fourth we have published, and others will follow it. He started out with some good advice given him by Louis Evan Shipman, of Life, who, he says, leaned across the big table in the building at Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and listened to his plans for some stories as yet unwritten. Mr.

Huston remarked that he had written a certain type of story. Mr. Shipman struck the table with his fist and challenged him with the statement: "There is only one type of story for you to write and that is a McCready Huston story!" "And you can't add anything to that," explains the author. "It represents the beginning and the end of

theories for creative workers."

* * *

But then, of course, comes the real difficulty: how shall the author be himself, and write his own individuality into his work? Mr. Huston solves it by letting the things write themselves. He says he would rather write one story that he could not help doing than manufacture a hundred. He does not reproduce characters and places photographically; he is more interested in the processes of people who act, in spite of what he can do, as they please.

* * *

"Not Poppy-"" had an unusual origin; it was compelled by a desire to do justice to an impression. The author explains: "Lines from Shakespeare bother me a lot; it takes the form of being unable to keep from repeating passages like 'To-morrow and tomorrow and to-morrow' from 'Macbeth'and 'Trifles light as air' from 'Othello,' when, overheard, I might lay myself liable to a commission in lunacy. After having the title I could do nothing until I had the name for the leading man. I never have been able to realize a story with the leading character named unsatisfactorily and have never failed to realize one when his name was, to me, everything it should be. After he was put down in the right picture, he found his own set of circumstances and met them in his own way. I'm afraid I had very little to do with it.

"One obstacle in the way, however, is the matter of words. To me it seems that mere words are likely to clutter and obscure a story. The hard part is to keep from writing, to avoid the danger of beginning to approach a situation before one is ready. Trying to follow that rule reduces one's out

author's family; but it helps him keep away from what seems to me disastrous, hasty, and inevitably unworthy work."

Phelpsian Etiquette

Phelps teaches the students of Yale UniIt appears that Professor William Lyon versity more than English. While the recent onslaught of women students began to play havoc with the Yale undergraduate's peace of mind and sense of the fitness of things, and while the faculty deliberated on what should or should not be done, Professor Phelps proceeded with his usual geniality to instruct them in the appropriate

attitude. According to a man in one of his classes, which boasts seven girl students, it is his habit to rise and bow profoundly whenever the ladies enter or submit papers. Undergraduate etiquette may have to undergo revision. Phelps, being the rare sort of critic who can write in a monthly with all the verve of a colyumnist, wins from the Lewisburg (Ky.) Leader the comment that he has "possibly the widest audience of any critic in America." This must ease his mind of all sense of responsibility, even if Percy Hammond's vision should be faultless. Mr. Hammond remarks in his column in the New York Tribune: "I can picture the drama-loving Yale men, setting out from New Haven for a week-end's communion with the New York theatre, studying as they do so their preceptor's recommendations of Broadway's worth-while things" and then "despite the professor's helpful guide-posts to 'Sun-Up' and 'Cyrano"" losing their way and arriving punctually at the Music Box or the Winter Garden."

Apropos of his discussion of modern art in "The Field of Art" is a paragraph from Royal Cortissoz's latest book, "American Artists": "In art there is, spiritually speaking, no such thing as the past. Chronology is largely a matter of conversational convenience. The masterpieces of antiquity are preserved, immobile, in the rooms of a museum, with dates over the door, but it is a mistake to think of them as held, in time, in a kind of atrophy, within airless, watertight compartments." Because Cortissoz applies the philosophy of this paragraph to criticism, he remains, after over twenty years at it, the most vital of the art critics of to-day.

The force of the past which impels Soames Forsyte to mount the steps of the Iseeum Club and inquire for his cousin, George, at the opening of this, the third, instalment of the Galsworthy serial novel "The White Monkey," has gained a momentary victory in his daughter Fleur, after a struggle which has been going on since the story began.

Forced by relentless circumstance to give up the man she loved, she married Michael Mont, a young publisher, and now after two years still attempts to fill her life with action to the elimination of thought, to seek sensations with sentiment overruled. Find ing the young poet, Wilfred Desert, in love with her, she is brought face to face with the necessity for a decision. She is unwilling to adopt the modern attitude entirely, yet when Wilfred threatens to go East, she is reluctant to lose him. "You will be a fool to go. Wait!" is her injunction.

Even though she does later go to Wilfred's

rooms, she is still unable to face finality, and she escapes. That night when Michael tells her that Wilfred has confessed his love for her, she passes it off with a word, but admits that she does not know the end. Neither does Michael.

The conduct of Michael toward his wife is in striking contrast to that of Soames toward Irene in Galsworthy's earlier work "The Man of Property." The difference marks the gulf between the two eras. Soames wanted beauty and love, but he could not but regard his wife as his property

her thoughts, her feelings, everything should be his. Michael, on the other hand, wonders whether he has a right to hold Fleur.

Coming out of the war with illusions shattered and the attitude that "feeling is tosh and pity is tripe," Michael betrays both by interceding unavailingly for Bicket, an employee of his firm who stole books to nourish his wife.

Struthers Burt's long poems, from the first one, "When I Grew Up to Middle Age," down to his latest, "Threnody in Major and Minor," have caused considerable discussion. The originality of his work has made many people wonder how it is that he gets his effect.

When asked about technique, Burt begins to talk of the tonal values of words, which he says he finds among the most delightful things in the world. Tone and actual sound, quite apart from meanings, fascinate him; he would not for anything make of them merely a medium for the expression of thought. Rather they should fuse with thought to embody the complete idea.

It is this very tonal technique which distinguishes Burt's work. He uses what might roughly be called a free ode form, in

iambics; and the present poem, largely in iambic pentameter, departs in places from its strict form, but always with the deliberate intent of the poet. It is always rhymed, but rhymed exactly as Burt happens to please. He never twists a line or strains a phrase or indulges in an inversion for the sake of his rhyme-in fact, he never makes use of poetic license. But his rhymes and repetitions are consciously placed for their emotional effect, and the resulting ease and smoothness is not the simple affair that it appears, but rather the true ease of art.

The excellence of Burt's prose, in which, as in his poetry, the sound strengthens and enhances the sense, forms one of the less obvious reasons why his brilliant novel, "The Interpreter's House," stands on the list of best-sellers.

College shortly after her poem "The Trust" sees the light of print. She has lived all her life in Philadelphia and New England, and looks forward to study abroad soon after graduation. She has no plans beyond that, since she admits to a recently acquired appreciation of the uncertainty of futures. RECREATIONS OF A SCREEN-WRITER

"People are continually handing me back my manuscripts, shaking their heads, and saying sadly, 'My boy, I knew your father!"" writes George Marion, Jr., who admits himself still considerably in awe of that parent. Yet we cannot believe that the actor-manager will have any very strong objections to his son's greatest ambition, which has always been to write the book and lyrics of a successful musical comedy. Apropos of his literary doings we are fortunate in being able to print the following "Outline of George Marion, Jr.," just as we received it:

All too recently this Boston-born youth emerged, a demi-baked bean, from the La Villa School, at Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was the worst member of the worst geometry class and the best crew on that institution's records. Of Irish and Hungarian ancestry, and an actor's son, the young man had little trouble persuading himself that he ought to write. But an early effort chanced to fall beneath the eyes of certain princes of the cinema, with the result that a film yclept "The Beautiful Liar," featuring Katherine MacDonald, was projected on numerous screens. Thereafter young Marion has journeyed along filmy ways and he is even now engaged in adapting for the films the "Telephone Girl" stories of H. C. Witwer out of the Cosmopolitan. Craving complete change from the sombre business of adapting these droll narratives, Marion turns of an evening to the joyous pastime of composing gloomy stories. Since almost all his years were spent in Europe, he not unnaturally turns to that locale in his individual endeavors. "The Second Francis the First" was suggested and evolved while promenading daily through the sets erected for F. Marion Crawford's "In the Palace of the King" at the Goldwyn Studios

last summer.

Marathon to Athens makes a good afternoon's hike, according to John Finley, who covered this famous twenty-six-mile stretch in five hours last summer, and wrote his poem, "The Blue Flowers of Marathon," as a result. The milestones were in disrepair and the mound of Marathon overgrown with flowers and shrubs, and Dr. Finley, who is president of the International Pedestrians' League, wishes the road and its markings might be kept up, so that others could enjoy as he did this historic and beau

on Marathon and the sea. Dr. Finley, besides being a noted walker and former star on the Johns Hopkins football team, is a well-known educator, and since 1921 associate editor of the New York Times.

Much has been loosely said about style in literature and life, and a critic takes his portion of the latter in his hand when he writes on that moot question, for he thereby makes himself a target for all critics who hold a different position. W. C. Brownell will incur the wrath of some of these for his sound and illuminating statement of the case for abstract style in a series of three essays, of which the one this month is the second. There is no other critic writing to-day whose reasoned opinion has more value, or whose range of knowledge and experience better qualify him for his task. Last month Mr. Brownell discussed the definition of style. He follows up this month with a consideration of the function of style in life.

AN ARTIST IN NORTH SQUARE "I would rather stand on the street corner and sketch than be President of the United States." The results of this preference of Frederick Polley's have been our gain, for he has caught the personalities of many cities, including New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, in his characteristic drawings, and now makes his fifth appearance in the Magazine.

Polley likes to sketch from the curb and only very rarely feels disturbed by crowds. Men sometimes murmur approval; little boys prove a pest; women never trouble him at all. But he did encounter difficulties in Boston while making the sketch of the Paul Revere House reproduced in this issue. He tried for several days to get up courage to go into North Square, in the swarming Italian district; and on a hot morning in August chose the sunny side from which to work, thinking he'd be let alone. But a charity organization was giving an outing to five hundred children of the neighborhood, who brought along their entire families and completely jammed the narrow street. They climbed all over Polley, exhibiting the usual small boys' curiosity. Then to add to his discomfort the artist discovered he had taken up a position near a ward hospital in which a patient had died, and the funeral cortege was added to the general congestion.

(Continued on page 5)