builds up in the minds of his readers a realistic conception of world trade and communicates to them much of the interest which he himself feels in this subject with which his experience so well qualifies him to deal. Our life is all one, and it is all compact of dreams and needs, facts and fancies, ideals and prejudices. No tremor of fear, no act of self-denial, no idle desire, but has its effect somewhere else than in the mind of the individual-an economic effect, for economics is a matter not only of figures but of human life and character.

This thought of the intimacy with which so many phases of human conduct are bound together even in so matter-offact a sphere as that of business is rather impressive and perhaps liberating. It may help to relieve one of the easy fallacy that different spheres of life may be partitioned off in watertight compartments, which is akin to the supposition that ethics has nothing to do with economics, or, in plain terms, that "business is business".

But what light does Mr. Dennis's discussion throw on progress? Certainly there has been progress in extent, in variety, and in power. The very impressiveness of this advance leads one to inquire whether, and to what extent, such progress may be regarded as real and satisfying. Without attempting to answer this difficult question one may remark that one cannot wholly share Mr. Dennis's optimism with regard to the future of our natural resources, and that the exploit of the gentleman, who Mr. Dennis tells us, succeeded in selling a piano to a woman who was almost totally deaf seems at once not highly commendable and a little too typical of a certain type of business efficiency in this present age.

When one considers the complexity and the obscurity of many of the questions treated in Mr. Toynbee's volume, his treatment seems quite astonishingly competent. Here, for example, one will find almost the first account of post-war Russia that has any pretensions to accuracy and adequacy. Though much remains obscure, we can with Mr. Toynbee's help begin to envision the Russian situation. The impartiality which he brings to the study of European affairs is not the apparent impartiality which results from indifference

or the desire to strike a balance. It is the justice of view which comes from a finely logical study; for justice and logic are interdependent qualities.

Certainly no one would be led through reading Mr. Toynbee's account into taking an unduly optimistic view of the future of Europe. Nor does the author hesitate to condemn what he feels merits condemnation. Of the French occupation of the Ruhr he writes:

To all unbiassed and competent observers it was evident by the close of the year 1923 that M. Poincaré's policy had not only impoverished Germany but had gravely retarded the economic recovery of the whole of Western Europe, and had therefore incidentally clouded the economic prospects of France and Belgium, of the other Allied Powers entitled to reparation, and in fact of every country in the West European orbit.

Though something like this was the British view all along, that is no reason for suspecting its truth. With regard to the separatist movements in the occupied territory, the author is even more outspoken:

In the Rhineland the French people and Government, which were more implacable in their attitude toward Bolshevism than most of their neighbors, were instrumental in placing in power, not the proletariat or peasantry (which suffered with the rest), but the criminal dregs of society.

What impresses one most, however, especially in connection with the negotiations at Geneva relative to the peace protocol, is the fact that there was an honest intellectual effort toward securing peace and order. What stood in the way of improvement was what always stands in the way of reform-the moral inertia of great masses of men. It was a change of popular sentiment that made the application of the Dawes Plan possible.

In fine, we may discern symptoms of progress even in international affairs, but progress along moral or ethical lines can be seen only through the eyes of tolerance, and for the acquisition of tolerance few things are more necessary than systematic and respectful study of facts.

CLARENCE H. GAINES.

AMY LOWELL'S EAST WIND

A STUDY IN NEW ENGLAND ROMANCE

EAST WIND. By Amy Lowell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Those critics who would say that Amy Lowell was an artist in jewelled glass and no more, must think a little after they have read East Wind. It is a collection of poems that strictly speaking contain a study of one side of New England life and character perfectly well known to those who understand the history and meaning of this small section of the United States. But of that, we converse later.

Let one who has not the pleasant gift of numbers say at once that as it figures in parts of East Wind free verse does not commend itself over much. Yet the same stories could not have been told in prose with the same effect, the same poignant assurance of fact, as they are in East Wind. From first to last this book gives a description of what has gone on in New England and what indeed still goes on, but it is not the whole of what goes on. Much of the New England drama is enacted in hard, bright lights and is shot with tragedy, but much again is soft and tender with a fragile delicacy developed only by two or three hundred years' recognition of the conscience. East Wind and its narratives will be much better understood if readers keep this in mind, especially those from other parts of our large country who draw their conceptions of the New England character from the American "Kailyard" school of novelists or the criticisms, sometimes literary, almost always political in motive, of those who resent New England.

The greater part of East Wind is free verse; it is not polyphonic prose, and some of the lines come very near staccato hiccoughs, at other times curiously lacking the distinction of What's O'Clock. I am sure polyphonic prose would never have helped the matter. Can Grande's Castle is of no use here. The fact is that Amy Lowell had certain glimpses to give of a people that has faced the spiritual more courageously than perhaps any other Western race, and her story had to be told just as it has been. It is of no use to say that she could have sought more rhythm or to com

plain that save for the expert, the strophic quality is none too evident; what concerns us is that she sang as she did and that we can be well content.

Let me illustrate as well as I can. In "The Doll's House" is that elegy whose melancholy echoes in many a New England heart. It is not so much of the snows of the year before as that there will be less and less to come:

With coffins passing through the door beside it,

From time to time, while nothing ever came.

You absorb the matter and catch the measure of the verse just as you take the pensive flavor of

And these frail ancient ladies are like tea-dust
Left in the bottom of a painted chest.

There is nothing much that can be added to either couplet. Prose could never have given these effects-poetry has asserted its prescriptive rights. Though the public dotes on rhyme as it does on happy endings, these couplets soothe and appease it. But when the verse becomes much freer and we dull eared can see little difference between it and "chopped up prose", we come to the conclusion that the question of free verse is what in another connection The Doge called a "mangled matter". Sometimes it is very good and sometimes singularly unsatisfactory.

Leaving the foot rules of the Medes and Persians, we turn to the narration in East Wind, to the matter that counts and hold our breath at the genius in "A Dracula of the Hills" and "The Rosebud Wall-Paper". The passion, the mystery, the fierce despair of these two poems take hold of us. As in Rumania there are vampires and were-wolves, so there are in New England; here, where the east wind blows on stone walls and schoolhouses, these figures may not be seen in the flesh, but they roam as surely in the dusky world of unconfessed thoughts. "The Rosebud WallPaper" is a very good example of what Amy Lowell could do with a not over-loaded brush. With a tragic bitterness far above much American work, it has great distinction and warmth. It is a piece of work so acute as almost to hurt, indeed more than its author reckoned when she seemed to concede that women as a corporate body are the world's moral vigilance committee, far too comfortable a convention for a society knee-deep in the ruins of its

experiments. "The Rosebud Wall-Paper" is a vivid and fine piece of narration; it is all Amy Lowell and shows no traces of Poe or Hawthorne. It is without heroics and it has all the agony of the inescapable, because she has gone straight to the elemental. "The House on Main Street" has some beautiful touches;

When the moon dazzled it of a June evenin',

An' the flowers was noddin' an' jostlin',

An' whisperin'.

These lines have the sweet unearthly smack of "Fool o' the Moon"; she is in her own domain, but when we follow the legend into the house, we feel that she has needlessly deferred to Hawthorne. I have less notion to like "The Note-Book in the Gate-Legged Table"; it rants too much and puts a greater burden on the reader than one generally meets in Amy Lowell's work. It is very ingenious, but it makes one resolve hereafter to take one's Vittoria Corombona straight; neither that lady nor Tamburlaine has any place on a New England hillside.

Leave this poem out of the reckoning; the residue is a remarkable, often lovely picture of one side of a people which persists spiritually in spite of the movies and the automobile. As I hinted, it is but a part portrayal. "Heartbreak," like the primary colors, is cosmopolitan, but the value to us of East Wind is that like Thomas Hardy's novels it dissolves certain myths and reveals the far more wondrous records of the human heart. There are sweet things and good in the "Six States," plenty of them, but side by side with them seem to exist hard things and bad, entangling diabolic puzzles; and above all, there is the comedy. It is this last that must be perceived in East Wind, a book by itself to be read most carefully. It is not a book for the fearful nor for the morbid; it is for those who can love the literature of compassion, for its stuff is miles above mere psychology, and it is for those who will not be conquered by sorrow. Though it has some very delicate details, it is not tea-tray work. Amy Lowell had too vigorous an understanding to weep under willows; she saw that in this flesh we do err and suffer, but she also saw the marvel of that renewing strength which outwears martyrdoms and takes on majesty and hope.