following list will indicate: "The God of the Men Who Do Things" by G. R. Herrick, "The Song of the Byways" by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, "The Pipes of the North" by E. Sutton, "The Drum" by E. Sutton, "The Fighting Swing" by Badger Clark, "Last Christmas in the Holy Land" by Andrew West, "A Marching Song for England" by Rhys Carpenter. We may include also the poems on Western ranch life by Badger Clark, "The God of the Open, "My Enemy," and "The Night Trail"; and those on modern inventions, "The Battleship" by E. S. Martin and "Telefunken" by John Finley. The humorous poems in Scribner's are largely of the newspaper variety,-burlesques, travesties, and other types of loud-voiced comedy, though a few examples of less boisterous humor are found, such as the "society" verses by Oliver Herford.

Didactic and philosophical poems are presumed to belong to the trite and outworn forms of verse; and there are many such in Scribner's, both of the expository and of the moralizing sort. But other poems of a didactic nature are so much in harmony with current thought and feeling that their message impresses the reader as very modern. Masefield's sonnets are of this character; Arthur Ficke's sonnet "To a Young Girl" is modern in spirit, though didactic; and Shane Leslie's reflective poem, "Oblivio Dei" (1917), voices the sentiments of all the thousands who felt the inconsistency of war among Christian nations. It concludes thus:

The Lord looked back from all the murder and first aid
Men offered up to him et filio,

And smiled as though he dreamed mankind were never made
In image like to him et Spiritui Sancto.

If contemporary thought has a legitimate place in modern poetry, then contemporary incident may be included as well. We find a group of sonnets on the wreck of the Titanic by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, and a reflective poem on the destruction of Messini by Louis Ledoux. Most of the occur

rences which have been celebrated in verse, however, have been connected with the war. Joyce Kilmer's "Rouge Bouquet" has for its theme the Irish soldiers buried in a dugout by a shell explosion. "In the Midst of Them" by Margaret Merrill gives a dramatic representation of the welcome accorded the American soldiers by the children of Paris. A number of other poems bear upon incidents connected with the war, though none of them are treated in the realistic manner noted in the trench-scenes described by W. W. Gibson. About sixty war-poems have been published in Scribner'smore than in either of the other magazines studied; but nearly all of them are reflective or expressive of emotion, such as sorrow at the departure of loved ones for war, loneliness, grief for the dead, resignation, or despair. Some are stirring and martial, reflecting the glamour that surrounds the wars of song and story. Some pay tribute to those who responded to the call of war, and especially to those who died. But there is very little in these poems that is distinctive of the actual experiences or point of view of the soldier in the trenches.

Similarly, in the narrative poems in Scribner's, we find the spirit of the past generation shown more often than that of the present. The most modern of the longer narratives are "In the Blue Ridge" by Olive T. Dargan and "The EyeWitness" by Ridgely Torrence, which is the story of the miraculous conversion of a tramp, resembling in some respects "The Everlasting Mercy" by Masefield. In addition to the humorous ballads already named, are a number of ballads of the conventional sort, stories of buccaneers and fighting men and mediaeval folk. Thomas Walsh has contributed a group of old church legends-"St. Francis to the Birds," "The Stigmata," "La Preciosa," and "The Passing of the Kings." There are a few other narrative poems of a religious character.

It remains only to give a brief resumè of the different types of poems which have not been mentioned in our study of the

more modern selections. About one-fifth of the poems in Scribner's are on themes drawn from nature, usually subjective or reflective in mood, with Nature as a background. As already stated, there is a large proportion of war-poetry and much didactic or philosophical verse. There are also many religious poems, mostly devotional in character and indicative of faith, though a few are speculative or questioning. The lyrics express all the moods that poets delight in,-gayety, simple content, reminiscence, romantic melancholy, grief, bitterness, and spiritual unrest. Love poems are fewer in number and, in general, less sentimental than those in Harper's. Another variation from Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly is seen in the large number of poems on classical figures, such as Helen, Hercules, and Artemis, treated in the form of dramatic monologues and similar to Tennyson's poems portraying mythological characters. Other poems are recognized as distinct echoes from Wordsworth and Keats. As to forms, the lyric and the sonnet predominate.

In the foregoing review of Scribner's verse, we have put the greater emphasis upon the search for poems having modern tendencies, and have found only a relatively small number. With all the effort made to locate the brighter spots, a general impression of mediocrity and extreme conservatism remains; and it seems undeniable that Scribner's belongs no less than Harper's to that much-abused class of magazines that refuse to welcome innovations and cling to the traditions handed down from the Great Ones of the century past.

Of the three conservative American magazines which we have considered in this study, only The Atlantic Monthly habitually reflects the newer tendencies in poetry and more nearly limits its verses to those of real merit. Its volume of verse is much less than that of either of the others; but the quality is unmistakably superior, chiefly for the reason that it is less outworn.

THE INTELLECTUAL POSITION OF H. G. WELLS

BY STANLEY ROYAL ASHBY

Of late, during a lull in the productivity of Mr. H. G. Wells, I have been trying to take stock of my opinions in regard to this bull in the literary china shop. The disposition to do this has just been given new impetus by Mr. H. L. Mencken's Prejudices, that gifted but sardonic writer's most recent batch of critical invectives. In this sulphurous potpourri the author has an essay entitled "The Late Mr. Wells,' in perusing which the reader has visions of gleeful imps dancing about Mr. Wells' unhappy shade-yes, dancing with a triumphant mirth sufficient to satisfy even the most uncompromising of his detractors. It is not that I disagree entirely with Mr. Mencken, who, it should be observed, attributes the alleged demise of Mr. Wells, not to natural or moral causes, but to sinning against art; in fact, one cannot easily deny the clear justice of some of his strictures. It is rather that his attack has served to remind me of a propensity that has long been common among critics, to dispose of Mr. Wells prematurely by composing facile obituaries; and that this reminder has aroused in me a desire to determine, at least to my own satisfaction, the extent to which Mr. Wells is still alive, or, more precisely, the extent to which he merits survival.

While endeavoring to take the measure of Mr. Wells, I have found that my thoughts have been largely occupied with the estimates of his critics. As a result, my remarks on this occasion will deal mainly with what these critics have had to say. I hope I shall be able to deal fairly with them. But as for the people who undertake to dispose of Mr. Wells with an airy gesture-people usually who have read only two or three of his books, I hope I shall be pardoned if I ignore the gesture.

All attempts to label Mr. Wells are made difficult by what

the Folletts, in Some Modern Novelists, call his "multitudinousness." His mental activity is incessant, and his range is prodigious. His forty or more books deal with a world of problems connected with physical and natural science, politics, sociology, economics, sex, love, marriage, woman suffrage, war, peace, religion, and education. His interest in life is boundless, and his portrayal of it has much of the complexity of life itself. Whenever he handles a problem, he never permits himself to be lured by the charm of specious simplicity; but, on the contrary, sparing neither himself nor the reader, undertakes to present the case in all its perplexing variety of aspects.

Moreover, his views are not fixed. They change; they grow. Whenever in his tireless probing into life he thinks he has discovered something which throws new light upon a problem, something which impairs the validity of one of his earlier conclusions, he does not hesitate to modify his conclusion accordingly. This kind of growth tends to bewilder some readers who undertake to keep up with his views. It has bewildered Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who has this to say about Mr. Wells in one of his essays On Contemporary Literature: "To those who look for fruit in the fall of the year he offers a new crop of blossoms. He has made a god of 'becoming.' His intellectual fluency and versatility have been his undoing, giving him ever the appearance of an unstable, an unformed power, a nebulous nucleus of dissolving impulses. Mr. Ches terton once remarked that one can hear Mr. Wells growing overnight." But Professor Sherman is prejudiced against Mr. Wells, for reasons that I shall presently touch upon. Some other people, after reading a goodly portion of Mr. Wells' enormous literary output and thus putting themselves in a position to compare his earlier with his later works, have not failed to find an abundance of consistency in his views. Consider, for instance, his religious beliefs. One very often hears it said that there are glaring discrepancies between the religion of Mr. Wells as expressed in First and Last Things (published in 1907) and his religion as expressed in Mr.