ville has an emotional intensity which grips up, and carries the reader beyond any mere reaction to a barren parade of distant and ill-apprehended facts. You always feel a vital mind behind the words. A fiction writer is not valued for the strangeness of his material so much as for the quality of the experience he communicates and his success in communicating it. Conrad undoubtedly had that in mind when he asked with some irritation why it was that he was called a novelist of the sea when Thomas Hardy was never called a novelist of the land. Cooper is decidedly not an early member of the romantic tradition of Melville and Conrad. He belongs with Robert Louis Stevenson, and Stevenson, Frank Swinnerton has with excellent reasons assured us, killed romance. In Cooper's way of romance is death, not literary vitality. From a primitive it is not pertinent to demand the highest development of possibilities, nor even that he follow the trends he starts to logical conclusions. Cezanne did not develop cubism, but Picasso did. Of a primitive we may demand intrinsic interest, and we may legitimately look for the developments of the genre. But where are the literary descendants of Cooper? And of what intrinsic interest are Cooper's books? The latest important essay on Cooper concentrates upon his personality. And really the great interest he still has for students of American literature is as a personality who solved the problem of the literary life in the frontier community. Broadly speaking there are two ways to do that: a writer may resolutely attack the problem of portraying, or being concerned with, his immediate surroundings, or he may turn to older, more fixed cultures and immerse himself, in them. In either case limitations of circumstance are imposed on the writer. Cooper by and large did the former, while Washington Irving did the latter. Irving, naturally and inevitably attained to a more "literary" achievement. But Cooper never became literary in an admirable or derogatory sense. He remained a frontier man to the end. He remained an extrovert to the end, with a mind uncomplicated by much culture. But perhaps because he imagined rather than personally experienced his stories they lack the merits sometimes found in the writings of minds of his type. And he lacked the qualities of a genuine literary artist. Because the intellectual values in Cooper are so slight they do not buoy up his work today. His books may continue for a long time interesting to children and as a personality he will always be an interesting type in our early literary history. But why blink the fact that he is no longer of high literary significance and try to make of a fossil a living man? A DRAMATIC FANTASY By JOHN MCCLURE PETRONIUS AMPHAX and EUSEBIUS SCAURUS, the latter very much out of breath, are discovered in a tavern at Cairo. There is a great disturbance without, the Egyptians milling in the street like cattle. EUSEBIUS. There is no question the stars were falling. The sky was alive with them like flaming butterflies. PETRONIUS. I did not see it. EUSEBIUS. The boys are calling it in the street. Did you fail to hear the people running and shouting? The market was mad. It is a grave prognostic. PETRONIUS. I was reading Plotinus on the angels. The hubbub escaped me. EUSEBIUS. As likely as not it foretokens the fall of the empire. They were like hailstones. Enter METRODORUS ASTYANAX, reeling METRODORUS. The devil take us, but this is the end of all. They fell in the ditches bigger than eggs. The earth will swallow us up. PETRONIUS. Calm yourself, MetroThis phenomenon may be quite dorus. natural. METRODORUS. Bah! So is death and destruction. The gods is stoning us, I tell you, because of our grievous sins. There has been too much beer-drinking in Cairo. EUSEBIUS. There has not been such a portent recorded since the crocodiles came out of the Nile. They marched out in squads, and Nero burned Rome the next morning. The situation is serious. Some doom was written across the skies. PETRONIUS. I will believe it when it has happened. METRODORUS. Bah! you will be dead. What dogs is left over will be gnawing your jaws. It is hellfire was falling. PETRONIUS. The sky does, in fact, look black. METRODORUS. They all fell in fell in the streets, I tell you. All the beer will be spilled and all us Egyptians..... EUSEBIUS. It is possible the omen applies to other cities than Cairo. METRODORUS. It could be, but the devil has been here. This town is licentious. Muleteers has shot dice in the temple, and I was among them. Young women has danced in the pothouses. PETRONIUS. Milk and blood fell from heaven in Italy and nothing in particular happened. METRODORUS. These was planets. PEOPLE without in the streets are hurrying to and fro in extreme excitement. Snatches of frightened speech are heard: "Is it the fall of Rome?.... The doom of Heliogabalus?" "The sea will rise boiling!" will rise boiling!" Enter PORPHYRY ARSANO with haggard eyes. PORPHYRY. The gods have spoken. I bid you farewell. Good friends, brave friends, give me your prayers. METRODORUS. Eh? T New York By EDITH VALERIO HE nightmare of the American billboard has been sufficiently inveighed against, by the vitriol-imbued pen and tongue of a doughty American artist. Like other esthetic scourges-yellow journalism, the "Comical Page," the B. R. T. Subway megaphone-it is one of the first fruits of a chaotic civilization and largely the result of grafting inferior shoots of old world races upon the American tree of Liberty, thereby impeding and distorting its proper and intended development. It is of the deep psychological chasm between the French and American conception of the commercial poster, something which cannot fail to impress the frequenter of the Paris "metro" (where this form of art is chiefly displayed), that I wish to speak, for in no particular, neither in dress nor language, in manner nor habits, does the national difference in temperament and degree of esthetic development stand out in greater relief. There is, I believe, a conviction current among Americans, that the art of the commercial poster is one in which their national artists excel. Of course that depends entirely upon what one considers the essentials of a good poster. If these consist in a sort of standand-deliver attack upon the vision, a forcible projection into his consciousness, through the eye of the beholder, of a stark, staring fact, set forth in a form which reflects more credit upon the implements of the artist than upon his gifts of imagination, then, indeed It pre-eminence must be conceded to the average American poster. In its strident appeal to the spectator, it also consolidates the first impression that the dweller in European cities must receive: upon arriving in New York-the impression of incessant, obsessing noise. And by this is not meant the noise of street traffic (in which respect Paris might successfully compete), but noise in the daily and general conduct of life -the ear-splitting yells of the children. at play, the shouting and be-shouted-at passengers in the subway, the loud vocal pitch at which conversations are everywhere carried on, to all of which its maximum of noise is contributed by every mechanical device at work. appears to him as if every individual, every object, were in a heated competition to assail him with the fact of his or its presence and particular claims. Dismayed and obsessed by the world of glaring fact that arrests his vision at every turn-colossal faces of rubicund red-lipped users of a certain brand of soap or article of food, serene and lofty youths in impeccable collars, grinning school-children, displaying an animal enjoyment in various toothsome confections, greedy old gentlemen ingurgitating cups of coffee with unpleasant gusto, realistic revelations of the intimacies of feminine apparel-the individual of a reflective or thoughtful bent of mind realizes definitely, if for the time, that there is compensation for the sightless orbs of the blind. Now, the French commercial poster does not break forcibly into the portals of your consciousness. It knocks very gently at the outer gate and when introduced, steps softly but surely into its intimate recesses. And there it establishes itself, not as a maddening obsession, but as a pleasant stimulant to the latent springs of imagination. It leads us into a world of fancy and graceful mirth, shot through with little darts of mockery and spritely badinage. The well-born and weil-bred old gentlemen, with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, reclining with easy grace in his arm chair, and wearing with elegance his half opened scarlet robes, regards you with a mocking smile which makes your own lips twitch with amusement. He is there to inform you, with smiling and courtly conviction, of the unquestionable superiority of the Clamond Radiator. "Nous clamons et pro-clamons," he asserts, with an apt and facile play upon the name, "que Clamond est le meilleur radiateur." And, of course you must accept the statement, or it would be a sad reflection upon the degree of your own intelligence, as the mocking smile so subtly intimates. Here we see the delights of Deloso, a new liqueur, demonstrated by a graceful lady-not the superior young woman of the American poster, who believes she has only to appear to conquer, but the one who understands the true secret of feminine seduction, the delicate flattery of the implied desire to please, before which the most impervious maseuline heart must succumb. Yes, even that of the big white polar bear who accepts the proffered aperitif with a melting glance of delicious abandonment. And here is a fantastic little old man in tight-fitting yellow pantaloons and long green coat, who is being shot into the air under the exhilarating influences of Kola. Every part of him, sidewhiskers and hair, green coat-tails-is participating in the general uplift. Even his hat has parted from his head in the aerial race. A very old-timer, but one which has deservedly survived pre and post-war times is the advertisement for a certain brand of pate-de-foie-gras. Two motherly old geese are standing over a jar of the confection with pensive and gratified glances, "Ah!" exclaims one feelingly, "que c'est bon!" You can almost hear a human sigh of the satisfaction that is untinged by any consciousness of its cannibalistic nature or the probable fate in store for herself and her companion. And to mention one more of the innumerable fancies with which the French poster artist invests his subject, we should not overlook this merry little figure, clad in glove-fitting costume of red, with dapper satin boots, dancing lightly down a staircase, flooded with the aspersions of a hose playing freely upon him. But coughs and colds have no terrors for him, as why should they? "Moi, ca m'est égal," he exclaims gaily, as he flourishes a box of cough drops in his hand, "j'ai les pastilles Britannia!" It may be objected that this pictorial style of poster can never have as immediate and universal an appeal as its more prosaic American prototype. This may well be, as the elementary perceptions of a young child, or the primitive understanding of the illiterate immi |