The Contributors' Column

GRANDSON of the great protagonist of science in the nineteenth century, Julian S. Huxley continues the tradition of making scientific knowledge accessible to people of general understanding. ▵ The first paper by Count Hermann Keyserling that the Atlantic published was entitled ‘A Philosopher’s View of the War,’ and appeared long before his reputation in America was born. Count Keyserling suffered his share of deprivation in the debacle of the Russian Revolution, finding it necessary at one time to hide in moors and woods for weeks. A lecture tour and a succession of prominent books have since made him familiar to American readers. His new series of papers will eventually be included in a volume on America which will appear this winter. Sir W. Beach Thomas gives one further instance of the fact that no ethical problem is without paradoxes. Harriet Connor Brown, whose life of Grandmother Brown received the Atlantic’s prize of $5000 for the best biography submitted in our contest, is the wife of Herbert D. Brown, Director of the Bureau of Efficiency in Washington, the last of the ‘four little Hawkcyes’ mentioned at the close of the present installment of Grandmother Brown’s story.

Eleanor Risley introduces us to a man named for a day of the week. Literature provides only one other instance of which we can think. Eileen Shanahan writes of a different Satan from Milton’s, who proclaimed : —

James Norman Hall is in his tenth year of residence on the island of Tahiti, and celebrates appropriately with the reflections which we print herewith. ▵ From South Carolina comes the illuminating incident which E. T. H. Shaffer has recorded.

A boat is the mother of adventures and strenuous action, before launching as well as after, as Alfred F. Loomis, well-known editor and writer, found in the course of the building of his yacht. Joseph F. Rock was born in Vienna, and received much of his education there. The list of his accomplishments as a scientist and explorer is long. He served as botanist to the Hawaiian Board of Agriculture anti Forestry, as agricultural explorer with the office of foreign seed and plant introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture. He has been Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. He has directed and accompanied botanical and zoological expeditions in China and Tibet, and is the author of numerous books and monographs. Nancy Byrd Turner achieved deserved reputation by writing the one poem in celebration of Lindbergh’s flight to Paris which was worthy of the event, and of poetry. Major A. W. Smith, who served in the British army during the war and later became a member of a trading company in Rangoon, is now in this country.

Elizabeth Glendower Evans pictures a happy association with America’s most influential and original philosopher and his family. William Henry Chamberlin, as foreign correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, has lived continuously in Russia for nearly a decade, and has acquainted himself intimately with the Soviet régime in city and country. His papers amply justify his words, written to us in a letter from Moscow: ‘ I aim so far as may be possible to avoid two besetting sins of much of the literature that has appeared about contemporary Russia: partisanship and superficiality.’ The Atlantic sets serious store by the illuminating group of Russian papers of which this is the first. M. B. Folsom made a study of the theory and practice of industrial pensions in connection with the inauguration recently, by the Eastman Kodak Company, of a comprehensive retirement annuity plan for its employees.

From the editor of Police '13-13,' the organ of Chicago’s police department.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Mr. Homer Henley’s experiment with ‘Prison Music,’ narrated in the July issue of the Atlantic, was as interesting as it was revealing. One is convinced that the 90 per cent now have a musical psychology towards life, and that their own souls are much the better for it. Such a result, it would seem, vindicates the logic of the experiment. It ought to be caught up.
Yet one is confounded in trying to apply that logic to the problem of the intelligent or the semi-intelligent criminal, whose name, society should be assured, is legion. He is here in the form of the élite bootlegger and the metropolitan gangster who specializes in extermination for as little as $250 per victim.
It is truth and not legend that many of them are connoisseurs of the ‘fine things’ of life, being notoriously choosy about the operas they shall attend, the symphonies they shall hear, and the biographies they shall read. One Salvatore ‘Samoots’ Amatuna was recently famous in Chicago for his almost religious patronage of the local opera. He was an unchallenged critic of that type of music even for the performers themselves, and none other than Tito Schipa wept aloud when he heard that ‘Samoots,’ who carried a violin case containing a sawed-off shotgun, met the abrupt finish that is gradually eliminating his kind.
Mr. Henley’s experiment, I fear, can only be applied to the plastic material and will in no wise affect the wholly disillusioned and blasé type of criminal. Its worth is there.
Meanwhile, what can we devise that will charm this other savage breast?
CHARLES DE LACY

The confidential English.

RUE BELTCHEFF NO. 21
SOPHIA, BULGARIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Your June number, which recently appeared in this distant ‘neck of the woods,’ brings M. André Maurois’s interesting suggestions to a young Frenchman ‘On Living in England.’ In contrast to his story of the Englishman with whom he lived in the same tent for six months without being asked whether he were married, and so forth, let me tell the following.

Some years ago I found myself in a secondclass railway compartment going north from Salonica, Macedonia, with a single companion. His appearance led me to address to him the question, ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘I should rawther think I do, bein’ a native of Manchester,’ was his reply. I had the courage to break M. Maurois’s ‘golden rule’ never to ask questions, and learned that my companion had just ended a three years’ contract with a cotton mill in Salonica, as its chief machinist. Without my asking about his family affairs he was eagerly telling me, within ten minutes, that he had a daughter who was born on the twenty-ninth of February and so had a proper birthday only once in four years; that she was to be eighteen on February 29 of this particular year; that he was timing his journey so as to appear in his home on the morning of that momentous day — without having forewarned the family! He pictured to me the sensation this happy event would produce, the astonishment on the Missus’s face and how the daughter would run at Daddy, with the same pleasure that any normal human being feels in sharing an anticipated joy with a sympathetic listener. He had a broad, bearded, rather heavy face which lighted up as he developed his theme. When I left the train we shook hands like lifelong friends, and I can’t think of him to this day without a ‘God bless him’ in my soul.
Of course my friend did not belong to English upper-tendom, with which class M. Maurois’s contacts evidently have been made. But ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’ in any case. An English officer with whom I was on a peace mission in Macedonia showed me pictures of his wife and children within two weeks of our becoming acquainted — in exchange for similar confidences on my part. A young English vice consul told me of his engagement and impending marriage with the same frankness and pleasure with which a young French captain of gendarmes told me of his. Despite my humble calling of foreign missionary it has been my privilege to administer ‘first aid’ of sympathy to a titled English high official wounded in an affair of the heart, although this naturally came about after a friendship of some years.
I am confident that my companion of the railway compartment is typical of Englishmen in general. It is possible that we Americans, standing midway between the English and French in emotionalism and talkativeness, may understand them both better than they understand each other. Therefore I would beg permission of M. Maurois to add a suggestion to those made by him in the June Atlantic. It is: Never stand in awe of the English. Treat them like ordinary humans and they will return the compliment.
EDWARD B. HASKELL

The anonymous man of affairs who asked in the Contributors’ Club the vital question, ‘Shall I Retire?’ has received ample advice from our correspondents. In fact, he has made retirement quite the question of the day in the Atlantic’s mail. We print in this number another Contributors’ Club paper by a young man who is so seriously struck by the situation that he proposes to retire before he has well begun. Below are two other points of view. Only a purist will complain that in these letters poetic license has been pushed a little too far and metaphors are not always strictly consistent.

By all means retire. Your wife has enough to live on as she pleases. She may even be more than willing to lose a ‘business man’ to regain a ‘lover.’ Your children are minors and, theoretically at least, are still under your control. With more time to devote to them you will be a better father and make of them—I started to say better citizens, but I prefer to say better human beings.

There are two ways of living within one’s income. One is to have an income large enough to cover all possible demands. The other is to keep one’s needs so simple that one’s income, however small, may cover them. I prefer, and try to practise, the latter, though I know that, from the point of view of Business, it is rank heresy.

An English college professor, educated at an American university, remarked that the American college trains men for the science of living, the English for the art of living.

In these days of increasing leisure, let any man who has within him the faintest glimmering of what the art of living means blow hard upon the tiny spark. Heaven knows we need it.

I would like to see founded some sort of MacDowell colony where the square pegs who have succeeded, by hook or by crook, in crawling out of their round holes may — unhampered — carve out square holes for themselves, according to their lights and leanings, where

. . . each, in his separate star,

Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of

Things as They Are.

I am supposed to be near the top in my profession. My chief pleasure in this is that it enables me to save money with which to ‘make my get-away’ before I am a bag of dry bones.

Yes, individually or collectively, I’d say,retire.

J. H. B.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —

The dilemma voiced in ‘Shall I Retire’ will grow more common as men awake from the horror

of industrial nowhitherness. The Robots are dancing on the steel girders and sending radio waves to the sensitive receiver.

Plainly, what are we to do when life automatically invents newly created needs and fails to satisfy them without money payment? The needy solve the problem by finding some corner without necessarily brightening it or wishing to do so. But to him that hath — ah, let him drop the receiver and run to the Maine woods. There, if he has ears, let him listen to the catbird and the splash of water; if he has eyes, let him catch the glint of silvery trout in the stream or watch a feathery cloud spread thin over blue vacancy.

The problem posed can be solved by courage; by a will to live otherwise, in the face of Elks and Rotarians. He who hesitates submits to herd notions of industrial morality that profiteers and their henchmen have made popular.

The Duchess’s garden — and a familiar but ever-welcome anecdote.

PEMAQUID POINT, MAINE
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Miss Arnold’s charming ‘Reminiscences of Lewis Carroll’ in the June Atlantic recalls a delightful experience that I had at Oxford last summer. Just as I was leaving Christ Church Cathedral after the morning service on Sunday, a dapper little man, ruddy-cheeked and browneyed, whom I recognized as the chief verger, but who had now abandoned his gown and staff and appeared in blue civilian clothes and a derby, was leaving too, and mentioned to me on the walk outside that there would be beautiful music at the six o’clock service. His voluntary friendliness made me ask him whether he could tell me in what part of the college were the rooms of Lewis Carroll. Thereupon he indicated that. I might see them just outside the main entrance to the quadrangle, a group of rooms with a bay window on the second floor to the left as one entered. I happened to say that someone had suggested to me to see a Mr. F—, who could tell me much of Lewis Carroll. At that he ‘ruffled his feathers,’straightened his chest, and, clearing his throat, acknowledged that F—was his name.
Mr. F—had been in a hurry to get off (evidently he had afternoon duties at the Cathedral after luncheon), but he mellowed under the mention of the name of Lewis Carroll. He had known Dr. Dodgson well, and he said, in a courtly manner, that he would take me up to the library, which had been in his care also in Dr. Dodgson’s time, and show me where the eminent don used to spend a great part of his days. He pulled from his pocket a massive iron key. We hastened along. Mr. F—was brisk for eighty-eight, and later I was told that at eighty-six he had been cycling about the streets of Oxford. Soon the great door swung open. We climbed the staircase, and after unlocking another door were within the library of musty yellow volumes, alive with the touch of centuries. He pointed to a place by the window. ‘There is where Dr. Dodgson used to work, miss, and out there is Dean Liddell’s garden and the rockery. Many are the times he and little Alice had tea on the green.’
And there, to be sure, was the exact replica of the Duchess’s garden — a fair greensward, stiff rose trees, borders of blue delphinium and pink foxglove, a rockery, and last of all a trim little path along which one could see the W hite Rabbit hurrying with coat tails flying.
Mr. F—with shining eyes continued to talk of Dr. Dodgson, of Alice in W onderland, and of the writing of the book. ’Many are the times I have skooted Dinah, the Cheshire cat, out of this library,’ he declared with a twinkle.
He asked me whether I realized the significance of the name ‘Lewis Carroll’—Lewis for Lutwidge, a derivation, he supposed, of the German Ludwig, and Carroll from the Latin Carolus for Charles.
With a winning smile he recalled an incident which took place shortly after the much-talkedof appearance of Alice in Wonderland. Her Majesty Queen Victoria sent a royal command to Dr. Dodgson, requesting him to send her a copy of his latest work. Now Dr. Dodgson’s latest publication happened to be an abstruse treatise on some branch of higher mathematics. Though he knew perfectly what Her Majesty wanted, he could not resist the opportunity to be both honest and humorous. Mr. F— had been in the library while the professor with many chuckles carefully tied up a brown paper parcel containing this latest work.
DOROTHY BRUCE

The ambiguous key.

LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
The lovers of Shakespeare’s sonnets are assuredly deeply grateful to the Atlantic for the article in the July number by Ian Colvin, ‘Shakespeare Unlocked His Heart.’ Through the author’s researches we now have added confirmation of the value of Sir Denys Bray’s notable rearrangement of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Even with Sir Denys’s rhyme-linked aid to continuity the sonnets as a whole or in single examples are deeply freighted with conjecture. As mental exercises they are unequaled — a single phrase often having the power to possess the mind as may a haunting chord or a spiritual reve-

lation. Shelley called the sonnets the ‘whetstone for dull intelligence.’ There are others who have not felt the necessity of rearrangement, and also Shakespearean students, notably Thomas Taylor, M. A,, who viewed them as a unity and chronologically arranged.
Grant that the sonnets as originally published are in disorder; is not that seemingly the way of life? The individual life resembles the seasons; though the days and months may be unseasonable, still order prevails. Even in nature’s haphazard style order and significance may be discovered.
Hence psychic illumination may be experienced by refraining from reading the sonnets episodically, but by reading them instead as symbolical revelations of Shakespeare’s inward life. By so doing the reader will be convinced that in line with the Titans of the race Shakespeare experienced a spiritual transformation. With this key there is a dignity in the sonnets otherwise lacking. The noumenal translation substituted for the phenomenal invests the sonnets with the same immensity of range possessed by the plays. Thus perceived, the beautiful high-born youth referred to in the majority of the sonnets symbolizes the mystic’s experience of immortal youth and his revelation of beauty as all prevailing — yet haunted still with the revelry of the world, its lusts and thwartings, symbolized by the mysterious lady, ‘the woman colour’d ill.’
Thus Wordsworth read the sonnets, not as a mere confession or record of events, but as the unlocking of his heart. Instead of being a trafficker in the episodical sense, Shakespeare became a seer of life’s spiritual significance as recorded in the majority of the sonnets. Hence he could proudly say, —
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
T. R. FLEMING

Doctors in fiction.

FREDERICKSBURG, VA. DEAR ATLANTIC, — I read with much interest Miss Repplier’s charming article entitled ‘The Public Looks at Pills,’ in the April number. In this paper the author makes the statement that the late Dr. Weir Mitchell once said to her that, in his opinion, neither English nor American fiction had ever produced a satisfactory portrait of a doctor.
In thinking over this statement I was inclined to disagree with the famous specialist and author. Dr. Mitchell himself has given us in Dr. North a very charming picture of a doctor who was also a thoroughly trained scientist. Two very different but equally distinct figures rise, however, before my mind, portraying with a loving fidelity the faithful family physician.
Who can ever forget Dr. MacLure in Beside the Bonny Brier Bush — his unfaltering devotion to his people and to his high standard of duty. Always, as has been said of one of our greatest presidents, ‘loyal to his rock-ribbed Presbyterian soul.’ How clearly we recall the wonderful scene when, with his faithful old mare, Jess, he swims the Tochty — the swift Highland river — in flood time to save the lives of Annie Mitchell and her baby; and the desperate allnight fight that won the life of Saunders. How vividly then comes to our memory his gentleness with little children — his ‘saving common sense,’ and his wonderful hold on the hearts of his people. No wonder that the whole community turned out to do him honor when he was laid to rest.
In marked contrast is the portrait given us by Margaret Deland in Willie King, the hardheaded, practical, kind-hearted family physician of Old Chester.
He is the embodiment of common sense, but as we follow him in story after story of the Old Chester Tales, where he comes in contact with so many human lives in their times of direst need, ministering to mind and body with the faithful use of all knowledge at his command, and spending his life to the uttermost, ungrudgingly, for these his people — we feel that he is worthy to take his stand by the side of Dr. Lavendar as one of the greatest forces in the welfare of the community.
These last two men are true and graphic portraits of a type that is fast fading from our life — the faithful family physician, who ministered to the members of his community from the time that he brought them into the world until he soothed the last hours of the dying, and comforted the stricken household, as no one else could do. All honor to his memory, and may he come back to us with the changing cycles of social development.
SALLIE M. LACY

‘Years to Savannah.’

DEAR ATLANTIC,—
Due to the rapid development of the South, many of the quaint customs and expressions of the Old South are fast disappearing.
The following anecdote relates how the negroes on the plantation recorded a date. Sometimes it was so many years before or after the stars fell or so many years before ‘Missus’ died; nearly always it was with reference to some important happening the date of which could be easily established.

A few days ago, while sitting at my desk in the City Hall at Mobile, I happened to glance toward the door and there stood an old whiteheaded negro with his battered hat in his hand and a wonderful smile on his face. I asked him if there was anything I could do for him and he replied, ‘Boss, is you the head-tax man?’ I answered in the negative and told him that this tax collector did not work after five o’clock in the afternoon. His face took on a worried look and he asked me if I could n’t take the money, explaining that he worked until five o’clock each day and by the time he walked the three miles to the city all the offices were closed — he had tried this several times already. I then agreed to take the money, so he placed three dollars on my desk and started out without giving his name, address, or age. I called him back and explained that the tax was five dollars. He answered, ‘Well, boss, I jist don’t believe I got to pay dat much — I think Ise over age, but I want to give them three dollars to keep them men off of me.’ Of course I then asked his age, but he could n’t enlighten me, and my next question was the date of his birth. His reply was instantaneous. The words came so fast and so mechanically that I knew that he had repeated them to himself literally thousands of times throughout his life so that the date would not be lost. And this is what he said: ‘Two years to Savannah, three weeks before Christmas.’ I pondered a few seconds wdvile my memory sped back to the old plantation in the Black Belt of Alabama, and I replied, ‘Why, John, you were born the first week in December, 1967, and you are over sixty years old, and you won’t have to pay head tax.’ He said, ‘Yas sir, yas sir — dat’s so, boss. You must be from up home’ — and his face beamed and my heart softened and I was glad.
I remembered that the expression ‘years to Savannah’ means years after the Civil War, which ended in 1865.
ANDREW A. COFFIN

Readers of the Contributors’ Club will remember the rich fruitage of names recently gathered and presented to the public by a filing clerk.

TECHOW, SHANTUNG, CHINA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
It was gracious of the filing clerk to recognize the injustice that was being done to some of us by not including our names. That apologetic word must have been specially meant for another quartette, namely — Miss Darling, Mrs. Love, Dr. Kissing, and
Yours truly,
M. HUGGINS