The more recent awakening of the general public to the possibilities and the power of Music and to its need in our daily lives has been brought about in various ways.

The phonograph, the player-piano, the radio, have each been of great value in increasing musical knowledge, musical appreciation and musical receptiveness. Possibly our advance along these lines has been more notable than has our progress in the art itself. For Music, in order to develop, must depend upon the trained intelligence of listeners. To get the highest value out of music one must actually give it some study.

It is fortunate therefore that in creating distinct places for themselves in public favor, the phonograph, player-piano, and radio have been serving to bring about wider realization of the basic importance of the pianoforte.

thors, who wrote: "Music, as an Art, may be best approached through the pianoforte. That is, unless some one is preparing to make a specialty of some other instrument it is perhaps a mistake to inaugurate a musical education with another instrument. There is nothing in the literature of music that cannot be explained through the piano.

"It is for this reason I feel very strongly that everyone who desires to study music, whether the design is professional or amateur, should at first strive to gain a certain pianistic facility. The piano is easily the

most practical instrument for this purpose and the average student gets more from it."

Because of this generally accepted view, and be cause so much of the musical history and progress of the past century has been written around this single instrument, one of the earlier purposes of the music talks to appear in this magazine will be to tell the story of the piano from its early beginnings and throughout its stages of development to the splendid instruments of the present day.

For the pianoforte, or piano as it is now generally called, like the illustrious pipe organ, is one of the really fundamental musical instruments. It is the only one on which the three elements of music -rhythm, melody and harmony-can be produced simultaneously and completely. It is the one instrument above all others that will most readily and richly repay its study and actual use.

It was Owen Wister, an accomplished musician as well as one of our greatest au

The talks on this and other subjects will aim to be of interest to every one interested in music and of as much practical value as possible in the way of helpful information and occasional suggestions.

The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1926. Large 12mo. x+273 pp. $2.50.

LEWIS MUMFORD's three books reveal a striking growth in their author. The Story of Utopias was what the name implies: a collection of the dreams of a perfected society which men have made from time to time. Sticks and Stones sketched the record of American civilization as it has been reflected in our architecture. Now, in The Golden Day, he has attempted the difficult task of tracing the history of culture in the United States as mirrored in imaginative and philosophical writing.

The 'Golden Day' for him is the period before the Civil War, the age of Emerson and Thoreau and the best work of Walt Whitman. Mr. Mumford is to some extent a believer in environment as determining culture. The Golden Day, he thinks, was largely the result of circumstance: industrialism had not yet closed down upon American life; it was 'the period of an Elizabethan daring on the sea, of a well-balanced adjustment of farm and factory in the East, of a thriving regional culture operating through the lecturelyceum and the provincial college.' Yet he seems to abandon his thesis, at least in part, when he finally invites his contemporaries to 'reformulate a more vital tissue of ideas and symbols to supplant those which have led us into the stereotyped interests and actions which we endeavor in vain to identify with a full human existence,' and assumes that this can be done by taking thought.

He begins his historical analysis with the Protestant Reformation, which, he thinks, with its concomitant series of mechanical inventions, turned the current of men's minds and brought to an end the full, free culture of mediaval times. The first settlers of America brought with them only the relics of an expiring system; its disintegration was followed by the unsuccessful attempt of the pioneer to synthesize out of the sterile environment in which he lived a background and a meaning for his life. Then came the Golden Day; since when industrialism's crushing yoke has lain upon us. We have made business the end of human activity; pragmatism was soon debased into a justification of whatever is, which lost sight of the ends of life in a consideration of the means. Surrounded by the proliferation of mechanical devices, artists and philosophers have alike surrendered to 'positive knowledge and practical action' and we have 'moved within an ever-narrower circle of experience, living mean and illiberal lives.'

It was inevitable that Mr. Mumford, seeking to cover so much ground briefly, should have somewhat oversimplified the theme which I have here butchered in order to fit it into a few sentences. At the same time, he manages, despite the limitation of brevity, to pack his book with an extraordinary amount of suggestive comment. His philosophic outlook is, no doubt, colored by his temperament; there is a danger in idealizing mediæval culture, or Emerson's period, like the danger into which Rousseau fell when he idealized the natural man. Yet I do not see how any thoughtful student of America can fail to agree with most of Mr. Mumford's analysis of the inadequacies of the industrial age. Despite his brave invitation, quoted above, I feel that he is perhaps too gloomy about the future; things are moving so rapidly in our machine civilization that there is no saying what may lie around the corner. In any case, this book, written in a style of notable lucidity and beauty, remains both indispensable to, and a source of great pleasure for, everyone who cares to know whether there is an American mind and, if so, what is happening to it.

BRUCE BLIVEN

Tomorrow Morning, by Anne Parrish. New York: Harper & Bros. 1927. 12mo. viii+305 pp. $2.00.

Tomorrow Morning has been called a novel of hope. This it assuredly is not. But it is a novel of hopefulness, of the elasticity of the heart - its power to pick up the pieces, to accept the second-best, to look steadfastly away from the truth when this is essential to happiness, to say, when to-morrow morning dawns much like yesterday, 'The day after to-morrow, perhaps.'

This novel has the same sharp reality as The Perennial Bachelor, the same moments of beauty. Emotionally, it is pitched in a lower key; its tragedy is that of misconception, maladjustment, disillusion. As in the earlier novel, over the grave depths of the story humor dances perpetually now satire, now pure farce. The reader will not forget the children playing statues on the lawn the tubby, stolid Charlotte and her small friends interpreting 'Furious Rage' and 'Beautifulness'; nor the returned travelers benevolently showing their vast collection of photographs to their mutely but passionately rebellious hostess. Least of all will he forget the cruel and soul-assuaging portrait of J. Hartley Harrison, that intolerable quintessence of fatuous smugness.