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lie. No, it's stupidity, poverty, the ugliness of life, that do the devil's work! In a house that isn't aired and swept every day-my wife maintains that the floors ought to be scrubbed too, but perhaps that is going too far; -well, in such a house, I say, within two or three years, people lose the power of thinking or acting morally.

Our Own Theatre List

Still With Us

"The Spider," Music Box.-Mystery melodrama with more surprises than any play on Broadway.

"Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. Done with vim, rum, and pistols. "In Abraham's Bosom," Provincetown Playhouse. The Pulitzer Prize play. "The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. New Faces

"The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck. -Vaudeville and melodrama, with vaudeville taking the tricks. "Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor.

"Pickwick," Empire.-All right, if you like "Pickwick Papers." If not, use your own discretion.

"Trial of Mary Dugan," National.--Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial. "Balieff's Chauve-Souris," Cosmopolitan."Mother Goose" under one arm, "Arabian Nights" under the other. "An Enemy of the People," Hampden's Theatre.-It's bitter; but it's Ibsenand true.

Musical Shows

the

"Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groodyand a fast show.

"The Five O'clock Girl," Forty-fourth Street Theatre. Has nearly everything. "Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it, but our friends like it.

"The Mikado," Royale.-Our old friends Gilbert and Sullivan excellently represented. "The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George Cohan-and everybody dances. "Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn. What more?

Lack of oxygen enervates the conscience. And there seems to be precious little oxygen in many and many a house in this town, since the whole compact majority is unscrupulous enough to want to found its future upon a quagmire of lies and fraud.

What does it matter if a lying community is ruined! Let it be leveled to the ground, say I! All men who live upon a lie ought to be exterminated like vermin! You'll end by poisoning the whole country; you'll bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish. And if ever it comes to that, I shall say, from the bottom of my heart: Perish the country! Perish all its people!"

Here is truth, drama, and fine emotion, uttered by an aristocrat of the soul, as he is being torn down by common wolves. Hampden makes you feel that-and it is no small achievement, in view of all that has gone before.

Judged by the playwright's own standard, some of the fire has gone out of Ibsen's attacks upon dead social

truths because they are more than twenty years old. There remains, nevertheless, the individual truth of the play, none the less living and vital because Ibsen is dead and gone, and precisely as applicable as ever to the philosophy of living. One can quarrel with minor defects in the character of Dr. Stockmann and perceive where Ibsen failed because he did not wish his protagonist to resemble the playwright himself-which makes the Doctor a little too genial and muddle-headed.

But the poet's perception of eternal truth remains, to thrill Broadway for a few moments, even in this day of many Burgomasters, many property-owners, many "compact majorities," and very few Dr. Stockmanns.

It's bitter; but it's Ibsen-and true.

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I

The Middlebrows

N one of my recent articles in these pages I confessed to an inability to read George Meredith with spontaneous pleasure, and added that "this is probably because I belong to the great middle class." This statement has prompted a correspondent in New Jersey, who holds an important and highly responsible office in the educational system of that State, to ask an interesting question. After paying me some compliments (which, I greatly regret, a decent respect for the appearance of modesty prevents my emblazoning here), my correspondent goes on to say:

There is one topic that I have been thinking of for a good while and hoping you might see fit to write on it: What about the classes in this country? Just what differentiates the "middle" class from the "lower" classes? A still more interesting question to me is, When does one emerge into the upper classes? Let us assume that a professor at $7,500 is in the middle class. If he marries a wife who brings him a million or two, or if he falls heir to that much, does he now read his title clear to a seat in the boxes? Suppose the professor's windfall is only a paltry $100,000. Has he made the grade, or does he still linger in the somewhat upper limits of the middle class? In other words, how shall he know where he is and how to classify himselfif he cares to?

I

SUPPOSE my correspondent's use of the dollar standard is a sly thrust at he tendency in this country-a tenlency characteristic of all democracieso measure a man's status in society by is riches. The time was when a millonaire was such a rare specimen that he very rarity gave him a certain social restige. He was like a blue rose or a hree-legged calf or any other lusus aturæ. But that has all gone by. Now hat a man can make a million dollars ten rounds of so-called prize-fighting,

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT

Contributing Editor of The Outlook

the possession of that once glittering sum of money is no longer a social distinction. Its value as a measure is to aid the income-tax collector in his unpopular work, so that to-day genteel poverty is rather more elegant than brazen riches. We must try to find some other method of classification than that of wealth.

But try as we may, we shall find the task a hard one and the problem almost insoluble. It has puzzled philosophers from the time of Solon and amused social satirists from Lucian to Matthew Arnold and H. L. Mencken.

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URIOUSLY enough, the division of society into three classes has been a common practice among sociologists from the earliest times. Whether this tripartite arrangement is in accordance with some as yet unformulated law of nature or whether the number three has some mysterious and esoteric significance like the number seven, I do not know; but social trinity certainly exists. Rawlinson, the translator of Herodotus, informs us that a comparison of the statements of Herodotus, the Greek traveler, Diodorus, the Greek historian, and Strabo, the Greek geographer, led to the conclusion that the society of ancient Egypt was based on three classes the priests, the military, and the peasants. The Greeks took this triple classification from the Egyptians, and the Romans took it in turn from the Greeks. Thus Rome in its heyday had patricians, plebeians, and slaves.

So it has gone on through the Middle Ages down to modern times. Old England had its barons, yeomen, and villains; modern England has its nobles, commoners, and laborers, whom Matthew Arnold, almost as much of an iconoclast as H. L. Mencken, proposed to call Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace.

Classification of this kind is easy

enough in a titular aristocracy. But when we come to democracies, it takes a very astute scientist indeed to label and pigeonhole properly the various social genera or species. The Revolutionists in France solved the problem by calling every man "Citizen." And Thomas Jefferson, in our own Revolution, tried to settle the matter by declaring "that all men are created equal." But it is not so simple as all this. Montesquieu, from whom both the French republicans and the American Jeffersonians derived much of their social philosophy, saw the difficulties more clearly than his disciples did. He observed that "the greatest difficulty in a democracy is dividing the people into classes in accordance with justice; upon it depend the success and the permanence of democracies."

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o we come back to the question asked by my correspondent-How can the American who cares to classify himself tell where he belongs? I certainly cannot answer the question, but possibly two suggestions may throw some light upon it.

The man who regards this country as a plutocracy will have no great difficulty in determining in which of the three classes composing a plutocracy he should be enrolled-the millionaire class, the salaried white-collar class, the trades-union class.

The man who believes that a democracy is a form of government based primarily on intelligence will have much more difficulty. Intelligence is a variable and elusive thing and has almost infinite gradations. A New York wit recently explained that the Chicago weekly "Liberty" is a periodical designed for people who think the "Saturday Evening Post" is too highbrow. And there is a pertinent-or is it impertinent?-story of a chorus girl who, (Continued on page 288)

"Jalna," a Prize Novel

T

Speaking of Books

HIS book was awarded the "Atlantic Monthly" prize "for the most interesting novel of any kind, sort, or description," presumably by a jury of its peers. Whatever one may feel about prize books, prize hogs, prize babies, the presentation of the laurel wreath is a ceremony dignified by time, and any winner of it is entitled to some attention. There are awards which do even greater honor to the giver than to the recipient (the case with the "Harper" prize novel, "The Grandmothers"). But Mazo de la Roche could scarcely have expected so wide a reading for her book if it had not been chosen from among "thousands of manuscripts" (as the book's jacket tells us) to carry the "Atlantic Monthly" colors.

You read this book for two reasons:

First, in the hope of enjoying it. And you undoubtedly will, because it has the most direct of appeals. It is a picture book. As to the style of writing, that is fresh and brisk; there are passages of able composition, weakened by some pages which read like beginner's work. The plot is familiar; the close-corporation family is invaded by two disrupting young women and is not disrupted. The character development is nil. The personages have no substance, give no illusion of life. There is not a strong or sympathetic or even intriguing figure among them. Maurice, who might have captured an instant's sympathy, is too faintly drawn. The same is true of Renny. The disruptive young women are too shadowy to have broken up a strawberry festival. The theme of the book connotes ironic treatment. Mazo de la Roche fails to convince us that she is an ironist. She may be like her Whitecaks of Jalna, who conceive themselves to be fierce and hot-blooded and appear as merely bad-tempered.

But

But this authoress, who once expected to be a painter, has in the matter of her characters established her own alibi. We learn (again from the jacket of the book) that often when she is supposed to be writing she is actually drawing caricatures. And there is the secret of

Edited by FRANCES LAMONT ROBBINS

pencil on thin paper, and they are very good. There are pictures in "Jalna" as prone to stick in the memory as that horrid frontispiece to the yellow fairy book, "The Witch in the Stone Boat," which has disturbed so many otherwise placid childhoods. The old hag of a grandmother and her abominable parrot reaching out for peppermints with dribbling lips and black beak cannot be immediately forgotten. The enfant terrible welcoming the brides to Jalna; the hobbledehoy, sneaking and sniveling; the spinster sister, "who never was able to eat at the table" and who was sexstarved besides, poor soul; the "strong man" watching beside the dying colt; none of these are people, but they are all vivid pictures, and they make the book good fun to read.

Presumably, they won the "Atlantic Monthly" prize for it. This will be the second reason for reading the book-to find out why it won the prize. If you do find out, will you let us know? Our private opinion is that the prize marks a moral victory for the Whiteoak family. We believe that the judges were terrified by that scheming, fighting, bullying crew, and handed over the ten thousand dollars without protest.

What would have happened if they had only clapped their hands and shouted, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"?

What They Are Reading

FOLLOWING LIST OF

TBEST-SELLING BOOKS is com

piled from lists sent us by telegram on Saturday by the following bookshops: Brentanos, New York; Old Corner Book Store, Boston; Scrantoms Inc., Rochester; Korner & Wood, Cleveland; Scruggs, Vandevoort & Barney, St. Louis; Kendrick Bellamy Company, Denver; Tiolin Pillot Company, Houston; Paul Elder & Co., San Francisco. We asked these stores to co-operate with us each week because we believe that they are representative of the taste of the more intelliin gent readers their communities. The books which are most in demand in these shops are usually those which are most discussed. We believe that they are the books which Outlook readers will want to know more about.

her book's success in catching and hold- K

ing the reader's attention. There are no people in this book, but there is a series of the best line drawings you could ask to see. They are done with a sharp

Fiction

ITTY. By Warwick Deeping. A. A.
Knopf.

If an ability to use the tricks of the trade, plenty of sincere and "wholesome" sentiment, a talent for catching

and using vague moods, small notions which give life to his characters, suffice to hold your interest, you will enjoy this typical Deeping story of social and personal conflict in post-war England. Old leaders of The Outlook will be interested to know that Deeping's first book was reviewed in the magazine by H. W. Mabie in 1903. He found it distinguished by freshness of feeling, intensity of emotion, dramatic power, deep and sensitive feeling for nature. If we miss the first two characteristics from Deeping's later books, we must remember that he was twenty-four years younger in 1903.

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If you are interested in the current type of psychological biography, you will want to read this, one of its finest examples. Not only are the scenes of Napoleon's public life given us with great graphic power; most of all, the loyalties, the failures, the disappointments of his personal life are told with such insight and skill as to give the reader an unhoped-for understanding of this man, at once idealist, living his dream at all costs, and man of destiny.

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The Inevitable Leeway

Men Are All Right

ALLIONS REACH. By H. M. Tomlinson, Harper & Brothers. (Reviewed by Parkhurst Whitney.)

It was time Mr. Tomlinson wrote a novel. The result is what might be expected of a man whose factual pieces always have glowed with the power of creation.

James Colet is one of that vast company whose souls are troubled about the nature of reality. He does not find it in the offices of Perriam, Limited, nor in London, nor in the eyes of the girl who obtrudes herself so faintly in the story; and when, in the one flawed episode in the book, he kills his employer the way is opened for him to seek it. He ships on the Altair, bound for the China coast. He experiences storm, shipwreck, and the uncertainties of existence in a small boat; is rescued, joins a prospector in the interior of the Malay Peninsula, leaves him for a moony ethnologist in search of his particular and inaccessible grail; and is delivered at last back in Penang, purged by fever and hardship and reflection for London again.

"There is no fun," he says at the end of his story, "unless we obey the order we know."

No.

Not an original observation. But men will be making that discovery for some hundreds of years to come. Mr. Tomlinson knows. He has been there. The typhoon, the last view of a stricken ship, the storm in the junglethese are monstrous happenings. Man doesn't like adventure, really. Its face is strange. He will alter it if he can; or, if he cannot, he will forget it, come to think of it as a dream. There are men alive today who can recall only with an effort the reality of Belleau Wood and the Argonne. Adventure is a spree. The quest for reality leads

home.

One hears Tomlinson compared with Conrad, and one takes down "Typhoon." Captain MacWhirr and Captain Hale. The storm that sank the Altair, and the one that all but took the Nan Shan.

Conrad, the sailor, is always painfully aware of the immensity of the forces of nature.

His somber phrases have the sweep and cadence of the gale; over his masts always hangs the sense of impending doom. Men struggle, but defeat is their lot. If they triumph, it is by chance; or, like MacWhirr, by a kind of divine stupidity.

Tomlinson does not quite accept that philosophy. His heart is with the men. He watches them, at times so closely that the howls of the enemy are barely audible. Men are all right. In chaos they are the sole reality. They can laugh. They can crack a joke. That is where they triumph over the insensate sea. When they abandon ship. while they sit in the bobbing small boats watching her stern come to the perpendicular, one of them can call to his

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mate:

"Ullo, Percy, I see you. Coming for a nice sail?"

In praise of such men, ordinary men, Mr. Tomlinson writes one of the finest passages in a book of distinguished prose. It is Colet's reflection on parting with Sinclair, chief officer of the lost Altair:

Sinclair marched stiffly away in that brisk manner, and he did not look back. Sinclair had gone; but

chance had added Sinclair to his store of riches, anyhow, though no bank manager would look at that credit. Perhaps additions to good fortune were always so, imponderable, unaccountable, and of no use to any one. Yet they were positive. His knowledge of Sinclair and that bunch of men of his old ship gave to an aimless and sprawling world the assurance of anonymous courage and faith waiting in the sordid muddle for a signal, ready when it came. There were men like that. You could never tell where they were. They were only the crowd. There was nothing to distinguish them. They had no names. They were nobodies. But when they were wanted, there they were; and when they had finished their task they disappeared, leaving no sign except in the heart. Without the certainty of that artless and profitless fidelity of the simple souls, the great ocean would be as silly as the welter of doom undesigned, and the shining importance of the august affairs of the flourishing cities worth no more than the brickbats of Babylon. These people gave to God the only countenance by which he might be known.

The murder of Mr. Perriam, a Britis Babbitt, is a gritty incident in an othe wise sound narrative. The story wou have gained force if Colet had bee driven to his search by his own inn compulsion. Mr. Tomlinson himse seems a bit dubious about the busine The reader is not sure, as even Col was not, whether it was a punch in t jaw or Mr. Perriam's pious rage th floored him.

Perhaps Mr. Tomlinson, who used work in a shipping office, simply had

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