queror, over the route of glory that Cortes and Scott had travelled in succession." "Lincoln was too intelligent not to know that attempts on his life were intended by individuals, but he had the full courage of high station, and wore the strong breastplate of a heart untainted." "Pure and austere though he was in ideals of public duty, Chase had something of that insatiate ambition to be first that perverts good feeling and keeps one wrapped in an atmosphere impervious to clear sunshine." "The bow of Chase's candidacy lingered not in the sky." "There was no such display of disdain or loathing as the fair rebels of New Orleans had once shown, but deep dejection and sorrow, rather, and a cold though courteous dignity, which proclaimed impassable barriers."

An example of felicitous phrase, of which there are many, is: "Yet something of that skill in carving epithets and of epigrammatic force that hurts he seems to have derived from the rigid abolition school."

Hutchins Hapgood.

A TEN YEARS' WAR. By Jacob A. Riis. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company. $1.50.

Practical sociologists like Jacob A. Riis, Walter Wyckoff and Josiah Flynt have the advantage over mere abstract reasoners and writers in that the purposes and theories which underlie their books in no way interfere with the narrative qualities. These writers may have reforms to urge, causes to advance, but their first duty is to turn out copy that is entertaining and easily read. A Ten Years' War is simply an additional part to the author's former books, How the Other Half Lives and Children of the Poor. It is a good book and a sincere book, but, of course, it is inferior in many respects to the other two. This could hardly have been avoided. When a writer follows a first book with two or three more dealing with practically the same subject, the later works are almost certain to be made of poorer material, and in A Ten Years' War Mr. Riis has been obliged to spread his ideas rather thin.

To those who are familiar with the author's work in the reclamation of the slum districts of New York City there is one incident related in the book which is delicious in its irony and humour. It is when Mr. Riis tells of how in his delight at the sight of the sod in Mulberry Bend Park he danced exuberantly upon the forbidden ground and was promptly clubbed by a too zealous police officer. Mr. Riis has much to say of the old

Bend of interest to New Yorkers. Despite the picturesqueness of its dirt and darkness it was hopeless, and had to go.

There was no question of children or playground involved. The worst of all the gangs, the Whyos, had its headquarters in the darkest of its dark alleys; but it was left to the police. We had not begun to understand that the gangs meant something to us beyond murder and vengeance, in those days. No one suspected that they had any such roots in the soil that they could be killed by merely destroying the slum. The cholera was rapping on our door, and, with the Bend there, we felt about it as a man with stolen goods in his house must feel when the policeman comes up the street. Back in the seventies we began discussing what ought to be done. By 1884 the First Tenement House Commission had summoned up courage to propose that a street be cut through the bad block. In the following year a bill was brought in to destroy it bodily, and then began the long fight that resulted in the defeat of the slum a dozen years later. It was a bitter fight, in which every position of the enemy had to be carried by assault. The enemy was the deadly official inertia that was the outcome of political corruption born of the slum plus the indifference of the mass of our citizens, who probably had never seen the Bend.

In writing of some of the abuses of the old East Side Mr. Riis adopts a tone that is tremendously sincere and passionate. He has rubbed against the slum, and in his own life felt much of its iniquity. A passage which the reader will not readily forget is that in which he tells of a night twenty-nine years ago he passed in a police station lodginghouse. There he was robbed, beaten and thrown out for protesting; and when the vagrant cur that joined its homelessness to his and sat all night at the door waiting for him to come out, snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, the author, raging and powerless, saw it beaten to death on the steps. That night was one which Mr. Riis has never forgotten. It is a memory which permeates the book.

A. B. M.

THE BENDING OF THE BOUGH. A Comedy in Five Acts. By George Moore. Chicago: H. S. Stone & Company. $1.25.

In an elaborate preface Mr. Moore explains why he preferred to have his play produced in Dublin rather than in London. But a serious student of the drama is first of all concerned with the question whether the play was worth producing at all. Mr. Moore's views as to the future home of the arts in the British Isles, as to the value of the several arts, and

as to the mission of the theatre, whether solidly based or not, are interesting but quite irrelevant as prelude to the work of one who has still to prove himself of some account in writing for the stage. Indeed, a reader needs no guide to the reason why the play should have had a kinder audience in Ireland than in England, and it is a simpler reason than that to which the author points.

The Bending of the Bough is one of those few plays-offered rather to the Irish than to the English public—that have been written for "love of art." So we are told. For art many unavailing sacrifices are made. If it had been published in the name of patriotism no one could have cried failure. It is an ingenious fable in which the relations between England and Ireland are shadowed forth in the intercourse between two towns, the prosperous Southhaven and the poor, ruined Northhaven. Northhaven has been induced to sell its fine line of steamers to Southhaven for certain advantages, including social patronage, which were not named in the bill. The money dues have not been all paid up by the rich neighbour, which, of course, has gained the means of attracting capital to it, and all kinds of material well-being. Some Northhaven agitators desire to break the unfair contract and start their own line of steamers again; others are content to ask that their bill should be paid. Southhaven pooh-poohs the thing, and offers to make a tramway for its poor neighbour, while the Mayor proposes to build a house and live in Northhaven part of the year. So there we have not only the Home Rule question shadowed forth, but the agitation of the Financial Relations Committee, and the matter of a royal residence as well. It is all very neat and ingenious, and, of course, quite unimaginative. Allegorywhich is the poles apart from myth and poetic symbolism-is a detestable bastard art, the weakness of which only one or two great geniuses have overcome. It serves ordinary ends indifferently well, and though the high and tragic story of Ireland seems unnecessarily belittled in this fable, let that pass. Mr. Moore has contrived a popular illustration of a condition of things which he has in no way exaggerated.

So far we have met only the patriotism. Then let us seek the art, for, alas! we did not meet it on our way through the book. But we diligently turn back to look for it. How is the situation developed? How are the characters conceived? They are not conceived at all. They are so many prating pup

pets with labels on their back: Strong Enthusiast, Shaky Enthusiast, Practical Man, Schemer, Weak Person, Trimmer, etc. Surely the costume designer for the Dublin theatre was hard put to it to differentiate them externally. To this there is only one exception. The bright spot in the play is Foley, a journalist, who justifies his frequent change of views by declaring "there is some truth in everything, though the truth of to-day is not always that of yesterday," and thinks "the intolerable is not to have large and noble views of what life should be and to expound these views in language as-as- Foley is only too brief a spark. The hero, Shaky Enthusiast, otherwise Jasper Dean, has the ear of the people. (His conversational style, by the way, is not attractive.) He will lead them to shake off the fetters of Southhaven. But he is in love -though nothing in his demeanour or speech to the lady proves it-and if the Southhaven trade is interfered with, his future wife's income will be reduced. He is nobly obstinate for a while, talks Nationalism and very irrelevant folk-lore, and prates about gods among the lonely hills-which in the circumstances sounds less like poetry than blasphemous quotation. Then he turns round, and says he really couldn't reduce his wife's income, and he is in love, you know, and all that. The agitation is over, for he alone has the ear of the people. Poor people!

Mr. Moore is, for the moment, an immense admirer of Ibsen. Ibsen is undoubtedly a great stage craftsman, but he is an unfortunate while a convenient model. Ibsen in his later plays has mostly defied the poet within him, and has mutilated the man of letters. But the poet is too real to be resisted at all times, and there is much implied poetry beneath a surface singularly wanting in beauty. He is, therefore, we repeat, a most convenient and unfortunate model for lesser men who in his name give rein to all the prose within them, as Mr. Moore has done here. The Bending of the Bough is unmitigated prose. Its language, like its whole conception, is good enough for an ordinary political squib, and no better. But then, though a Dublin audience may listen with patient courtesy to what so solemnly reflects its own sentiments, the thing is not lively enough to be put to electoral use. And that in the name of art, or even in the name of country, a dull thing should with such ceremony be offered to Ireland rather than to its phlegmatic neighbour -this is Ireland's newest wrong.

WHEN THE DEAD AWAKEN. A Dramatic Epilogue in Three Acts. By Henrik Ibsen. Translated by William Archer. Chicago: H. S. Stone & Company. Perhaps the end of every honest and intelligent controversy about Ibsen is the conviction that he is the Great Anarchist. His criticism of life seems based on diverse and irreconcilable principles. Which are his own personally it is impossible to say. He knows the impulses that sway men's hearts, and he makes his puppets dance to them. One puppet imposes its message of experience on a serious reader, who cries out, "Here is the rule of life for a nobler future," and he is confounded by the very next work of the puzzling dramatist. Ibsen must laugh at his solemn, distracted devotees. Says Rubek to the bearhunter in this play, "Am I to take these as oracular utterances, Mr. Ulfheim?" And Ulfheim answers, "Lord preserve me from playing the oracle!"

This latest work is, at least, as anarchic as any of the others. As for the meaning, if it's not what you please, you can choose between two or three very different-featured truths. He shakes the kaleidoscope of life before your eyes, and when one design seems to embody the impassioned meaning of his most impassioned puppet's words and actions, he has a trick of engaging your sympathies on the other side. The impulsive reader, or the critic in a hurry, may light on this passage and cry that he has found the key:

We see that we have never lived. Live out your life then as men and women. Do not starve your corporal selves. Do not miss your chances, blinded by an ideal, or by convention, or by languor. But having arrived at the conclusion this is the meaning, the impulsive reader will be bewildered at the end, where two pairs of lovers awaken, and resolve to lead their own lives out, and for result one couple, the unthinking, the material ones, go off to brutal savagery, and the other, the soulful ones, are swept down in an avalanche. The reader tries one more shot. Is it that only the clods, or the primitive savages of humanity may live their own life and prosper, while the more highly developed die

when they would realise their ideal in the actual world? Hardly, for it may be argued, this particular pair lost their early and best chance, and made the experiment after the world had battered and stiffened them; and their case really proves nothing. I think the meaning is more anarchic, bitterer than that; to most minds terrible. An ordinary life is as the sleep of death. At your peril awaken, for wakening means the sudden knowledge of loss; loss of beauty and joy if you have starved the sensuous part of you; loss of beauty and joy if you have starved the spirit. Man's capacities are so few, so frugal, and his waking desires so vast. Had Rubek long ago made no self-denying ordinance about his beautiful model, he would still have had wild remorse for loss in his waking moments. Had Irene in the old days killed the artist in him and roused the man, she would still have started up in sorrow because her gain had wrought destruction. Maia, we feel assured, if we fall under the spell of the play, woke from sporting with her bear-hunter, and knew the worth of her sculptor, whom she had deserted. Whatever our posture and dreams in the sleep of life, we wake to regret. "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!" But "Lord preserve us from playing the oracle!"

The symbolism of the play is quite as crude and childish as is usual in Ibsen's, and even more effective. The exception is Ulfheim, who represents the animal man in a quite needlessly brutal fashion. He with his hungry dogs and his talk of blood is at once ridiculous and revolting. But otherwise the dramatist's power of using puerile symbols and making them adequately shadow forth high truths, and his power of defying our sense of humour, are at least as great as ever. There is perhaps a more personal note in this latest play of his. In the expressed joy of Rubek, who bamboozles the public into thinking he is making literal portrait busts of men and women, when "at bottom they are all respectable, pompous horse-faces, and selfopinionated donkey-muzzles, and lop-eared, low-browed dog-skulls, and fatted swinesnouts and sometimes dull, brutal bull-fronts as well"; in the strong contrasts drawn between the life of the man and the poet, he speaks for the general artist, at least, if not for himself. And the poetry and the literature of the piece are more on the surface than in his other recent work. A strange play this, chaotic and unsatisfying. But it gives dreams, and uneasy wakening thoughts, which may not be Ibsen's. We readers are directly addressed and warned.

THE SLAVE. By Robert Hichens. Chicago: H. S. Stone & Company. $1.50.

Mr. Hichens has written nothing more distasteful than The Slave. Its pages are filled with the most weird occultism and the most depraved Orientalism. The slave is an English woman, a mysterious human icicle. Nothing moves her; nothing interests her. She is wilfully cruel in her coldness and detestable in her abnormal tendencies. If she were met with outside of Mr. Hichens's imagination she would be sent to the first convenient insane asylum and left there. But Mr. Hichens marries her to a broken-down old millionaire, in whose veins there flows some Oriental blood, who makes her his slave through satisfying her one passion-a craving for jewels. Page after page is devoted to analysing the horrible fascination that this man has for her whom he terms his slave. He says of her: "She was born to live in a harem, petted as an animal is petted, adorned with jewels as a Sultan's favourite is adorned. Such a life would have satisfied her nature. Her soul shines like a jewel and is as hard. Human sorrow will never touch her, for she cares for nobody." There are two passages in the book which once read cannot easily be forgotten: one, the deathbed scene of little Alf, the acrobat who sacrifices his life for the "Queen of Diamonds"; the other, the description of the struggle of the thief who secures the uncanny emerald. One turns aside from this chapter of horrors with a genuine shudder, and with a breath of relief when the struggle is over and the animal has again become the woman. There is not even a glimmer of happiness in this most gruesome story. The characters are exaggerated types of the men and women who belong to London's smart set. They are full of eccentricities and absurdities. They do not interest the reader, for they are superficial and unnatural. Even the hero is an unsatisfactory individual, and stupidly in love with one of the most unpleasant heroines that has ever emanated from an author's brain.

THE WHITE DOVE. By William J. Locke. New York: John Lane. 1.50.

Matthew Lanyon and Sylvester were father and son, the one tender and loving, the other outwardly cold and reserved. It is the story of these two men which gives to The White Dove strength and pathos. The son mourns a dead wife whom he has loved with the love eternal, and he is drawn even closer to his father because he has also suffered a similar loss. Just as Sylvester has reconciled himself to the thought of remarriage the horrible truth is revealed to him, through the delirium of a sick friend, that the pure, dead wife had been faithless to him. From that time he is a cynic, a hater of women, a mere human machine. He looks with eyes of horror upon his child, and without a word of explanation turns from the woman he has been about to marry. But the more severe he becomes in his judgment of mankind, the more charitable and divinely pitiful grows the father, who through his whole lifetime is burdened with the weight of a great secret sin. The story tells much about Ella, the woman Sylvester had won and flung aside, and Roderick, who is not wholly bad, although possessing certain qualities which are usually found in the villain. The plot is not entirely original, but it is handled with skill, and the characters, in the main, are distinctly human.

LOVE MADE'MANIFEST. By Guy Boothby. Chicago Herbert S. Stone and Company. $1.50.

The hero's name is Claude, and he is the typical hero of sensational fiction. He is an ill-clad, ill-kept boy living in an island in the Samoan group when the author first presents him to the reader. But he runs away from home in the good old-fashioned way, and fifteen years later he is in London a famous playwright and novelist. He is given every chance to prove his right to the title of hero. He saves a girl and her aged father from being run over by a hansom cab, which action is thrillingly impressed upon us in the frontispiece; he saves a strange young man from suicide

a

and adopts him; he makes more than one effort to save a woman's good name, and finally he gives up his life to the lepers in the island of Samoa. But in spite of this exaggerated type of the heroic man there are good points in the story. The difference between man's conscience and a woman's is effectively worked out. The woman sacrifices herself for love, and thinks she is right; the man permits her to make the sacrifice while knowing it is wrong. Then in a half-Pagan, half-Christian fashion he offers up his life as a penance for the sin. So the author is consistent, and satisfies the reader that Claude lives and dies a hero.

THE REDEMPTION OF DAVID CORSON. By Charles Frederic Goss. Indianapolis: The Bowen-Merrill Company. $1.50.

David Corson was a "credulous and unsophisticated youth dwelling in a realm of imagination rather than in a world of reality," a "saint, a mystic, a potential martyr," until beset by temptation. The whole foundation of his religious life then crumbled under his feet. A beautiful, wild and heathen gypsy girl, married to a quack doctor, is the cause of his downfall. It is the story of the prodigal son, and Mr. Goss describes every step in David's degeneration and regeneration. He paints him as would-be murderer, gambler and drunkard. But the further he drags him down the higher he lifts the woman, who grows purer and more spiritual through the love she bears for David. In the first half of the story Mr. Goss is at his best, and his characterisation of the "quack" comes very near to real life. But the story drags toward the end. David's redemption is a slow process, and it is the occasion of more sermonising than properly belongs to fiction. But in spite of a style often too pedantic, and of situations too melodramatic, Mr. Goss has written a story which will appeal strongly to two classes of readers: those who read for the "love interest" and those who read for the element of religion.

SMITH COLLEGE STORIES. By Josephine Dodge. Daskam. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50. It is plain to be seen that Miss Daskam is a Smith College "girl," and a very enthusiastic one. Life as it is seen in Smith College Stories is a very small part of life' as it really is. In her preface Miss Daskam says: "If these simple tales serve to deepen in the slightest degree the rapidly growing conviction that the

college girl is very much like any other girl the author will consider their existence abundantly justified." Now the college girl is not like any other girl, and it is safe to say that a keen observer of human nature can detect the typical college girl anywhere. The girls in this book belong distinctively to Smith, and before we finished the third story we longed for a man as a diversion. However, as photographs of college life these sketches no doubt will prove immensely entertaining and amusing to the many women who remember with a thrill of pleasure their undergraduate days. Miss Daskam knows how to tell a story, and we hope that in time she will do work which shall appeal to a larger reading public.

HEARTS IMPORTUNATE. By Evelyn Dickinson. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. $1.25.

Women seem to be having fiction very much to themselves these days, and new names are appearing frequently. In Hearts Importunate Miss Dickinson shows considerable strength and power, hampered at times by a peculiarly vague style. She has written around the sex question, and she has done this with taste and discretion. She says:

Hazell knew, as all men know, that woman has fair cause of complaint against man and against society. He knew that it was required of her to be an exquisite kind of paradoxgood and pure, steadfast in her constancy, and yet abundant in a piquant sauce of coquetry and wiles; and should the one part predominate, she is heavy, unattractive; and should the other, she is light, unworthy. To be fascinating-the reason of her being-she must maintain unstable equilibrium. Man, were he asked to do this, would refuse the endless effort.

The heroine is distant and unlovable, detached from her surroundings, and morbidly conscious of a past which is in truth dead. She shuts herself out from the love which comes to her, and which comes from a man who knows without seeking to know, and whose love becomes even stronger for the knowing. It is a struggle in human nature which provides plenty of material for the sexproblem writers, who write of it without arriving at any satisfactory solution of the matter. In this case the woman finally yields to the love of this rather unusual man, who asks nothing of her past, and who, therefore, is content. The scene of the story is laid in a faraway corner of Australia, and there is a good deal of interesting local colour.