overboard the old standards as they go! We can see for ourselves the results of our intellectual slovenliness everywhere. Students may crowd the lecture hall; they may fill an astounding assortment of examination papers; they may come out of school or college or university laden with laurels; but they cannot speak or write decent English. Their language is the language of the comics. In voices they have never been taught to control or modulate; they "gotta go" and they are "gonna do it," and they sprinkle their talk with such gems as "watcha" and "gotcha" and similar vulgarisms, barren even of the humor or vigor that makes real slang amusing and sometimes eloquent. As they talk so they write, their respect for the written no deeper than for the spoken word-anything to save time and trouble-thru for through, program relieved of the extra me, cigaret of the te, catalog of the ue, humour without a u, labour as ill-used; innumerable other desecrations as horrible-almost everywhere spaceand-time-saving abbreviations, until it looks as if presently books and papers will be printed in shorthand. Where there is no feeling for the beauty of language there can be none for the beauty of literature. We have Professors of English by the legion, and how many writers or critics of distinction, how many readers of discernment or appreciation? If the critic, the leader, fights shy of work done the day before yesterday, if he rejoices in his escape from the leading-strings of Greek and Latin, if he differentiates between the English language and the American, if he boasts of emancipation from the traditions that are the heirloom of modern literature, can we wonder at the quality of the "best sellers" and the cheap magazines on our bookstallsat the demoralizing amount of second-rate work, applauded in second-rate reviews, devoured by a second-rate public-at the demoralizing mess of stuff that fills America's literary garbage can to repletion?

The case of the art of the sculptor, the engraver, the painter, the architect, is, if possible, worse. Probably the people of no other country spend so much on art, talk so much about art. The American dollar is capturing the treasures that Europe cannot afford to keep. The American museums are becoming what European museums were before the war made Europe

unsafe for anything that can be turned into money. American towns, no matter how large or small, build spacious galleries— sham classic temples now scattered over the land. American art schools are no less numerous, and rich endowments, oftener than not, are theirs for the asking. American students are almost as countless as the sands on the shore, and scholarships almost many enough to go the rounds. Art is a fashionable toy, an instrument of reform, an aid to the uplifter of humanity. And what comes of it all? When our museums have captured the world's masterpieces, how do the people profit by them? What technical training, what practical preparation, do the schools supply for the students? And what do the students see in the schools save a factory to "produce" get-rich-quick artists as fast as possible, to point the way into the short cuts to success, to teach the trick of evading the labor without which great art never yet was and never can be? We have done and occasionally still do great things in art as in literature. In architecture we have triumphed. But I am speaking of the rule, not the exception, and what the rule is can be gathered from the present tendency of artists to take to the "isms"-to the short cuts as readily as ducks take to water; from the eagerness of the public for the sensational or the slipshod in painting, and the willingness of too many painters to play down to the preference; from the indifference to sculpture, except when women can see in it an insult to their sex or the reporter a good "story"; from the popularity of illustrated magazines that are the despair of illustrators, wood engravers and printers, who remember a not distant past when the illustrated American magazine was a work of art; from the tendency of architects to rest in commonplace after their triumph. Artists are left who love art too well to dishonor it; but what do their achievements mean to the public, whose eyes have ceased to be offended by the garbage of art?

Music fares as ill, and every sensitive ear must shrink from the proofs. It has become no less fashionable than politics and philanthropy, more fashionable than art. Music schools and music teachers are as plentiful as art schools and art teachers, and the students they attract and scholarships they offer as numerous. The weekly, the daily, concert brings a horde of wealthy sub

scribers to the front door, a queue of impecunious amateurs to the cheap entrance around the corner. Not to go regularly to the opera is to write one's self down an outsider. The favorite singers, in the size of their incomes, rival the "movie" stars. There is no polite eating without music, no polite receiving without music, no polite summer holiday-making without music. And with innumerable chances to hear good music, what is the music the people really love the music to which they would sacrifice all the grand operas and symphony orchestras that ever were, had they but the courage? If the choice lay between Wagner or Debussy and Jazz, between the playing of Heifetz or Rachmaninoff and canned music, can there be any doubt of their decision, save for the shame of it? Put a mechanical piano or a talking machine on the stage, make it the fashion, and see if the same horde, the same queue, would not besiege the doors of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan! The ear has been debauched by machine-made music. Music-making machines are amazing as machines, but what they produce is the machine-made, not art, and the people do not discriminate between them. They welcome every latest mechanical substitute for music, as they welcome the latest "isms" of untrained artists, the latest camera-made drama of the picture theatre, the latest journalese of the writer who has thrown tradition to the winds. It is so much easier for the easy-going not to rise to the intellectual or emotional demands of art.

The large majority, since education has been theirs, have always been the easy-going in these matters. There is nothing new in their attitude, but there is ever-increasing danger. The citizen who takes the garbage can at his front door for granted might end by overlooking its presence in his parlor; so the man of learning or taste who grows accustomed to the majority's slovenliness in the important things of life, may finish by thinking it inevitable and have his own senses blunted in the process. But, as in the case of the garbage can at the front door, the more I think of the menace to art and all art means, the less I find that anybody else does. Slovenliness, I am assured by those to whom I have carried my uneasiness, is unavoidable in a Democracy. Respect for art is no more to be expected than tidiness in a land where the people rule; a disturbing doctrine to one

brought up to believe in Democracy as the origin and dispenser of all good. If the people make the laws, then the laws must give them what they want, and if slovenliness is what they want, then they want the wrong thing. Either they are qualified to rule and ought to know better, or they do not know better and therefore are not qualified to rule; a dilemma out of which I see no possible way. And my uneasiness grows when I consider how our rulers, the people, have allowed the country to be flooded with undesirable aliens who add their foreign methods of untidiness to our own and, as the citizens they quickly become, have the right to inflict them upon us. Customs that do no special harm in wind-swept villages on Italian hilltops, when imported into our crowded slums can do all the harm in the world. Customs that make the Russian-Jew quarter a horror everywhere in Southeastern Europe, are more likely than not to flourish furiously in the Ghettos now encouraged or condoned in the democratic American towns.

And we accept it all, as satisfied with our easy-goingness as the British with their muddling. Not until our country was in the clutches of the objectionable immigrant did we set a limit to immigration; we waited until the Eighteenth Amendment was part of the Constitution to protest against Prohibition; and so, no doubt, art will have been submerged in slovenliness before we wake up to the truth that life without art is not life at all—indeed, that life itself should be an art. The very suggestion would startle or distress the progressive American who measures success in life by the big business he does. America is a commercial country, “the business man's country, not the artist's," the business man informs us. "The artist lives in our midst by sufferance, not by right." If this is what we Americans honestly believe, may God help us, for it is too late to help ourselves! Why, even the "heathen Chinee" we despise knows better. If he declines our offer of a share in our commercial darkness, it is because, as he has courteously reminded us, he understands how dearly bought is progress when it leaves a nation neither time nor inclination to cultivate the art of living. ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

THE BIG DRAFT

BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE

I SUPPOSE I must begin by explaining what a Draft used in this sense signifies. I have had occasion before this to attempt its definition, and in the effort have applied to dwellers in The Big Draft to assist me, but without much success. With us a draft is a draft, "An' ef you don't natch'ly know what that is, why then, dog-gone it! It's mighty hard to say what it is!" But for those who don't "natch'ly know", I may say that a draft is not quite a valley, nor is it exactly a gap. Perhaps it is a mongrel bred of the two, fathered by a gap and mothered by a valley, and is possibly what they speak of in the Tennessee mountains as a "cove". I am aware that this definition smacks somewhat of the Biblical one, “Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah," which is helpful no doubt if you happen to know how much an ephah is, but if you do not is as cryptic as "How old is Ann?" Well, for those who do not understand the fine points of distinction between valleys, hollows, drafts, coves, gaps and narrows, I will say that a draft looks so much like a valley that only the true mountaineer is aware of the difference. So the average reader may think of it as a valley, and not be far wrong.

We have in our vicinity many drafts, such as Morning Draft, Monroe Draft, and Tuckahoe; but it is with The Big Draft that I am especially concerned. Truth, however, compels me at this point to confess that though I now hail from The Big Draft, I first saw the light in Tuckahoe Draft, and though I moved from there at the early age of one year, nevertheless it was cast in my face in my youth that I was born "up Tuckahoe". The Big Drafters hold the dwellers in other sections in derision, and especially they sing—

Go for to milk, an' milk it in a gourd,

Set it on er bench, an' cover it with a board

That's the way they do

In the Tuckahoe crew!