Mr. Robert W. Chambers is the author of some fifty volumes, including novels, short stories, nature books, poems, and one drama. Known to the majority of readers through his longer romances, he began his career as artist of the brush and gained his first literary triumph by a volume of short stories, The King in Yellow.

It is not possible in this r�sum� of Mr. Chambers�s brief fiction even to take inventory of his novels, much less to voice a scientific or personal criticism or to venture upon consideration of their popularity. A complete account of so versatile and prolific a writer would discuss them as his significant accomplishment. If his admirers belong to a class of readers who seek sensation or revel in romance pushed to the utmost bounds of credibility, it is also true that his disclaimers belong to a class that objects, on principle and on hearsay, to reading him at all. The truth about his work lies not in extremes, but it is conceded that the extremist speaks with greater apparent force and picturesqueness.

Some years ago, Mr. Frederic Taber Cooper wrote an article on Mr. Chambers (1), which was later attacked in part by Mr. John Curtis Underwood(2). Mr. Underwood says, �If Mr. Chambers thoroughly deserves to be called the prince of wholesale and cheap illusion, of commercialized darkness and flippant immorality in American fiction, if he gets the highest current prices for literary lies and extravagant frivolity based on false social distinction and exclusively patrician ideals; if continually he assumes more than he proves, and alternately professes the most inconsequent triviality in his treatment of contemporary life and pose of the social reformer of society from the inside, when satirizes what he exploits; then it is small wonder that a comparatively large and unsophisticated section of the reading public, who still buy and read his books, are at a loss just where and how to place him.� Here is the expression of an extremist, obviously a thinker concerned about ethical values.

But the critic who is artist before he is social reformer will have a different word, Mr. Rupert Hughes, in writing of Mr. Chambers, spoke of his �unusual eye for color, and his delight in beauty of every sort,� and he praised The Fighting Chance: �The book has a largeness of sympathy, a breadth of construction, and a finish of detail that give it a high place among American novels.� Mr. Underwood wrote: �Books like The Fighting Chance have more to do with the tragedies of the divorce-court and the stock exchange than either Mr. Chambers or critics like Mr. Cooper are likely to imagine.� Without allowing the relation of art to morality to detain us, we may assert that the critic who regards literature as an artistic medium will see distinctive and distinguished values in the narratives of Mr. Chambers; the critic who regards literature as a vehicle for propaganda may find then definite forces for evil. There are, of course, few moralist-critics who exclude from themselves the artist, as there are few artist-critics who exclude from themselves the moralist. In any event, it will be our pleasure to notice his marked characteristics in his briefer fiction.

Mr. Chambers reveals himself in his short stories a man of the world, acquainted with states and kingdoms; a specialist in the art of the brush, in rugs, in armor, in butterflies, in dogs; a historian with a fine sense of historical perspective and a student who employs conscientious methods of research. He has written stories of Paris -- The Latin Quarter, in particular; stories of artists at home and abroad; stories of gamekeepers and fire-wardens in the Adirondacks and of millionaires on shooting preserves in Florida; many stories of beautiful women and brave men; stories of disordered brains; stories derived from French history, the Civil War in America and the World War; stories of wild fancy and of the supernatural; stories exploiting the back-to nature cry and the simple life;. stories that are humorous prophecies in the realm of wireless and mental telepathy. Nor is the list complete. He might say of himself with Bacon, �I have taken all knowledge to be may province.�

His method, rooted in romance, has grown by what it fed on, so that the strongest criticism against his short stories is that they represent romance run mad. Yet, skilled technician that he is, Mr. Chambers knows how momentarily to compel belief. He throws the veil of mood upon the reader, rose color or blue; he employs the lure of realistic detail to clinch probability, while he subdues it to the spell of fantasy; he describes his settings with the consummate ease of one trained to appreciate color and form; and these scenes, which are true to nature, prevail upon the reader to accept the dramas acted in them.

His best stories, of rare beauty and spirituality, are these of the supernatural. The should live so long as theories of metempsychosis last -- the subject is as old as Pythagoras -- and so long as revenants return. His stories to be forgotten are those which impress upon the reader the physical charms of the bright-haired, blue-eyed heroine, approvedly through the eyes of the hero, and which would convince the reader that, within an hour or a day after meeting each other, the heroine is safely harbored in the hero�s arms.

Robert W. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865. He shares with his brother, Walter Boughton Chambers, the artistic gift: he was in Julian�s Academy from 1886 to 1893; ,his brother, after taking a degree at Yale, studied architecture with Blondel in 1889. Before going to Paris, Robert was at the Art Student�s League in New York, where he has as classmate, Charles Dana Gibson. At the age of twenty-four he had painted pictures acceptable to the Salon. There is a legend that after returning to America in 1893 he and Gibson submitted sketches to Life and that his were taken but Gibson�s returned. Urged by the writing instinct and by a desire to express himself more rapidly than the medium of the brush would allow, he produced his first novel, In the Quarter (1893). The King in Yellow (1895) made his reputation and determined his career.

His life as art student may be gleaned from certain stories in the first collection. Rue Barr�e, which begins �one morning at Julian�s,� presents Kid Selby �drunk as a lord,� a study of intoxication equalled only by Owen Wister�s in Philophy Four, and as indubitably drawn from like. Inthe Street of Our Lady of the Fields, Valentine names the artists whom she knows and who are more or less contemporaries of Mr. Chambers: Bouguerean, Henner, Constant, Laurens, Puvis de Chavanses, Daguan and Courtois. One might also deduce from the book that while in France he had become interested in armor and falconry, and then or later in the elixir of life and metempsychosis as starting points for adult fairy tales. The Mask and The Demoiselle D�Ys, though the latter is somewhat over-burdened with technical language, are both admirable examples of the story-teller�s art. Almost from the first Mr. Chambers was sure of his manner. To know one art is to know the principles of all art. Through-out his volume and all those succeeding it, the author�s training in drawing and painting serves for first aid toward perfection of method. He might have been thinking of himself when he wrote of Leed in The Ghost of Chance (in The Tree of Heaven): �The technique that sticks out like dry bones, the spineless lack of construction finds, pitiful eccentricities to cover inability -- nothing of these had ever, even in his student days, threatened him with the pit-fall of common disaster.� And if the tales here and there are already the efflorescence of exaggerated romance, he justified himself to himself. He said later, through the Countess in A Journey to the Moon (InThe Adventures of a Modest Man): �Romance is at least amusing; reality alone is a sorry scarecrow clothed in the faded rags of dreams.�

In The Yellow Sigh -- to return to The King in Yellow --which combines an artist and his model with a supernatural theme, the author finds kinship with Edgar Allan Poe. The horror achieved through the coffin-worm watchman, the hearse and the yellow sign is unforgettable; and the mysterious book, The King in Yellow, so dire in its effects here and elsewhere, stands for the power of suggestion which Mr. Chambers grasped at the outset. Outside of the stories mentioned, the collection sows the seed for the more regrettable harvest-portions of the author�s later achievement. One striking exception should be noted. The beginning of the first story, The Repairer of Reputations, must draw a gasp from every reader who reads with awareness that it was written a quarter of a century before the year 1920 had dawned: �Towards the end of the year 1920 ... The end of the war with Germany had left no visible sears upon the republic. ... And even in New York a sadden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. ... In the following winter (1911-1912) began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide, which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.� With all due allowance for failure to foresee detail accurately, no one will hesitate after reading the first three pages of this tale, to add to Mr. Chambers�s other qualifications that of seer. For what he lacks in exactness is more than counterbalanced by the comprehensivesness of his vision. ...It is to be hoped, however, that the Lethal Chamber never will be established!

Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice has pointed out, in The New York of the Novelists, that Mr. Chambers was living at 60 Washington Square South when he wrote The King and that not only the Square but its environs are used in a number of the early stories. But �The Robert W. Chambers of the later books, so far as the Borough of Manhattan is concerned, is essentially associated with the vast expanse of city which comes under the head of Tea, Tango, and Toper Land -- in a word, the great hotels, clubs, and theaters; the sweep of Fifth Avenue from Murray Hill to the Plaza, and beyond along the east side of the Park, the Park itself, and the structures that line the Riverside Drive.�

The Maker of Moons appeared the same year as The King in Yellow. Of the eight stories bound in its covers, the title narrative of some fifteen thousand words illustrates the author�s progress in the unreal and horrible. It has to do with the alleged discovery that gold may be synthesized, with the repulsive creature that accompanies the manufactured metal -- �something soft and yellow with crab-like legs, all covered with coarse yellow hairs.� with Yue-Laou, who lived in the moon and perverted the Xin or good germ of China, with Yeth-hounds, or spirits of murdered children, passing through the woods at night, with the members of the Kuen-Yin, or sorcerers of China, and the Ysonde, the daughter of her who was created from a white lotus bud. Unreal undoubtedly. But even the most fantastic of these motives are not without parallel: Eden Phillpotts�s Another Little Heath Hound is the counterpart of the Yeth hound: James Brarch Cabell�s The Hour of Freydis(3) recalls the origins of Ysonde. Mr. Chambers makes immediately tredible all these marvels by a device as old as DeFoe Tiffany�s, the Metropolitan museum, and the Canadian woods are real, and they are the factual scenes of the tale; Cockney-speaking Howlett and Gamekeeper David contribute to reality through person and dialect; the narrator Cardenhe aids convictior through the matter-of-fact style -- not withstanding the fantastic passages, which are integrated through contrast; his friends, Pierrepont and Barris, by their worldly pursuits, increase it.

Mr. Chambers is a necromancer here, as elsewhere. The moons of Yue-Lauo conjured up rise about you like golden bubbles; later horror overwhelms you: �Up out of the black lake reared a shadow, a nameless, shapeless mass, headless, sightless, gigantic, gaping from end to end.� This powers of magician he displays most beautifully in An Ideal Idol, which is Chapter IV of The Green Mouse, and part of the firs story. He pursues his uncanny description of the horrible in A Matter of Interest (in The Mystery of Choice, 1896) The termosaurus in A Matter of Interest is a close relative of the sea-monster in Kipling�s A Matter of Fact copyright in 1892. It is interesting to compare the tales, to notice the American writer�s inventive facility and his riot of imagination in contrast to the economy and greater convineingness of Kipling.

In this volume, The Mystery of Choice, the author continues his stories of the supernatural. The Messenger, a ghost tale, covers the gap from 1760 to 1896, it uses thirty-nine skulls, a death�s head moth {the messenger) and the gruesome incident of the Black Priest by way of steps to the climax: �We were looking into the eye-sockets of a skull.� In conjunction with the modern Breton setting, with the simple minor characters of the action and with the lives of Lys and her husband, the produce sufficient plausibility for entertainment. At the other extreme from this longish story is �Passeur!� a brief conte, after the French models. The ghost returns, through a voice, to one who wished to be ferried over the stream, answering as in life to his �Passeur!�, �V�la Monsieur!� He marvels, �and when he raised his eyes he saw that the Ferryman was Death.�

The Haunts of Men (1898) is characterized by four stories of the Civil War, not one of which, however, is so satisfying as In the Name of the Most High (in The Makers of Moons). The best story in the volume is The Whisper. One of the first fruits of the Chinaman in New York, it furnished seed to succeeding writers; to-day the harvest is profuse. That the whisper itself effects surprise in the denouement is noteworthy because Mr. Chambers so infrequently employs a terminal shock. The poignant drama is presented with the economy of an etching.

The Latin Quarter, too, continues to find representation, and the familiar figures of Elliott, Clifford et al reappear. Enter the Queen, with its substitute cornet-player who did not play was probably funny when it was written -- as it is not now. Humor is largely a matter of fashion and successive eras must produce their own styles. The rattlesnake in Yo Espero and the shark that was the Collector of the Port are proof that their creator was still pursuing, with an eye to the reading public, tragic signs and symbols. He subdues them here to a happy end.

Mr. Chambers has a genius for titles. Occasionally he adapts a well-worn phrase, again he chooses an exotic feminine name, frequently he uses color -- green, yellow, red and blue -- and he drew from the following stanza for this volume:

�How shall we seem each to the other, when,
On that glad day, immortal, we shall meet --
Then who, long since, didst pass the hastening feet --
I, who still wait here, in the haunts of men?�

Having followed in summary Mr. Chambers�s course in writing brief fiction, and always remembering that a number of his novels must be examined for his complete progress, we approach a sharp apex in The Tree of Heaven (1907). He has extended his chain of stories; but he has not since projected a climactic peak so far into the ether. In this volume he expressed in narrative form better than he will ever express again his speculations on life and death and his envisioning of the high possibilities of spirit. It should be remembered to his credit that he sued the title a dozen years before the English author, Miss Sinclair�s Tree of Heaven is the living ailanthus, however, whereas that of Mr. Chambers in one woven in an ancient rug. Ghost, metempsychosis, separation of soul and body and allied themes underlie most of the dramas here enacted. Singly or in combination, they are at the basis of The Carpet of Belshazzar, The Sign of Venus, The Case of Mr. Helmer, The Bridal Pair, and Out of the Depths. Loss of memory and its restoration he was one of the first to handle, in The Golden Pool. Many changes have been rung on this motif, down to Wilbur Daniel Steele�s God�s Mercy (Pictorial Review, July 1920) and all manifestations and amnesia and aphasia possible to handle in the shortest story. The swastika humorously pits the power of the swastika against that of the crystal, and half-seriously, half-humorously reflects the spirit of the early twentieth century in its resurrection of rabbit feet, clover leaves, horseshoes and other luck symbols. The Carpet and The Bridal Pair are the pick of the volume; the first, for glowing imagination and conviction; and second, the spiritual beauty. The Carpet is a powerful orchestration of that motif first sounded in The Demoiselle D�Ys. It is, by and large, the finest short story Mr. Chambers ever wrote.

He was reflecting the spirit of the age in other ways. By the year 1908 the use of the wireless telegraph was well established, and the fictionists were following the trail of the scientist. Kipling�s Wireless (Traffics and Discoveries, 1904) suggested that that a wireless operating plant caught a message from the air and transmitted it to a drugstore clerk. Lines from the Ode to a Nightingale came to the counterpart of Keats in such a way as to hint that the spirit of Keats, or the same controlling force which impelled him to compose the Ode, was in contact with the sending apparatus, and was disturbing the transmission between the two experimental stations. Mr. Chambers surpassed the British author in dancy and daring, as may be observed from a survey of The Green Mouse (1910). Destyn has invented a machine which, taking advantage of the fact that the earth is circumscribed by wireless currents of electricity, is able to intercept the subconscious personalities of two people of opposite sex and to contact them. The result is union which, though inevitable in the course of the ages, the machine has accelerated. It aids destiny in pairing off and, incidentally, helps the author to achieve a story about each mating. The work may be regarded as so many of its companion books are to be regarded: humorously prophetic of a distant fact or gently satirical of those persons quick to catch up fads, from mental telepathy to Ouija.

The business of thought transference he had just satirized in the same fashion in Some Ladies in Haste (1903). The link that binds the numbers in this volume is Manners, with his uncanny gift of suggestion, the power to effect radical change in the lives of men and women, and to provide for them suitable mates. Five couples, paired off, are the actors in the several dramas. Under cover of his larger satirical purpose, he strikes a few playful blows at the back-to-nature cult and the ideal of the brotherhood of man; at the same time, he seizes the opportunity for exploiting his very real interest in butterflies. He might well have used for his title Some Ladies in Trees: the volume opens with a pursuit that ends in the unbrageous foliage of an oak and closes with one that allows the hero to rescue the heroine form the crotch of a maple.

In The Adventures of a Modest man (1911), the author returns to Paris. The thinnest of envelopes serves to hold the unrelated stories, produced ostensibly as fiction, by Williams, a character in the outer action. These pseudo-efforts of Willims include lovely artist models in new York, Vassar girls on the Caranay, and French countesses on the Seine, with the right gentleman properly directed by Fate, Chance and Destiny. Grotesque, if readable, some of these Destiny driven conclusions. The Author remarks somewhere in the book, �Everybody�s livers are full of grotesque episodes. The trouble is that the world it too serious to discover any absurdity in itself. We writers have to do that for it.� Apology or justification, this statement explains the position of the author which apparently shifts from running with the hare to hunting with the hounds. He loves nature, for example; but he recognizes the absurdity in a fashion of the hour which equips young women with green nets and three-corned envelopes and sends them in pursuit of butterflies along the Bronx River or which commands them to discard the garments of the modern world and, dressed in cheese-cloth, armed with bow and arrow, to roam Dianas on well-conducted estates. ... �Eccentricity is the full-blown blossom of mediocrity,� he also permits one of his heroes to confess.

The Better Man, technically among the best of the author�s works, represents in the maturity of his exaggerations of type and this wizard-like realization of the improbable. The first five stories are set in forest preserves of New York State; The Better Manhas its climax in Florida, as have five or six others of the fifteen stories in the volume. The ladies, if found in rustic setting, are not native to it; exotics by some chance transplanted to the backwoods, they retain amid primitive conditions there hot-house attributes, as though cherished by all the safeguards known to civilization. In real life they would wither or freeze or become toughened to endure. The villain is, usually some native who is lawless, though supposedly a representative of order, and who has the fragile lady in his power. The hero is, according to formula, an agent of the Forest Conservation Commissioner, every such a man, polished of English and manner and dress. The outcome might be fraught with considerable anxiety in real life, granted existence of previous conditions. But there is never a doubt over the denouement of these ruffian and gentlemen contests. The brave hero, without undue damage to scenery or villain, bears the fair lady back to her proper setting of culture and refinement.

Barbarians (1917)rises above the preceding collection by virtue of its theme -- the Great War -- the author�s interest in the subject and his proximity to it. Spite of the interest, he was too remote from the Civil and the Freanco-Prussian Wars to succeed with them as short-story material. Here he combines his knowledge of France, his sympathy with the character of the French girl and his antagonism to the �barbarians� in a series of appealing and sometime thrilling dramatic pictures. his butterfly flits, too, through a story or so. It has become his symbol, as it was Whistler�s. A thing beautiful in form, color, and notion; tenuous, fragile, the thing of a season; and yet emblematic of the soul. Perhaps it would have no place in a Gradgrindian scheme of the universe. ...

Mr. Chambers once asserted that he has no hard and fast rule of composition. �Sometimes I begin with the last chapter, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes I lay out an elaborate skeleton.� He also indicates that hi is under no delusion as to the status of authors. At best, he says, they �are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the general idea being -- which is usually true -- that literature is a godsend to those unfitted for real work. But very few authors comprehend what is their status in a brutal, practical and humorous world.� So he wrote in Number Seven (The Better Mane). The hero of the same story, a man of literary aspirations, probably voices the author�s thoughts when he admits in a note to the heroine: �You are quite right: art is never idleness.:

Volumes of short stories by Mr. Chamber:

The King in Yellow, 1895
The Maker of Moons, 1895
The mystery of Choice, 1896
The Haunts of Men, 1896
A Young Man in a Hurry, 1903
The Tracer of Lost Persons, 1906
The Tree of Heaven, 1907
Some Ladies in Haste, 1908
The Green Mouse, 1910
Adventures of a Modest Man, 1911
The Better Man, 1916
Barbarians, 1917