The Contributors' Column

IT is with unusual pleasure that we begin this number with two names that have adorned the Atlantic’s pages for more than a generation. Charles D. Stewart is a many-sided lover of life, a wise student of Shakespeare, and a successful novelist. In a recent letter Mr. Stewart writes us: ‘The very first bees of this season made their appearance a couple of weeks ago, at a time when there were no blossoms and no pollen to gather. But there were some maple trees which had been cut down last year to make room for a new road, and this spring the sap began to rise in those stumps with the first warmth of the sun. And the bees that had gone out for the spring “ cleansing flight” found those stumps and just fell to on the treasure of sweet sap. I caught one and brought it home and put it under the glass by way of looking again, with my own eyes, into the points dealt with in the Atlantic article.’ ¶Author of many notable volumes, Agnes Repplier of Philadelphia has made the essay her own with papers whose incisive skill and dexterity approach perfection. Among friends a delightful raconteur, Miss Bepplier has sent us this valiant chronicle: ‘An accpiaintance of mine, returning late to her apartment, found that it had been entered by a burglar whom she had evidently interrupted before he could carry off his spoils. Sure that the man was somewhere near, she flung open a window, and saw him crouching on a bay-window roof outside. Being a person without fear, she reached for a weapon, caught up an Atlantic Monthly, and hit the burglar on the head with it, whereupon he slid down the water pipe and was gone. A triumph, I take it, for your magazine.’

The purpose and efficacy of missions have been challenged by James Norman Hall, who sends us from Papeete his pitiable picture of a desolate South Sea battlefield. His account recalls that dolorous land in Lyonnesse where the great King Arthur

. . . glanced across the field Of battle: but no man was moving there,
Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,
Nor yet of heathen.

As though in answer to this charge, the mails brought us the manuscript of the Reverend Dr. Robert F. Fitch, President of Hangchow Christian College, wherein, speaking as with the tongues of men and of angels, Dr. Fitch affirms the supreme ideal of missions. These papers recall the missionary journal which appeared in the Atlantic of last November. ¶In her testimony a Social Worker presents evidence which demands an impartial hearing. In substantiation of the author, we have been allowed to print this letter from Mr. Edward L. D. Roach, Secretary of the Committee of Seventy of Philadelphia: ‘ The author of the following article is known to me. I have carefully scrutinized the article and find that the facts are not exaggerated.’

It is with sorrow that we publish our final contribution from Amy Lowell. Conspicuous in the art of modern poetry, Miss Lowell was, as well, a discriminating critic and a vivid and sympathetic biographer. Her death deprives American letters of a courageous, indefatigable, and gifted artist, and the Atlantic of a proud contributor. In her last letter to us, Miss Lowell described ‘ Fool o’ the Moon ‘ as ‘ one of my most successful poems in my readings. In fact,

I think it has been more successful than almost anything I have written except “ Lilacs,” “ Patterns,” and the “ Sonnets to Duse.” ‘ Since her first appearance in 1910, the following poems of Miss Lowell’s have appeared in the Atlantic: ‘ A Fixed Idea,’ ‘ A Japanese Wood Carving,’ ‘The Dream of St. Ursula,’ ‘The Starling,’ ‘Absence,’ ‘Patience,’ ‘A Tulip Garden,’ ‘Fireworks,’ ‘Merchandise,’ ‘Castles in Spain,’ ‘Dried Marjoram,’ ‘Prime,’ ‘Autumn and Death.’ C. E. Andrews, Professor of English at Ohio State University, has spent six months of the past year poking about the ‘ impossible places’ of Paris, and making fascinating acquaintances in the slums and markets. Leo Crane has severed his connection with the Indian Service after twenty-two years, during the last fourteen of which he has been laboring as an Indian Agent on the Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado frontiers. The opening chapter of Mr. Crane’s experiences appeared in the June Atlantic. ¶At the Blue Hill Observatory of Harvard University, its director, Alexander McAdie, has had opportunity to study the wonder of the heavens and the astronomers. We predict that his advice to the thunderstricken will be cut out and hung up in conspicuous places. native of the Blue Grass country, Peter Bumaugh speaks with authority on the affairs of the turf. Mr. Burnaugh is the racing-expert on the staff of the New York Evening Mail-Telegram.

Morgan Barnes, a master of the Thacher School, Ojai, California, gives us a just estimate of the cause and effect of college entrance examinations. Frances LeFevre’s story breaks all rules regarding the risibilities of Atlantic readers. Archibald MacLeish is writing and living happily in Paris with a wife and Nine Muses to keep him company. ¶Protection from that most dreadful disease of contemporary life, reckless driving, is wisely recommended by Herbert L. Towle of Philadelphia. His facts strike a note of warning audible above the din of motors and klaxons.

From early days, Americans have returned Columbus’s call with interest. To travelers and stay-at-homes alike, the position of contemporary Spain poses a question which has been intelligently and fully treated by Robert Sencourt, an English observer and essayist. William Martin, an editor of the Journal de Genèeve of Switzerland, has had opportunity for a close and impartial inspection of the Peace Treaty. ¶From history Edward Beach Howell has drawn up an intelligent hypothesis which in these bellicose times is a matter of immediate political importance.

In justice to an old and distinguished contributor, we quote from an acknowledgment which appeared in a recent number of the World’s Work.

In the Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Vol. I, p. 60, the statement is made that Mr. Page, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, changed the title of an article on the Kentucky mountains by Dr. William G. Frost, President of Berea College, from a commonplace one submitted by the author to ‘Our Contemporary Ancestors.’ This title has long been regarded as one of the happiest in the history of American periodical literature, and for this reason it is to be especially regretted that a mistake was made in attributing the authorship to Walter H. Page. Dr. Frost, who wrote the article, had already used this expressive phrase in describing the Southern mountains, and used it again as the title of his well-known Atlantic article. Its exclusive authorship is his own, and the biographer of the Life and Letters can only express his regret that he was misinformed into ascribing it to Walter Page.

We publish the following letter for its graphic picture of that indecision which is now holding sway in the minds of many seniors ‘safe in the wide, wide world.’

HANOVER, N. H.

DEAR DAD,— These long spring days up here certainly compensate for the dreariness of the winter. Spring football begins to-morrow and is to continue for four weeks, up to Spring Prom, May tenth.
Played baseball out on the lawn most of yesterday afternoon and if the stiffness I feel to-day is any measure of my condition, there are hard days ahead. But I can’t help looking forward to shaking off the winter’s accumulation of fat.
Last Sunday, while sitting in the library, you said something about ‘the future’ —what I expected to do after college. We started to talk it over, and then I decided that probably the best policy would be for me to wait and write. I was reminded of the fact that sometimes the channels of thought between the two parties are quite different. In that case, you get the better of the argument — you unsaddle me with one wellaimed remark, and I’m licked. Writing is one sure way of getting the floor and keeping it.
Well, the whole point is that I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m trying to find out and have been for the last three years, but it seems the more I learn, and the more my interests widen, the less conviction I have — that’s the curse of growth. I think if I had not come to college I should have been a happy and contented breadearner, a man of convictions, with a keen, unflinching eye, and a big bull head, happy and successful — as Ed says, too dumb to know I could lose.
But when a fellow gets a taste of college, a big enough one, he is apt to learn so much more than he expected to that it ‘throws’ him. I like to dip into things here and there. I have a lot of interests and get a ‘kick’ out of many things. In this respect, college has broadened me, but I’m afraid that sometimes such broadening comes at the expense of depth. College is liable to make of one an all-around dilettante. All this seems to spring from book-knowledge, so much of which experience and reali ty seem to deny. The reading of too many books ‘tends to falsify the cosmic values.’ Books give you a set of beautiful, poetic ideas that, do almost everything for you except feed your stomach. All this I know, but the fact remains that I’ve got a number of these pretty illusions about life and how it ought to be lived, and I hate to go into the mill of business and have them knocked out of me.
In myself I see a high and a low strain. To go into business, commuting and so forth, is to accept the low. To me, the city is depressing and grows continually more so. Everyone looks the same, does the same, thinks essentially the same — everything is sameness and conformity. In all this, Dad, I do not mean to wax ethereal; it’s just supposed to be representative of the kind of thought that’s been running through my mind since I struck college. I am at a disadvantage putting this kind of stuff to a man who has been in business for fifty years — I take that into consideration. But far be it from me to see you as one of the hard-headed variety. I do not believe you were ever intolerant of a difference of opinion. Here is a test for tradition.
My plight is that right now I am at that age where, not having tried anything, I feel I could be a success at anything. Cut my field of choice down to any one thing and I believe I could make a ‘go’ of it. I have a rather high opinion of my capabilities. But the question is not one of ‘success’ but of happiness. In what field would life have the most meaning? A man has only one life; it is not an obligation to anyone; so why not live it the way he wants to? I have for some time harbored the illusion that. I could write, be a critic, go into teaching and aim for a professorship in Philosophy or in English, or even go into the ministry. I could run a good modernist church.
It is one thing to ‘think’ and another thing to ‘do.’ Would n’t it be awful to make the plunge and then be dissatisfied or fail? You see, in considering a profession I am at a disadvantage. There is the influence of precedent, to overcome, and that precedent is always whispering to me that it would be so much easier to just drift into ‘business’ and forget it all, and have my home, and my car, and my daily chores, and live and die and amount to nothing!
And a second point; the æsthetic professions require a very distinct, temperament, and temperaments are not only expensive, but very elusive. The problem before me is to determine, once for all, just how deeply rooted this mood of mine is. It has not been a passing fancy — that, at least, is true. Some such revolution of attitude as I have undergone is usuaLly characteristic of everyone who goes to college, but it usually passes off after a few months, leaving behind a slightly more sophisticated victim. With me, however, the change has stuck, and it seems to grip harder and surer as time passes. Perhaps that fact may be taken as a measure of the future.
After looking back over these pages, it seems as if I’ve proved very little — but all I set out to do was to give you some picture of the situation in which I find myself. I hope I have done that. In the last analysis, there is only one thing I am sure of. I do not want to go into business. I should like to take a shot at writing, perhaps with an incidental connection with a publishing house, or at teaching, or, lastly, at the diplomatic service, which I did not mention before. The feeling I have is a desire to spread my wings — to clear out and lead a life of freedom — to do something different. But I don’t know where I’m at and I ‘ll admit it. Is there anything you can suggest? You’ve left the thing up to me so far and I’m glad of it — I’ve had a chance to do some thinking on the subject — but it seems as if I’m approaching the end of the rope. Will you tell what you’d like me to do?
Affectionately,
BOB

Bliss Perry’s disquisition on fly fishing has evoked considerable applause and some criticism. Fellow anglers show their pleasure by relating their favorite yarns, one of the most believable of which we reproduce.

BUFFALO, N.Y.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I wonder whether any of your readers of Professor Perry’s ‘Fishing with a Fly,’ in your May number, can equal this.
A year ago last September, the members of our small fishing club had had a very disappointing season. One afternoon I discovered a small open space among the lily pads at the foot of one of our lakes and, casting in my fly, had it instantly taken by a large trout. There followed in quick succession seven others, total weight eighteen and a half pounds.
During the next three days several members tried the same spot without getting a rise. On the fourth day I went down again and struck eight trout, landing seven weighing eighteen pounds. The eighth got tangled in the lilies and broke away. All of these were taken on a dark Montreal. Last year, during a four weeks’ stay at the club, I tried this same place time and again with a dark Montreal and every other fly in my book without getting a rise.
Very truly yours,
WILLIAM H. CROSBY

The critics resent the implication that one must be either a soil of Izaak Walton or a sentimentalist.

BRYN MAWK, PENNSYLVANIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I note with pain that your distinguished contributor, Bliss Perry, in his truly delightful paper on ' Fishing with a Fly, is on the defensive for his favorite sport. Why otherwise does he scout the non-fisherman in his simple unvaunted enjoyment of nature? It is apparently the rare fisherman who can resist the temptation of a fling at the ‘sentimentalist’ while exulting in the fish ‘flopping in the basket’; and yet this attitude seems somewhat gratuitous and the epithet inaccurate.
Must one be dubbed a sentimentalist because he takes his pleasure in the natural world without the destruction of vertebrate life, being provided with perfectly good lunches by a paid butcher?
I am not disposed to belittle what the man with the rod or the gun sees, but I cannot suffer in silence the assumption that he who does not carry these admirable instruments of pleasure sees less. There is conceivably an occupation (or preoccupation) other than fishing or gunning which trains the eye to the perception of every contour of hill and valley, to every form and coloration of rock and boulder, to every graceful movement of wild life, which indeed quickens the senses and the interpretive powers of the mind quite beyond ‘mere passive receptivity,’ and which contributes to a joyous ecstasy (equal, I humbly believe, to that contributed by the rod and gun, though I am loath to measure another’s emotions) that truly is not without sentiment — and what joy is? — but which scarcely makes of one a sentimentalist.
It might be noted in passing that the lower courses of ‘the brook in the Heart of Greylock,’ enticing to the fisherman, are less enthralling than the headwaters of this same stream, presumably unvisited by the fisherman, deep sunk in the heart of the mountain, eternally twilighted, surrendered to an unabashed and vigorous nature. How frequently, I wonder, have the fishermen of Williamstown experienced the rewards of a trackless climb in moments spent on the quartz ledge summiting the Dome? Why, finally, assume that the man without a rod or gun goes into the woods ‘to peep and botanize (sic) and name all the birds’?
F. BASCOM

This thrifty lesson in home economics is in accord with the highest authority in the land.

GOSHEN COLLEGE,
GOSHEN, IND.
DEAR EDITOR, —
My wife and I were especially interested in Ida L. Albright’s discussion of ‘The High Cost of Babies.’ We fully agree with her main arguments concerning the abuses of their sacred privileges by the medical fraternity, but regret that Mrs. Albright revealed a very weak spot in her own armor. We fear that she is not a reliable champion of the cause of the people against medical profiteers.
Mrs. Albright’s weakness is in the handling of her home finances — or, rather, how the family income managed to vanish so mysteriously. When the Albrights had been married seven years, he was receiving four thousand dollars. They should have already saved a few thousand dollars, at that rate, before the prolonged illness of their child. But then his salary had jumped to nearly eight thousand dollars. If they had started with nothing after that spell of sickness four or five years ago, they should have saved twentyfive thousand dollars, or more, by this time, after living comfortably.
I base my estimate upon the fact that the ordinary preacher or college professor can rear a family in comfort on a salary of two thousand dollars, and have a good home, automobile, and so forth, free of debt. That leaves a margin of nearly six thousand dollars for the Albrights to go on. If they cannot pay all those exorbitant doctor-bills and still save a few thousand a year, they need to have a guardian appointed to administer their finances.
Now I do not wish to have this little lesson in home economics for Mrs. Albright overshadow my hearty approval of her suggestions along purely medical lines. I would favor state control of public health by putting doctors on the civilservice list and fixing a sliding schedule of salaries and bonuses to pay them in proportion to the percentage of freedom from sickness within a prescribed district. Then the specialists would be required to serve rich and poor alike, without mercenary motives.
Sincerely yours,
ORVILLE T. RODMAN

Conciliatory advice from a mother who is a physician.

PHILADELPHIA DEAR ATLANTIC, — Being a mother, and also a physician, may qualify me to disagree (though I may also sympathize) with the mother who wrote to you in the May number as to the ‘high cost of babies,’ and family in general.
It seems rather unfortunate that the young parents encountered such high-priced specialists, rather than the practical physician, who keeps pace with changed conditions in medicine and manner of living. Both my husband and myself have practised many years and also raised a healthy family in a large city. We have met all varieties of patients, with and without incomes, more or less appreciative. Together with many other physicians, we call on specialists when there is need of technical skill in extreme cases. Otherwise a knowledge of human nature as well as medical knowledge, together with commonsense, brings success in the treatment of most bodily ailments. Certainly, before developing as a specialist, there should be a few years of practical knowledge, besides hospital practice. As to set prices, it is the physician’s privilege to be guided by the patient’s income. Medical ethics prevent advertising other than by G. P.’s (grateful patients). Outside of the palatial offices mentioned, the equipment, books, and so forth, require a large outlay, even for an ordinary doctor, so fees must necessarily increase. Moderate incomes can be served by able doctors even though they are not specialists.
Sincerely,
A FAMILY PHYSICIAN

A businesslike defense.

MASON CITY, IOWA DEAR ATLANTIC, — In the language of the street, ‘How does D. W. Fisher get that way?’—the mood he was in when he wrote ‘Seven Centuries of Civilization,’ appearing in the April Atlantic.
His entire thesis seems to have been founded on the major premise that what was of the Middle Ages was perfect, while what is of to-day is perfectly putrid; that the one was mediæval and therefore right, that the other is modern and therefore wrong.
Mr Fisher’s implication that there is no ethics

or morality in modern economics and business, that — on the contrary — both are wholly imbued with the principle of either unholy and unrestricted competition or an equally immoral monopoly, is not justified. On the contrary, general business of to-day is militantly moral. Business men arc fashioning for themselves codes of ethics and rules of action that are far in advance of the legal codes established for their regulation. It is true that there are many cases of glaring criminality in the conduct of modern business, but the percentage is marvelously small.
Mr. Fisher would have us canonize a civilization that was steeped in illiteracy and that was founded on the social, legal, and economic inequalities of feudalism and serfdom, whose history is written largely in the chronicles of wars between barons, feudal lords, and piratically competitive independent cities. In the same breath, as it were, he would have us pillory, if not burn at the stake of our hot scorn, a civilization builded on the principles of universal suffrage and education, political and legal freedom and equality, freedom of contract and sacredness of property rights; a civilization that renounced slavery and serfdom, and in which even voluntary labor by all ages and sexes is safeguarded and regulated, in which workmen’s compensation and insurance, and extensive participation in ownership by workers, are common and voluntary practice.
All of which simply shows that Mr. Fisher does not really know the facts about modern man, modern business, or modern civilization.
Very sincerely yours,
JAMES A. KING

We hope that many do not die of it, but we feel obliged to tell the story.

NEBRASKA DEAR ATLANTIC, — In a Mid-West college town a few ladies were discussing a fatal accident which had occurred in the neighborhood, and from that drifted on to their own preferences for meeting death. After all the rest had expressed themselves, one quiet little gentlewoman remarked, ‘I have always said that I hope to die sitting on the porch dressed in my best gown with the Atlantic Monthly in my lap.’
J. E. V.