A

PERFECTLY healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be (1) content, happy, satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their (2) azure, cerulean, blue. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and (3) convincingly, conclusively, surely, as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied, if only for the (4) mastery, sureness, excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man's (5) stride, pace, tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the (6) underwood, undergrowth, second growth, and one may ride on horseback through the openings. All the (7) distinctive, leading, distinguished writers of the period possess a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, - for it is allowed to slander our own time, and when we read a quotation from one of them in the midst of a modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a (8) greener, richer, rarer ground, a greater depth and strength of soil. It is as if a green bough and strength of soil. It is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring. You have constantly the (9) conviction, warrant, certificate of life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is (10) dribbled, doled, eked

out by implication of the much that was done. The sentences are verdurous and (11) blooming, rare, green as evergreen and flowers, because they are (12) seated, rooted, fixed in fact and experience, but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots. All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. They prefer to be misunderstood rather than to (13) come short, fail, fall short of its (14) exuberance, clarity. Hussein Effendi praised the epistolary style of Ibrahim Pasha to the French traveler Botta because of "the difficulty of understanding it; there was," he said, "but one person at Jidda who was capable of understanding and explaining the Pasha's correspondence." A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result. Every sentence is the result of a long (15) practice, apprenticeship, probation. Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a (16) typical, ordinary, standard man? The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better (17) done, executed, accomplished. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all. And perhaps the fates had such an (18) intention, design, plan, when, having stored Raleigh so richly with the substance of life

and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to this expression the emphasis and (19) virility, fervor, sincerity of his action.

Up in Detroit the other day, a half dozen drummers met and talked of places where they had got stuck on the road.

A young red-headed fellow from way down south caught the speaker's eye. "Well," he said with what the magazines call "that delicious drawl" - "There's a town down my way they call it Selma. It was named, so they tell me, for a castle in Scotland or maybe Ireland, that was written up 200 years B. C. by the poet Ossian- and, by the way, he was blind-'

"Does your town bear out the name?" Iwinked the dude from Ohio.

"What are its distinguishing characteristics?" laughed the Harvard graduate who was on the look-out for a sinecure.

The Alabamian looked mighty bored when he remembered the dismal days and even more doleful nights - but brightened up a little

by wanting what they have; and the working class, the colored citizenry, very numerous a few of them work most of the time, most of them work some of the time, and the rest "jest visits around."

Tea rooms in stately colonial homes filled with antique furniture, presided over by ladies with shingled heads and abbreviated skirts; rows of utilitarian red brick houses, A.M.I., boldly squat beside dignified mansions; and its most splendid relic of the past, Carlyle House, stands in the back yard of a modern apartment building.

Trolley cars, busses, signal lights, speeders and speed limits, factories, picture shows, and soda fountains the little imp of progress sitting in the lap of gray-haired colonial dignity - and tickling her under the chin.

Alice L. Parrish.

ARKANSAS CITY, KANSAS

The biggest town in the world for its size. The commercial Club offered five dollars for an appropriate slogan, and a traveling salesman called it "the buckle on the oil belt." It is bounded on the South by wild Indians, which ride in Marmons now; on the West by the wilder West; on the North by plains, and in winter, Alaska; and far, far to the East, by civilization.

The conversation of the citizens has turned from the crowd which gathered there for the opening of the Oklahoma strip in 1890, to the advent of the Roxana refinery.

Arkansas City has furnished her quota of the great, with a missionary in Africa, a dancer with Dennis-Shawn in Europe, and a trusty in Lansing. It is the home of the author of Abie's Irish Rose.

Not big enough for a city, too big for at town, it's like an over-grown country boy, too drawn out in places. Still a town is just what its citizens make it, and somehow the citizens of Arkansas City have been making it for some time, the best little town in Kansas. Louise Hannah.

A BOOK REVIEW EDITORIAL WRITING THE ONE-ACT PLAY. By Harold N. Hillebrand, Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois. 244 pages. Cloth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1926.

Preaching the doctrine of free-lancing meaning experimentation with a number of different forms of writing in order to develop fully the resourcefulness of the writer-involves bringing to the attention of our readers sound books on technique in all the various fields of creative writing. This we shall endeavor to do, selecting for special emphasis those which attack the subject in as simple a way as possible. Unfortunately, most books by practitioners lose the reader in a maze of futile technicalities and those by professors are slipshod adaptations of lectures to immature students. Mr. Hillebrand's book on "Writing the One-Act Play" just misses being topnotch. In the Foreword he says: "I have tried

to write a book that the veriest amateur may use in building his first and even his second play. . . . After that he will, no doubt, be ready for more theory and he should then go to Wilde. Another difference between my book and the three I have mentioned ('Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play' by Percival Wilde; 'Play Making' by William Archer; 'Dramatic Technique' by George Pierce Baker) is that, whereas they are written for the critic, mine is written for the dramatist." This sounds promising to the free-lance writer who is tempted to try the drama, for the one-act play as the simplest form commends itself as a subject for experimentation. This book, however, has the common weakness of all books which are a mere adaptation of a course of lectures in a college class. Its concussion on the mind of the general reader must be far different from its effect as part of a course in play-writing.

probably not capable of producing a creative work of quality can, by reading a book, or hearing a course of lectures, however simple or however strongly supported by example, absorb much useful knowledge about how to create any piece of literature. Whatever success Mr. Hillebrand has had as a teacher of playwriting he can attribute only in small part to the lectures he delivers to his class. In larger part he must thank the exercises which he asks his students to submit to him, and his criticisms of those exercises, whereby he is able to drive home the points which his students have incompletely absorbed from his lectures and which readers can but incompletely absorb from a reading of those lectures in book form.

Many people, seeing the weakness of the usual method of presenting theories of technique, have, in error, concluded that it is impossible to help any writer solve his technical problems by anything said or printed. On the other hand, a few insist, in spite of the paucity of proper literature, that, while it may not be feasible to teach people to write, it is entirely possible to help them teach themselves.

Mr. Hillebrand's theories of technique are unquestionably sound. They are, however, presented in a form which must be supple

mented by something else to be helpful either to his students or readers. What the reader who is denied the supplementary instruction of criticism needs and wants is an Analytical Pattern or a series of Analytical Patterns which he can simply and easily apply to all the plays which he reads and sees performed. He must be put in the way of teaching himself. Of course, a reader can, by virtue of study and labor, work out these Analytical Patterns from the information contained in this book and we commend this to those who are ambitious to write plays. But it is regrettable that the reader need be put to the labor of adapting a book to his special needs when the author might have done it for him. Will not Mr. Hillebrand, or someone like him, spend his next sabbatical year in adapting his knowledge of technique to the special needs of writers experienced in other forms? It is a worthy object and will bring resounding fame to the man who first succeeds. Probably a teacher could do it in a quarter or a half the time which he spends in working up a good course of lectures. It would require not a little mental agony to bring himself to adopt the point of view of those who could profit most from such a book, but it would be worth all that it cost.