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with the yellow tendu fruit strewing the red soil like little golden pippins, I watched him till he disappeared from view, a martyr as we all are at one time or another to the predominant impulse of mother-love and infant preservation.

That happened to be the last occasion on which I met Mungroo in the flesh. Administrative charges in India often comprise extensive areas, and the same duty that kept me so long in the vicinity compelled me to peregrinate farther afield. Eighteen months had passed ere I was afforded the opportunity of seeing again the Takaria Nala.

The winding gorge and surrounding hills had been a familiar sight in both their summer and winter garments. But the view that now greeted my eyes was the result of nature's most wonderful transformation. Every bare patch of soil was carpeted with a luxuriant growth of tropical vegetation, while across the stream-bed rushed and roared a torrent several feet deep, carrying along on its eddying surface the flotsam and jetsam of forest timber, hurtling it against rocks and over precipices with perfectly delightful abandon. The monsoon had arrived in all its life-giving force, and the whole countryside resounded with the music of long-parched rills.

Having sought and found the village oracle, I cautiously inquired about old Mungroo, whereupon the sage bowed low in respectful salutation and led the way down a forest path at the end of which a gigantic pipal reared its white, lime-encrusted branches to the sky, giving welcome shade to the footsore and weary. I followed close behind.

If Mungroo in the flesh was possessed of an unsavory reputation, it was nothing to be compared with that of Mungroo's spirit; nor had I ever seen anything quite so fearsome as the

colossal clay effigy of a bear which suddenly obtruded itself before my startled gaze. Mungroo Deota, jungle deity and village godling, was a veritable monstrosity the like of which one seldom reads of and never sees. A string of marigolds hung incongruously from its bull-like neck, while a great vermilion gash across its face did service for an awful mouth where teeth and tongue were entirely missing. The jasmine-scented, gayly draped village damsels, whose black sparkling eyes became so appropriately demure at the approach of a stranger, worshiped reverently as they strewed the spotless parapet with edible offerings. And as I gazed on this hideous incarnation of the deity I expected each moment to see it descend from its stone pedestal and join issue with the village pi-dogs, which, snapping and snarling through life, fought vociferously for the scattered titbits. Never was godling so appointed as did thus command the terrified and unstinted veneration of a highly superstitious and credulous peasantry.

So this was the end. Not being able to return to his beloved mate, and having already experienced one painful reception at the home of his youth, Mungroo had become peevish and morose and more aggressive than ever. Wandering ceaselessly, venting his spleen on all and sundry, he had eventually become possessed of a devil and was lost to the jungle for good. At least this is what the village wiseacres implied, though they did not actually say so. Mungroo's spirit, however, masqueraded in the village each night, smiting the men with maladies unspeakable and rendering the comely housewives alarmingly unprolific. Then it was that the village elders took serious counsel together, and the local priest, suspecting, no doubt, that his powerful position was about to be

assailed, took heart of grace, and, after propitiating the jungle gods with much slaying of goats, sprinklings, and incantations, conceived the idea of a fit commemoration. A pleasant diversion once created, enthusiasm immediately ran riot: Mungroo Deota was accordingly installed with regal honors, unanimously acclaimed, and henceforth worshiped with becoming solemnity.

I retraced my steps to camp with a sad heart, thinking of dear old Mungroo and speculating as to the share he

had contributed toward the welter of gods and half-gods that ever trouble India. In exasperation I turned to the sage with a few leading questions. He listened patiently and answered quite politely, but I could see that he considered me either grossly ignorant or quite insane. Presently there reached me from the direction of the godling the musical tinkle of a happy feminine laugh, followed by the sage's most logical assertion, 'Sir, you are but the skeptical Westerner.' And I was content to leave it at that.

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LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

THE AMATEUR AND THE DILETTANTE

ONE of the ironies that make the philologist's life infinitely more exciting than it looks is the habit words have of beginning life in the best society and gradually getting into worse and worse company, until at last they become thoroughly disreputable. (The opposite process takes place, too, and is perhaps even more entertaining- but that is another matter.) It is all one can do nowadays to realize that the verb 'to blubber' was once as dignified as 'to sob' or 'to weep' - and that Spenser was not making game of his heroines when he used it. It is quite as difficult to appreciate that 'disgusting' once meant merely 'distasteful,' and that Dr. Johnson could apply it to all kinds of innocent things, such as blank verse and oatmeal.

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The two words at the head of this page are cases in point. Are they ever used without a suggestion of contempt, or at least of condescension? 'Amateur,' to be sure, has a desirable connotation in connection with certain sports, in the eyes of nonprofessionals, - but in every other connection it is the kind of word that is or ought to be accompanied by a lifted eyebrow. And as for 'dilettante,' it has nothing to be said for it anywhere. Yet an 'amateur' was originally a lover presumably of good things; and a 'dilettante' a man capable of taking delight again, presumably in the praiseworthy. What secret snobbishness is it in human nature that has thus brought contumely upon such excellent traits as that of loving things

for their own sake and delighting in them without arrière-pensée?

Miss Sybil Thorndike, the eminent actress, recently defended 'amateurishness' in a speech at the Haymarket Theatre. She quoted Mr. Chesterton to the effect that the essence of amateurishness is the theory that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing badly. Could any theory be sounder? If all men postponed engaging in any creative or recreative activity until they could do it expertly what would become of all the experimental vitality of human life? When I was studying music,' says Miss Thorndike, 'and tried to play Bach, I was in despair. No, my fingers would not do it. I worried myself almost to death. But now I am an amateur I can attack anything. It is splendid. You do not want to keep to the wide path only; follow the little curly patches, from which you will get a new vision of the big highway and of something at the end.'

It takes a certain confidence in the value of experience, as such, to be a good amateur, and the modern world is probably too conscientiously utilitarian for that. Our scorn for the dilettante, according to Hermann Bahr, writing in the Berliner Tageblatt, has a similar basis. 'Everyone nowadays tries his best to escape being called a dilettante. The word has a ring of the second-rate: a dilettante is to us a man who would like to do more than he really can. And we are more interested in effective ability than in anything else; we don't care about what a man

is or what his purposes are, but simply about what he "turns out." We cannot comprehend a man who enjoys his existence so heartily that he is quite unconcerned whether anything "comes of it" or not. Actual achievement has become for us almost a measure of personality. We have forgotten that inactivity need not be indolence, and that there are types of men men of genuine power and great inner riches who never get anything visible done simply because they are constantly occupied with themselves, with their own spiritual lives.

'Gifted men who succeed in capturing their inspirations in the form of words, colors, or melodies are recognized as artists and held in esteem. But those other artists who have n't the power to objectify the fullness of their experience in artistic form - or whose experiences are so deep and real that they feel no need to do so seem to us suspicious characters: what use do we have for the kind of art that remains inside the artist's personality, and that we therefore cannot take hold of? The result is that dilettantism, even of the highest and finest type, can no longer be a profession of its own. There was a time when it was a recognized calling; in the romantic period, dilettantes were regarded as indispensable to society, and sinecures were arranged for them. Nowadays we have no society, in that sense, and, though we have sinecures, they are all given to politicians.'

CARL SANDBURG IN ENGLAND

MR. ROBERT FROST's reputation was first made in England, and Mr. Lindsay's dates back almost as long in that country as at home. Mr. E. A. Robinson has for some time had a devoted group of admirers there, and is becoming a more and more familiar name.

Until Mr. Jonathan Cape recently undertook to publish a selection from his work, however, Mr. Carl Sandburg was virtually unknown to English readers. The Westminster Gazette has this to say of the Chicago poet:

Without Miss Rebecca West's illuminat

ing picture of Chicago in the preface, many of the Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg would be meaningless to the average English reader, so packed are his verses with strange words and phrases, alien to our genius and our language. But Miss West contrives to make us see what is going on inside the heads of the Middle Westerners, especially those who live in Chicago. The war brought considerable additions to our ordinary talk when the American soldiers sailed over the sea in British transports, but one must still confess to ignorance of such words as 'floozies,' 'crap-shooters,' 'cahoots,' 'gazumps,' and similar gems of speech.

There is a fine courageous optimism about Mr. Carl Sandburg. Never is there the least trace of sentimentality. Work is good, for work's sake, and because man must live by the sweat of his brow. Nor does he ever suggest that the poor are unhappy because they work in sordid surroundings or that the rich are content because they have wealth and leisure. Only once is this idea touched on, in a poem about the Overland Mail, with its lighted restaurant-cars aglow, with roses and jonquils, while a railway man outside eats dry bread and sausage, as he gazes at the luxurious train and sees to its safe passing.

It is typical of modern America that this forceful singer should be a Scandinavian, born of Swedish parents, in the United States. Perhaps only the alien can see America in all its portentousness. Now, Sandburg 'stands' for the Middle West, just as Longfellow used to stand for Massachusetts. Yet he hankers, singularly enough, after a burial place in sombre Norway. His outlook on life is the virile, outspoken one of Walt Whitman, but being a European he has the sense of beauty inherent in an older civilization. Like Whitman, Sandburg is essentially modern; he can see the romance, the ad

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venture, and the tragedy of great steel railway lines stretching across a continent.

But Whitman never wrote anything of such sheer beauty as the poem 'Lost,' which describes a little steamer nosing around at night in a fog, to find a harbor on Lake Michigan. This is, as they say in Paris, de la vraie étoffe.

A THACKERAY HOUSE

LONDONERS have from time to time in the past taken care that certain houses within their precincts should be set aside as shrines to the memory of the great men who lived in them. Dickens has his memorial in the house in Doughty Street, as Carlyle has his in Chelsea, and not long ago the house in Hampstead Heath where Keats listened to the nightingale was taken over for the benefit of the faithful. Only the other day a writer in the Times demanded that steps be taken to make similar provision for the memory of Thackeray, far as he is from enjoying the kind of devotion lavished upon those others.

Three houses in London might be considered. In Palace Green, Kensington, is the house where he died, but its expensiveness would make purchase impracticable. There is a house in Onslow Square where he lived for half a dozen years, but, as Mr. Lewis Melville says in the Observer, 'it is too drab' and it has no important associations. The house in which he wrote Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and Henry Esmond would appear to have unanswerable claims, and this house - 'No. 13, Young Street,' near Kensington Church has been proposed both by the Daily Telegraph and by Mr. Melville.

"There are not many houses in London or the world in which so much golden prose has been written as in the quaint Georgian house of Young Street,' says the Telegraph; and Mr.

Melville reminds us that Thackeray, when he acquired it, 'was delighted with the two semi-towerlike embrasures, which, he declared, gave it the air of a feudal castle.' He also reminds us that it was this house that Thackeray was passing, in later years, with Fields, the American publisher, when he exclaimed, with mock gravity, 'Down on your knees, you rogue, for here Vanity Fair was penned; and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that little production myself.'

UNEARTHING LONDON'S FORUM

A COMMITTEE of experts has recently been appointed by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments to collect all the known information about Roman London, or Londinium. The immediate incentive to this action was the discovery of the remains of an arcaded portico in the angle of Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street, on the north side, during the excavation for a new bank-building. "The official view,' says the Manchester Guardian, 'that the find determines the site of the forum of Roman London, evidence of which has been sought so long, is not likely to be questioned by experts. It links up too closely with the discovery in the eighties of the foundations of a large building under Leadenhall Market that has been generally accepted as what is left of the basilica of Londinium, the public building or, as we should now say, the town hall that always stood on one side of the forum, just as the hôtel de ville does in a French place or the municipio in an Italian piazza.'

ENGLISH PLAYS IN BERLIN

In spite of Locarno, an international 'situation' is likely to be created by

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