several handkerchiefs to pieces'; and again, 'She tore and gnawed her handkerchief until her gown was strewn with lint.' This seems an artistic as well as an economic extravagance. "The handshake and smile, the challenging glance at herself, caused the depths of the desperate woman to swarm with fighting devils, rushing on their armors, and polishing their swords!' Poor lady! Surely here we are wandering out of the realm of tragedy, which this tale purports to be, into the region of melodrama.

The many ways in which the style of the book falls short of fineness might be instanced as a reason for doubting its immortality. It is possible to find ungrammatical sentences, but perhaps that is a minor point. English, wherein three adjectives are used where one would do, three phrases, where one would be far better, will, fortunately, not endure. Lengthy prose descriptions are added to the already complex texture of the Wagner drama, and Wagner dramas set to adjectives are hard to bear. A great theme should command something of the severity of the grand style, but there is nothing of that here, only a lashing and straining of language to an impotent fury of ink. The lack of fastidiousness in thought and in language would alone bar the book from the first rank. The constantly reiterated 'revealing gown,' and 'a more perishing languor' might well date from the days of debased English and debased morals of the time of Charles II, while, 'If their brains were not in a state of toxic poisoning from this love secretion' betrays a vulgarity which could date only from our own century. Possibly all the points suggested in regard to the style could be summed up in one further quotation: 'But when the rich soil of a woman's nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new

passion-' Ah, when that is happening, would it not be well perhaps to wait for a saner moment in the life of the heroine before writing a book?

This book, with its effort to be cosmopolitan in material, cosmopolitan in point of view, gives pause for thought. There has been of late much discussion by Mrs. Atherton and others of the narrow provinciality of our taste. Scoffed at for domesticity, timidity, innocence, and other defects, we are hastening to make good our lack, for, full of a sense of uncertainty as to right critical standards, we are greatly afraid of not being up-to-date in matters of culture. As the fashion of these later days points to decadent literature, literature in which the sins and shortcomings of humankind are dealt with admiringly, or flippantly, as the case may be, we strive to achieve a taste for it, and are greatly abashed when we cannot.

No race has ever achieved great literature by following foreign fashions; and a greater fear than the fear of not being up-to-date might well possess us, the fear of forgetting our own point of view, the fear of failing to find expression in literature for that which has been best and finest in our experience. Looking at the world's great pieces of fiction bequeathed to us by the past, one realizes that each, from whatever country, is fundamentally true to raceconsciousness; each contains some fine rendering of the heart of life as this people has discovered it. Don Quixote is Spanish to the core; the very soul of the country is revealed here so clearly that, in chance meeting with a Spaniard of to-day, you understand him better for having known the Don. How essentially English are Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe! How vastly, in each case, the wonders gain because of the practical, stolid character of the hero who faces them! How Russian in every

the story of a young English diplomat who meets at the Bavarian court Margarethe Styr, an opera-singer, is interested in her, then marries a shallow young American girl, whom he finally deserts for Margarethe Styr.

The tale, wide in scope, is intended to be tremendous in motif, and has been so pronounced by more than one critic. It must be remembered, however, that a great part of our public, lashed by the scorn of many a cosmopolitan, Mrs. Atherton among them, would perhaps be ready to welcome as 'strong' any novel which presents a husband's desertion of his wife at her hour of supreme need of him. We should remember, however, that this act in itself does not constitute greatness, either in life or in fiction, and that to tell this tale so that it would rouse, in finer minds, anything except disgust, the power of a supremely great master of tragedy would be necessary. This power Mrs. Atherton does not possess. Now and then in literature appears a study of human experience which makes one feel the irresistible power of the great tides of life. From the old Tristram tale, down through some of the master dramas of the days of Elizabeth, to Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, the type is familiar, and we are indeed purged by pity and terror as we follow breathlessly the working of passion that is fate. We do not feel this here. The author fails to make the impelling force of passion real, and the tale turns, at the end, where its power should be greatest, into a revolting spectacle of cold-blooded brutality. There is little in the character of John Ordham, there is nothing in the march of events, which makes inevitable this ending when the wife and new-born child lie dead. When the hero goes to Paris, on his way to Margarethe Styr, instead of northward, as he had said, to his brother's sickbed, one cannot tell whether it is anger

with his wife that makes him change his plans, or love for the other woman, or inability to manage the railway timetable. There is no possible reason why the singer should not have ridden her horse to death a few days earlier, and so have spared a deal of trouble. That inevitability which alone justifies such an ending is lacking both in character and in event.

This is preeminently the kind of fiction in which the second-rate will not do, and second-rate the book is, in management of motif, in character-delineation, and in style. The fine truth-telling of which we have been speaking is absent; here is none of the pitiless veracity in detail which gives Anna Karenina its peculiar power, nor is there that underlying sense, which the Russian novel shares with great tragedy, that artistic truth, in the last analysis, harmonizes with ethical truth. In The Tower of Ivory there is a remoteness about the characterization; the hero is vaguely and negatively done, and, in spite of all that is said about John Ordham, you do not at the end know him better than you know any selfcentred and reticent English traveler with whom you may have shared a railway carriage. The minute rendering of character in thought and act which would make his manner of choice at the end seem inevitable is lacking, and one can but conclude that the author has not had the opportunity for close observation, from which a characterstudy can be built up point by point, and that she lacks the fine quality of penetrative imagination which can project a character in its wholeness to act in least things and in great as a personality.

The tale makes the impression of being morally and artistically underbred. This shows in the characterization, in the dramatic scenes, and in the style. 'She wept, she had hysterics, she bit

several handkerchiefs to pieces'; and again, 'She tore and gnawed her handkerchief until her gown was strewn with lint.' This seems an artistic as well as an economic extravagance. 'The handshake and smile, the challenging glance at herself, caused the depths of the desperate woman to swarm with fighting devils, rushing on their armors, and polishing their swords!' Poor lady! Surely here we are wandering out of the realm of tragedy, which this tale purports to be, into the region of melodrama.

The many ways in which the style of the book falls short of fineness might be instanced as a reason for doubting its immortality. It is possible to find ungrammatical sentences, but perhaps that is a minor point. English, wherein three adjectives are used where one would do, three phrases, where one would be far better, will, fortunately, not endure. Lengthy prose descriptions are added to the already complex texture of the Wagner drama, and Wagner dramas set to adjectives are hard to bear. A great theme should command something of the severity of the grand style, but there is nothing of that here, only a lashing and straining of language to an impotent fury of ink. The lack of fastidiousness in thought and in language would alone bar the book from the first rank. The constantly reiterated 'revealing gown,' and 'a more perishing languor' might well date from the days of debased English and debased morals of the time of Charles II, while, 'If their brains were not in a state of toxic poisoning from this love secretion' betrays a vulgarity which could date only from our own century. Possibly all the points suggested in regard to the style could be summed up in one further quotation: 'But when the rich soil of a woman's nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new

passion-' Ah, when that is happening, would it not be well perhaps to wait for a saner moment in the life of the heroine before writing a book?

This book, with its effort to be cosmopolitan in material, cosmopolitan in point of view, gives pause for thought. There has been of late much discussion by Mrs. Atherton and others of the narrow provinciality of our taste. Scoffed at for domesticity, timidity, innocence, and other defects, we are hastening to make good our lack, for, full of a sense of uncertainty as to right critical standards, we are greatly afraid of not being up-to-date in matters of culture. As the fashion of these later days points to decadent literature, literature in which the sins and shortcomings of humankind are dealt with admiringly, or flippantly, as the case may be, we strive to achieve a taste for it, and are greatly abashed when we cannot.

No race has ever achieved great literature by following foreign fashions; and a greater fear than the fear of not being up-to-date might well possess us, the fear of forgetting our own point of view, the fear of failing to find expression in literature for that which has been best and finest in our experience. Looking at the world's great pieces of fiction bequeathed to us by the past, one realizes that each, from whatever country, is fundamentally true to raceconsciousness; each contains some fine rendering of the heart of life as this people has discovered it. Don Quixote is Spanish to the core; the very soul of the country is revealed here so clearly that, in chance meeting with a Spaniard of to-day, you understand him better for having known the Don. How essentially English are Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe! How vastly, in each case, the wonders gain because of the practical, stolid character of the hero who faces them! How Russian in every

fibre, un-English and un-French, is Anna Karenina! In each case the close rendering of an individual's sense of things, through this detailed ‘lying like truth,' expresses also something of this people's peculiar contribution to human experience, and so takes on a larger meaning and a greater value.

Pondering this truth, one is inclined to take issue with Mrs. Atherton as regards both her theory and her practice. Our own tradition will serve us better as a starting-point than a borrowed one; it may be a poor thing, but it is our own, and it is our only legitimate basis for art. I do not mean that we should confine ourselves to American material or to American soil, but that we should not borrow a point of view, nor imitate the thought or the emotions of other peoples. I doubt if we shall ever be able to deal with the sins and the shortcomings of humankind admiringly or flippantly. There is, happily, enough of morality and of decency in our tradition to forbid our thinking this way, and our race-consciousness under all the shift and change of fashion is as true as is great drama to the underlying laws of life. As for studies of human passion, what American has done, or can do them, in the French way, the German way, the Russian way? It is well that our artists, for the most part, confine themselves to those phases of human life which they have had the opportunity to observe, those aspects of experience that they understand. Keen observation, close analysis, delicate psychological detail in dealing with moral and mental and physical dilemmas, one finds in the best of our fiction, and we have had more than one writer capable of telling a good story that is all story; but passion, simple and entire, has been greatly rendered and dramatically rendered by no American. William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry James, the very

names that stand highest on our brief roll of fame, -illustrate and prove the point; and the lesser American novelists would do well to avoid that of which our best and wisest have fought shy. Even Hawthorne, who comes nearest to passion-study in the one great romance which our country has produced, The Scarlet Letter, begins the tale at the point where the modern novelist would leave off-the moment when passion is over. How deeply, in its spiritual interpretation of experience, does The Scarlet Letter embody the soul of old New England! How inevitably, like an unerring finger-post, does it point the way in which our novelists must deal with these themes if they are to interpret our finer sense of things.

Singularly enough, the next book at hand is a satire, and an exceedingly clever one, on our American fear of not being abreast with the world in matters of culture. Franklin Winslow Kane 1 is quite in line, in its fine analytical work wherein minute shades of individuality are recorded, with the best that has been achieved in American fiction. It has been written that the disciple shall not be greater than the master, yet there are moments when the pen of Anne Douglas Sedgwick weaves a more potent charm than that of Henry James. Her work, more restricted in range, is now and then, if one dare whisper it, keener in insight, while the incisive workmanship sometimes betrays by contrast the labyrinthine nothingnesses of the master's work in some of its lesser phases. With an almost uncanny insight into certain failings of humankind, this author combines unusual delicacy of perception of shades and values. Her American heroine, cultured far beyond her ability to receive culture, groping for standards, afraid of not showing the finest judg1 Franklin Winslow Kane. By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK. New York: The Century Company.

There is, in truth, in his fiction more analytic than dramatic power, and he is more often the academic man searching for themes about which to write problem-novels than the man possessed by insight, conviction, emotion which he must voice. His work covers a large range of subjects, is extensive rather than intensive; and his novels, like the themes in this special book, succeed one another too rapidly. This one is half treatise, half story, wavering between nothingness and creation, in the limbo of uncreate art. Mr. Herrick tells much abstract truth, and it is perhaps profitable to read him, but artistic truth he does not tell in this book, wherein the somewhat vague characterization, the indefinite detail, fail to convince us of the reality of that concerning which he writes.

Oddly enough, this work of a professor of English betrays a most careless prose. Even if it stops short of being ungrammatical, it is often slipshod. His ubiquitous short sentence fails of the Hugo effect perhaps intended, and the constant use of the dash, with swift breaking of the thought, is most annoying. The disintegrated sentence becomes an all-too-fitting symbol of disintegrated thought and purpose.

Nathan Burke' takes us back to days when machinery counted less in our lives than it does at present; when, possibly, the individual counted for more. It is refreshing to find a book which so contradicts the present trend of fiction, wherein most of our story-writers, adopting the pace set by the secondrate magazines, are eliminating every shade of meaning and of character-interpretation which do not bear on the next accident, and are producing work stripped of inner interest and of all psychological significance. There is an air of Olympic, or of Early Victorian,

1 Nathan Burke. By MARY S. WATTS. New York: The Macmillan Company.

leisure about Nathan Burke, an old-fashioned tale which, in the manner of an elder day, follows the hero from boyhood, through all phases of his development, into ripened manhood. It deals with the growth of an Ohio lad during the years preceding the Mexican War, and portrays country life, and life in a small town, with close and excellent local color. The book has at the core a fine Americanism, far removed from the cheap vulgarities of Blaze Derringer, and the superficial smartness of The Fortune Hunter, and it makes one realize, with all the Spartan plainness of country life, its heroic and silent idealism.

This is the kind of interpretation of American life that we most need, not that which shouts our sins through the market-place, but that which erects above the market-place, for all men to see, the figure of one full of fine practicality, of humor, of humanness, yet incorruptible enough to shame the sin. It may be that this book will take its place among those pieces of fiction which, through masterly interpretation of an individual, have become the interpretation of the inner heart of a race. One takes it up and lays it down with a fresh sense of patriotism, remembering that this country which has produced corrupt politicians and conscienceless financiers has produced also Lincoln, and an unnamed host of those who share his humor and his integrity.

At first glance it would seem as if the author had chosen an unfortunate moment to depict. It would take genius to make the Mexican War interesting, yet that is what Miss Watts has done, and Nathan's experiences here are as absorbing as are his earlier ones as choreboy, grocer's clerk, lawyer. Interesting

2 Blaze Derringer. By EUGENE P. LYLE. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

3 The Fortune Hunter. By LOUIS J. VANCE. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.