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writers, too, feel rather keenly that their profession is far behind all others in the practical help it gives to aspirants. Many would like to be shown a way to serve effectively. I think some of them feel a little sense of shame that the portals of authorship are surrounded by the thousands of crooks and quacks that feed so gluttonously on honest ambition.

It was my intention in this article to discuss more thoroughly the possibilities in regard to the co-operative study of markets and the co-operation in the marketing of manuscripts. I am so limited in space, however, I must postpone it, touching instead on a few lesser topics.

I take it for granted that regular production must be one of the requirements of continued membership. A few loafers and dilettantes will soon drag down the morale of the club. At the same time revision and re-writing are even more important than original composition. Reworking of a story idea should fall in the same category as the first writing up of the idea which has received favorable comment. Most clubs meet bi-monthly or weekly. Naturally a large club should never be at a loss for material if all the members hold to a fair schedule of work. Indeed, in some cases, it has been found necessary to appoint a committee to select manuscripts for reading and criticism. But even though the production schedule brings in more material than can be criticized, no laxity in living up to the schedule should be permitted. Better make it a real privilege to have a manuscript read for criticism by having a committee select from those submitted only the best.

It is quite evident that the problem of regularity of work must always be a troublesome one, but it can be solved. Proper care in selection of members will go a long way toward solving it. No new member, I venture to suggest, should be elected until a complete story, play, or article of his authorship is submitted to the officers of the club. That much, at least, is necessary as an earnest

of future endeavor. When clubs grow so large as to become unwieldy, a division is advisable. Whether the best unit is six or twenty people I do not know, but I believe that it is somewhere between those two limits. When a club is split up the smaller units can be combined from time to time in full club meetings with successful authors as guests to discuss and criticise manuscripts which have been already discussed and selected by the smaller groups. Of course, this sort of subdivision requires more organization and is perhaps only possible in large centers of population. The whole problem of organization is, of course, much simplified if the person best fitted to consolidate the best interests of writers can be persuaded to take an active part in the movement. The librarian of the local public library is unquestionably that person.

I have been astounded that the typical public library is apparently so completely outside the active creative literary life of its community. This is not true everywhere, particularly in the far West, but it certainly is true in many places. Manuscript clubs are meeting everywhere but in libraries, sometimes in homes of members, and even, surprisingly, in hotels.

I receive many letters from people who wish to join manuscript clubs in their communities. Not being on the ground and being ignorant of personalities, I cannot take it upon myself to put them in touch with local groups, even if I could spare the time for such a huge undertaking. I am always tempted to reply, "Go to your local librarian. He or she should be in intimate touch with the literary life of your community." If it is not so, we should make an attempt to make it so.

The library is the logical common meeting ground for everyone of literary interests. It is almost everywhere. The librarian, as trustee, is a key man in carrying out the whole program of the manuscript club. His co-operation will be invaluable in connection with a suggestion which I shall make next month anent co-operative marketing of manuscripts.

His active interest must be obtained. Go and have a talk with him at your first opportunity. If you belong to a manuscript club, tell him

about it. If you want to join one, give him your name. At least gain his interest and co-operation.

THE MAGIC OF DICKENS

Quilp is ferocious and cunning to a degree, and in his treatment of Kit Nubbles, a repulsive conspirator. Yet, we hate Sampson Brass so much, that we rejoice when Quilp makes that unworthy limb of the law smoke more than is good for him, and drink boiling hot rum from a saucepan. And there is a little humorous incident connected with Quilp which is so ludicrous that for the moment he is almost likeable.

He has been away from home for some time without a word of explanation, and is supposed to be dead. Sampson Brass is at his house preparing a descriptive advertisement of the lost body in the company of Mrs. Quilp and her mother, Mrs. Jiniwin. At this particularly appropriate moment Quilp returns and hiding himself behind the bed-room

door which communicates with the sittingroom, is able both to see and hear. Sampson Brass has got as far as the nose. "A question now arises with relation to his nose." "Flat," said Mrs. Jiniwin. "Aquiline!" cried Quilp, thrusting in his head and striking the feature with his fist. "Aquiline, you hag! Do you see it? Do you call this flat? Do you? Eh?"

Of course Quilp dies the death he deserves, but we have that one incident as a chalk in his favour- he has made us laugh.

That is the magic of Dickens: that out of the crudest and most unpromising dross he can extract, by his alchemy, the gold of humour.

Edwin Charles. SOME DICKENS WOMEN. (Frederick A. Stokes Company)

THE NOVEL AS PROCLAIMED BY H. G. WELLS

"Art," says Wells, "that does not argue nor demonstrate nor discuss is merely the craftsman's impudence." The novel that aims only at a beautiful picture of the social scene by the selective process, taking this detail and omitting that, is, he repeats many times over, certain to pass. Henry James, for example, sought “to pick the straws out of the hair of Life" before he painted her, forgetting that "without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love." If the novel is to mean anything, it must leave in all the straws; the characters must be no impersonal people, but

people with political opinions, religious opinions, partisanships, lusts, and whims, which may be discussed, analyzed, and illuminated in unrestricted freedom. As proclaimed by Wells, the novel is a proper medium for canvassing all social and political problems as they arise. He professes not to teach but to point out, plead, and display. He would fill in, build up, the collective mind. That is what he has used the novel for primarily.

Wilbur Cross. THE MIND OF H. G. WELLS. (Yale Review for January)

The Technique of Modern Poetry

By ROBERT HILLYER

VIII - The Ode.

DE is one of the most indefinite terms

OPE

in English verse. Almost any poem of fair length and elevated subject matter may be called an ode. Yet an analysis of the various works in this class reveals three distinct types, which we may name the Stanzaic Ode, the Pindaric Ode, and the Irregular Ode. Since these poems are too long for quotation here, I will refer my readers to the Oxford Book of English Verse in which will be found all the poems I shall cite as examples.

The Stanzaic Ode was originally an attempt in English to reproduce the effect of the Latin odes of Horace. Andrew Marvell's Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland is a fair example; much better is Collins's Ode to Evening, one of the finest unrhymed poems in our language. In this Ode, so delicate in sound, so rich in imagery, our ears are gratified in spite of the absence of rhyme. No unrhymed lyric until Tennyson's Tears, Idle Tears can be compared with Collins's lovely ode. The Stanzaic Ode, however, is generally much more complicated in pattern. Spenser's Prothalamion and Epithalamion, Milton's Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, among many others, might well have been termed odes. With the four golden odes of Keats, Melancholy, Autumn, the Grecian Urn, and the Nightingale, — the Stanzaic Ode becomes established in full perfection.

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The Pindaric Ode is an attempt to reproduce in English the choric ode of the Greek poet Pindar. The basic form is tripartite, consisting of a strophe and an antistrophe (two stanzas identical in form) and an epode (a third stanza differing in form from the first two). This pattern is then repeated any number of times, all the strophes and antistrophes throughout the poem being identical in form, and all the epodes corresponding in like manner. The Pindaric Ode is too complex for general use. An early example is Ben Jonson's Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Carey and Sir H. Morrison. The grandest of our Pindaric Odes are Thomas Gray's Bard and Progress of Poesy.

The Irregular Ode had its origin in a misunderstanding of the Pindaric form. The seventeenth century poet Cowley failed to recognize the identical correspondence between the various divisions of the Pindaric Ode and invented a form in which repetition of set patterns plays no part. Dryden followed suit with his Song for St. Cecilia's Day and his Alexander's Feast. The best known of these irregular odes is undoubtedly Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, wherein the shifting music skilfully and faithfully follows the shifting mood. So successful

is the modulated verse of Wordsworth's poem that we frequently hear this form spoken of as the Romantic Ode.

I believe that modulated verse, the offshoot of the Irregular Ode, is destined to a distinguished future in English prosody. It is a boon to those who have found the set stanzaic forms too rigid for freedom of expression, thus legitimately providing to poetry a new scope which the broken prose cadence known as free verse can never legitimately supply. It should be noted, however, that a thorough mastery of the set forms is prerequisite to the mastery of this more flexible technique, for they alone can train the ear to detect flaws in the music, and the mind to exercise that proper economy which forbids prolixity. In modulated verse we divide our poem according to the division of thought, we vary our line length according to the amount of content, and we insert our rhymes wherever they most musically and naturally fall. Our modulations from one line length or metre to another must be smooth, and similar rhyme sounds must not be separated by more than four lines, for in longer intervals the sound is lost. Modulated verse may be used very effectively in a short poem, such as Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach:

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full; the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd;
But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This magnificent poem illustrates well the power of modulated verse in a fairly short passage. I venture to prophesy that variety and brilliance of the form will be even more effective in overcoming the monotony and heaviness which are too apt to mar longer compositions.

Can a Writer Write Advertising?

By EARNEST ELMO CALKINS

LEADER in the advertising profession, favorite contributor
to the Atlantic Monthly and author of numerous books
and articles, Mr. Calkins combines to a rare degree the
viewpoint of both the writing and advertising world. It is
a pleasure to present his opinions on a much-discussed
subject.

ANY a writer is beginning to look specu

latively at advertising writing and wonder if he cannot do it. He hears of the large sums earned by advertising men, and he reads the copy they write in the advertisements, and it seems to him that the work is not beyond his powers, and that the income is larger and more certain than the one he is accustomed to.

great deal about the kind of goods he is going to advertise, knowledge which comes only from patient study and investigation in shops and houses. Such things are not found in books. They must be learned in the field. This knowledge must be supplemented by another sort of knowledge, knowledge of people - human nature. Such knowledge may come more natural to a writer. It is the sort that makes novels. But there is a technical and statistical side to it also. He must know where these people live, in what sort of homes, how many in the family, what they earn and what they spend, and what their ideas are about spending and saving; their budget and their standard of living. He must know what they read, especially magazines and newspapers, and how much such things influence them. When he has such knowledge, he will start to write advertising with a graphic picture of his audience before him, and he will then know what to say to them about these particular goods he wants them to buy, what appeal to make, how much of his story is to be told in words, how much in picture, where his readers are going to see it, whether in magazines, newspapers or circulars or on poster boards, and how what he writes should be adapted to these different mediums. This is the kind of knowledge that people, even writers, are not born with. It must be acquired, and it can be acquired only in one way, by mingling with people and talking with them, manufacturers, foremen, workmen, traveling salesmen, dealers, clerks, and the users of the goods, month after

The professional advertising man is often called upon to explain the difference between writing and writing advertising. The explanation is both simple and complex. Simply, it is that advertising must be written by an advertising man. A writer, an author, that is, goes through a long apprenticeship before he can write well whatever it is that he does write essay, sonnet, short story an apprenticeship to life, it may be, if he interprets life. The advertising man also serves a long apprenticeship during which he becomes an advertising man, and incidentally a writer of advertising incidentally, for the writing of copy is only a part of his work, an important part, but still a part. Before he can write a successful advertisement he must have acquired somehow a vivid picture of the commercial world. He must be at home in it, so that he can move naturally and easily, without knocking things over. He must know something about business in general, how it is carried on, how goods are made and sold, through what channels they flow from the factories through the shops to the people. He must have the merchandising instinct strongly developed, the desire to sell. He must know a

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