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of the camera, the gelatine plate, and the electrotyper; the pages are now adjusted so as to produce the best artistic and literary effect, corrected and recorrected by printers and editors until they suit the exigent taste of the latter; they are then disposed in a complicated fashion in a "form," so that when printed and folded the sheet will page

Feeding the 64-page Sheet

consecutively; the type is securely wedged together so that the many thousands of pieces of metal may be lifted as one mass; and the form is then ready to be transported to the press-room, where another story begins.

If the reader could see a page of The Outlook when it first comes off the press, before it has passed through the hands of the skillful craftsman who cuts the "overlays," he would not recognize it. The reading matter is dim and illegible; the pictures are masses of black that tell no story, or faint outlines of gray that torture the eye that tries to follow their elusive details. With this crude thing before him, the pressman proceeds to bring up the illustrations by the skillful use of knife, tissuepaper, and paste, in a delicate process that involves the application of greater pressure in the printing of the blacks and less pressure on the grays of the picture. The preparation of an illustrated form of The Outlook requires many hours of this careful, discriminating work, without which the fine effects of half-tone illustration would be wholly lost. When cuts and letterpress are finally made ready, the printing proceeds rapidly, day and night, until the edition

is off. The building in which The Outlook is printed is a perfect hive of printing-presses, from those marvels of mechanism which turn out the colored supplements of a metropolitan daily to the simpler and smaller machines which are used for book, magazine, and job work, and which, running at slower speed, produce a higher grade of work than is possible for presses which must turn out an edition of five hundred thousand in twentyfour hours. In this as in other matters "art is long," if one may suggest the quotation in comparing the work on the " Sunday supplement" and. on the Magazine Number of The Outlook.

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The Outlook, however, does not, the Spectator opines, desire to be classed with the monthly periodicals as an art publication. One of its main purposes is to present a weekly review of the world's history. Another is that its subscribers shall, as a rule, east of the

Mississippi, get their paper before Sunday of

each week.

These two objects necessitate holding forms open late and getting the edition mailed early. Going to press Tuesday noon, with editorial comment on Tuesday's news when important, without a sheet being at that time folded or a copy bound, will not the reader familiar with the leisurely methods of the monthlies be a little surprised to learn that by Wednesday night more than twenty thousand copies that is to say, nearly half of the edition-bound, labeled, and in wrappers, are in the post-office on their way to the West, the South, Mexico, and Canada, the distant localities being favored first in the mailing? The amount of work involved in

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Automatic Folder and "Gatherers"

this will be appreciated better when we follow the printed sheets from press-room to bindery.

Here is an elaborate mechanism which folds a sixty-four-page sheet and cuts it in two, delivering it at the rate of eighteen hundred an hour ready for the "gatherer." Smaller sheets are folded by less intricate machines or by hand. This work is attended to mostly by girls, and their pleasant faces seem to show that their labor is of a kind that gives satisfaction in the doing and at the week's end. Here, for instance, is a girl whose vigor and comeliness suggest country air and wholesome outdoor occupation rather than years of factory toil. A fine specimen of a hearty, wholesome girl who knows how to do her work and enjoys it. Her work, indeed, requires vitality, for it is mostly done at hours when other presumably more favored girls are asleep. Her work is that of pasting the covers on the Magazine Numbers of the paper, and, as the work requires skill and experience, she

postage-stamps
" that are the rara avis of
the stamp-collector, and cost from $1 to $100
each; and then The Outlook starts on its
journey that ends with the place indicated by
the yellow label.

And when finally, after all this work, and a great deal more which has not been touched upon-such as that of the business and advertising departments, which are not dilated upon in this article because of their modesty, but which, like modest people all, are full of meritorious works-when finally the subscriber has received his paper, what has he A mathematical got, on the material side?

Pasting on the Covers

gets as much for her single night's work as many a poor salesgirl must be content with for a whole week's salary.

There is a group of girls around a table; they are engaged in "gathering" the various sheets that make up the magazine; other girls take the gathered sheets to the stitchingmachines, where the wire staples are stamped through the thickest magazine with a single thrust. The sheets, thus securely bound together, pass on to the workers who paste on the cover. The completed paper must now be put through the "smashing-machine," a massive affair of ponderous cams and remorseless toggle-joints, into which the papers go round and plump, and come out flat and solid. They go then to the cutter, who trims off the edges so that the busy man can read his paper as he runs, without the necessity, annoying to him if dear to the heart of the bookworm, of cutting each leaf himself, and being sure that no irreverent eye has gazed upon the spotless beauty of the virgin page. Next the papers go to the men who put on the wrappers and stamp the little yellow label on each paper or wrapper. The papers belonging to each State, city, and town are grouped together, and finally put into the mail-bags and carried to the post-office, where they are weighed, and the postage paid for eventually by the "bulk-rate

friend of the Spectator's
has sent him a slip which
embodies the result of a
little investigation as to
the amount of literary
matter contained in the
various magazines for one
month. The Spectator
makes bold to print it,
trusting that his long
course of blameless con-
duct will absolve him from
the sin of advertising
The Outlook's contem-
poraries in its columns:

NUMBER OF PAGES OF LITERARY MATTER IN
JANUARY '97 NUMBER OF

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144

156

110

120

162

90

128

130 304

The mathematician says that the comparison, so far as regards quantity of reading matter, is obviously flatthe tering to whose paper physiological processes have been following; as to the quality-but here the Spectator must cease, for his friend's kind words contain intimations that are alto

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Affixing the Yellow Label

gether too pleasant for print. But, if the Spectator's psychometry has not been in vain, he has shown his readers that the issuing of a weekly magazine is a complex and difficult piece of work on its material side.

T

Teacher and Poet'

HERE are sharp limitations to the power of acquirement and production; a man cannot go on indefinitely learning all manner of unrelated things, nor can he work successfully in widely separated fields. But a man can go on indefinitely learning about things which are related to each other, and doing things which partake of the same spirit and are expressions of the same energy. The impression, which probably takes its rise in the tendency to specialization-admirable in its place and blind as a mole out of it-that a man can do but one thing well, has as little foundation in fact as the kindred impression that good scholarship and a feeling for literary form cannot go together; that if a man is really learned he must put his thought in blundering and inharmonious speech; and, vice versa, if he has the charm of style he must be more or less shallow in scholarship. Certain unrelated activities cannot, for obvious reasons, be combined with any high degree of success; a man cannot, for instance, successfully manage a business and write an epic; but he can combine the highest degree of intellectual activity with the highest felicity of literary expression. Shakespeare managed a theater and wrote immortal dramas; but the two occupations ran along parallel lines.

Dr. Henry van Dyke has succeeded in several fields of work, but they have been contiguous fields. He is, for instance, one of the foremost preachers of the day; making a successful appeal to a class of hearers, among others, who do not go to church because it is the conventional thing to do or because they recognize a duty in church-going; who do not go to be emotionally stirred or æsthetically charmed; who go because they are drawn by ringing conviction, clear thought, and genuine literary form. Such a preacher appeals to the best in his auditors because he gives them the best in himself

The Builders and Other Poems. By Henry van Dyke. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $1.50.

and in thought and faith. He accepts no easy compromises with truth, employs no artifices, makes no effort to produce artificial oratorical effects; he trusts implicitly to the power of truth by holding his gift in absolute service to it. Dr. van Dyke's ministry is one of definite conviction, clear, progressive thinking, and catholic spirit. It has the rich and full tone which is caught from a love of the truth as it speaks through art and literature; it has the range which comes from the perception that truth has many voices and that all its voices are one; science, history, art in all its forms, revealing man's thought of his spiritual condition and need. But with this breadth there is also notable decision and definiteness; the vagueness which often comes with wide knowledge and comprehensive views is wholly absent from Dr. van Dyke's preaching. It has not only marked virility, but it has a certain moral vivacity and dash which makes it peculiarly effective in college chapels; for Dr. van Dyke is one of the fortunate men who have the hearts of young men. The note of courage rings in all his utterances. The church to him is a moving army, with banners flying, bugles sounding, and all the stir and splendor of daring enterprise in the air.

In such a ministry there is always a progression of thought, and behind it there is a deep and arduous life of the mind. For the preaching that clarifies, purifies, and edifies is not a matter of brilliant occasional efforts, but of sustained expression of a fruitful intellectual and spiritual experience. Real sermons are born, not made; they are not skillfully put together

One

they grow out of a rich soil. who follows Dr. van Dyke's development as disclosed in his books becomes aware of a wide movement of thought steadily pressing on into clearness, order, and light. The lectures delivered a year ago before the Yale Theological Seminary, and published last autumn under the title "The Gospel for an Age of Doubt," are not only among the most widely read of recent

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works of their class, but are also admirable examples of sound, clear, and vital thinking. The book is catholic in its spirit and brotherly in its feeling-the work of a man who knows his time and loves it, and does not make the ancient blunder of the theologian of supposing that some other time was more sacred and nearer to the touch and guidance of the Infinite; but a man, also, who sees clearly that all times stand in need of the corrective of a vision which, like that revealed in the "Divine Comedy," discerns the life of man under the conditions of eternity. There are freshness, tenderness, open-mindedness in Dr. van Dyke's attitude to his own time; but there are also clear, searching

criticism, and clear, urgent suggestion of remedy for its intellectual and moral disorders. There is buoyancy of feeling in the discussion, and a literary quality which makes it so easy to read that one sometimes forgets the deeps over which one is borne; but the framework of the argument is of steel-so firm, compact, and well joined is it.

The book shows a quiet courage; it marks a distinct advance of thought; but it is so irenic in temper that it persuades readers into acceptance of positions into which no urgency of polemic argument would have driven them.

Dr. van Dyke is supremely interested in the vital rather than the abstract proc

19

esses of thought, and so all his thinking connects itself together and flows in a single channel. There is no violent transition, for instance, when he passes from his work as a religious thinker or teacher to the study of the poetry of Tennyson. With that poetry as the exposition of a noble view of life he was not only in full sympathy, but he had long been dealing with the same or with kindred ideas; to that poetry as an illustration of the subtle and captivating uses of art he brought a true poetic insight and instinct. His study of this poetry bore fruit in an exposition of Tennyson's ideas and form full of intelligence, sympathy, and felicitous suggestion; an exposition which is at once scholarly and discriminating, and at the same time full of that poetic feeling which is, far more than the keenest critical study, the key to a poet's quality and genius.

But Dr. van Dyke has not confined himself to a sympathetic study of poetry; he has practiced the art as well. From time to time pieces of verse bearing his name have drifted across the wide stream of contemporary writing and brought with them the sense of something fresh and real a breath of nature, a glimpse into the deeps of experience, a note clear, sweet, and memorable. In various forms he had shown his familiarity with Christian art; in several tales, simple, reverent, and singularly happy in harmonizing definite teaching with artistic form, he had revealed a quality of true imagination; and in a volume of delightful essays, "Little Rivers," he had shown a familarity with Nature which was at once the intimacy of a comrade and the deep feeling of one who knows by instinct and intelligence how we are infolded in Nature, partake of her life, and are in touch with the mystery of her being below consciousness and beyond thought. The breath of the imagination stirs to rare music of speech in a series of papers which is likely to become a classic in its field. All these tastes, gifts, and occupations predicted the volume which has now appeared, and which, slender as it is, furnishes material for an estimate of the quality which Dr. van Dyke is likely to put into his verse.

The first question which one is likely to ask is whether the religious feeling and

spirit, which are certain to be present, are didactically or poetically expressed. For a sincere man does not experiment with verse; he uses it as a more expressive medium than prose for the utterance of that deepest self which is, in every gifted man, the source and fountain of poetry. These poems are distinctly and deeply religious in their underlying conception; they are often definitely didactic, as in one verse which will go home to many readers:

Who seeks for heaven alone to save his soul, May keep the path, but will not reach the goal;

While he who walks in love may wander far,

But God will bring him where the Blessed

are.

This is an admirable example of a kind of gnomic verse which, while never taking the highest rank as poetry, has lived in the memory because of its concentrated truth. But Dr. van Dyke is, fortunately, a poet rather than a teacher in this volume; he is capable of the careless rapture, the easy force, the almost unconscious felicity, of the true versewriter. He has light moods, quick fancies, free spirits. He knows how to invite his soul and give it holiday; he hears those voices which are always penetrating the close places in which men work, and making them aware that work is, in the end, only a way of getting at life, and that life lies all about us even while we search for it with bent heads and lighted candles. Outside the school-room there are deep places in the woods where things are to be learned which are not in the books; and while we painfully con the text, through the window comes the delicious emptying of the bobolink's cup of sound, and the poet within us is up and away in spite of rules and tasks.

He who reads "An Angler's Wish" knows that he has struck hands with a poet. Here is a singer who, at his best, has caught some woodland notes more clearly than any other of his fellow-craftsmen in this country; notes which the cleverest man cannot imitate, but which a poet may translate into human speech. For a bird is not to be brought from the woods by the trick of matching his song; one must catch his spirit and suggest his sentiment. Who has done this with truer

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