neighboring villages of Kingston, Duxbury, and Marshfield, twelve hundred of them all told. In the list of them the old illustrious names recur-Delano, Bradford, Howland, Brewster; but the majority have a different sound. O'Brien and McClosky are there, and Stegmaier and Birnstein and Rodrigues and Borghesani and Siebenlist and Kaplowitz and Nordstrom and Scagliarini. Over half the Americans joining thus actively to celebrate the coming of the Mayflower three hundred years after the event were, in fact, of foreign birth or parentage, in the main Italians and Portuguése; a matter which might be a subject for gloomy meditation except for the fact that they re-enacted the old scenes with such extraordinary fervor. In them too, perhaps, some of the "pilgrim spirit" burned. To some of them surely those scenes of persecution and exile and bitter trials in a strange land must have appeared painfully real.

The play moves swiftly. At the opening, across a dark stage, from the direction of Plymouth Rock comes the Voice of the Rock, stating the theme: "I, the rock of Plymouth, speak to you, Americans. . . . Of me, a rock in the ooze, they have made a corner-stone of the Republic." The voice dies away, the orchestra begins the Prelude, and suddenly, as the lights flash on the water, they reveal, moving toward shore, a Norse galley bringing the first of the half-dozen "Pilgrim Adventurers," who preceded the actual Pilgrims to Cape Cod. Out of the darkness glide a halfdozen Indian canoes. There is a sharp skirmish, the Norse chieftain is borne away, dead, on the shoulders of his men, the lights go out, the scene is over.

The lights fall on another part of the stage. The English mariner Pring is shown in friendly intercourse with the Indians. Darkness. A third group of Indians stands revealed, to whom the

Sieur de Champlain, with his men in capes of brilliant purple and vivid green, comes to learn of fish in the harbor and corn on the land. The Dutch Admiral Blok is shown in a brief scene, then the Englishman John Smith; then another Englishman, Thomas Hunt, who ruthlessly slaughters the Indians and carries several off to captivity. Thomas Dermer comes in a friendlier spirit and lays the foundations for the friendship between the English and the Indian chieftains Samoset and Massasoit, on which the statesmanlike John Carver is later to build a valuable alliance. Swiftly and with extraordinary variety of grouping and incident the pre-Pilgrim background is revealed; and the First Episode is over.

There is no intermission. As darkness falls on the preceding scene there is a distant sound of men's voices chanting, and the second act, entitled "Pilgrims of the Soul," begins. We are back a hundred years, in England, in 1523. A group of religious pilgrims is revealed crossing a field where a boy is plowing. To them comes William Tyndale, telling of his labors in translating the Bible. The leader of the group is menacing. "If God spare my life," cries Tyndale, "in not many years I will cause a boy that doth drive a plow shall know more of Scripture than thou dost." It is the opening gun in the battle whose end is not yet.

Darkness is over the scene. A slender shaft of light reveals a little group of three, pathetically insignificant and desolate on the wide expanse of dark and empty stage. It is Greenwood and Barrow in the Fleet Prison in 1593, confined for reading that Bible which Tyndale has revealed to them, and now sending directions through Greenwood's wife to brethren in Holland. A jailer comes with the order that they are to be hanged at dawn. The light dies on

the praying figures. An instant later the stage is flooded with brightness. It is 1603. King James is on his way from Edinburgh to London to be crowned King. The procession is gorgeous to the last detail in brilliant color and grouping. Town dignitaries advance to do honor to the monarch; the Sheriff of Nottingham comes with his men. Scarlet and gold and glittering helmets, champing horses and the stately music of a triumphal march, emphasized on the one hand by the obeisance of the citizens and on the other by the rasping voice and lordly gesture of James, make vivid that here is the Divine Right of Kings at the peak of arrogance and pomp. Confronting it, drab and altogether insignificant, stands a little group of Puritans presenting the Millenary Petition. The voice of the King (in real life a mechanic of Plymouth) is extraordinarily convincing. "A Puritan is a Protestant scared out of his wits!" he exclaims to his retinue-and the words are authentic history. "I shall make them conform or I will harry them out of this land-or else do worse."

The bagpipes skirl, the crowd huzzas. Brilliant, powerful, arrogant, the procession moves off, leaving the little group of petitioners alone. As they gaze helplessly at the departing King an unseen chorus breaks forth in a glorification of absolutism. Through it, first faintly and uncertainly, comes the voice of the new order. The two forces grapple, and gradually the new order becomes dominant:

Thunder and cry out!

Not with the flash of a sword,

Not with a shout will ye turn and rout

A host whose captain is the Lord!
Harry, imprison, pursue!

Your foe is not what you deem.
In the black night, face to face with

you,

Behold, not men but a dream!

Not the downfall of King James, but the downfall of all kings, is presaged in the triumphant climax. The pomp and the arrogance are dust under the feet of the irresistible dream.

The familiar Pilgrim figures are now revealed-Brewster, Carver, Robinson, Bradford, Standish. At Scrooby they decide secretly to emigrate to Holland; on the shore at Haltonskittershaven they are for the moment foiled and driven back. The second act ends in defeat.

In a rapid succession of scenes the story of the Pilgrims is unfolded. The various characters stand clearly outlined; the dialogue, based to a large extent on words recorded by Bradford in his history, has dignity as well as the carrying quality of drama. The scenes are stirring-first, the momentous decision to leave the comparative security of Leyden, then the departure; the profoundly significant signing of the Compact in the cabin of the Mayflower; the landing, first at Provincetown, then at Plymouth. The Pilgrims establish themselves, and in their dealings with the

Indians present what has remained the ideal of the best American statesmanship-frankness, justice, and good will backed by force. "We are so few," cries Mrs. Brewster. "But prepared," answers the valiant Standish. "If it comes time to strike, we shall strike first and strike hard."

Pestilence comes to the Colony; half the settlers die; but it is youth which survives. Gradually the Colony finds itself. Government by the consent of the governed proves stable; but foes appear, not without, but within. Some of the newcomers to the Colony come merely for selfish gains; they seek to sow discord. When communism proves impractical and is given up, they still insist on reaping where they have, not sown, refusing either to work or to pay taxes. They spread lies at home and in England; they seek to turn the Indians against the colonists. "Return to England, whoever wishes and can," cries Governor Bradford sternly. "But let him who remains know this: No man who works shall starve, but he who has, must work for what he gets, and must share in the common defense."

The malcontents, after attempting to set fire to the storehouse, are brought to trial. The evidence against them is overwhelming.

There is something very stirring to twentieth-century American ears in Governor Bradford's charge: "Coming among us as 'friends, this man Lyford and his fellow Oldham have plotted to kill that for which we left England, for which we crossed the Atlantic, which we have enjoyed these last four years-government by and for ourselves in town and church. Accepting of us, pretending to be of us, they have plotted against

that which is dearer to us than our lives. [Rising.] John Oldham and John Lyford, you are expelled from the settlement of Plymouth."

One wonders what sympathy would the doughty Governor have had with the radicals who in 1919 appealed to the memory of the Mayflower when they were "expelled from the settlement."

"Let this be for a warning," Bradford concludes, "that what we established here for personal liberty and self-government, that will we hold as a heritage for our children and our children's children."

The voice of Washington is heard, the voice of Lincoln; then two youthful figures in modern dress appear, speaking the first lines of the final chorus, written by Robert Frost:

FIRST SPEAKER

This was the port of entry for our freedom.

Men brought it in a box of alabaster, And broke the box, and spilled it to the west

Here on the granite wharf prepared for them.

SECOND SPEAKER

And so we have it.

FIRST SPEAKER

Have it to achieve;

We have it as they had it in their day,

A little in the grasp-more to achieve. I wonder what the Pilgrims if they

came

Would say to us as freemen? Is our freedom

Their freedom as they left it in our keeping

Or would they know their own in modern guise?

There is a clash of cymbals. Up the steep slope out of the sea, literally "over the top," leap, as if in answer, the flags of the Allies and are borne forward.

Once more the Voice of the Rock is heard: "The path of the Mayflower must forever be kept free;" and as two hundred voices ring out, singing the words of the Chorus, the thousand or more participants march and countermarch in a final review that is a delight of dazzling color, the lights go out, and the pageant is over.

Professor Baker's "Pilgrim Spirit" has the sincerity, the simplicity, the beauty, and the imaginative quality which we associate with lasting literature. It is American to the core in its glorification of the principle of religious and political freedom. Mr. Baker evidently conceived the play as a nation's, and not an individual's, tribute; for he invited composers representing different parts of the country and different schools of musical expression to compose the incidental music, and a number of poets, of whom Edwin Arlington Robinson, Josephine Preston Peabody, and Robert Frost are the most distinguished, to write the choruses. The composers represented practically a cross-section of contemporary American music, Edward Burlingame Hill, Edgar Stillman Kelley, Frederick S. Converse, George W. Chadwick, and Arthur Foote representing the older tradition; Henry F. Gilbert, the middle group; and Chalmers Clifton, Leo Sowerby, and John Powell the moderns. Bellini is said to have remarked on one occasion, "La musique en plein air n'existe pas," and to some extent the music at the pageant justified his dictum. Not even an orchestra of ninety pieces could in the wide spaces of even a windless night convey altogether satis

factorily either delicate beauty or volume of sound. The notes, lacking anything in the nature of a sounding-board or a canopy, went astray. Orchestra and chorus sounded remote and a little thin.

The production itself was admirable in every detail and moved with the precision of clockwork, directed from a tower behind the bleachers by Professor Baker himself. It would be difficult to praise too highly the skill of the stage management which conducted twelve hundred totally inexperienced actors in a bare two hours through some twentyfour scenes without the semblance of confusion or hurry. The composition of the scenes themselves was extraordinarily varied and rich, for the costumes, designed by Rollo Peters and made by the women of Plymouth, were full of blazing color, even the sober garments of the Pilgrims revealing more exquisite shades of gray and brown, of lavender and deep green, than one entranced spectator knew existed. There was of course no scenery, and no attempt even to suggest scenery. The episodes lived altogether by their own inherent vitality, and in the sincerity and imaginative quality of the dialogue established about themselves an atmosphere of authenticity which no painted canvas could ever create.

It was the play which was the thing. Everything else was incidental, and to one spectator, at least, unimportant. The play could be given in any theater or in any schoolroom, and so long as it were given with reverence and sincerity the quality which made it deeply moving on the great stage beside Plymouth Rock would make it deeply moving there. It is a striking thing that the man who more conspicuously and more successfully than any one else in America has for a generation been training young men and young women in the making of plays should have written a play himself which is not only finer, perhaps, than any play which his students have written, but is almost the only American historical drama worthy to stand beside Drinkwater's "Abraham Lincoln."

W

HITELAW REID fulfilled four functions in American history: he was a war correspondent, an editor, a political manager, and a diplomat.

As war correspondent he was one of the first of a profession which by its letters to the American press rendered great service to this country during the Civil War and by its letters to the press of Italy, France, Great Britain, and the United States still greater service to the world during the Great World War. Success in this profession requires a combination of qualities not often to be found in one individual: courage, enterprise, initiative, keenness and quickness of mind, knowledge of men, love of truth, and literary skill. All of these qualities Whitelaw Reid possessed.

From war correspondent he graduated to become Horace Greeley's second in the editorship of the New York "Tribune." Editors are of two kinds-writers and administrators. Mr. Greeley won his fame and influence as an editorial writer. He was as devoted to certain political principles as ever was an apostle to the tenets of his religious faith. He was the most passionate and powerful editorial writer of his time. William Lloyd Garrison was as passionate, but his implacable spirit and his lack of common sense made him ineffectual, except to a small though not insignificant body of disciples. Whitelaw Reid won his place and influence by his administration. He was a good writer, but his leaders were too judicial, too well balanced, too carefully considered, to strike fire as did the more vehement utterances of his chief. Nevertheless Mr. Cortissoz's chapter entitled "An Editor's Methods" is well worth careful reading by any young person ambitious of making journalism his profession.

Mr. Reid is not the only man who has attempted to be both a great editor and a great political manager, and it is not strange that he failed in an endeavor to play a double part in which no one ever succeeded. His political adroitness enabled him to secure the nomination of Horace Greeley to the Presidency, though his better judgment compelled him as a politician to disapprove the nomination. No real independent at that time could have anticipated anything but the disastrous failure which followed in the election.

When four years later Mr. Hayes succeeded to the Presidency, with a divided party giving him a half-hearted support, a wise political manager would not have demanded impossibilities of so honest, able, and independent a President. Mr.

1 The Life of Whitelaw Reid. By Royal Corisso. 2 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. $10.

Hayes had critics enough barking at his heels, furnished by the professional politicians of both the political parties. A little warm, generous, uncritical support from the New York "Tribune" would have made Mr. Hayes's endeavor to

WHITELAW REID

cleanse the Augean stables easier and might have made it more successful; but Mr. Reid, who when Greeley was nominated merged the editor in the political manager, when Mr. Hayes was elected forgot the political manager in the edi

tor.

we believe he remained nominal editor of the "Tribune" to the end, the last years of his life were spent in the diplomatic service of his country. His most distinguished service was rendered, probably, in the part he took in the difficult and successful negotiation of the treaty with Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War.

Mr. Cortissoz's two volumes give a history of the forty-odd years of Mr. Reid's public life more valuable to the special student than to the general reader. There is usually something like half or three-quarters of a century of the world's life concerning which the average citizen is comparatively ignorantthat which immediately antedates his own active life. It is so recent that the historian has not yet interpreted it; it is so remote that the periodical and daily press have dismissed it. Mr. Cortissoz in narrating Mr. Reid's share in the events of that half-century assumes a knowledge of them which this generation does not possess. Thus, to give but one illustration, his chapter on the "Cipher Dispatches" gives interesting details respecting their accidental discovery and respecting the ingenuity required in deciphering them. But we venture to affirm that not one American recent college graduate in ten, probably not one in fifty, and practically no recent high school graduate, knows what the Cipher Dispatches are and what light their discovery and publication throws on the hotly contested HayesTilden Presidential campaign. A better historical background would have made clearer to the general reader of this generation the not unimportant part which Whitelaw Reid played in a criti

In the main, however, his political cal period of American history.

FICTION

THE NEW BOOKS

CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND. By Leroy Scott. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $2. Criminals, detectives good and bad, a police captain who is more objectionable than any of the criminals, a painter who is forced to become a genius despite himself, a convict who has served his term and is almost a miracle of moral purpose and gentlemanly manners, his fine old pawnbroking grandmother who is a friend of thieves but not a thief, and other figures in New York City's underworld and fashionable world figure in this story. It has abundance of plotin fact, superabundance, for to mal-e everything and everybody come out all right at the end is a complex task.

GALUSHA THE MAGNIFICENT. By Joseph C.
Lincoln.
D. Appleton & Co., New York. $2.
Mr. Lincoln gives us here a new
Cape Cod story with characters as
quaint and human as those of his other
numerous and always popular stories.
He does not, it seems to us, quite reach

as high a degree of success in dealing with motive and character as he did in "The Portygee," which marked a distinct development in his grasp on the art of fiction.

GRINDING (THE). By Clara Boise Bush. Henry Holt & Co., New York. $2. This is a tale of life in the Louisiana sugar-growing country. The title has a double reference, to the culmination of the sugar product and to the process by which a young, fashionable, and helpless society girl finds out what work and life The minor characters, Cajuns and Negroes, are cleverly drawn. The construction of the story might be improved, but otherwise it is of rather unusual quality and promises well for future work from this author. HEEL OF ACHILLES (THE). By E. M. Delafield. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50

mean.

The Lydia about whom this story re volves is clever in making people things, and is witty and ambitio

her life she almost succeeds in doing what she wants, but not quite. Finally she concludes that the trouble was indicated in a remark she overheard some one make about her, namely, that she was "a situation-snatcher"—that is, that her cleverness led her to pose in the limelight so much that she gained more admiration than friendship. One way in which she made headway was by remembering her grandfather's remark, "Always let the other people talk about themselves." There is a good deal that is animated and not a little that is cynical about the talk in this book.

LOW CEILINGS. By W. Douglas Newton. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $2.

The title indicates the repression and confinement which beset people who have no love for the open air in social life and intellectual intercourse. A young man subject all his days to this atmosphere finds it hard to break away from smug conventions, fear of what people will say, and distress at anything said or done out of the ruts of narrowmindedness. Then comes the war, and this and the influence of just the right man and just the right girl open visions of liberty and free our young friend from "low ceilings" forever. The dialogue is decidedly good; the construction not remarkably so.

JOHN KEATS MEMORIAL VOLUME (THE). Issued by the Keats House Memorial Committee. The John Lane Company, New York.

This sumptuous volume, a notable example of English book-making at its best, was issued on the centenary of the poet's death by the Committee which recently purchased as a permanent memorial the house in Hampstead in which the poet resided in 1818 and composed the "Ode to a Nightingale." That the funds acquired by its sale will go toward the purchase and maintenance of this memorial should of itself assure the volume a wide distribution among lovers of poetry. To collectors of Keatsiana it affords a unique opportunity to acquire an important contribution to the body of critical literature and personalia relating to the poet.

But this volume is something more than a collector's book. Planned to celebrate the beauty which is peculiarly the common heritage of England and America, it gives the lover of literature an sight into those qualities of spirit

which have won for Keats the enduring love of poets and men of letters through out the world. The contributions to this "Memorial Volume," originating in large measure in England and the United States, nevertheless include representative tributes from Continental and Oriental writers, and thus constitute a significant addition to the study of Keats's works by which we may estimate the influence of his art upon the culture and tradition of contemporary literature in many lands.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY ESSAYS IN BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION. By Henry Preserved Smith. The Marshall Jones Company, Boston. $2.50. The author, in his preface, modestly says, "This book does not claim to be a history of Biblical interpretation." Nevertheless the Essays are so connected as to furnish something akin to a continuous history; and this history makes it very clear that the modern method of treating the Bible, not as a single book all of whose writings possess equal authority, but as a collection of Hebrew literature which can be fully understood only as we know what can be known concerning the writers who speak and the persons and times to which they were speaking, is no new doctrine, but is only a consummation of a long period of study and of a long succession of interpreters. The conclusion to which modern theology has come has hardly, even in modern times, been more radically expressed than by Luther in the rule: "What urges Christ is Scripture, though written by a Judas; what does not stand this test is not Scripture though written by an Apostle."

This author presents the human origins of religion in terms of the social history of the race and emphasizes those phases which reflect and interpret the needs and aspirations of mankind. He traces religion through the tribal, feudal, national, international, and universal phases of its evolution. "Whether religion comes to man through instinct, intuition, philosophical insight, revelation, or some form of supernatural intervention, it must ultimately be brought within the compass of the human understanding and fitted to the needs of hoping and sorrowing men and women. It must be reduced to practice, fitted to daily utilities, and made to conform to individual and social demands.

SPIRITUAL VOICES IN MODERN LITERATURE. By Trevor H. Davies. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $2.50. A series of ten essays originally delivered by Dr. Davies as lecturer in the Metropolitan Church, Toronto. Criticism of these lectures as essays in the interpretation of literature is disarmed by the author's statement that he "was not attempting essays in literature, but the enforcement of Christian truth." The fact that these two aims should be considered absolutely disparate by the

author is perhaps a sufficient indication of his point of view and the interest of his book to lovers of literature. The subjects taken up include Francis Thompson, Ibsen's "Peer Gynt," Ruskin's "Seven Lamps," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Masefield's "Everlasting Mercy," and others.

THIRTEEN PRINCIPAL UPANISHADS (THE). Translated from the Sanskrit with an Outline of the Philosophy of the Upanishads and an Annotated Bibliography by Robert Ernest Hume, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of the History of Religions in Union Theological Seminary, New York. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, New York. "To every Indian Brahman to-day Upanishads are what the New Testament is to the Christian." But the difference in the point of view, or habit of thought, between the East and the West is so great that the ordinary American reader can make but little out of the original foundations of Oriental philosophy. For them that philosophy must be translated, not merely into the English language, but into the English forms of thought; and even then it seems hardly thinkable. The American thinks of men as a collection of individuals each complete in himself, whose connection with other individuals is voluntary and incidental, if not accidental; and he thinks of God as another individual dealing with men as their Creator, their Ruler, or, perhaps, their Friend. The Oriental thinks of God as the Great Spirit breathing through men who variously interpret him, as the air breathes through the pipes of an organ whose various voices are the utterances of one infaite and all-pervading breath. His thought finds expression in the following verse, which Mr. Hume puts as a motto at the beginning of his volume: The One who, himself without color, by the manifold application of his power

Distributes many colors in his hidden
purpose,

And into whom, its end and its be-
ginning, the whole world dis-
solves-He is God!

May He endow us with clear intel-
lect!

Professor William James, in a letter to Henri Bergson, expresses the same idea, though not necessarily his own philosophy, in the following sentence: "The brain is an organ of filtration for spiritual life." It is this radical difference between the assumptions, or the approaches, or the points of view, or the methods of thought, which leads Rudyard Kipling to say that East and West can never meet. Yet if the Oriental is too dreamy and mystical in his universalism, the Americans are too crass in their individualism; and, while it is true that neither can adopt the philosophy of the other, it is also true that each can learn something by comprehending the philosophy of the other. To the average American reader Professor Hume's book will be an enigma; but to the catholic-minded student it will be valuable both for the interpretation it brings and for the intellectual stimulant which it furnishes.