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"appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music which is the art of arts."

The evidence of the senses, the appeal to the senses, are, then, according to Joseph Conrad, the secret of his art and of his talent. And this is indeed what is most striking in his work.

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For Joseph Conrad, then, sensation is the artistic medium par excellence. As to the moral and ethnic object of his work, he does not find it in the battle of the classes as do the social novelists, nor in the battle of races and of peoples as do the imperialistic and nationalistic noveltists, but in "the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

It would have been enough for Joseph Conrad to proclaim this sense of interracial solidarity, at the very time when Kipling was winning his triumph, for him to be distinguished from his contemporaries among the novelists of exoticism and adventure.

Abel Chevalley. THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL (Alfred A. Knopf)

ALAN SEEGER DARED LIVE WITHOUT COMPROMISE

In "Maktoob" (which is the Turkish for "It is written") Seeger acknowledged the power of a fate from which there is no escape, and after complete submission to the will of this Oriental destiny, there came to his heart

"The resignation and the calm
And wisdom of the East."

It is a combination of this Oriental fatalism and an overpowering hunger for a newer mightier experience that inspires the unforgettable line,

"I have a rendezvous with Death," probably the most famous line of poetry written during the war. Several explanations of this line have been suggested by Amy Lowell, William Lyon Phelps, and others; but none seems to be so plausible as the one offered by Walter Adolphe Roberts, who knew Seeger intimately in Paris. Mr. Roberts says: "The word rendez-vous is one of the commonest

words in the vocabulary of the French soldier, and was constantly used by officers and men in a variety of ways. Donner un rendez-vous à quelqu'un is to make an ordinary everyday appointment with some one. It is the equivalent of our slang word 'date,' but also bears connotations of place as well as time. It was commonly used to designate the time and place of attack. To Seeger, hearing the word used twenty times a day, and recognizing the beauty of the word itself, nothing could be more natural than to link the idea of a rendez-vous with that of Death, an idea which we know to have preoccupied him constantly at this time." The juxtaposition of the ideas made him immortal wherever English or French is spoken, for his poems have been translated by the French poets André Rivoire and Odette Raimondi-Mathéron.

Henry Morton Robinson. LOVE, ARMS, SONG, AND DEATH. (Century for December)

A GUIDE TO CRITICISM

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

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GENUINE REALISM

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)

THREE-PENNY LUNCH

It was a squalid street, dimly lighted by the lamps and gas-jets of a few small basement shops. In one of the windows nearly opposite me I saw a sign, "Eat," and under this, "Three-Penny Lunch."

supper; and I might have walked the streets of Boston for years without finding a restaurant where food was more reasonably priced. Jingling my two dimes and a nickel — which now seemed a fortune, I crossed the street I remembered that I had not yet had my and entered. I was rather shabbily dressed in

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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.

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"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

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WORDS ANCIENT AND MODERN. By Ernest Weekley. 163 pages. Cloth. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company.

In these days of "gentlemen with dusters," true confession publications, and all the other manifestations of post-war frankness, we thought that everything "with a past" had been discovered. Now comes Ernest Weekley, of University College, Nottingham, with a pithy little volume which attempts to give "fairly complete Lives of words whose history has been unusually adventurous what might be called 'words with a dramatic past.'" It is an admirable attempt and the result is a unique assembly, ranging the length of the alphabet from Agnostic through Blackmail, Cuff, Democracy, Haphazard, Magazine, Pilgrim, Pipe, Plot, Rummage, Uproar and Weird. There are such familiar words as Story and Democracy and such foreign ones as Soviet and Swaraj. Altogether, an entertaining book of value to everyone who is careful

in the use of words.

CHAMBER'S BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY. New and Revised Edition. Originally Compiled by David Patrick and F. Hindes Groome. 1006 pages. Cloth. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Company.

"The Great of All Times and Nations Over 10,000 Biographies"-a ponderous looking volume, in its green and black binding and sober brown jacket. But there is not

one page too many. The publishers inform you that "All the little Somebodies are in it and all the great Nobodies: The world's Upper Ten Thousand and the Lower and the Lowest." In it we find the stuff of a legion of romances. Abd-ul-Hamid, Ravanchol, Gilles de Ritz and Pickle the Spy-the names alone would intrigue. Nothing has been overlooked in the biographic sketches. There are many more names than could be found in an en

cyclopaedia, with pronunciation of difficult or foreign names and an index of pseudonyms

and nicknames.

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pose of criticism is set forth in several vigorous chapters: J. E. Spingarn gives emphatic approval to the belief of the Idealist that the purpose of the critic is solely to interpret the self-expression of the writer. Following this spirited defense is H. L. Mencken's lively "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism," emphasizing his belief in the critic's right to express his own individual uniqueness. All sides of the merry battle, as well as many types of mind, are represented in the chapters by W. C. Brownell, Stuart Sherman, Percy Boynton and Van Wyck Brooks. Still other controversies are taken up by Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Doren, Llewelyn Jones, William McFee, Amy Lowell, and many other authorities.

"Current Reviews" is prepared especially for everyone who wishes to study book reviews as a preparation for the writing of them. To this end there is much valuable instruction

condensed in an Introduction, Appendix A, and Appendix B. But the book constitutes far more than a text. Written for various audiences, and covering a wide range in subject matter, the reviews selected are not only highly entertaining but form an illuminating study of the work of many fine minds. They are particularly noteworthy because, as the editor says of them, "There is nothing of which I could suspect that it had been written for the exploitation of the writer's cleverness or the satisfying of a petty malice." Biographical, historical, and like reviews include such names as Henry James Forman, Robert Morss Lovett and M. R. Werner; fiction reviews by Henry Seidel Canby, Edwin Francis Edgett, Harry Hansen and Sinclair Lewis; poetry, drama, and criticism by Ernest Boyd, and John Erskine; and reviews of critical and social discussion by Zona Gale, H. L. Mencken and Ben Ray Redman.

$2,000

PRIZE OFFER FOR PLAY MANUSCRIPTS This amount will be paid in cash for plays suitable for amateurs and will be distributed as follows:

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The plays must be at least three acts, comedies, melo-dramas or serious plays. The costuming and settings should be simple; the plots clearly defined; the plays free from objectionable features.

Contest closes March 1st, 1927. Prize winners to be announced April 15th. In the event of a tie for any of the prizes, a prize of the amount offered will be awarded to each of the tying contestants.

Detailed information sent upon request.

THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY

925-927-929 Filbert Street

Philadelphia

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