Consider a few examples: “He could drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground, or he could gain the utmost pinnacle of the loftiest tropical giant with the ease and swiftness of a squirrel.” But how? Being a man he does not have the feet of a squirrel or of a monkey? Having dropped twenty feet — twenty feet! — how does he secure himself on the new limb before he drops again to the next? Do jungle trees have limbs conveniently arranged in perpendicular succession, like the rungs of a ladder? Are there no intervening limbs, no gaps of more than twenty feet, which even Tarzan dare not attempt?
When Kipling tells us about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’s attacking Nag, the big black cobra, he describes just how Nag was lying, just where Rikki struck him, and why he struck him there, and then what a furious shaking and battering Rikki received, how doggedly he held on, and how dizzy, aching, and shaken-to-pieces he felt when it was all over. From that single short story in the Second Jungle Book students may get more real information about jungle animals than in all of Tarzan. Although in Kipling’s stories there is a large imaginative element, the basis is truth, fidelity to actual traits in the various animals, and the pictures are definite, distinct, and clear. Again, we are poor teachers of English if we cannot make our pupils see how vastly superior is Kipling. If we can get them to read the Jungle Books and other animal stories by Kipling, such as Mobi Guj — Mutineer and Plain Tales and Mine Own People, there is little danger that they will ever again care for Tarzan or any other book of that type.
As a composition exercise we might ask them after reading Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses to satirize something in Tarzan after the same fashion. Bright youngsters with a gleam of humor would relish such an exercise. One could hardly find better opportunities for satire. Roosevelt’s African Game Trails will furnish details about the actual killing of lions. Let them read that and then whet their satirical dagger for Tarzan. The youngster that would not enjoy such an exercise has either no imagination or no sense of humor. Even the dullards ought to succeed at this task. Perhaps African Game Trails might lead on to Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Winning of the West. If so, a taste that began with Tarzan would end in something worth while.
* * * * *
Probably, however, the attraction of Tarzan is not so much in jungle conditions or in animal life, as in action, stirring events. If so, it may be compared with any one of many novels and romances that abound in action. Every teacher in English knows dozens of such books, the poorest of which is doubtless far superior to Tarzan. It would be idle to attempt to make a list. But let me name one which I happen to have read recently — The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail by Ralph Connor. This book has stirring action, thrills, heroism, idealism. It also has suspense and climax, which Tarzan lacks. Its background is historical. The events are clearly possible, even probable, and the characters are consistent and natural. Such a book is instructive, and its influence elevating. As soon as pupils come to know such books, Tarzan and books like it will cease to be attractive.
In the last analysis books of the Tarzan type are simply literary dramshops, intoxicating their readers while they linger there, and weakening their power to reflect and to reason. To accept as truth such bosh as Tarzan is to cease to think; and to cease to think is to cease to grow. One who indulges frequently in such literary intoxicants is likely to consider the daily routine dull and uninteresting, likely to neglect daily tasks and duties, likely to seek pleasure not in the actual world about him, but rather in an imagined impossible world of thrills and marvels. Let no one consider that books like Tarzan are harmless. They tend to make their admirers incapable of continuous mental effort.
* * * * *
All life is developed from within. “Out of the heart are the issues of life.” Character grows from ideals; or, as some one has put it, “Character is caught by contagion.” One may catch this contagion from a friend; one may also catch it from a book — a biography, a drama, a poem, a novel. A novel true to life may easily convey this contagion of fine character and high ideals. To imbibe high ideals from books is therefore to prepare one’s self for right conduct. If it be true that conduct is three-fourths of life, then books that nurture high ideals and prepare for right conduct are among our priceless possessions. But no such benefit conies to any reader except as he thinks and discriminates. If he loves Tarzan and dreams of Tarzan his fate is sealed.
We are nourished, not by marvels and lies, which lead us nowhere, but by realities — the things that surround us daily, and which, if we are to succeed, we must understand. In the daily round of things commonplace the thinker, the genius, develops his power. Darius Green’s dream of a flying machine, because it had no basis in physical laws, ended in disillusionment and broken shins; the Wright Brothers, by mastering certain laws of physics, developed a machine that really flies, and the world is benefited by their thinking.
After years of incessant effort and such sacrifice by strong, devoted men and women who understood better than did others the truth about intoxicating liquor, the world seems about to be freed from this evil. Are we librarians and teachers of English, who probably understand better than do others the truth about intoxicating books, nerved to wage unceasing warfare against the literary dramshops of today?
When we have led our pupils to prize truth, we may then lead them on to works of constructive imagination and beauty. Tarzan has imagination without truth, and hence leads to nothing. The fantastic career of Peer Gynt resulted from an overdeveloped imagination and an unwillingness to face facts. Although Peer realized at times that his imaginings were mere lies, he had played with them so long that he could not shake them off. In contrast with Peer’s wild, freakish imagination we might ask our pupils to consider a constructive imagination, anticipating and pointing the way to a real achievement. For example, in the field of scientific invention, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, once denounced as impossible, but now realized in the submarine. In the realm of social welfare, Sir Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men, a dream which Arnold Toynbee declared to be too good not to be true, and which he set to work to realize in the People’s Palace of Pleasure, erected in the slums of London to serve the end imaginatively described by the novelist. From this first People’s Palace have come social settlements in all the great cities of Western Europe and America, and also in many smaller cities, such as Des Moines. Such imaginings as Verne’s and Besant’s are constructive and prophetic because they are based on truth.
Forerunning every great accomplishment is a vision: a vision, then a bridge, a steam engine, a telephone, a wireless telegraph; a vision of something better in government, then the Constitution of the United States, preparing the way for a great nation. But if a vision is ever to be realized it must have a solid foundation in truth and it must be worked out with mastery of detail.
If the pupils now under our guidance are to help solve the problems of the coming day they must be able not only to observe, to discriminate, to compare and classify, but also to construct — to construct visions of better machines, better schools, better churches, better social and industrial methods, better systems of government, better world-relations. To this end the books that they read should be based on truth, and should develop the imagination and direct it along constructive lines. Literature contains many books of this character. As teachers we shall not have rendered the service we ought to render until we have trained our pupils to appreciate not Tarzan of the Apes, but books of truth and of rich, imaginative power, such as those of Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Shakespeare.
When we have helped our pupils to plant their feet firmly, first on the stepping-stone of truth, and then on the stepping-stone of imagination, they will find it easy to reach the stepping-stone of beauty; for insensibly a passion for truth and quick, constructive imagination lead on to beauty. And the trinity of truth, imagination, and beauty will conduct them to the goal of correct taste, even though they started at
Tarzanville.
Excerpted from: Three Novels, by Thomas R. Mather — Reedy’s Mirror, V.27, No. 11, March 15, 1918, p.151
Romantic stories of mystery that move amid pseudo-science and in strange, exotic moods and scenes — such, for instance, as Rider Haggard’s “She” — will continue to afford recreation to the very sophisticated, who love, on occasion, to forget their logic. And surely they will continue to foster the childlike sense of mystery in the many. Although prevented by their unrealistic themes from ever being the highest type of literary art, such stories will always have a considerable fiction interest. A book of this nature is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” (McClurg & Co., Chicago). Mr. Burroughs (creator of Tarzan, the Ape-Man) now takes the reader, together with the hero of his book, to Mars, and there through many hazardous, hairbreadth experiences. A terrific martial tragedy between strange Red Men, much like ourselves, and far stranger Green Men, struts a colossal stage. The Green Men of Mars, fifteen feet tall, and of fearsome feature, have two extra arms with which they manipulate marvelous guns that shoot two hundred miles. They ride horses that are like fiery dragons of old, and arc followed about by ten-legged, froglike dogs. These Green Men know the last thing in war, — are warriors or nothing, — and it is against them that the hero fights for Dejah Thoris, the ecstatically beautiful Martian Princess of the Red Men. The Red Men are the only inhabitants who have not been thoroughly militarized — in a small sense they still believe in love and friendship. But unfortunately the ideals of their green neighbors force them into continuous warfare, and the chief end of life on Mars has become war alone. And all this with the development of at least a mechanical intelligence far surpassing ours, on a planet that has run the stages of our civilization and much beyond: and now, almost burned up by the heat of the sun, gradually losing its meager atmosphere, Mars is in the last throes of planetary life. The people are in the last stage of a triumphing militarism. Science has chiefly been dedicated to the uses of destruction. There are telescopes that pick out men walking on the earth; there are air-craft that make one shudder; there arc engines of war that astound. The flame of kindness — almost gone — still burns dimly among the Red Men, but it bids fair soon to go out. Here the reader no doubt will see an earthly satire.
All fiction is essentially a glorious manner of lying; especially is this the case in the story of mystery. Now when a lie is told, it must be a good lie — it must have verisimilitude. Although the reader knows it a lie, he must feel it to be gospel. Or else, as in “Tartarin de Tarascon” and in some of Bill Nye’s prevarications, the lie must be so colossal — and consistently so throughout — that it serves as humor. In any case, there must not be inconsistency of detail, unevenness, or exaggeration that is only occasional. Everything must fit and jibe. It is this quality that makes Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” so truthful; it is this quality in Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” that made it possible for the author to gull his generation and many of ours to believe that he actually suffered through the Great London Plague of 1665. It is just here that our author fails. On arriving in Mars the hero learned the Martian language “in a few days” — with the aid, it is true, of the highly developed Martian art of telepathy. But this could not have been, for, obviously, the hero had to read the telepathic communications not in English, of course, but in a word-series utterly unfamiliar to him. Or possibly the author means to tell us telepathy uses no words. If so, why learn the Martian language? There are other discrepancies and anachronistic imaginings, but one must not lack humor here, for the book is, for the most part, melodrama, and should lie judged as such. Still melodramatic verisimilitude would not hurt. For the largeness of his imaginings the author is to be commended. His conception is virile, his fancy active and big; but the fault is in the working-out of the smaller detail.
“The Return of Tarzan” — The Living Age, V. LXVII, No. 3699, May 29, 1915, p.576
“The Return of Tarzan” is the sequel to “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is the story of a young man who although born of a woman, was left by a succession of untoward circumstances to be reared in an African jungle by a she-ape, the only mother he ever knew. Tarzan was drawn from the jungle by love for a young American girl whom chance threw in his way. Disappointment in love, in the new volume, results in his return to the jungle where he has many strange adventures and whence he is again led forth by love, this time happy love. It is difficult to swallow without a grain of salt the range of this young man from the finished society manners which prompt him to reply to a Countess’s invitation to tea at five o’clock that “it will be an eternity until five,” to the savage that “put a foot upon the body of his savage kill and, raising his face to the full moon, lifted his mighty voice in the weird and terrible challenge of his kind — a bull-ape had made his kill,” — a young man who converses as understandingly with apes as with Englishmen, but the reader does swallow it and feels the wholesome brace that seems to accompany all tales of the open. “The Return of Tarzan” produces the quaint feeling that we have gone back twenty-five years to the thrills and wonder of Rider Haggard. A. C. McClurg & Co.
“Thuvia, Maid of Mars” — The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, V. LIII, No. 10, November 15, 1920, p.618
Thuvia, Maid of Mars, is by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan books, which, for several years have been listed among the best selling novels. This has flatly contradicted the well-nigh universal opinion of literary critics, that an absolutely impossible novel will not find appreciative readers. For this new story, Mr. Burroughs goes to the dying planet of Mars for his scenes and characters, but his wonderful imagination has endowed them with characteristics that are fascinating. As we might expect, the incidents are as original as the characters, strange and startling. Those who have read the Tarzan stories with lively interest — and their name is legion — will like this novel as well and perhaps better. It has nine full page inserted illustrations by J. Allen St. John, and these, admirably interpreting the imagination of the author, add much to the value of the novel. (A. C. McClurg & Company.)
Edgar Rice Burroughs — The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, V. LII, No. 4, August 15, 1920, p.137-138
Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan stories, has had one of the most varied and interesting careers. He was born in Chicago, educated at Philips Academy at Andover, Mass., and at the Michigan Military Academy. He served in the 7th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant, Ariz., for a short time and then became treasurer of American Battery Co. of Chicago; later was department manager for Sears, Roebuck & co., and also held the same position with A.W. Shaw Co. of Chicago and in the interim was a gold miner in Oregon, a storekeeper and cowboy in Idaho, a policeman in Salt Lake city, and was a major of the First Battalion, 2nd Infantry Illinois Reserve Militia from September 14, 1918 to January 2, 1919. He is a member of many clubs and is probably best known by his Tarzan stories although he has written numerous novelettes for magazines. His home is the Tarzan Ranch, Van Nuys, Cal.
“The Return of Tarzan” — Topics, V. 1, No. 18, October 20, 1920, p.20
Tarzan will return to the screen in a new photoplay of jungle thrills to he seen the week beginning October 17 at the Ohio Theatre. “The Return of Tarzan” is another dramatization of an Edgar Rice Burroughs book, and is a pretentious production featuring Tarzan’s adventures in the jungle, at sea, and in the underworld of Paris. Lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, apes, chimpanzees and orangoutangs help to make up the cast, headed by Joe Martin, sad to be the most intelligent ape in the world. There are actual fights between Tarzan and two full-grown lions in which the jungle man kills the beasts with his bare hands. There is another high point of interest when Tarzan, surrounded by hungry lions, is rescued by a huge elephant that hears his call for help. The plot bristles with such events as a desperate fight between Tarzan and a gang of rutlians, a duel between Tarzan and a jealous husband and hand-to-hand fighting between Tarzan and a crowd of sav
age fanatics. Gene Pollar, who plays Tarzan, is — needless to say — a remarkably strong and athletic type.
“Tarzan of the Apes” — Brentano’s Book Chat, New Series No. 82, July 1914, p.13
TARZAN OF THE APES. — By Edgar Rice Burroughs. 1.30. Tarzan is unique — one of those books that appear only once in a while — fascinating, absorbing, and different, untamed.
“Tarzan the Untamed” — The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, V. LII, No. 11, June 1, 1920, p.532-533
Tarzan the Untamed, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, marks another episode in the series of unique and amazing adventures of the famous ape-man, and a continuation of his strange dual life amongst mankind and the wild creatures of the African jungles. His marvelous career leads him into incredible hazards, and he becomes a participant in German intrigue during the war. and learns the treachery of so-called Civilized Teutons, as well as of the brute inhabitants of his own world. A romantic strain enters the story in the presence of a plucky young English girl, who proves her patriotism and loyalty in braving grave perils, and though suspected of being a German spy, manages to serve her country and the brave .young Englishman with whom “Tarzan” has made friends. The pages are crammed with breathless incidents, against the weird and unknown background of unexplored and terrifying wastes in the heart of African forests. The book is illustrated. (A. C. McClurg & Company.)
Burroughs to Found Artist Colony — Holly Leaves, V. XI, No. 40, October 13, 1922, p.28
A portion of the famous Tarzana Ranch, the home of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of “Tarzan of the Apes,” and other books, is to be subdivided and placed on the market immediately, according to an announcement made this week. On a tract of 100 acres at the corner of Reseda avenue and Ventura Boulevard, with a frontage of 2000 feet on the latter thoroughfare, a new town, to house a colony of artists, and literary people, will be founded and named Tarzana.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 771