our own achievements. But this is a provincial rather than a cosmopolitan trait; and its cure is more knowledge. More knowledge of foreign art and literature on our part will mean the separation in our minds of foreign modern art from the immense over-emphasis imparted to it by the achievements of the past. If we can strip from modern foreign art this merely sentimental over-emphasis, we shall be able to compare it more justly with our own.

And in this juster estimate of our own rank we shall be aided by their more knowledge of us, as well as by our more knowledge of them. One fact against which our poets and artists have had to contend has been lack of reciprocity: it has been only too easy for reputations to cross the ocean westward, but almost impossible to cross eastward. Even England, whose language we speak, has listened with patronizing condescension to our voices; and France, though less prejudiced intellectually, has been even more isolated in national pride. The sympathies aroused by the war may change all this; indeed, already there are signs. Such a book as Pierre de Lanux's Young France and New America (Macmillan Co.), with its ardent acknowledgment of the debt of young France to Whitman and its warm appreciation of our note in modern art, is an eager plea for closer relations, uttered to his own countrymen and ours; and thus is an important sign.

Italy also is aware of Whitman, and possibly of a few more recent Americans. And there are signs too from the Latin-American nations to the south of us-Pan-American

magazines, poets wandering to our ports, intellectual sympathies beginning to take the hint from commerce.

When these Latin peoples are once aroused to intellectual hospitality, they may prove more freely reciprocal than the English. England has the indifference of an elder brother toward the obstreperous relative over-seas; the "There, little boy!" attitude is hardly to be disturbed from this distance by either assertion or proof of the youngster's equal or greater strength. Recently I heard two of our most famous poets express impatient regret that these United States had inherited the English language instead of growing an indigenous product-"It loads all English literature, past and present, on our backs," said one"what chance have we of real freedom or spontaneity?" But as the English language, for better or worse, seems to be ours for keeps, we may only hope that the deeper sympathies aroused by the war may shake the elder brother out of his insularity, and force him to accept the relationship on equal terms.

Thus in spite of reactionary and separative tendencies, which must always discount prophecies of international amity, it seems reasonable to hope, through the sorrow of these years, for a closer intellectual union among the nations, and more generous appreciation and sympathy in the arts.

Monroe

REVIEWS

LARGE MEASURES

Toward the Gulf, by Edgar Lee Masters, Macmillan Co. When, in the preface to this volume, Mr. Masters touches on the iambic tetrameter of the Spoon River poems, it is hard to see how the term can be of more than faint interest to him. For one thing, it belongs to a lame science, one failing to assume the twofold character of the art it analyses and take note of the large delicate measures possible to prose-the cadences of passages in the Brothers Karamazoff or Madame Bovary, to cite at random. These, if not poetry, bear the kindred marks of it, being rhythmic language that stirs the heart as wind does water. And even the most inclusive study of metre and cadence would still be coarse and approximate; since art finding its birth in the forms of life, their tone and their rhythm, the great poems can obey no easy arithmetic but only the final mathematic law, the infinite equation. Were it otherwise Traubel would count like Whitman, and an army of writers like the few who hypnotize them. Prosody at best provides the poet with but a set of diagrams more or less diverting, of which certainly a work of art, intact, complete, like the Spoon River Anthology, bears no trace. Its right to an official metric term is well enough, but less relevant than the fact that the short, fluid, fateful lines invade the ear with the terseness of the grave; that in a new fabric of words, the limbs of

life, the face, the voice, the hands, appear once more to manifest themselves. The Great Valley, and this new volume T'oward the Gulf, which, to quote from the preface, “continue the attempts of Spoon River to mirror the age and country in which we live," often afford delight keen and painful as the anthology, but not, I think, so unbrokenly. 'This new book at least mingles a sprinkling of verse, wherein prosody does usurp the lines, with poems authentic as day-. light, and, like the Anthology, freighted with the presence of reality-the cargo of great art.

To read certain of them-Johnny Appleseed, The Lake Boats, Sir Galahad—is to touch the soil of Illinois and the states south, to get the very voices of the mid-western country their slight flatness of tone in contrast to the fragrance of land and water:

People were walking the decks and talking,
Children were singing.

And down on the purser's deck
A man was dancing by himself,
Whirling around like a dervish;
And this Captain said to me:
"No life is better than this.

I could live forever,

And do nothing but run this boat

From the dock at Chicago to the dock at Holland
And back again.”

Then there are poems less sleepy than these that scarcely detach themselves from the landscape they celebrate. The Eighth Crusade, for one, lifts its characters for a minute from their rocking-chairs in Pleasant Plains into the midst of plump Swiss life; the Orient glimmers on the horizon,

and faintly about the tale hangs the ancient raillery of Venus -so deftly are these people made to take their places under the sun.

One hears too the nervous voices of the city; the prostitute and the editor at Perko's; the sound and look of beggars and venders in "the granite ways of mad Chicago." And there is the sharp sketch of an Indian runner and his voice saying:

It was under a sky as blue as the cup of a harebell,
It was by a red and yellow mountain,

It was by a great river

That we ran.

Besides these bas-reliefs is larger modelling-extravagant ineffectual figures emerging more dramatically from the background-their divergence and abortive return. With the enterprise and at times the elegance of a Velasquez, Mr. Masters shapes these images-the dream-ridden, the paranoiac, the spendthrift, the nymphomaniac, the dogmatist, the fanatic. Root and branch he evolves them. One group springs from parents quietly shadowed in a pair of old daguerreotypes:

They were married, you see.

The clasp on this gutta-percha case

Locks them together.

They were locked together in life,

And a hasp of brass

Keeps their shadows face to face in the case.

As if to bring such lives into scale, three studies-Voltaire, Napoleon, Thomas Paine-rear themselves handsomely above the horizon. And a number of poems-Grand River