The Contributors' Column

AFTER serving as an officer in the British Army, William Orton took a post in the Ministry of Labor. He is now Professor of Economics at Smith College. Alfred F. Loomis is a well-known yachtsman, especially devoted to small-boat cruising for long distances. To the quality of his sportsmanship this paper bears testimony. Δ Paintings and drawings by William Rotheristein, A.R.C.A., have found their way into a large number of the great museums and collections here and abroad. The delightful book from which the . Atlantic’s papers are drawn will be published in the spring by Coward-McCann. Edward Weeks is a member of the Atlantic staff in immediate charge of Atlantic Press books. AΔ Lancashire born. James S. Hart is a journalist of Providence, Rhode Island, and coauthor of a novel entitled Scoop. Alice Day Pratt lives the life she loves on her Oregon ranch. W. F. Downing, a Britisher, is in private life an authority on horses as well as bicycles. He held a riding school for fellow officers in the war. He is also the author of several plays, one of which in time past brought together Mrs. Pat Campbell, George Arliss, and Du Maurier in the same company. Freda C. Bond’s verses are the fruit of a holiday in Provence.

For the past three years Chester Henry Jones, a graduate of Cambridge University, has been studying architecture in this country on a fellowship maintained by the Commonwealth Fund. A. Vibert Douglas is Professor of Astrophysics at McGill University. Frank O’Connor, born at Cork, lives in Dublin. His poems are represented in numerous anthologies. Frank Kendon is an English poet. Dr. Paul Withington is a well-known physician who lives in Honolulu. Henderson Daingerfield Norman, a Virginian by birth, is an Atlantic contributor of long standing. Edmund G. Krimmel is a Philadelphia architect. Bishop William Lawrence in retirement is never out of reach of the call of his people.

Lord Meston’s long and eminent service in India has made him an almost unrivaled authority on this, perhaps the most difficult political problem in the modern world. Owen Tweedy is a traveler, writer, and lecturer whose reputation grows apace.

It is not often that the Atlantic sounds tinnote of protest, but in the shadow of great national error a reasoned warning becomes imperative. In the issue for March 1930, the Atlantic published ‘A Challenge to the Federal Farm Board’ by Jesse E. Pope, who made, as it seemed to us, a case against the grandiose project of the Board not only convincing but conclusive. Now that the account is cast and the black chickens are coming home to roost, it is instructive to look back and see how absolutely the present deplorable situation was forecast.

In a much-discussed paper entitled ‘Shall Woman’s Work Be Regulated by Law?’ the author, Miss Lutz, remarked regarding the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, ‘When every investigator sent out is an ardent believer in “protective” legislation, it is humanly impossible to turn out an unbiased report.’

To us, as to Miss Lutz, this seemed the conventional expression of a truism. The Women’s Bureau, however, considered the remark as reflecting upon the sincere and serious work of its employees. Any such impression the Atlantic would like absolutely to remove.

Where good speech is found.

ÉLYSÉE PALACE, NICE, FRANCE
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The article, ’Keeping Step with Speech,’ in the August issue has interested me so much that I should like to offer a few comments.
I was born in one of the central counties of England, and, after some education at home and at small private schools, went to one of the great schools of England. Then I went to Oxford, where I was senior scholar of one of the large colleges and took first-class honors in Greek and Latin literature. At about twenty-eight years of age, having up to that time been only once out of my native country (to France for a few weeks), I went to Australia, where I remained rather more than two years; then to New Zealand, staying rather more than one year, and then to California, where I was admitted to the Bar and took a law degree at the University of California. I remained more than twenty years in California, practising law very little but journalism a good deal. After two years in Paris, spent chiefly among American residents there, I went to England in 1913 and remained there till 1920, when I came to the French Riviera, and have remained here ever since.
The object of all this rather tedious narration is to indicate that I have had somewhat varied experiences among English-speaking people and have been much interested in questions of language and usage. I likewise did not possess until I was twenty-eight years of age an English grammar. I gathered my words and their pronunciation almost entirely from the people around me.
When I came to America nothing struck me more forcibly than the respect paid to the dictionary and the disposition to fly hotfoot to it when any question arose. Now the compiler of a dictionary has no authority whatever over the language of those who speak it; he is of value only as a recorder of the usage of the educated and cultivated persons whose native tongue the language is. Only so far as his record is correct has it any value at all; as an individual his opinion is valueless unless he happens to belong to the most cultivated class of his community. He may be an excellent scholar of Anglo-Saxon, Early English, and what not, and so what he has to say about the origin and literary use of words may be interesting and valuable. But often such a man (especially in American universities) comes from a family whose speech was far from impeccable, and consequently his own pronunciation and accentuation are not models to be followed, but rather examples to be avoided. The all-important matter is early environment; the kind of speech spoken by parents, relatives, friends, companions, teachers.
I agree that the standard is ‘the consensus of usage,’but I do not agree that this means ‘the widest usage among the English-speaking races.'
I cannot imagine the usage of Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, the African colonies, affecting the usage of the best speakers in Great Britain. Even in Great Britain, Scotch usage, and the local usage of Lancashire, Devon, Dorset, and so forth, are disregarded by the best speakers; indeed, freedom from localisms is one of the tests of good speech. I do not think that the best speakers in Great Britain are at all ‘self-conscious about their speech.’ They speak their language as they have always heard it spoken, and they feel that they and people like them make the language what it is, and that their speech is the best English. In England educated, cultivated people foregather so much, and so constantly meet in school, college, regiment, club, sports, and private houses, that the usage tends to become very uniform and to have an authority possessed nowhere else. An important matter in America is that highly educated men from cultivated families rarely take up

teaching as a profession — it offers so few rewards; whereas in England most of the bishops and archbishops have been schoolmasters, and men of the highest attainments are attracted by the profession and continue in it all their lives. When a man who has been an assistant master and housemaster at Eton dies, his death is mentioned among those of the noted men of his day and he often leaves a quite substantial little fortune.
So far as his knowledge goes, the English of a gay young guards officer, or a fox-hunting squire, is as good as that of a cabinet minister — indeed, in these days of Socialist Ministries, almost certainly much better. I cannot think that the usage, say, of San Francisco and Los Angeles, cities inhabited by an aggregation of people of French, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Bohemian, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, Australian, even Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Hawaiian origin, could affect in any way the standard best English speech. The number of people who know and practise the best of anything must always be limited (very limited), yet this limited class is the sole authority; and the dictionary maker may not be a member of it. Like many things, good speech is almost wholly a matter of imitation, largely unconscious; the laboriously trained speaker can never quite attain the results achieved by the person whose speech is correct and graceful because it is the only way he knows how to speak.
I think it may be said that average American speech is so stereotyped and based so little on reading that the educated American, a reader or student, knows many words only from print and does not hear them spoken among his associates. I think the spoken vocabulary of the educated Englishman is considerably greater and richer than that of the educated American; and I have an idea that many educated Americans whose written language is very much like that of similar Britons do not speak by any means so well as they write. Few men of high education arc found in ‘exclusive’ American circles, which are frankly based oil wealth, and mean little except abundance of money and the willingness to spend it on entertainments. British society includes nearly all people of eminence in whatever line, and consequently affords a much more valuable education and richer culture; it includes the men at the top in almost every human endeavor. In America the teachers in high schools, the instructors in universities, the judges on the bench, the parsons in the pulpits, are rarely good models of speech.
Roughly, and exceplis cxcipiendis, good English speech may be found in the class composed of persons of good birth, educated principally at the great schools, at Oxford and Cambridge, and occupying an assured and definite position in society. Among members of this class almost wholly devoted to sport, the speech is apt to be too horsy and sporting, but generally it is true that the judges, the leading men at the Bar, the higher clergy, the teachers at the great schools (who are the cream of Oxford and Cambridge scholars), are mostly exemplars of good speech.
ARTHUR INKERSLEY

Readers of Dr. Withington’s account will be interested in this letter describing the genesis of his adventure.

HONOLULU, HAWAII—
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In 1928, the Australian Research Council asked Stanley D. Porteus, Professor of Racial Psychology at the University of Hawaii (himself an Australian), to make a psychological study of the ‘blacks of Australia,’ who have always been considered the ‘lowest of mankind.’ Professor Porteus invited me to join the expedition as ‘ medico.’ With the financial assistance of some of my friends, I added to the expedition two camera men, equipped with cameras and 25,000 feet of film. Mr. Clinton Childs, also of Hawaii, was the fifth member of the party. We left Honolulu in the spring of 1929, crossed Australia from Sydney to Perth, and then went on to Broome, on the northwest coast, which was to be our base. Ee had chosen the Northwest of Australia for our expedition because it is there that from one third to one half of the uncivilized blacks can be found. We covered 1600 miles of this country, called the ’Never Never Land,’ by truck, studying the blacks in missions and cattle stations and government outposts, and finally landed in Wyndham, about one thousand miles north of Broome. Here we left our truck and went back to Broome by steamer.
Dr. Porteus and Mr. hilds left us at Broome to go south to meet engagements, while I fitted out a pearling lugger and with the two camera men made my way back along the coast to Wyndham. There is a Steamer every other month between these ports, but traveling that way one sees practically nothing of the thousand miles of coast, half of which is uncharted, for the steamers give wide berth, avoiding the many reefs, islands, and tremendous tides — tides which are second only to those of the Bay of Fundy. We were thirty-six days making this trip, oftentimes not being able to make more than twenty miles a day even with the assistance of a staunch little Johnson outboard motor. There are but five settlements on this whole coast, three small isolated missions, one government station for the blacks, and the little town of Derby. Although there is some traffic along this coast there are very few white men except the missionaries who know it well enough to navigate it, and we had some difficulty finding a skipper and a crew for our jaunt. We made daily contacts with the aborigines, visited the missions, hunted and fished, and thoroughly enjoyed a month and a half of ‘stone age’ life.
The narrative [which the Atlantic prints in this issue] was merely the story of our return to civilization and my accident, which, through no intention of mine, got rather wide press notoriety. I jotted down from flay to day as much as I could of my illness, knowing that if anything happened to me my family would want authentic details.
Very sincerely yours,
PAUL WITHINGTON

Pro patria.

SIENA, ITALY—
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I hope that the Contributors’ Column will be kept open long enough to receive some of the protests of Americans in Europe who have read Alice Beal Parsons’s ‘So You’re Glad to Be Home?’
I am a Californiac whose love of country (and acquaintanceship) covers all the land from New York to San Francisco, and from the Canadian border to Key West, Brownsville, and Nogales.
I can’t help wondering how often the writer and her unhappy shipmates have crossed the Mississippi, possibly even the Alleghenies. (I wish her expatriate friends who seek solace in the winter hotels of the Riviera anti Egypt and Algiers might taste the delights of California!)
I am now on my fourth visit to Europe, this time for two years, to give the younger element of the family an opportunity to acquire modern languages and to absorb a bit of old-world culture.
Last week we stayed in a house more than six hundred years old, owned by the family of the present occupant for considerably more than a century. The windows were few, but the walls were of stone, and the floors and roof of tile. The meats were roasted on the spit, and vegetables were boiled over glowing charcoal in the great stone stove which has served many, many generations of housewives.
Such a place possesses a mellow beauty which only age can give, and a leisureliness of life which most surely results when people stay in the same surroundings for generation after generation. To enjoy such places as this is one of the purposes of our visit, and it seems to us a worth-while purpose. However, the experience only increases our love and appreciation of our own modest home in America. (Its walls are only stucco, and its roof will not last even one generation, and I have to confess that it contains such materialisms as central heat, modern plumbing, and a variety of electrical devices.)
We believe that through foreign travel we may gain a knowledge and an understanding of world problems, and a breadth of sympathy that we can secure in no other way. Besides, there is much to be learned in the fine art of living. But we are sure that all of this can be accomplished without losing sympathetic touch with American life and without losing the ability to appreciate American beauties, material and spiritual, which are everywhere to be found by him who has the eyes to see and the will to enjoy.
It was wholly unfair for Mrs. Parsons to compare New York with Paris. It would have been much more to the point to compare New York with Marseilles,¹ only the argument would have suffered sadly. Capitals should be compared with capitals. Keeping in mind age and the conscious striving for beauty, compare Washington and Paris. The result must be a source of satisfaction to every loyal American. Nor is Washington the only American city whose plans for civic beauty compare favorably with those of Paris. No city in the world has ever set for itself so ambitious a programme of this sort as Chicago, and she is steadfastly carrying out that programme in spite of political turmoil. St. Louis is even now spending many, many millions of dollars just for beauty. Cleveland, with its civic centre and lakeside parks, Kansas City with its boulevards, Denver with its playgrounds, Los Angeles with its gardens — what industrial centre in the whole country can be named which is not consciously working toward greater beauty?
In no American city have I found slums that for grimy wretchedness could be compared with those in European cities, even in France. What is more significant, however, is a fair comparison of the improvement in slum conditions in America and in Europe during the past twenty-five years. No American need shrink from such a comparison.
In my late teens I worked in a government office from six-thirty in the morning till eight at night, with an hour off for dinner and one for supper, for six and a half days a week. Contrast those hours with the usual hours of labor to-day to realize the change that has come within just one generation. The five-day week is already arriving and will be practically universal soon.
To-day Europe offers to the well-to-do, whether he be American or European, a leisurely way of life that refreshes and charms. But it is based on the fact that those who serve work for excessive hours under unnecessarily trying conditions, in their parks, the leisure classes may indeed enjoy the trees that their great-grandfathers planted, but in the sculleries the maids are putting up with many of the inconveniences with which their great-great-grandmothers contended.
Stay-at-home Americans will be unfair to thousands of American travelers if they accept ’So You’re Glad to Be Home?' as the expression of general sentiment. Many of us have come to Europe, not to escape irritations, but to enrich our experience. When the time comes, we shall return home joyfully, making no invidious comparisons, with the confident hope that our travels have made us more valuable Americans.
CHARLES B. GODDARD

In the Message, published by the Church Periodical Club, appears a letter from an archdeacon in the great open spaces. It suggests that gang warfare in our cities might be made much less sanguinary if charitably disposed subscribers would pass on used copies of the Atlantic to their neighborhood racketeers.

There are a few homesteaders around here to whom I pass on my magazines, books, and so forth, and the stray cow-puncher, sheep herder, or prospector that passes my gates is always sure of a mental hand-out. Last year I inherited some Atlantic Monthlies and gave them to a passing puncher who had a pack horse with him. He was in some months ago and said that during a three-week blizzard, out in a camp thirty miles from nowhere, those magazines were all that saved the men’s sanity. Their tobacco gave out, they had lost their cards in moving, and that reading was all that kept them from exterminating each other.

‘Over the Wire.'

SUFFOLK, VIRGINIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
On my way home last April after a winter’s schooling in Poitiers I lingered long enough in Paris to satiate myself with such theatrical entertainments as had been denied me en province. Rostand’s Les Romanesques drew me to the forlorn Comédie for a Sunday matinée. I arrived late, just in time to see the curtains part on the second act of, as a woman aptly remarked behind me, one pièce très queleonque. I squirmed as it limped toward its feeble climax and expired amid weak applause. La Voix Humaine followed — pièce en un acte de M. Jean Cocteau, so the programme announced. It caught me totally unprepared, for I had anticipated nothing but the stereotyped drama that the associés enact as best they can amid cracked and faded sets.
There was no motion in the murky gloom; I saw merely the two silvered walls and the white figure of a woman prone beside a white rumpled bed, her shoulder touching a small table littered with a few books, a lamp, and a telephone. Finally, when the bell jangled and the conversation began, I was absorbed us I had never been before—at the Comédie. The throaty voice went on, throwing, by intonation or by phrases, light on her recent and unorthodox past. There were no coughs in the audience, no shuffling of feet, no tramping about in the echoing corridors behind. I had the impression that Mlle. Bovy had her auditors in as tearful a condition as she, apparently, was, until that moment when, if I remember correctly, she was pressing the gloves passionately to her lips; then two voices, somewhere in the blackness, lifted in ardent conversation, subsiding only at the command of numerous hisses.
At the end, when the overwrought Bovy took her curtain calls, she did so graciously, reserving the last moment, however, for a slow and deliberate turn of the head toward the box from where the offending voices had issued. Her black eyes told all she thought. Afterward, when the lights went up, even the obese ouvreuses waddled down the aisles to inspect what one of them called des jeunes gens mal élevés. In New York one expects such, but in Paris — ilors, c’est lamentable!
FILLMORE NORFLEET

Has this Ego passed?

EDITOR, ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAGAZINE:—
I have a remarkable essay, ‘The Passing of the Ego,’but will not send it unless you buy it sight unseen.
B. J.

THE SALLYPORT

It is not insignificant of our times that Mr. Chester Henry Jones discusses one of the chief arts without suggesting that it has anything to do with beauty. ‘The criterion of the architecture of any age,’ he observes, ‘is its “efficiency.”' Perhaps a truly efficient building would contain all the beauty that is good for it. By its efficiency would be implied at least an unaffected design appropriate to its structure and function. Yet, taking into consideration the spirit and visible fruits of a certain kind of thinking about matters artistic to-day, it seems not unfair to suspect Mr. Jones of a somewhat grudging attitude toward what the uninstructed layman might consider of paramount importance to any of the arts. At least one feels that there are people, whether or not Mr. Jones is of them, who would consider an overt concern for beauty a rather shocking passion for a building to exhibit. Its first duty is, after all, to be modern.

Yet it turns out not to be easy to tell when a building is modern and when it is not. Mr. Jones is definitely dissatisfied with the pretensions of architecture to-day to be called modern; even the skyscraper is to him insufficiently alienated from the past. It is hard to form a definite idea of what Mr. Jones would consider, with approval, a truly modern building. Perhaps it would be impossible for him to enlighten us without the aid of architects’ drawings. One or two examples he mentions as possessed at least of hopeful qualities; but in general the reader is led to conclude that architecture, in America at least, has not really got down to the job of modernizing itself.

Some of us will hear this with at least as much apprehension as expectation. No one can help approving in spirit of the laudable sentiment that art should not be fettered to the past, that there should be progress and contemporaneity always; for the great arts of the past were contemporaneous, and not piously archaic. But innovations ought to be made by powerful and spontaneous talents; conscious and laborious modernism not infrequently adds new frightfulness to a civilization already ugly enough.

That architecture is in need of reform, that it lags far behind contemporary science in other fields, many will be prepared to grant. Had Mr. Jones been only a little more modern, he might have gone to the vital problem of architecture, and told us a little about housing. Anyone who tries to live on modest means, whether he owns his dwelling or rents it, knows the crushing expense of the simplest quarters. Many causes can be called to account for this. It can be laid to the tax rate we pay for the kind of municipal government we receive and so richly deserve. It can be laid to extortion, waste, and mounting costs in the building trades. In a growing number of large cities, tribute money paid to racketeers may well be a not inconsiderable item. But all these causes would be largely obviated if the engineering and factory skill applied to other branches of industry could be applied to housing. Nowadays we can be moved about with wondrous efficiency in vehicles that represent the most advanced engineering thought much more cheaply than we can sit still at home in a simple cottage such as a thrifty tradesman might have owned in the eighteenth century.

One wonders if Mr. Jones ever heard of Buckminster Fuller and his ‘Dymaxion house,’ which was to exemplify modern industrial science and the methods of mass production applied to housing. The Dymaxion house was to cost not much more than an expensive automobile. It was to be made in factories by the hundreds of thousands, and distributed through sales and service agencies that would deliver and install the house, furnish standard replacement parts, and in general perform the kind of services that the local dealer in Fords or Pierce-Arrows performs for the automobile. Its rooms were to be suspended from a hollow central shaft made of tubes of metal and set in a bed of concrete. Its floors and interior walls were to be inflated, so that they would always fit right and tight instead of cracking and sagging after the fashion of lath and plaster. It was to be divorced from the city sewer, light, and water lines, for its garbage disposal, its ventilation, refrigeration, and illumination, were all to be supplied by its own Diesel engine, operating at a cost less than the upkeep of the owner’s automobile.

All this may be as absurd as you like, but if Mr. Jones wishes really to urge that architecture should modernize itself, this is the kind of picture he should have drawn. If it is feasible as an engineering project, we need not be surprised if Buckminster Fuller’s programme or some equivalent of it is eventually followed. The cost of living in houses of brick and stone, stucco and wood, with all the wastes of construction and expenses of labor they require, will not allow the possibilities of the massproduction house to go unexploited if they are in fact possibilities and not chimeras. And who living to-day cares to set limits to the possible?

Mr. Jones for the most part seems to be writing of architecture as an art, not of architecture as a science or as a branch of industry. But its broadest opportunities of modernizing itself may well lie in the direction of industry rather than art. ,Æsthetically, one may question whether Mr. Jones’s plea is altogether well founded. Architecture awaits its Ford rather than its Gauguin.

A strong tendency in literary criticism to-day, suggested to my mind as I read Mr. Jones’s remarks on arehiteeture, is to call loudly for the birth of a literature unmistakably American, and charged with all the realities of American industrial society. We may well desire the growth of such a literature; but the critical hortatives and appeals that seek to promote it have certain consequences that the critic might do well to consider. One consequence is the tendency to give extravagant notice to any book that purports to furnish the kind of literature the critic calls for, no matter at what cost to good sense or mastery of literary method. Indeed, criticism of this kind tends to reward eccentricity, for it begins unsatisfied, not merely with the measure of achievement, but with the character and purpose of books as they are, and is therefore predisposed to regard any departure as important. A second consequence is that the very books which the critics attempt to summon by incantation from the vasty deep are overlooked when they lie prosaically on the doorstep. As a matter of fact, many studies of American life at the hands of the novelist, poet, and historian are continually being published in which the character and native lineaments of every part of the country and its people are faithfully recorded. Some of the best of these are the least obtrusive and pretentious as far as novelties of form or conception are concerned.

True, it is fitting to wish for a profounder and more independent literature of America, to hope and labor for its development. But critical preparation will do little to advance this end, and is unessential to it. Such labor the critic undertakes for his own satisfaction, and for love of the art he deals in. He cannot flatter himself that his influence is causative. Indeed, it may be detrimental, for it encourages a kind of conscious attempt to be American, to revolt from the heritage and formative influence of the past, which can produce only the artificial and the shallow, and not that genuine flowering of American genius which, if it should finally appear, will doubtless wear some guise which no critic could have foreseen, and which will create its own laws of judgment. Matthew Arnold thought it the office of criticism to prepare the way for new ages of creation by circulating a current of true and fresh ideas. It is well for such a current to be circulated at any time and by any means. But true and fresh ideas are themselves the product of creative genius. It is doubtful if criticism, strictly speaking, has ever done anything for a creative age except annoy it.

Whether these remarks are applicable by analogy to architecture is not mine to say. But Mr. Jones’s paper tempts me to think so. It is easy to observe that Gothic cathedrals in an age of modern engineering and modern society are anomalous. But for the fulfillment of culture the character of one age needs to be seasoned by the character of others. A loyal Harvard man will on the whole be gratified that the new Harvard Houses which mean so much to the future of the University present a Georgian rather than a Gothic aspect, although the origin of neither form is American. At the same time he may feel that the fact of chief importance about one of Mr. Cram’s chapels is its beauty, regardless of the age to which we owe it. He may well ask what modern building will equally repay hours of study and inspection by a man who happens to be in search of beauty. And who shall determine when a particular form of art has lost its value, or set a point in time beyond which the sonnet, the symphony, or the Gothic cathedral loses its title to be created afresh?

The true critic has his mind fixed neither on tradition nor on innovation for its own sake. The arts are judged by experience and reflection. Where tlie critic has rich capacities for experience and abundant powers of reflection, neither tradition nor innovation will he regarded as such, yet the importance of neither will be slighted, for the work itself, in all its qualifies and effects, will claim sole attention. But the artistic and qualitative experience of the race has been long and profound; it is quite possible that it has been in no small sense exhaustive. Certainly it has been more exhaustive than man’s practical and scientific experience, in which genuinely new departures are still possible. A new age will make for itself new arts, but the sensitive observer will always detect in them the heritage of the past, nor will he wish the sense of beauty to be deprived of its rich patrimony and cast naked on the world like a foundling.

THE OFFICE ICONOCLAST