very one hundred pounds of stock at such times and by such drawings as the Treasury, on the recommendation of the Mining Council may think fit. (5) The stock may be issued at such times and in such amounts and subject to such conditions as the Treasury may direct, and may be issued as bearer bonds with quar- terly or half yearly interest coupons attached. (6) The stock shall be transferable in the books of the Bank of England in like manner as other stock is trans- ferable under the National Debt Act, 1870. XI. Powers of Mining Council (1) Subject to the provisions of this Act, it shall be lawful for the Mining Council to open and work mines and search for, dig, bore, win and deal with minerals and gen- srally to carry on the industry of mining, distributing, vend- ing, and exporting, together with all other industries carried on in connection therewith. Provided that it shall not be lawful for the Mining Council to lease or sell any mine or minerals or rights to any person, association, or corporation. (2) The Mining Council may, from time to time, in such manner and on such terms as they think fit— (a) subject to the general consent of the Treasury, appoint or continue in employment or dismiss manag- ers, engineers, agents, clerks, workmen, servants, and other persons; and (6) construct, erect or purchase, lease, or otherwise acquire buildings, plant, machinery, railways, tram- ways, hulks, ships, and other fixed or movable appli- ances or works of any description, and sell or otherwise dispose of the same when no longer required; and (c) sell, supply, and deliver fuel, coal and other products, the result of mining operations, either with- in or without the realm; and (4i Leonid Andreyev THE DIAL A FORTNIGHTLY 1L**3& VOL. LXVII NEW YORK NO. 803 NOVEMBER 15, 1919 Fall Announcement Number Leonid Andreyev: 1871-1919 Eugene M. Kayden 425 To Li Tai Po. Verse Maxwell Bodenheim 428 Maximalists and Minimalists in Italy Arthur Livingston 429 The Roaring Forties Joseph Hergesheimer 431 Our Unique Humorist—Artemus Ward P. H. Belknap 433 The Abyss of the People Geroid Robinson 435 The Remaking of a Mind George Donlin 438 Freedom and the Grace of God . Babette Deutsch 441 To Timarion. Verse M. L. C. Pickthall 442 The Old Order and the New 443 Casual Comment 445 COMMUNICATIONS: Conrad Aiken is Questioned.—And Replies.—Education and Esthetics in 447 Art Museums. NOTES ON NEW BOOKS: Jeremy.—Heartbreak House, Great Catherine and Playlets of the 448 War.—Pink Roses.—The Cali of the Soil.—Sonia Married.—A Book of Princeton Verse: II, 1919 _Dr. Jonathan.—Small Things.—Body and Raiment.—The Silver Age.—Education and Aristocracy in Russia.—Main Currents of Spanish Literature.—Cervantes. Fall Announcement List 453 A List of Books for Children 460 Books of the Fortnight 460 "The Dial (founded in 1880 by Francis F. Browne) is published every other Saturday by the Dial Publishing Com- S.I^Martyn Johnson, President-Oswald W. Knauth, Secretary-Treasurer-at 152 West Thtrte^nth Stre£ New York N Y Entered as Second Class matter at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., August 3, 1918, under the act of March'3, 1897. Copyright, 1919, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc. Foreign Postage, 50 cents. $3.00 a Year ($4.00 after Jan. 1, 1920) 15 Cents a Copy Issued by Sanction of the N. Y. Printing Trades Unions 414 November 15 THE DIAL A FEW APPRECIATIONS OF THE PENGUIN SERIES "The publishers of the Modern Library have again be- come benefactors of belles letters in publishing the Penguin Series."—Chicago Tribune. "This series is to consist, in the words of the publishers, of books of distinguished literary value that have never be- fore been published in America. Both of these qualifica- tions are possessed by the present volumes."—The Nation. "That attractive new series of books known as the Penguin Series."—The Dial. fengwa "Having given us the Modern Library with its interesting array of books at an exceedingly moderate price, its pub- lishers have initiated the Penguin Series that promises to fill a quite definite field of its own and to fill it quite charm- ingly."—New York Times. "All that should be necessary to make these tastefully bound volumes, beautifully printed on fine paper, highly popular, is to maintain their high standard of literary ex- cellence."—New York Tribune. Series THE PEGUIN SERIES includes books of distinguished literary value that have never before been pub- lished in book form. While the first six volumes have not presented any authors unknown to the American reading public, the two fall volumes introduce George O'Neil, a young American poet of rare achievement and rarer promise, and Eduardo Zamacois, one of the greatest of living Spanish novelists. THE PENGUIN SERIES offers a home to short novels and collections of poems, plays, short stories and essays of exceptional worth, preference being given to the work of living American authors. Gay Colored Boards, Light Vellum Backs, Good Paper, Large Type, Wide Margins. $125 per volume. FALL TITLES The Cobbler in Willow Street By George O'Neil Introduction by Zoe Akin* A volume of verse of magic beauty. Zoe Akins says that George O'Neil, with the inspiration and clear-sightedness of youth—he is only twenty-one—brings back to today's turbulent world the loveliness, the dreams and colors that are the saving reality of this sometimes too realistic age. Their Son and the Necklace By Eduardo Zamacois Translated by George Allan England In these two stories there are finely etched dramas of every day life which crash suddenly into unexpected and tremendous moments. These are stories if love and passion, romance and beauty, and tragedy that is immense and ironic- Gabriele De Bergerac By HENRY JAMES II. Karma By LAFCADIO HEARN III. Japanese Fairy Tales By LAFCADIO HEARN Previously Publisbed IV. Iolanthe's Wedding By HERMANN SUDERMANN V. The Curious Republic of Gondour By SAMUEL L. CLEMENS VI. Sketches and Reviews By WALTER PATER SPECIAL OFFER: The Eight Volumes in the Penguin Series cost (at $1.25 each) $10.00. They make a most worth-while and attractive set. If you will send us your check for $10.00, they will be sent to you prepaid, together with a complimentary copy of Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh" or any other title in the Modern Library (if you do not know just which one of the eighty odd titles you want, send for our catalog). 111 W£ST 40th Y the VOTE TAKEN at the closing of the con- gress at Bolognaon October 10, the Italian Social- ist Party passes to the extreme left. On the reso- lutions drawn respectively by the right and the left the show of hands was overwhelmingly in favor of the latter. In view of this, the minority factions consented to intervene in the executive committee only in a consultative fashion, leaving unanimous control to the sovietist elements. On the question of participation in the imminent elec- tions, three groups developed: the abstentionists, led by Bordiga; the societists, led by Lazzari, who favors participation in the present instance; and the traditional parliamentarians, led by Treves. The second of these parties prevailed. As a result of this decision, the Italian Soviet is now insti- tuted, with elements devoted to insurrectionist tac- tics and having revolution as their immediate ob- jective. "Before this action," comments a con- servative writer, "the Fiume problem pales into insignificance." It is indeed possible that "Bo- logna, 1919" will have as important a place in the history of Italian Socialism as that enjoyed for the past twenty-six years by "Genoa, 1892." Meanwhile the General Federation of Labor an- nounces that the policy adopted by the Socialists at Bologna will not cause any change in its own traditional attitude. This helps to clarify as well as to complicate the Italian situation, which would seem to be now moving toward a fairly permanent stabilization. To put this action of the Socialist Party in its historical perspective, we may venture to recall that the founder of Italian Socialism was not Marx but Bakunin. The Italian populace, with cen- turies of political tyranny behind it, had native to it that hatred of the state and of all types of bureaucracy which was one of Bakunin's dis- tinctive emotions. Marxism, with its concept of an organ'zed society, made in the earliest years of Socialism only a gradual advance in Italy. While Bakuninism passed to the minority in the first International, as early as 1872, and was ex- cluded from the second International on the foundation of the latter in 1889, the corresponding evolution was not complete in Italy till the Genoa Congress of 1892, when the Italian Socialist Party came into being and Italian Marxian Socialism became clearly distinguished from anarchistic lepublicanism. Between 1892 and 1906 Italian Socialism was in much the state of mind that still predominates in the American movement. The party contained, first of all, those who thought that common owner- ship of the essentials to life could be attained through the capture by ballot of the instrumentali- ties of the modern democratic state; and second, those who thought that Socialism could be insti- tuted only by the development of the trades unions, the triumph of which would involve the disappear- ance of the present democratic state and the crea- tion of a new organism integrating political and economic power in the hands of the workers. Here we find the cleavage between Reformist and Revolutionary Socialism, which had been fully de- veloped in Italy by 1906. In that year majority control in the Italian party passed to the latter of these groups. Italian Socialism became definitely syndicalistic and revolutionary, and linked up, in a close relationship that has lasted ever since, with the General Federation of Labor, founded in 1900. In 1907 it was recognized that the prin- ciple of collective ownership, shared in common by Reformists and Revolutionaries, was not broad enough to accommodate syndicalist action and exclusively political action in a single efficient or- ganization. Enrico Ferri, the leader of the demo- cratic political actienists, left the party. The expulsion of Mr. Bissolati in 1913 was only an echo of this same difficulty—a new secession which drew off into the Reformist Socialist Party, for the elec- tion purposes of that time, the elements, really reformistic in conviction, who had hesitated for one reason or another to forsake the rich supply of votes delivered to the Socialist emblem by the General Federation. At the outbreak of the world war the socialistic and revolutionary movement in Italy presented the following picture. The old Bakunin group, shed by the Socialist Party in 1892, stood organized with about 100,000 members in the Syndicalist Union, centralized in the "red" province of Romagna and fighting for the system of anarchistic republics which was temporarily proclaimed in June 1914. The Reformists, dropped in 1907 and 1913, were hovering on the right of the Parliamentary group with about twenty-five deputies, led by Mr. Bis- solati and Mr. Berenini, and combining as often with the Radicals and Liberals as with the majority Socialists. Forming the vanguard of Socialism was the alii- 430 November 15 THE DIAL ance constituted by the General Federation of Labor, numbering 400,000 in 1913, and the Italian Socialist Party, counting 37,000 active members and polling almost exactly a million votes in the total of eight millions cast in the elections of that year. The war caused one slight abrasion on the surface of this solid group, when a few intellectuals of the type of Mr. Mussolino, and a few revolu- tionary workers like Mr. Alceste De Ambris, ex- perienced a revival of patriotism and nationalistic sentiment. . In the same plane with the General Federation we have had since last year the Italian Labor Union, exhibiting a compound of national-' ism and syndicalism, while the Italian Socialist Party has a rival in the Socialist Union, of which one faction is following the moribund Wilsonism of Mr. Bissolati, while another is riding on the nationalist band-wagon in the trail of D'Annunzio. Now as for the central nucleus of Italian So- cialism, which carries on the unbroken tradition originated in 1892, and which was united with the labor movement in 1906, it is important to note that the Socialist party has grown since the war to a membership in excess of 100,000, while the Federation has also tripled in size, reaching a strength of not less than a million and a quarter. But this powerful agglomeration of revolutionary energy is a unit only in its ultimate ideal—the seizure by the syndicates of the instruments of pro- duction and consequently of political power. It is divided by important differences as to tactics and strategy, which are indeed not so great nor so incompatible with each other as was the old cleav- age between Reformists and Revolutionaries. That is why the revolutionary Socialist organism has not split on the issue of Bolshevism. The terminology distinguishing the two most im- portant tendencies in the Italian movement in- cludes the words "maximalism'! and "minimalism." These terms are not so expressive as the words "sovietism" and "productionism," which are be- coming current in France. Let us hazard a state- ment of the opposing views of the groups com- monly called the "left" and the "right"—a state- ment all the more necessary in the United States in view of the somewhat different tendencies which developed at the Chicago convention. The Maximalist (Sovietist) holds that the work- man is the only producer, while the capitalist is a parasite. For the Minimalist (Productionist), the worker is not the only producer: he is not able to invent, design or set up his machinery, nor to find markets for his products; therefore the technical expertness of the capitalist class must be conserved and utilized. The Maximalist thinks that the worker has no interest, at present, in his output. Increased pro- duction means more strength to the employers and tighter bonds on the workingman. Reforms de- press revolutionary morale by arousing false hopes and preventing the general despair essential to the success of revolution. In the view of Minimalist, any measure that increases output is so much gained by the worker. He learns how to manage his ma- chinery better and what efficient production under good conditions of labor is. Not despair but tech- nical efficiency on the part of the working classes is the first prerequisite to a revolutionary period. For the Maximalist, the revolution is a political cataclysm. After seizing political power at what- ever cost in suffering and retrogression, the workers can begin to reconstruct and acquire their own technical efficiency. For the Minimalist, the revo- lution is viewed as an economic evolution. A revo- lution resulting in famine and suffering will pro- duce reaction and result in failure. The Maximalist recognizes that the main body of labor is conservative. Therefore the revolution must be the violent act of a small body of con- vinced enthusiasts, which will "start something" and either sweep the majority into like enthusiasm or intimidate it into acquiescence. For the Mini- malist, such enthusiasts cannot be trusted either to be successful in seizing power or to use that power wisely after they may have secured it. The Maximalist thinks the masses can be con- trolled by dictatorship, just as the capitalistic sys- tem controls them now. The Minimalist fears that violence will provoke a mass assault by the mili- tarized majority on the revolutionary minority, with the extermination of the revolutionists as a result. The workers must therefore gradually and per- sistently force their way into the control of the economic power in their regions, cooperating with government and owners until able to dispense with both. For the Maximalist, participation by the revolu- tionists in the work of the existing parliamentary system demoralizes the participants and inhibits violent action. For the Minimalist, such coopera- tion enables the revolutionist to weaken the action of the government against the revolution, hastens the granting of necessary advantages, and facili- tates the advance of the workers to complete control. Now to draw a contrast that may serve to en- lighten the somewhat complex situation in Italy: while the French Confederation generale du- 1919 431 THE DIAL Travail has a large majority in favor of the Pro- ductionist or Minimalist program, with Sovietism or Maximalism in a minority that seems to be diminishing, and is captained by intellectuals and unskilled laborers, the Italian Federation takes no positive stand on the issues between left and right. There has been no occasion for a recorded division on this question, but it seems clear that out-and-out Minimalism is favored only by a relatively small minority, while Maximalism itself has never been able to muster more than a thirty per cent vote. Between these Extremes stand the majority of the workers, who represent, not a compromise between left and right, but a hesitancy to accept either. The Federation was ready in July to make the effort to save Russia. It did not care to try the venture without a guarantee of support from Eng- land and France. It stands ready now to make an effort all alone, should the Fiume venture throw the army .and middle-class organization into chaos. Certainly this would indicate a tendency toward Maximalism. This situation explains the action of the Socialist party at Bologna. Whether the party go to the left or to the right is of little moment, unless it carries the Federation with it. Considered apart from the labor organization, the Socialist party is, in the words of Turati, "a mere abstraction." As the Federation itself put it, "the Federation can never assume a subordinate role in the alliance be- tween party and Federation." But the Federation "stands pat" on the traditional Minimalist or Pro- ductionist program framed by its leaders and not yet put to the direct test of a vote under after-war conditions. The Socialist party constitutes itself as the soviet and volunteers to offer the enthusiasm which will sweep the masses into insurrection and revolution. Will it succeed? Does it wish even to succeed? Is the new direction the party has taken indicative of a permanent reversal of policy, or is it simply a propagandist expedient adapted to the moment? No one, apparently, pretends to know, and time only can tell. Turati says that "the experiment decided on by the Socialist congress must be car- ried out with perfect freedom of action and with undivided support from all factions." It is the skepticism of the old campaigner who suddenly finds himself crowded into the background by the sudden elevation to command of inexperienced but sanguine lieutenants. Turati, however, has never been able to differentiate between the Maximalism of 1918 and the Bakuninism of 1890. And there is a dif- ference in goal, in spite of near identity in tactics. It is possible to understand the regret of the older leaders when they see the Italian Socialist party abandon policies which have made it the greatest single influence for good in the Italian democracy of the past quarter-century. But there is unques- tionably much that isTiopeful in the present out- look. The action at Bologna shows that the Italian party is still vital and aggressive—strong enough to disagree with itself. It brings the Italian nation sharply to order at the moment when the lure of romantic adventures overseas is strongest. It is an impressive act of solidarity with Russia at a time when that beleaguered nation is most in need of encouragement. Arthur Livingston. W The Roaring Forties 'hat is clearly evident in Mr. Ralph D. Paine's narrative The Old Merchant Marine (The Chronicles of America; Yale University Press), is that, before beginning it, he was opposed by an almost insuperable difficulty. The chronicle, a rec- ord of events in their absolute order, without com- ment or art, while it serves well enough the sim- plicity of early romance, is entirely incapable of even indicating the rise of a great period, its dom- ination, practically, of a world, and, for a mul- tiplicity of causes, its decline and end. This, sat- isfactorily related, requires either limitless space or a great art; and forbidden, evidently, the for- mer, Mr. Paine has not brought the other rare gift to his undertaking. The trouble, certainly, with his book is that he has permitted his own preferences and admira- tions to dominate practically every chapter; and, although his sympathetic knowledge of our mer- chant marine is deep, although he has faithfully followed its logs of voyage, he is first drawn to the more obvious romance: here he loves, above everything, the flash of a cutlass; he sees most vividly not the old barques feeling their way about Africa by the color of a current, but privateersmen lashed bulwark to bulwark with heavier metal and firing with indomitable courage their last car- rona'de. This is evident not only in his choice of inci- dents, but in words; he loves, as well, just such 432 November 15 THE DIAL phrases as carronade; the third chapter of The Old Merchant Marine is called Out Cutlasses and Board; his pages echo with the trumpeted ery, "Strike, or' I'll sink you with a broadside!"; the swaggering pirate traditionally chews wine-glasses; there is shower after shower of round shot and bars of iron, engagement after engagement under the very cliffs of England, stabbing and shooting amid yells and huzzas. It is all as gallant as pos- sible, a stirring affair from first to last; but un- fortunately aside from the veritable magic, the spirit, of the early trading ventures. Yet Mr. Paine's book is eminently fair and widely informed; in detail it is uncommonly accu- rate. To be sure he has spread—where only moon- sails belong—watersails and ringtails above the sky sails; while the ringtail is a jib-shaped sail set abaft the spanker, the watersail under the swinging boom. But this is relatively unimportant. A large amount of reading, the preparations for the other books allied in subject, lies behind The Old Merchant Marine and makes it both authentic and valuable. The chapter on The Packet Ships could hardly be better. And, in its entity, it is a courage- ous presentation of the truth about our whalers and merchant marine in the face of a contrary British legend: this, in reality, being that we had faster ships better served than England, our mas- ters, throughout the great period, and were far superior to the English. Mr. Paine establishes these facts by overwhelm- ing evidence drawn from actual performance, com- parison, and English sources; and he shows back of that the fundamental causes of American su- premacy on the sea. The necessities of physical situation, enormous natural resources, the spirit of a new land, produced—as he so justly says— the finest full ships of all time, lovelier, except for cathedrals, than anything else created by man. He makes plain, too, the long involved diplo- matic and political jealousies and blindness that hampered American shipping at home and away. Frequently this was a means of more notable ac- complishment: restricted in easier lanes, Salem ship-masters carried their house-flags into the farthest straits and ports, returning with incredible riches; but, in the end, shackling treaties and Con- gressional bargaining, time itself, left the little brigs and ships, the packets and towering clippers, idle at their cob-built or solid wharfs. In the pressure of his predilections, however, Mr. Paine has thrown overboard—for his cutting out expeditions and boarding parties—a romance, a courage, far surpassing the bullying clatter of *«^el. After all, a book called The Old Merchant Marine has for its subject the epic of trade and not of wars. In, for example, the chapter Yankee Vikings and New Trade Routes, while there is a great deal about the first, and a conventional paste of patriotism and mutineers, there is nothing actu- ally of the routes. The cannon are again in action; but the strange beauty of uncharted seas and islands, the extraordinary cargoes of sea-horses' teeth and beche-de-mer, lacquers and longcloth and amber, is quite absent. Beyond slight references to China, to tea, the mere terms Sumatra and pepper, nothing is told. It is more important, more impressive, to learn that there was no anchorage whatever at Sumatra— that the ships lay off the pounding surf while their masters, with a rack of muskets in the long boat, negotiated with the native datoo supported by a show of poisoned creeses—than to listen to the tale of the whaler Betsy coming safely out of harbor under the guns of Spanish forts. It is more enthralling to picture the tea ships, the frigate-built East Indiamen with their captains in gold lace and bluff American vessels often under two hundred tons' burden, lying side by side in Whampoa Reach while their masters went up the river to bargain with the co-hongs of Canton, than to read of a prancing midshipman with a dirk. What about the trading barques of the East African Coast? What about the West Coast? From which did the frails of dates come, the palm oil, ivory, gold dust, gum copal? There are detailed paragraphs about unimportant affairs with Japan, trivialities of description. But when was Shanghai opened to American bottoms? What were the difficulties of trade with Dutch Java? How, during a stormy period of interminable strife, were voyages and ports constantly shifted to avoid the ruthless confiscation of entire cargoes? What, actually, were those rare scented exports from fabulous lands? How did they look broken out of holds on the Salem water-side? The indigo, of Calcutta or Manila, was boxed in cases of dusty blocks six inches square, and a hun- dred or two such cases, valued at a hundred dol- lars each, made a characteristic shipment; pepper, in the earlier days when it was still a direct cargo, was carried in bulk, the vessels drew away from western Sumatra with the between-decks, the boats above, the cabins literally overflowing; the cassia buds of Singapore were powdered, but the bark arrived in heavy plaited mats; the fine teas—the first picking from the Sunglo and Black Hills— were contained in little leaden cannisters. . . . Such things not only form the fragrant romance of Mr. Paine's subject, they are the subject itself, 1919 433 THE DIAL its shape and substance and value and being. What, too, were the weights and measures, the monetary exchanges, of the old merchant marine: what is a picul, a frail? Why were Spanish dol- lars, in kegs, universal for American trading? How, in their preliminary turn, were they con- tracted for and procured? And what, finally, about the ports and new routes? Sauger Island with the tigers roaming under its light, Papatpe in the heavenly calm of Point Venus, the Hoogly River and Malacca Straits, with an American shipmaster on his deck for sixteen days, the withheld eastings of inhuman southern lati- tudes and winds! How were the courses laid—why did a ship make the British Isles before bearing away, by way of South America, for the Cape of Good Hope, the Indian Ocean and the East? How was the one, the two or three years of a voy- age consumed? ... A Salem vessel might make Bermuda Hundred, on the James River, for tobacco, discharge that at her home port, ship lum- ber and cotton to South America, carry hides and rubber on to Madeira for wine, bear that to the Isle de France, proceed, by way of Bombay and its printed chintzes to the Feejees for a fantastic collection of delicacies offered to the Chinese palate in exchange for Shantung silks and porcelains. So much Mr. Paine has ignored. There is the necessity, as well, of adding that the bibliography of The Old Merchant Marine is hardly more than perfunctory, a curious omission in view of Mr. Paine's unquestioned knowledge of his sources." There is no notice of the Augustine Heard Memoir, n©r of the George Nichols volume, both of inestimable value; his reference to Cap- tain Richard Cleveland takes no account of the fact that Harpers issued in 1886 a comprehensive description of him by H. W. S. Cleveland called Voyages of a Merchant Navigator. The remark- able collections of the Essex Institute, manuscript logs and valuable casual papers, the actualities of the Peabody Museum, are not indicated. To be complete such a bibliography must in- clude, perhaps, three hundred titles, English and French, contemporary and retrospective: Shang- hai almanacs and sailors' journals, opening with an invocation to God and blistered with the salt spray of their daring, books on Chinese behavior, with dusty lithographs of ingenious tortures, charts with Neptune, clasping his Triton, rising from the sea—works of unalloyed superstition slowly de- veloping into an assured art of navigation; New England village annals, Admiralty law, coinage, food, dress. . . . But this would necessitate an infinity of interests together with a spaciousness of scope denied, in its exact sense, to any mere chronicle. T TI Joseph Hergesheimer. I Our Unique Humorist—Artemus Ward N A creditable volume—Artemus Ward: A Biog- raphy and Bibliography (Harper)—Mr. Don C. Seitz fails to give us any distinct idea of the celebri- ty who, living from 1834 to 1867, was Charles Far- rar Browne and called himself "Artemus Ward." This is no fault of the biographer, not only be- cause he never saw his subject but because the des- criptions of the many who did see and know him al- most equally miss conveying just what this pleas- ant creature was like. All notably successful plat- form individualities being highly peculiar to them- selves, even contrastive one with another, most of their effect, their self-impression, unreproducible at second hand, vanishes with their mortal passing, as with great jury lawyers, politicians, actors, pulpit- eers. Yet rambling through this book and his writings, one occasionally perhaps glimpses if not grasps the bubbling idiosyncrasy of the person. Long ago, a gentle codger of an Irish-English poet delighted to devise and hum such things as "Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song, And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long;" the plot here being that a dog went mad and bit a human, wherefore "sure the dog had lost his wits to bite so good a man." Yes, Artemus Ward flavors of this mood of Noll's. Both exceedingly de- lighted—Ward among other spontaneous absurdi- ties^—to enforce the obvious as if it were a prime point to make, and they were so circumstantial about it that they wrought no end of simple humor and good-humor. It is true that Goldsmith was a writer only. The American's best wit and whimeey were spoken. "In the midst of life we are in debt; Rat jump over a trunk; I am saddest when I sing and so are others"—such colloquial morsels must have dropped more movingly from the utterer's lips than they could, did, or do lie in his printed ink. Notwithstanding that the weary Lincoln read this laugher's broad grotesque skits with fondness and for relief, and that Artemus mounted to the plat- form from the considerable editorship of the New York Vanity Fair as the successor of Leland, he had no sustained literary powers, such as Mark 434 November 15 THE DIAL Twain's, whose first publishings he godfathered. Of their similar humors Mark Twain's is much the more robust; Ward's was sweeter. Nothing harsh, nothing so hard as a sarcasm, can be found among his "goaks,'' as it was one of his jokes to spell the word. A rational being who gloated all over like an infant or idiot in such trivial perversions was a wholesomely exquisite effervescer. We must cor- rect our received impressions that his humor strokes fell in whacks and bricks. His latitudes in ap- proaching a point were sometimes wild, and his rocking auditory wildly laughed in answer, but it did not hullabaloo and yell. Inordinate hailing could not greet such elegant feeling as the genius rvinced when one night snow-bound in the chill chamber of a remote Maine inn. The closets were ransacked for extra bed cover but nothing better