The New York herald. [volume] (New York, N.Y.) 1920-1924, 1922-04-16


.knighthoods and side whiskers re-
duced the BENEFITS and Stainers
and Stanfords of England; that the
Nobel prize will probably never
follow the course of empire. We
have no baronetcies by which a
novelist many receive equal honor
with barrister or a brewer. We
have no supreme Order of Merit,
which leaves our literary journal
lists without such opportunity for
divine discomfort as the English
critics enjoyed on New Years Day,
when Sir James Barrie was chosen
from all England to sit alone with
Thomas Hardy above the salt. And
if our Congress should present
medals for service with the pen as
well as for service with the sword
we should have just such a pother
over Mr.. Theodore Dresser, who
says his nay as unfalteringly as
Mr.. Hardy, and in a prose which is
scarcely worse for America than
Mr.. Hardy's is for England.-By
Frances Neiomdn in the Reviewer.
The Ultimate Sources of Folklore.
IN HE folklore of children's games
i is a reservoir of persisted SUI
perstitutions, spells, charms, divi-
nations, and what not, and their
doggerel (''Eena, meena, mona, mi,
Pasca, lara, bona, BIZ" &c.) records,
nine times out of ten, the relics of
incantations. Thus does the oral
tradition of the ages hand on their
human childhood to children who,
happily, know not what they say.
This odd packing up of the past
into rhyme goes some way toward
explaining why folk rhymes are so
rarely poetic. One does not meet
a catch like this "a form for val
entine):
1.-THE rose is red, the violet's blue.
The honey's sweet, and SO are you
Thou art my love, and l am thine;
/ drew thee to my Valentine
The lot was cast, and then drew.
And fortune said 1t should be you."
once in a hundred pages. Folk
rhymes are vestigiary structures,
like "Darwin's point" on the ear,
and were never intended to be
poetry, even in their origins
From the London Nation and Athe-
noun.
French Society in Moliere's Day.
IL RENCH society, in Moliere's
i time, was shaped, settled and
bounded. Perhaps already too
much so. Capitalization and for
mutation had set in unduly, and the
grand rough reckoning was to come
a hundred years later. Abuses ex-
listed to the hand of the censor mo-
rum; survivals from a medieval So
ciety, and newer growths to be
pruned later by the sharp knife of
revolution. Moliere, as he grew
older, found abundant matter to
suggest reform. Half of his plays,
declares Faguet, are plays with a
moral. Yet Moliere himself, he
hastens to add cautiously, if moral,
is only "as moral as experience"
Remy de Gourmont, of freer ma
ture and a more liberalizing mind,
finds in ''L'Ecole des Femmes," in /
"Tartuffe." and even in Don
JUAN" protestations in favor of
natural liberty and against the
morality of constraint.-By Henry
B. Fuller in The Freeman.
Chicago as a Literary Center.
THE vantage point which New
L York occupies is not to be
denied or overlooked. How then
are we to account for the fact that
Chicago, by common consent, has
brought forth or stimulated such
salient and unusual recent writer's
as Theodore Dresser, Edgar Lee
Masters, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood
Anderson, Vachel Lindsay. Sinclair
Lewis. Floyd Dell. IONA Gale. and