untold number, and trade and traffic with each other. Some of these twobankers or canoes which I saw were propelled by seventy or eighty paddlers.

The peoples of these islands do not differ from each other in appearance, customs, or language. All of them understand each other when they talk. This is very useful for the purpose of our Royal Sovereign, who I assume is intent upon converting them to the holy faith of Christianity. So far as I was able to inform myself, they are very apt and well disposed toward that.

I have said that I coasted along the island of Juana from the west toward the east for three hundred and twentytwo miles. With reference to that part of my course, I can say that this island is larger than England and Scotland together. For as I have said above, it is three hundred and twentytwo miles on the side toward the west. In addition, however, there are two provinces that I did not visit, one of which the Indians call Ana. The inhabitants of that province are said to be born with tails. Those provinces extend for a distance of one hundred and eighty miles, as I was told by the Indians that I carried with me and who know all these islands.

The extent of Hispaniola, however, is greater than that of all Spain from Catalonia to the Rabida River. This is easily inferred from the fact that the fourth side, which I coasted from the west toward the east, is five hundred and eleven miles long. This island must be subjugated, and I have taken solemn possession of it, as of all the others, in behalf of our victorious King, and dominion over that island throughout its whole extent has been transferred to the King for his profit and trade. In particular I took possession of a large town which we named after the birthday of the Saviour, La Navidad. There I gave orders for a

fort to be built at once, which must have been completed by this time. I left there as many men as seemed necessary, with every kind of arms and with sufficient provisions for a year, together with carpenters and ship carpenters. The friendliness and kindness of the local chiefs to our people is beyond belief, for these native tribes are kind-hearted and docile and their chiefs pride themselves on the fact that I let myself be called their brother. And even if they should change their mood and wish to harm those who have been left behind in the fort, they could not do so, because they have no weapons and go about naked and are very timid. For this reason those who have possession of the fort can dominate the whole island without being in any danger from the population as long as they do not overstep the instructions we have given them.

On all these islands so far as I learned a man has only one wife, except the chieftains and princes, who may have as many as twenty. The women seem to work more than the men. I have not been able to ascertain whether they recognize private property. I observed that whatever one person had he divided with the others, especially food, vegetables, and the like. I discovered no criminal among them in the ordinary sense of the word. The people are timid and friendly and are not black like the Negroes. They have long, smooth, straight hair. They do not expose themselves for any length of time to the direct rays of the sun, for the sun is very hot in that part of the world, because this region is only twenty-six degrees from the equator.

On the mountain heights it is exceeding cold, but the natives endure it because they are accustomed to it and because they eat great quantities of very heating food. I have seen no criminal among them and I have

learned of no crime among them, except on an island named Charis, which is the second of the islands encountered by people who sail from Spain toward India. A tribe [the Caribs] dwells there which is regarded by its neighbors with great horror. Those people eat human flesh. They have many kinds of two-bank canoes, with which they invade the other islands and plunder and steal whatever they can. They do not differ in appearance from the others except that they wear their hair long like women. They carry bows and cane arrows with sharp points on one end, for which reason they are considered very savage and are greatly feared by the other natives. Their women dwell apart from the men on the island Mateunin, the first island that you reach when traveling from Spain to India. These women, however, perform no labor becoming to their sex. They carry bows and arrows like the men. They wear copper ornaments, of which they have a great quantity. The Indians also told me of another island which is greater than Hispaniola, but the inhabitants of that island have no lances, although they have a great abundance of other things, including gold. I have brought with me natives from the island of Hispaniola and the other islands to bear testimony to what I have reported.

in the fort I mentioned have found or as I believe they will find. I myself did not stop longer at any point than wind and weather forced me to, except at the town of La Navidad, where I arranged for erecting the fort and the security of the place. Important and unprecedented as all this is, I could have done much more if the ships had obeyed me, as reason dictated. Nevertheless, this that we have done is great and wonderful. But thanks for all this is not due to our services, but to the holy Christian faith and piety of our Royal Majesties; for what the human spirit alone cannot attain God grants to men, for God is wont to enable His servants and those who love His law to perform incredible things, just as it has been vouchsafed us in the present case to accomplish what has never hitherto been granted to the powers of a mortal being. For when anyone has written or reported about these islands it has been upon vague conjecture. No one has been so fortunate as to see them. They were regarded almost as legendary places. For this reason the King and Queen and their Princes and their realms and all the other lands of Christendom may thank our Master, Jesus Christ, who has granted us such a signal victory. Processions should be held, solemn sacrifices should be made, our churches should be adorned with wreaths and garlands. Christ should rejoice on earth as He rejoices in Heaven, Who in His providence has provided that the lost souls of so many people shall be saved. Let us also rejoice on account of the exaltation of our faith and the extension of our present knowledge, which will benefit not only Spain but all Christendom. To this end I have made this brief report. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS Admiral of the Ocean

To disengage the qualities and estimate the rank of the poetry of one's generation is peculiarly difficult. In the first place, the qualities that the critic has to discern seeing that he too is of the age

are in a sense his own, and cannot be seen objectively; and secondly, it is impossible for him to separate his reactions to them from the rank of the poetry which they distinguish. A third thing will influence his judgment

the quantity of contemporary poetry. There is very little poetry being written to-day, and it is legitimate criticism to note that by its nature it is not poetry that could be produced in great quantity. It is the kind of poetry that is written in an age of general poetic debility, that is achieved against the current, caught adroitly where it can be caught, or seized desperately in the midst of hostile forces. It has the qualities of a thing which must use its wits: it is stubborn, violent, or clever. In the Victorian age poetry held its own; in the Romantic era it was supreme, and even the prose-writers were dominated by it. But to find another age in which the genius of prose was so immensely more powerful than that of poetry as it is now we have to go back to the eighteenth century.

That century was the century of enlightenment; our age too is one of enlightenment, but on a far vaster scale. The genius of our generation, as Mr. Bertrand Russell has said, has gone into science, not into literature. And it 1 From the Calendar (London literary monthly), January

seems to be a fact of experience that to the supremely creative, the poetic, power, the spirit of enlightenment, when it is widely disseminated, becomes inimical. Science, enlightenment, skepticism- these make us look coldly, and involuntarily, automatically so, upon the things that the poet must contemplate with passion. The theorist's impersonality of intellect becomes insensibly an impersonality of general habit, and eventually an impersonality of feeling. We have all been influenced by the theories of science, and the intellectualization of imaginative literature has been going on for a long time. It produced in the generation before last such things as the dissolvent plays of Ibsen, and — perhaps its most finished expression - the pity of Anatole France, so admirable in the man, so inadequate in the artist. For France did not pity the immediate object, nor even pity in him the human race; he pitied humanity directly, passing by the particular case in indicating it, making it an open occasion for a quite impersonal emotion of which it served only to remind him, but which it did not intensify. The pity of France is not typical of this age, but his impersonality is; our emotions are colder, more generalized, more intelligent perhaps, than they were fifty years ago.

The growth and dissemination of science has made our approach to experience more impersonal; the circumstances of modern life tend to do the same thing. No one has investigated properly the effect of the growth of

cities upon literature, politics, and popular conceptions of morality. Yet the effect of such a vast change must have been great. It is impossible, for example, to conceive a poem like 'The Waste Land' being written anywhere except in a huge modern city; the small, dirty, leisurely London of fifty years ago did not contain the atmosphere for it. The atmosphere was not there, but neither was any way of life, any class of experience, that could make such utterance as this comprehensible. As we read "The Waste Land' modern London, though not deliberately evoked, seems to rise up around us like a wall. Miss Sitwell's poetry, too, recalls us to London, and, if we except that of Mr. Squire's followers, there is hardly any poetry of the present day that does not do so. In the main, English poetry has been a poetry of the English country; it is now a poetry chiefly of the town. This is a decisive change. But it is also a comprehensible and natural one; for the cities are alive, the countryside is no longer so.

The effects of this vast change in the life of England must needs be infinitely complex, and finally impossible to define. The most one can do is to take hold of a few generalizations, obvious enough when stated, and yet, perhaps, generally overlooked. In the first place, life in a large city is necessarily more impersonal than life in the country. The difference, indeed, is so great that anybody coming to the city from the country has to reorient his values or else remain permanently at a loss. Where formerly his contacts were all personal, here he finds that they are preponderantly collective. His circle of acquaintances has been superseded by a crowd, permanent but shifting, as much a part of the furniture of the streets as the houses and shops. For the individual has been substituted the mass, and to the mass the order of

feelings that expressed his relations toward his circle of acquaintances is no longer relevant. He develops, therefore, another set, the peculiar set of impersonal feelings that all town-bred people carry about with them, without guessing it, from their birth—the feelings that seem to make them a part of the crowd and yet keep them outside it, that permit them to know it and yet ignore it. Everything, moreover, is on such a large scale business, the populace, the machinery of life- that nothing seems to matter so much. A calamity is one in a series of calamities; a man is part of a crowd. In the last hundred years England in general has come from the country to the city. The city as we know it, moreover, is like nothing that the human race has seen before. These attitudes, these emotions, are therefore new. They were bound to influence thought and feeling, and to bring a different note into literature.

Still another thing has helped to change the atmosphere of England, and to change it subversively the rapidity of change. In a stable order of society, or in solitude, men may listen to their feelings without much question, for these feelings correspond to the situation, they have a sort of suitability. But where change is very rapid our reactions tend to become obsolete before we realize it. True of a past in which we always tend to live, the present delights in refuting them. They become confused, lose their force, and cease to give us satisfaction, as soon as we see that another set of responses, which, however, we cannot command, would be more suitable. So it was inevitable that we should have in contemporary literature a general distrust of the feelings, a conditional or ironical presentation of them, and sometimes a frank reduction of them to their lowest factors -to those elements

distrust everything else.

These things, then, must be taken into account when we consider contemporary literature, for they are part of our environment, and the creative writer lives not in a world of poetry but in his environment. If poetry is colder, more intellectualized, more skeptical, than it used to be, this, we see, is a natural result of the fact that contemporary thought and life impose upon us an increasingly impersonal attitude. If poetry is conditional and ironical, affirming and denying in one breath, what response could be more natural to a world that has changed so rapidly that no one knows where he stands? And these attributes of modern poetry become more significant if we see them neither as qualities assumed, nor as a fashion, nor as a new approach to reality, but as a reaction, genuine if confused, to the world we know. The poetry of Mr. Eliot, Miss Sitwell, and Mr. Graves, seen thus, is a poetry congruous with the nature of the age. It is neither a complete criticism nor a fulfillment; for that we are still waiting. But the age makes it comprehensible, gives it validity; we see clearly in it the forces that mould and the obstacles that inhibit modern life.

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Let us take the testimony of the poets themselves. Miss Sitwell has a few very frank and illuminating notes in Bucolic Comedies. 'We are accused of triviality; but poetry is no longer a just and terrible Judgment Day world of remorseless and clear light.' 'Modern heartbreak is merely a dulling and a retrogression, a traveling backward: till man is no longer the bastard of beasts and of gods, but is blind, eyeless, shapeless as the eternal stones, or exists with the half-sentience of the vegetable world - a sentience that is so intensely concerned with the material world (as apart from the visual) that it

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'What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do? The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four.'

And with that finality which Mr. Eliot can communicate over such a keen undertone of rebellion:

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only.

It is the same cry as Miss Sitwell's. The 'giants crumbling'; the 'trivial sands' the 'stony rubbish'; the hell with 'no vastness'- the 'penny world'; the sentience that is like 'the sentience of the blind'- the key turned in the door once and turned once only: these are images of one and the same world, the modern world which has risen silently around us, and in which we have not learned to think and to feel.

The response of the poet to this world is not pessimism, for pessimism is a reasonable and traditional thing; it is rather a bewilderment and distress of