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tain atheistical bodies are, we understand, urging that the Bible be kept out of the mails, and their logic is unanswerable. If a book is to be suppressed because it contains passages more frank than we are accustomed to, then the story of Lot and his daughters would be enough to disqualify the Old Testament.

Yet there are good reasons why it would be a great pity to leave this story out of the Bible. It has an immense and terrific meaning in itself, but it interests the historian as an illustration of what has recurred many times since. I refer not to the daughters, but to the unknown person who wrote the story. We observe that according to the unsavory tale Lot's daughters became the ancestresses of two tribes hostile to the Israelites; the account, then, is a bit of war psychology, ancient propaganda against the enemy, to get up a good hate. It has nothing to do with religion but much with human nature.

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We have a similar argument in mind when we come to the defense of Boccaccio or of Chaucer or of Shakspere. In these authors there are passages of considerable coarseness, but nothing worse than the Bible contains. There are also passages of gorgeous beauty. Their works on the whole have seemed true to life, in the noble sense in which poetry can be true, and the world has agreed to call them classics. Now comes the zealous American who would suppress every page of them. "Classics, do you say? Nothing but smut! Professor, you wouldn't read them to your classes, would you? Well, that settles it.

This country can do without them!" But of course I wouldn't read the Bible to my classes, though only men were in the room, without glancing ahead a bit to see what I was getting into. Each age has its own fastidiousness and much in the Bible distresses my taste. But the Bible is not for that reason an indecent book. The test of reading aloud isn't fair. One would hesitate to read aloud any intimate idea, a personal lyric quite as readily as a chapter from Rabelais. The censors should remember that since the invention of printing it has been possible to read intimate things very much in private.

The censors should remember also that before the introduction of plumbing, life had no chance to be reticent, and conversation is never more reticent than life. Visit an old château of Boccaccio's time, or Montaigne's, and see for yourself why all bodily functions are mentioned freely in old pages. I am not one to preach that the reticence which followed plumbing is a false modesty; I don't share the European sneer at the American's worship of his bathroom. The American bathroom, up-to-date, has had spiritual consequences. But if in the old books there is what seems to us a vulgar streak, we should leave it there as historical testimony to a way of life, not ours, but characteristic of those times. To expurgate the book, and make it as delicate as though the author lived in our own society, would be to falsify history and to deprive our age of the satisfaction of seeing how far it has improved.

Much the same thing can be said of the "Arabian Nights." the "Arabian Nights." The civiliza

tion which produced these masterly tales differed widely from ours in standards of delicacy, but surpassed us in the sense of adventure, in sympathy for changing human fortunes and in knowledge of human nature. A Biblical frankness pervades most of the tales, but since the purpose of the collection is secular entertainment rather than religious instruction, we find it less easy to overlook the directness of thought and the plainness of speech. Yet the frankness is essential to the record; the stories in expurgated form give no picture of the culture which produced them, and certainly no portrait of ourselves; complete, they are a witness to certain large differences between the East and the West, and they throw light on much history; but abbreviated in the interest of our decorum, they are evidence only of our reluctance to permit another point of view than our own. ♦

It has been remarked that writers of experience and scholars are almost unanimously opposed to the suppression or the censoring of famous books. The reason, I take it, is not that writers and scholars are fonder of indecency than other men, but that they have acquired a sense of the importance of these books as documents in the human record. The habit of living with the masterpieces does not corrupt taste, but it does suggest a certain tolerance of what has been admired by cultivated people. A certain tolerance? I should have said, reverence. More than a building or a statue, a great book in which the race has once recognized its ideals, is a shrine. It is too late for us to say what should or should not have been in it. It

may be the shrine of a religion we no longer recognize, but we are none the less vandals if we destroy or despoil it. Those who disapprove of the worship, may stay away. Those who have enough imagination to understand even the faiths which are now dead, will prize every monument which the human spirit has set up in its march.

The habitual reader of old books comes to another conclusion also, or shares it, rather, with the practised historian-he is not so sure that the other ages were wrong in their standards of taste and decorum. The distinction will remain between fineness and coarseness, but so will the distinction between sanity and priggishness. Much reading suggests that men often are more contentious over matters of taste than over essential questions of right and wrong. The true decency, which holds in any time and place, would seem to be a respect for courage and honesty, for temperance and humility, for that chastity of mind which sees nothing unclean in those matters evidently created to be an integral and permanent part of life. By this standard the real indecency is meanness, undue suspicion of other men, the persuasion that nobody else has a pure mind, the conscientious search for symptoms of rottenness. Examples of the Pharisee can be found in the "Decameron" and in the "Arabian Nights," quite as easily as in the Bible. The Pharisee was a good man in many ways and he submitted himself to a strict discipline. He still does. But his imagination, now as then, needs exercise. Instead of suppressing or amending famous books, he should read them.

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full force of her polished irony upon so easy a target as the fatuous society matron who patronizes mahatmas and loves to be told she is psychic, the effect at first is somewhat like that of using heavy artillery to shoot a rabbit.

Mrs. Manford, the optimistic rich woman whose life is chronicled in "Twilight Sleep" is a familiar character; her inspirational patter, her soulful bustle in aid of genius, motherhood, new thought and whatnot, have been satirized a score of times before. Nevertheless, the honors go to Mrs. Wharton. She has made an almost heroic figure of her silly, unresting, futile Mrs. Manford-a creature of almost elemental energy, not to be annihilated by any missiles of wit.

It is a sad little world that is created for us in "Twilight Sleep"a world of dreams gone wrong, of love frustrated by cowardice, of suave moneyed people who have substituted for the joy of life an expensive and scientific avoidance of pain. Dexter Manford flees from scandal, and from his wife's endless patter; she in turn dodges worry, except when, under the influence of a new healer, she triumphantly chases it by "soul gymnastics"; their daugh

ter Nona runs from the man she loves. All of them run hard,

and in vain, from that delightfully wicked poor relation, the Marchesa Amalasuntha.

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Mrs. Wharton's pen seems linger affectionately upon the figure of Amalasuntha the Unprincipled, and her sponging rake of a son. Perhaps it's because they're the only two people in the book who have a clear notion of what they want in life, and proceed to get it.

By the same token, whenever the wrinkle-dodging, celebrity-hunting, world-reforming Mrs. Manford finds herself in a tight place and the gleam of battle appears in her eye, Mrs. Wharton becomes the devil's advocate. Pauline Manford is more than a satirist's puppet. Before she is through with us we are following her fortunes keenly, in a lively state of suspense as to whether she will manage to suppress her scandals, put her social enemies in their places, capture her cardinal for the big dinner. She is as authentic a creation as Babbitt.

Mrs. Wharton has always excelled in the art of telling a story by implication. Her emphasis is that of under-statement, her drama hinges on the turn of a phrase, a barely audible little click of the wheels of

cause and effect. She shares with her protagonists an aristocratic dislike of melodrama, and when in "Twilight Sleep" the atmosphere of peaceful discontent is shattered by the sound of pistol shots, the reader is treated exactly as the characters in the story-left to judge for himself who did the shooting. Her stories demand to be followed closely, and read between the lines. They are usually worth the trouble, and this one is no exception to that rule. Published by D. Appleton and Company.

NEW YARNS FROM OLD THREADS

The aristocratic Southern beauty, with her rustling white dress and her far-away eyes; the courtly plantation-owning colonel, her father; the stalwart lad who loves her, hopelessly, from afar; the mint juleps; the cracker-barrel discussions of the slavery question; the battle-how many times before have these ingredients been put together to make a romantic tale of Civil War days? James Boyd sets himself a difficult task when he tackles this theme in "Marching On." Succeeding eminently, he proves anew that the field belongs not to the first-comer, but to him who can hold it. He has made old legends come to life, new and fresh and altogether charming. "Marching On" bears the same relation to other novels of its type that Owen Wister's the "Virginian" does to the general run of stories of the West.

It is possible to enjoy, in the work of a competent writer, precisely the same situations and moods that one rails at most loudly in the hands of a bungler. The taste for romance is a

delicate one, easily cloyed or insulted. He who purveys to it must woo the confidence of his reader early. His documentation must be not only sound but unobtrusive, his people real. If he crowds his stage with General General Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and Sherman marching to the sea, as more than one ambitious scribe has done, they are apt to push his poor little madeup characters clear off the boards, without atoning by living up to the impressive names on the program.

Boyd builds his effects carefully. His Southern hero, James Fraser, is a real country boy, big-fisted, awkward, aspiring. His parents too are genuine-Pa Fraser counting silver dollars out of a worn wallet and grumbling at the prohibitive price of slaves which deprives a poor man of the equal opportunity to which he is entitled; Ma diligently keeping her end up, determined to show the world that the Frasers aren't poor white trash. And James's love-affair is a real boy's "crush," for all that it begins before he has seen the object of it.

Only the writer who is able to achieve dramatic effect from the ordinary homely situations of life is likely to get much of it out of a great burst of historical fireworks. Mr. Boyd can. His account of the fiddling contest in the village, while we wait to see whether James is going to carry off the two-dollar prize, is as exciting as a skirmish on the field of battle.

Later, when the Colonel's daughter returns the love of the boy who is so many miles outside her sphere, when the Colonel miraculously capitulates, and even when the old gentleman

goes through the ultimate flourish of dying to rescue the picture of his departed wife from the depredations of the Yanks, what happens is true enough to a mood and we can accept it uncritically.

Incidentally, Mr. Boyd succeeds in conveying a clear-headed notion of what the Civil War was about, of the little-understood spirit underlying the bare issues. The story is told from the Southern point of view -and so well that the unwary Yankee reader finds himself on occasion forgetting what he read in school-books. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

A PEDDLER IN AFRICA

If the reader's appetite be stirred for novelties after these sound, nourishing, traditional dishes, he will find it a-plenty in "Trader Horn." But it won't be a case of pastry after roast beef-rather, a course of underdone leopard steak.

The story of Alfred Aloysius Horn (the man, we are told, is real but not the name) is a saga and a circus, with crocodiles basking in the sun while the industrious tick-birds are picking their teeth; dwarfs and cannibals and gorillas and bull elephants, rifleshots and spears. Here are Cecil Rhodes, sleeping off the effects of too much prickly-pear brandy on a shelf of rock by the waterside, while a crocodile licks his chops below (I am sure that Mr. Horn's crocodiles lick their chops); the blue-eyed "Nina of the joss-house," ruling as white goddess of the Isorga tribe; nice old African grandmothers, who have outlived their generation, being pitched head-first into the river by their dutiful next of kin.

Trader Horn first came into the ken of Mrs. Ethelreda Lewis, who edits his story, on the stoep of her African home. A broken-down itinerant peddler, he came to sell her pots and pans, and stayed on to talk of trading, fighting, exploring and love-making in the raw Africa of earlier days. Whether his narrative is true is about as important a question as whether the crocodile in "Peter Pan" really swallowed the clock. My own guess is that honest Trader Horn has told the truth, the whole truth, and more than the truth.

Whatever his method, Alfred Aloysius Horn succeeds in conveying the spirit of primitive Africa— "Africa, Ma'am, Africa—as Nature meant her to be, the home of the black man and the quiet elephant." Also, he achieves a gorgeous wordpicture of himself-and Mr. Horn is a person worth knowing. He can tell you, being a blood-brother of the cannibals, that they are a moral and admirable people. He can discourse at length on the habits of elephants and gorillas. He can chronicle the medicinal properties of the white juice of the cricket, and how to draw the poison of a snake bite by applying a lighted pipe and puffing hard. He can even make some very sagacious remarks on America, such as this one:

"If a book's to be sold in America, you must keep your eye on the novelties."

Assuredly, Trader Horn missed his vocation. No, not that of a writer, but a showman. With his genius for superlatives, he would have painted the tattooed man. His story of how he and his South American friend, after rescuing the white goddess of

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