New Thoughts for Old Ones

WHEN Paul the Apostle preached on Mars Hill, it was not the first time that the people flocked to hear or to see some new thing. Nor is it the last. The demand for novelty springs from a deep place in human nature. In a very real sense, new things, new experiences, new ideas make up life itself. Many people, as we know, find existence but a squirrel cage,— eternal movement and eternal sameness,—but only the unthinking. For any one with new thoughts, or, rather, with new vision of old thoughts, life is one adventure after another; and, as the editor has long thought, a magazine’s business is to give freshness and a new significance to the ideas that make everybody’s life worth while.

In planning for the Atlantic’s new year, it is steadily in the editor’s mind to keep the magazine (a young veteran of sixty-five) looking at the world, its doings, and its motives with undimmed eyes. If you peer sharply at life, you will see it is never quite the same. Take, for instance, the year 1920, through which we have just passed. Do you realize that for the first time in our history more than half the population of the United States began to live in cities and towns? A dangerous tendency, this: what brought it about? The answer is, the automatic machine. It is a paradox, but a true one, that the machinery intended to eliminate men has wrought more congestion than our cities had ever known. But it has done more than this. It has revolutionized our American life almost as completely as steam did a century ago. The genie is out of the bottle. The automatic tool is no slave, but a master, beckoning girls from the farms, rushing boys to maturity before their time, paying them fabulous wages, and then, having taught them to live riotously, withholding, skimping, starving their development. Here indeed is a vital new aspect of a problem old as mankind. The Atlantic will treat it in intensely interesting articles entitled THE IRON MAN, by a new writer of knowledge and intuition* ARTHUR POUND.

Another series in prospect, promising in peculiar degree this same quality of illuminating the basic factors of our lives, is a group of papers by VERNON KELLOGG on The New Biology. Every Atlantic reader recalls his famous Headquarters Nights and his more recent Problems of Life and Death. Here again Professor Kellogg not only interprets the facts, but has the sympathetic trick of unlimbering the reader’s imagination and enlarging his world.

One of our New York contemporaries challenges competition by promising articles which will “send the red blood spurting through every vein.”We should dislike to subject our readers to so trying an experience, but we do believe that no one will read unmoved the new discussion of our prison system which opens in the November Atlantic. FRANK TANNENBAUM, whose papers last year roused so intense an interest, has made a tour of investigation covering every important penal institution in the country. The results of his inspection, though temperately stated, haunt the mind.

Ever since certain plain-spoken papers on THE NEGRO appeared in the Atlantic, we have thought it a matter of public importance that this discussion should be enlarged, so that Americans can see the problem steadily and whole. To write the new series, we have chosen a Southerner, a man of broad and sober vision, with many years of intensive experience.

Following the Peace of Versailles and the failure of the treaty, a kind of desperate torpor settled on the hopes of mankind. Now the pall gradually lifts, and in the general renewal of effort, it will be the Atlantic’s part to light its own little lanterns along the dark road ahead. Supplementing the reports of the Conference at Washington, we shall cover the greater OBSTACLES TO PEACE in a series which promises to be one of the most luminous and helpful in the Atlantic’s history. Nothing in these discussions will go nearer to the heart of the question than the searching and luminous survey of the part each individual among us must play in these matters of public policy, written for the Atlantic, by ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK. It is a literal and awful truth that upon you and me rests the ultimate responsibility.

A moment ago we were speaking of new light on ancient things. There is no better illustration of this in the new volume than PROFESSOR CHAUNCEY B. TINKER’S engaging series on Young Boswell, based on what we confess seems to us a miraculous discovery of manuscript letters written, by the Boswell not yet known to fame, to Rousseau, Ollie Goldsmith, John Wilkes, and many of the celebrities and notorieties of the day. There never was a letter-writer just like Bozzy. PROFESSOR TINKER’S series will be not only popular, but famous.

There is a certain accent on the new also, whether the Atlantic publishes new stories by old writers or by new ones. Tales such as the very modern idyll, Sunset, by VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ, in the November issue, take their place, not by virtue of the authors name, but by his individual talent. Then there are new writers like EMMA LAWRENCE, JAMES BOYD, and FRANCES NORVILLE CHAPMAN. Indeed, nothing is more characteristic of the Atlantic than half a dozen brand-new names a month.

It is futile to speak of the new volume without those names round which Atlantic associations cluster most thickly. DR. CROTHERS and MISS REPPLIER, — to take the names at random, —

MRS. GEROULD and A. EDWARD NEWTON, DALLAS LORE SHARP, WILLIAM BEEBE, GAMALIEL BRADFORD, MRS. DARGAN and JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE; and the newcomers making tradition fast, such as L. ADAMS BECK, EDWARD YEOMANS, and E. BARRINGTON. But to a grateful editor this subject hath no end.

One word more. Those who have grown intimate with the Atlantic through the years know that, when they seek the deep human comfort of those things of the spirit which the world, singularly careless of other personal matters, still thinks too personal to discuss, they can often find in the Atlantic’s pages much that they seek. Such a paper as DR.

J. EDGAR PARK’S Is There Anything in Prayer ? suggests what we mean. Throughout the year contributors who have sought and found an answer will pass it on to the forlorn, the lonely, and the stricken.

In the Christmas Atlantic we shall print as the first of many poignant messages of comfort and, we hope, of help, CONSOLATION, a paper which is, in a very true sense, a distillation of that healing which brings surcease of sorrow.