pain in the neck. Heiresses constantly masquerading as waitresses to find out if some college boy really loves them for themselves alone and not for the money. Said college boys, immediately after graduation, becoming bond salesmen, and cleaning up Wall Street in a sensational manner within twelve months, finally marrying the girls of their choice, who were, supposedly, stenographers but turn out to be the Bond Broker's daughters. I got the impression that you have a great deal of admiration for the Saturday E. P. As a commercial proposition for writers it may be worthy of admiration. But its absolute cheerful freedom from ideas, sheer horror of realism and hatred of probability is only rivalled by the great motion picture corporations. This same criticism applies equally to ninety per cent. of the current periodical output.

How many people really believe in the story of the poor boy who comes to the city with thirty cents and "works" his way up to a millionaire ? Generally this class of individual "works" somebody else and has no ability beyond the ability to hold the carrot two feet from the donkey's nose. How often has sheer unparalleled luck made a millionaire from a monkey, and how often sheer unadulterated swindling? It would be a very refreshing thing, and a good thing for the public if some of the high-pressure sales magazines printed the true history of some of our great men. I know quite a lot of these inner histories.

Man evolved from a nut-eating monkey to a mutton-eating man. Will he, by eating nuts, or reading nutty literature ever revert to his original monkeyhood? Rupert Hughes is being slammed by the Press for trying to portray George Washington as a man and not as a stupid, lifeless, goggle-eyed waxwork. Mr. W. E. Woodward is busy writing a biography of George and we hope (as we have reason to hope) that this great man will come into his own, and not remain the insipid, hybrid creature that former historians would have had us believe.

writing for the Cosmopolitan, or John McCabe writing for Liberty.

I have my nerve to so far forget myself as to criticize a person that writes. It may be impertinence, but then I have a philosophy of life which says that a "cat may look at a king." Metaphor is glorious, the most glorious of poetic achievement but it must not be involved metaphor. We are never at the edge of a precipice ground down under the iron heel of the velvet glove. Even metaphor must be practical and convey a concrete idea. Authors are plentiful who write "he was, indeed, up a tree; and he realized that he would have to do some heavy thinking to get himself out of the hole." We know what he means, but he should say what he means. In such a simple case we cannot fail to understand him, although in more obscure cases we are left entirely in the dark as to the idea that it is intended to convey. The authors mean well, and intend their metaphor to convey a practical idea. Theoretically, I suppose, they are practical, but practically they are as unpractical as the wildest theorist.

When a man's ideas stand out with the hard, crystalline brilliance that characterizes real ideas, we are able to place his ideas in juxtaposition to our own philosophy and to give him his place in our mental catalogue. Thus, the pessimism of Pope does not perturb us, nor the banalities of Byron, nor the crashing Catholicism of Chesterton. We understand their point of view, and their message, and look to see what is their place in the cosmic scheme. But when a man's ideas are involved, hazy, it is as difficult to catalogue him as it is to appreciate him. He is like a mule with the trunk of an elephant and the cloven hoof of a camel, a monstrosity, a trope, a prosopopoeia.

The same thing happens when a man portrays a girl. She makes up excessively, she rolls her stockings (and incidentally exposes a good deal of thigh when seated), and smokes cigarets (not to mention cocktail drinking). Now all this is very fine, and probably true, but such a girl is not pure and chaste as the authors would have us believe. She marries the owner of the department store in which she works because marriage is the one price upon which she bases her surrender. That is pure rubbish and never happens in real life. Chastity is not a mere abstention from sexual wrong, but is something flaming within, a pellucid clearness of mind and an unspotted soul. It made a make-believe soldier out of Jeanne d'Arc, made her fight to liberate France. It did not make a soldier of her because a soldier will go anywhere to fight, and with any motivegood or bad. It made Portia don legal habiliments, and perpetrate the most magnanimous, heroic fraud in history. She had a definite mission and carried it through, afterward discarding the lawyer's role. She was not a legal lady as we know her. That is

Is it harder to write good stuff than to write rubbish? Or do so many authors write rubbish because the publishers won't take anything else? Would any of our magazines (outside the more intellectual ones) ever print articles by G. K. Chesterton, or stories by Guy de Maupassant or Remy de Gourmont? Hardly. These gentlemen would have starved to death if they depended on the American periodical for a livelihood. Yet I challenge any modern author to produce a literary masterpiece like de Maupassant's "Piece of String." Just a trivial piece of string picked up by an old man in a village. But what a story. Crammed with human interest, human avarice, human cruelty, human (or rather, inhuman) brutality. It seems to me, that to be a successful periodical writer one must never have learned to think. I could n't imagine Bernard Shaw

one objection that I have to the practice of referring to the modern lady lawyers as Portias. They are not. They are Feminists, but Portia was feminine.

Now a girl that smokes cigarets and drinks cocktails and knows that she is unduly exposing her person (in addition to the possession of a highlydeveloped sexual urge that makes her demand marriage of her employer simply because she is afraid of the consequences, or of the conventions) cannot be described as chaste, or be so treated as to leave the impression that she is chaste. Say she is no worse than she is painted, all very well. That in the light of modern conditions, and the emancipation of women (which my philosophy calls the degradation of women) that such things are perfectly acceptable and understood. But do not say that she is chaste, or a good pattern for any generation to follow. If chastity is out of date (it always was) let us acknowledge the fact boldly. We have to handle muck sometimes, but we cannot handle it by throwing roses and perfume on it. Let us don a pair of gloves and take up a shovel and throw it (the muck, not the shovel) where it belongs. And don't tell us about the girl who marries the head of the department store. It simply is n't done.

And I'm heartily sick of the square-jawed, determined-looking young man, who, during his first year of business, gets a wrong letter in his mail (and opens it) exposing the dreadful secret that the Broker's firm over the way is staggering under the weight of a terrible mortgage. The same young man draws his year's savings out of the Bank and surreptitiously buys up the mortgage thus saving the Brokers from utter ruin. And, of course, he marries his stenographer, who really turns out to be the Broker's daughter in disguise, but was so much in love with him that she went to work for him. In this way she really discovered that he loved her for what she was, not because she was the Broker's daughter. And, besides, she wanted to see if he had the stuff in him that millionaires are made of. They all are, every blessed one. The stories are all the same, except that the authors' names are different and the names of the dramatis (or comedias) personae are changed. And the author always neglects to tell us how the young lady, pampered by footmen, and expensively chaperoned at a Paris "finishing school," came to learn typing and shorthand in the first place. According to the conversations these young ladies must have undergone a rigorous course of training in cross-word puzzles (to judge them by the words they use), in other words, they are brainless, beautiful (always beautiful) waxworks. Now I know that it takes a little brain to acquire a knowledge of typing and shorthand. You can see that even I cannot type very well, with all my terrific brain-power.

I do not insist that all stories should be horribly real. I do insist that they contain, at least, a modicum of possibility and a larger share of probability. Glorious Grecian girlhood is often (too often) garrulous, gay and grasping, but almost never brainy. Most beauties are insipid, not intelligent, demanding, not devoting; ephemeral, not ethereal; synthetic and not sympathetic. I can get along very well with an ordinary-looking heroine, just as I can live happily with an ordinary-looking wife. I can get along with a wife who says "It's getting light now," but not with a heroine who says, "See, see! The Dawn breaks upon the hills. What a glorious hallowed aura." They rake up queer words from their crossword puzzle vocabulary and inflict them on a longsuffering reader. "Psittacism" (of which most heroines are composed), "mnen monistic," "inhibitory complex," "essence of dogmatism," all these freaks jump out of the mouths of heroines and proceed to attack the poor sap who has to do the reading. I cannot understand a young meat-packer saying to his girl (who wraps shellac in the glue-factory):"Well, honey, life is hard, but we are young and perseverance overcomes all things. If we are possessed of a little patience and save why who knows? . . . perhaps we could afford to to ..." She smiled happily, but being too overcome to reply, she gently let her head sink into (sic) his shoulder."

...

What the young meat-packer would have said was something like this. "Oh, come on kid. It's all right."

"No," protested the girl, "it would n't be right. Besides something might happen."

"Well. I'll tell you what we'll do," said Mr. Meatpacker. "I gotta cupla bucks for a license. Less go and git married."

Together they walked to the city hall.

Nothing to be overcome about, just an everyday occurrence. Of course, they get a divorce in six months' time and re-marry and so on, ad inf., but that is what really happens. She doesn't (ninetynine time out of a hundred) turn out to be an heiress, daughter of a Newport, L. I., family, nor does he turn out to be the only son of John D. Rockinghorse, the Oil Magnet.

My thanks to Mr. W. E. Woodward for his faithful adherence to truth in his splendid booksBunk Lottery and Bread and Circuses.

Many thanks to Mr. Sinclair Lewis for Babbitt. Both these gentlemen write about the people I know and have seen - and do see — - constantly. There are others, too few, although too numerous to

"That first year, with prices for stories by unknown authors smaller than now, and with no particular demand for new writers, I made about twelve hundred dollars. This was a business. It was entitled to recognition and encouragement. But how? My first thought had always been my family. I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say. But after a time- it was a long time I learned to work when the chance came. The total result of this, after twelve years (1917), is that I have learned to sit down at my desk and begin work simultaneously. One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and struggle. That was my belief in what is called 'inspiration.'

"Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so many things to write about, and writing was so difficult. Ideas came, but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the technic of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I have less to say, I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do real work, I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous writing, and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of these great times in which I live, now I shall fail.

"The truth is, my critical powers have grown faster than my creative ones. I am always dissatisfied. I write and rewrite, and destroy. I am afraid of reading my book reviews for fear of meeting an honest critic. I go scourged to my desk. Yet I go on writing. It is, very definitely, a part of my life.

"I am not an early riser. I like to let the day break on me gradually. My house takes up a little time in the mornings. Then I generally go to my study and work until luncheon. Afternoons have always varied. If there is a long piece of work, I frequently work all afternoon for perhaps three afternoons

in a week; but I am quite as likely to go out riding or play golf, or make a visit to the dressmaker. I may say that I work every weekday morning and perhaps three afternoons. Generally speaking, all of the rather large amount of work I have done in the past twelve years has been done in my home. But when a long piece of work was on, I have frequently felt the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while.

LANIER. A rejection slip from the Atlantic Monthly had a great influence in making Sidney Lanier famous as a poet. Dr. Ernest Kuhl, professor of English at Goucher College, Baltimore, has found a letter, written by Lanier to Edward Spencer, the poet and essayist, in which he tells of the rejection of his great poem, "Corn," in 1874 by editor William Dean Howells, on the ground that it was inconsistently put together. The chagrin caused by this setback, Lanier intimates, was the turning point of his career, the rebuff having inspired his determination to devote his life to poetry.

RILEY. James Whitcomb Riley had a habit of writing poetry wherever he was, on boards, boxes, fences, or anything else that came handy. One day, in his youth, while he was a guest of a farmer named Steenberger, a companion of his, now a man of seventy, Thomas H. McQueen, saw him pick up a white poplar paddle that had been made for a pumpkin and apple-butter stirrer, sit down on a box, and begin to write with a lead pencil. McQueen and Steenberger, who were in the loft of a barn nearby, said, one to the other: "Rily is writing poetry again." After writing for some time, Riley threw the paddle up on the roof of a shed and paid no more attention to it. Some time afterward McQueen said to Steenberger: "Let's get the paddle and see what Riley wrote." McQueen climbed up and got it, and was the first man to read "When the Frost is on the Punkin and the Fodder's in the Shock." He took the paddle next day to Riley, who had forgotten that he had written anything.

Dear L.:

My feminine imagination insists on building up a picture of you from your last initial, which is all that know of you. L reminds me of a carpenter's square and I'm sure that your critical measure of the books you read is quite as precise as that. My own selection from the alphabet, Q, is appropriate, for like most typical readers my opinions of the books I read come mostly in the form of questions. I feel more than a little embarrassed by my first venture into print, but I shall try to be brave, remembering that a typical reader rarely has such an opportunity as this. Usually it's the other way about-the critic praises the book highly; the reader buys it, does n't like it and goes around muttering to himself what nuisances reviewers are.

Well then, I have been reading "Drums" by James Boyd. Halfway through the book I said, "I have read two hundred pages of a novel and all that has happened is that a boy has gone from his home in the back woods of North Carolina to be tutored, and after a few months has returned for a vacation. Not exactly a plot for a movie but I have been interested from the very first page."

Does that mean, L, that it really is the little things that count? I loved the descriptions of the clothes our Revolutionary forbears wore, of what people had for dinner in

the distant settlements, and of what they drank in sophisticated Edenton on the coast, of slaves rowing Wylie Jones' barge to the tune of their cadenced chanteys up the river to his big plantation; of the season's sporting event, the races where Johnny rode Sir Nat's horse to a hairbreadth victory. I grew very fond of Johnny's friends, Sir Nat and the learned Doctor, the Merrillees and the Tenants, and I wanted to see much more of his adorable mother than Mr. Boyd allowed.

But why, L, when the scene was clear before us, when we knew at least some of the plotters and their plots and had seen the actual beginning of the Revolution, why were we suddenly taken away from America to spend three dull years in England and more tedious months in France? The one sea-fight with John Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard was thrilling, and the bit of army life which we saw when we finally got back to the colonies was just as good as "What Price Glory" but it did seem too bad to miss a perfectly good war. If you can find some good reason why this so-called "greatest novel of the Revolution" gives us so little of the struggle, I wish you would try to explain it to me. As it is, I feel cheated.

I was less interested in the hero, Johnny Fraser, than in his friends and surroundings. Something must be wrong. Perhaps you can