confrères; but in every coterie there are certain to arise the Judas or Judases who think more of thirty pieces of silver than of conscience or good will. It would be a sad day for authors and publishers alike if the leaven should extend and open war be declared. Yet such is the inevitable result if the methods of some be persisted in, for it is growingly difficult, if not impossible, to turn the other cheek.

THE EAGER MASSES

EACH spring, when schools and col

leges are closing, the summer sessions of various educational institutions prepare to welcome flooding thousands who come with open pores to soak in wisdom for winter's thought. The number of applicants varies from hundreds at some retreats to nearly fifteen thousand at Columbia University. Many of these students are teachers whose progress depends on their ability to keep up to date in a specialized field. Others are simply on the path of adult education, or developing some fond avocation. All of them, practically, are eager; if not eager for study, at least eager for new contacts. What a tremendous opportunity lies here for the spreading of an intellectual, a tolerant, a forthright viewpoint! Visitors to these schools come away with the impression that in many cases they are hotbeds of silly gossip and political intrigue. This is not entirely true. Whatever muddled outlook results is due more to negligence on the part of authority than any attempt to foster a moral or mental viewpoint that shall be either radical or dryly academic.

There are wise exceptions to this lack of perspicacity. In some schools

open forums are held, badly run and without an iron hand to guide them, but nevertheless places where the man from Utah or the woman from California may exchange viewpoints with the Harvard instructor. Furthermore, there are possibilities for international contacts; many of these schools are well sprinkled with foreigners. After all, the actual book learning which can be gained from a crowded two or three months' study is as nothing to the intellectual lanes opening from a mass of interested and open and diverse minds. Those who argue against the mushroom growth of organized mass education should remember that it can be used to spread a propaganda of tolerance that has as a first principle the total absence of propaganda. The provincial mind can be broadened, the metropolitan viewpoint freshened. Such a result, however, is not one which · occurs by gentle accident. It must be planned by school executives and met by a desire on the part of summer students. Easterners will do well to seek western schools if they have any suspicion that their outlook is bound to the New England coast. Westerners are perhaps more likely to find the older eastern universities luring. So large a mental shake up each year, increasing as it does, cannot fail to be of use, whether for doctrinaire opinion or solid thought, to those who are interested in the education of adult America.

LEISURE AND TECHNIQUE

N English novelist of major reputa

read a score of novels by Americans. Some of them were volumes by authors whose reputations on both sides of the Atlantic are assured. Three others

particularly interested him: a third novel, a second, and a first. These were F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", Cyril Hume's "Cruel Fellowship", and James Boyd's "Drums". Fitzgerald, he feels, has developed amazingly in this latest story, a book of which the author may well be proud. Hume has great promise as a novelist. Of "Drums", he says many fine things, among them, "Above all here is a book with 'breeding', an element too often lacking in English and American fiction." Does he know that James Boyd is a person with the leisure to think, who lives on a large estate in the south, who hunts, rides, fishes, and lets his mind grow? Is it not significant, too, that both Fitzgerald and Hume by their own efforts purchased leisure in Europe to produce these, their latest books?

Perhaps it is not leisure entirely that produces a sense of breeding in fiction; on the other hand, it is conceivable that a well bred man might write a book in execrable taste, had he not the time to secure in it the actual effect of his own personality. The securing of thinking time in America is assuredly a difficult and an individual problem. And the number of persons in the writing profession whether they be essayists, novelists, reviewers, or others

who demand of themselves and for themselves time for uninterrupted thought is deplorably small. A critic. of note who ceased his commentaries several years ago in order to write other things, and also to think, recently stated that, returning to criticism. with an entirely new viewpoint, he found himself shocked by the work he had done before. The journalistic book reviewer and critic naturally does not have leisure for the development of a careful technique. This does not argue that the journalistic critic should.

not exist; he does and must. As a result, however, breeding is even less apparent in criticism than in fiction. And critical insults are no less unjust for being the result, not of deep planning, but of thoughtlessness. It is fruitless to preach breeding; for it is only from increased leisure that the well bred will spring.

THOMAS HARDY'S BIRTHDAY

ON

N his eighty fifth birthday, richly aware of his eminence in English letters, Thomas Hardy sits surveying the twentieth century. About his ears scramble the little reputations of the day, and he has seen literary gods and periods wax and wane. He is full of years, and they have not deepened nor assuaged his pervading irony. His old age cannot be called bitter, because his youth was tinged with bitterness, yet mawkishness has never darkened his door. He has seen Puritanism give way to decadence, reverse and reverse yet again, and it has not disturbed the calm flow of his pen. Many wars have been fought at his doorstep and he has listened tolerantly to talk of eternal peace. Politics have worn petticoats for him; the present Prince of Wales who called upon him not long ago is only one of several Princes of Wales whose careers have unfolded before him; yet he has not found himself commanded to write decorous odes in celebration of the Empire. Thomas Hardy wrote in the accents of definitive works while he was yet in swaddling clothes. He has not wasted the long years in idle speculation or in fruitless controversy and striving, nor has he displayed the temperament of a poet or the cupidity of a popular novelist. He is a great man. Some say he is our

greatest novelist since whoever they say our last greatest novelist was. Others say he is our greatest poet, in similar fashion. It has been a serene and unruffled greatness. It is a calm old age. It is a perfect life. It has made no grandiloquent gesture. Without the romance of a Conrad, the daintiness of a Rossetti, the boisterousness of a Wells or the activity of a Bennett, Thomas Hardy walks in his garden, thinking calmly of a disordered world in which he has never permitted himself a disordered thought.

E

NOTHING VANISHES

VEN the blush has not vanished from the face of the earth. Perhaps as we generalize about the manners of youth and age we forget the spectacle of the evolutionary trial in Tennessee, where God is made the subject of argument for the sake of self glorification, and a lawyers' circus and chautauqua is held in honor of science and religion. It is difficult to realize that all the world is not as we are. radio cannot unify the souls of men, nor the motion picture teach unified manners and customs, even though Station WEAF should attempt to dispense finalities of philosophy, and Messrs. Zukor and Lasky pose as teachers of deportment.

The

The impression gained from current fiction and from newspaper columns is that the chaperon is a thing of the past, that morals are fitted agilely to desires, and that custom has staled. A well known dramatic critic two years ago censured a play because it made use of the fact that gentlemen at dinner parties linger to smoke among themselves, while the ladies retire to chatter. This, he affirmed, was outworn and

Victorian. Foolish, perhaps, but not outworn. Such strong statements on the manners of the time may prove only to be indices to the quality of one's acquaintance. There are still blushes. There are still chaperons. There are still fond mammas who do not allow their daughters to read the books we quite calmly discuss in these pages.

What of it? Should you be projected from a more tolerant life into such a circle, you would find that life had suddenly become romantic again. These fond mammas are not calm. They give zest to the stolen glance and encourage the ready blush which adds beauty to their already charming daughters. There is an obvious truth concerning forbidden fruit, and it applies to lovers' meetings as well as to the reading of volumes on the index exparentibus.

As antidote for boredom, then, seek again Victorian circles. Here you will find old gallantries and priceless chivalries, and you will learn that woman is to be courted and won. You will learn again to cloak your thoughts in flannel underclothes and to wear precise and engaging costumes. The discussion of personalities before the screen will be frowned upon, and you will be forced to hunt further for the impersonal epigram.

This was not a lazy existence. Life was not slow moving, for it played in undercurrents where the swimming was dangerous for the careless. It has not vanished. You can find it if you look and, should the fond mammas frown upon you at first, you will soon learn to use your wits again. After all, Victorianism was merely an exercise of the gifts for concealment and intrigue, and you will discover that even frankness can quickly be forgotten and banished to limbo.

A Place in the Sun

ORGY lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed.

In this city there persisted the Golden Age of many things, and not the least among them was that of beggary. In those days the profession was one with a tradition. A man begged, presumably, because he was hungry, much as a man of more energetic temperament became a stevedore from the same cause. His plea for help produced the simple reactions of a generous impulse, a movement of the hand, and the gift of a coin, instead of the elaborate and terrifying processes of organized philanthropy. His antecedents and his mental age were his own affair, and, in the majority of cases, he was as happily oblivious of one as of the other.

Had it all been otherwise, had Porgy come a generation, or even a score of years, later, there would have been a repetition of the old tragedy of genius without opportunity. For, as the artist is born with the vision of beauty,

and the tradesman with an eye for barter, so was Porgy equipped by a beneficent providence for a career of mendicancy. Instead of the sturdy legs that would have predestined him for the life of a stevedore on one of the great cotton wharves, he had, when he entered the world, totally inadequate nether extremities, quick to catch the eye, and touch the ready sympathy of the passerby. Either by birth, or through the application of a philosophy of life, he had acquired a personality that could not be ignored, one which at the same time interested and subtly disturbed. There was that about him which differentiated him from the hordes of fellow practitioners who competed with him for the notice of the tenderhearted. Where others bid eagerly for attention, and burst into voluble thanks and blessings, Porgy sat silent, rapt. There was something Eastern and mystic about the intense introspection of his look. He never smiled, and he acknowledged gifts only by a slow lifting of the eyes that had odd shadows in them. He was black with the almost purple blackness of unadulterated Congo blood. His hands were very large and muscular, and, even when flexed idly in his lap, seemed shockingly formidable in contrast with his frail body. Unless one were unusually preoccupied at the mo