Atlantic Shop-Talk

Printed, like unprinted, letters evoke a variety of responses, but it is not every volume of correspondence that calls forth a letter which itself has the quality that gives pleasure in print. That is what A Scholar’s Letters to a Young Lady has done with one of its readers — Mr. Gamaliel Bradford. After reading these ‘Passages from the Later Correspondence of Francis James Child,’ printed not long ago in a limited edition, Mr. Bradford wrote of them, and of the Harvard professor from whom they proceeded twenty-five and more years ago, in a letter from which these sentences are taken: —

‘These are the most adorable letters of Child, the most delightful. I am rather an epicure in letters, having made a business as well as a pleasure of them for a great many years, and I do not know of any American letters that are superior to these, if any equal. Do you realize how sweet they are, how human, how full of profound meaning and significance in their careless grace?

‘In the first place, they are so admirably written: without one trace of conscious effort, and yet so swift and light and vivid, nothing clumsy or trailing or loose-ended, but the natural expression of one who thinks with perfect clearness. And they rise to such a high imaginative quality. The sense of Shakespeare is present all through them, but it is not always easy to tell where the Shakespeare ends and the Child begins. And the delicate interweaving of humor and jest through it all is as Shakespearean as the touches of poetry. For you feel that you are dealing with a Shakespearean soul and the best of all is the way the soul shines through. The more I study letters, the less I understand what makes the difference in this respect. Matthew Arnold, for example, was an interesting man; but his letters are among the dullest. Bowles was a man of far less depth and power; but how the heart beats in his. And certainly the heart beats in these, without the least effort at self-display, the least pretense of revelation, but simply in spontaneous effusion of friendship and tenderness. How delicate and subtle and pervading the tenderness is, a wave of warm affection breaking always into the lightest, dancing foam of merriment. There is such fine, profound insight into life there; there is such just yet unobtrusive digestion of the art of living. Then the man’s own work and passionate interests come in so charmingly, do not obtrude or tire, but yet are always there in their suave predominance, showing how he toiled over them, and sighed over them, and loved them.

‘And then there are the roses. What a strange, subtle, mystical crown the roses weave and twine over the man’s whole life, the roses symbolizing woman, symbolizing love, symbolizing joy, tingeing page after page with their crimson splendor. Oh, I call them wonderful roses, and a wonderful book, and a wonderful soul.’

The season of roses is also the season of school and college commencements, to say nothing of the strawberries with which these festivals are intimately associated. This is the season of mourning for those to whom Professor Child once alluded in asking a discouraged student: —

It is impossible to dispose so neatly of the A’s and the B’s, but for youth in general the season is one of hope, and it is peculiarly the season for the issue of a new Atlantic text, Youth and the New World. The editor of this compilation of essays which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly is Mr. Ralph P. Boas, Head of the English Department of the Central High School of Springfield, Massachusetts, the only preparatory school that has twice distinguished itself by winning the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa trophy, awarded on the basis of entrance-examination records. The essays which make up the book deal with a variety of topics — social, political, athletic, educational, and religious—with which the rising generation is confronted. Among the twenty essayists represented are Dean Briggs, of Harvard, President MaeCraeken, of Vassar, Bertrand Russell, the Rev. Dr. George A. Gordon, and others whose thoughts and words have produced stimulating effects upon many readers, young and old, through recent years. It is the definite purpose of the Atlantic Monthly Press, in placing books of this nature in the hands of school and college students, to fortify them for really constructive encounters with the world in which they must soon take their places.

Appearing at about the same time with Youth and the New World is The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays, edited with Introduction, Commerit, and Annotated Bibliography, by Professor Sterling Andrus Leonard, of the University of Wisconsin. This is Professor Leonard’s first year at Wisconsin, to which he went from the Lincoln School (Teachers’ College) in New York. He has been keenly interested in the drama, especially as a vehicle of expression and cultivation for students in schools and colleges, and in this volume he has assembled a number of contemporary plays, American, English, and Irish, which lend themselves both to ‘drama study’ and to acting by high-school and college students and other adventurers in the field of amateur dramatics. The editorial apparatus of the book provides it with a distinct educational value, but what we hope is that, in addition to all its classroom uses, it will serve to supply the acting texts of a number of the best recent plays, by the best recent writers for the stage, in a highly practical and attractive form. The Garricks and Fanny Kembles of a future day may not at this moment be thronging our high schools, but the audiences of the future are, and in their discrimination between good and bad plays, whether it be acquired through witnessing or participating in them, lies the best hope for the further development of a great art.

Still another addition to the list of Atlantic Texts is a volume scheduled for June publication under the title, Story, Essay, and Verne. It is edited by Charles Swain Thomas, Lecturer in Harvard University, and Harry G. Paul, of the English Department of the University of Illinois. These editors have collaborated before in the production of Atlantic Prose and Poetry, which was preceded on our book list by two volumes of Atlantic Narratives, compiled by Mr. Thomas, whose chief occupation has now become that of the editorial head of our educational texts. This new book is made up of selections in prose and verse from the Atlantic Monthly, of a character adapted particularly to the interest ot freshmen in college and seniors in high schools. Through such books the Atlantic Monthly Press has abundant reason to believe that it is causing many younger students to realize that, after all, the relation between literature and life is a vital thing, of some personal concern to themselves.

In talking before about The Founding of New England, by Mr. James Truslow Adams, we said nothing about the illustrations it contains. As a matter of fact, it is a rather notable example ot what can be done, not in the way of turning a serious history into a ’picture-book,’ but by the genuine illumination of history through historic documents. Several months ago Mr. Adams devoted some days to ransacking the seventeeuthcentury treasures of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Massachusetts Archives in the State House at Boston, for pieces of manuscript and print which would truly illustrate the book he had then written. Among the things he found were the manuscript of the ‘ Reverend John Cotton’s Opinion that Philip’s Son should be put to Death,’ a ’Warrant signed by Governor Winslow of Plymouth for Sale of Indian Captives as Slaves,’ a ‘Document Signed by Uncas and his Squaw,’ a ‘Testimonial to the Good Character of Rebecca Nourse, executed as a Witch. These and other pages are redolent of the time of which he writes. He has enriched the book also with two maps drawn especially for it: ' New England in 1640,’ and ’Streams of Immigration from England, 1620 to 1642,’ and has included also a ‘Manuscript Map of the New England Coast, 1607/8, believed to have been drawn by Champlain,’ reproduced from the original in the Library of Congress, and hitherto unfamiliar to most historical students.

Mr. Adams is himself an expert in cartography, and as such served the United States Government in the war, both at Washington and at the Peace Conference, while he held the commission of a captain in the army.

In a casual note from the Atlantic office to the ‘conductor’ of the ‘ Bowling Green’column of the New York Evening Post, the author of Shackled Youth,Mr. Edward Yeomans, was mentioned as a writer possessing ’the unspeakable advantage of approaching the whole question of education from theangle of a manufacturer of steam-pumps. The phrase afforded Mr. Christopher Morley the text of an amusing little dissertation upon the superfluity of colleges in the educational scheme — at least till one is forty. But it ought to be said of Mr. Yeomans that he approached the manufacture of steam-pumps from the vantagepoint of a Princeton education. If he has written a better book on education because he makes steam-pumps, who shall say that he does not make belter steam-pumps because he first went to Princeton?

Miss Frances Lester Warner’sPilgrim Trails has been defined by the delirious advertiser as a book to be read before going to Cape Cod this summer, and after coming home. Many tercentenary pilgrims will be passing through Boston on their way to and from the Cape. They will find Pilgrim Trails at many shops in Boston; but friends of the Atlantic, wishing to buy this book or other publications of the Atlantic Monthly Press, or none, will be welcome visitors to our Book-Room, facing the Boston Public Garden.