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254 254 THE SHEPHELAH OR PHILISTIA.

IV.

This group has the Wady el Afranj on the north, and the main channel of Wady el Hesy on the south. This main channel enters the Shephelah at the junction of the Wady el Butm, through the gorge of Tell el Akr'a ; and it emerges at Tell el Hesy into an arm of the western plain, having the villages of Bureir and Simsim at its mouth.

The village of Idhna is the central point of the northern part of these hills. From thence a range runs north-west- ward, following the curvature of Wady el Afranj, and forming its left bank, until it reaches Khurbet Senabreh, when the range is deflected to the south-west, along the northern- most affluent of the southern branch of the Sukereir Basin, which crosses the plain as Wady el Ghueit. The range now divides the affluents of Wady el Afranj from those that fall to el Ghueit, and in the performance of this function it reaches the plain on the south of Zeita. The most noted place on its summit is Tell Sandahannah on the south of Beit Jibrin.

Another range proceeds from Idhna westward to el Khubeibeh, and throws off considerable spurs to the north- west, which terminate on the left bank of the Ghueit affluent before mentioned, called in part Wady Beit 'Alam, and filling up the space between the two Idhna ranges.

The next range arises between the wadys that rise about Beit 'Auwa. It is in continuation of the waterparting between the basins of Nahr Sukereir and Wady el Hesy, which begins at Eas Biain on the south of Dura. It throws out spurs on the south side of the range, from a point on the south of ed Dawaimeh. They are divided by the Wady el Butm ; and at its western end it sends two spurs towards Bureir. Otherwise it hugs the right bank of Wady el Hesy so closely, that no features of that kind occur. To the basin of Nahr Sukereir, this range contributes not only spurs, but a considerable branch, which, beginning on the west of ed Dawaimeh, passes to the plain at Arak el Menshiyeh. From


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the main range further west, a spur passes between Wady el Habur and Wady es Sukriyeh ; and between the latter and Wady en ISTeda, a broad slope descends to Khurbet Fattatah. Tell Ibdis caps the termination of the main range, which falls boldly to the plain northward from that summit between Arak el Menshiyeh and Khurbet el Jils.

V.

South of Wady el Hesy, the next dividing line is found in Wady esh Sheriah, and its upper course called Wady Khuweilfeh. Along the eastern margin of this extremity of the Shephelah, a range rises from the banks of Wady el Butm and Wady el Beiyarah, which extend between the plains of Aitun and Sabti. From the central points of the range at Kh. Jeimer (alt. 1,530 feet), a range proceeds north-westerly to Kh. Surrar, presenting an abrupt escarpment to form the left bank of Wady el Jizair or el Abd, and a long slope with tributary streams towards the left bank of Wady en Nas.

South of the Plain or Sahel es Sabti, a long range emanates from the waterparting between Wady el Hesy and Wady Ghuzzeh at Kh. Bureideh. On its summit on the south of Sabti is Kh. Z'ak (alt. 1,370 feet), followed by Jebel Abu Huteirish, and the Ard el Mak-huz, the termination being at Tell el Hesy. The only notable spurs on the north-east side of the range are near the Ard el Mak-huz. On the south-west side they occupy a considerable slope which descends to the Wady el Muleihah. The country is entirely pastoral with some ruins, but no existing villages.

The next range is part of the waterparting between the Wady el Hesy and Wady Ghuzzeh, beginning at Kh. Khuweil- feh and proceeding westward with bold curves to the maritime plain on the south of Gaza. It has been already traced.* Its northern side is closely followed for about six miles by the Wady Nuksar ; indeed so closely that the wady may almost be said to be on the summit. After that wady turns to the north-west, five spurs descend in succession to Wady el

 * See ante, pages 54, 55.

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256 256 THE SHEPHELAH OR PHILTSTIA.

Muleihah and Wady el Hesy. The most westerly of these spurs, throws off several very rugged arms westward to the plain. From Sateh Burber on the main range, a considerable branch extends to the villages of Huj and Nejed in the plain, spreading out its lower features towards Gaza. North of Nejed a group of low hills of a similar character divide the plain between Simsim and Keratiya from the margin of the sea, where the famous city of Ascalon once held its powerful sway. Westward of Sateh Burber, the main range nowhere reaches an altitude of 500 feet, and the undulations do not invite much notice. The same may be said of the slope from the main range towards the Wady esh Sheriah. Judging from the map it exhibits the ordinary aspects of chalk downs. It appears to be passable in every direction, if the numerous tracks over it may be taken as evidence to that effect. The hills to the south of Wady esh Sheriah within the Survey, appear to be of the same character, and seem to be deprived of interest, owing to the obscurity in which the south country or Negeb is still left. That the country will ultimately be surveyed to which Abraham bent his steps in fulfilling to the utmost the divine command, the Gerar which became his home, and the scene of his exemplary confidence in the presence of the Almighty, the Negeb with its interesting events in the life of David, and the southern border of the Promised Land with the long disputed site of Kadesh, and many other places the sites of which Mr. Wilton has so ably discussed, that this portion of the Land of Promise, may'be added to the Survey is ardently desired.

HARRISON AND SONS, PRINTERS IN ORDINARY TO HER MAJESTY, ST. MARTIN'S LANK.


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carved these twenty-six critical impressions, and having arranged them with various odd intentions in three little galleries, I am to stand for a few moments in the vestibule, exhibiting the artist and chatting about his exhibition with the visitors, the purpose being to lure the curious onward and to satisfy the incurious at the door.

In the present state of criticism, I fancy that most of my visitors will interest themselves in the subjects and not in the treatment, just as, to compare great things with small, the casual visitor at the Metropolitan standing before the portrait of an eminent American falls into a revery on Mr. Rockefeller rather than on John Sargent. But as the object of my appearance here is to remind the public that even the crudest sketches imply the existence of an artist, this is clearly the occasion for the drumming up, if possible, of a little interest in the workshop and in the point of view at which these "woodcuts" were made.

It has been intimated to me that this book shows significant changes in my point of view and in my opinions. Perhaps it does. If so, I trust that some reviewer, hostile to change, will go patiently through the essays, collect the evidence, compare it with the previously accessible evidence, and point out my aberrations and inconsistencies. I have never taken a vow to carry any opinion unaltered to the grave; and if it can be proved to-night that I have learned absolutely nothing since morning, I shall be dismayed.

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 The first duty of a commentator on current literature, as it appears to me, is to present a fairly full and veracious report of what is going on. He will have his own convictions regarding the permanent value of various parts of the contemporary spectacle; and, inevitably, they will "show through" in his report. But his first duty is not to exploit his own predilections; it is rather to understand the entire "conspiracy" of forces involved in the taste of his day. What is "important" now and never may be so again has a charm for him which he would think it a kind of baseness and disloyalty not to admit and record.

He conceives of literature perhaps as a river, himself as a scout seeking for the main channel of intellectual and emotional activity in his own tract of time, recurring constantly to the point where the full rush of living waters comes in from the past, and eagerly searching for the point where the flood breaks out of the backwater and through the dams, and streams away into the future. He is always sounding and essaying to discover where the water is deepest now. He tries to characterize the most promising navigators, their crafts, their cargoes. When he concerns himself with historical figures, he seizes upon those who, by reason of some vital congruity, are felt by us as "modern" and pertinent to our present occasions.

In the back of his mind is the knowledge that an annual chronicle so composed will outweigh the sum of the diurnal entries; his work will come together in the end, and constitute a picture of his age and its tendencies.

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 expression for expression's sake. I have now and have always had a lively interest in the arts of expression; and yet I am not conscious of any alteration in my ancient conviction that all human activities have, up their sleeves, an ulterior object and ultimate justification in happier living; and that it is rather specially the "function" of critics to be engaged in an incessant untiring exploration in quest of "the good life."

The important change of which I am conscious is in the intensity of my conviction that no man should state very emphatically what "the good life" is until he has found it. Too much theory about it and too many preconceptions obscure the vision. The best criticism is of a concrete and inductive habit. The wise critic attempts on all possible occasions to keep his theoretical and didactic mouth shut and all his other faculties open, here, there, and everywhere, for all the reports and rumors of positive charm and joy in things and people, as the most indubitable tokens that they are participators in some degree of that "good life" which he is seeking.

A suspense of judgment regarding the complete outlines of the ideal, need involve no abdication of discrimination and judgment. But these elements in the critic's report will, in proportion as the report itself becomes "artistic," be more and more implicit, will be conveyed insensibly along with the characterization of the subject, will be felt by the reader immediately as elements in his own response to the subject.

In my exploration for the "virtues" of men, I have learned that patient search usually discovers some refreshing virtue wherever there has been exhibited any unusual display of energy. As I revisit my three little galleries, I am impressed by the abundance and variety

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 and high interest of the vital powers exhibited there. Taking my "sitters" one by one, I rather think that my main intention has been to feel strongly the unique life in all these men and women from Sherwood Anderson to the Known Soldier, and to communicate the impetus of it, in a sort of blind faith that "where there is life there is hope," and where there is power there is virtue.

The essays in this volume were all printed in "Books," the literary supplement of the Herald Tribune, in 1924 and 1925. The title was suggested by my admiration for the swift cutting art of the original and present illustrator, Mr. Bertrand Zadig, who, under the constant temporal stress which urges a contributor to journalism to do well promptly, has accomplished with the graving tool what I have tried to do with the pen.

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 doubtless now therefore would be to attest the intensity. He at last quitted the place with the step of a man proposing to test it on the spot. All this while, however, the anxiety truly deepest in him was about another affair. What in the world had happened to her in Europe?

It was when he reached the quiet scene which the recent lapse of his mother's soft pervasion had made so inconsequently, though now the abode of a more single state, not wider but narrower, that the next great thing befel him. He found on his table a letter from a firm of London solicitors, a communication on the face of it most harmoniously timed. It appeared that under the will of his late kinsman, Mr. Philip Augustus Pendrel, he inherited property—a fact enriched by the further mention, on the part of his informants, that should he find it convenient to come to England without undue delay his being on the spot would contribute to their action in his interest. It may immediately be said that the light wind of this stroke had even at the moment a happy effect on the heat of his wound. The event would certainly appeal with no great directness to the author of that injury, but its connection with the object of his other passion, as we have termed this source of inspiration, became at once of the liveliest. He made as rapidly as possible his arrangements for a journey to London, but he had time, before winding up the situation 39


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ELL, here is Sherwood Anderson again with another disquieting tale, "Dark Laughter."

He is a man rather difficult to make out or to "size up," externally or internally, and one shouldn't go at it too hastily. Your eyes take an impression of him distinct enough: middle height, middle age, a compact, square-shouldered person in rough tweeds, dark blue flannel shirt, and bright-colored tie drawn through a ring or fastened, perhaps, with a horseshoe pin. He stands squarely on his feet, no shifting or teetering. His well-molded head, strong-featured, firm-mouthed, substantial in all its dimensions, sits squarely on his shoulders. In speaking—his speech is mild and slow—his eyes light up quickly with humor; but in silence they are somber with a shadowy introversion. In repose the lines of the face set austerely. I fancy the head would have appealed to the sculptors who limned the tougher-minded of the Cæsars. But this visual impression is inadequate. His secret aspiration, I believe, is to be "preeminent in being more sensitive to everything going on about him than others could possibly be."

He is from the fat Midlands—born, he rather thinks, in Camden, Ohio, in 1877, of a shrewd hardworking mother and a father who was a romantic braggart and a liar. In his youth he haunted race-

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 tracks and conceived a passion for thoroughbred horses. Then he knocked around a bit on farms, in mines, in factories, in paint shops, drug stores and harness shops, working at one thing and another. But he is distinctly from Chicago, too, from the Chicago of Mr. Darrow and Mr. Masters and Mr. Sandburg and Margaret Anderson, from roaring, odorous, fuliginous Chicago, where poets are obliged to yell if they are to be heard above the booming of big business, the bellowing of the stockyards, and the bass drums of advertising conventions. Also he is from New York, where intellectual Villagers draw a little away from Wall Street to discuss anarchy and perfect love over synthetic gin and spaghetti. But finally he is from the left bank of the Seine, where one can sit all day on the boulevard talking of line and color and the virtues of words, with enthusiastic foreigners of American birth who regard George Moore, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein as the brightest constellation in heaven. Yes, he is from the fat Midlands, but decidedly he has been a passionate pilgrim.

I wish to write an introduction to the works of Mr. Anderson for the benefit of correspondents who inquire: "When will the country begin to sicken of this flood of literary rot from the corn and hog belt?" But the devil—to borrow his own favorite literary expletive, he doesn't make it easy for me!

Recently he has been down the Mississippi Valley, down the river, living in New Orleans, I believe. He has been getting the "feel" of all that rich, crude, rough, profane tract of land and water which Huckleberry Finn traversed and navigated in his ingenuous youth. He has been down in the heart of our

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 Africa, and the spell of dark blood, the careless gusto of dark laughter, the magic of spontaneous and instinctive people, have been invading him. Mark Twain had told what the great river meant to a boy. What if he, Sherwood Anderson, should tell what it means to a man? What if he should attempt to suggest in same fashion how the national culture, the national letters, might be vitalized, vivified, if the national imagination assimilated its materials? It is obvious that some such undercurrent of thought was running in his mind when "Dark Laughter" took shape. His imagination has been roving southward for warmth, color, abandon.

But, as I have already remarked, "the devil!" He might have found a better symbol for the expedition, mightn't he? Here is Mr. Anderson reciting me another story about a man who has run away from his wife! I think he overworks that symbol.

This time it is a journalist with literary aspirations and a wife who writes for the popular magazines. At times they have in some "arty" people who talk about art. But they never touch the heart of the matter, with their palaver about "word-slinging." The beginning of art is to know what people think and feel. The time comes when he can stand it no longer. He runs away. He wanders around in the South; finds work painting wheels in an automobile wheel factory; consorts with a jocund fellow workman and his wife who are very jolly and lively and spontaneous when they are on their cat-fishing expeditions and are a little drunk, the two of them. Then the eye of his employer's wife falls upon him—etc. In fact, they flash together as abruptly as the electricity of earth and sky.

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 The first chapter of this book, which is just four pages long, seems to me as consummate a piece of art as the first chapter of "Pride and Prejudice," which also occupies four pages; and the rest of the book is keyed up to that pitch. I am not comparing Sherwood Anderson's narrative soliloquy with Jane Austen's dramatic method. I am comparing merely and exclusively the skill with which two fine craftsmen handle their tools, the ravishing economy of their means, the intensity and poignant reality of their effect. But when I have said a good word for fine workmanship, and have invited curious and shocked readers to take down their "Pride and Prejudice" and compare its first chapter with the first chapter of "Dark Laughter," what else shall I say to commend the suspicious material and theme of the Midwesterner's tale to the favorable attention of correspondents who are sick of "literary rot from the corn and hog belt"?

Shall I fall back upon the earlier novels? The first, "Windy McPherson's Son," 1916, is another tale of a runaway. Nothing enchants Mr. Anderson like a runaway. Windy McPherson is a self-made Midwestern business man whose successful career breaks down in the middle; he decamps and goes vagabonding and carousing through various sordid adventures in search of a meaning for a life that rang hollow, seemed empty. He finds his meaning in some adopted children.

In "Marching Men," 1917, Beaut McGregor runs away from his success in law to find a life-purpose in drilling men to march; he knows not why they should march or whither, but in the form and order and

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 in New York, to hear from his cousin's representatives of matters still further concerning him and to receive from them in especial a letter addressed in that gentleman's hand and not at first found among his effects. It contained the only words that had, so far as he knew, come to any member of the American kinship, for two generations, from any member of the English. The English, he was perfectly aware, had been held by the American to be offish and haughty, and the American had stiffened itself to show that, since the question was of turning an unconscious back, the game was playable wherever backs were broad enough to show—which they made bold to feel themselves in the new country too. It was familiar to Ralph Pendrel that his father and his grandfather had fairly studied, and had practised with consistency, the art of the cold shoulder. They had each been more than once to England, but had "looked up" nobody and nothing—had clearly not acquainted themselves either by inquiry or closer visitation with those thin possibilities of something some day to their advantage, or to that of their posterity, that might have been dreamed of at the best. The property mainly accruing to Ralph loomed large now as a house—it was described as commodious—in a fine quarter of the town; this remained at first the limit of his charmed apprehension. No light, of the dimmest, had previously reached him as to 40


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 rhythm of marching there is something which to his chaos-maddened soul is profoundly right.

Hugh McVey, the inventor in "Poor White," 1920, runs away from his bride, leaps from the window to avoid her embrace.

Webster, the tub manufacturer in "Many Marriages," 1923, runs away from his wife and his business—elopes in the dusk of the morning with his stenographer; and when this novel appeared Mr. Canby made something of a sensation by comparing Webster's flight with the departure of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress" from the City of Destruction.

The shorter tales, "Winesburg, Ohio," 1919; "The Triumph of the Egg," 1921, and "Horses and Men," 1923, are filled with restless fugitives. Images of escape hitherto have been the dominating shapes in Mr. Anderson's imagination, and for reasons some of which are now obvious.

The central fact in his life, when you come to understand it, is this: Till he was nearly forty years old he was engrossed in the all-American game of getting on in the world. He was in the "advertising game"—making it go, too, one understands—why not? with that Cæsarian chin, that rudder-like nose, those devouring eyes. But midway in this mortal life he walked out of business into art. Midway in life he had the sort of experience which makes the crisis in many of Tolstoy's novels—a kind of uprushing profound despair over the oppressive emptiness of his busy, successful existence, a kind of desperate need of finding some soul-satisfying meaning in the clangorous scheme of things. He had the Dantean experience of losing his way in an "obscure wood" and meeting a "lion" which drove him from his path, drove him in

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 scornful flight from the familiar path. And now, not to enter into detail which may be found most captivatingly set forth in "A Story Teller's Story," after only ten years in letters he finds himself in the front line of the "new literary movement" in America and, in certain respects of his craft, one of the most interesting men writing English. For him, at least, what happened within him at forty was epoch-making. Relatively speaking, nothing that happened before mattered till the "illumination" of his middle years broke over it.

I should like to see Sherwood Anderson "whole" and in relation to this literary movement in which he is now active. Rigorous teachers seized my youth and taught me some phrases about the desirability of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole. But experience has taught me that it is exceedingly difficult to see steadily and whole any object which is alive and moving rapidly. Our object is very much alive and is moving rapidly. I mean by our object that group of American writers which is most conspicuously engaged in the "advance of letters."

Some of them affectionately salute. Theodore Dreiser as their shaggy spiritual Father, as the path-breaker who went before them and with heavy stumbling tread opened the way to Truth and Life. Some trace their descent from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Some neither know nor inquire who their spiritual Grandfather was. But all of them, with increasing clearness as to what they are about, are seeking, in divers ways, to end the dwindling reign of "the New Englanders" over the American conscience and the American imagination. They seek to pull out all the unused stops in the organ of national consciousness. They

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 seek to use powers that have been denied, starved, suppressed. They seek to make the voice of contemporary letters adequately express the color and passion of contemporary life. Perhaps I should add that with the general purpose of the movement, as here stated, I am heart and soul in sympathy, however impatiently I may have contemplated some of its bungling preliminary operations.

To this movement Sherwood Anderson brings a number of gifts, some of which were not abundant in it before his arrival, gifts which should be of inestimable service to it. I don't really know where to begin enumerating them nor which of them to single out as his prime distinction. But I rather think it is an allotropic form of the religious spirit which particularly appeals to me in him. It is something inward, close to his heart, regulating his other powers, and giving edge and intensity to his perceptions.

Externalized, this central passion signally flames forth in his white-hot zeal for craftsmanship. This Midwestern ex-advertising man with the inscrutable poker-player's face is down on his knees, is in sackcloth and ashes, is shattered and in tears when he finds himself in the presence of superbly perfect workmanship. The man is in love, desperately in love, with perfection. And that passion puts humility into his heart, and grace, and reverence, and the fragrance of adoration. That is one gift.

Another is that he possesses the idiom of American colloquial speech beyond most living writers—Ring Lardner perhaps excepted; and he has had the tact and the taste and the patience to work with the colloquial idiom and the colloquial tune till he has lifted them above the level of slang and made of them a

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 sound literary medium, original and savory. In his first two books, "Windy McPherson's Son" and "Marching Men," it is present but not fully developed; in the rest of them he is master of a singularly intimate and vital style, a delicate instrument for telling the truth about the agitations of the heart in the presence of much unvisited beauty.

Another gift is that he is a natural born story teller, who has scornfully rejected standardized tricks and formulas and has steadily perfected and subtilized his art, and devoted it to expressing secret crises in the mind and in the feelings which only a delicate and subtle art can explore. I seem to remember that he was credited with being a follower of "the Russians" before he had made the acquaintance of them. If so, it was a natural error. Notably in his short stories one has the sense that one is envisaging restless naked souls in the moments which contain, as the Russian masters of the short story think, all the real significance of lives, dead else.

Another of his gifts is that he is tremendously American and is glad of it. He is no booster or braggart, save in the purely poetic Whitmanian sense. Like Whitman, he is too profoundly conscious of all that is vile and shoddy and vicious and sodden and ugly in the American scene. But in his moments of elation he, too, feels that, with all his imperfections on his head, and with all the roily turbulence within, he is "the typical American" of our day. I love his cry of defiance as a Chicago poet, in his "Midwestern Chants." Leave us alone, is the burden of it: "We want to see if we are any good out here, we Americans from all over hell." The men and manners and soil, yes, even the profanity, of his native land are a gay

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 riot in his blood and a sweetness under the tongue as they were to Mark Twain when he first came out of the West.

Another of Sherwood Anderson's gifts.—Now, I must apologize, I suppose, for calling this a gift. He possesses what some of the younger critics devoutly hoped had gone out: he possesses "high seriousness." He has made no secret of it. From his first book to his latest he has appeared as a passionate seeker for the meaning and purpose, the inmost meaning and purpose, in this driving, noisy, smoky, ugly, hungry, monotonous, wearying civilization in which we welter.

Finally, Sherwood Anderson is or has been a mystic—I think a genuine mystic; and time after time he has been in moments of almost ecstatic "awareness," when through the arid channel of existence meaning swept like a spring freshet and all the dusty cobwebbed windows of the house of life were filled with colored flame, like a sordid tenement transfigured by some casual felicity of the sunset.

I know perfectly well that I cannot expect modern readers to follow me when I say that my interest in this ex-advertising man from Chicago and my understanding of him are due in considerable measure to my youthful addiction to a queer book by a mediæval Italian—a fierce, quarrelsome, disreputable, probably sensual and certainly vagabond fellow who wrote a book about the Beatific Vision and another, Vita Nuova, in which he describes, among other visions, this:

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 to me so joyful within himself that a marvelous thing it was; and in his words he spoke many things which I understood not save a few, among which I understood these: Ego Dominus tuus. In his arms meseemed to see a person sleeping, naked, save that she seemed to be wrapped lightly in a blood-red cloth. . . . In one of his hands it seemed to me that he held a thing which was all on fire; and it seemed to me that he said these words to me: Vide cor tuum. And when he had remained a while, it seemed to me that he awoke her that slept; and he so far prevailed upon her with his craft as to make her eat that thing which was burning in his hand; and she ate it as one in fear.

God knows what our psychoanalysts would make of this naked lady eating a man's heart; but it was once generally understood to express something of the fiery ecstasy in which this Italian vagabond entered upon a new spiritual life; and I wish modern readers who are under the spell of psychoanalytic quacks might have it in mind when they attempt to classify the day dreams of Sherwood Anderson. As for myself, for the moment I will say only that time after time he has caught and reported fragments of spiritual meaning beneath our struggle—more or less stolidly, more or less handsomely, refined and concealed—our struggle for existence.

Many of Mr. Anderson's associates in the movement have intimated—some of them have vehemently affirmed—that life has no inner meaning and purpose. And I myself have long been inclined to believe, with Conrad, for example, that life's meaning is only in the figure or pattern which human volition marks and holds in place upon the surface of infinite chaos and darkness. Perhaps I have been too rarely a mystic,

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 too arrogantly rationalist. For Sherwood Anderson, at any rate, the meaning of life is something that the rational mind can hardly lay hold upon. Only in the "moments" which are, he thinks, the prime subjects of the story teller's art, the meaning comes clamoring through the senses, through all the senses, out of the unfathomable inwardness of life.

Symbolism just now is very much the mode in the movement, but Sherwood Anderson has always been a symbolist, feeling from the outset the necessity of storming sluggish sensibilities with a new set of images, strange, extravagant and grotesque, symbols of an experience otherwise intransmissible.

I insist on this because it is absurd to approach such a book as "Dark Laughter" or, indeed, any of his books, as if they were ordinary "realistic" novels attempting to picture the detail and circumstance of contemporary society. His books are stories of house-fronts falling down; stories of men walking out of houses and closing the doors behind them; stories of men walking up railroad tracks into the night; stories of women racing through corn-rows; stories of souls fleeing out of nowhere into nothing; stories of barren breasts opened to the night; stories of arms outstretched to enfold the fugitive wind; stories of persons bathing, with a passionate eagerness to be washed and made clean, with tears and with prayers, with water and with blood, for some mystical union with the spirit of life.

Since the day when he himself decided that he cared nothing about making money, and he went out of the factory and closed the door and entered a new room, and wrote at the top of a fresh ream of paper, Incipit Vita Nova—Here beginneth a new life—he has been,

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 I fancy, serenely indifferent to the instituted forms of society. He has not railed at society, with the satirists. He has been all absorbed in studying more perfect means for expressing the strange joy in the hearts of men and women when, at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty and upward, they suddenly resolve not to accept the world's price for tame acquiescence in its routine, not to "fall for" a standardized antemortem burial in respectability, but to strike out resolutely for a personal life and a deeper awareness of their own existence and its brief ripple in the coursing stream of humanity.

We should approach Mr. Anderson as the impassioned interpreter of day-dreams, the day-dreams of common people—newsboys, stableboys, washerwomen, farmhands, sign painters, drug clerks, old maids, small-town preachers, tub manufacturers, newspaper men, and women with nothing to do but to wait for their husbands to come home—the great masses of the plain people, in their occasional hours of revolt against what Stevenson declared is the destiny of most men: "leading lives of quiet despair." He has an intimate and quite extraordinary understanding of what goes on in American plain people when they are groping for an escape from "lives of quiet despair." Do you wish he would keep that understanding to himself or, at least, find some less disquieting way of uttering it? You don't like his symbols?

I suppose Mr. Anderson knows how a late-Victorian poet expressed his revolt against the enveloping grayness of drab lives, "faces of all emotion purged, from nothing into nothing urged." He imagined a mad king proclaiming: "I heard an angel crying from the sun for glory, for more glory on the earth." That

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 Sherwood. Anderson's Tales of the New Life injured no one's sensibilities. It is in the grand style, I suppose. But Sherwood Anderson knows that stable boys, farmhands, and washerwomen, so far as they attempt to phrase a kindred urge, do not phrase it in that way. Their speech in this field is poor and meager. It is of the very essence of their misery that they cannot give it a name. They can only say, per haps: "Oh, I feel so queer—so queer!" or "Hell, but I'd like a drink!" or "I want a woman." And if they act upon these urges they are likely to act in a way which only a man who understands very primitive signs and symbols could interpret as a cry for "glory, more glory, on the earth."

And yet I am sorry for any one who doesn't get the "glory" in a bit of the vernacular, like this:

It does me!

Well, there is what I have found of chief interest in Sherwood Anderson, and the only way to determine whether all these qualities are really in him or whether I have imagined them, is to read his books.

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H. LAWRENCE has been rushing through an evolution. When he first faced the public, he was open-faced, clean-shaven and looked at one squarely from big glowing eyes. Now he resembles a moujik, now he makes himself up to resemble a moujik as much as the heir of all the ages can—a shag of hair across the forehead, eyes alert, defiant, glinting like a squirrel's, snubby nose sniffing the air, and a big bush of a beard.

The beard is sacred. It is worn out of respect for the impulses from our "lower" natures, out of reverence for the Dark Gods which inhabit the Dark Forest of one's own being. As Mr. Lawrence wears the beard, it is intended also to suggest and symbolize his isolate and inviolable "otherness," "separateness," "maleness." He does not insist upon an exclusively male aristocracy. He respects also the isolate "otherness" of women who attain that form of self-realization. But for himself, he is a conscientious barbarian, a revolutionist in favor of a cultivated, individualistic, aristocratic barbarism. He wants to bring back the beard, and to rebuild the ancient barriers between the naturally and the artificially smooth-faced sexes. I am not sure when he first restored the beard to fiction, but there is a sacred beard in "Kangaroo" and a still more sacred beard in "St. Mawr"—a rather

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 book, which can be read easily enough but can hardly be taken in, with its full import, unless one has in mind everything that led up to it.

"Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me?" So, sitting on the lid of cultivated English fiction, wrote Henry James to that able lookout for young talents, Mr. Hugh Walpole, in 1913, on the appearance of Mr. Lawrence's third novel, "Sons and Lovers." "Send him and his book along," he continued, "by which I simply mean inoculate me, at your convenience . . . so far as I can be inoculated." Next year, in his much-quoted essay on "The New Novel," James warily circled around Mr. Lawrence three or four times, without actually boarding him, with, I suspect, a dim septuagenarian presentiment that Mr. Lawrence was a power, and, potentially, an intensely hostile power. As he was. As he is. Mr. Lawrence admired William James: he wore a beard. Henry James was a smooth master of bien-séances—smooth-faced and bland as a Roman prelate.

In 1922 Mr. John Macy, who, with characteristic generous enthusiasm, had flung up his cap for "Sons and Lovers," ranked Mr. Lawrence with Meredith and Hardy, and declared that he knew of no other writer of his generation "endowed with his great variety of gifts." In 1923 Dr. Joseph Collins, psychologist and alienist, allured to the task by Mr. Lawrence's obvious interest for the psychoanalyst, avowed that he once had had high hopes of this man, but he added sternly that Lawrence had "sown in glory and raised in corruption," that his instincts were perverted and that it was a pity the British did not "annihilate every trace of him."

In 1924, Mr. Herbert Seligman carried on the de-

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 fense in a little monograph, "D. H. Lawrence, an American Interpretation," of which the main contention, couched in very mixed metaphors, is that Mr. Lawrence is a great genius who is striving to do our Western world good. Mr. Seligman's expression of this thought is memorable: "D. H. Lawrence, like a well tempered chisel or some sharp boring instrument, goes to America's vitals, not to destroy but to strip off the lies and duality and subterfuges that prevent its voice singing out." One doesn't ordinarily use a "boring instrument" as a stripping instrument, but when by such an operation one can get "singing" out of a nation's "vitals" one shouldn't be too particular.

Something there is discussable and even exciting in Mr. Lawrence. There is much of England and Europe in him, and quite a bit now of Australia and the United States. The World War is in him and a violent individualistic reaction against war and the pressure of mobs and the crush of democracies upon the "isolate" self; see "Kangaroo." There is much current emotion and contemporary psychological interpretation of it in him. He appears to possess abundant energy and drive and more and more definiteness of purpose and direction. It is surmised in some quarters that the future is going his way and that he is close at its heels. Of the little group with the "bloom" on them, which James discussed a dozen years ago, he seems still as well worth watching as any. If what he will do next cannot be surely predicted, that is a considerable element in our interest.

This much can be said with assurance: His novels do not leave you where they found you. They have designs upon you. They quicken your consciousness, enlarge your capacity for feeling. They invade you,

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 pluck at you, pervade you, stir the centers of emotion, as Mr. Seligman suggests—or else they produce a reaction of repugnance and send you out slamming the door after you, as Dr. Collins has done. Mr. Lawrence has this token of genius, that he affects readers as Whitman, Hardy and Dostoievsky affect them: He makes flaming disciples, on the one hand, and on the other hand he allures a certain number of temporary devotees, who subsequently shudder away from him as from the brink of a precipice and the roar of chaos.

I suspect this second group is composed of those who were first charmed by the luxuriance of natural beauty in his earlier novels and then shocked by the frank insistent association of beauty in his poetry and elsewhere—in "Amores," "Tortoises," and "Birds, Beasts and Flowers"—with Alma Venus, the generative and reproductive forces in nature.

For my own part, I came to him in his strenuous and somewhat yeasty middle period, between "Rainbow," 1915, and "Kangaroo," 1923, when he was troubling our censors with things which they were probably incapable of understanding, such as "Women in Love" and "Aaron's Rod." Though I felt immediately the power and the seriousness of intention in these books and their unfitness for children and censors, I was—by reason of an antecedent inoculation—nearly immune to them, very little stimulated by them till "Studies in Classic American Literature" struck me by its original critical force and interested me in the course of Mr. Lawrence's development. The two books in which I felt most his captivating charm and his substantial power as a novelist were "The White Peacock" and "Sons and Lovers."

The undebatably potent and enthralling virtue in

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 Mr. Lawrence and the central source, I think, of his power as a writer is his marvelous awareness of life in nature. To a limited extent he responds to the life in people, particularly in deep, vital, inarticulate people. The articulate life of people in society he regards as mainly tedious. But he responds as if there were no barrier between him and the life which pulses in beasts, birds, flowers, clouds, the sea and the spumy star clusters of the Milky Way. Arnold called Wordsworth "a priest of the wonder and bloom of the world." It is a beautiful phrase, but it should have been reserved for D. H. Lawrence. Wordsworth was an interpreter of the contemplative mind. Wordsworth saturated nature with purely human emotion, he filled the woods with the "still sad music of humanity," he tinted the skies with a divine benevolence not their own. Mr. Lawrence does not taint the air with human preconceptions or "pathetic fallacies." And to reward him for his disinterested adoration of the multitudinous spirit of life, the "thing in itself," it seems as if life had let him penetrate into intimacies unknown even to those who have made most boast of her confidences.

One might illustrate the point by quoting innumerable lovely things from his record of the bright intoxicating passage of the seasons over the English land. But our question here is not primarily a question of beauty, and not at all a question of conventionally recognized beauties. It is a question of life and the adorableness of life. It is a question of life discovered afresh by a sixth sense—life magically rendered, rippling and quivering under the impulse of the élan vital. To illustrate Mr. Lawrence's incessant captures of moving life I could ask nothing more conclusive than this:

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If the reader will pause now and thoughtfully consider the point of view at which the phrase "with a luscious gurgle" was written he will be close to one secret of Mr. Lawrence's incomparably vital interpretations of nature. He sees nature with a vision more intuitive than was possessed by even those "clear Greek eyes" which Heine envied Goethe for possessing. He looks at nature for nature's sake, acknowledging nothing superior, nothing equal. Nature through the eyes of the old god Pan—fecund, fair and flecked with blood, without sentiment, but passionately urgent. Nature, with humanity standing back, fearful of interruption, holding its breath, not to stir the down, not to hurry the drifting mist, not to mar the pale bloom on blue plums, not to drown the whisper of the grass, not to alarm the thrush molding the mud of her nest with her breast, not to quicken the little heart

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 with the Yamagata Ken a waggon road is being constructed to connect the two places, and a large portion in the latter Ken is already completed. A proposition was made to the Okitama Ken to make a road between Yonezawa and Fukushima, the Fukushima people offering to pay 50,000 Yen, if the Yonezawa people would pay the same sum; but the latter do not like parting with their money. There is some talk of all that portion of the Ôshiu kaidô which is in the Fukushima Kea being put into proper repair; but it seems doubtful whether it would not be better to abandon it and make a new road; for as the Abukuma gawa finds it way from Shirakawa to Fukushima, it is reasonable to suppose that it would be possible by following its course to make a nearly level road, instead of as now crossing all the spurs that strike out from the grand central rage. Some portions of the upper waters of the Abukuma gawa are navigable for small boats, but near Nihon Matsu there are dangerous rapids. From Fukushima there is a good deal of traffic by it to Arakawa on the Bay of Sendai, 13 ri from the sea port of Ishibashi on the opposite side of the Bay.

In all the towns here named is to be found excellent accommodation for travellers and exceedingly cheap, except indeed at some places south of Utsunomiya where the innkeepers have learnt to demand a special rate for foreigners. The charge for supper, bath, bed and breakfast is three quarters of a bu in the very best hotels. In villages it is even less: at Kubota, on the Kinugawa, there was a notice posted up announcing that, in consequence of the high price of provisions the innkeepers had made an agreement to fix the price of first-class accomodation at 15 sen!

As a means of communication the Ôshiu kaidô is not to be commended, the portion north of the Kinu gawa being in such bad order as to be only not absolutely impassable for carriages; but one must not leave it without saying something of the scenery through which it passes. The blue mountains, along which one travels for days

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 of the rabbit palpitating under the brown fur, not to lose the faint tinkle of stubble, not to dim the light in the moth's eye.

The second conspicuous interest of Mr. Lawrence's work he believes is intimately and profoundly related to the first. I refer, in general, to the erotic interest and, in particular, to his searching, exhaustive and exhausting exploration of certain phases of sexual attraction and sexual repulsion, and the bearings of these violent and excessive emotions upon human conduct. Where and how he acquired the psychopathic lore which fills the pages of "The Rainbow," "Women in Love," "The Lost Girl," "Aaron's Rod" and "The Captain's Doll" I shall not inquire. It is clear that for a dozen years he has been a "specialist" in that form of violent "love," which, as he says, is to be regarded rather as a "duel" than as a "duet," as a bitter and shattering clash of contending egotisms—"wildcats in a red-hot iron cage."

This tract of Mr. Lawrence's labors is before us. It is just as well to take an intelligent attitude toward it. Whether we wish it or not, Mr. Lawrence's remorseless studies in sex psychology will no more be annihilated by wishing than sex will be annihilated by wishing. These studies are dangerous to the young; sex is dangerous to the young. The men and women in these novels, exclaims Dr. Collins, can be referred to definite abnormal types, easily recognized and named by the psychopathologist. But that supplies no principle for annihilating Mr. Lawrence's novels. Doubtless Dr. Collins has often seen in hospitals or insane asylums men easily recognizable as of the type of Orestes or King Lear or Othello. We don't dispose of Othello by saying "epilepsy," or of King Lear by saying

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 "senile dementia," or of Orestes by murmuring "paranoia." The critical attitude, commendable for young and old, is to recognize Mr. Lawrence's studies of excessive and perverse passion for what they are. Classify them, name them, see them clearly, and then these books may be as safe and useful on the shelf as a labeled bottle of carbolic acid.

To adult readers moderately acquainted with European literature, with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with Zola and Flaubert and the Goncourts, with Ibsen and Strindberg and with D'Annunzio, there is little that is novel in Mr. Lawrence's representation of the various erotic furies. In "The Triumph of Death," for example, D'Annunzio worked out for readers of a generation ago, the entire course of exactly such passions as rage through "Rainbow" and "Women in Love." D'Annunzio's sophisticated and megalomaniac poet-hero aspires through sexual excess to a state of the "soul" which shall "surpass carnal sensibility and communicate itself to an ultra-sensible element of the inner being." He is an aristocrat, his mistress is of the peasantry, and, through her lower animal nature, he hopes to enter into communication with every form of natural life. In a short time, however, he discovers that the central ingredient of his relation to his mistress is hatred—"the mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love." He recites to himself the words of the Preacher: Non des muliert potestatem animae tuae—Give not power over thy soul into the hands of a woman. He begins to frame for himself a "male" ideal of physical force, robust health and savage joy. He struggles to assert himself against the woman, and has a premonition that he will never attain complete "self-realization" except by killing

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 her. And the book ends with the appropriate mortal consummation of sex-antagonism: the two of them, locked in a last embrace, roll fighting over a precipice.

Mr. Lawrence's "Women in Love" is, psychologically, identical in most important respects. He introduces this variation of his Alpine scene: Gerald Crich releases the throat of Gudrun, when he has her nearly choked, with this reflection: "As if he cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands."

The story of violent and egotistical loves faithfully, remorselessly told is always, I am inclined to believe, as "moral" as hell fire or Holy Writ—"Her guests are in the depths of hell." And Mr. Lawrence impresses me as a far more austere "moralist" than D'Annunzio. As I have said elsewhere, my abiding impression from these books of his middle period is a sense of his "studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear, and with cold, probing curiosity, and with murderous hatred. . . . He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world . . . and that the romanticists have all been on the wrong track in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and to resist the dissolution of union. 'When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul,' says Mr. Lawrence in his 'Fantasia of the Unconscious,' 'he falls into the beginnings of despair.

"St. Mawr" carries on, from there, Mr. Lawrence's

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 "criticism of life." It carries on his moving representation of the soul's fiery struggle for independent self-hood, for individuality. In this case, the chief protagonists are women. From the first Mr. Lawrence has been a feminist—of a sort. In "The White Peacock," he speaks with profound insight of Lettie's determination to ignore her own self and to empty her potentialities into the vessel of another:

"St. Mawr" is a shorter novel than Mr. Lawrence is accustomed to write—only 222 pages, unencumbered by dissertations or digressions. Its tempo is much brisker. The narrative moves at a swift canter. The characters are sharply and brilliantly drawn, so far as needful for their function, and only so far. The novel is not a contribution to contemporary "realism," and should not be so approached. It is a piece of symbolism, which is, however, so well written that, if you are a child, you are at liberty to read it as if it were the story of a horse, of a superb golden stallion, who rears and throws his rider.

But St. Mawr is a symbolical horse as Melville's Moby Dick is a symbolical whale. It is Mr. Lawrence's hobbyhorse. Readers of his "Studies in Classic Amer-

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 ican Literature" will remember that he interpreted the whale as the subconscious seven-eighths of man's life, what goes on beneath the twinkling surface of intelligence, "the deepest blood-being of the white race." The golden stallion has exactly the same significance: he is the deepest instinctive "blood-consciousness." It may be noted in passing that the big bay stallion in "Sons and Lovers," the red Arab mare in "Women in Love," and the horses which thunder ominously through two or three pages of "Rainbow" are steeds of the same stable. See also Plato's horses.

The characters arrange themselves in a scale beginning with the horse, and descending, according to their degrees of "blood-potency," to Flora, who is an ordinary woman of the social world. Next to the horse is his own groom, Lewis, who is a dark, silent, shaggy mystical Welshman with a sacred beard; he understands the horse, speaks to him in Welsh and is in perfect sympathy with him. There is a second groom of mixed Mexican and Indian blood; he is almost as sympathetic. Then comes the mother, Mrs. Witt, from Louisiana, inheriting a strain of dark Welsh blood through her grandmother: having exhausted society, despising most of the human animals, including her son-in-law, she admires the horse and shares his spirit. Next comes Lou, the daughter, an American girl, much Europeanized, very sophisticated. At twenty-five she marries an artist, the best thing in sight, handsome, healthy, with a desire for a fashionable success in London. Lou buys St. Mawr for her husband, hoping that he will ride the splendid creature with effect. The husband, Rico, has outgrown horses, doesn't like St. Mawr, and the golden stallion has an instinctive repugnance for him. Ill managed, St. Mawr throws his

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 rider and breaks several of his bones. The lowest character in Mr. Lawrence's scale is Flora, who after the accident seizes upon Rico for a lover, and proposes to buy, castrate, and tame the horse. The immediate upshot of the affair is that mother and daughter fall in love with the horse and with the grooms and carry them off to America.

A superb creature, St. Mawr, if one knows how to ride him.

If one has but the merest rudiments of symbol-reading, the main meanings of all this and subsequent developments will be clear enough. The story is excitingly told, independently of its meanings. But it is obvious that this symbolical novel is intended to be mordantly satirical, as well. Mr. Lawrence's first theme is the emancipation of the two American women from the perfunctory type of men, and their adventure in quest of an independent self-hood. His second theme, pervading his entire conception of the tale, is his own profound revulsion from polite tea table literature, his sense that the English scene is exhausted, his quest for a newer, younger land in which, as George Moore would say, to "enwomb" a vital art.

The concluding chapter, in a slackened tempo, pictures the last refuge of Lou and her mother: an abandoned, rat-pestered, goat-ruined ranch in the mountains of the American Southwest. I know what Mr. Lawrence means by that, but I believe in leaving something to the imagination of readers. To mine, I recommend reading "St. Mawr," and thinking it over for some time before deciding whether or not it is a deeply suggestive piece of symbolism.

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ILLA CATHER has published a new novel, "The Professor's House." If I should say no more than that, I should have said enough to send all discerning readers in search of a copy. Miss Cather is not merely one of those rare writers who have taken a vow never to disappoint us. She is also one of the true classics of our generation. She is not merely entertaining. She is also important. Her work has a vital center, and its contours become steadily more distinct. It will become clear to us presently that she has been expressing these last ten or fifteen years a new sense of values which we are all gradually and often unconsciously beginning to accept. She has been clarifying for us our sense of what we have in common with the generation before 1900, and our sense of the points at which we have departed from the old paths.

Each of her novels has been a desired event, of which one could safely predict nothing but a style with the translucency of sky; a beauty, cool, grave, pervasive; deep feeling under perfect control; and a criticism of life both profound and acute—a criticism which deals as nobly with the simple elements as with the fine complexities of human experience.

"The Professor's House" is a disturbingly beautiful book, full of meanings, full of intentions—I am sure that I have not caught them all. Everything in it has

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 its own bright surface meaning. The publisher's announcement suggests that Miss Cather actually intended to describe academic life. She is here addressing herself, we are informed, "to those who do not know or who doubt the American youth, to those who may be interested in the environment which their sons and daughters find in college."

The novel does, to be sure, present Godfrey St. Peter—a man of mixed French and American ancestry—professor of European history in a state university near Lake Michigan; his wife, Lillian—a woman of some elegance and beauty, with whom he seems to have almost nothing to do; the two married daughters and their husbands; the seamstress, Augusta; the professor's favorite pupil, Tom Outland, explorer of cliff-dwellings and inventor, killed in the war, and a colleague or two. The professor has completed his life work, an eight-volume history of the Spanish Adventurers in North America. He has received a big money prize from Oxford. And the family is moving into the new house which he, or perhaps rather his wife, has built with the reward of his labors.

What happens after that point would strike me as inconclusive, slightly incoherent, and without vital thesis, if I did not regard "The Professor's House" as an Ibsenish title—as Ibsenish as "The Doll's House." There is more in this house than meets the eye; but let us consider first what meets the eye.

The professor's former house was a poor old place, lacking many modern improvements, inconvenient, and as ugly as a house could be. It had a tin bathtub which the professor used to renovate with porcelain paint. It had a garret study. The professor wrote his "Spanish Adventurers" in a wretchedly bare little

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 room under the mansard roof, without filing apparatus, and heated by a most dubious old stove. The room was further encumbered by a number of ancient dress forms, and he had to share it at times with Augusta, the sewing woman.

Money comes to the family from the professor's prize and from the marriage of a daughter to a Jewish engineer, who has grown wealthy by exploiting a patent of Tom Outland's. All sorts of comforts and luxuries now are made available—cars, imported Spanish furniture, furs, jewels, wine, country houses, travel. The professor's wife and his children take with alacrity to the new standard of living; they blossom out; the wife renews her youth.

But the professor is a tree of which the trunk has been hollowed by fire. He is nearly burned out. He haunts the old home. He clings whimsically to the fleshless companions of his scholarly solitude—those old dress forms. He finds comfort in chatting with the antique sewing-woman; and she saves his life when he is on the point of asphyxiation from the fumes of the old stove, the fire of which has been extinguished by the wind.

Out of a large acquaintance with professors, I can testify that Professor St. Peter is not an ordinary professor. Ordinary professors do not reluct against exchanging a ramshackle old house for a luxurious new one. Professor St. Peter is rather a spirit than a man. He is a spirit saying good-by to something much larger than the ugly old square domicile in which his life work was accomplished. He is a spirit reluctantly bidding farewell to a generation of American life, to a vanishing order of civilization. I find "The Professor's House" echoing and vibrating with the cumu-

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 lative meaning of all the books in which Miss Cather has sought to record the quest of her generation for true romance, for the real thing, for that which enables one to forget everything else, for that which uses and consumes one adequately.

Miss Cather came out of a Western small town by way of the University of Nebraska some twenty or twenty-five years ago. From that statement alone one can infer, with small probability of error, that she had a good intelligent mother of "Puritan" upbringing; that her father was something of a pioneer, and that Miss Cather's early education was of what we call a New Englandish cast, qualified by a Western environment and contacts with German, Swedish and Bohemian settlers on the prairies.

When the University of Nebraska had done its best to kindle her curiosity and to open her mind, I infer that she came East with literature and music in her heart, and eagerly continued her education in Greenwich Village, in Paris, in London, and in many other places at home and abroad.

For nearly twenty years I have fondly preserved a second-hand impression of her before she was a famous novelist. It was sketched for me by a college friend of mine, Harry James Smith, who was killed in war service. Many years ago, as a beginner in letters he used to give me delightful gossip about the young people who were in those days sharpening their pens for literary adventure in New York. In my old memories young Miss Cather is sitting every morning on a bench in Washington Square, reading Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." I believe she repudiates this reminiscence as imaginary. But I am sure that she has sat in Washington Square and that she has read "Leaves

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 of Grass." So I cling to the reminiscence for its symbolic truth.

Looking back through the seven novels to discover the newcomer from the West, I see a young Nebraskan, hungry from the austerities and rectitudes of a prairie home, reading the "Leaves of Grass" in the morning sunshine on a bench in Washington Square and dreaming of the western pioneers and of Paris, dreaming of a world richer, fuller, freer than our fathers knew, a world enriched by the development of perceptions of beauty which in them were but rudimentary, and enriched by the liberation of powers which they did not value or which they feared and suppressed. With that much by way of biography, one can in some fashion "account" for everything that she has written.

Her first book, "Alexander's Bridge," 1912, is more significantly hers than she admits. It is a short novel presenting a "crucial moment" in the career of Bartley Alexander. He was by the gift of the gods a tremendous natural force, a great man of action. He came out of the West and distinguished himself as a bridge builder. He married a fine woman of talent and fortune and settled firmly into the imposing structure of established society in Boston. But in his dangerous middle age his unexhausted youth fermented within him. He renewed a liaison of his student days with an Irish actress in London. When he returned to inspect his biggest bridge, then building, it collapsed and he was drowned in its ruin.

In 1922, eleven years after the composition of this tale, Miss Cather wrote an apologetic but extremely interesting preface for a new edition. She said that

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 the "subject matter" had originally attracted her, but that she now recognized it as not her "own material," not the field in which she was master. So far as the "subject matter" is concerned, I can't follow this explanation; she appears to possess the subject matter adequately for her purposes. But so far as the treatment is concerned, I see a point in the apologetic preface. She has tried to treat her theme in accordance with the New England tradition, established by Hawthorne and more or less perpetuated by Mrs. Wharton. She has moralized the story as Hawthorne would have moralized it: the collapse of the bridge is an obvious symbolical device for emphasizing the "collapse" of that pillar of society, Bartley Alexander. In its form and outline, the tale looks like a tribute to that rigorously established order to which Mrs. Wharton used to offer sacrifices.

Now, nowhere else in Miss Cather's work, I think, is there any such tribute to "established society" as is implied in the title and in the dominating symbolism of "Alexander's Bridge." All her deepest sympathies, as her subsequent novels prove, were with, not against, Bartley in his revolt against the prison-house of respectability, in which he felt that the primal energies of his nature were being progressively fettered and wasted. But in this first book she actually lugs in a professor of moral philosophy, a Professor Wilson, to serve as spokesman for the ethical sense of his generation; and he—lightly, yet ominously—speaks of a flaw in Bartley's nature which he once feared might lead to disaster. In so far as the book is moralized in this sense, it is out of line with Miss Cather's practice and her convictions.

Yet in "Alexander's Bridge" itself, Miss Cather does

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 strike into her own theme and material, she begins her own characteristic comment on life, in these "mutterings" of Bartley to the professor of moral philosophy:

"After all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work like the devil and think you are getting on, and suddenly you discover that you've only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink you dry. Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while you are being built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap about. I sometimes wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I hadn't been this sort; I want to go out and live out his potentialities, too." [My italics.]

To live out one's potentialities: there is the clew to all Miss Cather's sympathies. There is her primary intuition of the "real thing," in harmony with which she has readjusted her entire scale of values. She sympathizes profoundly and intelligently with that aspiration. It is a major distinction of her work and of her literary generation. Her criticism of life, in both its negative and its positive aspects, springs from her sympathy with that aspiration, and from her intelligent repudiation of the repressive philosophy upon which Mrs. Wharton's established polite society, as well as the village society of New England, was based.

From polite society, Miss Cather turned abruptly in 1913 to one large division of her "own material" in "O Pioneers!" with which, for our purpose, we may immediately associate "My Antonia," 1918. In these books, she tells us that she did not "build" her story. The story shaped itself inevitably in a loose, anecdotal, yet intensely vivid and poignant memoir. Here she is dealing not with the domain of convention, but with the domain of necessity. She is presenting the Bo-

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 hemian, German, Swedish and native American farmers of Nebraska battling with the soil and the elements, against heavy odds. This is her account of what life is, and must be, at bottom. This is her picture of "romance" in its most elementary form.

For pioneers, these books tell us, there is naught but this: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction of their species; just not to perish; just to hold one's own on the hard bedrock of existence. In these conditions, the primitive struggle suffices to call forth one's best and one's utmost, and to make one oblivious of everything else—of all the graces and refinements and the large awareness of the world in which later generations endeavor to slake the thirsts of the soul.

Miss Cather has taken the pioneers into her brooding heart. She extenuates nothing, but she sets down naught in malice. She cannot, like so many of our jolly young novelists, write satirically or even bitterly of the long, lonely roads that lead to Main Street or of "the big, lonely country where people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say." In her, this elementary struggle, whether she contemplates its symbol in the plow standing in the black furrows against the Nebraska sunset or in the shards and flints of the vanished cliff-dwellers who left their mournful vestiges under the turquoise heavens of New Mexico and Colorado, evokes a mood of luminous Virgilian sadness. No other American novelist, I think, has treated this theme with a beauty so grave, so wistful.

The heroine of "O Pioneers!" demands special mention as one of Miss Cather's important contributions to contemporary "feminism." Dux femina facti: the

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 the English view of what he had always heard called at home "the American attitude." He had in growing older not much believed there could be an English view; but it would seem after all that over this ground his fancy had too shyly hovered.

Mr. Pendrel's letter practically expressed the unsupposed quantity, and nothing surely could have been of more flattering effect. Written to be delivered after his death, it explained and enhanced, the delightful document—shaking the tree, as it were, for the golden fruit to fall. What it came to was that he had read as an old man his young relative's remarkable volume, "An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History," and, wishing somehow to testify to the admiration he felt for it, had come to consider that no symbol would be so solid as the old English house forming the sole item, in a long list of heavily hampered possessions, that he was free thus to dispose of. It was a mere town tenement, and none of the newest, but it was the best repayment of his debt he could make. He had nowhere seen the love of old things, of the scrutable, palpable past, nowhere felt an ear for stilled voices, as precious as they are faint, as seizable, truly, as they are fine, affirm a more remarkable power than in the pages that had moved him to gratitude. Unpretending though the title, the spare volume, but in which every word reached the mark, was a 41


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 chief pioneer is a woman. Alexandra is one of several children on a poor Nebraska farm. On the death of her father she alone of the brood reacts positively and creatively to the new demands of circumstances. Her brothers plod in the old ruts. She strikes out. She has enough vital energy to shape a little the terms of her struggle for survival, to make of it a big thing, an inspiring and rewarding activity. She finds what "romance" life has for her in buying up unvalued and forsaken farms, adding quarter-section to quarter-section, and competing with men in all the details of farm management. In this she is a notable predecessor of Ellen Glasgow's heroine in "Barren Ground."

Alexandra is not inhuman, not emotionally stolid. She feels the normal woman's desires and needs. In the end she takes a husband. But in the end the husband's place in her life is perforce incidental. Before the time comes when he seems to fit in, she herself has already done, fully accomplished, what we used to call "a man's work in the world." Marriage for her is a side enterprise—as it is for a man. It cannot now fill her life to the exclusion of everything else. Her life is already full—all but full. She will live out her personal and domestic potentialities without interrupting the big constructive "romance," which for many years has occupied her mind and her imagination.

From the pioneers, Miss Cather turns to her second major theme in "The Song of the Lark," 1915, and in her collection of short stories, "Youth and the Bright Medusa," 1920. One theme develops, when it develops vitally, out of the other, as the pattern comes out on the waterpots of the cliff-dwellers. Vital romance has its roots in necessity. For Miss Cather there are two great things in the world, the struggle for existence,

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 and the art which expands our measured interval with beauty or high passion till we forget that we must live and must die.

I am astonished to learn that there are still some intelligent persons who have not yet read "The Song of the Lark." It is absurd. "The Song of the Lark" is certainly near the top notch of American fiction. It seems to me one of the truest and profoundest studies of the mind and heart of a great artist ever written anywhere. It is a magnificent piece of imaginative realism. It is also, I believe, Miss Cather's most intimate book—the book which she has most enriched with the poetry and wisdom and the passion of her experience, and made spacious with the height and the depth of her desire.

It is the story of a Swedish pastor's daughter in Colorado, in whom there is gradually discovered a singing voice of the first quality. Gradually the voice is born in her. "Every artist," says her old German singing master, "makes himself born." Gradually she escapes from everything else till she is living to fulfil the possibilities of her talent—for that and for naught else. Then, as one of her lovers says, with a note of pity for himself, "she drifts like a rifle ball" to her object. All her childhood, all her labor, all her love, all her acquaintance with the wide world, her struggles, her frustrations, her triumphs—all are converted into music, into beauty. Everything else is incidental—as it is, as it must be—to every absolutely first rate artist. As for those who play with art, art plays with them. Thea does not play.

Nothing in contemporary fiction has stirred me, I think, quite so profoundly as the deep rich harmonies Miss Cather makes in this story by the interweaving

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 of her life-preservative with her life-expansive themes in those marvelous chapters where she shows. Thea musically assimilating, among the ruins of the cliff-dwellers, the history of humanity's struggle for survival.

In all the stories of "Youth and the Bright Medusa" you will find variations on the central theme in "The Song of the Lark." These are poignant tales of painters, sculptors, singers seeking their "real thing," and discarding the interpretations of polite society, the New England village, and Main Street. Their romance is the expansion of the allotted interval. Their motto, like that of the old play, is "all for love." The object of their one unfailing love is their art. Through all the disgrace and squalor of life, that remains clean and holy. The artist who will not give all is no true lover of his art, and his mistress will forsake him.

The war tried in vain to divert Miss Cather from the development of her theme. In "One of Ours," 1922, she did indeed write one of the stories of the World War. As a reward for this work she received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel which "best presents the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." I am not sure to what extent the judges were moved by the patriotic and military interest of the book. It is a sufficiently good war story. But war is not Miss Cather's "own material."

And, as a curious and ironic matter of fact, Miss Cather is much occupied in "One of Ours" with an implicit satire on "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood," and with exhibiting the superior literacy, intellectuality, æsthetic interest, friendliness, affability and geniality of German men

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 and women in the Ehrlich family at the University of Nebraska. The young hero who goes to fight the Germans has learned pretty much all that he knows of the amenities of life from his German friends and neighbors.

Miss Cather's hero is a Western boy from the farm whose deepest impulses and aspirations have been frustrated by precisely what I suppose the founder of the Pulitzer Prize imagined were essential constituents of "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." They have been frustrated by the hard frugality and thrift of prosperous American farmers; by the influence of a narrow denominational religion; by the average American man's contempt for gracious manners, art and the things of the mind; by the narrow mother and the narrower parson piously assuring a warm-blooded, hungry boy that he will find his happiness "when he finds his Saviour"; by a chaste and frigid wife who abandons her young husband in order to nurse a missionary sister in China, etc.

Miss Cather has never been valuable to us as a flatterer of "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." She has conspicuously served us by showing just how and where this "wholesome atmosphere" has corroded and wasted some of the precious resources of life. She has served us by showing again and again how the "alien" elements in our population—German, Swedish, Bohemian, Spanish, Mexican, French—have utilized what "we Anglo-Saxons" have suppressed and rejected.

Her next novel, "A Lost Lady," is a remarkable case in point. Like "The Song of the Lark," this is a story on her great theme of living out one's potentialities. But in this case the potentiality to which the

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 heroine gives all is not artistic, but personal and specifically erotic, and to a certain extent illicit. Mrs. Forrester is a woman who, as we vulgarly put it, "trades" on her charm, though what she gets in barter is only adoration. She is animated and consumed by the passion for giving and receiving pleasure, which she uses incidentally as a means of refining the manners of those to whom she gives it. Her perfumes, her rings, her furs, her voice, her eyes, her kindness, the touch of her fine hand upon one's arm are all bewitching, penetratively seductive. She cannot bow or give one a passing glance without establishing a personal relation of an indescribable sweetness.

Mrs. Forrester is the radiant Venus Anadyomene united in the holy bonds of matrimony to an honorable, crippled, corpulent, big-jowled railway man who looks and acts like Grover Cleveland. She is, in her own sense, unflinchingly loyal to this fine old wreck. But that is not enough for her. She is in her sense loyal to all men. She gives the best of herself to them all, and so she fascinates all men, and all boys, who come within reach of her voice and eyes. Personal charm is her one talent. In all circumstances, worthy and unworthy, she lives out its potentialities. She uses it as the musician uses music, to expand the allotted interval; and, like a public performer of music, she wishes to please all.

At the first reading of this book I did not lose my heart to Mrs. Forrester. I happen to have a deeply seated, perhaps ineradicable, prejudice against persons who desire to please everybody. Mrs. Forrester's passion for pleasing everybody left her, I thought, without that trait which is essential to pleasing people who are at all particular: it left her without discrimi-

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 nation. It seemed to me to betray her as estrangingly devoid of taste in personal relations. And when she submitted quietly to the embrace of the hard-eyed, carbuncled shyster Ivy Peters, I revolted from her charm as young Neil revolted.

But Mr. Heywood Broun, winking with the indulgence of the Almighty at Mrs. Forrester's unconcern about preserving "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood," assured me in print that in Mrs. Forrester I should find the genuine "portrait of a lady," which I had somewhere said was missing from current fiction. And not Mr. Broun alone, but all my acquaintances, academic persons, old maids, hardened old New England bachelors of the austerest virtue—all unite with Mr. Broun in surrendering to her charm and admitting—the austere old bachelors—that if they could have met anywhere in their generation a lady like Mrs. Forrester—well, their lives might have been very different.

On a third reading I see how "A Lost Lady" fits in with the main thesis of Miss Cather's work. Mrs. Forrester is a symbolic figure. Her story is Miss Cather's poem of personality and its values—its powers, its too-little regarded powers. In her calling she is as admirable as. Thea is admirable in hers. She used the rare talent intrusted to her. She gave all for love. She consumed herself adequately in making personal relations charming. She illustrates, and her innumerable adorers illustrate, the coming around of our generation to Browning's position in the much quoted poem:

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 And now I think we are in a position to see a little more deeply into Miss Cather's extraordinary Professor and his extraordinary House. The Professor—he is the intellectual spirit of our American "Victorian Era." The old house, which he cannot persuade himself to leave—that is what our famous Young People call Professorial America. His wife and daughters and sons-in-law—they are the celebrated Younger Generation, building themselves new homes, enriched with all sorts of new devices which the professor values little. His mind and imagination have been occupied, splendidly occupied, in a long historical retrospect; his dream has always drifted backward to former glories, Spanish adventurers, Cliff-Dwellers, the storied past, which rises like a western mesa abruptly out of the flat present, affording his essentially romantic spirit a refuge and a retreat. And now the word is forward. Young people may go forward, seeking a new romance amid the realities of the modern world and all its dizzying change. But he has consumed himself. His fire is out. He is a superannuated figure in his times. He clings to the old dress forms. He chats with Augusta.

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HE publication of a new novel by Mr. Floyd Dell has for the second time within a week set me to reflecting ironically on this thought: "What a crew of political subversives our literary radicals are becoming!"

Suppose you are an impressionable young person, and suppose the current drastic criticism of American civilization has convinced you that our "bourgeois" society is uninteresting and unlovely—humdrum, hidebound, and tedious to the yawning point. You turn to writers who are busy making ideals for the younger generation. You turn to two of our novelists who, like their master, Mr. H. G. Wells, regard the novel as a branch of social dynamics, and what guiding beam is thrown on your pathway?

Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who was once thought to be tainted with Socialism, and who certainly has a rare talent for presenting human beings as members of organized society—Mr. Lewis has at last given us in "Arrowsmith" a novel which presents a clear-cut ideal and suggests a way out of the vulgar stress of a competitive money-making society. But what a way out!—to renounce the world for the quest of pure truth in the laboratory—a way prescribable only to solitary remorselessly energetic individuals dedicated to the

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 pursuit of science, capable of severing all social bonds in order to voyage through strange seas of thought alone.

Mr. Floyd Dell has also, in one way and another, acquired what young unacademic authors rather enjoy, a reputation for being dangerous to existing institutions. He has been in court under the espionage act, together with his editorial colleague, that passionate immitigable individualist, Mr. Max Eastman. He has had a book—"Janet March"—suppressed or withdrawn. He has written an admirable panegyric on John Greenleaf Whittier and other conscientious objectors. He has talked blithely of The Revolution, and has, for picturesque purposes, painted his eagerness to assist at the building of a barricade. In the spring of life a young man's talking lightly turns to social Utopias.

But talking is a privilege guaranteed by the Constitution—though it is not always upheld by the police. As Disraeli pointed out, it is "imagination," not talking, that "governs mankind." And Mr. Dell's imagination is thoroughly unsocialistic. He may, to be sure, join the Socialist party, because, being out of power, it is free from responsibility and rich in promises and because it contains a number of intellectual Jews who relish, as few "Anglo-Saxons" do, the excitement of talk, the intoxication of ideas, the exhilaration of protest. He may for an evening unite with them in discussing the redistribution of political and economic power. But the "inner form" of Mr. Dell's imagination is individualistic and anarchical. Everything in him that is deep and instinctive loathes the impositions of power, loathes regulated work, loathes regimentation, loathes forced co-operation and

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 loathes obligation. Mr. Dell loves freedom and spontaneity just as heartily as Mr. J. P. Morgan does.

In the twentieth century, all literary men of any sense, like all sensible kings and presidents, wish to show themselves friendly to the poor and the inarticulate. But Mr. Dell is a poet, and no real poet, so far as I have heard, was ever a real Socialist. He is not merely a poet! He has been hitherto almost exclusively a poet of the coast of Bohemia—simple, sensuous and passionate. He knows nothing except what he has intimately experienced. His imagination does not penetrate into the reality of the economic, social, and political structure of a state. He is a play-boy like John Synge's hero, so deeply enveloped in his personal dream of felicity that he scarcely notices his collisions with a sordid reality.

He was born in the land of suppressed desires, the romantic dreamland of west-central Illinois, in the little town of Barry, in 1887. Illinois suppressed his desires by forcing him to attend high school and study algebra for a while in a Mississippi River town; but he escaped out of that into the Agnostic Society and into the library, where he made his own education by reading Ingersoll and Shelley, Spencer and Omar, anthropology and Ernest Dowson, Ecclesiastes and Swinburne, Verlaine and "The Shropshire Lad," and dreaming of the Venus of Melos and the Discus-Thrower. Economic need suppressed his desires by forcing him to work in factories, then as a newspaper reporter in Davenport, Iowa, and subsequently as a literary editor for some years in Chicago, and finally in New York, on "The Liberator" and "The Masses."

But in his high-school days he had entered an avenue

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 of escape from bourgeois realities by thinking freely and writing verse. In 1913, he expressed his dream of a new feminine ideal in "Women as World Builders." In 1918, he published his dream of educational reconstruction entitled "Were You Ever a Child?" which sets forth the "new" educational notion of utilizing instead of killing off by the educational processes the child's personal and creative impulses. As in Chicago, so in New York, he escaped from journalism to the coast of Bohemia; he haunted artistic settlements; he was a pioneer of the modern migration to Greenwich Village; he frequented little theaters; he wrote much verse and several one-act plays; he published in 1924 a very readable collection of critical essays called "Looking at Life," which interprets current books and ideas from the point of view of a poet and an intellectual radical.

Mr. Dell's novels are four: "Moon-Calf," 1920; "The Briary Bush," 1921; "Janet March," 1923, and "This Mad Ideal," 1925. By a comparison of these books with the essays and the available biographical record, I have convinced myself that the first two of them, at least, are hardly to be regarded as fiction, are rather to be considered as confessions, like those of Jean Jacques. They constitute one continuous narrative of the adventures of Felix Fay from childhood through his first marital difficulties and adjustments, and they resemble the "Confessions" of Rousseau in many important respects.

They are poetic, in the sense that poetry is "impassioned recollection." They have the form and movement of autobiographical revery in a sensitive mind which feels a rhythm in its experience, sees pictures in its own life history and savors and idealizes

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 its past. There is nothing here of the sociologist's notebook, nor of the overworked optic nerve of the photographer-realist. Memory has discarded everything that is not memorable, quick, delicious, pungent, or enchanting to the revisiting mind. There are reminiscences of childhood raptures here as exquisite as that passage in Rousseau in which he remembers how he and his father read romances together till they were reminded that it was morning by the swallows twittering under the eaves. Take, for example, this recovery of the child's delight in learning to read—not forgetting that Mr. Dell's impulse to revise educational method derives from this source:

After young Felix has learned to wander on short excursions into "the realms of gold" he has a curious fantasy one day in school while dreaming over how

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 many yards of calico you can buy for $1.38 at 11½ cents a yard. He dreams that he is a fairy prince carrying a magic book containing answers to all secrets into "a little house in the woods that nobody knew anything about."

That is good child psychology: to build a "secret house" seems to be an instinctive act with children as with birds. For days and weeks together, when the fit comes upon them, they will live in a fever of mystery and excitement about their hidden retreat. And a conservative may interpret this fever as a token of the profound naturalness of the passion for 'property.'

At the age of twelve Felix, who has passed through his doll period, enters his secret-house period, and finds in the garret, with a trapdoor, a secure hiding-place where he may read and dream. Presently Rose, the gardener's daughter, joins him there. He reads to her from Rousseau's "Confessions." They talk, they dance, they dream there. Sometimes they walk in the woods and recite poetry to each other. One night they slip out to the woods with bread and meat and build a fire and eat their supper, and lie watching the friendly stars for hours. They are too happy to sleep. "Nevertheless, at last they slept, and awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn. They laughed cheerfully, each rather secretly frightened at their daring." Then they went home. It was all quite innocent—and childlike!

Was it really? Childlike, yes, very likely. But what is "innocence" at the ages of twelve and fifteen?—when the girl gives queer little kisses on the mouth, which begin fiercely and end abruptly with a laugh, and when the boy has already read Jean Jacques and

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 relishes the "frank sensuality" of "Venus and Adonis." Let us for the present leave the question unanswered. As Mr. Dell presents the incident, it is what is known as an idyllic incident.

I have recited it in some detail because it is a kind of prototypical symbol for Mr. Dell's entire vision of the happy life. It recurs, in one form or another, in each of his four novels. The end of every man's desire, as he sees it, is to be one of two children playing in a secret garret. In "The Briary Bush" the fairy prince and princess find some equivalent for the garret in the artist studios of Chicago, and then there is the actual cottage in the woods where Rose-Ann on her bridal morn bathes in a bank of snow. In "Janet March" the substitute for the shepherd's cottage is again a studio in Greenwich Village. In "This Mad Ideal" there is a little "shack" on the hillside that "nobody knows anything about," where passionate friends talk, read poetry and exchange kisses—innocent and childlike.

Everything that Mr. Delt has to tell us about the summum bonum is in Shelley's "Epipsychidion." So far as I can make out, none of his heroes or heroines conceives of any object higher or more complex or extensive than a solitude à deux with most simple cooking and sleeping apparatus—"all the romantic incon-

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