'Spur" and "The Bracelet" have been translated into Swedish, and "The Eleventh Hour" is being dramatized for moving pictures. Among Mr. Potter's other books are "The Lost Goddess," two or three novelettes, and his latest achievement, "The Streak," the scene of which is laid in the Philippine Islands, and which Mr. Potter regards as the most important work that he has done.

Harold Titus, who had a story, "The Man Who Made 'Em Block," in the Popular Magazine for November 15, is twentyfive years old, and a native of Michigan, where he attended the State University for three and a half years. During that period he served as a correspondent for the Detroit News, and during vacations and after leaving Ann Arbor he was on the staff of that paper. In 1911 he gave up newspaper work to write fiction, and this has since taken the greater part of his time. During the summer he gives more or less personal attention to Western Michigan orchards in which he has an interest, but during the winter he devotes himself to searching out story material and putting it in shape. Mr. Titus has lived in Arizona, "punched cows" in Colorado, and acquainted himself with the people of other portions of this country. He furnishes the American Boy with much juvenile material and has sold some stories to the Boy's Magazine. His stories have also been accepted by the Cavalier, the Blue Book, the People's Magazine, the New Story Magazine, Short Stories, the Popular Magazine, Adventure, the Illustrated Sunday Magazine, Sunset, and Collier's Weekly, and the Country Gentleman has accepted horticultural matter.

winter there, at work on a series of stories in the same vein as "Rosabel Paradise". stories picturing the life of the natives, and especially the young people, in that summer resort. Miss Widdemer has been known heretofore more by her poetry than by her prose work, as she has had poems published in most of the leading magazines.

PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS.

Sienkiewicz. As to Quo Vadis," says Sienkiewicz, "I got the idea from reading Tacitus and I went to Rome for local color. I never plan a book in detail; the subject grows and develops as I write it, according to the laws of logic. When a new idea takes hold of me I let it simmer in my mind for a long time before I put it on paper. I find writing hard work, but I seldom change any thing in my copy, for I always know exactly what I want to say. I work from ten A. M. to five P. M., then I hunt for a couple of hours. The Greek classics give me continuous delight; I also love memoirs and historical works and reports of travel."

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Trollope. Anthony Trollope's first three novels all fell stillborn from the press, as the saying is, and have not been reprinted since. No modern reader of Trollope knows anything about them. Two were Irish stories and one was a novel of the French Revolution. There is something really heroic in the way in which the young novelist stuck to his ambition in spite of his three initial failures. The man who was ultimately to make close to half a million dollars by his pen, besides deriving a comfortable living from his official situation, was unable by his first three novels to earn anything at all, for the $100 in advance which he got for one of them he admits to have been the result of an improvident and losing bargain on the part of the publisher. He was sufficiently discouraged to let two years go by without trying again, besides having been very busy with his official duties. When he made his new trial it was with "The Warden," which

was as English as all his other successes. This was in 1853. — New York Sun.

CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS.

66

Preying on Poets. Professional plunderers of the community, so far as they have confessed their methods, have almost uniformly admitted that the easiest way to rob a man is through an appeal to his vanity. The agent for Lives of the Famous Men of Pelican Falls knows this, and his victim pays twenty dollars for a two-dollar book in order to see his name in print. The swindler of the type made famous by O. Henry knows it, and when he can gratify his victim's vanity he is sure of a double prize.

It is perhaps unfair to accuse poets of having less than the ordinary amount of business acumen, but certainly any attempt to defraud them by playing upon their wholly natural desire for fame seems much like robbing children. This sort of deceit is consistently practiced by certain publishers and while the total number of versewriters in the country may not be large, it is so much larger than any one not "in the business" suspects that an explanation of the methods of these publishing houses is really demanded.

A young writer, after the usual quantity of courteous but discouraging rejections, succeeds in selling a poem to some wellknown magazine. Within a month of its publication he has probably received half a dozen personal letters from publishing houses, expressing an inordinate interest in his work, and a desire to bring out forthwith a volume of his verse. It seems as if these houses had hitherto existed solely in the hope that some day they might rise to prosperity on the wings of his fame.

The wise poet deposits these letters, unanswered, in the waste-basket; he knows that volumes of verse by unknown writers have practically no sale, and that publishers are no more altruistic than other business folk. But if he is not wise, if no one has warned him that this is the first step in the process of holding him up and going

through his scantily filled pockets, he answers one or more of the flattering letters.

For a time all goes swimmingly. He submits a huge batch of verses, including all those favorites of his which, like Marcel's picture, have learned by long experience to come home all by themselves. He wonders how many of these the omniscient publisher will find suitable for the forthcoming volume. Hle hears that they are all excellent, quite out of the ordinary, full of promise and so on, and his heart thrills with pride.

Ile scarcely notices a polite request that he, merely as a form of course, guarantee the sale of a thousand copies at a dollar apiece. Of course such poems as the publishers, who must know, say these are will sell. He signs the merely formal document, and all continues to go as smoothly as ever.

It is when he receives a notice of the sale of a hundred and thirty copies, - half of these his friends can account for, and a request for eight hundred and seventy dollars, as per agreement," that he suddenly wakes from his dream. It is needless to follow him through the dreary weeks to the compromise which, having extracted his last penny, ends the business. He has paid for his lesson, and his belief in fame has considerably cooled.

have been so

Of course he ought not to foolish; but the point is that he or one of his kind is just so foolish almost every week. For it seems to be a thriving trade, this preying on the poet. Is he, with his high ambition and limited business experience, so much to blame, or does the fault lie with the organized business house that subsists by such practices? There is no legal crime involved, no actual fraud which might make possible redress through the courts. The publishers, like Mr. Kipling's men who "talked intimidation," are "honorable gentlemen," and have done nothing amiss, from their own point of view. They have merely set a clever trap, and the prey has walked in. But though we have not succeeded in making all rascality illegal, we can at least call this sort of a transaction by

its right name, and warn all young writers to beware of such well-disguised dishonesty. -The Bellman.

Good Style Not a Mere Matter of Words. Polish, choice words, faultless rhetoric are only the accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one thing, style as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may and often does go with faulty workmanship. It is the choice of words in a fresh and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new spiritual force and personality. In the best work the style, is found and hidden in the matter.

I heard a reader observe, after finishing one of Robert Louis Stevenson's books: "How well it is written." I thought it a doubtful compliment. It should have been so well written that the reader would not have been conscious of it at all. If we could only get the craft out of our stories and essays and make the reader feel that he was face to face with the real thing! The complete identification of the style with the thought, the complete absorption of the man with his matter, so that the reader will say: "How good, how real, how true!" that is the great success. Seek ye first the kingdom of truth, and all things shall be added.

One fault I find with our younger and more promising school of novelists is that their aim is too literary we feel they are striving mainly for artistic effects.

Do we

feel this at all in Scott, Dickens, Hawthorne, or Tolstoy? These men are not thinking about art, but about life - how to produce life.

In essayists like Pater, Wilde, Lang, the same thing occurs. We are constantly aware of the literary artist; they are not in love with life, reality, so much as they are with words, style, literary effects. Their seriousness is mainly an artistic seriousness. It is not so much that they have something to say as that they are filled with a desire to say something.

Nearly all our magazine poets seem filled with the same desire. What labor, what art and technique; but what a dearth of feeling

and spontaneity! I read a few lines. or stanzas and then I see it is only deft handicraft, and the heart and soul are not there. One day my boy killed what an old hunter called a mock duck. It looked like a duck, it acted like a duck, but when it came upon the table-it mocked us. These mock poems of the magazines remind me of it. - John Burroughs, in the Fra.

Authors Who Wrote in Bed. It is more than fifty years since "East Lynne" was published, yet both the novel and the play founded upon it are as popular as ever. The novel was written in bed, at a house in Upper Norwood. In fact, so i was Mrs. Henry Wood, its author, that she did not expect to complete it. Much of the novel was penned when its author could not even sit up.

Sir Walter Scott wrote, or rather dictated, his most popular novel, "Ivanhoe," in bed or at least from a sick couch. He had two secretaries who used to take turns at writing down the fruits of his fertile fancy, and although he was in the most constant and severe pain, the interest of the great story went on unchecked to the end.

"Michael Fairless" is the pen name of a young girl who died in her "teens," and she wrote "The Road Mender" on her death bed, finishing it but a few hours before she passed away.

"Weir of Hermiston," Robert Louis Stevenson's last unfinished book, was written in bed, or rather dictated to the novelist's devoted wife.

Mark Twain wrote nearly all his later books in bed. He had a specially contrived bed desk fitted up, so that he could write without trouble or exertion while propped luxuriously among his pillows. He used to aver that most of his best thoughts came to him in bed, and that the trouble and worry of getting up, shaving and dressing dispersed them all and left him in no mood for commencing his literary labors.

Keats wrote one of the finest and most pathetic sonnets in literature on his deathbed; Charles Wesley wrote a lovely hymn

on his, and Mozart, as is well known, composed the famous "Requiem," which was first performed at his own burial, while he lay dying. -- Rehoboth Sunday Herald.

Use Short Sentences. Writers who wish to impart to their productions power and pungency, who wish to keep the reader's attention upon the tiptoe of activity, who desire to escape the imputation of pedantry and who seek to surcharge their sentiments with sparkle and spirit, will do well to bear in mind constantly that long, lingering sentences, unduly overburdened with an abundance of phrases, clauses, and parenthetical observations of a more or less digressive character, are apt to be tiresome to the reader, especially if the subject-matter be at all profound or ponderous, to place an undue strain upon his powers of concentration and to leave him with a confused concept of the ideas which the writer apparently has been at great pains to concentrate, while short, snappy sentences, on the other hand, with the frequent recurrence of subject and predi cate, thus recalling and emphasizing the idea to be expressed as the development of the thought proceeds, like numerous sign-posts upon an untraveled road, these frequent breaks having the effect of taking a new hold upon the reader's attention, oases in the desert of words, as it were, will be found to be much more effective, much more conductive to clarity, and far better calculated to preserve the contact, the wireless connection, SO to speak, between the writer and the reader, provided, however, and it is always very easy to err through a too strict and too literal application of a general rule, that the sentences are not so short as to give a jerky, choppy, and sketchy effect and to scatter the reader's attention so often as to send him wool-gathering completely. Ellis O. Jones, in Life

New Poetry. Why so much new poetry? Why do writers rhyme and bookmakers publish the rhymes ? Is there not enough poetry in the world? No, there is not enough. We need more poetry. Not because Browning and Tennyson, Whittier, and

Longfellow have not written poems great enough; not that the great poets of our English tongue have not written already more than we can hope to read; not that the standard volumes of poetry are not sufficiently modern. But we always need new poets to produce poetry: the production of poetry should never cease.

Unhappy the land in which there is famine and where people hunger for bread. More unhappy the land where there is a dearth of mysticism, a scarcity of poetic expression, a lack of blossoming of the language into new forms of beauty. Unhappy the land in which there is drought, where the springs no longer flow and where the brooks do not sparkle in the sunlight, where fields are thirsty and men and animals suffer from lack of water. More unhappy the land where idealism is dead and there is a drought of spiritual inspiration.

It used to be commonly believed it still is by many that poetic genius is very rare, almost superhuman. In reality it is widely distributed, like the capacity to sing. A nation which sings, which keeps its songs and teaches them to its children, which expresses its spirit in new songs, will not see the springs of its idealism go dry. A nation in which poetry is continually produced wilk not thirst for inspiration.

American life has produced poetry. Not only is it in our own mother tongue, but it could not have been produced in any other English-speaking land in the world. American life sings. No one quite understands the American spirit who does not appreciate its new poetry. - Christian Register.

SIR WALTER SCOTT AND CHAUCER. J. R. Schultz. Molern Language Notes for December.

ON

THE

Two PLACE-NAMES IN "THANATOPSIS." John William Scholl. Modern Language Notes for December.

MARIE CORELLI'S SPARRING PARTNER ( Hall Caine ). H. L. Mencken. Smart Set for December. PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM. F. C. Ormsby-Johnson. Author (London) for November.

PUTTING A NOVEL ON THE MARKET. F. G. Browne. Reprinted from the Bookseller, Newsdealer and Sta tioner in the Author (London) for November.

MAKING THE NEWSPAPER AN INFLUENCE FOR GOOD. Louis Wiley (Business Manager of the New York Times). With portrait. Business America for November.

WIT AT WHOLESALE. Arthur Adams. Bellman for November 1.

How A MOVING-PICTURE PLAY IS WRITTEN. Lewis Allen. Collier's for November 1.

THE PREACHER'S USE or ROMANCE. Rev. Samuel McChord Crothers, D. D. Christian Register for November 6.

AN IRISHMAN, A CLERGYMAN, AND A PLAYWRIGHT ("George A. Birmingham "). Sydney Brooks. Harper's Weekly for November 15.

THE BOOKS I READ Now. Richard Le Gallienne. Harper's Weekly for November 15.

DR. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. With portrait. W. B. Northrop. Outlook for November 22.

A BENGALI POET (Rabindranath Tagore ). Outlook for November 29.

MRS. EMILY HUNTINGTON MILLER. With portrait. Louise Manning Hodgkins. Zion's Herald for November 26.

HAVE WE LOST THE ART OF HUMOR? Mary S. Watts. New York Times Review for November 30.

NEWS AND NOTES.

The Nobel Prize for literature for 1913 has been awarded to the British Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, this being the first time that this prize has been given to anybody but a white person. Tagore himself translates his poems into English.

The Authors' League of America has opened against certain moving-picture interests a fight which involves the validity of nearly all book copyrights issued in recent years. The moving-picture people contend that when a novel or short story, disposed of in the usual way, is copyrighted in a magazine, the copyright becomes invalid so far as other forms of publication are concerned that upon the expiration of serial publication, any one is at liberty to republish the work, to dramatize it, or to produce it in moving pictures. A Los Angeles court has rendered a decision in accordance with this view. Should this decision hold, it will take from the best known authors of the country from one-half to one-third of their incomes, and the Authors' League will take the matter to the United States supreme court, if necessary.

Mrs. Katharine D. Osbourne has obtained a divorce from Lloyd Osbourne, the author and step-son of Robert Louis Stevenson, on on the ground of desertion. Mrs. Osbourne is awarded alimony and the custody of the two Osbourne children.

Dr. Talcott Williams, dean of the Pulitzer School of Journalism in Columbia University, has been elected president of the American Conference of Teachers of Journalism. Other officers elected are: Vice-President, F. L. Martin, University of Missouri; secretary and treasurer, James Melvin Lee, New York University; executive committee, W. G. Bleyer, University of Wisconsin, J. W. Piercy, University of Indiana.