'We Have Read With Interest'

I

So much attention has been paid to the extraordinary development of the radio, motion-picture, and automobile industries that we have been inclined to overlook another form of production, singularly American, which in ten years’ time has broken all existing records. If you drop in at a bootblack’s the chances are that you will have your shoes shined in front of a high rack lurid with the covers of a hundred magazines. If you stop at the corner drug store you will probably find magazines occupying as much space as candy or cosmetics. If you go to the Greek’s for some fruit you will see him reach into his window over a display stand of periodicals. And if you live in an apartment you will know what a frequent problem it is to get rid of the old numbers. Mr. Charles Walker, an associate editor of the Bookman, has computed that the aggregate number of copies of all magazines distributed each month in America is 275,000,000, or something over two copies a person. But, unlike other items of mass production, the magazine is still very much an individual creation: no two issues are alike, the parts are assembled from all over the country, and most of them are homemade.

Since graduation from college I have worked steadily with manuscripts. The magazine which I help to edit receives in the course of a year about forty thousand contributions, and to dispose of each within the customary fortnight my associates and I have to read an average of sixty a day. Each morning after the recording angel has done her work the bundles of fresh mail are brought up to our operating table — prose in one group, poems in another, manuscripts requiring a quick decision in a third. On the table stand three tin bread boxes into which the envelopes arc stowed in the order of their coming. Then we settle down to read.

Forty thousand manuscripts from which to choose t he three hundred and sixty which compose our twelve issues. This leaves 39,640 contributions to be returned to their authors. Despite a courteous rejection slip, the figure represents a fairly large sum of disappointment. Even more significant is the amount of ambitious and unprofessional writing which it represents. There are several hundred magazines of national circulation in the United States, and if each of them receives the same proportion of unavailable manuscripts as we it does not take a statistician to tell us that a great many people— ‘doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs’ — are writing in the time they can spare from their day’s work. This is borne out by the fact that the bulk of the manuscripts comes to us in the summer months when vacations give everyone the chance to play author.

To judge sixty manuscripts a day requires about equal parts of curiosity, enthusiasm, and decision. By curiosity I mean a kind of hungry interest in the written word, and by enthusiasm I mean that which sends you from one manila envelope to another with the perpetual hope of finding a leading article, and holds you fast to a discouraging paper till you are sure there is not a redeeming feature in it. Such curiosity is only human: it waxes, is keen and more critical, in the morning (an appropriate occasion for stout essays); is more kindly disposed after lunch (the right time for stories); and by mid-afternoon is waning and so the more receptive to the gentler charms of verse. As for one’s decisions, — which are written on the envelopes themselves, — they have to be made for the most part with little hesitation. Making up one’s mind every five or ten minutes can be a fatiguing business.

A reader’s position is somewhat analogous to that of a doctor. Each writer has something on his or her mind, and as I read their temperature and feel their pulse I can tell fairly well whether the cases are important or only illusory. The former are discussed with the other readers and the editor; the latter are gently dismissed, and only the more puzzling remain to trouble one’s sleep.

Looking back on several years of such practice, I find that my chair — with its padded seat — has been one of liberal education. The first-rate manuscripts have taught me much, the very bad a little, but the most interesting observations have been afforded by the papers which we have had to reject, the vast majority of which will probably never find their way into print. They express the contemporary state of mind in a way which I shall do my best to illustrate. And because my relation with these many writers has been of almost medical intimacy I shall take care to quote from no specific contribution, but instead shall make up my own typical illustrations.

II

Essays, short stories, poems — each in its way reflects the thought of the times, and of the three the essay’s is the most direct reflection. Now the formal essay, with its nice phrasing and apt quotations, has been considerably altered to suit the present, taste. Often for the better, as one will see in comparing Lowell’s famous essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ with Agnes Repplier’s ‘On a Certain Condescension in Americans.’ We take less time and verbiage to say what we mean to-day, and with our most skillful writers the economy is achieved without dulling the edge of their words. But for every precise and hard-hitting essayist now alive there are a dozen pugnacious and careless ‘article writers’ who will undertake a crusade against any grievance or attempt to tip over any monument that an editor may suggest. Where the essay is formal and objective, the article is personal and full of objection. Articles make for controversy, which, in turn, makes many a magazine’s reputation. And articles — particularly the more ‘outspoken,’ the more ‘natural’ — are easy to imitate. Both mediums to-day are stamped with the skepticism that prevails in most of our thinking, but instead of philosophizing on the beauties of autumnal woods, — or Browning, — as of old, your contemporary writer prefers to take a crack at Democracy, Higher Education, or Marriage.

The subjects naturally follow the trend of events. Revolution in China will bring us a hundred articles dealing quizzically with the Missions, the Treaties, or the Yellow Menace; longdistance flights are the occasion for several pounds of manuscripts on Aviation, just as every June graduation seems to bring into focus the problems of the Younger Generation. Year in, year out, the subjects which weigh most heavily upon the public conscience are Prohibition and the conflict between Evolution and Fundamentalism. Every aspect of Prohibition is attacked and defended: identical statistics supply either side with the conclusion it desires; even the Bible is seemingly a two-edged sword. With Evolution there is less open hostility, the majority of the writers still striving to reconcile the two positions. The scientists, however, are very zealous to protect their research against gentlemen of Tennessee, and the Bryanites are equally determined to legislate ‘this monkey business’ out of the country. These keep up a steady sniping at each other the year round.

The critics of Fundamentalism have a habit of alluding to ‘the waning power of the Church ’ — a charge which is fiercely debated in many quarters. A subject closely allied to this is the poverty of the clergy, a complaint in which not a few ministers and their wives raise anxious voices. Should the protest be aired, — as surely it deserves to be, — professors, schoolteachers, and their wives set to talking about their plight, and then young housewives chime in, decrying the ‘high cost of babies,’ and young college graduates denounce their low salaries. . . .

For it is fashionable to speak out. In times past the privilege may have been reserved for those who had climbed the Himalayas, made a million, or tutored the Prince of Siam. But to-day it needs but the simplest excuse for a writer to set off on a painstaking confession in which nothing is spared. The result is often highly interesting to the unacquainted reader, who may never have had a séance with the spirit of Washington, or have suffered the throes of bankruptcy or divorce. The subject matters little so long as the ‘personal reactions’are frank and ‘revealing.’ Curiously enough, the revelation is consistently one of failure. An oppressive number of people seem to think that their inability to cope with a given situation entitles them to speak with the voice of authority. ‘I am submitting at the usual rates,’writes the contributor, ‘an article entitled “Why I Am a Nobody.’” If one may judge from the confession magazines, nothing succeeds like failure.

Next to finding fault with one’s self is the joy of finding faults in others. Nowhere is this more plainly to be seen than in current biography. Armed with a popular smattering of psychology and with a kind of tolerant cynicism, we write about our betters in a way to make them worse. In so doing — whether in book length or in a magazine profile — we pay an indirect compliment to our own sagacity, very flattering to the ego. To his delicious book about six fantastic men Max Beerbohm gave the title Seven Men. Most biography writers, I notice, include themselves very prominently in the picture — though they are seldom so disarmingly frank as to say so.

It is, of course, no longer necessary to wait until a man is in the ground before invading his private life. The public’s craving for personalities has been so pandered to that it has become, as Norman Douglas says, ‘cannibalistic.’ ‘Men cannot live, it seems,’says he, ‘save by feeding on their neighbors’ lifeblood.’ And notoriety makes anyone fair prey, whether he is a Judd Gray under penalty of death, a Gene Tunney trying patiently to get married, or the Prince of Wales on a horse. Presidential candidates have always been good targets, though this year there is no doubt that Al Smith drew most of the fire. To read the broadsides directed against him is enough to make one believe that ‘all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ But there are others who are constantly being hounded. Mussolini, pictured as a lion stalking Democracy, is a special antipathy of American critics. Borah is pursued for his fearlessness; Fall is the country’s scapegoat; and more anathemas are fired at H. L. Mencken than at any other writer.

A lust for personalities, an aggressive skepticism, and a weakness for confession — these individually or in concert are the characteristics to be remarked in most of our essays that come in with enthusiasm and go back with regret.

III

Our essays are dominated by men. Two thirds of our stories, on the other hand, come from women. More plentiful than the essays and, speaking generally, of less originality (I am speaking of‘unavailable manuscripts’), they are fruits of leisure and evidence of the vast energy that is being more or less cultivated by literary advisers and teachers of composition. For it seems that writing is one of the first occupations to which emancipated women turn a hand.

Save for Christmas stories, — which have to be submitted by midsummer if they are to be in time for the December make-up, — the narratives have little relation to the seasons. It takes some extraordinary catastrophe — war, floods, or earthquake — to have any appreciable effect on the themes of fiction. Normally the subjects are multifarious and follow in their outline any one of the standard plots, whose custom-made situations are cut to fit the individual’s taste. In many of them, however, one can detect the motive that has prodded the writer into action.

Thus, stories of the Southern mountains are written against illiteracy, stories of Indians or negroes against white aggression, animal stories against cruelty; stories of children protest the selfishness or ambition of parents, and stories of dissipation still persist in crying down Demon Rum. These, of course, are plainly labeled.

Less conscious in their aim are those stories — and they are legion! — which seek to glorify Art in any one of its delectable careers. In the pursuit of ‘self-expression’ (our modern fetish) the imagination invents an artistic Utopia which the Muses would be the first to deny. It is noticeable how few of these stories ever focus attention on the discouraging years of apprenticeship or on the pitiful decline of genius. Instead, the hero sings his solo, paints his masterpiece, or writes his best seller as though it were the result, of divine visitation. Let me devise some examples.

A humble bond salesman writes poems in his evening hours, though they win him nothing but rejection slips. But in his dreams his lyrics acquire an amazing beauty. One midnight he wakens and captures the sonnet that has been running through his mind. It is accepted by the leading review, and in no time his night thoughts bring him recognition and the poet laureateship of North Dakota.

An Italian cobbler in Greenwich Village draws crude pictures on the backs of his hides when business is slack. All his savings go to train his little daughter, Rosa, who eventually grows up, wins a Prix, has a triumphant Paris exhibition — and neglects her penniless old papa, who dies with an art journal illustrating daughter’s masterpiece clutched in his hand.

A young couple are living happily in a small apartment. The husband, a business man, has artistic aspirations. On the plea of working late at the office, he repairs to the attic of a boarding house, where he struggles with plasticine and where he is occasionally visited by a dark woman who poses for him. The neighbors talk scandal; his wife hears of it and, morbid with jealousy, does away with herself. Not till then does genius infuse his modeling, which soon becomes the talk of the town.

Art is miraculous, selfish, cruel — but most of all miraculous. Many such stories, I have no doubt, represent a longing to escape from prosaic surroundings, — a longing to pay off old bills, have a nurse for the children, and spend the day writing more such stories, — but, sad to say, they are the least credible of any that we have to read.

Another longing for escape — for which one has real sympathy! — is to be found in those narratives that transform a nervous city failure into a successful farmer. That the ‘back to the land’ movement in literature is cherished by disgruntled townsfolk may plainly be seen from the ‘purple patches’ which smack of late reading rather than of early ploughing. Oaks, elms, and ivy are always ' immemorial’ (Tennyson should have taken out a patent), water always ‘plashes,’ and sunsets happen like this: ‘Came twilight. With its last rays the sun brushed with loving fingers the hillside and the immemorial elms, flung rosy gleams across the lush valley, and shyly, caressingly whispered over the lily ponds.’ There is a kind of land hunger that assails the city dweller after a Sunday’s outing. And in the resulting fiction there is likely to be a conflict (typical of the writer’s own indecision) between the husband who wants his rosebushes and bungalow and the wife who pines for Broadway — and that’s where the story comes in.

I have to witness a good many domestic scenes. If I learn anything from them it is that the divorce rate among our heroes and heroines is not as high as in real life. Marital difficulties there are in excess. I have never known people to be so touchy, so quick to take offense. A husband’s habit of biting his nails, a wife’s incessant humming or her too-ready smile for the tutor — such irritants as these lead swiftly to the thought of desertion, to the writing of the traditional note to be found on the hall table. But absence soon makes the heart grow fonder, and at the eleventh hour — and on the next to the last page — there is reconciliation. Wild horses could n’t keep the couple apart.

At first glance the younger generation appear to be more daring. But it seems to me that their flaunted independence is largely the prerogative of the young lady. Her freedom consists in ignoring the advice of her family and going straight after the man she wants. No more languishing for Man o’ My Dreams. And in her courtship she makes as good use of her arts (‘petting’ is one of them) and is as careful in her code as was the persistent Pamela. Like divorce, free love is often contemplated, but seldom indulged in. I don’t think there are as many unmarried mothers in print to-day as there were in Victoria’s time.

It is curious to see how often the lovers are reconciled or erring youth saved from disaster by the timely aid of the supernatural. Ouija, telepathy, and television are held in popular respect and may be very helpful to a plot. In fact, these mysteries have come to take the place of the old-fashioned ghost stories. And in their associations they lead directly to the thought of death, a phenomenon that seems not so awesome as it did fifty years ago. Stories that take place in Heaven or Hell have one trait in common — they are recounted with an air of flippancy. The deathbed serves a more practical purpose: it may be used as the setting for a lifelong reminiscence or as a judgment seat to settle old grudges, or it may be the occasion for one of those fantastic wills which can always be relied on for intrigue.

The hope of receiving something for nothing has never been more stimulated than to-day, what with oil springing up in one’s back yard, Spanish galleons raised from the deep, and Wall Street making thirty-seven millionaires overnight. It suits our temper, our pride in prosperity, and explains why, in one form or another, El Dorado is the most popular theme of adventure. Perhaps it is a prevailing Puritanism that makes our writers bestow their paper fortunes only upon the deserving. There are no Falls in fiction.

Adventure and romance are coming slowly back into favor. It will be remembered how the war heated our imaginations with tales of atrocities, spies, and blood, and how, after the Armistice, the realists were called in to purge us. They have left behind them a skepticism which requires that a story be before all else ‘convincing,’ a qualification that has considerably reduced the number of battles, murders, and sudden deaths that would otherwise occur. We require our mystery stories and romances to be as credible in print as they are preposterous on the screen.

Before we leave the field of romance let me pay my respects to certain automatic devices which writers use to intrigue the reader. The first, which always appears early in the narrative, goes something like this: ‘Had you told Oliver Underwood that three weeks from that very day and hour he would be lying stunned and blindfolded in the Lewisons’ library he would have called you a fool, and poured himself another whiskey and soda.’ Like the red light at the crossing, this announces danger ahead. Then, continuing to read, the incidents bear us swiftly forward, until almost before we know it the hero is actually in the path of danger. It is what we have been warned to look out for, and this is how it is averted: ‘Oliver’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. Then he sprang forward. To wrench the Persian dagger from the wall, to sever Elsie’s bonds, to force the lock, and to gather the unconscious girl in his arms was but the work of an instant. With his precious burden he fled into the night.’ Now, anyone — except Oliver — who has ever tried to cut a rope with a dull blade, to force a lock, or to pick up a lump of a woman, will know that neither singly nor in conjunction are these ‘the work of an instant.’ Perhaps that is one reason why these yarns are not very well received to-day.

In their place we have character stories. Bringing psychology within easy reach — or easy misunderstanding — has resulted in the increasing vogue of subjective writing. For a time it was fashionable to follow the realists. Villages, whether in ‘decadent New England’ or the monotony of the Middle West, supplied the setting, and old maids were a favorite subject. Everything about them was photographed in prose — their dwellings, their belongings, and their inhibitions. The story began with the old lady looking out of the window at the rain, and ended with the old lady looking out of the window at the rain. It was probably entitled ‘Rain.’ That was life.

But life was not as black as it was painted, and with the coming of Katherine Mansfield and the streamof-consciousness school the characterization took on a more natural hue. Here, as before, the mind is the principal arena of action. But, instead of being made to stare into the window as at freaks, the reader is induced to inhabit other minds and to see things as they see them. The head of the character is unscrewed, and then, as from Pandora’s box, comes forth a swarm of thoughts, recollections, and fancies. Outward description, inward reflection, now spoken, now unspoken comments, merge in a single stream. Some writers dismiss all punctuation; others make the most elaborate use of it.

There is, to give one instance, the ‘dot system.’ A lady sits before her dressing table lazily polishing her nails the while her mind rehearses a secret love affair. Her husband is in the next room, shaving. And here is what we read; —

And she . . . What color suited her? . . . Green, he had always said. Jade green, cool, fragile, untouchable. . . . Ah, but he had forgotten her fragility that night on the terrace. . . . And she . . . She had no longer been cool. . . . ‘Did you speak, Tom? You cut yourself? Oh, I am sorry.’ . . . But he, he would never cut himself. ... So sure, so deft, so . . . Ah, well. . . .

A magic significance is imparted to these omissions. If this mystic system were carried to its logical conclusion we might in the future find ourselves purchasing a set of characters and an arrangement of dots, — a kind of crossword puzzle, — to be filed in according to taste.

But this time will never come, for the good reason that people read to be entertained and that, despite psychology, romance, and the best of motives, what they want is a story, however dressed, which they could not invent for themselves and which is not too remote from their experience.

IV

There is a saying that poets are born, not made. If to genius we can apply the law of averages, there would seem to be considerable truth in this bromide; certainly we know that far the larger number of major — and minor — poets have burst into song at an early age. The phenomenon, so far as I know, has never been explained, though in itself it does explain why we receive and have gently to return so many juvenile verses, sent to us by proud parents and teachers.

But, early or late, the urge to versify comes to nearly all of us, and — if I may judge from our mail sacks — is seldom suppressed. The writing of verse was never more democratic than it is to-day. It may be true, as some critics say, that the genus of poets is steadily decreasing, but there is very positive evidence that the race of versifiers is increasing as rapidly as Mr. Butler’s pigs. The New York Times computed that, following Lindbergh’s flight, it received ten thousand Lindbergh poems, and I have not the slightest doubt of it, for when they were returned they were all immediately readdressed to us. And they came from everywhere. A newspaper reporting Eugene Field’s funeral declared that there were present at the ceremony ‘ninety-two Chicago poets.’ I do not know how many that city boasts to-day, though I suspect only one. But versifiers! For six months I kept a tabulation: in that time we received over seven thousand envelopes of verse, and as I read them I noted that they came from every state in the Union — though more numerously from New York and California and could be divided almost equally between male and female contributors.

There is, however, a more striking division than that of gender. In no other form of writing is the line so sharply drawn between the traditionalists and the freethinkers. By way of illustrating this cleavage I wish to quote from an essay by Humbert Wolfe, one of the younger English poets, which appeared in the Monthly Criterion: —

We have all, I think, been a little afraid to acknowledge how much we like Sara Teasdale. We can’t help feeling if this stuff — so simple, so straight, sometimes (apparently) so silly — is poetry, then what on earth is the heavy lumbering intellectual output, for which we are ourselves responsible. . . .

For example, there is this poem: —

You cannot easily escape from that poem. There is exactly the breathless sense of a wave hanging, and held always in that exciting instant. And with the sense of the suspended water is an echo or a memory of the Greek lover on the urn. It is all very disorganizing, and all very like poetry. . . . Well, let me proceed to Mr. Vines, who does n’t vex us in the same way.

Mr. Vines writes with that deliberate inversion which we have grown to associate with Art. He has thought seriously, and not unbeautifully, of the general structure of life and action. He has then carefully disfigured all his thoughts, like a Cubist wiping out the likeness in a portrait. Here, for an example, is an extract to set against Miss Teasdale. Mr. Vines is dealing with the progress of the human soul, and he has reached the realm of the prince, and that prince, as a supreme act of sacrifice,

Now, here we are at home in our own world of the obvious disguised as the incredible by being stated upside down.¹ It is the universe where everything is given a new value by being expressed in terms of an old but different one. Beauty, if I may use that outworn symbol, is rescued by being presented as a skeleton, and the least attractive parts of the human anatomy are given a subtle aura, which, if it faintly recalls fish, is none the worse for that.

Where, then, are we? Miss Teasdale provides the emotions proper to poetry, and is not a poet. Mr. Vines only provokes these emotions, when he puts his theories on one side — and he is a poet. . . . But for the most part it is so difficult to come by his meaning, his essential meaning, that the mind is puzzled rather than restored. . . .

Here, then, brightly contrasted, are the two opposing forces in contemporary verse: the traditionalists writing of the universe in the old conventional forms — sometimes at the risk of being too ‘obvious’; and the freethinkers, each with a theory and intent on a world ’of the obvious disguised as the incredible by being stated upside down.’ And in the wake of these forces swim no less eagerly the smaller fry. Some follow one leader, some another. Rupert Brooke, for instance, the last of the Tennysonians, has a great, following. If emulation is any test, ‘The Great Lover’ is his most enduring poem, and from it are derived numberless rhymed catalogues of personal likes and dislikes.

Some swim after the admirable A. E. Housman, though they seem to be unable to reproduce the simple movement of his quatrains. Contemporary writers, like the reviewers, find great difficulty in being restrained. Certainly the ego has an easier time in free verse. This freedom and the recent enthusiasm for a ‘native’ American literature must account for the increasing influence of Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, and — among the daring few — of T. S. Eliot. And a simpler explanation of the vogue may be that it does look easy. I am inclined to think so when I unfold a page which has a family resemblance to Alice’s version of the Mouse’s tail — in effect something like this: —

THE ACCIDENT

It is free, and it may be verse, but to many of us it seems more like what the Chinese student called ‘goggerel.’

Not that it is necessary for a poet to work consciously from a model. Real poets, says Santayana, create their own idiom. This idiom is a thing of fashion, a fashion set by those ideas which are current at a particular time. The ideas which fashioned the Commonwealth were caught up by Milton and made epic in his idiom. So today the idea of evolution stirs popular imagination and awaits the coming of another Milton. Meantime we receive many a screed about the Cosmic Process. Much of the idiom, having already been formulated by the scientists, is anything but lyrical: ‘Paleozoic,’ ‘crustacean,’ and ‘amœba,’ and such phrases as might have been lifted from Mr. Wells’s Outline, are not disposed to rhyme. Instead, the writer lays them out in strips of his own measurement, and we receive once a week, if not oftener, some such poem as this: —

COSMOS

and so on down to man.

Bringing creation down to earth has somewhat tempered our approach to divinity. ‘Divine Dialogues’ in which the writer quizzes his Creator and comes off only a little second best; ‘Challenges’ that begin

poems in which rain may be referred to as ‘God’s Sprinkler’ — these are of common enough occurrence to show that if we are long in the ego we are short not only in respect, but in a sense of the absurd.

A wise man has said that the reason our generation prides itself on its tolerance is that it holds so few things sacred. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in a comparison of the Victorian and our own attitude toward death. For the Victorians death was awesome: the poets contemplated it soberly and sometimes nobly. But it is worth remarking how few contemporary poems approach the theme, and how facetious are those few.

As for the ‘sense of the absurd’ — Whitman wanted it, and so does many an innovator to-day. So easy is it to lose perspective in one’s devotion to a theory that those very poets who are most intent upon freeing themselves from restraint — rhyme, predicates, and punctuation—are often the last to be aware of the ludicrous, if not positively funny, results they produce. They forget how rational arc the eyes of most readers; they do not stop to consider the possibilities of such a line as your lips fascinate me like a babbling brook — however fervent the rest of the love poem may be. Nor is the weakness confined to the freethinkers. Among the traditionalists, to take a single instance, are a surprising number of women — someone has dubbed them ‘The Samarkand School’ — who voice the desire to wander off with ‘Gypsy Lads’ on ‘Open Roads’ all of which eventually lead to ‘Samarkand’ for the closing rhyme. They, too, are wanting in a ‘sense of the absurd.’

Which brings us back again to the subject of idiom. Words, we know, have their ups and downs. For remote reasons a certain word will suddenly enjoy a débutante’s popularity, for six months will be the talk of the town — and then fade away. Such, in recent years, has been the fate of ‘realistic,’ ‘sensed,’ ‘complex,’ ‘gripping,’ ‘reaction,’ ‘intriguing’ — one could name a dozen more. These were not newly coined — merely gilded for the occasion. (Few novelists can be said to have added one word to our language. Even Mr. Sinclair Lewis has added only two.) Novelists, reviewers, and writers of advertising simply thrust them into circulation, and the public rubs the shine off. Poets, in the same way, have their seasonal favorites. We are all familiar with flourishing Victorian phrases. Here is ‘a little thing of mine own’ containing some of the pet verbiage of contemporary versifiers — though not, I realize, in a favored metre: —

NOVEMBER IMPRESSION

It need not be Keats. Any bird will do.

V

I have endeavored to describe some of the homemade products that are pouring into our magazine offices, and the thought that has gone into their making. And what, as we say to-day, do they prove? They prove, in the first place, that cacoethes scribendi, the ‘itch to write,’ is becoming, as James Norman Hall says, ‘ a common malady. ’ They prove that there is a very genuine, aspiring, and democratic interest in ‘self-expression.’ They prove that neither in college nor in correspondence courses can one be taught to write better than grammatical English. They prove, despite all that George Gissing had to say, that a literary career is still conceived to be more glamorous than any other. And, finally, they prove that the counter-attractions of the movies, the radio, the automobile, and golf have not. lessened the hold of books (magazines are but tabloid books) upon the public.