THE BATTLE ΤΟ RELIEVE EYE - STRAIN. John Corbin. Metropolitan (18 c.) for August.

WHAT MAKES A MAGAZINE PROGRESSIVE? Illustrated. William Kittle. Twentieth Century Magazine (28 c.) for August.

HORACE TRAUBEL: Propagandist and Prophet. Illustrated. Mildred Bain. Twentieth Century Magazine (28 c.) for August.

NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY. With portrait. Octavia Roberts. American Magazine (18 c.) for August.

TEACHING INDUSTRIAL JOURNALISM. Charles Dillon. National Printer-Journalist (23 c.) for July.

LORD BYRON AND GREECE. D. Caclamanos. Translated by Lydia Noble. Eastern and Western Review (23 c.) for August.

1882 - 1911.

Henry Savage.

RICHARD MIDDLETON English Review (28 c.) for July. BROWNING AND THE ASCENT OF MAN. John R. Slater. Christian Register (9 c.) for July 4.

A MEMORY OF EMERSON. Aubertine Woodward Moore. Christian Register (9 c.) for July 25.

UP AND DOWN WITH THE DRAMA. Illustrated. Saturday Evening Post (8 c.) for July 6.

COPY. The diary of a real newspaper woman. Peggy Van Braam. Collier's (13 c. each) for July 13 and 20.

THE MAKING OF SIR WALTER. Illustrated with photographs. Charles S. Olcott. Outlook (18 c.) for July 27.

NEWS AND NOTES.

William Winter spent the morning of his seventy-sixth birthday, July 15, working on a new book, which is to be ready in the fall.

William Dean Howells is occupying his summer estate, "Edgemere," at York, Me., which he bought about a year ago. His daughter, Miss Mildred Howells, is with him.

"Goethe: The Man and His Character," by Joseph McCabe, is published by J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The late John Bigelow's "Retrospections of an Active Life" will be completed in the autumn by the publication by Doubleday, Page, & Co., of Volumes IV and V, bringing the autobiography down to 1879.

A Life of Henry Labouchere is being written by Charles Edward Jerningham, who for twenty-two years has contributed to Truth the Linkman's column signed Marmaduke."

66

announce

Doubleday, Page, & Co. Browning and His Country," by Helen A. Clarke.

Through the efforts of Miss Harriet Monroe, one of Chicago's woman writers, a magazine to be devoted exclusively to the poetic art is to be established. Miss Monroe is to be its editor. Offices will be established in the Fine Arts Building, Chicago, and the first issue will appear in November. One hundred prominent Chicago residents have pledged fifty dollars a year for five years, to guarantee the expenses of the publication.

Homer Croy has been made managing editor of Judge and Leslie's Weekly.

Recreation has been purchased by the Illustrated Outdoor World.

Speaking of the financial difficulties of religious journals, Zion's Herald says: "It is said to have cost a single wealthy family in one city in the Northwest $150,000 during a period of about thirty years in order to sustain a great weekly paper, representing with fidelity and with great ability the Presbyterian Church, and conducted by an editor whose gifts and strength were masterly."

What successful playwriting means financially may be inferred from the sworn statement in court of the writer of "The Man of the Hour" that he already has had royalties amounting to $250,000.

The Penn Publishing Company, of Philadelphia, is beginning to bring out fiction.

"Where to Sell" is a pamphlet giving lists of publications that buy manuscripts, published by the Magazine Maker Publishing Co., New York.

The estate of Mrs. Margaret E. Sangster is valued at less than $1,000.

Dr. J. A. Miller died in Philadelphia July 2, aged seventy-two.

Dora Greenwell McChesney died in London July 5, aged forty years.

William Lindsay Scruggs died in Atlanta July 18, aged seventy-five.

Andrew Lang died at Banchory, Scotland, July 21, aged sixty-eight.

VOL. XXIV.

Nothing is harder than to begin an essay. Indeed, there are those who will tell you that the whole art of essay-writing lies in the neat construction of the first half-dozen sentences. That perhaps is an extreme view, but the dictum is none the worse for a little heightened coloring. For it is true that a fair beginning may carry off even a weak essay; and the best of essays finds it hard to live down a clumsy beginning. For better or worse, its fate is settled by its opening sentences. You can tell from the first puff of your pipe if it will smoke cleanly and coolly to the end. So with an essay,

No. 9.

you know at once whether or no it will take your fancy. Nor is the success of first sentences less important to the writer then to the reader, as all who have essayed know well. If those sentences are neatly put upon paper, if they run smoothly and have caught the writer's meaning, he will pursue his way with that zest which is the great secret of essay-writing,

There are essayists - Mr. Chesterton is the most notable example among modern writers who believe in startling their readers at the outset with some smashing paradox or other extravagance. As it were, they hustle him into the essay. But these are the methods of the controversialist. The true essay-writer is more gentle. He tempts his reader forward. He will give him something a little whimsical for a start to catch his fancy, and so lead him on. If he is well advised, he will make his opening sentences as crisp and simple as may be. The essay should be clear and tranquil, and flow smoothly for a start; later on, when the reader is well upon his voyage, it may tumble and riot a little if it will.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself; I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

The fields his study, nature was his book.

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time; when I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticizing hedgerows and black

cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it.

Indeed, that is not near perfection. It is perfect. It is clear and simple as could be. Of the first dozen sentences, not one is two lines in length. Yet they run smoothly. They tempt the reader forward. He could not stop even if he would. They pleasantly stimulate him; they set him anticipating what is to come. For they lie in perfect balance between what might offend by being commonplace, or startle by being extravagant. An essay which begins like that may do what it likes with its reader.

Another essay which opens in the same perfect fashion is Stevenson's "Walking Tours." It was written very much under the influence of Hazlitt, indeed clearly with an eye upon this essay of his, "On Going a Journey," from which it quotes. Much of it might have, been written by Hazlitt, or by a younger and more elfish Hazlitt than Hazlitt ever was:

It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humors. of the hope and spirit with which the tnarch begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's rest.

To have read that is to be in a jolly humor at once. If there is anything in it to which exception can be taken, it is the phrase "canting dilettantes." There is an irritable quality in that which is out of place. Setting out upon a walking tour in a jolly humor, one should find it impossible to be annoyed even with the wicked people who do not share one's opinions. Each of these beginnings has this supreme quality, that it gives you at once the writer's point of view. From the start you and he are on a complete understanding. There is no need for more explanation. If you agree, you go on comfortably together. If you disagree, you may part company. But you can not

accuse him later on of having inveigled you into the essay on false pretenses.

Lamb is above the rules which guide lesser men. None could write a complex sentence as sweetly and lightly as he. He can use parentheses as freely as other men use epithets. There is no one of his essays which begins more charmingly than the "Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," yet its first sentence runs to a lengthy paragraph of itself. It, too, is perfection in its way, but a perfection which other essayists may well hesitate to attempt.

One does not, at first thought, turn to the Edinburgh Reviewers in search of examples. For the works of these portentous essayists do not so much begin as have "introductory paragraphs." Macaulay, for example, is not conspicuously successful in the beginning of his essays. He starts more than once with the uninteresting statement that the book under review has given him pleasure. But reading Macaulay is like swinging a very heavy pendulum. It is difficult until the pendulum is moving by its own momentum. There are two, and only two, "openings openings" in Macaulay's essays worth the quoting:

The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface; the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library.

In its way that is perfectly written, well calculated to tickle the fancy of the reader. The other, the beginning of the essay on the ill-fated Montgomery, is no less admirable:

The wise men of antiquity loved to convey instruction under the cover of apologue ; and though this practice is generally thought childish, we shall make no apology for adopting it on the present occasion. A generation which has bought eleven editions of a poem by Mr. Robert Montgomery may well condescend to listen to a fable of Pilpay. It is worth noting that Macaulay and

Macvey Napier, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, had some discussion upon that paragraph. Napier, apparently, would have had it omitted, and have plunged straight into the fable. Macaulay ruled that this would have "had rather too flippant a look," and wisely kept his first sentences as they stood. A more successful beginner of an essay among the Edinburgh Reviewers was Lord Jeffrey. He dashed into his subjects in a very spirited fashion. His "This will never do!" addressed to Wordsworth, has become famous; but it must yield to the essay on Byron's "Sardanapalus." The whole of the opening passage of that essay is admirable, and it begins very happily thus:

It must be a more difficult thing to write a good play, or even a good dramatic poem, than we had imagined.

on.

After that no one would hesitate to read

Among Thackeray's lesser sketches there are two delightful examples in the light and whimsical manner, though Thackeray for the most part runs to too great length in his opening sentences:

It has been said, dear Bob, that I have seen the mahogany of many men, and it is with no small feeling of pride and gratitude that I am enabled to declare also that I hardly remember in my life to have had a bad dinner. So Great and Little Dinners." But better still is the beginning of that amusing

I have always had a taste for the secondrate in life. Second-rate poetry, for instance, is an uncommon deal pleasanter to my fancy than your great thundering first-rate epic poems.

And from the moderns let us take two:

Having spent an hour in the company of a book entitled "Picture Paragraphs: Things Seen in Everyday Life Explained and Illustrated," I am one of the best informed men in England, capable of taking my place with distinction at any dinner-table and devilish well worth sitting by. For I know if not all, very nearly all.

It might be Lamb; as a matter of fact, it is Mr. Lucas. And then one from that pleasant essayist, Mr. G. S. Street :

It is all very well to denounce superior people, but I am inclined to think that inferior people are, on the whole, a more serious inconvenience.

All these have the pleasant tempting quality which the opening of an essay should have. Each at once puts the reader on good terms with himself and with the writer. For the reader will feel certain that the writer, having set it down, has paused to read it over with an approving chuckle, and then has hurried on with added zest. And that is the spirit in which essays should be both written and read E. P. Stephens.

The Spectator.

The young writer who is ambitious to produce plays will do well to compare a novel and a drama based on the same plot. Such a study will do more to make clear to him the essential differences between the two forms, and teach him what to strive for, than any other one thing that could be recommended. The "Lion and the Mouse" is one of the plays that offer themselves for such research. In the first fifteen pages of

the

novel there are only seven short speeches, none of which appear in the play. The opening scene of the play does not appear in the novel until the 157th page. From that point on the two are nearly identical, barring one interpolation in the novel of about twenty pages and several of one to five pages. In this case the play was written before the novel. It is very evident that the first pages of a novel will be de

voted to giving the stage setting, that the eye takes in at a glance in the theatre. But there are also scenes, dramatic in themselves, that the author adds to the story that do not figure in the drama. The necessity of reducing the duration, the time limit, of the performance, shuts them out. Then the shifting of scenes must be avoided as much as possible, and these dramatic incidents would demand a complete change.

It is well known that when "Man and Superman" was produced, a few years ago, a whole act was cut out because it contained only conversation which did not "get anywhere" from a stage manager's point of view, yet which probably meant more to its author than the other three acts combined. The dramatist is constantly between the Scylla of time-limit and the Charybdis of scenic restrictions, and must act accordingly.

Another instance of a novel and a drama by the same author is The Little White Bird" and "Peter Pan." Almost the first notable impression in regard to these is that out of the 350 pages of the book, scarcely more than 130 form the basis of the play. The former is one continuous, magnificent character sketch, somewhat after the manner of Sterne, however different it may be as to thought-content, while the latter is the dramatization of a story told by this character to a little child whom he loved. The reason why so much is left out of the stage version is probably because it is too subtle for immediate comprehension: one can perceive only the more salient features of a landscape from a Pullman window. Then, too, a drama cannot be built up out of lyric emotions. A lover reconciled to the loss of his sweetheart is an unheard-of thing on the stage.

Then there is "Madame Butterfly." The novel and the opera seem nearly equivalent: but the play has not nearly the charm of either of the other two. The music supplies the lyric quality that fills the gaps of action. There could scarcely be anything more intimately appealing than Geraldine Farrar standing at the shoji watching the steamer disappear over the horizon, through those long minutes when the orchestra is voicing

her emotions more effectively than any words could ever express them.

To generalize, the drama is like the modern advertising poster, - a face, a detached hand, and a desultory foot made to suggest a complete man clothed and in his right mind, but the man so represented is a type man. The novelist is a portrait painter, not of a type, but of a variation, for the accurate portrayal of whom a thousand and three delicate distinguishing touches are necessary, touches for which no play has time. The novel may be truer to life, since it is not imperative that the chief characters should be introduced with certain dramatic effects, or that they should be on hand ready to bow when the curtain falls; it has a greater freedom in all its elements, a more elastic form. The sea has a constant motion easily followed by the eye. It varies with the weather. It has its long, oily swells, short choppy waves, lines of foam, and majestic billows. These surface indications of movement may be taken to typify dramatic action that which is easily seen and interpreted by the observer. The same ocean has its slow-rising and receding tides, its subtle undertow, the stirring of deep-sea creatures that do not rise to the surface. These the novelist explains for us. But after all, both are of the sea, and to parody Richard Realf, "twin thoughts, twin spirits rise starward, and the essence of both is divine."

The fact that prose has superseded poetry may have an interesting significance. The rhythm of prose is more subtle and elusive: may it not be more appropriate to the drama of to-day, so widely different in its tendency from the drama of the earlier period? The modern man does not express his emotion in "ohs" and "ahs"; it does not show so readily upon the surface; we are often tempted to think that it is not there at all. Yet it may be that there never was a time when feelings, emotions, were keener; the cuticle of reserve, suavity of manner, is perhaps thicker.

The drama may be called unified epic; epic to which the principle of unity has been applied; then the novel may be either the