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Books and Things

HE hero of Mr. Charles Norris's Salt looks back on the four years of his college life and declares that it has been useless. He has only learned to spend money. He has been fitted for no practical employment. I suppose the complaint would be re-echoed by half the undergraduates of America. They take, more and more, all sorts of specialized courses to fit them for the business world-and there are not a few colleges where shorthand and typewriting have become an integral part of the curriculum. I have had students who are convinced that the only thing worth while is accounting. They can read a whole philosophy into it; at least, I believe, that it results in the rejection of the Hegelian metaphysic. Certainly they think Plato old and Emerson commonplace; and the defect of Shelley is clearly seen when you remember that he failed to secure the proper circulation of his pamphlets. He stood on the roof of a Dublin inn and threw them down to the crowd. Of course, today he would have had them published by the Carnegie institution.

It is the modern note; and it is useless to deny that the theories of a university that men like Newman so nobly laid down are hardly understood, much less received with sympathy. Oxford and Cambridge are commonly regarded as sweet, old places where people mutter Plato to each other in the street. If you are going to teach you want to go to Germany for a degree. The seminar is businesslike, and, at least before the war, a recommendation from Edward Meyer or Schmoller was good for a post in the smaller colleges. Nowadays Spanish is eagerly studied to promote commercial intercourse with South America. Latin and Greek, as we all know, are almost dead. Philosophy causes no great excitement. History before 1815 is regarded as antiquated. Politics began with Theodore Roosevelt. Literature means Mr. Masters and Kipling and Guy de Maupassant.

I hold no brief for the past, and, doubtless, it made mistakes and to spare. But I think it had a certain fine depth of intellectual seriousness that is lacking in our generation. It cared for mind for its own sake. It bought books in plenty, it felt Goethe and Dante, Lamb and Hazlitt important people about whom it was worth while to know. The intellectual movement stirred it deeply and it worshipped its men of letters. It is a fascinating thing to go over the shelves of an old college library and study the content of its bequests. We collected our own books then; now we leave an order with a dealer who forms our library on angling. It even seems that they discussed in those days; and the college life did not centre round the stadium. You had a proper sense of shame when you had not read Gibbon. Science had not become a routine and its conflict with the Mosaic cosmogeny stirred the foundation of men's thoughts. They came to college, in fact, to learn the thinking process, and they have no reason for a sense of shame. At least you can read in the letters of men like Leslie Stephen how deeply they cared about the American friendships of their youth.

By his very inauguration the college president has foresworn audacity, but it would be splendid indeed if one of them broke into revolt and foreswore the modern note. He would write a passage in his annual report in which he said that he was not going to have instruction in eugenics and statistics and bookkeeping and salesmanship. He would have all technical studies transferred, as law is transferred, to the graduate schools. He would try, instead, to make the

minds of his students finely tempered instruments without particular reference to any immediate situation. He would announce, for instance, that three times a week Professor Blank would explain what he understood ethics to mean; and because Professor Blank discussed ethics that would not mean that his colleague, Professor Y. (who happens to disagree with Blank's pragmatist opinions) should not lecture also on ethics that the errors of pragmatic morals should suffer proper dissection. In politics there would be no cut and dried division, but A and B and C would choose topics of interest and give out the fullness of their mind upon them. No examinations would be held in the courses and no text-books would be used. At the end of four years the student would have a purely general examination in the subject-history or politics or chemistry-which he had chosen as the field of his interest. And if he failed he would not get a degree.

Of course, it will be said, that throws an enormous intellectual burden on the student. If he is not told what to read, if he does not hear correct views, if his note-book is not crammed with neatly articulated facts, the outcry will be terrible. I wonder. Sometimes you get a student who doesn't take a note, but sits back and listens and asks the inconvenient questions that put you on your mettle. He comes round to borrow a book and stays to tea. You talk on and on, books, teachers, his ideas, his friends and next year he is reading eagerly and keenly of his own accord. You can get him quite excited about the origin of the borough or the exact value of Mr. Russell's logic. He won't know, I grant you, the variations introduced into the Lactonic theory of value by Von Unterheim Guggenmeyer, and it may even be that he will not greatly care to know them. But the movement of thought will interest him passionately and he will see the splendor of books and the richness of ideas. He will leave college with a mind trained to work, capable of seeing the principles in the facts, discontented with formulæ, shunning all but the sources of original-mindedness.

It is perhaps an unworthy ideal. Perhaps we ought to make immediate preparation for an income the real business of education; be willing, like Mr. Britling's Heinrich, to accept the status of philologist into which it has pleased God and the German emperor to call us. But, if you have ever seen the business man buying a book, you will know that it's not altogether unworthy. A college man so learned won't think, as the T. B. M. will tell you, that Mr. Galsworthy has "style, you know, but no mind," or that Mr. Shaw is just a vicious jester. He won't think it supremely important that Bertrand Russell is in prison and Sir Edward Carson in the Privy Council. He will have a mind receptive to Meredith as well as Trollope, to Mr. Howells as well as Robert W. Chambers. His conversation in the Pullman car won't turn at once to the cost of living or the latest German atrocity or the new stance he has learned in golf. Life for him won't be a belching forth from the suburbs downtown and a tired return in an overcrowded train back into the suburbs. He won't have to make his home an annex to his business. He won't feel that the poor are there to enable him to be charitable or that the clergy is professionally licensed to be out of date. He is bound, perhaps, to be somewhat more of a solitary, less dependent on Broadway and the editorials of the New York Times. But he will have the secret of perennial youth. He will be interested in life itself for its own sake. And that is the one sure preventive against the tyranny of old age.

H. J. L.

The Voice of Kansas

The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me, by William Allen White. New York: The Macmillan Co.

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N both sides of the war there are Hamlets and Calibans-men whose weakness takes the form of irresolution, men whose weakness takes the form of savagery. The neverenders are Calibans whose hidden hatreds back up like sewage at the thought of killing an enemy-any enemy. These gentlemen may be writers or clergymen or politicians or professors. For years, if they are true Calibans, they have probably suffered some horrible frustration. They have lost a job they were looking for, or a fortune, or a wife, or a famousness. And the beautiful chance to hate, to wreak their vengeance on a public enemy, is a luxury they cannot deny themselves. Men I know whose hope has been soured for years have become the most ferocious bellmen of this war. They keep tar bubbling in their brains perpetually and live with a warehouse of feathers. The mere thought of a sick Hamlet inflames them. They dream of the fat pale irresolute, the puffing and procrastinating brother, and they grind and growl while they dream that they are slaying this peanut constrictor. Every man is a bit of a Hamlet, perhaps, and every man a bit of a Caliban-especially in hot weather. But the worst Caliban of all is the green-yellow Hamlet of the day before yesterday, the man with a sick inside who daren't look inside, the fellow whose neurasthenia demands that he make a noise like Hercules.

It is a relief to turn from Hamlet and Caliban to the fine, free sage of Emporia. When we had the Caliban projection of the U. S. A., in 1916, there was no Kansas on it. The entire Middle West was hidden in obloquy. But somehow, somewhere about April, 1917, the Middle West lifted its bright young face and, overleaping the wardogs and the warlocks, beheld the business of America. It is this business, the Red Cross end of it, that William Allen White and Henry J. Allen grasped for themselves in the remote fastnesses of the country. Stopping at New York long enough to buy cotton uniforms, they shipped to France early in 1917, to do their own share and draw their own moral. Without the assistance of New York, after all, they had once been Progressives, and Progressives never hampered by bit, spur, saddle or bridle. In 1916, as we remember, they both had attended the burial of the Republican hatchet and had dutifully wept for Cock Robin on election day. But the habit of Kansas stood by them when it came to making the world safe for democracy. It was their own old job in Wichita and Emporia, and they went to Europe with a firm conviction that the war was a colossal annex to their progressivism. No sedentary rancor poisoned them, on one hand, nor were they confused, on the other, between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Lincoln, America. All they did with the tenacity of their accent was to interpret the war as an extension, a deep and searching continuation, of the tasks to which they had dedicated their Kansan lives.

You can feel all of Kansas surging up in William Allen White when he starts to the war with Henry Allen. On the surface he is a jay, a jocund jay, with facetiousness and sentimentalism jostling one another to capture him, and a sob chasing laughter to his lips. But under that rounded surface there is the big, sincere, straight readjustment of a lifetime of civility and good-nature to the mess of manslaughter that is war. You find no Hunhater in William Allen White. You simply find an Amer

ican who has at last carried Kansas to the planet, and espoused the planet on the terms of his long-upheld, authenticated morality. It is a clean and wholesome sight. The sentiment is often a bit thick, to cover up the powerful realities exhaled by a war now four years old. But beneath the sentiment there is the survival of something more than the idiom of Emporia. There is the cause of the Allies ringing true to Kansas. Not in regard to the juggling of territory or the smearing of democratic unguents, but in regard to a fatal policy of callous and calculated transgression and the need for the broad re-emphasis of a totally different creed.

One could quote a good deal from Mr. White on the subject of his pants or on Henry Allen's diabolical attitude toward onion soup, but outside these surgings and bubblings of a strong, native humor there are genuinely momentous expressions on the meaning of the war. France, for example, Mr. White has seen with that depth of insight which is only given to men of pure spirit. He confesses the facts of French mutiny and the nature of French grumbling, and there he says, after a glimpse of French villages dripped broken from the jaws of war, "We were beginning to realize slowly what a hell of torture and disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce choked with the offering to the war god; soldiers filling the highways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the space upon the railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; and always talk of the war-of nothing, absolutely nothing, but the war and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curse proves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shrouded torches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really means to the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we at home would react under the terrific punishment which these people are taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homes crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and even the mourners going about the street and man to his long home."

Here you have the tradition of a rich and serene success stripping its eyes to look at "this awful storm that is testing the stoutest souls in the world." And you see the serenity and richness laid aside, and the fight embraced, with "a fine lot, just joyous, honest, brave, young Americans," waved ahead to the harsh, the necessary, enterprise.

"But the things that roll off the laps of the gods," says this wise man, "after humanity has put its destinies there, sometimes are startlingly different from the expected fruits of victory. We fight the war for one thing, win the war and get quite another thing. The great war now waging began in a dispute over spheres of influence, market extensions, Places in the Sun and Heaven knows what of that sort of considerations. Great changes in these matters, of course, must come out of the war. But boundaries and markets will fluctuate with the decades and centuries. The important changes that will come out of this warassuming that the Allies win it-will be found in the changed relations of men. The changes will be social and economic, and they will be institutional and lasting. For

generally speaking, such changes as approach a fair adjustment of the complaints of the 'have nots' against the 'haves' in life, are permanent changes. Kings, overlords, potentates, politicians, capitalists, high priests-masters of various kinds-find it difficult to regain lost privileges and perquisites. And in this war Germany stands clearly for the 'haves.' If Germany wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all over the world. For the same autocracy in Berlin lives in Wall Street, and in the 'city' in London, and in the caste and class interests of Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany alone among the nations of the earth rests on the divine right of Kings that is the last resort of privilege. In America we have the democratic weapons to break up our plutocracy whenever we desire to do so. In England they are breaking up their caste and economic privileged classes rapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a motheaten relic. And when junkerdom in Germany is crushed, then at least the world may begin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself free. In the lands of the Allies the autocracy will be weakened by an Allied victory. In Germany the junkers will be strong if they win the war, and their strength will revive junkerism all over the earth. If the Allies win, it will weaken junkerdom everywhere.... The roaring of the big guns out at the point, seemed to Henry and me to be the crashing walls of privilege in the earth."

Here, in plain words, Mr. White expresses the terms upon which he and his democratic tradition are fused with the war. The Hamlet of nerveless speculation will not be satisfied. Caliban will remain savage. But the German has more to fear from this brand of faith than from any other. It is the core of fundamental American aspiration. It should govern every move of American policy. It is worth every drop of American blood.

International Structure

F. H.

Démocratie et Politique Etrangère, par Joseph Barthélemy. Paris: Félix Alcan. 10 francs.

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us.

HATEVER M. Barthélemy writes he discusses with sure knowledge and high distinction. Certainly there is no volume in existence which so valuably orientates the general reader into the heart of the greatest problem before Even the specialist may well stand amazed at the vast resources M. Barthélemy has at his command. Biographies, speeches, newspapers, dispatches, treaties-all of these are ransacked with amiable liberality to point the moral that is preached. The book, of course, is especially grounded in French experience; and signs are not wanting that when the author deserts the country of his origin he writes only with an outsider's knowledge. It is unfair, for instance, to pillory the Union of Democratic Control on the strength of a government prosecution; as well attack John Bright because he did not win the approval of Queen Victoria. It is ungenerous to explain the Irish Rebellion as a deliberate attempt to prejudice the liberties of Europe; certain of M. Barthélemy's friends, M. Paul Dubois, for example, could have informed him differently. But these, after all, are small blemishes upon so vast a canvas as the author has sought to trace. They are the kind of error he will omit when the cooled passion of peace enables him to prepare a second edition.

Broadly speaking, M. Barthélemy attacks three problems. He tries, in the first place, to overthrow the general notion that a democracy is unsuited to the carrying-on of

foreign policy. It is, of course, an old story. We all know how a monarchy is supposed to provide unity and continuity, permanence and the joys of secrecy. We have all been shown how royal marriages and royal tact, royal visits and personal diplomacy are guarantees of prestige and peace such as no republican or democratic régime can offer. M. Barthélemy attacks this thesis in two ways. He shows historically that it is false; and by a comparison of French diplomacy under the third republic with that of her monarchical neighbors he has no difficulty in repulsing the legend of its inferiority. Indeed, anyone who bethinks him of names like Jules Cambon, Jusserand, Gérard, Delcassé, will have no doubts upon this head. A recent and famous examination of the English foreign office has shown how much it has to gain by democratization; and anyone who has at all minutely studied the internal organization of the French ministry knows how much it would gain if the traditions of the second empire could be left behind. On the other hand, it is clear that America has still to develop the technique of diplomacy; her embassies can no longer be regarded as gilded resting-places for the millionaires who contribute to the election funds. Provision has still to be made at the universities for the kind of special training that the budding French diplomat gets at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Because the State Department is to be democratic, it does not mean that it is to be inefficient.

Few parts of M. Barthélemy's book are more suggestive than his discussion of secret diplomacy. He is convinced, I think rightly, that most international negotiations are too delicate to be conducted in public. But he presents no single effective argument in favor of keeping secret treaties that have once been concluded. He makes a valuable point when he suggests, as Mr. Balfour has recently insisted, that the association of non-ministerial members of the legislature diminishes the power and prestige of the foreign minister; yet I think it is a point dependent upon the personal character of the minister concerned. Mr. Wilson has the Senate Committee at his side, but it does not seem unduly to depress his opportunity of expression. Nor, when M. Barthélemy emphasizes the essential executive character of treaty-making, does he sufficiently make allowances for the unlooked-for results? Sir Edward Grey's diplomacy has recently been given by a German ambassador what is probably the highest tribute a foreign minister has ever received; but it is worth noting that his conversations with M. Cambon from his assumption of office, of which only the two or three highest cabinet ministers were aware, while they were not technically binding upon the House of Commons, did constitute a source of moral obligation. M. Barthélemy enlarges upon English public apathy about foreign affairs, and I suppose the same is true of America; but the only way to remove that apathy is to make them interesting, and the only way to make them interesting is to make them public. I can remember, for instance, the passionate sympathy of England with the Russian Revolution of 1905 after men like Mr. Nevinson had set it in its proper perspective, but, soon afterwards, the Anglo-Russian agreement was concluded and the press, with certain honorable exceptions, ceased to report the progress of the Revolution, with the result that, on the outbreak of war, the internal situation of Russia was totally obscured. If it had been ceaselessly remembered, not only might the present catastrophe have been averted, but, years before, a constitutionally organized Russia might have been secured.

M. Barthélemy has discussed with particular fullness the democratic control of the actual processes of war, and here, naturally, he has much of importance to reveal. For it must be remembered that this is the first large war of modern history in which democratic organization has been put to the test. Everyone knows the type of man who wants to stop all national life in war-time and hand us over to the general staff and the military police. M. Barthélemy's exhaustive analysis of the five stages of French experience since 1914 shows, I think, conclusively, the immense superiority of a régime in which the civil power is dominant. French history, like English history, seems to suggest that once the domain of tactics is passed, the peculiar cast of the military mind is unsuited to the problems that arise. The position of the parliamentary institutions is not so clear; but it is worth insisting here that three French Prime Ministers have paid glowing tributes to the value of the parliamentary commissions, and that the virtual abdication of Parliament in England has generated an atmosphere of intrigue too poisonous to be long endured. Nor is it in this connection unimportant that the one fundamental thing of which we complain in Germany is the absence of a parliamentary régime. It is probable, to take only a single instance, that there are few things for which we have more cause to be grateful in this war than that session in which M. Briand forced the resignation of M. Ribot on the latter's attitude to peace negotiations in 1917. Here, as elsewhere, no one can object to the utmost concentration of power in governmental hands; but it is a power which, at every stage, must meet with close and public scrutiny. So far, at any rate, we have no guarantee of such analysis save in the existence of deliberative assemblies.

The last of M. Barthélemy's questions is the relation of democracy to peace, and though there are many fine things here well said, it is, undoubtedly, inferior in quality to the earlier parts of his book. He rightly emphasizes, at the very outset, the important relation between foreign affairs and domestic policy; but with that key to the whole problem in his hands he becomes a traditionalist and discourses on geographical boundaries, ethnic relations, the respect of treaties and so forth. No one, I take it, can examine, say, the history of France without seeing the important part played therein by the Rhine and the Alps and the Pyrenees, just as no one will deny the vital factor of race in the problem of Austria-Hungary. But, when the last totals of these subjects have been added up, there remains the economic factor, and it clearly outweighs all others. The thing that is going to preserve peace after the war is not the League of Nations, or any similar machinery; it is the determination of organized labor in every country that the industrial system shall be so organized as to prevent the competition of capital in foreign countries from exploiting national prestige. We are going to have no more Mannesmanns in Morocco and no more Rhodes in Africa. Granted a genuine industrial freedom and the international economic relationships it demands, the spirit that makes most for war is largely exorcized. A failure to perceive this adequately is the main defect of M. Barthélemy's volume; but it remains, with the admirable essay of Maxime Leroy, one of the two best treatises on international structure that France has contributed to the making of peace. H. J. L.

Ezra Pound-Proseur

Pavannes and Divisions, by Ezra Pound. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.

IT seems an incredible thing that the poet who wrote

Provença sometime about 1911 is also the studio oracle that in 1918 has put his excursions and false alarums into

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such permanent type. But here is the unbelievable; a carefully enshrined series of trivialities, translations, annotated excerpts, beauty submerged in banalities, criticism smothered in a mixture of snobbery and bad temper. Yet it is something more than a jumble of mannered prose and ostentatious finalities. It is the record of a creative talent grown sterile, of a disorderly retreat into the mazes of technique and pedantry. No living American poet started with a more vigorous determination than Ezra Pound. He began by blazing his own path through a trampled poetic forest. Then he started wandering whenever he saw a by-road, followed every curious twist and turn, pursued the will-o'the-wisps of the bizarre, until finally he has lost himself in the backwoods and marshes of literature. Equipped with a restless athleticism and a freshness of personality, he did something to words that, even though it speedily degenerated into an idiom as tight as the clichés from which it reacted, was an impetus and influence to a small regiment of writers. He was one of the most pitiless antagonists of the mawkish and treacle-dripping verse that was being manufactured and retailed under the gaudy label of poetry; it was under his leadership that the Imagists became not only a group, but a fighting protest.

It is scarcely fair to argue, as has been attempted, that England changed the eager, experimental boy into a cynical litterateur. One may become as completely immersed in the pedantry of culture in the Philadelphia which Pound left as in the Bohemia of London which he now inhabits. There was undoubtedly something of the scholiast and a little of the antiquarian in his nonage; even his first book, for all its intensity, throbs with a passion that is, at bottom, a literary passion.

Provença, in spite of its echoes of Browning and Bertran de Born, was a highly personal and distinctive collection. In it Pound achieved a half defiant, half disdainful independence. It made the publication of Lustra, his most recent volume of poems, doubly disappointing. Lustra was not so much a collection of poems as a catch-all for Pound's slightest gibes and gesticulations. And Pavannes and Divisions seems to serve the same purpose for Pound's prose dicta. Here are the scrapped experiments, introductions to a catalogue of vortographs, malformed models, filings and tailings from the craftsman's workshop, a list of exceptions filed with the editor of Reedy's Mirror in 1916, an extract from a letter to the Dial circa 1913-all the old, petty irritations and amiable heresies are carefully collected, tagged and set down for the edification of the cognoscenti, the delicately attuned, the nuance worshippers. Possibly the final criticism of the book is that of its publisher, Mr. Knopf, who in an advertisement couples it with Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and labels them both "For the Intelligentsia."

It remains to be seen how much the intransigents and æstheticians will appreciate this collection of out of date manifestoes and poorly disguised platitudes. The intelligentsia will doubtless be startled to learn that "Poetry is a composition of words set to music," that "Our only measure of truth is our own perception of truth," that it is not advisable when writing a symmetrical poem to "put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining yacuums with slush." The intelligentsia will be still more uplifted by finding in this volume L'Homme Moyen Sensuel, a long piece of doggerel, in which Pound says, in pointless and mostly false rhyme, what H. L. Mencken has been saying in pointed prose for the last dozen years.

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But Pound compensates for such bland repetitions and truisms. Frequently he gives us criticism which is as penetrating and graceful as, "Shelley's 'Sensitive Plant' is one of the rottennest poems ever written," or "Milton is the most unpleasant of English poets. His popularity has been largely due to his bigotry." Browning usually commands his admiration, but "Crabbe will perhaps keep better than Browning." Wordsworth is recognized as a silly old sheep with a genius for Imagism and this talent, or the fruits of this talent, he buried in a desert of bleatings." ("Don't," says Pound in A Few Don'ts to Poets, such an expression as 'dim lands of peace." Such a mixture is sloppy and unnatural; it "dulls the image.") Education is characterized as an onanism of the soul." And the speech of the Sanatogen school reinforces his style when Pound, in an energetic effort to define beauty, says: "You feel bucked up when you come on a swift moving thought in Plato or a fine line in a statue." In fact, these scattered essays with their enthusiasm for Arnold Dolmetsch, for certain neglected Elizabethans and for the twelfth century troubadours (by far the most careful, as it is the least selfconscious of the chapters) reveal Pound less as a pioneer than as a press agent. But his is a publicity strictly for the intelligentsia. Pound never lets one forget his scorn of America and his antagonism to the crowd. His unconcealed dislike of Demos, half contempt, half fear, together with his patrician attitudes, make him seem something of an anachronism, a hyperæsthetic pedant, a disgruntled aristogogue.

This dissatisfaction with his age and his inability to command its attention accounts for most of Pound's splenetic outbursts. The nimble arrogance of Whistler has been a bad example for him. For where Whistler carried off his impertinences with a light and dazzling dex

terity, Pound, a far heavier-handed controversialist, begins by being truculent and ends by being tiresome. He is best in his least original moments, when he is estimating the richness of Remx de Gourmont, interpreting the exuberant artifice of the Provençal poets or translating the twelve dialogues of Fontenelle that are so strange a contrast, in spite of their classical similarity, to Landor's Imaginary Conversations. These essays do much to offset the vacuity of Stark Realism or the sexual preoccupations in Jodindranath Mawhwor's Occupation, which masks as a general irony but is actually a satire on itself.

And so the reckless poet of 1910 develops into the sophisticated proseur; he declines into querulous dogmatizing; he becomes the scholiast gone to seed. Even more than in Lustra, one senses the decadence which appraises the values in life chiefly as æsthetic values and which expresses its superiority in petulance instead of assurance, in a flash of erudition rather than the light of wisdom. It is a queer, out of tune collection; queerer than ever this year, 1918. LOUIS UNTERMEYER.

The Young Modern and the Puritan

The Heart of the Puritan: Selections from Letters and Journals. Edited by Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Ph.D. New York: The Macmillan Co.

"THE Puritans had no dances or festivals. They

burned witches instead." So wrote Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Politics. So have written, or inferred, a good many of the best men writing today. The Seven Arts Magazine, unfortunately suspended, kept on saying it by implication through its too brief career. Mr. Mencken says it in his book Prefaces. Theodore Dreiser says it, in fiction and in essay, on every occasion. Even Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, who ought to know better, hints at it. And as for Floyd Dell!

In fact, the whole younger set, including Mr. Dreiser, never see the word "puritan" without getting out their axes, refreshing their memories of Freud and Forel, remembering bitterly the small towns they were brought up in, thanking God they can find the way to Greenwich Village, even if they do not live there and then taking another whirl at the long-suffering men whose manners and customs, distorted and unillumined by that unearthly light in which they lived, have yet been the mold in which our country's laws, literature, education, religions, economics, morals and points of view have become petrified. Europe and the east have poured uncounted millions of people across fifty states, with all their old and deep-rooted ideals of civilization-and Puritanism has swallowed them up and they are not.

And the fun of it is that a large number of them seem never to have read anything in American literature, or any literature for that matter, written before 1875. In fact, a better date would be 1890, when Wells and Shaw first burst upon the world. They know all there is to be known about the modern Englishmen and the modern French and the really modern Russians, of the Italians who belong gladly to the future and of the Viennese psychology which explains them all.

But they talk about the Puritans without knowing, apparently, any of that vast literature, secular and theological, sermons, histories, treatises, diaries and letters, crabbed, formal, long-winded, homely and unworldly, shrewd and zealous, dogmatic and fanatical, which poured from the