There was one day, Yourself in truth, There was one day So filled with youth, Sunlit and shaded, Fire and gray, Elusive and lasting,

There was one day.

THE JEWELER

BY ARTHUR R. CURRY

The jeweler put out a velvet pad,

Pleasing to touch and yellow as pure gold.
Thereon he placed a row of glowing rubies;
Then, nearer me, a row of cold, white diamonds,
And last, a row of tranquil amethysts.

Then, looking up to catch my admiration,
"These," he said, pointing, "are erotic sonnets;
And these are poems of the intellect;

And these are of devotion and the spirit.
Some lapidary, taking stones of value,

Has made them into gems of sparkling beauty.
But see you this," he said, the while withdrawing

A purple pad whereon a necklace lay,

A coil of lucent pearls. He raised them up And fondled them between us and the light. "No lapidary, friend, is vain enough

To touch an instrument to one of these.

These are the lovely thoughts that move in beauty. Like maidens sporting in a lily pond."

He coiled the necklace on the purple pad;

Then, looking up, but pointing while he spoke: "This is the poetry that needs no art

But that inherent in the form God gave it.

We make our diamonds, but we search for pearls."

THE HUMANITY OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

BY DELMAR GROSS COOKE

I

The death of William Dean Howells closes a career of citizenship and literary achievement without example among us. If the finality of this event quicken the critical intelligence of our country at all, we shall understand better, I think, the interdependence of these two aspects of his genius. For we have been curiously reluctant to identify the informing spirit of his art with the spirit of democratic living upon which he was so insistent. He will inevitably be established in the critical consciousness as a literary leader, as a social historian, and as an unrivalled technician. In the mind of the student of letters, he will emerge from the great artistic evolution that was consciously forming the world-literature of his time-the realistic movement, as we loosely style it-the most conspicuous figure on this side of the Atlantic. Many of less exclusive interests will look to him, with astonishment at the accuracy of his methods and at the length and singleness of his devotion, as an indispensable recorder of the national life. And his perfection in all that relates to literary handling ought to become a still more compelling source of refreshment and renewal to the fellows of his craft. But these valuations of his worth all point to a writer of yesterday. In one way or another they commit him to the shadows of literary history, while all that he valued in literature was an essence that is timeless. He was content to rest his title to immortality on qualities of spirit that were to Chaucer and to Cervantes.

His exploits as a literary leader group themselves about one central purpose-the substitution of simple humane criteria for all others, literary or moral. The enterprises to which he lent the weight of his authority-and he commanded an almost superstitious reverence-were calculated to loose in America

dynamic forces that should make for a humanistic and democratic literature. And I do not believe that he cared greatly about the nature of those forces, provided they propelled the native talent in the right direction. He was eager in the support of such disparate undertakings as the popularization of the Russian novel and the establishment of a school of local or regional fiction, wishing American literary youth to catch the complete naturalness and high seriousness with which the Russian masters handled their material and fearing lest it fall under the spell of foreign themes and foreign color. If the notoriety he once enjoyed as a doctrinaire and dogmatist persist, it is because some of his opponents made literature of their controversial writings, Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, putting the remonstrance greeting him as a bondslave and zealot of the narrowest convictions into Memories and Portraits. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the chief of his aims as a schoolmaster was the abolition of discipleship and pupilage. Mr. Hamlin Garland, who told us through the magazines long before he produced A Son of the Middle Border how he became an adherent of Howells in the eighties, when Howells was an "issue," was greatly impressed by this fact and recorded his realization of it glowingly :

"As the art which Mr. Howells represents declines to be held accountable to any age, or land, or individual, so it discourages discipleship. It says to the young writer: 'Look to nature and to actuality for your model-not to any book, or man, or number of men. Be true to yourself. Write of that of which you know the most, and follow faithfully the changes in your feeling. Put yourself down before common realities, common hopes, common men, till their pathos and mystery, and significance flood you like a sea, and when the life that is all about you is so rich with drama and poetry, and the vista of human thought and passion so infinite that you are in despair of ever expressing a thousandth part of what you feel, then all idea of discipleship will be at an end. Your whole aim will be to be true to yourself and your infinite teacher, nature, and you will no longer strive to delineate beauty, but truth, and at last truth will be beauty.'"

His unique importance as a recorder of American civiliza

tion no less than his influence as chief of a school is fundamentally conditioned not by his genius as a reporter but by the humanity of his motives. When he advertised himself as a realist, he announced that realism was not a new theory but only one that had never before so universally characterized literary endeavor, and that its assertions were simply that fidelity to experience was the essential condition of a great imaginative literature, and that the function of such a literature was to widen the bounds of human sympathy and make men better known to one another. "When realism becomes false to itself," he solemnly warned, "when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too." That was to say, even as classicism and romanticism perished-because they became faithless to fact. Thus, he proposed truth to the actual as an essential but not a final condition of art; and if he ascribed any intrinsic finality to veritism as a method it was because the course of literary history presented itself to his view, not merely as a cyclic evolution, but as an advance-a progress toward the conscious and exclusive employment of the data of human experience and the definite recognition of human values.

The subtleties of technique by which Howells realized his large and generous aims will be found to sustain a very close relation to them. This is a matter that his critics and readers have scarcely begun to understand. His insistence on impersonality and detachment as the authorial attitude, for example, has brought him a great deal of ill will from the critics and no end of miscomprehension from his readers. Even so sound a theorist and so discerning a commentator as Mr. W. C. Brownell rushed to the defense of Thackeray when Howells attacked him for his gross violations of this principle. Yet this is the very crux of the Howells technique, involving the abandonment of sentimentalism and satire as instruments of the moral novel, and thus serving more than anything else to make it an experiment in humanism. This is a sort of secret that yields itself only to the few but sincere readers who come to the Howells people without the common prepossession for "literary