Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition, and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The _Tender Buttons_ arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of one peculiar motive: (From _A Substance in a Cushion_.) What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. (From _Red Roses_.) A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sole hole, a little less hot. Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers. (From _Breakfast_.) What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary. Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain.... Why is there so much useless suffering. Why is there. Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood, most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—_Adieu_! IBN GABIROL. [1] _Tender Buttons_, by Gertrude Stein [Claire Marie, New York]. [2] _The Art of Spiritual Harmony_, by W. Kandinsky [Houghton Mifflin, Boston]. London Letter E. BUXTON SHANKS _London, Sept. 11, 1914._ We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared. The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors, but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.