I shall doubtless be asked whether I assert that one type of mind belongs always to the man and one to the woman. By no means. I do not even lay emphasis on the necessity of naming the two types "male" and "female." All I say is that the types exist—with those intermediate cases that always bother the classifier—and that the great majority of men possess one type and the great majority of women the other. It is possible that differences of training may have originated or at least emphasised the types; it is possible that future training may obliterate the lines that separate them, but I do not believe it. I am even afraid of trying the experiment, for there is reason to believe that its success in the mental field might react unfavourably on those physical differences on which the future of the race depends. We may have gone too far in this direction already; else why the feverish anxiety of the girls' colleges to prove that their graduates are marrying and bearing children?

The fact is that the problem of the education of the sexes is not yet solved. Educating one sex alone didn't work; neither, I believe, does the present plan of educating both alike, whether in the same institution, or separately.

II—A Diagnosis

Reading, like conversation, is, or ought to be, a contact between two minds. The difference is that while one may talk only with his contemporaries and neighbours one may read the words of a writer far distant both in time and space. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the printed word has become a fetish, but fetishes of any kind are not in accordance with the spirit of the age, and their veneration should be discouraged. Reading in which the contact of minds is of secondary importance, or even cuts no figure at all, is meaningless and valueless.

In a previous paper, reasons have been given for believing that reading of this kind is peculiarly prevalent among the members of women's clubs. The value of these organisations is so great, and the services that they have rendered to women, and through them to the general cause of social betterment, are so evident, that it seems well worth while to examine the matter a little more closely, and to complete a diagnosis based on the study of the symptoms that have already presented themselves. As most of the reading done in connection with clubs is in preparation for the writing and reading of papers, we may profitably, perhaps, direct our attention to this phase of the subject.

Most persons will agree, probably, that the average club paper is not notably worth while. It is written by a person not primarily and vitally interested in the subject, and it is read to an assemblage most of whom are similarly devoid of interest—the whole proceeding being more or less perfunctory. Could it be expected that reading done in connection with such a performance should be valuable?

This is worth pondering, because it is a fact that almost all the vital informative literature that is produced at first hand sees the light in connection with clubs and associations—bodies that publish journals, "transactions" or "proceedings" for the especial purpose of printing the productions of their members.

This literature, for the most part, does not come to the notice of the general reader. The ordinary books on the technical subjects of which it treats are not raw material, but a manufactured product—compilations from the original sources. And the pity of it is that very many of them, often the best of them from a purely literary point of view, are so unsatisfactory, viewed from the point of view of accomplishment. They do not do what they set out to do; they are full of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, interpolations and omissions. It is the old story; those who know won't tell and the task is assumed by those who are eminently able to tell, but don't know. The scientific expert despises the public, which is forced to get its information through glib but ignorant expounders. This is a digression, but it may serve to illuminate the situation, which is that the authoritative literature of special subjects sees the light almost wholly in the form of papers, read before clubs and associations. Evidently there is nothing in the mere fact that a paper is to be read before a club, to make it trivial or valueless. Yet how much that is of value to the world first saw the light in a paper read before a woman's club? How much original thought, how much discovery, how much invention, how much inspiration, is put into their writing and emanates from their reading?

There must be a fundamental difference of some kind between the constitution and the methods of these two kinds of clubs. A study of this difference will throw light on the kind of reading that must be done in connection with each and may explain, in great part, why the reading done for women's club-papers is what it is.

A scientific or technical society exists largely for the purpose of informing its members of the original work that is being done by each of them. When anyone has accomplished such work or has made such progress that he thinks an account of what he has done would be interesting, he sends a description of it to the proper committee, which decides whether it shall be read and discussed at a meeting, or published in the Proceedings, or both, or neither. The result depends on the size of the membership, on its activity, and on the value of its work. It may be that the programme committee has an embarrassment of riches from which to select, or that there is poverty instead. But in no case does it arrange a programme. The Physical Society, if that is its name and subject, does not decide that it will devote the meetings of the current season to a consideration of Radio-activity and assign to specified members the reading of papers on Radio-active springs, the character of Radium Emanation, and so on. If it did, it would doubtless get precisely the same results that we are complaining of in the case of the Woman's Club. A man whose specialty is thermodynamics might be told off to prepare a paper on Radio-active Elements in Rocks—a subject in which he is not interested. He could have nothing new nor original to say on the subject and his paper would be a mere compilation. It would not even be a good compilation, for his interest and his skill would lie wholly in another direction. The good results that the society does get are wholly dependent on the fact that each writer is full of new information that he desires, above all things, to communicate to his fellow-members.

In the preparation of such a paper, one needs, of course, to read, and often to read widely. Much of the reading will be done in connection with the work described, or even before it is begun. No one wishes to undertake an investigation that has already been made by someone else, and so the first thing that a competent investigator does is to survey his field and ascertain what others have accomplished in it. This task is by no means easy, for such information is often hidden in journals and transactions that are difficult to reach, and the published indexes of such material, though wonderfully advanced on the road toward perfection in the past twenty years, have yet far to travel before they reach it, Not only the writer's description of what he has done or ascertained, but the character of the work itself; the direction it takes—the inferences that he draws from it, will be controlled and coloured by what he reads of others' work. And even if he finds it easy to ascertain what has been done and to get at the published accounts and discussions of it, the mass may be so great that he has laid out for him a course of reading that may last many months.

But mark the spirit with which he attacks it! He is at work on something that seems to him supremely worth while. He is labouring to find out truth, to dissipate error, to help his fellow-men to know something or to do something. The impulse to read, and to read much and thoroughly, is so powerful that it may even need judicious repression. The difference between this kind of reading and that done in the preparation of a paper to fill a place in a set programme hardly needs emphasis.

The preparation of papers for professional and technical societies has been dwelt upon at such length, because I see no reason why the impulse to reading that it furnishes cannot also be placed at the disposal of the woman's club; and I shall have some suggestions toward this end in a future article.

Meanwhile, I shall doubtless be told that it is unfair to compare the woman's club, with its didactic aim, and the scientific association of trained and interested investigators. It is true that we have plenty of clubs—some of men alone, some of both sexes—whose object is to listen to interesting and instructive papers on a set subject, often forming part of a pre-arranged programme. These, however, need our attention here only so far as the papers are prepared by members of the club, and in this case they are in precisely the same class as the woman's club. In many cases, however, the paper is merely the excuse for a social gathering, perhaps at a dinner or a luncheon. Of course if the paper or lecture is by an expert invited to give it, the case falls altogether outside of the region that we are exploring.

I am condemning here all clubs, formed for an avowed educational or cultural purpose, that adopt set programmes and assign the subjects to their own members. I am deploring the kind of reading to which this leads, the kind of papers that are prepared in this way, and the kind of thought and action that are the inevitable outcome.

It would seem that the women's clubs now form an immense majority of all organisations of this kind and that there are reasons for warning women that they are specially prone to this kind of mistake.

The diversity of interests of the average man, the wideness of his contacts—the whole tradition of his sex—tends to minimise the injury that may be done to him, intellectually and spiritually, by anything of this kind. The very fact that he is the woman's inferior spiritually, and in many cases, in intellect, also—although probably not at the maximum—relieves him, in great part, of the odium attaching to the error that has been described. Women are becoming keenly alive to the deficiencies of their sex-tradition; they are trying to broaden their intellectual contacts—that is the great modern feminist movement. Some of those who are active in it are making two mistakes—they are ignoring the differences between the sexes and they are trying to substitute revolution for evolution. In this latter error they are in very good company—hardly one of the great and the good has not made it, at some time and in some way. Revolution is always the outcome of a mistake. The mistake may be antecedent and irrevocable, and the revolution therefore necessary, but this is rarely the case. The revolutionist runs a risk common to all who are in a hurry—he may break the object of his attention instead of moving it. When he wants to hand you a dish he hits it with a ball-bat. Taking a reasonable amount of time is better in the long run.

That there is no royal road to knowledge has long been recognised. The trouble with most of us is that we have interpreted this to mean that the acquisition of knowledge must always be a distasteful process. On the contrary, the vivid interest that is the surest guide to knowledge is also the surest smoother of the path. Given the interest that lures the student on, and he will spend years in surmounting rocks and breaking through thorny jungles, realising their difficulties perhaps, but rejoicing the more when those difficulties prove no obstacles.

The fact that the first step toward accomplishment is to create an interest has long been recognised, but attempts have been made too often to do it by devious ways, unrelated to the matter in hand. Students have been made to study history or algebra by offering prizes to the diligent and by threatening the slothful with punishment. More indirect rewards and punishments abound in all our incitements to effort and need not be mentioned here. They may often be effective, but the further removed they are from direct personal interest in the subject, the weaker and the less permanent is the result. You may offer a boy a dollar to learn certain facts in English history, but those facts will not be fixed so well or so lastingly in his mind as those connected with his last year's trip to California, which he remembers easily without offer of reward or threat of punishment.

The interest in the facts gathered by reading in connection with the average club paper is merely the result of a desire to remain in good standing by fulfilling the duties of membership; and these duties may be fulfilled with slight effort and no direct interest, as we have already seen.

If interest were present even at the inception of the programme, something would be gained; but in too many cases it is not. The programme committee must make some kind of a programme, but what it is to be they know little and care less.

Two women recently entered a branch library and asked the librarian, who was busy charging books at the desk, what two American dramatists she considered "foremost." This was followed by the request, "Please tell me the two best plays of each of them." A few minutes later the querists returned and asked the same question about English dramatists, and still later about German, Russian, Italian and Spanish writers of the drama. Each time they eagerly wrote down the information and then retired to the reading-room for a few minutes' consultation.

Finally they propounded a question that was beyond the librarian's knowledge, and then she asked why they wanted to know.

"We are making out the programme for our next year's study course in the Blank Club," was the answer.

"But you mustn't take my opinion as final," protested the scandalised librarian. "You ought to read up everything you can find about dramatists. I may have left out the most important ones."

"This will do nicely," said the club-woman, as she folded her sheets of paper. And it did—whether nicely or not deponent saith not? but it certainly constituted the club programme.

On another occasion a clubwoman entered the library and said with an air of importance, "I want your material on Susanna H. Brown."

The librarian had never heard of Susanna, but experience had taught her modesty and also a certain degree of guile, so she merely said, "What do you want to know about her, particularly?"

"Our club wishes to discuss her contributions to American literature."

Now the Brown family has been active in letters, from Charles Brockden down to Alice, but no one seems to know of Susanna H. The librarian contrived to put off the matter until she could make some investigations of her own, but, all the resources of the central reference room proving unequal to the task, she timidly asked the clubwoman, at her next visit, to solve the problem.

"Oh, we don't know who Susanna H. Brown was; that is why we came to you for information!"

"But where did you find the name?"

"Well, I don't know exactly; but one of our members, in a conversation with some one who knows a lot about literature—I forget just who it was—was told that Susanna H. Brown had rendered noteworthy services to American literature. We've got to find out, for her name is already printed on the programme!"

I don't know what was said of Miss, or Mrs. Brown at the meeting; but my opinion is that this particular item on the programme had to be omitted.

Another lady entered a library abruptly and said "I want your books on China."

"Do you mean the country of that name? or are you looking up porcelain?"

First perplexity and then dismay spread over the lady's face. "Why, I don't know," she faltered. "The program just said China!"

A university professor was once asked by one of these program committees for a list of references on German folklore—a subject to which it had decided that its club should devote the current season. The list, as furnished, proved rather stiff, and the astonished professor received forthwith the following epistle (quoted from memory):

"DEAR PROFESSOR—

"Thank you so much for the folk-lore; but we have changed our minds and have decided to study the Chicago Drainage Canal instead."

This hap-hazard method of programme-making is not confined to club papers, as the following anecdote will show:

An officer of a woman's club entered a library and said that she thought it would be nice to vary the usual literary programme by the introduction of story-telling, and she asked for aid from the library staff. It was a busy season and as the librarian hesitated the clubwoman added hastily that the whole programme need not occupy more than half an hour. "We want the very simplest things, told in a few words, so that it will really be no trouble at all."

Pressed to be more specific, she went on: "Well—no story must take more than three minutes, and we want Little Nell, Louis IX, Moses in the Bulrushes, the Princes in the Tower, Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Holy Night and Louis XI.

"You see that allowing three minutes apiece would bring them all within twenty-four minutes—less than half an hour, just as I said.

"And—oh, yes! we want the storyteller to sit on a platform, and just in front of her we will pose a group of little girls, all in white frocks. Won't that be nice?"

The making of programmes has in many cases been influenced by the fact that some subjects are considered more "high-toned" than others. The drama is at present a particularly high-toned subject. The fine arts are always placed in the first class. Apparently anything closely related to the personal lives, habits and interests of those concerned is under a ban. The fine arts, for instance, are not recognised as including the patterns of wall-paper or curtains, or the decoration of plates or cups. Copying from one programme to another is a common expedient. The making of these programmes betrays, all through its processes and their inevitable result, lack of originality, blind adherence to models, unquestioning imitation of something that has gone before. I do not believe these to be sex-characteristics, and there are signs that the sex is growing out of them. If they are not sex characteristics they must be the results of education, for ordinary heredity would quickly equalise the sexes in this respect. I have already stated my belief that the physical differences between the sexes are necessarily accompanied by mental differences, and I think it probable that the characteristics noted above, although not proper to sex, spring from the fact that we are expecting like results from the same educational treatment of unlike minds. When we have learned how to vary our treatment of these minds so as to produce like results—in those cases where we want the results to be alike, as in the present instance—we shall have solved the problem of education, so far as it affects sex-differences.

It has long been recognised that whenever woman does show a deviation from standards she is apt to deviate far and erratically. So far, however, she has shown no marked tendency so to deviate in the arts and a very slight one in the sciences. There have been lately some marked instances of her upward deviation in the field of science. In literature, no age has been wanting in great woman writers, though there have been few of them. I look eventually to see woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin, woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as able as Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solely the fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative, arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part—the very fact that our clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequence of it. The substitution of something else for these programmes, with the accompanying change in the interests and reading of clubwomen, will be one step toward the rationalisation of education—for all processes of this kind are essentially educative.

We need not despair of finding ultimately the exact differences in method which, applied in the education of the sexes, will minimise such of the present mental differences as we desire to obliterate. Problems of this sort are solved usually by the discovery of some automatic process. In this case the key to such a process is the fact that the mental differences between the sexes manifest themselves in differences of interest.

Every parent of boys and girls knows that these differences begin early to show themselves. We have been too prone to disregard them and to substitute a set of imagined differences that do not really exist. We go about the moral training of the boy and the girl in precisely the same way, although their moral points of view and susceptibilities differ in degree and kind; and then we marvel that we do not get precisely similar moral products. But we assume that there is some natural objection to the climbing of trees by girls, while it is all right for boys—an imaginary distinction that has caused tears and heart-burnings. We are outgrowing this particular imaginary distinction, and some others like it. Possibly we may also outgrow our systems of co-education, so far as this means the subjection of the male and the female mind to exactly the same processes of training. The training of the sexes in the same institution, with its consequent mental contact between them, has nothing to do with this, necessarily, and has advantages that cannot be overlooked.

Whatever we do in school, our subsequent education, which goes on at least as long as we inhabit this world, must be in and through social contact, men and women together. But if each sex is not true to itself and does not live its own life, the results cannot be satisfactory. Reactions that are sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as they would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is to let the woman's mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as the man's always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released from the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down and will bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition.

We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members of women's clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is often trivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment. Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a total lack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligent programme-making. The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acute programitis and the physician is in a position to consider what therapeutic measures may be indicated. We shall endeavor to prescribe some simple remedies.

III—The Remedy

When we have once discovered the cause of a malady, we may proceed in two ways to combat it; either we may destroy the cause or we may render the possible victims immune. To put it a little differently, we may eliminate either of the two elements whose conjunction causes the disease. To grow weeds, there must co-exist their seeds and a favourable soil. They may be exterminated either by killing the seeds or sterilising the soil. Either of these methods may be used in dealing with the disease that prevails among readers, or, if you prefer the other metaphor, with the rank vegetation that has choked the fertile soil of their minds, making any legitimate mental crop impossible. We have seen that the conditions favorable to the disease are a lack of interest and a fallacious idea that there is something inherent in the printed page per se that makes its perusal valuable whether the reader is interested or not—somewhat as a charm is supposed to work even when it is in a language that the user does not understand.

We are considering only the form of the disease that affects clubwomen, and this we have diagnosed as programitis—the imposition of a set programme of work—which, as an exciting cause, operates on the mental soil prepared by indifference and fetichism to produce the malady from which so many are now suffering.

I think physicians will generally agree that where the exciting cause can be totally removed that method of dealing with the disease is far more effective than any attempt to secure immunity. I believe that in most cases it is so in the present instance.

In other words, my prescription is the abandonment, in nine cases out of ten, of the set programme, and the substitution of something that is interesting primarily to each individual concerned. This is no new doctrine. Listen to William James:

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.... If we could recall for a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our thinking—they hang to each other by associated links, but the original source of interest in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed.

If we are to exorcise this spirit of indifference that has settled down like a miasma upon clubdom we must find James's original germ of interest—the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang. Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested in something; few are supremely interested in the same thing. I shall not attempt to prove these, and what I shall have to say will be addressed only to those who can accept them without proof. But I am convinced that illustrations will occur at once to everyone. Who has not seen the man or woman, the boy or girl who, apparently stupid, indifferent and able to talk only in monosyllables, is suddenly shocked into interest and volubility by the mere chance mention of some subject of conversation—birds, or religion, or Egyptian antiquities, or dolls, or skating, or Henry the Eighth? There are millions of these electric buttons for galvanising dumb clay into mental and spiritual life, and no one of them is likely to act upon more than a very few in a given company—the theory of chances is against it. That is why no possible programme could be made that would fit more than a very small portion of a given club. We have seen that many club-programmes are made with an irreducible minimum of intelligence; but even a programme committee with superhuman intellect and angelic goodwill could never compass the solution of such a problem as this. Nor will it suffice to abandon the general programme and endeavour to select for each speaker the subject that he would like best to study and expound. No one knows what these subjects are but the owners of the hearts that love them.

We have seen how the scientific and technical societies manage the matter and how well they succeed. They appoint a committee whose duty it is to receive contributions and to select the worthiest among those presented. The matter then takes care of itself. These people are all interested in something. They are finding out things by experimentation or thought; by induction or deduction. It is the duty and the high pleasure of each to tell his fellows of his discoveries. It is in this way that the individual gives of his best to the race—the triumph of the social instinct over selfishness. As this sort of intellectual profit-sharing becomes more and more common, the reign of the social instinct will extend and strengthen. To do one's part toward such an end ought to be a pleasure, and this is one reason why this course is commended here to the women's clubs.

Everyone, I repeat, is deeply interested in something. I am not talking of idiots; there are no such in women's clubs. I have been telling some odd stories of clubwomen, in which they are represented as doing and saying idiotic things. These stories are all true, and if one should take the time to collect and print others, I do not suppose, as the sacred writer says, "that all the world could contain the books that should be written." Things quite as idiotic as these that I have reported are said and done in every city and every hamlet of these United States every day in the year and every hour in the day—except possibly between three and five A.M., and sometimes even then. Yet those who say and do these things are not idiots. When your friend Brown is telling you his pet anecdote for the thirty-fifth time, or when Smith insists that you listen to a recital of the uninteresting accomplishments of his newly-arrived infant, you may allow your thoughts to wander and make some inane remark, yet you are not an idiot. You are simply not interested. You are using most of your mind in another direction and it is only with what is left of it that you hear Brown or Smith and talk to him. Brown or Smith is not dealing with your personality as a whole, but with a residuum.

And this is what is the matter with the clubwomen who read foolishly and ask foolish questions in libraries. They are residual personalities. Not being at all interested in the matter in hand, they are devoting to it only a minimum part of their brains; and what they do and say is comparable with the act of the perambulating professor, who, absorbed in mathematical calculation, lifted his hat to the cow.

The professor was perhaps pardonable, for his mind was not wandering—it was suffering, on the contrary, from excessive concentration—but it was not concentrated on the cow. In the case of the clubwomen, the role of the cow is played by the papers that they are preparing, while, in lieu of the mathematical problems, we have a variety of really absorbing subjects, more or less important, over which their minds are wandering. What we must do is to capture these wandering minds, and this we can accomplish only by enlisting their own knowledge of what interests them.

If you would realise the difference between the mental processes of a mere residue and those of the whole personality when its vigour is concentrated on one subject, listen first to one of those perfunctory essays, culled from a collection of cyclopaedias, and then hear a whole woman throw her whole self into something. Hear her candid opinion of some person or thing that has fallen below her standard! Hear her able analysis of the case at law between her family and the neighbours! Hear her make a speech on woman suffrage—I mean when it is really to her the cause of causes; there are those who take it up for other reasons, as the club-women do their papers, with not dissimilar results. In all these cases clearness of presentation, weight of invective, keenness of analysis spring from interest. None of these women, if she has a feminine mind, treats these things as a man would. We men are very apt to complain of the woman's mental processes, for the same reason that narrow "patriots" always suspect and deride the methods of a foreigner, simply because they are strange and we do not understand them. But what we are compelled to think of the results is shown by the fact that when we are truly wise we are apt to seek the advice and counsel of the other sex and to act upon it, even when we cannot fathom the processes by which it was reached.

All the more reason this why the woman should be left to herself and not forced to model her club paper on the mental processes of a man, used with many necessary elisions and sometimes with very bad workmanship, in the construction of the cyclopaedia article never intended to be employed for any such purpose.

Perhaps we can never make the ordinary clubwoman talk like Susan B. Anthony, or Anna Shaw, or Beatrice Hale, or Fola La Follette; any more than we can put into the mouth of the ordinary business man the words of Lincoln, or John B. Gough, or Phillips Brooks, or Raymond Robins—but get somehow into the weakest of either sex the impulses, the interests, the energies that once stood or now stand behind the utterances of any one of these great Americans, and see if the result is not something worth while! An appreciative critic of the first paper in this series, writing in The Yale Alumni Weekly, gives it as his opinion that these readers are in the first stage of their education—that of "initial intellectual interest." He says: "Curiosity, then suspicion, come later to grow into individual intellectual judgment."

I wish I could agree that what we have diagnosed as a malady is only an early stage of something that is ultimately to develop into matured judgment. But the facts seem clearly to show that, far from possessing "initial intellectual interest," these readers are practically devoid of any kind of interest whatever, properly speaking. Such as they have is not proper to the subject, but simply due to the fact that they desire to retain their club membership, to fulfil their club duties, and to act in general as other women do in other clubs. To go back to our recent simile, it is precisely the same interest that keeps you listening, or pretending to listen, to a bore, while you are really thinking of something else. If you were free to follow your impulses, you would insult the bore, or throw him downstairs, or retreat precipitately. You are inhibited by your sense of propriety and your recognition of what is due to a fellow-man, no matter how boresome he may be. The clubwoman doubtless has a strong impulse to throw the encyclopaedia out of the window, or to insult the librarian (occasionally she does) or even to resign from the club. She is prevented, in like manner, by her sense of propriety, and often, too, we must admit, by a real, though rudimentary, desire for knowledge. But such inhibitions cannot develop into judgment. They are merely negative, while the interest that has a valuable outcome is positive.

Another thing that we shall do well to remember is that no condition or relation one of whose elements or factors is the human mind can ever be properly considered apart from that mind. Shakespeare's plays would seem to be fairly unalterable. Shakespeare is dead and cannot change them, and they have been written down in black and white this many a year. But the real play, so far as it makes any difference to us to-day, is not in the books; or, at least, the book is but one of its elements. It is the effect produced upon the auditor, and of this a very important element is the auditor's mental and spiritual state. Considered from this standpoint, Shakespeare's plays have been changing ever since they were written. Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed; the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date," to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as that of his original audience, and probably no one ever will.

Anecdotes possess a sort of centripetal force; tales illustrative of the matter at hand have been flying to me from all parts of the country. From the Pacific Northwest comes this, which seems pertinent just here. A good clubwoman, who had been slaving all day over a paper on Chaucer, finally at its close threw down her pen and exclaimed, "Oh, dear! I wish Chaucer were dead!" She had her wish in more senses than the obvious one. Not only has Chaucer's physical body long ago given up its substance to earth and air, but his works have to be translated for most readers of the present day; his language is fast becoming as dead as Latin or Greek. But, worse still, Ills very spirit was dead, so far as its reaction on her was concerned. Poetry, to you and me, is what we make of it; and what do you suppose our friend from Oregon was making of Chaucer? Our indifference, our failure to react, is thus more far-reaching than its influence on ourselves—it is, in some sense, a sin against the immortal souls of those who have bequeathed their spiritual selves to the world in books. And this sin the clubs are, in more cases than I care to think, forcing deliberately upon their members.

A well-known cartoonist toiled long in early life at some uncongenial task for a pittance. Meanwhile he drew pictures for fun, and one day a journalist, seeing one of his sketches, offered him fifty dollars for it—the salary of many days. "And when," said the cartoonist, "I found I could get more money by playing than by working, I swore I would never work again—and I haven't."

When we can all play—do exactly what we like—and keep ourselves and the world running by it, then the Earthly Paradise will be achieved. But, meanwhile, cannot we realize that these clubwomen will accomplish more if we can direct and control their voluntary activity, backed by their whole mental energy, than when they devote some small part of their minds to an uncongenial task, dictated by a programme committee?

I shall doubtless be reminded that the larger clubs are now generally divided into sections, and that membership in these sections is supposed to be dictated by interest. This is a step in the right direction, but it is an excessively short one. The programme, with all its vicious accompaniments and lamentable results, persists. What I have said and shall say applies as well to an art or a domestic science section as to a club in toto.

To bring down the treatment to a definite prescription, let us suppose that the committee in charge of a club's activities, instead of marking out a definite programme for the season, should simply announce that communications on subjects of personal interest to the members, embodying some new and original thought, method, idea, device, or mode of treatment, would be received, and that the best of these would be read and discussed before the club, after which some would appear in print. No conditions would be stated, but it would be understood that such features as length and style, as well as subject matter, would be considered in selecting the papers to be read. Above all, it would be insisted that no paper should be considered that was merely copied from anything, either in substance or idea. It is, of course, possible to constitute a paper almost entirely of quotations and yet so to group and discuss these that the paper becomes an original contribution to thought; but mere parrot-like repetition of ascertained facts, or of other people's thoughts, should not be tolerated.

Right here the first obstacle would be encountered. Club members, accustomed to be assigned for study subjects like "The Metope of the Parthenon" or "The True Significance of Hyperspace," will not easily comprehend that they are really desired to put briefly on paper original ideas about something that they know at first hand. Mrs. Jones makes better sponge cake than any one in town; the fact is known to all her friends. If sponge cake is a desirable product, why should not the woman who has discovered the little knack that turns failure into success, and who is proud of her ability and special knowledge, tell her club of it, instead of laboriously copying from a book—or, let us say, from two or three books—some one else's compilation of the facts ascertained at second or third hand by various other writers on "The Character of the Cid"? Why should not Mrs. Smith, who was out over night in the blizzard of 1888, recount lier experiences, mental as well as physical? Why should not Miss Robinson, who collects coins and differs from the accepted authorities regarding the authenticity of certain of her specimens, tell why and how and all about it? Why should not the member who is crazy about begonias and the one who thinks she saw Uncle Hiram's ghost, and she who has read and re-read George Meredith, seeing beauties in him that no one else ever detected—why should not one and all give their fellows the benefit of the really valuable special knowledge that they have acquired through years of interested thinking and talking and doing?

But there will be trouble, as I have said. The thing, simple as it is, would be too unaccustomed to comprehend. And then a real article in a real cyclopaedia by a real writer is Information with a big "I." My little knowledge about making quince jelly, or darning stockings, or driving an auto, or my thoughts about the intellectual differences between Dickens and Thackeray, or my personal theories of conduct, or my reasons for preferring hot-water heat to steam—these are all too trivial to mention; is it possible that you want me to write them down on paper?

It may thus happen that when the committee opens its mail it may find—nothing. What, then? Logically, I should be forced to say: Well, if none of your members is interested enough in anything to have some original information to tell about it, disband your club. What is the use of it? Even three newsboys, when they meet on the street corner, begin at once to interchange ideas. Where are yours?

Possibly this would be too drastic. It might be better to hold a meeting, state the failure, and adjourn for another trial. It might be well to repeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence of original ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate. If this does not work, it might be possible to fight the devil with fire, by going back to the programme method so far as to assign definitely to members subjects in which they are known to be deeply interested. This, in fact, is the second method of treatment mentioned at the outset, namely, the endeavour to secure immunity where the germ cannot be exterminated. We shall probably never be able to rid the world of the bacillus tuberculosis; the best we can do is to keep as clear of it as we can and to strengthen our powers of resistance to it. So, if we cannot kill the programme all at once, let us strive to make it innocuous and to minimise its evil effects on its victims.

Let us suppose, now, that in one way or another, it is brought about that every club member who reads a paper is reporting the result of some personal experience in which her interest is vivid—some discovery, acquisition, method, idea, criticism or appreciation that is the product of her own life and of the particular, personal way in which she has lived it.

What a result this will have on that woman's reading—on what she does before she writes her paper and on what she goes through after it! If her interest is as vivid as we assume it to be, she will not be content to recount her own experiences without comparing them with those of others. And after her paper has been read and the comment and criticism of other interested members have been brought out—of some, perhaps, whose interest she had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse to search for new accounts and to devour them. There is no longer anything perfunctory about the matter. She can no longer even trust the labour of looking up her references to others. She becomes an investigator; she feels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge.

And lo! the problem of clubwomen's reading is solved! The wandering mind is captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest to form a normal, intelligent whole. No more idiotic questions, no more cyclopaedia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes. Is it too much to expect? Alas, we are but mortal!

I trust it has been made sufficiently clear that I think meanly neither of the intellectual ability of women nor of the services of women's clubs. The object of these papers is to give the former an opportunity to assert itself, and the latter a chance to profit by the assertion. The woman's club of the future should be a place where original ideas, fed and directed by interested reading, are exchanged and discussed. Were I writing of men's clubs, I should point out to them the same goal. And then, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when a selected group of men and women may come together and talk of things in which they both, as men and women, are interested.

When this happens, I trust that in the discussion we shall not heed the advice of some modern feminists and forget that we are as God made us. Why should each man talk to a woman "as if she were another man"? I never heard it advised that each woman should talk to each man "as if he were another woman"; but I should resent it if I did. Why shut our eyes to the truth? I trust that I have not been talking to the club-women "as if they were men"; I am sure I have not meant to do so. They are not men; they have their own ways, and those ways should be developed and encouraged. We have had the psychology of race, of the crowd and of the criminal; where is the investigator who has studied the Psychology of Woman? When she (note the pronoun) has arrived, let us make her president of a woman's club.

It is with diffidence that I have outlined any definite procedure, because, after all, the precise manner in which the treatment should be applied will depend, of course, on the club concerned. To prescribe for you most effectively, your physician should be an intimate friend. He should have known you from birth—better still, he should have cared for your father and your grandfather before you. Otherwise, he prescribes for an average man; and you may be very far from the average. The drug that he administers to quiet your nerves may act on your heart and give you the smothers—it might conceivably quiet you permanently. Then the doctor would send to his medical journal a note on "A Curious Case of Umptiol Poisoning," but you would still be dead, even if all his readers should agree with him.

I have no desire to bring about casualties of this kind. Let those who know and love each particular club devote themselves to the task of applying my treatment to it in a way that will involve a minimum shock to its nerves and a minimum amount of interference with its metabolic processes. It will take time. Rome was not built in a day, and a revolution in clubdom is not going to be accomplished over night.

I have prescribed simple remedies—too simple, I am convinced, to be readily adopted. What could be simpler than to advise the extermination of all germ diseases by killing off the germs? Any physician will tell you that this method is the very acme of efficiency; yet, the germs are still with us, and bid fair to spread suffering and death over our planet for many a long year to come. So I am not sanguine that we shall be able all at once to kill off the programmes. All that may be expected is that at some distant day the simplicity and effectiveness of some plan of the sort will begin to commend itself to clubwomen. If, then, some lover of the older literature will point out the fact that, back in 1915, the gloomy era when fighting hordes were spreading blood and carnage over the fair face of Europe, an obscure and humble librarian, in the pages of THE BOOKMAN, pointed out the way to sanity, I shall be well content.



BOOKS FOR TIRED EYES

The most distinctive thing about a book is the possibility that someone may read it. Is this a truism? Evidently not; for the publishers, who print books, and the libraries, which store and distribute them, have never thought it worth their while to collect and record information bearing on this possibility. In the publisher's or the bookseller's advertising announcements, as well as on the catalogue cards stored in the library's trays, the reader may ascertain when and where the book was published, the number of pages, and whether it contains plates or maps; but not a word of the size or style of type in which it is printed. Yet on this depends the ability of the reader to use the book for the purpose for which it was intended. The old-fashioned reader was a mild-mannered gentleman. If he could not read his book because it was printed in outrageously small type, he laid it aside with a sigh, or used a magnifying lens, or persisted in his attempts with the naked eye until eyestrain, with its attendant maladies, was the result. Lately however, the libraries have been waking up, and their readers with them. The utilitarian side of the work is pushed to the front; and the reader is by no means disposed to accept what may be offered him, either in the content of the book or its physical make-up. The modern library must adapt itself to its users, and among other improvements must come an attempt to go as far as possible in making books physiologically readable.

Unfortunately the library cannot control the output of books, and must limit itself to selection. An experiment in such selection is now in progress in the St. Louis Public Library. The visitor to that library will find in its Open Shelf Room a section of shelving marked with the words "Books in large type." To this section are directed all readers who have found it difficult or painful to read the ordinary printed page but who do not desire to wear magnifying lenses. It has not been easy to fill these shelves, for books in large type are few, and hard to secure, despite the fact that artists, printers, and oculists have for years been discussing the proper size, form, and grouping of printed letters from their various standpoints. Perhaps it is time to urge a new view—that of the public librarian, anxious to please his clients and to present literature to them in that physical form which is most easily assimilable and least harmful.

Tired eyes belong, for the most part, to those who have worked them hardest; that is, to readers who have entered upon middle age or have already passed through it. At this age we become conscious that the eye is a delicate instrument—a fact which, however familiar to us in theory, has previously been regarded with aloofness. Now it comes home to us. The length of a sitting, the quality, quantity, and incidence of the light, and above all, the arrangement of the printed page, become matters of vital importance to us. A book with small print, or letters illegibly grouped, or of unrecognizable shapes, becomes as impossible to us as if it were printed in the Chinese character.

It is an unfortunate law of nature that injurious acts appear to us in their true light only after the harm is done. The burnt child dreads the fire after he has been burned—not before. So the fact that the middle-aged man cannot read small, or crooked, or badly grouped type means simply that the harmfulness of these things, which always existed for him, has cumulated throughout a long tale of years until it has obtruded itself upon him in the form of an inhibition. The books that are imperative for the tired eyes of middle age, are equally necessary for those of youth—did youth but know it. Curiously enough, we are accustomed to begin, in teaching the young to read, with very legible type. When the eyes grow stronger, we begin to maltreat them. So it is, also, with the digestive organs, which we first coddle with pap, then treat awhile with pork and cocktails, and then, perforce, entertain with pap of the second and final period. What correspond, in the field of vision, to pork and cocktails, are the vicious specimens of typography offered on all sides to readers—in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers—typography that is slowly but surely ruining the eyesight of those that need it most.

Hitherto, the public librarian has been more concerned with the minds and the morals of his clientele than with that physical organism without which neither mind nor morals would be of much use. It would be easy to pick out on the shelves of almost any public library books that are a physiological scandal, printed in type that it is an outrage to place before any self-respecting reader. I have seen copies of "Tom Jones" that I should be willing to burn, as did a puritanical British library-board of newspaper notoriety. My reasons, however, would be typographic, not moral, and I might want to add a few copies of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," without prejudice to the authors' share in those works, which I admire and respect. Perhaps it is too much to ask for complete typographical expurgation of our libraries. But, at least, readers with tired eyes who do not yet wear, or care to wear, corrective lenses, should be able to find, somewhere on the shelves, a collection of works in relatively harmless print—large and black, clear in outline, simple and distinctive in form, properly grouped and spaced.

The various attempts to standardize type-sizes and to adopt a suitable notation for them have been limited hitherto to the sizes of the type-body and bear only indirectly on the size of the actual letter. More or less arbitrary names—such as minion, bourgeois, brevier, and nonpareil,—were formerly used; but what is called the point-system is now practically universal, although its unit, the "point," is not everywhere the same. Roughly speaking, a point is one-seventy-second of an inch, so that in three-point type, for example, the thickness of the type-body, from the top to the bottom of the letter on its face, is one-twenty-fourth of an inch. But on this type-body the face may be large or small—although of course, it cannot be larger than the body,—and the size of the letters called by precisely the same name in the point notation may vary within pretty wide limits. There is no accepted notation for the size of the letters themselves, and this fact tells, more eloquently than words, that the present sizes of type are standardized and defined for compositors only, not for readers, and still less for scientific students of the effect upon the readers' eyes of different arrangements of the printed page.

What seems to have been the first attempt to define sizes of type suitable for school grades was made fifteen years ago by Mr Edward R. Shaw in his "School Hygiene"; he advocates sizes from eighteen-point in the first year to twelve-point for the fourth. "Principals, teachers, and school superintendents," he says, "should possess a millimetre measure and a magnifying glass, and should subject every book presented for their examination to a test to determine whether the size of the letters and the width of the leading are of such dimensions as will not prove injurious to the eyes of children." To this list, librarians might be well added—not to speak of authors, editors, and publishers. In a subsequent part of his chapter on "Eyesight and Hearing," from which the above sentence is quoted, appears a test of illumination suggested by "The Medical Record" of Strasburg, which may serve as a "horrid example" in some such way as did the drunken brother who accompanied the temperance lecturer. According to this authority, if a pupil is unable to read diamond type—four-and-one-half-point—"at twelve-inch distance and without strain," the illumination is dangerously low. The adult who tries the experiment will be inclined to conclude that whatever the illumination, the proper place for the man who uses diamond type for any purpose is the penitentiary.

The literature upon this general subject, such as it is, is concerned largely with its relations with school hygiene. We are bound to give our children a fair start in life, in conditions of vision as well as in other respects, even if we are careless about ourselves. The topic of "Conservation of Vision," in which, however, type-size played but a small part, was given special attention at the Fourth International Congress of School Hygiene, held in Buffalo in 1913. Investigations on the subject, so far as they affect the child in school, are well summed up in the last chapter of Huey's "Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading." In general, the consensus of opinion of investigators seems to be that the most legible type is that between eleven-point and fourteen-point. Opinion regarding space between lines, due to "leading," is not quite so harmonious. Some authorities think that it is better to increase the size of the letters; and Huey asserts that an attempt to improve unduly small type by making wide spaces between lines is a mistake.

As to the relative legibility of different type-faces, one of the most exhaustive investigations was that made at Clark University by Miss Barbara E. Roethlin, whose results were published in 1912. This study considers questions of form, style, and grouping, independently of mere size; and the conclusion is that legibility is a product of six factors, of which size is one, the others being form, heaviness of face, width of the margin around the letter, position in the letter-group, and shape and size of adjoining letters. For "tired eyes" the size factor would appear of overwhelming importance except where the other elements make the page fantastically illegible. In Miss Roethlin's tables, based upon a combination of the factors mentioned above, the maximum of legibility almost always coincides with that of size. These experiments seem to have influenced printers, whose organization in Boston has appointed a committee to urge upon the Carnegie Institution the establishment of a department of research to make scientific tests of printing-types in regard to the comparative legibility and the possibility of improving some of their forms. Their effort, so far, has met with no success; but the funds at the disposal of this body could surely be put to no better use.

With regard to the improvement of legibility by alteration of form, it has been recognized by experiments from the outset that the letters of our alphabet, especially the small, or "lower-case" letters, are not equally legible. Many proposals for modifying or changing them have been made, some of them odd or repugnant. It has been suggested, for instance, that the Greek lambda be substituted for our l, which in its present form is easily confused with the dotted i. Other pairs of letters (u and n, o and e, for example) are differentiated with difficulty. The privilege of modifying alphabetic form is one that has been frequently exercised. The origin of the German alphabet and our own, for instance, is the same, and no lower-case letters in any form date further back than the Middle Ages. There could be no well-founded objection to any change, in the interests of legibility, that is not so far-reaching as to make the whole alphabet look foreign and unfamiliar. It may be queried, however, whether the lower-case alphabet had not better be reformed by abolishing it altogether. There would appear to be no good reason for using two alphabets, now one and now the other, according to arbitrary rules, difficult to learn and hard to remember. That the general legibility of books would benefit by doing away with this mediaeval excrescence appears to admit of no doubt, although the proposal may seem somewhat startling to the general reader.

In 1911, a committee was appointed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science "to inquire into the influence of school-books upon eyesight." This committee's report dwells on the fact that the child's eye is still in process of development and needs larger type than the fully developed eye of the adult. In making its recommendation for the standardization of school-book type, which it considers the solution of the difficulty, the committee emphasizes the fact that forms and sizes most legible for isolated letters are not necessarily so for the groups that need to be quickly recognized by the trained reader. It dwells upon the importance of unglazed paper, flexible sewing, clear, bold illustrations, black ink, and true alignment. Condensed or compressed letters are condemned, as are long serifs and hair strokes. On the other hand, very heavy-faced type is almost as objectionable as that with the fine lines, the ideal being a proper balancing of whites and blacks in each letter and group. The size of the type face, as we might expect, is pronounced by the committee "the most important factor in the influence of books upon vision"; it describes its recommended sizes in millimetres—a refinement which, for the purposes of this article, need not be insisted upon. Briefly, the sizes run from thirty-point, for seven-year-old children, to ten-point or eleven-point, for persons more than twelve years old. Except as an inference from this last recommendation, the committee, of course, does not exceed its province by treating of type-sizes for adults; yet it would seem that it considers ten-point as the smallest size fit for anyone, however good his sight. This would bar much of our existing reading matter.

A writer whose efforts in behalf of sane typography have had practical results is Professor Koopman, librarian of Brown University, whose plea has been addressed chiefly to printers. Professor Koopman dwells particularly on the influence of short lines on legibility. The eye must jump from the end of each line back to the beginning of the next, and this jump is shorter and less fatiguing with the shorter line, though it must be oftener performed. Owing largely to his demonstration, "The Printing Art," a trade magazine published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has changed its make-up from a one-column to a two-column page. It should be noted, however, that a uniform, standard length of line is even more to be desired than a short one. When the eye has become accustomed to one length for its linear leaps, these leaps can be performed with relative ease and can be taken care of subconsciously. When the lengths vary capriciously from one book, or magazine, to another, or even from one page to another, as they so often do, the effort to get accustomed to the new length is more tiring than we realize. Probably this factor, next to the size of type, is most effective in tiring the middle-aged eye, and in keeping it tired. The opinion may be ventured that the reason for our continued toleration of the small type used in the daily newspapers is that their columns are narrow, and still more, that these are everywhere of practically uniform width.

The indifference of publishers to the important feature of the physical make-up of books appears from the fact that in not a single case is it included among the descriptive items in their catalogue entries. Libraries are in precisely the same class of offenders. A reader or a possible purchaser of books is supposed to be interested in the fact that a book is published in Boston, has four hundred and thirty-two pages, and is illustrated, but not at all in its legibility. Neither publishers nor libraries have any way of getting information on the subject, except by going to the books themselves. Occasionally a remainder-catalogue, containing bargains whose charms it is desired to set forth with unusual detail, states that a certain book is in "large type," or even in "fine, large type," but these words are nowhere defined, and the purchaser cannot depend on their accuracy. An edition of Scott, recently advertised extensively as in "large, clear type," proved on examination to be printed in ten-point.

In gathering the large-type collection for the St. Louis Library fourteen-point was decided upon as the standard, which means, of course, types with a face somewhere between the smallest size that is usually found on a fourteen-point body, even if actually on a smaller body, and the largest that this can carry, even if on a larger body. The latter is unusually large, but it would not do to place the standard below fourteen-point, because that would lower the minimum, which is none too large as it is. The first effort was to collect such large-type books, already in the library, as would be likely to interest the general reader. In the collection of nearly 400,000 volumes, it was found by diligent search that only 150 would answer this description. Most octavo volumes of travel are in large type, but only a selected number of these was placed in the collection to avoid overloading it with this particular class. This statement applies also to some other classes, and to certain types of books, such as some government reports and some scientific monographs, which have no representatives in the group. The next step was to supplement the collection by purchase. All available publishers' catalogues were examined, but after a period of twelve months it was found possible to spend only $65.00 in the purchase of 120 additional books. A circular letter was then sent to ninety-two publishers, explaining the purpose of the collection and asking for information regarding books in fourteen-point type, or larger, issued by them. To these there were received sixty-three answers. In twenty-nine instances, no books in type of this size were issued by the recipients of the circulars. In six cases, the answer included brief lists of from two to twelve titles of large-type books; and in several other cases, the publishers stated that the labor of ascertaining which of their publications are in large type would be prohibitive, as it would involve actual inspection of each and every volume on their lists. In two instances, however, after a second letter, explaining further the aims of the collection, publishers promised to undertake the work. The final result has been that the Library now has over four hundred volumes in the collection. This is surely not an imposing number, but it appears to represent the available resources of a country in which 1,000 publishers are annually issuing 11,000 volumes—to say nothing of the British and Continental output. In the list of the collection and in the entries, the size of the type, the leading, and the size of the book itself are to be distinctly stated. The last-mentioned item is necessary because the use of large type sometimes involves a heavy volume, awkward to hold in the hand. The collection for adults in the St. Louis Library, as it now exists, may be divided into the following classes, according to the reasons that seem to have prompted the use of large type:

1. Large books printed on a somewhat generous scale and intended to sell at a high price, the size of the type being merely incidental to this plan. These include books of travel, history, or biography in several volumes, somewhat high-priced sets of standard authors, and books intended for gifts.

2. Books containing so little material that large type, thick paper, and wide margins were necessary to make a volume easy to handle and use. These include many short stories of magazine length, which for some inscrutable reason are now often issued in separate form.

3. Books printed in large type for aesthetic reasons. These are few, beauty and artistic form being apparently linked in some way with illegibility by many printers, no matter what the size of the type-face.

The large-type collection is used, not only by elderly persons, but also in greater number by young persons whose oculists forbid them to read fine print, or who do not desire to wear glasses. The absence of a wide range in the collection drives others away to books that are, doubtless, in many cases bad for their eyes. Some books that have not been popular in the general collection have done well here, while old favorites have not been taken out. Such facts as these mean little with so limited a collection. Until readers awake to the dangers of small print and the comfort of large type there will not be sufficient pressure on our publishers to induce them to put forth more books suitable for tired eyes. It is probably too much to expect that the trade itself will try to push literature whose printed form obeys the rules of ocular hygiene. All that we can reasonably ask is that type-size shall be reported on in catalogues, so that those who want books in large type may know what is obtainable and where to go for it.

It has often been noted that physicians are the only class of professional men whose activities, if properly carried on, tend directly to make the profession unnecessary. Medicine tends more and more to be preventive rather than curative. We must therefore look to the oculists to take the first steps towards lessening the number of their prospective patients by inculcating rational notions about the effects of the printed page on the eye. Teachers, librarians, parents, the press—all can do their part. And when a demand for larger print has thus been created the trade will respond. Meanwhile, libraries should be unremitting in their efforts to ascertain what material in large type already exists, to collect it, and to call attention to it in every legitimate way.



THE MAGIC CASEMENT[16]

[16] Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis.

Anyone who talks or writes about the "movies" is likely to be misunderstood. There is little to be said now about the moving picture as a moving picture, unless one wants to discuss its optics or mechanics. The time is past when anyone went to see a moving picture as a curiosity. It was once the eighth wonder of the world; it long ago abdicated that position to join its dispossessed brothers the telephone, the X-ray, the wireless telegraph and the phonograph. What we now go to see is not the moving picture, but what the moving picture shows us; it is no more than a window through which we gaze—the poet's "magic casement" opening (sometimes) "on the foam of perilous seas." We may no more praise or condemn the moving picture for what it shows us than we may praise or condemn a proscenium arch or the glass in a show window.

The critic who thinks that the movies are lowering our tastes, or doing anything else objectionable, as well as he who thinks they are educating the masses, is not of the opinion that the moving pictures are doing these things because they show moving objects on a screen, but because of the character of what is photographed for such exhibition.

Thoughts on the movies, therefore, must be rather thoughts on things that are currently shown us by means of the movies; thoughts also on some of the things that we might see and do not. I have compared the screen above to a proscenium arch and a show window, but both of these are selective: the screen is as broad as the world. It is especially adapted to show realities; through it one may see the coast of Dalmatia as viewed from a steamer, the habits of animals in the African jungle, or the play of emotion on the faces of an audience at a ball game in Philadelphia. I am pleased to see that more and more of these interesting realities are shown daily in the movie theatres. There has been a determined effort to make them unpopular by calling them "educational," but they seem likely to outlive it. One is educated, of course, by everything that he sees or does, but why rub it in? The boy who thoroughly likes to go sailing will get more out of it than he who goes because he thinks it will be "an educational experience." As one who goes to the movies I confess that I enjoy its realities. Probably they educate me, and I take that with due meekness. Some of these realities I enjoy because they are unfamiliar, like the boiling of the lava lake in the Hawaiian craters and the changing crowds in the streets of Manila; some because they are familiar, like a college foot-ball game or the movement of vessels in the North River at New York.

I like the realities, too, in the dramatic performances that still occupy and probably will continue to occupy, most of the time at a movie theatre. Here I come into conflict with the producer. Like every other adapter he can not cut loose from the old when he essays the new. We no longer wear swords, but we still carry the buttons for the sword belt, and it is only recently that semi-tropic Americans gave up the dress of north-temperate Europe. So the movie producer can not forget the theatre. Now the theatre has some advantages that the movie can never attain—notably the use of speech. The movie, on the other hand, has unlimited freedom of scene and the use of real backgrounds. We do not object to a certain amount of what we call "staginess" on the stage—it is a part of its art; as the pigment is part of that of the painter. We are surrounded by symbols; we are not surprised that costume, gesture and voice are also symbolic instead of purely natural. But in the moving picture play it is, or should be, different. The costume and make-up, the posture and gesture, that seem appropriate in front of a painted house or tree on a back-drop, become so out-of-place as to be repulsive when one sees them in front of a real house and real trees, branches moving in the wind, running water—all the familiar accompaniments of nature. The movie producers, being unable to get away from their stage experience, are failing to grasp their opportunity. Instead of creating a drama of reality to correspond with the real environment that only the movie can offer, they are abandoning the unique advantages of that environment, to a large degree. They build fake cities, they set all their interiors in fake studio rooms, where everything is imitation; even when they let us see a bit of outdoors, it is not what it pretends to be. We have all seen, on the screen, bluffs 200 feet high on the coast of Virginia and palm trees growing in the borough of the Bronx. And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest of stage plots in as stagy a way as they know how. I am taking the movie seriously because I like it and because I see that I share that liking with a vast throng of persons with whom it is probably the only thing I have in common—persons separated from me by differences of training and education that would seem to make a common ground of any kind well-nigh impossible. With some persons the fact that the movie is democratic puts it outside the pale at once. Nothing, in their estimation, is worth discussing unless appreciation of it is limited to the few. Their attitude is that of the mother who said to the nurse: "Go and see what baby is doing, and tell him he musn't." "Let us," they say "find out what people like, and then try to make them like something else." To such I have nothing to say. We ought rather, I believe, to find out the kind of thing that people like and then do our best to see that they get it in the best quality—that it is used in every way possible to pull them out of the mud, instead of rubbing their noses further in.

On the other hand, some capable critics, like Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton, decry the movies because they are undemocratic—because they are offering a form of entertainment appealing only to the uneducated and thus segregating them from the educated, who presumably all attend the regular theatre, sitting in the parquet at two dollars per. One wonders whether Mr. Eaton has attended a moving-picture theatre since 1903. I believe the movie to be by all odds the most democratic form of intellectual (by which I mean non-physical) entertainment ever offered; and I base my belief on wide observation of audiences in theatres of many different grades. Now this democracy shows itself not only in the composition of audiences but in their manifestations of approval. I do not mean that everyone in an audience always likes the same thing. Some outrageous "slap-stick" comedy rejoices one and offends another. A particularly foolish plot may satisfy in one place while it bores in another. But everywhere I find one thing that appeals to everybody—realism. Just as soon as there appears on the screen something that does not know how to pose and is forced by nature to be natural—an animal or a young child, for instance—there are immediate manifestations of interest and delight.

The least "stagy" actors are almost always favorites. Mary Pickford stands at the head. There is not an ounce of staginess in her make-up. She was never particularly successful on the stage. Some of her work seems to me ideal acting for the screen—simple, appealing, absolutely true. Of course she is not always at her best.

To the stage illusions that depend on costume and make-up, the screen is particularly unfriendly. Especially in the "close-ups" the effect is similar to that which one would have if he were standing close to the actor looking directly into his face. It is useless to depend on ordinary make-up under these circumstances. Either it should be of the description used by Sherlock Holmes and other celebrated detectives (we rely on hearsay) which deceives the very elect at close quarters, or else the producer must choose for his characters those that naturally "look the parts." In particular, the lady who, although long past forty, continues to play ingenue parts and "gets away with it" on the stage, must get away from it, when it comes to the screen. The "close up" tells the sad story at once. The part of a sixteen-year-old girl must be played by a real one. Another concession to realism, you see. And what is true of persons is true of their environment. I have already registered my disapproval of the "Universal City" type of production. It is almost as easy for the expert to pick out the fake Russian village or the pasteboard Virginia court-house as it is for him to spot the wrinkles in the countenance of the school girl who left school in 1892. Next to a fake environment the patchwork scene enrages one—the railway that is double-track with 90-pound rails in one scene and single-track with streaks of rust in the next; the train that is hauled in quick succession by locomotives of the Mogul type, the Atlantic and the wood-burning vintage of 1868. There is here an impudent assumption in the producer, of a lack of intelligence in his audience, that is quite maddening. The same lack of correspondence appears between different parts of the same street, and between the outside and inside of houses. I am told by friends that I am quite unreasonable in the extent to which I carry my demands for realism in the movies. "What would you have?" they ask. I would have a producing company that should advertise, "We have no studio" and use only real backgrounds—the actual localities represented. "Do you mean to tell me," my friend goes on, "that you would carry your company to Spain whenever the scene of their play is laid in that country? The expense would be prohibitive." I most certainly should not, and this because of the very realism that I am advocating. Plays laid in Spain should be acted not only in Spain but by Spaniards. The most objectionable kind of fake is that in which Americans are made to do duty for Spaniards, Hindus or Japanese when their appearance, action and bearing clearly indicate that they were born and brought up in Skowhegan, Maine or Crawfordsville, Indiana. I have seen Mary Pickford in "Madame Butterfly", and I testify sadly that not even she can succeed here. No; if we want Spanish plays let us use those made on Spanish soil. Let us have free interchange of films between all film-producing countries. All the change required would be translating the captions, or better still, plays might be produced that require no captions. This might mean the total reorganization of the movie-play business in this country—a revolution which I should view with equanimity. Speaking of captions, here again the average producer appears to agree with Walter Pritchard Eaton that he is catering only to the uneducated. The writers of most captions seem, indeed, to have abandoned formal instruction in the primary school. Why should not a movie caption be good literature? Some of them are. The Cabiria captions were fine: though I do not admire that masterpiece. I am told that D'Annunzio composed them with care, and equal care was evidently used in the translation. The captions of the George Ade fables are uniformly good, and there are other notable exceptions. Other places where knowledge of language is required are inadequately taken care of. Letters from eminent persons make one want to hide under the chairs. These persons usually sign themselves "Duke of Gandolfo" or "Secretary of State Smith." Are grammar school graduates difficult to get, or high-priced? I beg you to observe that here again lack of realism is my objection.

But divers friends interpose the remark that the movies are already too realistic. "They leave nothing to the imagination." If this were so, it were a grievous fault—at any rate in so far as the moving-picture play aims at being an art-form. All good art leaves something to the imagination. As a matter of fact, however, the movie is the exact complement of the spoken play as read from a book. Here we have the words in full, the scene and action being left to the imagination except as briefly sketched in the stage direction. In the movie we have scene and action in full, the words being left to the imagination except as briefly indicated in the captions. Where captions are very full the form may perhaps be said to be complementary to the novel, where besides the words we are given a written description of scene and action that is often full of detail. The movie leaves just as much to the imagination as the novel, but what is so left is different in the two cases. Do I think that everyone in a movie audience makes use of his privilege to imagine what the actors are saying? No; neither does the novel-reader always image the scene and action. This does not depend on ignorance or the reverse, but on imaging power. Exceptional visual and auditive imaging power are rarely present in the same individual. I happen to have the former. I automatically see everything of which I read in a novel, and when the descriptions are not detailed, this gets me into trouble. On a second reading my imaged background may be different and when the earlier one asserts itself there is a conflict that I can compare only to hearing two tunes played at once. Persons having already good visual imaging power should develop their auditive imaging power by going to the movies and hearing what the actors say; these with deficient visual imagery should read novels and see the scenery. But to say that the movies allow no scope for the imagination is absurd. As I said at the outset, the movie play is just a play seen through the medium of a moving picture. It is like seeing a drama near enough to note the slightest play of feature and at the same time so far away that the actors can not be heard—somewhat like seeing a distant play through a fine telescope. The action should therefore differ in no respect from what would be proper if the words were intended to be heard. Doubtless this imposes a special duty upon both the author of the scenario and the producer, and they do not always respond to it. Action is introduced that fails to be intelligible without the words, and to clear it up the actors are made to use pantomime. Pantomime is an interesting and valuable form of dramatic art, but it is essentially symbolic and stagy and has, I believe, no place in the moving picture play as we have developed it. If owing to the faulty construction of the play, or a lack of skill on the part of producer or actors, all sorts of gestures and grimaces become necessary that would not be required if the words were heard, the production can not be considered good. Sometimes, of course, words are seen; though not heard. The story of the deaf mutes who read the lips of the movie actors, and detected remarks not at all in consonance with the action of the play, is doubtless familiar. It crops up in various places and is as ubiquitous as Washington's Headquarters. It is good enough to be true, but I have never run it to earth yet. Even those of us who are not deaf-mutes, however, may detect an exclamation now and then and it gives great force to the action, though I doubt whether it is quite legitimate in a purely picture-play.

I beg leave to doubt whether realism is fostered by a method of production said to be in vogue among first rate producers; namely keeping actors in ignorance of the play and directing the action as it goes on.

"Come in now, Mr. Smith; sit in that chair; cross your legs; light a cigar; register perplexity; you hear a sound; jump to your feet"—and so on. This may save the producer trouble, but it reduces the actors to marionettes; it is not thus that masterpieces are turned out.

Is there any chance of a movie masterpiece, anyway? Yes, but not in the direction that most producers see it. What Vachell Lindsay calls "Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature of them—the moving of masses of people amid great architectural construction—sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs—but all this is akin to scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far, the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular movies has been poor. It was notably so, it seems to me in the Birth of a Nation and not much better in Cabiria. Judith of Bethulia (after T.B. Aldrich) is the best acted "splendor" play that I have seen. Masterpieces are coming not through spending millions on supes, and "real" temples, and forts; but rather by writing a scenario particularly adapted to film-production, hiring and training actors that know how to act for the camera, preferably those without bad stage habits to unlearn, cutting out all unreal scenery, costume and make-up and keeping everything as simple and as close to the actual as possible. The best movie play I ever saw was in a ten-cent theatre in St. Louis. It was a dramatization of Frank Norris's "McTeague." I have never seen it advertised anywhere, and I never heard of the actors, before or since. But most of it was fine, sincere work, and seeing it made me feel that there is a future for the movie play.

One trouble is that up to date, neither producers nor actors nor the most intelligent and best educated part of the audience take the movies seriously. Here is one of the marvels of modern times; something that has captured the public as it never was captured before. And yet most of us look at it as a huge joke, or as something intended to entertain the populace, at which we, too are graciously pleased to be amused. It might mend matters if we could have every day in some reputable paper a column of readable serious stuff about the current movie plays—real criticism, not simply the producer's "blurb."

Possibly, too, a partnership between the legitimate stage and the movie may be possible and I shall devote to a somewhat wild scheme of this sort the few pages that remain to me. To begin with, the freedom enjoyed by the Elizabethan dramatists from the limitations imposed by realistic scenery has not been sufficiently insisted upon as an element in their art. Theirs was a true drame libre, having its analogies with the present attempts of the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme and metre. But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from its restrictions, the mise-en-scene in the drama has continually, with the attempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands on the real vitality of the stage.

Those who periodically wonder why the dramatists of the Elizabethan age—the greatest productive period in the history of the English stage—no longer hold the stage, with the exception of Shakespeare, and who lament that even Shakespeare is yielding his traditional place, have apparently given little thought to this loss of freedom as a contributing cause. While the writers of vers libre have so far freed themselves that some of them have ceased to write poetry at all, it is a question whether the scenic freedom of the old dramatists may not have played such a vital part in the development of their art, that they owed to it at least some of their pre-eminence.

Shakespeare's plays, as Shakespeare wrote them, read better than they act. Hundreds of Shakespeare-lovers have reached this conclusion, and many more have reached it than have dared to put it into words. The reason is, it seems to me, that we can not, on the modern stage, enact the plays of Shakespeare as he intended them to be acted—as he really wrote them.

If we compare an acting edition of any of the plays with the text as presented by any good editor, this becomes increasingly clear. Shakespeare in his original garb, is simply impossible for the modern stage.

The fact that the Elizabethan plays were given against an imaginary back-ground enabled the playwright to disregard the old, hampering unity of place more thoroughly than has ever been possible since his time. His ability to do so, was the result not of any reasoned determination to set his plays without "scenery," but simply of environment. As the scenic art progressed, the backgrounds became more and more realistic and less and less imaginary. The imagination of the audience, however, has always been more or less requisite to the appreciation of drama, as of any other art. No stage tree or house has ever been close enough to its original to deceive the onlooker. He always knows that they are imitations, intended only to aid the imagination, and his imagination has always been obliged to do its part. In Shakespeare's time the imagination did all the work; and as imaginary houses and trees have no weight, the services of the scene-shifter were not required to remove them and to substitute others. The scene could be shifted at once from a battlefield in Flanders to a palace in London and after the briefest of dialogues it could change again to a street in Genoa—all without inconveniencing anyone or necessitating a halt in the presentation of the drama. Any reflective reader of Shakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to shift scenes, which after all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessed and still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of view that was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama of the Ancients. Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid of intense power—a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of passion or exaltation. The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does not focus, it is diffuse—a congeries of episodes, successive or simultaneous—something not re-producible by the ancient dramatic methods.

Today, while we have not gone back to the terrific force of the Greek unified presentation, we have lost this breadth. We strive for it, but we can no longer reach it because of the growth of an idea that realism in mise-en-scene is absolutely necessary. Of course this idea has been injurious to the drama in more ways than the one that we are now considering. The notable reform in stage settings associated with the names of Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Urban, Hume and others, arises from a conviction that mise-en-scene should inspire and reflect a mood—should furnish an atmosphere, rather than attempt to reproduce realistic details. To a certain extent these reforms also operate to simplify stage settings and hence to make a little more possible the quick transitions and the play of viewpoint which I regard as one of the glories of the Elizabethan drama. This simplification, however, is very far from a return to the absolute simplicity of the Elizabethan setting. Moreover, it is doubtful whether the temper of the modern audience is favorable to a great change in this direction. We live in an age of realistic detail and we must yield to the current, while using it, so far as possible, to gain our ends.

This being the case, it is certainly interesting to find that, entirely without the aid or consent of those who have at heart the interests of the drama, a new dramatic form has grown up which caters to the utmost to the modern desire for realistic detail—far beyond the dreams of ordinary stage settings—and at the same time makes possible the quick transitions that are the glory of the Elizabethan drama. Here, of course, is where we make connection with the moving picture, whose fascinating realism and freedom from the taint of the footlights have perhaps been sufficiently insisted upon in what has been already said. In the moving picture, with the possibility of realistic backgrounds such as no skill, no money, no opportunity could build up on the ordinary stage—distant prospects, marvels of architecture, waving trees and moving animals—comes the ability of passing from one environment to another, on the other side of the globe perhaps, in the twinkling of an eye. The transitions of the Elizabethan stage sink into insignificance beside the possibilities of the moving-picture screen. Such an alternation as is now common in the film play, where two characters, talking to each other over the telephone, are seen in quick succession, would be impossible on the ordinary stage. The Elizabethan auditor, if his imagination were vivid and ready, might picture such a background of castle or palace or rocky coast as no photographer could produce; but even such imagination takes time to get under way, whereas the screen-picture gets to the brain through the retina instantly.

It is worth our while, I think, to consider whether this kind of scenery, rich in detail, but immaterial and therefore devoid of weight, could not be used in connection with the ordinary drama. There are obstacles, but they do not appear insuperable. The ordinary moving-picture, of course, is much smaller than the back drop of a large stage. Its enlargement is merely a matter of optical apparatus. Wings must be reduced in number and provided each with its own projection-machine, or replaced with drops similarly provided. Exits and entrances must be managed somewhat differently than with ordinary scenery. All this is surely not beyond the power of modern stagecraft, which has already surmounted such obstacles and accomplished such wonders. The projection, it is unnecessary to say, must be from behind, not from before, to avoid throwing the actors' shadows on the scenery. There must still, of course, be lighting from the front, and the shadow problem still exists, but no more than it does with ordinary scenery. Its solution lies in diffusing the light. No spotlight could be used, and its enforced absence would be one of the incidental blessings of the moving scene.

The advantages of this moving-picture scenery would be many and obvious. Prominent among them of course are fidelity to nature and richness of detail. The one, however, on which I desire to lay stress here is the flexibility in change of scene that we have lost with the introduction of heavy material "scenery" on our stages. This flexibility would be regained without the necessity of discarding scenery altogether and going back to the Elizabethan reliance on the imagination of the audience.

Of course, moving scenery would not be required or desired in all dramatic productions—only in those where realistic detail combined with perfect flexibility and rapidity of change in scene seems to be indicated. The scenery should of course be colored, and while we are waiting for the commercial tri-chroic picture with absolutely true values, we may get along very well with the di-chroic ones, such as those turned out with the so-called Kinemacolor process. Those who saw the wonderful screen reproduction of the Indian durbar, several years ago, will realize the possibilities.

And more than all else, may we not hope that these new backgrounds may react on the players who perform their parts in front of them? Not necessarily; for we have seen that it does not always do so in the present movie play. But I am confident that the change will come. Little by little the necessities of the case are developing actors who act naturally. One may pose in a canoe on a painted rapid; but how can he do so in the real water course, where every attitude, every play of the muscles must be adapted to the real propulsion of the boat?

In short, the movie may ultimately require its presenters to be real, and so may come a school of realism in acting that may have its uses on the legitimate stage also.

Who will be the first manager to experiment with this new adjunct to the art of the stage?



A WORD TO BELIEVERS[17]

[17] Address at the closing session of the Church School of Religious Instruction, St. Louis.

People may be divided into a great many different classes according to their attitude toward belief and beliefs—toward the meaning and value of belief in general—toward their own beliefs and those of their neighbors. We have the man who does not know what "belief" means, and who does not care; the man whose idea of its meaning is perverse and wrong; the man who thinks his own beliefs are important and those of his neighbors are unimportant; the man who thinks it proper to base belief on certain considerations and not on others—the man, for instance, who will say he believes that two plus two equals four, but can not believe in the existence of God because the grounds for such belief can not be stated in the same mathematical symbols. These are only a few of the classes that might be defined, using this interesting basis of classification. But before we can take up the question of instruction in the church's beliefs, about which I have been asked to address you this evening, we must recognize the existence of these classes, and possibly the fact that you yourselves are not all in accord in the way in which you look at the subject.