the mind which must not be taxed to remember anything more than five minutes. No conclusion is necessary. When you have provided thirty cents' worth of nervous action, all you have to do is to foil your villain, give him his "flogging at the gangway," rub salt into the lashes, amid the cheers of the innocent bystanders, and leave "the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques."

I have suggested that low tragedy may be the lesser work of the great artist; often it seems to be his immature work, produced before he has reached the power to organize his work into coherent structural forms. John Jay Chapman remarks that Richard III is "rattling good melodrama." It rattles, it is good in many respects, and in many respects it is melodramatic, but it is not rattling good melodrama. It is melodramatic in sundry scenes and in various characteristics of plot, but it is impossible to kill so many good people and still have a happy ending. Every possible hero except the villain is dead before the last act, and to check over their ghosts and kill their killer is revenge for all and happiness for none. Low tragedy seldom kills anyone anyway, and never anyone of any account. It always has more thunder than blood. Its thunder threatens, but it has no bolt of heaven save the one reserved for the villain. It has not the inexorability of greatness. It has no more effect than the parent who incessantly threatens dire consequences to the child's acts but never executes them. The process affects the child's nerves and those of all within range, but has little effect on emotions and less on conduct. As we learn of disaster or catastrophe, we have consciously or unconsciously a smug feeling: "Such things are inevitable, but they never happen to us." The business of high tragedy is to wrench us out of this complacency, and no verdict of "Not guilty, but don't do it again," will perform the service. "I'll let you off this time," says low tragedy, "but you see, the consequences might have been serious." Even this lesson is of no effect in the face of low tragedy's urgency upon us to perceive no consequences to

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anything. The performance merely stiffens placency. "Of course," we say, "it happens to them but never to us.”

The Romance of Terror is low tragedy from the beginning; its action is hectic and its dolls are stuffed with sawdust. I find no sufficient evidence that even in its palmiest days any thoughtful reader ever got a thrill out of it. I venture to suggest, too, that when we think of it as low tragedy we may see more clearly its relationship to the sentimentalism which preceded and permeated it. The Man of Feeling and Julia de Roubigné are low tragedy with the appeal to pity; Otranto and Udolpho are the same with the appeal to terror. They are the same in that they seek the emotional situation for the sake of the emotion; emotion for emotion's sake without thought of purification by its fire. The plots are made up of emotional situations one by one, like the scenes of Tracked Across The Continent. Like boiling water on the mountain-top, they bubble up with the crackle of a few dry twigs, and evaporate into thin air without heat enough to make tea for anybody. More than other fiction this is enervating because it does not exercise the will by so much as imagined rigor. Do not remind me that in Otranto some of the dramatis personae are killed; it is merely a heroine or two, but nothing to the purpose. Kill everyone in the book, and nobody is dead; it would not make tragedy because we do not love them, any more than the young man who "said he should die, and he did, and nobody cared," or like the steamboat accident in Huckleberry Finn:

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

In our conventional classifica'ion of literature into periods and movements, we think of it as occasionally, Antaeuslike, renewing itself by contact with the soil, returning at the beginning of a brief romantic movement to the literature of the people whence cometh its strength. Surely it would

be nearer the fact to think of it as continuously rooted in the soil of vulgar letters. We botanists of literature may well beware lest we become mere flower-fanciers, concerning ourselves too much with an occasional orchid or passion flower, disdainful of dabbling in fertilizers or soil analysis. Even the passion flower is rooted in the soil. The gardener who should see only the dahlia, gaudy and tall, overtopping its fellows, who should discuss it as if it were a meteor out of heaven, might be as far from the facts as we who neglect "everything as is low" in literature. The dramatist who serves his apprenticeship in melodrama, the novelist whose first works appear in lurid paper covers until they sell by the hundred thousand, follows the course of the development of the art he pursues. He is on the direct trail, and, other things being equal, is more likely to wear the laurel than the child of scorn who seeks to grow passion flowers without roots, who pursues his art in theory but not in fact along a road on which he may pursue forever without overtaking. And for the rest of us, a course in the movies, ruminatively digested, is not the worst preparation for Shakespeare and Ibsen.

ARC LAMPS

CRISTEL HASTINGS

I count the yellow arc lamps down the street,
These clustered globes that hang in twos and threes,
Bursting to sudden brilliance with the dusk,

And watch them shine like stars between the trees.

My windows have a view of granite aisles
And buildings that stare back at noon-day suns,
But I see rugs of grass and moss-green paths,
And a blue canyon where a river runs!

And when the roar of traffic's voice assails
My ears like monsters tearing through the night,
I hear the roar of trade winds in high sails
That ride the blue with gulls in breathless flight!

Night comes again-dusk clothes the city's glare
With shadows that pursue the dying sun,
And once again I stand alone and count

The arc lamps through black trees when day is done.

EMULATION

A little house stands in a lane

Half-hidden by a hill

That the sun paints gold at eventide
A house where flowers spill

Their fragrance on the twilight air,

And, oh, the way is sweet

Along a homebound trail that once

Was made by eager feet!

And when the first white star appears

Its twinkling is in vain,

It cannot match the candle glow

Against a window pane!

THE THEATER IN EARLY CALIFORNIA

TEMPE E. ALLISON

It is just sundown in the squat little pueblo of Sonoma. We pass through the plaza and by the two-story adobe house of General Vallejo, the palace of the northern frontier in the California of the forties. Beyond the dwelling of the proud old general stands his storehouse. That is our destination. We pause at the threshold. What a change has been wrought in the interior! Across the farther end, a platform has been built. A brilliantly hued Indian blanket shuts off this place of mystery. On either side the stage are the boxes, theatrical tributes to the socially elect. Rough-hewn benches firmly supported by strong wooden frames slant upward and backward from the front. Branches of trees and trailing vines cover the nakedness of the walls and add a simple air of festivity to the abandoned granary.

We enter and choose a place near the center of the house. Our eyes accustomed to the dusk now tell us that we are not the first to arrive. There, near the door, at the farthest possible distance from the stage, sits an old Indian. The audience is increasing. Sparkling Mexican beauties in bright dresses and dark shawls, shepherded by calm and dignified señoras, take places not far away. Across on the other side is a group of vociferous cowboys in clinking spurred boots and wide hats. American soldiers push down toward the very front. Then the deposed comandante himself and his complacent wife make their way to the box at the left of the stage. At the same time Alcalde Boggs