that into the majority of the homes in the United States the language and the manners of the stable have not yet penetrated, and that virtue is still regarded as a decoration rather than a commodity or a pose.

TH

INGENUE

HE highways and byways of literature, especially the unpaved byways, are as difficult to keep clean as the streets of New York, and have as few to attempt it an unimportant squad of whitewings, a disgruntled paper scavenger or so in the parks, and an occasional wayfarer, a literary pedestrian, who mutters to his wife as he stamps his feet in the hall. Yet these mutterings have grown to an appreciable volume, to a point where they are worth newspaper space and are worth making the basis of a crusade; and though such a campaign cannot perhaps accomplish any but a spasmodic washing down of gutters, it does at least bring to light the reasons involved in the ethical question: Why are the streets dirty? Surely frankness has a value where writing is to be believed, even if words are used in books which are barred from the bedrooms of many a respectable house. Yet the mass value of a movement toward candor carries some writers beyond good taste. The reasons are not far to seek. There are always extremists; and again, everyone does it because everyone is doing it. Still another reason, more naive, is the fact that the most productive writers of this time are younger than they have been in other periods. For nowadays a young man or woman can live by writing and without other visible means of support. These young people are at the age when they have only just dis

covered sex, and they are delighted with its interest, they want to talk about it. All of us bookish persons have at some time "discovered" Thackeray, Johnson, and the like, and have rushed to friends or family waving the volume and exclaiming, "This man can write!" There is really something wonderful about the great personage, we feel, in spite of his being so banal a character in the library. And surely someone (perhaps we ourselves) should point out this beauty, and that truth, and sing all by itself such a phrase, lest its cadence be lost in the opera.

It may be that this generation of writers has discovered, with the same loquacious wonder, that civilization is largely the problem of sex and society, and it speaks and writes about that problem as if no one had ever heard of it before. Doubtless there are few who disguise salacity under frankness for commercial reasons. Yet even to those whose art, self expression, or what-you-will in the jargon, demands frankness, there should be apparent the limits of good taste.

TWO DANGEROUS
ADJECTIVES

EST" and "popular" as applied

"BEST"

to books or lists of books are insidious and snobbish little adjectives. There is a fragment in the writings of Epictetus which may unfortunately be applied to an attitude common among American readers of books: "If you begin by admiring little things, you will not be thought worthy of great things; but if you despise the little, you will be greatly admired." We are afraid to like the humble, the small, the entertaining. Our books, like our clothes, must bear the approval either of the

discriminating few or the vast crowd. They must be the very best, or the most popular. We must be led to taste them by a lure of superlatives. Since this is true, the magazines and reviews do not neglect to furnish lists and advices, elaborating the method through the use of questionnaires sent out and answered by serious ladies and gentlemen who solemnly select their two, four, or five foot shelves; whereupon we obediently build in bookcases and fill them. Read the books themselves? That is another matter. So many of us do not dare to admit that we really like best to read, perhaps, a rattling good adventure story. What's one man's poetry may be another man's doggerel - Eddie Guest's verses inspire the taxi driver as Shelley's might the professor. Some time back, in "John O'London's Weekly", the librarian of the London Library, Dr. C. Hagberg Wright, published a wise discussion of "Snobbery and Books". His second paragraph seems both suggestive and fair:

There has been in the main a touch of intellectual snobbery in the published categories of "best books". They have presented some literary man's ideal, or the school prizes of his youth. Rarely do we find a mention of the humble bedside favourite or the mirthful pocket volume that beguiles a journey. Yet Charles Darwin is said to have preferred a "shilling shocker" to graver tomes, and I can vouch personally for the attachment of Huxley to detective fiction. But the fact remains that when an eminent person is called upon for a list of books to appear in print, he assumes the black cap and incontinently condemns everything short of the most lofty poetry and prose. The consequence is that the general reader glances through the solemn catalogue, and goes away sorrowing. In his eyes the best book is apt to be one from which he draws the most instruction with the most (or the least) entertainment, and the instruction derived does not necessarily come under the heading of book-learning. This general reader on whom publishers and booksellers depend for the steady sale of their wares will usually own he has no desire for Plato or Aristotle. John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer leave him cold.

He feels unable to cope with Einstein. He prefers, and confirms his preference by purchasing, often at considerable cost, modern authors who do not figure in any notable list of "best books".

IN

THE PAMPERED ARTIST

N an article in "Scribner's Magazine", Henry Rood finds it in his heart to point out that the American college is not a fit place for the harboring of genius. He cannot picture Frank Stockton or Mark Twain in the toils of present day undergraduate imbecility. The artist, he points out, must have leisure and freedom of soul. "The whole college community", he writes, "is vibrant with a thousand notes and discords, echoing from a thousand directions. Is it reasonable to expect Creative Genius to germinate, take root, unfold its buds to develop steadily, surely in such soil, in such atmosphere?" Why not? Is college any more distracting than life? Does Mr. Rood, whose admiration for the liberal young folk of today is obviously tempered, and who finds the literary gods of the Puritan past admirable, think that life is any less disciplined than the academic sanctuary? Surely, intellectual freedom, of a sort, is found more readily among professors than among business men. Where shall we put our young geniuses, if we are wise enough to know them, if they are wise enough to know themselves? Shall they troop to Greenwich Village, or sail with William Beebe and Zane Grey to the Sargasso Sea? The artistic impulse, if it is worth anything at all, must find its scene and endure its struggles. It cannot survive a lack of discipline any better than it can survive the rigors of training in self control. But survive it will, if it is worth its salt. Mr. Rood deplores the gaiety of mod

ern college life, with its automobiles, house parties, and other frivolities. Does it not occur to him that Poe might have found these more entrancing than the college of his day, and might have amused himself therewith in quadrangle and cloister for more than a year? Sinclair Lewis is said to have found the restrictions of Yale unbearable, while the sedate Edmund Clarence Stedman was graduated and became a business man. Yet Frank Norris wrote "Vandover and the Brute" at Harvard, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote "Renascence" at Vassar. Mr. Stedman had the soul of a business man; Sinclair Lewis had the temperament, if not the soul, of a reformer. Mr. Lewis would have reformed Greenwich Village quite as sturdily as Gopher Prairie, although his definition of reform would not have agreed with John Sumner's. Obviously, we cannot make our institutions of learning at the same time free of discipline and destitute of distraction, nor can life ever be planned so as to nurture the artist. Art is in its very nature uncommon, and the artist's problem, whether in college or in life, is one of adjustment. Whether he chooses to make these adjustments while being educated within or without a college, seems a peculiarly individual problem, and one with which the corporations of universities cannot greatly concern themselves.

"Père Goriot" pile on pungent detail until the very flavor of the Pension Vauquer is an unforgetable pain in our memory. But the word "real" is a question begging epithet. Some of the novels we remember best, and some of the passages in otherwise dim books, are those which happen mostly out of time and place but which put us unforgetably inside the mind and passion of a character. The pages in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" that are perhaps most searing and ineradicable are those pages after the hero commits the murder where madness marches tangibly before us in his mind and ours. Nothing could be more intimate and real to us than the fancies that simmer on the threshold of consciousness. Yet nothing is more difficult for a writer to make clearly present to us. A room may be made real; the outer furniture of our lives may be transmitted with comparative But that realm of being which throbs in our minds and courses through our hearts is possibly the hardest realism of all. Not the gas station and the drug store on Main Street, but what goes on in the psyche of the garage mechanic and the drug clerk, is a knotty problem for the artist.

ease.

us losing lives and millions by unnecessary blunders. The scandalous conduct of our Air Service has been hinted at but never fully recorded. Confidential files were closed to its historians by official order, and carefully selected West Point officers put in charge of the work. The result is that General William Mitchell, brave, daring, farsighted, finds himself in a difficult position, as difficult as that of visionaries in 1917 who attempted to push aircraft preparation only to be met with prejudice and stupidity at many points. The heroism of our aviators cannot be dimmed by criticism of our supply department. It is well known that squadrons made their own spare parts from plowshares and that a famous American machine, much praised by our press, was known at the front as "the flaming coffin", for obvious and just reasons. Could we not have a history of the war written with the boldness of "What Price Glory?" Would it not be an integral part, even a necessity, in any preparedness program, in any pacifist propaganda? It is, of course, too much to hope; for true histories are to be composed only when time has made caution unnecessary, when lack of patriotism cannot be imputed. We apparently must go on forever being deaf, dumb, and blind. Is there no chance that official war histories may escape from the conventional, as have personal stories of the encounter? General Mitchell, being honest and bold, will be accused of insubordination and of publicity seeking. Yet it is more than likely that he is a prophet, and a prophet, right or wrong, is never popular.

ADVENTURE AND THE

"W

YOUNG

E don't know what to do with my little boy of nine", said a lady in an upstate New York city. "He reads constantly, two books a week; but always adventure stories. What shall we do about it? Surely, we ought to be able to persuade him to read other things." Persuading chil

dren to read is a sorry pursuit. That they have the reading habit at all is a matter for parental congratulation. Why shouldn't a healthy boy like to read of Indians and pirates, of thunderous seas and bloody assaults? Such wanderings in romance will not have more serious results than occasional attempts to tomahawk the neighbor's baby. Sooner or later, the boy who has a real love of reading will find that the ordinary adventure tale cloys, and he will, under the guidance of a librarian or a parent who is wise enough to hint rather than to persuade, turn to the romantic masterpieces of literature. He will find, perhaps for himself, "Treasure Island" and "Jim Davis". Later he will discover Dumas, and then for a time his happiness will be unbounded. Perhaps he will pass through a stage where the love story comes in for its share. Such reading, it is true, may build up in his mind visions of life as he never will find it; but which would you rather have in your family, a romanticist or a realist? Does not the truthful child lack imagination? Let him dream his dreams, let him have the joy of selecting his own books, to which he may look back as an integral part of his spiritual development.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full,

And round earth's shore,

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,
But now I only hear

Its melancholy long withdrawing roar
Retreating to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges
drear

And naked shingles of the world.

HEN Matthew Arnold wrote these mournful lines, he was worried because the new science had made it impossible to believe in the old theology; the avalanche of new information was making the old credulities impossible. He was writing in the period when the warfare between science and theology was at its height. On the one hand was the theological picture of a wise, tender, and omnipotent God, ruling the universe in the interest of a fallen but redeemable angel, man. Science was carefully constructing a landscape full of sardonic contrast, a mechanical universe in which blind matter rolled on its relentless way, and man appeared a brief fated flare of dust in a meaningless cycle of destruction. Honest, sensitive, and troubled minds like Matthew Arnold's engaged in the thankless - and hopeless-task of reconciling these irreconcilables. They tried to make the sweet incredible mysteries of theology tenable to the hard unquestionable teaching of science. The furies of that old con

flict have not died down. There are still fundamentalists on both sides. But the conflict and the reconciliations now, after fifty years, both seem strangely ancient. It seems trivial now to adjust Darwin and Genesis to each other. In the tumult of clashing ideas, religion itself seems to have been forgotten.

The quarrel between the two rival pictures of the world given by religion and science has come to seem as irrelevant to religion, in its intimate and vital sense, as a dissertation on the history of marriage would be to a person in love. Religion as an experience is more like love and rapture than it is like logic. It is a sense of dependence arising out of human need, a hunger for union emerging out of human loneliness, a thirst for salvation arising from frustration and the need

for peace. Out of the expression and exuberance, the failure and triumphs of human experience, the religious geniuses of the world have imagined symbols. They have made banners for the spirit to follow, patterns by which men might passionately and completely live.

The heat of controversy is over, and in the afterquiet of our noisily acquired freedom we are beginning to realize that the human needs out of which religion grows are present as of old, and that the religious experience is