characteristic of both their attitudes toward life. One shows them standing side by side in Rome before a rarely beautiful tapestry. James Stillman had ideas of buying it, while he felt it to be an extravagance. J. S., slowly, "I suppose I oughtn't, but it's a great temptation." J. P. M., gaily (unconsciously quoting Wilde), "Always resist everything, Stillman, except temptation!" Another story, which James Stillman told himself, concerned a visit he paid his friend in London. Having heard that Morgan had arrived in England unaccompanied by any member of his family, he went around one hot June morning to find his friend alone eating strawberries in the gar den. The two had some talk and then a pause fell, and Morgan asked: "What brought you here to see me Stillman?" "Oh," said the other slowly, in that quiet way of his "I thought you might be lonely!" "Whereat," the narrator continued, "Morgan jumped up from the table and kissed me on the cheek!" "And you?" "Oh-I was very much amused.” "And what did you do then?" "We ate up all the rest of the straw berries!" James Stillman was one of the thr great financial captains of a bygone b important epoch of American history the last quarter of the nineteenth a the first decade of the twentieth ce turies. Any book written about hi fairly and with access to inside inform tion would be historically useful. B Miss Burr has done more than this; s has really drawn a vitalized portrait a complex human being-a difficult tas for, after all, as she pertinently as "Who knows a human being?" Wh biographer, even the most skilled, c measure the resultant of the convergi forces of heredity, environment, and c cumstance? |