I have said nothing of Mr. Untermeyer's limitations. That he has his shortcomings it would, of course, be absurd to deny. Personally, I must confess that I miss in the verse of Louis Untermeyer many of the things that are most dear to me as a lover of poetry. To put the matter specifically, I do not find in his work the airy delicacy of some of Noyes's and Drinkwater's shorter lyrics, the superb finish of most of Sir William Watson's poetry, the gorgeous nature imagery that glorified the work of the late Madison Cawein, the pictorial vividness which illumines many of the pages of Masefield's "Daffodil Fields," or the tender pathos of a little poem like W. M. Letts's "Spires of Oxford." All this, however, does not alter the fact that Louis Untermeyer is a young poet of exceptional worth.

At the beginning of this paper I hinted that Mr. Untermeyer might ultimately take rank with the distinguished nineteenth-century New England group of singers. Perhaps this comparison is a foolish one. Possibly the future will ridicule me for rash enthusiasm. More likely, however, it will censure me for consigning Mr. Untermeyer to a company of estimable, though none the less inferior poets. But whatever his ultimate standing may be, and whether he continues to grow or not, it is undeniably true that today his spontaneity and thought, his human appeal and modernness, his sanity and virility make Louis Untermeyer one of the most significant poetic voices in America.

BOOK REVIEWS

WILLIAM DUNLAP. A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND WORKS AND OF HIS PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE. By Oral Sumner Coad. The Dunlap Society, New York, 1917,-xiii, 315 pp.

One of the most depressing instances of the neglect to which American drama, especially of our earlier periods, has been dedicated, is afforded by an examination of books purporting to survey American literature from its beginnings down to the present day. Virtually without exception such works either ignore the drama completely, save as an incidental attribute of the theater; or treat drama as a weak by-product of literature, sometimes as it were by accident forcing its way to the surface. It is encouraging to note many signs, nowadays, of a growing and widely developing interest in American drama, and study of the wider literary and cultural problems which arise. Where, indeed, shall one find a clearer indication of the tastes, the culture, the esthetic preoccupations of a civilized people than in the drama of the day, which attracts the general public to the theater? Dramatic art holds up the mirror to nature; but in an even deeper sense, drama itself is a mirror, in whose variegated colors and changing films we recognize the mind, the heart-the soul-of a people.

Such collections as Representative American Dramatists, admirably edited by Professor A. H. Quinn, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Representative Plays by American Dramatists, of which volume one has appeared, with an illuminating introduction to each play by Mr. Montrose J. Moses, are harbingers of great promise. At last the American drama is being made readily accessible to the general public, through well chosen selections of plays, illustrating various phases of dramatic art and representing the drama created here through examples most worthy of perpetuation.

A sign of this new preoccupation with the American drama. is the volume under consideration, which was presumably written in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the doctor of philosophy degree at Columbia University. Certainly it is very largely the fruit of studies prosecuted there. At the

age of thirty, Dr. Coad has written a work embodying the results of extended research and rendered a service of permanent value to the study of American drama. His list of William Dunlap's writings anticipates the list long in preparation by Professor Quinn; and while not complete, it is a valuable addition to the bibliography of the American drama. In his preface, Dr. Coad correctly says: "In any consideration of the subject (American drama), William Dunlap must be given a prominent place. As a playwright and manager, he was the dominating personage in our theatrical affairs at the end of the eighteenth century. But he was more than this. He was a biographer and historian, he was in some measure a journalist and novelist, and he was very much of a painter. In short, he participated in nearly all the cultural activities of his day. For a study of so important a figure there is ample justification." In this connection, it is appropriate to state that this volume, handsomely printed and illustrated, has been issued in an edition of four hundred and twenty-three copies for The Dunlap Society, which by its highly prized publications has already done so much to conserve, and give currency to a knowledge of, the early works of American drama and of American literature.

The chief criticism of this book is the valid contention that, viewed by the exacting standards of literary criticism, it is at once too much and too little of what it purports to be. In the effort to place Dunlap solidly in his time, the author has produced a rather lifeless survey of conditions in the theater and the drama. Little effort is made to humanize Dunlap, or to bring him close to the reader. In consequence, the portrait seems to be done on some opaque surface in hard black-and-white. The marks of the careful thesis, of the meticulously accurate and rather colorless piece of research, are over it all. On the other hand, I am glad to have the opportunity of pointing out that the third chapter of which I have spoken above, dealing with the original plays of Dunlap, constitutes in itself an exceedingly useful survey of American drama for the period considered; and might well be printed separately. The general reader, wholly unfamiliar with the subject, will find here one of the most accurate and

informative brief accounts of the early phases of American dramatic history to be found anywhere in print. The three parts: "American Drama before 1790," "Dunlap's Plays," and "His Place in American Drama," in themselves are full justification for this work. In the last section of this chapter, Dr. Coad pronounces Dunlap "unquestionably. . . the most conspicuous leader (among American dramatists) at the end of the century, for in every case he was among the first to try the novelty which later became the recognized convention." While the record of Dunlap's career is an almost extraordinary exhibition of imitativeness and facile adaptability, it cannot be successfully disputed that his indefatigable efforts, his continuous vending of fresh wares, his knack of utilizing "good things" and "putting them over" on the stage, constituted a valuable and constant stimulus to American taste. "After all," says the author with discrimination, "the most memorable thing about our dramatist is not that he wrote good plays or bad plays, important plays or negligible plays, but that he wrote plays at all. He had a pleasant and remunerative business; and certainly the experience of his forerunners was not such as to tempt a young man from the selling of china to the writing of dramas. His motives were love of the art and a desire to be known as a playwright. He obeyed the urge of the author's instinct at a time when authorship was not encouraged. He rejoiced in the opportunity to give his countrymen the benefit of his talent. And in recounting William Dunlap's claim to an honorable remembrance, it should not be forgotten that commercialism had no part in the making of the 'Father of American Drama.''

University of North Carolina.

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.

PRESENT DAY AMERICAN POETRY. By H. Houston Peckham, Boston: Richard G. Badger. $1.00 net.

For several years past that school of American critics who, if not most representative, are at any rate most clamorous, have taken for their motto (or might properly have taken): "To be Victorian is to be damned." To meet, therefore, with a critic, both young and well informed, who dares to acclaim

what in the writers of the day is indubitably Victorian is almost as novel as it is refreshing. Such a writer is Mr. H. Houston Peckham, whose first volume of literary essays has recently come from the press.

The strong Victorian cast in Mr. Peckham's tastes is indicated by his dislike of what he terms "lopsided realism," the fiction of the Wharton-Dreiser-Herrick group. Such "realism" is untrue because disproportioned. "If I photograph Farmer Brown's pig-sty," he asks, "and label it 'a typical scene on Mr. Brown's farm,' am I altogether just to the good farmer?" He prefers the healthier because more truly typical realism of Howells, Tarkington, James Lane Allen, and Mrs. Deland,-fiction which after all has a strong touch of idealism. Mr. Peckham's Victorianism appears even more strongly in his poetical preferences-in his love for the music of the conventional verse forms, in his regard for Alfred Noyes as "the foremost poet of our day" and his evident leaning to the late Madison Cawein as deserving a similar rank among the latterday poets of America. A passage will illustrate: "Long after erudite students shall have ceased to worry their brains about the conceits of Donne and Herbert and Crashaw; long after most of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' have grown sere and have returned unto dust; long, long after men have forgotten that some flowing-haired, horn-spectacled critic once pronounced Ezra Pound wonderful, or that Ezra Pound ever lived and moved and had his being, a grateful public will rejoice that Madison Cawein sat at the feet of Milton the Stately, and Keats the Lovely, and hearkened not to the clanging cymbals of some freakish innovator, some stridently clamorous mountebank outside the gates of the sacred temple of Poesy."

Only less prominent than Mr. Peckham's conservatism is his firm optimism, particularly as regards the present and future in American literature. What we need, he says, far more acutely than new creative power, is a new spirit in our criticism, a spirit less prone to disparage the present in comparison with the past or to lament our inferiority to European contemporaries. "We may not have any Galsworthy or Alfred Noyes, any Maeterlinck or Sudermann; but why, in