about, or that the undergraduate will take his academic instruction from only one man, the athletic coach - the man who teaches him to play. I promise myself a terrible day of reckoning up these issues and the relation of my own conscience to them.

But for the moment I only ask, What can be done about it? What on earth can be done about it?

CONCERNING UNHEARD

MELODIES

'SUPPOSE, children, nobody had ears, suppose no living thing had ears,' Teacher said, looking hard out of her brown eyes at the row of attentive faces before her, 'would there be any sound in the world?'

Silence into which presently a bumblebee, fresh from the sweets of the scraggly lilac bush outside the schoolhouse window, boomed his sturdy disapproval of speculative niceties. The third boy from the door dragged a copper-toed shoe across the bare floor, and nodded doubtfully. Then there was a chorus of nods - practical unanimity.

'Sure there would be,' quoth freckled John Smith, emboldened by the nods. What courage of conviction is ever so recklessly cocksure as that inspired by conscious cohesion with the uninspired majority?'T would n't make no difference. The noise'd be there just the same, whether anybody heard it or not. 'Course it would why would n't it?'

Another boy, minus forty-odd years of enlightening experience, seconded John Smith. 'S'posen, now, a gun was set some way, so's it'd go off in — in the middle of the Desert of Sahary. Would n't it bang, same as it does here?'

Teacher smiled oddly, and the controversialist was seized with geographical searchings of heart.

'Well, s'posen a thunder shower was to come up in the middle of the night, and nobody waked up - nobody't all anywhere-then it'd be just heatlightnin', would it? Huh! And could n't the deafest man ever was see a dog's mouth go, and know the bark was comin'? Well, I rather guess he could!'

But Teacher convicted us of scientific heresy from a torn volume of Webster's Unabridged, though our uninstructed common-sense still stood stubbornly on the defensive. Sound was a sensation, produced through the medium of the ear, she explained; hence, if there were no ears, there could be no sound no sound of any sort.

Freckled John Smith drew a long breath, making an incredulous wheeze through his nose.

'But there'd be the stuff to make it of,' he contested; and Teacher conceded that much, with cautions about the materialistic suggestions of 'stuff.'

This reminiscence of my boyhood was recalled by Mr. and Mrs. Follett's essay on Henry James in the June, 1916, Atlantic, especially by that line, aptly quoted to such a theme, concerning 'unheard melodies,' which granting we trust the poetic intuition — are sweeter far than any which filter through the tympanum, and get themselves duly recognized as melodious in the positive degree. I confess that that line, and its suggestions, have always troubled me a good deal. For if a melody is unheard, how does anybody know that it is a melody, and not a discord? Does an exceptionally keen ear catch a glinting note now and again, and boldly vouch for the quality of what ears in general are oblivious to? And, even then, is n't 'just plain sweet,' with the popular vote in its favor, vastly preferable to the superlatively saccharine, with its severely select audience, or no audience at all? Again I seem to see Teacher's brown eyes look

ing at me over the dog-eared pages of Webster's Unabridged, as she patiently explains that 'if there were no ears, there could be no sound, no sound of any sort.'

It is Browning who has given the strongest color of reality to the myth of the 'unheard melody,' because, in listening to his song, new, rich notes repeatedly vocalize out of the silence. I never take up my Browning without an awed sense of treading on brinks of unsuspected discovery, which goes to prove the contention of Mr. Chesterton that things undreamed of, or, better still, vaguely surmised, whether these be in heaven or earth, or in Sordello, have a 'certain poetic value.' This value depreciates notably, however, when the 'unheard melody,' long listened for, unravels itself out of the brooding silence only to prove a familiar street ballad in a Browningese setting- not particularly apt, but only incoherent. And this, alas, happens oftener than one might wish!

Furthermore, despite Browning societies numberless, and a perfect Midrash of illuminating or distracting commentary, there are lines in Browning which still whet the daring of the adventurous. What is under there, we ask -Kohinoor or brook-smoothed pebble? And sometimes we add, with a dash of petulance, Why should so much be left underground, anyhow? Is this which baffles the fairly intelligent reader, after a third reading, or even a fourth, the ecstatic utterance of a soul which has drunk so deep of the Pierian spring that the common tongue of the street and the drawing-room fails in its struggle for self-expression; or is it merely the blundering obscurity of a 'great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech'?

Mr. Browning is credited with the belief that it would be rather difficult to express some of the thoughts in Sor

dello in a perfectly lucid manner. Well, be it so, but is not literary artistry admittedly difficult, and is it not the chief glory of the poet's craft to fit apt and understandable phrases to unknown or dimly comprehended truths? The true poet is burdened with his seer's vision, but is he not burdened also with the interpretation thereof? If Browning be 'clearly one of that class of poets who are also prophets,' shall it not, then, be frankly counted a defect that his message will never be delivered in its entirety, and that only a few stray lines of cheerful optimism will ever reach the common ear? After Sordello, 'the most involved, bewildering, and altogether incomprehensible poem ever written by Browning,' there was ample time left to cultivate the 'winning graces of simplicity,' had such a course seemed desirable. Was it desirable? Was it possible? Or is genius of a high order always erratic, and more or less bewildering?

It is the fashion of critics to mention Meredith after Browning, and the later Henry James after Meredith. For writers of prose, these two last certainly sported to the verge of peril with the 'unheard melody,' so far, at least, as a popular hearing is concerned. It is said that Meredith wrapped his toga wrathfully about him, and shook the dust of the arena from his sandals, when his second book, Evan Harrington, failed to win the plaudits of the giddy populace. Whether the deserted public afterwards shed bitter penitential tears over the distressing complexities of Diana of the Crossways, bewailing too late what was now lost forever, or simply 'threw up its hands in despair' and went its light-hearted, care-free way to the literary music-hall on the next corner, is a question for those better versed in Meredithiana to decide.

And when all is said, was Meredith's style influenced in the least by a public

I

WITH savage pity Marjorie regarded a sobbing girl whose face was distorted, and whose palsied hands were trying to straighten her veil and push back stray wisps of hair. Marjorie thought: 'What a fool she is to cry like that! Her nose is red; she's a sight. I can control myself. I can control myself.'

An elderly man with an austere face, standing beside Marjorie, started to light a cigarette. His hands trembled violently and the match flickered and

went out.

Marjorie's heart was beating so fast that it made her feel sick.

A locomotive shrieked, adding its voice to the roar of traffic at Victoria Station. There came the pounding hiss of escaping steam. The crowd pressed close to the rails and peered down the foggy platform. A train had stopped, and the engine was panting close to the gate-rail. A few men in khaki were alighting from compartments. In a moment there was a stamping of many feet, and above the roar and confusion in the station rose the eager voices of multitudes of boys talking, shouting, calling to each other.

Marjorie saw Leonard before he saw her. He was walking with three men -joking, laughing absent-mindedly,

VOL. 119-NO.5

while his eyes searched for a face in the crowd. She waited a moment, hidden, suffocated with anticipation, her heart turning over and over, until he said a nonchalant good-bye to his companions, who were pounced upon by eager relatives. Then she crept up behind and put both her hands about his wrist. 'Hello, Len.'

Joy leaped to his eyes.
'Marjie!'

Impossible to say another word. For seconds they became one of the speechless couples, standing dumbly in the great dingy station, unnoticed and unnoticing.

'Where's the carriage?' said Leonard, looking blindly about him. 'Outside, of course, Len.'

A crooked man in black livery, with a cockade in his hat, who had been standing reverently in the background, waddled forward, touching his hat.

'Well, Burns, how are you? Glad to see you.'

'Very well, sir, and thank you, sir. 'Appy, most 'appy to see you back, sir. Pardon, sir, this way.' His old face twitched and his eyes devoured the young lieutenant.

A footman was standing at the horses' heads, but the big bays, champing their bits, and scattering foam, crouched away from the tall young soldier

when he put out a careless, intimate hand and patted their snorting noses. He swaggered a little, for all of a sudden he longed to put his head on their arching necks and cry.

'You've got the old pair out; I thought they had gone to grass,' he said in his most matter-of-fact tone to the pink-faced footman, who was hardly more than a child.

'Well, sir, the others were taken by the Government. Madam gave them all away except Starlight and Ginger Girl. There is only me and Burns and another boy under military age in the stables now, sir.'

Inside the carriage Leonard and Marjorie were suddenly overawed by a strange, delicious shyness. They looked at each other gravely, like two children at a party, dumb, exquisitely thrilled. It was ten months ago that they had said a half-tearful, half-laughing good-bye to each other on the windy, sunny pier at Hoboken. They had been in love two months, and engaged two weeks. Leonard was sailing for England to keep a rowing engagement, but he was to return to America in a month. They were to have an early autumn wedding. Marjorie chose her wedding-dress and was busy with her trousseau. She had invited her bridesmaids. It was to be a brilliant, conventional affair flowers, music, countless young people dancing under festoons and colored lights. In August the war broke out. Leonard had been in training and at the front from the first. Marjorie crossed the precarious ocean, to be in England for his first leave. It was now May: they were to be married at last.

'Marjie.' 'Len.'

'I have just four days, you know, darling. That's all I could get. We've been transferred to the Dardanelles; else I would n't have got off at all.'

'Four days,' murmured Marjorie. She looked up, and met his eyes, and stared, and could not look away. 'It's a long, long time, four days,' she said, without knowing what she was saying. All at once she put her hands over her eyes, and, pressing her head fiercely against Leonard's arm, she began to cry and to laugh, continuing to repeat, senselessly, 'It's a long, long time.'

And Leonard, trembling all over, kissed her on the back of her head, which was all he could reach.

They drew near to Richmond, the familiar avenues and the cool, trim lawn, and the great trees. Marjorie's tongue all at once loosened; she chattered whimsically, like an excited child.

'It's home, home, home, and they're all waiting for us-mater and your father and all the family. He's been in a perfect state all day, poor old dear, though he has n't an idea any one's noticed it. Little Herbert's the only one that's behaved a bit natural — and old Nannie. I've been rushing about your room, sitting in all the chairs, and saying, "To-night he'll be sitting in this chair; to-night he may be standing in this very spot before the fire; to-night he may be looking out of this window." O, Len, we're to be married at halfpast eight, and we're going in motors so as not to waste any time. I have n't even read over the marriage service. I have n't the vaguest idea what to do or say. But what difference does that make! Do you see, Len? Do you see?' She stopped and squeezed Leonard's hand, for she saw that he was suddenly speechless. "There they are,' lifting the blind, 'mother and little Herbert; and see the servants peeking from the wing.'

They swept grandly around the bend in the avenue. The windows of the great house blazed a welcome. All the sky was mother-of-pearl and tender. In the air was the tang of spring. In the white light Marjorie saw Leonard's lips