1922

tending over many years, show that all typhoons follow three general tracksThose that two usual, one eccentric.

start slowly take an initial course nearly due west, gradually gathering headway, until by the time they have reached full power and swing sharply to the north they have also reached the Philippine Islands or the China Coast. (Track No. 1 on the chart.) If they begin violently, their full force has passed in the empty sea before they sweep across southern Hondo. (Track No. 2.) And about once or twice a year, for reasons not yet thoroughly understood, a typhoon attains its maturity too soon, goes insane, and flies the wrong way. (Track No. 3.) These maniac typhoons are short-lived, like other maniacs, and rarely last longer than just long enough to uproot the cocoanut trees from which Guam makes its livelihood.

Outwitting a typhoon is an exhausting but exciting adventure when a ship is not too close to shore-"has plenty of sea room." First of the many warnings that presage the storm is a thick, still heat. Then the wind begins to sidle about in tiny puffs, its direction veering 180 degrees in two or three minutes. The second day long, thin fingers of white cloud radiate from some one point on the horizon, like bony fingers of a giant hand, and an opaque white haze hangs in the far distance, although the Then for two sky is bright overhead.

or three days the clouds, at first white, then gray, then purple black, climb steadily, massing higher and higher. The fitful gusts grow stronger, and at night you wake, straining your ears. There is nothing to hear but the palm leaves rattling in the gusts; but you have an eerie sensation that some one in the distance has screamed. By this time the islanders are watching the wind anxiously. If it keeps on shifting, well and good, for the center is passing by. If it steadies to one point of the compass and slowly rises, the storm is heading straight in the observer's direction, and it is coming from a point fortyfive degrees to the right of the direction of the wind. The wind is tangent to the side of the center, so a steady wind means a constant bearing of the storm itself. If the shipmaster finds himself to the south and west, he need not be particularly apprehensive. He has only to keep the wind on the left side and astern, changing his course as the wind shifts, for he is outside of the storm's curve, is keeping a constant, wide angle between his course and the bearing of the storm center, and consequently, every mile he steams is a mile farther away from trouble. When he finds that his ship is inside the curve of the typhoon, however, he has an anxious time ahead of him. To try to cross ahead of the center is perilous. To go back may be to run full into it. Once caught, his only course is to slow down to bare steerage-way and keep his ship from falling into the trough of the sea, broadside to the wind. He may put out a

THE OUTLOOK

islander's thatched and wattled shack cannot be closed up; so the entire family work like busy ants guying up the walls like a tent. To hold down the roof, the man of the house takes ten-foot or twelve-foot sections of old bamboo, punching out the joints until he has a dozen or more long buckets about four or five inches in diameter. He ties these bamboos together with a foot or so of rope, in pairs, and throws them, open and up, across the ridgepole of his hut, until his entire roof is covered. The rain quickly fills the buckets, and the weight thus gained is sometimes enough to save the roof. With the more solidly built houses of the white men there is but one salvation-to keep the wind out of the house. Doors must be closed and bolted, the cracks stuffed with rags. Heavy, solid wooden shutters, sliding in grooves outside the windows, are I closed and fastened with hooks. The wind must not be allowed to enter, for, once inside, it will explode a frame house like a bursting shell or blow the windows and roof away from a stone building. A defective lock on the massive front doors of the Kow Loon Yacht Club in 1913 gave way under the blast of a typhoon, and as the roof flew away it carried with it the ruined fragments of the finest collection of Chinese anThe intiques in Hongkong Harbor. terior of the building was completely wrecked.

The problem was simple in my house in Guam. It was squat and low and coral-built, and was in the lee of a high cliff. It was uncomfortable to sit for hours in the hot, wet dark of the tightly sealed house, watching the rain leak through where the gale had driven it under the tiles, but the only real sufferer was my cat. Unable to hunt for rats during the storm, she had to be fed on salmon and sardines, and it invariably gave her indigestion.

T

HE home life of a genius is often SO disappointing, SO sedentary and uninspired a process of incu. bation that it is always wise to approach books that treat of such intimacies without too great a measure of expectation. This warning is hardly necessary to lovers of Swinburne, for his home life with Walter Theodore Watts Dunton at The Pines, Putney Hill, was no secret. Mrs. Watts Dunton's "The Home Life of Swinburne," if we except the hodgepodge of tea-table anecdotes and small talk which gives it a gossipy interest, brings hardly anything new to the subject.

Watts Dunton's valiant rescue of the brandy-drinking pagan poet from a sick-bed in Great James Street and the nursing of that poet (a process that took thirty years) is ancient history. Most readers know all that they need to know about the carefully regulated days at The Pines, and, indeed, Mrs. Watts Dunton's book proves that they know all that there was to know. The whole thing formulates itself into a rapidly ossifying brain and childlike existence that assuredly was not stemmed in any degree by Watts Dunton. It is impossible to assert at this late date that The Pines did, or did not, destroy Swinburne as a great poet. It may be true that he would have destroyed himself, anyway, if Watts Dunton had left him on his sick-bed in Great James Street. Indeed, evidence would seem to favor such a theory. Mrs. Watts Dunton is furious enough about those critics who have ascribed Swinburne's lessening vitality as a poet during the last thirty years of his life to the influence of Watts Dunton. "There is no chapter in literary history," she asserts, "dealing with men's friendship more lovely; and yet envy and spite have tried to disfigure the public aspect of this sweet and sacred thing."

In the past I have leaned toward the theory that Watts Dunton's influence on Swinburne was as bad mentally as it was good physically, and nothing that Mrs. Watts Dunton has to say in this volume would seem to shake that theory. She looked upon her husband apparently as a sort of reincarnation of Alfred Tennyson's good old Victorian King Arthur. He possessed toward Swinburne what Mrs. Watts Dunton quite rightly calls "the mothering instinct." She asserts of her husband: "His anxiety for his [Swinburne's] physical welfare, his great interest in his mental output, his concern for his domestic comfort and for his amusement were beautiful to witness." "Walter," she re

1 The Home Life of Swinburne. By Clara Watts Dunton The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

marks in another place, "ruled him by love, guided him by advice, and influenced him by suggestion." All this, it must be remembered, is written about him who, as Max Beerbohm once put it, "erstwhile clashed cymbals in Naxos."

Now, there have been two theories prevalent concerning the sad debâcle of Swinburne's later years. One is that the poet needed alcohol to whip his brain up to the proper point of ecstasy in order to write his greatest poetry, and this is the sole theory to which Mrs. Watts Dunton pays any attention. She is horrified at it, and quite properly so, for there is no proof that Swinburne wrote any of his greatest poetry while under the influence of alcohol. But the second theory is not disposed of so easily, and perhaps this is why Mrs. Watts Dunton ignores it. That theory is based on the premise that Swinburne's poetry fell off during his later years because Watts Dunton's stodgy mind began to permeate and influence the inspiration of the poet. Of course Swinburne would not write about Faustine again with Walter's careful eye upon him. The poet had been set down in surroundings that made such a procedure impossible. He was in a Victorian household where everything moved like clockwork. He got up and breakfasted about ten o'clock, read the daily paper, ambled about Wimbledon Common, drank a bottle of Bass at the Rose and Crown, had luncheon, an afternoon nap, wrote from four o'clock until six, read aloud until 7:45, had dinner at eight, and then retired to his library. And that for thirty years was the life of the man who shifted the values of mid-Victorian poetry! One can but regret Watts Dunton's "great interest in his [Swinburne's] mental output" and the fact that he guided the poet "by advice and influenced him by suggestion."

Nothing but gratitude can be extended to Watts Dunton for his activity in 1879, but it is to be regretted that it had to be Watts Dunton. His was a calm, moderate, machine-like, critical mind, full of the milk of human kindness, but hardly capable of intensifying the vagaries of genius. Swinburne did not live his own life at The Pines, whatever Mrs. Watts Dunton may say. The evidence is too strongly on the other side. The poet led Watts Dunton's life. In spite of the dynamic qualities of Swinburne's brain, it is obvious that he was weak and easily dominated. He had no head for practicalities, and it was easier to let other people do things for him than to do them himself. And because of this, because he took the line of least resistance, was nursed back to health and then permitted himself to be coddled for

Did you ever Just look at Isn't he per

the rest of his life, we have the figure of the dapper little gentleman who would observe the picture of a baby and coo, "Oh, the little duck! see such darling dimples? those sweet little arms! fect?" Mrs. Watts Dunton, by the way, sets this speech down with the utmost gravity.

Except for inconsequentialities and a number of minor anecdotes of some interest there is nothing new in Mrs. Watts Dunton's volume except the rather touching chapter recording the poet's last days. Here she does reach a certain height of poignancy, although, to be quite honest, she fumbles it through an inveterate sentimentality which makes itself manifest throughout the book. I do not remember that the last days of Swinburne have ever been so minutely described before, and it may be of some interest to set down part of Mrs. Watts Dunton's narrative. She writes:

A nurse was stationed on the landing outside his room with the door open, for in his lucid moments it would have irritated him to see a strange woman sitting by his bedside. Walter prepared both nurses for the possibility that their presence might excite their distinguished patient to the utterance of "Elizabethan language," and requested them not to go near him except when absolutely necessary. Upstairs in his room, although by now he was gaining strength, Walter lay in bed strained and nervous, wondering what the issue would be. At intervals I would go down to Swinburne to take little I messages to him from Walter. found that he absolutely refused to allow the nurse to administer oxygen. Though he was sometimes delirious, he was conscious enough to know that a stranger was bending over him, and when she attempted to place the tube near his mouth he beat it away with his hands, crying out in an enfeebled voice, "Take it away, take it away!"

But the nurse's science told her that oxygen was necessary, and accordingly Walter's influence was asked for and promptly used. Acting as Walter's proxy, I went to Swinburne's bedside and told him that Walter considered the oxygen to be akin to a sea breeze, and that it would do him all the good in the world. He opened his eyes and gladly allowed me to put the tube quite near his mouth as he inhaled the vapor without another murmur.

It was painful sometimes to watch him hurl the blankets off his chest and shoulders as he tossed about in a state of high fever. No sooner had the nurse or I replaced them than he would again try to fling them off. Occasionally he would talk wildly for a long while without stopping. I remember the nurse asked me in what language he was talking. I could catch a word here and there as he muttered long sentences with aston

ishing rapidity, and an occasional
phrase in his disjointed monologue
made me guess that he was speaking
or reciting in Greek.

It was in this manner, the victim of double pneumonia, that Swinburne died on the morning of April 10, 1909. It is pathetic to note that the dying poet, dreamer to the last, would take his oxygen only after it had been urged upon him as something akin to a sea breeze. He who had been a stormy petrel in his younger days never lost his passion for the sea.

The picture that Mrs. Watts Dunton draws of Swinburne as a bibliophile is pleasing, but it is hardly as arresting a portrait as that furnished some years ago by Max Beerbohm, who passed an afternoon with the poet among his rare first editions. Swinburne's passions were few, and Mrs. Watts Dunton is careful to note them all. There was Victor Hugo, for instance, and there was Dickens. Several pages are given over to a description of Swinburne as a reader of Dickens. He was a very bad reader, according to Mrs. Watts Dunton, although in later years she became rather fascinated by his delivery. It seems that Swinburne would attempt to convey character by the tones of his voice as he read, and, as the poet was far from being an actor, the attempt was generally a failure. His high falsetto voice must have been a surprising thing. Another enthusiasm was the blossoming hawthorns on Wimbledon Common, and great was Swinburne's excitement the season he wheedled Mrs. Watts Dunton into accompanying him on a trip of inspection to them. "I found that he knew each one separately and individually," writes Mrs. Watts Dunton, "as one knows old friends. He ran from one to another, jumping over the numerous intersecting dikes and ditches and giving me his hand to help me to leap over to his side. When he got to one large hawthorn of divine loveliness, he paused for a long time in front of it and drew in long deep breaths, as though he were inhaling the subtle emanation of the blossoms he so rapturously adored, and softly and repeatedly ejaculated, 'Ah-h-h!'" And of course his enthusiasms for the sea and babies are repeatedly emphasized. One chapter deals almost wholly with efforts to find a likely shore resort for the poet, and there is quite a pathetic touch in the account of Swinburne's sad discovery that he was getting too old to remain very long in the water.

He

Although unimportant, there is much to amuse the reader in the two chapters concerning Swinburne's fads and his difficulties as a man of business. never would let a tailor measure him, because he did not like the idea of foreign hands traveling over his body. This necessitated all his suits being cut from the one he possessed. Checks were an abhorrence to him and he never cashed them, sometimes thrusting large ones away in odd corners, where they

remained hidden for months. He was

averse to carrying small coins, and this appears to be part of his aristocratic heritage, for he feared contamination from them. Christmas was a gala time at The Pines and many were the mys terious proceedings on Swinburne's part as the holiday drew near. He was meticulous in his selection of Christmas cards, and great was his delight when he discovered any with ships upon them.

From a photograph (C) by Elliott & Fry, London SWINBURNE

Of all the people who came to visit Swinburne but one is selected by Mrs. Watts Dunton for special mention, and this proves to be the novelist F. Marion Crawford. Swinburne got on very well with him, and so too, apparently, did Watts Dunton and his wife. Mrs. Watts Dunton even mentions such trivial things as Swinburne's predilection for blue writing paper and for Samphire Soap. She informs us that his newspaper was the "Daily Telegraph," there being "too much 'We-ishness' about the "Times.'" Although Mrs. Watts Dunton is careful to state that Swinburne was not eccentric, it is hard to resist a smile at her description of the poet's appearance. He braced his trousers so high, she asserts, that he showed several inches of white sock. "Furthermore, he had a curious prancing gait, and his deliberate way of flinging out his feet before him as he trod the ground reminded one of a dancing master or a soldier doing the goose-step."

An entire chapter is devoted to the bard's humor, but the evidences of it offered are pretty sad. For instance, Mrs. Watts Dunton covers a lot of paper describing one anecdote which culminates in the fact that Swinburne read "Walter Watts" into the obituary of "Richard Watts" in Dickens's "The Seven Poor Travelers." There is nothing brilliant in this, and as one looks through the book, observing the various remarks ascribed to Swinburne, one

wonders at the dullness of the poet. We have Mrs. Watts Dunton's word for it that he scintillated at times and that his excoriations were fearsome and wonderful to hear, but there are certainly no examples of any such wit or excoriations to be discovered in the book. One cannot but reach the conclusion that the author of "The Home Life of Swinburne" has left much unsaid and has carefully selected those few tidbits of information with which she does interlard her appreciation of the poet. In no sense of the word does this volume close the door to the biography of Swinburne. Edmund Gosse did not do it, and neither does Mrs. Watts Dunton. Of course the hostess of The Pines is attempting no such thing, but even the ground which she has selected for herself is so meagerly scraped at as to make it imperative that an authentic history of those last thirty years be yet written. It must be remembered that she did not become a part of the menage at The Pines until the very fag-end of Swinburne's life, and much of her observation was made through the eyes of a girl, and a girl very much in love with Theodore Watts Dunton at that. It was but natural that she should have seen Swinburne through the eyes of her husband.

Certain sillinesses creep into the book. For instance, there is the gravely delivered information that Swinburne carefully folded up his napkin after a meal. Did Mrs. Watts Dunton imagine that her readers would jump to the conclusion that the poet flung it upon the floor after he had satisfied his appetite? It is easy to perceive why certain people have asserted that this volume is in bad taste. It is really not so, for the enthusiasm and undoubted love for the poet of the woman who wrote it lift it from any such quagmire. But it does have its lapses, and a rather serious one is the unconscious belittlement of Swinburne that runs through it. It is a loving belittlement, but it is insidious. It strips and presents as practically helpless a character that must have possessed many sound masculine traits. True enough, Swinburne's anger is hinted at, but, being hinted at, it is quickly slurred over. Mrs. Watts Dunton is striving to place a halo on a head that had been haloed long before she was born, and with a flaming halo that she can hardly comprehend. There is no doubt that the young pagan Swinburne gradually metamorphosed into the quaint little Victorian gentleman who never ran far from his masculine nursemaid, Watts Dunton, but there is hardly any need to rub it in so vigorously.

There is a psychological problem implicit in the career of Swinburne that will be worked out some day, and it is safe to assert that Mrs. Watts Dunton's volume will prove valuable at that time And it will prove valuable, not for the conscious information she gives, but for the unconscious betrayals which she does not perceive and never will be able to perceive.

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A

MY PIECE OF GARDEN

WHITE COTTAGE, green blinds and ivy vines. A garden filled with flowering shrubs, pink peonies, blue larkspur. There is a soft tinkle of a fountain, and a sweet, delicate fragrance fills the air. A porch shaded by elms and pines. On the porch a white-haired gentlewoman of about threescore and ten, knitting her lovely yarn of blue, lavender, pink, and yellow.

The gate latch clicked. A young girl in organdy and leghorn hat walked slowly up the cool, shady path. Her eyes were full of sorrow, perplexity. A smile of welcome, a loving kiss. "This is a wonderful place, dear Lady Lavender. 'Tis peace, perfect peace. No sin nor trouble could live in here, yet just outside greed makes the world hideous. There is so much that is wrong. I am young, my life before me, but I have no aim. Tell me, dear Lady Lavender, what can I do to help destroy this ugliness of the world?"

Patiently sat the little old lady, listening once again to the cry of the young. "What can I do? My dear child, once upon a time there lived a boy who desired great riches and power. He gained the coveted riches by advertising his wares upon huge painted signposts along highways, destroying beautiful views, disfiguring the landscape, stealing from all who passed by the beauty that might have been theirs. Stealing that which is far more precious than mere money, yet the criminal went unpunished, though truly hated, this man behind the painted signs.

"With riches in the bank, he longed for happiness and began wandering the world over hunting happiness, contentment. He built hospitals, organized uplift societies. At last he came to a beautiful gate, knocked, heard a voice say, 'Enter, stranger.' It was the sunset hour-all about was enchanting beauty; a waterfall in the distance, a stream of sparkling water. Flowers covered the ground beneath ages-old trees. 'At last,' thought he, 'I have found perfect beauty, happiness.' Then, turning, he

with rank weeds, unsightly sand, and ant-hills. Indignantly he turned to the man by his side and said: 'Why is not this spot attended to? Why is it left to. mar the garden?' 'It mars the garden far more than you know, stranger,' the man replied. From this miserable spot millions of weed seeds fly over the place. Hours are spent each day weeding, ever weeding; many a man, many a woman, might have had time for greater things but for this cursed spot. It has stolen hours of ease-hours that might well have been filled with nobler things. Only hard labor has saved the beauty of the garden.' Then why, in the name of beauty, don't you care for it?" "That is the tragedy, stranger; we cannot. It is the law of the garden that each man must care for the piece of ground given him, his work cannot be done by another; and the man to whom this ground was given was not willing to work here; he wanted to do greater things-build hospitals, organize societies for the relief of the weary. Had he remained and attended to his ground, he might have saved many from being ill and weary.'

"The stranger flushed with indignation. "Tell me, who is this wretch that has so neglected his piece of work that little children grow tired, men and women downhearted? Tell me the name of the man who builds hospitals and allows such carelessness as this to harm mankind.' 'John Brown, of Yorktown.' The stranger staggered, grew pale, and muttered to himself: 'John Brown, of Yorktown. My unkept piece of ground. Hours wasted undoing the work of those seeds, and I thought the task given me of no consequence; too small a piece of work for me. And here, too late, I find it's a piece of ground in the midst of beauty, destroying beauty.' His head dropped, he would have fallen but for the quick arm of the gardener. 'I am old; oh, for my youth, my strength, that I might make this spot like unto the rest of the garden, or even strength enough to clear my small piece of ground! Yes, to even leave it bare, but not, oh, not a curse to mankind!'"

The sweet-voiced woman looked up, and saw a tear in the little visitor's eye. She put her arm about her. "Shall we, dear, have tea under the trees? And now tell me about your pretty new frocks." A half-hour passed. Later the girl in organdy, with a bright, happy, contented smile, entered an old-fashioned home. She kissed the crippled father and put her arm about the gentle woman at his side. "No need, mother, darling, worrying about me any longer. I am not going away. I am going first to attend to my piece of the garden." She ran upstairs singing. The father turned to the mother. "Why, Peg is like a ray of sunshine to-day." "Yes, father, I feel ten years younger since she entered that door. And did you hear the happy ring in her voice when she said, 'I am not going away'? But I wonder what she meant when she said, 'I am going to attend first to my piece of the garden.'" L. A. G.

1,115,000 carloads of farm products
have been hauled to market in the
past twelve months by the New York
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Better Farming

and Better Railroading

AKING two blades of grass grow where

"MAKING

one grew before" means more prosperous farming communities, more prosperous towns, greater buying power and a higher standard of living.

All of which spells an increased demand for the service we have to sell-transportation.

That is why the New York Central Agricultural Department operates demonstration trains; cooperates in the distribution of limestone in counties where the soil is impoverished; aids in solving local drainage problems; invites county agricultural agents to inspect terminal marketing systems-and generally interests itself in the development of agriculture.

A large part of our day's work is hauling the products of the farms, and the goods these products buy.