NON-FICTION

American Impressions

As a poet, Alfred Noyes is credited with much studious innovation in metre and verse forms. But the fancies and profundities of his mighty lines are about as subtle and original as Kipling gone Tennysonian with an occasional dash of brine from John Masefield and a few zephyrs from Swinburne.

Similarly in his essays, Alfred Noyes, commentator, says nicely what he has to say but what he has to say has almost all been said. For this reason he is a most serviceable person. He wraps up the commonplace with loving care and presents it with an expression combining sturdy faith and "lest we forget" to people who only get confused when they read "clever" writers. How truly useful this ingenuousness is can be estimated almost mathematically. The "American Impressions" in his new book* were written for the London Times. To U. S. readers it will seem that Mr. Noyes "burbles" a bit, but burbling helps the world go round and for this particular kind of burbling, there is no better burbling ground than the London Times. Also, Mr. Noyes is awfully nice.

Of all commonplaces, none is more spectacular than calling the U. S. a "melting pot." The Noyes wrapping for this household article is "new united Europe." He defends the U. S. delay in entering the War by picturing U. S. polyglot population as a sturdy band of folk collectively dismayed and none too impressed by the quarrels of their stay-behind cousins back in Europe. He soothes Revolutionary rancor by embracing Washington, Franklin, Hancock, et al., as Englishmen and even appeals to the Empire spirit of Britons by revealing a bevy of immigrant children singing "My Country "Tis of Thee" to the same tune as "God Save the King." He reminds England that President Wilson said "too proud to fight" to Mexico, not Europe, and that the man (Horatio Bottomley), who reported that Americans were wearing "We Won the War" buttons, was later jailed by England for another fraud. The vexed matter of debt collection is skillfully elucidated following an esthetic discourse on skyscrapers, of which the "stone and steel logic" is shown to be the reality behind the Uncle Shylock myth. The soul within the logic comes through in the eyes of Manhattan office workers who, it is well known, sometimes pause to gaze in breathless wonder at their ethereal city.

Let not the Middle West be scorned, says Mr. Noyes, for it was Lincoln's home. And Detroit, though England would never guess it, lets more marine tonnage through her gates than any other port in the World. Dallas, unheard of in musical England, is familiar to Kreisler and Paderewski. Hollywood is actually a very minor adjunct to Los Angeles and "the most successful makers of temporal happiness in the world today" are by no means limited to cinema, chewing gum and flivvers.

The outstanding chapter, flanked as are most of the chapters by appropriate selections from Mr. Noyes's verse, relates for U. S, ears as well as English a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Mr. Noyes was there the night the new 100-inch telescope was first put into use. The experience started him writing his blank verse epic of science, The Torchbearers. The U. S.'s high rank in pure science was superbly certified when Astronomer George Ellery Hale called his guests and assistants to be the first humans to witness the rising of one of Jupiter's eight moons.

Mr. Noyes believes that "the sun of the new world" has broken through Europe's clouds and will burn "our blue devils to blue birds." He sees

. . . the glimmer of that great dawn

Which over our ruined altars yet shall break

In purer splendour, and restore mankind

From darker dreams than even Lucretius knew

To vision of that one Power which guides the world. . . .

He notes "a curious lack of metaphysical power" in the U. S., but thinks this is only natural and temporary in a country that has been so busy. The U. S. will eventually see the vision too. Its insistence on the importance of the individual, i.e. Walt Whitman, is its contribution to civilization so far, and, being a capable manufacturer, it will some day add Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, etc., to its already celebrated product, Liberty.

The Author. Alfred Noyes became, a U. S. celebrity and adopted son in 1913, when the Lowell Foundation brought him over to lecture in Boston. He lectured also at many a U. S. college and Princeton invited him to stay on as visiting professor. The similarity between Princeton and his own Oxford did not escape him. He accepted, lectured often and melodiously, wrote verse about Princeton in the Revolution and in the then-brewing World War. Prior to The Torchbearers, his most cele brated poem was Drake, an epic of British empire-building. Aged 47, Mr. Noyes lives in London, sensitive, earnest, fond of swimming. Mrs. Noyes (Garnett Daniels) is the daughter of a U. S. Army colonel.

Scientific Seer

AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME-- J. W. Dunne--Macmillan ($2.50). The three old ladies who advised Macbeth that he was to rise in the world would have interested Author Dunne very much. He would have disregarded their boiling potful of newt, toad and bat fragments and asked them to tell him carefully just what their excited minds saw coming to pass in the future. He would have asked them to be particularly careful to identify for him in their visions all elements that seemed to come from their past experience. About other elements, such as Birnam Wood marching to Dunsinane, he would have exacted minute details, however meaningless these seemed. When the prophecies came true he would have been able to explain them in a perfectly scientific way.

Roughly, his explanation would have rested on this proposition: that Time, being an absolute fourth dimension, exists quite as completely, as independently of a conscious observer, as does Space. Tomorrow co-exists with yesterday just as "here" and "there" co-exist for the individual without his being in both places at once to observe them. The reason we are unconscious of the future is simply that our conscious brains are habitually concentrated on the sensory "present" or on memories left by the sensory past. In sleep, the mind is free from brain stimuli and can rove backward or forward in Time.

To believe this, to lay a foundation for acceptance of Serialism (Time wrapping time, Space wrapping space, Consciousness wrapping consciousness in a series to infinity where Space, Time and Consciousness become absolute), Author Dunne recommends that his readers try writing down their dreams in careful detail immediately after waking. Friends of his who did this faithfully were, in every case, able to detect the "effect": events or parts of events experienced in dreams were later experienced waking.

A British scientist of high standing and most deferential to lay readers, Author Dunne brings brilliant analysis to bear on the "second sight" of folk lore, proving among other things that hasty scorn for superstition is superstition itself.

*NEW ESSAYS AND AMERICAN IMPRESSIONS --Alfred Noyes--Holt (?2.50).