The Contributors' Column

Brigadier-General P. R. C. Groves was Director of Flying Operations at the Air Ministry of Great Britain in 1918, after two years’ service as Chief-of-Staff to the Royal Flying Corps, Middle East, an organization which embraced four theatres of war. In January 1919 he was appointed British Air Representative at the Peace Conference, was later British Air Adviser to the Supreme Council and the Council of Ambassadors, and at the same time to the Council of the League of Nations. Until his recent retirement he was for three years the British Air Representative on the Interallied Military Committee of Versailles, which, under the presidency of Marshal Foch, has been primarily responsible for ensuring the execution of the disarmament clauses of the Peace treaties.

Langdon Mitchell, son of S. Weir Mitchell, physician, poet, and novelist, inherits his father’s genius for diagnosis. A member of the New York bar, he has for many years been an author and playwright. Theatregoers will recall especially ‘Becky Sharp’ and ‘The New York Idea.’ George Madden Martin is known to every American schoolgirl as the author of Emmy Lou. Her more recent volumes are A Warwickshire Lad, Children of the Mist, and March On.

James H. Ryan is a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. Parkhurst Whitney, who writes for us a story of the workings of a small boy’s mind, is a new Atlantic contributor. Elizabeth C. Adams in her sensible postscript to our discussion of marriage and divorce makes her first contribution to the Atlantic.H. R. Dilling, who translates for this issue the diary of the Arctic explorer Thorleif Mokleby, frozen to death near Kobbe Bay, in the winter of 1922, is a Norwegian journalist who, for the past seven years, has made his home in America. George Villiers, a new English poet, will be remembered by Atlantic readers for his ‘Coming Down to Dinner,’ (March), and ‘Blessed Are the Moments,’ ‘Values,’ and ‘Prayers’ (April).

Such a freshet of autobiographical writing has risen from the presses in late years that it is time someone discussed the whole matter of intimate writing and especially the peculiar happiness which comes both to its writers and readers. Agnes Repplier makes this the theme of one of her wisest and pleasantest papers. All that we are permitted to say of M. E. B. appears in the editor’s note at the head of the article. His dream experience is genuine. George Soule, for many years a student of social and economic problems, is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and since its foundation in 1920 a director of the Labor Bureau, Inc., which renders professional services to unions in economics, accounting, and engineering. He defends unionism in the important discussion inaugurated by F. Lauriston Bullard.

One of the many reasons why readers like Margaret Prescott Montague is that old friends are to be met with in most of her stories. Tony Beaver appears in ‘ Up Eel River’ (May Atlantic) and also in ‘The To-day To-morrow’ (August). Readers of Robert Frost’s last volume of poems will be interested in another version of Miss Montague’s theme. Miss Montague’s new novel, Deep Channel, was published last fall by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Dr. Jacks is editor of the Hibbert Journal and Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. Florence J. Clark has been a worker at the Henry Street Settlement, New York City, for twelve years. Joseph Auslander is a teacher of English at Harvard University. A book of his poems will be published in the spring by Harpers’.

With England expecting to starve unless Germany be allowed to recover and furnish her a market, with France pointing to 1870 and 1914 as her justification for the Ruhr, with Germany slipping toward chaos and intimating that unless she be granted life she will drag all Europe with her, a sense of bewilderment comes over the American mind. Some of us are partisan, but most of us, like W. O. Mendenhall, are simply asking, ‘ Who Is Right?’ Formerly a professor of mathematics, Dr. Mendenhall is President of Friends University, Wichita, Kansas. John Crane, son of the Honorable Charles R. Crane, former Minister to China, is secretary to President Masaryk of the Czechoslovak Republic and so writes from a particular coign of vantage. Franklin Snow is a student of railroad problems, and a writer on railroad economics. He is editor of the railroad column of the Christian Science Monitor. ¶Few newspaper writers in Europe are better able to discuss the terrible question, ‘Is Civilization Menaced?’ than Sisley Huddleston. During the Peace Conference his dispatches for the Westminster Gazette won him wide recognition, and he is now Paris correspondent of the London Times, a position which many regard as first in the newspaper world.

Among the novelists whom Joseph Warren Beach scores for ‘sawing the air’ and using ‘proud words’ to excess, are Hugh Walpole, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Frank Swinnerton. Mr. Walpole in the most courteous of briefs opens the case for the defense: —

THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS
November 24, 1923
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have just read with much pleasure the two articles by Professor Beach of Minnesota that have appeared in your numbers of October and November. Will you permit me a few words in reply? Not indeed in my own defense. I bow my head and can only say as did the small boy to his schoolmaster in Ribiera’s famous story: ‘Sir, mother thinks you take a prejudiced view.’
It may further interest Professor Beach to learn that I have arranged in my house a system whereby, whenever I write the word ‘suddenly,’ a bell rings, the household is roused and hurries to my reproach; so much good his articles have already wrought.
But I write rather in search, like Rosa Dartle, of information. Professor Beach must intend one of two things in his articles. He is either pillorying certain writers for the iniquities of their styles — but implying at the same time that they are writers of merit — or, as I sadly fear to be the case, he is insisting that these are writers of no merit at all, men who have endeavored to cover up their nakedness with extravagance and empty volubility. If he is doing the first of these there is little point in his articles. If he is speaking of writers of merit he can find tricks of style, redundances, exaggerations in the very highest examples. The monotonous ‘wailing’ of the characters of Henry James, the wooden stiffness of Hardy’s middle-class dialogues (his peasants talk marvelously), the redundances and sentimentalities of Dickens, the false affections of Thackeray, the verbal ugliness of Walter Scott, the clumsiness of Balzac — there is no end to the criticisms that may be made.
These are great names and Professor Beach’s retort would, I am sure, at once be: ‘It is exactly because I hear on occasions the names of miserable popular novelists mingled with the names of these great ones that I am out to expose such wretched pretensions.’
He hints again and again, if he does not openly declare, that none of the writers named in his articles are honest writers, that they are humbugs and are themselves claiming high station because they have been financially successful.
It is this insinuation on the part of Professor Beach that I am writing to contradict. To take only three of his names, — those of Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Hergesheimer, and Mr. Frank Swinnerton, — it is unfair criticism to select certain extravagant passages from their works and to imply from these quotations that their authors are impostors. The creator of Babbitt, the author of Wild Oranges and Java Head, the author of Nocturne and Young Felix, are not so to be described.
These men are yet young but they have already achievements to their name impossible of denial. Professor Beach would better look at his Christmas Garland again and ask himself whether already the names of Swinnerton and Lewis are not as worthy of inclusion as several there present. I venture to think that the pictures of middle-class London life, drawn for us by Mr. Swinnerton, will live longer in English letters than the historical romances of Mr. Hewlett, the Babbitt of Mr. Lewis as long as the Forsyte of Mr. Galsworthy.
But these comparisons are empty. I would only suggest that the selection of fragmentary quotations from authors, great or small, is too easy a game for the serious critic.
HUGH WALPOLE.

Two points in Philip Cabot’s ‘Adventures in Christianity’ (December Atlantic) have brought us an interesting letter from the Reverend S. Leslie Reid: Mr. Cabot’s remarks upon our neglect of Hell, and of fasting!

Mr. Cabot argues that the effect of our neglect of Hell has been to empty our churches. Again he argues that were the doctrine revived and preached upon during the coming year, the churches would have to hang up the sign, ‘Standing Room only.’ Is there a contradiction here? Only a slight familiarity with the history of modern thought should indicate that the passing of the doctrine of Hell has something back of it far deeper than either empty pews or full pews. In philosophy to-day monism is upon the throne; dualism is under the ban. We have one God, not two. There may be a Purgatory where men resist the light for a time; but a Hell, where an Evil God reigns and where there are men who throughout all eternity will resist the good is a conception quite out of line with what a great many now consider the best philosophy of the ages.

The question of fasting is interesting but impracticable. The old type of fasting (no longer advised) is about the only sort open to our average church-member to-day; they must go right along with their work. The type Mr. Cabot advocates would require wealth, leisure, servants in the home, and a much better state of social well-being than is afforded to our average working men and women. We need to-day, not only a personal experience of salvation, an escaped Hell, and an assured Heaven; we need, even more than that, religious folk who will harness up their emotions and their ability and their money to the work of bringing in the Kingdom of God upon this earth. The great weakness here seems to be the lack of a ‘social gospel’ and a theology for the same.

Here is an Anglican Catholic comment upon Mr. Cabot.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
A great number of your readers, Anglican Catholics and Roman Catholics, will sympathize deeply with Mr. Cabot’s interesting record, in your December number, of his religious experience in fasting and confession. They will be, however, at a loss to understand his treatment of these practices as adventures or discoveries, when they are the commonplace of Catholic life and have been for two thousand years.
All over the country there are Episcopal churches, quite apart from the Roman churches, whose congregations habitually practise auricular confession with absolution, and where fasting is practised in connection with religious devotions and on many other occasions and at many seasons.
So in regard to ‘retreats’: there are now, in the Episcopal Church, permanently established ‘places of retreat’; and many churches, several times in the year, are converted into retreats ‘where we can go,’ as Mr. Cabot says, ‘to fast and pray,’
The highest testimony to Mr. Cabot’s appraisal of the value of fasting is the fact that in the main services in these Episcopal churches, as in all the Roman Catholic churches, fasting in connection with and preparation therefor is required not only of the priest but of all the laity actively participating therein.
Reactionary Protestantism, as it from time to time revives the discarded beliefs, devotions, and discipline of the pre-Reformation Church, demonstrates that these were indeed rooted in the Christian religion and integral parts of Christian life. There are few more valuable contributions to this conclusion than the notable record made by Mr. Cabot in the Atlantic.
CHARLES C. MARSHALL.

The Atlantic invades the East !

SINGAPORE,
October 23, 1923.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
There are not many places further from No. 8 Arlington St. than Singapore, and when the September number of the Atlantic arrives, on October 22, there is cause for rejoicing. Letters from home, coming by the same mail, are read in the office, but the Atlantic, with its wrapper intact, is put away in the drawer of my desk until the day’s work is done. At long last the clock strikes four, and with the Atlantic in hand I step out into the sun-baked square to wake up my Malay syce. He knows the meaning of the thin brown package, and heads the old Ford straight for home. It is a bungalow seven and a half miles from town, on a hilltop overlooking the Straits of Malacca. At the back, the green jungle stretches away to a purple distance, and the road winding up through the rubber trees ends at the bungalow door.
Tea is ready on the verandah, but it must wait until I have taken off my clothes, wet with perspiration since I put them on in the morning. A few dipperfuls of cool water scooped from a Shanghai jar in the corner of the bathroom serve as a shower bath, and for a brief moment banish all thought of heat. Then, with a sarong around my middle, I am ready for tea.
Ah Fong has been with me for only a month, but he has remembered everything: sliced fresh limes instead of condensed milk, hot buttered toast, and fat chunks of an enormous Borneo pineapple. Through the verandah rails I can see the ocean glistening in the distance. A rickety-looking pilgrim ship bound for Mecca is threading its way among the islands, and two Malay fishing-boats are beating up into a pool of ripples nearer shore. The sun is still high, so there will be light enough to read by for at least another hour. Shall I begin at the end with the advertisements of ‘round the world tours,’ or start in the middle with the article by Bishop Lawrence? Before I begin with either I’ll move over into that long chair, placed where it will catch any possible breeze, and call for a whisky soda. After all, the Atlantic does n’t arrive every day, and this hour won’t come again for another month.
Am I the same person who, not so many years ago, thought that his mother should give up the Atlantic and subscribe to some magazine with pictures, or is my literary appreciation the result of two years in the sinister East?
Looking at you from another angle, I am,
Yours,
J. H L.

Of the many curiosities which ‘A WeekEnd with Chinese Bandits,’ by Lucy Truman Aldrich, aroused, the most burning question is clearly, ‘What became of those rings ? ‘

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Please tell anyone who is still interested in the subject that my rings were found. When I reached Peking, a week after the Shantung affair, Mr. Naill wrote asking me to redraw my map, more in detail. Both he and Mr. Babcock were too busy to take the long trip into the country to search for them, but Mr. Babcock sent his Chinese boy with my bandit as a guide. They found the little town and the hill above it quite easily. Then, the boy says, he searched the hill for hours, sinking at last to the ground exhausted. Idly putting his hand into the crack of a rock by which he sat, he found one ring — and then the other. Holding them up in front of him, they caught the light just as my bandit and a small boy from the village came over the top of the hill. So he had to tell them they were found.
In that way the village learned the news. As soon as it was night and everyone asleep, the boy says he got up and stole away — in deadly fear that he would be murdered and the rings stolen. This is the boy’s story and I am afraid he made it as dramatic as possible to gain face and incidently a larger reward. Mr. Babcock sent my rings up to Peking wrapped in the little crumpled map which I wish now I had kept. The emerald is badly scratched and cracked, which makes it more interesting as a souvenir, but I am New England-y enough to regret the loss of value. No one in China had the slightest idea they could be found — which added to my joy in getting them back.
LUCY T. ALDRICH.

Ramsay Traquair has read the retort courteous by Griffis Marsden to his ‘Women and Civilization’ — and here is what he says: —

I find myself in agreement with almost everything in it. Any criticism I could make would be on mere matters of detail and the use of terms. One idea I should like to contradict, not of this article but of many letters which I have received. I am not a ‘woman-hater.’ I hope that the women will continue to exert themselves even more actively than before in all departments of life. My serious quarrel is with the men on this continent who are leaving all the things which as a man I must think important, the art, the abstract science, the literature, the higher thought, to the women (who are not nearly so good at them as they are). The women are all quite awake here, as I know, but the men are asleep in their offices and on their golf links (except a few).

Two Franco-Americans write us on the ‘ Ruhr ‘ question in complete disagreement, as follows: —

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have read Mr. Cassel’s article, and wonder if you would care to know how the matter strikes an impartial reader, all whose sentiments, indeed, were against Germany in the recent war. I was in France a year as a director of the Foyer du soldat with the French army from the time of the battle of Château-Thierry.
It is clear enough to us all that France’s real aim is to destroy Germany and render her forever incapable of further mischief. What confuses us and prevents us from seeing our clear duty is our consciousness of the fact that, if Germany had won the war, she would have acted precisely the same toward France. But what should we have done in that case? Should we have looked idly on? Our action during the war shows that we should not have tolerated any such treatment of France by Germany. Why then should we tolerate such a treatment of Germany by France, whose ability so to treat her is due solely to our action? For it is common knowledge that France unaided could never have conquered Germany, and could never have been in a position to do what she is now doing — holding Germany down by the throat and making impossible demands upon her, while refusing to take the suggestion of her allies and submit the matter of Reparations to an impartial tribunal.
But, someone says, what about the future, if we interfere thus? Should we not have to guarantee France against future aggression by Germany? To that the simple answer is that our action during the war is a sufficient guaranty to France that we would never stand idly by and see her dismembered and enslaved by Germany. Unless, indeed, we now continue to stand idly by and allow France to dismember and enslave Germany!
What should we do then? Plainly, instead of weakly suggesting to France the submission of the Reparations question to a judicial tribunal, firmly give France to understand that that is our will.
Having a French name and none but French ancestors on my father’s side, and having done what I could to help France during the war, I shall hardly be accused of pro-German sympathies. My sympathies have never been and are not now for either France or Germany primarily, but for justice.
Professor of Romance Languages C. GUILLET COLORADO COLLEGE.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I take advantage of the hospitality reserved in your columns to your readers, to express to you and your subscribers the astonishment which Mr. G. Cassel’s article has caused me.
It is regrettable that its author did not inform himself a little, before writing. I am convinced for instance that he would not have spoken of the enormous military expenditures of France if he had known that compared to the pre-war period the French army has been reduced 25 per cent, and the length of military training cut down 50 per cent; or had he known that at the present there are in the Ruhr only the normal recruits doing their military service, like all Frenchmen of twenty-one, and that it costs hardly more to keep them there than in French barracks. I am convinced also that he would have avoided speaking of ‘the highest legal authorities in England’ finding the occupation illegal, had he remembered that a few months ago the British Cabinet and those same authorities, not knowing as yet that British Commerce would be affected, declared the occupation perfectly legal.
I would suggest his reading the Versailles Treaty, of which he does not seem to have heard, and the French Answer to the English Note of August 1923. These are interesting documents! I also urge upon him, and this will perhaps be more to his taste, the reading of a German document, Max Harden’s latest book, (Germany, France, England, 1923). He would find the following sentences, which would no doubt surprise him: ‘We are lied to to-day as in war-time. To hide the shortcomings of administrations, abuse is heaped upon France, upon Poincaré.’ ‘After all,’ Mr. Harden points out, ‘what France is doing to-day does not differ materially from what Germany did after the war of 1870. (Does Mr. Cassel know that such a war has ever existed?) Germany then occupied French soil until the last centime of the indemnity of five billions of francs had been paid, and five billions were more than three times as much as Germany’s entire war-costs. But what a difference between the policy of fulfillment of the French and the policy of subterfuges adopted by Germany to-day.’ These are Maximilian Harden’s words!
This dispenses me from any further arguments. One cannot expect sentiment from an economist: honor, country, five invasions in less than 125 years, a million and a half dead, 600,000 mutilated, all this does not exist for an economist who only thinks of the market, and has never heard of the Lusitania. One cannot ask him to be a psychologist, but one can insist on his at least knowing his figures. How does Germany pay for her enormous purchases of copper, cotton, and machinery from the United States?
One last fact ignored by Mr. G. Cassel: There has been a war between France and Germany; there has been a treaty which registers the obligations of the vanquished. On the other hand America fought by the side of France as an ally. This creates a slight difference — that Mr. Cassel does not seem to understand — which makes that France can speak to Germany, who attacked her traitorously, in a different tone than that which is employed between allies.
P. LECOMTE DU NOÜY, D.SC.