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"The Youth of Goethe," by P. Hume Brown, is published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Swinburne An Estimate," by Professor Drinkwater, is published by E.. P. Dutton & Co.

The editor of the Associated Sunday Magazines (New York) wants traveling men to tell their own stories of the triumphs and tragedies, the problems and philosophies, of their everyday life and says: "We are willing to pay $100 in prizes to traveling men every two weeks as follows: Twenty-five dollars for the best contribution; twenty dollars for the second best; fifteen dollars for the third best; ten dollars to two dollars for all others accepted." Manuscripts are limited to one thousand words.

The largest literary prize on record is to be awarded at St. Petersburg in 1925. The prize amounts to $1.540,000 and it is to be given for the best history in any language dealing with the Czar Alexander I. In 1833 Alexander's most loyal helper, Araktcheef, deposited 50,000 rubles ($25,000) in the Bank of St. Petersburg to be left at compound interest for ninety-two years for this award. A quarter of the sum is to be used in printing the winning manuscript and translating it into various languages and rewarding the next best work with a consolation prize. The winner will thus get well over $1,000,000.

L. A. Rankin & Co., 372 Boylston street, Boston, are going to publish a magazine for girls.

New York has a new magazine called the Bible Champion and published by the Bible League of America, with Rev. Dr. Jay Benson Hamilton as editor, its object being to rekindle faith in the old Bible stories.

Rev. Herbert B. Gwyn has resigned as editor of the Churchman, and Rev. Charles K. Gilbert, secretary of the New York Diocese Social Service Commission, will take charge of the paper for the present.

Charles Dwyer, for seven years editor of the Ladies' World, will become editor of the Woman's World (Chicago) September 1. Herbert Kaufman will continue his editorial contributions.

Arthur Page, son of Ambassador Walter H. Page, has succeeded his father as the editor of the World's Work, and has also taken over the work laid down by the late Henry Peyton Steger as literary executor of O. Henry.

August Harold Hedge will relinquish the editorship of the London Saturday Review at the end of this month, and its chief proprietor, Hon. Gervase Beckett, M. P., will become editor-in-chief, with the assistance of George A. B. Dewar as literary editor. Little Folks and the Children's Magazine (Salem, Mass.) have been combined.

The Chautauquan has become a weekly publication. The first number in the month will be devoted to magazine features, while the other three will be of the ordinary weekly nature.

The offices of Good Housekeeping, Hearst's, the Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazar have been removed from 381 Fourth avenue to 119 West 40th street, New York.

The Caxton Society, Incorporated, publishers of the Caxton Magazine and books, at Chatham, N. Y., has filed a petition in bankruptcy with liabilities of $24,961, of which $17.143 are secured and $375 for salaries, and nominal assets of $42,674, including cash in bank, three dollars.

New light on William Vaughan Moody is shed by the letters from him to Daniel Gregory Mason, published in the Atlantic Monthly for August.

Mr. Howells, in the " Study Chair" in Harper's Magazine for August, makes it clear that he deems the note of idealism to be far less dominant in national literature now than it was when he was a youth.

The Red Book (Chicago) adds thirtytwo pages of reading matter with its August issue, and will now contain 208 pages in each number.

The estate of Alfred Austin amounts to $10,490.

Henri Rochefort died at Aix-les-Bains July 1, aged eighty-two.

Professor John Milne died at Newport, Isle of Wight, July 31, aged sixty-three.

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS.

VOL. XXV.

BOSTON, SEPTEMBER, 1913.

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David Graham Phillips, a most virile writer, avoids description almost entirely in some of his stories; in others he uses it freely. Making a study of the descriptive portions, phrases, and sentences from "The Bribe," published in the Cosmopolitan for January, 1911, I found that they contained a thousand words, about one-sixth of the total number in the story. But such descriptions!

Only a very few brief phrases have to do with merely physical characteristics, and certain significance: have even these

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"strong features," "a small man," "small eyes," "small face," "a little man," "development of the forehead," "shining eyes," these are all.

Almost all the pure description is devoted to expressions of countenance. The following are examples: "Loungers with eager and mean curiosity in their faces the expression in the faces of the circle around a dog worrying a rat to death." “A small, slouchy man with a terrier face and small eyes, wicked but humorous and good-natured. He went toward young Senator Clarke with a grin of amused and cruel pleasure on his small, intensely energetic face. This expression changed to affable, faintly respectful kindliness as he stood beside the young man stood where Clarke might see."

This last sentence affords an illustration of another peculiarity of these descriptions - their merging into narration. Often and often is change of expression noted, sometimes briefly, sometimes exhaustively: "Clarke listened with a disgusted, disdainful expression that gradually changed to amusement." "At the sound she turned her head and burst into a radiant smile." "The look of stormy resolution abruptly left his face, to be replaced by an expression of weakness that was grotesque, so ill did it fit his strong features."

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steadily at Jessica Bushrod without speaking. The smile died from her face. Into her eyes came a fascinated, frightened expression, and her lips and her cheeks suggested that they were burning with the fire of invisible kisses."

The close of this quotation illustrates an

other phase of these descriptions — their suggestiveness, usually of dynamic quality: "The look was speech, vigorous speechconcentrated essence of negation."

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Such descriptions as these have value in narration, they carry the story forward. VENTURA, Calif. Emma Younglove.

AUTHORS AND NEWSPAPER CRITICS.

James Lane Allen, at work in Boston this summer, foretells an expansion of American periodical literature, and scouts Ambassador Page's idea that a shrinkage is either imminent or desirable. As for the recent changes in the staff and management of many New York periodicals, he finds them but natural in the life history of any monthly or weekly. "A magazine simply dies of old age on account of laws which we cannot reach," says Dr. Allen. The fact that a number of such deaths have occurred of late he takes as evidence that American periodicals are in a state of transition. They are adjusting themselves to the developing standards of the reading public. Soon they will emerge, more numerous, better suited to the needs of the age, and endowed with the vigor of a new birth.

Mr. Allen is "working," not "living," in an ivy-grown house on Newbury street. There the interviewer sought him out. The leading topic for the interview the author chose himself - the relations of authors to the newspaper critics of authors.

"The subject is of great importance," he premised, “both to the large body of workers trying to produce American literature, and to that other immense body of workers organized to make known the value of it to a vast public. Here, first, is a body of creative workers who are in large measure perfectly sincere, very serious, and intent upon doing their best, whatever that best may be. The results of their labor

go to a second body of workers, nearly all of whom are distributed among the newspapers of the country. The critics receive the output of the creative workers, and they, too, for the most part at least, are deeply in earnest, perfectly sincere, and resolved to do their best. Thus there are two vast bodies of contemporary workers related to each other in a very vital

way.

"The total result of this relation may be broken into many partial results. One is that the sympathies of the body of critics pass by way of the books over to the great body of creative workers. This is the first and chief value of such criticism — that it puts new life into the authors. This result is direct and positive and of incalculable value to the body of workers.

"Authors cannot live on anything but sympathies, nor does any other human being, doing any other work, live on anything but sympathy in what he does. So that you may put down all the sympathies that pass over from the critics to the writers as the foremost vital and absolutely indispensable influence on the creative workers and on the literature of their time.

"Consider what is the channel this influence takes. An author puts out a book. is publishers distribute it broadcast to the leading newspaper offices of our entire literary world. In each office is a critic. Within three months, at most, the verdict of every critic in the land has reached the

author. There, spread out on his desk, are the verdicts of a hundred, a hundred and fity, or two hundred critics, who have had no communication with each other. Thus the author can see at a glance the critical map of his world in regard to his story. It is often an amazing experience for him as he surveys that map.

'Out of, say, 150 criticisms, he will often find that 140 are in substantial agreement. Each critic has reached his conclusion by a road true to his mind, but all of these personal paths have run together into a common highway of thinking. It is as amazing as would be the verdict in an imaginary case at law, in which 150 jurors should sift the evidence, each in solitary confinement, and then march back to the courtroom to give a verdict of acquittal or the reverse. Such a result as this could not possibly be reached unless these 150 human minds were working sincerely and intelligently. The knowledge that they do so work makes the author one in humanity with these workers, not one of whom he will possibly ever meet.

'There is no measure of how vital such an experience is. Simply by it, we acquire faith in human nature. And the more faith an author has in human nature, the better his work will be. The less faith he has, the worse his work will be. All real literature is faith in human nature. Great satire seems to be an exception, for it is the literature of bitter attack. But great satire carries on the attack upon human nature always for the sake of making human nature grow right. As much as any other form of literature, great satire is, I say, founded on faith in human nature. Otherwise it cannot be great. Satire is the great scavenger of the Imagination in the Evolution of Life.

"Of course all the body of criticism does not consist of sympathies. A certain part of it may consist in nearly every case of antagonisms. The critic does not like your book, and like a man, or like a woman, he says so. That is bad for the critic and it is bad for the author. No progress is born of such antagonism. In nature, the thing that goes with all birth is not hatred; it is love.

To hate a book and to know that your book is hated is a black and damaging situation. It is just so much life taken out of both author and critic.

"To the question, what is the effect of criticism upon the reading public? the answer is there is no telling. This I do believe, that the best criticism of fiction written in this country at present comes in nearly every instance from the newspapers.

"Technical knowledge is not the first requisite for the criticism of fiction. The direct, primary, pre-civilized - you might say the instinctive animal and instinctive spiritual forces of your own nature are your best qualifications as a critic of imaginative literature. Added to these, a knowledge of technique is indispensable only when you seek to criticise a work on its technique. But the vast majority of reviewers are never going to criticise your work of fiction as anything more than a human document. Your readers will largely be affected by your technique if it is good. Comparatively few will be conscious of your technique if it is bad.

"In spite of the intimate relation that exists between the critics and the authors, almost complete silence reigns between them. There is little or no communication between the great body of newspaper critics and the body of creative workers who work side by side and never meet. They live on each other's sympathies. and never acknowledge each other. They constitute the biggest factor in each other's eyes and yet remain perfectly independent. Perhaps not one time in a hundred will a critic write to an author or an author write to a critic.

"There should be a word as to the inevitableness of this vast silence on each side of so much sympathy. It exists because you don't dare break it. You don't dare break it, because an expression of appreciation is an attempt at payment. The finest things cannot be paid for. One of them is duty. Duty pays for itself; and the critic in doing his duty in the review of a book is critic-paid and must not be author-paid. So that the author with 150 letters before him often wants to write 150 replies. Usually he

writes not one. The author knows that however his letter might be at first received, it would lie as a dead weight on the critic's mind, when the author's next book came to him for review. The attempt at payment would have bound the critic hand and foot.

"And this brings us to gratitude, which ends the whole matter. We often speak of gratitude as something that dwells on the heights of human nature. Rather, it dwells on its own peak and can never cross to others. In truth, there are whole planes of human nature where it never is found. You can't thank a fellow man for his friendship. No citizen can arise in a mass meeting of

citizens and thank them for respecting him. When the young lover addresses the one he loves and is accepted, he cannot possibly say I am much obliged to you.' A father cannot express gratitude to a son for reverencing him. Many upper regions of human nature are inaccessible to gratitude. What we call gratitude in the lower planes becomes transmuted in the upper into a thing altogether different. All that is noble in gratitude, if it ever scales other heights with its living energy, drops its heavy name, and reappears there as a less burdened spirit." James Ernest King.

The Boston Transcript.

THE DRAMA OF PURE EMOTION.

What hope is held to-day for the romantic drama, or the drama of pure emotion? A complex scientific age has had its reflection in the theatre. It has brought with it and not without regrettable consequences intellection, and the drama of social ideas as opposed to that of unalloyed emotion. That the thesis play, which seeks to prove a proposition; the problem play, which puts a question; and the propagandist play, which is avowedly missionary, are, more or less, an outgrowth of some passing phase in our highly artificial life, needs only to be stated to be believed. The future of any didactic literature doubtful; for its vitality and appeal must be enfeebled when the idea becomes out-of-date, or the particular problem treated has been solved by time. This fate awaits most contemporary plays whose tendency is to substitute for the portrayal of elemental and universal motives a protest against some existing evil or the expression of some idea. Scorning "native wood-notes wild" we take refuge in the inane causerie of the drawingroom, or we delight to represent the sordid aspects of modern life for sheer joy of the sordid, or perhaps baser motives.

It is pretty evident that the traditions of Shakspere, Molière, Calderon, Dumas the

elder, and Victor Hugo are being more and more discarded for the heritage of Ibsen. What has been the immediate effect on the atmosphere of modern drama? The light and airy touch has been abandoned for a melancholic pose; insurgency, and its distorted reflection, lubricity, have usurped the place of conciliatory humor; in a word, the idea has crowded out humanity.

All this has not been without its evil effects on the rising generation of dramatists. Sudermann, a frank imitator, Strindberg, in his more realistic moods, and Brieux have been held up as models for imitation. Rostand, it will be noted, is rarely mentioned; d'Annunzio is but slightly known to the general public, and such a figure as the late John M. Synge is tardily coming into his own. In America, it has been affirmed, a drama of the soil has been stifled by the importation of European distresses to be remedied very real and poignant, it may be, abroad, but purely chimerical here.

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At Wallack's, Louis M. Parker, a romantic dramatist of a very high order, has won a certain measure of success with his "Disraeli" and "Pomander Walk"; but his "Lady of Coventry" proved a flat failure. Why? Not because it was a bad piece of

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