MYTHS IN SCHOOL HISTORIES

In the May number, John P. Sheffey nominated Gerald W. Johnson and Miss MacGill as candidates for the Ignoble Prize and Charter Members of The Sorehead Club. Mr. Sheffey seemed to imply that Miss MacGill was stabbing at the Anglo-Saxon myth because of an inferiority complex. So in her letter she establishes her claim to the realms of the blest.

I am one-fourth Highland Scotch, my grandfather MacGill being of the Clan MacGregor, who changed their names after one of the many rebellions in favor of the Stuart kings. He came to this country about 1845. His wife was an English woman. On my mother's side, English, with one Scotch strain, all colonists before 1660.

Then she tells us why she took a fling at some of the traditions which many of us so blindly cherish. In my years on the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, I did a lot of curious and extensive research into the actual documents and facts about the settlement of this our Country. And sometimes I uncovered things which did not square with certain pretty yarns in the current minor history books.

Personally I cannot see why it is of any special service to the young to keep on telling them things which are not true. And most of our school histories, if not really untrue, are at least so badly proportioned and biased that the effect is about the same.

"... DOES MURDER SLEEP"

The head of the Bible Department of the Brewton-Parker Institute at Mt. Vernon, Ga., complains that we disturb his slumbers.

DEAR EDITOR: I am glad you do not publish a weekly. Coming in from one of my country churches last evening, I wanted to read for thirty minutes and then sleep. But you would not permit the sleep part of the program. SCRIBNER'S for May had come. That would not do for every Sunday night. I started reading and could not stop. For I had lighted on the most interesting number I had ever seen.

First, I leaped into "As I Like It." I have been an admiring reader of Mr. Phelps' articles ever since I first saw something from his pen in another, or a Mothers' Journal, or some sort of feminine publication. I even read his discussions about "plays" and the theatre-and even what he once had to say about that freak of a cow "sitting" out there in his meadow. (They won't do that on my meadow, or on my milking stool-and I have milked thousands of gallons. And I am skeptical, too, about their meditating.)

But what I want to say is that I enjoyed a good laugh

when I read what was said by Mr. Sheffey, Mr. Rutledge, and Mr. Rector, in their tirades against Gerald Johnson for his "Battling South" effusions, not that they wrote anything untrue, but that they could so clearly overlook the possibilities for good in Mr. Johnson's article. I bow in full sincerity to Mrs. Stice.

"Why Men Disagree" got an answer from me in just one word as soon as I saw the subject dealt with by Mr. Spaulding "self." But that was a cipher compared to his wonderful discussion. And then I turned to "Southern Memories by Albert Guérard. I wanted to get on the wire Sheffey, Rutledge, Rector, and their great company, and feast with them. I know they now forgive SCRIBNER'S for all the sins of the past. Mr. Guérard has come into the South with sense, with heart, with breadth, and like all Northerners of such fine type who come and get a true appreciation of the conditions which we face in the South, he came, he saw, and he was conquered.

Yes, I became so intensely interested last evening in reading May SCRIBNER'S that I actually read some of the poetry. (I'll pause and blush for the implied confession of antipathy to poetry-except as sung, or seen in nature-if you wish.) L. S. BARRETT.

HERE'S A BIT OF ERUDITION FOR YOU DEAR EDITOR: Mr. Emerson Low's story, "The Man Who Had Been Away," published in the May number of your magazine, would be more interesting to some of your readers did it not remind them so much of that once famous domestic tragedy, Lillo's "Fatal Curiosity," produced in London in 1737. The main incidents in Mr. Low's story are startlingly similar to those forming the plot of the play mentioned, written by the London jeweler-dramatist who was also the author of that Hogarthian moralistic tragedy, "George Barnwell," which so delighted and edified London bourgeois audiences in the days of George II.

Please understand that I am not hinting at plagiarism on Mr. Low's part-it is quite probable that he has never even heard of Lillo and his now forgotten plays-but am merely offering the above as a bit of information which may interest you.

2365 Klemm Street, St. Louis, Mo.

V. D. ROSSMAN.

It turns out that the tragedy to which our correspondent refers was based-as was Mr. Low's storyupon an actual happening. The scene in Lillo's case was a farm near Penryn and the year 1618. Strangely enough a play by Lillo produced just before "The Fatal Curiosity" had the implication of plagiarism thrown at it. In January, 1735, "The Christian Hero," based on the story of Scanderbeg, the Albanian chieftain, was produced. A piece on the same subject was written by Thomas Whincop, who died in 1730. Although Whincop's piece was not published until 1747, both Lillo and another chap were accused of plagiarization.

Rupert Brooke wrote a play with a somewhat similar situation and Corsican legend tells a tale not unlike. Several readers have been more downright than Mr. Rossman in calling attention to the similarity between the Brooke play and Mr. Low's story. If they will refer to the note on the author in the April number, they will discover the true source of the story. Mr. Low is no more guilty of plagiarism than if he had written a story of two men and a girl.

WOMEN WHO DO VOTE

A campaigner comments on Mrs. Gerould's article.

DEAR EDITOR: Is it quite candid for Mrs. Katharine Gerould, in the May SCRIBNER'S, to claim for herself an attitude of resentment over the enforced duty of voting, while she so clearly and optimistically defines the advantages of women's enfranchisement?

Some of us ardent campaigners cared little for the vote as a personal decoration, a “right," or even as an immediate implement. We were willing to concede, at the start, that the vote might prove to be like "those patented labor-saving devices that are more nuisance than help," and that men would probably have to struggle for many years to drag their women-folk to the polls. At least one of us is still struggling against an almost violent distaste for balloting and for politics.

Only sometimes in the midst of my indolence and distaste at the voting machine, while absently pulling levers down onto blanks, after the names have given out, get flashes of that old suffrage argument which appealed to me most during the campaign, the argument that even if it takes a hundred years to awaken and educate them, the women of the nation, if given the vote, must eventually develop a larger civic consciousness.

Because this seems to me vastly important for the republic, for the women, for their children, I stop being indolent for the moment, long enough to be glad I helped fight the fight for my civic education, long enough to appreciate that what we are doing now with the vote has little significance, for it is only the beginning of the story.

And so to all reluctant voters, I would recommend contemplation of Mrs. Gerould's hopeful picture of the future filled with intelligent women citizens, as an antidote for that tired feeling at the polls.

215 Seminary Street, Dubuque, Iowa.

DORIS BINGHAM.

THEY VOTE WITH CARE

DEAR EDITOR: Among the many interesting and inspiring articles in your last edition, I am called to a halt by Katharine Fullerton Gerould's "Some American Women and the Vote." It seems to me she has stretched the point of the lack of women voting. I have never seen evidence to the fact that a lot of "intelligent and civilized American women either do not vote at all or vote under protest and not very carefully." It is true a mass of women, too busy with the details of their life and not educated enough to inform themselves and think out their own opinions, vote carelessly. It is also true that as large a number of men vote, not as their best judgment if they should stop to analyze it, dictates; but vote in the direction their party leader leans, or where business favors are plentiful or the way their best friend, who is equally uninformed, votes. I see no encouraging factor that this latter condition will be changed.

That intelligent women vote carefully and quietly has been brought to my attention many times during elections. There seems to be less of the pettiness and carelessness with which men vote. The vote is a new acquirement to the women and because of its newness the women have seen the seriousness of it. It has been like living up to a new ideal. It is no new ideal to the men-they are unconscious of it and its seriousness has never struck them with the force it has been brought out to the women, because they are used to it-they were born with the right. Why should we sit back and bemoan the fact that we are not as educated as the men to vote? We are. There is no reason why men should have to teach us to see "in voting the shining symbols of civic rights and responsibilities." Women can do it and are doing it. Let's spend our time informing ourselves and writing articles stimulating interest rather than writing articles showing inertia in our sex, and asking the men to lead us.

BLANCHE GILBERT WICKES.

30 See Avenue, White Plains, N. Y.

A COUGH SYMPHONY

DEAR EDITOR: Now that you permit readers the safetyvalve of the "What You Think About It" department, I hope that I may be accorded space to express my grateful,I may say my ecstatic appreciation of Mr. Roland Young's "The Audience Can Do No Wrong."

I am perfectly thankful that Mr. Young has spoken out as he has about the intolerable nuisances who whisper, comment, and cough when at the play. The coughing is inconsiderate, and generally unnecessary, but one can see some shadow of excuse for it; there is no excuse whatever for whispering or speaking at all during a musical or dramatic performance. Óh, if d manners, plain decent consideration for others might only become the fashion; then there would be some hope of comfort, not only for the players, but

for those in the audience who come, as I do, always, to listen to the actors, and not to the sound of my own voice. Such a reform will, however, never be popular, as it involves passivity and self-effacement.

I wish Mr. Young's paper might be broadcasted, reprinted as a leaflet, and made the subject of intensive propagandaand, when all that was done, nothing would have been accomplished, the essential human swine is a permanent institution.

By the way, I have often wondered, when reading that ambitious young musical composers are searching for some inherently American theme on which to build, why they do not take the typical coughing symphony concert matinée audience; this theme should work out wonderfully for a full orchestra. ELIZABETH NICHOLS CASE.

252 Sisson Avenue, Hartford, Conn.

66

DICKENS DEFENDED

This writer knows the psychological value of the 'waste-basket" hint.

DEAR EDITOR: I suppose it is a waste of time for me to write a few comments on the article in this month's SCRIBNER'S by Edith Wharton, and it will find its way to the waste-basket in short order. However, here goes. Edith Wharton should not resent a little criticism, she is so good at it herself.

Charles Dickens' novels (according to Mrs. Wharton) are constructed along lines that are tedious, senseless, etc., and in a style that is distracting to the reader's attention. Distracts attention to what?

Dickens is loved and quoted as much as Shakespeare, and what a consolation it is to the lovers of this great author, to reflect on the following facts.

In spite of his "tedious and senseless" method, his works are the most vivid, dramatic, human and appealing of all the Novelists.

There will never be again, in the world's history, such a monument as the Dickens Fellowship, to any author. If Mrs. Wharton could produce anything nearly approaching The Cricket on the Hearth, or the Christmas Carol, her place in the sun would be assured.

I am surprised to see her mention Anthony Trollope in the same breath with Dickens. Is this supposed to be humorous, or just an insult? I never in my life met anyone who took Anthony Trollope seriously.

Despite Mrs. Wharton's adherence to the "single plot" and her possible perfection of construction, although I have read all her works, I cannot now recall more than just the titles of one or two. Whereas the memory of Dickens' works brings me an impression of warmth, light, sparkling wit— power, beauty, and tenderness.

This is not the first time I have seen criticisms of famous authors by Mrs. Wharton, and I could have forgiven her if she had said the construction used by Dickens is a little out of date (it is never out of date) but tedious and senseless - ??? Not with Dickens. ETHEL C. MARQUETTE. Drexel Building, Philadelphia, Pa.

Traditions gather about the memory of a man dead half a century. Dickens and Thackeray are gods of that age. "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities" are the only Dickens novels that we have ever finished of our own free will. "Oliver Twist" became a travesty after two chapters. "David Copperfield" we never penetrated beyond the first few pages. Whatever charm there is in Dickens resides in his power of dramatizing characters often caricatures-and a journalistic flair for atmosphere. We've never heard his construction defended so spiritedly before. It might interest the writer to know that the Trollope tradition is being revived and that people are taking him extremely seriously nowadays. Dickens seems to have one foot in the wings, as the prolific Trollope strides upon the stage.