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stories from real life, submitted by January 1, 1920. Particulars in May WRITER.

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Walker Trust open prize of £200 and eight limited prizes of £25 each for essays on Spiritual Regeneration," offered by the University of St. Andrew's, Scotland, submitted before March 1, 1920. Particulars in June WRITER.

Prize of $100 offered by the Engineering Company of America (35 West Thirty-ninth street, New York) for the best story on the subject, "America in War and Peace," using all the 6,221 different words used by President Wilson in the delivery of his seventy-five addresses, 1913-1918. The words are given in the "Victory White House Vocabulary," a copy of which the Engineering Company will send on request.

Prize of $100 offered by the Manuscript Society of Philadelphia for a cantata on the subject of Peace. Particulars in March WRITER.

Prize of $100 for a cappella choral composition offered by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, submitted before August 1. Particulars in June WRITER.

Prize of fifty dollars for a play of two or three acts, suitable for production at the Municipal Thea tre in Forest Park, St. Louis, and an equal sum for a play designed to be acted by children before an audience of children, offered by the Committee on Drama and the Literary Arts of the St. Louis Art League. Competition to close October 1. Particulars in June WRITER.

Prizes offered by Poetry (Chicago) for the best work printed in the magazine during the year October, 1918 September, 1919. Particulars in December WRITER.

Prize of $100 offered by Poetry (Chicago), as a mark of distinction, like a scholarship, to be awarded in November to the unknown poet among its contributors who most deserves and needs the stimulus of such a reward. Particulars in March WRITER. Prizes offered by American Ambition (Philadel phia) in comedy-drama, short story, song, and other

contests.

Two prizes of five dollars for the best photographs published in Physical Culture each month and two prizes of $100 for the best photographs published each six months, offered by Physical Culture, New York. Particulars in May WRITER.

New York Herald weekly prizes of fifteen, ten, and five dollars, and grand prizes of cameras valued at $100, $50 and $25 for the best pictures offered by amateur photographers, the last picture to appear September 8. Particulars in June WRITER.

Monthly prizes offered by the Photo-Era (Boston) for photographs, in an advanced competition and a beginner's competition.

Weekly prizes offered by the Boston Post for original short stories by women, published each day. Particulars in January WRITER.

The Boston Evening Record is paying one dollar each week day for a poem written by a Record reader.

Prizes of two dollars and one dollar offered monthly by Wohelo (New York) for stories, short poems, and essays on subjects suggested by the edi.

tor, written by Camp Fire girls. Particulars in November WRITER.

WRITERS OF THE DAY.

Ruth Lambert Jones, whose poem, "Confession," was published in Life for May 1, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where she is now living and writing. A graduate of Bradford Academy in the class of 1914, she was forced by ill-health to forego college, and two years and a half ago she began to write. Her poems, essays, and short prose sketches have appeared in the Boston Transcript, Life, the Youth's Companion, Adventure, Contemporary Verse, the "Point of View" in Scribner's Magazine, and in the Bookman. Others have been accepted by Poet Lore, Contemporary Verse, the Transcript, Life, and Scribner's Magazine.

Mary Adams Stearns, the author of the poem, "Weary," in the April issue of Milady Beautiful, is not at all a weary person, being one of the busiest of Chicago's business women. She is the editor of the Republic Item, which is almost the only building organ in existence, and is a combination of house organ and magazine. Miss Stearns has been a writer for years, and has had articles and poems in Munsey's Magazine, the National Magazine, Book News (defunct), and many others. She has received several prizes for her poems, and expects before long to bring out a collection of them. For several years Miss Stearns devoted herself exclusively to literary criticism, which was published in the Chicago Post, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Herald, and the Continent.

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realism of street, shop, and home has been reflected in American literature.

Our fiction has been largely the expression of remote romanticism, not to say sentimentalism. The stories we read, like that of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," tell of heroines who begin life as paupers and end as society queens; of heroes who meet and win the object of their dreams during a thrilling railroad accident; or of worthy young men who become millionaires through a winning personality and a stroke of luck. These are the characters whose antics absorb American readers of light literature.

Strangely enough, it seems to take a visionary, temperamental, lyric race to produce realistic fiction. Ushered in many years ago by the Russians and the French, realism in fiction found tremendous vogue abroad. In those old countries people enjoy reading of life as it is rather than as the adolescent dreamer imagines it to. be. Anglo-Saxons

have not found this extreme realism attractive, but lately with H. G. Wells's and Arnold Bennett's remarkable art of detail and character analysis, a modified type a sort of romantic realism has captured the conservative taste of the English people.

Writers of fiction who have the courage to throw off the fetters placed upon them by tradition, and write of life as it really is (which, by the way, does not imply that their novels must be disagreeable) rather than of life seen through a mist of sentimentalism, ought to be warmly greeted in America. We need authors who have the courage to strike in our fiction the tonic chord of reality. Men and women who "see life clearly and see it whole" are the writers whose books will survive the fickleness of generations and retain a lasting place on the shelves of our libraries. The Piper (Houghton Mifflin

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then made for reading at the meeting, a different reader being chosen each time. At the end of the reading the members of the society vote on the best poem, and again, that being eliminated, on the second best. The names of the writers of all poems read are then announced. At the end of the year all the "best" and the "second best" poems, usually fourteen, the result of the fourteen meetings at which poems are read, are gathered into a pamphlet and sent to every member for further voting upon the best and the second best of them all. To these two poems go the money prizes. This system is objected to on the ground that no true judgment of poems can be given by a crowd of people merely hearing them read, and that no stable standard is used through the year by the committees which decide what poems. shall be read at the meetings.

How a Cabled Poem Looks. There is a great difference between cablegrams as they appear in the newspapers and the despatches when they arrive. Poems are, of course, more difficult to restore to their original form than prose. Take, for instance, Kipling's "The Song of the Lathes." When this poem first arrived in this country for newspaper publication, it came as a cable despatch and looked like this:

Poem begins, the song of the lathes. pn being the words of the tune hummed at her lathe by mrs. 1. embsay, widow py. the fans and the beltings they roar round me. the power is shaking the floor round me till the lathes pick up their duty and the midnight shift takes over. it is good for me to be here si guns in Flanders dx Flanders guns si pn I had a man that worked em once si py shells for guns in Flanders, Flanders, si shells for guns in Flanders, Flanders si shells for guns in Flanders si feed the guns si the cranes and the carriers they boom over me. the bays and the galleries they loom over me. with their quartermile of pillars growing little in the distance, it is good for me to be here si."

and so on to the end, and it is a long poem. "Si," "pn," "py," etc., indicate punctuation marks.

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Hebrew books the stories of Jacob and Esau, of Joseph, of Gideon, of Gibeon, of Jephtha's daughter, of Rahab, of Balak and Baalam "one of the first instances in history where a political boss discovers to his chagrin that he cannot control his most influential orator" of Ruth, of Ahab and Naboth's vineyard, and so on through all the rich category. Dr. Phelps recalls the fact that an English newspaper prize to the man who would designate the greatest short story in literature was awarded to the writer who presented the claims of the story of the woman caught in sin told in 225 words. Canada's Copyright Reform. Introducing in the Senate the government bill on copyright, Senator Lougheed said: "The bill establishes a uniform period of copyright protection, consisting of the life of the author and a period of fifty years after his death. It also extends copyright protection to records, perforated rolls, cinematograph films, or other contrivances by means of which a work can be mechanically formed or delivered. The bill is also intended to secure for Canadian authors full copyright protection throughout all parts of His Majesty's dominions, as well as in Canada. It also aims at securing for Canadian authors full copyright protection in the United States of America." Manitoba Free Press.

Words and Metres in Poetry. - Poetry is an Art, that is, it is one of the Fine Arts,

and, using the word in this recognized sense, all Art is the expression of Ideas in some sensuous material or medium. And the Ideas, in taking material forms of beauty, make a direct appeal to the emotions through the senses. Thus the material or medium, as it is called, of Sculpture is stone or marble, and so on; the medium of Painting is colors; the - medium of Music is sound; and the medium of Poetry is words. Now while it would be manifestly preposterous to begin the study of Sculpture by an examination of stones, you will admit that in Painting a knowledge of Colors is less remote, and is even a necessary equipment of the artist and you will further grant that in Music the study of the Sounds

i. e. the notes of the scale and their mutual relations is an indispensable preliminary. So that in these three Arts, if they are taken in this order, Sculpture, Painting,

Music, we see the medium in its relation to the Art rising step by step in significance : and I think it is evident that in Poetry the importance of the material is even greater than it is in Music; and the reason is very plain. All Art, we said, was the expression of Ideas in a sensuous medium. Now Words, the medium of Poetry, actually are Ideas : whereas neither Stone nor Color nor mere Sound can be called Ideas, though they seem in this order to make a gradual approach toward them.

The poets of the world, in their purpose of making speech beautiful, chose to set it out in metres why then did they so? why should poetry have confined itself to metres? This very natural inquiry may be honestly satisfied by an appeal to the stupendous results attained by the great poetic metres. . . The common explanation of the metrical charm is, I believe, the love of patterns, and it is true that metrical poems can all be well considered as word-patterns; there are certain stanza forms in which the pattern is very obtrusive yet I prefer to take a somewhat wider principle for basis. First, all artistic beauty exhibits a mastery, a triumph of grace and this implies a difficulty overcome, for no mastery of grace can appear in the doing of whatever you suppose any man could do with equal ease if he chose. And since in a perfect work (music perhaps prɔvides the best examples) all difficulty is so mastered that it entirely disappears, and would not be thence inferred, — it is necessary that for general appreciation there should be some recognition or consciousness of the formal conditions, in which the difficulty is implicit. And thus one of the uses of second-rate works of art is that they reveal and remind us of the material obstacles. Now the limitation of metre is of a kind which particularly satisfies the conditions just described because it offers a form which the hearers recognize and desire, and by its recurrence keeps it steadily in view. Its practical working may be seen in the unpopularity of poems that are written in unrecognized metres, and the favor shown to well-established forms by the average reader. pleasure is in some proportion to his appreciation of the problem. Secondly, a great deal of our pleasure in beauty, whether natural

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Authors' Blunders. Miss Marie Corelli, in "The Treasure of Heaven," makes one of her characters say: "After school hours I got an evening job of a shilling a week for bringing home eight Highland bull-heifers from pasture"!

A common blunder in poetry is to make the female bird sing. Shakspere, referring to a nightingale, says: "Nightly she sings on yond pomegranite-tree" and The nightingale, if she shall sing by day . . ." Milton also trips in this respect :

Wakeful nightingale,

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She all night long her amorous descant sung." Scott and Burns, both keen nature-lovers, were always correct in this detail.

Sir Walter Scott once confessed to having a bad memory, but in dealing with the wealth of historical incidents in his books he is remarkably accurate. On occasion, however, he is at fault. In "Ivanhoe " Wamba says: "I am a brother of St. Francis." The order of St. Francis was founded in 1206, but Wamba lived in the time of Richard the First, 1189-1199. In "The Heart of Midlothian" Scott errs in some of his references to Bedreddin Hassan, of "The Arabian Nights." As Thackeray copied the same mistakes into "Vanity Fair," he is also at fault. One of Scott's most picturesque incidents is that in "Waverley," when Prince Charles Edward leads Flora McIvor out to the dance. Whether Scott erred knowingly cannot be said, but a good authority recently told us that "there is nothing so authentic as knowledge of the fact that Prince Charles never danced at all."

Our

Pope was wont to boast of his accuracy, but he blunders in translating "The Iliad," where he transforms Homer's "horned stag" into a “branching hind." Hinds do not possess horns.

Campbell writes of aloes and palm-trees in Wyoming, but neither of these trees grows there.

In "Paradise Lost" Milton says: "Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa." The trees of Vallombrosa,

being pines, do not strow the brooks in Autumn with their leaves.

A certain English novelist puts Bombay in Bengal. Not until the edition was printed was the mistake discovered, and, rather than sacrifice the edition, the author, evidently of a humorous turn of mind, had a slip of paper printed and inserted in each copy of the edition with the words: "It must be understood that for the purposes of this story, and this story only, Bombay is in Bengal." Boston American.

LITERARY ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS.

[ Readers who send to the publishers of the periodicals indexed for copies of the periodicals containing the articles mentioned in the following reference list will confer a favor if they will mention THE WRITER.]

THE ANTIQUITY OF "6 NEW DEPARTURES in Drama. Current Opinion for July.

SENATOR ARTHUR CAPPER. With portrait. Current Opinion for July.

POETS' TRIBUTES TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT. Amer. ican Review of Reviews for July.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH AS INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGES. American Review of Reviews for July. NEW FRANCO-AMERICAN PRESS RELATIONS. American Review of Reviews for July.

PROGRESS IN PRONUNCIATION. Robert P. Utter. Harper's Magazine for June.

THE MONEY RETURNS OF AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP. Earl L. Bradsher. Bookman for June. SOME LITERARY REMINISCENCES. Ellsworth. Bookman for June.

William Webster

NOVELIST-BAITING. Frank Swinnerton. Bookman

for June.

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NEWS AND NOTES.

The Program Committee of the Authors' League of America at the recent annual meeting of the league recommended that an extensive scheme of work be undertaken, planned to promote general interest in authorship and in books and reading. Among the suggestions of the committee were: The establishment of monthly conferences in New York City, open to local and out-of-town members and to publishers and editors, which might be developed into important literary congresses; the establishment of State chapters, to be chartered by the league, with which existing literary organizations might affiliate, the purpose being in each case to unify the authors of the State, and to foster a pride in State literature; the establishment, under the State chapters and with the aid of the league, of local societies of authors in towns or cities, each chapter, branch or local society to have a nucleus of league members with a larger membership of associates.

Kipling's English publishers say that nearly 600,000 copies of his first four volumes of poems have been sold.

A paragraph in the "News and Notes" of the February WRITER gave the contents of a bill in equity brought by Mrs. L. M. Montgomery Macdonald against the Page Company. The case has since been heard, and according to the final decree, after hearing of evidence and arguments by counsel and the parties to the suit having so agreed, it was ordered that the suit be dismisssed without costs, the court also finding that charges of fraud made therein against the defendant are not sustained.

The Society of American Dramatists and Composers, George M. Cohan, president, has leased space at 148 West Forty-fifth street, New York, for use as a clubroom, with restaurant service.

"The Dickens Circle," by J. W. T. Ley (E. P. Dutton & Co.), is a study of the life and character of Dickens, with many sidelights on notable men and women of his day. "New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry," by Marguerite Wilkinson, is published by the Macmillan Company.

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'Behind the Motion-Picture Screen," by Austin C. Lescarboura (Scientific American Publishing Co.), is a discussion of the production and possibilities of the motion-picture play.

"My Life and Friends," by James Sully (London: T. Fisher Unwin ), contains reminiscences of such Victorians as Darwin, George Meredith, Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, and many others.

"Virgil and the English Poets," by Elizabeth Nitchie (Columbia University Press), is a critical study in which is traced the influence that Virgil has exerted upon the literature of England.

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"The Style and Literary Method of Luke," by Henry J. Cadbury (Harvard University Press), is a study of the diction of the Gospel of St. Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

Dodd, Mead, & Co. (New York) have issued for free distribution a booklet with the title, Archibald Marshall: The Man and His Work."

The estate of Mrs. Amelia E. Barr, who wrote sixty successful novels, consists of personal property valued at about $550.

Emma Frances Riggs Campbell, the author of the hymn, "Jesus of Nazareth," died recently in London.

Joseph A. Altsheler died in New York June 5, aged fifty-seven.

Dr. Francis Barton Gummere died at Haverford, Penn., June 12, aged sixty-four.

Weedon Grossmith died in London June 14, aged sixty-seven.

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