is because of the material, the human material they worked upon. The greatness of each is quantitative rather than qualitative. Each has qualities of personal greatness, it is true; but so have many others who will die unsung. The real point is that each found open to the elating and inflaming effect of his ecstatically fanatical and unintelligent gospel vast hordes of ignorant, disorganized, and oppressed people; so that each is adjudged great because of the magnitude of the resulting upheaval or commotion rather than because of any genuine or lasting achievement. So long as Russia and China and India remain what they are, the determined fanatic may arise to rock the world.

"Poems," by Clinch Calkins. Alfred A. Knopf.

There is a book of true feeling and fine, simple speech among the poetry presentations for the spring. This is a volume called "Outcrop," issued by Harper & Brothers, written by a woman, Abbie Huston Evans. The lyricism of these poems is valid and is born in a naturalness revealing the essential poet mind. No ostentation or unfortunate self-delight has stiffened the singing in these lines. They have the sound of a mind used and ready enough to sing for its own solace. And there are signs that this writer has found the special rewards for herself in making her poems, those quick luminous tracings along the body of a poem intensified with the gratitude of the pen catching them:

But silver fish that make a splash,
And ripples sliding under,
Have power to startle like a crash
Of February thunder.

The observation throughout this book creates frequently that startling emanation from an unexpected perception which is, one might say, the indefinable body of an image:

The azure chicory rises in the grass Like a thin puff of smoke no one can pass

Without a trembling.

Quotation of the delicate imagery in this work would give a misleading idea of its vitality and ease. There are poems with an engagingly informal directness, dramatic in their chief impression. The best example of this is "The Old Yellow Shop," which will remind some readers of Robert Frost yet is in no way an imitation. "The Black Road" is another beautifully plain poem. "The Light Upon the Rock," "Hill-Born," "Under

Cover," are moving creations, made in the fibrous material which is the distinctive quality of this poet. There is a reiteration of the exclamatory conclusion somewhat deflective to the aim of the poems here and there, but a remarkable number of lines in "Outcrop" embody things which are seldom apprehended. It is a book with poetry in it.

"The Bare Hills," by Yvor Winters, published by the Four Seas Company, presents an interesting poet. Interesting is a regretful description, since in reading the poems the feeling is born that constriction forces many of them into that classification. A rather arrogant attention to manner seems to repress relentlessly the fine instinct of the poet. The effect of his particular form is much less forceful than the substance which he arbitrarily dismembers. This is an instance in which a conviction rises that the style is not the man. The man is much better than the style. When he is willing to evoke with a measure of his natural means he is very successful. There is exquisite precision in "The Fragile Season:"

The scent of summer thins,
The air grows cold.
One walks alone
And chafes his hands.

When he says originally and powerfully

sunrise is set as if reflected from a
violin hung in the

trees the birds are
lost in admiration in a
stiff wild hall of light,

the strength of his perception would obviate its originality. He could afford much more simplicity than he grants himself. "The Bare Hills" proves often that a gift and power above originality are at the command of the writer.

In "Poems," printed by Alfred A. Knopf, Clinch Calkins is overtly versatile. The effect of the best poems in the collection is finally lessened by the candid chameleon variety of the book. It is not fortunate that a book of poems should at last impress one with the writer's virtuosity. The intensity of writing like "Suffocation" which is compelling at the first reading becomes suspect after encountering the over-ironic

WHEN

did

you last say to yourself "I am a failure"

FAILURE" in many cases can be traced

back to some simple fault in the mental make-up which needs only to be understood to be corrected.

But how can it be understood? Who can tell us how to escape or remedyfailure?

Now, for the first time, the men who know -the psychiatrists, who straighten out twisted lives by determining what made them twisted-have written the facts about human failure in a remarkable book called WHY MEN FAIL. It tells you exactly what are the common causes of human failure and how it may be averted or remedied. It is a valuable and helpful book written by eminent authorities.

ASK YOUR BOOKSELLER FOR

WHY MEN

A vigorous novel of a new kind -a flash of lightning illuminating the church world, and hitting at

shoddyism" wherever it shows its head-a human story-strong and weak characters, well drawn-suspense irony, tragedy, pity-such is

SHODDY

By DAN BRUMMITT

$2.00 AT BOOKSTORES

Willett, Clark & Colby—Publishers 440 South Dearborn Street Chicago

"The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands.”A British film; well worth your while. "Beau Sabreur."-Pepless desert drama. "The Chasers."-Harry Langdon won't get far with this one.

"The Big City."-Lon Chaney in a flat picture. Maybe some one stepped on it. "Chicago."-See what the movies can do when they try.

"The Circus."-Charlie Chaplin's newest, and one of his best.

"The Count of Ten."-James Gleason and Charles Ray in a good ring drama.

"The Crowd."-King Vidor is a great director. The story is slim and depressing. "Czar Ivan the Terrible."-Hectic, but interesting Russian-made film. "The Divine Woman."-Greta Garbo has a tough time with this one.

"Doomsday."-As dismal as it sounds. "Dressed to Kill."-Excellent crook melodrama. "Drums of Love."-A big eyeful from D. W. Griffith.

"Finders Keepers."-Laura La Plante, and some hard-pressed humor.

"Four Sons."-Beauty, skill, tears, and hokum. "The Gaucho."-Douglas Fairbanks. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."-Plenty of chuckles for the business man.

"A Girl in Every Port."-A pretty feeble vehicle for the large Victor McLaglen. "The Jazz Singer."-Al Jolson + Vitaphone Price of Admission.

"The Last Command."-Emil Jannings in a picture worthy of him.

"The Last Moment."-Interesting

tricks, if you like them.

photographic

"The Latest from Paris."-Something pleasantly, innocuous, with Norma Shearer.

"The Legion of the Condemned."-After "Wings." A long way after.

"Love Me and the World is Mine."-For insomniacs and very young cash-girls.

"Mother Machree."-For the

nice.

picture.

Irish vote.

Very

"The Noose."-A pretty fair Richard Barthelmess

"Red Hair."-Clara Bow and Elinor Glyn. Decide as you see fit. "Rose Marie."-Run! again. "Sadie Thompson."-Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore trying not to play "Rain." "The Secret Hour."-"They Knew What They Wanted" dolled up for the screen with Pola Negri and Jean Hersholt. Good. "The Showdown."-Tropical mix-up, and how. "Simba."-See it-you'll thank us. "Skyscraper."-An interesting and entertaining picture. "The Smart Set."-You'll die outside, seeking air. "Soft Living."-A nice enough little drama, with Madge Bellamy. "Speedy."-Harold Lloyd in your money's worth. "Stand and Deliver."-Rod La Rocque stands, but doesn't deliver.

Here's the Mounted Police

"Street Angel."-Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, and some fine scenes. We were hopelessly bored.

"The Student Prince."-A Lubitsch production. Don't miss it.

"Sunrise."-The best picture on any screen today.

"Tenderloin."-The talking picture. They'll have to do better.

"That's My Daddy."-Reginald Denny in a pleasant farce.

"The Trail of '98."-Big Alaskan melodrama, with some grand scenes.

"Two Lovers."-Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky in a romantic picture of the sixteenth century. "We Americans."-Melting-pot drama with good "Wings."-Still soaring toward a record.

spots.

personally than with Lenin. There is much in Lenin that we can understand, much that we can admire, but in Gandhi there is little that Occidentals can understand or admire except in theory.

But Gandhi's appeal is not to us, it is to the millions of wretched and halfstarved peasants of India. According to Gandhi, eighty per cent of the overcrowded population of India are compulsorily unemployed for half the year because of Great Britain's exploitation of the country as an exporter of raw cotton and a market for imported cotton goods; the result having been the destruction of the ancient home spinning industry by which the small peasants used to eke out existence. Thus the pressing woe is that there are too many mouths to feed; and the obvious remedy must be either a reduction in the number to be fed or an increase in the amount of work available for the production of wages with which to buy food, or possibly both.

To this problem, then, Gandhi dedicated himself, and generally to the uplifting and freeing of the peoples of India. Unlike Lenin, he did not dream of hurling his country forward through breathless centuries to the condition of a super-modern state. On the contrary, his dream was backward-looking-backward to the ancient home industries and away from the devilish man-enslaving industrialism of the West; backward to the old forms of government and away from the parliamentarianism of the West; backward to the old religions and cultures of India. But for any such message to India he must first be known to the people of India and honored by them. This resulted from the twenty years which he spent in championing the cause of the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who had been reduced to a condition of practical slavery in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; so that when he returned after those years of struggle, privation, and imprisonment his fame had gone before him; he was as much the man of the hour in India as was Lenin in Russia in the spring of 1917.

So honored and believed in throughout all India was this quiet, cheerful little man so great his fame as a saint, ascetic, and deliverer of his oppressed people that differences of race, religion, and caste were thrown aside in devoutly enthusiastic response to his message; a miracle unheard of in all the caste-ridden history of India.

The message of the Mahatma (Great Soul) was economic, social, and political as well as spiritual, and in the end he became in fact the high priest and political dictator of his country. The

spinning-wheel: all foreign textiles to be destroyed and boycotted, and thereafter every one in India, rich and poor, to work at least a little each day at the wheel and the loom, so that all may find work and all be clothed in the native cloth. Brahmacharya: chastity even among the married, so that children may not continue to be born into a life of starvation and misery; for which manner of life Gandhi's own colony at Ashram sets the example. Ahimsa: love for all created things; the active practice of love and understanding which becomes a concentrated spiritual force stronger than violence in its mysterious power. Satyagraha: non-violence, which is not the passive resistance of the weak, but is rather the active force of love and truth set in opposition to oppression; the "civil disobedience" which refuses to obey an unjust or oppresive law, but at the same time gladly admits the disobedience and suffers the penalties; the non-co-operation with the English Government which was designed "to invite the English to co-operate with us on honorable terms or to retire from our land.”

No one can think of Gandhi without thinking of Christ; and the striking parallel has often been commented upon. And no one can read of Gandhi's trial in the English court without thinking of Christ before Pilate and the trial of Socrates. A strange and arresting combination, this little Finance Minister's son-a mixture of Christ, St. Francis of Assisi, Tolstoy, and Thoreau. And yet with his repellent side: the emotional ignorance which allows him to believe that time can be turned back and India again be as it was; that for the well-todo to distribute their goods and forego one meal a day for the benefit of the poor will have any effect economically except to increase the poor and their poverty; that to boycott the products of factories manned by Indian labor will benefit the laborers; that the birth rate. among the ignorant and poverty-stricken can be reduced by voluntary response to a spiritual appeal; that all medicine and hospitals are bad because palliating the wages of sin; and that any education at all is a bad thing for the lower classes.

Of these two men, Lenin and Gandhi, the more striking to the American or European is, of course, Gandhi. The methods of Lenin-the methods of organization and violence-are an old story in all parts of the world, but the methods of Gandhi are new. Extraordinary men both, men whose names will be writ large in history. Yet both are distinctly unpleasant personalities to us, despite the spell which they cast upon their peoples. It is submitted that this

is because of the material, the human material they worked upon. The greatness of each is quantitative rather than qualitative. Each has qualities of personal greatness, it is true; but so have many others who will die unsung. The real point is that each found open to the elating and inflaming effect of his ecstatically fanatical and unintelligent gospel vast hordes of ignorant, disorganized, and oppressed people; so that each is adjudged great because of the magnitude of the resulting upheaval or commotion rather than because of any genuine or lasting achievement. So long as Russia and China and India remain what they are, the determined fanatic may arise to rock the world.

Three Worthy Books of Poetry

By GEORGE O'NEIL "Outcrop," by Abbie Huston Evans. Brothers.

"The Bare Hills," by Yvor Winters. Seas Company.

Harper &

The Four

"Poems," by Clinch Calkins. Alfred A. Knopf.

There is a book of true feeling and fine, simple speech among the poetry presentations for the spring. This is a volume called "Outcrop," issued by Harper & Brothers, written by a woman, Abbie Huston Evans. The lyricism of these poems is valid and is born in a naturalness revealing the essential poet mind. No ostentation or unfortunate self-delight has stiffened the singing in these lines. They have the sound of a mind used and ready enough to sing for its own solace. And there are signs that this writer has found the special rewards for herself in making her poems, those quick luminous tracings along the body of a poem intensified with the gratitude of the pen catching them:

But silver fish that make a splash,
And ripples sliding under,
Have power to startle like a crash
Of February thunder.

The observation throughout this book creates frequently that startling emanation from an unexpected perception which is, one might say, the indefinable body of an image:

The azure chicory rises in the grass Like a thin puff of smoke no one can pass

Without a trembling.

Quotation of the delicate imagery in this work would give a misleading idea of its vitality and ease. There are poems with an engagingly informal directness, dramatic in their chief impression. The best example of this is "The Old Yellow Shop," which will remind some readers of Robert Frost yet is in no way an imitation. "The Black Road" is another beautifully plain poem. "The Light Upon the Rock," "Hill-Born," "Under

Cover," are moving creations, made in the fibrous material which is the distinctive quality of this poet. There is a reiteration of the exclamatory conclusion somewhat deflective to the aim of the poems here and there, but a remarkable number of lines in "Outcrop" embody things which are seldom apprehended. It is a book with poetry in it.

"The Bare Hills," by Yvor Winters, published by the Four Seas Company, presents an interesting poet. Interesting is a regretful description, since in reading the poems the feeling is born that constriction forces many of them into that classification. A rather arrogant attention to manner seems to repress relentlessly the fine instinct of the poet. The effect of his particular form is much less forceful than the substance which he arbitrarily dismembers. This is an instance in which a conviction rises that the style is not the man. The man is much better than the style. When he is willing to evoke with a measure of his natural means he is very successful. There is exquisite precision in "The Fragile Season:"

The scent of summer thins,
The air grows cold.
One walks alone
And chafes his hands.

the strength of his perception would obviate its originality. He could afford much more simplicity than he grants himself. "The Bare Hills" proves often that a gift and power above originality are at the command of the writer.

In "Poems," printed by Alfred A. Knopf, Clinch Calkins is overtly versatile. The effect of the best poems in the collection is finally lessened by the candid chameleon variety of the book. It is not fortunate that a book of poems should at last impress one with the writer's virtuosity. The intensity of writing like "Suffocation" which is compelling at the first reading becomes suspect after encountering the over-ironic

"Disraeli."

Non-Fiction

"Strange Interlude," by Eugene O'Neill.

A New Literary Department

"SKYWARD" (see list). It was un

lucky for Commander Byrd that his transatlantic flight, no less courageous, no less successful (except for weather), and more difficult than Lindbergh's, should have followed so hard upon those celestial heels. In the excitement over the fair young god, Byrd's achievement never had the popular acclaim that it merited. But he must have been accustomed to such disappointments. Before the war he was retired from the Navy with a bad leg, and when trained men came into demand was given an armchair job in Washington. He suffered there in anything but silence, and at last his importunities got him transferred to a flying-field. There, by the grace of happiness, his leg got well and he became a flier. He spent the period of waiting for active work by perfecting himself for the career that was to be his. He became expert in navigation, and worked to diminish flying risks. His chance for flying came, after many delays, when, under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, he and Donald B. MacMillan undertook exploring flights in Greenland. After a season spent at Etah and beyond, Byrd went to Spitzbergen to fly over the North Pole. The most exciting pages in "Skyward" are those which describe that Arctic flight. But most moving and romantic is the chapter which tells of the proposed attempt to fly over and chart the Antarctic continent. "Skyward" deserves to be widely read. It is a heartening book. Like Lindbergh's, it is the story of achievement made possible only by courage, fortitude, the intelligent use of scientific knowledge, and vast common With such equipment, these young men do not fly in the face of Providence.

A

sense.

When an

SHENDEN" (see list). author who has produced one very fine book and one or two pretty good ones slips a piece of negligible fiction. onto the market, the natural thing is to growl "pot-boiler." Perhaps that isn't fair. Like the returned spirits of the great dead who will be prankish at some

Revolution-Russian and Hindu

By L. J. P.

Lenin and Gandhi," by René Fülöp-Muller. Translated from the German by F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Here are depicted lucidly and with insight and fairness the lives and characters of two men who are as remote from our own understanding and sympathies as Genghis Khan or Mohammed, and who would have been as legendary and unreal to us had they lived at a time when their pictures and words and the record of their daily acts could not have been broadcast to the world through the daily press. Remote from us they still are, and always will be, no matter how great the source material for the biographer; but in this book they are at least real.

"In the faces of Lenin and Gandhi," says Mr. Fülöp-Muller, "the physiognomy of the impersonal millionfold mass, which no one had ever looked at before, took on the form and austere features of two great personalities. . . . Both of them . . . in different ways undertook the heroic and at the same time adventurous experiment of putting into practice the long-cherished dreams of humanity, . . . were upheld by the emotion of an ecstatic faith," and their words "have the fascination, and at the same time the disturbing and repellent arrogance, of a gospel. . . . They desire to lead humanity to salvation in different

The Outlook

ways and they point in opposite directions, each with the same gesture of profound conviction."

An astounding anachronism to the European or American mind, that in this twentieth century there could have arisen two great men of the messiah type

with power to sway hundreds of millions -the one already deified by the faithful, and the other cer

tain to be upon his

death!

"Of course, in Lenin," says the author, "we are dealing with an entirely new type of greatness." This

may be conceded in the sense that the source of the messiahinspiration was new; for instead of being drawn down from a god as a spiritual force it was drawn up from the masses as a materialistic and antireligious force. But in other respects we find too many analogies to other men both great and small. His complete selfless identification of his personality with the Cause is the fundamental trait of the messiah type. His violent methods of forcing his reforms

are singularly reminiscent of those of Peter the Great. His flair for practical details and his habit, even in moments of crucial strain, of issuing countless orders for the carrying out of minor reforms and public improvements remind us of the detailed orders which Napoleon found time to send streaming back to Paris during his campaigns. His knack of understanding and inspiring confidence in the common man was Rooseveltian.

But it is not so much the man that makes us gasp as the Herculean task of materialistic romanticism he set himself: the revolutionary "jerk" or "leap" by which in a single spasm of violent effort a hoard of a hundred and fifty million

MOHAMMEDAN BEGGAR Etching by W. S. Bagdatopoulos

illiterate peasants were to be catapulted from the feudal serfdom of the Middle Ages to a state of scientific and mechanized Marxian Socialism conceded to be far in advance of anything even attempted among the more advanced peoples who have been toiling for centuries through the industrial and capitalistic stages! And all by means of the slender lever of the almost negligible fraction of the people who made up the factory workers and the proletariat of the towns.

Inflamed in boyhood by the reading of revolutionary literature, and embittered in early manhood by the execution of his elder brother for revolutionary plotting, Lenin deliberately took up and tirelessly followed from 1893 to 1917, and

together."

through prison, Sibe

rian exile, and forced sojourn abroad, the hunted and squalid

but emotionally exalted life of the professional Russian revolutionary. Early in this period came to be recognized his genius for organization, for inspiring his coplotters and co-work

ers, and for understanding his people;

and these traits, combined with his shrewdness, his insistence upon action rather than words,

his inflexible courage, and his unshakable faith in ultimate success, ended by making him the man of

the hour when in the spring of 1917 the famous "sealed coach" deposited him at the Petersburg Station after the furtive ride through Germany and Finland.

And the result of it all? In the words of Mr. Fülöp-Muller

(page 120): "A cross between Asiatic indolence and lethargy and extreme Americanism, between the muzhik and the mass man, now represents the new Russia; the country is now dominated by an apposition of bastard forms, chaotically jumbled Without discussing this pithy summary, it seems at least fair to say that if the peasants have not been affected otherwise than in their land tenure, then the whole Bolshevist phantasmagoria may ultimately prove no more than a city-bred squall. Even through the optimistic enthusiasm of the writers whose little studies of Soviet Russia are being issued by the Vanguard Press, it is impossible to escape the impression that the Russian peasant is fundamentally the same Russian peasant as before, except that he now has his land for himself.

When we turn to Gandhi, we are at once in a different world. And we have even more of a struggle with Gand