ceives it may make it a public nuisance. In fact, the way in which it is presented or illustrated may make it a public scandal. It may draw shallow and unintelligent dirthunters to its theatre, and drive away true lovers of the drama. Its audiences may react in rowdyish and offensive fashion. That play is then a nuisance. Our laws provide for the suppression of such things, after a judge or a jury declares that the community has been harmed.

A police force does not function easily and smoothly, I admit, in these cases that involve harm to public morals. Citizens, too, quite naturally hesitate to complain. They are not sure of their own judgments. Then there rise up earnest citizens who say: "because the police power so easily breaks down, such plays must hereafter be stopped before they are presented. We must have a censor who will read the manuscript before the play becomes a committed act, and the story before it is published, and decide whether or not they are going to have an effect upon the public mind that will be generally harmful to morals." But that calls for prophetic powers which are not often vouchsafed to men, and very seldom granted to political appointees.

* * *

It is one of the regrettable manifestations of democracy that a police force, maintaining order amongst the very populace from which it draws both its powers and its personnel, often fails to function satisfactorily. Then we begin inventing other forces that shall supplement the police. This is just what we have done in the case of motion pictures. There are laws enough to empower the police to close any really harmful picture show in any community, but they often fail to do it; so we appoint a board to eliminate the harmful show before it becomes a show. Any human board faces a hopeless task trying to figure out rules and recipes and definitions of indecency, in order to prevent all productions that will surely in the case of any audience prove to be harmful.

Why not have a Board of Censors who should prevent all violations of Good Taste? Now that, to my mind, would be a great thing; but of course I should not care for it unless I myself were on the board. I should cut out all the "close-ups" in the movies, to begin with. When a producer films an enlargement of the retina of the eye of the hero, showing the heroine's reflection in it, I should imprison him. When an actress heaves her chest once too often, to signify her passion, I should cut her throat. And this brings me back to that article in the American Mercury that started all the trouble in Boston. So far as I can tell, it was written as a sociological study. When I first read it I had no idea that I was reading something that might injure my morals. But it did occur to me that the author revealed poor taste when he cracked his little jokes at the expense of the lady in the case, it made me question the scientific-ness of his attitude. I should enjoy a quarrel with Mr. Mencken on that point; but it would be an academic quarrel, without a policeman, and I should let him give me a cigar afterward.

There is more to the editing of a magazine than just a critical sense and some skill in appraising public taste. There is for instance a sense of responsibility for the training and encouraging of immature writers so as to build them up into dependable contributors; and more important is the sense of responsibility in some measure for the developing taste of any mass of readers. The magazine editor who does not study opportunities to train his public in discrimination is not really a capable editor. He is just a salesman. He is not even a salesman; his circulation manager is that, and he is just an office clerk.

When I buy a magazine I want one that represents the constructive force and imagination of a capable editor; one who has studied the problem of what will interest or amuse or entertain or instruct me, up to the highest mark of my capabilities; a magazine does not

have to be "highbrow" to be good. It is quite possible that Adventure is a better piece of magazine-making than the Atlantic. In fact I suspect that it is. The people who read the New Republic have a higher degree of culture, so-called, than those who read Flynn's. But I think that Flynn's has been at one time or another the better piece of editorial work.

In other words, I think that magazine is most ably edited which deals best with the public it aims to reach, regardless of the grade of intelligence of that public. Any high school boy ought to understand this. If he picks up a magazine that is nothing but a can into which an editor who is the hireling clerk of the circulation manager has chucked all the filthy manuscript he has found here and there, even a high school boy must know that he is encouraging a bad job. I am not talking about the morals of it, I am talking about bad workmanship in the editorial field.

*

There are plenty of good magazines that appeal to the understanding of those who are not elaborately educated in schools and colleges. I just mentioned Flynn's, for instance. I might as well confess that I lately met that magazine for the first time when I picked up a tattered copy from an empty seat beside me in a train and started idly to glance through it; soon I was interested. It was full of really good detective stories. The next week I bought a number and read it all through. I like a good detective story, and these were so good that I started out to find who did the editing. It proved to be an old friend, formerly editor and owner of Outing. The other day they made him president of a college of ancient repute. I am sure that editing a detective story magazine is not the conventional training for a college presidency, but I know too that this president is a man of brains and imagination; and when he used these qualities in the making of a lively magazine of entertainment for the average readers of our towns and cities, he made a first class job of it.

After all, one may find pretty good stuff on the newsstands to suit any mood or level of intelligence without pawing over the garbage.

Is there a taint of the sermonesque about these philosophizings? If so, I apologize. It may be the influence of the title I chose so hastily. Read Thoreau for the derivation of a saunterer, and you will find him delightfully explaining that it means one who is travelling toward the Holy Land. The idea is disturbing in a way; not that I would assert that I am bound in the other direction; but I should not want to be travelling too fast, even if one ought to be bound for somewhere. Curious, is it not, that literary men who are popularly supposed to avoid any undue practice of morals are so prone to talk about them! There is Sinclair Lewis, for instance. According to the papers- I don't know why I should believe the papers- he gained some publicity the other day by engaging in a sort of duel with the Deity, and claims that he won by default. I was not so much interested in that episode, however, as in the moral issue which he later raised in connection with the Pulitzer Prize.

There is a good deal to be said about these prize contests, and there will be more space for it in another issue. But speaking as a disinterested observer I am inclined to think that I would have accepted that Pulitzer money. If, for instance, some solemn group of directors of a literary foundation should get together and decide to award $1,000 to the writer of an editorial that most closely conformed to certain specifications which they had laid down, and this editorial of mine won the prize, I should say "Thank you, gentlemen, I admire your judgment!" Even if they decided to give it to the writer of the worst editorial they ever read, and mine impressed them that way, I should still take a sneaking sort of satisfaction in the fact that their judgment was so bad; and I should still say, "Thank you, gentlemen. God bless you!" Or if it were only ten dollars.

WHE

WHEN we have practiced writing unrhymed iambic pentameter until the measure has become second nature with us, then, and not before then, we may proceed to rhyme. The simplest sort of rhymed iambic pentameter is, of course, the Heroic Couplet, an excellent example of which is Herrick's epigram on the Virgin Mary:

To work a wonder God would have her shown At once a bud and yet a rose full blown.

Or Donne's couplet on Lady Herbert:

No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Note how much meaning is packed into these brief poems. Not a syllable is wasted, not an adjective is introduced to pad the metre. The modifying phrase full blown in the first couplet is inevitable to contrast the rose with the bud. In the second couplet, the single adjective autumnal, with its richness of suggestion, carries the burden of the whole epigram. Such economy of phrasing, such simplicity of statement, captivates the reader at once. Compare these two couplets with a lyric in some current magazine, and notice how much sharper are their outlines, how much defter their diction. And then try writing single couplets yourself, always striving for

packed significance and arresting turns of thought.

Then proceed to a double couplet. Consider Francis Quarles's epigram "Respice Finem":

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.

You have doubtless remarked in this poem the swift "run-over" or "overflow" in the second couplet, and the variety of pauses contrasting with the regular beat of the introductory couplet. An analysis of even this short poem reveals a number of subtle metrical variations without which the verse would be monotonous and flat-footed.

It is not necessary, of course, to confine your experiments to the epigram. The Heroic Couplet is one of our most flexible measures and may be adapted to almost any mood or theme. It has served our poets chiefly as the vehicle for narrative, as in the works of Chaucer; for satire, as in the works of Pope, and for epigram, as in the examples just quoted. But its possibilities are unlimited. In his long poem "King Cole," for instance, Masefield uses the Heroic Couplet for his dialogue, to set it off from the narrative, which is in a stanza form called "rhyme royal." And

in Keats's "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill," we find a very free treatment of the form, flowing and well modulated, to communicate a mood inspired by natural beauty:

I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling and so very still

That the sweet buds which with a modest pride

Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside Their scanty-leaved and finely-tapering stems Had not yet lost their starry diadems Caught from the early sobbing of the morn. The clouds were pure and white as flocks new-shorn,

And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept

On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept

A little noiseless noise among the leaves
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

It may be that in attempting some such effect as this, you will find your verse becoming too loose, the lines not merely flowing into each other but slopping over. In that case, read Pope as a corrective. Pope, you will discover, constructs each couplet separately as a "thought-coop," a finished epigram in itself, almost without metrical irregularity. The poem as a whole is bound together only by the continuity of thought. That is the reason why so many of Pope's single couplets have become proverbial. We weary of his work if we read much of it because it is almost too neat, too tricky. Between the polished couplets of Pope and the looser couplets of the Romantic poets lies the golden mean, which has, as always, enough irregularity to vary the metre, but not enough to break down the metre.

form falls into monotony more readily. The verse is essentially lyric; indeed, most of the Elizabethan lyrics are based on four-stress metre. It will not, no matter how many irregularities you introduce, support the burden of a long poem. Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" (read these carefully) are the longest successful poems in four-stress couplets, and it would be folly for a lesser poet to attempt four-stress poems even as long as these. The history of English poetry is full of examples of long failures in this form, the work of some of our best poets. In spite of these clear warnings, no less a modern poet than John Masefield has wasted his efforts and fallen into the same old pitfall; in his "Reynard the Fox" and his "Everlasting Mercy" he varies the measure as boldly as possible, the only result being that the verse is rough as well as monotonous.

Let us take two stanzas from Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my Love
And we will all the pleasures prove
The hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields .
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

In this lyric Marlowe, whose genius for subtle variation is almost unequaled, has kept fairly close to the normal metre, yet we notice at once the variety of pause, and, in the second stanza, the "feminine" or two-syllable endings. Furthermore, we find that the second line in the second stanza is not iambic at all, but trochaic. The line scans thus: And' a thou'sand fra'grant pos'ies. The introductory weak syllable of the normal iambic foot has been omitted. This omission is important, for it constitutes one of the main differences between five-stress and four-stress iambic measure. The omission of the introductory weak syllable in a passage of five-stress iambic verse is nearly always awkward and should be avoided; in four-stress iambic metre, this

When you have conquered the Heroic Couplet (and that is no easy conquest) it is time to turn your attention to a more lyric measure, the four-stress iambic couplet. The possibilities and limitations of this form are sharply defined by centuries of experiment. In the first place, the measure will test to the full your ability to vary musically, for no

"beheading" of the line is one of the most common and necessary variations. If you examine "L'Allegro" carefully, you will discover that about a third of the lines are thus beheaded. Sometimes we find complete paragraphs of these lines:

Streit mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the Landskip round it measures,
Russet Lawns, and Fallows Gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren brest
The labouring clouds do often rest.

The final line of this passage is iambic measure (with three syllables, however, in the second foot); the rest are all beheaded. The effect intended, of course, is one of swiftness and lightness. In "Il Penseroso" the proportion of these lines is much smaller. It would not be advisable to introduce so many irregularities in a short poem in four-stress metre. Milton's problem was more complicated than any we are likely to face at this stage of our experience; hence his variations are bolder and more frequent than ours will need to be. Finally, for an even freer treatment of this form, read Coleridge's "Christabel." Here the poet has fallen back on the time element in our verse. We find lines in "Christabel" like the two-syllable line from Shakspere's lyric quoted in our last issue, where we can not possibly hear four stresses. Coleridge's explanation is that these lines although syllabically deficient, are equal in time to the others. We also discover a constantly shifting movement of the verse to conform to the movement of the narrative. Frequently these variations take the form of long passages in three-part metre.

For the beginner, however, it would be wiser to hold more closely to the normal measure, particularly in a short lyric. Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is an excellent example of the four-stress couplet varied in exact propriety to the needs of the occasion. A short quotation from this must suffice:

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace.

The next step in the conquest of rhyme is the study of the quatrain with alternate rhymes: a b a b. Beginning with the Heroic Quatrain, we may take Gray's famous Elegy as a model: