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OVER since the beginning of poetry, poets have tried to define the phenomena of life in their own terms. The instinct is close to the tendency toward metaphorical language. Metaphor lies half way between comparison and definition. Someone writes, "My thoughts are like butterflies," a simile, a comparison. Another, "My thoughts are butterflies," a metaphor to convey the quality of one's thoughts. And a third will define his thoughts. Poets have always delighted in all three forms of speech. Sometimes they cast their definition in the form of a riddle, embellishing the object they were describing with all sorts of picturesque and misleading fancies, sometimes they used definition to express their own opinion of the subject under discussion. But very seldom can a poem which is definition, and definition alone, rise to any great height.

The reason is simple. Although poetry may teach, it must not be written merely

to teach. And definition, since it is always bent to the poet's own ideas, is just another form of teaching. The most popular verses in this mode are Kipling's 'If," beloved of motto-card manufacturers, a jingling collection of platitudes, which too often represent the average man's investigations into ethics. The best definitions which are also poems are generally short, epigrammatic, and memorable, "What oft was thought but ne'er SO well expressed." Thomas Hardy's "Young Man's Epigram on Existence" is one of these, and many of Emily Dickinson's unforgetable epigrams belong in the same class.

the interior rhyme of cloud and shroud, and the hackneyed rhyme of strife with life. Now that the poem has been shortened, the author should study every word of the epigram with a view to improvement. The poem as it originally stood is well above the average; it shows thought, skill, and balance; but being a definition, it demands the utmost polish for its full effect.

Here is another:

Friendship is a single tone

Struck at random by two hearts, Neither one could sing alone

For the chord required two parts.

Friendship is a single speech Only two can understand, All to say and all to teach

In the pressure of a hand.

Friendship I have never known And my heart lies on a shelf, Singing to itself alone

Talking sadly to itself.

In this curiously uneven poem we have

evidences of great skill, separated by lines and phrases which are sadly (to use the author's rather weak word) bungled. The figure in the first stanza is very good, but it is not consistent. If the tone is single, how can there be a chord? And note in the last line of that stanza the flatness of the word required. The second stanza could hardly be improved. It fulfils all the demands of this sort of writing, and, in my opinion, should stand alone. In the last stanza, again we find a clumsiness strongly contrasting with the skill of what has gone before. My heart lies on its shelf! What a phrase! Its overtone brings to mind the old slang expression: I've been laid on the shelf. The actual picture is scarcely less unpleasant than the charge made against Mrs. Shelley (she denied it) that she had used her dead husband's mummified heart as a book-mark. And, finally, we know that the shelf was only included to furnish a rhyme for itself in the last

line.

Why can not a writer of such appar

ent skill develop his critical powers sufficiently to distinguish and separate the excellent second stanza from the faulty two?

And here is one more definition:

Love is a sea,

A moving tide Eternity

In quest of bride; A mighty storm

Where ships go down, An evening calm,

A cross, a crown.

Here we meet again the bugbear of all composition, abstraction. The sea, very good; a concrete symbol of the abstraction, Love. But, continuing, we find that Love is Eternity, and the two smoky abstractions meet, dilute each other, and vanish in a thin vapour. We return, then, to the sea, and discover that Love is sometimes stormy and sometimes calm. But in the last line where, if anywhere, the epigram should find its logical climax, the sea is suddenly abandoned altogether, and the cross and crown are

introduced at the last minute and with unseemly haste. The definition lacks proper construction; we feel that the author is playing with ideas rather than organizing them into one unified, logical sequence.

Finally, we may add that the best definitions in verse are those which are merely implied. It is generally weak to begin "What is life?" or "Friendship is." The obviousness of the method puts us into a frame of mind for prose, not for poetry. Consider the implied definition in Francis Quarles's "Epigram" (quoted from memory):

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on, Judge not the play until the play be done. Its plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene. The last act crowns the play. Every word is placed to the best economy of the whole; the tone is grave, convincing, and the suggestions are so rich that we repeat the lines many times without exhausting their meaning. Suppose the poet had written:

time, and can be related from experience. At any rate, the setting of the early years in the book, the picture of life during the last half of the nineteenth century, came directly from such information as I possessed. It has been enjoyed by people whose personal memory runs back much farther than mine. One reviewer even gave me credit for having lived during the entire period of which I wrote! When I returned to America in the fall, the State Library of Michigan sent me a small volume on the state up to 1840, from which I checked up various details, such as the extent of wooded land, the beginning of railroads, the condition of banking, even such a trivial thing as the use of Indian ponies.

The second problem was technical, that of handling within one volume the course of almost a century. In such a novel the flow of time is of great importance. Properly handled, the timeelement itself becomes one of the vital things in the reality of the book. It is life itself within which the characters exist. Reduced to simplest working terms, the problem is one of selection and transition. Selection, in the first place, of the moments which require dramatic expansion because of their significance either in character development or in plot. Twenty years may need little more than a sentence of summary, and the next day may demand projection into clear scenes. The moments selected for this full dramatic treatment must have some quality of crucial action, of conduct which terminates an earlier period, or decides the next period.

The other problem, that of transition, is more variable. The author can not say merely that ten years have elapsed. He must in some way give the reader the sense of those years in the lives of the characters. Superficially the author may accomplish this end by the use of details of background; he may indicate that the characters now use stoves instead of fireplaces, or gas instead of kerosene lamps; he may suggest changes in dress;

he may relate his story to actual historical events the Civil War, the SpanishAmerican War, the World War. All of such details are necessary; more profound and more essential to the truth of the story are the changes in character. There is a rhythm of growth, of development, which the author must realize for his characters if he is to give the actual feeling of passing years. In handling this onward movement of time the author may sometimes resort to the panoramic, summarizing method; frequently a sentence or so containing the character's own awareness of the lapse of time will give the desired effect; sometimes an abrupt plunge into a scene ten years later than the preceding one, with suggestions in setting and in character of the time relation, will furnish the reader the necessary toe-hold on time.

There is a danger, in a novel covering so many years, of dissipation of interest. One method of avoiding this danger is that of drawing events down for the most part to the consciousness of one character. "Islanders" could have been told entirely from the angle of Ellen Dacey, giving events only as she herself realized them. For the most part it is told in that way, as it is her story. There are moments, however, when it seemed possible to gain drama by allowing the reader to share the consciousness of some other character, and when that consciousness seemed to enrich the meaning of the story. And so brief scenes are given through Martha, through Thurston, through Alice, and finally through Anne, when those characters are sharing most intensely the progress of the story.

The most difficult and the most engrossing problem of the book was not primarily technical, nor can the results be analyzed. It was the creation of Ellen Dacey, a woman who came slowly, unaided, to a full awareness of herself and her place in the world, who developed her own philosophy of life in terms of herself and her own experience.

MARGARET GORDON

BERTHA W. SMITH

ROBERT HILLYER WILLIAM M. TANNER

Anent this commercial age of literature, the New Haven Courier-Journal makes some pertinent statements:

Walter Scott used to express gratitude in his later years that his conscience could not reproach him for writing books that debauched the minds of his readers. It was very true; the Scottish novelist had himself a healthy, pure mind. The same thing was said of Dr. Samuel Johnson. He was the king of conversationalists and left no topic untouched, yet Boswell reports no word or sentiment of his that defiles and his books were familiar in British schools and homes for a century. Johnson himself drew a distinction between the spoken and the written word, so much did the irrevocableness of the latter awe him. He would talk lightly at times and "for victory," but he was scrupulous not to "make permanent" by printed word unsupported statements or expressions that might do harm.

One of the strange expressions of this commercial age is the laying hold of literature to serve avarice. One does not readily think of analogy in other eras. We believe not in ancient Rome or Greece did writers frankly barter their modesty, their dignity, good name, for a publisher's fee. There have always been weaklings and reprobates who would relate their sins to some clever pen to make a story of, and some great names in literature have worked in unholy veins of experience and imagination, but it has remained for this book

mad generation to industrialize literary impurity to make books and eagerly search as a loathsome scavenger for fresh material attractive as the lustre of decaying carrion which has a repellent fascination. The men and women writers who permit their genius to become a tool of panderism for either fame or gold are fearsome spectacles proportionate to their gifts. The fool in his wrongdoing is to an extent protected from remorse by incapacity to comprehend the evil; the later reflections of talented purveyors of evil must be doubly bitter by reason of their clear perception of its irreparableness.

A glance over the apparently endless sensational fiction "best-sellers" for 1927 would lead us to believe that this is a "book-mad" generation in more ways than one. It is encouraging, however, to note the public taste in "general" literature. AS THE WRITER goes to press, Lindbergh's "We" tops the list of bestselling books throughout the United States. Close to it is Bruce Barton's "What Can a Man Believe?"

Will it be these books or "Elmer Gantry" and "A Good Woman" that will be remembered after a decade? What novel of today will even exist in the memory of 1938? For writers that "live" we look to the general field.