visit, although he learned that there were still a few at the settlement. A sister with a nun's face showed the Spectator about the village, from the long, low cow-barn and the modern dairy to the peaceful kitchen garden where cabbages, tomatoes, beans, potatoes, corn, and beets prospered in the sun with a background of blue hills. The sister wore her quaint Shaker straw bonnet, made in the community, with the gauze Marie-Stuart-like coif underneath. Her dress, cape, bodice, and full skirt were dove-colored, her eyes blue and tranquil. Not only in its use of the telephone, the Spectator discovered, was the settlement one with the world of to-day. The Shakers use their own automobiles to journey back and forth from Concord, and all their appliances are modern. Almost all of the dairy products are consumed in the settlement. Their hand industries, except for the manufacture of straw bonnets and baskets, have either been abandoned or supplanted by mechanical processes. Once they made all their own implements and garments and printed their printed their own paper, the sister said. Sweaters woven by machinery, but of superior quality, seem to be the principal industry of the Canterbury settlement, although the Shakers make also fancy articles, preserves, candied fruit, and the "Dorothy cloaks, named for their beloved elderess, Dorothy Durgin.

The Spectator asked if they had an herb industry, having a fragrant memory of an old Shaker in a low room full of dusty sunshine and the pungent odor of herbs; but he was told that the gathering of simples was not part of the Canterbury work. He spoke

of the rows of yellow straws lying on the grass in the sun, and learned from the nunlike sister that they were in a half-way stage of the alternate scalding and bleaching that prepares them for weaving into baskets and bonnets, a delicate, arduous hand labor that is divided among a number of the community. The visitor and his guide went next into the bare meeting-house, built in 1792, seldom used now, while the sister told anecdotes of earlier days when the community was larger. Coming out, they passed the school-house, the running expenses of which the Shakers now divide with the town.

The sister refreshed the Spectator's memory concerning the story of the Shakers and

Jane

of their founder, Mother Ann Lee, a refugee from religious persecution, who left her home in Manchester, England, in 1736 for the New World, in search of freedom to worship God. As a child, like Joan of Arc and other mystic leaders, she had had visions. A natural celibate, she was urged into matrimony by her parents, but her husband subsequently deserted her. In England Ann Lee had come under the influence of James and Jane Wardley, a remnant of the religious body known as the French Prophets. was said to incorporate the spirit of John the Baptist" operating in the female line." They called themselves Shakers, and expressed the joy of their religion in a sort of dance, a striking contrast to the austere and gloomy observances of the period. After the death of her children Ann took the lead of the Shaker movement and promulgated its doctrines of celibacy and communal ownership. In accordance with their belief that the second coming of Christ would be in the form of a woman, they called Mother Ann their spiritual parent in the female line." They taught the duality of God, a fusion of the father and mother principle. It was in 1774 that the entire little army of Shakers, numbering eight, sailed for America and settled temporarily near New York. In 1776 they made their first permanent settlement in Watervliet, New York. Later, at the time of a religious awakening in New Lebanon, they made many Shaker converts there.

回

Mother Ann Lee and her elders also made pilgrimages, attended by much hardship, to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire in 1781. A peddler brought the news of the new religion to Canterbury, and some of its citizens visited the community at Harvard, where Mother Ann Lee was preaching. The result was the establishment of the Canterbury Community. One Benjamin Whitcher gave his farm, and assemblages were held there until the organization of the formal society and the erection of its buildings. Part of an old farm-house, with its wide-beamed ceiling, is incorporated in the building where the herb medicines were once brewed. Now it is used for making preserves. The only medicines the Shakers still make are witch hazel and sarsaparilla.

The Spectator reflected that Shaker com munism seemed to owe its success in part to the religious element which so rigorously eliminates selfishness. No doubt, too, the principle works more smoothly in a celibate society, where altruism is perhaps more easily substituted for domesticity and the affectionate sense of property rights. The Shakers once had non-communal members who accepted the faith and lived in their own homes, but there were never many of this class. Their strict adherence to their principles has been notable, as, for example, in the case of one John Wadleigh, who served in the Civil War but refused to accept a pension.

阿

The Shakers maintain that the first spiritualistic manifestations were among their number, and a certain pure and mystic form of spiritualism is part of their belief. Shaker dancing ceased over forty years ago, although a sort of marching with movements remained a part of their service until a later date. Now nothing except celibacy and the communal life distinguishes their practice from that of any other Protestant body.

A number of happy-looking children were playing under the trees. In answer to the Spectator's question, the sister admitted that not all of them remained with the Society as they grew older. Sometimes the children were returned by the Shakers as unsuited for the life, sometimes the parent or relative who had given them would decide later on to take them back. "And as non-resistance is part of our belief," the sister said, we never try to hold them, even when it is very hard for us to give them up."

66

66

No, there ain't many brethren left there now," the cheerful farmer who drove the Spectator away informed him. "'Course they expect to keep 'em away from other folks, an' it ain't easy to get young men to live that way nowadays."

Yet how peaceful it all seemed, the Spectator thought as he looked back at the group of convent-like buildings, this community of New World monks and nuns, isolated yet not sequestered: a non-ritualistic monasticism, a non-militant Socialism, another of the restless world's dreams of a new earth.

BOOKS Public Library.

which has served so long and so strangely as an altar-cloth in the temple of Christianity. These two love lyrics are from the sequence in "The Gardener ·

31

My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes.

They

are the cradle of the morning, they are the kingdom of the stars.

My songs are lost in their depths.

Let me but soar in that sky, in its lonely immensity.

Let me but cleave. its clouds and spread wings in its sunshine.

33

I love you, beloved. Forgive me my love. Like a bird losing its way I am caught. When my heart was shaken it lost its veil and was naked. Cover it with pity, beloved, and forgive me my love.

If you cannot love me, beloved, forgive me my pain.

Do not look askance at me from afar.

I will steal back to my corner and sit in the dark.

With both hands I will cover my naked shame.

Turn your face from me, beloved, and forgive me my pain.

If you love me, beloved, forgive me my joy. When my heart is borne away by the flood of happiness, do not smile at my perilous abandonment.

When I sit on my throne and rule you with my tyranny of love, when like a goddess I grant you my favor, bear with my pride, beloved, and forgive me my joy.

The following is from "Gitanjali :"

In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet.

Like a rain-cloud of July hung low with its burden of unshed showers, let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.

Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day back to their mountain nests, let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in one salutation to thee.

It is, however, in "The Crescent Moon" that Tagore comes closest to life as we know it and to the spirit of the West. Perhaps this phrase is too boastful. It would be more exact to say that we can accept his lyrics of children in full comprehension of their worth, even though we have few poets who speak with such understanding. It is from this volume that the two pictures by

Indian artists published elsewhere in this issue have been taken. These are illustrations for the following poems:

THE HOME

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.

The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.

Suddenly a boy's shrill voice rose into the sky. He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening.

His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoanut and the dark green jack-fruit trees.

I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers' hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.

THE BEGINNING

"Where have I come from, where did you pick me up?" the baby asked its mother.

She answered half crying, half laughing, and clasping the baby to her breast

"You were hidden in my heart as its desire, my darling.

You were in the dolls of my childhood's games; and when with clay I made the image of my god every morning, I made and unmade you then.

You were enshrined with our household deity, in his worship I worshiped you.

In all my hopes and my loves, in my life, in the life of my mother you have lived.

In the lap of the deathless Spirit who rules our home you have been nursed for ages.

Art and Common Sense. By Royal Cortissoz. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.75. Mr. Cortissoz's art criticism is always welcome. It is notably frank, spontaneous, sincere. It is also very individual, as those who have been reading the New York "Tribune" for the last twenty years need not be told. Finally, the criticism is human, if one may use the word.

Mr. Cortissoz's latest volume is entitled "Art and Common Sense." The title itself is a timely reminder. No matter how much the criticism of art may be frank and spontaneous and sincere and individual and human, it can also go off at a tangent. To his other qualities Mr. Cortissoz adds the saving grace of common sense.

He is thus rarely solemn. He can be depended upon to see the element of humor in any situation. As an example, take Mr. Cortissoz's estimate of Rodin: "It is still permissible to believe that Rodin has been overrated." Certainly, most men agree that Rodin is "grand, gloomy,

When in girlhood my heart was opening its petals, you hovered as a fragrance about it. Your tender softness bloomed in my youthful limbs, like a glow in the sky before the sunrise. Heaven's first darling, twin-born with the morning light, you have floated down the stream of the world's life, and at last you have stranded on my heart.

As I gaze on your face, mystery overwhelms me; you who belong to all have become mine.

For fear of losing you I hold you tight to my breast. What magic has snared the world's treasure in these slender arms of mine?"

There is delightful humor in this third poem from the same volume:

SYMPATHY

If I were only a little puppy, not your baby, mother dear, would you say "No" to me if I tried to eat from your dish?

Would you drive me off, saying to me, "Get away, you naughty little puppy"?

Then go, mother, go! I will never come to you when you call me, and never let you feed me any more.

If I were only a little green parrot, and not your baby, mother dear, would you keep me chained lest I should fly away?

Would you shake your finger at me and say, "What an ungrateful wretch of a bird! It is gnawing at its chain day and night"?

Then go, mother, go! I will run away into the woods; I will never let you take me in your arms again.

The fourth volume, "Sadhana," an essay on the realization of life—perhaps in some ways the most important of all-does not lend itself easily to suggestive quotation. The reader will finish this book with a new comprehension of the meaning of pantheism and of the reasons why the Bengalese call this present age the " epoch of Rabindranath Tagore."

and peculiar," even if they do emphasize

the " grand " and seem justified in it. Not

so Mr. Cortissoz. Are we considering Victor Hugo, for instance, as Rodin viewed him? Mr. Cortissoz says of Rodin: "He figured to himself Victor Hugo listening to the voices of nature, and, if we are to believe the nonsense of his acolytes, the poet, as he portrayed him, is truly rapt by the murmurs of the sea. But, as a matter of fact, he shows us only an old gentleman looking absurd in the absence of his clothes."

More than almost any other critic, Mr. Cortissoz seems to have the qualities we associate with youth. His is an elemental criticism. It smacks little either of prejudice or pedantry. It seems almost to have been written by an Italian rather than by an American, for the Italian child is born with the faculty of distinguishing not only between good and bad, but also between the beautiful and the ugly. The Italian

much-discussed college question! Speaking of the decline of oratory, Petronius says:

I believe that college makes complete fools of our young men because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there, . every word and act besprinkled with poppy seed and sesame. People who are fed on this diet can no more be sensible than people who live in the kitchen can be savory. The fact is that the teachers are not

to blame. They are in a madhouse and they must gibber. Unless they speak to the taste of their young masters they will be left alone in the colleges. Then what is to be done? It is the parents who should be attacked for refusing to allow their children to profit by stern discipline. . . . If they would allow work to go on step by step, so that bookish boys were steeped in diligent reading, their minds formed by wise sayings, their pens relentless in tracking down the right word, their ears giving a long hearing to pieces they wished to imitate, then the grand old style of oratory would have its full force and splendor. . . . If any man seeks for success in stern art, and applies his mind to great tasks, let him first perfect his character by the rigid law of frugality: We cannot agree with the anonymous writer of the eighteenth century who, in his ".Observations on the Greek and Roman Classics in a Series of Letters to a Young Nobleman," speaking of Satyricon," said: "You will in no writer, my dear Lord, meet with so much true delicacy of thought, in none with purer language" but there is truth in his later remark: "You will be charmed with the ease and you will be surprised with the variety of his characters." These characters are all the product of a period in history when the first aim of the ripest civilization was the getting of money.

This, too, is familiar; and how like a picture of a certain section of our society of to-day, with its contrasts, its swift changes of fortune, is the description of the luxury, glitter, and dire poverty of the South Italian town, its system of local government, honoring the vulgar and corrupt, and of the dinner given by Trimalchio, the prince of grafters and speculator in vice, at which the shoulders of one who wallows in his host's silken cushions are still sore with carrying firewood for sale! In his poems Petronius is spiritually at his best. Many speak of the country and seaside, of love deeper than desire, weariness of court life, and relief at escape from it.

Young Working Girls.

Edited by Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $1. Work-a-Day Girl (The). By Clara E. Laughlin.

The Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. $1.50. A small book edited by experts and introduced by Jane Addams contains the results of an investigation into the condition of young workinggirls. There is no doubt as to the importar ce of the situation; the question is, just what is accomplished by these summaries of carefully gathered evidence? In this volume the subject is soberly treated; one can accept with confidence both the facts cited and the remedies offered. The latter are, in part: neighborhood recreation, which will include the whole family; trade training, which will help to fill the "two