utes if you draw a thumb-nail across it. After a while it ceases to respond. The hearts of a good many city dwellers are in the latter condition.

The clergyman, or large, cold-eyed business man, who announces that all is for the best in the best possible of worlds is no greater purveyor of hokum than the sleek young translator or producer who claims that perversion-let us say-has become such a common factor in life that it has assumed the largeness requisite for tragedy. And this remains a fact whether the producer's claim is based on venal hypocrisy or the fact that he himself has reached a point where he responds only to abnormal stimuli. Beautiful and tragic things may be said about perversion, and in one instance recently they have been said, but it is an old and proven rule that nothing can be warm food, except for experts of life, until it has some elements of the universal; up to that time it is dangerous for the larger public and generally popular for no artistic reasons. Nor is this contradicting the well-taken stand of the psycho-analysists that everything is universal. Undoubtedly everything is, but until a particular thing is actively present in the common consciousness, if treated publicly at all, it must be treated as the universal workings of a blind Fate, as the Greeks treated such subjects, and not as the particular horrors of an individual or small group, no matter how splendidly conceived and executed the history may be.

The classic attitude, after all, is the only one as yet discovered that is a sure cure for sentimentality, or, in other words, hokum.

The arrival of our own brand of hokum has been hastened, moreover, and our susceptibility to it heightened by a peculiar and not clearly recognized reinforcement in the shape of the increasing influence of orientalism. The Oriental has much to commend him, but he belongs to a tired race, he actually has eliminated. Unfortunately his elimination has been in a direction entirely opposed to any possible future and to-bedesired elimination on the part of the Occidental. The desire of the Occidental, despite how little most of them think and how little the desire is evident, is always

toward spiritual and intellectual elimination toward the sparse, clear regions of the mind and a concentrated warmth of emotion. The Oriental-that is, the particular Oriental of whom we are speaking

persecuted and confined, has learned to eliminate in the direction of texture and the sensation of the moment, or the sensation that will arise from a singleeyed pursuit of an especial, not-too-hardto-obtain end. In short, he has eliminated everything except what can be packed up and carried off, in the mind or in boxes, in the face of impending pogroms. And at the same time he has concentrated on those things that can be carried on from a distance, or put aside and readily taken up again. The Oriental, in other words-all Orientals, as a matter of fact, save the East Indian-is a pragmatist. When the Oriental finds himself surrounded by Occidentals he exercises his peculiar talents by catering, with his tongue in his cheek, to what he thinks is the sentimentality of his neighbors. His mental reservations are sardonic. Or else, if he is a rarely powerful and honest Oriental, he seeks to impose his own ideas upon an alien audience, and educate them to a set of reactions not their own. He misunderstands the Occidental as the Occidental misunderstands him.

Save in the Mediterranean basin, where he has long been under Oriental influence, the Occidental cannot and never will recover from the perhaps altogether illogical belief that beyond everything there is an indefinable creature called the soul, whereas the Oriental is as dry and pragmatic as the desert winds that once blew upon him. Forced by the common ambition to make money, the Occidental, for instance, will hire hundreds of young women to dash out on a stage in a state of comparative nudity before hundreds of one-hundred-per-cent American travelling salesmen, but, believing that all these young girls have souls, which is doubtful, he will weep about it and lie to himself. The Oriental has no such pangs and will lie only to meet the requirements of the Occidental-requirements he thinks, mistakenly, are hypocritical. He does not care whether the young women have souls or not so long as their bodies form a colorful and desirable pattern. He has no con

ception of the dual Occidental personality which is constantly agonizing in a world where, in order to make a living, one has so frequently to break all the rules of life.

He has no idea of the God of the old Scotch dominie who, "in his official and public capacity does so many things he is ashamed of as a private citizen."

But you can see that the juxtaposition of such differing points of view makes at once for hokum; the hokum of the pragmatist playing up to what he thinks a sentimentalist wants, or, at the other end of the scale, the hokum of the sentimentalist, vaguely uneasy about his sentimentality and unable to separate it from his genuine sentiment, trying to play up to the opinions of a pragmatist. At all events, it is bad for art, which is a bitter attempt to ascertain the truth. That, and nothing else. And that the Occidental, whatever his faults, is a better artist than his rival is proven, it seems to me, by artistic history. A better final artist, that is; not a better performer, perhaps, or producer. The Oriental is an excellently chromatic background, but otherwise artistic history is filled with extinguished Oriental comets.

You have to be a bit of a fool to be a great artist. You have to forget yourself and give yourself away at times. You have to be a trifle uncertain and, above all, you cannot deny mystery. This, as a member of an audience, is interesting to watch. When an audience comes forward psychically toward a great artist, whether he be a fiddler, an actor, a painter, a singer, a novelist, a composer or a poet, inevitably the great artist comes forward to meet his audience. The two mingle and ascend by alternate reactions toward an indefinable and, possibly, sentimental apex. But the Oriental cannot do this. His attitude is always one of a ne touche pas, as it is in his personal relationships, and he is forever stepping back out of the picture, a frightened or amused smile on his lips. He has not the final silliness-if you wish to call it thatof the transcendent creator.

The motion-picture, that most widely influential of the arts, if it can be called an art, which I am quite sure as yet it cannot be, has a curious hokum of its own, far

more subtle than the apparent hokum assigned to it. It is not the comparatively simple reverse-English of much of the radical stage and radical literature, nor is it in reality a frankly cynical appeal to banality, although that is what for the most part it is intended to be. The motion-pictures have a reverse reverseEnglish; you box the compass, passing through vast realms of pseudo-sophistication or perhaps real sophistication, since the term originally had no complimentary meaning and arrive finally at nothing. But on the way many of the more unpleasant traces of sophistication are caught by and adhere to the skirts of the Bathing-Girl Muse. Due to censorship, the average present-day motionpicture represents a tacit conspiracy on the part of the public and the producers to agree that all ends well if it ends in matrimony. In between you can titillate all you want. But after all, the nudity or escapades of another man's wife, or husband, are not such personal or accustomed matters that they fail to titillate.

*

Every other art having striven for decades to prove that marriage means nothing in itself and is frequently a most immoral convention, the motion-pictures are working night and day to prove that marriage means everything and is a cloak for all immorality.

But there is another conspiracy of which the motion-picture producers are unaware that will one day bankrupt the original conspiracy, an unconscious conspiracy in which the audience is an enforced participant. And this is proven by the fact that nowadays wherever an audience is partially civilized it is necessary to introduce dancing and music, and various other adventitious props, to support the tottering edifice. Not one person engaged in the making of motion-pictures believes in a single premise connected with the vast majority of pictures they make, the only premise they believe in— one common to the partially wise and rashly educated—is that their pictures are being made for audiences of morons. They cannot get through their heads that most people are not really morons, and that after a while, if you persist, you can insult even stupid people intellectually. They may be ill informed, these people,

ignorant, obstinate, and prejudiced, but they are not morons. Meanwhile, lacking other amusement and in the habit of seeking some sort of recreation, say Tuesday and Friday nights, the outlying public permits in silence the whims of the producers, even to permitting that final insult and, as far as the pictures are concerned, new form of megalomania, where the leading characters of a story bear the first names of the leading actors and at times the actors themselves even step out of their medium and, in their ordinary street clothes and personalities, appear on the screen.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the lure of doing something on Tuesday and Friday nights fails any longer to function. It will be interesting to see what happens when the audience begins to educate the producers.

During the next twenty years the coming generation of radicals and haters of hokum will have their hands full. Perhaps among the first of their startling and terrifying pronouncements will be the statement that every woman, possibly unfortunately, does not kiss you the first time she sees you-not the first time, anyway-and that "Ulysses" is not a complete picture of the average man's mind. . . . A furtive picture, perhaps, but not a complete one. There are moments when the average man sleeps. It may be even that a renewed interest will be taken in those inevitably important but at present entirely unconsidered members of society, the gently bred and gently acting man and woman, if for no other reason than because, no matter what may be said to the contrary, they of all people are least given to hokum.

T

HE story of life as it comes to us through the ages must in certain cases be built upon fragments. This does not signify that it is therefore untrustworthy. Nor should it be assumed that it is always fragmentary. A clear understanding of the record requires appreciation of the importance of our evidence, even if it rest upon meagre data. The following incidents in the course of cave exploration in a search for knowledge of ancient life in California illustrate conclusions which seem not to be avoided, though based on scanty materials. It was a part of the programme in this investigation to examine every suggestion of evidence that might lead to discovery of caverns in which remains of ancient life could be entombed. In searching for new clews we learned from Wintun Indian workmen of a cave long known because of reputed magic qualities of a pool in one of the larger chambers. Though the story came to us repeatedly, it was always in the same form: of a cave with a magic pool called in the Indian language, "Samwel," and that it was visited for the potency of its water in bringing good fortune. Always it concluded with an account of three maidens who failed to obtain good luck at the pool, and were told by a very aged woman of other water with stronger magic. This second pool was said to lie in a remote chamber, and to escape discovery excepting for the most adventurous. In the course of a long search for this more powerful charm the three maidens came to a pit with sloping borders. As they approached the entrance, one of them slipped on the moist rock. The others tried to save her, but

she fell screaming into the darkness. They heard her "strike and strike again, and all was still." A rescue party was unable to reach the bottom of the well and efforts to find the maiden were aban-. doned.

The story of the cave of "Samwel". seemed to present the possibility of a cavern of considerable magnitude, in some part of which remains of ancient life might be discovered, and plans were therefore made to visit this locality. Though it lay in a wild, unsettled region, there was little difficulty in locating the entrance of the cave. About sixteen miles above the mouth of the McCloud River an extensive series of galleries was found opening on the face of a limestone bluff three hundred and thirty-five feet above the river. Nor was there difficulty in finding a pool located in the third chamber. Whether or no its waters gave us the good fortune, it is true that we succeeded also in the real objective of our search. On the floor of the cavern there were ancient deposits containing numerous bones and teeth representing animals of California in a period probably antedating the present by many tens of thousands of years.

The second pool and the deep pit we did not find. Three expeditions failed in search for the well, and in the attempt to verify the story that had led us to this cave. Neither fascination of following the lead of a legendary description nor lure of unexplored regions could bring success. In the third attempt we made heroic efforts, crawled through passageways so narrow and tortuous as to seem impassable, and entered chambers apparently never before visited by white men; but without obtaining evidence indicating that the legend was based on fact.

that he had found the deep pit, and requesting that I return as early as possible with all the rope-ladder and rope available. The next afternoon I arrived at Samwel Cave camp with a pack-horse carrying fifty feet of rope-ladder and all the loose ends of rope to be obtained in camp.

Furlong told me that on entering the cavern shortly after our departure he had noticed a narrow ledge along the wall of the second chamber. On following this shelf he discovered a series of galleries not seen in earlier exploration. At the end of these passageways was a pit with sloping borders. Rough measurement indicated a depth of approximately ninety feet. After transmitting word to me by a roundabout route, Furlong had returned to the cave and begun preparations for VOL. LXXXII.-18

ment to the edge of the pit. The ladder was firmly fastened. A few pieces of burning paper were dropped into the well to make certain that the air was safe for breathing. Then we drew straws for choice as to order of descent. Furlong's straw was the longer and he elected to go first.

As he descended, Furlong described the cavern opening to the light of his candle. "It widens as I go down," he said, "from a diameter of ten feet at the top to a great chamber below. And here as the ladder begins to hang free of the wall is a sharp projecting spine of rock that thrusts itself between the ropes and makes climbing difficult." Then after a longer wait, during which he moved somewhat unsteadily over the rickety lower fifty feet of odds and ends of rope and firewood, I