A nightmare, a kaleidoscope, swiftly moving pictures, voices crying out of the depths, pitiful puppets caught in the machine. How else is it possible to compress the thousand forces of the day into a couple of hundred pages-at most four or five hours on the stage of a theater? Human beings have disappeared, they count for so little, they are overwhelmed by forces they can scarcely perceive. Impotent men and women, without names-that is all. Digestive tubes labelled "Materialist", "Idealist", "Socialist", "Revolutionary"—these are Kaiser's people. Here we deal with millions, the nameless masses governed by greed, swayed by catch-words or superstition. Once in a while someone, a little less blind, gropes toward the light, and is promptly crucified.

Kaiser has discovered the means of bringing the world together within a single frame. Merely to have conceived a method of doing this is an accomplishment. It seems so easy, after the event, to say, "Of course, that's the only way it could be done!" And how has it been done? First, he has seen and felt the powers of business, of the law, of the race for gold, of industrial slavery; then he has submitted all his materials to a process of compression. The atmosphere is rarefied, the parts are separated, the steel and iron, glass and cement, together with the bits of humanity, are set up as one would set up a machine.

light-radium, violet-rays, X-rays to show the skeleton. The machine stands complete, bereft of everything that cannot function: there is not an atom of decoration. And you look at it, not directly-you couldn't stand that—but through powerful refracting glasses.

Kaiser has attacked the multifarious life of his time by adopting the very means that have made it what it is. If he had not been a dramatist he might have been a steel king or an international war-making banker. Instead, he has captured the guns of the enemy and directed them againt him. In Kaiser we have a writer who is as powerful as a coal magnate, as merciless, as direct, as intelligent.

But Kaiser is something more than a fighter. I have perhaps over-emphasized the thesis or "tendenz❞ element in his plays; that is scarcely to be helped, as his ideas are not separable from his art. But that, I think, is a proof that his art is genuine. He has so identified himself with his day and generation that he cannot escape into the realm`of the unrelated. If he has deemed it necessary to discard human beings as unimportant to his scheme, it was only in order that he might the more efectively show us humanity. He has lost something in the process could it be otherwise?-but he has gained much. Like the Billionaire's Son, he is looking for Men, Men who Understand Themselves. He is an idealist.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

(New Hampshire, by Robert Frost. Henry Holt & Co., 1923)

M

R. FROST has done a number of

small lyrics and occasional lines and passages in longer pieces which prove him to be a good poet. But in his more ambitious work (owing to his espousal of the romantic theory that poetry is a matter of viewpoint, vision, subject or personality, rather than a fine art) Mr. Frost fails for the same reason that so interesting a person as Arnold Boecklin failed in painting. Boecklin, whose pictures have an uncanny charm of their own, a charm of subject matter, is not a good painter because he either couldn't or wouldn't

paint well. Mr. Frost, who frequently

advances surprising and beautiful conceptions, generally refuses to write verse well. It is a pity, because he could.

Mr. Frost's verse is too often thin. He is most famous for a certain drawling conversational inflection. This he works overtime, until, never beautiful, it becomes wearisome. (This drawl was used before him and is still used with better aesthetic effect by Edwin Arlington Robinson). As used by Mr. Frost, this movement owes its charm, when it is charming, not to intrinsic beauty, but to mimicry. It charms because it seems an echo of speech, not because it strikes us as a beautiful creation. Bemused by the sound of his own voice talking, Mr. Frost has writ

ten hundreds of lines of verse almost devoid of beauty.

This is extremely unfortunate because he is a poet with ideas. Many of his conceptions deserve to be encased in more beautiful form than he has troubled to give them. Few of his genuinely distinctive poems have a musical vitality. His studied subtlety is aesthetically vague, as much so-called

free verse intended to be "subtle" in cadence is simply vague. The fine precision of excellent verse is generally lacking in Mr. Frost's work. Only now and then has he arrived at it.

If we view poetry as merely the expression of personality or of ideas, as we view bald prose, there is more to be said for the author of "New Hampshire." Mr. Frost probably would be a capital person to sit on a fence with, or smoke with, and listen to. He would (like so many people we meet unexpectedly in this world, in corner stores or hotels, saloons or salons) be charming. His perspective on life would interest terest us. His comments on things seen would often be delightful. We would enjoy the conversation and feel a personal satisfaction in having made his acquaintance. But most of us go to poetry for something more than this. (We expect a concert singer to sing well, however interesting his program; a painter to paint well, however unusual his subject matter.) We go to poetry for beauty of form as we go to the other arts. Mr. Frost does not often give us much of this.

There are a number of critics who

rate Mr. Frost as a great poet. These critics generally talk of his personality and of his chosen subject-matter, his ideas. Thus one speaks of "The Witch of Coos" as one of the best ghost-stories in English poetry, which it is, and of "A Star In a Stone-Boat" as a lovely chain of tercets, when-though the conception is beautiful-the tercets, with the exception of two or three, actually lack distinction. Another quotes Mr. Frost's opinions about the puking villagers. And so it goes.

It is my belief that American poetry has lost a great deal through Mr. Frost's preoccupation with subjectmatter. As a result of this attitude to the most difficult of the fine arts, the bulk of his work is mediocre and tiresome. His poems are often very bad. His contribution to American literature -at any rate, to the art of poetry-is not great, but small. His work will go down like Whittier's and long be reverenced. As a personality he will become legendary-a charming New Englander, remembered and loved by those who have penetrated his barrier of long-winded verse to find him. But, this human documentation aside, considering poetry as a fine art and poems the sort of creations which interested Horace and the Romans, the Elizabethans, Milton, Heine and the modern Irishmen, we must consider Mr. Frost's actual output of poetry slight. A few fine lyrics and a somewhat larger number of poems of charming conception, in mediocre verse, but short enough to be read with pleasure for their ideas.

Among the best of the short poems, both included in "New Hampshire," are the two following:

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY. Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

FIRE AND ICE.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great

And would suffice.

The poet's whimsical vision is shown in "Gathering Leaves":

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight; And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

There are a number of poems of charming conception in "New Hampshire." There are several of charming execution. The personality that is revealed in this book as in Mr. Frost's

earlier books is whimsical and pleasing and shrewd. The volume will be a delight to those who read poetry for its personal content. Those who read poetry because it is a fine art will find more than they ordinarily expect to find in a volume of American verse-but, after all that has been promised them by a flock of critics, they will be disappointed.

JOHN MCCLURE.

STEPHEN CRANE FINDS HIS BIOGRAPHER

evinced early an ineptitude to conform to the traditions not only of his family circle but also of the wider and, in a sense, narrower circle represented by the pompous gentlemen of the American nineties. Though slender and sparely built, not exactly the small boy type of his time, he yet entered into the games of the village youngsters with more than common zest. He appears, incredibly, to have been a horseman almost from the cradle and a town-lot ball player of some repute. At Lafayette College, where he remained a year, he played on the college nine; at Syracuse University he was captain of the

A

PART from its biographical significance, which is by no means slight, this is an excellent readable book; more readable, more fascinating to my temper than any fiction come upon during the past year. And this is not fiction, nor can it be classed arbitrarily as biography, it is more properly, just as Mr. Beer indicates, a study. But such a study as one rarely encounters at this ciate. Mr. Beer seems to have caught the spirit of the Crane complex remarkably well. He is comrade, he is friend, he is interpreter to his man. And quite sanely, unsentimentally-en rapport. There is a healthy pleasant vigor to his narrative a nicety that discards the purely morbid and legendary, and at the same time preserves the color of

romance.

Crane's short whirl on earth was intensely dramatic. The fourteenth and last child of a Methodist minister and a descendant of one Stephen Crane who signed the Declaration of Independence, after whom he was named, he

to join the professional ranks of baseballdom. But Crane began to have other plans. He wanted to write. Through the influence of his elder brother he managed while at Syracuse to form a connection with a New York paper. From this time on he was at it, taking up a residence in New York City with the determination to live by his pen. An act reminiscent of many besiegers and conquerors of the citadel by way of the Grub Streets of the world. Crane, though, was never a good reporter and could not hold a job for any length of time and the storming was made so much the harder.

The period from his leaving college until he was twenty-five, was one of struggles and failures. But Crane had a purpose and fastened to it with a sort of instinct that we would come through finally. His first sustained effort "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" belongs to these days. Seeking in vain to find a publisher for the story, he decided to print it on his own account and paid a religious publishing house "eight