Page:Poet Lore, volume 28, 1917.djvu/512

492 and Mr. Waugh should prove himself an international benefactor in discussing them.

Two more unusually beautiful books are, Rings by George Kunz and The Book of the Peony by Mrs. Edward Harding,—both Lippincott books. Mrs. Harding has undoubtedly compassed at least one of the requirements of an education,—to know everything about something. Here I had been going along admiring peonies whenever I had the chance,—which in our modern gardens is far too seldom,—without once realizing that the peony had a history and a mythology, and any number of branches to its illustrious family. Of course I should have known that behind that high-bred beauty must have existed an old and honorable lineage.

Rings would make the famous fifty-seven varieties hide their heads,—if they had any,—in shame. The countless illustrations are fairly bewildering.

No book-review section these days is complete without comment upon Lord Dunsany. Certainly any one of the Plays of the Gods and Men (Luce and Company) would prove that the comment was not out of place, for each play expresses life in terms of art.

In The Tents of the Arabs, we see the king longing for the life of the camel-driver and the camel-driver longing for the life of the king. That is life all right, but in the play each attains his ambition, which is sure-enough art.

The Laughter of the Gods portrays the power of woman's discontent, but by an epochal stroke of art, an earthquake swallows the nagging women and their suffering husbands.

Two other interesting volumes of plays are Masterpieces of Modern Spanish Drama (Duffield and Company) and Plays by Jacinto Benavente (Scribners).

Criticising a work of criticism may seem rather like gilding refined gold and painting the lily, but Present-Day American Poetry by H. Houston Peckham (Richard G. Badger) is no ordinary work of criticism. It is a volume of those crystalized bits of conversation known as essays. I do like a good essay and there is no danger of being surfeited with good ones,—too few are written. I like a writer whose thoughts are interesting enough when he writes them as they come without finding it necessary to let them issue from under the fierce mustachios of Duke Bombolasto or from the rosy lips of Maraschina. I can be impressed by ideas without their being written in futurist verse which one can be almost sure what it means after reading it a dozen times. Mr. Peckham has very interesting ideas and he expresses them in a very interesting way. In fact he possesses in a rare degree what Lowell called the great antiseptic,—style. To read the book is like listening to an appreciative and witty friend talk about his favorite authors and at the same time intersperse the conversation very freely with his own very original ideas.

To refrain from giving a very few quotations from a very quotable book is impossible.

"An English station-porter, when asked once by an American traveller why British railways do not give checks instead of continuing the antiquated and stupid system of pasting labels upon