Classic Audiobook Collection - Some American Storytellers by Frederic Taber Cooper ~ Full Audiobook [history]

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Some American Storytellers by Frederic Taber Cooper audiobook. Genre: history In Some American Storytellers, editor and critic Frederic Taber Cooper offers a guided tour of American fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, introducing listeners to a vivid lineup of popular writers and the distinct narrative gifts that made them household names. Part literary portrait, part close reading, these essays trace how each author wins attention and trust - through voice, character, atmosphere, humor, suspense, and the careful shaping of plot. Cooper moves from the polished cosmopolitan worlds of Edith Wharton to the frontier mythmaking of Owen Wister, from O. Henry's swift twists of irony to Ambrose Bierce's sharp-edged wit, and onward through figures such as Francis Marion Crawford, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Winston Churchill, Robert W. Chambers, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Robert Herrick, Booth Tarkington, Gertrude Atherton, and Frank Norris. As he compares styles and ambitions, Cooper keeps returning to a central question: what makes a writer a true storyteller, kin to the oldest traditions of spoken tale and fireside legend, yet unmistakably American in rhythm and sensibility. The result is an accessible, opinionated, and often illuminating snapshot of a formative literary moment. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:03:33) Chapter 01 (00:38:06) Chapter 02 (01:06:05) Chapter 03 (01:32:46) Chapter 04 (02:01:48) Chapter 05 (02:30:44) Chapter 06 (03:08:08) Chapter 07 (03:46:35) Chapter 08 (04:24:43) Chapter 09 (05:03:35) Chapter 10 (05:30:48) Chapter 11 (05:56:44) Chapter 12 (06:37:08) Chapter 13 (07:18:20) Chapter 14 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper Preface The term storytellers has been deliberately chosen for this volume in place of novelists or storywriters or any other available variant because it makes possible a more uniform manner of treatment and a more generous point of view. While it is true that the modern novel in its higher development has come to mean something more important than a mere story, the source of amusement for an idle hour, Still, the fact remains that in all classes and grades of fiction, the underlying story is the one common factor.

The one indispensable element without which the most carefully written novel becomes a mere dry-as-dust essay or sermon. Now, the ability to tell a story is precisely the one gift that cannot be taught. The late Frank Norris once wrote, that in every child a storyteller was born, but that the vast majority died soon after birth. This, of course, is only a figurative way of saying that the imaginative faculty is a prerogative of childhood. That successful storytelling, where it survives to mature years, is an intuitive, inborn quality not to be acquired by any amount of conscious cerebration. The subjects of the essays included in this volume differ widely in aim and in accomplishment. But all of them possess to a considerable extent, the gift that makes them next of kin to the minstrel and troubadour, to the ancient fabulous, and to the forgotten spinner of the world's first nursery tales,

the gift of holding the attention by the spell of the spoken word. Indiscriminate praise is, of course, as foolish and as harmful as wholesale censure. Yet it is more helpful to discover some merit lurking in an otherwise mediocre volume than to dismiss it contemptuously because its shortcomings are all upon the surface. Some very large oysters contain some very small pearls, but that is no reason for disdainfully tossing the oysters aside with a remark, those pearls are not worth the trouble of saving. See the amount of waste shell there is. Now all of the authors herein treated contain pearls, some large and some small,

and the attempt has been made in each case to find and indicate them. The intention has been, not to ignore or gloss over any faults, but first of all to lay the main emphasis upon the positive merits, to show a sympathetic understanding of what each author has tried to do, and to give full credit wherever they have succeeded in their attempt. And the highest and best reward that has yet come or that can come is in those cases where the subjects of these essays voluntarily say, You have understood.

A few essays are here printed for the first time. Others have been extensively rewritten in order to bring them up to date. But the majority, in one form or another, appeared originally. in the pages of the bookman, and the author wishes to express his appreciation of the courtesy of the editor and publishers of that magazine in allowing them to be reprinted. Frederick Tabor Cooper New York City, June 26, 1911 End of Preface

Chapter 1 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Francis Marion Crawford There is a peculiar satisfaction in undertaking a critical study of Mr. Marion Crawford in a volume which by its very title avows the intention of viewing the novelist primarily in his capacity of storyteller. While it is quite true that an interesting plot is the indispensable cornerstone of successful fiction, yet many of the biggest novels are not those in which the storyteller's art has reached

its highest development. They are big because they are not only stories. but a great deal else besides. Fearless paintings of existing conditions, trenchant criticisms of life. And, conversely, many a novel faulty in structure, false in coloring, exaggerated in action to the point of melodrama, has been vitalized by that magic instinct of the born storyteller,

that inimitable gift of making miracles seem plausible and convincing you that impossibilities could have happened, simply by telling you with assured audacity that they really did happen. Consequently, to approach a novelist primarily on the storytelling side is neither a direct road to discovering his permanent place in fiction nor a barrier to such discovery. It simply determines the initial point of view, avoids the trouble of making explanations and saving clauses,

and often makes possible a greater indulgence for shortcomings, a more cordial recognition of merit. In the case of Mr. Crawford, the advantages of this standpoint are sufficiently obvious. whatever position may be assigned to him now or hereafter in english letters it must be conceded that he was first last and always a prince of story-tellers whose title was inborn and not acquired A little more than a quarter of a century ago, when Mr. Isaacs caught the attention of a volatile reading public, there were those who predicted, in view of its oddity of theme and treatment, that the newly discovered author would never again repeat his initial success, that Mr. Crawford

would remain in the class of authors of one book. Yet anyone with a well-developed critical sense must have seen in Mr. Isaacs, beneath its oriental coloring and its mystical atmosphere, the first flowing of that strong, steady, inexhaustible current of narration, which has held its even way through upward of two score volumes, not one of which deserves the stigma of mediocrity, while just a few possess equality entitling them to a higher recognition than they have yet received. There is yet another reason for preferring to treat of Mr. Crawford primarily as a storyteller, namely, that it is the point of view from which he himself would have chosen to be read it. The first axiom of all impartial and helpful criticism is that an author's work should be

judged in the light of what he has intended to do. Most novelists of real importance have sooner or later expressed in print their theories of the art they practiced, but few have done so with the terse clearness, the uncompromising conviction that characterise Mr. Crawford's suggestive little monograph upon the novel what it is. To the critic, it is a most helpful little volume, not for a better understanding of what constitutes a novel, since there are a score of points on which one is inclined to take issue with the author, but for a better understanding of Mr. Crawford himself. Indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that it is a convenient key to every one of his merits and defects. And for that reason it seems wise to examine it somewhat carefully, to quote from it

rather freely, and to get quite clearly before us just what are his theories of fiction, and why those theories do not always bear the fruit which he expected to obtain from them. In the first place, then, the novel is defined by Mr. Crawford as, a marketable commodity of the class collectively termed intellectual artistic luxuries. In other words, the first object of the novel is, to amuse and interest the reader, and a novelist is at all times under an implied contract with the prospective purchasers to give them the entertainment they are looking for and to attempt nothing more serious than entertainment. It is not surprising, therefore, that he has no tolerance whatever for the

purpose novel, not merely because, in art of all kinds, the moral lesson is a mistake, but for the more specific reason that the purpose novel is, a simple fraud, an odious attempt to lecture people who hate lectures, to preach at people who prefer their own church, and to teach people who think they know enough already. The novel is nothing more nor less than a pocket theater. The novelist, nothing more than a public amuser. Quote, It is good to make people laugh. It is sometimes salutary to make them shed tears. It is best of all to make our readers think, not too serious thoughts, nor such as require an intimate knowledge of science and philosophy to be called thoughts at all, but to think,

and thinking, to see before them characters whom they might really like to resemble, acting in scenes in which they themselves would like to take part. Mr. Crawford need not have added to the above paragraph a single word regarding his attitude toward romance and realism. For it is obvious that the novelist who recognizes that his chief duty is to entertain, and who deliberately purposes to leave out of his books all characters whom his readers would not like to resemble, and all scenes in which his readers would not care to play a part, must of necessity have scant sympathy for the realistic school, or small use for the definition of the novel as, a cross-section of life. what he does have to say upon this subject is exactly in accord with what one would expect him to say zola he concedes somewhat reluctantly to have been a great man mightily course to no purpose but great nevertheless a nero of fiction

but zola's shadow seen through the veil of the english realistic novel is a monstrosity not to be tolerated the fact that in our anglo-saxon system the young girl is everywhere seems to him in itself a sufficient reason why we should temper the wind of our realism to the sensitive innocence of the ubiquitous shorn lamb and after defining the realistic school as that which purposes to show men what they are and at the romantic school as the one which tries to show men what they should be he frankly declares that for his part he believes that more good can be by showing men what they may be ought to be or can be than by describing their greatest weaknesses with the highest art there is just one more paragraph which deserves to be emphasized, because it touches quite unconsciously upon the source of the real weakness, not only of Mr. Crawford's novels, but of the romantic school as a whole. Quote, practically, what we call a romantic life is one full of romantic incidents which come unsought as the natural consequence and result of a man's or a woman's character. It is therefore necessarily an exceptional life, and as such should have an exceptional interest for the majority. now there cannot be any question that the theory contained in this paragraph is admirable the trouble is that as a working formula it almost never succeeds even in mr crawford's own novels admirable as they are for he understands beyond question the technique of his craft

it would puzzle the critic to point out any one romantic life made up solely of incidents which have come unsought as the natural consequence and result of the man's character the hidden flaw in all romantic fiction is due to the fact that the incidents which come unsought as the result of character rarely show the romantic quality which a scott a dumas stevenson demands the novelist may take the greatest pains in his selection of exceptional types of men and women and may show equal care in bringing them together under exceptional conditions nevertheless in nine cases out of ten if he leaves them alone to follow consistently their natural bent if he does not actively intervene and force them to say no or to say yes if he does not check and harass and complicate their actions by the intervention of blind illogical fate in the shape of disaster disease and death he will find them naturally and quietly doing the normal and obvious thing and frustrating his hope of providing that exceptional interest which is demanded by the majority in mr isaix perhaps quite as consistently as in any of his later books mr crawford evolved a long series of highly romantic happenings directly from the peculiar temperament of his hero yet take away the element of chance the accidental blow on the head received by isaics in the game of polo the coincidence which made miss westenoff's brother the unknown benefactor of isaics in his days of poverty and finally the girl's illness and death from jungle fever and the story would necessarily have had a radically different and more prosaic ending. In Saracanesca and Saint-Ellario, the most admirably real of all Mr. Cropper's Italian

stories, the fact remains that the vital issues of the plot arise in the one case, out of a purely chance identity of names between two distant cousins, and in the other, from an almost incredible series of coincidences, a lost pin, a stolen envelope, a forged letter. Now, in romantic fiction, there is no logic. objection to the use of chance, accident, fate, call it what you will. The mistake lies in trying to write romance in accordance with a realistic formula, and to convince the reader that sane men and women did strange unlikely deeds as the direct result of their own characters. Mr. Crawford, however, in a measure disarms criticism, by confessing genially

that he is himself, the last of literary sinners. His creed, so far as he has one, slips on and off easily, like a well-worn glove. In theory, as we have seen, he advocates romance. In practice, he is in turn realist, psychologue, mystic, whatever for the moment suits his needs or appeals to his instinct of born storyteller. His stage setting, his local color, are painted in from life with scrupulous fidelity. A belzac or a Zola could not be more faithful to reality in matters of topography. You may at any time, if you please, trace the peregrinations of Count Scariatin through the back alleys of Munich, or of Paul Pattoff through the labyrinthine paths of Constantinople, and his people are as real as his streets and

houses. The whole world knows that his Mr. Isaacs was drawn direct from life. The original being a certain Mr. Jacobs, a trader in rare jewels, who later came into note through his dispute with the Nizam of Deccan over the price of the great Empress Diamond. Had you talked with Mr. Crawford about his other characters, you would have learned that there was nothing exceptional in the case of Mr. Isaacs. He would have told you with a quiet smile that the men and women who thronged the pages of his Saracchineska trilogy were all real people, whom he had for the most part known and liked well. That Corona was still living. That Spica was a composite portrait of a catavorous pole and a famous Neapolitan duelist, who died a few years ago. That Count Scariateen, the crazed nobleman

in a cigarette-maker's romance, was in reality a German count who once a week, just as in the story, left his workbench in the little tobacco shop and sat at home waiting in vain for a summons to the Bavarian court. That Vieira, the Russian girl who sold her hair to pay the Count's debt of honor, was also a reality. And that even Fischniewicz dengue tobacco shop, with the absurd mechanical figure of the Viennay's giggle in the window,

existed in Munich exactly as Mr. Crawford drew it, and was in fact the shop where he went day after day to buy his cigarettes. his method then may be summed up somewhat after this fashion. He begins by taking a real stage setting, someone of the many corners of the world of which his cosmopolitan experience has given him intimate knowledge. He brings upon the stage a group of real people of strong and interesting personality, whom he has known and studied from the life, idealizing them to suit his purpose, yet not so much as to mar the illusion of reality.

And having up to this point held himself in check, he now gives free reign to his imagination, and puts these thoroughly real people through a series of highly romantic adventures, forcing them to think and say and do many things which our sober second judgment tells us they never would have said or thought or done. And yet, with his inborn power of storytelling, convincing us for the time being that it all must have happened exactly as he assures us that it did. It would be futile to attempt to survey in detail any large number of Mr. Crawford's two-score novel, novels, nor would any very useful purpose be served were it practical to do so. There is a surprisingly large proportion of his books which a critic may quite safely ignore. Books, which one and all maintain an even quality of interest, yet add nothing to our estimate of him as a man or artist. As is well-nigh inevitable in a novelist who never allows himself to forget that novel-writing

is a business, and who has brought the technique of construction almost to a mechanical routine, the difference between his earlier and later books is mainly a loss of spontaneity and an increased conventionality in plot and character. Mr. Crawford did not write himself out, to use the phrase which he declared was so terrible for any author to hear. His average standard during his closing years was far nearer to that of his best work than that of Mr. Howells. Let us say comes to Silas Lapham. Nearer indeed than many other novelists whom the world has chosen to honor could come to his own. best achievement after a quarter of a century of unremittant toil.

It is nevertheless a fact that the volumes which one feels inclined to single out for specific discussion all belong to the first decade of Mr. Crawford's literary activity. Mr. Isaacs, of course, must remain one of the volumes which will be read as long as Mr. Crawford continues to be remembered. Crude, though it may be in construction and uneven in style, it nevertheless remains a rather remarkable achievement, one of those rare first efforts that are nothing short of a sheer stroke of genius. It is usually an unwise experiment to read over in maturity a story which gave keen pleasure in early youth.

Yet, if the present writer may be allowed to cite his own personal experience, Mr. Isaacs is one of the books that stand the test surprisingly well. Mr. Crawford himself admitted that he was most fortunate in having begun his literary career with this particular book. Theosophy was in the air. Kipling had not yet preempted the field of India, for fiction, and there was, moreover, a certain mingling of poetry and cynicism, of mature experience

and youthful enthusiasm, that went well with the strange theme and the vivid coloring. And one may seriously question whether any single volume written by Marion Crawford in the height of his powers could have duplicated the success of Mr. Isaacs, if put forth as the first novel of an unknown author. Dr. Claudius, which followed Mr. Isaacs within the year, may well be passed over with a comment that for a book so badly handicapped, the wonder was that it succeeded at all. As has very truly been said, a learned Heidelberg, Ph.D., however sentimental and yellow-bearded, is a less attractive conception than a youthful and pure-blooded Iranian adventurer whose glowing eyes outshine his jewels. Yet, but for the caprice of fate, it might have been known to the

world as Mr. Crawford's first book, for it had been in the hands of the publishers many months before Mr. Isaacs was issued. Of the books which followed, at an average rate of two volumes a year, a Roman singer was notable for that extreme simplicity of style which has since become one of Mr. Crawford's most effective assets. Marzio's crucifix, as representing a long step forward in the technique of unity of plot, Khaled, as the most effective and artistic of all the author's purely fanciful efforts. But the volumes which it seems worthwhile to single out for more detailed comment, are the three fates, a cigarette-makers' romance, and the Saracinetska trilogy. It is a curious and unexplained fact that when the topic of Mr. Crawford's novels comes up in a

company of fairly well-read men and women, and they have all expressed a more or less intelligent opinion about the Ralston's and Don Orsino and Fair Margaret, if you then make mention of the three fates, you are likely to find that no one present has read the book, nor one in ten even heard of it. Yet it is easily the first of the three fates. Yet it is easily the best of Mr. Crawford's New York stories. It is simply not in the same class with Catherine Lauderdale and Marion Darsh. The people in it are all thoroughly alive. At times they tempt one to say that they are the most intensely alive of any characters Mr. Crawford has ever drawn. The principal figure is a young and struggling author, making the rounds of New York

publishing houses and striving to win a hearing for his first novel. It takes no very profound intuition to guess that there is a modicum of autobiography worked into the pages of the three fates, and its author makes no attempt to deny it. If Mr. Crawford was asked which of his American stories he personally liked best, this is the one that he was almost sure to name. Adding, with a reminiscent sigh of mingled satisfaction and regret, the fact is, I put a great deal of myself into the three fates. The personal touch is, of course, an all-sufficient reason to explain the author's preference. but a critic's choice should rest on a sounder basis.

And in this case, such a basis is to be found in the rather exceptional study it contains of some phases of love where both the man and the women are quite young. The emotions of mature men and women are comparatively easy to chronicle. They know life too well to jeopardize their happiness with imaginary woes. But the very young are prone to magnify their troubles and their grievances, to torture themselves over trivial false and absurd scruples, which are, of course, for the time being as vital and momentous to them as profounder trials are to those of riper years. And the task of interpreting these youthful crises with sympathetic understanding,

and a touch of indulgent irony is one which just a few novelists successfully achieve. One recalls especially certain chapters in William Black's Matt Cap Violet and Mr. Howell's April Hopes, and to these may be added the three fates. as in several of Mr. Crawford's earlier volumes, the construction is faulty. There is no clear-cut central theme. The most that can be said for the plot is that the author has sought to show how a young man of keenly sensitive artistic temperament may, in those vital formative years when his life's career is just opening before him, find his ideals of womanhood so subtly and yet so radically modified,

that in a comparatively brief space he has been able to love tenderly and sincerely three different women and to receive from each in turn a permanent impression, a modification of his character which time will only strengthen. And yet, as the first and the second successfully withdraw themselves from his life, he knows that there can be no going back, even should they so elect. They have been very dear to him. They have each played the part of one of the fates in his life, yet there is no resurrection for the emotions which are dead. And at the end of the story, the man, sobered by sorrow and

toil and hard-won achievement, even more than by the sudden and unforeseen responsibility of great wealth, hesitates to put to the test the last of his three fates. He knows that this time there is no question of a transitory passion, but rather the deep, lasting love of mature manhood. This third woman means so much in his life that even her friendship is a precious thing, which he fears to jeopardize by speaking prematurely. This denouement of the three fates is one of the most artistic and felicitous single touches to be found in Mr. Crawford's writings. We know that the third and greatest opportunity is merely deferred, not lost. Yet the contrast between the boy's precipitancy and the man's delay is the best measure of the difference in kind as well as

in degree between the earlier and the later love. It is customary to regard the cycle of Italian novels, beginning with this Saracanesca trilogy, and continued in Corleone and Daquicera, as the the strongest and most finished work that the author of a Roman singer has produced. This, however, is not the view held by those critics who have made the most careful study of his novels, nor is it the view held by Mr. Crawford himself. Indeed, he has sometimes expressed a doubt whether, on the whole, his Italian stories have not been more of a detriment to him than a help. The public seemed to expect them of him, he explains, and so confined his activity to that

particular field when he would much rather have directed it elsewhere. Of these Italian books as a whole, it may be said that they have at least the merit of presenting to English readers, a comprehensive picture of social life in Italy, such as cannot be found elsewhere in English fiction. The fact that Mr. Crawford was born in Rome and spent much of his early life there, and that later he deliberately elected to make Italy his permanent home, placed him in a position to write from the standpoint of a native. In fact, he is on fullerner. In fact, he is on firmer ground and writes with a more assured knowledge when the scene is laid in Rome than when the action takes place in Boston or New York. Nevertheless, while they are his most ambitious

efforts, even the best of them, even Saraciniska and Santillario, have not the artistic charm and unity possessed by several slighter works. And the reason is not hard to find. Saracenesca and its sequels belong to the type best defined as the epic novel, the type where in a great social movement, a moral or political revolution drawing to a climax, serves as the background of the story, while the destiny of some special group, some single family, some individual man or woman, closely interwoven with the progress of the general movement, forms the central thread of the plot, the focus of interest. At first sight, Saracaneska seems to fulfill the conditions of the epic novel. The setting is Rome, on the eve of the downfall of the

Pope's temporal power and the achievement of a United Italy, and the central thread concerns itself with the fortunes of a single family, the Saracenesca, proud, conservative, loyal adherence of the church. Yet, when we study the book's construction a little closer, we realize that the relation between the general and the specific theme is of the most perfunctory sort. The historical background is admirable as a piece of verbal painting. It shows on the surface the days of careful study which its author that he brought into its construction. But it fails to be, properly speaking, an epic novel, because there is no close and necessary connection between the historical movement then going on in Italy and the private drama of the Saracenska family. Take any one of the big, unmistakably epic novels,

whether it be Uncle Tom's Cabin or Zola's La Sommoir, the epic of slavery or of intemperance. You will find the central theme inseparably interwoven. You will find the central theme inseparably interwoven. with the general. The fate of Uncle Tom, symbolic of the slave system, the fate of Gervais, symbolic of the demon of alcohol. In Saratinesca and Saint Ilario, there is no such close connection, no central symbol. Nor did Mr. Crawford intend that there should be. For the symbolic novel is next of kin to the purpose novel. It teaches and preaches and does other kindred things which conflict with the creed which Mr. Crawford professed. Nevertheless, oddly enough, Don Orsino, much inferior to its predecessors in human interest,

is in point of structure much more logical and correct. In fact, it may be called an epic of the era of disastrous building speculation in Rome, and the fact that Don Orsino's fortunes were closely entangled in the general panic which resulted, gives us the connection between the general and the special motif which this type of novel demands. In point of form, however, Mr. Crawford has never done anything more perfect than a cigarette-maker's romance. In dimensions, it is a rather long novelette. In structure, it obeys the rules of the short story rather than those of the novel. It contains no superfluous character or incident, and its time of action is confined within a space of 36 hours. It seems worthwhile, even at the risk of repeating what must already be familiar to a majority of Mr. Crawford.

readers, to run over briefly the substance of this little masterpiece. Count Scadiatine, a Russian of noble birth, who has quarreled with his father and has been disowned, is eking out a pitiful living by rolling cigarettes for a thrifty Munich tobacconist. Disappointment and privation have so preyed upon his mind that he has become affected with a periodic delusion that a letter has come from Russia restoring him to his lost position, and that messengers from his family will visit him on the moral. Once a week, under the spell of this delusion, he absence himself from the tobacco shop and waits in confidence all day, only to awaken when the clock tolls midnight to a shuddering realization of his abnormal condition. On the particular night when the story opens, Count Scariateen's periodic delusion is just coming upon him.

Once again, he tells his employer the familiar story of the letter from Russia. The friends who will come tomorrow, the necessity of his bidding the tobacconist goodbye. The tobacconist's wife, who refuses to believe any part of the count's story, or even that he is a count at all, rudely breaks in upon him with a claim for money, the value of a stolen mechanical figure, a Viennese gigerl, for the loss of which the count is in reality not responsible. Incensed, however, by the woman's attitude and relying upon the visionary fortune which he expects upon the moral, Count Scariatine, rashly gives his word of honor that the value of the giger shall be paid within 24 hours. the next day runs its usual course and the evening finds the count slowly struggling to a consciousness that not only have his friends failed to come but that he has pledged his honor to pay a sum of money which he does not possess and has no hope of raising in time and that he is not willing to live dishonored the rest of the story tells how viera the humble russian girl who day after day has rolled cigarettes side by side with the count and learned to love him with dumb hopelessness discovers his desperate need and comes to his aid. How the Count, under the spell of his temporary insanity, declares his love for her, and makes extravagant promises of the wonderful things he will do for her as soon as his estates are restored to him. How she raises the money needed to save his honor, and how, finally, when

on the morrow the Count returns as usual to his bench, and the frenzy has so long awaited to actually do arrive and bring him word that he is sole heir to his father's wealth. He presents to them the humble little cigarette-maker, as the future Countess scariatine. Quote, I had contracted a debt of honor, and I had nothing wherewith to pay it. There was but an hour left,

an hour, and then my life and my honor would have gone together. She saved me, gentlemen. She cut off her beautiful hair from her head and sold it for me. But that is not the reason why she is to be my wife. There is a better reason than that. I love her, gentlemen,

with all my heart and soul, and she has told me that she loves me. It is in passages such as this that we get the key to Mr. Crawford's perennial hold upon the hearts of his readers. His real strength lies not in his mastery of technique or his originality of plot, but in his ability to picture for us

honest gentlemen and noble women, whom we are the better for having known, if only, through the medium of the printed page. If there is room for choice, his men are better than his women, more finely drawn, with subtler understanding. There is a long list of them whom you cannot forget, even if you would. Even in Saracineska alone, there are a whole group whom it is a joy to remember.

Old Saracineseka, with his chronic fondness for quarrelling with his well-loved son, the melancholy spica, whose fame in duels made him a momento mori wherever he went. Even astrardente, the worn-out old dandy, shows that the last certain fine instincts which make us glad of the privilege of having known him. It is doubtful whether any of the novelists who are writing today have given the world so many characters whom the average reader will remember with pleasure and years afterwards recall by name. What place will be ultimately assigned to Mr. Crawford in the history of fiction it is

somewhat early to predict? Accepting, as a conservative force, it is doubtful whether he has influenced the formal development of the modern novel in any important degree. In a history of technique, he could not be cited in the way that Henner Henry James or Emil Zola must be cited over and over again, as the inventor of a peculiar manner or the founder of a new school. Writers of a more striking and flamboyant type leave a trail behind them as conspicuous as the tale of a comet.

Gabriel Danzio, for instance, from the moment that he sprang into public notice, radiated a clear and ever-widening circle of influence, the effects of which can be easily traced by anyone who cares to take the trouble in the younger generation of continental writers. His imitators are as conspicuous as they would be if he had chosen to wear a scarlet necktie and they had chosen to copy him and that. It would be difficult to imagine Marion Crawford ever having done anything in a literary way, sufficiently flaunting to warrant the symbolism of a red necktie. He remained from first to last as he wished to remain, wholly free from mannerism. And one of the qualities which give to his books an unconscious charm is a simplicity of style and

method which may be compared to that rare good taste in dress, which does not draw attention to itself. It has sometimes been claimed that Mr. Crawford was in a measure responsible for the modern spread of cosmopolitanism in fiction. But at best it must have been a remote influence, since his was that of that rare and perfect kind that few others possessed the skill to imitate. We have, of course, a surfeit of novelists who choose to lay their scenes all the way around the world and back again. And while they live, lead us on a gay chase across three continents, their point of view all the time remains insularly British or aggressively American. With this type of pseudo-cosmopolitanism, that of

Mr. Crawford has nothing in common. It has often been said of him that he was one of the very few Americans who had been mistaken in Paris for a Frenchman, in Munich for a German, and in Rome for an Italian, and this power of assimilating racial traits and standpoints he carried over into his novels. He was not so much a cosmopolitan in the sense of a man whose home is the world, as he was a man who has chance to have a succession of different homes in widely scattered portions of the globe. His fondness for the cities where he successively stayed and worked, for Munich and Prague, Constantinople and Rome and Paris, always gets into his pages in spite of him, and passes on something of its contagion to the reader from between the lines. It is distinctly worth noting that he has always

from choice written of what was near at hand. Mr. Isaac's, his first book, it is true, was written after his return to America, but before the first intensity of his impressions had begun to fade. And it is significant that, although he had a rich store of material as a result of his two years' residence in India, he never again reverted to it. There was in particular one story, drawn from the earlier life of the man who served as prototype of Mr. Isaacs, which Mr. Crawford had mapped out and, even so recently as two years before his death, still talked of writing. But it was one of the books destined to remain unwritten. Yet, whatever other influence Marion Crawford may have exerted, it is at least beyond

question that few novelists of the present day have been more widely read or have had a more salutary effect in fostering a taste for what is clean and pure and high-minded in literature and in life. He has shown that it is possible to win and hold a very wide public, while maintaining a certain high standard of literary quality. He has shown that it is possible to offer social and domestic problems that will appeal to mature and thoughtful readers, and at the same time contain nothing which one might hesitate to put into the hands of the young and thoughtless. He has said in these respects a sort of high watermark for fiction, which frankly and honestly professes only to entertain. And in doing this, he is largely responsible for the increased proportion of clean, healthy,

vigorous fiction that our younger writers are giving us today. Nevertheless, he occupies a position somewhat apart from the general trend of the novel of today and of tomorrow, and for that reason, he is somewhat difficult to class. Almost any comparison that one ventures to make is likely to strike a majority of readers as odd and unjustified. Recently, one of the English reviews spoke of him as approaching most nearly to Trollope and Mrs. Oliphant, a curious partnership which the writer wisely did not try to justify. In purpose and ideals, as well as in the uniformly readable quality of his books, he suggests a certain kinship with the late William Black. Yet of the two, Mr. Crawford is undeniably the finer artist, as well as the better

storyteller, with a far better chance of being remembered by a later generation. And whatever position is ultimately assigned to him one thing is certain, that the general tendency of academic criticism will be to do him ampler justice and concede to him. a higher meat of praise than he has hitherto received. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 2. Kate Douglas Wiggin

Kate Douglas Wiggin is one of those rare and delightful spirits in modern literature who, by a certain quiet charm of their own, have freed themselves from most of the trammels of form and tradition to which more ordinary writers are subject. Who, even in doing quite ordinary things, do them in an extraordinary way? Who in all they do are in themselves, their personality, their attitudes toward life, their own best excuse for so doing, and who, when they happen to fit in most appropriately to a particular scheme of things, as, for instance, Kate Douglas Wiggin herself fits into a volume upon American storytellers, do so with a unique appropriateness. Ordinarily, the qualities or the demerits of a

literary production are matters to be determined quite aside from an author's personality, the place and hour of his or her birth, the inches of his or her stature, and all the other little details of a personal or domestic nature into which, after our modern habit we are forever too closely inquiring. In the present case, however, there are just a few facts that are worth putting briefly before us at the start in order to understand more clearly this particular author's sources of inspiration, range of interests and limitations of experience. that she was born in Philadelphia, that she lived throughout her girlhood in the midst of the peaceful beauty of rural New England, that at the age of 18, after her stepfather's failing health

had made a removal to California imperative, she joined her family at Santa Barbara immediately after her graduation from the Abbott Academy at Andover, that she has been twice married, the second time to Mr. George C. Riggs in 1895, although she continues to use her earlier name as the signature of her literary productions. that it was directly through her efforts that the first free kindergartens for poor children were organized in this country, and that for the past 25 years she has been prominently associated in many an administrative capacity with important educational movements. These facts concern us for our present purpose only to the extent to which they explain

why her writings are what they are, and why they could not well have been otherwise. A single sentence will serve to make this clear. Kate Douglas Wigan is at heart a romanticist whose romance is woven not from the stuff that dreams are made of, but from the homespun threads of everyday life. She has an exuberant and unquenchable spirit of optimism, of the sort that bubbles up spontaneously at the most unlikely moments, casting a dash of cold across her pages,

just at the point where the shadows seem to lie heaviest. She reaches the heart, and she appeals to the memory because she has an abundance this power of making very ordinary lives seem beautiful, because she writes only of the life that she has seen, and because, from the first story that she wrote up to the most recent, she has always preserved the clear directness of narration, the unaffectedness of form that are the qualities inborn in anyone who hopes to interest a youthful audience, to hold bright, eager little faces under the spell of a spoken tale. A glance down the list of Kate Douglas Wiggins' writings in any one of her recent volumes

reveals upward of a score of titles. And these are a exclusive of the educational books and the various collections of children's stories that she has compiled and edited in conjunction with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith. It would seem at a glance that Mrs. Wiggin had a rare fertility of imagination, a wide range of interest and an unusual power of productiveness. But a little closer examination shows that such variety and range as she achieves are produced from very simple and limited materials, like melodies of much depth and tenderness played on only one or two strings. The settings of her stories

are of three types. The California of her early memories, based on those two years in Santa Barbara, the rural New England of her entire girlhood, which she has somewhat described as all the years that count most, and the British Isles, which have given her, probably because she came to

them later in the full maturity of her receptive powers, a broader horizon and a keener intellectual stimulus than either of her other settings. She has said of herself, the more familiarity she has with the subject, the less she desires to write about it, because, exact knowledge hampers one's imagination sometimes. In this respect, almost anyone of Mrs. Wiggins' admirers

will take the liberty of telling her that she is in a measure mistaken. It is only that saving, sometimes, at the tail end of the sentence that keeps her from being very far astray. It is her perfect familiarity with the New England fields and woods, the New England ways of speech and dress and thought, the New England types of many, and women and children, the types of children above all things, that is the golden key to the success of such books as Timothy's Quest and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nor has her familiarity with these subjects made her one-width less eager to revert to them. New England is her chosen field,

and she goes back to it again and again with no visible diminution of interest or power. On the other hand, it is quite easy to see how the stimulus of foreign scenes of the kind that produced the Penelope series might grow dull as their familiarity increased. The whole point to Penelope's experiences, as to Mark Twain's innocence abroad, was the first sharp imprint of the unfamiliar, the incisive force of contrast, and, of course, each subsequent impression was bound to become less keen, like the duller mintings of a coin as the dye begins to wear smooth. Details of this sort, however, will be seen more clearly when we come to take up her

separate works for discussion. For the moment, let us consider frankly what her standards are as a writer of fiction. What ideas she has of form and of technique? What plan she seems to make for telling her stories, and to what extent she succeeds in building them according to the accepted rules? In this connection, it seems worthwhile to quote a passage of reminiscences by her sister, Nora Archibald Smith, giving a rather graphic glimpse of what sort of a child it was that was destined to grow into the woman who to this day has preserved such a rare insight

into the hearts of the children both of real life and of her dreams. The passage in question may have been widely circulated, or it may not. It may form part of a preface to some volume already in its many thousands, or it may be an extract from a private letter. In any case, the present writer ran across it for the first time in a recent article by Ashley Gibson, published in the London Bookman. Quote, My sister was certainly a capable little person at a tender age,

concocting delectable milk toast, browning toothsome buckwheats and generally making a very good parents' assistant. I have also visions of her toiling at patchwork, and overseeing sheets like a nice old-fashioned little girl in a storybook. Further, to illustrate her personality, I think no one much in her company at any age could have failed to note an exceedingly lively tongue

and a general air of executive ability. If I am to be truthful, I must say that I recall few indications of budding authorship, save an engrossing diary, kept for six months only, and a devotion to reading. Her literary passions were the Arabian Nights, Scottish chiefs, Don Quixote, Thaddeus of Warsaw, Irving's Muhammad, Thackerysnaubs, Undine, and the Martyrs of Spain. These and others joined it to an old green Shakespeare and a plum-putting edition of Dickens with the chief of her diet.

For our immediate purpose, the centre of interest in the above passage lies, of course, in the list of favorite books. What a splendid stimulus they are, one and all of them to the young imagination, and how superbly defiant of the trammels of modern technique. Who in the world if his reading had been limited to these books, even though they include such gems as the Christmas Carol

and Undine and the Forty Thieves, would ever dream even remotely of the modern short story form with its insistence on unity of effect and economy of means? And this is an excellent place at which to say that had no one seen fit to betray what Kate Douglas Wiggins' early reading included, it would have been a safe venture to make up from pure conjecture very

nearly the same sort of list. In the case of an author who combines so many merits with so few defects, there can be no harm in saying quite bluntly that however much or little she may know of the accepted rules of story's structure, she deliberately and blandly ignores them wherever she sees fit. And to a critic who rates the importance of technique of form rather than highly it is almost exasperating to find how frequently she justifies herself and by breaking the rules secures an effect that could not have been gained by adhering to them she seldom knows when she has reached the end of a story she almost always stops too soon or else not soon enough that is if you are judging her stories by the ordinary tests

but that is precisely what nobody wants to do if she stops too soon no one ever thinks of saying to her, this is inartistic and unfinished. Not at all. They simply emulate all of her twist and cry for more. If she fails to notice when the end of a story is reached and goes steadily onward with that unflagging power of invention, that felicitous mimicry of human types, that sparkle and sunshine of hope and faith, no one would ever think of stopping her, of saying, you have gone beyond your goal, you ought to have turned in at the gate. They are only too glad that she forgot to turn in. Now all this is as it is for the very simple and sufficient reason that with Kate Douglas Wigan,

just as with a few other big-hearted, clear-sighted writers, whose purposes are very simple and few and worthy, the substance is so vastly more important than the form, or, rather, I ought to say, than somebody else's dictum of what the form ought to be. Kate Douglas Wiggin is in a measure and anomaly in American letter, being on the one hand so peculiarly native and even local that one feels it would be possible to pick out the particular habitation of her

childhood simply by strolling through New England byways until one happened upon it. And yet on the other, so cosmopolitan that she has been frankly recognized in England by more than one critic as our leading writer of her sex, with just one possible rival, Mrs. Wilkins Freeman. And while she has that high standard of good taste in letters that makes her next of kin to Agnes Repleur, Is this, by the way, a mark of sisterhood due to her Philadelphia birth? She nevertheless has achieved that approval of democracy so conclusively and substantially attested by sales that reached the 200,000 mark. Now, the easiest way to understand all this.

The easiest way to explain why her books are what they are, and not something altogether different, is to remember that before she was known as a writer she was a masterhand at kindergarten work. She knew how to hold the attention of children. She knew the way which for her was the best, the inevitable way to tell a story to children. And all the stories that she has told, and all the stories she has printed have owed their power and their charm to that pervading simplicity and sincerity and naive literalness that made her success as a teacher of children. And it is precisely in the spirit of childhood that the public has received her books.

Whether she writes of the simple-hearted Rebecca or the cosmopolitan and sophisticated Penelope. There is the same clamorous demand for more, a demand which, like all good-natured storytellers, she does her best to gratify. And because they are all imbued with a simple, unaffected kindergarten spirit, the public receives them with the uncritical mind of childhood, closing its eyes to the fact that the further adventures of Rebecca are not quite as good as the earlier, and that the experiences of Penelope in Ireland and Scotland lack something of the freshness of her first months in England. How many times we have heard children clamoring for just one more story. And the tired storyteller says doubtfully, but I don't know any more stories. I haven't any good

ones left. And the children answer, we don't care, tell us anything. Anything so long as it is a story and you tell it? That in brief is the public's attitude toward Kate Douglas Wiggin, tacitly expressed by the popularity of each new book. and after all, an author can hardly have a higher order of praise than this public testimony that her worst is preferable to many other authors best. The writings of Kate Douglas Wigan fall of their own accord into three classes, one of which, the purely educational written in collaboration, such as Freebel's Gifts and Kindergarten Principles and Practice, does not concern us here.

The other two groups are, first, the bulk of her writings, being stories dealing more or less directly with the life problems of children, and so written that they appeal almost equally to the child reader and to the man or woman who has preserved, even though pretty deeply buried, some smoldering embers of the childhood spirit. And secondly, a group of books much harder to characterize because they are not, on the one hand, novels, nor on the other can they fairly be called inspired guidebooks. And yet, unless they are to be recognized as in some proportion a blending of these two. There is no other existing classification for them. The childhood stories begin as far back as 1888 with the Bird's Christmas Carol,

a simple, tender, whimsical Christmas tale that has quite justly come to be already a sort of children's classic. Then followed in swift succession, the story of Patsy, a summer in a canyon, one of the few books due to her Santa Barbara memories, and in 1890, Timothy's Quest. This volume is worthwhile pausing over for a moment, not only because it is an excellent prototype of the bulk of Mrs. Wiggins' works, but because it helps us to see how limited in their variety are the threads with which she weaves and the patterns that she chooses to make. Timothy is a lad of ten or eleven.

Foundling asylums are not over-accurate in their records. Lady Gay, his protege, is an exceedingly pretty child of possibly 18 months or more. Certain people have seen fit to pay peer periodic sums for the support of these two waifs to a bedraggled and drunken hag named Flossie in a reeking slum known as Minerva Court For the simple reason that so far as the writer is aware, this is the one time in all Mrs. Wiggins' fiction where she has permitted herself to picture a slum It is worthwhile to quote briefly from her description of Minerva Court Had she chosen to do so she might not in effectively have rivaled the squalor and repulsiveness of Arthur Morrison's Tales of mean streets Quote,

Children carrying pictures of beer were often to be seen hurrying to and fro on their miserable errand. There were frowsy, sleepy-looking women hanging out of their windows, gossiping with their equally unkempt and haggard neighbors. Apathetic men sitting on the doorsteps in their shirt-sleeves smoking. A dull, dirty baby, disporting itself in the gutter, while the sound of a melancholy accordion, the chosen instrument of poverty and misery, floated from an upper chamber, and added its discordant might to the general desolation.

The sidewalks had apparently never known the touch of a broom, and the middle of the street looked more like an elongated junkie than anything else. That was Minerva Court. A little piece of your world, my world, God's world, and the devils, lying peacefully follow, awaiting the services of some inspired home missionary society. This paragraph is here set down chiefly for the sake of its contrary, to all of Mrs. Wiggins' later methods and ideals. Not that she has ever lost her interest in the swarming life of big cities,

the brilliant and the sordid alike. To realize this, one has only to read her account of Market Night in one of the Penelope chapters entitled, Tepinney travels in London. Yet in that very chapter, she voices that prevailing spirit of her books, which insistently iterates that in a world where there is so much sunshine, it does not pay to look too closely into the shadows. quote,

As to the dark alleys and tenements on the fringe of this glare and brilliant confusion, this babble of sound and at bed of moving life, one can only surmise and pity and shudder. Close one's eyes and ears to it a little, or one could never sleep for thinking of it, yet not too tightly, lest one sleep too soundly, and forget altogether the seamy side of things. But to go back to Timothy's quest, Flossy the hag has died, and the almshouse is the destined fate of Timmy. and Lady Gay. But the instinct of chivalry and protection has awakened early in Timothy, and in obedience to this instinct he steals out into the night with a baby girl in his arms,

and laboriously, doggedly, fearlessly makes his way far from the city hour by hour, mile after mile, till a beautiful, restful, eminently safe country house by the wayside appeals to him, as the ideal spot where Lady Gay should find a home. The mere fact that this farmhouse is presided over by two Mature spinsters who have never before in their lives had children around them is not a matter to daunt a valiant soul like Timothy's, nor disconcert a heaven-sense storyteller like Mrs. Wiggin. And, of course, Timothy triumphs gloriously in all his plans. The point that it seems worthwhile to make just here is that in this book, as in Polly Oliver's problem, a little later, and still again in both of the Rebecca books, the underlying motive, the germ idea, as one may call it, is a sort of premature sense of responsibility, possessed by just a few children, an embryo foreshadowing of the father-love or mother-love

which is to come later, that makes the Timothy's and the Polly's and the Rebecca's of real life bend their fragile shoulders under burdens almost too heavy for their young strength. It would not be within the scope of the present essay to speak at any great length of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. It has received, to be sure, quite triumphantly the popular vote. Its central character is the one that already enjoys the widest equation. ship, and now that she has come before the footlights, she is destined to a new and still wider fame. Rebecca is probably the volume by which the author will be most frequently measured in literary

analyses, largely for the reason that it is the one by which she is most easily measured. If we make due allowance for the change in manners and ideals from decade to decade, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm appeals to the readers of today for much the same reasons, and with much the same right that Miss Alcott's little woman appealed to an early. your generation, and Elizabeth Wetherill's, wide, wide world, to a generation still more remote. Indeed, if one shuts one's mind to the rather exasperating priggishness of that earlier period, the ubiquitous praying and psalm-singing and reading of scriptures, which in those days was an inseparable quality of all properly conducted little heroines, there is a good deal in the advent of

Ellen Montgomery to her Aunt Fortunes farm, her sensitive shrinking from her aunt's rough ways and rougher tongue, her haven of refuge in the slow-spoken, slow-moving farmer, Mr. Van Brunt, and in general, the whole atmosphere behind the story of New England farm life, farm hardships, there is, it seems to me, in all this, a great deal of the same sort of appeal as that which the present generation finds in Rebecca. But of course there is one rather important distinction. It was the habit in those days to look resignedly upon this world as a veil of tears to be passed through somehow as best one could. While to Kate Douglas Wigan, and to one and all of her heroines, it is a supremely glorious thing just to be alive, and to smell the flowers and see the sunshine.

And the author who can spread the contagion of such feeling among a few thousand of readers is a sort of inspired home missionary society in herself. One would like to have this space to say a few pleasant things about Roseau the River, which is as tranquil and naive a little pastoral as a modern daftness in close. the old peabody pew is another slim little volume at least so far as its text goes it is the ambition of the illustrator which has necessitated the wide page in ample margin the tempts one to bestow upon it a disproportionate amount of notice just the fulfilment of a long cherished dream the final blossoming of a hope that had almost withered in the heart of a new england girl now a girl no longer who had seen the bright years slip away one by one while she waited mutily patiently, for the lover who had gone away to seek his fortune. The lover who through all these years had sent no word into all appearances had forgotten her.

It is a true Christmas story, bright with the spirit of hope and faith and love. And what is more, it is the best piece of fiction so far as pure structure goes that the author has ever put together. The second and last group into which Mrs. Wiggins' stories divide themselves are those of the scenes of which are enacted in the British Isles. As already intimated, they are of a more urbane, more sophisticated type, and appeal in consequence to a more special audience on both sides of the Atlantic. The first of the Penelope books, the one containing that delightfully independent and well-poised young woman's experiences

in London and in rural England, is easily the bright and shining gem of the collection. The late Mr. Lawrence Hutton did not quite share this view. To his enthusiastic appreciation, any gradation of merit in the Penelope, was not to be thought of. Her first course, he once wrote, served in England, is as delicate and savory as in her second course pervade in Scotland, while her third course, now being dished up in Ireland,

promises as well as did those which preceded it. We can only hope, before the symposium is brought to a close, that she will regale us with whales as a salad, and with the Isle of Man as a dessert. Now Mr. Hutton's enthusiasm is easy, not only to understand, but to share. those three volumes devoted to the confidential relations from the facile and diverting pen of miss penelope hazelton are surely to be numbered among that sadly small collection of modern volumes that people of real culture and intelligence find themselves from time to time reverting to for another and yet another perusal but to pronounce all three of them of equal merit is to proclaim one's own lack of discrimination it is the same sort of mental astigmatism as would prompt one to claim that there was no gradation of merit between the autocrat of the breakfast table and its companion volumes devoted

respectively to the professor and the poet. As there is much to be said in the praise of the Penelope books, it is well to begin with what little there is to be said against them and to have it over with. Kate Douglas Wigan, it may be noted parenthetically, never attempted a regularly constructed full-length novel. Penelope is her nearest approach to a regulation heroine. And that simplicity of structural form, that tendency to harp upon just one or two strings which pervades all her other works is equally in evidence here. Let us analyze quite briefly and without malice these three volumes which for convenience sake we may christen the trilogy of the rose, the heather, and the shamrock. First, in Penelope's experiences in England, we are introduced to that

perennially delightful trio, Penelope herself and her two traveling companions, Francesca and Salamina, offering an infinite variety in feminine moods, temperaments, personal appearance, and age. Whether regarded as a guidebook, as a picaresco novel of the gentler sex, as a summer idol, or just as a miscellaneous feminine cleverness, the book is a delight. But anyone who wishes to epitomize the plot finds himself reduced to something like the following. A young American woman, charming but fancy-free, finds it a pleasant summer's pastime to be made love to intermittently by a young man very much in earnest, amid the picturesque surroundings of English byways and hedges, churches and ruined castles. Then comes a weary interregnum

during which the suitor is detained elsewhere. A little loneliness teaches her what she ought to have known all the time and prepares her to give him the right sort of a welcome when he at last comes back to claim her. The experiences in Scotland simply shift the limelight from Penelope to Francesca. A charming and unattached young woman finds it pleasant to be wooed amid the Scotch Heather by an earnest young minister of the established church, but she too remains somewhat uncertain of her own mind until a few weeks' separation gives him a chance to come and play the conquering hero. The experiences in Ireland are again the same tune in a new key with Salamina as the light motif. Salamina is not exactly young, though still undeniably charming.

and, not strictly unattached, because many years ago she loved an Irishman, who inconsiderately married someone else, but is now a widower. She, in her turn, finds it pleasurably romantic to be courted in a reserved, middle-aged fashion amid the Irish lakes, the bogs of Lisconel and the glens of Antrum. She too finds a brief loneliness salutary and is quite prepared to signify a cordial assent just as soon as the Irishman vouchsafes her a second chance. Such at least is the summary which, which an unfriendly critic might give if he felt in a carping mood.

There is a rather obvious duplication of plot running through these books, which, after all, is a better and franker thing than an artificial attempt at variations when the author knows, and the reader knows, and the author knows that the reader knows that the plot is only a makeshift at best, something to carry the real vital substance of the book, and every bit as conventional as a blue muslin rose or a cigar store Indian. The real charm and magnetism of these Penelope books depend, of course, upon their personal equation. Mrs. Wiggin chose for her purpose the freest, most elastic vehicle that she could find for conveying her exceedingly subtle and equally frank observations,

of such points of difference as must inevitably strike the cultured and well-bred American visitor to the British Isles. That she has done this thing with rare tact is best evidenced by the fact that the English enjoy the cleverness of her attack, quite as much as we do ourselves, and that such a paper as the Spectator genially remarks that she is the most successful ambassador that the United States has yet sent to England. The Penelope books are a part of the mental equipment that the American visitor to the British Isles will do well to provide himself with upon his first visit.

In precisely the same way that on his first trip down the Thames, he will read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, or William Black's Strange Adventures of a Houseboat, and on reaching Florence or Rome will wish to refresh his memory of Romola or the marble fawn. And yet there is a certain inevitable compunction that follows even a suggestion that the romance of these Penelope books is perfunctory. One feels somehow that the author's eyes would follow one with a haunting disapproval, because to her the world is obviously made up of romance. She cannot help it. She is so constituted, and thank heaven that she is.

Because there are so lamentably few writers today in whom sunshine and bright hopefulness and the joy of living are incarnated. And among these, Kate Douglas Wigan holds a privileged place. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

3. Winston Churchill. If there is any one writer among the American, American storytellers of today who best illustrates the familiar paradox that genius is a capacity for taking infinite pains, that writer is Mr. Winston Churchill. That his novels are born of an inexhaustible patience. A dogged determination to be true to his own stern exactions both in style and substance is a self-evident fact. It is not necessary to know the prosaic details of his literary methods, or even to remember that he considers three or four years none too long a time to bestow upon a single volume. Such matters do not concern the critic,

accepting insofar as they stand revealed by internal evidence, and in the case of Mr. Churchill, they are woven into the very warp and woof of every page he writes. There is no escape from the pervading sense of careful documentation, plodding diligence, endless repolishing. It is impossible to read a single chapter without being aware that its production involved a labor, not unlike the slow process of chipping away fragment by fragment, grain by grain, the enveloping marble from the emerging statue, and no small share of that labor is expended in covering its own traces. The net result is that from Richard Carvel to a modern chronicle, these novels present themselves to the public with an air of solid dignity and conscious worth

that involuntarily calls to mind, portly, middle-aged, prosperous gentleman in immaculate frock-coats, who typify the so-called pillars of the church. In other words, the sum and substance of all adverse criticism upon Mr. Winston Churchill's books may be reduced to this. There is in them all a streak of literary Phariseism, a certain air of seeming to thank God openly that they are not like other books. Let other books, if they choose, be frivolous or melodramatic, or ultramodern according to any one of the fifty various and transitory schools of fiction that spring up and pass like mushrooms. Mr. Churchill's books desire no kinship was such as these. They aspire to be literature, spelled with a capital L. They are carefully fashioned

upon the great mid-Victorian models. One almost questions whether the author did not deliberately draw his dividing line at Thackeray and refuse to regard any subsequent developments of technique and fiction as deserving of notice. The consequence is that in his method of construction, Mr. Churchill has retained the chief faults of his early models as well as the qualities that he sought to emulate. The conception of a well-knit plot without irrelevant characters and episodes, and with the interest strongly focused upon someone main issue is distinctly modern. So also is the instinct which tells an author at what point in the infinite sequence of human events, his special series of episodes logically begins and at what point it ends. The naive assumption of the earlier

novelists that a story begins with the birth of a particular man or woman has long since become an exploded fallacy. The writers of today recognize that in its broadest sense, the life story of any human being has already begun unnumbered generations before his birth, and that its end is not within the powers of human foresight to predict. While in a narrower sense, the history of a human life cannot in itself constitute a story structure, but is at best the raw material for several stories. Now, when an author chooses to follow the old-fashioned method of introducing his characters practically in their cradles, and following their subsequent development step by step and year by year, well into the prime of life, it is too much to ask of him that he shall give us a well-constructed

plot. Indeed, the form itself warns us that he is attempting nothing more complex than a family chronicle, and therefore necessarily of a loose and rambling nature. As a matter of fact, Mr. Churchill's plots are not his strong point. As we shall see in taking up the separate volumes, they give the impression of wandering aimlessly along the highways and byways of life, most of the time with no clear structural reason for turning to the right rather than the left, no preconceived goal toward which the various tangled threads of the story are converging. Now, there is no intention of conveying the idea that Mr. Churchill is unaware of what he is doing. On the contrary, nothing is clearer than the fact that he knows perfectly well

the sort of plot structure that he is using, and that he could have used quite a different kind had he so chosen. His method is the time-honored method of fielding and of Thackeray, and to some extent of Dickens. Like Thackeray, he chooses to think of himself as master of the show, and to keep us reminded that it is he who pulls the wires that make the puppet stance. He even interrupts himself occasionally to regret, between parentheses, that the space limit of his book will not let him tell us more about some particular character whom he has just introduced, but assures us that we shall meet that character again in a later volume. Mr. Churchill likes to do this sort of thing, and the mere fact that the whole tendency of fiction

today is toward the objective method, and away from the old-fashioned, confidential relation between author and public obviously does not concern him in the least. After all, it is a sufficiently harmless mannerism, but nonetheless as out of date as powdered wigs and knee-breeches. The practice of chronicling the childhood of hero or heroin calls for rather more specific notice. There is, of course, only one ground on which it may be defended, just as there is only one ground on which to defend the analogous practice of narrating the family history of the hero's ancestors for several generations back. If we grant that human character is the result of

heredity modified by environment, then, of course, a knowledge of a man's ancestry explains his inherited traits, and a knowledge of his early surroundings shows how those traits have become modified. But now and then we find a man or woman in whom heredity has had a free hand, and environment has accomplished little or nothing. We realize that it would have made small practical difference in which hemisphere they had been reared, or what manner of guardians and teachers they had had. The strong, primitive impulses and passions of their race, whether for good or bad, are no more to be curbed or changed by food or climate or higher mathematics than the color of their hair and eyes.

When dealing with such strongly defined characters, it is simply a waste of time to picture minutely the influences to which their childhood was subjected. Mr. Churchill's heroes and heroines belong with hardly an exception to this dominant self-sufficient class. Even as small children, they have a precocious assurance. They foreshadow with surprising accuracy the men and women they are destined to become. It is true that Mr. Churchill's portraiture of childhood is rather well. done. He allows himself in these portions to fall into a lighter vein. He comes nearer than

anywhere else to genuine humor. Nevertheless, the impression he leaves in one and all of his books is that his characters have become what they are, not because of environment, but in defiance of it. And for that reason, the introductory chapters of each book are structurally superfluous. The foregoing remarks, however, apply only so long as we are considering Mr. Churchill's books as studies of human character. But it must be remembered that a second, and in his eyes, an equally important function of his books

is to picture the life of a period, the net results of national or social development. There can be no question that he has succeeded admirably in handling big backgrounds. Few American novelists have achieved as he has that sense of wide spaces of earth and sky,

the weariness of dragging miles, the monotony of passing years, the motley movements of humanity in the mass, the whole fundamental trick of making us feel the relative value of our own modest holdings our individual interests our brief hour as contrasted with mankind and with eternity it makes small difference whether he is describing a drunken broil in a colonial tavern an indian massacre in kentucky or a political riot in a new england state legislature in either case his trick of characterization is as graphic and almost as indefatigable as that of a camera lens you see face after face figure behind figure each drawn with fewer and swifter strokes as they become more blurred by distance yet every one individualized and recognizable and back of these beyond the range of sight you still feel the presence of a crowd shoulder jostling shoulder tongue answering tongue full of the rough virility of conflict taken as a whole with the exception of his earliest and latest the celebrity and a modern chronicle mr Churchill's books may not unjustly be defined as comprehensive panoramas of American history,

each standing as a vivid summing up of some national or local crisis. Regarding the literal accuracy of historical novels in general and of Mr. Churchill's in particular, those critics may quibble to whom the letter seems more essential than the spirit. One cannot escape the conviction that the author of Richard Carville errs too far on the side of accuracy, that if his facts were questioned, he would be painfully prompt in producing original documents. Indeed, there are episodes in Richard Carville, and in the crisis, and the crossing as well, that narrowly escape the weariness of the historical monograph, and make one wish that the author had burned his library and relied upon the sheer force of his

imagination. Lé Tro-Musquetterre had a scant allowance of historical accuracy, but it had what was far more essential, a generous supply of real flesh and blood. And yet, any fair estimate of Mr. Churchill must necessarily recognize that his favorite formula narrowly misses that of the so-called epic novel, just as we have already seen that Marion Crawford missed it in his Saracaneska series. He uses, with conscious purpose, a double theme. First, the big, basic idea underlying some national or ethical crisis. And secondly, a specific human story standing out vividly in the central focus with the larger, wider theme serving as background. Where his stories failed to to achieve the epic magnitude is in lacking that essential symbolic relationship between the greater

and the lesser theme. His central figures find their lives molded and modified, as all lives must be, by the conditions and the events of their own epoch. But they are scarcely symbolic of that epoch. They do not leave the impression that they are the mouthpiece of their country and generation. Thus, Richard Carvel was, at best, an example of the colonial aristocracy, but he was not in character or career such an embodiment of it that the term a Richard Carville would have any real significance. David Ritchie, in the crossing, is part and parcel of that movement which began the great Western migration that was destined to stop only at the Pacific. But there is nothing in his life which in any way symbolizes a great awakening. He is of his time and generation because he has

to be, rather than because he would not have had it otherwise if he could. It has seemed worthwhile briefly to point out in a general way the extent to which Mr. Churchill parts company with the modern trend of technique and fiction. To note these differences is by no means equivalent to passing censure upon them. By a stricter system of construction, a sterner elimination of non-essentials, it is quite possible that Mr. Churchill's novels would have lost as much as they would have gained. They would at least have lost one element which every reader of them must feel to a marked degree. Namely, that sense of the unexpected and inexplicable, that infinitude of daily happenings, of accidents and coincidences, the meaning of which in the ultimate pattern of life must always baffle us.

Aside from a short satiric play, the title Mart, Mr. Churchill's published works now include seven volumes. Of these, the earliest in point of actual composition, was Richard Carvel. Although its publication was anticipated by some months by the celebrity, a clever farce of the mistaken identity type, which served its purpose as a sort of comic poster to attract public attention to his more ambitious work. Of the remaining six that have since come, at almost uniform intervals from his pen, the earlier three, Richard Carvel, The Crisis, and The Crossing, are historical novels in the accepted sense. Coniston and Mr. Cruz's career, while presumably resting on an equally solid foundation of local history, fall into the class of the American political novel with its

unsavory accessories of bribery, lobbying, and bossism. The type familiarly exemplified in Paul Lester Ford's Honorable Peter Sterling and Bran Whitlock's 13th District. The last of the six, a modern chronicle is a new departure for Mr. Churchill, being an ambitious study of American marriage and divorce and belonging in theme, if not in magnitude, on the shelf with Professor Robert Herrick's much discussed, together. The statement was made earlier in this chapter that plot construction was Mr. Churchill's principal weakness, and the justness of this criticism may easily be seen by a brief examination of the separate stories. To begin with, Richard Carville concerns itself with the life history of an orphan boy in the province of Maryland, reared by his

stern old grandfather in strict Tory principles, but little by little imbibing revolutionary doctrines from associates of his own generation. An unscrupulous uncle scheming for the family inheritance as young Carville waylaid, kidnapped, and flung aboard a pirate craft, to be later dropped over the rail at a convenient time. The pirate boat, however, is scuttled by the famous naval hero John Paul Jones, and Carbel is the sole survivor. Subsequently, fate lands him in London, penniless and without friends, where he spends some weary months in the debtor's prison, knowing all the while that the girl whom he loved back in America is now also in London, courted by dukes and earls,

and that his present predicament is known quite well to the girl's father, who is only too glad to have a troublesome suitor out of harm's way. The rest of the story consists of some swift changes of fortune, some well-drawn pictures of fashionable English life in which Horace Walpole, Charles James Fox, and other historic personages take part, a few stirring naval battles, and finally peace between the two countries and Garville happily married and settled on his ancestral acres.

it is to be noticed that this plot is merely a string of episodes governed for the most part by the intervention of chance it is little more than a highly developed pkaresco type with rather less cohesion than the average dumar romance whatever literary quality it possesses is do not to plot but to individual portraiture and a pervading sense of atmosphere the specific story of david ritchie in the crossing has even less cohesion than richard carvel throughout the greater part of it, Richie is a mere lad, and as drummer boy accompanies the expedition led by George Rogers Clark, from Kentucky northward to the Wabash River and Veson. It is a chronicle of border warfare, of Indian treachery and ghastly massacres. It is scarcely fiction at all in the strict sense of the term, but rather a sort of pictorial history of the Clark expedition painted in vivid words. In the second half, the plot grows more cohesive. Ritchie, like Carvel, is an orphan with a worthless uncle, who, instead of befriending him, flees to England at the outbreak of

the war. The uncle's wife takes advantage of her husband's desertion to elope with her lover, leaving a small son to shift for himself. This son, Richie's cousin, later makes it his chief object in life to hunt down his mother and her companion and inflict vengeance upon them. But long years passed before he finally, through Richie's intervention, finds her in New Orleans, dying of yellow fever and is reconciled with her before her death. This and the additional fact that Richie has found in New Orleans the young woman whom he is destined to marry constitute all that is worth epitomizing in the way of a central plot. Now, it is the lot of a good many human beings, both in childhood and in later years, to drift along the stream of life, not shaping their own

destinies, but allying them with the destinies of others. And it often happens that somewhere or other in the course of such drifting they meet a woman whom they wish to marry. It does not, however, usually occur to a novelist that this is the stuff of which books are made. Mr. Churchill's own explanation of the crossing is that it expresses, the first instinctive reaching out of an infant nation, which was one day to become a giant. In his opinion, no annals in the world's history are more wonderful than the story of the conquest of Kentucky and Tennessee by the pioneers. He confesses that it was a difficult task to gather together in a novel the elements necessary to picture this movement, that the autobiography of David Ritchie is as near as he can

come to its solution in that he has a great sense of its incompleteness. There is but one flaw in his self-criticism. The trouble with the crossing is not that it lacks completeness, but that it fails to be a novel. Passing over the crisis, that story of the Civil War, which is at best a less vigorous repetition of the qualities and the shortcomings of Richard Carvel, we come to Coniston. This is a book which deserves rather careful consideration, not merely because it shows us people no longer through the veil of romantic glamour, but face to face. But more especially, because it is the one book he has yet written,

the plot of which will bear careful dissection. Coniston may not unfairly be called a prose epic of political corruption, as it existed in New England a generation or more ago. From the critic's standpoint, it is quite unimportant whether the particular state that the author had in mind happened to be Vermont or Connecticut or Rhode Island. What is important is that we get a sense of life and of conflict, of impulses to do right, clashing with the instincts of self-protection, of a grim party battle for the political survival of the fittest and the entire state, its banks, its franchises, its governor,

its legislature, all reposing in the pocket of one man, the undisputed party boss. This man, Jethro Bass, simple farmer by Orrard. origin, taciturn, inscrutable, with his streak of sardonic humor, and his slight unforgettable stammer, is easily the most important single figure that Mr. Churchill has drawn. One might venture to predict the most important figure that he is destined ever to draw. Jethro Bass is not merely an individual. He is the concrete presentment of a type which, though well-nigh passed away, is destined to be remembered. It is not too much praise to say that in the annals of fiction a Jethro Bass deserves to be.

serves to stand for as definite a figure as a peck-sniff, a macabre, or a Becky Sharp. A big, vital political issue for a background, a unique and dominant figure for the central interest, are already two prime factors of an important novel. What binds the whole together and makes this volume, in contrast to all Mr. Churchill's others, a piece of good construction, is that the individual tragedy of the story grows out of the self-same source as the bigger issue. Namely, Jethrobas's utter unscrupulousness, Like Mr. Churchill's other books, Coniston gives us the entire childhood of its heroine. In fact, it goes further than that and shows us the youth, the marriage and death of the heroine's

mother. But this time he has treacherally testified his method. The childhood of Cynthia Weatherell under the guardianship of Jethro is to be sure no more a study of character moulded by environment than was the childhood of David Ritchie in the crossing, or, as we shall presently see, the childhood of Honora Leffingwell in a modern chronicle. But it happens that in Coniston the focus of interest is not Cynthia Weatherell, but Jethro Bass, and the story of her childhood serves a second and more important purpose as a masterly study of a man's slow transformation under the influence of affection and trust. Jethro Bass once hoped to marry Cynthia Weatherell's mother. At that time he was too young

with a choice of ways before him. He chose then and there to take the first step toward the political conquest of his town, the first step toward the bossism of the whole state. And the girl's clear, fearless eyes looking into his own read him aright, and knew there could be no happiness for her where there could not also be honor. Afterwards, when Jethro befriends the dead woman's orphan daughter, and sees in her those same clear, fearless eyes, his one great wish is that she may always be spared the knowledge of his knavery, the source of his wealth, the secret of his power. To the reader, all the and the undercurrents of dishonest politics are exposed, naked, and unashamed.

Mr. Churchill has nowhere else approached and sheer narrative power the graphic vigor of the best scenes in this book. That, for instance, of the wonderful Woodchuck session, in which the Truro franchise is jammed through the legislature by a bit of unparalleled trickery, and the equally remarkable interview with President Grant, in which Jethro saves the power almost rested from him by forcing the appointment of his candidate for a second. class post office. Scenes like these are enough on which to build a reputation.

They belong to the memorable situations in the annals of fiction. And the climax to which the story inevitably works up is a fitting conclusion to an exceptionally good piece of constructive craftsmanship. It happens that the life-happiness of Cynthia can be purchased by Jethro only at the price of his own political downfall. And this sacrifice he makes freely, gladly, secretly. To the world at large he is defeated and dethroned, a man who has outlived his usefulness. To Cynthia, he is not merely the source of happiness, but a man in whom her affection

has worked a great and wonderful reformation. The climax of the book triumphantly achieves the double purpose of affecting a crisis equally momentous to the individuals of the central group and to the world at large that forms the story's background. It would be an anticlimax after Coniston to examine in detail. detail Mr. Cruz's career, which treats of the same order of corruption in state politics, but deals with a later generation and in a spirit of lighter comedy. Accordingly, there remains only Mr. Churchill's new volume, a modern chronicle. Here, for the first time,

the author ventures to make woman, the American woman of today, his central point of interest. It is rather remarkable that no one has taken the trouble to point out that in all his earlier books, the portrayal of woman was one of Mr. Churchill's serious deficiencies. even in his period of romanticism his men stood out strongly like living portraits but his women have for the most part been mere conventional sketches either quite colourless like dorothy manners in richard carvel or impossible symbols of all the virtues at once like cynthia wetherell in conniston that is why it is such a surprising thing to find him giving us in honora leffingwell a woman who is really alive a woman full of illogical moods and caprices a woman who take her from start to finish is very nearly although not quite a consistent piece of characterization it is rather exasperating to see by how narrow a margin mr churchill missed doing a big piece of work in a modern chronicle that he did miss so doing is due mainly to that inherent fault of his the unwillingnesses or inability to construct carefully. Honora Leffingwell's story

seems too largely a matter of the whims of chance to be of great significance to the world at large. Her childhood and youth are sketched at rather tedious length, with the net result that we know she almost but not quite made up her mind to marry Peter Irwin, the close companion of these early years. Subsequently, after a week's acquaintance, she consents to marry Howard Spence,

portly, prosperous, and not too young, a typical modern businessman, whose soul is in the money market and who after marriage does not realize that a wife needs an occasional word of appreciation. Honora naturally seeks attention elsewhere and finds it in Tristan Brent, who is an adept at making love to other men's wives. What saves her from Trxton Brent she never knows. His failure is not his fault. It is simply a matter of temperament. But when she meets Hugh Chiltern with his personal charm and his unspeakable reputation, she

ceases to have a will of her own. Being for the first time in his life seriously in love, he easily persuades her to break with her husband, go west into the exile of a divorce colony, and after the needful delay, marry him. But her second marriage for love proves as big a failure as her first marriage for ambition. And when Chiltern rides a horse against which he has been warned and breaks his neck in consequence, the reader gives a sigh of relief. Then Peter Irwin, her childhood friend, drifts into view again, and we leave her on the brink of the brink of of a third matrimonial experiment. Just a succession of episodes, you see,

the story of a woman who does not know her own mind. The disillusion and unrest of the first marriage are good workmanship. So also are the dragging weariness and the heartache of that year in the divorce colony. But the book lacks finality. There is no good reason for supposing that the third marriage, the marriage of sympathy and pity, will turn out one wit better than the other two. Regarding Mr. Churchill's place,

in American fiction, it is possible to speak with more confidence than in the case of most of his contemporaries. That he has a widespread popularity is a fact that cannot be disregarded, and this popularity, instead of waning, has remained a constant quantity. He builds his books solidly, as one builds a house upon a rock with the intention that it shall not soon be torn down. He has, moreover, the advantage of a careful style at a scrupulous regard for truth. There are some of us who are inclined to feel that he has been taken rather too seriously by the present generation, in much the same way that Mrs. Humphrey Ward has been overrated by her contemporaries. Of the two writers, it seems a fairly safe prediction that Mr. Churchill has a rather

better chance of maintaining his present level in the years to come. He is still young, and his later work shows a real gain in the knowledge of what fiction as a serious literary form should mean. End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librovox recording is in the public domain. 4. Robert W. Chambers There are certain novelists whose phenomenal popularity challenges us,

almost like a blow in the face and demands an explanation. Mr. Robert W. Chambers is a case in point. We have not at present a large number of writers who have made good their claim to a place among the born storytellers, But of these few, Mr. Chambers is one who, in the estimation of the big reading public, seems to have proved a clear title. For this reason, it is distinctly worthwhile to examine the work of Mr. Chambers with an unsparing frankness that would seem unkind to a writer of less popular favor, and to ask ourselves, without prejudice

or illusion, just what he has succeeded in accomplishing, wherein he has fallen short of his early promise, and why he has not attained that higher goal which has always seemed to lie so easily within his reach. In the first place, it is worthwhile to rehearse briefly and keep in mind just a few biographical details. That Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865. That he and Mr. Charles Dana Gibson were fellow students at the Art Students' League in New York. That in 1886 he went to Paris and studied at the Ecole de Beauvoir, and at Julian's for seven years, his paintings finding acceptance at the salon when he was about 24 years of age.

He returned to New York in 1893, and a glance over the old files of life, truth, and vogue reveals his activity at that time as an illustrator. But the story writer's instinct, the riotous fertility of imagination that insisted on flashing endless motion pictures before his eyes at all times, and in all places, demanded a fuller and more rapid means of expression than that of palette and brushstroke. The tangible realities of his student's life in Paris formed the raw material for his first novel in the quarter, while the yet undisciplined extravagances of his imagination found outlet in the short stories of uncanny and haunting power

that make up the volume entitled The King in Yellow. It was the cordial recognition accorded the second volume that decided Mr. Chambers' subsequent career. To a critic attempting a conscientious and discriminating study of Mr. Chambers' work, the first and most salient feature is his productivity. In barely 17 years he has produced 36 volumes, including four juvenile stories and a collection of verse. Furthermore, his uncommon versatility once found expression in a drama entitled The Witch of Ellen Gowan, written for Miss Ada Rehan and produced at Daly's Theatre. It is neither practicable nor advantageous to study in detail more than a fraction of these works.

Singling out such as clearly mark the author's several periods of transition and Stan, and as significant landmarks of gain or loss in technique. But before taking up these separate volumes, it is well to get a general impression of Mr. Chamber's literary methods, his characteristic practice of the art he has chosen, in preference to that for which he was trained. The emphasis of position is deliberately laid upon the concluding phrase of the preceding paragraph.

The disadvantage under which the art of fiction has always suffered is that there is demanded of it no such long period of probation, no such definite apprenticeship as are exacted from all the other arts. It is true that many a beginner in storywriting is condemned, usually with justice, to months and years of disappointment, an augmenting collection of rejection slips, and the consignment one by one of treasured manuscripts to the waste paper basket. On the other hand, it happens every now and then

that a new writer breaks into print like thunder out of a clear sky, with scarcely any preliminary training and by sheer force of an inborn talent, But the important point is that, whether premature or belated, the success of the storywriter comes from self-tuition. There exists no Julian's to train the budding novelist, no salon to give a worldwide recognition to real genius. The case of Mr. Chambers himself is interesting and significant. Seven years seemed not too long a time to serve for the right to have a few sketches published in our illustrated magazines. But when one day it casually occurred to him to sit down at his desk, and to turn the things he had seen into written pages, the result a few months later

was the irrevocable black and white of a printed book. Of course, in one sense, such an experience is high testimony to a writer's natural talent, and not merely justifies but while nigh demands his continuance along the same path. On the other hand, such an inborn and spontaneous vein of creative power is a handicap as well as an advantage. It minimizes the importance of self-discipline and of that mastery of technique, which is to be acquired only at the price of many failures. All this is by way of preface to the one obvious and all-pervading weakness in the writings of Mr. Chambers. For it is important to get this weakness clearly in mind before we recognize cordially his many distinctive talents. Some admirers of Mr. Chambers have spoken

enthusiastically of his rare constructive ability, and of the unerring instinct with which he brings his stories to the desired climax. To a great extent, this is true, if only we place the principal accent upon the word instinct. What Mr. Chambers' literary methods are, the present writer does not know in detail. But a careful analysis leaves the impression that he allows his stories very largely to construct themselves, relying upon that inborn faculty for narrative which we have already so cordially granted him. For instance, the elementary principle of economy of means is a rule for which Mr. Chambers seems to have no use. He has found, by experience, that the public likes to listen to him, and so long as they listen, he sees no reason for curtailing

to fifty words a sentence which left to itself flows along to upward of a hundred. In his latest books, he no more sees the objection to interrupting the progress of a plot by a few pages of unnecessary dialogue, then in his earlier period he saw the harm of delaying progress with superfluous paragraphs of quite vivid and wonderful description. In other words, the impression left by Mr. Chamber's work as a whole is that he has not chosen to study carefully and to practice the best technique of the recognized masters of modern fiction. He prefers to begin and to end a story where he pleases, regardless of the question whether this beginning and end coincide with those dictated by

the best art. In a measure, this is rather curious, because of all the arts none is so closely related to fiction as that of painting, none that should be a more unerring guide to the best methods of composition. And yet in his stories, Mr. Chambers over and over again interjects extraneous details which, if he had been thinking in terms of brushstrokes and paint-tubes, he would have known at once to lie far beyond the borders of his canvas. These criticisms of Mr. Chambers' methods are based not upon individual impressions but upon facts, easily to be demonstrated from the books themselves. Nevertheless, they are made hesitantly, because it is quite possible that Mr. Chambers has been

wise in writing precisely as he does. It may be that his erratic, effervescent, irrepressible flow of invention would have become clogged and diverted under the trammels of a stricter technique. What he does possess, and what must be exceeded to him freely and generously, are a graphic power of visualization that sets before you, with the lavishness of a glowing canvas, precisely the picture that he has in his mind's eye, an ability to handle crowds and give you the sense of the jostle and turmoil of busy streets, the tumult and uproar of angry throngs, the din and havoc of battle, and thirdly, he possesses to an exceptional degree the trick of conveying a

sense of motion. You are caught, swept off your feet, and breathlessly carried onward by the irresistible rush and surge of his narrative. Many another writer has succeeded in describing speed. Few of them have been able so intensely to make you feel it. Few of them have given the impression of the inexorable rapidity with which the tragedies of life sometimes succeed each other. And furthermore, a quality which must be conceded to Mr. Chambers in common with such specialists in the outdoor life as Stuart Edward White or Charles G.D. Roberts is an enthusiastic and all-pervading love of nature, of wood and field and water, of hunting and fishing, of all

creatures of the earth and air, large and small. There is not a story, but what has in it some furred or feathered creature that plays a more or less prominent part in the structure. Not a chapter that is quite lacking in the song of birds or the fragrance of flowers or the flutter of insect wings. And with all this is the unmistakable imprint of authority. You feel that Mr. Chambers may blunder in the color of a man's hair or the motive for a woman's action, but he is too good a naturalist to mistake the species of a beast.

or a butterfly, or misname a wayside weed or a woodland creeper. The great majority of our society novelists confine themselves so largely to the artificial life of drawing-room and boudoir that we ought to be grateful to Mr. Chambers, if only for the sake of the breath of open air and song and sunshine that he never quite loses, even in the darkest and meanest of our city streets. It will not be necessary in order to arrive at a well-rounded estimate of Mr. Chambers' real value, to examine critically more than half a of his books. An author's first published volume usually possesses a peculiar significance as a standard

of measurement for what comes after. Therefore, in the quarter cannot be disregarded. One's first impression in reading it is that of astonishment at its vividness. It is so unmistakably a series of pen drawings, of things actually seen and lived, a pell-mell gathering of the humor and pathos, the gladness and the pain of the modern art student's life. One second thought is that, while essentially modern and material, the book is curiously old-fashioned in structure, almost as destitute of coherence as La Vie de Bohem itself.

There is not an episode that you wish to prune away. They are so frankly enjoyable for their own sake. But as for plot, with the best intentions in the world, one fails to extract anything more definite than this. An American art student who drifts into quite the usual entanglement with a young girl of a rather better sort than the average Parisian model, an estrangement brought about by the American's inheritance of a fortune, and the interference of the French girl's jealous sister. And finally, the unjustifiable and melodramatic murder of the American by the sister, just as all misunderstandings have been cleared up and the wedding is arranged.

In this book, in spite of certain crudities, the following points are to be noticed. Here, at the very start, Mr. Chambers showed a rare power of description, a distinct ability at portraiture of such types as he really knew. And because the book was written under French influences, the slight structure that it possessed was logical. Even the melodramatic ending was foreshadowed and structurally justifiable. Following this novel came a succession of volumes

which, with the exception of one or two negligible efforts, consist of collections of short stories. The King in Yellow, the Maker of Moons, and the Mystery of Choice. Mr. Chambers has, at intervals since then, published other volumes of tales, such as the Tree of Heaven, and some ladies in haste. But unquestionably, his fame as a writer of the short story will rest upon these earlier volumes. Widely as they differ in character and quality, ranging from painfully sinister horror stories to fantasies light as rainbow bubbles, they all of them have

one quality in common. A wanton unreality, a defiance of everything that, in our sober senses, We are accustomed to believe, coupled with a certain assumption of seriousness, an insistence upon little realistic details that force us for the time being to accept as actual the most outrageous absurdities, and to vibrate as responsibly as a violin string to the touch of the author's finger and the sweep of his imagination. It would be easy to pick a dozen of these stories as characteristic examples of Mr. Chambers at the height of his fantastic mood. As a matter of personal preference, I would single out the story, which gives its name to the volume entitled The Maker of Moons,

for it runs the gamut of all the varied emotions that characterize these stories. The repulsion of tangible, physical ugliness, the dread of unguessed horror, the witchery of supernatural beauty, the pervading sense of invisible, warring forces of good and evil.

We start with cold prosaic details, a favorite trick of Mr. Chambers. The United States Treasury officials have reason to believe that an unscrupulous gang of counter, have discovered a method of manufacturing gold so adroitly that it defies chemical analysis, and they decide that these makers of moonshine gold must be suppressed. There is only one peculiarity about this gold, and herein lies the first suggestion of creepy repulsion. Wherever a lump

of the gold is found, there are pretty sure to be found also one or more curious, misshapen, crawling creatures, half crab, half spider, covered with long, thick yellow hair and suggestive of of uncleanness and venom. The headquarters of these counterfeiters is somewhere in the northern woods in a region of peaceful trees and still waters. And the whole effect of the story is obtained by the swift series of transitions between the physical violence of a ruthless manhunt and the ineffable charm and beauty of a dream lady, who appears to the hero repeatedly and without warning, standing beside a magic fountain, and talking to him of a mystic city beyond the seven seas and the great river. The river and the thousand. The river and the thousand

and bridges, the white peak beyond, the sweet-scented gardens, the pleasant noise of the summer wind, laden with bee-music and the music of bells. It is hard in a clumsy retelling of such gossamer spun tales to give the impression of anything more than a jumble of mad folly. Yet the tale itself leaves an insisted memory of supernatural beauty, seen vaguely through moonlight, and of the fulsome opulence of demon gold distilling fowly into writhing crawling horrors. lorraine ashes of empire the red republic and the maids of paradise though appearing at irregular intervals from eighteen ninety four to nineteen hundred three belonged together for the twofold reason that they all four have the franco-prussian war as a setting and dashing young americans for their heroes of these four ashes of empire seems best adapted for analysis since it shows perhaps the best of any of them the qualities and weaknesses of mr chambers in this type of novel it is essentially the type of the modern novel of adventure the type made familiar by stanley wayman max pemberton henry seaton merriman and richard harding davis and on the whole mr chambers treatment of the type may be compared not unfavorably with any one of these

he happens to know unusually well both the history and the topography of france during the period that he has chosen to treat he attempts no ambitious character study he takes no daring liberties with recorded facts he is content to tell a series of rattling good stories that not only keep moving but keep you moving with them and there is no doubt that he himself is having as much enjoyment in the writing as any of the readers have in the reading and yet it is evident that this type of book is not what mr chambers would have deliberately chosen as his favourite life work one may venture to risk the conjecture that he would never have written these books at all had it not been for the sudden popularity a decade ago of the adventure novel coupled with his own fatal facility for turning out pretty nearly any sort of story that he chooses to undertake Had he cared more for his work, we should have had in these books characters less wooden and more like real people, and episodes more uniformly serious and less apt to approach the borderline of forests. Ashes of Empire is in this respect typical. It deals with the Empress Eugène's flight, the siege and the surrender of Paris. There are two young American war correspondents who happen to be outside the Tullery at an opportune time

to aid two unknown young women to hoodwink the crowd and affect the Empress's safe retreat. these two war correspondents partly by design partly by good luck succeed in tracing the young woman to their home abutting on the city's fortifications learn that the girls live there quite alone renting the upper apartments to lodgers and keeping a bird-shop on the ground floor in which parrots jackdaws and a tame lioness harmlessly romp together The war correspondents promptly fall in love with the two sisters, rescue them from the villainous machinations of two German Americans, who turn out to be Prussian spies, and after undergoing the usual allotment of hair-breadth escapes, marry and live happily ever after. But while the characterization is weak and the plot conventional, the background is really alive. We feel the tension of a national crisis, the dread of approaching disaster, the scream of shells and the whales of starvation, the despair of the despair of the tension of a national crisis, the dread of approaching disaster, the scream of shells and the whales of starvation, the despair of the despair of the of a people who know that both from within and without, they have been betrayed. To this extent, at least, the book is a worthy piece of work, and it is exasperating in the same way that so much of Mr. Chambers' work exasperates, because we feel that he might so easily have made it better. Many a sincere friend of Mr. Chambers has frankly declared outsiders

to be his one great blunder. Yet it is a finer and more sincere piece of work than many of his successful volumes. Moreover, it throws some useful light upon his attitude not so many years ago toward publishers, critics, and life in general in the city of New York. It is not surprising that the book failed to achieve popularity.

He committed in it almost all the indiscretions which are supposed to bar the way to a big sale. He ridiculed American culture, American architecture, and American social standing, and he rounded out the story with an ending which sinned it doubly by being not only unhappy, but structurally unnecessary.

Nevertheless, one cannot help liking the book. It is so vigorous, so cleverly satirical, and in the main so well-written. The life of the self-styled bohemian circles, the life of the petty artists, the minor poets, the second-rate scribblers of all sorts, is, to be sure, largely done in caricature, but it is caricature of an easily recognized sort. And the background, though frankly painted by an outsider and a hostile outsider at that, is vividly, unmistakably, aggressively, New York.

You cannot at a single moment of this story forget your whereabouts, or imagine yourself in any other city in the world. Quote, Far up the ravine of masonry and iron in a beautiful spire, blue in the distance, rose from a Gothic church

that seemed to close the great thoroughfare at its northern limit. That's Grace Church, said Oliver, with a little catch in his voice. It was the first familiar landmark that he had found in the city of his boyhood, and he had been away only a dozen years. Suddenly he realized the difference between a city, in the old-world acceptance of the term, and the city before his eyes. This

stupendous excrescence of naked iron, gaunt under its skin of paint, flimpsily colossal, ludicrously sad. This half-begun, irrational, gaudy, dingy monstrosity. This temporary fairground, choked with tinsel, ill-paved, ill-lighted, stark, treeless, swarming, crawling with humanity. In the decade that has since passed, Mr. Chambers has learned to make his characters, even when they have long resided abroad, more uniformly courteous regarding their expressed opinions of American cities and American customs. One wonders a little whether this is because he has succeeded in acquiring a taste for our ugly buildings and our noisy streets, or whether it is simply a matter of expedient reticence.

Be this as it may, one cannot read attentively his latest and most mature volumes, his present series of contemporary New York life, without observing that descriptive passages of city streets and buildings are conspicuously absent. The moment that he escapes from the city, the moment that he finds himself in the open once more, on the widespread levels of Long Island or the picturesque stretches of the main coast or the Adirondacks, we get again that fertile vividness of landscape painting which was one of the great charms of his earlier book. For the most part, however, one notices a great change in method in these later society novels that already include the fighting chance, the younger set, the firing line, and the danger mark. He has begun to take himself much more seriously. He no longer gives you the impression of deliberately having fun with his characters and situations.

He is trying quite sincerely to handle social and ethical problems of real importance, and what is more, to handle them in the only way that is worthwhile. namely by using for his setting the present-day social life in the city and among the people that he best knows and for these reasons the recent work of mr chambers must be judged more strictly than his earlier volumes because he has become more ambitious he must be held more closely to account for his deficiencies these four novels have the following points in common the action is divided between the social world of new york city and the country homes of the fashionable set the central interest in each of the four volumes is due to certain hereditary instincts or impulses which make it either inexpedient or impossible for a certain man and woman to marry. In two of the volumes, namely, the Younger Set and the Firing Line, they unwisely have married and the story itself largely hinges on problems raised subsequently by divorce. In the fighting chance and the danger mark, the problem is that of unfitness to marry, the only difference between the two volumes being that the one is the

reverse of the other. The former presenting a case where the man inherits a craving for alcohol, and the woman an abnormal instinct for the flattery and attentions of men, while in the latter, it is the woman who is intemperate and the man whose gallantries are uncontrolled. Now, it cannot be denied that these themes are good enough in themselves, and that, if properly handled with adequate knowledge of life and sincerity of purpose, they might have given us something worthy of standing as an American substitute for the continental type of analytical novel. And it is precisely for reasons of this sort that one becomes every now and then distinctly

exasperated with Mr. Chambers. Not because his work is bad, but because one feels that it falls just short of being something a great deal better. The fighting chance and the danger mark are easily the best works of this later period. So much better than the two divorce problem novels that the latter may be left out of consideration. You read along in the fighting chance, rather skeptical. perhaps at the start, because of a conviction that it has been much over-praised by the general public. Then, little by little, you find it taking hold upon you, because it has much of Mr.

Chamber's earlier qualities and something new in addition. It has his pictorial vividness, his skillful light and shade, his rapidity of action, his mismaric trick of making even the improbable seem quite a matter of course. And at the same time it reveals a new power of delineating character, of presenting us with people who are not merely types but individuals as well, people whose inward struggles and anxieties we feel a keen and growing desire to share. And then, all at once, we run up against a paragraph or a chapter that gives us a shock, because it seems so out of keeping with the rest of the picture, so clearly the sort of thing that people do not say or do.

One charitably minded reader, who is at the same time a sincere admirer of Mr. Chambers at his best, explains these occasional notable lapses, at least so far as the dialogue is concerned, on the ground that the author at such times has contented himself with merely giving, as it were, the bare scenario, with telling what his character said, without taking the time or trouble to work up the still more important question of just how they really said it. In other words, the simplest explanation of the unevenness of style in the fighting chance is that Mr. Chambers, to borrow one of his own titles, permits himself at times to be a young man in a hurry.

But the real reason why Mr. Chambers' studies of American life at times strike a note that we feel to be off the key is this. His portraits of men are always a little stronger, sure, more convincing than those of his women. Study them all carefully from first to last, from his roughly blocked-in women of the Latin quarter, and the vaporous dream-maidens of his early fantasies, down to the designedly flesh and blood women of his latest book, and you feel that in varying degrees they all have one little defect. They are all of them what men like to think women to be, rather than

the actual women themselves. In their actions, they live up to the man's expectation of what they are going to do next, rather than to women's inalienable right to do the unexpected and illogical thing. Take, for example, the fighting chance. In substance, it amounts to this. A young woman already pledged to a man enjoying all the advantages of wealth and position, one day meets another man under the shadow of a heavy disgrace due to his intemperate habits. They are guests at the same house party. They are thrown much together, and within forty-eight hours she falls unresisting into his arms and yields her lips as readily as any servant-girl. Heredity says the author, the girl cannot help it. The women in her family have for generations

been all that they ought not to be. Nevertheless, the reader retorts, the girl does not become all that she ought not to be. During the weeks that follow there is many a venturesome scene, many a dialogue between the two that skirts the edge of impropriety. But in spite of heredity, the lady never quite loses her head. And after they separated the close of the summer season and the months slipped by, and she knows quite well that the man she loves is drinking himself to death, when a word from her would stop him, she continues to wear the other man's large diamond ring and play her part in the social whirl. and only after the lapse of many months

does it occur to her that she can affect the salvation of a human soul without in the least endangering her own reputation by merely calling him up on the telephone and having a five-minute chat. Now, this is not said with the object of belittling Mr. Chambers' work. The greater part of it is good, surprisingly good when one considers that he as a romanticist suddenly turned psychologue. Only it does not seem that a real woman could have acted in quite that way.

She either would have flung discretion to the wind and done all sorts of mad things earlier in the game and thrown the blame upon heredity. Or else, she would from the very beginning have had sufficient self-control to keep her lips her own for somewhat longer than 48 hours. It is always an interesting question,

interesting largely, because it is in a measure unanswerable. What position is going to be assigned by a later generation to any one of our contemporary novelists? As regards Mr. Chambers, are just a few predictions which may be made without hesitation. As a writer of short stories, he has produced at least half a dozen that deserve to rank among the best that American writers have produced, and no future collection of representative

short stories can claim to be complete if it happens to neglect his name. As a novelist, he has to face the handicap that must accompany too great an adaptability. With rare exceptions, the great names in fiction are those of writers whose work throughout has been fairly homogeneous. Writers who have known from the beginning precisely what sort of books they wanted to write, and whose volumes have differed in degree and not in kind. Mr. Chambers has veered,

and apparently with intention, in accordance with the breeze of popular demand. First, to the French historical novel, then to the Civil War story, and finally, when the demand was sufficiently emphatic to the contemporary society novel. In this last field, there is still a hope that Mr. Chambers will at length

find himself. And the fact that the last of the four books is the best and most sustained and most honest piece of work that his later manner has produced, affords solid ground for the hope that he may have still better and mature volumes yet to come. Nevertheless, the accumulated experience of the ages has inculcated a wise distrust of the literary weathercock. End of Chapter 5 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 5. Ellen Glasgow In glancing backward over the 12 or 15 years

during which Miss Ellen Glasgow has been practicing her careful, deliberate, finally conceived art, and patiently striving not without an occasional blunder toward her present mastery of technique, one feels that all things considered, she has not yet had in full measure the generous, widespread, and serious recognition to which she is entitled. Some of her volumes, to be sure, have enjoyed an encouraging popularity, and in many quarters she has had cordial critical appreciation. And yet, at best, it seems distinctly disproportioned to a talent which stands in the forefront of American women novelist, outranking on the one side Mrs. Atherton, as far as it outranks Mrs. Wharton on the other. A talent which sees life, if not more deeply than the author of The House of Mirth, at least through a far wider angle.

a talent which replaces the riotous unrestraint of the author of ancestors with that greater strength of logical purpose and symmetry of form. Now in order to make clear the sound critical ground for assigning so high a place to the author of the deliverance and the miller of old church, it seems not merely worthwhile but even obligatory to examine rather carefully her understanding and her use of the technique of form. Miss Glasgow's creed in fiction is obviously that of the realists. Although her adherence to it is not so rich, as to preclude her from the occasional excursion into romanticism. Her novels are not only realistic, but, like the novels of Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, and David Graham Phillips, they are, in the best sense of the term, Zolaesque. That is to say, they have an epic sweep and comprehension, an epic sense of the surge of life and the clash

of multitudinous interests. This particular type of novel is so seldom successfully achieved in English that, although there has been occasion to speak of it more than once already in the present volume, it seems desirable, even at the risk of repetition, to call to mind once more just what are its characteristic features. The epic novel, like the epic poem, must have a two-fold theme, a specific human story and a big general problem. The wrath of Achilles and the Trojan War. The expulsion from Eden and the fall of man. The fate of Uncle Tom and the whole problem of slavery. and the very essence of this epic quality lies in the ability to tell the specific central human story and hold and stir you with the pathos and the tragedy of it and yet all the while keep before you the realization that this specific story is only an isolated case of a general and widespread condition that achilles brooding in his tent is only a symbol of the pervading wrath and sorrow and desolation begotten by war that the empty cabin of uncle tom is only a symbol of the cruelty the broken tie

the inhumanity attendant upon slavery. It is a curious fact that Mrs. Toe, probably without any conscious understanding of technique, produced an almost perfect epic novel according to principles that were destined to be formulated fully half a century later. And it is equally curious that the first American woman since Mrs. Stowe to succeed in writing a genuine epic novel should also have chosen a similar setting and a similar theme. To state the case more correctly, it is curious that the first woman among our modern writers to achieve this type of novel should have happened to be a southern woman. Because since Miss Glasgow happens by birth and education to have a knowledge of Virginia

scenes and people beyond that of other parts of the world, she has simply been obeying the most elementary principle of good technique when she chooses for her setting the region that she knows best, while such a volume as the Wheel of Life in which the scene is laid in New York is to be classed in spite of much that is good, among the number of the author's blunders. one feels in this new york story as though miss glasgow was slightly out of her element as though she lacked sympathy even for the best of the characters in it and frankly disapproved of the others it is even more difficult for a woman than for a man to attain the attitude of strict impersonality which is demanded by the highest rules of modern construction and herein one feels lies one of miss glasgow's failings she could not if she would help showing us her heart goes out to certain favorite characters young and old white and black alike, nor would we have it otherwise, because in her affection for these people whom she understands so profoundly, lies the secret of the abiding charm which they in turn possess

for us. Human stories, strong, tender, high-minded her volumes undeniably are. But what one remembers about them, even after the specific story has faded from the mind, is their atmosphere of old-fashioned southern courtesy and hospitality, of gentle breeding and steadfast adherence to traditional standards of honor. She has dealt with special skill with the anomalous and transitory conditions of society that followed the close of the war, the breaking down of old barriers, the fruitless resistance of conservatism to the new tendencies of social equality, the frequent pathetic struggles to keep up a brave show in spite of fallen fortunes, the proud dignity that accepts poverty and hardship and manual labor with unbroken spirit. Such books as the battleground, the deliverance,

the people, are, in the best sense of the term, novels of manners, which will be read by later generations with a curious interest, because they will preserve a record of social conditions that are changing and passing away more slowly, yet quite as relentlessly, as the dissolving vapors of a summer sunset. In order, however, to understand, on the one hand, just how she uses her technique, and on the other how she succeeds in giving such poignant reality to her people and her scenes, it is necessary to examine in somewhat more detail at least a portion of her books. And the battleground, as one of her earlier works, and also one that reaches back historically to the time of the Civil War, forms a convenient starting point. It is, besides, one of the most

obvious instances of Miss Glasgow's characteristic method of epic structure. In the first place, it deals with the wide, general theme suggested by the title, and in this wider sense the central figure is not a person but a state, the state of Virginia. And the story is the story of that state before, during and immediately after the four years of devastating struggle. But more specifically, the battleground is the intimate history of one southern family, the Lightfoot's, or rather of one member of that family, Dan Montjoy, whose mother, old Major Lightfoot's only daughter, had made a runaway match with a hot-headed, mean-natured scap who caused her a brief misery and an early death. Dan Montjoy comes naturally by his hot temper, but for the most part he is a true

lightfoot, and the idol of his grandfather's old age. But there comes a day when youthful impetuosity leads Dan into certain foolish escapades that his grandfather takes too seriously. Angry, unforgettable words are exchanged, and the young man goes forth penniless to fight his way in the world alone, leaving home, friends, and the girl he loves. What he might have made of himself under other conditions is a question that Ms. Glasgow does not even touch upon. But it happens that this quarrel occurs on the eve of the Civil War. Dan's secession from the family circle coincides with the South's withdrawal from the Union. And so throughout the rest of this powerful war novel, we see a double struggle waged upon a double

battleground, the struggle of a family of federal states at war with each other, and the struggle of a human being for independence of the ties of blood. and in the end, when the South as a whole is brought to accept defeat, Dan has learned still another and more personal lesson, and returns once more, wiser and happier with the sober happiness of maturity, to those at home who have never ceased to hope for his coming. Similarly, in the deliverance there is a double significance of title and of plot. After the battle comes the vultures, says a Union soldier in the battleground,

and, in a broad general way, the deliverance may be said to symbolize the sufferings of the South in the years immediately following the war, when so many of those who had constituted the wealth and pride and aristocracy of the country saw their remaining possessions arrested from them by corruption and by fraud. Christopher Blake is only a single instance of this widespread injustice and robbery. He has seen his father die, broken in body and in mind, has seen the magnificent estate that had been for two centuries the property of the Blakes, sold at auction and bought in for a beggarly sum by Bill Fletcher, his father's former overseer.

Nothing can be done in a legal way, for Fletcher has been careful to see that all documents and account books that might serve as evidence against him were destroyed by fire. Christopher, a mere boy, with a crippled mother and two sisters on his hands, finds himself turned adrift, with no refuge save the overseer's former cabin and a few acres of tobacco fields, down in one corner of the estate, which should have been his own. The mother, paralyzed and blind, is transferred all unaware of the change one day when she is being carried out for her accustomed airing. Knowing nothing of the fall of the Confederacy, of the death of Lincoln, of the freedom of the slaves, she lives on in a world of her own imaginings, nurtured on an elaborate tissue of lies, daily issuing orders to an army of slaves which no longer exists,

and delicately partaking of broiled chicken and sipping rare old port, while her son and daughters exist painful, on ho cake and fat bacon. Such is the tragic and impressive symbolism by which Miss Glasgow pictures to us the contrast between the hopes and the humiliations of the South. And in the story of the blakes we see not merely a single family tragedy, but behind it an entire country given over to desolation, with countless estates passing into unworthy hands, countless impoverished families taking up unaccustomed burdens and cherishing in their hearts a mortal bitterness because of the dead dream of the Confederacy that

refuses to be forgotten. But in the case of Christopher Blake, there is another and more specific story. As a boy, his first mad impulse after being turned from his home was to murder Fletcher. But the impulse once checked has turned to a smouldering hatred, a fixed and secret determination for revenge. Fletcher has two grandchildren, a girl and a boy. The girl Maria marries and goes abroad before Christopher has had time to determine whether his feeling for her is hatred or love. toward the boy will he has but one feeling and that is a steadfast longing to use him as an instrument of vengeance the boy is the one living thing that old fletcher loves Therefore, by making him a liar, a coward and a drunkard, Christopher feels that he is paying back with interest the wrongs the blakes have suffered.

He never once realizes the unworthiness of his own conduct until Maria, after some years of marriage and widowhood, returns home, and they meet once more and realize the feeling they had cherished as boy and girl needs only a word to make it flame into love and not hatred. But Christopher has himself done a vulture's deed in accomplishing the ruin of Maria's brother. And when the lad in a drunken frenzy kills his grandfather, Christopher, realizing his own moral responsibility, aids the other to escape and gives himself up as the murderer. Deliverance finally comes, so the book seems to preach.

Deliverance of the land from vultures like Old Fletcher, deliverance of men like Christopher from the curse of their own mad deeds. But neither the one nor the other may be hurried. They come only with patience, in the fullness of time. There are two other volumes by Miss Glasgow, separated by an interval of nearly a decade, which nevertheless deserve to be analyzed together because of the interesting contrast they afford. The Voice of the People and the Romance of a Plain Man Throughout all of her books, one notices a theme to which Miss Glasgow reverts again and again with never flagging interest,

and that is the theme of unequal marriages. Under the changed conditions of the Reconstruction period, it was inevitable. that the old distinctions of race and breeding, the old prejudices against honest toil and industry should be to some extent modified, and that the daughters of impoverished families should not in all cases think that they were stooping if they wedded brave and honorable men whose fathers perhaps have been mere plain tillers of the soil. This problem in its various aspects, Ms. Glasgow has approached over and over again. But it is only in the two books now under discussion, and to some extent in her latest and maturest volume, the Miller of Old Church, that she has frankly made

at the central theme. Far apart as they are in other respects, since the voice of the people is not without crudities of construction, while the romance of a plain man is, with one exception, Miss Glasgow's finest achievement, the two books offer a curious parallel of plot for very nearly the first half of their development. Nicholas Burr and Ben Starr are both small, barefoot, not over clean boys when they first meet, In the one case, Eugenia Battle, in the other, Sally Mickleboro, spick and spank and freshly starched,

and in each case, the small girl makes the small boy exceedingly uncomfortable by declaring that she cannot play with him because he is common. In each case, the childish insult fires a latent ambition. Nicholas Burr confides to kindly old Judge Bassett his secret hope of someday becoming a judge, and Ben Starr similarly owns to General Bowlingbroke, who happens to be the president of the Great Sam. South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, his own determination to work his way up eventually, to the presidency of that same road. In each case, the boy's ambition both amuses and pleases

the busy man, and in each case the boy's education is cared for, his way made smooth, and the first steps toward his ultimate goal are guided by a wise and protecting hand. And in the later book, Sally Mickleboro is brought to acknowledge, precisely as Eugenia Battle acknowledges in the earlier, that common was a mistaken and an unjust word, and that she is glad and proud to give her heart and hand to the man who has already achieved so much for her sake. But here the two books part company. In each of them, the pride of the girl's family forms an almost insurmountable barrier. In each of them, there is another man who by birth, fortune and education seems expressly designed for the girl's husband. In the earlier book, Miss Glasgow decides that

between Nick Burr and Eugenia Battle, there is too great a gulf ever to be bridged over even by love. A stray scrap of scandal touching him too hastily believed in by her, estranges them permanently. She marries the man in her own class while he goes on doggedly climbing the rungs of the political ladder to his final goal as governor of the state. The voice of the people, through the ballot, has given him his political ambition. The voice of the people, through the tongue of scandal, robbed him of married happiness. The voice of the people, through the mad frenzy of a mob, bent upon lynching a negro whom he, as governor, has sworn to give a fair trial, robs him of his life. And the woman lives on in a marriage that has brought neither joy nor sorrow, finding her only real emotion

in the cares of motherhood. The romance of a plain man is a book as much bigger and stronger as a decade of steady growth can well make it. To begin with, Miss Glasgow has realized that such a story, concerning itself mainly with the inward growth of a man's character, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by being seen through the man's eyes. Therefore, she tells it in the first person. Secondly, she realizes that when two people care for each other with the fierce unreasoning passion either of Nick and Eugenia or of Ben and Sally, they are not likely to let either small opticles or great ones come between them. That they will brush aside in treaties, warnings and commands, and take their chances of being either supremely happy or utterly miserable.

In the marriage of Ben Starr and Sally Mickleboro, the author, if we rightly understand her, wishes to show how difficult it is for a man sprung from a humble and rather vulgar source to understand the finer feelings of those more gently born. For Sally's sake, Ben Starr wants wealth and education and power, and for her sake he wins them, rapidly, surely, and with apparent ease. He wants them first to prove that he is not common, and afterward having won her in defiance of her family and her social world, he continues to strive for more money, more power, more positions of trust, always with a fixed idea that they will bring her greater happiness.

And here is where he makes his one great mistake that almost wrecks their married life in mid-course. He does not realize that his absorption in the big game of finance leaves him little time even to think of his wife, and none at all to place at her service. Because the obvious difference between himself and the men in Sally's own class is money and position and education,

he makes the natural mistake of thinking that the attainment and possession of these things is in itself the key to social equality, the one thing essential to his happiness and hers. And the last and most important lesson in his whole course of self-education he is slow in learning, that the essential thing does not lie in these achievements

but behind them. It lies in a man's power to mould his own character until he is capable of attaining his goal. It is not a bank account, nor a directorship in a railway, nor social recognition, nor a knowledge of the odes of Horace

that in themselves win and hold the love of a woman like Sally Mickleboro. But without the energy and persistence to compass these things, Ben Starr would not have been the kind of man to win her. But, having once won her, though he should lose his money, forget his Latin,

Find himself under a social cloud, she is the sort of woman who will cling all the more loyally, and with feminine illogic to be the happier for serving him. This lesson Ben Starr might have learned early in their married life during temporary reverses when for some week Sally is slowly nursing him back to health after a desperate illness, and, incidentally, earning their daily bread with her own frail, unaccustomed hands. Had he been less of a plain man, and gifted with a little more subtlety, he would have seen that for these few weeks they were nearer to true happiness than at any time before. But as a matter of fact, he does not see, but goes on toiling, amassing, reaching out for more

power, more fame, and year by year approaching his boyhood's ambition, the presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. And at last, it is only under the stress of a great sorrow and a greater fear, only when he sees his wife's life trembling in the balance that this essentially plain man receives enlightenment, and realizes that the path to happiness may lie through the deliberate sacrifice of a lifelong ambition. Such in brief is the substance of the romance of a plain man, which at the time of its publication two years ago was easily Miss Glasgow's most thoughtful, most mature and altogether biggest novel. It is a peculiarly American novel, since it symbolizes with a subtlety that is essentially feminine and a force that is almost

virile, the practical limitations of the doctrine that all men are born free and equal. It was quite natural that in reading it one should say, in this book, Miss Glasgow has come to full maturity. She may give us many other volumes worthy of a place beside it, but surely nothing better or stronger. But in the Miller of Old Church, she has climbed to a still higher level, because never before has she succeeded in being at once so preeminently local and so universal in her appeal. Old Church deserves to become one of those historic landmarks in fiction, with a physiognomy and an individuality as unmistakable as George Elliott's St. Aug's and Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Yet the underlying problem, while presenting a certain surface newness, is in reality not peculiar to Old Church or to Virginia or to the New South, but is as old as civilization itself. It is new to this extent only, that the specific conditions which determine its episode,

are of recent origin, forming a definite stage in the slow transition in southern social and economic life that began with the reconstruction period and is not yet ended. But in its essence, Miss Glasgow's theme is nothing more nor less than that of the universal and inevitable struggle of the lower classes to rise, and the jealousy of caste that would hold them back if it could. And it is precisely the universality of the theme, studied under vividly local conditions, that gives to the book a large degree of its vitality and strength. The central human story of the Miller of Old Church has to do with the complex fortunes of Molly Meriwether, the illegitimate daughter of Janet Meriwether and Jonathan Gay, both of whom

have been dead many years before the opening of the story. Janet Meriwether belonged to that humble and despised division of the white race in the South which even the Negroes felt at liberty to look down upon. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, it was so humble and unpersuming. Jonathan Gay, on the contrary, was of the aristocracy. The gays of Jordan's journey were easily the dominant social power of the neighborhood. At heart, Jonathan sincerely loved Janet. He had meant to deal with her honestly, and he would have been glad to make reparation by marrying her.

But it was at this crucial time that Angela Gay, Jonathan's widowed sister-in-law, came to make her home with him. Now, Angela, was one of those frail, ephemeral flower-like women who keep their family, friends, and medical advisor in the state of chronic anxiety, and tyrannize over the home circle with a strength-born of their weakness. In fact, it was tacitly understood that Angela was not long for this world, and that everything and everybody must be sacrificed in order to spare her agitation and guard against a strain upon her dangerously fluttering heart. In a vague way, Angela knew about Jonathan's irregularities of life. But according to the standards of her station and her epic, there were matters which a woman of refinement could not allow to be mentioned in her

presence. It was part of her sweetness that she never faced an unpleasant fact until it was literally thrust upon her notice. Consequently, when Jonathan tried gently to break to her the idea that he was half inclined to marry Janet, Angela made it plain to him that for a gay so to demean himself would be equivalent to a death blow to her. Janet's shame insanity and early death distressed Angela in a vague way. But marriage would have been something a thousand times worse, a stupendous unimaginable calamity. So Jonathan, not dreaming that Angela would outlive him, contented himself with leaving a secret bequest, and a paper acknowledging Molly as his daughter, all of which was to be made public only when the girl should reach the age of 21. He did not

foresee that the belated revelation would fall all the more heavily because of the delay, upon the fragile woman to whom he had sacrificed his own happiness. Now, at the opening of the story, all this is ancient history. Molly is on the threshold of womanhood. She has ripened into great beauty and is eagerly sought after by the young men of the new order. The order, as one character phrases it, that is rapidly forging to the surface and pushing us dilapidated aristocrats out of the way. But by no one more eagerly than by Abel Revercombe,

the Miller of Old Church. Now it happens that Jonathan Gay the younger, Angela's only son, after long years of absence in the North, at last comes to Jordan's journey, to see for himself how she can stand it. Almost the first person he meets is Molly. And her beauty and tragic history

kindle so quick and interest that ancient wrongs seem to have a prospect of being at last set right. And so they might have been, in spite of Molly's avowed hatred of men, but for the fatal circumstance that before meeting Molly he had lost his way while taking a shortcut across lots had been set on his right path again by Blossom Revercombe

and learned that not his philosophy but the little brown mole on a woman's cheek stood for destiny. Jonathan is a true gay by nature and a gay will go on ogling the sex as long as he is able to totter back from the edge of the grave all the time that he is openly paying court to Molly Maryweather and good

goading the Miller into sullen jealousy, he is secretly meeting Blossombe, the Miller's sister, and the old-time tragedy bids fair to be reenacted. There has been an ancient feud between the gays and the Revercombs. In fact, at his current gossip that the shot which killed the elder Jonathan ten years earlier was fired by Uncle Abner Revercombe, who had never been quite sound in mind since the old days when the sweetheart of his youth, Janet Merriweather was lost to him. And when he learns of the clandestine meetings between his niece and the younger John Jonathan, he takes the law once more into his own hands, and, by the death of another

gay squares a long-standing account. So much of the bare plot of the Miller of Old Church it has seemed necessary to tell in detail in order to understand the symbolic meaning behind it. Of the subordinate stories, the secondary interests, the complex, interwoven threads that make this volume a richly embroidered piece of living tapestry, it is impossible to take notice here, without a risk of blurring outlines and confusing motives. It seems almost a pity that it is necessary to lay such special stress upon the bare skeleton of a book which, considered as a human story rather than an ethical problem, finds its main interest less in

the sheer narrative than in the atmosphere of a unique locality and the intimate concerns of a group of people whom we grow to love in a very personal way on account of their sterling merits or rare whimsicalities. But it was necessary to get the bare, framework of the book clearly in mind and for the following reason. Without so doing, we could not understand the masterly way in which Miss Glasgow is here once again employed the epic method. In the broadest sense, this book is not so much the history of Molly Maryweather, as it is the story of the New South. The various factors that tend either to hasten or retard development are personified one by one in the several characters of this little local drama.

In Angela, for instance, we have the incarnate spirit of the old-time Southern aristocracy with its pride and its traditions, sorely stricken since the war. Moribund, yet still clinging to life with the amazing tenacity of chronic invalidism. In the older Jonathan, we have the bygone type of the reckless devil-may-care hot-blooded southerner, who at any cost would maintain his family standards and traditions. And in the younger Jonathan and Abel Revercombe, we have respectively the new dignity of labor and the new and broader tolerance of gentle breeding. And lastly, if we read Miss Glasgow's purpose rightly, we have in Molly Maryweather herself

the future solution of the social problem. In her origin and in her character, Molly represents a mixture of two natures, a compromise between the upper class and the lower, combining the better qualities of each. Furthermore, she typifies a social intermingling which a generation earlier was not to be thought of, but which today, owing to changed conditions, has come more and more to be tolerated. In other words, the stigma of the girl's illegitimacy stands as a symbol of the social ostracism of the poorer whites even for many years after the war, and her belated recognition by her father's people, in consequence of his posthumous acknowledgement of her, symbolizes the reluctance with which the social barriers begin to yield.

And even Molly's marriage has its deeper hidden significance. Even had Jonathan lived, she would not have married him, the representative of an effete's social code. She would inevitably have taken the man whom she did take, the sturdy miller of old church, because the younger society of the New South is destined more and more to recruit itself from the vigorous ranks of the rising democracy. Such at least is what Miss Glasgow seems to have said herself to say. And in this, it is not easy for the reader to misunderstand her, for she has said it with a courage, a clearness,

and a strength of conviction that make it easily her best book, her wisest book, the book that amply justifies the most sanguine prophecies of those who have had an abiding faith in her. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 6. David Graham Phillips

In any critical analysis of the life work of the late David Graham Phillips, it is well to recognize, frankly, at the outset, that he has been a rather important figure in the development of American fiction in recent years. We could name on the fingers of one hand the contemporary novelists who, like Mr. Phillips, have devoted themselves to depicting and studying the big ethical and social problems of their own country and generation, and doing it in a broad, bold, comprehensive way with a certain epic sweep and magnitude. And among these few none was more deeply in earnest than Mr. Phillips. None strove more patiently to do his work in the best, most forcible, most craftsman-like manner.

Having made these concessions, we are free to recognize that his results fell somewhat behind his intentions, that with all his industry he developed his technique rather slowly, and that while just a few of his novels are of a quality which no serious student of present-day fiction can afford to neglect, a large proportion of the remainder may conveniently be set aside, as merely tending to increase the bulk of a critical analysis, without contributing any light of real importance. Now, in saying that Mr. Phillips was slow in acquiring the technique of construction, it behooves a critic to define rather carefully just wherein he showed himself effective.

It certainly was not due to any lack of willingness or ability to practice infinite pains. On the contrary, the habit of making the act of writing a slow and conscientious toil grew upon him year by year. Few novelists of his degree of success have accepted. accepted adverse criticism in a more tolerant spirit. But there was one thing that he resented, and that was the charge of careless haste. People sometimes say that I write too fast, he protested not long before his death. They said so about my light-fingered gentry.

They don't know anything about it. I don't believe anyone ever wrote more slowly and laboriously. Every one of my books was written at least three times. He paused a moment, then added in correction. and when I say three times, it really means nine times, on account of my system of copying and revision. When once under full headway in a book, he worked immoderately, producing an actual bulk of material far in excess of what was needed for the limits of the story. I have writers cramp every spring, he said with a laugh.

As he became better acquainted with the characters and situations in a book, his great difficulty lay in confining himself to such details as were strictly relevant to his central purpose. He was hampered by knowing too much about his people, their habits of life and methods of thought. They were all the time taking matters into their own hands, and insisting upon his setting down upon paper all sorts of happenings quite extraneous to the story. According to his own estimate, he usually ended by discarding not only in paragraphs and episodes, but also in whole chapters, from two to three times as much as he retained in the published volume. nor are his faults of construction due to a lack of acquaintance with the best methods of the modern schools of fiction abroad as well as at home.

There are certain qualities in his later volumes, such as Old Wives for New, and the Second Generation, which are to be explained only through the influence of the best French realism, qualities which on the one hand are not the result of a conscious and deliberate imitation, but on the other cannot possibly have been an independent and spontaneous creation. The broad, zoalesque sweep of phrase and action, the sense of jostling crowds and ceaseless activity, the endless panorama of city streets, the whole trick of treating humanity in ranks and battalions, as though the crowd were a natural unit of measurement. These are things which Mr. Phillips learned to do as just a few other American writers,

Frank Norris, for instance, and Robert Herrick have learned to do them, and necessarily he must have studied at the fountainhead. Indeed, his whole conception of what a novel should be was French rather than Anglo-Saxon. When one discussed with him about theories of fiction, he would admit, frankly, on the one hand, that he had small use for such artificial devices for giving unity to a series of volumes as Belzac's scheme of the Comédie Humene,

or Zola's complicated family tree of the Rougeon-Maccar. But he did insist upon seeing every human story as a cross-section of life. And by a cross-section of life, he did not mean a little local slice carefully measured to fit the dimensions of the particular story he happened to be telling. On the contrary, if he was narrating the simple love affair of a boy and girl in some small town of the Middle West, he was always conscious, even though he had no need of bringing this out in the

story, that there was between that boy and girl and all the other people in that town an inevitable and all-pervading human relationship. That the town was not an isolated community, but was itself only a link in the vast network of social and industrial life stretching over the wide continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with endless miles of railroad intersecting it, with a centralized government, a president and Congress at Washington, and with countless lines of steamers keeping it in touch with the other world powers.

All this helps in a measure to show what to Mr. Phillips was a very vivid actuality. And of course the writer who always sees each little human happening, not as an isolated incident, but as a detail, in a tremendous and universal scheme, necessarily has a wider outlook upon life, and necessarily communicates to his readers a similar impression of bigness and of vitality. This brings us directly to the question, Why is it that so many of Mr. Phillips' books contain more of promise than of fulfillment? Why is it that, starting as they do with big ethical problems and a broad epic treatment,

they are so apt at the end to leave rather the impression of having given us an isolated and exceptional human story, than of having symbolized some broad and universal principle. The answer, I think, is simply this, that there was a curious anomaly in the manner in which Mr. Phillips' mind worked when in quest of the germ idea of a new story. In spite of the fact that his instinct led him to write purpose novels, and that his interest in social and economic problems was in some respects keener than his interest in people. Yet, according to his own admission, no story ever began to shape itself in his mind in the form of an abstract principle, an ethical doctrine. Reversing the usual process followed by writers of the epic type, he always

started from a single character or episode and built from these, sometimes indeed from nothing more definite than a face glimpsed for a moment in a crowd. A striking case in point is the origin that he assigned to one of the novels left unpublished at the time of his death. The theme of this story was the outgrowth of Mr. Phillips' deep interest in the economic independence of the modern woman, and more especially in the peculiar dangers and temptations which beset her, as contrasted with the more sheltered lives of her mother and grandmother. He had been deeply stirred by recent statistics regarding the influx of refined young southern women into New York, so many of them fated to be swept under by the surge of city life. He wanted to know whether such a girl could, by her own effort, struggle

up, out of the depths, to a position of independence and social standing. Such in substance is the longest book that Mr. Phillips ever wrote, a book that in the form in which he left it ran to considerably more than 300,000 words. The title of the book has not yet been made public, but it is probably safe to conjecture that it is the volume which he intended to call Susan. At all events, it is utterly unlike any of his previous efforts, and the author himself confessed that it baffled his powers of self-criticism. But, like all his other books, it received its first impetus, not from economics, but from a trivial incident, namely a passing glimpse of a young woman seated in a wagon. The incident in question occurred when the author

was a lad of fourteen. It was in a western town where he chanced to be staying at the time, and the face of the young woman in the farm wagon haunted him long afterward. It was a beautiful face, a face indicating breeding and culture, but it bore the stamp of dumb, hopeless tragedy. As he stood gazing at her, a gaunt elderly man, rugged and toil-stained, with the hallmark of the well-to-do farmer plainly visible upon him,

climbed to the seat beside her, gathered up the reins, and drove off. Mr. Phillips, a boy, though he was, noticed how the girl shrank and whitened as her companion's shoulder touched her. He heard the girl's story afterward. She belonged to a family of local prominence, But there had been a scandal, sordid, notorious, unforgettable.

The girl herself was probably the one person in the community who did not know the facts. She could not understand why her people were shunned socially, nor why they welcomed the chance of providing for her by marriage with an illiterate but prosperous old farmer who lived at a desirable distance from town. The girl's story has nothing to do with Mr. Phillips' novel, but the suffering on her face was his inspiration after the lapse of a quarter century. It is the logical result of Mr. Phillips' method of working from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general, that his big underlying principle, whatever it may be,

is never personified with that graphic visualization that makes it everywhere and at all times loom up portentously, as for instance in Zola's L'Agen, the bourse looms up. In Le Ventre de Paris, the Hall, in La Somois, the wine-chop, like so. many vast symbolic monsters wreaking their malignant pleasure upon mankind. In Mr. Phillips' books, one feels the ethical purpose far more vaguely. He is always stimulating. He sets us thinking deeply over big problems, most deeply perhaps when he most strongly antagonizes us. But it is difficult to say with precision, or, at all events, to say within the limits of ten words, just what principle any one book of his stands for.

Take, for instance, the best and strongest of all his books, the husband's story. Even here, the general public has groped rather helplessly to decide just what the author meant. It must be admitted that, on the whole, the general public has in this particular case been rather stupid in failing to recognize that when Mr. Phillips chose to see this particular story through the eyes of a certain shrewd and unscrupulous financier, he deprived himself of the chance of expressing his own ideas directly, and was obliged to give us every detail strong. colored by its passage through another man's temperament. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly to some extent Mr. Phillips' own fault that a majority of his readers assumed that the husband's story was an indictment of the American woman as a whole, and not

simply of one limited and ultra-snobbish type of American woman. And the same question of his meaning is raised with considerably more justice in every one of his earlier books. Is old wives for new a protest against girl and boy marriages, or an endorsement of divorce or both? Is the hungry heart an arraignment of the doll's house treatment of a wife or a plea for equal standards for man and woman in questions of morality? And is the second generation to be taken mainly as a protest against inherited fortunes, a glorification of work, or as a satire upon the snobbery of America's idle class? In other words, had Zola written this book, would his symbol for it have been the probate

Court, the dinner pale, or the powdered flunky. It was part and parcel of Mr. Phillips' habitual tendency to see his cross-section of life in its entirety that he found himself unable to do one thing at a time, found himself obliged to complicate and obscure his central purpose by having, in reality, several simultaneous central purposes. This brings us face to face with the real fault of Mr. Phillips' method of work, the real weakness of even his best achievements. He was not merely the clear-eyed and impartial observer of life. He was always a partisan and a reformer. His interest was so keen in the problems he was seeking to set forth that he found it impossible to keep himself and his ideas out of them. Of course, when you take one of Mr. Phillips' novels to

pieces, you discover that in its essence it is a problem novel. But this side of his work he had learned to disguise pretty cleverly. It is not so much the way in which he twisted the lives of his characters in order to point a moral, as it is the slight running comment going all through the narrative portions of his stories that keeps us reminded both of his personal outlook upon life, and of the annoying fact that he is trying to do our thinking for us. Here, for instance, is a trivial little example that may stand as typical of his method. In White Magic, he had occasion to tell us, as evidence of the expensive scale on which his heroine's mother ran her summer home, that she had no less than five footmen in attendance at the

the front door. Now, some of us may think this mere foolishness, others may wax indignant over it as a criminal extravagance, and others again simply regarded as no more than what was proper for a person in her position of life. Mr. Phillips had as good a right as anybody else to his own opinion about it, but it was not good art for him to force that opinion upon the reader by couching this little fact in the following terms. Five lackeys, five strapping fellows with dumb faces and the stalwart figure is that the rich select as menial showpieces. There is a veiled sneer in the very intonation of such a sentence that is incompatible with the best art. It is this uncontrolled tendency to inject the personal equation into his books

that every now and then sets the reader tingling with sudden antagonism in the midst of some of his strongest scenes. His outlook upon life was extremely clear-eyed and broad, and if he had been content to give us the uncolored facts and let us think what we would about them, we should get considerably more benefit as well as enjoyment out of contact with his people and their histories. That there is a good deal of snobbery among our wealthy and fashionable class. Our imitation aristocracy of money is undoubtedly true. And to the average sane-minded American, there is something distinctly foolish in the sight of an American mother trailing her daughters through Europe, with the open and unashamed intention of selling them

to a title. But after all, questions of this kind are largely a matter of the point of view. There is no useful purpose served in waxing indignant over people who happen to regulate their lives somewhat differently from the way in which you or I would regulate our lives. It is always worthwhile to set forth as strongly as possible in a story certain existing social conditions, which the author in his secret heart condemns, but there is nothing gained by insisting that the reader must condemn them also. It may very well happen that the reader does not at all share the author's views, and in that case such an attempt to prejudice him is

fully as irritating as is the coloring given to news in a paper of the opposite political party to your own. This interference on the part of Mr. Phillips, born as it was of over-earness produced upon the types of his people and the construction of his plots certain modifications which are precisely what a shrewd judge of books might have expected in advance to find there. In the first place, it led him quite frequently to picture, not what average people are doing under existing conditions, but what somewhat unusual people would, in his opinion, have done under conditions just the reverse of those that exist.

As, for instance, in the second generation, not what happens to the inefficient heirs of great wealth when the hard-working father dies, but to the distinctly exceptional and self-sufficient children of a rich man who, for their own good, deliberately disinherits them. Or, again in white magic, he studied not the typical case of the girl reared in wealth and luxury who, upon losing her heart to an impecunious artist, fights a long battle

with herself because she cannot go against her training. But the exceptional case of the girl who flings such training to the winds and brazenly offers her heart and hand to the penniless artist in question, who, being himself equally an exception, repulses her because he selfishly thinks that she will interfere with his art. And secondly, this tendency to tell us what we ought to think has its effect upon the individualization of his character. and more especially upon his women. What I mean here is best illustrated by taking for a moment a book from which this particular fault is absent, the husband's story. The fact that this book was written in the first person made it of course impossible for Mr. Phillips to obtrude directly his own opinions.

And probably it is due to this fact quite as much as to any other that, artistically speaking, this is the best book that he produced. The character of the wife Edna we get entirely as colored by the husband's husband's, eyes, as strongly colored as though we were looking at her through a piece of stained glass. The admirable thing about it is that the color is uniformly and consistently maintained from start to finish, a bit of craftsmanship that requires a rather masterly touch. In turning from this book to others that are not written in the first person, we realize that a good deal of the time Mr. Phillips was coloring his women, not so strongly to be sure, but nonetheless to a noticeable extent.

in other words that he was forcing us to see them through the medium of his own eyes instead of directly from life. We become aware of this by finding that he quite frequently expects us, indeed demands of us, to admire things that his heroines do and say, which we ourselves can not find at all admirable. And sometimes he has led into making them take certain actions that we are quite sure the women that we ourselves think they are would not have been guilty of taking. But questions of this kind are not a matter for. for generalization. They can be better understood when we proceed to take up for separate analysis a few of the more significant of Mr. Phillips' novels. During the dozen years that represent

the period of his activity as a writer of fiction, Mr. Phillips produced somewhat less than a score of volumes. To analyze these books one by one in the order of their appearance, beginning with the great God, success, and a woman ventures, and coming steadily down the list through golden fleece and the cost, and all the rest of them, would be not only tiresome but futile. It would be simply one of the many ways of making it impossible to see the woods because of the trees. Mr. Phillips was striving from the start to do pretty much the same sort of thing in all his work, and the only practical difference between his later volumes and his earlier is that he was steadily learning to do the same sort of thing considerably better.

For this reason there is no point in spending time on those earlier volumes than if one writing an analysis of Zola, it would be worthwhile to waste space on Madeline Ferra and Nantes and Therese Rackin. In point of fact, one gets quite effectively the whole range of Mr. Phillips' powers, and also of his weaknesses in the volumes that belong to his period of mature development, the volumes produce within the last four or five years. The second generation is probably the best book to recommend to a reader approaching Mr. Phillips for the first time, because on the one hand, it contains less than most of his books that is likely to arouse antagonism, and on the other, it admirably illustrates his strongest qualities, his ability to give you the sense of life

and emotion in the clash of many interests. The substance of it can be told in rather fewer words than his usual with Mr. Phillips' novels. Old Hiram Ranger, millionaire manufacturer of barrels in a small western town, suddenly makes two rather painful discoveries. First, he learns that his remarkable physical strength, which has never once failed him throughout all his years, is at last breaking, and that he has not many days in which to set his house in order. And his second and even more painful discovery is that for twenty years he has unwittingly been harming his son and his daughter by over-indulgence, allowing them to grow up in idleness, to form foolish and extravagant tastes, to choose their friends exclusively from the ultra-fashionable

circles, and to learn to despise the humble beginnings from which he himself sprang, and from which the money that they thoughtlessly waste has come. He decides in bitter agony of soul that there is, at this late date, only one thing that he can do to repair his huge mistake, and that is to deprive his children of the inheritance on which they have counted. The act hurts him more cruelly than it can possibly hurt them. It hurts him through his love for them, through his pride in them, and through his desire for public esteem and approval, since he foresees that such an act will be misunderstood and disapproved. All of this part of the story, the old man's sturdy courage and shrewd common sense,

contrasted with the weak vanity and costly luxury of the son and daughter, is given with graphic truth, rugged strength, and a sure swiftness of movement. But from the middle point of the story, we get a rather exasperating impression that we are being allowed to behold not so much a cross-section of life as an up-to-date morality play. Old Hiram Ranger has chosen rather drastic methods to teach his son and daughter a lesson to reform their characters, practically to make them over. No one can say that a situation thus created is without interest, but it becomes exasperating to find that the old man has made his calculations with the sureness of omnipotence, that his plan succeeds even in all its minor details, and that the son and daughter repent of all their errors, reform themselves completely,

are to all intents and purposes, born anew. Mr. Phillips was probably not conscious of it when he wrote the book, but nonetheless, it is to all practical intense, a grown-up version of the story of the bad little boy who went fishing on Sunday and was drowned, and the good little boy who went to church and was rewarded with plum-pudding. A dozen different readers would probably give a dozen different statements of the central theme of Old Wives for New.

The real importance of this book, for among Mr. Phillips' books, it is unquestionably one of the important ones, is that it sets forth quite pitilessly the gradual estrangement that arises between a husband and wife in the course of long years through the woman's sloth and selfishness and gratification of all her whims. It is an open question whether Mr. Phillips' method of presenting this problem might not have been improved upon. What he has done is to show us first in a brief prelude the sudden ardor of a boy and girl attachment, each caught by the mere physical charm of youth and health and high spirits, and rushing into our marriage with no firm basis of mutual

understanding. Then he skips an interval of about twenty years, and takes us into the intimate life of this same couple, showing us with a frankness of speech and of thought that is almost cruel in its unsparing realism the physical and mental degeneration of the woman, fat and old and slovenly before her time, and the unspoken repulsion felt by the man who has kept himself young, alert and thoroughly modern in outward appearance as well as in spirit. The situation is complicated by the presence of two grown children, a son and a daughter who see unwillingly the approaching crisis and realize their helplessness to ward it off. Such a situation in real life may solve itself in any one of fifty different ways.

What Mr. Phillips has chosen to do is to bring the husband in contact with a young woman who represents everything in which his own wife is lacking. and although the man fights for a long time against temptation, in the end he obtains freedom from the old wife through the divorce court and promptly replaces her with the new. There is probably no other American novel that gives us with such direct and unflinching clairvoyance the sordid, repellent, intimate little details of a mistaken marriage that slowly but surely culminates in a sort of physical nausea and an inevitable separation. What a good many of us are apt to resent in the book is the stamp of a

approval that the author seems to place upon the man who deliberately discards a wife after her youth and beauty are gone, not because he thinks it for their mutual welfare, but for the cold-blooded reason that he wants to marry somebody else. There is a sort of heartless immorality about the whole proceeding that makes us feel that the slovenly faded wife, with her shallow pretense of having worn herself out with household cares, her gluttony that has been the ruin of health and beauty, her peevish temper and ridiculous vanity, makes on the whole a rather better showing than the husband. One cannot leave this book without adding just a word of protest against what may seem a trivial detail, yet is the sort of detail in which Mr. Phillips' technique sins rather frequently.

The husband has met the woman who embodies his ideal of feminine perfection, quite by chance in the woods where he and his son are camping out. In the course of three weeks, almost without there knowing it, they have fallen in love with each other. Then comes the awakening and they go their separate ways, the man still knowing nothing of the woman's identity, of her station in life, or of the particular corner of America which is her home. Several chapters later, the man is in New York helping his daughter buy her trousseau. There are a thousand shops in New York from which she might choose, but purely by chance she takes her father to the one shop which happens to be presided over by the woman with whom he is in love. A coincidence of this sort is bad enough

when it seems to be more or less of a structural necessity. But when, as in this case, one can think of a dozen simple ways of avoidance, it becomes unpardonable. There is only one excuse for pausing to speak of Mr. Phillips' next volume, the fashionable adventures of Joshua Craig, namely that it shows that even yet the author was weakened the power of self-criticism. How it was possible for a writer possessing the breadth of view and the power of expression that have gone into the making of at least.

least four or five of Mr. Phillips' best novels, to put forth seriously a piece of cheap caricature like Joshua Craig quite passes the understanding of the ordinary impartial outsider. Joshua Craig is simply an exaggerated specimen of a rather exasperating type of novel, which has unfortunately become far too common in American fiction. The novel which shows the refined and carefully nurtured American girl, usually from the east, belying all her inherited instincts and acquired training by marrying the rugged, virile, usually rather vulgar man of the people, who, for the purposes of this type of novel, is generally represented as coming from the West. The whole type seems to have originated at about the time that Owen Wister made

Molly's New England conscience capitulate to the Virginian, and the type has steadily degenerated year by year. But of course, it is never fair to quarrel with an author simply because one does not happen to like what he has tried to do. The trouble with Joshua Craig is that he has so obviously failed to do what he tried. Joshua is not merely bluff and rugged and primitive of manner. He is loud-mouthed and vulgar and deliberately discourteous. Margaret Severance, the reigning beauty of Washington, whom he decides in his stormy, violent, irresistible way to marry,

not because he loves her, but because he conceives the idea that she loves him, is in point of manners pretty nearly his match. She has a way of look at it. at people with a lady's insolent tranquility. And on one occasion when she receives a letter that angers her, and her maid happens at the same moment to be buttoning her shoes, she relieves her feelings by springing up and bringing her sharp French heel down with full force on the back of her maid's hand, leaving its skinned and bleeding. She is distinctly an unpleasant personality, yet even so, to marry her to such a cyclonic bore as Joshua Craig does seem rather

like making the punishment exceed the crime. Passing over white magic, which is simply an innocuous little love story told with rather more explosive violence than the theme warrants, we come to the two books that exhibit Mr. Phillips' ripest powers. The Hungry Heart and The Husband Story. The Hungry Heart is a sincere and detailed study of a marriage that threatens to be a failure because the man adheres to old-fashioned standards regarding women, while the wife, with her modern education and progressive views, finds it impossible to accept the role of domesticity and in action to which she would assign her.

As a piece of careful construction, this volume deserves frank praise. The entire action takes place within the house and grounds of the husband's ancestral home. The cast of characters is limited to just four people, two men and two women. We hardly get even a passing glimpse of any outsiders, friends or relatives, or even servants. And yet within this little world of four people, we get a sense of universality of theme and interest, an impression not of learning the secrets of a few isolated lives, but of learning much that is big and vital about man and woman. There is nothing essentially new in the specific story.

It is simply one of the many variants of the familiar triangle. The husband and wife who drift apart, the other man who takes advantage of a woman's loneliness to persuade her that she is in love when really she is only bored. and finally the inevitable discovery by the husband of his wife's infidelity what gives the book its value is not the episode of the wife's frailty but the wise far-sighted understanding of the way in which two people physically mentally and morally well equipped to make each other happy gradually dripped apart through stubborn adherence to foolish prejudices mistaken reticence petty misunderstandings and a hundred and one of which by itself is worth a second thought while the cumulative effect of the them all becomes fatal. Mr. Phillips' solution of the story in which he makes the wife experience a revulsion of feeling that drives her from her lover back to her husband, while the husband, after hearing her confession, not only forgives her, but practically admits that he is glad

everything has happened as it has, because the effect upon him is to have reawakened his love. This solution comes as a disappointment. One feels it to be in the nature of an anti-climax to an exceptionally fine piece of work. that a man of this husband's conventional conservative type could bring himself to pardon and receive back the woman who admits her guilt with a frankness of speech that makes one wince rings false. Forgiveness under such circumstances is a delusion and a blunder. The ghost of such a past would simply refuse to be laid.

An interesting sidelight on the concluding chapters of the hungry heart, which in point of fact came near to being the author's favorite among all his books, is shed by the following anecdote. It was pointed out to him one day in friendly criticism that a woman such as the heroine was portrayed to be throughout the first half of the story would neither have remained with her lover nor gone back to her husband, but would have lived alone unless some third man eventually came into her life.

This comment impressed Mr. Phillips to an extent which seemed disproportionate until he confessed that the solution of a third man was precisely what he had planned from the start as definitely as it lay in him to plan anything in advance. But he explained, when he had reached the midway point, his characters took the matter quite out of his hands. He suddenly awoke to the realization that his heroine was quite a different woman from what he had all along supposed her to be.

She made it clear to him that she was not the kind either to hold to the old lover or to take a new one. She was the type of woman who would have the courage to go back. If I have not made her convincing, he concluded, to that extent the hungry heart is a failure, but, he added undauntedly, I know the type of woman I was after, and I know she would have done just what I made this woman do. Lastly, we have the husband's story, which is the type of book that we had long had the right to expect for Mr. Phillips, and which, if he had been spared, might have been the first of a long series of equal strength and bigness.

Like all of this author's best previous work, it is a study of marriage that failed. and the reason that it is a better and bigger book than any of his others is not because of his theme, but because of his workmanship. The thing is better done in its underlying structure, in its working out of details, in all that goes to make up good technique. Robert Herrick, when he wrote the diary of an American citizen, attempted to handle much the same subject in the same way, but that book, clever though it was, hardly did more than scratch the surface of the opportunity lurking in his theme. Mr. Phillips dug deeper.

He has shown us in the lives of a certain couple, Godfrey Loring and Edna his wife, all the artificiality and selfishness, the empty ambitions and false ideals that lie behind the tinsel and glitter of the so-called 400. The husband tells the story with great simplicity and directness.

He makes no secret of the utter sordidness of their origin in Passaic, New Jersey, of Edna's father, the undertaker, known as old Weeping Willie, and his own father, honest, innocent soul with a taste for talking what he thought was politics. He makes it clear that Edna married him not for love, but because he was getting the biggest salary of any of the young fellows whom she knew and so offered her the best chance of advancement. She deliberately intended when she married him to get as much out of him as could be gotten by

clever driving, nor could she have planned the thing more ruthlessly had she been acquiring a beast of burden instead of a husband. Now the one thing that is, you know, the one thing that saves the story and renders it at all possible is the fact that the husband is an exceptional man with that extra sense which constitutes the business instinct and coupled with it a saving sense of humor. The early chapters, picturing the transition period while Edna was floundering out of the half-baked standards of Passaic into the midway stage of Brooklyn, are full of those wonderful little flashes of first-hand observation that seem like fragments filched, if not directly out of your life and mine, at least from that of the family next door or of the neighbor across

the street. This husband is never for an instant under any illusion about his wife. He realizes her incompetence, the incompetence of thousands of young American wives for the particular work they have undertaken, the work of wife and of mother and of housekeeper. He realizes to her craving for social advancement, and, in a half-confessed way, he sympathizes with her and is willing to accept the fruits of her social conquests, although he will not raise a finger toward helping her. This, perhaps, is the cleverest touch in Mr. Phillips satire. He does not tell us in so many words that the husband is just as much at fault as the wife, just as unfitted for his task of husband, and father and master of the house as she is for her duties. But he makes this perfectly clear,

and distributes the blame with an admirable equity. If she has been cold and calculating and dishonest in her social life, he has been cold and calculating and dishonest in his business life. If she is meanly and snobbishly ashamed of the people from whom she sprang, so also is he. If she has been too absorbed in her schemes for advancement to give him the companionship due from a wife, he in turn is too absorbed in huge financial deals to give her the love and care due from a husband. In other words, this book might be defined as an indictment of the high life, American marriage, on the ground of the woman's vaulting ambition and overweening self-importance, and the man's inertia, coupled with his absorption in the busy game of

chasing dollars. A large part of the merit of this undeniably big novel lies in what it merely implies rather than in what it says. To conceive a story of this sort is something in itself to be proud of, but to conceive of telling it through the husband's lips was a stroke of genius. To have told it in any other way would have been to rob it of its greatest merit, the all-pervading sting of its satire. As I have tried frankly to recognize, Mr. Phillips was a writer with many qualities and some defects, like all men who have it in them to do big things. But it would have been easy to forgive more serious faults than his in anyone possessing his breadth and depth of interest in the serious problems of American life and his outspoken fearlessness in handling them.

There are, unfortunately, few in this country today who are even trying to do the sort of work that he was doing. And the fact that he did it with apparent ease, and that he had reached a point where he had begun to do it with triumphant strength multiplies tenfold, the tragedy of his untimely death. The interruption of fate at the midpoint in his career has entailed a loss to American fiction, not only irreparable, but one which can never be accurately measured. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 7. Robert Herrick It was in the autumn of 1897 that Professor Robert Herrick, who occupies the chair of rhetoric in the University of Chicago,

produced a novel entitled The Gospel of Freedom. His name at that time was not quite unknown in fiction. thanks to a few earlier efforts more notable for manner than for content. Yet, the Gospel of Freedom came quite unheralded, a glad surprise to the serious student of fiction, who at that period was forced to take a rather pessimistic view of the future of the American novel. One did not need to read a dozen pages before discovering

that here was a man who was familiar with the best of what the modern French school has to offer, who understood wherein lay the strength of Montaussain, of Bourget, of Zola, and in a tentative and by no means inadequate way was trying to profit by their teaching. Its theme was one already familiar to readers of continental literature. The revolt of the modern neurotic woman against the trammels of social conventions, the awakening of the unhappily mated wife to a sense of her inborn right to live her own life in her own way. In other words, it was a variation of the underlying motif of Magda, of Hedagbler, of the Daweshouse, executed with a nice appreciation of European craftsmanship

and an equally subtle insight into peculiarly American conditions. Altogether it was a book of big promise, in spite of considerable unevenness and here and there a touch that was almost crude. At the time it looked bigger, no doubt, than it does today, as we glance back at it along the vista of his later achievements. One realizes now that he had not yet found himself, that he was working a trifle uncertainly, with tools not quite adapted to his needs,

experiencing the dilemma of a foreign-trained machinist attempting to put together American-made implements with nuts and screws cut to a scale of centimeters instead of inches. What he had not yet learned to do and what he soon realized that he must learn before success could come was to adapt continental methods to Anglo-Saxon needs, to revise his craftsmanship, with the same independent courage

with which from the beginning he had chosen his themes. It was during this transition, period, this process of finding himself, of discovering just what he was trying to do and how he was trying to do it, that the two books of least interest as stories and of least worth in point of technique were written, the web of life and the real world. One feels in reading them over again today that the two titles in some degree symbolize the mental attitude of their author at that time. Like his heroes, Mr. Herrick was finding the threads of life's web in a rather sorry tangle and was groping for a solution of the world's real meaning. And so inevitably they forced the reader to do

some little groping on his own account. In short, like many another author's second and third book they were disappointing, and people who had based their faith upon the Gospel of Freedom were justified in asking, is Mr. Herrick destined to remain in the rank of writers of a single book? But the appearance in due course of time of the common lot, and its still more virile successor, the memoirs of an American citizen, answered this question with a vigorous and welcome negative, and foreshadowed the coming of the volume which remains to this day, not only Mr. Herrick's biggest achievement, but the finest, boldest, most representative piece of American fiction that has appeared within the past decade. Together. And this statement is made not merely with Mr. Herrick's

subsequent volume, a life for a life, clearly in mind, but largely for the purpose of discriminating sharply against it. A life for a life represents, as we shall presently see, a curious, and it is to be hoped, a transient apostasy. Something still remains in it of the old Herrick. Certain pages here and there of a purely pictorial character flash forth, with a graphicness that is almost cruel in its unsparing truth, the swarming, turgid city life of today. Nonetheless, when the sum total of its plus and minus values has been honestly taken, a life for a life must be set down upon the debit side of its author's literary account. In other words, it is a rather audacious, rather

splendid failure. But before considering this new phase of Mr. Herrick's development, it is essential to run over quite briefly his earlier novels and thus obtain a bird's-eye view of what in each case he has tried to do and how far he has succeeded in doing it. The first thing of which you become aware in taking up the Gospel of Freedom is the initial debt which its author owed to Ibsen and Zoodleman, and to that whole tendency in drama and fiction that took its impulse from Haimath and Hedagabla. In other words, its theme is in the main the spirit of revolt of the modern, restless, somewhat neurotic woman against the established conventions and the tragedy which such a revolt entails, because the woman fails to understand

that freedom is something that must start from within and not from without. something that cannot be acquired by a mere payment of money or a plaguant breaking of the marriage bond. Adela Anton is too healthy-minded a young woman to be classed with the magdaes and headas of the old world, but she has, to a large extent, a strain of what, for lack of a preciser term, is a want to be stigmatized artistic temperament. She does not quite despise the brick industry on which the colossal fortune of the Antons has been reared, nor the comfortable blocks of brick stock which form her independent means. But she does rebel against the prescribed routine of her conventional social life,

forces her family to allow her the semi-liberty of a course in the Paris art schools, and at the opening of the book, seems in a fair way to marry Simeon Erar, a penniless dabbler in art, a parasite on her uncle's bounty, who has shown much promise in a dozen different lines and accomplishment in none. But before she makes up her mind to bestow her hand and fortune on her, Errar. In fact, before Errar has made up his mind to ask her, a restless, energetic, successful young Westerner, John Wilbur, who is spending a hard-earned vacation in Paris, takes her by storm, dazzles her with the picturesque account of his big achievements in irrigation

machinery, and more particularly his conquest over men and over natural forces. Marriage with him would mean a splendid partnership, a new and undreamed-up freedom, an opportunity to have a share in the world's big enterprises. The awakening comes quickly. Marriage, she learns with a shock, is not a partnership. It has its obligations against which she rebels mutely. But of compensations, in the shape of an understanding and interest in her husband's vast business schemes,

she finds there is nothing for her. Within a year after her marriage, she is declaring bitterly, there is no freedom for women. They are marked and capable from their birth and are supported by men for some obvious and necessary services. between times they have a few and different joys dealt out to them. But what brings about, the final wreck of her marriage is not merely temperamental incompatibility, but a difference in standards of honour and business integrity.

Wilbur's business conscience is elastic. If he does not actually have a hand in bribing the legislature to pass certain railroad measures that send stocks and bonds soaring upward, he does participate in the profits. And what Adela finds impossible to forgive is that the very house she lives in is paid for with what she persists in regarding a stolen money. Then follow the death of her only child. The arrival in Chicago of Simeon-Eira and his somewhat too-pronounced friendship with Adela, her husband's rather vulgar jealousy of the artist, and finally Adela's open revolt, her refusal to live any longer in a marriage

that she feels as only a bondage, and her departure to Paris for an indefinite period. reckless of conventions, she openly flaunts her friendship with Erard, a friendship which in her defiant mood she is willing to let drift to any length. But Erra, coldly working for his own best interest, bides his time until the news comes that her husband through the courts has given the wife her freedom. In this, however, he overreaches himself. This subservience to the world's opinion on the part of the man who had taught her to despise conventions, and to whom until now she would willingly have given herself,

brands him, in her eyes, a hypocrite, with whom life would be simply another and ignobler form of bondage. She realizes at last that in her rebellion she has not been attaining freedom, but simply beating herself impotently against the bars of a prison largely of her own making. It has seemed worthwhile to examine the Gospel of Freedom at some length, because in it we find already well developed the two themes that in one form or another underlie all Mr. Herrick's subsequent work. The discords of sex and the discords of commercialism. Adela Wilbur's repudiation of her marriage duties,

John Wilbur's repudiation of the highest standards of business integrity, are only the first instances in a long series of lives that Mr. Herrick shows us, wrecking themselves on the same dangerous shoals. The web of life and the real world, his next two books in point of time, need only a brief mention, because they are rather loose, in structure and of no great significance in the history of his development. The web of life may be conveniently defined as a male gospel of freedom, a man's rebellion against the obligations which the world's conventions thrust upon him,

just as Adela Wilbur rebelled against the obligations that life laid upon her. Howard Summers is a promising young physician, whose good fortune it is to find on landing in Chicago that some old friends of the family, the influential and wealthy Hitchcock's are disposed to help him, that the daughter Louise Hitchcock looks upon him with favor, that a place is open for him on the staff of the famous Dr. Lindsay, in short, that he is on the high road to fortune. But his professional conscience will not leave him in peace.

His impractical ideals teach him that it is wrong for a physician to accept payment beyond a mere pittance. His intolerance of the conventions of a fashionable practice makes his early expulsion from Dr. Lindsay's office a foregone conclusion. and the long, disheartening hand-to-mouth struggle that follows, with all its inherent miseries, and the incidental loss of the woman he loves, is needful to bring him to a sane understanding of the necessity of accepting the world as it is, and effecting an honorable compromise between reality and our ideals. The real world, while it is an attempt to develop still further this same idea, is mainly interesting as a study of individual lives. The gradual building up of Jack

Pemberton's character, from his early boyhood, isolated on a small farm on the main coast, until he finally achieves success, prosperity, and happiness, is undoubtedly a fine and strong piece of portraiture executed with a more assured touch than Mr. Herrick had previously achieved. The high purposes which take permanent hold upon the lad at the prompting of a girl seemingly forever beyond his reach, and which continue to force him onward and upward, step by step, even when the girl herself has disappointed his ideals and would have dragged him down with her, are all interpreted with such sympathetic understanding that the secrets of a human soul are laid bare before us, and we understand, minutely and intimately, how Jack Pemberton succeeded in his endeavor to keep faith with life.

But Mr. Herrick's strength lies, not in the probing analysis of individual lives, but in the broad, comprehensive interpretation of human motives and tendencies in the mass. and this gift of generalization this rare ability to treat life on an epic scale with a bold sweep of brushstrokes an imposing breadth of canvas has developed and progressed steadily with each successive volume up to the full ripeness of together the first of his stories however that showed clearly wherein his real strength lay was the common lot like all stories of the bigger type it has a twofold motive first a specific story of the struggle of a young architect between his artistic ideals on the one hand, and business success on the other. Secondly, the big general far-reaching problem whether the common lot, the comparative obscurity and narrowness of the vast majority of lives, is not better and happier than wealth and position attained at the cost of self-esteem. Francis Jackson begins with splendid

ambitions, and had the millionaire uncle who gave him his training at the Paris Beaux-A also made him his heir instead of leaving the bulk of his fortune to found an industrial school, the nephew might never have felt the temptation to be untrue to his art or to compromise with his conscience. But, under the goad of vanity and ambition and a feverish desire for wealth, he yields to the tempting offers of a dishonest contractor, consents little by little to turn out inferior work, to permit shameless tampering with specifications, to connive at the bribery of building inspectors, in short, to lend himself to every crooked trick known to the profession. And one fine day, retribution overtakes him. He is disgraced in the eyes of his friends and relatives because they

discover that the industrial school erected under his direction with his uncle's money is a fraudulent piece of work from cellar to roof. This, however, can be and is hushed up. But another and worse disaster follows. The destruction by fire of a so-called fireproof hotel, which, with his full knowledge the contractor has so skimped and slighted that it is little more than a cardboard death trap. And even if the scandal could be silenced, Jackson could never silence the memory of the victim's screams as they flung themselves from the windows or fell inward to a still worse fate. The experience leaves Francis Jackson a sadder but far wiser architect. And although he lives down the scandal, he has learned his lesson well. That it is better to share the common lot

and be at peace with oneself than at the cost of self-respect to attain wealth and power and the envious admiration of the world. Because, there are few things that make any great difference to real men and women, and one of the least is the casual judgment of their fellow men. The memoirs of an American citizen, which might with equal aptitude have been called the Confessions of a Chicago Packer, treats more specifically and from the opposite point of view, the whole big problem of honest and dishonest business methods. Edward Harrington comes to Chicago, a friendless lad with a friendless lad with a

without money or prospects. He begins as driver for a retail market, and from this he works himself up, step by step, by clever tricks, unscrupulous moves, dishonest deals and combinations, until he ends as controlling power of the meat trust, master of the destinies of many railways, banks and trust companies, and United States Senator from Illinois. There is not a step in his upward path that by the higher standards of honesty is quite beyond a approach, not an achievement that is not somewhere besmirched. Yet, as he unfolds this very frank and ingenuous chronicle, you feel that the man is honest in his frankness,

that he believes himself to be in the right, and justifies to himself each and every questionable act. He believes that it is best for the world that he shall succeed, and in order to succeed he must fight the world with its own weapons. And at the end, he looks out over the city of Chicago with its drifting smoke, its ceaseless traffic. quote i too was a part of this the thought of my brain the labor of my body the will within me had gone to the making of this world there were my plants my carline my railroads my elevators my lands all good tools in the infinite work of this world conceived for good or for ill brought into being by fraud or daring what man could judge their worth there they were a part of god's great

world. They were done, and mine was the hand. Let another more perfect turn them to a larger use. Nevertheless, on my labor, on me, he must build. Involuntarily my eyes rose from the ground and looked straight before me to the vista of time. Surely there was another scale, a grander one, and by this I should not be found wholly wanting. There in a paragraph we get the colossal egotistical, invincible confidence of the successful magnet in the justice of his cause. And yet, had he stopped here, Mr. Herrick's picture would have remained unfinished and not quite convincing. But, with unerring instinct, he has added here and there the needful little ironic touch. This masterful man, so sure of himself, so infallible, so far beyond the reach of malice

or envy, knows that there are just two or three people in the world whose approbation he craves and cannot win. The old judge, who once befriended him, and now does not see him when they pass. The trusted employee who will no longer serve him. His brother's wife, who in early days might have been his own, had he chosen to speak, and who now would starve and see her family starve with her, rather than take a penny of his money. It is the knowledge of these facts that rankles and adds a dash of bitterness to his final triumph. To sum up this brief review of Mr. Herrick's past achievements, the general impression that they make upon the critical mind is

that, granting their strength, their subtle understanding of life, their admirable lights and shades, their frequent splendid brilliancy of description, they, after all, suggest not so much an accomplishment as an apprenticeship to something bigger and higher. To be sure, they are American, unmistakably so, the product of keen interest and intimate understanding of the conditions of life in this country, and more specifically of life in the big progressive Middle West, and considered as individual volumes, stories of separate human lives, little groups of humanity working out their individual destinies, they deserve to stand high in the list of the best fiction our writers have produced in the last decade. But from the first volume to the last we cannot

escape the impression that Mr. Herrick's dominant interest is in something beyond the mere story he has to tell, that his ideal of fiction is to present through the medium of individual men and women, the big basic problems on which depend the welfare of a people, and what is more, so to present them as to force the reader, whether he will or not, to take thought of them. Hitherto, however, he has not been ready to accomplish on a big scale the sort of novel of which he has so evidently dreamed. The novel of wide, sweeping, zolayesque magnitude, with its symbolic title, its crowded canvas, its motley panorama of human lives. Central ideas he has had, to be sure, and his title of the title of the subject of.

as well as his themes have not been lacking in symbolism, but there was a certain vagueness about them, a lack of specific intent. One might, without serious injustice, shuffle his titles and redistribute them. In a general way, the central characters in all these books are struggling in the web of life,

learning their lesson of disillusion from the real world, rebelling against the common lot, and thirsting for the gospel of freedom. It is curious to see how, with each successive book, Mr. Herrick has broadened his field of vision as his knowledge of life has widened, how he began as a psychologist of the school of Bourget and Henry James, and little by little swung around to the freer, more objective methods of the realist, caring less and less for the vivisection of a human heart under a microscope, and more and more

for tracing the orbit of an ethical problem through a telescope. Sooner or later, those who had faith in him felt sure that Mr. Herrick would produce a really big book, perhaps the first of a series of big books. And suddenly, and rather sooner than was expected, he justified this belief with together, his fine, sane, fearless study of American marriage. It may be said with some assurance that no American novel of such ambitious purpose and such a sweeping amplitude of outlook has been written since Frank Norris gave us the opening volumes of his epic of the wheat. And no such relentless probing into the subtle character of American womanhood since Robert Grant precipitated a war of critics over unleavened bread.

And there is this important distinction to be made in favor of Mr. Harick's book, that whereas Robert Grant gave us in Selma White just one memorable type, the author of Together, has given us a score of types, every one of them undeniably, surprisingly, triumphantly true and essentially American. As we have already seen, throughout the wide diversity of his themes, One of Mr. Herrick's persistent preoccupations is the tragedy of mismated marriage. Sometimes, as in the Gospel of Freedom, the woman simply mistook for love her unbounded enthusiasm for the man's fighting strength, his virile power to achieve success.

Sometimes, as in the real world, she makes the more sordid and less pardonable blunder of thinking that wealth and social prestige will compensate her for the absence of love. Sometimes, as in the common lot, she loves not the actual man whom she has married. but a figment of her imagination, an ideal that she has created in his image. And when one day he stands revealed and she sees him as he is, the whole universe crumbles miserably to pieces around her. In comparison, however, with together, all these earlier themes take on the aspect of preparatory studies, trials of strength, as it were, preparing the way to his first

big, unqualified achievement. There is no useful purpose to be served by attempting to analyze the central story of together. Like L'Argent or La Samois, it has no central plot in the usual conventional sense, but just as Zola's novels are the embodiment of some big symbolic idea, frenzied finance personified by the bourse, intemperance by the wine shop, earth's universal motherhood by the soil, so Robert Herrick has, for his central figure, the personification of marriage. The married life of Isabel Price and John Long, with whose wedding the volume opens. leaving them, henceforth man and wife before the law, before their kind, one and one and yet not two,

is obviously not intended by the author to be more typical or more significant than the score of other marriages of which he unveils for us the intimate joys and griefs. Every well-composed canvas must have its central group, its focal point towards which its significant lines converge. But in, together, we must bear in mind that it is not Isabel Price, who is the real protagonist, but marriage with a capital M, the symbolic figure of American Waifood. Graphic as the picture is of this particular couple's first mistakes, their temporary and makeshift readjustment and their slow, reluctant awakening to actualities, this special side of the book, considered as an individual human story, is only a fragment, an unfinished

pattern, a single thread in the intricate and complex fabric of human lives that the author has patiently and splendidly woven. It is not the individual nature of Isabel Price that we remember as we call to mind those bold opening chapters, which are probably the most thought-compelling portrayal of a young couple crossing the threshold of married life that any author has given since Mopin wrote his unforgettable pages in Unvie.

She stands for us simply as the average type of young American womanhood, entering blithely, unthinkingly, unwarned, upon the most serious obligations of life more engrossed in the guests the presence the fit of her wedding-gown the brilliant social function of which for the moment she is the centre than she is in the years of intimate companionship that lie before her and then after all has been done as ordained by the church according to the rules of society and it remains for man and wife to make of it what they would or could The inevitable awakening comes, and they look into each other's eyes, as countless thousands of wedded couples have done before them, and realize that they are looking into the eyes of strangers. It is not on this particular couple that our gaze should be focused as we read, but on those countless couples that preceded them and the countless other couples that are fated to follow. The crucial point is not the mere fact that this particular marriage was a mistake, but that it was, one of the millions of mistakes women make out. of the girlish guess, mistakes arising from, blind ignorance of self and life.

In short, the recurrent burden of Robert Herrick's theme is the hidden, insistent, inevitable tragedy underlying countless married lives. The tragedy so often summed up carelessly, even scornfully, with the flippant euphemism of incompatibility. A plunge in the dark, a bewildered awakening, a losing fight for readjustment, an inevitable revulsion. Such is Mr. Harry epitome of thousands of marriage as the world over. And while this holds true for the world at large, the conditions he seems to think are peculiarly aggravated in America. Our lives here are lived to a great extent at fever heat. The husbands tend more and more to consume their vitality in ceaseless nerve-wracking strife for more and ever more wealth and power. And the wives are daily

sacrificing to vanity and pleasure, social leadership and browning societies more and more of obsolescent virtue of domesticity. But it would be a mistake to assume that Mr. Herrick finds no happy marriages in America, or even that he would assert that the happy marriage is a rare exception. The reproach which has been too frequently made against together, namely that by assembling a score or more of ill-mated couples, truant husbands, airing wives, the whole sad gamut of incompatibility, infidelity, and the divorce courts, he has shown a distorted perspective, a false sense of

proportion, really rests on no firmer ground than a similar reproach against Uncle Tom's cabin, Lessemois and every other big epic study of ethical problems. Mr. Herrick is here studying on happy marriages, not happy ones, and with the latter type, he has no more concerned than the pathologist engaged in a research of malaria germs has with healthy human beings or healthy mosquitoes. And equally mistaken is the effort to find in together a remedy for matrimonial discord. mr harrick simply records a certain number of typical cases he attempts no solution he merely gives us the facts and says an effect here is what i find think this over for yourselves how to remedy the prevailing lack of common interest between husband and wife the men engrossed in the great game of amassing wealth the women equally engrossed in the game of spending it the decrease in domesticity in motherhood in the old-fashioned family affection and loyalty

These are conditions which he depicts without bias and without comment, but with the calm assurance of one who is certain of his facts and of the high moral worth of his purpose. And for this reason, together is a book which, whatever may be its relative value as a contribution to literature, belongs as regards the spirit in which it is conceived in the category of Zola's fecundity and Tolstoy's Kreitzer's Kreitzer. It seemed reasonable to assume after a triumph of such magnitude

that our author's course was definitely late at least for some years to come, that together was the harbinger of a lengthening series of similar vigorous studies of the crucial problems in our busy, arduous American life of today, handled with the same fearless and robust naturalism. For this reason, when a life for a life was published, it could scarcely fail to bring to a good many of its author's sincere well-wishers something of a shock. When readers who had hitherto not been in sympathy with Mr. Herrick's aims and

achievements permitted themselves to say somewhat patronizingly that a life for a life was in a distinctly different vein from many of his previous work, and that he seemed at last to be really in earnest. It was only natural that his admirers should approach the book with rather somber misgivings. Here was a writer who for twelve years had produced very nearly an annual volume, every one of which had borne witness that he was not merely in earnest, but just about as earnest as, humanly speaking, it is possible for a writer to be. Ernest, that is, in his determination to handle the big truths of life as frankly and sincerely as lay within his power, and to satisfy his own conscience regarding the substance and the method of his work,

unmindful whether the general public liked it or not. He had steeped himself in the theories and practice of the Continental School as opposed to the English and American. That was the real secret of his fearlessness and his strength. If now, for the first time, he had so altered his method that any reader could make the mistake of a tributary, to him a newborn earnestness, it could mean only one thing, that he had begun to obtrude his own personal opinions,

that, to some extent at least, he had lost that purely objective attitude which has always been one of his chief assets. And this was precisely what had happened. A life for a life is as radical a departure from the substance and the method of together, as in Zola's case, the four evangil were from the substance and method of the Rougeon-Macard. It was small wonder that to many a reader the volume brought keen disappointment. Small wonder that a review like the London Academy found itself gravely saying,

It is rather baffling when we remember the high standard attained by Mr. Harrigan together, a book which seemed to hold clear indications of a masterpiece later on, to find that in his latest volume he lapses almost into mediocrity. Yet, on the other hand, there were those who hailed a life for a life as the author's high watermark. It contains scarcely anything likely to offend those poor, squeamish souls who shrank from the fine honesty of together. It dealt with what newspapers like to speak of as live issues, and the one fault of construction in its closely interwoven plot is that it is too careful, too symmetrical to ring true. What, then, is the matter with the book? The answer is so simple and so obvious that if you cannot see for yourself, there is small use in trying to point it out to you.

Mr. Herrick has made that disastrous mistake that many another and bigger novelists has made before him, of becoming more interested in his text than in his story, of losing his clear perception of men and women in his sociological theories about man and woman, of blurring his whole picture because he tries to paint the universe at once. What he has undertaken to do, so far as one may venture to expound his purpose,

is to crowd into the limits of a single canvas, the sum total of those social and economic questions that are today responsible for most of our national unrest. It involves problems as wide apart as the curbing of the trusts, the suppression of anarchy, the justification of trade unions, the regulating of the social evil. It covers a vaster field than even Uncle Tom's cabin,

for although that book dealt with a problem nationwide in interest, it at least narrowed down to a single question with but two possible answers. A life for a life propounds a score of questions, each with more size than can readily be counted. In all modern fiction, only one other volume comes to mind so all embracing in its summing up of existing social conditions. Zola's Paris. And Paris does not occupy a high place in the lifework of Emil Zola. In undertaking to epitomize a life for a life, one feels something of that awkwardness which is experienced in an attempt to pick up any rather bulky object that seems to protrude an uncomfortable number of points and

ankles. Here, however, in a brief and somewhat ragged abstract, is the substance of it. Hugh Grant, a foundling, indebted to his foster father even for the name he bears, leaves his country home, yields to the lure of the city. The author nowhere says that the city in question is New York, but his local color fits no other place on the terrestrial globe. The city's wealth and power are symbolized in the person of Alexander Arnold, banker and multi-millionaire who gives Hugh a chance, for no better reason than that Arnold had once known the Elder Grant and incidentally cheated him out of a fortune. Hugh finds lodgings almost directly beneath a mammoth electric advertising sign that perpetually flashes the word success into the eyes

of men. Incidentally, he forms a friendship with a man at war with society who is known to the reader by no other name than the Anarch. Also, he meets a sweatshop girl, a certain young Jewist named Mina and witnesses the hideous accident by which she is maimed for life and driven into what Mr. Kipling has called, the oldest profession in the world. These details sound fragmentary. That is the inevitable penalty of overcrowding a pattern. Now Arnold, banker and millionaire, maker and destroyer of men, likes Young Grant and proceeds to try him out by sending him west and using him as the tool with which to acquire certain vast western properties. Consolidate, amalgamate, play all the tricks of the big financial game, heedless of the trail of ruin that the

process may leave in its wake. Hugh, being what he is, fails to live up to Arnold's expectations. He is too clean-minded, or has breathed too much clean western air, or if you please, he is, as Arnold thinks, too big a fool to succeed in the modern business struggle. Then there is still another complicating factor. Like Polonius, Arnold has a daughter. And like Hamlet, young Grant harps upon her. Like Hamlet also, when the time comes for him to accept the good things of life that are offered to him, he practically tells her, get thee to a nunnery, because to win her means acceptance of modern economic conditions and to this he cannot bring himself. Having symbolized all the varied strata of society, all the warring creeds and doctrines of the

economic world, Mr. Herrick obviously felt the need of some impressive spectacular climax, some titanic convulsion of nature, which, like the destruction of Sodaman Gomorrah, would symbolize the wiping out of the old order of things and the ushering in of anew. This he accomplishes by the simple device of transferring the San Francisco earthquake and fire to New York City. Victorially, his presentment of the vast upheaval of a metropolis, the clamor of men in the crash of falling buildings, the writhings of mass humanity in their death throes leaves nothing to be desired. But what one does resent is that nice subservience of chance

which obligingly lets all the characters in the book meet one another at the psychic moment in the midst of chaos. Hugh, shaken from bed in the cosmic crash, casually wanders out through reeling streets, meets Mina, the woman of the gutter, and exchanges with her what Homer would have called winged words, then moves onward through showers of stone and sheets of flame, and casually rescues from a mob, Arnold's daughter, Alexandra.

Then follow more winged words in the course of which the girl rises to the heights of unselfishness that he once had vainly demanded of her, and he explains that it is now too late since he is a sick man dying of cancer. Moving onward along more reeling streets, they reach her father's bank,

where Alexandra learns that her husband, I forgot to mention that she had married her father's partner, lies dead in the safe deposit vault, smothered by the very mechanism provided to protect his wealth. Her father, meanwhile, is speeding eastward in his automobile toward the Brooklyn Bridge, plowing a georgonaut course through frenzied mobs when just on the threshold of safety. The anarch, who turns out to be old Arnold's disowned son, arises out of darkness

and avenging nemesis, springs into the machine, swings it around and drives himself and his father back to their fate in the flame-swept city. As above pointed out, the effect of this synopsis is to leave an irritating sense of detached fragments, and that is precisely the sense one gets from the book itself. It conveys the impression, not of a vast, complex, closely reticulated scheme of society, but of a handful of individuals afloat in some sort of an attenuated social medium, who, by some strange law of attraction, miraculously meet each other under seemingly impossible circumstances. Picture for a moment the chaos of a mammoth city, overwhelmed by earthquake and by fire. A man might go mad at such a time, impotently seeking the loved ones whom he could not find.

Mr. Herrick simply lost his sense of reality in the latter part of his book. It is a thing he never did before, and one sincerely hopes that he will never do it again. Much symbolism, it would seem, hath made him mad, and furthermore, it is an obscure symbolism that leaves the reader groping. This, then, to-day, is the position of Robert Herrick. For nearly a score of years he has been true to a definite ideal, writing to please himself, regardless of popular approval. And through pleasing himself, he attained at last in together, that pleasantest of victories,

a popular endorsement of his own methods and standards. And then suddenly, inexplicably, he chooses to fling aside the victories attained, abandon a hard-won battlefield, and branch off in a new direction to fight on untried ground. It is to be hoped not only for his own sake, but for the greater good of American fiction, that, before it is too late, Mr. Herrick will go back again to the firm ground of his acknowledged victories. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 8. Edith Wharton

In undertaking a critical estimate of any of our modern novelists, there is usually a good deal to be learned from a study of their early work, the volumes that stand as a record of their apprenticeship. In the case of Mrs. Wharton, however, we have to dispense with any such side-light. When her first collection of short stories appeared in 1890, under the title of The Greater Inclination, the most salient fact about them and the one which brought swift recognition was their mature power, their finished art. As it seemed to us then, the clear-cut, polished brilliance of those eight keen studies of human heart-pangs represented the full development of a talent of unusual magnitude.

Now, from the vantage point of a dozen years, we can see that the author of the House of Mirth and Madame de Trames was still far from having found the full measure of her strength, that a plenitude of culture and social wisdom had veiled an unsure technique, and that a normal sympathy for human weakness was either lacking or else deliberately masked under an assumption of amused irony. It is possible to show with a fair degree of conclusiveness that in these respects Mrs. Wharton's later work is bigger and stronger and more human.

Yet the changes are of a subtle kind that would not strike the casual reader's naked eye, and for that reason it is more helpful in considering her general characteristics as a storyteller, and before taking up her separate volumes, to ignore any division into periods and to treat of her style, her methods, her philosophy of life as though there were no essential difference between her first book and her last. Now, the first thing that must strike a discriminating critic, whether he makes her acquaintance through the medium of the muse's tragedy, or the letters, is that he has to do with an author of rare mental subtlety and unusual breadth of culture, a worldly wise person with wide cosmopolite

sympathies, yet rather rigid prejudices of social caste. One would guess, with no further help than the light shed by her own writings, that here was a mind that might be likened to a chamber of art treasures, not overcrowded, but sufficiently rich to offer a pleasing harmony of color and form. Such at all events is the impression that one gathers from her stage setting. She lingers over each interior, its portiers and wallpapers, its etchings and mezzotints, its choice-old furniture and fragile porcelain with the grudging reluctance of a bibliophile relinquishing a first edition or priceless binding. So far as the atmosphere of her stories goes, there is everywhere a pervading sense of art and literature and culture, a sense as it were, of sunlight softly filtering through

richly stained glass, of life seen relentlessly within the limits of a definite angle. Mrs. Wharton's literary activity has resulted up to the present day in somewhat more than 50 short stories and novelettes, and three novels, and of these the great majority deal frankly with the literary and artistic circle. One has only to run over in memory the separate stories to realize the truth of this. There are, for instance, no less than a dozen in which the hero is by profession and author. Every reader recalls at once the muse's tragedy, souls belated, full circle, expiation, the legend, the touchstone, and there is no use in amplifying the list. And next to authors her favorite heroes are artists, as witness the portrait, the recovery,

the Rembrandt, the moving finger, the daunt Diana, the letters, the verdict and the pot-boiler yes her angle of outlook upon the world is rather narrow but like the proverbial still waters within that angle her thought runs rather deep yet if mrs wharton shows a predilection for artistic and academic society she nevertheless has a far-reaching i was tempted to say an exaggerated instinct for social values in all the various settings of her stories whether in the self-satisfied provincialism of a new england college town, or the full flood tide of New York life today, or of Lombardy a century ago, she never for an instant allows you to lose sight of the fact that there exists a local social code more potent than any laws of Medes and Persians. A fine stratified caste system, too attenuated for any but the native-born to grasp in all its details, yet inflexible in matters of cause and effect. Her subtle sense of the far-reaching significance of some quite trivial, perhaps unconscious

infringement of these unwritten rules of conduct, gives us the real key to a number of her strongest situations. Her understanding of human nature, her relentless pursuit of a motive down to its ultimate analysis, her deliberate stripping off of the very last veils of pretense, showing us the sordidness and cowardice of human souls in all their nudity, are unsurpassed by any other woman novelist now living. She has a trick not merely of describing even her secondary characters so clearly

that you feel you can see them both inside and out, but she often flings out some single line of description whichever afterwards sticks to that particular character like a burr, and is probably the first thing we think of each time that character reappears. For instance, in souls belated, Mrs. Tillotson, Sr., dreaded ideas as much as a draft in her back. In A Coward, Mrs. Carstile was one of the women who make refinement vulgar. In The Mission of Jane, Mrs. Lethbury is described

as a woman, most of whose opinions were heirlooms. She was proud of their age and saw no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable. And still again in the portrait, Vard, the political boss, is described to us as a man who had gulped his knowledge standing

as he had snatched his food from lunch counters. The wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation. And such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. But this is merely a superficial aspect, of Mrs. Wharton's treatment of character and of life.

And, to some extent, the surface sparkle of her style is at times a blemish. We find ourselves straying away from the central interest of the story in order to relish for a moment the sheer verbal cleverness of some casual epigram, such as, Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. Or, to many women, such a man, would be as unpardonable as to have one's carriage seen at the door of a cheap dressmaker. Her whole attitude toward the personages of her stories is a direct application of La Roche Foucault's maxim that in the sorrows and misfortunes of our friends we find something that is not altogether displeasing.

And her stories allow her abundant opportunity to do this. From first to last they deal with the victims of fate. Men and women who are caught in the meshes of circumstance and struggle with us hopeless impotence as so many fish in a dragnet. Mrs. Wharton may not be conscious of it, but they really are not. is a great deal of predestination in the philosophy of her stories. Nearly all her heroes and heroines seem for ordained to failure. Of struggle, in the sense in which drama is defined as a struggle, a conflict of wills, her books contain little or nothing. Her tragedies belong to one or the other of two classes, or to a combination of the two. On the one hand, to the complications

arising from not understanding, from the impossibility of ever wholly getting inside another person's mind, and on the other, from the realization that one cannot escape from one's environment, that one's whole family and race have for generations been relentlessly weaving a network of custom and precedent too strong for the individual to break. As for the first of these tragic keynotes, that of misunderstanding, it is only necessary to glance through a few of the separate stories chosen, almost at random, to see how the word recurs over and over with or without variations like a light motif. Thus, in the story entitled, In Trust,

Halladon sums up the crucial point with the words, I can't make her see that I'm differently situated. In the last asset, Garnet lays his finger on the difficulty. Ah, you don't know your daughter. In the portrait, Mrs. Mellish says, I wish you'd explain. And Lilo answers, Would there be any failures if one could,

could explain them. In souls belated, Lydia asks piteously, You do understand, don't you? And the heroine of the muse's tragedy says pathetically, I shall never be quite so lonely again now that someone knows. That's the dreadful part of it, said Mrs. Westall in the reckoning, the not understanding. And even in the daunt, Diana, where the idol of old Humphrey Meve's heart was not a woman but a statue, the same light motif recurs in the concluding paragraph. Now, at last, we understand each other. The other tragic motive,

that of the inexorable demands of social traditions, the unwritten law of noblesse oblige, we find forming the very warp and woof of all Mrs. Wharton's bigger and more serious efforts. In the House of Mirth, Lily Bart is tossed as helplessly as a quirk in the whorls and eddies of the social stream. Tossed and buffeted.

and finally dragged under with her eyes wide open to her own helplessness. In the Valley of Decision, Odo Valseca and Fulvia Vivaldi sacrificed their happiness to the obligations of rank, a prince's duty to his people. And they do this not in the spirit of generous sacrifice, but rather because they recognize the impossibility of doing anything else. And so again in Madame de Tremes, even an American finds that all the vaunted freedom and independence of our republic,

avails nothing when confronted by the impalpable yet unyielding wall of French family tradition and prejudice. So much for the general character of Mrs. Wharton's situations and problems. Before turning to take a more specific glance at some of the separate stories, it is well to get the following points clearly in mind regarding her technique of construction. Mrs. Wharton is one of those exceptional writers who do not greatly concern themselves with conventional rules of length and breadth. Economy of means is a principle which never binds her against her will. Her short stories frequently lengthen out into the structure and dimensions of a novelette.

Her novelettes might so easily have been expanded into full-length novels. She writes apparently to suit herself in whatever way the narrative comes most naturally to her. A mous pasant with a different ideal of story structure, a more relentless self-discipline would have used a vigorous pruning knife on almost any of her stories and gained, it might be, sharper effects, but at the sacrifice of much delightful cleverness in some rare and subtle half-tones. We must accept Mrs. Wharton as she is, recognizing, frankly, that she is one of those writers who must do the thing their own way if they are to do it at all. But do not let us

fall into the widespread error of assuming that, because her stories are so remarkably good, she necessarily has a flawless technique. It would be impracticable as well as bewildering to attempt a detailed survey of all or even a majority of Mrs. Wharton's stories. We must necessarily make a slender choice touching only the higher places. The first volume, however, the greater inclination, needs closer attention for the purpose of pointing out some structural weaknesses. The opening story, the muse's tragedy, deals with a young critic's interest in an older woman who in earlier years was the source of inspiration to a now deceased poet. Dan Yers the critic,

has learned to know Mrs. Anerton first as the Sylvia of Vincent Rendell's verse. Secondly, through the gossip of a quite negligible woman Mrs. Memorall, thirdly, by direct association with Mrs. Anerton herself, and lastly, through her voluntary self-revelation when in one sentence she not only destroys Danier's hopes, but sweeps away the entire legend that had gathered around her. It is because Vincent Rendell didn't love me that there is no hope for you. Now the central idea of this story is clear as crystal, the tragedy of an unloved woman as seen through the eyes of another man.

Two men and one woman and a single point of view. That, I think, is the way Mrs. Wharton would have written the story ten years later. She would have done it more in the manner of the dilettante, and by doing so have gained in power. A journey, Mrs. Wharton's second story, offers one of the strongest situations she ever used. A woman bringing her invalid husband home to New York discovers in the morning, shortly after leaving Buffalo, that he is lying dead in his birth. To avoid being put off the train,

she all day long keeps up the pretense that he is too ill to be disturbed, and breaks down under this train only at the moment when the train glides into the Grand Central Station. Now the greatness of a short story very largely depends upon the trick of choosing all details of structure, with the idea of making each in turn add its share to the pregnancy of the situation.

In the present case, it seems axiomatic that the ultimate tragedy of the situation would depend upon the degree of affection that the wife felt for the dead man. Mrs. Wharton has chosen to tell us without reserve that the wife had ceased to care for him at all. She is a frail woman, physically unstrung,

a little frightened at her isolation and helplessness. But that ultimate turn of the screw which comes of a great personal bereavement is missing. And thirdly, we come to that much-praise story, The Pelican. The history of a woman who finding herself a widow with a small child and no property undertakes to support herself by lecturing in hotel parlors and before women's clubs. She has a scant mentality, but she makes a moderate success, thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek. Thanks also to encyclopedias and an indulgent public that sympathizes

with her desire to educate her boy. Thirty years later, she is still making the rounds of clubs and parlors for the purpose of raising money to educate the same boy. Now the crucial moment of the story comes when the boy, a bearded man of 30, runs across her at a hotel, discovers her subterfuge and demands an explanation.

All this is natural enough, but the story is told in the first person by an old friend of the mother. The son drags this old friend a stranger to him into his mother's presence and before him denounces her in terms that make one wince. his whole manner is in bad taste.

Perhaps Mrs. Wharton meant him to be precisely that kind of a man, but one doubts it. At all events, if she were writing that story today, she would not have made him a man of quite that kind. In this way we might take up those early stories one by one and show how they miss that fine perfection which Mrs. Wharton began to show in crucial instances, and which she shows so triumphantly in the descent of man. It is hard in speaking of this third. volume to discriminate in favor of any particular stories. They are all so extremely good.

In the one that lends its title to the book, we have the delighted irony of the struggle of old Professor Linyard between the hobby of his life on the one hand and the practical needs of daily sustenance on the other. His heart is in the ethereal reactions of the infusoria and the unconscious cerebrations of the amoeba. He has contempt for the world at large and writes what he thinks to be a biting satire on the modern popular thirst for books of pseudoscience. But the public insists on taking his satiric volume, the vital thing in earnest, and on making a lion of him. And when we take leave of the poor professor, he is still planning for some time or other to go back to his serious work in life, the amoeba. But he has just signed a profitable

contract for a sequel to the vital thing. But unquestionably, if we must discriminate, we should do so in favor of the other two. the story of a woman twice divorced and a third time wedded. When Weithorn married Alice Verrick, who had earlier been Alice Hascott, and had brought with her Hascott's little daughter, he had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But in this he was to learn slowly that he was mistaken. Both of his predecessors are still alive.

Both of them, by a series of quite natural coincidences, come into contact with himself and Alice, partly through business relations, partly through social exigencies. He rebels at first fiercely, yet impotently. Then little by little accepts the inevitable. And the curtain falls at last on the group of all three husbands, past and present, assembled in Weithorne's sitting-room with Alice placidly pouring tea for them.

There is not a single brush-stroke, a single touch of color in the whole picture that one could afford to alter. It is a little masterpiece of its kind, a deliciously ironical apotheosis of conventionalism. These examples suffice to show the peculiar and inimitable quality of Mrs. Wharton's gift for the short story when she is at her best. The later stories differ often in their specific kind, but scarcely any of them show a higher excellence than she had already attained in the descent of man. It is a temptation to linger over such a delicate piece of artistry as the daunt

Diana, in which an impecunious art collector, after having long and hopelessly coveted a famous collection of rare antiques, unexpectedly inherits a fortune, buys the collection, and then finds himself more unhappy than before, because the collection is not really his. It has not been gathered slowly and laboriously piece by piece. It lacks that ultimate zest known to all true collectors, that of pursuit and conquest. He has no other remedy than to sell the collection at auction, scatter it to the four corners of Europe, make the greater part of it practically inaccessible, and then, begin over again and squander the residue of his fortune in tracking down and buying back each one of the scattered treasures. Then again there is the letters,

a cruel little story of a man's easy-going selfishness and a woman's limitless tolerance. When Vincent Deering is left a widower, it seems to Lizzie West, who for years has been his little daughter's daily teacher and companion, and for months has listened to his protestations of love, that now, after a decent interval, they may marry. Deering is an artist and has made his home in France, but now money complications summon him to America. Lizzie writes to him at first each day, then once a week, then at longer intervals, but never a line comes back from him. Two years pass. Then one day she casually runs across him in a restaurant. At heart, she is unchecked. but externally she is a different Lizzie from the one he knew and forgot.

She has had a small fortune left her by a distant relative, and prosperity has already set its mark upon her. Deering finds an ingenious and convincing explanation for his long silence, an explanation that sets him in a noble light of self-sacrifice, and swept along in the full tide of his eloquence, Lizzie forgives him and surrenders herself and her fortune. It is not until some time after their marriage that she accidentally comes across in an old trunk all her former letters to him.

There is nothing strange in the mere fact of finding them. It is the further detail that they are unopened, that he never took the trouble to break their seals that brings enlightenment. In her first passionate resentment, she wants him to know that she has found him out, wants to taunt him with his shallowness and his hypocrisy, and then to leap him. And some such ending would have been the blunder of a lesser talent.

Mrs. Wharton was wiser than that. She knew that for the Lizzie West's of this world, though an idol may be shattered, there remains no resource but to go on worshipping the fragments. She understood now. He was not the hero of her dreams, but he was the man she loved. But to speak separately of each short story which for one reason or another stands out conspicuously beyond its neighbors in these several volumes would be to consume a disproportionate space and time upon only one side of Mrs. Wharton's

literary activities. She began by proving her easy mastery over the short story form. The interesting question remained whether she would be equally dexterous in her management of structure in the full-length novel. For this reason, it is worthwhile to examine at some length her first and most ambitious experiment in that direction, the valley of decision. She was fortunate at the outset in her choice of a subject peculiarly congenial to her temperament and acquired tastes.

Her ambition was to sum up in a single volume, Italian life as a whole in the latter half of the 18th century, that crucial setichento, which has aptly been compared to the closing act of a tragedy. It was a period of fallacious calm, following the war of the Austrian succession, when beneath the surface all Italy was seething with undercurrents of rebellion against the old established order of things. When the little Italian courts were still dozing in fancied security

under the wing of Bourbon and Habsburg's suzerins, when clergy and noble still clung tenaciously to their class privileges and united in their efforts to repress the spread of learning, when throngs of the ignorant and superstitious still crowded the high roads to the shrines of popular saints, and a small but growing number of enlightened spirits met in secret conclave to discuss new and forbidden doctrines

of philosophy and science. It is a big subject and one full of epic values, a subject which it is easy to imagine a bazac or a Tolstoy treating in the bold, sweeping, impressionistic way that it demands. But it was not easy to imagine in advance what an introspective writer such as Mrs. Wharton had hitherto shown herself could make of such a theme. That the resulting volume showed much comparative excellence came as a pleasant surprise. She brought to her task no small amount of erudition.

She was saturated to her fingertips with the hissibility. historical facts of the period. The motley and confusing tangle of petty dukdoms, the warring claims of Austria and of Spain. She gave us not merely a broad canvas, but a moving panorama of the life of those restless times, presenting with a certain dramatic power and a clear sense of relative values, the discontent of the masses, the petty intrigues of church and aristocracy, the gilded uselessness of the typical fine lady with her cavalierre servante, her pet monkey and her parrot, base ignorance of the peasantry, the disorders and license of the bohemian world, the strolling players and montabanks. In short, all the various social strata and sub-stratta of the

period. The book is less a novel than a sort of culture to see ten guest it of the epic, comprehensive, thorough, and rather ponderous. It is not surprising to find now and again a certain avoidance of the concrete and the specific. That is a defect commonly found in historical fiction of any period. It is always safer to leave out a detail than to run the risk of putting one in that has not been amply verified. Yet, curiously enough, the value of decision lacks much of the time another element which needed no verification. Namely, the sunshine, the blue sky, the redolence of warmth and color and surface gaiety which is the very essence of Italy, which makes itself felt in every page of standes, Chartreuse de Parme, is woven into the woof and warp of a romola.

and goes far towards redeeming the tawdry sensationalism of Wida. There are times when one cannot help suspecting that Mrs. Wharton has something in common with her hero, who she tells us, had lived through twelve Italian summers without sense of the sun-steeped quality of an atmosphere that even in shade gives each object a golden salience. He was conscious of it now, only as it suggested fingering a missile stiff with gold leaf and edged with a swarming diversity of buds and insects. Her consciousness of nature is in this volume of much the same sort. When she pauses to describe it,

she usually does so from a purely aesthetic point of view, with an artist's professional enjoyment of some grouping of rocks or trees which would make an effective picture, a scene which Salvatore might have painted, or abandoned the road where, the roadside started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter. And these descriptions are always of the briefest character. It is only when she becomes interested,

in some matter of aesthetic or philosophic import that she permits her pen to run freely. It is worthwhile to quote even at some length a characteristic passage of this latter type, because such passages constitute a formidable proportion of the pages in this particular volume. Quote, In the semi-parisian capital, where French architects designed the king's pleasure houses, and the nobility imported their boudoir panellings from Paris, and their damask hangings from Lyon, Benedetto Alfieri, presented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the grand manner, which had held its

own through all later variations of taste, running parallel with the barochismo of the 17th century and the effeminate caprices of the Rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in the company of men like Vinkleman and Mafé, in that society where the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality of princes and cardinals, and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars in their pay. From this center of aesthetic reaction, Alfieri had returned to the gallicized Turin, with its preference for the graceful and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained, bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past. The view of a generation of architects in whom

archaeological curiosity had stifled the artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the past like their great predecessors, were engrossed in a state. sterile restoration of the letter. It requires a certain conscious effort to disinter from under all the superimposed erudition, the essential central thread of the story. The stage setting is an imaginary pediductum Pianura in the north of Italy, owing allegiance to Charles Ferdinand on the one hand, and attached by marriage to the house of Hapsburg on the other.

The hero, Odo Valceca, is of the old order, heir presumptive to the throne of Pianura, and kept from the succession only by a no one. an invalid cousin and the latter's sickly child. In his character and temperament, Odo represents the conflicting tendencies of the times. He is in sympathy with the new ideas of progress and liberty and has brief flashes of energy and enthusiasm. But they soon burn themselves out, for he is fundamentally lethargic and indifferent, inheriting the fatal taint of his house.

The heroine, Fulvia Vivaldi, represents the new order. She is the daughter of a professor of philosophy who, who, has suffered exile for his temerity in teaching the forbidden learning. Under Fulvia's influence, Odo becomes an eager disciple of the new philosophy, and he is on the point of sacrificing his prospects and accompanying her to France when the death of his cousin unexpectedly makes him Duke of Pianura. To the man and the girl his duty is plain. This is so typical of Mrs. Wharton. The idea of rebellion against fate hardly seems to occur to them. He must accept his burden and devote his life to securing for the people of Pianura the liberty to which they are entitled.

As for Fulvia, she may either continue on her way alone to Paris, or she may remain at Pianura under conditions which she will not accept. Quote, The Regent's Mistress, she said slowly, the key to the treasury, the back door to preferment, the secret trafficker entitles and appointments. That is what I should stand for, and it is not to such services that you must even appear to owe your power. I will not say that I have my own work to do, for the dearest service I could perform would be to help you and yours. But to do this I must stand aside.

To be near you, I must go from you. To love you, I must give you up. No one can say that this was not excellent reasoning. But three years later, Fulvia changes her mind, returns to Pia Nura, and accepts the very conditions which she previously so emphatically refused. The result is an impression of inconsistency, a feeling that the Fulvia who went away and the Fulvia who came back are two

quite different persons. Apparently, however, her return was a structural necessity in order to pave the way for an effective and tragic ending. Fulvia spurs Odo on to give the people a liberal constitution for which they are not yet ready, and, in the midst of the ensuing riots receives in her heart the shot intended for her lover. Such in brief is the substance of a story which the general tendency of criticism has been to overvalue. The characters are clearly and conscientiously drawn. The drama in which they play their part deals with vital questions of life and liberty and human happiness.

Yet, for the most part, they leave us cold. They fail to touch the keynote of responsive sympathy. The explanation lies, of course, in the author's willingness to subordinate the human interest of her story, the individual joys and sorrows of her characters to the exposition of her main theme, the sociological conditions of 18th century Italy.

In other words, at the time of writing the value of decision, she had not yet learned the trick of that delicate balance between the general and the specific theme, which is the hallmark of the strongest and biggest type of fiction. There remain three other volumes which demand specific notice. The House of Mirth, Madame de Trems, and the Fruit of the Tree. Two intermediate volumes, the touchstone and sanctuary, although highly characteristic,

are of no more significance in relation to Mrs. Warden's growth as an artist than the majority of her short stories, perhaps rather less significant than just a few of them. The fruit of the tree, although the latest of her long novels, may well be put out of the way first, as representing the greatest gulf between purpose and accomplishment that any of her books afford. The story opens with an accident in a woollen mill by which an employee loses an arm. The affair would be hushed up, but for the efforts of John Amherst, assistant for and a Justine Brent hospital nurse, both of whom lose their positions in consequence. The mills are run in the interest of capitalists and in defiance of factory regulations.

They are owned by a young widow, Bessie Westmore, who has been content to shirk her responsibility and leave matters in the hands of her trustees. John Amherst marries the widow, believing that he has convinced her of the justice of his plans to reform the mills. And here begins a long, slow struggle and an inevitable estrange. Since Bessie, contrary to her husband's expectations, cannot see why her money should be thrown away on club rooms and gymnasiums for the workmen when she needs new gowns, new carriages, new automobiles. Estrangement begets defiance, and Bessie deliberately risks her life on a horse that Amherst has forbidden her to ride. The result is a disastrous fall and serious damage to the spine near the base of the brain. Her husband cannot reach her for weeks. He is traveling in South America.

The doctors know that there is not one chance in a thousand for her recovery, but there is a hope, through the cruel skill of modern surgery, of keeping her alive until Amherst can arrive. But this can be done only at the cause of unimaginable torture, an augmenting anguish that rings from the sufferer a ceaseless, hoarse, inarticulate cry, increasing in intensity with the slow passage of the days. Justine Brent, the trained nurse,

who has been a lifelong friend of Bessie, finds her patient's agony more than she can bear to which and mercifully cuts it short with an extra hypodermic of morphine she believes in her conscience that she has done right and not a doubt assails her until in the course of years she herself becomes the wife of john amherst and he comes to know that in the eyes of the law she would be regarded as the murderous of his first wife the plot of this story in so far as it concerns the right of the medical profession to shorten suffering where a cure is hopeless is not a new theme it has been briefly but poignantly in a short story by Mrs. Atherton. It has been worked out at great length by Eduardo Rod in La Sacrifié. Mrs. Wharton has nothing new to add to this issue, and by bringing in factory reform and labor questions,

she has simply obscured her main theme. The House of Mirth is a book of altogether different caliber, a big, vital, masterly book of its type, and one that utterly refuses to be forgotten. Like so many of Mrs. Wharton's earlier and shorter stories, it is a trenchant satire on the manners and customs of certain social strata in New York of today. The pages are not overcrowded with figures, yet these are so wisely chosen and so deftly sketched in as to give an impression of many-sided kaleidoscopic life.

The book, however, belongs primarily to the type of the one-character story. It is a history of just one woman, Lily Bart, through a few crucial years. The remaining personages in the story, whether few are many, are merely. background, shadow shapes that come and go, with no other effect than to make the central figure stand out in sharper relief. Lily Bart at the opening of the story is, in spite of her nine and twenty years, still essentially a girl, with a girl's unquenchable desire for a continuation of the ease and luxury, pleasure and adulation that have hitherto been her birthright. But her parents are dead, her resources are almost exhausted, and she has all the helplessness

which characterizes those brought up in accordance with the sheltered life system, when confronted with the elemental problem of self-support. She has, in fact, only one obvious path open to her, namely, marriage. She may marry for money and despise herself, or she may marry for love and repent at leisure, or else suffer the equally probable pain of seeing her husband do sufficient repenting for them both. So she temporizes, and meanwhile puts off the evil hour from week to week,

living at the expense of her friends in a round of visits, playing recklessly at bridge and, of course, losing heavily, and foolishly accepting a rather large loan from a married man under the thin pretense that he has been speculating for her and has sold out at a profit. But these details merely skim the surface of a book which quite wonderfully and unsparingly probes into the deepest recesses of a woman's heart, dragging to the surface much that she would have refused to reveal, even to herself. And back of this merciless analysis, and perhaps even bigger than it, is the sense of an inexorable logic of cause and effect which leads us by closely correlated steps, from the moment when Lily Bart first breaks one of the unwritten laws of her social set, by a brief visit to a man's bachelor apartments down to the hour when she renders her final account and the empty chloral bottle tells its story. It is easy for those who echo the modern cry for a spiritual uplift in fiction to carpet the house of mercy. But the fact remains that the name of Lily Bart will be handed down in the list of heroines

with whom the well-read person is expected to be acquainted. And now, quite briefly, let us look at Madame de Trem, a slender, unpretentious little volume, which I believe, nonetheless, to represent Mrs. Wharton's high water mark of attainment almost flawless in structure and in content. It is an extremely simple story. John Durham had in the old unrestricted New York days known Fanny Frisbee long and intimately, but it never occurred to him to find her desirable

until, 15 years later, he met her once more in Paris as Madame de Malarieve, separated, but not yet divorced from her husband. Her estrangement from her husband was now a five-year standing, so John Durham could see nothing premature or indelicate in urging his own claims and persuading her to seek her freedom through the courts. But he was destined to learn, that in France, especially among the old families, there is a hereditary code so powerful as to make appeal to the courts well-nigh hopeless. Durham cannot understand. The law is the law. It all seems

so simple. But Fanny de Malrive knows better. She has a little son whom she has pledged to bring up as a Frenchman. He is only half hers even now, and she must do nothing that will lessen her hold upon him, nothing that her husband's mother and sister and uncle the Abbe do not approve. this sister madame de tremme holds the key to the situation if durham can meet her and win from her a statement whether or not the family will oppose a suit for divorce he and fanny will know where they stand the main story of the book is the contest between durham and madame de tremme the duel of verbal finesse that is like the crossing of fine flexible rapiers and lastly that wonderful final thrust through which madame de treme by the very act of granting what he asks affects his own total overthrow, and, to her own surprise, hurts herself almost as keenly as she hurts him. The book represents a high development of all of Mrs. Wharton's admitted qualities, and beyond these, it has a more perfect technique of form and a greater sense of real sympathy

with the people of her creation than anything she has written before it or since. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooke. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. 9. Newton Booth, Tarkington. Upon renewing acquaintance with the gentleman from Indiana, from the vantage ground of a 10-year interval, one realizes by what a narrow margin Mr. Tarkington rescued the born storyteller within him from the would-be maker of purposeful and serious fiction. This book, in fact,

represents a parting of two ways, a battleground between two opposing impulses, two wide divergent views of the aims and ambitions of a novelist, and for that reason it fails, in spite of occasional strength, to be a really good book, a piece of symmetrical and finished workmanship. Although it was his first published work, the gentleman from Indiana was far from being Mr. Tarkington's first attempt at fiction. It has often been told that the germ of the two van revels was a short story of two thousand words written many years earlier, and that while the gentleman from Indiana was not begun until 1898, Monsieur Beauchre was written a year earlier, and a Cherry not only antedates them both, but was accepted as a two-part serial at a time when

its author was practically unknown. In a lengthy critical study of Mr. Tarkington's writings, Arthur Bartlett-Morice rather happily conjectures that, perhaps it was of himself, and of his own disillusionment that he was thinking when he described in the gentleman from Indiana, John Harkless occupied with a realization that there had been a man in his class whose ambition needed no restraint. His promise was so complete, in the strong belief of the university, a belief that he could not help knowing,

and that seven years to a day from his commencement, this man was sitting on a fence rail in Indiana. And Mr. Maurice hereupon adds, Sitting on a rail fence in Indiana was figuratively just what Tarkington was doing from 1893 to 1890. now in order to understand how the author of m beaucaire ever happened to write the gentleman from indiana it is necessary to keep just a few facts in mind in the first place mr tarkington had throughout these seven years been vainly trying to obtain a public hearing and had been persistently denied even after cherry had been accepted for magazine publication the editor seems to have had a sober second thought and the manuscript was sidetracked until the subsequent success of his other stories gave it an unforeseen and in intrinsic value that hurried it into print.

Secondly, in the closing years of the 19th century, there came a sudden demand for a rather serious type of political novel, and of the novel that professed to study the social and economic problems of American life, and especially of life in the West. The times were ripe for just such books as Brand Whitlock's Thirteenth District, Mr. Tarkington's gentleman from Indiana, the Virginian of Owen Worcester, and bigger and greater than these, the pit and the octopus of Frank Norris which were to come later. It was quite natural, quite pardonable, that a young man in Mr. Tarkington's position, sobered by discouragement, should have attempted for once to meet a specific popular demand,

especially when the attempt to meet it meant no greater effort than simply to open his eyes and set down faithfully what he could see from his viewpoint on the fence rail, and what he thought about the things that he saw. Unfortunately, this method of work, which to many another writer is the simplest and most congenial, was one which Mr. Tarkington, with the best intentions in the world, found himself unable to sustain. He is one of those whose worship of the God of things as they are is at best an outward show. The mantle of realism is upon his shoulders a curious misfit, and he has done wisely in discarding it. The gentleman from Indiana is a luminous object lesson.

There are in it two interwoven stories so radically different in their spirit, their outlook upon life and the key in which they are told, that it is rather difficult to say with any assurance which of these two was Mr. Tarkington's starting point, and just what important thought, if any, he undertook to develop. Apparently his theme was something of this nature. When a discouraged young man from the East, discouraged because he knows that he has the ambition and the energy to succeed,

but lacks the opportunity, finds himself at last an insomnalant western town, and by remorselessly driving himself day and night, succeeds in instilling some sort of life into that town, and at the same time making himself the most important and most respected of all its citizens. He is quite likely not to see that success is already holding out her hands to him, quite likely to feel that he is stagnating, wasting his strength and his ears in a jumping-off place from which there is no escape, and all the while he is building for himself unconsciously a big and splendid future. This is what I think that Mr. Tarkington was trying to say, that the surest way to play a big part before a large audience tomorrow is to play your little part before your small

audience today, and to be sure that you play it with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. The trouble with the gentleman from Indiana, which might so easily have been made a really big book, is that in trying to say this, Mr. Tarkington said it so very badly. The book makes one think of a long steel girder which has buckled and broken in the middle from sheer structural weakness. Harkless, the young Easterner, who has come to the town of Plattville and invested his last dollar in the Carlo County Herald, accomplishes a number of rather difficult things with almost too much ease and promptness. He rescues the paper from a moribund condition and makes it a recognized local force.

He drives an unscrupulous political boss from power and ushers in a new era of honest government. He declares war against the lawless band of white caps, who constitute the squalid settlement at six crossroads, and for years have terrorized the neighborhood, and his crusade results in a considerable number of them in state's prison. The remaining white caps, however, have sworn vengeance. And because he will not take their threat seriously and will not guard himself properly, they catch him one night on a lonely road, and on the morrow there remains no sign of him save some footprints in the mud and trampled grass. Suspicion is divided between the white caps and a couple of shellmen, whom Harkless had been instrumental in driving out of town.

Public opinion condemns the white caps and a well-equipped lynching party is proceeding to make short work of them when a telegram arrives from the neighboring city of Ruan. Quote, found both shellmen. When arrested a at noon in a second-hand clothes store, wearing Harkless's hat, also trying to dispose torn full dress coat known to have been worn by Harkless last night. Staines-on lining believed blood. Second man found later at freight yards an empty lumber car left Plattville 1 p.m., badly hurt, shot and bruised. Hurt man taken to hospital unconscious. We'll die. Hope Abel question him first and discover whereabouts' body. Now the details of what happened at the

six crossroads and what share the shellman had in it need not concern us here. The above telegram is quoted solely for the sake of pointing out the big dramatic possibilities of the subsequent scene when a delegation from Platteville arrive at the Rouen hospital in order to take the shellman's dying confession and the mass of bruised flesh and broken bones opens its eyes and the white-scarred lips move and speak with the voice of heartless. This is all good workmanship. The surprise when it comes is complete. And the whole story has been worked up slowly, carefully, with a painstaking diligence of details, an ingenious plausibility that effectually veil the underlying melodrama.

But it is just at this point that the girder breaks and the book structure goes to pieces. There is, of course, the usual obligatory young woman in the story. Although up to this point it has not seemed needful to the present writer to make mention of her. She is known as Helen Sherwood, and, like Harkless, is an outsider, being in a Plattville only on a visit. But in reality, she is only the Sherwood's adopted daughter, and her father is old broken-down Frisbee, whom Harkless has befriended and saved from drinking himself to death. Now, what Mr. Tarkington in the naivete of early authorship asks us to believe is this, that while Harkless lies in the Ruin Hospital fighting for life inch by inch,

Helen Sherwood, nay Frisbee, with the courage of utter ignorance, rushes into the breach and with no newspaper training, no knowledge of politics, no practical experience of life, proceeds to edit the Carlo County Herald to increase its size, to build up its circulation and, most amazing of all, to start a campaign in favor of Harkless that results in securing him the nomination to Congress. All this is sheer romanticism, and if taken at its face value is exceedingly good fun. But unfortunately, the first half of the book was conceived in a sane and sober spirit of actuality, and that is why the first and second section of the book, part company with a violence like that of a railway train if a switch were suddenly misplaced beneath the middle car.

The purpose of giving so much space to the gentleman from Indiana is not solely in order to show its structural defects. It is a book which one may quite sincerely like without being blind to its faults. It bristles with absurdities, yet in spite of them, one cannot help feeling the warm, lovable human nature in its characters. To create characters that seem thoroughly alive is part of the inborn gift of the true storyteller, and no amount of farce or melodrama will quite hide it. But characters endowed with the breath of life are not the exclusive prerogative of either romance or realism. If, on the one hand, we have Major Pendennis and Colonel Newcomb, On the other we have D'Artagnan and Chico the jester,

equally alive, equally impossible to forget. It still remained to be seen which of the two methods was Mr. Tarkington's natural medium. The publication of Monsieur Bocquerre promptly solved the doubt. No one but a born romanticist could have written that dainty and consistent bit of fictional artistry. It had no more serious excuse for existence than a miniature on ivory or a finely-cut cameo,

and it needed none. its best excuse was the blitheness of its mood the symmetry of its form the swiftness of its action the tingling vitality of it from start to finish but it immediately and once for all defined mr tarkington's proper sphere and limitations it proved him one of those writers whose stories whenever and wherever laid should carry with them something of the once upon a time atmosphere the fitting atmosphere of this story that aims frankly to entertain it reduced at once to an absurdity the bare idea of Mr. Tarkington's ever again attempting to write a novel, opening with such prosaic actuality as, there is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana, where unigrarian eastern travellers, glancing from car windows, shudder, and return their eyes to interior upholstery. From the clumsy heaviness of the gentleman from Indiana to the debonair self-mastery of Monsieur Boucaire is indeed a rather far cry.

But it is precisely this type of historic. which has the most to lose in the retelling. Something of its fragile charm must inevitably brush off at the first careless touch like the golden pollen on a butterfly's wings. It is less a tale than an episode

in the life of a princely young Frenchman who, temporarily out of favor at court, is sojourning incognito in England and falls under the spell of gold and snow in the blue sky of a lady's eyes. Now, Monsieur Beauchre, so it is rumored, has come to England as a valet

in the suite of Monsieur de de Mier Poix, the French ambassador. For this reason, he has been publicly rebuffed in the pump room at Bath by no less a personage than Bo Nash, and for a time he lives quietly and is visited surreptuously by just a few men of fashion, who know him only as a professional gambler, but believe that his play is honest. The story opens at the moment when Bocer catches the Duke of Winterset in the act of cheating at cards, and, as a price of his silence, forces Winterset to introduce him into the upper social circles at Bath as the Duke de Chaturien of Castle Nowhere.

He has only to strip off his imposing mustachios and his black peruque can shake down the sparkling curls of his yellow hair to make the transformation complete. As Duke de Chaturier, vouched for by Winterset, he meets and wooes the Lady Mary Carlyle, the most beautiful woman in England on whom Winterset has already turned a covetous glance. This is the reason why Winterset does not

keep his pledge of silence, and why he spreads the rumor that the successful suitor for the hand of Lady Mary Carlyle is none other than Victor the barber and Bocquer the gambler. And one clear September night, when the mists were rising slowly from the fields and the moon was radiant overhead, and all of Bath that pretended to fashion was present at a certain fate at a country house in the neighborhood. Monsieur Bocquer sees the opportunity while escorting the Lady Mary's carriage to bring his suit to some definite issue, when Suddenly, a party of horsemen charged down the highway, raising the battle cry of, Barber, kill the barber. And being six to one, they overcame Monsieur Beauchre,

bound him and would have shamefully beaten him before the Lady Mary's eyes, had not his belated servants arrived in the nick of time to save him. The attacking party, however, had already branded him as an imposter, and as he stands there, slowly bleeding from a hidden wound and held erect only by indomitable pride, he sees Belief fade out of his belief fade out of from the blue sky of Lady Mary's eyes, and limitless scorn take its place. The climax comes two weeks later when Bocaire, though warned to quit the country, reappears in the pump-room of Bath, his incognito laid aside, and is formerly presented to the Lady Mary and his enemies as,

His Highness, Prince Louis-Philippe de Valois, Duke of Orleans, Duke of Chartres, Duke of Nemour, Duke of Montpensier, first Prince of the Blood Royal. The list trails on indefinitely while a bystanding Frenchman murmurs in an aside, Old Merepoix has the long breath, but it take a strong man today to say all of the names. It is here in the final page that Mr. Tarkington gives the one last artistic touch. Monsieur Beauchamp forgives the Lady Mary for her bitter mistake. It is nothing, less than nothing.

There is only just one woman in the whole world who will not have treat me in the way that you treatise. me. It is to her that I am going to make reparation. Cherry, written prior to either of the books already mentioned, followed next in order of publication. It is not one of Mr. Tarkington's significant books, but it attracts attention because of the whimsical nature of its theme and its still older setting, for it is a story of a college student in the days preceding the American Revolution. It is told in the first person by a certain Mr. Sedgeberry, intolerably priggish, incredibly self-souled. satisfied, who at the age of 19 is finishing his third year of study at Nassau Hall.

Mr. Sedgeberry is, so far as his preoccupation with himself will permit, deeply enamored of a young woman, a certain Miss Sylvia Gray, who is addicted to cherry-colored ribbons and who is curiously tolerant of one of Suchberry's classmates, one William Fentress, whose riotous and ungodly mode of life Sudgeberry sternly condemns. The exaggerated pedantry, the unbelievable thick-headedness of Sudgeberry, Barry, while cleverly sustained, become wearisome when prolonged throughout 174 pages. The story of a girl who, while accepting attentions from one man, amuses herself by keeping another dangling upon the string, and using him to keep her father engaged in conversation

is too flimsy material from which to make a novel, even when eked out by a lover's quarrel, a burlesque highway robbery and rescue, and Christmas chimes presaging marriage bells. No author can produce three volumes of such varying degrees. of merit and of success, without learning a good deal about his readers and about himself. What Mr. Tarkington seems to have learned pretty thoroughly was that, whether the general public did or did not care for serious fiction, problem novels with weighty lessons behind them, from him at least they asked only entertainment, and that entertainment was the commodity that he could most easily afford them. Accordingly, he wrote the two Van Revels, the novel

of the high-class comedy type, blithe, wholesome, optimistic, peopled with men of old-fashioned courtliness and women of gracious manners and soft-voice charm. Technically, it was a better piece of work than the gentleman from Indiana, which in date of composition immediately preceded it. The plot structure, although frail in substance,

showed careful workmanship. The character drawing was done with a surer touch. And best of all, Mr. Tarkington knew precisely in what key he was pitching his story, and he held to that key from first to last. There is nowhere in it the least suggestion of an attempt to pretend that it is anything else than sheer romanticism, which here and there trespasses across the borderline of melodrama. The setting is once more the Indiana which Mr. Tarkington knows so well, but he

secures that rose-tinted mist of distance so essential to romance of this type by throwing back the time of action a couple of generations to the days just preceding the outbreak of the Mexican more. As in all three of the earlier stories, the plot turns upon a prolonged misunderstanding. And, as in two out of the other three, the nature of the misunderstanding is a mistaken identity. And herein lies the inherent weakness of the two van rebels, the lack of plausibility that no amount of verbal dexterity quite succeeds in disguising. Where a story hinges upon the chance confusion in the mind of a young girl, of one man for another, in a town where everyone knows everyone else, and she is constantly meeting first one of the two men and then the other

at all sorts of social functions, talking with them, dancing with them, liable at any moment to hear them addressed by name. Under such circumstances, the difficulty of carrying conviction increases with each additional page of the story. In Monsieur Beauchre, the hero's identity is an easily kept secret because it is shared by no one but his loyal servants, and Monsieur Beauchamp had the further advantage of being very short. In the gentleman from Indiana, the fact that the heroine is the substitute editor on the Carlo County Herald is easily kept from the hero because he is flat on his back in a hospital ward in another town many miles distant, and there is the further advantage that the

secret had to be kept throughout only a third of the volume. In the two Van Revels, Miss Betty Caru's blunder in taking Tom Van Revell and Craleigh each for the other is the very essence of the whole book, its starting point. its continued suspense, its culminating tragedy, its sole excuse for being. It would have served admirably as the substructure of a short story, in which form Mr. Tarkington is said originally to have conceived it. But as a full-length novel, in spite of a great deal of ingenuity, one feels that the situation is forced, artificial, and perilously near a breakdown at almost any moment. Old Robert Carew has the reputation of being not only the

richest man, but the best hater in the community. And at the time that his daughter Betty bids farewell to her convent school and comes home, his long-standing feud with the Van Revels has blazed up with renewed heat. In his opinion, openly expressed, the law firm of Van Revel and Gray is made up of a naive and a fool, and in this opinion he is not in the slightest degree shaken by the fact that the public at large has never made up its mind, which of the two it loves the more. Steady, loyal, wholly dependable, Tom Van Revel, or light-hearted, fickle, fascinating, and utterly untrustworthy, Crayley Gray.

Betty Carew, warned by her father, that if young Van Rebel ever dares set foot inside his grounds, he will shoot him on sight, finds a delicious and perilous joy in clandestine meetings with the man she thinks her father's enemy, but who in reality is Crayly Gray. And all the while she is hearing disgraceful, scandalous tales of Crayly Gray, and because of them doing her best to make herself hate and despise the man whom she fell in love with at first sight, and who, of course, is the real Van Revel. The story proceeds with clever artistry to its inevitable melodramatic tragedy and would deserve to rank rather high among Mr. Tarkington's productions, accepting for the fact that we

cannot escape from a sense of its being in a measure expert jugglery, a tour de force, of a literary presidigitator. Next, in order of time, comes a volume of short stories of such wide divergence of merit that one suspect some of them at least to belong to a rather early period. Nevertheless, they deserve for certain easily explained reasons somewhat more serious attention than Mr. Tarkington's critics have chosen hitherto to give them. The title of the volume is in the arena, and the theme of every one of the six stories, directly or indirectly, is political. These stories are quite serious studies of existing conditions in American politics as Mr. Tarkington sees them, and it proves that while he is

unable to do a sustained full-length novel in this serious vein, he can keep it up quite easily so long as he confines himself to the short-story dimension. It is hard to discriminate in favor of any one story over the others. There is a great deal of human nature in The Need of Money, in which we are told how it happened that Uncle Billy Rowlandson, a lifelong Democrat, and a man as honest as the day is long, one day so voted as to kill a party measure and was in consequence read out of his party. And then there is that delightful bit of social and political satire combined, entitled Mrs. Prothrow. It recounts the Waterloo of a certain Alonzo Rosson, who happened once upon

a time to be the senator from Stackpole. Now Alonzo was a raw, boned, half-educated, intensely earnest young man who took his duties, especially those connected with the Drain's and Dykes Committee, with such solemnity that he nightly prayed on his knees for guidance. Of course, a young man of Alonzo's education and environment could not have been expected to fathom the wiles and fascinations of a creature of infinite resources and sagacity, such as Mrs. Prothero, social butterfly and veteran lobbyists proved herself to be. The odds were really unfair, and from the moment of his first encounter he was lost.

The cause of his downfall was a certain Sunday baseball bill, which he was pledged to oppose, which with untrained but moving eloquence he had already publicly denounced, and which Mrs. Prothero succeeded in convincing him was a generous and noble measure on behalf of the downtrodden working man. It happened that Mrs. Prothero owned the local baseball grounds, the rent of which would have doubled if they could have been used on Sunday, but this the senator from Stackpole did not know until afterwards. His moral back somersault was dexterously turned. His final speech in favor of the bill was an able effort, and all might have gone well, but for the unfortunate circumstance that a political opponent had happened

to see him at the crucial moment, when behind a sheltering screen of palms he had rashly kissed Mrs. Prothero, and the news thereof had been disseminated throughout the Senate. A particular interest, however, attaches to the last story in the volume entitled Great Men's Sons. The occasion of the story was a certain performance of Legloon, at the time when Madame Sarah Bernhardt and Monsieur Cochlein were touring the country. The story, however, concerns Lee Glouin, only indirectly. In the audience on the night in question, there is a certain thin old man with a grizzled chin beard and a high-pitched voice. His name, so Mr. Tarkington explains, is Tom Martin, and his home a small country town where he commands the trade in dry goods and men's clothing.

It is after the play that Tom Martin permits himself to tell Mr. Tarkington what he thinks of the performance. They seem to be doing it about a well as they could, but he thinks they were badly handicapped by the play itself. Quote, folks always like to laugh at a great man's son and say he can't amount to anything. Of course that comes partly from fellows like that ornery little cuss we saw tonight, thinking they're a good deal because somebody else done something and the somebody else happened to be their paw, and the women run after him and they get low down like he was and so on.

I read the book in English before I come up, and it seemed to me he was pretty much of a low-down boy, yet I wanted to see how they'd make him out herein it was thought the country over to be such a great play. Hereupon the old man wanders off with apparent irrelevance to a story about a certain fellow-townsman of his, Orlando T. Bickner's boy, Mel. It is a simple, plainly told tale of silent self-sacrifice and splendid courage, showing how a young fellow with the right kind of stuff in him fights an almost hopeless battle educating his sisters and younger brother, holding the family together, keeping his mother from want and winning the love and respect of the whole community.

And then, on the threshold of achievement, he breaks down from overwork and dies as uncomplainingly as he had lived without it's ever once occurring to him that he had done anything more than his simple duty. But the story gets its point. The kind of point that Mr. Tarkington in his life, later work is fond of making. From the suggested contrast between the romantic glamour of thrones and titles and the simple pathos of actuality, quote, well, sir, I read that leg-long book down home, so I thought I'd better come up and see it for myself, how it was, on the stage, where you could

look at it, and I expect they'd done it as well as they could. But when that little boy that always had his board in clothes and education free, saw that he just about talked himself to death, and called for the press notices about his christening to be read to him to soothe his last spasms. Why, I wasn't overly put in mind of Melville Bickner. Three more volumes need to be commented upon briefly, not because they serve to throw any new light upon Mr. Tarkington's method, but simply because they are exceedingly good of their kind. The first of these is The Beautiful Lady. Like Monsieur Bouquire, it is merely a trifle, but a very charming and a very perfect trifle.

The opening scene is one of the open-air cafes in Paris at the corner of the Place of the Opera. The principal actor is one Anselini, an impoverished Neapolitan, who, in order to pay for the board and education of two little nieces, has accepted the humiliating office of being an animated billboard. His head is shaven and adorned in brilliant letters with the legend. Teatres Follier Rouge Revue de pretene allés war. His contract obliges him to sit for weary hours day by day with his head bowed above one of the small cafe tables

surrounded by a curious and jeering throng. Just once during all these days does he hear a word of sympathetic understanding. A woman, clad in gray, whose voice proclaims that she is an American and that she is young, pauses before him, and far from seeing anything amusing in the sight,

exclaims involuntarily. Ah, the poor man! She has perceived that he is a gentleman. This is the beginning of a delicately wrought idol, the peculiar and elusive flavor of which is due in no small measure, to the skill with which Mr. Tarkington makes the Neapolitan tell the story, in a variety of English which he flatters himself as triumphantly idiomatic, but which at times is fearfully and wonderfully constructed.

We come next to the conquest of Canaan. The theme briefly stated is simply the difficulty of living down a bad reputation after it has once been firmly established. Joe Ludin found himself at the age of 19, a much neglected and misunderstood young man, owing to the conditions of his home life after his father's second marriage with a widow having a son of about Joe's age.

It was not unnatural that, failing to find companionship among the more stained and respectable citizens of Canaan, he should seek it in the back rooms of saloons and in a still less savory resort known by the name of Beaver Beach. Naturally, enough people Bad company begot bad manners, and at last a day came when a certain mad adventure

won for him the enmity of Martin Pike, the smug, sanctimonious and utterly unscrupulous old millionaire who dominated Canaan with an iron hand. There was nothing left for Joe Ludin to do but to leave Canaan, and for long years his whereabouts and his methods of life are an unknown quantity to his native town. In those earlier days, Joe numbered among his acquaintances only one real friend of the better class. She was the granddaughter of an impoverished painter, and her name was Ariel Tabor. She was shabby in dress and painfully conscious of it. And she had the shyness and the awkwardness of movement which in girlhood not infrequently

are the forerunner of later grace and charm. But in those early days, at least, she was as far from winning the approval of Canaan's autocrats as Joe himself, and their common grievance helped to cement their friendship. Seven years elapse between the time of Joe's disappearance and his return as a man sobered by hard experience, strong from his single-handed fight with the world, and ready now to settle down in his old home as a practicing lawyer. To his amazement, he finds that the old prejudice against him is still smoldering. The bad name once attached to him has not yet been forgotten.

The young men and women who knew him as a boy imitate the example of priest and Levite and pass him by on the other side. The clerk at the National House curtly informs him that the rooms are all occupied, and the greetings of his father and relative are even less cordial, his stepbrother sarcastically inquiring whether he has saved up enough money on which to starve. In short, all respectable Canaan conspires to drive him back to his old haunts and old companions, and he finds that if he is to stay in Canaan and fight for his rights, he can do so only by seeking shelter at Beaver Beach and accepting the human scum and refuse of the place as his first clients. Such is the beginning of a prolonged, tenacious, doggedly

contested struggle, which is destined to end in Joe Ludin's complete and triumphant conquest of Canaan. From passive scorn, the town soon awakes to active hostility with Martin Pike, his millions and his newspaper representing the entrenched forces of Canaan's respectability. From this point on, the story becomes frank melodrama, of that glorified sort which could not be appreciated on Third Avenue. The shy, gauche Ariel Tabor, returns from Europe transformed into a vision of feminine grace and charm, wreaks havoc with the male population of Canaan, and gives to Joe the one needful incentive to keep him from weakening at the crucial moment of his fight. Joe promptly wins a series of great victories. He triumphs in a prolonged legal fight, although

all public opinion is against him. He exposes the rascality of Martin Pike, who has nearly defrauded Ariel of a fortune. And the curtain is finally wrung down upon him, as the Gertin always should be rung down upon the hero of a melodrama, in the hour of his exaltation as mayor-elect of Canaan and the accepted suitor of the woman he loves. And lastly, we have the guest of Kinet, which some of Mr. Tarkington's more enthusiastic admirers have pronounced the best piece of fiction that he has yet produced. It is somewhat difficult for an impartial reader to find any adequate reason for thus discriminating against his earlier volumes. The guest of Kenet is a readable story with a picturesque setting and an atmosphere of

considerable charm. It has an underlying mystery so transparent that it ought to cease to mystify any person of average intelligence at least as early in its progress as the fifth or sixth chapter, and it does contain one or two ideas of serious import. Yet, take it all in all, it is simply a new variation of the old Tarkington formula, a prolonged social tangle based upon mistake an identity, with only this difference, that the person whose identity is in question is as much a puzzle to himself as to anyone else. Several years before the opening of the story, its heroine tried that familiar and dangerous experiment of marrying a dissolute wreck of a man with the intention of reforming him. The experiment resulted in the customary failure. The husband was before long

making himself notorious on the Paris Boulevard in company with a Spanish dancer, and the outraged wife was seeking a divorce when a grim automobile accident very nearly crushed life out of him and completely crushed out all knowledge of himself, all memory of the past. The automobile accident, by the way, is a fine bit of pictorial sketching. Mr. Tarkington certainly has a rare gift when he wants to use it for a freehand drawing of scenes of carnage. All of these details belong structurally to the prologue. The real story begins a couple of years later when a strikingly handsome young man with prematurely gray hair. A young man who looks, so friends of the automobile victim say, as though he

might have been the latter's younger brother or his own better self at an earlier age, makes his appearance in a little French village with an easy walking distance of a chateau temporarily occupied by a beautiful stranger who is understood to be an American woman. The story is told in the first person by an American tourist to whom at the outset none of the principal characters is personally known, and being himself much mystified, he succeeds in surrounding his people and his events with a certain amount of verbal fog. Nevertheless, it takes no great ingenuity to conjecture that the young man with the prematurely gray hair who looks out upon life with the wondering gaze of a child is the former dissolute husband whose accident has blotted out

all memory of evil, and that the beautiful stranger at the chateau is the wife who, in spite of neglect and humiliation, has never ceased to care for him, and who now is tremulously fearful, lest his loss of memory of other things involves also the memory of her. Persons whose past has been blotted out by some injury to the brain have been the theme of more novels than it would be now worthwhile to count. Mr. Tarkington, in a measure, justifies the use of an old idea by injecting into it this new suggestion, that we are all of us hampered by our memory of the past, handicapped, by our knowledge of the evil in the world at large, and more specifically in ourselves, and that if upon

reaching maturity some accident should blot all this out, leaving our minds as blank as in early childhood, and give us a chance to start over again, to ignore evil and learn only what is good, we might make of ourselves far nobler men and women than we were before. Mr. Tarkington contends himself with making this suggestion. He proves nothing, nor does he try to. His story ends on the threshold of the new life, and whether his Hero is a permanently reformed character, or whether he slowly but inevitably drifts back into his old evil ways, remains tantalizingly, an open question. But this does not alter the fact that the author

has written a very agreeable summer idol pervaded by the soft sunshine, the fragrance of flowers, and the singing of birds, an atmosphere which altogether brings a thrill of nostalgia for the highways and byways of rural France. These eight volumes pretty well sum up not only what Mr. Tarking has done in prose fiction, but what he is likely to achieve in the future. In spite of much diversity in time and setting, his talent is not an instrument of many notes. His themes, as already suggested, are few and oft repeated. The basis of every story he has written is a misunderstanding of one kind or another, of identity, of purpose, of character. He sees life, even the prosaic, everyday life of his home environment, through rose-tinted lenses that both

soften and magnify. He has an imperishable faith in the innate goodness of the human heart, which, coupled with a wholesome scorn of sham and snobbery, gives to the people of his fantasy a certain whole-souled quality that makes them lovable, even while we feel that they are a little bit too good to be true. All of these qualities offer in themselves as much promise of success and drama under existing conditions, as in prose fiction. Indeed, one has only to glance at a play like The Man from Home, in which his share in the collaboration with Mr. Wilson can be shrewdly guessed between the lines, to see how every one of his favorite tricks in his novels is there reproduced with even more felicitous effect. There again in that play, we have a situation depending on a

whole series of misunderstandings and mistaken identities. A Russian prince masquerading as a simple German traveler, an escaped anarchist disguised as a chauffeur, a whole group of adventurers and tricksters, male and female, passing themselves off as shining lights of European aristocracy, and the man from home himself voluntarily posing as a very simple homespun personality, but in reality the brightest, keenest, most indomitable personality in the whole group. And here, more than anywhere in his novels, Mr. Tarkington allows himself to fall back upon that favorite makeshift of the romanticist, coincidence. Everything happens in the nick of time.

A person's name is mentioned, and miraculously he appears upon the scene. A secret is whispered, and somewhere a window or door opens stealthily, and the secret is overheard. A tangle of situations is tightly knotted up, and the only people who can unravel it are supposedly scattered widely throughout Europe and Asia. And, presto, they are all discovered simultaneously beneath the roof of a Sicilian hotel. Here, indeed, we have the very essence of Booth Tarkington. From first to last, under various disguises, he has always been, as he is today, a successful exponent of glorified melodrama. End of Chapter 9

Chapter 10 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 10. O Henry It is a sufficiently common figure of speech to characterize the careers of certain men as meteoric, but usually with no conception of the length of time that it may have taken the meteor to gain the requisite velocity and momentum to produce its brief, fiery burst and no thought of the stray fragments that remain after the burst is over to awaken the curious appreciation

of the enlightened view. If we accept this broader view, then O'Henry was quite literally a literary meteor. Although he had served an apprenticeship of a score of years, he remained up to within half a decade of his death, practically unknown to the general reading public, and by them, in half a decade more, he will already have begun to be forgotten. Yet, for just a few intervening years, he achieved a popularity unparalleled in its swift development and its extent by any modern American writer of short stories. And not least surprising was the variety of taste to which he appealed, the range in education, culture and social grade of his reading public. Considered as an article of merchandise, his stories have commanded a market rate rivaled only by Mr. Kipling.

Considered as literature, they have formed the theme of more than one grave and reverend professor of English letters. The meteor has blazed and burst and burned itself out, and the interesting question not unnaturally arises, to what extent was O'Henry's vogue justified? Is the popular verdict greatly an error? Does his fame of the passing hour rest upon a solid found? one takes up the answer with a certain amount of diffidence. As was said in another critical article in one of the magazines quite recently, but while

the author of Cabbages and Kings was still with us, such matters, rest upon the knees of the gods. It is always easier to dogmatize as to what Posteri ought to do than to predict what that profoundly unknown quantity really will do. Nevertheless, certain opinions may be ventured with some assurance, provided we base them first, upon a few things. established facts regarding the personal O'Henry, his life, his temperament, his attitude towards his craft, and secondly, upon the really salient points of his own productions. In the first place, then, at the risk of tediously repeating what has recently become a commonplace of the Daily Press, let us summarize the main facts in the life of this particular

American storyteller. That his real name was Sidney Porter, and that he happened to be born in Greensboro, North Carolina in the year 1867 is not material. But it helps to complete the record. The fact that his health as a boy was rather poor and that consequently he was sent to a Texan ranch at a time when otherwise he would have gone to college, as a more direct bearing upon our problem. He was not of the stuff from which ranchmen and cowboys are made, and although with characteristic facility he picked up his surprising amount of the picturesque idiom of the ranch, a scant three years had satiated him with the life. All this time, somewhere in the back of his mind had lurked persistently the ambition to write.

Perhaps, one of the most curious facts in the world of letters is the unlikely sources from which the public favorites among writers spring. When one sees the apparent hopelessness of conditions that have given birth to some of the successful fiction-makers of today, even the most self-confident critic hesitates to say to an apparently hopeless novice, Give it up. There is no chance for you. The life of the ranch had reestablished Mr. Porter's health. Following the insistent call of letters, he went to Houston and secured a position on a daily paper, The Post. It is curious how biographers insist upon mixing up essentials and non-essentials. Much has been made of the fact that the Houston Post paid Mr. Porter $15 a week,

and that the editor assured him that within five years he would be earning a hundred a week on a New York News. newspaper. So far as this means anything, it means that Mr. Porter must have been more successful as a reporter than the editor was as a prophet. Many more than five years passed before he reached New York. The essential facts so far are that he had an inborn desire to write, a frail constitution which debarred him from a college education, and the good luck to strike almost simultaneously a healthful climate and a newspaper opening. The following items have their importance. And After a year on the post, he went to Austin and purchased for the sum of $250 a newspaper named the Iconiclast from its owner a certain brand.

The latter, having withdrawn to Waco, and perhaps regretting his bargain, asked Mr. Porter to give him back the paper's name. Our author, with characteristic generosity, consented and rechristened his own paper, the Rolling Stone. Whatever symbolism there may be in names, this particular paper promptly rolled itself out of existence, and the future, O'Henry, went into voluntary exile in Central America.

The fact that he went there with a friend who intended to go into the fruit business but didn't is evidence of a credulity characteristic of him, not only then but later, as subsequent anecdotes show. What he did and what he saw in Central America, one gleaned between

the lines of cabbages and kings. But the one authentic bit of autobiography of that period is the single leconic sentence. most of the time I knocked around with the refugees and consuls. Mr. Porter's subsequent movements are given still more briefly in the few meager printed accounts. He returned to Texas, thence removed to New Orleans, where he began more consistently to work as a writer, and in 1902 came to New York, having received from Ainsley's magazine the offer of $100 apiece for a dozen stories.

From that time until his death, Mr. Porter made New York his husband. home, exhibiting that extreme, almost exaggerated affection for the metropolis that is peculiar to the Manhattanite by adoption. Now, the years about which we know the least are probably the important ones, the years of growth and slow accretion. The record as it stands fails to explain. It shows a man of naturally roving spirit, whose schoolbook has been experience hard and practical, and who toiled for twenty years before beginning to reap his reward. It is easy enough, to write sagely that his wanderings have influenced his work, that Texas gives the setting of short stories called the Heart of the West, that Central America is the scene of cabbages and kings,

and that New York gives the background for the four million, the voice of the city, and the trimmed lamp. This all sounds as though it meant something, but in reality it does not. There are probably many thousands of people whose lot in life has taken them successively to Texas, to Central America and to New York. Yet there is only one O'Henry. What would really be worth knowing is what he was thinking about through all those formative years, what books he read, and which especially impressed him. What sort of work in kind and quality he did on the various newspapers with which he connected himself, and above all, where he learned his technique of the short story, and what models, if any, he consciously imitated. Of all this, we have only a few meager and tantalizing

glimpses, like the following paragraph published in a comparatively recent interview. Quote, I did more reading between my 13th and 19th years than I have done in all the years that have passed since then. And my taste at that time was much better than it is today, for I used to read nothing but the classics. Bergen's Anatomy of Melancholy and Lane's translation of the Arabian Nights were my favorites. The Anatomy of Melancholy and the Arabian Nights are indisputably classics.

but there is nothing in either that could have given a hint of that nice economy of means that on airing instinct for ending a story at just the right instant, and with just the right phrase, that makes so many of O'Henry's stories models of technical skill. Because of his constructive gift, he has not infrequently been hailed as the Yankee mot passant, and yet those who knew him best give assurance that O'Henry either never made the acquaintance of the author of La Parure, or else read him only after the great bulls of his own writings was completed. And it is equally doubtful

whether he became acquainted with French technique through what is probably the next best medium, the short stories of H. Z. Bunner. Apparently, the O'Henry's story is to a large extent an independent development born of an instinct for getting the sharpest possible narrative effects. Now, it is idle to deny many of O'Henry's

very genuine merits. He was technically a master of his craft, even though to the practiced eyes, certain tricks of his trades take out somewhat conspicuously. He had mingled on terms of frank comradeship with all sorts and conditions of men, the tramp, the clerk, the ward politician, the city policeman, the shop and factory girl, the human derelict at home and abroad, and he has a faculty compared by more than one critic to that of Dickens for catching both the humor and the pathos of these alien lives.

Mr. Francis Hackett, writing recently in the Chicago Evening Post, the following comment. To O. Henry, the clerk is neither abnormal or subnormal. He is simply $15 a week humanity. He has specialized in this humanity with loving care, with a Kipling-esque attention to detail. But his is far from the humorless method of Gissing and Merrick, who were no more happy in a boarding house than Thoreau would have been happy in the Waldorf Astoria. One is tempted to ask, parenthetically, why, in the name of all that makes good art, an author should be required to be happy in a boarding-house or a corner grocery, or an east-side tenement in order to write of them truly and with understanding.

The important fact is not whether O'Henry was happy in the company of clerks, but whether he understood them, and of this his stories leave not the shadow of a doubt. It is true, however, that O'Henry's likes and dislikes do occasionally intrude themselves between the story and the reader, and to the lover of a finished art this is not a merit, but quite distinctly a fly in the o'ythe o'yptment of our enjoyment. Another quality for which O'Henry has been over-praised by nearly every writer who has attempted a critical analysis of his work is the excellence of his local descriptions,

the accuracy with which he makes you feel that a certain story not only happened in New York, but that it was part and parcel of the city itself and of no other place in the world. It is extremely enlightening as regards O'Henry's attitude towards fiction in general and towards his own work in particular to read the following frank confession. People say I know New York well, but change 23rd Street in one of my New York stories to Main Street,

rub out the flatteren building and put in the town hall. Then the story will fit just as truly elsewhere. At least I hope this is the case with what I write. So long as your story is true to life, the mere change of local color will set it in the east, west, south, or north. The characters in the Arabian nights parade up and down Broadway at midday or Main Street in Dallas, Texas. When I recently ran across this paragraph for the first time, it gave me a rather keen delight, because, personally, I could never see the excellence of O'Henry's local color. I never could feel that a few names of streets and buildings, printed with capital letters, suffice to give the illusion of that indefinable atmosphere which a person born and bred in a

certain city absorbs from a thousand subtle little sights and sounds and smell such as that city and none other has to offer. It is a comfort to discover not merely that the fault was not a lack of perception on my part, but a deliberate choice upon the part of O'Henry. In short, that he not only neglected an essential article in Mopin's declaration of faith as an artist, but that he openly avowed his disbelief in it. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought of Floubert's insistence upon the supreme necessity, if you are describing only a tree, a horse or a dog,

of catching its special physiognomy so unerringly that it could not be confused with any other tree, horse, or dog in the whole world. Yet it is easy to understand, O'Henry's vogue. He appealed to a wide range of men and women, because he wrote of a wide range with sympathy and understanding. He appealed to the wide class that is repelled by anything like academic nicety of speech, by the raciness of his phrase and vocabulary, his habit of making the English language a servant rather than a master. much of his humor lies in his verbal audacities and for that very reason he is doomed within a decade to seem in a measure already out of date and his habit of invoking local and temporal allusions not merely as subordinate details but at times as the turning point of a story is another factor that will hasten the wane of his popularity take for example one of the best stories that he ever wrote the rose of dixie it is a story of an old southern colonel who has a has undertaken to edit a magazine exclusively in the interests of the fair daughters and brave sons of Dixieland. Handicapped by the Colonel's strong sectional prejudices, the magazine is not

a financial success. So, the stockholders suggest that the aid of a certain Thacker, famed for his successes in forcing up the circulation of lagging periodicals, shall be invoked. The Colonel rejects Thacker's much to radical suggestions, but at the same time hints mysteriously at an important article that he has on hand, an article brimful of wise philosophy of life, but unfortunately written by one regarding whose qualifications he has not yet sufficiently informed himself. The tale, in order to be appreciated, has to be read. No amount of skill in epitomizing can begin to convey the humor of the denouement, when the article at last appears with the title emblazoned with local significance in prominent full-faced type, and the name of the author so

minute as to be almost illegible below it, and that, too, the name of one who, at the time the Rose of Dixie was written, happened to be the chief executive of the nation. A generation, hence, the edge of the joke will be quite gone. Indeed, it is already somewhat dulled. One disadvantage under which a writer of short stories labors is that it is out of the question to analyze at any length even a tithe of his writings. Thus, in the case of O'Henry, one would be glad to dwell at some length upon each separate volume to analyze the clever mechanism of cabbages and kings, whereby the reader is carried through a lengthy string of apparently slightly correlated tales, and does not suspect until the final page is turned that underlying them all is a mystery.

A series of cross-purposes, straightened out only when two bits of human flotsam finally meet and exchange confidences on a North River pier in New York. But to stop long over any one volume or even over any considerable number of stories which serve no special purpose. The more you read them, the more you realize that there is a certain sameness about his themes and his structure, that he has just a few formulas

that he invokes over and over again. There is, for instance, the formula of cross-purposes, like the story, if memory is not at fault in details, of the man who pawned his watch to buy his wife for Christmas a fur neckpiece to match her muff, unaware that she in turn had sacrificed her muff

in order to buy him a watch-bob. Or again, there is the irony of fate formula, as exemplified in the story of Soapy and the anthem, in which a tramp, having made up his mind that a few months on the island will be the pleasantest arrangement that he can make for winter, proceeds to attempt to get himself arrested

by swindling a restaurant-keeper out of a meal, by breaking a window, by insulting a woman, and all to no purpose. Fate, under one guise or another, intervenes to defeat his plans. And then, at least, Last, as he is passing a church door and hears the swelling notes of a fine old anthem, some softening memory of childhood steals over him, and he finds himself unkept and ragged as he is,

drawn irresistibly into the church with a growing resolution to turn over a new leaf. A policeman, deciding that he is lurking there for no good purpose, runs him in and soapy, now that he no longer wishes it, finds himself on his way to the island. And then again there is what we may call the inertia of human nature formula. The type of story based upon a subtle appreciation of the fact that people often think that they have learned a lesson, but as soon as the stress is over, drop back again into their old rut. One of the best of this class is a story in the volume called The Trimmed Lamp. It is not necessarily the best of the collection, but somehow it made a rather special appeal to the present writer

and seems worth giving in some detail. It is merely the story of a commonplace man married to a commonplace little wife, and living in a commonplace little apartment on a salary the smallness of which always seems to have the element of commonplaceness. A story you will perceive in which the temperamental barometer on the hall stands rather low. After the glamour of the honeymoon wore off, the man fell gradually into the habit of spending his evenings away from the home atmosphere. As surely as the hands of the clock came around to half-past eight he would reach for his hat. Now where are you going, I should like to know? the wife's querulous voice would question, and his stereotyped answer would be flung back

through the closing door. Just going down to play bull with the boys for half an hour. But one night when he comes home there is no wife to meet him. No, dinner waiting, nothing but a pervading disorder and a hasty note telling him that she has been called away by the sudden news of her mother's serious illness. Disconsolately he makes a comfortless meal from cold remnants found in the icebox, the loneliness of the apartment each instant forcing itself into his consciousness. It is the first night since their marriage that she has been away from him, the first time that he has asked himself what life would be without her. He begins to regret the hours of her society he has voluntarily lost. The evening Zee has gone out and left her to bear the same

solitude from which he is now suffering. Never again, he tells himself, never again. He will make it up to the little woman when she comes back. He will take her out more, to theatres and all that sort of thing. She shall never again be left to the ghastly loneliness of these silent rooms. And, in the midst of his good resolutions, the door opens and the wife walks in. Mother's illness was a false alarm. She did not need to stay after all. This topic occupies them until she finishes dinner. Then, as the hands of the clock move around to half-past eight, the man reaches mechanically for his hat. now where are you going i should like to know comes the stereotyped question with all its wanted querulousness and the stereotyped answer comes back through the closing door just going down to play pool with the boys for half an hour

yet in the case of o henry more perhaps than in that of any other popular story-writer of his generation the relative merits and deficiencies of his stories are a matter of individual opinion discuss kipling in any group of average well-read men in women and you will find a certain amount of disagreement. Some will hold that the earlier tales are easily superior to the later, and others will insist on the opposite view. Some will maintain that they is his most finished masterpiece, the one story that stands alone upon a lofty height, and others will see little or nothing in it. But on the whole, the world agrees pretty well in singling out, without benefit of clergy, the drums of the fore and aft, the man who would be king, on the city wall, the courtship of Dinah Shad, while an habitation enforced,

Mrs. Bathurst and Adela Cotton, would come in as pretty close seconds. But if you try the same experiment regarding O'Henry's stories, you will find a very different state of matters. Almost everyone present will have read him, and almost everyone will have his or own personal preference, backed up by reasons to justify it. Half of the time they will not remember the title,

In spite of the pains that Mr. Porter is said to have taken over his titles, they are not of the kind that's sicken the memory. Sometimes a good many of the details will have faded out. But what people remember is the sharp, unlooked-for twist at the end of the story, like the snap of a whip in a practiced hand. Do you remember, someone is sure to ask, that story of the local champion prize-fighter, who is just tarting in on his honeymoon and whose bride expresses a wish for peaches? It is late at night, and even in New York, even in the ward where he is something of a power, peaches in the off-season are not easy to find. Everywhere he is offered oranges, big, thin-skinned, juicy oranges, but not a peach is to be found. At last he remembers a certain high-life

gambling resort, where everything is done in lavish style, and where the buffet is never lacking in luscious hot-house fruits. Now, in all his devious career, he has stuck to his standards of loyal he has stood for a square meal among his kind. But tonight he is in a dilemma. His bride has demanded peaches, and peaches she must have, loyalty or no loyalty. Accordingly, he goes contrary to the ethics of his class, takes part in a police raid on the gambling house, and in the midst of a general rough and tumble fight, which is a gem of its kind, manages to make his escape with two rather dilapidated peaches. And now comes the snap of the whip. When he has to hands them to his expectant bride, she looks at them disappointedly and says,

Oh, did I say peaches? It was oranges that I wanted. You haven't told that quite right, someone else rejoins. You don't emphasize the oranges enough. Don't you remember that everywhere he goes they say to him, now if it was only oranges you wanted? And at the last place he turns on them savagely and interrupts with, If anyone dares to say oranges again to me, I'll—and words fail him. But I'll tell you a story ever so much better than that, and that's the Jimmy Valentine one. There's a short story that really has some substance to it, a short story that had in it the material of a full-length play.

Supposing you should give a story-writer the following problem. Let the hero be a criminal, perhaps an escaped convict. Under another name, he has found honest employment in a town where his past is not known. He has won the respect of his new friends and the love of a good woman. his future seems assured, and suddenly, as he is in the act of destroying the only remaining evidences of the past, of cutting himself off even from the memory of his old life, fate brings him face to face with an extraordinary dilemma. Someone very close to the woman he loves is in danger of death, tragic and agonizing, and it is only by revealing his crime-stained past, only by resorting

to his criminal skill that he can save her. In other words, it is the the man's reformation, his newly acquired tenderness of heart that is his undoing. There is the problem. And if you assigned it to a score of writers, I doubt if one of them would have got a quarter of the possibilities out of it that O'Henry did. That is all very well, objected someone else at this point. Jimmy Valentine was a good job of its kind, but he deliberately spoiled it at the end by one sentimental touch, the popular or happy ending. We all know that in real life the detective who had spent weary months in tracking down an escaped convict would not let him go at last, with the tools of his trade in his hands

just because he, cracked a safe, in time to save a child from smothering. But if you want, oh, Henry, at his best, take a story like the one about the little girl whose mother didn't like that she should play in the street, and whose father, red-headed and sullen-tempered, spent his Sunday afternoon sitting by the window, in his shirt-sleeves and with his heels on the ledge leisurely emptying a tin can of beer. Papa, won't you play checkers with me? The little girl asks wistfully. No, I'm busy.

Run along and play in the street, growls the man, and the little girl goes, in spite of the mother's feeble protest. I don't like that she should play in the street. Well, when we see that child again, a few years have passed. The street has done its worst for her, and she is in cruel trouble. The man whom she has loved too rashly openly favors another girl at a big east side dance-hall. When true to her street training, she draws a knife, stabs her rival, and ends her misery in the East River. The scene shifts from this world to the next.

An angel of the heavenly detective corps has brought up for judgment the bedraggled soul of a poor drowned girl, and is proceeding to press the charge. Hold on, says St. Peter, or words to that effect, you have arrested the wrong person. The one you want to look for is a red-headed man in his shirt-sleeves drinking beer on Sunday out of a tin can. You'll lose your job if you aren't more careful. That's the fourth mistake you've made this week. There, in brief, we have a fairly wide and representative selection of O'Henry's stories.

They do not pretend to include even a tithe of those one would like to mention of space allowed. Yet, such as are here included, show him pretty nearly at his best. wisely comprehensive of human foibles, indulgently ironic, yet with an underlying touch of sympathy that illumines and softens much that is sorted and commonplace. That he was a genuine artist cannot be questioned. That he was overrated by his own people and generation is more than possible. That the large element of what was local and temporal is likely to prove a heavy handicap in the race for immortality cannot be denied. As Anatol France sagely remarked, One must be light in order to fly across the ages.

At all events, Frankness demands recognition of the fact that, O. Henry, while not limited to a narrow range, was not possessed of a conspicuously wide one. That he had already achieved enough on which to rest a substantial fame, and that it is doubtful whether had he lived he would ever have surpassed what he has already done. His early death has robbed us of the man, but in all likelihood it did not seriously rob him of any laurels. End of chapter 10. Chapter 11 of some American storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. 11. Gertrude Atherton It was in the Saturday Review, which about ten years ago, in discussing one of Mrs. Gertrude Atherton's novels, borrowed for its caption one of that author's own phrases, Intellectual Anarchy. The tone of the article in question, was that of incisive irony and unkind cleverness. Nevertheless, this term intellectual anarchy may not unfairly be applied even by stanch admirers of Mrs. Atherton to a large part of

her work, and may serve conveniently as a sort of condensed explanation, both of the degree of success she has achieved and of her failure to gain certain greater heights, which seem to have lain so easily within her reach. Mrs. Atherton, it must be remembered, has had abundant opportunity for studying both life and literary methods in great extent and diversity. She knows and understands her native land from California, which has served as a luminous background for much of her best work, clear to the eastern coast, to Washington, the complex social strata of which she has given us in Senator North, to New York and Westchester County that she deftly satirized in patient Sparhawk, to the Adirondacks that formed the setting for the trenchant irony

of her aristocrats, and on the other hand, she has spent a large portion of her recent years in Europe, imbibing new impressions and methods, and also, it must be frankly admitted, yielding now and again to the temptation of laying in those foreign countries the scenes of several of her literary blunders. The net result of Mrs. Atherton's varied experiences and methods of self-training may be summed up as follows. That she has an uncommonly broad outlook upon life, an inviably rich equipment of material, and side by side with these advantages, a willful, almost illogical independence, a persistent rebellion against the bondage of literary schools.

In short, a riotous freedom of style and construction that is not unfairly stigmatized as intellectual anarchy. Consequently, it is somewhat difficult to do strict justice to Mrs. Atherton's contribution to American fiction, somewhat difficult accurately to take the measure of her achievement, and while honestly pointing out wherein her shortcomings lie, to give her full credit for merits which have made her one of the forces that refuse to be disregarded in contemporary letters. In the first place, then, it is well to get clearly in mind the more obvious elements of strength in Mrs. Atherton's novels. She has the big advantage of seeing life with clear-eyed accuracy and without illusions. She is no idealist, inventing an imaginary

world because the world of actuality happens at times to contain much that is sordid and painful. On the contrary, she faces unflinchingly the unpleasant truce of physical baseness and moral obliquity, mirroring them back with a fearlessness that compels recognition even from those who shrink from the naturalistic method. It is, of course, always rash to hazard a guess as to the source of any author's manner of procedure, but in the present case one ventures, with little fear of contradiction, the opinion that Mrs. Atherton owes to the French Realistic School, her interest in heredity, her frank treatment of the physical facts of life, and her unusually wise understanding of the complex relation in all big human emotions and impulses between the flesh and the spirit,

and the impossibility of saying that hate and love, jealousy and self-sacrifice can ever be purely physical or purely psychic in their origin. She is right in constantly insisting upon the blending of the two in all the relations of men and women, and upon her fearless treatment of problems of sex, rests her best title to be consistent. an important factor in fiction. With the possible exception of the author of Pigs in Clover, she is the only woman now writing in English who is able to handle questions of sex

with a masculine absence of self-consciousness, and consequently with an absence of morbid exaggeration. But, on the other hand, Mrs. Atherton has not acquired, along with a continental frankness of speech, certain other qualities that are equally essential to the highest type of art, namely, a subtle nicety of construction.

an appreciation of a finished technique. It is an inevitable consequence of her whole nature, her rugged independence, her refusal to be hampered by technicalities of the art, her fearless brushing aside of any arbitrary barriers standing between her and the way in which she happens for the moment to feel like writing a particular story, that almost without exception her book suffer from a faulty technique.

Almost without exception we feel that the basic idea behind each of them, the skeleton structure upon which they were was worthy and capable of a development considerably beyond that which she finally achieved. It needs no very great critical acumen, no special experience in the art of story construction to realize that in all of Mrs. Atherton's books there is a large proportion of episode that is not vital to the development of the central theme, that there are a certain number of minor characters devoid of real structural importance, that there are frequently secondary themes interwoven with the central one which constitute what might in the hackathes.

neat phraseology of Mr. Kipling be accurately designated as another story. And in some cases these secondary themes, these subordinate characters which might have become structurally important if carried through to the final chapter, suddenly drop out of sight midway through the

book, leaving us impotently wondering why they were introduced at all. Indeed, one of the most obvious faults of Mrs. Atherton's special brand of realism is that she imitates to freely nature's inscrutable way of injecting into the intimate dramas of human life, a multitude of apparently irrelevant details.

It is, of course, a common, everyday experience to find all sorts of sordid and paltry interruptions from the outside world, heedlessly intruding upon our intimate joys and sorrows. But there is no hard and fast rule ordaining the invariable occurrence of such interruptions, and the finer technique of fiction demands that their intrusion shall be reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the main issue, the vital thing that the novelist has to say, runs the risk of becoming blurred, perhaps of being lost to sight altogether. One of the axioms of literary criticism is that an author shall be judged not merely by what he has done, but also by what has been the nature of his intention. The initial difficulty that lies in the way of

fairly judging Mrs. Atherton is that it often becomes difficult to conjecture just what she really has intended to do. In several of her books, as we shall have occasion presently to observe in detail, she has apparently had in mind that epic breadth of subject and of treatment which characterizes the best work of Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Ellen Glasgow, and David Graham Phillips. A big national problem filling the whole background of the canvas, and against it some sharply defined personal tragedy thrown out in bold relief in the middle of the picture. This, at least, one feels she has tried to accomplish, but she has fallen short of the accomplishment. The close connection between the general and the special theme,

a connection that is vital to the achievement of any epic, whether in prose or in verse, is either wanting altogether or else too weak to fulfill its purpose. One sees, or rather half suspects, a number of symbolic characters and episodes planned apparently to develop and accentuate the epic scheme, but they are either abortive or else so obscure that one hesitates to venture an opinion as to what the author's intent really was, feeling moderately certain that, if consulted, she would probably declare that she had no such intent at all. Altogether, the literary methods of Mrs. Atherton may be summed up briefly as extraordinarily variable and arbitrary,

and, nevertheless, perhaps indeed for this very reason, at times undeniably effective. It would be difficult to find in the whole range of English fiction another writer of such uneven quality, another writer whose best pages are separated from her worst by so wide a gap, whose strongest scenes are so vastly superior to her weakest, whose style at one time is so exceedingly good, and at others so exasperating to an ear that is sensitive to style. Mrs. Atherton, when at her best, is delightful in her ability to make us see. Her picturings of Old California, which forms the background of so larger part of what

must be recognized as her best work, possess an artistic charm, a sensuous richness of color and at the same time a discreet self-restraint that constitute a delight to the ear and to the mental vision mrs atherton at her worst lets her pen run riot in a blare of words until the printed paragraph shrills onward and upward into a painful and hysterical shriek Contrast, for instance, the following brief paragraphs taken almost at random from her earlier writings. Quote, Carmel River sparkled peacefully beneath its moving willows. The Blue Bay murmured to the white sands with a piece of evening. Close to the little beach, the old mission hung its dilapidated head. Through its yawning arches, dark objects flitted. Mold was on the yellow walls.

From yawning crevice the rank grass grew. Only the tower still defied elements and vandals, although the winds whistled through its gaping windows and the silver bells were no more. The huts about the church had collapsed like old muscles, but in their ruin still whispered the story of the past. And in sharp contrast with the art of a delicate vignette like the above, compare such a riot of words and thought as the following.

As she reached the sidewalk, a squall caught and nearly carried her off her feet. She cursed aloud. She let fly all the maledictions, English, and Spanish of which she had knowledge. She raised her voice and pierced the gale, the furious energy of her words hissing like escaping steam. She raised her voice still higher and shrieked her profane arraignment of all things mundane

in a final ecstasy of nervous abandonment. It is this tendency to vociferate a little too shrilly, this inability to sustain the key, that suddenly has the effect of letting a whole scene drop, from grim reality into something akin to melodrama. In spite of this, Mrs. Atherton compels admiration for her unwavering independence, her splendid strength when she is at her best, and for the rich, glow and passion of pulsing life that she injects into the printed page, and that she undoubtedly would fall short

of attaining with a less rugged and better disciplined style. A brief analysis of certain representative volumes will make clearer the scope and the limitations of Mrs. Atherton's attainments. To discuss in detail every one of the score of volumes which she has put forth during nearly as many years would not only be impracticable, but would seriously blur the resulting impression. But if we select, let us say, such volumes as the Californians, Patience Sparhawk, Senator North, rulers of kings, and ancestors, we shall have an easily manageable group that admirably shows her range of power, her chief interests in the problems of modern social life, as well as her methods and her errors of technique. Of Mrs. Atherton as a short story writer there seems no need to speak specifically. The splendid idle forties with its kaleidoscopic pictures of the life of old California, a life already vanishing into the realm of forgotten things, has a quality that refuses to be

disregarded. A quality of exotic beauty, an elusive fragrance, a strange mingling of pride and passion and languor. Yet the most that can be said of it is that it shows more of promise than of fulfillment, and that the best that it contains is to be met with again, worked out with a sure touch in her longer California novels. It is a little rash in the case of a novelist whose interests in life are so broad as Mrs. Atherton's, and whose point of view is so cosmopolitan, to attempt to find some unifying principle, some common keynote serving to harmonize her work as a whole. And yet, in Mrs. Atherton's case, such an attempt may be made with less danger than in the case of many of her contemporaries, of being accused of a far-fetched artificial interpretation.

No one can read her books without being aware of the keen interest she has always taken in the spread of the modern democratic movement in our political, social, and moral attitude toward life. And still more keenly is she concerned with the inevitable conflict constantly in progress between this younger, stronger democratic movement and the inherited prejudices of an older aristocratic conservatism. Most of all, she has chosen again and again, with many minor variations, to study the struggle of a young woman striving to re-adjust herself to the new order of things, trying to conquer her own heredity, to put aside the conventions in which she has been nurtured, and to

live her own life in independence and liberty. This is the dominant note of Senator North, in which Betty Madison's long fight for happiness is the direct outcome of rebelling against the traditions of her family. iron-bound prejudices of her mother. Numbering themselves among the oldest and most exclusive families in Washington, they have made it their boast that no politician has ever been received within their doors. Betty, in the prime of splendid young womanhood, overrules her mother's wishes, seeks the acquaintance of representatives and senators, frequents the gallery of the Senate chamber,

establishes a salon in which politics is the prevailing topic, and, to the destruction of her peace of mind, falls in love with Senator North, realizing only too late that she has given her heart to a man already married. The same note, although not quite so insistent, makes itself heard in the Californians. Magdalena Yorba is the daughter of a Spanish father and a New England mother. She is perpetually at war with herself, constantly suffering from the clash between Spanish pride and New England conscience, between passive acceptance of that obedience to convention which the women of her father's house had always shown, and that inborn sense of the individual right to live one's own life in one's own way, which came to her through generations of Puritan blood.

The particular way in which she asserts this independent seems not especially momentous in itself, nor even vital to the structure of the story, but it serves to keep before us her ineffectual spirit of revolt. Magdalena, unlike the other girls of her social class, has a restless brain, thirsting for knowledge and for an opportunity to achieve and to create. Her secret ambition is to become an author. But, to Don Roberto Yorba, for a daughter of his house to essay to write, is in itself an offense, while to publish a book and allow her name to appear in print would be shame unspeakable. The main theme of the story is only loosely connected with that of the girl's secret longing for a novelist's fame, but it does have to do very distinctly

with the repressed conditions under which Magdalena has matured, conditions that have handicapped her for the inevitable social game, and make it possible for another girl reared in greater freedom, to intervene and rob her of the man she loves. Patience Sparhawk fits in less well to the prevailing scheme of Mrs. Atherton's books. But at least it is the story of a young woman's struggle against heredity, against the evil impulses bequeathed her by her mother, the degradation of her mother's memory. And in the later development of the book we get, to some extent, the clash between the exclusive class and the democracy when patient Sparhawk, wrongly accused of the murder of her husband, fights a losing battle for her life in court, in the public press, and even at the hands of the

state governor, partly because the evidence looks black against her, but also, as Mrs. Atherton makes us feel, because she is an aristocrat suffering judgment at the hands of the masses. rulers of kings and ancestors, among Mrs. Atherton's later volumes, are two books which it is most enlightening and salutary to study side by side, for they reveal her respectively at her worst and at her best. Rulers of Kings is a preposterous book, a book of Opera Booth, pure and simple, a book of genius seemingly gone mad and running amok through the palaces of Europe, ruthlessly trampling on the divine rights of kings and caricaturing the reigning monarchs in the spirit of a Sunday Supplement cartoonist. It is distinctly depressing to have been under the necessity of

reading so bad a book. And what makes it not merely depressing, but irritating as well, is the conviction that Mrs. Atherton is perfectly well aware of what she has done, and that she has done it deliberately after much careful thought. For the benefit of readers who may not happen to have read rulers of kings, it may be worthwhile very briefly to state the sum and substance of it. The book opens with the following paragraph. Quote, When Fessitin Abbott heard that he was to inherit four hundred million dollars, he experienced the profoundest discouragement he was ever to know,

except on that midnight ten years later when he stood on a moonlit balcony in Hungary, alone with the daughter of an emperor, and opened his contemptuous American mind to the deeper problems of Europe. A man equipped with a contemptuous American mind and four hundred million dollars may be relied upon to make some stir in the world. Fessenden Abbott's special way of getting into mischief is to fall in love with an Austrian princess, a daughter of the Emperor Franz Josef Renata by name, whom you will search for in vain in the Almanac de Gota, for the simple reason that Mrs. Atherton invented

her for the occasion. Now, if there is one court in Europe that is, more than any other, a stronghold of the divine right of kings, it is that of the Habsburgs. The one court with a marriage of a princess with an American is not merely a thing forbidden, but simply unthinkable, inconceivable, impossible. It is true that just once in the world's history a commoner did precisely this impossible, inconceivable thing, a dauntless firebrand of a man from Corsica. Had Napoleon never really lived, and had some audacious novelist of the Dumas type invented him, conceived his fantastic career, his juggernaut progress over the fallen thrones of Europe,

then by rights we might have had a novel entitled to call itself rulers of kings but fessenden abbott with his contemptuous american mind is sadly out of his element when we listen to his stolen interviews with renata we wonder whether he is not a petty clerk who has taken his employer's daughter for a sunday outing to coney island frankly princesses do not talk that way what happens in mrs atherton's story is this Fessenden Abbott possesses the rights to an invention which makes future warfare an impossibility. It is an explosive which starts in motion deadly whirlwinds that simply sweep out of existence any armed force venturing to stand in the way. Fessenden will sell his invention to Germany and Austria in exchange for France Joseph's daughter.

Then, as he points out, these two powers can declare war upon Russia and the East and wipe them out of existence. But if his offer is refused, he will insisting. instead sell the invention to Russia, and to quote his ultimatum to France Yosef. When Austria is a province of Russia, your daughter will be the first prisoner set free. The emperor's face turns purple, and his heavy Habsburg mouth, trembles, but he capitulates and his daughter marries the American with the paternal blessing. The only point of spending so much space upon this literary blunder is to show that here, as elsewhere, Mrs. Atherton has the obsession of a triumphant,

democracy, riding roughshod over Europe's proudest aristocrats. In contrast to this, it is like a breath of ozone to turn to ancestors, in which the same general theme is treated not merely with sanity, but with a bigness, a comprehension, a convincing force that make it easily the most important contribution she has yet made to American fiction. It is not surprising that she has put into it so much of her best work. She is writing not fantastic melodrama about comic opera kings, but plain truth about real people whom she may have known personally. She is showing sanely and convincingly

the manner in which certain almost forgotten strains of heredity will come to the surface and assert their right to a share in working out our destiny. And lastly, she is picturing how the magic glamour of California may react upon a conservative Englishman, and little by little make a new man of him, until he ends by proving himself a better American than the Californians themselves. It is a big book, undeniably, a book of almost epic sweep, a book whose power and value are likely in a measure to be missed if we do not realize that the protagonist is not Jack Gwynn, the

Americanized Englishman, nor Isabel Otis, the California girl who wins his love. But the city of San Francisco, which dominates the book like a regal and capricious heroine, and whose hour of agony by earthquake and by fire closes the volume with the shadow of a cosmic tragedy. nevertheless even ancestors as faulty in technique mrs atherton was on the right track as she had been many times before san francisco the gateway of the west the big and splendid symbol of american liberty dominating the whole volume and against this spectacular background a little group of individual lives handicapped by a complex heredity slowly and bravely working their way to freedom and to happiness why the book is built on a plan of zolaesque magnitude and boldness the trouble is that the two themes the general and the specific are not closely enough correlated that many of the episodes which take place in san francisco might just as well have been enacted elsewhere and that even the tremendous final chapter picturing the devastation of the great earthquake is not a structural necessity, not a solution of any problem, nor a rounding out of the specific human story. The latter has been

amply solved in an earlier chapter, and the earthquake is merely like the last piece played by the orchestra after the curtain has been wrung down and the audience is filing out. One more example of what may be called slovenly technique is to be noted in one of the books already discussed, Senator North. Apparently, Mrs. Atherton had in mind in this case also a volume of epic breadth, with Washington and the whole scheme of national politics as the big, dominant general theme, and the love of an ardent young woman for one of the nation's lawmakers as the specific and individual point of interest. But here again, the relation between the two themes is too loosely knit. We hear a good deal about political life. We frequent the houses of

Congress, the homes of diplomats, the motley gatherings of public functions. But after all, the specific human interest of the book, the old, old story of a woman bravely fighting against her love for a married man, is independent of the political background, independent of party lines, independent even of the Cuban War with which the book concludes. As a story of two human lives, it would have been essentially the same had the setting been laid in no man's land outside of time and space. there is however one subordinate story interwoven in senator north which if it could have been made into a book apart would have been an almost flawless bit of technique this is the story of betty madison's half-sister harriet the illegitimate daughter of her father and an octaroon harriet is practically a white woman but for a scarcely perceptible blueness at the base of her fingernails the secret of her birth is well kept and eventually she marries betty's cousin a southerner full of the pride of blood

and race. The secret might have come out in any one of a dozen ways, but the way in which it does come out is structurally perfect. White, though she is, Harriet inherits certain strains of Negro temperament, among others the sort of religious fervor that finds vent in revival meetings, loud hallelujahs, and gospel songs. And one night when she returns from a Negro camp meeting almost in a religious trance, she hysterically confesses to her husband the truth about the one-16th strain of colored blood, too hysterical to foresee that he will inevitably kill himself, and that her own suicide is the logical sequel. This character of Harriet is perhaps the best bid of feminine analysis that Mrs. Atherton ever did, and it is a pity that it is buried away in a volume where its

importance is unfairly overshadowed by far less vital episodes. And now, briefly, what is Mrs. Atherton's place among the novelists of her time and generation? That she is a vital living force cannot be denied. That she has won and holds her public is also unquestionable. Much that she has done is well deserving of the recognition it has received. On the other hand, there is much in her writings that is indefensible. It is well, however, for the world of letters as a whole, in a generation when form and technique are in danger of being raised up as a fetish, to have now and then a fearless and untrammeled spirit, refusing to be bound by other laws and conventions than those of her own making,

especially when she justifies herself from time to time by the sheer strength, the rugged sincerity of such books as the Californians and ancestors. It is no bad thing for a nation's literature to be stirred now and again by the sort of intellectual anarchy that is represented by Mrs. Atherton at her best. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of Some American Storytellers, by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

12. Owen Worcester No matter how willingly we may obey Condide's wise injunction to cultivate our garden, it is well to remember that not every writer can achieve an equal profusion and variety, nor an equal clearness of plan and purpose. Not to everyone is it given to grow oranges and lemons, citrus and pistachios in oriental opulence. There are some literary gardens, that bring with them an old-time fragrance of Mignonette and Sweet Alism, with sunflowers and hollyhocks in the background. Others again may be only an humble cabbage patch, or perhaps

a garden of Allah, all burning sand and sunshine, but born of singleness of purpose distinct and unmistakable. But how, at first sight, is one to interpret a garden composed of much sagebrush, one towering redwood, a magnolia, and a head of Boston lettuce. Yet this, in all courtesy be it said is a fair inventory of the harvest which up to the present time has rewarded Mr. Wister's tillage in the fertile soil of his imagination. His short stories of Western ranch life, ranging from Arizona to Wyoming, and comprising practically all his early work and an ample share of his later, are literally as redolent of the soil, as unmistakably indigenous in color, form, and atmosphere, as is the gray-green aromatic herbage that form so conspicuous a feature

of their setting. His one full-length novel, the Virginian, has a certain primal bigness about it that makes it seem to loom up tree-like and rugged dignity, a growth of nature rather than of art. Lady Baltimore has, by contrast, a sort of hot-house charm. That southern softness of manners and of speech, as unmistakable and as delightful in their way as the form and fragrance of a magnolia bloom. And even Boston lettuce has not a flavor more local, a more unconstitutional. A more unconstitutional. A more suspected generosity of close-packed and succulent substance than that blithe little satire of college life, philosophy four, with its unpretentious outward showing, and the golden wisdom hidden at its heart. Yet it is precisely the informality of Mr. Wister's garden, the absence of

neat paths in close-clipped hedgerows that gives the first important clue to his literary methods. The simple fact is that Mr. Wister has never attempted to preempt any special corner of the habitable world, and make it his own, in any such sense as Mrs. Wilkins Freeman preempted New England, Mr. Allen, Kentucky, or Mr. Cable, New Orleans. The fact that he has become identified in the popular mind with certain sections of the West is due less to his interest in the life of the plains as something curious and anomalous, something different from humanity as we ordinarily understand it, than to his recognition of the far more important fact that underneath the picturesque and striking surface differences,

human nature west and east is at heart a fairly constant quantity. His obvious love for the characters of his own creating, Scipio Lemoine, and Steve and the Virginian, is not because they were cowboys with a strange dialect and a still stranger moral code, but because when one came to know them,

one found them men, acting as the best of us might act if exposed to like conditions. In this connection, it is a significant fact that Mr. Wister almost always writes frankly as an outsider, bringing himself into the story after the method of Mr. Kipling's earlier tales, and writing in the first person as the one who has witnessed certain events, or to whom certain others were repeated at firsthand. The result of this method is that we are all

the time forced to see and measure whatever is local and transitory through alien eyes, and that we think of such a book as the Virginian, not as the record of a phase of life that has already passed away, but as a vital and enduring presentment of types and characters that are most thoroughly, most widely, most delightfully, American. After conceding freely and gladly these merits to Mr. Whistre, it will not be thought ungenerous to proceed to point out some of his shortcomings, and to say at once, frankly, that he is one of those storytellers who have won fame, not because of their craftsmanship, but in spite of their lack of it. To the fundamental doctrine of economy of means he shows a blithe and difference. In his long stories and his shorter ones alike,

he refuses to trim his hedges or to prune back his vines, preferring to let them luxuriate weed-like in whatever direction they list. To some extent it is a handicap for an author to have a too-facil charm of style. The writer who is conscious that, if he allows himself to become garrulous, if he strays a hair's breadth beyond the strict letter of his theme, he will be voted abhor, learns at an early stage the fine art of suppression, which Emerson once declared to be the supreme quality of a literary style. But the genial narrator who is assured of his hold upon his audience, even when he rambles far afield with Manya digression,

Menia, this reminds me, is not likely to hamper himself with a rigid technique and thereby lose the chance of drawing forth an additional laugh or winning an extra round of applause. This ability to digress with impunity Mr. Wist's has to an unusual extent. Even through the medium of the printed page, one is always conscious of a pleasing personality, and can almost see the indulgent smile or the amused twinkle of the eye that must accompany certain characteristic flashes of humor. For there can be no question that besides being a storyteller, the creator of Emily and the Frog's Legs episode must be

numbered among our recognized American humorists. And what is more, enrolled as one who has never, for the sake of scoring a point degraded humor to the level of farce comedy. Now, since an author is known by the company that he keeps upon his bookshelves, or at least by that smaller group which he considers worthy of emulation, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment over Mr. Whistor's own confessions, in the preface to his latest published volume members of the family. He tells us, for instance, that so far back as 1884, Mr. Howells had felt his literary pulse and pronounced it promising,

that a quickening came from the pages of Stevenson, and a far stronger shove next from the genius of plain tales, and, oddly enough, that the final push happened to be given by Prospere Mirime. All of these influences, with the exception of the last mentioned, are of course obvious enough to any clear-eyed critic, but it is interesting to know that they were influences of the conscious sort, and that Mr. Whistr frankly recognizes his indebtedness. The influence of Merri Mae, however, is one that we might have been a long time in discovering without this direct acknowledgement. Yet the connection is sufficiently easy to perceive when one's attention has been directed to it. Mary May, like Whistair, found his interest aroused

and his imagination stimulated chiefly by new and foreign environments. As in his best-known stories, Colomba, Carmen, Levinus Dille, wherein he could study without criticizing, the manner in which the fundamental problems of human nature work themselves out under the special limitations of Corsican or Spanish manners and customs. But his list of acknowledgments is not yet complete. There is one more to whom he professes a debt of gratitude, namely Henry James. And the heartfelt tribute that he proceeds to pay to the author of The Ambassadors is the best proof that, whatever his own shortcomings in technique may be,

Mr. Wister's instinctive recognition of a master craftsman is beyond, reproach. His own words in this connection deserve, not only to be quoted, but cordially endorsed, because if more of our young novelists today had even a rudimentary idea of the amount that Henry James might teach them, American fiction would be less conspicuous for its prolificness and more conspicuous for its finer and higher standards. The influence is, as he points out, already at work, and slowly but surely it is bound to spread. Quote, it is significant to note how this master seems to be teaching a numerous young generation. Often do I pick up some popular magazine and read a story, one even of murder it may be in

tropic seas or city slums, where some canny bit of foreshortening of presentation reveals the spreading influence and I say, Ah, my friend, never would you have found out how to do that if Henry James hadn't set you thinking. But in authorship, for everyone influence of which we are conscious, there are a dozen that work unguessed unsuspected. And in Mr. Wister's case, had his acquaintances with modern fiction been limited solely to those authors

to whom he pays tribute, a work like, the Virginian, with all its faults, would be inconceivable. What the other influences have been, it is needless here to conjecture, for the sufficient and practical reason that his own admissions prove him to be of widely Catholic tastes,

as free from attachment to any particular school as, let us say, was Marion Crawford. Howells, the veteran champion champion, of realism, James, the subtlest of English psychologues, Stevenson, the belated romanticist, all find equal favor in his sight, not because of what they profess, but because he realizes that each of them achieves quite admirably the special thing that he has undertaken to do. In other words, Mr. Wister is an eclectic, both in his theories and in his practice of fiction. It is impossible to pronounce him realist or romanticist, symbolist, or psychologist. His method

vary, not only from book to book, but from chapter to chapter in the same book. Mopassant, for instance, might have written more than one episode in the Virginian. The lynching of the cattle thieves, for instance, or that other even more cruel chapter in which a human fiend avenges himself upon a horse driven beyond its strength by gouging out its eye. But none but a dreamer could have written the idol of Molly's marriage to the Virginian, and the honeymoon on the Sylvan Island, the only fault of which is that it was all too beautiful to be quite true. Having acquired this initial perspective of Mr. Wister's literary theory and practice as a whole,

we may now profitably take up the separate works in detail, according to the division suggested by our opening symbolism of the garden. And, first of all, as to the sagebrush portion of his work, the stories of rather uneven merit, ranging all the way from mediocre to extremely good, that made up the contents of such early volumes as Red Men and White, and the Jimmy John Boss. Well, to be quite candid, a detailed analysis of them

would add nothing of real value to a critical estimate of their author because they are in a measure apprentice work. They were written while Mr. Whister was in the phrase of the literary shop learning his job. Had he never done anything better, the Jimmy John Boss,

the opening story in the volume of that name, narrating how a cowboy whose sole education has been acquired in the school of adversity, and whose chief asset is his indomitable nerve is made foreman of the most lawless and undisciplined set of refions on any ranch in the state, takes them firmly in hand, and even after a temporary rebellion when they are crazed with drink,

succeed in getting back control and making himself undisputed master. All this and a dozen other tales would have merited a certain amount of critical praise. But, as it happens, they were merely an earnest of something far better yet to come. and in due time that something better came in the form of the Virginian, which in its genesis is nothing more nor less than an accretion of short stories. Just as Mo Passant's first novel, Unvi, is an assemblage of short stories, and with the additional point of resemblance that in both cases a number of the stories have been published separately. In the case of the Virginian, several chapters having appeared in advance in magazine form. In that of Unvi,

the short stories being printed much later in a posthumous volume. The only practical purpose for recalling here what must be a rather widely known fact is that it serves to prove that Mr. Wister belongs to that class of storytellers whose natural form is the short story rather than the long, who see every story in the first instance as a single detached incident. And when they attempt a more sustained effort, find themselves simply stringing together a series of such incidents upon just one rather slender narrative thread.

As it happens, the Virginian proved itself in defiance of mathematics to be considerably bigger than the sum of its parts. But that, I think, was due less to a definite, carefully worked-out plan than, to a chance unity of ideas running through all the several segments. The West, as a broad, free, stupendous hole, had impressed Mr. Whistre mightily,

and in a way that could not be quickly formulated or easily put into words. but with each story, each episode, he came nearer to saying some part of what was struggling for utterance. And when all these separate parts were finally fitted together into a single volume, it would be interesting to know whether Mr. Whistler himself was not just a trifle surprised to find how well he had succeeded in expressing a number of rather important truths. If it were not for the danger of being misunderstood as praising the Virginian for qualities which it does not possess,

the simplest way of defining its character, and at the same time explaining why its very looseness of construction in some degree is a help rather than a hindrance, would be to say that it was of the epic type. But the term would have to be understood in a far more elemental sense than when applied to the careful, almost architectural symmetry of the Zolaesque method. The Virginian is epic, insofar as it shows us certain individual lives struggling to reach a solution of problems, equally vital to the length and breadth of the whole vast region in which they live. A small group of human beings trying to justify to themselves and the world at large the fundamental justice of the rude moral code that governs them. In a stricter sense of the word,

the Virginian is not merely badly constructed. It is almost without structure. There is not a chapter in it that we would willingly spare, but that does not alter the fact that, aside from a few crucial scenes, there is scarcely a chapter whose excision would destroy the book's essential unity. In other words, the book is so far of the Picaresco type, that its episodes are like so many pearls on a single thread. Undoubted gems of their kind, but so arranged that the removal of one or more would not leave a gap in the design. The Virginian has actually that lack of deliberate detail work for which so many critics wrongfully censure Mr. Kipling's Kim. Yet, if we are willing to think for a moment of the West, that glorious Virgin West of earlier years,

as a sort of anthropomorphized heroin, just as we think of India as the heroine of Kim. Then it becomes possible to forgive much of the looseness, the apparent irrelevancy, the digressions, because much that is either superfluous or beside the mark, so far as it is meant to help us understand the individual lives of Molly or the Virginian, Steve or Trampus, becomes fraught with a new import when our interest is focused on the destiny of a community, almost on a nation. This bigger view of the Virginian is, of course, the true one. The individual life of any one cowpuncher, of no matter how much instinctive and inborn

honesty and courage and deference to women, is not, for its own sake alone, material fine enough or strong enough from which to fashion a novel that could have taken the firm hold upon the general public, from the Atlantic to the Pacific that the Virginian indisputably has taken. However lovable Mr. Wister's rough diamond of the ranches may be, and however sympathetically romantic his courtship of the demure little schoolteacher with the New England conscience, these ingredients alone would not have kept the book alive throughout the first six months. The secret of its enduring hold upon the public must be sought in something deeper and more

vital. We find the answer, I think, in the broad, general principle expressed here and there in words, and throughout the book by implication that in every community men must make such laws for themselves as the conditions under which they live demand. The trick of getting the drop, on your adversary,

the right to shoot an enemy at sight after a fair warning, the whole underlying theory of vigilance committees and of lynch law are justified only by the exigencies of special conditions. The advantage of the crudest and most rudimentary form of justice over no justice at all. Mr. Whistair has not the least

intention of holding lawlessness up for our admiration, just because it comes in picturesque masquerade. When the Virginian cooperates in a murder, according to our Eastern standards, by helping to lynch his personal friend, Steve, and when again he puts himself upon a level with a skulking outlaw like Trampus, accepts his challenge to shoot at sight, and succeeds in shooting straighter, Mr. Whistor is not proclaiming the Frontier Code of Wyoming to have been superior to the English common law. He is simply insisting that if you or I are going to live in a community, we must accept the ethics of that community if we wish to be respected.

He is exalting the Hackneyed proverb about doing in Rome as the Romans do from mere expediency, a mere courteous wish to do the expected thing into a big fundamental principle of human rights and duties. And when Molly's New England conscience capitulates to love, and when after swearing she will never forgive the Virginian if he kills Trampus, she exclaims, Thank God! At the sight of Trampus's dead body, Mr. Whistre is not to be misunderstood as claiming that Molly's moral nature has undergone a change, and that if she returned to her New England home, she would take with her a strain of newly acquired lawlessness.

What he does teach is that she has acquired a wider horizon, a broader view of life, that she has suddenly been made to see that right and wrong are sometimes relative terms, and that what is a penal offense in Massachusetts may be the truest heroism among the Rockies. This same broad principle that every community, whether large or small, rude or cultured, knows better than any outsider can know its own interests and necessities, forms the cornerstone of Mr. Wister's best short story,

Philosophy 4. And partly because it is his best short story, partly because it is replete with a far-sighted wisdom, partly also because it is in a class by itself, unique and inimitable, it has seemed worthwhile to give it in the present analysis of Mr. Wister's writings, an amount of space that to some readers may seem out of proportion to its size and scope. There are many worthy persons who cherish the delusion that the percentages marked by solemn professors upon examination books are a fair criterion of the practical good which a student is obtaining from his college course, and that is precise

standing in the graduating class as a reliable gauge of his future chances of success or failure. They are not aware that they are judging life from the standpoint of that venerable but somewhat misleading fable of, the hare and the tortoise. And because some human hairs have loitered by the wayside, and some human tortoises dull, plodding and industrious, have come in ahead. They take the result as a measure of relative speed throughout life. The undergraduate world makes no such blunders. And Mr. Wister, always felicitous in his subtle understanding of worlds and environments to which he bears the relation of an outsider, was never more delightfully, more triumphantly successful than in his tour de force, in which he bridged the years that separated him from his

own Harvard days, and reflected the spirit of the time and place as only a Harvard man of the early eighties could have known and felt it. But it would not be fair to imply that the merit of philosophy before is mainly local or temporal. In all the larger universities, there are in every class certain students who are recognized as born leaders. In class politics, in athletics, in college journalism, in all that gives undergraduate life cohesion and unity, they come to the front. In the older New England universities, they belong largely to the number of those whose fathers and grandfathers before them were prominent in the social life of their respective classes, and whose family names figure prominently in the pages of early American history.

To such as these, a four-yearous course at Yale or Harvard is enveloped in a maze of traditions undreamed of by the stranger and the alien. The university is not merely a seat of learning from which the maximum of knowledge must be extracted at a definite rate per day. It is a miniature world, in which they are to find their level, just as they must find it later in the bigger world. and they are quite as much interested in finding out what their fellow classmates think of them as they are in winning the approval of the dean and faculty. And in the long run, the verdict of the undergraduate world is not greatly at variance with a later verdict of the world at large. In other words, philosophy four, in spite of its joyously irresponsible mood, emphatically points a moral,

although it may be in a somewhat topsy-turvy manner. And incidentally, it reflects undergraduate life with some sort of a moment. Fidelity that no Harvard man of 25-year standing can read it without experiencing successive waves of nostalgia With the opening sentence, it projects us at once into the sultory atmosphere of examination week with all its Unforgotten sights and sounds and odors the fragrance of early June flowers wafted in at the windows The lazy droning of ponderous beetles blundering into the student's lamps the distant singing of the glee club borne in from the steps of a dormitory across the yard Within the room, two anxious perspiring students, Bertie and Billy, are being prepared for an imminent examination in philosophy four by a fellow classmate, whose name alone is a fairly sufficient characterization of race and attributes, Oscar Myroni, at the exorbitant sum of five dollars an hour. Bertie and Billy are of the type of the grasshopper in La Fontaine's familiar fable. Throughout the season of plenty they have played and sung, oblivious of fate approaching in the form of the Greek philosophy.

But suddenly, the very names of Aristotle and Plato, Epiarmus of Cause, sent cold chills down their backs, and they hastily seek out Maroni, the human aunt, and preempt a share of his stored-up knowledge. Now, Maroni is a type of student that will be readily recognized. He is of the tortoise type, patient, plodding, bound ultimately to attain his goal, because a certain number of steps make a furlong, and a definite number of furlongs make a mile. his retentive memory absorbs the words of professorial wisdom after the fashion of a sponge, and when examination day comes, sponge-like, he will squeeze it back again, somewhat muddier and

somewhat more scanty than when he received it, yet essentially the same and without an added drop of originality. Over the two irresponsible spirits, Billy and Bertie, Oscar labors faithfully, sadly bewildered and somewhat pained by their lack of reverence for the sages of antiquity, understanding only vaguely the rapid fire of their chaff and their slang, but allowing himself no protest beyond a mildly sarcastic reference to their original research. By seven o'clock on Monday evening they have salted down the early Greek bucks. By midnight they have called the turn on Plato. Tuesday night brings them down to the multiplicity of the ego.

The examination is set for Thursday. Accordingly, Wednesday is dedicated to a general last survey of the whole subject. as it happens Wednesday morning dawns bright and clear, a most alluring morning for a wild and irresponsible break for liberty. The open country beyond the Charles calls to them irresistibly. There is besides a sort of tradition that somewhere in the direction of Quincy there is a wonderful old tavern, a mysterious, elusive Will of the Whisp sort of place called the Bird in Hand, where marvellous dinners and still more fabulous wines could be obtained if only one could find the place. "'Have you any sand?' Bertie inquires of Billy.

"'Sand?' Billy yells in response. "'And within twenty minutes they are driving rapidly in the direction of Quincy, "'leaving Oscar in the lurch.' "'And at this point Mr. Whistre subtly explains, "'quote, "'you see, it was Oscar that had made them run so, "'or rather it was duty and fate walking in Oscar's displeasing likeness. "'Nothing easier, nothing more reasonable

"'than to see the tutor and tell him that they should not need him today, but that would have spoiled everything. They did not know it, but deep in their childlike hearts was a delicious sense that in thus unaccountably disappearing, they had won a great game, had got a way ahead of duty and fate.

It was a wild and exhilarating day that Bertie and Billy spent in pursuit of the elusive bird in hand. They cooled themselves with a swim in the Charles. They lay on the bank and shouted at each other questions from Greek philosophy, turning it into a game by agreeing that each should

credit himself with 25 cents whenever the other failed to answer correctly. And finally, when daylight was fading into dusk, they stumbled unexpectedly upon the long-sought tavern, thanks to the timely shying of their horse, enjoyed an opulent repast in which Silver Fizz played a conspicuous part, lost all conception of time and place, and drove homeward by the waning light of the moon in such an exhilarated condition that when Billy inadvertently tumbled out of the wagon over the wheel, he had barely energy enough remaining to inquire who had fallen, and when told to add in plaintive cadence, did Billy fall out? Poor Billy! Now, by all the laws of probability a night like this should have paved

the way for a first-class failure in philosophy four, but it did nothing of the sort. Oscar, who had spent the previous day in calling with business-like punctuality once an hour at their room, and leaving memoranda to the effect that his services had been duly tendered, plotted through the three-hour's examination with his wanted laborious fidelity, and received a modest 75% as a reward for answering the professor's questions in the professor's own words. But Billy's mark was 86 and Bertie's 90, and they were both highly complimented by the professor, Bertie, for his discussion of the double personality and his apt illustration of the intoxicated hack driver who had fallen from his hack and inquired who had fallen and then had pitied himself.

And Billy, for his striking and independent suggestions concerning the distortions of time and space which hashish and other drugs produce. But the crowning touch of irony is attained in Oscar's unbounded astonishment his inability to understand. Quote, he hastened to the professor with his tale. There is no mistake, said the professor. Oscar smiled with increased deference. But, he urged, I assure you, sir, those young men knew absolutely nothing. I was their tutor, and they knew nothing at all. I taught them all their information myself. In that case, replied the professor not pleased with Oscar's tail-bearing, you must have given them more than you could spare. Good morning.

Before proceeding to point out that Lady Baltimore, Mr. Wister's next volume in point of time, is in spite of all the obvious differences of subject, setting, and workmanship, essentially the product of the same mind, the same philosophy, the same outlook upon life, it is necessary to clear up one or two possible misunderstandings regarding certain terms used in this chapter. There is, for instance, the statement that the Virginian is Mr. Wister's only sustained effort is one full-length novel, and to offset it is the indisputable fact that Lady Baltimore is issued in the conventional novel form, contains upward of 400 pages.

Now, to suggest that broad margins and large type are potent factors in lending a deceptive impression of amplitude is merely to quibble over non-essentials. The difference between a short story and a novel lies deeper than a mere choice between 8-10 point type. The Virginian, curtailed and compressed into 50 pages, would still be a novel because of the serious purpose and the tremendous human truce behind it.

Lady Baltimore, regardless of men, mathematical dimensions can never be in spirit anything more than an amplified novelette. Exquisite in workmanship, perennially charming in its presentment of an exotic and evanescent civilization, yet containing little in the way of broad generalities or of serious practical philosophy. Nevertheless, there is the further important truth that technically, Lady Baltimore is the most admirable artistry, the most nearly flawless piece of work that Mr. Whistair has yet achieved. Every conservative critic must deplore the rash extravagance of a certain type of reviewer who finds in the passing novel of today qualities worthy of comparison with Fielding and Thackeray,

Bazac and Flaubert and Daudet. Even in Mr. Whistor's case, it is at least over generous to pronounce him, within the limits of a single review, a worthy successor both of Meredith and of Henry James. Yet this is precisely what Mr. Edward Clark Marsh, a critic characterized equally by the modesty and the discernment of his judgment has done, at least by implication in a review of Lady Baltimore. A possible indebtedness to the author of the egoist we may well let pass. Considering how few novelists ever learn just where or how to begin or end a story, it is quite natural to attribute to the few who show intelligence in this respect a conscious

imitation of one of the acknowledged masters. The influence of Henry James is a very different matter. In acknowledging his indebtedness to the author of what Macy knew, in the preface already quoted, Mr. Wister goes on to say that he once had the privilege of going over one of his own books with Mr. James, and of having the latter point out, page by page, his shortcomings, his lost opportunities, his lack of that finished technique without which no amount of native genius can reach artistic perfection. Mr. Wister does not state which of his volumes was thus criticized, but one does not feel much diffidence in venturing the conjecture that it was the Virginian, and that Lady Baltimore was Mr. Wister's prompt acknowledgement of his indebtedness, as well as a demonstration of his

surprising aptness as a pupil. For this reason, it is worthwhile to call attention to the critical acumen of Mr. Marsh's comment, anticipating as it did by five years Mr. Wister's confession. Quote, If there is a remote suggestion of Meredith in the elegant leisure of his beginning, there is a closer reference, a conscious indebtedness, indeed I believe, to Henry James in his manner, the turn of his phrases, and even in the framework and articulation of his story. All this is perfectly true, and the extraordinary thing about it is that, while in everything excepting the sheer craftsmanship of writing, Mr. Whistor has followed his usual methods, there is nothing in the earlier volumes to show that Henry James ever before influenced him.

In many respects, no doubt, their two minds are not in the mind's must work in much the same manner, or Mr. Wister could never have found himself so quickly in sympathy with the veteran artist's technical methods. But so far as the outsider can discover, their newly revealed kinship is a matter of those more obvious questions of plot construction, point of view, the grouping of paragraphs, or the turn of a phrase. Accordingly, let us see, first of all, of what substance Lady Baltimore is made. And secondly, in what fashion, and with what new manipulations Mr. Wister has chosen to mold that substance. As all readers of the Virginian are aware, its author has always insisted that although its pages

contain no famous characters, and its date is so recent as to be practically contemporary, it is nevertheless a historical novel, a record of a certain phase of American history, caught and preserved during the actual making. In the same sense, both Philosophy 4 and Lady Baltimore are historical documents, representing eternal. truce of human nature as reacted upon by transitory conditions. The setting of Lady Baltimore is a certain town of King's Port, a quiet backwater in the current of southern social life, where old-time manners and customs still linger, and there is a fragrance of gentle dignity and bygone courtliness in the ordinary relations of life.

Perhaps no story ever made claim to serious consideration while resting upon so fragile a foundation. Lady Baltimore is a local southern name for a certain rare and glorious species of cake, and the cake itself could not be of more airy and delicate consistence than the story it is here called upon to sustain. Imagine a northerner plunged by certain whims of destiny, the details are immaterial, into this tranquil eddy of an alien civilization, of whose social code he is utterly ignorant. Imagine him, while taking luncheon in the one available cake and tea room of the town, witnessing the purchase of a Lady Baltimore cake by a much embarrassed young man, who admits to the equally self-conscious young woman behind the counter that this cake,

ordered for a day near at hand, is to serve at his wedding. In the embarrassment of the young man, the northerner sensed something unusual in the way of romance, and little by little he gleanes the facts and pieces them together. The young man, it seems, has committed an act which his family and friends choose to regard as suicidal. He has engaged himself to a young woman of whose pedigree they know little or nothing. She may be a very worthy girl, but she is not one of them. She does not belong to the southern aristocracy. She is not a part and parcel of King's Port.

Such in brief is the opening situation of Lady Baltimore. To give an adequate idea of the way in which the unyielding, indomitable force of local prejudice is brought to bear upon this young couple, how gossip twists and distorts and plays havoc with the actualities of the case, and how a number of destinies are forced out of their natural channels by the dead inertia of traditional social laws, would mean nothing less than to rewrite Lady Baltimore and to spoil it in the rewriting. In the Virginian, Mr. Wister succeeded in giving us a thoroughly virile book without brutalizing it.

In Lady Baltimore, he has achieved the harder task of producing a delightfully feminine book without stooping to effeminacy. Or, to put it another way, he has juggled dexterously with soap bubbles without breaking them in the process. It remains to speak only of the technique of Lady Baltimore. It is no new thing to find Mr. Wister

writing in the first person, but it is distinctly new to find him rigidly confining himself to that narrow segment of life that passes directly within the angle of vision of his spokesman, the Northerner. This is the Henry James' Strick, by excellence. Earlier novelists have sometimes done the same thing indifferently well,

by instinct rather than intention. But Mr. James was the first to reduce this method to rules. And the admirable consistency with which Mr. Wister has followed out this principle of a single viewpoint, not only proves him to be an apt pupil, but makes Lady Baltimore one of those rare achievements in American fiction, a piece of technique that is almost without a flaw. It is a regrettable fact that Mr. Wister, never a prolific author, seems to be writing with never decreasing momentum. It is so long since a new volume has appeared bearing his name, that there is a half-hearted effort to hail as a literary event the recent appearance of members of the family, in which he has gathered together the later stories of the West, which from time

to time he has contributed to the magazines. In all candor, it must be admitted that the majority of them are rather lightweight. A few are frankly humorous, as, for instance, happy teeth, in which the easily aroused superstition of Indians is cleverly utilized to drive out a new post-trader who has acquired monopoly through unfair means, or again in the back, in which a hasty, although perhaps well-merited kick, delivered by an army captain to one of his men, becomes the subject of serious investigation and infinite red tape and is finally paid in full with accumulated interest. But the stories that deserve to be remembered are Timberline and the Gift Horse. Imagine yourself a tenderfoot, unskilled in the ways of the West, and without the clues that would help you to read character.

Imagine that you have done a kindness to a man who is locally eyed askance, and that he, to mark his gratitude, has insisted upon lending you a splendid specimen of a horse for the season. It might, or it might not strike you as peculiar, that before giving you the horse he should inquire so particularly as to your plans, and get your definite statement that you will remain throughout the summer on a certain side of a certain mountain range. Imagine, furthermore, that you suddenly change your mind and cross that range in quest of a certain legendary spring, which, according to Indian tradition, has a way of strangely appearing and disappearing. You find this spring, and simultaneously find an enclosure wherein there are many horses, stolen horses with fresh brands

not yet healed. At your very first spring, and simultaneously find an enclosure wherein'er soaring, and in the same thing, feet lie a pile of branding irons. And before you can collect your thoughts, you are looking into the muzzle of a pistol and find yourself surrounded by a company of ominously quiet men, one of whom carries a coil of hempen rope. These men do not care to listen to explanations. They simply cite the significant fact that you are here, that the branding irons are here, and that the horse you ride is a stolen one. Such is the awkward predicament narrated in the gift horse, and there is a grim little touch at the end which completes its artistry. But even stronger than this is Timberline.

For sheer economy of means and a steady rise in dramatic force to the culminating tragedy, it stands as easily the best story in the collection. Indeed, one of the best that Mr. Whister has ever written. It is simply the account of a man, little more than a boy, who, having been the unintentional instrument of a murder, has accepted a bribe to remain silent, and slowly, inexorably, has found himself dragged back by conscience to the scene of the crime, forced under the spell of an extraordinary and awe-inspiring convulsion of nature to make confession, restore the money, and by his spectacular death, revealed the hiding-place of the other victim at the bottom of a canyon a thousand feet below.

An old idea, elemental in its simplicity, but, like many of the world's big stories, owing its value to a finished workmanship, an unnering instinct for telling neither too much nor too little. In his earlier work, as we have already seen, Mr. Wister cared little about the rules of form. His strength lay in his ability to hold the attention, whether he shortened up a story or unduly prolonged it. In other words, he told his stories in a certain form,

not because it was the best form, but because it happened for the moment to be his form, the form that came instinctively. The most interesting thing about this is, this new volume is that it shows that he is continuing to practice as he first learned to do in lady baltimore a more careful more conscious method of construction mr whister has possessed from the first the valuable assets of sincerity force and broad popular appeal and above all he has always had something to say that was eminently worth the saying now that he has added to these

qualities of finer artistry it is to be hoped that his lessened productiveness is not due to an impoverished soil, but to a wise economy that deliberately lets land lie for a season fallow. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of some American storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Thirteen. Frank Norris It is barely a decade since Frank Norris was putting the final touches to the volume which was destined to be his last novel, and clarifying his ideas upon literature and life in a series of essays entitled,

salt and sincerity. There have been so many changes in American fiction during these intervening ten years. So many younger reputations have waxed and waned that the work of Norris, taken as a whole, has been thrown into an unjust and misleading remoteness. We are apt to think of him as belonging to a bygone generation, as an influence which after showing a brief potentiality

suddenly withered once and for all, as a matter of fact norris's influence has never for an hour been dead in a quiet persistent way it has spread and strengthened leavening all unsuspectedly the mature work of many of the writers who have since come into prominence and the best way in which to realize the nearness of norris in point of time and of spirit as well as the dormant strength which his early death prevented from ever fully awakening is to glance back and briefly consider some of the conditions of american fiction at the time when he began to write During the closing years of the 19th century, or, to be more specific, from 1897 to 1902, the period of Norris' activity, there were easily a score of new writers who leaped suddenly into prominence on the strength of a single book. The volumes that come casually to mind and may be regarded as fairly representative are Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel, Robert Herrick's Gospel of Freedom, Mrs. Wharton's The Greater Inclination, Booth Tarkington's Gentleman

from Indiana, Brand Whitlock's 13th District, George Horton's Long Straight Road, Theodore Dreiser's sister Carrie, Morgan Robertson's spun yarn, Harry Leon Wilson's The Spenders, Owen Worcester's the Virginian, Jack London's son of the wolf. The list might be stretched to twice the length. In glancing over this array of names, the various associations and contrast they offer strike one today as exceedingly odd. Certain of these reputations seem now curiously stunted. Certain others loom up unexpectedly large. But in spite of the unforeseen readjustments that time has wrought, the significant fact remains that Norris and his lifetime dwarfed them all. At the time of the appearance of the octopus and the pit, there was not a single

volume produced by this younger group, with the possible exception of the Virginian that even approached them in breadth of view or bigness of intent. And when we measure the ten years' growth in individual cases, when we compare the promise of the Gospel of Freedom, or the greater inclination with the accomplishment of Together or the House of Mirth, then the fact is suddenly forced home to us, how much greater growth that same ten years would have shown in the best craftsman and the bravest, biggest soul of them all. One realizes now that even in his last and maturest books, Nouris had not fully found himself, that he was still in the transition period, still groping his way tirelessly, undauntedly toward self-knowledge.

He had adopted the creed of naturalism ardently, refashioning it to suit the needs of a younger, cleaner civilization, a world of wider expanses, pure air, freer life. And even while he wrought, he witnessed the apparent downfall of that very creed in the land of its birth, saw its disintegration beneath the hands of its chief champion. It is impossible to read Norris's works without perceiving that from first to last,

there was within him an instinct continually at war with his chosen realistic methods. an unconquerable and exasperating vein of romanticism that led him frequently into palpable absurdities, not because romanticism in itself is a literary crime, but because it has its own proper place in literature, and that place is assuredly not in a realistic novel. How this inner warfare would eventually have worked out. What compromises, innovations, iconoclasms would have paved the way to full maturity of accomplishment it is of course impossible now even to guess.

but one thing is certain Norris would have found that way, and when found it would have proved not merely big, rugged, compelling, but also clean as the opened wind-swept spaces that he loved, and fine as gold that has no dross. The expressed views of any novelist on the principles of his art have a value far out of proportion to their critical acumen. We may agree or not with Marion Crawford's the novel, what it is, or with Moe Passant's preface to Pierre and Jean, with Zéryorne, with Zin's Zola's Romance Experimental for the Art of Fiction by Henry James. Their principles may be quite right or quite wrong. The important fact in each case is that they have betrayed to us the principles in accordance with which they themselves wrought. They have given us penetrating searchlights into the secrets of their methods,

the sources of their strength and their weakness. This is why in a critical examination of the writings of Frank Norris, his collected essays entitled The Responsibilities of the Novelist, not only cannot be ignored, but form the natural and obvious starting point. It is well to add quickly that these essays will serve merely as a starting point, and nothing more. If they were the measure of Norris's value, if they represented not only what Norris believed that he was trying to do but what he actually succeeded in doing, he would be of considerably lesser magnitude and his influence would have ended long before this. They are exceedingly uneven, some of them revealing a surprisingly deep and far,

reaching understanding of the methods and purposes of serious fiction, while others again show nothing excepting certain curious personal limitations, a sort of mental astigmatism. In a number of them such as a problem in fiction, one feels that Norris was not so much telling the general public the views that he had long and clearly held, but rather that he was making interesting exploration trips into his own mind and trying by a tour de force to reconcile the contradictory instincts and impulses that he encountered there. It may be said in passing that these essays contain some curiously bad writing to come from the pen possessing the strength and brilliance and lyric quality of Norris at his best. It seems almost as though he were saying,

This is not my real work, it is only a side issue. I cannot stop to worry about form and style. All I want to do is to convey the idea with sufficiently comprehensible journalistic fluency. I am in a hurry to get back to my new big novel, the biggest and the best I have ever done. This was quite literally Norris's attitude towards fiction in general and his own in particular. The novel to him was the literary form of supreme importance,

the most potent and far-reaching. Quote, The pulpit, the press, and the novel. These, indisputably, are the great moulders of public opinion and public morals today. But the pulpit speaks but once a week. The press is read with lightness. haste in the morning news is waste paper by noon. But the novel goes into the home to stay.

It is read word for word. It is talked about, discussed. Its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family. How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple art of writing, can invade the heart's heart of thousands whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness. How necessary it becomes for those who wields such power to use it rightfully? Is it not expedient to act fairly? Is it not, in heaven's name, essential that the people hear not a lie, but the truth? Such was Norris's firm conviction regarding the modern novel, an instrument of vast and at times dangerous power, and the novelist's responsibility he looked upon as a solemn trust. He had only scorn for writers who shifted and spun around like weathercogs to

meet the wind of popular favor, and he insisted that the true reward of the novelist, the reward that could not be taken away from him, was to be able to say at the close of his life, I never truckled. I never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth. I knew it for the truth then, and I know it for the truth now. The essay on the novel with a purpose is the sanest, wisest, most important chapter in this volume. It shows how thoroughly Norris understood the principles of epic structure and fiction, how faithfully he had learned the one big lesson that Zola had to teach,

and how wisely he had taken to heart the warning contained in the great Frenchman's later blunders. The novelist's purpose is to his story, what the keynote is to the sonata. though the musician cannot exaggerate the importance of the keynote, yet the thing that interests him is the sonata itself. In like manner the purpose in a novel is important to the author only as a note to which his work must be attuned. The moment that the writer becomes really and vitally interested in his purpose, his novel fails.

And Norris proceeds to illustrate this strange anomaly by imagining Hardy writing a sort of English germinal, setting forth the wrongs of the Welsh coal miners. quote, It is conceivable that he could write a story that would make the blood boil with indignation. But he himself, if he is to remain an artist, if he is to write his novels successfully, will, as a novelist, care very little

about the iniquitous labor system of the Welsh coal miners. It will be to him as impersonal a thing as the key is to the composer of a sonata. Now all this is absolutely right. Indeed, so simple and elemental an axiom of structure that one wonders why, at the close of the 19th century, it was still necessary to put it into words at all. Why it was that even the unthinking general reader could not feel instinctively the fatal

inferiority of Mrs. Humphrey Ward to Zola. The inferiority, for that matter, of all the Frenchman's work subsequent to the Dr. Pascal, to almost all his work preceding it. Yet, as a matter of fact, even Norris himself did not perceive this truth in its fullness until after the appearance of fecondity. he had not seen how far astray zola had already drifted in paris he did not see that he himself in the octopus was being drawn into the same disastrous current but he did see later in time to show in the pit the dawn of a new light and that is why the following quotation is not merely a reiteration of the point already made about hardy and the welsh miners but has an interest all its own quote Do you think that Mrs. Stowe was more interested in the slave question than she was in the writing of Uncle Tom's cabin? Her book, her manuscript, the page-to-page progress of the narrative, were more absorbing to her than all the Negroes that were ever whipped or sold? Had it not been so, that great purpose novel never would have succeeded.

Consider the reverse. Fecondity, for instance. The purpose for which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did not. care more for the depopulation of France than he did for his novel. Result. Sermons on the Fruitfulness of Women. Special Pleading.

A farrago of dry, dull incidents overburdened and collapsing under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only indirectly. It is rather painful to turn from the broad sanity of views like these, views that Norris arrived at through his intellect to certain others that he reached through his emotions. Such, for instance, as his views upon romantic fiction. If we have ever had a writer in this country who owes every last atom of importance that is in him to the realistic creed, that writer is Frank Norris. And for that reason it sounds like the basest kind of ingratitude to find him speaking up, that harsh, loveless, cutterless, blunt tool called realism.

The plain truth is that Norris never understood in any of their accepted senses, the meaning of the terms romance and realism. At the time when a man's woman was still running serially in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Evening Sun, Norris said in a letter to a critic who had objected to his exasperating vein of romanticism. For my own part, I believe that the greatest realism is the greatest romanticism, and I hope someday to prove it. In a plea for romantic fiction, he gave the following topsy-turvy irrational irresponsible definition. quote Romance I take it is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations

from the type of normal life realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life according to this definition then romance may even treat of the sordid the unlovely as for instance the novels of Monsieur Zola

Zola has been dubbed a realist but he is on the contrary the very head of the romanticists Now Norris might just as well have defined white as that pigment which we use to paint the rare and precious things of life and black as that which we choose for all common everyday things, cups and saucers, table linen, wheelbarrows, and cobblestones. Shoe polish he might have added is generally considered black,

but really it is the most dazzling of all possible varieties of white. This sort of thing is definition run mad, arrant nonsense leading nowhere. There are several perfectly legitimate definitions of the two chief creeds in fiction, any one of which Norris might have adopted, any one of which would have been intelligible to the public at large. There is, for instance, that very simple distinction drawn by Marion Crawford, making realism a transcript of life as it is, and romance of life as we would like it to be. But Norris is right in one thing. Realism and romance do exist side by side

everywhere and all the time. Where he missed the truth is in this, that the difference between the two is not one of material fact, of a different series of episodes, but simply of a different attitude of mind. Two people can look at a sunset and one of them may say, with what magic trickery has nature's brush decked out the heavens with a new and marvelous color scheme? And the other may with equal right reply, the refraction of solar radiation through a finely attenuated aqueous vapor does produce some rather pretty effects. You have a perfect right to go into raptures over the infinite power of creation which produced Niagara Falls, but the man who didn't see what prevented the water from tumbling over

was equally within his rights, and he was a pretty good realist. Water itself may be looked at romantically as the god Neptune, or realistically as H-2-0, and if you cannot see that the chemical fact is the greater wonder of the two, then there is no use in trying to convert you. Frank Norris was of the number of those whom it was hopeless to try to convert. He could not or would not understand that while a novelist has a perfect right to look upon life either literally or imaginatively, he has not the right to do the two things simultaneously. There is a character presented almost at the outset of the octopus, a poet by the name of Presley, who admirably illustrates the chief shortcoming of Norris' work.

He is haunted by the dream of writing an epic of the West. His ambition is to paint life frankly as he sees it. Yet, incongruously enough, he wishes to see everything through a rose-tinted mist, a mist that will tone down all the harsh outlines and crude colors of actuality. He is searching for true romance, and instead finds himself continually brought up against the materialism of railway tracks and gray nellation. elevators and unjust freight tariffs. All this is of interest to us, not because Presley is an especially important or convincing

character, but because he is so obviously introduced as a means of stating once again, the author's topsy-turvy theory that realism and romanticism are convertible terms, and that the epic theme for which Presley is vainly groping lies all the time close at hand, could he only see it, not merely in the primeval life of mountain and up desert, the shimmering purple and gold of a sunset, but in the limitless stretch of steel rails, the thunder of passing trains, the whole vast, intricate mechanism

of organized monopoly. Now, of course, there is an epic vastness and power in many faces of our complicated modern life, and the only possible way in which to handle them adequately is by using a huge stretch of canvas and blocking them in with broad, sweeping, Zolaesque brush strokes. But epic vastness has no logical connection with romanticism.

Its very essence lies in some huge, all-pervading, symbolic figure, some personified idea, seen vaguely in the background behind a closely woven web of human actualities. Here and there it may be, the seeds of romance will take root and spring up, in spite of all precaution, like tears among the wheat, and they are inevitable in the case of a writer who, like Norris, has a tender indulgence for the tears. this was his pet failing his besetting sin a curious paradox when one stops to consider how wonderfully clear the greater part of the time his vision was he knew in his inmost soul that what counts most in honest workmanship is fidelity to life the real actual life as it is lived day by day by average commonplace human beings it still remains true he once wrote that all the temperament all the sensitiveness to impressions all the education in the world will be true he once wrote that all the temperament all the sensitiveness to impressions all the education in the world will not help one little, little bit in the writing of a novel, if life itself, the crude, the

raw, the vulgar, if you will, is not studied. And in this respect he practiced what he preached, studying the crude, the raw, the vulgar, doggedly adhering to the blunt truth, never softening or palliating a thought where he conceived it essential to the fidelity of his picture. Occasionally, his very imagery verged upon coarseness, as where he described the ships along the city's waterfront. Their flanks opened, their cargoes, as it were, their entrails spewed out in a wild disarray of crate and bale and box. And what magic effects this fearlessness of words produced? How prodigiously Norris succeeded in making us see. There have been few novelists who could buy with him and the ability to sketch the physiognomy of some mean

little side street in San Francisco, to picture with a few telling strokes some odd little Chinese restaurant, to make us breathe the very atmosphere of McTeague's tawdry, disordered, creosote-laden dental parlor, or the foul, a reeking interior of Bennett's tent on the ice fields of the far north. And yet, every now and again, the same acute, clear-visioned writer would perversely sacrifice not only truth, but even very similitude for the sake of a melodramatic stage effect, even at the risk of an anti-climax worthy of Dickens, as Mr. Howells has characterized the closing scene in McTeague. When a friend once expostulated with Norris for the gross improbability of that chapter

in which a murderer, fleeing from justice into the burning heat of an alkali desert, carries with him a canary that continues to sing after 36 hours without food or water, he frankly admitted the absurdity, but said that he had been unable to resist the temptation, because the scene offered such a dramatic contrast. Besides, he added whimsically, I compromised by saying that the canary was have dead anyhow. Norris's debt to Zola, already referred to, is too obvious to have need of argument. Everywhere, from his earliest writings to his last, in one form or another, it stares us in the face, compelling recognition. Like Zola, his strength lay in depicting life on a gigantic

scale, portraying humanity in the mass. Like Zola, he could not work without the big underlying idea, the dominant symbol. In McTeague, the symbol is gold, the most fitting emblem he could devise to personify the state of California. The whole book is flooded with a shimmer of yellow light. We see it in the floating golden disc that the sunlight through the trees casts upon the ground. In the huge gilded tooth of the densest sign, in the lottery prize which Trina wins. In the Polish Jew, Zirkoff, the man with the rake, groping hourly in the muck heap of the city for gold, for gold, for gold. In the visionary golden dishes of Maria Macapa's diseased fancy. A yellow blaze like fire like a sunset.

And again in the hoarded coins on which Trina delighted to stretch her naked limbs at night in her strange passion for money, the coins which finally lured McTeague and his enemy to their hideous death in the alkali desert. In the epic of the wheat, as we shall see more specifically when we come to examine the octopus in detail, the central symbol had become an even vaster, more relentlessly dominant element. A single state no longer satisfied him. What he wanted was a symbol which would sum up at once American life and American prosperity. His friends are still fond of telling of the day when he came to his office trembling with excitement, incapacitated for work, his brain seething with a single thought, the trilogy of the wheat. I have got a big idea,

the biggest I ever had, was the burden of all he had to say for many a day thereof. Another obvious debt that Norris owed to the creator of La Rue Jean Macaure is his style, the swing and march of phrase and sentence, the exuberant wealth of noun and adjective, the insistent iteration with which he develops an idea, expanding and elaborating and dwelling upon it, forcing it upon the reader with accumulated synonym and metaphor, driving it home with the dogged persistence of a triphammer. Here is a passage which, brief as it is, admirably illustrates this question. quality. Quote,

Outside, the unleashed wind yelled incessantly, like a Sabbath of witches and spun about their pitiful shelter and went rioting past, leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry dust-like snow into the air. Folly-stricken, incensate, an enormous mad monster gambling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious, headstrong, pitiless, as a famished wolf. And again, in accordance not only,

Only with Zola, but with the entire continental school of realism, Norris delights in dwelling upon the physical side of life. With the exception of the pit, the characters in his books are none of them possessed of an over-refinement of sentiment. They are normal human beings with a healthy animality about them, rugged, rough-hewn men and dauntless self-sufficient women. He dealt by preference with primitive natures, dominated by single passions. His favorite heroes are cast in a giant,

mold, big of bone and strong of sinew, with square-cut heads and a salient prognathus jaw. Such was Captain Kitchell, in Moran of the Lady Letty. Such also was McTeague. Quote, a young giant carrying his huge shock of blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground, moving his immense limbs heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair. His head was, a square cut, angular, the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora. Bennett also, in a man's woman, is of the same brotherhood. Quote, his lower jaw was huge, almost to deformity, like that of a bulldog, the chin

salient, the mouth, close gripped, the great lips indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes, too, were small and twinkling. one of them marred by a sharply defined cast. In dealing with women, it was Norris's want to paint pleasanter pictures. But here, too, he dwelt mainly on physical attributes. He never wearied of describing their features, the color of their hair and eyes, the fragrance of their neck and arms, their whole sweet personality.

It is curious to see what a fascination woman's hair seems to have had for Norris. It fairly haunted him like an obsession. He dwelt upon it constantly. constantly, lingeringly. It is the one great charm of each and all of his heroines. They are forever smoothing it, braiding it, putting it up or down. It enters into and lends color to their every mood. Moran Sternerson has an enormous mane of rye-colored hair, which, whipped across her face and streamed out in the wind like streamers of the northern lights. Travis Bessimer in Blix,

trim and trig and crisp as a crack yacht, also has yellow hair, not golden nor flaxen but plain honest yellow, sweet yellow hair rolling from her forehead. Lloyd Searight and a man's woman has Auburn hair, of veritable glory, a dull red flame that bore back from her face in one grand solid roll,

dull red like copper or old bronze, thick, heavy, almost gorgeous in its sombre radiance. Even small, delicate, anemic Trina McTeague has heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tierra, heavy, abundant, odorous. All the vitality that should have given color to her face

seemed to have been absorbed by this marvelous hair. But it is not alone the redolence of woman's hair on which Norris likes to dwell. his pages diffuse a veritable carnival of odors. McTeague's dental parlors give forth a mingled odor of bedding, creosote, and ether. In blicks the Chinese quarter suggests, sandalwood, punk, incense, oil,

and the smell of mysterious cookery. Here again is the fragrance of the country in midsummer. Quote, During the day the air was full of odors, distilled as it were by high noon. the sweet smell of ripening apples, the fragrance of warm sap and leaves and growing grass, the smell of cows from the nearby pastures, the pungent ammoniical suggestion of the stable back of the house, and the odor of scorching paint blistering on the southern walls.

And as a companion piece to the foregoing, here is an unsavory little paragraph, giving a glimpse of the starving occupants of a wind-buffeted tent in the Arctic regions, A paragraph redeemed only by the dramatic suggestion of the closing words. The tent was full of foul smells, the smell of drugs and of moldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching seal skin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover. Every smell, but that of food. One does not have to read far into Norris before discovering the strong underlying note of

primevalism in him, the undisguised delight that he took in pointing out that in spite of our boasted civilization, La Baix de Man is still rather close to the surface, our veneer of conventionalism sadly thin. He welcomed eagerly the nature revival in literature. Mr. Seton and his school opened a door, opened a window, and more literature has given place to life. The sun has come in, and the great winds and the smell of the baking alkali on the Arizona deserts and the reek of the tarweed on the Colorado slopes, and nature has become a thing intimate and familiar and rejuvenating. In his own books he preferred wherever possible to isolate his men and women to get them away from the artificiality of pink teas and ballrooms and set them face to

face with the open sky and their own passions. He delighted in the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plain of the blue sky, and the bare green slope. of land, three immensity's gigantic, vast, primordial. Scenes wherein, the mind harks back unconsciously to the broad, simpler basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. He was nearly always at his best when describing the elemental, unchanging aspects of nature, the golden eye of a tropic heaven, the unremitting gallop of unnumbered multitudes of gray-green seas, the remorseless scourge of the noon sun,

In the desert waste of Death Valley where, the very shadows shrank away hiding under sage bushes. And all the world was one gigantic blinding glare, silent, motionless. Better than any of these is the following picture of the limitless desolation of the Arctic icefields. Quote, In front of the tent and over a ridge of barren rock was an arm of the sea, dotted with blocks of ice, moving silently and swiftly onward, while back from the tent. from the coast and back from the tent and to the south and to the west and to the east stretched the illimitable waste of land rugged gray harsh snow and ice and rock rock and ice and snow stretching away there under the sombre sky forever and forever gloomy untamed terrible an empty region the scarred battlefield of chaotic forces the savage desolation of a prehistoric world such in brief

are the materials and the methods of Norris's art as a novelist. Big words, big phrases, big ideas, an untrammeled freedom of self-expression. He could not be true to himself if hampered by a narrow canvas. That is why it is as incongruous to look to Frank Norris for short stories as it would be to set a rodin to carving cherry pits, or a verish shagin to tinting lantern slides. Yet it does not follow that the short tales rescued from the magazine files

and collected under the title a deal in wheat were not worth preservation. On the contrary, they are full of keen interest to the student of fiction. No one but Norris could have written them. Every page testifies to the uncrushable vitality of the man. But to call them short stories is to misname them.

They impress one as fragments rather splendid fragments, trials of the author's strength before he launched forth upon more serious work. Take, for instance, the opening story which gives the title to the volume. It was palpably written for practice, a sort of five-finger exercise in preparation for Norris' last volume, The Pit,

and, from this point of view, it possesses a definite interest. But taken as a story it is at once too long and too short. He attempted to cover altogether too much ground. He might, with advantage, have brought it to a conclusion some pages sooner, and yet, when the end is reached, there remains a sense of incompleteness. In the whole collection there is just one story that stands out unique and forceful, a memorandum of sudden death.

This memorandum is a fragment of a journal supposed to be written by a wounded soldier, one of a small company of troopers who have been relentlessly trailed day after day by a band of hostile Indians through desolate miles of sand and sagebrush until the final attack is made. If we agree to overlook the improbability of the whole thing, if we grant that a man with one or two bullets in him, and with his comrades all dead or dying on the ground beside him, could go on recording passing events with the accuracy, the minuteness, the astounding atmosphere of this story,

then we must admit that it is Norris's nearest approach to the artistic unity of the short story form. Of Norris's longer stories, Moran of the Lady Letty was the first to dawn the dignity of print. although the greater part of McTeague antedated in point of actual composition. It is a fact not generally known that the nucleus of McTeague was submitted as part of the required theme work during Norris's period of postgraduate study at Harvard University, and that it was conscientiously elaborated and polished for four years before it was

finally given to the public. Moran, the author's one frankly romantic story, was dashed off in an interval of relaxation. Its swift popularity suggests, that an easy avenue to fortune lay open to him, for Norris had a lively gift for stories of the blood and thunder order, and often entertained his friends by reeling off extemporized sword and buckler plots by the yard. But from the beginning he took fiction too seriously to debase it, and even Moran has a certain primitive bigness about it, a rhythm of northern runes, a spirit of ancient sagas.

There are whole chapters conceived with reckless disregard of plausibility, but that does not make it any the less a strong, fresh ideal of the sea, full of the dash of waves and the pungency of salt breezes. Full also of health and vitality and clean hearts, and amply redeemed by the brave,

frank loyal character of that daughter of a hundred Vikings, Moran herself. It is probable that in this volume Norris had no underlying motive, no central idea beyond the wish to tell the story, and yet one likes to think that consciously or unconsciously, he embodied in Moran his ideal of the muse of fiction,

the spirit of the novel of the future. Listen for a moment to his own description of this spirit as given in one of his later essays. Quote, She is a child of the people, this muse of our fiction of the future, and the wind of a new country, a new heaven and a new earth is in her face,

and has blown her hair from out the fillets that the old-world muse has bound across her brow, so that it is all in disarray. The tan of the sun is on her cheeks, and the dust of the highway is thick upon her buskin, and the elbowing of many men has torn the robe of her, and her hands are hard with the grip of many things. She is hale fellow well met with everyone she meets,

unashamed to know the clown, and unashamed to face the king, a hardy, vigorous girl, with an arm as strong as a man's, and a heart as sensitive as a child's. Read these words once again, and ponder on them. Then go back to Moran of the Lady Letty, and see if you do not find in it a hitherto unguessed amplitude, a gladder sense of the joy of living, a deeper pathos in

the absolute right, the artistically inevitable tragedy with which it ends. Of McTeague, almost enough has been said already. It is the most frankly brutal thing that Norris ever wrote. Its realism is as unsparing as Donunzios, though its theme is cleaner. It is a remorseless study of heredity and environment, symbolizing the greed of gold and dominated throughout by the gigantic figure of the dull and brutish dentist, ox-like, ponderous, and slow. Necessarily it is a repellent book, and yet there is about it that curious attraction which certain forms of ugliness possess when they attain a degree of perfection amounting to a fine art. McTeague does not begin to show the breadth of purpose or the technical skill of the octopus or the pit,

yet there are times when one is tempted to award it a higher place for all-around excellence. There is a better balance between the central theme and the individual characters, or, to state it differently, between the underlying ethics and the so-called human interest. If Norris had never written another book, he would still have lived in McTeague, just as surely as George Douglas Brown still lives in the house with the green shutters. Blix, which came next in point of time, offers a sharp even an astonishing contrast. It is a sparkling little love story, clean and wholesome, the chronicle of an unconscious courtship between a young couple who begin by agreeing that they do not love each other, and then

try the dangerous experiment of attempting to be simply and frankly good friends. There is an effervescence, an irrepressible bubbling up of youthful spirits, a naive, good comradeship, quite free from the embarrassment of sex consciousness, all of which gives to the volume a special Piquancy of actuality. One feels that if it were possible to ask Frank Norris a few leading questions about blicks, he would have answered, as Marion Crawford

answered, apropos of the three fates, and was something of the same wistfulness. The fact is, I put a good deal of myself into that book. A man's woman is of all Norris's novels, the nearest approach to a failure, the one that shows the greatest gulf between purpose and accomplishment.

The central figures are an arctic explorer whose heart is divided between two passions, love and ambition, and a woman, a grand, noble man's woman, strong enough to subordinate her own love for him to the furtherance of that ambition, the discovery of the North Pole. The story abounds in strong situations of an intensity often bordering on the repellent, and the convincing pictures of helpless, isolated humanity, agonizing amidst the desolate ice plains of the far north cannot fail to win an honest even though grudging recognition. But the book as a whole is keyed a trifle too high. It is overweighted with two ponderous words and phrases, with two tense and too sustained a pressure of emotions. One feels that people could

not go on living and keep their sanity if life was such a constant blare of passions, such a crude raw presentment of primitive humanity born out of time. The Stone Age transferred to the 20th century. And yet, like all of Norris's works, it has its lure, its compelling force. We will not open the book again, we will not read another line. And yet, wait a moment, our eye has just caught another passage. Listen to this. Quote, there were six of them left, huddled together in that miserable tent. Their hair and beards were long and seemed one with the fur covering their bodies. Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat. Fat as things bloated and swollen are fat.

It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that Arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterwards destroys. The men moved about at times on their hands and knees. Their tongues were distended, round and slate-colored, like the tongues of parrots, and when they spoke they bit them helplessly. Here in a single paragraph we have the domythos. We have the domithos of his earlier volumes. They have less of the primordial and the Titanic in their composition, and considerably more of the average everyday foibles and weaknesses. One feels that somehow and somewhere he had gained a deeper insight into the hearts of the men and women about him, and that this was what Owen Wister had in mind when he wrote.

In the pit Norris has risen on stepping stones to higher things. And yet, the pit is just as much a structural part of the whole design of Norris' trilogy as well. was the octopus. It has that same inherent epic bigness of theme. A gigantic attempt to corner the entire world's supply of wheat, to force it up, up, up, and hold the price through April and May and June. And then finally the new crop comes pouring in and the daring speculator is overwhelmed by the rising tide. A human insect impotently striving to hold back with his puny hand at the output of the whole world's granaries. Such are the books, which Norris. with feverish impatience and tireless nervous energy produced in the few short years that fate allotted him they stand today as the substructure of a temple destined never to be finished the splendidly rugged torso of a broken statue

that is the way the best the truest the only way in which to think of norris's place in american fiction as only a partial fulfillment of a rarely brilliant promise had he lived to attain his full stature there is small doubt that he would have given us bigger, stronger, more vital novels than the younger American school has yet produced. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Taper Cooper. This Libre Fox recording is in the public domain. 14. Ambrose Beers In the preface to the fourth volume of his collected works, the volume containing under the title of Shapes of Clay,

the major portion of purely personal satiric verse, Mr. Ambrose Beers emphatically expresses his belief in the right of any author, to have his fugitive work in newspapers and periodicals put into a more permanent form during his lifetime if he can. No one is likely to dispute Mr. Beers' contention, but it is often a grave question how far it is wise for the individual

to exercise his inalienable rights. And in the case of authors, the question comes down to this. how far is it to their own best interests to dilute their finer and more enduring work with that which is mediocre and ephemeral for it is unfortunately true that no author is measured by his highlights alone but by the resultant impression of blended light and shade and there is many a writer among the recognized classics who to-day would take a higher rank had a kindly and discriminating fate assigned three-quarters of his life work to a merciful oblivion to the student of american letters however the conference comprehensive edition of Ambrose Beirce's writings recently issued in ten portly and well-made volumes cannot fail to be welcome. It places at once with inconvenient reach a great mass of material, which good, bad or indifferent, as the case may be, all helps to throw suggestive sidelights upon the author, his methods, and his outlook upon life.

It forces the reader who perchance has hitherto known Mr. Beers solely as a master of the short story to realize that this part of his work has been throughout a long and busy life, a sort of side issue, and that the great measure of his activities has been expended upon social and political satire. And similarly, those who have known him best as the fluent producer of stinging satiric verse suddenly recognize how versatile and many-sided are his literary gifts. The ten volumes are divided as follows. Three volumes of prose fiction. Two volumes of satiric verse. two volumes of literary and miscellaneous essays, and three volumes consisting mainly of satiric prose,

including a greatly amplified edition of that curiously caustic piece of irony, the cynic's word book, now for the first time published under the title of Mr. Beers' own choosing, The Devil's Dictionary. It seems therefore most convenient to consider Mr. Beers the man of letters under three separate aspects, the critic, the satirist, and the master of the short story. regarding literary criticism Mr. Beer says quite frankly,

the saddest thing about the trade of writing is that the writer can never know nor hope to know if he is a good workman. In literary criticism, there are no criteria, no accepted standards of excellence by which to test the work. Now there is just enough truth in this attitude of mind to make it a rather dangerous one. If there were literally no accepted standards in any of the arts, no principles to which a certain influential majority of critical minds had given their adhesion, then literature and all the arts would be in a state of perennial anarchy. But of course, any writer who believes in his heart that there are no criteria

will necessarily remain in lifelong ignorance regarding his own worth, for it is only through learning how to criticize others sanely and justly that one acquires even the rudiments of self-criticism. And, incidentally, it may be observed that no better proof of Mr. Beers' fundamental lack of this valuable asset could be asked, then the retention in these ten volumes of a considerable amount of journalistic rubbish side by side with flashes of undoubted genius. Mr. Beers' entire essay on the subject of criticism is a sort of literary agnosticism, a gloomy denial of faith. He has no confidence in the judgment of the general public nor in that of the professional

critic. He admits that, in a few centuries, more or less, there may arrive a critic that we call posterity. But posterity, he complains, is a triple slow. Accordingly, since the worth of any contemporary writer is reduced to mere guesswork, he, Ambrose Beers, has scant use for his contemporaries. He has very definite ideas regarding the training of young writers and tells us at some length, the course through which he would like to put an imaginary pupil, but he adds, quote, If I caught him reading a newly published book, save by way of penance,

it would go hard with him. Of our modern education he should have enough to read the ancients. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and that lot. Custodians of most of what is worth knowing. In spite of the pains

to which Mr. Beers goes to deny that he is a lodator temporis acti, the term fits him admirably. And nowhere is this attitude of mind, more conspicuous than in his treatment of the modern novel. It is important, however, to get clearly in mind the arbitrary sense in which he uses the word novel as distinguished from what he chooses to call romance. His occasional half-definitions are somewhat confusing, but apparently by the novel he means realistic fiction, as distinguished

from romantic fiction. A distinction complicated by the further idiosyncrasy that by realism, he understands almost exclusively the commonplaces of actuality. and, by romanticism, any happening which is out of the ordinary. The novel, then, in his sense of the word, is, a snow-plant. It has no root in the permanent soil of literature, and does not long hold its place. It is one of the lowest form of imagination. And again, the novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to painting. With whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted, it must lack that basic quality in all art,

unity, totality of effect. He seems utterly unaware that the great gain in modern fiction, the one indisputable factor that separates it from the fiction of half a century ago, is precisely the basic quality of unity. The modern novel whose technique most nearly approaches perfection is the one which, when read rapidly, with a virgin attention at a single sitting, to borrow Mr. Beers' own phrase,

gives an impression of as single-hearted a purpose as one find, in the most faultless of Mopassant's three thousand word masterpieces. It is quite possible for any well-trained reader to go through even the longest of novels at a single sitting. The present writer would feel himself grievously at fault if he interrupted his first reading of any novel that had been given him for the purpose of review,

and he well remembers that in only two recent cases did he become conscious of the prolonged strain, namely Mr. Kipling's Kim, which required an uninterrupted attention of Ait and One, one-half hours, and the golden bowl of Mr. James, which required somewhat more than eleven. Mr. Beers' attitude, however, is partly explained by his obiter dictum that, no man who has anything else to do can critically read more than two or three books in a month, and of course, if you are going to allow an average of ten days to a book, the most perfect

unity of purpose is inevitably going to drop out of sight. All of this helps us to understand how it happens that Mr. Beers, otherwise a man of intelligence can say in all seriousness that, in England and America, the art of novel writing is as dead as Queen Anne. Listen also to the following literary blasphemy. Quote, So far as I am able to judge, no good novels are now made in Germany, nor in France, nor in any European country except Russia. The Russians are writing novels which so far as one may venture to judge, are in their way admirable, full of fire and light. like an opal. In their hands, the novel grew great, as it did in those of Richardson and

Fielding, and as it would have done in those of Thackeray and Peter if greatness in that form of fiction had been longer possible in England. Or again, quote, not only is the novel a faulty form of art, but because of its faultiness it has no permanent place in literature. In England it flourished less than a century and a half, beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, since whose death no novels probably have been written that are worth attention. Think for a moment what this means. Here is a man who has ventured to speak seriously about the modern novel, and who confessedly is unaware of the importance of Trollope and Meredith and Hardy, of Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, and Maurice Hewlett,

and who deliberately ignores the existence of Flaubour and Mopassin, and Zola, Galdos and Valdez, Verga and Danunzio. It is not astonishing after that to find Mr. Beers seriously questioning the value of epic poetry. What more than they gave, he asks, might we not have had from Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Camoins and Milton, if they had not found the epic poem ready to their misguided hands?

The fact is that Mr. Beers, as a critic, is one of the iconoclastic variety. He breaks down but does not build up. He has no patience with a historical form of criticism that traces the intellectual genealogy of authorship, showing, for instance, Mopassant's debt to Poe, or Bourget's debt to Stendale. He is equally intolerant of that analytical method, the fairest of them all, that judges every written work by its author's purpose as nearly as this may be read between the lines. Nothing is more certain, he says, than if a writer of genius should bring to his task the purposes

which the critics trace in the completed work. The book would remain forever unwritten to the unspeakable advantage of letters and morals. Yes, he tears down the recognized methods of criticism, but suggests nothing better in their place. And when he himself undertakes to criticize, it is hardly ever for the purpose of paying tribute to excellence, with the noteworthy exception Mirabili dictu, of his extraordinary praise of George Sterling's poetic orgy of words, the wine of wizardry. Tolstoy, for instance, he defines as a literary. very giant. He has a giant's strength and has unfortunately learned to use it like a giant,

which means not necessarily with conscious cruelty but with stupidity. The journal of Marie Baskerzev, the last book on earth that one would expect Mr. Beers to discuss, he sums up as morbid, hysterical, and unpleasant beyond anything of its kind in literature. Among modern critics, he pronounces Mr. Howells, the most mischievous because the ablest of all this psychophantic crew. the truth is that the value of mr beers as a critic lies solely in his fearlessness and downright sincerity his unswerving conviction that he is right he has to a rather greater extent than many a better critic the quality of consistency and no matter how widely we are forced to disagree with his conclusions there is not one of them that does not throw an interesting side-light upon mr beers the man the short stories and the serious critical papers of mr beers have appeared in a spasmodic and disembarked adultery way, but from the first to last he has been at heart a satirist of the school of Lucilius and Juvenal, eager to scourge the follies and the foibles of mankind at large.

The fact that Mr. Beers is absolutely in earnest, that he is destitute of fear and confessedly incorruptible, accounts for the oft-repeated statement that he was for years the best-loved and the most hated man on the Pacific coast. Now, the ability to use a stinging lash of words is all very well in itself. It is a gift that is none too common. But to be effective, it must not be used too freely. The two ample volumes of Mr. Beers's poetical invectives form a striking object lesson of the wisdom in Hamlet's contention that unless you treat men better than they deserve, none will escape a whipping. And when fresh from a perusal of the contents of shapes of clay and black beetles and amber, one has become so accustomed to

seeing men flayed alive that a whole skin possesses something of a novelty. now there is no question that there is a good deal wrong with the world just as there always has been if one takes the trouble to look for it but when any one man takes upon himself the task of reprimanding the universe it is not unreasonable that we should ask ourselves in the first instance what manner of man is this what are his standards and beliefs and if he had his way what new lamps would he give us in place of the old in the case of mr bierce it is a little difficult to make answer with full assurance Somewhere in his preface he has said that he has not attempted to classify his writings under the separate heads of serious, ironical, humorous and the like, assuming that his readers have sufficient intelligence to recognize the difference for themselves. But this is not always easy to do, because in satire these different qualities and moods overlap each other, so that there is always the danger of taking too literally what is really an ironical exaggeration. Here, however, is a rather significant passage taken from a serious essay entitled To Train a Writer. It sets forth the convictions and the general attitude toward life which Mr. Beers believes are essential to any young author before he can hope for success.

And it is only fair to infer that they represent his own personal views. Quote, He should, for example, forget that he is an American and remember that he is a man. He should be neither Christian. nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor a snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong, he should be civilly indifferent.

In the virtue, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general expediency. In fixed moral principles, only time-saving predecisions of cases not yet before the Court of Conscience. Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence

as the end and purpose of life, art and love as the only means to happiness. he should free himself of all doctrines theories etiquettes politics simplifying his life and mind attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height to him a continent should not seem wide nor a century long and it would be needful that he know and have an ever-present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues blind with superstition tormented with envy consumed with vanity selfish false cruel cursed with illusions frothing mad now this strikes the average fair-minded person as a rather wholesale indictment of what on the whole has proved to be a pretty good world to live in in fact it is difficult to conceive of any one honestly and literally holding so extreme of you and yet of his own volition remaining in such an unpleasant place any longer than the time required to obtain the amount of gunpowder or strychnine sufficient for an effective exit but of course mr beers does not find life half so unpleasant as he professes in fact he gives the impression of hugely enjoying himself by voluntarily looking out upon a world grotesquely distorted by the lenses of his imagination. He has, of course, a perfect right to have as much or as little faith as he chooses in any human religion or philosophy, moral doctrine or political code,

only it is well when studying Mr. Beers as a satirist and reformer to understand clearly his limitations in this respect, and to discount his view accordingly. It is well, for instance, to keep in mind when reading such a subject. some of his scathing lines directed at small offenders, who at most have left the world not much worse off for having lived in it, that Mr. Beers once eulogized that wholesale destroyer of faith, Robert Ingersoll, as, a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight, who stood as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty, for honor, for goodwill toward men, for truth as it was given him to see it.

To the present writer there is much that is keenly irritating in Mr. Beers's satiric verse for the reasons above implied. It is, of course, highly uncritical to find fault with the writer for no better reason than because you find yourself out of harmony with his religious and moral faith or his lack of it, for in author's personal beliefs should have no bearing upon the artistic value of what he produces. But putting aside personal prejudice, it may be said in all fairness that Mr. Beers made a mistake in giving a permanent form to so large a body of his fugitive verses. It is not quite true that satiric poetry is read with the same interest after the people at whom it was directed are forgotten.

Aristophanes and Horace and Juvenal cannot be greatly enjoyed today without a good deal of patient delving for the explanation of local and temporal illusions. And in modern times, Pope's Dunciad, for instance, is probably today the least important and the least read of all his writings. It is impossible to take much interest in vitriolic attacks made 20 years ago. upon various obscure Californians, whose names mean nothing at all to the world at large. But on the other hand, anyone can understand and enjoy the sweeping irony as well as the sheer verbal cleverness of a parody like the following. Quote, Irrational Anthem. My country, tis of thee, sweet land of felony, of thee I sing.

Land were my father's fried young witches and applied whips to the Quakers' hide and made him spring. My navish country thee, land where the thief is free, thy laws I love. I love thy thieving bills that tap the people's tills. I love thy mob whose wills all laws above. Let federal employees and rings rob all they please the whole year long. Let office holders make their piles and judges rake our coin. For Jesus' sake, let's all go wrong. One is tempted to devote. One is tempted to devote considerably more space than is warranted to that extremely clever collection of satiric definitions, the devil's dictionary. It represents a deliberate pose consistently maintained. It is pervaded with the spirit of what a large proportion of readers in a Christian country would pronounce

irreverent. It tells us nothing new and can hardly be conceived of as an inspiration for higher and nobler living. But it is undeniably entertaining reading. Almost anyone must smile over such specimens as the following taken almost at random. Monday. Noun. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. Bacchus, noun. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. Positive. Adjective. Mistaken at the top of one's voice. But it is a writer of short stories that Mr. Beers' future fame rests upon a firm foundation. It is not too much to say that within his own chosen field, the grim, uncompromising horror story,

whether actual or supernatural, he stands among American writers second only to Edgar Allan Poe. And this is all the more remarkable when we consider his express scorn of new books and modern methods, and his implied indifference to the development of modern technique.

He does understand and consciously seeks for that unity of effect, which is the foundation stone of every good short story, yet in sheer technical, skill there is scarcely one among the recognized masters of the short story today, Mr. Kipling, for instance, and the late O'Henry, Jack London and a score of his contemporaries, from whom he might not learn something to his profit. What Mr. Beers' habits of workmanship may be, the present

writer does not happen to know. It is possible that he has always striven as hard to build an underlying structure, a preliminary scaffolding for each story as ever Edgar Allan Poe did. But if so, he has been singular. successful in practicing the art which so artfully all things conceals. He gives the impression of one telling a story with a certain easy spontaneity and attaining his results through sheer instinct. He seldom attempts anything like a unity of time and place, and many of his short tales have the same fault which he criticizes in the modern novel, namely, that of having a panoramic quality of being shown to us in a succession of more or less

widely separated scenes and incidents. Nevertheless, in most cases his stories are their own best justification. We may not agree with the method that he has chosen to use, but we cannot escape from the strange haunting power of them, the grim boding sense of their having happened, even the most weird, most supernatural, most grotesquely impossible of them, in precisely the way that he has told them. The stories, such of them at least as really count and represent Mr. Bierce at his best, divide themselves into two groups. First, the Civil War stories, based upon his own four years' experience as a soldier during the rebellion, and unsurpassed in American fiction for the unsparing clearness of their visualization of war. And secondly,

the frankly supernatural stories contained in the volume entitled, Can Such Things Be? Stories in which the setting is immaterial because if such things could be, they would be independent of time and space. The war stories range through the entire gamut of heroism, suffering and carnage. They are stamped in all their physical details with a pitiless realism unequalled by Stendhaled in the famous Waterloo episode in the Chathreuse de Parme, and at least unsurpassed by Tolstoy or by Zola. Indeed, there is nothing fulsome or extravagant in the statement that has more than once been made that Mr. Beers is a sort of American moe-possin. And what is most remarkable about these stories is that they never fail of a certain crescendo effect.

Keyed as they are to a high pitch of human tragedy, there is always one last turn of the screw, one crowning horror held in reserve until a crucial moment. Take, for example, a horseman in the sky. A sentinel, whose duty it is to watch from a point of vantage overlooking a deep gorge and a vast plain beyond, to see that no scout of the southern army shall discover a trail down the precipitous sides of the opposite slope, suddenly perceives a solitary horseman making his way along the verge of the precipice with an easy range of fire.

The sentinel watches and hesitates, takes aim and delays his fire. The scene shifts with the disconcerting suddenness of a modern moving picture and we see the sentinel back in his southern home at the outbreak of the war. And we overhear the controlled bitterness of his parting with his southern father

after declaring his intention to fight for the union. A modern storyteller would consider this shifting of scene bad art. Nevertheless, Mr. Beers, in theatrical parlance, gets it over. Back again he shifts us with a rush to the lonely horseman, shows him for a moment motionless upon the brink, and the next instant launched into space, a wonderful, miraculous, awe-inspiring figure,

proudly erect upon a stricken and dying horse whose legs spasmodically continue their mad gallop throughout the downward flight to the inevitable annihilation below. This in itself, told with Ambrose Beers' compelling art, is sufficiently harrowing, but he has something more in reserve. Listen to this. Did you fire? The sergeant whispered.

Yes. At what? A horse. It was standing on yonder rock, pretty far out. You see, it is no longer there. It went over the cliff. The man's face was white, but he showed no other signs of emotion. having answered he turned away his eyes and said no more the sergeant did not understand see here drus he said after a moment's silence it's no use making a mystery i order you to report was there anybody on the horse yes well

my father and again there is that extraordinary tour de force entitled an occurrence at owl creek bridge it is the story of a spy caught and about to be held a story of a spy caught and about to be held hanged by the simple expedient of allowing the board on which he stands to tilt up and drop him between the crossbeams of the bridge. The story is of considerable length. It details with singular and compelling vividness what follows from the instant that the spy feels himself dropped, feels the rope tighten around his neck, and its fibers strain and snap under his weight. His plunge into the stream below, his dash for life under cover of the water, his flight, torn and bleeding, through thorns and brambles, his miraculous dodging of outposts and his passing unscathed through volleys of rapid fire all read like a hideous nightmare. And so, in fact,

they are, because the entire story of his rush for safety lasting long hours and days, in reality is accomplished in a mere fraction of time, the instant of final dissolution. Because, as it happened, the rope did not break, and at the moment that he thought he had attained safety, his body ceased a struggle and dangled limply beneath the Owl Creek Bridge. Variations upon this theme of the rapidity of human thought in the moment of death are numerous. There is, for instance, a memorable story by Morgan Robertson called, if memory is not at fault, from the main top, in which a lifetime is crowded into the fraction of time required for the action of gravity. But no one has ever used it more effectually than Mr. Beers. But it is in his supernatural stories that Mr. Beers'es' but it is in his supernatural stories that

Mr. Beers shows even more forcefully, his wizardry of word and phrase, is almost magnetic power to make the absurd, the grotesque, the impossible, carry an overwhelming conviction. He will tell you, for instance, a story of a man watching at night alone by the dead body of an old woman. A cat makes its way into the room and springs upon the corpse. And to the man's overwrought imagination, it seems as though that dead woman seized the cat by the neck and flung it violently from her. Of course you imagined it, says the friend to whom he afterwards tells the tale. I thought so, too, rejoins the man, but the next morning her stiffened fingers still held a handful of black fur.

For sheer mad humor, there is nothing more original than the tale called, a jug of syrup. A certain old and respected village grocer, who, through a lengthy life, has never missed a day at his desk, dies, and his shop is closed. One night, the village banker and a leading citizen on his way home drops in from force of habit at the grocery, finding the door wide open and buys a jug of syrup, absent-mindedly forgetting that the grocer who serves him has been dead three weeks. The jug is a heavy weight to carry. Yet, when he reaches home, he has nothing in his hand.

The tail spreads like wildfire through the village, and the next night a vast throng is assembled in front of the brightly lit up grocery, breathlessly watching the shadowy form of the deceased methodically casting up accounts. One by one, they pluck up courage and make their way into the grocery, all but the banker. Riveted to the spot by the grotesque horror of the sight, he stands and watches, while pandemonium breaks loose. To him in the road, the shop is still brilliantly lighted, but to those who have gone within, it presents the darkness of eternal night, and in their unreasoning fear, they kick and scratch and bite. and trample upon one another with the primordial savageness of the mob.

And all the while, the shadowy figure of the dead grocer continues undisturbed to balance his accounts. It is a temptation to linger beyond all reason over one after another of these extraordinary and haunting imaginings, such for instance as Mokson's master, in which an inventor, having made a mechanical chess player, makes the mistake of beating it at the game and is promptly strangled to death by the revengeful puppet of his own creation.

But it is impossible to do justice to all these stories separately, and it remains only to single out one typical example in which perhaps he reached the very pinnacle of his strange fantastic genius. The death of Halpin Fraser. The theme of the story is this. It is sufficiently horrible to be confronted with a disembodied spirit, but there is one degree of horror beyond this, namely, to have to face the reanimated body of someone long did from whom the soul has departed. because, so Mr. Beers tells us, with the departure of the soul all natural affection, all kindness has departed also, leaving only the base instincts of brutality and revenge. Now in the case of Halpin Fraser, it happens that the body which he is fated to encounter and these hideously unnatural conditions is that of his own mother, and in a setting as curiously and poetically unreal as any part of Kubla Khan, he is forced to realize that his mother, whom he had in life worshipped as she worshipped him is now, in spite of her undiminished beauty,

a foul and bestial thing intent only upon taking his life. In all imaginative literature, it would be difficult to find a parallel for this story in sheer unadulterated hideousness. Mr. Ambrose Beers, as a storyteller, can never achieve a wide popularity, at least among the Anglo-Saxon race. His writings have too much the flavor of the hospital and the morgue. There is a stale odor of moldy serraments about them. But to the connoisseur of what is rare, unique and very perfect in any branch of fiction, he must appeal strongly as one entitled to hearty recognition as an enduring figure in American letters. No matter how strongly he may offend individual convictions and prejudices with the flippant irreverence of his satiric writings,

it is easy to forgive him all this and much more besides, for the sake of any single one of a score or more of his best stories. End of Chapter 14. End of Some American Storytellers by Frederick Tabor Cooper.