Books: Grindell-Mathews

What Use to Write Books, Poems?

Zona Gale, novelist, poet, playwright, always comes to my mind when a discussion of pacificism arises, because the accomplishment of World Peace with her is so impassioned a crusade. She is the sort of person who does not eat meat or wear furs because she believes it is wrong to kill animals for the luxury of mankind. I should like to have her meet Prof. Grindell-Matthews, famed inventor of the death-ray (TIME, Apr. 21, SCIENCE) as I met him the other morning, and to see the motion picture of his experiments. What would she have to say to him, I wonder; for he is a quiet, shy, slight Englishman, just as shy and as quiet as is she, and he claims to be a devout advocate of World Peace, advocating fighting war with its own instruments. Yet when I had seen two reels of his dreams, there seemed nothing to say. He went out of the room, and none of the newspaper people who had chanced to see the picture spoke to him. There was absolutely nothing to say.

A beam of light shoots from a projector. It seeks out a mouse in its cage. The mouse blinks, surprised, into the glow. A switch is turned. Terrible energy flies along the beam. The mouse jumps into the air, quivers, is dead. So, in the future, Prof. Grindell-film such prophetic visions—the death ray will sweep whole armies into oblivion, whole cities into bleak, smoldering ruins, explode bombs in midair, blow up ammunition dumps from great distances; in a word, make existence for those who do not possess its mysterious secret impossible, and, so he says, end war.

This is a dream worthy of H. G. Wells; but too long thinking about it will send anyone of imagination into a mood of depression. What use is it writing books, or poems, or discussing them, when radios bring the human voice and human events themselves into the back parlor of the remote farmhouse, when the motion picture offers more of a thrill to the simple mind than any written romance ever could? What time will anyone have for reading?

Ah, well, what I saw the other morning was, after all, only a shy little Englishman trying to put across an invention, just as scared, doubtless, as the youngest ingénue trying out her first speaking line on Broadway. The human comedy is just as amusing, just as pathetic, just as worth playing and writing as ever; and Death, whether by death-ray or automobile accident, just as cruel, kind and inevitable as ever—just as inevitable as bad novels and good novels coming in a steady stream across my desk. J. F.