and financier in South America. The Wards had five children. The eldest son, Captain Charles Ward, of the Grenadier Guards, one of the finest lads I ever knew, had been a champion boxer of Christ Church, Oxford. He represented Oxford University against Cambridge. His popularity was shown when he knocked out an adversary in the first round of one of the heats. The adversary came to, and Charlie, bending over him, said, "I hope you will soon be all right." The other, looking up, recognized young Ward, and, though feeling badly shaken, said: "Oh, I'm all right. I do hope you'll win." And Charlie did. He was to fall at Neuve-Chapelle (1916). Another son, Captain Herbert Ward, on the outbreak of hostilities joined the Royal British Flying Corps direct from Eton. He was shot down in 1915, badly wounded in an aerial duel over the enemy's lines, and taken prisoner by the Germans, but, after six months of captivity in German hospitals and prison camps, managed to escape to Switzerland. The third son was named for Ward's early co-laborer in the Congo, Sir Roger Casement, but on Sir Roger's

amazing defection during the war Parliament was petitioned to change the boy's name to Rodney, so that there should be no difference in the name "Roddy," by which he has always been called. Of the two daughters, Sarita, the elder, her mother's namesake, is the wife of Sir Colville Barclay, British Minister to Sweden, while her sister, Frances, is the wife of Eric Phipps, Councillor of the British Embassy in Brussels.

Herbert Ward died (1919), a willing and conscious sacrifice, from excessive exertion and injuries received in the war. Having voluntarily given his splendid property at Rolleboise for hospital uses, he gave himself. His unit, "Number 3 Convoy," an English Red Cross section serving with the French, became one of the best-known units in any army. He was its heart and soul. His book "Mr. Poilu" (the proceeds from which were given to the French Red Cross) is a notable tribute to the French soldier and to the French woman in the war. As an instance of the latter he told me about Sour Claire, of Gérardmer, and about what happened every morning at dawn when "there occurred the

same sad ceremony, the same line of stretcher-bearers, carrying to the cemetery the bodies of those who had died in the hospitals during the night. Sad enough it was, and rendered even more touching by the accompaniment of orphan children from Sour Claire's orphanage near by, dressed in black hats and capes. 'What could be more fitting,' Sœur Claire said to me, 'than for these children who were already parentless to represent the new orphans and to follow the lonely bodies of the soldiers to the grave?"

But to return to the Smithsonian exhibition. It portrays the primitive African-indeed, the soul of a very primitive Africa-these gaunt bronzed figures, many of eloquent solemnity. pathos, and dignity, surrounded as they are by the broad knives and other weapons of what seems to us a cruel civilization or lack of civilization. Certainly the collection shows what the savage was who lived and fought and died before the moderns vulgarized him. As Ward said to me about them: "I fraternized with every one I met, and I soon found that there was a fund of

THE NEGRO WARRIOR ("DÉFI")

good humor in the African's composition. In this free and easy way I entered into the lives of the natives. Commencing in a casual manner, I became imbued with a profound sympathy for African human nature. My sympathy was with them in the beginning, and it ripened with time. They appealed to me because of their simplicity and directness and lack of scheming or plotting, and by the spontaneity of everything they did. Hence my efforts to learn their language in order that I might know them better. I have tried to explain this somewhat in my book 'A Voice from the Congo.'"

Ward's sculpture is expert sculpture. Take his "Warrior." In showing it to me he said: "You know, as a rule, warriors in sculpture have their arms flung out. They are full of movement. But I have been present at a good deal of fighting, and I have noticed that the man most intent on killing some one is so intent that he keeps himself in, knitted together, like a modern boxer."

His figures are more than mere sculpture. They tell us something about a mysterious, savage, suffering world of which we know little. "People ask me," Ward once remarked to me, 'Why do you do these ugly Negroes? Why not do things that can be put into a drawingroom?' I reply that if I do these and know what I am doing, some day a man will come along who will understand. I love the native Negro because he is the unspoiled son of nature. He is without what you might call modern vice. He may be cruel, he may be childish, but he learns this from nature. He has innate dignity."

Ward used to illustrate this by a story which you may find much expanded in Hopkinson Smith's "Armchair at the Inn:" "Once circumstances made it necessary for me to make an expedition into a district inhabited by cannibals and typical savages so far as morals and habits were concerned. Manioc was about their only food. The women tilled it-in fact, that which protects her from being sold as food is her value as a worker. Four days' march led us to a hilly country where the villages were few. As no food was to be had, I was obliged to push on. We met a new kind of native tribe; they spoke one of the dialects I knew, however. The fifth day we had spent trying for game. At nightfall I sent my men ahead and pushed along myself until I caught sight of another village, the first one I had seen in that day's march. The inhabitants were squatting in front of their rude huts and stared at me in wonder, for I was the first white man they had ever seen. One man threw his arm around his wife as if to protect her; she crouched close to him, and both were naked as the day they were born. I used this pair in a group I exhibited some time ago, under the title, "They Have Eyes and See Not'-you may remember it. When I got in the middle

of the village, I had a sudden desire for a pipe. I felt for my match-box. Then I remembered that I had given it to one of my carriers to start our morning blaze. I now looked for some sign of a fire, and finally in the very last hut discerned the glow of a heap of embers. Huddled over it were two figures-a man and a woman. I walked into the hut and made the sign of peace and asked in Mabunga for a light. The man started and sprang to his feet. He looked at me in amazement, but returned my greeting and touched his forehead in acquiescence. The woman made no gesture. I leaned over to pick up a coal, but, needing to steady myself, involuntarily laid my hand on the woman's shoulder. It was cold and it was as hard as wood. I looked at her closer. She was a dried mummy. Then the man said: 'She was my woman. I loved her. I could not bury her.'”

There is something about the Ward collection of sculptures which mirrors not only African primitive life, but hints of the primitive life of all men, and at a long-ago, elemental universal brotherhood. It carries out the principle I heard from Ward, "Great art is along universal lines. It expresses the human heart, no matter what the period or the nationality."

No wonder that these bronzes have

received all the honors France can give to a foreigner.

Herbert Ward was more than a mere explorer and sculptor. He had another life-work-to bring about international friendship. No one labored more tellingly than he to engender understanding and sympathy and friendly feeling between England and France, England and America, France and America. "As to France," I heard him say once, "in my opinion, it comes nearer being a real democracy than England or America. There is no such caste in France as in England and there is no such aristocracy of wealth as in America. In France you have the aristocracy of intellect."

How pervasive Ward's influence was may be gathered from the "Armchair at the Inn." "Monsieur Herbert," namely Herbert Ward, is the principal character. The Inn is the Guillaume le Conquérant at Dives, Normandy, near the English Channel, and not far from Houlgate and Trouville and Cabourg. The Chair is an old Florentine affair with carved heads on the top. "Nothing like a chair," affirmed Lemois, the landlord, and the prince of major-domos, "for stirring up old memories and traditions." He continued:

And do you see the carved heads on the top? I assure you they are alive! I have caught them smiling

You

or frowning too often at the talk around my table not to know. . . . You don't believe it? You laugh. Ah, that is just like you modern writers; you do not believe anything, you have no imagination. You must measure things with a rule. must have them drawn on the blackboard! It is because you do not see them as they are. You shut your eyes and ears to the real things of life. It is because you cannot understand that it is the soul of the chair that laughs and weeps. Monsieur Herbert will not think it funny. He understands these queer heads-and, let me tell you, they understand him. I have often caught them nodding and winking at each other when he says something that pleases them. He has himself seen things much more remarkable. Since he was fourteen years of age he has been roaming around the world doing everything a man could to make his bread and he a gentleman born, with his father's house to go home to if he pleased. Yet he has been farmhand, acrobat, hostler, sailor before the mast, newspaper reporter, four years in Africa among the natives, and now one of the great sculptors of France with his works in the Luxembourg and the ribbon of the Legion in his buttonhole! And one thing more; not for one moment has he ever lost the good heart and the fine manner of the gentleman.

DE

FISHIN'

'Postles, 'Postles,

Fishin' in de sea.

Yore nets am fuller sinners

En yo' done kotch me.

ONE LYRE: LOST, STRAYED, OR STOLEN

P

BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

OETS are generally solemn crea-
tures. Even their ecstasy springs

out of gravity and disports itself not unconscious of a cloud of sidereal witnesses. Poets with a sense of humor --not the comic fellows who fill the joke papers, but those shapers of airy verse who combine imagination with their gayety are rarer than roses in January. Don Marquis is one of them, Arthur Guiterman at his best is another; and fifteen years or more ago at Harvard there was one who belongs in their company.

His name was Charles Tripp Ryder. He was an undergraduate, of the class of 1906; a long, thin, sallow individual with an overlong neck, a sharp nose, and large inquisitive eyes set wide apart behind spectacles. He roomed with Henry Bellows, who has since won distinction as Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, as poet, as editor of the "Northwestern Miller," and as head of the Minnesota National Guard, but at that time was famous mainly for his airy and somewhat supercilious brilliancy and the question he asked President Eliot on a historic occasion. It was at the Signet Club, and all of Harvard's literati had gathered to pay their respects to the aged head of the University. "Don't you think, President Eliot," asked Bellows in a pause of the general conversation, "that the elective system has been a complete failure?"

The reply of the system's sponsor has not come down to posterity, but that doesn't matter.

Ryder and Bellows were a gay and irreverent pair: and both of them wrote verse. Bellows's verse was excellent as undergraduate verse went; but Ryder's glowed, and he tossed it off with the ease and the fecundity of genius. In the spring of 1905 "The Immigrant" was given as the subject for the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize in poetry. The night before the competition closed Ryder made up his mind that he could use that hundred-dollar prize, dashed off three sonnets, and absurdly outdistanced his rivals, of whom the writer of these words humbly records himself to have been one; and, oh, what hash his own laborious effort was! Ryder's poem has echoes in it of other songs, but, after all, in its pity, its rich imagination, its self-control, its impassioned clarity, has any other American poet ever done better with the theme?

THE IMMIGRANT

I

How heavy a fate has overtaken us! Faith is a crust, allegiance is a lie, For she that bore and has forsaken

us

Wears the king's purple while her children die;

And all our excellent and precious things,

The youth that fades, the glory that endures,

The love that keeps men's hearts

alive, she flings

For tokens to her idle paramours. We cannot see to heaven from this dark land,

Ever our dull eyes rest on bog and fen-

Yet even now, would she but understand,

And give us leave to live and be as men,

How would we serve her, cherish her, adore!

She never will be worthy-hope no

more.

Even as one who, hand to hand with death,

Has stood at bay before him all the night,

And, lying with gripped hands and grating breath,

Suddenly feels the sweet first touch of light,

Searching and soothing every wound

ed part,

And all the infinite courage of the day Flows like a tide into his withered

heart,

in hand. A year later the Garrison Prize Committee (which was invariably solemn) chose "The Stadium" (a new addition to the solemnity of Harvard at that time) as one of the subjects for the competition. Ryder snorted and set to work, but the poem which he wrote did not this time win the prize. The judges loved it, but their sense of responsibility bestowed the prize on a solemn ode to Serge Witte which does not make exciting reading to-day.

This was Ryder's poem, and the only annotation it requires is a word to explain that Mr. Keezer was Harvard's most famous old-clothes man:

THE STADIUM

Tell me not in mournful numbers
That the Stadium is crass,
For I've witnessed in my slumbers
Strange mutations come to pass.
Now, I know, it's an abhorrence,
No more classical than Cork-
But the pickle-jars of Florence
Are the vases of New York.
Time-devoutly let us thank it
Who affect antiquity---
Gently draws a purple blanket
Over every crudity;

Consequently I am certain

Some one in the year three thousand will draw aside the curtain Of the golden days of now,

He will tell of triumph marches,
Sing of glory, sweat and blood,
Praise the beauty of the arches--
(Made of artificial mud).

Like a second Walter Prater

He will make his readers hear "Ave Keezer Imperator!"

Thundering from tier to tier. He will gabble countless versesClaiming speechlessness the whileOn how infinitely worse is

Every custom then in style.
Thus will he attain Parnassus,
Just as you and I would do,
Should we see a ruined gas-house
That we took a fancy to.

For, from Merrimac to Humber,
All old truck, however crass,
Is the literary lumber

Of the literary ass.

Ryder was always gunning for cant and humbug and shams of all descriptions, and when a highly respected citizen of Cambridge announced that he had found the place on the shore of the Charles where Lief Erickson had landed in the year 1000 A.D., and went so far as to build a fence about the place, Ryder burst forth into "The Saga of Lief Erickson:"

Beside the silent river, beyond the city dump,

The passing wanderer beholds a little grassy hump, Hoop-skirted with iron piping, and beset with weeds and things, And round that bit of masonry an old, sad legend clings.

The appeal of the legend is local, but the speech which Lief delivers to his

mariners on their arrival in Cambridge somehow does not lose its freshness:

"O men," he said, adopting the classical address,

"I've got a lot to brag of, and something to confess;

I've made the North Atlantic re-echo to my cheers;

And beaten out Columbus by thirteen thousand years."

(A slight exaggeration or hyperbole,
of course,

But it didn't sound improbable when
bawled in ancient Norse.)
"I've been extremely seasick on all
the Seven Seas,

And had my name misprinted in

countless histories;

For eighteen years I have not slept
without my coat and vest,
And my soul is very languid, and
fain would be at rest.

I'm getting mighty weary of the
Roosevelt type of life,

And so by Thor and Wotan I think
I'll take a wife!

And there beside the river, three uffas
from the town,

I mean to build a chicken coop and softly settle down.

Plain living and high thinking is what appeals to me,

And I've got the plainest living-she's a Radcliffe Ph.D."

Ryder, like most of the Harvard poets of the present (and the preceding) generation, studied versification under that most whimsical, wise, and lovable of teachers, Dean Briggs. The exercises in the course consisted almost entirely of the writing of imitations of the poets from "Piers Plowman" to Robert Browning, and were dutifully ground out and submitted and read and thrown away. But it was not Ryder's way to leave anything that he touched unsinged by the divine spark. Gower had been punishment to read, and in writing his imitation of the fourteenth-century spendthrift of iambic four-foot couplets the bored sophomore took his revenge.

They dressed him in his finest gown,
And put him on a special car,
Bound for the most remote fixed star.
And so, far up above the skies
The garrulous old angel lies,
Droning away through endless years,
And no one cares-for no one hears.

One speaks of Ryder in the past tense, for all these things were written sixteen or seventeen years ago and printed in the "Harvard Monthly." They are not to be had between covers, and Ryder has published little or nothing since. First there was the Medical School;

FICTION

then a long illness and years of convalescence in Colorado. It is the hope of those who knew him as the most brilliant and courageous of the literary group at Harvard in the first decade of the twentieth century that the sword which struck so sharply at a hundred shams and the flame which glowed so brightly in response to beauty may, when the time comes, strike and glow once more, for the sake of a world which needs vision and courage, and has not too much of loveliness and clean laughter.

HIDDEN PLACES (THE). By Bertrand W. Sinclair. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $1.90.

A war hero supposed to be dead comes back to Canada, to find his wife remarried and his money gone. He falls in love with a girl who is temporarily blind and cannot see his shockingly scarred face. Then he finds that his wife is living near by. What should he do; what will he do? Mr. Sinclair is a practiced writer (his "Poor Man's Rock" is a capital story) and he deals with these problems carefully and well. RIDER OF GOLDEN BAR (THE). By William Patterson White. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $1.75.

Another spirited cowboy and rustler story with politics, gun-play, a stage hold-up, and a murder mixed in. It more than moves, it gallops. Mr. White is a skilled hand at this sort of thing, and here he has turned out a first-class slap-dash article.

TOILERS OF THE TRAILS. By George Marsh. Illustrated. The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia. $2.50.

Stirring short stories of the Canadian wilds that make the reader's heart beat fast till the end is reached and the battle is won. The book is a handsome one and has illustrations that fit the text. WINNIE O'WYNN AND THE WOLVES. Bertram Atkey. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $1.75.

By

Bad men are wolves; they hunt innocent maidens; don't let them get you. Thus, in effect, Winnie's old sport of a dying father warns her. So Winnie hunts the wolves. Ingenuous and sweet to look upon, she is wise and smart. She whitemails the blackmailers, and long before the book is over is rich. The episodes are clever and funny, but the story doesn't end, it just stops.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY WHAT IS SOCIALISM? By James Edward Le Rossignol. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. $2.

The words "Socialism," "Socialist," and "Socialistic" are frequently applied to those schemes and their advocates that assume the present wage system, with its two classes of capitalists and laborers, to be inherently wrong and demand a radical remedy. The author of this volume deals almost exclusively with the various forms of Marxian Socialism, which trace their genealogy back to Karl Marx. These he defines,

criticises, and condemns. He does not regard them in any of their forms as impracticable ideals; quite the reverseunsound in philosophy, unsupported by history, disproved by experience. As an indictment of Marxian Socialism the book is to be commended; its defect as a treatise on Socialism is its failure to indicate any remedy for the acknowledged evils of our present industrial system.

TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION SEA AND SARDINIA. By D. H. Lawrence. Illustrated. Thomas Seltzer, New York. $5. An unusually entertaining book of travel, spirited alike in description and illustration. The critical author's comments on the incidents of travel are diverting, if a trifle caustic at times. As might be expected by readers of his fiction, he has an excellent eye for the notable characteristics of his fellowtravelers and a fluent pen; and his comments are well matched by the colorful pictures of an exponent of the new school of illustration.

MISCELLANEOUS

CITY HOMES ON COUNTRY LANES. By William E. Smythe. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50.

Here is a very inspiring and practical book for the garden lover. The author considers such rather unusual features as hens, rabbits, squabs, goats. He considers the mechanics of the garden-home and gives some helpful pages on "the garden-city." As he justly says, America's recent advance in the culture of gardens is due chiefly to the National War Garden Commission. In that instance "the finest public spirit leaped to meet a great emergency, without waiting for one line of legislation or asking a penny from the public Treasury." FORTY-ODD YEARS IN THE LITERARY SHOP. By James L. Ford. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $5.

Mr. Ford has had experience of many years as newspaper worker, dramatic critic, and play writer. He has known almost every one in New York's art, dramatic, and literary circles. He knows how to tell a good story so as to bring out its point cleverly. His memoirs here included make excellent reading. They are written in a free and easy and somewhat bohemian manner, and sometimes personal feeling leads the author a little further than one could wish in invective and sarcasm.