drawing to a close. For one thing, he says, the circumstances of life are stranger and more fanciful to-day than ever before, and only by an effort of will do the realists keep their eyes on trivial or sordid details. Great forces are being unchained, forces that irresistibly appeal to the imagination. According to Mr. McCarthy, not even the daring fancy of Jules Verne could picture anything stranger than the marvels that are to-day parts of our lifethe swift and enormous ocean-steamers, the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane. "Writers cannot compel the world to listen to their dry recitals of petty af-. fairs when wonders such as these are happening all about." But Mr. McCarthy does not think that the romanticists who soon are to supplant the realists in popular favor will follow slavishly in the footsteps of the novelists of the "gadzooks and zounds" school of twenty years ago. They will apply, he believes, the methods of realism to the objects of romance. As examples of this sort of writing he instances such fairy stories as those of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm-imaginative, highly romantic creations which, nevertheless, are almost photographic in their attention to commonplace detail. He says: "I think that the new romanticists will be different from the old. They will have learned something from the realists; no important literary movement is without its effect. The new romanticists will be less conventional than the old; they will Northwest, Sir Gilbert may be said to have applied some of the methods of realism to the materialism of romance. For Zola himself never showed the naked souls of men and women more have no use for such stock figures as the impossibly wicked villain and the impossibly virtuous heroine of the older novelists. When they write about the people of the romantic ages they will not be afraid to show them as they actually clearly than does this Canadian writer. But the difference between "You Never Know Your Luck" and "Nana," for example, is that the souls of gallant Kitty Tynan, Shiel Crozier and his pathetic little wife are worth seeing. Crozier is the impoverished son of an Irish baronet, who comes to Canada to make a fortune rather than live on his wife's money. He quarrels with her before he leaves, because he has still further impoverished himself by losing on a horse race. The dea ex machina is Kitty Tynan, a charming but sharptongued young Irish-Canadian, who in spite of certain temptations to take Mrs. Crozier's place, brings that somewhat irritating young woman to Canada and gives the Crozier household a peace it has not known before. is all highly imaginative, but thoroly Vernon living among the golden wheat-fields of plausible, and the people are real. Sir A KNIGHT OF NEW ROMANCE Sir Gilbert Parker has found an Irish Diana Canada. It Gilbert Parker has never conceived a plot more ingenious. The Boston Transcript lectures Sir Gilbert severely for his descriptive writing, his rhapsodies over the miles of wheat gleaming in the sun, and over the charms of Kitty Tynan. But there is action enough to satisfy most critics, and even the Baltimore Sun, which considers "You Never Know Your Luck" inferior to "The Judgment House," admits that "there is a touch of nobility about it which the greater book lacks." S O. HENRY UNDER THE SCALPEL OF THE INCE the death of "O. Henry" his stories have been the subject of much eulogy but of little discriminating criticism. His picturesque personality has appealed to the imagination of the thousands who enjoy his writings and a not unattractive sentimentality has characterized most appreciations of his rich and varied talent. Because of this, Professor Hyder E. Rollins's critical study of his work in The Sewanee Review is of special interest. Professor Rollins considers O. Henry with the impartiality and detachment with which he would consider Thackeray or Coleridge, and with the same serious ness. Professor Rollins, like most critics, acknowledges O. Henry's mastery of the short-story form, saying that in this respect no American writer except Poe has excelled him. He praises, too, "his frank individuality, his genuine democracy, his whole-souled optimism, his PROFESSOR perennial humor, his sympathetic treatment of characteristic American life.' But, in spite of his enthusiasm for this shrewd and kindly interpreter of his fellow citizens, he calls attention to several of his faults. What he has to say concerning the conclusions of O. Henry's stories is worthy of attention. Children, he says, play crack-the-whip not for the fun of the long preliminary run but for the excitement of the final sharp twist that throws them off their feet. So adults read O. Henry, impatiently glancing at the swiftly moving details in pleased expectancy of a surprising ending. The conclusion, he says, is an enigma: the author has your nerves all aquiver until the last sentence. He believes, however, that this continued use of the unexpected ending grows tiresome, and that when one sits down and reads all or the greater part of the two hundred and forty-eight short stories, he feels that the biggest surprise O. Henry could have given him would have been a natural, expected ending. Professor Rollins regrets O. Henry's mannerisms and thinks that they are likely to lower his rank in literature. He is inclined to believe that O. Henry failed to take himself and his art seriously. He adds: "All critics, so far as I know, class O. Henry's stories as hyphenated, capitalized 'Short-Stories'; but if they hold to the hide-bound a priori rules which require a short-story to fulfil the three classic unities, to deal with one character only, and to show rigid compression and condensation of details, they are hoist with their own petard. For O. Henry gleefully breaks every rule and heartily enjoys the critics' discomfiture. The only thing that may be confidently postulated of his stories is that they usually produce a single effect on the mind of the reader. This alone, it would seem, is enough to make a short story a 'shortstory': most certainly it was the ideal that Poe had in mind. O. Henry recog nized no rigid, unalterable laws of structure: the story was the thing, and there was a best method of telling each story. Indeed he declared: 'Rule I of storywriting is to write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. In writing, forget the public. I get a story thoroly in mind before I sit down at my table. Then I write it out quickly, and, without revising it, send it to my publishers. In this way I am able to judge my work almost as the public judges it. I've seen stories in type that I didn't at first blush recognize as my own." He finds in most of O. Henry's stories stages of plot as definite as those in the Shakespearean drama. This goes to prove, he believes, that even tho O. Henry pokes fun at all rules he obeys them in the fundamental particulars. "He is a clever architectonist in spite of himself," he says. "While he prided himself upon his disregard of conventional rules and upon his originality, his technique (if one ignores his manneristic digressions) conforms. closely to the very rules that he affected to despise." The Bookman has for many months been devoting much space to the life and works of O. Henry and a recent issue of that interesting periodical contains a symposium on the relative merits of his stories. Booth Tarkington, Owen Johnson, George Barr McCutchen, Mrs. Sidney Porter (O. Henry's wife), Robert H. Davis, Arthur W. Page, Gilman Hall and Arthur Maurice selected, each for himself, the ten stories that had to them the most appeal, not necessarily his ten best stories. The result of the canvas was astonishing in the diversity of opinion revealed. As the editor of The Bookman says, a similar canvas as to the most popular of Kipling's short stories would unquestionably show almost unanimity of choice. Every one of the lists would contain "The Man Who Would be King," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "Without Benefit of Clergy," "The Finest Story in the World," and "The Brushwood Boy." It is doubtful if ten lists of ten titles Nashville "roast" that was given that story and I hear his puzzled, "Why did it offend? Do you see anything in it that should offend?" "The Fifth Wheel" -and we stand together on Madison wind, looking at the line waiting for Square in the deep snow, or the biting beds. When we turn away ten men have found shelter. The recording angel must have seen us there some of the snowy nights of 1908. He must have known that when we turned homeward there were times when O. Henry had not a dollar fifty left in his pocket.' One story in Mrs. Porter's list that is likely to surprise readers is 'Madame Bo-Peep of the Ranches. But Mrs. Porter tells us that story figured largely in her own life. In the spring of 1905 her mother came home from Greensboro and said to her: "Your old friend Will Porter is a writer. He lives in New York and writes under the name of O. Henry.' 'O. Henry! In my desk lay "Madame BoPeep" and I loved her. I wrote O. Henry a note.. "If you are not William Porter don't bother to answer," I said. He bothered to answer. The letter came as fast as Uncle Sam could bring it. "Some day when you are not real busy," he wrote, "won't you sit down at your desk where you keep those antiquated stories and write to me. I'd be so pleased to hear something about what the years have done for you, and what you think about when the tree frogs begin to holler in the evening." Thus after many years a boy and girl friendship was renewed. Last in my list, but first in my heart, is "Adventures in Neurasthenia," the new title, "Let Me Feel Your Pulse"-the publishers gave. It brings back the little office in Asheville, the pad, empty except for the title and the words: "So I went to a docthat made by O. Henry's wife. Of it. tor." So often at the last the pad was the editor of The Bookman says: HE NEGLECTED THE UNITIES BUT O. Henry is not the American Balzac or the empty. The sharp pencil points in their I. tary Greek in his first year in a public school; it is amazing on the part of a young man who has matriculated at a British university. As Mr. Brooks says: "It gives color to the statement made by him and by his critics that he was by nature inaccurate in rudiments." In 1862, after he had been elected Fellow of Magdalen, he had a serious illness which made him for three years unable to use either eyes or brain for severe study. "What effect this had," writes Mr. Brooks, "on the ultimate work of a mind naturally weak in its grasp of rudiments and constantly impressionable may be imagined by anyone who has formed an idea of Symonds's place in English criticism." "Truly, there is something catlike about modern pagans," remarks Mr. Brooks, commenting upon Swinburne's biting criticism of Symonds's "In the Key of Blue." The adjective may have been suggested by his previous quotations, those of Symonds's observations on the work of his brother "Platonist," Walter Pater. Writing of "Marius the Epicurean," Symonds said: "I shrink from approaching Pater's style, which has a peculiarly disagreeable effect upon my nerves-like the presence of a civet-cat." And five years later he wrote: "I tried Pater's 'Appreciations' to-day, and found myself wandering about among the 'precious' sentences, just as tho I had lost myself in a sugarcane plantation." Mr. Brooks adds that no one could have been so acutely annoyed by Pater's style who was not himself on the perilous edge of preciosity, and that Symonds was often preserved from preciosity only by the other extreme of half-heedless improvization. Mr. Brooks calls Symonds "a victim of our modern passion for the picturesque," and says that with all his intense feeling for individual men and women, his passion for comradeship, S 131 Franco-Austrian government by a speech of Garibaldi. Four hundred were taken prisoners under his hotel window; and he observes, 'I often wondered what a demonstration meant. This is a pretty and picturesque specimen.' This amazing sociological insensibility might be consistent in an artist; in a historian it is, to say the least, singular. And it is all the more singular when we recall the sympathy of Symonds with historical liberators like Savonarola and Campanella. Human evolution, the liberation of men, was indeed an animating principle of his entire critical and religious philosophy. Are we forced to conclude then that his major sympathies were, in fact, purely literary? His life at Davos seems to belie that, but the self-conscious pursuit of the picturesque is perilous to the most genuine types of intellectual integrity, Certainly this tourist attitude toward Italy, as a kind of museum filled only with beautiful dead things, gives a false perspective even to his magnum opus." In his concluding chapter, Mr. Brooks writes that he finds in Symonds "a defect of power and also a defect of coherence." The writings of Symonds, he insists, do not stand together as do those of Arnold or Ruskin. There has never been a collected edition of his works, and even the idea of such a thing, we are told, is inconceivable for the following reasons: "With all their community of tone and subject, their marked evolution of style, their consistently delivered message, they lack that highest unifying bond of personality. Some of them are isolated popular handbooks, others are esoteric and for the few, others again are merely mediocre and have been forgotten. Individually they appeal to many different types of mind. Taken together they do not supply any composite human demand, nor are they powerful enough to create any such demand. They are indeed rather the product of energy than of power." THE BEST POEM EVER WRITTEN IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE OME twenty-five poets were asked by the New York Times Sunday Magazine to name the best short poem that they had read in the English language. Six of them were unable or unwilling to decide on any one poem and of the others only two voted for the same poem. That poem was Keats's "Ode a Grecian Urn." Each of three poets named two poems between which they were unable to choose. William Stanley Braithwaite named Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Shelley's "The World's Great Age Begins Anew." John Masefield, strangely enough considering his mo оп dernity, selected Chaucer's "Ballad of Good Counsel" and Shakespeare's 146th Sonnet. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, treating the matter with characteristic levity, named Blake's "Tiger" and the immortal limerick that begins "There was a young lady from Niger." Those who did not name their favorites were Henry Mills Alden, Charles Buxton Going, Thomas Hardy, Brander Matthews, Curtis Hidden Page and Ella Wheeler Willcox. Mr. Hardy, indeed, was so severe with the idea of the symposium as to say: "This attempt to appraise by comparison is, if you will allow me to say so, one of the literary vices of the time, only a little above the inquiry, 'Who is the biggest poet, novelist or prize-fighter?' tho not quite so low down as that deepest deep of literary valuation, 'Who is the biggest seller?"" Here are the other poets who voted and the poems they selected: Witter Bynner, Wordsworth's "She Dwelt. Among the Untrodden Ways"; Bliss Carman, Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; Madison Cawein, Poe's "To One in Paradise"; John Erskine, Scott's "Proud Maisie Is in the Wood"; Theodosia Garrison, Lang's "Lost Love"; Arthur Guiterman, Shelley's "Ozymandias of Egypt"; Thomas S. Jones, Jr., Keats's "Ode on Melancholy"; Joyce Kilmer, Patmore's "The Toys"; Richard Le Gallienne, Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"; Edwin Markham, Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears"; James. Whitcomb Riley, Longfellow's "The Bridge"; Clinton Scollard, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; George Sterling, Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes"; Charles Hanson Towne, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; Thomas Walsh, Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness"; Edward J. Wheeler, Blanco White's sonnet on Night." . In addition to this list, the Times tabulated also the names of poems which the poets who contributed to the symposium mentioned as among the best in the language, some of those who were unwilling to single out one special favorite mentioning a dozen poems that they considered of equal merit. There are sixty-eight poems by forty poets on this supplemental list, and not John Keats but Robert Browning has the place of honor in it, five of his poems being mentioned, and one of these "God's in His Heaven," from "Pippa Passes"-being mentioned twice. Matthew Arnold is a close second, five of his poems being mentioned. The most popular poem on this supplemental list, however, is Shelley's "To a Skylark," which four poets placed among their favorites. Commenting on the results of the inquiry, the compiler of the symposium in the Times says in part: "Some of the omissions in the list of favorite poems are surprising. For instance, Edmund Spenser is traditionally the 'poets' poet.' Yet none of the modern followers of his craft thought of him, FROM OLYMPUS BY RAIL Arrived at Forty-second Street, Alcmene's son submits to a slight operation. it seems, when they reviewed their poetic experiences; 'A Ditty in Praise of Eliza, Queen of the Shepherds,' goes unpraised, nor are the poets of to-day appreciative of the magical refrain 'Sweete Themmes! runne softly till I end my Song.' only one of his poems being on the list of "Shakespeare himself fares rather badly, twenty. Also faring badly are Milton, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Whittier, Lowell, Sidney Lanier, Walt Whitman, Ben Jonson, William Butler Yeats, Alice Meynell, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, George Meredith. These are a few of the poets whom every one might reasonably expect to find mentioned in the letters received in answer to the N. Y. Times's question. Yet not one of these was named by a of the twenty-five contributors to the symposium." It is not probable that many of the poets endeavored to apply fixed standards of criticism. Most of them merely named their favorite poems and undoubtedly that was what the Times expected them to do. Mr. Thomas Walsh, however, in defending his choice of Milton's "On His Blindness," wrote: "It seems to me that some objectivity of judgment in reply to your query might result from a rigid control of personality on the part of your criticsa sort of ascetical exercize of restraint regarding 'what appeals to me,' a relinguishment (as far as may be) of the meum et tuum so dominant in recent criticism, and a return to an envisagement, cold and comfortless, perhaps, of literary standards that are set to reproach us across a thousand years." Desirable as this "objectivity of judgment" may be, it cannot be denied that some of the most interesting letters in the symposium are those which simply express and justify a personal taste. When you look at the new clock in the Grand Central Station you see Hercules attentive to Mercury's celebration of the Twentieth-Century Limited, and you notice that not even Minerva finds a time-table easy to decipher. the figure, it seems to have all the lightness of flight owing to its poise and to the sweep of its graceful draperies. Peering out from behind Mercury is an eagle with outstretched wings. On the right arc of the arch is a figure of Hercules and on the left one of Minerva, holding a scroll. None of the figures is detached from the wall. They are simply the carved faces of huge blocks. According to the specifications the blocks were to be twelve feet four inches square and four feet thick. The center of gravity is behind Mercury. Mr. Whitney Warren, the architect of the Grand Central Terminal, in discussing the group with the Tribune reporter, made this explanation of its symbolism: fications. This portal was usually decorated and elaborated into an Arch of Triumph, erected to some naval or military victory, or to the glory of some great personage. The city of to-day has no wall surrounding that may serve, by elaboration, as a pretext to such glorification, but none the less the gateway must exist, and in the case of New York and other cities it is through a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very center of the town. "Such is the Grand Central Terminal, and the motive of its façade is an attempt to offer a tribute to the glory of commerce as exemplified in that institution. The architectural composition consists of three great portals crowned by a sculptural group, the whole to stand as a monument to the glory of commerce as typified by Mercury, supported by moral and physical energy-Minerva and Hercules. |