This electric rumor of him was helped to prosperity by the fact that specific data about him were extremely hard to come by. His books seemed to be rare--some of them, indeed, unprocurable--, and even when one of them was obtained and examined it turned out to be largely unintelligible. He wrote, it appeared, in an occult dialect, partly made up of fantastic slang from the French army. He gave to old words new and mysterious meanings. He kept wholly outside the vocabulary at the back of “College French.” Even returning exiles from La Rotonde were baffled by some of his phrases; all that they could venture was that they were unprecedented and probably obscene. But the Village, as everyone knows, does not spurn the cabalistic; on the contrary, it embraces and venerates the cabalistic. Apollinaire grew in fame as he became unscrutable. Displacing Cocteau, Paul Morand, Harry Kemp, T. S. Eliot, André Salmon, Paul Valéry, Maxwell Bodenheim, Jean Giraudoux and all the other gods of that checkered dynasty, he was lifted to the first place in the Valhalla of the Advanced Thinkers. It was Apollinaire’s year.... The work before us is the pricking of the bladder--a jest highly effective, but somewhat barbarous. M. Josephson simply translates Apollinaire’s masterpiece, adds an _apparatus criticus_ in the manner of T. S. Eliot, and then retires discreetly to wait for the yells. They will make a dreadful din, or I am no literary pathologist! For what does “The Poet Assassinated” turn out to be? It turns out to be a dull pasquinade in the manner of a rather atheistic sophomore, with a few dirty words thrown in to shock the _booboisie_. From end to end there is not as much wit in it as you will hear in a genealogical exchange between two taxicab drivers. It is flat, flabby and idiotic. It is as profound as an editorial in the Washington _Star_ and as revolutionary as Ayer’s Almanac. It is the best joke pulled off on the Young Forward-Lookers since Eliot floored them with the notes to “The Waste Land.” M. Josephson rather spoils its effect, I believe, by rubbing it in--that is, by hinting that Apollinaire was of romantic and mysterious origin--that his mother was a Polish lady of noble name and his father a high prelate of the Catholic Church--that he himself was born at Monte Carlo and baptized in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This is too much. Apollinaire was, like all Frenchmen of humor, a German Jew. His father was a respectable waiter at Appenrodt’s, by name Max Spritzwasser: hence the _nom de plume_. His mother was a Mlle. Kunigunda Luise Schmidt, of Holzkirchen, Oberbayern. 10 _Sweet Stuff_ SIX DAYS OF THE WEEK: A BOOK OF THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND RELIGION, by Henry van Dyke. New York: _Charles Scribner’s Sons_. [The American Mercury, March, 1925.] I offer a specimen: As living beings we are part of a universe of life. A second: Unless we men resolve to be good, the world will never be better. A third: