objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a standpatter, but don't be a standpatter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don't be a demagogue. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.

It will be observed that this wise but laconic address is couched chiefly in monosyllabic Saxon words. There is no introduction, no ornamentation, no peroration. The force of such a style is manifest. But its very simplicity makes a certain type of mind suspect that it is complex. Thus it is with Mr. Coolidge's simple assertion, "I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight." It is so obvious that it seems mysterious.

But if the politicians cannot fathom the mystery, the lexicographers can. The politicians seem to think that Mr. Coolidge meant to say, "I prefer not to be a Presidential candidate in nineteen twenty-eight." The lexicographers knew that the Saxon verb "choose" implies, not gentle inclination, but decisive action. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon ceósan and the Middle English cheosan or chusen. "Choose," says Professor Whitney, "always represents an act of the will." When it is used with the infinitive as an object, choose means "to prefer and decide." What Mr. Coolidge, therefore, really said in round Saxon English was, "I will not run for President," etc. Thus we see that a little knowledge of etymology and philology may be a very present help in a political crisis. I suggest that the Republican National Committee might very well create a new position on its staff-that of Etymological Secretary-and I nominate Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, for the office. In the present case he could have protected some of the Committeemen from much anguish of spirit and saved them at least two or three days of delay in grooming their new candidates. For he would have known at once that Mr. Coolidge was, and will continue to be, definitely out of the running.

The politicians except those who have Presidential bees buzzing in their bonnets-may not be wholly grateful to Mr. Coolidge for his abrupt statement, but teachers, professors, and men of letters ought to be extremely grateful. For he has given a new zest to the study of

Underwood & Underwood

English. Nobody but a New Englander could have done it so well, for the Yankees of New England still speak the Saxon English of the translators of the King James Bible. The Messrs. Fowler, authors of "The King's English"-a text-book which is almost as readable as a best-seller-begin their attack on slovenly syntax in these words:

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavor, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:

Prefer the familiar word to the farfetched.

Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

The Yankee has been doing this ever since the day when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The result is that the native New Englander who has been unspoiled by a superficial urban culture is famous for his incisive speech.

During the Russo-Japanese War I was spending the summer on an island of Penobscot Bay, in the State of Maine. One summer afternoon I employed a ship carpenter from a neighboring island to come over and repair my landingstage. While we were working together he plied me with questions about the causes and progress of the war. When I

explained that it was not a racial conflict for white or yellow supremacy, but the inevitable attempt of the Japanese to break the geographical shackles that bound them, his comment was: "Wal, I guess it's a case of 'live dog eat

hatchet'!" I had never heard the adage before; I have never been able to trace it since; but its meaning is clear. A dog about to be brained by an angry human may continue to live only if he succeeds. in swallowing his enemy's weapon. How more succinctly could be expressed the contrast between the power and resources of Russia and the desperate plight of Japan?

Those who will take the trouble to read James Russell Lowell's introduction to the "Biglow Papers" of the Civil War period will find a remarkable tribute to the vigor and charm of Yankee diction. No American man of letters has ever equaled and no English-speaking man of letters has ever surpassed the combination of linguistic scholarship and literary taste which Lowell possessed and in his prose and poetry displayed. "In choosing the Yankee dialect," he says, "I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of

American writing was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look upon our mother-tongue as a dead language, and yet all the while our popular idiom is racy with life and vigor and originality." Lowell found the Yankee dialect, or "lingo," as he preferred to call it, not only a perfect vehicle for the humor and satire of Hosea Biglow and Birdofredum Sawin, but capable of expressing very deep and affecting sentiment. Mistral never wrote in Provençal a tenderer poem than "The Courtin'."

Says he, "I'd better call agin";
Says she, "Think likely, Mister":
Thet last word pricked him like a pin,
An'... Wal, he up and kist her.

When Ma bimeby upon 'em slips,

Huldy sot pale ez ashes,
All kin' o' smily roun' the lips
An' teary roun' the lashes.

For she was jes' the quiet kind

Whose naturs never vary, Like streams that keep a summer mind Snowhid in Janooary.

New England may be losing its cotton spindles to the South and its farm products to the West, but it has a quality and character of thought and speech which can no more be taken from it than its rocky hillsides. Mr. Coolidge's "I do not choose" will revive many homely and affectionate memories in the hearts of Yankee sires and sons in all parts of the country; and the National stir which the phrase has made will incline him to agree with the opinion of Coleridge, that "there are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.”

T

HE theoretical division of human beings into the saved and the damned has for centuries been sufficiently well known by the public to provide a tolerable livelihood for the practice of speculative theology. Still, not until the era of the revival meetings was there a large enough number of people willing or able to suffer classification with the damned to make the problem of labeling an acute one. About the time, then, when revivals were inaugurated, and salvation by public avowal began to be the fashion, a certain spellbinder put the all-important question to an Anglican clergyman of the old school-the old lusty, trusty, honest, dignified, and conventional type of clergyman:

"Tell me, my friend, are you saved?” "Sir," said the clergyman, drawing himself up with dignity, "I am a member of the Church of England."

The Church of England has always been one of the dignified amenities of the English squirearchy, and the honest. clergyman rightly side-stepped the evangelist's classification, partly, no doubt, through the perfectly understandable arrogance of class, but mainly because

Labels

By PHILIP CHILD

he felt that neither of the alternative states offered (namely, of being saved or damned-such rigid alternatives!) quite fitted his spiritual condition.

Is

Hobson's choice of expressing up-to-date enthusiasm for the latest pornographic novel, because it was "true to life," orif I chose not to grovel before Ashtaroth -of being called Babbitt, Philistine, grape-juice moralist, or one of the similar cachets that have the approval of the intelligentsia. I have had many another unfair alternative thrust on me in the certain knowledge that if I plumped for the wrong side there was an unpleasant label waiting for me; and the whole time all I wanted was the right to express a private opinion, entirely local in its application, without being either damned or saved or otherwise pigeonholed in any way for it.

Is there not a sort of universal and amiable egotism which makes us all believe that the rest of mankind is divisible into certain categories, but that we ourselves by nature of that variety and that subtle elusiveness of our personalities of which we are well aware-quite defy classification? I for one am willing to confess that I have more than once had a fellow-feeling for that resolutely had a fellow-feeling for that resolutely independent clergyman, especially when my friends-taking gross liberty with my many-sided personality-have labeled me with this or that ism. "Your is both the genius and the misfortalk like a young radical," they say; or, "What! you don't believe in a second bottle? Why, you're as strait-laced as a Puritan." Strait-laced, indeed! I had as lief be called grim-corseted.

I ruefully submit that I have frequently had to choose between being saved (or damned) with the Fundamentalists or damned (or saved) with the Modernists. I have had thrust on me a

tune of the American people that they should wish to label almost every sort of tangible and intangible phenomenon in uncompromising black and white -by means of a law, or by a definitive document of some sort (a doctoral thesis, say), or, failing a document, by a classification. The belief is that you have only to define a thing in order to understand it clearly and thoroughly,

the terms of the definition being of minor importance as long as they are sufficiently picturesque to impress the public via the newspapers.

The appalling length to which labeling is carried was vividly revealed to me during a friendly chat I had recently with a doctor. I had spoken of a friend of mine who suffered periodical fits of depression, which he seemed unable to overcome. "I know all about him," said the doctor, "he's a cyclothymic," and he waved his hand as if that settled the matter. That doctor classified his patients according to their glandular reactions; if he had been a psychologist, I suppose he would have docketed them according to their intelligence quotients; if an ethnologist, according to whether they were brachy- or dolicho-cephalic; and if a clergyman, according to whether they were Fundamentalists or Modernists.

Do what we will, people will file us and pigeonhole and docket and stick pins through us and place us in drawers according to the genus of bug they think we are. Take the term "Puritan." Since Mr. Mencken became entangled in the public ear it has been considered something of an insult to be called "Puritan." And the worst of it is that this man of straw erected and dubbed "Puritan" has very little in common with the early New Englanders. The use of the term is a libel on people who, whatever their faults may have been, were manly men and womanly women and who certainly enjoyed life. I venture to believe that the so-called "Puritan tradition" which is supposed to be at the root of our "repressions" (another label) is largely an invention also. I am certain that the average Puritan was both free and able to quaff an amount of hard liquor that would seriously embarrass most of our smart intellectuals. Yet Puritanism will retain its position as the popular cocoanut shy of the moment, thanks to another ism-psychoanalysis. Let me put this distinction between Freudian "freedom" and Puritanism in the terms in which it is understood by the intelligentsia: There are two alternativesyou may express your suppressed desires, in which case you are liberal, scientific, up to date, in a word, a believer in psychoanalysis; or you may repress them, and live a drab life, have frightful and filthy dreams, and be, in a word, a Puritan. The fact that the Puritans certainly recognized the alternatives as clearly as any one is deemed of no importance. In point of fact, though the Puritans saw the alternatives, they labeled them more simply, more accurately, and more comprehensively

TH

Each

HE OUTLOOK wishes to receive cartoons from its readers, clipped from their favorite newspaper. cartoon should have the sender's name and address together with the name and date of the newspaper from which it is taken pinned or pasted to its back. Cartoons should be mailed flat, not rolled. We pay one dollar ($1) for each cartoon which we find available for reproduction. Some readers in the past have lost payment to which they were entitled because they failed to give the information which we require. It is impossible for us to acknowledge or return cartoons which prove unavailable for publication.

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"good" and "evil" conduct. Instead of "expressing" or "repressing," they did "ill" or "well," according to their several natures-and there really were several sorts of Puritans.

E

detest alike Shavian ipse dixits, Fundamentalist say-so's, and the "take-itfrom-me-bo's" of the man in the street. I shall be the dupe of no demagogue and the pet partisan of no sect. I shall be neither Freudian, Fundamentalist, Bolshevist, he-man, cake-eater, American-Mercuric. Accepting labels from none, I shall build my own fence and persist in sitting on it. Therefore I shall be called a trimmer, an apostate, and a weathercock. I shall be petted by none and stabbed by all. Being stabbed, I shall die, like Mercutio, asserting with my last breath my distinct and unclassified human individuality; I shall say: "A plague o' both your houses."

MMA DOWNES (Mr. Bromfield's Good Woman) knows that she is a good woman; therefore those who do not conform to her mean and shallow little standards as to religion, social conduct, and propriety are malignant sinners. Her goodness does not prevent her from lying-in fact, she is a master hand at falsification when the sanctity and perfection of her family rule are in danger. Her easygoing, hard-drinking husband disappears when he cannot longer stand her goodness, so she creates a romantic legend of his being lost in the wilds of China, and has a little trouble in explaining him when he reappears from Australia, where he has formed a morganatic alliance and has a husky brood of children. Her own boy, Philip, under the glamour of her smooth fluency becomes a missionary to Africa, only to emerge with faith quite shattered, distaste for the wife Emma has foisted on him, and a wild, mystic longing for art and the jungle. Emma keeps his strange rebellion a secret as long as her lies will hold water. She tries to mold every one's character, with slight success. She is always right in her own conceit, but she works havoc in the lives of others. Her executive ability is the bane of the community, but few find out that she is a hollow shell of conceit and ignorance. She reminds the reader in a coarse way

1A Good Woman. By Louis Bromfield. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. $2.50.

weak

of Mrs. Wharton's efficient, brained lady in "Twilight Sleep." These exemplary, ever-busy "good" women of the brainless but cock-sure variety do endless harm in the world.

The satirical intent of Mr. Bromfield's novel is clear, but its real hold on the reader is due to his skill in making the sufferings of the revolters against Emma's reign so poignant that one suffers and struggles with them. He is one of the small number of American novelists who keep creative instinct free from being clogged by the general purpose or theme of the story. There are half a dozen people here who are throbbing with life and whose troubles one follows with constant intentness. Even a humorous element is found in that graceless and shameless husband, who liked Emma well enough to return from Australia to see how she was getting on (incidentally spoiling an ambitious marriage for her), but knew better than to stay long within reach of her complacent mastery. Perhaps we cannot hold Emma solely responsible for the tragedies of the book, but it was her indomitable will that every one should help make her prominent in the town's activities-Sunday school, church, woman's club, and the like that set the causes of the tragedies in motion.

Altogether the novel is a carefully thought-out, attention-holding piece of literary work. It confirms the impression formed from its predecessors, that Mr. Bromfield is to be accepted as an

observer of human nature and a faithful depicter of social and personal struggles toward life and liberty.

It will be remembered that when Mr. Bromfield's "Possession" appeared he indicated that the story, together with the previously published "The Green Bay Tree" and other novels he had in view, were to be like panels in a screen "all interrelated and each giving a certain phase of the ungainly, swarming, glittering spectacle of American Life." This is the fourth panel. Whether more are to follow we do not know-the plan is of course indefinitely expansible. It may be noted, however, that the connection between the novels is only in the slightest degree structural; one can read the four in any order without the least confusion or hindrance. A very few characters appear more than once, but usually the second or third appearances are of a background type.

What, then, is the general theme? It might possibly be a question of discussion if the publishers had not now given

Fiction

GERFALCON. By Leslie Barringer. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. $2.

A mediæval romance somewhat overladen with the high-flown talk knights and ladies are supposed to have used in olden days, but well supplied with deeds of chivalry, trials of arms, sieges, an extra-wicked It robber baron, and true love rewarded. may prove a relief to those weary of ultramodernity.

CONGAREE SKETCHES. By E. C. L. Adams. of North Carolina The University Press, Chapel Hill, N. C. $2. These tales of Negro life and talk are restricted locally only to "heaven, hell, and the Congaree swamps in South Carolina." They have more than a folk-lore and dialect interest; they get at the flavor of the colored man's humor and the way he looks at his own faults, struggles, and ambitions.

E. P.

THE MOB. By Vicente Blasco Ibañez. $2. Dutton & Co., New York. If the translation were smoother and smacked less of Spanish idiom, the American reader might take more interest than he is likely to do in the adventures of the newspaper hanger-on who sees the sordid side of Madrid life-squalor, poverty, sensuality, petty politics-pass by him in a The story has romance weird panorama. and realism, but it is straggling in construction and will not be classed with the author's best novels.

the clue in the group title, "The Escape"

thus, in "The Green Bay Tree" Lily and Irene Shane rebel against restraint, the one by becoming frankly but elegantly immoral, the other by refuge in the Church and humanitarianism; in "Possession" Ella Tolliver escapes from the social aridity of mill-town life in the development of her musical career; in "Early Autumn" (the Pulitzer Prize book) Olivia Pentland beats against the bars of clammy, family exclusiveness; in "A Good Woman" not only Philip but his wife, Naomi, who wakes from all but incredible narrowness to passion and tragedy, revolt against the bondage of Some of their Emma-imposed lives. these revolters gain something, some meet full disaster, but all suffer loss of the fullness of what life should have been.

In general it may be said that it is not the interrelation of theme, but the inand strong vention, dramatic suspense, character creation, that makes these novels powerful.

fresh youth that began adventuring in 1922, when he took up flying as an avocation. The story is bird-like in its breeziness and details the care-free life of an aviator, the first requisite of whose composition would appear to be absence of worry. The greater part of the book is devoted to personal experiences previous to the Paris flight, told with simple directness. Besides this the author sets down some sage opinions on aviation; for example: "Trans-Atlantic service is still in the future. Extensive research and careful study will be required before any regular schedule can be maintained. Multimotored boats with stations along the route will eventually make Trans-oceanic air-lines practical but their development must be based on a solid foundation of experience and equipment."

Ambassador Herrick furnishes a foreword for the volume. "I felt without knowing why," he observes, that Lindbergh's arrival "was far more than a fine deed well accomplished, and there glowed within me the prescience of splendor yet to come. Lo! it did come and has gone on spreading its beneficence upon two sister nations which now conquered ocean joins."

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