ulating in this way, hunting analogies, exceeding the author's apparent design, and interviewing the characters on one's own account. The pleasant clever novels of the day leave no such illusion that the characters gave got away, and give no such impulse to a wild-goose chase. It is a strange man that could remain awake five minutes beyond his usual time with the characters of Messrs. Harding Davis, Booth Tarkington, O. Henry, or even Anthony Hope, Maurice Hewlett, and stars of a greater magnitude. Gone like a glass of soda water; cheerful but done with; ancient after two ticks of the clock, hazy as Tiglath-Pileser; and the soul now ready to be completely absorbed in the deeds of the flies on the window pane. It must be that Mr. Hapgood has written an unusual book. It might be an altogether admirable one, but Mr. Hapgood is more credulous of his people than he has a right to be of any one, even of himself. They are subjects for sympathetic derision-not satire the sneering substance that we know, but satire that includes the satirist himself. That is the grave omission of the satirist, the omission of himself-nearly all the world to the literary person, yet left out of the world in almost every extremely sarcastic. survey of it. There can, of course, be no sound derision of things sub specie eternitatio that does not include the derider himself.

II

F. M. Colby.

ROSE O'NEILL'S "THE LADY IN THE
WHITE VEIL"*

The author of this novel is known as an illustrator of considerable merit, an artist of a certain originality and force. There are several specimens of her handiwork scattered throughout the pages, which are not unpleasing. Now, it is but a jealous carping criticism that would deny to the successful achiever in one line of artistic endeavour,-because of success-the right to achievement in some other line of work. Indeed it would have been, for the present reviewer at least,

*The Lady in the White Veil. By Rose O'Neill, New York: Harper and Brothers.

a pleasure to be able to announce that Mrs. Rose O'Neill is as clever a writer as she is an illustrator. But this cannot be said. In fact it must be regretfully stated that she has written a very poor book. It is quite impossible to discover why such a book should have been written at all. For the author's time and coffers could presumably have been filled to so much better advantage by the exercise of her real talent. The story of the novel hinges about a mystery which becomes so obvious about one-third through the book that the snarl of so-called mystifying happenings becomes annoying in the extreme. The style is overladen with a would-be facetiousness and attempted brilliancy which read like the efforts of a capable high-school girl who has not-perhaps never will,-learned the beauty of simplicity, nor the power to understand life from anything but the school-girl attitude.

One oasis in a desert of mannerisms and useless words is the figure of Uncle Dodson, the violin-playing amateur detective. Uncle Dodson is really delightful. He is the only justification for an otherwise unnecessary book. He is so good that we fancy the author must have forgotten her literary ambitions for the time, and simply painted a figure from life.

Uncle Dodson's sayings are most amusing, and give the only really funny moments among so much that is painfully trying to be funny.

Insects are not necessarily celibates.

Or:

To a man of a lofty nature a noble purpose cannot be forgotten. It inspires all the divine energies of his soul: all the strength of his spirit reaches out: he sits down on it, like a bull-pup on an old overshoe-if you know what I mean.

This is a sample of Uncle Dodson's conversation. If the delightful old gentleman was the reason for writing. the book-there is no other apparent-it could have been done much easier. He is of himself so much worth while that we regret it has not been done in any other way.

Grace Isabel Colbron.

III

G. R. CHESTER'S "THE MAKING OF
BOBBY BURNIT”*

A good many excellent novels are very poor serials. Also the reverse is true. By this the reviewer does not wish to imply that Mr. Chester's The Making of Bobby Burnit, which was an unusually entertaining serial, is a bad novel. It is not. Only it is impossible to regard the story in book form in any other way than in the light of a second incarnation. Even the reader who has never heard of it before, seeing it between these covers of blue and gold, will inevitably feel this.

Here is the tale in a nut-shell. John Burnit has died, leaving to his son a vast fortune and a series of philosophical letters. The fortune is curiously tied up, and the letters are to be given to the son not as a warning against an indiscretion, but after the indiscretion has been consummated. Robert Burnit, bouyant, enthusiastic, inexperienced, generous, and something of an ass, becomes more deeply involved with each new venture. He begins by losing control of his father's

*The Making of Bobby Burnit. By George Randolph Chester. Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Company.

department store. He plunges into a wild-cat real estate scheme. He enters the field of municipal affairs and finds the game an expensive one. He backs a stranded opera company and becomes entangled in a breach of promise suit. Finally, in journalism he finds his true career, and, taught wisdom by constant reverses, is able to pay off old scores and to emerge from the long struggle with flying colours.

The Making of Bobby Burnit may be summed up as modern, American, spirited, entertaining, and ephemeral. It is a book that will be thoroughly enjoyed to-day, and quite forgotten six months hence. To speak of it as belonging to the school of The Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son is not to imply imitation. True, the John Burnit of this story is not unlike the old Gorgon Graham of Mr. Lorimer's remarkably successful narrative, and in certain callow moods Bobby bears a marked resemblance to Pierrepont Graham. But there the similarity ends. In place of the anecdotes of the shrewd old Chicago financier there is here a philosophy that is quite as sound, and in addition a narrative that should satisfy the most insistent admirer of incident and action.

Beverly Stark.

0.0.0.0.0.0

T is generally conceded that of all literary forms the novel stands nearest to the drama in its dependence upon popular favour. As with the drama, its legitimate purpose is neither to teach nor to preach, but to entertain. It may, of course, incidentally accomplish many other things besides. It may, on occasion, stir us to noble impulses and righteous indignation; it may propound some of the weightiest problems of human life and point a way to their solution; it may strip the veil from hideous social evils and kindle a sweeping fire of reform. But unless it possesses the initial gift of entertaining, it courts defeat at the outset; for whatever people may do with sermons and essays and text-books, it is quite certain that they will refuse to read a novel that bores them. Accordingly it is wellnigh axiomatic that a novelist, like a playwright, must catch and hold the interest of his audience. What the nature of his audience shall be is one of the questions he is privileged to answer for himself. He may write for the many or for the few; for the wise or the foolish; for the reverend senior or the matinee girl. But having chosen his public, he must give them entertainment, or else own himself ignorant of the first principles of his art.

Now, since the purpose of all fiction, of whatever degree of ambition and achieve ment, is to present a series of imagined

*Antonio. By Ernest Oldmeadow. New York: The Century Company.

Idolatry. By Alice Perrin. New York: Duffield and Company.

Salvator. By Percival Gibbon. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

Peter-Peter. By Maude Radford Warren. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The Whips of Time. By Arabella Kenealy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

The Black Flier. By Edith Macvane. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company.

The Half Moon. By Ford Madox Hueffer. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

incidents in such a way as to produce the maximum impression of reality, it would seem to be a perfectly reasonable and legitimate question to ask why the popular verdict on a novel is not the decisive verdict-in other words, why the novel that reaches the widest audience is not artistically as well as commercially the best novel? For the art of fiction is different from the other arts, in that it does not afford a conscious enjoyment, for its own sake, excepting in rare, individual cases. None but the trained critic takes pleasure, as he reads a story, in the cleverness of its technique, the symmetry of its structure, the effective tricks of rhythm and assonance, because in the technique of fiction the best art lies in most subtly concealing it; it is not something to be enjoyed for its own sake, as in music or painting. And so, if the aim of all novelists is essentially the same-namely, to interpret life in the most graphic, effective and convincing way at their command-then it would seem that the test of a novelist's ability, like that of a great actor, should lie in the size of his audience, the number of people whom his genius has the power to hold spellbound.

In point of fact, there are a sufficient number of cases in which the popular verdict and the verdict of authoritative criticism have coincided, to give a sort of fallacious justification to this doctrine that a novelist's greatness is in direct ratio to his popularity. Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, Stevenson and Kipling, Dumas and Balzac and Zola, are familiar instances of great writers who could hold and sway a great audience. But they were able to do this because of the breadth of their sympathies with human life, the universality of their themes, the gift of touching certain common chords of human nature, that set all classes of readers vibrating in response. This power different writers have to a varying degree; Dickens, for instance, to a greater extent than Thackeray-and therefore, while Thackeray is the finer

artist, Dickens gathers around him a more motley audience and wins by popular verdict. So long as a novelist confines himself to themes that possess this universal appeal; themes dealing with such primitive, basic emotions that they are as intelligible to the ploughman as to the man of letters; themes as singleminded as Othello's jealousy or Macbeth's ambition, just so long will his true worth be roughly measured by the size of his audience.

It is, of course, one form of genius to be able to choose themes that will thus reach the public at large and make the whole world feel the thrill of kinship. But it is not one of the indispensable factors. of great fiction, because greatness lies in the way a story is told, rather than in the story itself. It depends upon the degree of an author's ability to tell the truth about life, rather than upon the particular truth that he has undertaken to tell, and if he succeeds greatly, the absolute value. of his achievement remains the same, whether a million readers or only a score possess the intimate knowledge of life that is necessary to a complete understanding of what he has done.

It follows that while many of the greatest novels ever written belong, and rightly, too, to the general public, many other novels, equally great, must remain caviare to the general. The general public will continue to yawn over the novel that deals with problems too subtle for it to understand; and it will continue to read and admire writers whose ignorance of life it is itself too ignorant to detect. There are just a few peculiarly gifted writers who achieve that seemingly impossible task of simultaneously appealing to the child and the adult, by means of an Alice in Wonderland or a Jungle Tale. But the mere fact that books like these augment their possible audience by the sum total of the nation's childhood, does not make them greater in literary value than, let us say, Vanity Fair or Pere Goriot, which must remain content without a juvenile audience. A certain portion of the general public are at best only children of a larger growth; and while certain masters of fiction succeed in writing down to their level, it would be folly to claim for these a higher degree of

merit than for other writers who frankly choose to write for a limited public possessed of a special culture, an exceptional maturity. The fact that three generations have wept over the death of little Nell does not alter the fact that The Old Curiosity Shop lies considerably lower in the scale of art than, for example, The Golden Bowl of Henry James, whose very meaning would persistently elude ninety per cent. of the sum total of Dickens's readers.

For these reasons it should be remembered that there are few tests so fallacious as the popular verdict on books of fiction. As against the one time when the public may possibly be right, there will be ten times when it will be plainly, if not grotesquely wrong. It will look askance at the really promising work of an author's youth, and then end by absurdly overrating the mediocre productions of his middle age. And this is not surprising, because mediocrity is itself one of the notes that awaken a ready response from the world at large.

And yet the Popular Verdict is a factor which it has become impossible to overlook in the criticism of modern fiction because of the easily understood and somewhat deplorable reason that it is the factor which largely explains why so many mediocre books are published-and also why many a book containing the promise of better things is deliberately warped and cheapened and spoiled. A casual glance over a shelf full of socalled "summer novels" is in these days rather disheartening, not because a light little story skilfully told is in itself an unworthy achievement, but because in so much of our current fiction it is unpleasantly evident that the author has had his eye at least two-thirds of the time upon his audience, rather than on his work.

Accordingly, when we come across a book that evidently has been written for

the story has numerous faults; it is somewhat too long drawn out for what the author has to tell; it is wearisome in spots, and the conversation is here and there distinctly crude. Yet these objections are more than counterbalanced by the welcome fact that here is a book not written in accord with any of the popular formulas; a book which appears to say to the general public, "Take me or leave me as you please. I am written for my own sake and not for yours. I have nothing in common with the average parody upon reality that is called a novel. I am the record of the struggle of a human soul." Obviously, then, Antonio is not a book destined to receive the popular vote. It is the story of a young Benedictine monk who finds himself, with the rest of his brethren, ejected from the monastery at the time when Portugal, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, confiscated the possessions of the Order and drove the monks out into the world. All the other monks of this particular monastery are old and near to death; but Antonio is young and strong and full of zeal; and in him, if anywhere, lies the one hope of some time restoring the brotherhood. How he accomplishes this task is the central theme of Mr. Oldmeadow's strong and unusual story. He shows us this young priest, inexperienced and untrained to face the world, starting forth penniless, laying aside his monastic garb, and beginning life as a simple citizen, obtaining employment, first of all, as an expert judge of wines. How he rises step by step in the confidence of the wine merchant who employs him, how he takes a cargo of rare old wines to England, and reaps an ample harvest for himself and his employer; how he returns and with his savings buys the vineyards adjoining the old monastery, so that he may be on hand to watch and protect it day by day; how night after night he creeps through an underground passage into the old abandoned chapel to kneel in the old stall and offer up prayers for his absent brethren-all this forms the very warp and woof of the vivid verbal tapestry into which is worked a romance of turbulent fashion, self-abnegation and protracted struggle, ending in a final and lasting peace. The spirit of

faith and devotion is admirably sustained, and the colouring throughout the book exhibits a softened and mellow richness suggestive of the glow of sunlight through old stained glass.

"Idolatry"

Religious fervour forms the keynote to another book of the month, Idolatry, by Alice Perrin. Like this author's previous volumes, it is a story of British India, and pictures with a good deal of vividness the motley and teeming life. of the East, the startling contrasts of manners and customs, the clash between Eastern and Western philosophies and faiths. The immediate atmosphere of the story is that of a colony of English missionaries, one of whom, in sharp contrast to the conservatism of his brethren, asks himself frankly whether the methods that the church is pursuing are not, after all, a waste of time and energy; whether in order to reach and hold the Hindoo the missionary must not make more obvious and radical sacrifices than in the past; whether, in short, it is not necessary for Christianity in India to adopt in a measure the poverty and selfabnegation of the Brahmin and the Buddhist. The character of this man, animated by the spirit of a great martyrdom, we get not directly for the most part, but through the eyes of a young Englishwoman, a vain, self-seeking, unscrupulous young woman who, having refused to marry a British officer who loves her, afterward learns that he has come into a fortune and promptly follows him to India with the deliberate intention of marrying him for his money; but in India she forms the acquaintance of this ardent, almost fanatical young missionary, learns to love him, learns to see life through his eyes, and by doing so learns how mean and contemptible have been all her past plans and motives. There can be nothing for the future between her and the missionary, because, although he loves her, his one dominating motive is sacrifice. But, having known him, she realises that it has become impossible to marry another man. whom she does not love, and that the only honest thing left for her to do is to tell this other man the truth and give