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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. IN HIS ARTICLE IN THIS ISSUE, PROFESSOR PHELPS SAYS YEATS "HAS DONE MORE FOR ENGLISH POETRY THAN ANY OTHER IRISHMAN, FOR HE IS THE GREATEST POET IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THAT IRELAND HAS EVER PRODUCED." A HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PORTRAIT

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Word has just come of the death of Dora Sigerson Shorter, whose name

Dora S.

Shorter,

Irish Poet

is associated with the earlier days of the attempt to bring into English literature some of the colour and picturesqueness that is found in the Gaelic literature of Ireland. Mrs. Shorter was born in Dublin, the daughter of Dr. George Sigerson, who is remembered for his Bards of the Gael and the Gall, translations into the original metres of poems from the Irish. Dora Sigerson's work shows greater lyric gift than that of her father, and, at the same time, a desire to draw on the folk-lore of her country. She has, therefore, left behind her many ballads and lyrics which breathe the spirit of Ireland. To her Collected Poems, published in 1907, George Meredith contributed an Introduction, praising the poet's skill in metrical narrative. Mrs. Shorter had a command of technique, and that feeling for connotation essential in a ballad writer; while her sense of the supernatural enhances the weirdness of her ballads.

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Foreign Minister Trotzky, of the government that prevails in Russia at the moment of goThe Life of ing to press, gave the Leon Trotzky following sketch of his life in a conversa

tion with some of his friends a week or so before leaving New York to return to Russia:

I was born thirty-eight years ago in a little Jewish colony in southern Russia, in the government of Kherson. When about fourteen years of age I entered the gym. nasium of Chernigov, and like most of the impressionable youth of Russia soon became interested in the revolutionary movements. Here in America school boys seem to spend most of their time in sports, base. ball and football. In Russia, the boysand the girls too, for that matter-use their leisure for reading books like Buckle's History of Civilization, Marx's Capital, Kautsky's The Social Revolution, and our own great classics that throb with the passion of revolt. Our pastime is chiefly at tending underground Socialist meetings and spreading the propaganda among workingmen in the city and peasants in the country.

I was no exception to the rule. The revolutionary cause gripped me early in life and has never relaxed its hold. There was indeed a great deal of work to do. When I was little more than twenty years old, the Russian Revolution blazed up into a mighty flame. Most of the young people of Russia with any education were enlisted in the fight against the unspeakable Czaristic system, determined to put an end to the wrongs it inflicted upon the long-suffering Russian people.

My university education was interrupted, for I soon plunged deep in the work of propaganda, which left no time for any thing else. I continued, however, to apply myself to the study of sociology, political economy and history and soon became a convinced Marxian Socialist. When the Russian Social Democracy split_up_into_two sections on the issue of tactics I did not identify myself with either the Mensheviki or the Bolsheviki, but continued to work for the general cause, for the overthrow of Czarism and the cause of Socialism. Since the division in the Party was not based on fundamentals, but only on a difference of opinion as to the method to be applied in gaining the same ends, I used all my efforts to effect a reconciliation between the two wings. However, I leaned strongly to the radical side. In other words, I was a Menshevik of the extreme left, or a nearBolshevik.

My ability as a speaker and as a writer soon drew me into the very centre of Socialist activity. I wrote for the party press, composed pamphlets, and carried on per. sonal propaganda chiefly among the city populations.

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Naturally, I did not escape the general fate of Russian Revolutionists. I was rested and imprisoned, and as I did not give up my work for the cause after my release I became what the Russian authorities called an "illegal" person, and had to live under an assumed name. My first jailer was called Trotzky, and the idea occurred to me to take his name.

When the Revolution broke out in full force in 1905 I was made president of the first Soldiers' and Workingmen's Council in Petrograd to succeed the first incumbent to that position. I remained president un til the defeat of the Revolution, when I was arrested and sent to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. From there I succeeded in making my escape, and went to live in Switzerland.

In Switzerland I founded a Socialist pa. per called Prada (The Truth), which was published both in Russian and in German. I also established an international news service for the dissemination of truthful news of current political and revolutionary events in Russia.

In 1910 I went to Germany, where my revolutionary activity incurred the displeas ure of the Prussian authorities. I was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment, but escaped. Three days before the outbreak of the present war found me in Vienna. On the advice of Dr. Adler, the Austrian Socialist leader, I left Austria-Hungary, and was in Servia when that country was invaded by the Austro-Hungarian troops, and was present at the Servian parliament, the Kuptchina, when the vote for the first war credits was taken.

I returned to Switzerland, and was later summoned to Paris to edit the Russian Socialist paper there. When a Russian division of troops mutinied and killed the general, I addressed a severe letter of criticism of the French Government to Jules Guesde, a Socialist member of the cabinet, for the savage punishment that was meted out to the Russian troops. This so displeased the French Government that I was ordered out of France. I then went back to Switzerland, but Switzerland feared complications with the Czaristic government and would not let me in. I then turned to Spain. Spain would not have me either. I was detained at Barcelona, where I was to be deported to Cuba, where I knew no one, and where I should have found my. self completely stranded. Later the Spanish Government decided to let me go where I pleased, provided only I left Spain. Every

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country in Europe practically was closed to me, and so I turned my gaze across the Atlantic, and arrived at Ellis Island at the end of December, 1916.

Here in New York I lived with my wife and two children in three rooms in a Bronx tenement, wrote for the Novy Mir, the Russian Socialist daily and spoke at Socialist meetings. I do not expect my stay here to be very long, however, for a revolution is bound to break out in Russia in a short time, and as soon as that happens I shall hasten to my home country and help in the work of Russia's liberation.

My book The Bolsheviki and World Peace expresses in full my convictions on the world war. It is the result of wide and deep study and the programme laid down there is the only solution that I can see to the problems that confront humanity.

This personal account is particularly interesting in comparison with the illuminating estimate of Trotzky, of him and all his works, published elsewhere in this issue.

The late William Frend DeMorgan's last novel, The Old Mad House, ap

DeMorgan's Last Novel

pears to have the engaging qualities of his Alice-for-Short and Somehow Good and it is of a more comfortable length, though it will be nearly seven hundred pages when issued this spring. There is a triple romance: Fred Cartaret's with Nancy (nicknamed “Elbows," not because of any physical singularity, but because of something "cornery" about her personality); the love affair of Nancy's sister, Cintra, and Charles Snaith's romance with Lucy, a real beauty. The "DeMorganish" haunted house and mysterious disappearance are here. Fred Cartaret's uncle goes to look had house which a been a private lunatic asylum. The caretaker leaves him a moment, and he is never seen again. As in Somehow Good, there is built up for the mystery a sense of something sinister and intriguing, which pervades all the author's casualness and fidelity to life. The romance and the characters are developed within the aura

over

once

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DONA GATLIN, AUTHOR OF "THE FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION," AND FORMERLY
LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE NEW YORK SUN." OF HER BOOK CHARLES
HANSON TOWNE, EDITOR OF "MC CLURE'S," WROTE, "I RECALL NO PIECE OF

LITERATURE

THAT HAS SO BROUGHT HOME TO ME

WHAT
THIS WAR SHALL COME TO MEAN TO THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS OF
AMERICA.
I WISH THAT EVERYONE MIGHT READ THIS LITTLE
TALE.
A FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THIS STORY WILL BE MADE IN THE
APRIL "BOOKMAN" BY EDWARD J. O'BRIEN

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in 1892 to take part in the decorative work of the Chicago World's Fair. Subsequently he made his home in New York, where he was at various times art critic to several prominent newspapers. He was the American editor of The International Studio, and had been a regular lecturer at both the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale School of Fine arts. How to Study Architecture was his last book, published last fall; others of his works are How to Study Pictures, The Story of French Painting, The Story of Dutch Painting, The Story of Spanish Painting.

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story writer came early; indeed it was a part of his undergraduate literary output that suggested the volume published in 1895 entitled Princeton Stories-a book which is still in demand. Then came his newspaper experience in New York, and from it a series of newspaper stories, the most notable of which, The Stolen Story, became the title of the volume. Later it was made into a play with the same title and was produced about two hundred times. It was shortened into a one-act play later and also served as the vehicle for a full-length novel entitled The Day Dreamer. He wrote other successful stories-My Lost Duchess, 1908; The Girl and the Game, 1908; The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls, 1910; and then in 1915 he produced a play in book form, And So They Were Married.

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A Brilliant Comedy

Prominent stars and managers had a chance to read it in print, but at first they did not see its possibilities. One man, Roi Cooper Megrue, a successful playwright himself, had years before seen it in manuscript and tried to place it and always believed in it. When the Franklin Sargent dramatic students produced it at a matinée last spring, he was there and said it simply had to be put on professionally. He interested the Selwyns and the play was produced (and renamed "Why Marry?"), with a cast including Nat Goodwin, Estelle Winwood, Shelley Hull, Ernest Lawford, Beatrice Beckley, Lotus Robb and Edmund Breese. Everything was done beforehand to make it a success and it succeeded-ten weeks in Chicago and then to New York. But it was not easy-the work, the revision, the perpetual the perpetual thinking about it; and this revision of the dialogue by Williams counted because his work was intelligently directed. Sparkling dialogue that seems

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