Ramsey Milholland
By . New York: Doubleday, Page and co. 12mo, viii -J-218 pp, $1.50.
MR. BOOTH TARKINGTON proves once more that he is the ideal biographer of The Boy. The seventeen-year-old is a shy animal, likely to dodge and dart away at the first sign of a curious observer. When cornered, he will give the onlooker a notable exhibition of arms and legs and of what he can do with them; he will temporize with slang and specious words; he will pretend exhaustively — but he will not, if he can help it, give away one hint of his real self. The author of Ramsey Milholland has the knack of observing without frightening, and of penetrating beneath the humorous pretense. He has the art, too, of expressing the outward manifestations of the American boy with the humor that is theirs, and the spirit of that boy with the gentleness it deserves.
The school and college life of Ramsey Milholland was that of many an American boy, filled with incidents usual enough, but freshened by an irresistible humor. Into this life, in the spring of 1917, fell that which shook and changed it utterly. Proms, frats, girls, skylarking, gave place to thoughtful interludes. War-talk, argument, filled the air. Loquacious boys gabbled more and louder than ever; silent ones withdrew more and more deeply into themselves. The first boy enlisted; others followed, leaving the argument to boil on unheeded behind them. Ramsey was the first to go from the small college in Mr. Tarkington’s book.
What sent him was not, it is clear, his recoil from the pacifisl arguments of The Girl; still less was it the war-talk of campus or fraternity house. ‘Ramsey had his own secret . . . and did not tell it. Sometimes there rose, faint in his memory, a whimsical picture, yet one that had always meant much to him. He would see an old man sitting with a little boy upon a rustic bench under a walnut tree to watch the “Decoration Day Parade” go by. , . . And Ramsey would bring out of his memory thoughts that the old man had got into the child’s head that day. “ We knew that armies fightingfor the Freedom of Man had to win, in the long run. . . . Man has to win his freedom from himself — men in the light have to fight against men in the dark.”'
The spirit of Ramsey Milholland is the spirit in which America passed over one great crisis into the war. It was a fine spirit, and Mr. Tarkingtoo understands it finely. But it was also a terribly inarticulate spirit, in such youths. It will have to be made articulate and capable of ideas as well as of generous emotions, before we can have passed over the other great crisis into anything that ought to be called peace. If Mr. Tarkington has a suspicion that the spirit of his hero is not completely adequate to the future as well as the past, he gives no sign. H. T. F.