flesh and of God." We see none of the latter but an abundance of the former. She has "health, good sense, an oily skin and no little wit. . . . How straight is her glance beneath her ruddy eyebrows. The abundance of life swells. fulsomely her frame, her cheeks tinged with blood ("barbouillées de sang"), her young throat, her ears garnished with dirt. . . ."

Should this be not enough, however, to scandalize the commoner nor yet sufficient for him to claim great novelty and originality, M. Delteil continues: "Joan is tall and robust, of noble carriage, with the physiognomy of the drunken angels, a large sensual mouth . . . . and the thick nose of the mothers of the Old Testament."

After such a description no one will deny him originality, of a certain brand, at least. A child, conscious of an audience, cuts capers just as smart. M. Delteil is a juggler of words of no mean capacity, however, and his studied effects, although not always happy, are arresting. He speaks of "the microbicide sun." The child's first step is "the unforgettable miracle of verticality." At the consecration of the king at Rheims "the Latin syllables catch in the throats and on the vaults of the ceiling. The carbon dioxide of the respirations confuses the atmosphere and the people's hearts. It is one of those pathetic moments when the stones themselves rise on their weighty wings."

His juxtaposition of spiritual and material attributes is one of his commonest and most successful tricks. "The cabbage soup smokes like a beautiful prayer." "An odor of mystery and of cheese fills the atmosphere." He speaks of an analysis "rothschildly rich," of Joan "superb with energy, life and death, . . . a block of radium setting on fire men and villages." He is fond of the rabelaisian outpouring of words and gives us an untranslatable hymn to milk (all alliterative) which begins: "O Milk, Milk with a capital M, great Milk, spherical and tetraform, Milk of cow, of goat, of woman, quintessence of roundness and principle of whiteness, lapidary, lapis lazuli Milk, supreme nourishment and supreme speculation, consonance of caresses and love, soft

syllables of life, Milk, Milk," and so forth until he is weary of his play.

With Delteil, then, the fit is upon us, or rather upon Jeanne. The Maid is torn from her saintly niche to be carried through the streets in a shockingly clever vaudeville parade. Moreover he promises to prolong his prophetic train (if such it can be called) with the publication of Adam in 1926 and we are assured that Eve comes tumbling after in 1927. Doubtless we have here the "last word" on Joan of Arc but scarcely in the sense given the term by SainteBeuve.

CAVEAT VENDOR

When a man comes to the stage of life when he ceases to look upon "successful" business men as Captains of Industry and Merchant Princes, but knows them for what they are, rapacious birds of prey, hungry sea-gulls swarming and fighting over garbage and offal-when "four years more of prosperity" means to him that the robbers have renewed their license to increase one hundred per cent at a time their capricious demands on his capacity for hard work, and he is inclined to spell prosperity with the same four letters with which General Sherman described war-then he is apt to feel that no power on earth can help him, and there is nothing left for him but to write a letter to the Boston Transcript or to the London Times.

To him in his dark hour I bring a glimmer of hope. It is not a panacea in a bottle, nor yet a formula for transmuting life's leaden metal into gold, but only a point or two in the manly art of self-defense. I do not claim much for it in practice; of the little I ever had, I have been able to save from the harpies only a crumb here and another there. I offer my bits of science in the hope that they may enkindle others, and that in time they may grow into an acknowledged system. Nor do I look forward, at least as an announced policy, to putting a stop to salesmanship altogether. It is enough for now to point out that even in theory unlimited salesmanship might lead to danger for the salesmen themselves. If salesmanship had everything its own way, everyone would be able to take money from everyone else (including salesmen) at will and on demand. Money would circulate so fast that we should all (including salesmen) die of vertigo. I believe that salesmen must have some secret method of defense against one another. Probably it is part of the secret ritual of the order,

and as such will remain forever unknown to me-there are so many good reasons why I shall never be a salesman that it is not worth while to mention one of them.

I assume at the outset that the self-evident facts are known to all (including salesmen) namely: that salesmanship is the name of the system by which men take from other men the results of their toil (or of their salesmanship); that the methods of salesmanship run the scale from small deceit to general massacre; that salesmanship is not a virtue, but something between misdemeanor and felony; that a man who succeeds in selling himself earns the name that a woman receives who does the same, and that women cannot compete with men in business until they receive permission from society, or from men, to sell themselves and reap the benefit as freely as men do. In addition to these, I will call attention to the demonstrable fact that salesmanship is not wisdom but cunning. The demonstration is quite simple. In Bacon's essay Of Cunning, for cunning read salesmanship throughout, and lay the precepts beside those of any modern manual of salesmanship, and you will readily perceive that what my Lord Bacon did not know about salesmanship was only the modern name of it. I append a few sample passages:

It is a good point of [salesmanship] to wait upon him with whom you speak with your eye, as the Jesuits do in precept.... Another is that when you have anything to obtain of present dispatch, you entertain and amuse the party with whom you deal with some other discourse that he be not too much awake to make objections.... Some have in readiness so many tales and stories, as there is nothing they would insinuate but they can wrap it into a tale.... It is a good point of [salesmanship] for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.

It is true that there are various more or less instinctive defenses against the rapacity of the salesman, just as there is a haphazard sort of "natural" immunity against various diseases. None the less, it has seemed worth while to thoughtful people to systematize the practice of medicine, and vaccination and inoculation have been considered vast benefits. Since anti-salesmanship is essential even to salesmen, and to those who have nothing to sell is a necessity of life, it should certainly be developed as a science.

I think it would be safe, for the present at least, to base a system of anti-salesmanship on the hypothesis that salesmen are not very intelligent. Sellers now-a-days are neither broad nor

deep. That they have cunning, is clear by definition, but it is the small caliber, high pressure, self-overreaching style that is easily checkmated by anyone of broader mind who chooses to pay any attention to the matter. I note, for example, that most persons whose occupation is buying and selling have the naïve idea that six men on an otherwise uninhabited island could make a living by issuing bonds and selling them to one another. They not only hold this belief in theory, but act on it. In the belief that the more people there are in town, the more wealth there will be, and so the more for them, they seek to attract to their cities as many as possible of their own kind. The sea-gulls are more intelligent. If one of them finds an attractive site on a float of garbage from the ferry-boat, he does not call the others, but rather seeks to fight them off. Again sellers are possessed of the fantastic notion that to sell anything at any time is always and per se a praiseworthy act, which would indicate that they do not read history, or that if they do they waste their time. Judas, for example, was a clever salesman, but he has little honor for it. I do not mean that intelligence has not been applied to selling, but only that it is not the sellers who have applied it. They are like football players; if the game shows them moving as if they had almost human intelligence, you know that they have been well coached, and we know to our cost that they do not coach themselves. It is very easy to test this with sellers by springing on them. a situation that is not in their book. The next time an insurance agent opens with the invariable inquiry, "Do you carry any insurance?" tell him suavely that you do not discuss your private affairs with strangers, and go on talking about the weather, or keep silent. You will see on his face his elementary attempts to think for himself for five minutes, then he will go away. A friend of mine invented this formula nearly twenty years ago, never dreaming but that as soon as it was reported back to the coaches they would find an answer. You may draw what inference you like from the fact that I find it still effective.

On a familiar walk with your dog, you know at just what instant the impulse will strike him to dart through a hedge to a certain garbage can, and just before that instant you call him and slip the leash on his collar. So in many other of his motor impulses, it is with a certain gratification of the sense of superiority that you keep your mind one jump ahead of his. It is not difficult to do this with the seller. Whatever his own intelligence, he