The Contributors' Column

‘RECOLLECTIONS of a Respectable Mediocrity’ . . . Probably not one reader in America would recognize under such a title Great Britain’s distinguished Ambassador to the United States from 1924 to 1930, then Sir Esme, now Lord Howard of Penrith; but his engaging modesty led him to adopt the title suggested to him in the Fifth Form at Harrow. The Atlantic chapters of his autobiography, however, concern themselves not so much with diplomacy as with the record of the romantic and adventurous youth which led him to his life work. Albert Jay Nock upholds his reputation for ‘most ingenious paradox’ in ‘The Quest of the Missing Link,’ but his thesis is the expression of his absolute and considered belief. Δ ‘The Progressive Tradition’ has no more fitting exponent than Rexford G.Tugwell, Undersecretary of Agriculture, who delivered this significant contribution to social history in a recent address at Union College, Schenectady. Δ ‘The Vanishing Gentleman’ continues the discussion begun last month by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, an author and scholar whose traditions inevitably destine him for his present research. Δ When February Hill was given to a receptive world last October, the publishers astutely demanded of the public: ‘Have you discovered Victoria Lincoln?’ Since then her wit and her sensitive understanding of character have been recognized in all parts of the country. Her belief was that she could write only at novel length, but her first short slory (’All Losses Are Restored’) should convince author and reader otherwise.

‘Free Inquiry or Dogma?’ was delivered at a special convocation at Amherst College on January 12, 1935, by James Bryant Conant. It is, many will agree, his most important public utterance since he assumed the Presidency of Harvard University two years ago. Δ The Yankee who puts up his own when ‘Hands across the Sea ’come into play ‘knows his stuff.’ Charlotte Kellogg (‘The Beloved Doctor’) is the wife of Professor Vernon Kellogg, and one of the many devoted friends of the late Dr. William H. Welch of Johns Hopkins University and the world. Phillips P. Elliott (‘Religion and the Gospel of Success’) is minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York. Curtis Billings, a member of the staff of the Public Safety Division of the National Safety Council, considers in ‘Alcohol and Motors’ the problem that has arisen since the repeal of Prohibition. Δ All we may say about the author of ‘The Art of Dying’ is that her experience is as genuine as her message. Paul Hoffman, whose ‘Mud Time’ is his first published verse, has recently joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly Press. Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (‘The Crow’) graduated from Harvard in 1932, and as Curator of Ornithology in a Southern museum has done a good deal of work for a biological service station. ‘Just now,’ he writes, ‘I am getting ready to leave for Para, Brazil, to help investigate the backwaters of a river near the Amazon.’ Harold Goldman (‘Heart-Unbroken’) appears for the first time in the Atlantic. Δ ‘The Great Rich Vine’ is the first prose we have published by John Holmes, although several poems of his have appeared in the Atlantic. He teaches English composition and modern poetry at Tufts College. Louis Stark, Washington correspondent of the New York Times, writes on ‘The American Federation of Labor’ with the detachment of a trained investigator who has no personal axe to grind. He is recognized as an authority on labor problems. Δ ‘An Old English House’ is described with the magic touch that characterizes all the writing of Llewelyn Powys, particularly when, as here, his own experience is drawn upon. Arthur Pound (‘The Atlantic Portfolio of Industry’) has acted as industrial guide, philosopher, and friend to the Atlantic since the publication of his Iron Man a decade and a half ago.

Logic and the louse.

Dear Atlantic, —
Informed and entertained by Hans Zinsser’s ‘History and the Louse,’ I was also reminded of other louse lore found in Dr. Halliday Sutherland’s autobiography, The Arches of the Years. On his visit to tho island Lewis, of the Outer Hebrides, Dr. Sutherland found the following peculiar situation: —
‘The public health authorities had started a delousing campaign in the islands. This was opposed to the ideas of the people, who believed that lice came out of the blood and were a sign of health. At first glance that view is sheer superstition, but I discovered that it was merely a wrong deduction made from the correct observation of the facts. More than once typhus fever had decimated the population, and during the fever the temperature of the body rises. When the temperature rises all lice leave the body. This fact these people had observed and remembered, and from that observation had concluded that lice were a sign of health, as, in logic, they are.’
GEDDES H. JACKSON
Berkeley, California

The trials of sainthood.

Dear Atlantic, —
In the spirit of this case-loving generation that prefers to do its louse-hunting by proxy, I voice my gratitude to Dr. Zinsser for his intimate and moving account of the insolent parasite, in your January number. No one who lovingly explores the records of asceticism can fail to recall additional relevant data, as he peruses Dr. Zinsser’s thrilling pages. He is reminded, for instance, that Julian the Apostate prided himself on the populous and undisturbed (if not uadisturbing) colony in his Neoplatonic whiskers, in which respect he was prepared to vie with the most devout of Christian ascetics; and that Christian monks in general neither shaved nor disinfected the beard, at least till after the time of the holy Bernard of Clairvaux. In Bernard, be it noted, sainthood reached its peak, unless we are to award the prize to the Little Poor Man of Assisi, who also bore, patiently and not proudly, the badge of manhood upon his chin.
JOHN T. MCNEILL
Divinity School, University of Chicago

The ultimate answer.

Dear Atlantic,
Here is a true story for the entertainment of Dr. Hans Zinsser.
The Biology class was having a test in Protozoa. The first question was: ‘Name the living processes which all animals must perform.’ The second question: ’Explain why Protozoa, which have one cell only, are able to perform these same processes.’
I received the following answer from one student: ‘The Lord created the Protozoa so that they are able to perform the living processes, therefore they perform them.’
JULIA ALEXANDER
Fort Wayne, Indiana

Dizzy dithyrambs on the New Physics.

Dear Atlantic,—
‘This Mysterious Universe,’which J. W. N. Sullivan contributed to your January issue, would make the average reader double in on himself and then unbend as follows:—

F. A. WOOD
La Jolla, California

A visit with James Norman Hall.

Dear Atlantic, —
You surely will be interested to hear that the lifesaving old hen, made famous by James Norman I Hall in his utterly delightful Tahitian tale, ‘Sing: A Song of Sixpence,’ first published in the Atlantic Monthly some years ago, has just died of old age. Her passing was peaceful; her industrious and productive body was found, with bright eyes closed, upon her nest only yesterday.
To-day as I sat upon the balmy porch of Mr, Hall’s plantation home but a few miles from Papeete, sipping a cool drink from a tall and frosty glass, he told me of her passing. Everyone who has read Mr. Hall’s charmingly told tales of the South Seas which the Atlantic Monthly has been generous and wise enough to give to the world has read about this old hen presented to him by a grateful Chinese friend.
From the very day I landed upon this favored isle I kept a watchful eye out for land crabs, which he told of eating while waiting for his ship to sail into Papeete harbor. I soon saw hundreds of them tiptoe dancing across the roads, dragging yellow hibiscus blossoms into their mud-rimmed homes. Needless to say, the ships he and his friend Nordhoff recently sent out laden with the precious Mutiny on the Bounty and Men against the Sea have duly returned with rich cargo of gold and fame. The eggand-crab days have long since passed, but is it possible for any diet to produce more time-enduring books than these two?
With courage born of fervent admiration of Mr. Hall’s writings I ventured to call upon him, with not even a letter of introduction to help me. But I would as soon think of sailing below the equator without making an effort to see the Southern Cross as to be in Tahiti for a month and not try to see Mr. Hall!
He was engaged in the healthful exercise of cutting wood, but with courteous word and pleasant voice bade me welcome, introduced me to his lovely wife and little daughter. I wished to know so many things, but did not like to ‘interview’ (hateful word) him. However, I could not resist asking him how it was possible for two men to write one book. It seemed so unlikely that perfect unity could be achieved. But he said that they talked over the plan, or plot, of a book, decided which chapter each preferred to write, and when each was finished the other one would read it over, criticize, suggest changes, and thus develop and unify the whole thing.
Such harmonious friendship, such close association of ideas and ability to adjust thought and word, is one of the rarest and most precious things in life. Fortunate are they to have found so utterly satisfying a friendship. Long may they continue the best of friends, adding thus to the choice list of the world’s best literature.
ELOISE ROORBACH
Papeete, Tahiti

‘Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.‘

So many were the readers who took with deadly seriousness the satire in Mr. Bergen Evans’s ’Nursery Crimes’ that the Atlantic felt impelled, in these pages, to caution the author never to dare to write as funny as he could. Whereupon a critic after our own heart sent in the following lines inscribed ’To the Atlantic: May It Be Always Salt!’

CHARLES FOSTER RANSOM
Tufts College, Massachusetts

A living example of ‘Musical Hunger.’

Dear Atlantic, —
Thanks so much for letting Catherine Drinker Bowen express the feelings of so many of us who are inarticulate in print!
Last year, in the Contributors’ Column, I told Atlantic readers that I was commencing the study of the piano. In four months I shall be sixty (you can’t make me believe it, though) and my repertoire now includes five Bachs, four Griegs, besides Schubert, Mendelssohn. Tchaikowsky, and others. And I can play (believe if or not) the Adagio Cantabile of Beethoven’s Pathétique, Op. 13.
And boy, is it fun! By the time I am eighty I shall be playing — maybe — Brahms and maybe — Liszt; anyhow, I’m on my way!
And if they don’t, have grand pianos in Heaven I am not sure I want to go there; I much prefer ’em to harps!
A. E. BRUCE
Claremant, California

More polylinguistics.

Dear Atlantic, —
I believe it was Carter H. Harrison, former Mayor of Chicago and now Collector of Internal Revenue, who in the early ’80s, while a student at St. Ignatius College, contributed to the amusement of the Latinloving students the following lines: —

WILLIAM S. HEFFERAN, Attorney
Chicago, Illinois

P.S. I have sent him a copy, and have asked him to plead Guilty or Not Guilty.
P.P.S. (A week later) He pleads Guilty.

Legal pi.

Dear Atlantic, —
‘The Kansas Legislature . . . for convenience, by statutory enactment changed pi from 3.1416 to an even number.’
I have read this statement in an authoritative book on government. The Secretary of State of Kansas and the State Superintendent of Schools both deny that such legislation was ever enacted in Kansas. The author of the quotation simply remembers reading it in an article appearing many years ago. It may have been another state or foreign legislative body which proposed this curious law.
I am very anxious to identify the source and learn of its particulars. If any reader remembers the article, or knows where I might trace down the matter, I should be glad to hear from him.
R. W. MATTOON
Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

An unusual proposal.

Dear Atlantic, —
Because of difficulties with income, I am obliged to limit outgo to the three necessaries of life for myself and family: food, clothing, and shelter. For extras I can offer only service. It is with regret that I place the Atlantic in the class of extras; but while every issue contains food for thought, there is in it little food for children. So much do I regret my inability to renew my subscription that I am appending a list of my accomplishments in the hope that you will find there some item by which I can work out the price of a renewal.
I can drive a yoke of oxen.
I can write shorthand (rusty).
I can navigate a ship (also rusty).
I can tend furnace, sift ashes, and generally raise a dust.
I understand hens, and know when they are making egg-talk.
I can set a pane of glass.
I have a fair taste in literature, and can write moderately well.
I can paint a house, or put on a new roof.
I can mend leaky water faucets, and can usually find the trouble when the light fails to turn on.
I have a legal education, but no practice.
I can chop a cord of wood in twice the time a professional wood chopper requires.
I can milk a cow, load hay, use a hoe, cultivator, plough, or harrow.
I can burn out a nest of wasps.
I think I have solved the mystery of religion, and have penetrated further into some phases of the psychological field than any other man.
WILLIs A. KINGSBURY, JR,
Framingham, Massachusetts-

Titular tour de force.

Dear Atlantic, —
The following lines were inspired hy the titles of books advertised in a recent issue of the Atlantic.

EDNA JUNE HORN
Newark, New Jersey

In defense of progressive schools.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have had a passion for teaching ever since I was eight years old. Of course I had to begin on my younger brothers, But from the time I was nineteen until I married I taught in a real school, probably badly, — most people did in those days, — but I learned a few things, First: that education is n’t pouring things into a child, but pulling them out of him; and that you can’t pull much out unless you can interest him in the subject, or at least make him feel the worth-whileness of it enough to make him realize that the satisfaction of good work is better than any happiness he may get out of play.
Alter I was married and had had several children, of course I read everything on education that I could find.
I remember with great interest some article in the Atlantic by Edward Yeomans of the Ojai Valley School and later his Shackled Youth. And of course, as my children grew up, I visited till the schools within my reach. To my delight I found that they were moving forward — especially those afflicted with the tag ‘progressive.’ Is n’t it a little like calling them ’intelligent’? I suppose all schools aim at being both; but so many of them really were. I have never been fortunate enough to visit the Lincoln School, but I find if difficult to believe that it was so far behind the ‘progressive schools’ I have seen. The ones I know best aim first at ‘capacity to think, and selfdiscipline,’ believing that knowledge, facts, will come — tempered, we hope, by wisdom, and accompanied by a sense of responsibility born of the fact. that the students are free to make some mistakes, and suffer from them. I have heard one headmaster say that he was satisfied ‘now that he had the scholars chasing the teachers, instead of the teachers the scholars,’ but I am sure he would agree with Professor Friedrich that the relationship between teachers and students should never be sentimentalized.
Of course every new tool that comes to the human race is mishandled by some fools — especially at first. But I do believe that the best of the modern (‘progressive’) methods are more of a boon to the poor than to the rich, and I rejoice to see some of the new ideas creeping in, here and there, into our public schools.
HELEN CABOT ALMY
Cambridge, Massachusetts

A teacher’s view.

Dear Atlantic, —
There is such opprobrium attached to the term ‘conservative’ among teachers that one is willing to go to almost any length to avoid this damning epithet. If the Atlantic could take a poll of teachers, I am sure that an overwhelming majority would applaud ’This Progressive Education.’ But even though we had the facile pen of Professor Friedrich, we should hesitate to write a criticism of so-called ’progressive education’ as he has done. We must be ’progressive,’ and ‘certainly these experimental schools are progressive,’ conclude our executives. Some university should award Professor Friedrich an advanced degree for having the temerity to enter the holy of holies and kick up some dust.
A MIDDLE-WESTERN TEACHER

On coddling the young.

Dear Atlanlic,
The last night before the school year began found me reading with delight that excellent article, ’This Progressive Education.’ Professor Friedrich’s cogent comments struck a responsive feeling in me, and I am in hearty accord with his general thesis. It seems to me that the one great fault with our educational policies is the prevalent softness. Such articles as this make for a sounder attitude on the part of those concerned — the teachers and the parents.
HERBERT SNYDER
Cincinnati Country Day School
Madisonville, Ohio

Varmints in verse.

Dear Atlantic, —
Mr. Phillips’s concern lest his readers might have escaped knowledge of varmints may be spared for those of us who have lived in the Middle West and Southwest. Varmints are well known in those regions, while the Ozark hills of Missouri and Arkansas fairly overflow with them.
But let him not think that the word is an Americanism, or a recent growth. For here is a stanza from Tennyson’s ‘Owd Roä.’
Sa I brow l tha down, an’ I says, ’I mun gaw up ageUn fur Roä.’
‘Gaw up ageän fur the varmint?‘ I tell’d ’er, ‘Yeäs I mun goä.’
In this case the ‘varmint’ was Rover, the faithful house dog who had just assisted in the rescue of the son of the house from a blazing loft.
But I have searched in vain for the word in Shakespeare, which is a pity, since varmint is just the sort of word Shakespeare would have known how to handle.
MARY ZIRKLE;
l />/>er Darby, Pennsylvania

Who can answer this query?

Dear Atlantic, —
In these days many thousands of young folks who have every intellectual right to go to college cannot do so. This in spite of student loans, scholarships, and other aids. Is it possible, in view of this situation, for young men and women who have no chance to study on a college campus to get a college education without going to college? Just how should such an ambitious young person go about it to get the best possible substitute for the college course which seems absolutely out of reach?
Here is a typical young man graduated with honors from a good high school. He would like to equip himself thoroughly for his life work, would like to make the very most of himself, to be the most useful possible citizen of the United States and of the world. He is not thinking about technical courses of any kind, but about preparation for living as well as for making a living. Who can outline a course of procedure for such a choice youth? Perhaps some Atlantic reader can answer.
REVEREND OTIS MOORE
R.F.D. I. Tipton, Iowa

Private worlds.

Dear Atlantic, —
Thoughtful persons must have read with interest Mr. J. W. N. Sullivan’s article in the September Atlantic entitled ‘Science and the Layman.’ Suggesting that science is not necessarily hostile to religious belief, the author observes that ’there are questions that science is incompetent to deal with, and beliefs may rightly be based on evidence which is not scientific evidence.’ Thus, science ‘deals with a public world,’ while ‘my toothache, my perception of beauty, my sense of communion with God,’belong

to a private world. ‘These are not perceptions that everybody shares; nor can universal assent be claimed for them.’
It seems to me that the attempted classification of perceptions as public or private may be of doubtful validity, and at least offers the opportunity for unnecessary argument. Why not adopt the classification made by a brilliant mathematician and physicist and say (Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 275): ‘The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientifice domain of experience is . . . not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental, but between the metrical and the non-metrical.‘
If we adopt this test, then the suggestion of Mr. Sullivan that perceptions of beauty ‘are not therefore necessarily illusions‘ becomes an all too modest statement, more strongly put by Eddington, who says: ‘Certain states of awareness have at least equal significance with those which we call sensations. It is upon this that the basis for a spiritual religion rests.’
The subject seems fundamental even in these days of distressing problems. Who can say that science may not shortly agree that man is not ’a fortuitous concourse of atoms’?
JOHN H. S. LEE
Evanston, Illinois

More things of beauty.

Dear Atlantic, —
After reading the little essay, ‘Things of Beauty,’ in the Contributors’ Club for September, I became ‘suddenly conscious of a world of beauty’ about me, and sat right down to draw up a list of my own. Here are some of the items: —
Creativeness expressed in the hands of a potter at his wheel.
The smell of the thirsty soil after the first sudden shower in the fall.
One’s vivid consciousness of one’s physique after a day of hard physical work, when through sweet aching every single muscle and nerve asserts its existence.
Sunset from the window of my room, across the plain of Sharon, with a train of camels on the horizon.
A simple, healthy meal with a group of hungry, healthy men sharing it.
The physical awkwardness of a growing boy.
The course of the Nile as a continuous line of green life defying the gray death of the desert sands on both sides.
A plough splitting open the heart of the ripe soil.
Complete unselfconsciousness.
A personality that is harmonious and integrated, whose mind is as clear as a bell, whose heart is as pure and clean as the lily, who is genuinely concerned with the truth at all times, whose living is as the overflowing of pure spring water, and whose, essence is graceful unselfishness.
AFIF I. TANNUS
American University, Beirut
Lebanon, Syria