It may not be out of place, however, to quote a few of the conclusions, in order to give a taste of the book's direction. This of man: A man is clean alone, if he is clean at all. It isn't being superman to learn to listen to the real self--just the beginnings of manhood proper. This of publishers and the public: In many, not all, editorial offices, the producer is paid well and swiftly alone for that which is common, in which plots are pictured, and all but greedy imagination put to death.... I saw that it was not enough for me to get down to the parlance of men, but to leave all hope behind--not only possible intellectual authority--but, by all means, any spiritual in sight; that only frank "down writing" would do. This of woman's status: The soul of woman dies if it may not sometimes aspire. A periodic possession of devils on a man's part will not break the waiting quiescence of his woman, but the sordid routine of downtown methods will set her into screaming destruction at the last. The creature who eight times the year obeys the tradesmen's instinct for style; who has broken her bearing with centuries of clothes-bondage, fed her brain upon man's ideas of sex, her body upon food bought for her and prepared by people whom she does not respect; who has not yet heard the end of a dollar-discussion begun when her baby ears first noted sounds; who holds in shame all that is mighty in her genius, and who has finally accepted as a mate one of her male familiars--she is a man-made creature, in whom is buried a woman. She is man's ignorance and effrontery incarnate--the victim of his mania for material proprieties, which, from the beginning, have utterly desecrated spiritual truth. And this of the future: By every observation, law and analogy in life, the constructive purpose at work in the world is toward the end of the increase of spiritual receptivity in every creature, a continual heightening vibration toward the key-rhythm. G. S. A Defense of the Grotesque _Sonnets from the Patagonian_, by Donald Evans. [Claire Marie, New York.] It has become the fashion, even among intelligent people, to fling tawdry sneers at something not understood--especially the intensely grotesque. The indulgent smile has disappeared, and the little peevish joke has taken its place. Perhaps this is obvious, but some obvious things cannot be made too obvious. _Sonnets from the Patagonian_ is a type of book which will be almost universally laughed at. Yet it is something like a gold nugget: one must use his mind as a pick with which to isolate streaks of poetry from the coarse rock. The rock is simply grotesqueness. The gold is protesqueness mixed with unconscious simplicity.