Prizes

By S. V. B.

Let Us Have Them, By All Means -- But Without Strings

The award of the Pulitzer literary prizes for the year of 1922 has aroused the usual flicker of controversy. Amiable ladies and gentle men have as gallantly as unsolicitedly taken the occasion to rush into print and explain exactly how they feel as to relative justice and intelli gence shown in the awards. Meanwhile the weary judges, let us hope, are recuperating in some pleasant clime unvexed by newspaper-clippings. It must be the devil of a business, hunting among contemporary books and plays for a Cinderella to fit the little glass slipper.

Especially when the glass slipper is made to such definite specifications as Mr. Pulitzer's. Most patrons who give such prizes seem quite unable to do it without various qualifications. And, no adequate Bertillon system having yet been invented for literature or the drama, these qualifications -- except where they concern matters of ascertainable fact, such as the citizenship of the author, or the year of a play's nativity -- must, in general, be dodged when the time comes for the award of the laurel wreath. Very sensibly, too--but, why have the qualifications in the first place? Could there not be one prize, awarded with out qualification, to what, in the opinion of its judges, was a good piece of work?

It has been asserted that prizes, like political conventions, encourage safe mediocrity. The present Pulitzer awards in poetry and the novel hardly seem to bear out this statement. Miss Millay's lyrical advice to burn the candle at both ends is hardly the customary slogan of mediocrity -- Miss Gather has produced as distinguished and individual writing as any American in our time.

We have not yet reached the pres ent delightful condition of prize-giving in France where, one French newspaper suggests, an author who has written more than three books without receiving at least one prize should be given the Legion of Honor for meritorious service to the State. But we may come to it. And why shouldn't we? The stones of Grub Street are still as flinty as they were in Johnson's day, when the adolescent Doctor was forced to hie him to eating-houses where the back of a New foundland dog served the patrons for a serviette. If prizes can rescue some native Arthur Machen from drudgery -- give comparative freedom and leisure for so much as a year to some unrecognized Sherwood Ander son--by all means let us have prizes.