The old-time publisher is passing, and the. author is largely to blame. I have seen the close association-in many cases the profound friendship between author and publisher broken by the commercialism fostered by some literary agents and completed by competitive bids made by one publishing house to beguile a popular author away from another. There was a time when a writer was proud to be classified as a "Macmillan," or a "Harper" author. He felt himself a part of the publisher's organization, and had no hesitation in taking his literary problems to the editorial advisor of the house whose imprint appeared upon the title pages of his volumes. A celebrated Boston authoress once found herself absolutely at a standstill on a partially completed novel. She confided her dilemma to her publisher, who immediately

sent one of his editorial staff to the rescue. They spent two weeks working together over the manuscript, solved the problems, and the novel, when published, was the most successful of the season.

Several publishers have acknowledged to me that in offering unusually high royalties to authors they have no expectation of breaking even, but that to have a popular title upon their list increases the sales of their entire line. The publisher from whom the popular writer is filched has usually done his share in helping him attain his popularity. The royalty he pays is a fair division of the profits. He cannot, in justice to his other authors, pay him a further premium.

Ethics, perhaps, has no place in business, but the relation between author and publisher seems to me to be beyond a business covenant. A publisher may deliberately add an author to his list at a loss in order to accomplish a specific purpose, but this practice cannot be continued indefinitely. A far-sighted author will consider the matter seriously before he becomes an opportunist.

William Dana Orcutt. IN QUEST OF THE PERFECT BOOK. (Little, Brown, & Company)

No writer of our time, perhaps, is gifted with a power of moral and mental dissection superior to that displayed by Joseph Conrad. None succeeds better in hiding the mechanism and revealing only the effect. His psychological capacity is intense, but it finds expression only in results. He spares the reader the

cumbersome and vain analytical apparatus that is senselessly exhibited by so many would-be psychologists. He does not say of his characters: "This is what they think and feel." We know their thoughts and emotions because they live before us, in full relief. "All art, therefore," says Joseph Conrad,

In directing the study of the criticism that presents itself in current periodicals I have asked students to formulate answers to the following questions. It will happen often enough that the review in hand at any particular time will not provide material from which answers to all of the questions can be either directly or conjecturally derived. In such cases the business of hunting for a critical needle in a discursive haystack is not one in which the student should be too much encouraged, but he must be invited to look for revelations of the author's mind somewhat below the surface of the written word.

1. How is the author's point of view ro

Dorothy Canfield has beaten one of her most formidable rivals, the one particular rival that every artist is eager to defeat her own past work. "Her Son's Wife" is superior to anything she has hitherto accomplished. It is superior because it deals searchingly with the secret places of the human heart. This is indeed genuine realism, the realism of George Eliot, Turgenev, and Henry James. Most realistic novels can be divided into two classes - novels of manners and novels of motives, what I call external and internal realism. We have the pleasure of recognition in reading any faithful reproduction of surface life; speech, accent, slang, clothes, customs, gestures, local characteristics; but we have the Jamesian double delight of both recognition

and surprise when the novelist goes far down into the depths of personality, and studies the faint dawn of passion, the beginnings of an emotional revolution, the obscure causes of conduct. For just as the Greeks made their most exciting events in the theatre take place off the stage, so the true apostles of realism get their sharpest effects by indirect action, by subtle hints, by adumbration of motive.

As conversations in Ibsen are more exciting than deeds in romantic melodrama, as the dawn is more thrilling than the noonday, so the analysis of hidden thoughts and the revelation of secret emotions offer a novelist his greatest problem and his highest opportunity. William Lyon Phelps. As I LIKE IT. (Scribner's for December)

those days for my sixty dollars per month as a preventer of cruelty to children barely sufficed to keep body and soul together — and so I could enter a Three-Penny Lunch with the ease of a regular patron. One or two men glanced up-glared rather, as animals do when disturbed at eating and fell to again. There was no talk. The silence was broken only by the sounds incident to the consumption of food, which was soup a thick, fragrant soup out of a huge caldron, and one could have two bowls of it for a nickel. I don't remember ever having dined with greater zest, despite the remark of a sour-faced little man who occupied the stool next to mine.

"Leavin's!" he said scornfully, scowling at his soup. "Leavin's from hotels and chopsuey joints and Gawd knows where-all!"

This did n't prevent my ordering a second bowl of it, which I ate in more leisurely fashion. "There ought to be a poem in this place," I thought, "if I could find some method" Presently fragments of sentences, unrelated words, began to bubble up from the depths of consciousness like the morsels of fat in the huge pot back of the counter: "Three-Penny Lunch - Eat Street hunks of bread-basement room." It was hardly the stuff of poetry, so I merely watched it falling into nonsensical combinations. As luck would have it, while I was thus idly engaged, a band of Salvation Army workers passed, to the music of cornet and drum. With this timely aid to rhyme and rhythm the words fell into column-of-route of themselves and marched down the page of my notebook in the following order:

There's a Three-Penny Lunch on Dover Street With a cardboard sign in the window: EAT.

Three steps down to the basement room, Two gas-jets in a sea of gloom;

Four-square counter, stove in the center,
Heavy odor of food as you enter;

A kettle of soup as large as a vat,
Potatoes, cabbage, morsels of fat
Bubbling up in a savory smoke-
Food for the gods when the gods are broke.
A wrecked divinity serving it up,
A hunk of bread and a steaming cup:

Three-penny each, or two for a nickel;
An extra cent for a relish of pickle.
Slopping it up, no time for the graces
Why should they care, these men with faces
Gaunt with hunger, battered with weather,
In walking the streets for days together?
No delicate sipping, no leisurely talk

"Now, then, matey!" said an authentic Cockney voice it belonged to the man back of the counter "Wot you a-doin' of? Writin' up yer diry? Eat an' walk — them's the rules 'ere. They's others witin'."

Poets, contrary to traditional belief, are sometimes interrupted to advantage even when in the white-heat of composition. It was the very suggestion I needed to complete the stanza; therefore, having scribbled

The rule of the Place is Eat and Walk

in my notebook, I paid my reckoning, six cents, and went out.

James Norman Hall. ON THE STREAM OF TRAVEL. (Houghton, Mifflin Company)