terms the "grand style." His definition of the "grand style" is significant, in view of its rarity among the writers of to-day. "With what relief do we return to it, after the wallowings and rhapsodies, the agitations and prostitutions, of those who have it not!" He indicates first what the "grand style" does not consist in:

"There are certain things that cannot -because of something essentially ephemeral in them-be dealt with in the grand style.

"Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists -what you will-and we may be able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations; but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter!

"The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that makes the grand style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be expressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous -like Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that the important thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, or discussion upon Creed or Commandment. Creeds change, Morality changes, Mysticism changes, Philosophy changes-but the Word of our God-the Word of Humanity-in gesture, in ritual, in the heart's natural crying-abideth forever!" The very existence of this "grand style," John Cowper Powys points out, is a protest against false views of "progress" and of "evolution." "Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions; he may build up one Utopia after another; but the grand style will still remain; will remain as the ultimate expression of his life that ⚫ cannot change - while he remains Man."

How far may we live in the light of the grand style? We can live, Mr. Powys is quite certain, in the atmosphere, the temper, the mood, the attitude towards things which "the grand style" used by the great "planetary creators" evokes and sustains. Already there certain individuals who have discovered the secret of living in the "grand style":

are

"There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have a way of troubling us by their aloofness from our controversies, our disputes, our argu

The explorations of John Cowper Powys have been into the farthest spiritual north to the highest parallel of mental latitude.

ments, our 'great problems.' We call them Epicures, Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists and Virtuosos. And yet not one of these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and the temper of 'the grand style'-and that is why they are so irritating and provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of the consciousness what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is enough to occupy their consciousness and their passion. In this sphere-in the sphere of the inevitable things' of human

life-everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a symbol-be it noted-but a sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink; their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctances of their devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their long loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden 'lashings out'; their hate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us become, every one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns, as a 'last day,' and to

make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its sunsetting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods-this is to live in the spirit of the 'grand style.' It has nothing to do with 'right' or 'wrong.' Saints may practice it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant."

The critics of the Powys type of criticism, as exemplified in the Boston Transcript, are of the opinion that he

is "inclined to set forth his individual judgments as if they were universal opinions. The result is an abundance of commonplaces which, mingled with an ecstatic and ejaculatory style, fails to impress or convince the reader." The same writer notes in a summary dismissal of Mr. Powys' manner of expression: "Doubtless some may joy of it, doubtless it may be more impressive as a spoken message from a platform, but on the printed page it scarcely seems to be of any permanent value."

1

T

HE only American name that Henry James found occasion to name in his latest appraisal of contemporary English fic tion ("Notes on Novelists," Scribner's) was that of Edith Wharton. Even more recently, in the pages of the English Quarterly Review, Percy Lubbock plays a glowing tribute to the art of this distinguished American woman, considering in detail her short stories and novels, and bestowing upon her the high praise that as writer she has never relapsed into a settled life, that the entire bulk of her

a

work has been "the adventure of her rare and distinguished critical intelligence." By a curious coincidence, Robert Herrick has just contributed to the New Republic his own estimate of the work of his fellow-craftsman, an estimate that must prove a valuable corrective upon the enthusiasm which the James and Lubbock tributes might tend to evoke.

"She has waylaid all manner of dramatic moments in widely various scenes," notes Percy Lubbock, "not merely in different lands under different skies, but in a large diversity of mental and moral climates."

"She has made many experiments, and has been drawn aside into not a few digressions, some of which have seemed to break, a little too abruptly, the forward march of her work. Yet her rest

less movement has never been wayward, for it has been directed by a single intention; and it is precisely this that has brought her work to the brilliance it has latterly reached, not merely of lucidity and precision, but of quick color and expressive charm. Her intention has clearly been to leave no image and no moment uncriticized, to analyze every impression and to interrogate every conclusion; and the timely moral pointed by her work is the dependence of the reason and beauty of literary form upon this activity."

Each of Mrs. Wharton's later books represents for Percy Lubbock a new difficulty mastered. "The House of Mirth," "Ethan Frome," "The Custom of the Country," "The Reef," "The Fruit of the Tree," all indicate to the English critic a talent which has never tired of the enterprize of criticism, and for which, consequently, one cannot And with her prescribe limitations. development he notes the new attainment of the American authoress to round and fuse her subject, throwing over it the light "of so receptive and intent a mood that, when once the development is started, it carries itself through to the end, moving as one mass and needing no further impul sion." He concludes:

"Her books are the books of an imagination far more easily stimulated to work

OF HER ART

than induced to ruminate. Their curious lack of anything that could be disengaged as a philosophy of life, a characteristic synthesis of belief, is no doubt their weakness from one point of view, just as their fine clear-cut outline is their strength from another. The mind that has never, so to say, compromized itself with life, that has kept its critical integrity entirely out of the way of imaginable superstitution, must naturally pay for its fastidiousness in some sort; and it may well pay by the loss of the fullest possible intimacy with the stuff of character-especially of social character as opposed to individual—an intimacy more lightly won by the uncritical mind which

does not know how to use it. There is

accordingly a certain amount of Mrs. Wharton's work which shows the general defect of the tour de force-a defect, not of sinew or bone, but of vein and marrow. Such are the penalties of a talent whose leading qualities are swiftness and acuteness. But it is precisely in the case of a talent like this that summary inferences are most misleading, for its future can never be predicted. As time goes on its power is revealed by the fact that it begins to add to itself, right and left, the very virtues which appeared furthest from its reach, and to produce work which has gained in every respect, in freshness and vigor as in controlled flexibility, over its earlier experiments. This has been the history of the work of Mrs. Wharton; and, because it has not only had a history but is constantly making one, always attacking new positions and never repeating either a failure or a success, it is work of the kind most of all interesting to criticism, work of which, in the middle of its course, nothing can be foretold but that its best is yet to come."

Robert Herrick readily grants Mrs. Wharton's technical virtuosity as a fact.

She writes, perhaps, "too consciously well." Her technic, he points out, is founded on the approved tradition of French fiction, "the tradition of refinements and exclusions, of subtleties and intentions, the tradition of Flaubert and Turgenev, on which Mr. James admiringly formed himself a generation ago, rather than on the richer if less esthetically satisfying tradition of English and Russian fiction, of Fielding and Thackeray, of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."

"Technical proficiency of any sort, according to any intelligent ideal, is commendable surely, but only in measure as it achieves the purpose of all technic, which is effective creation. No true artist can be content with a triumph of manner alone. If Mrs. Wharton were forced to remain on a solitary pedestal of technical proficiency, hers would be a lonely position in this day of unacademic freedom in all creative effort, and her admirers by dwelling too insistently on her excellent manner would do her a dubious service, all the more as their praises seem

to deny the validity of other and robuster ideals for the novel. It may well be, indeed, that French tradition with all its reservations is already doomed in favor of that freer, more epic treatment of life so much deprecated by Mr. James in his comments on Tolstoy."

But what, asks the Chicago novelist, has Edith Wharton done toward painting in our national canvas?

"Granting the utility and significance of all elements in the scene, granting at least for 'The House of Mirth' and 'The Fruit of the Tree,' the authenticity of figure of Lily Bart, which is doubtless the portrayal, nevertheless, beyond the single

most authoritative version ever rendered

of the shallowly rooted and socially obsessed American girl, there is little of importance that remains. For one reason, Mrs. Wharton's stories are almost man

less in any real conception of the sex, and in spite of the dominance of American women in our social world we have not yet reached the point where men are utterly negligible.

"As for the woman side of the picture, Mrs. Wharton's chosen contribution has been quite exclusively in the realm of social passion, which she has correctly portrayed as the pathological absorption of American women. Even her skill and her special knowledge have not saved her from exaggerations, unrealities, and repetitions. The prevailing tone, the final taste, of this American society is that of a marvelous thinness-tinniness, rather.

men

Are we as a people when we evolve into society, are our women, even, as tally and spiritually anemic as Mrs. Wharton's world betrays them? Without too easy a patriotism it may be doubted whether this clever observer has been fair even to our most fashionable circles. Certainly she has not cared to tone her pictures by vigorous contrasts or shaded examples. Instances of these she has offered, but with little enthusiasm; they are pallid ghosts, her nice people, who by right of soul as well as of blood belong to the world she has chosen to exploit. Why has Mrs. Wharton never cared to do more for them, for the Seldens, the Marvells?"

Primarily because she is not a social historian, he explains. The secret of her real power is to be found in "Ethan Frome." This shortened novel is a monochrome prose tragedy, depicting spiritual conflicts which involve no necessity of picturing a civilization, "But her talent, a defining, analyzing and subtilizing talent, has found little that was really congenial or suggestive in the common run of our coarsely accented national life. She has rarely caught its more significant notes or tried to peer beneath its obvious superficialities, nor has she been warmly charmed by its kaleidoscopic glitter. The larger canvas, therefore, I infer, is not her natural opportunity, competent artist that she is."

T

MESSAGES FROM THE POETS

HERE was a lively discussion on the subject of vers libre at the meeting of the Poetry Society of America in February. The discussion was finally seen to be revolving around the question whether the new-old form should or should not be termed poetry. But there seemed to be general agreement that, whatever it is to be called, vers libre has justified itself as literature. It certainly does make more shadowy than ever the line between prose and poetry. But "we should worry" over that fact. If free verse can bring, as it has brought, a new ardor into the creation of vital literature, it has justified its existence. Which, however, is very different from saying that it should or will supplant the old forms of poetry. It does not need to do that to justify itself.

of

Here is an interesting specimen free verse, by the author of "The Spoon River Anthology." We take it from Poetry:

SILENCE.

BY EDGAR LEE MASTERS.

HAVE known the silence of the stars and of the sea,

And the silence of the city when it
pauses,

And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick

When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,

Of what use is language?

A beast of the field moans a few times

When death takes its young.

273

And all our passion, all our desperate prayer

Held them, O held them not.

A little of what Ruskin called "the pathetic fallacy" - endowing animals tions-is inevitable and pleasing in poand inanimate objects with human emoetry. But Katharine Tynan's new volume, "The Flower of Peace," is so filled with pathetic fallacy that there is not

realities

We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier Sitting in front of the grocery store, "How did you lose your leg?" And the old soldier is struck with silence, Or his mind flies away Because he cannot concentrate it on Get

tysburg.

It comes back jocosely

And he says, "A bear bit it off." And the boy wonders, while the old soldier

Dumbly, feebly lives over

The flashes of guns, the thunder of can

non,

The shrieks of the slain,

And himself lying on the ground,

And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.

But if he could describe it all

He would be an artist.

But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds

Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred, And the silence of a great love,

And the silence of an embittered friendship.

There is the silence of a spiritual crisis, Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,

country who earnestly defends free verse as having saved his flagging poetic inspiration from a total collapse. His volume is all written in this form, and it is well worth while for those who wish to make a study of the form. His poems, like most of the free-verse poems, has a certain preciosity about them that makes them for the elect rather than for the many, which is just contrary to the claims most frequently made for such verse. From "Creation" we select the following as particularly good:

And the cold hearth kept no cheer, And the panes no light;

Oh, if I came not again,
Would you miss me much?
Would your fingers once be fain
Of my wandering touch?

Would you dream me at your side In the waking wood,

Where the old spring hungers hide In blue solitude?

Would you wonder where I passed,
Into joy or pain?

Oh, to know you cared, at last,
Came I not again!

We have taken the liberty to rechristen the next poem, which we find in Scribner's. Dr. Finley calls it "Telefunken." Now everybody ought to know that that word refers to a system of wireless telegraphy. But, as a matter of fact, comparatively few do know it, or know it so well that they recognize the word when they see it at the head of a poem. And it is too good a poem to suffer any handicap. Our title is not brilliant, but it is not obfuscating:

This is the turkey trot. The Saint

Spurs them. They mimic, scared of

peace,

Till the last blazing billboards faint,
The mad gyrations of Maurice.
When from wan sleep they start, the
drug

Still whips their blood. Thus night and day,

With tango, grapevine, bunny-hug,
Saint Vitus trots along Broadway.

And yet why not? To-morrow closes The door of life and ends my rime, And where Milady pins my roses

The worm will leave a trail of slime. New bacchants wheel to measures newWho shall remember Gaby's sway? And who shall think of us, of you

And me, along the mad white way?

L'ENVOI.

Dear, Death, the fowler, spreads his net, And lovely limbs are made of clay; Our dust shall twitch with vain regret If love we seize not while we may : Prince Vitus stalks along Broadway!

There are two exquisite love-songs in the March Century by Mary Carolyn Davies. Love songs by women are always, or nearly always, a little too unrestrainedly rhapsodic. But perhaps that is merely a man's criticism. This is rhapsody, but exceptionally fine rhap

HAT wondrous crop has grown sody: upon this shore!

tendril of the earth has felt

A LOVE-SONG.

BY MARY CAROLYN DAVIES.

HAT is love?

Love is when you touch me; Love is a noise of stars singing as they march;

Love is a voice of worlds glad to be together; What is love?

There is a strong wall about me to pro

tect me:

It is built of the words you have said to

me.

There are swords about me to keep me safe:

They are the kisses of your lips.

Before me goes a shield to guard me from harm:

It is the shadow of your arms between me and danger.

All the wishes of my mind know your

name,

And the white desires of my heart
They are acquainted with you.
The cry of my body for completeness,
That is a cry to you.

My blood beats out your name to me, un-
ceasing, pitiless-

IRLS fidget with their fans. Scarce Your name, your name.
heard,

The murmurs pause. The cur-
tain rings.

Desire, like an uncouth bird,

My body talks about you in the night, My hand says soft, "His hand is like a shield."

Against the playhouse flaps huge wings. My cheek grows warm, remembering your The crowds, like crazy silhouettes,

Reel to a tune more fierce than gay

From thousand frantic cabarets;
Saint Vitus stalks along Broadway.

lips.

My arms reach blindly out into the dark; My pulses say, "We cannot beat without

him";

OUR after hour, she rattles at the keys,

With head bent low and furtive smiling lips,

Blind to the world that through her ribbon slips,

Dreaming girl-dreams, re-living memories.

Hour after hour, the hands of little ease Know not their soul,-flash from their finger-tips

Strong words that rear a tower or launch great ships Voyaging for miracles upon strange seas; Strong worlds that crush in steel and blaze in fire;

Startle a myriad arms; give life to

wheels; Fashion men's destinies and wing desire; Levy earth's tribute; guide the golden stream;

She weaves the magic age weary feels . . Dead monodies

Over the vanishing tide-swept ribbon of shoreway come,

Into the hill-locked forest, for I am your mother and home.

"I, the childless and husbandless: I, the slender of feet,

Lithe of flank and of shoulder: unmaternal and fleet;

All ye may crave Aphrodite: to me after Mary ye come

I the untamed am your mother; I am your lover and home.

"And when your voices are weary, and your songs grown harsh and old,

I shall not comfort nor coddle: my arms shall never enfold.

Go seek your motherly goddess!-lay down your heads on her breastYe shall speed to me fleetly, lightly, when ye have waked from rest.

"My songs are songs for the strong ones, my rule is no rule for the weak. Over the shore and the mountains come-I am yours to seek. Swim the rivers swiftly; lightly and gladly run:

Ye pray to your motherly Marys: but I am the ultimate one."