ADAM'S first impression was of a good world, well arranged.

At noon precisely he opened his eyes upon a broad field. It was a very broad field indeed, and he was pleasantly situated in the very centre of it. Behind him extended a luxuriant green expanse of waving bank-notes, the royalties from Helen of Troy and the royalties from Galahad. Before him stretched the pleasant prospect of a long contract with the Cosmopolitan magazine, reaching as far as the eye could see just now. The field indeed seemed rich and unlimited. He wondered if he would ever grow weary, just walking across it.

Adam leaned on the top-rail of the fence, and munched this idea thoughtfully. There was another object in the direct line of his vision, a large ungainly object. When he looked at this object he had to put away the disquieting thought that in a good world there might be imperfections. The object was sitting down, or you might say lying down, except that its four feet were under it. Adam reached over affectionately and patted the front of this object. It gave forth a nice musical sound.

"I wish I might stay and play with this grand piano*," thought Adam, "instead of exploring this fertile but uninteresting field any further."

With a sigh of resignation he picked up a copy of Adam and Eve, adjusted his tortoise-shell spectacles, and resolutely made his way with bare feet through the first few editions. Suddenly he halted; for a stranger was standing directly in his path. He was considerably broader than Adam, and he carried under his arm a copy of Something About Eve; and his clothing consisted exclusively of a very peculiar leaf, and a long and well-worn sword with a bejeweled tip, which was hung conspicuously at his waist. The stranger dismounted from his silver stallion, and approached Adam with a sly wink.

"Come, now, but since you are likewise traveling along this woman-haunted way," this stranger accosted him, "then do you tell me forthwith where may be that fair princess Evasherah, variously known as Evelyn, Evadne and Evaine, her whom I seek in the realm of Porneos Pornographos, as befits a member of the . Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and the foremost swordsman of his time?"

"This is my field," said Adam. His first statement to any human being.

"Ho, then, but you must know this be the oldest field there be," rejoined the stranger lustily, "in whose rich dirt men have burrowed since Solomon and Rabelais and Mrs. Glyn. And since you have elected to harrow it likewise, then let us travel together in search of the First Principle, and that which pays the biggest royalties."

"I am looking for Eve," said Adam.

"That is as it may be," smiled the stranger, "but surely in such an innocence of dress you are scarcely prepared to meet her with propriety?"

"I can hide behind my tortoise-shell spectacles," said Adam, blushing slightly.

"Hoity-toity, an' you cannot hope forever to conceal yourself behind an academic restraint," remonstrated the stranger. "Prithee, let your body be enamoured as mine of the fig-leaf of romance, with which I cover my own unmentionable obscenities, so that they may be read and sold, and even called literature, in the incredible morality of the United States of America."

"Thank you," said Adam, "but I prefer to explore .this field without the dubious protection of a double entendre."

"Hotsy-totsy, an' a fig-leaf for your decency," laughed Adam of the Unsheathed Sword, "for I have romped nine years in this field, and I know my grosseries. And it is my talent—which is variously called 'art' and 'genius' by those fawning critics who feel they must laugh at a dirty story for fear their own manhood shall be challenged—it is my talent, I say, to clothe and bedeck my gross indecencies with this magic veil embroidered with brazen fig-leaves, which is called Honi Soit, and behind which I may wax pornographic, with phallic allusions and smart insinuendoes, to the carnal titillations of a nation of stenographers and literary sycophants."

"I may be a Puritan," said Adam, "but I am not a hypocrite."

"Then, prithee, bear with me, O Adam of the Academic Restraint, whilst I amuse myself by scratching with my golden pen lewd pictures on the back fences of literature."

"I'm not so sure that I want to travel in your company," said Adam, leaning on the fence,, and gazing doubtfully at the distant pastures rich with translation and magazine and motion-picture rights. "If it were not for this thing that I desire, I'd be quite content to stay here with my grand piano."

"Tell me the name of this thing that you desire," interrupted a bearded and white-clad figure who loomed menacingly in their path.

"And who is this ancient in the cotton nightshirt," inquired the stranger curiously, "who holds in his hand a Flaming Sword not hotter than my own?"

"It must be the Angel Gabriel," said Adam.

"I wish you would hurry and answer my question," reminded the Angel Gabriel, in some agitation. "This flaming sword is getting extremely warm."

"I desire to effect an intellectual liaison between myself and Eve," said Adam, "in which I may hereafter embrace only philosophy, and satisfy my passion exclusively in pure rhetoric."

"Whereas I," volunteered the stranger, "desire in Eve merely to explore the heaven which lies beyond those two Moons of Delight, which I seek to enter in the name of the Holy Nose of Licentius, since I likewise may find it if I but follow my nose."

"As a matter of fact," replied the Angel Gabriel, waving his flaming sword about to cool it off, "in your search for this First Principle and that which brings the biggest royalties, variously called Evasherah or Eve or just plain sex—" here he paused for a moment to blow on his fingers—"one of you has gone too far, and the other has not come far enough. And since neither of you therefore belong among the best-sellers at all, I really must ask you to get to hell out of this garden."

"In that case," said Adam of the Academic Restraint, with a tremendous sigh of relief, "I shall be getting back at last to my essays and my piano."

"And I," shouted Adam of the Unsheathed Sword, "shall mount again upon my silver stallion, and gallop next time beyond the horizon of taste, beyond all the limits of decency itself, until I am lost to view forever."

* * * *

"And now," added Mr. Riddell, as he removed his "Angel Gabriel" beard and hung up his white cotton night-shirt, and rubbed a little unguentine on his blistered fingers, "now perhaps we'll be happier all around."

(ADAM AND EVE, by John Erskine. Bobbs, Merrill)

(SOMETHING ABOUT EVE, by James Branch Cabell. McBride)

RESIGNATION

With this issue Mr. Riddell announces, with considerable regret, his resignation henceforth from the Society for the Suppression of Critical Superlatives. As a loyal brother of this order, Mr. Riddell did his part, during his brief period of membership, to encourage moderate criticisms and temperate reviews of the arts, couched in sober and well-considered phrases, not too enthusiastic, a bit contained, nicely adult and noncommittal and comparative. And now, at one leap, Mr. Riddell transfers himself to the extreme Left Wing of critical enthusiasm. Margaret Kennedy's Red Sky at Morning and Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitable are out together in the same month with Ernest Hemingway's Men Without Women.

Mr. Riddell, perhaps it is betraying no confidences to admit, is not himself.

THE CONSISTENT NYMPH

For Margaret Kennedy is back, with all the old magic that made The Constant Nymph the best novel that Heywood Broun had read in—well, ten years, and the most enjoyable novel that I had read since—well, Samuel Butler. Her long-awaited new book is just as readable and just as deftly charming, lit with the same detached and impish smile; and if it is not quite as lovable as The Constant Nymph that is only because no book could ever he. As a novelist, Miss Kennedy maintains her supremacy still.

Red Sky at Morning is once more the story of the children of a genius: two hapless twins with the curse of brilliance upon them, scurrying to their disaster before the same relentless fate that hounded the mad, sad progeny of Sanger's Circus. I suppose it is this inevitability that is Miss Kennedy's great trick: her terrifying sense of the drama of little coincidences, hidden allusions to approaching danger, half-hints that you remember when it is too late, a significance that grows upon you with an infinitely gradual and dreadful effect as you hurry onward helplessly toward the impact awaiting you at the end of the story. The "red sky at morning", in the opening chapter of the lives of the Crowne twins, gives an uneasy warning of the rough weather ahead; and the rest of the story runs an uncanny parallel to this ominous prologue. It is an expert device, expertly done.

Miss Kennedy is a curious mingling of pig-tails and stern sophistication. Her intimate sense of little poignant things is feminine; her brusque refusal to sentimentalize them is masculine. There is a little touch of old-fashioned primness about her, a strain of mad music, a wistful pity, a Continental sense of bawdy comedy; and there hovers about her always a sense of humourous tolerance and an impassive sympathy that belongs only to the very great ironists. She is an odd combination of a grim and parental Jupiter ordering the destinies of mortals, and a quaint little girl playing with her dolls.

She is very sure of herself as a writer. Her rhythm is paced to perfection. Her action is always concentrated; when someone telephones into a scene between two characters, for example, she makes this third voice emerge strictly from the mouthpiece of the telephone. She has a happy knack of picking the perfect chapter title, and yet she never seems to strain for an effect. No American ironic novelist can touch her; I would not trade a paragraph of her hook for a dozen Bromfields.

Certainly they will salute this work hysterically and read it over and over into the hundreds of thousands; but somewhere there is a dim affection in me still for that inimitable, "naphthaflare" quality of Sanger's Circus, the rude pathos of little Tessa, the wild wind that sang round the Karindehütte, which this newer book can never quite efface. But for all my loyalty to her first-born, Red Sky at Morning is a gorgeous novel, dancing with irrepressible brilliance. It is the best novel I have read since—well, The Constant Nymph.

(RED SKY AT MORNING by Margaret Kennedy. Doubleday, Page)

DON MARQUIS

"Shakespeare and I are frequently coarse," boasts this modest old trouper, sitting with his boots crossed on the table, bibbing his ale and bawling ribald melodies in a lonely corner of the back-room of modern literature. "He pulled rough stuff, and he liked rough stuff ..." For that is the genius of Don Marquis: the gross, slovenly, hard-boiled comedy of Falstaff, shot with savage poetry, rumbling to a great belly-laugh and re-echoing to the subtlest over-tones of sad humour. You would say he is one of the greatest of the current American poets, except that would be, unfortunately, saying so very little. You may say without doubt that he is one of the greatest of our living humourists.

Archy and Mehitable will be welcomed with the same fanatic zeal that brings lip-worship to every Gilbert and Sullivan revival. The old-time followers of the Sun Dial will re-read now with almost a religious awe these free-verse communications from the famous lower-case cockroach, who absorbed the soul of some departed E. E. Cummings and was discovered one night in the toils of composition upon Mr. Marquis' typewriter. "He did not see us," confides Mr. Marquis, "and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. . . . Congratulating ourselves that we had left a sheet of paper in the machine, so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination, and this is what we found..."

What Mr. Marquis found, upon that historic occasion, was the first communication from archy, and, what is more important, the first mention of mehitable the cat, destined to emerge in future correspondence as the most authentic and the most winning harlot immortalized in American folk-lore.

For it is in the character of mehitable, herself a reincarnation of "cleopatra and a lot of those other dames dearie", that Mr. Marquis has achieved his supreme characterization. Here is no Aesop's fable puppet, no comicstrip Felix, no mere caricature of a cat; but rather a great free spirit, the soul of the eternal fille de joie, one of that loose sisterhood of Jezebel, Thaïs and Phryne and Aspasia.

"I have been used something fierce in my time," mehitable confides to archy, "but i am no bum sport archy so wotthehell kid wotthehell . . . one life up and the next life down archy but always a lady thru it all and a good mixer . . . always free-footed archy never tied down to housework . . . 'what though a boot should break a slat, me for the life romantic, fishheads freedom a frozen sprat, is better than bores and a fireside mat . . . ' like a gentleman friend of mine used to say archy toujours gai kid toujours gai i have known some swell gents in my time dearie ..."

It is a glorious conception: this cat of easy virtue, this strumpet of the back-alleys, kicked and cursed, the target for flying boots and bottles, seduced by every "maltese cat with a come hither look in his eye" and bobbing up serenely from each betrayal, good-humoured, infinitely vulgar, proud but slightly battered from fighting weak-kneed lovers—"because no cat can hold me archy that lets me claw him i live my own life and only a masterful cat can hold my affections" —a grand, lonely old war-horse, scorning pampered ease for the life of the hobo and the bum, to the end she carries her tail in the air.

A glorious conception; and at times it mounts into such moments of sheer, bitter humour as that unforgettable ballad "Mehitable Dances with Boreas," sung by the solitary figure of mehitable while the "wild December wind blows thru her frozen whiskers" and she dances all night long on the cobbles of the alley, "wailing to herself the fragments that rattle in her cold brain":

"whirl mehitable whirl
and show your shadow how
tonight it s dance with the bloody moon
tomorrow the garbage scow

blow wind out of the north
to hell with being a pet
my left front foot is brittle
but there s life in the old dame yet

whistle a tune north wind
on my hollow marrow bones
i ll dance the tune with three good feet
here on the alley stones

eight of my lives are gone
it s years since my fur was slicked
but blow north wind blow
i m damned if i am licked

i will not eat tomorrow
i did not cat today
but wotthehell i ask you
the word is toujours gai

caper mehitable caper
leap shadow leap
you gotto dance till the sun comes up
for you got no place to sleep ..."

There is only one disappointment to the book. If Harriman could have illustrated it with the fantasy of "Krazy Kat", we should have had at last a magnificent blending of these two perfect and oddly sympathetic talents. As it is, Archy and Mehitable is a book you simply cannot afford to miss; the best humourous book by all odds of the year.

(ARCHY AND MEHITABLE by Don Marquis. Doubleday, Page)

LAST OF HIS LINE

Nor can you afford to miss Trails Plowed Under by Charles M. Russell, the late cowboy artist, the best all-around book of the old West I have ever seen. You can't talk much about a book that's so grand and so complete as this. If you have ever loved the West, if there is any loyalty in you for the finest page that was ever turned in American history, then this authentic collection of yarns and pictures of the old-time cowpuncher is your book. It is boisterous, crude and honest; it smells of leather; it leaves you feeling as good as a month with a pack-outfit through Wyoming.

No; you can't talk much about it. Stuff that is as true as his tales of the days "when a cowpuncher's home wasn't where he took his hat off, but where he spread his blankets" is only dulled by re-telling. Forty-four years Russell punched cattle through Wyoming and Montana, mixing with "cowmen and priests, sinners and drinking men", gathering yarns of Indians and bear and buffalo, drawing his magnificent sketches of horses and roundups and campfires at night. Ross Santee is the only other artist who can draw a horse that feels like a horse; and Santee is of Arizona and the Southwest. Russell roamed the northern range, wrangling horses in the spring, herding beef in the fall, always painting and sketching and noting the little comedies and mannerisms of the cowmen that make his work ring so very true:

"Now, humans dress up and punchers dress down," he observes, recognizing a fellow-puncher once dressing in a cheap Chicago hotel. "When you raised, the first thing you put on is your hat. Another thing that shows you up is you don't shed your shirt when you bed down. So next comes your vest and coat, keepin' your hind quarters covered till you slide into your pants, an' now you're lacin' your shoes. I noticed you done all of it without quittin' the blankets, like the ground's cold. I don't know what state or territory you hail from, but you've smelt sagebrush an' drank alkali. I heap savvy you. You've slept a whole lot with nothin' but sky over your head ..."

Will Rogers did the Introduction, one of the truest and most compelling things he has ever written. "Us, and the manicured tribe that is following us, will never have the Real Cowboy, Painter and Man, combined that old Charley was, For we aint got no more real cowboys, and we aint got no real Cows to paint, and we just don't raise no more of his kind of men. . . . At first we couldent understand why they moved you, Charley, but we can now. They had every kind of a great man up there, but they just dident have any great Cowboy Artist like you. Shucks! on the luck, there was only one of you and he couldent use you both places."

Get two copies: one to keep and one to give away. For if ever a book deserved to be given by every man to every other man in America at Christmas, then this is the hook.

(TRAILS PLOWED UNDER, by Charles M. Russell. Doubleday, Page)

NOW WE ARE EXHAUSTED

We have tossed our hat into the air so high and so handsome for Miss Kennedy and Mr. Marquis and Mr. Russell that our critical right arm is getting stiff and tired; and we have only time to add a final superlative for A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (the superb sequel to When We Were Very Young, a tender and thoroughly delightful book of child's verse), as our bonnet descends into our outstretched fingers for the fourth and last time. Hereafter we shall be just the sourest and meanest critic you ever saw, until our arm heals.

(WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG, by A. A. Milne. Dutton)

IN LESS WORDS THAN IT TAKES TO TELL

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP, by Willa Cather. (Knopf). Miss Cather it is reported, herself composed the remarkable and oft-quoted publicity copy for her book: a great tapestry of color, flung across the newspaper-pages with the inimitable gesture of a supreme advertising-writer.

LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOSEPH CONRAD, by G. Jean-Aubry. (Doubleday, Page). A dignified and revealing collection of intimacies, handsomely presented and indispensable to any lover of Conrad. 

AN UNMARRIED FATHER, by Floyd Dell. (Doran). Wherein Mr. Dell knits his own baby socks in another listless attempt to be barred from Boston. 

MOTHER INDIA, by Katherine Mayo. (Harcourt, Brace). "The impression that it leaves on my mind is the report of a drain-inspector sent out for the sole purpose of opening and examining the drains of a country and giving a graphic description of the stench . . . the hook is a travesty of truth."— Gandhi, in Young India.

BUT GENTLEMEN MARRY BRUNETTES, by Anita Loos. (Boni & Liveright). I may have been the only person in the United States who found Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a dull hook; but I imagine that this second effort of Miss Loos' will find me less conspicuous in my opinion. It is pretty stupid stuff.

IN THE GREAT DAYS OF SAIL, by Andrew Shewan. (Houghton, Mifflin). A mellow and affectionate history of the sea-going sailing-ships, told with a sentimental dignity by this last grizzled survivor of the tea-clipper captains: a worthy book for any lover of the sea.

JEREMY AT CRALE, by Hugh Walpole. (Doran). Once your ear is accustomed to the startling nuances of British school-boy slang, this book emerges as an extremely credible and vivid portrayal of adolescence; for once, portrayed with sympathy.

TRANSITION, by Will Durant. (Simon & Schuster). The learned doctor seems to have lost his sense of humour. 

FIREFLIES, by Rabindranath Tagore. (Macmillan). Exquisite Oriental thoughts "written on fans and pieces of silk", expressed with a fragile magic. 

CARRY ON, JEEVES, by P. G. Wodehouse. (Doran). The fact that I did not laugh quite as hard as usual at Mr. Wodehouse is probably my own fault, and not Mr. Wodehouse's. He is still very funny.

TEN-AND OUT! by Alexander Johnson. (Ives Washburn). A painstaking and often dramatic story of the prize-ring in America, with the authentic smell about it of wintergreen-liniment and sweat. 

CHARLOTTE LOWENSKOLD by Selma Lagerlof. (Doubleday, Page). The author plays God in that simple Swedish way with a cast of well-drawn characters, who are "not bad, hut only mistaken", and fixes up a cheery ending, full of "realizations".

THE WOODCUTTER'S HOUSE by Robert Nathan. (Bobbs, Merrill). A simple and beautiful fable, with a Gallagher and Shean Greek chorus of a rational dog and a stoical horse. This book comes like the clear ring of axe on timber from a mythical and almost forgotten glade, among the back-stairs gossip, the introspective complaining, and miscellaneous hullabaloo of contemporary fiction.

EUROPE AT LOVE by Paul Morand. (Boni & Liveright). The translated L'Europe Galante, in which an exquisitely literary exquisite, in his most artful manner, translates into words the perfumes into which exquisite sensibilities have translated a number of ladies. 

THE GREAT BEAR by Lester Cohen. (Boni & Liveright). An epic of the only heroic modern "warfare—Business made thrilling (take it from one who hates to admit it). You will find out for yourself how little you will miss by skipping the pages of love interest. 

UNCLE ANGHEL by Panait Istrati. (Knopf). Three tales of Roumanian madmen, bandit chiefs, perverts, nymphomaniacs, and kindly patriarchs who disport themselves without seeming to realize that they are in any way remarkable.

ON THE KING'S COUCH by Octave Aubry. (Boni & Liveright). The perfect civilized light reading: Casanova, Louis XV, and the bourgeoise who is the lover of the first and the mistress of the second, make a prettily poignant pattern in intrigue and counter-intrigue. 

THE FIFTH CHILD by Klaus Mann. (Boni & Liveright). The son of Thomas Mann adds lustre to the family name Avith a precious and ëerie story of a philosopher's widow who exemplifies in a new sense the aphorism: "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred Avith their bones". 

YELLOW GENTIANS AND BLUE by Zona Gale (Appleton). A collection of compressed human interest stories, a medium in which Zona Gale is preeminent: tragic trifles, glimpses suggestive of a life, bitter and gay decorations for a roadside.

MEN OF DESTINY by Walter Lippmann, illustrated by Rollin Kirby. (Macmillan). Essays by an observer of the political comedy, whose sense of the dramatic in events never clouds his perception of their underlying significance, and whose admitted and just prejudices do not dull the courtesy of his ironical edge. A fruitful book for those who are still Interested In Politics.

COBRA, by Harry Hervey. (Cosmopolitan). Sexplorations in Siam, by just another Halliburton.

WHAT CAN A MAN BELIEVE, by Bruce Barton. (Bobbs, Merrill). What can a man believe by Bruce Barton?

PERSONAL NOTE

There seems to exist considerable confusion about town as to the proper pronunciation of the name of the editor of this Department. The pronunciation of "John" is practically unanimous; but opinions differ as to whether it is correct to rhyme "Riddell" with "fiddle", "twiddle" or "diddle", or to give it the penultimate advantages of "smell" or "what the hell". We leave it to our readers. Personally, after a vain attempt to make it correspond with "Excellent" or even "adequate", we gave up hope and lost interest altogether.

*"Professor Erskine is very musical and is said to have played Mendelssohn's Spring Song with promising virtuosity and charm."—From John Erskine, or Enough of His Life to Explain His Reputation.