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.

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 richeswho never get anything visible done simply because they are constantly occupied with themselves, with their own spiritual lives.

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'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 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

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

the ire of German playwrights if their English confrères continue to hold the attention of German audiences as steadily as they have done latterly. At one time not long ago three English plays were running simultaneously in Berlin theatres - Mr. Galsworthy's Loyalties (somewhat inaccurately translated Gesellschaft), Mr. Shaw's Saint Joan, and Mr. Somerset Maugham's Rain. The first of these was staged with elaborate and studious care by Max Reinhardt at the Komödie theatre. "The play, which,' as a writer in the Daily Telegraph observes, 'is after all a fairly broad piece of work, hardly bears the strain of all this finesse.'

The production of Saint Joan was a revival, it had run for something like two hundred nights, an unheard-of period for Berlin, when first produced, but Rain was seen for the first time there this winter. It was not a complete success, to judge from the reactions of critics, who were perhaps not equipped to appreciate the peculiarly 'Anglo-Saxon' problem it treats. Rain was also a Reinhardt production. "The detail of the setting,' says the Telegraph's correspondent, 'is preRaphaelite in its exactness, and the small parts are as scrupulously considered as the leading rôles. . . . The play was fairly well attended, but I heard many hardened theatregoers complain of its unpleasantness; and even those unmoved by patriotic feelings to object to foreign plays see no reason why plays so unedifying as this should be imported.'

ON EVENING DRESS

AN anonymous woman writer in the Spectator not long ago, attacking mas

Apparently there are other reasons for holding such costume objectionable. A controversy has raged in England over the question whether Labor leaders should wear formal evening dress. Mr. Robert Lynd, writing in the Daily News, disposes of this different aspect of the question:

As regards evening clothes, I confess quite frankly that I possess them, and that I feel no sudden inflow of vice into my system when I put them on to go out to dinner. If I have any criminal tendencies, they flourish as freely when I am in my shabbiest suit as when I am wearing a white waistcoat. Nor do my politics change with my clothes any more than my morals do.

The truth is, all the denunciations of evening dress as though it were the mark of a snob and an antidemocrat to wear it are nonsense. It is no more snobbish or undemocratic to possess a dress-suit than to possess a gramophone. It is no more snobbish to put on evening clothes than to put on cricket flannels or a football jersey.

A man who cannot preserve his political principles in a dress-suit has no political principles worth preserving. Artists who dress ostentatiously like artists are not always the best artists, and democrats who dress ostentatiously like democrats are not always the best democrats. The abolition of rags, not the abolition of glad rags, is the true object of democracy.

The Plumed Serpent, by D. H. Lawrence.

London: Martin Secker; New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $3.00.

JUDGMENTS of Mr. Lawrence's work have been, from the beginning, as various and irreconcilable as its judges. In regard to The Plumed Serpent they range from the view of a Spectator critic who holds that 'if this writing up of a new faith is intended for a message, then it is only a paltry one,' to the view of a writer in the Daily Telegraph who, admitting that Mr. Lawrence's undisciplined pathological interest keeps the book from being great literature, declares that 'page after page here is unique, and even unapproachable.' Mr. H. C. Harwood's review in the Outlook is representatively judicious:

Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of forty, whom since her husband's death life has ceased to interest, comes to Mexico. The country and the people repel her; nor is her temper made smoother by the fact that her companions are Americans who can never refuse a new sensation. How she loathes dirt and oppression and under dogs and cruelty and crowds and revolutions and politics and - and everything. Civilization is a bore, and its absence a torment. She is swept by gusts of rage. But two men interest her. One is Don Ramon, a cultivated gentleman of European descent. The other is Don Cipriano, a full-blooded Indian general. These two men are up to something. She stays in Mexico to see what it is. They intend to supersede Christianity by the worship of the Aztec gods, and they succeed. Ramon is the high priest of Quetzalcoatl, the feathery serpent, and, esoterically, Quetzalcoatl himself. Cipriano is Huitzilopochtli. Kate, promised an apparently subordinate part in the Pantheon, is in love with both, but marries only the latter.

It will now be unnecessary for me to explain that The Plumed Serpent is not

everybody's pet. If you have never read Lawrence and do not want to, or if you have read him but think him an overrated rhetorician, or if you deplore the fact that he gave up writing about coal-heavers, or if you think Sons and Lovers superior to Women in Love, or if, while agreeing that Mr. Lawrence is a great novelist, you do wish that he would write about nice things, or if you are preoccupied by planning the speech you are to make at the local literary society on 'John Galsworthy and Arnold. Bennett: which is the greater?' — then I cannot honestly recommend The Plumed Serpent to you, or ask you to bother yourself with what I have to say. The descriptions of Mexico are as good and as convincing as they could be made. But, unless you believe that Mr. Lawrence's romantic quest for a novel and more intense way of living is approximately the most important thing in contemporary literature, occasional descriptive passages will not compensate you for being bored by a long, profoundly obscure, and often tedious book.

What, however, will admirers of Mr. Lawrence make of The Plumed Serpent? They will agree, I think, that the author has not advanced from the Kangaroo stage. His imagination has not mastered his theme. As ever, he rises at all sorts of unexpected moments to an emotional intensity and a fierce, intuitional understanding, parallels with which can be found in no other living author. But the inspiration comes in lightning flashes. After each flash is no steady flame to light us. We plunge on and he plunges on through the darkness of chaos. When all allowances are made for Mr. Lawrence's innate mysticism, for the difficulties he meets when he tries to express his ideas in other than emotional terms, and for his unhappily increasing contempt of technique, it remains apparent that Mr. Lawrence has not advanced on his quest. Perhaps his wandering about the world is to blame. He has traveled too.