We, in America, are prone to fads, and fads are always transitory. Anything that can be construed as freakish, or odd, or strange, is sure of immediate attention. And often that attention, no matter how clamorous, does scant justice to the work which arouses it. Our papers are full of discussions for and against "The New Poetry," and yet I am constantly struck, in my peregrinations up and down the country, with the extremely prescribed understanding there really is about it.

Another of our American characteristics is that we are inclined to dig artistic movements up by the roots to see how they are getting on. Now it is a melancholy truth that although America produces a great many young artists of unusual promise she has difficulty in bringing them to a satisfactory maturity. Our literary history is strewn with clever first books. I remember that the same phenomenon was remarked upon by Mr. Bertrand Russell, a few years ago, in regard to other fields of intellectual activity. His explanation was that young men here were expected to "make good" soon after leaving college, and that the effort to do this exhausted them mentally and prevented the farther ripening their powers should have had.

I think that the same explanation, slightly altered, applies to poets. Once a man has written a book of promise, the whole force of American life is upon him to urge him to the quick production of another. With us, reputations are made and lost overnight. The habit of the older countries, where it takes ten years to make a reputation, which, once made, is unassailable (unassailable to all intents and purposes, that is), is certainly more conducive to the growth of a great art.

Another difficulty against which the American poet has to struggle is the extraordinarily little æsthetic knowledge which the American public possesses. With the breakdown of classical education, there has crept into our schools a strange amorphous system of many subjects and none pursued to mastery. There could be no better method devised to puzzle and blunt the taste of a people. All of us who have had the ill luck to be born since this system came into vogue must often regret the years of arduous labor we have had to devote to training ourselves; and there is no playing truant to the schooling one gives oneself.

The last generation-too many of them-fled from these conditions. It is our proud belief that we can be artists and still live in America. And yet many of us realize, since Europe has been closed to us on account of the war, how much comfort and stimulus we derive from occasionally sojourning there.

It is the conditions I have been enumerating which make the advent of the highly trained critic so important. These critics will do more than any other body of men to temper our American atmosphere to the degree in which art can most happily flourish. Again, the critics can do more to raise the taste of the public than we, the artists, can do. We speak, perforce, in terms of art. But where those terms are not understood, they naturally have very little effect in modifying conditions. It is not the artist's business to explain, it is enough that he create. But his future depends upon explanation. It is to the critics that the world owes the knowledge that great artists have been. The work of a great man is re-created in every generation by those few men who study and love him, and who proclaim this love aloud for their contemporaries. If the artist is the heart and brain of art, the critic is its arms and legs-its motive power, in short.

This has been brought to my attention very forcibly of late, largely by the sudden interest which the public has begun to feel in the work of two young artists dead in the war, both of whom I knew. One a poet; the other a sculptor. I refer to Rupert Brooke and Gaudier Brzeska.

When Rupert Brooke passed through this country in the spring of 1914, on his way from the South Sea Islands, only his brother poets were concerned with his coming. His books were very little known in England, not at all in this country. He and three other young men started a little quarterly to print their own poems called New Numbers, and at a reading he gave of his own poems at The Poetry Book Shop in London, I remarked that the audience seemed to consist entirely of poets and art students. He was well known to his teachers and fellow students at Cambridge, but the London public knew him not at all. Even when his now famous sonnets came out in Poetry, Chicago, and shortly afterwards in England, in his own New Numbers, they passed without undue comment.

What has brought about the change regarding them? Is it the tragic circumstance of the poet's death? Does he owe his fame entirely to the fact that he has died? I do not think so. He owes his fame to the fact that people's attention has been turned to him. His death brought letters in the press from his friends and masters, and the public's eyes have been opened to his quality. Had he lived, it would probably have taken years for his work to have achieved the place in the public estimation it now enjoys, not because it would not have been worthy of it, but because the public had to be told it was worthy before according it.

But Brooke was always a marked man among his intimates because of his extraordinary physical beauty and pleasant temperament. The case of the young French-Pole, Brzeska, is even more remarkable. When I first knew him, his studio was in one of the boarded-in arches of Putney Railroad Bridge. He was quite unknown and extremely poor-so poor that he had to make his own tools. Now London has seen an exhibition of his works, and New York is to have another.

Are not these cases pathetic? And the more so that they are not isolated in the history of art. A little intelligent criticism accorded these men in their lifetimes would have given them what is more valuable than life itself; content, the feeling that at least one has not lived in vain.

Brooke and Brzeska, and others like them on both sides of the Atlantic, are dead. You can do nothing more for them. But there are struggling poets among us to-day. In spite of newspaper "réclame," we of "The New Poetry" have not found our path strewn with roses. People find it difficult to understand why we write as we do. May I suggest that a little study into the matter will repay any one interested in the subject of poetry. And may I, in closing, say a few words on the subject of that poetry?

"The New Poetry" is a tree of many branches. A brief summary of these ramifications shows us several distinct groups. There are the realists, with Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost at their head; the folk singers, chief among them Vachel Lindsay; the romanticists, of which William Rose Benét is a good example; the Imagists, to which group I belong, and

the "vers libristes," some of whom are Imagists, and some are not. For the followers of "vers libre" derive from two distinct sources, one being Walt Whitman, and the other, the French Symbolistes.

Roughly speaking, however, all these groups have certain traits which they hold in common, and which separate them from the poets immediately preceding them. Chief among these is "externality," the regarding of the world as having an existence apart from oneself. Introspection is not the besetting sin of the new poets as it was of the poets of the nineties. Again, all these groups seek life and vividness. They are all desperately sincere, and to portray the world about them in its truth and its beauty is their only aim. To this end, they frequently discard meter for the free rhythm of emotional thought. They endeavor to write with the syntax of prose, an artificial arrangement of sentences detracting, in their opinion, from simplicity and directness of presentation.

Only those poets with a natural sense of rhythm can write "vers libre" well. Had I time, I think I could prove to you by reading two or three examples aloud that it is among the most musical verse in the English language. It is written to be read aloud. Poetry is a spoken, not a written art.

I have not time for greater elaboration, suffice it that I have proved The New Poets to be worthy of the critics I so desire for them.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY

Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as president of the Alumni Association, occupied the chair. His address "Democracy" is given in Volume VIII.

BRETHREN:-Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superstitious survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects the imagination of the mass of his fellows. The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive, and having a roundness of completion in its period. We, the youngest of nations, the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and commonplace as to Napoleon when he saw forty of them looking in undisguised admiration upon his army, bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear without calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. [Applause.]

It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the longdrawn æons in which this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man, and man accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of them.