CH

-

festations is as little used today as the armors and plumes which were its habiliments. Yet the chivalry of youth toward age and experience cannot pass without a notation of regret. When a New York paper finds the death of William Archer, the eminent English dramatic critic, an opportunity for flippant judgment of his importance, the occasion is one for annoyance. Whatever Archer's abilities were and we happen to view them as considerable the dignity in which his living presence was held would seem to require at his death a measure of respectful tribute, or a kindly silence. Anything else is inexcusable. Last year when Julia Marlowe appeared in New York City as Cymbeline, the cruelty which was evidenced in criticizing a woman whose gift to the American theatre is obvious, had little of either chivalry or kindness in it. Youth is remorseless and cruel, you answer. Not always, is the reply; a tolerant youth sometimes sows the

seeds for a respected old age. It is the most cruel youths who, in turn, find youth turned cruel to their middle age. Critical manners have mended somewhat in the last years, yet there is still a distance to be traveled. Can we not look for a revival of chivalry with the wane of the realistic novel? Does romance not presuppose some understanding of the ways of gentlemen and ladies?

sitely asked, Mr. Hergesheimer would have answered, replied to it in fact, told her. So he confides to us in "The Saturday Review of Literature". One need not say how greatly criticism and the science of æsthetics would have been enriched by that reply. But alas! things are in this world so seldom precisely right are they, dear reader? The dinners have been but incompletely ingratiating, or the champagne did not "progress" in the esoterically correct manner, or the lady has had too much or too little champagne, or something has gone wrong and so we shall never know Mr. Hergesheimer's answer. Too bad! As it is, Mr. Hergesheimer doesn't, doesn't quite, know what pure poetry is. Nevertheless, he knows what he likes, and he strongly suspects that it is much the same thing. He has found what he likes in George Moore's "Pure Poetry" anthology. This volume in the Nonesuch edition, "a tall slender book with a fine page, a warm, fine paper", ought to contain pure poetry; and sure enough, it, to Mr. Hergesheimer's delicate and exacting taste, did. Mr. Moore's introduction, relating a literarious conversation in Ebury Street, and striking, oh precisely the right note by a change from the dining room to the drawing room "where it occurred to Mr. Moore that the coffee might be served" this warmed Mr. Hergesheimer's heart. People like that, people who so unfailingly think of the right thing in the conduct of dinners, would know about poetry; and if not they, then who? Mr. Moore's confession that as a child he had read and loved poetry, touched Mr. Hergesheimer deeply. Who would have thought it! And the beautiful tenacity of Mr. Moore's memory - he actually can remember verses, one after another. Amazing! Some cyn

ical and unromantic person might have been amazed, not perhaps at the abysmal depths of Mr. Moore's ignorance of poetry, for that is only natural, but at the blessed naïveté of Mr. Moore in fancying that his whimsical and dilettante preferences constituted a canon of æstheticism; but Mr. Hergesheimer is impressed differently. It seemed to him that what Mr. Moore said was so. Poetry - pure poetry-should have no thought in it, since poetry is "diluted, lost, by thought". Shelleyand how many more, alas! - made that mistake. But in these "entrancing" lines with which Mr. Moore opens his selections, there is no such fatal dilution:

Isabel,
Reflaring rosabel,
The fragrant caramel,
The ruddy rosary,
The sovereign rosemary,
The pretty strawberry

Here is nothing so ill bred as thought, nothing but "fragrance and delicate color". Mr. Moore was pleased with the other selections, too, though he thought there was "a great deal of Blake". Of course, for Blake could hardly keep from thinking, though he did indeed disguise that process in symbols too obscure for Mr. Moore's innocent mind to fathom. Better pleased was Mr. Hergesheimer with the "Mariana" of Lord Tennyson - Mr. Hergesheimer does not fail to give him his proper title. Yes, Mr. Hergesheimer knows what he likes; and there being "no champagne, no lovely individual to be charmed by adroit definitions", we must be content with that. We shall never, now, perhaps, know why, precisely, Mother Goose is of the essence of pure poetry. Yet there is one hope one. Bring on your champagne and your lovely "individuals", and perhaps Mr. Hergesheimer will unriddle the secret of the Sphinx.

HOW SELL, WHY BUY?

WE were looking through the

W pages on pages that proclaimed

the various excellencies of this publishing firm and that in the advertising section of one of the literary magazines, and wondering. Does anybody ever actually buy a book because he sees a printed advertisement of it somewhere? A book, we mean, by some author previously unknown to the reader of the advertisement.

Of course, if you like Edith Wharton or Ethel M. Dell the announcement of a new novel by Mrs. Wharton or Miss Dell may create in your mind a certain desire for its possession - but the others? A catchy title may arrest the attention momentarily, or a line of commendation from a critic whose opinions in general coincide with your own. But ordinarily, and in the majority of cases, does the usual book advertisement leave any more decided impress on your consciousness than, say, the stick or so devoted in the morning papers to an unimportant fire in Bridgeport or the funeral of a retired major general? Personally, we think books as a rule much less winningly advertised than most patent medicines, ketchups, or devices for restraining

no, these fancy compounds are not, as might notunnaturally be supposed, drawn from James Joyce's "Ulysses", nor, as would be a secondguess, from the opuses of his various young ecstaticimitators. Nor did we make them up out of sheer joy in their pie eyed appearance. They are drawn from the early work of Alfred Tennyson, in the period when he was writing "Keepsake" verses, subsequently suppressed. Thus we learn that there is nothing new under the sun, and that words like "brightwindbridled", "steelyringing", "strandentwining", twining", "myriadislanded", "loudlatinlaughing",

"shellcocoacolored", "peacocktwittering", have a precedent, such as it is. The fine rich earlyvictorian flavor of this resurrected vocabulary should console us for the untimely loss of the bustle.

ARTIST OR COIFFEUR?

how to better the situation, we find ourself whirling dizzily. Should publishers advertise less or more or not at all? Would a dozen under

cover agents paid secretly to whisper a novel's praises wherever they went be more effective than the usual advertising campaign? Or how would you fix it? Why, for example, do you buy one particular book instead of another very much like it in size and color?

are racing with fiction for lead in the reading lists. Publishers' catalogues bristle with provocative as well as staid volumes revelatory of the great, the near great, or the notorious. The ethics of autobiography are regulated only by the standards of gentlemanly conduct, and the revelations of a cad are that and nothing more. But with biography there is a moot question. Should biographers tell the whole truth?

"Of course", you say!

Then, what of yourself? Would you care to have broadcasted the information usually filed in an insurance company safe? Would you care to have fingers tear strings from old packets of letters, open old wounds? John A. Steuart's recent discussion of Stevenson has caused much chitterchatter in the literary world; for he dwells long and with somewhat undue emphasis on certain unimportant sexual episodes. Granting that Mr. Steuart's taste has been faulty, in other cases is it possible to give the world a real evaluation of a man without entering the debits on the ledger? Is it not true that, though one might trust one's whole life story in all its details to a great biographer, one would hesitate to tell the slightest anecdote to a flippant or dishonest chronicler? Strachey, Guedalla, Harold Begbie, Thomas Beer, Van Wyck Brooks, albeit charming, are not entirely merciful biographers. William Allen White has cared to analyze the weaknesses of Woodrow Wilson. Yet these men seldom prove less than gentlemen in their revealments. In preparing her story of John Keats, it is well known that Amy Lowell blew the dust from every detail of the poet's life, and recorded each item from the tale of the black eye to the changing of a

adulation has no value unless it be as a tract. Perhaps humanity is the characteristic we demand of our heroes; we can afford to admire them less if we can love them more.

Zuloaga, the Spanish painter, has come to America just in time to point the moral. Some time ago he made a portrait of a South American gentleman who had a heavy beard. Months later, the artist received a cable from South America saying that the man had been married and, since his wife didn't like the beard, he had shaved it off. Would Zuloaga mind erasing the beard from the portrait?

Zuloaga cabled back: "I am an artist, not a coiffeur!"

UNLOVELY AMERICA AGAIN

Restlessness such as ours, success such as ours, striving such as ours, do not make for beauty. Other things must come first, good cookery, cottages that are homes, not playthings; gardens, repose. These are first-rate things and out of first-rate stuff is art made. It is possible that machinery has finished us as far as this is concerned. Nobody stays at home any more, nobody makes anything beautiful any more. Quick transportation is the death of art. We can't keep still because it is so easy to move about.

pened, Keats proved a spotless hero; but had there been dire scandals uncloaked, he has been dead so long that even his relations could make no objection. Not so, recently, in the case of a famous American man of letters. The daughter of that man, asked by his biographer for certain information, replied: "It's none of your business." And so another goes to lengthen the list of fine stories untold.

To appear at one's best at all times is primary and instinctive; but biography in which sympathy is carried to

interview granted to Rose Feld

and printed in the New York "Times". Art, she sees largely in repose; beauty, she finds, must come from a civilization more like that of France than our own. No beauty in restlessness, she says and she forgets all the restless, sensitive, striving beauty of youth. No beauty in machinery? She forgets the etchings of Pennell and the poetry of Carl Sandburg. If she means art, the technique of art, she is perhaps right in her feeling that America is not contemplative enough. We could not