of escape from bourgeois realities by thinking freely and writing verse. In 1913, he expressed his dream of a new feminine ideal in "Women as World Builders." In 1918, he published his dream of educational reconstruction entitled "Were You Ever a Child?" which sets forth the "new" educational notion of utilizing instead of killing off by the educational processes the child's personal and creative impulses. As in Chicago, so in New York, he escaped from journalism to the coast of Bohemia; he haunted artistic settlements; he was a pioneer of the modern migration to Greenwich Village; he frequented little theaters; he wrote much verse and several one-act plays; he published in 1924 a very readable collection of critical essays called "Looking at Life," which interprets current books and ideas from the point of view of a poet and an intellectual radical.
Mr. Dell's novels are four: "Moon-Calf," 1920; "The Briary Bush," 1921; "Janet March," 1923, and "This Mad Ideal," 1925. By a comparison of these books with the essays and the available biographical record, I have convinced myself that the first two of them, at least, are hardly to be regarded as fiction, are rather to be considered as confessions, like those of Jean Jacques. They constitute one continuous narrative of the adventures of Felix Fay from childhood through his first marital difficulties and adjustments, and they resemble the "Confessions" of Rousseau in many important respects.
They are poetic, in the sense that poetry is "impassioned recollection." They have the form and movement of autobiographical revery in a sensitive mind which feels a rhythm in its experience, sees pictures in its own life history and savors and idealizes
