"They silence the scientist but do not shut the mouth of the ignorant midwife. The reputable physician does not like to risk imprisonment; the conscienceless quack will take a chance. Safe, harmless and rational contraceptives exist, and fraudulent devices are covertly advertized and circulated by commercial concerns. The limitation of families is very commonly practiced on a basis of old wives' misinformation."

The control of births is held by its partisans to be the next step in civilization.

"Civilization advances just as fast as mankind obtains the mastery over environment. . . . Every time we take a force out of the wild domain of nature and place it in the regulated domain of science we have made the world better to live in. It now seems to many people

out of the realm of chance, that the birth of human beings is too important to be left to irresponsible nature.

mother.

In

"The limitationists hold that this change will benefit the individual family and revolutionize industrial conditions. the family it will lower the rate of infant mortality and increase the health of the A small family of children can have proper food and warm clothing where double the number would suffer from malnutrition and go always ragged. They can have medical attention when sick if clinics and hospitals are not swamped as at present. With small families children may not be forced so soon into the factories, but can remain in school till they get their education. In brief, small families among the very poor will raise the standard of living."

Roman Catholic protest against this kind of propaganda, we note, is promptly voiced by America, New York, which says:

"Ye of little faith, less dignity and still less patriotism, ye are filling human ears these days with hollow words that mock the dignity of man and make sport of God's law. Ye have joined hands with anarchists; ye have seduced two powerful journals to your wicked cause, and ye of little faith will now wage war in favor of a horrid sin: 'The Control of Births." God's positive law will be violated, and God will not be mocked for ever, ye of little faith. The natural law will be broken, and the crime will carry with it its own punishment. For that law objectively viewed is part of your very self; it is interwoven with the very fiber of your soul. A sin against it is a crime against self, a degradation of self, a lowering of self from manhood's plane to the animal's estate. Control births, ye of little faith, and ye shall no longer walk upright with man; your spirit will grow coarse; your instincts brutal, your nature crass beyond telling. The sign of the beast will be upon your brow; the stigma of infamy on your nation, ye of little faith."

T

HE unification and commercial progress of the German Empire within the last forty years have been achieved, according to some leaders of the German State Church, through the devastation and disintegration of many of the most valuable moral and spiritual elements of the national life.. Perhaps nowhere on earth has such a radical transformation of morals and ideals taken place in the same length of time as in rural Germany. We are told that in many villages the change is as sweeping and complete as if all the old inhabitants had moved out, taking with them every tradition and landmark even to their dwelling houses and churches, to give place to an entirely new population with different modes of thought and manners of life. This transformation has come on at such a pace that a comparatively small per cent. of the old peasantry, with its simple devotion to the village church, remains.

But for this transformation, it is declared that Germany could never show the solid front it does in the war, and tho the religious press lament many of the present features of the nation, such as its utter materialism, sordidness, cheapness, vulgarity, lack of seriousness, dishonesty, love of pleasure, restlessness and the general disposition "to get something out of life," it also sees arising in the transition a "reconstructed church and a new spiritual life for Germany."

Such well-known rural church-men as Von Lüpke, editor of Die Dorfkirche, Berlin, and the Hessian

RURAL GERMANY preacher B. Mahr have worked out a comprehensive plan for reconstructing the German rural church so as to harmonize it with what is called the New Age. The spirit that inspires this movement is the spirit that animates the German term "Kultur." Interpreted in England and America as representing German stateism and militarism, for the Germ... mind, we are told, it contains a new spiritual conception of life reinforced by modern culture.

Herr Mahr sees in the industrialization of Germany a great opportunity to intensify and revitalize Christianity; but at times he stands aghast before the crumbling of all that was simple, devout, picturesque and innocent in peasant Germany. He observes that among the many disastrous effects of modern culture on German life in general are the marked increase in sensuality and epicurism and the deplorable servitude of humanity to intellectualism and criticism, for which moral and religious ideas and energies mean scarcely more than is meant by objects of scientific observation. All ideal forces of humanity seem stifled and oftentimes it appears as if nothing else has survived for a basis of agreement between men than negation, derogation and the breaking to pieces of old tablets. The strongest contrasts occur side by side-materialism and spirituality, realism and symbolism, sensuality and purity, emotionalism and intellectualism.

This new conception of life, we are told, has radiated from the city into the country. It has attacked the home life of the people so long securely sup

ported by unconscious custom and the Christian faith. It has struck a mortal blow at the old idea of the village's common ownership of property and the use-right of the common land. It has destroyed village unity. It has caused the people to abandon their native styles of building and costume. It has made them despise their age-honored customs, so peculiarly the expression of their inner life and which have been the strongest support of their moral and religious energies. But above all it has cruelly threatened the extinction of the village church in the marked decline of church attendance that has resulted in so many communities.

The great spiritual danger in German life to-day, according to Herr Mahr, is intellectual homelessness. The industrial restlessness of the people is fast dissolving their ancestral estates in the country. The division and sale of the land leave no security to those left in the country. Consequently millions of persons have lost, with their homelife, their soul-home. They have been severed by the economic demands of the new life not only from the soil but from their old moral and spiritual conceptions of life, and in the midst of their new material prosperity many of them remain spiritually bankrupt. This intellectual homelessness, with all of its appalling results, is especially prevalent in the newly citified villages and in the suburbs of great cities, where the old peasantry have been converted into small traders and day-laborers. Here socialism has laid a gripping hand upon the imagination of the people and they have passed from devotion to indiffer

ence and even hostility to the church. This homelessness of the soul is the hardest problem the church has to deal with.

In the articles on the German village church published in Die Dorfkirche and about to be republished in Rural Manhood, New York, the organ of the Y. M. C. A. county work, Herr Mahr gives the following description of the spiritual condition of the average German village as he sees it to-day:

"We are not even aware any longer that the country way of our earlier time has in it something durable. Youth does not go well with age. Piety is lacking to the young world and to the young peasantry. To modern thought there belongs as an essential constituent the commercial conception of life. The peasant becomes merchant; he reckons, he calculates; everything expresses itself to him in money value. His relation to home and yard and land and cattle is changing. The land no longer represents so much his ancestral inheritance as it does a marketable commodity. The peasant is no longer so closely grown to his yard and the soil. He no longer sees the old home

favor. At the same time he is giving up his quiet old pleasures. He neglects old folk songs to engage in evening entertainments and the public dance. He exchanges his humility and simplicity for gance of display and extravagance of the pomp and style. He attempts the elecity and he goes in debt without scruple. "All these new lines of thought and new bents of purpose are beginning to leave their marks on the village church and, as a general result, on the character of the nation. The custom of attachment to church is everywhere on the decline and the Christian positiveness of life is retrograding. In many neighborhoods the impression prevails that the culminating point in the crisis has been reached; but here it is uncertainty that prevails and one will hear the statement, 'we are waiting to see what will happen in the new time.' But even tho the old life of attachment to the church no longer satisfies the heart of the peasant, there is no new one, and he does not come to the decision to withdraw from the church. Baptism, church marriage, church holidays and communion are still observed even among the working classes."

But Herr Mahr admits that the re

He has lost his peasant's pride in his calling; he insists on calling himself now landlord and proprietor and dealer and merchant, even tho he sells only fruit, vegetables and milk.

"With such a commercial conception of life, the relations to servants, to neighbors and to the community have undergone a great change. We no longer eat at the same table with our servants. On occasion of burials, not neighbors but hired helpers are bearers. Poor and rich, high and low, are more distinctly separated than formerly.

“Under such spirit the old-time village unity is breaking up. The working man with his separate quarters is thrust like a wedge into the village life. The mercenary conception of the entire manage

tachment to the ancient faith and the

life filled with the new thought remains concealed from the people, for the effect of their modern culture on the religious life is first expressed in the deep places of the unconscious being. There are undercurrents in the psychical life of the village which are as dangerous and

fateful as the hidden rocks in the track of an ocean liner. The villager is assuming an altered value towards nature. He is becoming master, and whatever falls to his lot seems to him more than ever to be the fruit of his thought and of his labor. That which was felt for merly to be a direct gift of God is taken now to be indirectly a present from

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spiritual revolution and for that reason he warns the church not to oppose itself to the march of the new age. The old, in its psychological and spiritual crisis, is no match for the new with its intellectual pretensions and its mechanical mastery of nature. Against a life essentially ingenuous and in accord with custom and usage, there is pitted a life of conscious and exact organization, exalting itself above nature as an independent mind, which therefore seeks and finds its final goal in the personal life. The civilization of the one, which is country civilization, will have to perish in so far as it denotes the youthful and immature stage of spiritual life.

The country church therefore seems to be doomed. But it only seems so, for, in the breaking to pieces, enough of rural matter and form remains, so that it can and will maintain its right within the new culture. There will remain the.sod and the soil as the fundamental condition of all work, and nature in its tranquility and majesty, the independence of the individual, the feeling of community, blood ties and the Against these forces, the devastating value-creating capability of the farmer. power of the new must break. dark sides of city life will fall back the wall of the sea. against this wall as the surf against

The

The decisive struggle between Christendom and the spirit of the new time and not in the country. What the counwill be fought to a finish in the city try must now do is to hold intact the virile forces of its individuality so as to receive and mold whatever of good comes to it from that struggle. In the hour of victory for a higher spiritual life, we must not find that the greatness of rural Germany has perished.

To that end the first thing to be ac

before it, and that precious possession which the German village had and which made it so rich in individuality—its characteristic quietude of life deep and real, the forcefulness and genuineness of nature is now lacking. Existence is now becoming a labor chase; but our machines do not secure us a release from labor. They compel us only to use land and property more intensely in the service of

mammon.

"It is true that after the pattern of the city our houses are made more comfortable, better furnished. We are cleaner and more sanitary. We cook more rationally and scientifically, tho our food is not of as good quality and as substantial because everything is now turned into money. We are learning to regard the style of living and behaving. But in all this there is seen the alliance of practical

materialism with rustic realism.

"To eat well and drink well has always been the fundamental desire of the peasant; but now he is deteriorating to the ground principle, 'something to be had from life.' City sensuality and pleasureseeking, luxury and superficiality all charm him. City club life is coming into

as he thinks, and manipulating the world's markets upon which the results of his labor so much depend. He relies more and more upon his own strength, upon the skill of the doctor and upon the abilities of other people to help him, and he trusts less in prayer and in the justice and mercy of God in his joys and sorrows.

On the reverse side of prosperity and the material enrichment of the German people, Herr Mahr sees a picture of desolation and pauperism and social depression which recruits the new social ranks of discontent in the village, taints the peasantry and robs it of its inner hold and inspires the press with distrust of pastor and church. With this displacement of the church as a leader, increasing numbers are demonstrating to their own satisfaction that they need no church.

The writer of the articles is convinced that the great economic revolution of Germany clearly indicates a

nomically stable and secure. But the central task of the rural pastor always remains this: to bring the gospel to the village in such a manner that it allies itself with the heart of the village and becomes the own of the village. The unconscious Christianity fostered by peasantry has long been guided by an

habit and custom. Now that custom is being swept away by the levelling process of the modern spirit, a conThis conscious religious life requires scious Christianity must be cultivated. a definite, exact religious training on the part of the peasantry. Adequate reasons must be given for the nature of things in the training. Men must be taught to discover the real connection between the gross effects in the material world and their true causes in the invisible world. A living faith in the soul of the nation must be created. That is the faith, we are told, that animates the Kaiser and the German

church and gives strength to German "Kultur."

O

The Meleager of the Antilles. UR indifference to the literature of Latin America is emphasized again by the recent death of Léon Laviaux, who was drowned off the

Léon

island of Martinique in April. was the son of Paul Gauguin, the postimpressionist painter, and of Laure Laviaux, a beautiful quadroon. The exotism of his own blood-he was the son of a Breton father and a Peruvian mother-aroused in Gauguin a desire to escape from "the disease of civilization." He visited Martinique in 1887. Léon Laviaux was born the following A correspondent to the Boston year. Transcript calls Laviaux "the Meleager of the Antilles." There is a striking similarity in the lives and genius of the two men, he says.. The sensuous fire of the Asiatic Greek was also to be found in Laviaux's poems. "He paints with words, as his father did with brush, lavish of color, the green of palm and wave, the gold of foamwashed sands, the purple of isles afar.

. . Laviaux lacks something of the divine pathos of the Gadarene, of the elegiac poignance that trembles on the verge of tears. And he carves his figurines of love with less delicate precision. But he compensates for this with a plenitude of exotic fervor." John Myers O'Hara recently translated "The Ebon Muse," a poem by Laviaux which strives to enrich the very soul of the tropics. "Poèmes en noir" was published in 1914. The poet was buried on the island he loved-the Cos of the Antilles. The Transcript correspondent suggests as an inscription for him the epitaph Meleager composed for his own. tomb

"My nurse was Tyre; Syrian Gadara my attic fatherland; I, Meleager, son of Eucrates, have lived with the Muses; and

an intimate sympathy for the primitive folk, notes the reviewer of the Chicago Evening Post. Guimó (pronounced Ghee-mó), the hero of the book, is the son of a Spanish friar and a native girl. At the beginning of the American régime in the Islands, Guimó becomes the servant of a young American civil service resident in Manila. The American falls into the evil ways of American residents of the tropics and Guimó attempts to straighten out his life. The young Filipino looks toward the United States as a land where he would find the much-talked-of ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. In the end, of

the Menippean Graces. Tho I am Syrian, what matters it? O stranger, we all inhabit one land, the earth! One single end awaits us all!"

himself competent to explore still further, the Chicago Evening Post points out, even tho "Guimó" bears many unfortunate marks of being a first novel.

"Sad human fortunes in a land of rich color, strange sights and sounds, native fruitfulness; apathy and childishness on the one hand, ignorant brutality and then self-imputed superiority on the other hand; such is this picture of Filipino life. But the world thus opened up to us is a most interesting one, and Mr. Elwood has shown that he has become a loving citizen of it. It is to be hoped that he will tell us further tales of these sun-lit islands."

A

The Versatile Genius of
St. John Ervine.

NOTHER new Irish novelist of importance has appeared on the literary horizon. This is St. John Ervine, first known in America through the Irish Players, who perfomed his comedy "The Magnanimous Lover." But as a writer of fiction Mr. Ervine is even more successful. The Macmillan Company has recently published three volumes from his pen-"Mrs. Martin's Man," "Eight o'clock and Other Studies" and "Alice and a Family." In "Mrs. Martin's Man," Ervine proves his worth as a serious novelist. This Book is a stern piece of realistic fiction. It is the story of an Irish family. Its subject is the fidelity of a hardworking wife for a wastrel husband, a dissolute sailor, who deceives his wife and decoys her sister, and who finally deserts both and goes to America. The book would be depressing except for the cleansing quality of humor St. John Ervine has infused into it. "Alice and a Family," his latest novel, is practically all humor and comedy. It is a story of South-East London. 'Erbie and Alice, according to T. P.'s Weekly, are as memorable as the characters of Dickens. Alice is of the ever popular type of little mother, like the Marchioness. But, as the London Spectator assures us, St. John Ervine has given us a set of new and delightful variations on this old theme. The comedy of actuality is well suited to the genius of this author. His is a mirror that sparkles as well as reveals, in the words of T. P.'s Weekly. Typical is the conversation between the fourteen-year-old 'Erbie and Mr. Keating, the van-man:

"I'm a Socialist,' he said. "That's wot I am. Brother'ood of man, my boy-that's my motter!' He took a deep drink of tea. 'That's a fine thing, you know!

Brother'ood of man! The 'ole world, see!

world! All of us! See? No fightin' or Not a little bit like Engalan'! The 'ole nothink! Just peace an' 'appiness!' He bit off a large portion of bread as he spoke. 'Takes your breath away when you think on it. It do straight!'

"'Erbie, busy with his meal, nodded his head sapiently.

"Ever 'eard o' the clawss waw?' Mr. Keating suddenly demanded.

'The wot?' replied 'Erbie. "Erbie shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'Wot is it?'

ought. Never 'eard of Kahl Mahx, I "Oh, you ought to 'ear about that, you suppose?'

'No. 'Oo's 'e?'

"Mr. Keating leant across the table,.

and spoke almost with awe. "E was a Socialist same's me,' he said. 'Clever chap, 'e was, great 'ead on 'im, 'e 'ad! Absolute genius! It was 'im wot discovered the clawss waw. Germing, you know!'

"Comprehension came to 'Erbie. 'Oh!' he exclaimed intelligently. I know! A b... y foreigner!""

T

War and the Literature of the Future.

HERE is no doubt in St. John Ervine's mind that the present war will produce an inevitable change in literature and art. He is not certain that this will be a change for the better. Already the war has affected writers not only financially but to an incalculable extent in the matter of raw material. "Practically the world in which we were born," Mr. Ervine writes in T. P.'s Weekly, "came to an end at the beginning of last August, and a new world was created. We shall have to shed many beliefs and acquire many new ones before we are able to move about in the comfort we had before the war began. That process of adjustment will be difficult and tortuous for all of us, but it will be a thousand times more tortuous and difficult for the novelist and the imaginative writer, who has not merely to fit himself into the new world, but has to discover the readjustment made in the lives of other people." It is in respect to this future work that the imaginative writer is most likely to feel the effect of the war. He concludes:

"Men can go on producing machines and buttons and clothes and knick-knacks after the war is over very much in the way in which men produced these things before the war began; but the novelists. I will not be able to write novels in the old way. The man who produces patent medicine will be able to continue producing it as if there never had been a European disaster, but the man who writes novels dealing with his own times must take the war into account; and because of this, the novelist of to-day is at a disadvantage compared with the novelists of other times. Jane Austen was able to write six novels without mentioning the Napoleonic wars, during which she lived, altho they must have touched her intimately, for two of her brothers were in the Navy. A modern novelist, dealing as realistically with our time as Jane Austen dealt with hers, simply must let the war into his story.

"War did not affect men's lives in other days to the extent to which it affects them to-day. It was possible for novelists to write about the England of the Boer war without referring to the war beyond, perhaps, a casual reference; but it will not be possible for any novelist

to write of these times without reference to Armageddon, for the life of every man, woman and child in Europe to-day has been profoundly affected by it, and it would be as senseless to ignore the influence of the war as it would be if a

THE GOYA OF LITERATURE

T

An English Tribute to the Genius of Ambrose Bierce. HE mystery of the present whereabouts of Ambrose Bierce does not seem to have been cleared up. The statement was made and denied that the American author had been discovered drilling recruits in England. It has remained for a British periodical -the London Spectator-to point out that Bierce was a pioneer in presenting the realities of war. "He did not, fail to render justice to its heroic side, but he stripped it of its pageantry." So the English paper notes in a review of Bierce's book, "In the Midst of Life," a cheap edition of which was recently published in England. "He made no attempt to deal with it as a vast panorama in the manner of Tolstoy, or with the cumulative and circumstantial detail to be found in Zola's 'Débâcle'

ENGLAND ACCLAIMED HIM FIRST

Tho his wonderful poetry of New England life is said to be even more American than the work of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost's great work "North of Boston" first received recognition in London, where it was published by David Nutt. Altho Mr. Frost spent much of his life in New Hampshire, he was born, we are informed, in San Francisco, some forty years ago.

or the 'Désastre' of the brothers Margueritte. He confined himself to epi

sodes none of these stories run to more than twenty pages-and their essential interest is psychological. In this regard he naturally suggests comparison with another and later American writer of war stories, Stephen Crane; but his style was simpler and less spasmodic, and while Crane wrote his best stories before he had seen any fighting, Bierce had himself served in the fighting line throughout the campaign of 1861-1865. Stephen Crane's 'Red Badge of Courage' was a triumph

1

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reconstructive imagination; but Bierce brought to bear on his first-hand knowledge an imagination even more horrifying than that of the younger writer." Altho, as the reviewer points out, there is only one of Bierce's books in the catalog of the London Library, the American is one of the greatest masters in depicting the horrors of war. He is the veritable Goya of literature:

"No one has ever reproduced the grotesque horrors of war more vividly than Ambrose Bierce. In this vein he reaches. a climax in the story of the deaf-mute child who wandered away from his home and, coming across a number of wounded soldiers crawling painfully from the battlefield of Chickamauga, thought they were playing a game, in which he tried to take part, finally returning to his home to find it burned down and his mother lying dead and shattered by a shell. But the kind of narrative peculiar to Bierce is the analysis of a man's thoughts during the brief moments in which he is being sent from life to eternity. Thus, in the description of the death of the Southern spy, we escape with him by the breaking of the rope, drop into the stream, reach the river bank, and are on the point of reaching his home, when the narrative breaks off, and we realize that all these incidents have taken place in the doomed man's imagination, and his death follows instantly. Perhaps the best comment on Ambrose Bierce's somber genius and the best explanation of his limited appeal is to be found in the remark made to the present writer by a friend. On being asked whether he had ever read Bierce's war stories, he answered: 'O yes. I read them years ago, and shall never forget them. But I could never read them again. They are too terrible.' It may, however, be fairly urged that, while there is nothing in them to blunt the resolution of those who are fighting for a righteous cause, they form the most powerful indictment conceivable of war for war's sake. Sherman's often-quoted saying, 'War is hell!' never found more convincing literary illustration than in the stories of Ambrose Bierce."

A

Discovered in England-A Real American Poet. MERICAN reviewers of "North of Boston" and "A Boy's Will" (Henry Holt & Co.) by Robert Frost, the New England poet, are not willing to overemphasize the fact that both these books were published in Lon

don and acclaimed by the English critics long before American publishers were aware of Mr. Frost's existence. No less than a year ago the pugnacious Mr. Pound made the accusation in Poetry that Robert Frost had been refused a hearing by American publishers before his work was published by David Nutt of London. this is true, it is certainly one of liter

If.

ature's little ironies. For Robert Frost is of America American, as indigenous and as American, so Louis Untermeyer

points out in the Chicago Evening Post, as Whitman. "Outside of the fact that he is much more local and much less

rhapsodic than Whitman, there is, it is true, a decided bond between them." The critic of the New York Globe also

insists on the essential Americanism of this poet whose work was presented to the world by an Englishman.

"Nothing more interesting has happened in American literature in a long time than the poetry of Robert Frost. It is ours and it is good. It is not 'after' the French, nor imitative of the English. It is racy of our own soil, it breathes our

IS

A

democratic spirit, it pictures our own homely scenes and plain people, it speaks our language. It is truly American, at least truly New England, from blueberries

and stonewall and pasture to the woodAnd yet England pile and the hired man. seems to have recognized this American poet first. It is curious. It is as if Masefield should first have been read in this country."

All the authoritative English critics acclaimed the work of Mr. Frost as more near the "much finer, much ground, and much more national, in the true sense, than anything that

Whitman gave the world." The irony of the situation is intensified, for the Boston Transcript, by the fact that Robert Frost was no better known English publishers than to American.

"It must be remembered that Mr. Frost had no influence to attract this critical attention except what the work itself commanded. He has accomplished what no other American poet of this generation has accomplished, and that is, unheralded, unintroduced, untrumpeted, he has won the acceptance of an English publisher on his own terms, and the unqualified approbation of a voluntary English criticism."

CCUSTOMED as we have become to stringent criticism of American literature by British critics and gentlemen of letters, we are occasionally shocked and surprised by some such critic who seems a trifle more than eager to point out our enormous deficiencies. One would suppose that Mr. James Stephens, for instance, might have a warm spot in his heart for us, for most of us have admired Mr. Stephens and his crocks of gold and leprechawns and Mary Makebelieves especially Mary. But now we discover him saying in The Century all sorts of disagreeable things about us-about our writers and our readers. He is almost angry with us. One would not suppose the whimsical Mr. Stephens had so much venom in him. He recalls "the fine promise of Whitman, Lowell, Emerson and several others." But he confesses the disappointment the foreign writer meets here:

"Other literatures may disgust him or leave him cold, but the writings of America will make him angry: he will get there the cinematograph without its comfortable silence, and he will hear baby language shouted through a megaphone. He will discover that the fine promise has not been performed, and he will wonder what horrid circumstances have conspired to change that of fifty years ago into this of to-day. Perhaps, after revolving the matter, he will counsel American writers to get rid of the old woman as speedily as they can, and to put the boy back to discipline for a few years more. If his remarks are harsh, it may be that he divines a proud future for America despite the fact that the old woman and the boy have allied themselves against the genius of their country.

"The sole means by which a stranger can satisfy his curiosity about foreign lands is through literature. Writers are the unofficial historians of their own country, and from their pages a national psychology emerges, sharp and clear if the writers are competent, obscure and blotchy if they have not learned their

OF OLD WOMEN?

craft. Are Americans quite as hypocritical, sentimental, greedy, and foolish as their writers proclaim? It is a subject on which the American people themselves must pronounce judgment; but in the psychology which has been projected for foreign study these ugly vices overshadow whatever of virtue is limned beside."

He blames the American writers for this.

There is a strong idealism in America, Mr. Stephens admits, but this idealism finds no place in our literature. Our writers have not learned how to write, "their thoughts are superficial, they have no critical intelligence, and they have the sad courage of all these disabilities." The American novelist seeks a short cut to art, as the American capitalist seeks a short cut to wealth. American writers follow English mediocrity; they know the mechanism of the novel fairly well, but believe that is the whole secret of story-telling. But the worst vice of the American novelist, according to James Stephens, is his unconscious appeal to the middle-aged woman.

"Its literature has become brutally feminine. Instead of being sensuous it is sensual, and often indelicately so. After hunger, there is no subject in which an artist or a philosopher might more fruitfully interest himself than the sexual relations of humanity; but the philosophers have avoided it as completely as they could, and the writers, intent on construction, have expressed sex as a liaison, and compressed it to a formula which is very easy to handle This formula is called 'the literary triangle,' and is composed of two women and one man or two men and one woman; but it does not say the last word on sex, it does not even say the first. The sex mystery, all the reactions of which are mental, is not to be settled by this pill, nor is it to be arranged by treating sex as sexuality. That grease is thick on American literature, and it would not be so unpleasant if it were expressed less sentimentally; and sentimentality is a weed growing only in the gardens of the ignorant or the hypocritical.

"If one were asked what is the domi

nant tone in American literature and life, the answer would be 'youthfulness'; but this youth has attained to all the vices of age, and has conserved few of the charms proper to its period. It is a very disingenuous youth indeed. This insistence on 'boyishness' is unhealthy; more, it is depraved. These boyish boys and girlish girls of the writer and the artist are the indications of a real cancer in American public life. Perhaps in portraying them the writers and illustrators are describing their environment, and are exposing some

thing which is as true as it is detestable. The cult of youthfulness in America is a national calamity far graver than anything for which Europe has to mourn. Youth has nothing to give life but its energy; it has even less to give literature, for literature is an expression of the spiritual truth which runs parallel with every material experience. It is not the retailing of petty gossip about petty people; and when this youthful energy is nobody can benefit from it excepting that divorced from the control of maturity, middle-aged woman for whom American literature is now being written."

Whose fault is it? Perhaps, says James Stephens, not so much the fault of the writers as of the general American public. "America, perhaps, is not in a position to make or to receive literature." It has not yet had the leisure to evolve a social order, to conserve traditions. "Without a social order there can be no literature; for that the house must be in order.".

"Literature is something more than art; it is the expression of philosophy in art, and it is at once the portrayal of an individual and a racial psychology. A writer is not one who portrays life; he is one who digests life, and every book of his is a lecture on the state of his mental health; he should be careful, then, how he babbles.

"American writers must discover or create a vocabulary which is not a jumble of worn-out phrases; they must ruthlessly cut out the boyish boy and the girlish girl, and they must deport that middle-aged woman who seems to be their paymaster, or is it paymistress?"