numerous, it may be said that throughout the prosperous and productive farming regions of the United States which have been settled for fifty years community life has disappeared."

Not very long ago, Mr. John R. Colter found a little town in North Carolina "socially poverty-stricken." It was a century and a half old, so he tells us, and "sixty per cent of its white citizens were members of five or six families who had lived there for generations; yet there were persons who did not know their own cousins living a few rods off. There was no neighborliness, no spirit of get-together. The people themselves said so." In the South! It sounds almost incredible, especially as "the town was isolated by nature and had remained so for lack of good roads. You might think that a community which is visited by a single train and single little river boat a day would have learned to become socially self-nourishing. But it had not. Never at any time did the people all get together to talk, to sing, walk, play, listen to entertainment, or laugh together. Their children did not know how to play games and get fun out of them-which boded ill for the next generation. And thus things had been going on in this North Carolina town for a long while."

It is not from mere belief in jollity for its own sake that one would wish to elevate such towns to the Elizabeth Street standard. It is from a profound, albeit unwilling, belief in the dire and woeful result of not elevating them to that standard. When a town loses the play spirit it loses good fellowship, and when it loses good fellowship it loses efficiency, and when it loses efficiency it loses people. The last Census revealed the alarming fact that more than half of us now live in cities. What wonder? From "dead" towns the younger set move away or the pluckiest of them do. And you have then a case of "natural selection the other end to, a survival of the unfittest." Stick-in-the-muds re

main, and run the place; or, more properly, walk it; or, still more properly, "leave it lay." The church declines. Schools decline. The very look of things betrays a retrograde movement. Houses lack paint. Grounds go ill-kept. On every hand there develops a suggestion of incompetency and unsuccess. Meanwhile the individual life grows narrow and a little hard, and more and more the villagers shrink from one another, dislike one another. Of such a town it was said, without much exaggeration, "This isn't a community, it is a disease."

I lived a year in that town. Its diversions were prayer-meetings, funerals, and fires, with now and then an auction. I respected the prayer-meeting. In a doleful, tragical way, I respected the funerals. They were especially doleful, especially tragical. Death, in that town, meant loss of population. Nothing was growing but the graveyard. And fire

Courtesy of Community Service

meant irreparable loss. A burned building was never replaced. But the auctions I laugh. Dolefully, it is true; yet I laugh. Among my most vivid memories is the spectacle of Moe Sykes and Sadie Green driving up Bumblebee Hill five miles in a pouring rain to look on at an auction-and as excited as if on their way to a Harvard-Yale Game. Poor things, they were recreationally starved!

Well, as Bimbo might ask (and probably will when we next meet at Migliore's), what are you going to do about it? The problem is not new. President Hyde, of Bowdoin, and President Tucker, of Dartmouth, exploited it years ago. President Roosevelt's Country Life Commission plowed the same field. And it is years now since we began to hear that some astonishing innovation or other would obligingly Sicilianize our "socially poverty-stricken" villages and small towns. For a time it was the telephone. Then it was the trolley car. Next it was the motor car. A bit later it was the graphophone. Later still it was the social settlement. But, while all these innovations tended to relieve what a peppery person quoted by Dr. Wilson terms "the intolerable condition of country life," material kept piling up for Mr. Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street."

Nevertheless there have been exceptions to the general rule of monotony and aching dullness. Dr. Wilson himself admits it. And this morning I have been devouring a booklet on "Rural and Small Community Recreation," which tells of the exceptions. Some friends of mine up in the Metropolitan Tower (Community Service, Incorporated, they style themselves) prepared this inspiring little encyclopædia of good times, with a view to showing dead-and-alive towns how easily they can jollify their existence. Moral: Go to it!

There will be great argument at

Migliore's next time. I am loaded, if not for bear, at least for Bimbo. I shall speak of the Saco Valley, where people from all the tiny villages assemble at a hilarious musical festival, which Kate Douglas Wiggin describes as "just a collection of small country choirs rehearsed separately," adding: "I have never seen enthusiasm equal to it. What splendid neighborliness and comradeship, all born of singing together!" Can Elizabeth Street beat that?

Also I shall tell him how "the families of farmers, fishermen, ship-builders, and seamen along the Maine coast drive for miles in bad weather so as not to miss local rehearsals for the great festival in Portland." Then I think I shall speak of Peterboro, New Hampshire, where MacDowell lived and wrote, and where "a Community Festival appropriately sings much of his music," and of Lindborg, Kansas, where the townsfolk perform Handel's "Messiah" three times each Easter week, with a chorus of five hundred and an orchestra of forty. The booklet says: "Each day of the week is given over to musical entertainment by visiting artists, and many hundreds of people flock to the little town." A regular festa, non e vero?

Here and there I have marked a pas sage in the book-for example, one about a harvest home festival got up by the Pennsdale Rural Progress Association. Great doings! "Arrival from outlying districts of men, women, and children by every means of conveyance." Morning of "tether, volley, and playground ball, potato races and mass play for the boys and girls and adults, and circle games and story-telling for the little tots." Community luncheon. Then "a pageant depicting the history of Pennsdale." Indians, lumberjacks, wood maidens in green with wreaths of mountain pine, haymakers, cornhuskers, milkmaids, all dressed as Jacko'-lanterns. Finally, "imposing fourhorse wagons loaded with youngsters, modern style." Then speeches and prizes, and with "supper under the trees and old-fashioned dances on the lawn" the close of a holiday gloriously enjoyed by "fully three thousand people."

rooms.

I shall point out, moreover, how a town here and there secures a permanent building for its gayeties. One such town, thirteen miles from the nearest railway station, "organized a Community Welfare Association and purchased the country hotel. Provision was made for headquarters in the building for all the churches and local organizations and for reading and game Adequate supervision of the house was secured by having the high school principal and his family occupy the second story. The old barn belong ing to the hotel was rebuilt, and over its door may be read in large letters 'Community Hall.'" Another instance, that of Brimfield, Illinois. There "a $30,000 community building has been erected. The greater part of the stock in this building has been taken by the farmers in the outlying districts, each

Courtesy of Community Service

share costing $25. The main feature of the building is the community theater, but by a clever arrangement of floor space there is provided room for dancing, basket-ball, games, gymnasium, roller-skating rink, a banquet room, parlor, and reception-rooms."

And in talking this over with Bimbo I shall find a lot to say about Professor Arvold, who is booming the Little Country Theater. At the North Dakota Agricultural College he has been teaching young folks to "produce plays which they can later take back to their own communities." He teaches them to remake town halls; to use screen scenery; to make use of the simplest materials in the most effective way." As the booklet adds, "By such means Mr. Arvold is giving farm people what they need more color and romance." Precisely. Under our skins, we are Sicilians, all of

us.

Now, I am not for inducing Bimbo to desert Elizabeth Street. At Migliore's he is a little ray of sunshine-"il sole mio." Let him remain there. In printer language, "Stet!" But he must abandon his contention that our country life is incurably dull-and so must our country folks, especially in towns where dullness is leading to worse calamities. If I understand those friends of mine up yonder in the Metropolitan Tower, at No. 1 Madison Avenue, New York, they feel that their work in promoting community recreation the country over means to "dead" villages and small towns a new lease of life, since playing together for the mere fun of the thing is a first step toward working together for community betterment. Witness this letter from a member of the girls' club started by the Y. W. C. A. in the little town of M-: "We found that there were great possibilities for a swimming-pool in a pond near town, had it drained, built bathhouses, and now the place is a scene of great sport. We are planning when winter comes to have a public skating rink there. We worked wonders with our abandoned opera house. We cleaned it

thoroughly and, with a little money made selling articles at a bazaar, we put in all the paraphernalia found in any first-class gymnasium. Our funds were so small the problem of heating it seemed almost beyond us, but there is always a way out. We rented the lower floor to a family in poor circumstances, giving the rent free in return for the care of the furnace and the janitor work.

"In the beginning our elders laughed at us, but now they also come. I saw three generations on one pole the other night, all as happy as larks. We are planning to buy chairs and make our main hall an auditorium for community gatherings. We girls who are home from school and who are compelled to remain in a small town, with its limited environment, are having such good times that we wouldn't live elsewhere for the world! We have interested the town parents in a sewerage system; we have talked paint until three-fourths of our houses boast new coats; we have clean-up days once a week, and our prizes for the best-looking lawns are putting our town on the map."

Just so. And in all likelihood it will stay on the map. Towns "die" or dwinIdle and sicken-not so much because it is difficult to get a living there as because it is well-nigh impossible to have any fun there. Yet right in those same towns all the ingredients of a roaring good time exist. Schoolhouses, churches, libraries, make excellent community centers. Talent abounds. The play instinct, long dormant, pops awake once you start something. Play, in its turn, awakens the social instinct, and sociability makes possible a concerted movement for progress and uplift, and the movement goes on until, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Wilson, there develops "a community to which people belong with some pleasure and pride," and, reversing the usual formula, cry, "Welcome to our village!" adding, heartily, "We wouldn't live elsewhere for the world!"

C

AN any good thing come out of Missouri? Surely not a prophet! Well, then, perhaps a poet-since nature is freakish. Else how should there be poets at all? And verily comes there one, in singing robes, and sable, modestly offering "Songs of My People."' And it is thus he introduces his people: My people laugh and sing, And dance to death,—

None imagining

The heartbreak under breath.

Is it not a proof of the true verse artist that these four lines are permitted to go as an entire poem? And here is another like unto it:

We have fashioned laughter
Out of tears and pain,
But the moment after,

Pain and tears again.

The singer is Charles Bertram Johnson, and this is in brief his life-story: Born at Callao, Missouri, October 5, 1880, of a Kentucky mother and a Virginia father, he attended a one-room school "across the railroad track," where who can explain this?-he was "introduced to Bacon, Shakespeare, and the art of rhyming." It reads like an old story. Some freak of a schoolmaster whose head is filled with useless lorepoetry, tales, and such stuff-nurturing a child of genius into song. But it was Johnson's mother who was the great influence in his life. She was an "adept at rhyming" and "she initiated me into the world of color and melody"-so writes our poet. It is always the mother. Then, by chance, he learns of Dunbar and his poetry. The ambition to be a poet of his people like Dunbar possesses him. He knows the path to that goal is education. He therefore makes his way to a little college at Macon, Missouri, from which, after five years, he is graduated-without having received any help in the art of poetry, however. Two terms at a summer school and special instruction by correspondence seem to have aided him here, or to have induced the belief that he had been aided. For twenty-odd years he followed the profession of teaching. For ten years of that period he also preached. His entire energies are now spent in the preacher's profession; he is at present pastor of the Second Baptist Church at Moberly, Missouri.

Teacher, preacher, poet; learning, religion, and song, anciently one, again are found in union, as they should be. The fact is Mr. Johnson is not at all given to preaching in verse. His sole aim is beauty-he assures me it is truth. Perhaps we are only using different words. The philosophy of Keats is true in the highest realm of thought. Perhaps it was the poet's dialect

1 Songs of My People. By Charles Bertram Johnson. The Cornhill Company, Boston.

pieces that suggested to him the title he has given his little book. These pieces seem to me to be strong in character delineation and to fuse humor and pathos, as genius is wont to do when genius dwells with a kindly heart. But perhaps also he was thinking of his two long odes, "The Mantle of Dunbar" and "Ode to Booker Washington." These are nobly pitched and well-sustained odes. Another poet of his race-Roscoe C. Jamison-he has also commemorated in "Lacrimæ Æthiopiæ." One stanza will represent the fluent melody of the

verse:

Too soon is hushed his silver speech,
The music dies upon the lute,
The cadence falls beyond our reach;
Too soon the Poet's lips are mute.

I do not wish to maintain that this poetry is great-only that it is genuine.

"Out in Chicago" is another singing Johnson, christened Fenton. His voice, too, is authentic. They are brothers only after the spirit, and as unlike as brothers sometimes are. He has flung out his banner twice to the world: "A Little Dreaming" (1914) and "Visions of the Dusk" (1915). Modest enough, these inscriptions.

Fenton Johnson's songs blossom out of the old plantation "spirituals" of the slaves. Do you, good reader, know about those "spirituals"? They are one of the most wonderful melodic achievements of our race: quaint, rude, primitive, pathetic beyond parallel, inexpressibly appealing; a people's "canticles of faith and woe," to change one word in a famous line. Fenton Johnson's melodies suggest these classics. Here is

one:

I PLAYED ON DAVID'S HARP

A Negro Spiritual

Last night I played on David's harp,
I played on Little David's harp
The gospel tunes of Israel;
And all the angels came to hear
Me play those gospel tunes,
As the Jordan rolled away.
The angels shouted all the night
Their "Glory, hallelujah" shout;
Old Gabriel threw his trumpet down
To hear the songs of Israel,
On mighty David's harp,
As the Jordan rolled away.

When death has closed my weary eyes
I'll play again on David's harp
The last great song in life's brief
book;

And all you children born of God
Can stop a while and hear me play,
As the Jordan rolls away.

Fenton Johnson is an unrivaled melodist. His harp has many strings, and there is no other harp exactly like it. One may like the music or not. If one does not like it, however, it will probably be because of its strangeness. One

2 A Little Dreaming. By Fenton Johnson. The Peterson Linotyping Company, Chicago.

has had no experience of anything like it. Better incomplete success, I say, in something peculiarly one's own than perfect strains of music long familiar. I cannot hope to represent the full range of Fenton Johnson's harp here, but, instead of several short melodies, I will give a chant which has some length, and more than its music to commend it:

THE NEW DAY From a vision red with war I awoke and saw the Prince of Peace hovering over No Man's Land. Loud the whistles blew and thunder of cannon was drowned by the happy shouting of the people. From the Sinai that faces Armageddon I heard this chant from the throats of white-robed angels: Blow your trumpets, little children! From the East and from the West, From the cities in the valley, From God's dwelling on the mountain, Blow your blast that Peace might know

She is Queen of God's great army.
With the crying blood of millions
We have written deep her name
In the Book of all the Ages:
With the lilies in the valley,
With the roses by the Mersey,
With the golden flower of Jersey
We have crowned her smooth young
temples.

Where her footsteps cease to falter
Golde grain will greet the morning,
Where her chariot descends

Shall be broken down the altar
Of the gods of dark disturbance.
Never more shall men know suffering,
Never more shall women wailing
Shake to grief the God of Heaven.
From the East and from the West,
From the cities in the valley,
From God's dwelling on the mountain,
Little children, blow your trumpets!
From Ethiopia, groaning 'neath her
heavy burdens, I heard the music
of the old slave songs.

I heard the wail of warriors, dusk brown, who grimly fought the fight of others in the trenches of Mars.

I heard the plea of blood-stained men of dusk and the crimson in my veins leapt furiously.

Forget not, O my brothers, how we fought

In No Man's Land that peace might come again!

Forget not, O my brothers, how we

gave

Red blood to save the freedom of the world!

We were not free, our tawny hands were tied;

But Belgium's plight and Serbia's woes we shared

Each rise of sun or setting of the

moon.

So when the bugle blast had called us forth

We went not like the surly brute of yore;

But, as the Spartan, proud to give the world

The freedom that we never knew nor shared.

These chains, O brothers mine, have weighed us down

As Samson in the temple of the gods; I'nloosen them and let us breathe the air

That makes the goldenrod the flower
of Christ.

For we have been with thee in No
Man's Land,

Through lake of fire and down to Hell
itself;

And now we ask of thee our liberty,
Our freedom in the land of Stars and
Stripes.

But I must dismiss this melodist and introduce another-this time a woman. A bit of her verse will best serve:

The dreams of the dreamer

Are life-drops that pass
The break in the heart

To the Soul's hour-glass.

The songs of the singer

Are tones that repeat
The cry of the heart

Till it ceases to beat.

The author's name is Georgia Douglas Johnson and her book of lyrics is entitled "The Heart of a Woman." "3 Truly it seems to be such-a heart that has known its Gethsemane, its garden of sorrow. The phantom happiness has aye fled before it, "along the trail of destiny:"

What need have I for memory,
When not a single flower
Has bloomed within life's desert
For me, one little hour?

What need have I for memory,
Whose burning eyes have met
The corse of unborn happiness
Winding the trail regret?

Mrs. Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and received her academic education in Atlanta University and a musical education at Oberlin. She now lives in Washington, D. C. She is at the beginning of her career as an author. A second book of lyrics, under the title of "An Autumn Love Cycle," will soon appear from the press. "Wisdom's cruelty"-the phrase is hers, and it reveals at what cost illusions have been slain, illusions that have left a woman's heart "unanswered and alone." One boon only has this bruised heart, and that is forgetfulness. This lyric is entitled "Peace:"

I rest me deep within the wood,
Drawn by its silent call;

Far from the throbbing crowd of man
On nature's breast I fall.

My couch is sweet with blossoms fair,
A bed of fragrant dreams;
And soft upon my ear there falls
The lullaby of streams.

The tumult of my heart is stilled,
Within this sheltered spot,
Deep in the bosom of the wood,
Forgetting, and-forgot.

These lyrics are the melodious tears of a heart overfull-tears that "fall in the heart like rain." What are the experiences and what the conditions of life which make a soul "try to forget it has dreamed of stars"? The tragedy is as deeply concealed as in "Smothered Fires:"

"The Heart of a Woman. By Georgia Doug Johnson. The Cornhill Company, Boston.

A woman with a burning flame

Deep covered through the years
With ashes-ah! she hid it deep.
And smothered it with tears.
Sometimes a baleful light would rise
From out the dusky bed,
And then the woman hushed it quick
To slumber on, as dead.

At last the weary war was done,
The tapers were alight,

And with a sigh of victory

She breathed a soft-good-night! Without one word or hint of race in all the book there is yet between its covers the unwritten, unwritable tragedy of that borderland race which knows not where it belongs in the world. A sadder book has not appeared among us. I am folding up my little dreams Within my heart to-night, And praying I may soon forget

The torture of their sight.

So this woman of the broken heart clasps the covers of her book, baffled by the eternal mystery.

THE NEW BOOKS

FICTION

ROGUES AND COMPANY. By Ida A. R. Wylie. The John Lane Company, New York. $1.75. Just for sheer amusement this irresponsible and lively story is capital. It is farce rather than comedy, but it is farce very well carried out and with many a laugh in it. Queer situations arise out of the plight of a man who has absolutely lost the memory of his past, who is convinced against his will that he is two or three different men and has to shoulder their wrong-doings and enter into their troubles.

THREE LOVING LADIES. By the Honorable

heaven, sin, and repentance, though he is quite unlike the religious prophets of the past. His Invisible God bears no resemblance to the just but pitiless Jehovah of Jonathan Edwards, or the "Infinite and Eternal Energy" of Herbert Spencer, or the "Father Man" of Professor Clifford; his hell is not a tormenting flame in a future inquisition, but the tormenting hate and greed of modern life; his heaven is not a celestial city "far, far away," but an earthly heaven which we are to make out of this earthly hell; repentance is "a bold reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions of minds;" and the condition of the world's salvation is "an understanding of and a will for a single world government." To the exposition of this "plan of salvation," what it is, what is the necessity for it, how it can be brought about, his latest volume is devoted. It possesses both the clearness and the vigor which generally characterize the writings of an egotist who is quite sure that he possesses a panacea for the ills that flesh is heir to and is eager to make the world listen to his message. The value of his panacea we do not here consider, but we commend his book as worth reading by any moral teacher who is oppressed by present world conditions and is open to a consideration of proposed remedies, whether true or false.

TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION STORY OF A THOUSAND-YEAR PINE (THE). Illustrated. By Enos A. Mills. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Mr. Mills is well known as a popularizer of what we have come to call "nature study." Especially has he done much to make us acquainted with the This exqui

Mrs. Dowdall. Houghton Mifflin Company, Rocky Mountain region.

Boston. $2.

There is something that reminds one of the leisurely and quietly satirical manner of Jane Austen in this story of English social and philanthropic circles in a second-class city. It is very far from exciting, but it has a gentle sense of humor, and more than most novels it deals with motive and personal traits rather than with what is unusual and extreme in life. Its women especially have marked individuality.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY ROMANCE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROGRESS (THE). By Rev. Robert Lee Webb, S.T.M. The Judson Press, Philadelphia. People who are tired of pessimistic forecasts as to America's future will find comfort and suggestion in the facts and reflections contained in these short chapters. SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION (THE). H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York.

By

There are three modern English authors who are sometimes classed together because they are radical in their thinking, entertaining in their expression, and write philosophy and fiction with equal facility: Chesterton, Shaw, and Wells. But Chesterton is a stalwart believer in the established order; Shaw, a critic who believes in nothing, not even in himself; and Wells, a religious prophet. He believes in God, hell,

sitely printed little volume tells us in particular about the southern Rockies and in very particular about the cliffdwellers' Mesa Verde, which stands at the corners of four States. The story of a "Thousand-Year Pine" is that of a venerable yellow-pine tree which Mr. Mills discovered within sight of the Mesa Verde. No one can read the story without some instantly keener appreciation of our natural resources and of the spiritual as well as of the material necessity of their conservation. TAMING NEW GUINEA. By C. A. W. Monck

ton. The John Lane Company, New York. $. The title hardly gives a fair idea of the entertaining quality of this narrative. It abounds in curious experiences in sport, in work, and with odd characters among the natives and the white men. In parts it is as exciting as a plot story. It will certainly please lovers of adventure in new countries. TOUR IN A DONKEY-CART (A). By Frances

Jennings. Illustrated. The John Lane Company, New York. $7.50. Here is the strange, sad story of a crippled girl of imagination and latent genius. Her letters and drawings reflect the pathetic background of her life. The narrative grips one and the pictures are full of a strange power, though they cannot be said exactly to ustrate the "tour in a donkey cart."