University Debaters' Annual. Edited by Edith M. Phelps. New York: The Constructive and rebuttal speeches delivered in debates of American colleges and universities during the college year 1926–27. English Grammar. By John C. Green. New York: Oxford Book Company, 1925. Pp. 137. A summary of formal grammar in tabular and graphic form prepared for review and college entrance courses. A list of recent examination papers is appended. Pitfalls in English and How to Avoid Them. By Sophie C. Hadida. New Lucidly written from a purist viewpoint. Mechanics of Readings. A series of drills for adult beginners. By Samuel E. Samuelson and Nina Joy Beglinger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927. Pp. 181. WINSTON Fresh-Inspiring-Effective THE MASTERY OF ENGLISH A series of two books for Junior and Senior High Schools The height of critical folly, I suppose, would be an attempt to define the literary decade in which we find ourselves—especially when that decade is only seven-tenths gone. A vastly longer perspective is needed by one who would say what is significant, typical, and lasting in the midst of an output bewilderingly large and amazingly various. Authors upon whom we pride ourselves may be forgotten; authors of whom we know nothing yet, or at the most a very little, may stand out eventually like peaks in a low range; authors to whom we condescend may have their sweet revenges long after they and we are dead. But it is necessary to guess at any rate. And my guess concerning, for instance, the difference between the present decade in American literature and the one just past is that whereas before 1920 or thereabouts we were casting rather wildly about for new materials to celebrate in American life, since 1920 or thereabouts we have settled down to the materials at hand. A reviewer of The American Caravan, that interesting experiment in the way of a literary year-book whose first fruits were published a few months ago, closed by remarking upon the comparative lack he had found of examples of literary protest. The emphasis, he insisted, was upon problems connected with art rather than with problems arising out of American life considered sociologically as a whole. The Caravan was perhaps "radical"; but the word had to be taken as having meaning only in the realms of form and imagination. If this is true, it does not imply that American literature in the third decade of the twentieth century has gone and become com ΙΟΙ placent. It is, if anything, bitterer than the literature of the decade which preceded it. Robinson Jeffers in poetry has immensely outdistanced Edgar Lee Masters so far as pessimism goes. It is simply a matter of outlook or rather of the fact that today there seems to be no outlook. Our satirists are bent less upon telling America what she may become than upon saying what life never has been or will be, worse luck, in America or elsewhere. There is a notable absence of the feeling that America can be "saved." Saved from what? One does not know. Saved for what? One does not know that either. And why saved at all? Bother salvation! There is much to write about in any world. I spoke of Robinson Jeffers, and he is a very good case in point. This California poet, the discovery of the decade in his particular realm, has been taken to task by Floyd Dell for his failure to possess the "social sense." His long narrative poems, Tamar, The Tower beyond Tragedy, Roan Stallion, and The Women at Point Sur, are bitter beyond tears. They say that humanity is a "crust to break through," a "mold to break away from❞—or at least they contain characters who say so. There is a relentless desire in Mr. Jeffers's people to have done with the surfaces of this life, and particularly with the customary methods of interpreting those surfaces. The surfaces, indeed, have an inherent nobility which is outraged by the things we say and do and feel. Mr. Jeffers, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is for restoring to the universe that grandeur which we forgot while we were bent upon salvation and reform. Now this may seem after all to be simply another "program," another document in sociology. It is not that, however. It is the expression of a mysticism which Mr. Jeffers would probably have possessed in any age or in any place. And the fact that he can express it now in poems of such unmistakable beauty and power is a sign, I think, of a certain maturity in the American literary mind. Mr. Dell's protest would have had more pertinence in the last decade than it has in this. While I am on the subject of poetry, I should like to say that I emphatically disagree with those who see a decline in the contemporary output. The poetry of this decade is far richer, I am convinced, than the poetry which made so much noise and got so much |