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desirability of the publisher's own office, where, as he says, great men go in and out, with respect. And to complete the evidence-the books do not lack the note of New English austerity, though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or, if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public passion for philanthropy, for education, and what-not-in the books, after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim with sentiment, Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so empty of emotion.

Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander -a New Englander of the villages, I mean-will admit that the New English are singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after Little Women, to any one of Mrs. Ewing's or Mrs. Molesworth's stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth's heroines all were, by Walter Crane! The real "old-fashioned girl" was not Polly Milton, but Griselda, in The Cuckoo

Clock. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plotas Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages is familiar, too, with the passion for "education"; a passion that, I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering with the term "idiomatic." One or two of Mr. Churchill's novels have preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family, that a book— "any old" book — is sacred. We scoff heartily at the parvenu whose books are bound without first being printed; but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems to us quite so good.

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for discriminating against some of the playmates their children would ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without indirection, "I do not wish you to play with the butcher's little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school

class makes no difference whatever." But the real New England mother never does. She must manage it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations would be some sort of proof that butchers' little girls were apt to be naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott's books were brought up like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father for religion's sake. Of course we all had to read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss Alcott's world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it! I have not done more than indicate Miss

Alcott's exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if, even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott's people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for map-makers. These be our villages.

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THE SENSUAL EAR

HAVE a friend who always calls-when he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes

forgets the Methodist Church building in our village, a "conventicle." I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome "conventicle," just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an idea— it is almost a fear-that Gospel Hymns, No. 5, is by this time Gospel Hymns, No. 10, and that some of the most haunting melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the "Endeavorers" are now chanting Hymns Ancient and Modern. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!

When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies has indulged in a new "democratic" vagary; when flour has gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of

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