delightful acquaintance for the introverted reader. And somehow he appeals to the extroverted readers also. They tell me they excuse his weaknesses because of the unfortunate environment of his childhood!

Another motive that drives us in our search for literary and for flesh and blood friends is our pursuit of laughter. The chuckle with which we sense incongruity leads us to forgive both our own absurdities and the idiosyncrasies of others. My laughter at Priam Farll bubbles from deep wells of memory. He is positively the only individual of my acquaintance who can be trusted to do as fantastic things as myself when unexpectedly confronted by a strange situation. My matter-of-fact friend also laughs at Priam - but with a difference, a very great difference. It is Priam, and other geniuses of his ilk, who quite reconcile my friend to being just plain normal and no clown.

The young mayor of Ourtown tells me Babbitt's a good fellow in spite of the fun poked at him. "I laugh at myself in him", says the Mayor. "I've heard myself make his very speeches! But what would the world be without Babbitt, who makes the wheels go round?"

So say many Babbitt-men, and some of them get hot under the collar suspecting heresies on the part of Babbitt's creator; they conjecture that Lewis's book royalties go for automobiles and country houses and oriental rugs just as do the oil royalties of prosperous business men. I've often wondered about that myself, just as I've wondered how Mencken could reconcile himself to becoming popular.

If, in fact, one could accurately gauge the meaning of the popularity of the present day satires on American manners, mob spirit, stereotyped outlook, one would be at the point of un

derstanding the American spirit. Is it because the satirists of American life have not interpreted their public quite correctly that so many laugh with them? Is their great success best proof of their failure as interpreters of the Zeitgeist?

But to return to Mark and Mabel Sabre and their admirers or detractors. "How can one help sympathizing with Mabel?" one imagines Emmy Blanchard of Swinnerton's "Nocturne❞ exclaiming. "Who wouldn't find the incalculable Mark hard to live with?"

Mark is indeed a curious character, an odd combination of introvert and extrovert that not many men can fathom

and therefore understand. On the one hand he is an emotional extrovert. He identifies himself SO readily with different persons in his environment, takes on their sorrows, their perplexities so swiftly, with such utter lack of self reference, that he seems unanchored, adrift. But his thought life is introverted, out of touch with social conventionalities and readymade philosophies and creeds. With such an inner conflict in his makeup, little wonder that a neat, compact, outwardly oriented person like Mabel - and many a reader - should fail to understand him. In "Lummox", Fannie Hurst has created another masterpiece of the loving heart, quick to identify itself with the myriad beings of the world, but alien in thought and unexpressive.

On the screen, Mark becomes more readily understandable. I believe this is due in part to the fact that the conflict in his temperament cannot be filmed and that in the movies he becomes a pure emotional extrovert human variety that makes wide appeal, so simply loving and devoted is it. But note this: to the sensuous extrovert who feeds on the external world of

a

As a final test of yourself, determine which heaven you would prefer to go to, the heaven of the extrovert or that of the introvert. Wells and Shaw have lately portrayed them for us. One closes Wells's "Men Like Gods" with a vision of gloriously developed men and women walking vigorously in a beautiful world of flowering terraces and golden mountain spaces.

As for the choice of a hell - if one may speak of a choice in a matter so delicate - that of the extrovert would seem far the more desirable, for he is reduced to clean ashes by flame and whirlwind. But the introvert knows the fire that, consuming not, bites forever at the shrinking flesh. It is this latter hell that is lived in by Claude Fisher subject of Cyril Hume's penetrating analysis in "Cruel Fellowship"

the hell of inadequacy, of self distrust, of dreams unfulfilled. "Fisher was a creature of dreams", says the commentator. "He had no defence against reality." And, again, "There is no defence against dreams."

Shaw's "Back to Methuselah" hints at the superbeings that are to walk in solitude on high barren mountain tops in the day when the spirit comes of age. He-Ancient and She-Ancient, he calls them: "equally bald and equally without sexual charm but intensely interesting and rather terrifying".

Says the He-Ancient, "For whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death, and our destiny is not achieved."

Says the She-Ancient, "The day will come when there will be no people, only thought."

What, I wonder, will that thought be like? Preoccupied with the wonders of a universe of objects or lost in contemplation of itself?

EVERY two or three months we

become aware of the isolation of New York City from the rest of the country. There are scores of evidences on every side, but one is likely to overlook them, especially if one becomes submerged for a time in a circle of friends whose entire existence is bounded by the arts. Such submersion is an easy temptation for a writer or an artist and it is a dangerous one, for in the end his life is likely to become simply an endless discussion of his own and other people's work. Proportion and perspective disappear, lost usually in a cloud of bickerings and jealousies over this or that method, this or that writer. New York, toward which all ambitious young men and women turn their faces, is in some respects (excluding the usual banal differences) a foreign country.

All this occurs to us in connection with a talk we made not long ago in a large New England city before an audience of more than five hundred men and women who were enough interested in books to fill a small hall to overflowing on a very hot day. It happened that we chose to speak on a group of writers who are not in the grand tradition of the novel such men and women as Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, E. M. Forster, Carl Van Vechten, the Sitwells, and a dozen or so others. It is reasonable to suppose that even in an audience of book lovers the Sitwell

family and Dorothy Richardson might be unknown, but it came as a shock to be asked about Huxley and Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Forster (whose "Passage to India", praise God! has sold more than 40,000 copies) as though they were new writers of whom nothing was known. For some time past we had thought of them with almost the same familiarity as Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy. And here, to many in this audience, they had never been heard of; they were new names. We were even more astounded to read in the newspaper on the following day that we had discussed "The Lunatic Fringe of Contemporary Literature".

On thinking the matter over, it occurred to us that the mistake was our own. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the men and women who seem commonplace enough in the world of publishing and writing are after all "a lunatic fringe" so far as the general public is concerned; for the general public, it must be remembered (even the public which considers itself discriminating), is not always hungry for caviar. It wants rather the novels written upon some good, homely theme, filled with sentiment and high ideals such books as "So Big". We do not make this statement in any derogatory sense; most of the greatest novels in the classic tradition are bounded by just these specifications. It is simply that the two publics - the general and the limited are different,

a fact which becomes each day more apparent in the world of publishing.

The centre of that group which has made Mr. Forster at last a best selling author has, very likely, not much relation to the public which made of "So Big" an immense success. The limited public is one which feeds perhaps on inside information. It has, one might say, no reading morality; it is neither honestly shocked nor dishonestly given to gloating over what might be called by the larger public "an improper book". It has an admiration for subtlety, for wit, for mockery. It is, in short, a sophisticated (oh, abominable word!) audience and one that is a little weary. It is the audience which supports "the lunatic fringe", the audience which buys "Serena Blandish", "The Tattooed Countess", "Mrs. Dalloway", "A Passage to India", "Those Barren Leaves", "Antic Hay", and "Triple Fugue". It is an audience which less than fifteen years ago had no existence in this country; for one cannot include those who admired the sickly, obvious naughtiness of the Yellow Nineties. This new audience has no relation to the one which thought it rakish to admire Oscar Wilde; the inheritors of that period have gone over body and soul to Michael Arlen. This new audience has a Gallic and an eighteenth century flavor. There is money to be made out of it, and the publishers have come to recognize the fact. It is an audience within an audience, whose steady increase augurs well for the intelligence of America. But at the moment, it seems to us that it is essentially foreign, with its roots embedded deeply in Manhattan Island.

Since the only scheduled theatrical enterprises of interest the "Scandals" and the new "Grand Street Follies" did not open until after the

time of going to press, it is possible to discuss only the "Garrick Gaieties", a sort of kindergarten revue staged and peopled by the younger actors and actresses associated with the amazingly successful Theatre Guild. Surely this organization has set a new record for shrewdness. For skill in picking material and staging it, the Guild leaves the Broadway managers far in the rear. In the "Garrick Gaieties" there is virtually no talent with a Broadway reputation, yet it is surely one of the most entertaining of productions - one which recalls the "Charlot Revue". Without Without exception, the burlesques (which include "They Knew What They Wanted", "Fata Morgana", and "The Guardsman") were uproariously amusing. A young woman named Edith Meiser covered herself with glory in a variety of performances ranging from an excellent imitative caricature of Lynn Fontanne to the singing of a song called "An Old Fashioned Girl", in which she appeared as a Gibson girl with a flowing pompadour. Peggy Conway's imitation of Pauline Lord was one of those performances which are perfection; it was impossible to believe that we were not seeing Miss Lord and hearing her remarkable, husky voice repeating again and again, "I think . . . I think I'll sit down." And Sterling Holloway's performance as Emily Stevens had the quality of a caricature by Covarrubias, who himself contributed a brilliant setting for a Mexican scene. One might go on and on listing these young players and admiring their talents. . . . House Jameson, Hildegarde Halliday, June Cochrane, Philip Loeb, Romney Brent, James Norris, and the others who provided an eveing which was fresh and amusing amid the bare legs of Broadway's Glorified American Girls,

The Guild has announced for the coming season a repertory of Shaw plays of which the first will be "Arms and the Man" with Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt and, undoubtedly, the never failing Helen Westley, as well as Pirandello's "Right You Are if You Think So", Allan Monkhouse's "The Conquering Hero", "M. Bretonneau" by what was once the world's most unflagging team of farceurs de Flers and de Caillavet, "At Mrs. Beams' by C. K. Munro, "The Lonely Way" by Arthur Schnitzler, and a revival of the grand old Strauss opera "Die Fledermaus".

Otherwise the theatre brought only the usual round of mongrel summer productions cast before the public in the forlorn hope that one of them might catch on. Of the lot one trick play, built upon lines of classic hokum and called "The Gorilla", blossomed into a success which shows signs of rivaling the historic run of "The Bat". As to the others, the pulses seem affected by low blood pressure, but it is always possible that one of them may suddenly turn into an everblooming "Abie's Irish Rose" (which has just passed something like its one millionth performance).

The galleries remain closed and the music is confined principally to open air concerts which lay great stress upon the "Leonore" overture, the "Symphony Pathétique", the march from "Aida", and similar well known war horses.

Last month we mentioned "Mrs. Dalloway", an excellent novel written in a brilliant new manner; since then we have read the same author's book of essays called "The Common Reader" and we can recommend it to anyone interested in the business of writing,

as one of the most dazzling performances of a mind which for clarity and critical penetration has no superior in contemporary Anglo-Saxon letters.

Rumors circulating in the world of books, the theatre, and music seem to forecast a season which may well surpass the one just ended. Certainly in the theatre it would not be difficult. Within a month or two the new books, the new plays, and the new music will begin to appear. It remains to be seen whether the promise will be fulfilled.

The

It is not possible to close without mentioning two of the newer books which should give satisfaction to those interested in the future of American writing. One is "The Great Gatsby", in which Scott Fitzgerald, over whom there had been much headshaking among our more sober reviewers, emerges as a fine, objective novelist freed of the excesses of youth. gaudy world which he chose as his specialty and which in his earlier books seemed to him so delectable, has been left behind somewhere in the middle distance; in this new book Mr. Fitzgerald sees it with a fine sense of proportion. The flappers are growing middle aged and the spectacle is not a pretty one. The other book is "Cruel Fellowship" by Cyril Hume, who chose a difficult subject which, save for a few sophomoric touches and a tendency toward a style that resembles a steam shovel at work on a sandbank of colorful words, is admirably done. Out of the chaos of "Wife of the Centaur" Mr. Hume seems to be emerging brilliantly. Good first novels essentially autobiographical in character are frequent enough; it is the second and the third which are the acid tests.

LOUIS BROMFIELD