room for the possession of American pictures. Perhaps it is no longer permissible for the reviewer that would avoid facile banalities to recall the monstrous amount of obtuseness and superficiality that has opposed a clear proclamation and an equitable estimate of this subject. When at some future time a competent and comprehensive history of American painting shall be written, wonder will no doubt be expressed at the lack of perception displayed by those critics of our own time that were not only incapable of seeing and responding to sublimities of vision and integrities of purpose in our painting, but were, moreover, incapable of perceiving the dominant trend of the art of their country and the authentic gist of its development.

More for Art Than for Criticism

So much of the field of art criticism has been invaded by the Jungle, with its tropical exuberance of personality and its atmosphere of tense struggle for existence between the artists who have been caught in its verbiage, that it is pleasant to come on such a cool, clear spring of interpretation as Mr. Frederic Fairchild Sherman's Landscape and Figure Painters of America. A comment of his on the spirit of modern painting would, with the change of a word or two, serve as a description of his own ideal of criticism: "There is a lot of feeling in contemporary landscape art, but too much of it is personal feeling and not enough the feeling, the sentiment, the mood of Nature herself." He does not adventure forth like a lion-hunter among masterpieces, but more as a sympathetic naturalist; and he is even inclined to neglect the masterpieces altogether for the work of solitary,

serious, somewhat epic souls, like Homer Martin, Albert Ryder, and Elliott Daingerfield, whom the everyday world is apt to slight. The shadow of a somberer world which falls across his appreciation of Miss Lillian Genth's lyrics to sunshine and youth is equally symbolic of his turn of mind: "The tragedy of bent forms and misshapen bodies, the endless drama of the human face, has, as yet, no representation in her work." It is a book for those who care more for art than for criticism, and more for life than for art.

The American Short Story, Its Apologia

Edward J. O'Brien's book of The Best Short Stories of 1917 has just been issued, and in putting it out Mr. O'Brien says: "I deny that the American short story is at a low ebb, and I offer the present review as a revelation of the best that is now being done in this field. I agree that the best stories are only to be found after a laborious, dusty search, but this is the proof rather than the refutation of my position. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organised criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh, living current of life which flows through the best of our work, and the psychological and imaginative reality that our writers have conferred upon it. During the past year I have sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic. and artistic form."

In this number of THE BOOKMAN Mr. O'Brien makes a discussion of the volumes of short stories that have come from the publishers so far

doubts and fears which are apt to do as deadly work at home as the gas bombs and bullets do at the front.

Miss Carolyn Wells, author of a round hundred books, whose latest volumes, Faulkner's Folly, a a mystery story for adultslikely to be much

Née Carolyn Wells

Mr. Franklin P. Adams, the "F. P. A." gentleman who for so

The Ubiquitous "F.P.A."

long was the faith

ful typographical critic of THE BOOKMAN and who in

cidently conducted a "Conning Tower" in the New York Tribune, is now a captain in the army and will sail sometime for somewhere in France to conduct a new "Conning Tower" for the soldiers. This new "tower" will be a feature of the Stars and Stripes, the trench newspaper of our expeditionary force in France may it give the boys "over there" a full measure of the pleasure we on this side have enjoyed in Mr. Adams's work and may there be a French counterpart to THE BOOKMAN to afford Mr. Adams exercise for that all-discerning eye of his, for which there is nothing typographical hidden, neither in the heavens above nor the earth beneath nor in the waters under the earth. Good fortune to F.P.A., patriot and satirist!

THE first American publication of R. B. Cunninghame Graham's stories and sketches (nine volumes in all) is a literary event of no little importance, for it makes easily accessible to curious American readers the work of perhaps the boldest, most original and unpopular of living British writers. For many years, these sincere studies of life, intense and vivid, striking a blow, now here, now there, at some cruelty or hypocrisy in our civilisation, have added a fascination to serious English periodicals; appearing later in book form under such enigmatic and ironical titles as Faith, Hope, Charity, Success and Progress. They are a unique artistic record of the author's adventures in Spain and Morocco, on the South American pampas, and in his native Scotland-a record of his adventures and his hostilities.

Cunninghame Graham is a romantic figure, as one may see by looking at John Lavery's superb portrait of him in his youth,-a_man of action more than of the study, following the tradition of Spanish writers since Cervantes fought with sword and pen. A Scotch baronet, of Spanish birth on his mother's side, he is an extraordinary combination of the hidalgo and the "canny Scot." "How he contrives to be authentically the two things at the same time," says his friend, Bernard Shaw, "is no more intelligible to me than the fact that everything that has ever happened to him seems to have happened in Paraguay or Texas instead. of in Spain or Scotland."

As one of that early group of British socialists and men of letters

whose thought has permeated English life and literature, the political career of the Laird of Ardoch was brief and violent. He fought for free speech with William Morris in the famous battle of Trafalgar Square, while Shaw looked on, as he confesses, a "discreet spectator." And later, as a member of the House of Commons, he publicly damned that body for its hypocrisy. Possessing, then, neither the patience of a politician nor the wisdom of a Shaw, Cunninghame Graham withdrew from all political entanglements and started on a life of travel and adventure.

Mogreb El Acksa (Morocco the Most Holy) is the captivating title of his first book of travel. Shaw congratulates himself upon the fact that he was "intelligent enough" to steal its scenery and knowledge of the East, its Cadis, Sheikhs and Krooboys, for his play, Captain Brassbound's Conversion. But not the hero. Cunninghame Graham, as hero of his own book, was taken prisoner by the Cadi of Kintafi; but Shaw refused to make him the leading character in his most improbable play, because "so incredible a personage must have destroyed its likelihood."

He rides like an Arab or a South American "Gaucho," and his knowledge of horses is as keen as his knowledge of men. They figure almost as conspicuously in his writings. Man's inhumanity to the horse is the subject of his most indignant descriptions. There is irony in the fact that as an active supporter of the British Government in the pres

ent war, Cunninghame Graham's services have been required, not in the trenches, but on the plains of Uruguay, selecting and marking the half wild creatures which he loves for the European battle-field. The deparThe departure of the horses is picturesquely described in Los Pingos and Bopicuá, but with revolt at the writer's task and curses (in Spanish) for "the Boches."

As an unconventional traveller and historian, Cunninghame Graham is the author of several volumes, including an account of Bernal Diaz del Castillo and a life of Hernando de Soto; and he is the writer of many provocative prefaces. His original power, however, lies in the hundred and more sketches and stories, tossed to us by the way apparently, yet wrought with all the passion and particularity of the great word painter.

Some of his most idyllic pictures are of old and vanishing Spain. His quarrel is with what he considers its present superficial Europeanisation. In Spain, he tells us, through the mouth of one of his characters, "life is so primitive and yet so intense, it seems as if you touched the Middle Ages and the most ultra-modern life when you stretch out your hand." Which is precisely how he pictures it, in scene after scene, gaining his wonderful effects by contrasts. In the shabby romance of one poor overworked hidalgo, timid, arrogant and ineffectual, one is made to feel all the sadness of this irreconcilability, and its weakness. "Madrid woke up to talk, as other towns wake up to work, and the streets slowly filled with people who at first sight were going nowhere, by the longest way they could find."

Degenerate Spain, with its bull

fights and drinking places for tourists, reeking with blood and sensuality, is the realistic and contemptuous background for the figure of a dancer, "Aurora La Cujini," which makes Sargent's "Carmencita" look like a polite wooden puppet. In sharpest contrast is this idyll taken from the sun-baked Castilian plains, in their fiery heat and violet haze:

A shepherd stood immovable and brown, and looking like a trunk of a dead tree, as he leant on his stick, guarding a flock of brown-woolled sheep, who searched amongst the stones for any herbage that had escaped the drought. When they strayed out of bounds he cracked his sling, unwinding it from where he wore it, wrapped above his sash. . . . His great, brown dog, with its spiked collar round its neck, slept at his feet, changing position when he moved, to keep itself within the shade its master's figure threw upon the ground. The red-roofed town, wild sierra, and the shepherd with his sling, his angarina, knotted quince-tree staff, his gnarled, brown hands, rough hempen sandals, his sheep-skin jacket, and his clearcut features, shaded by a broad hat, such as was worn in Thessaly when the world was young . . all formed a picture of that Spain, now so fast passing.

It is very remarkable that a literary artist of to-day should have wiped our civilisation almost completely off his canvas; a writer, too, who is not a dreamer but a man of action and affairs, intensely modern and, in many ways, born before, not behind his time. He does not appear to have left even the curiosity of his pious old Arab "Sherif," who liked to talk to Europeans, if only "to hear about the devilries they had invented to complicate their lives." Glimpses there are, here and there, of London, Paris, or Buenos Aires, just showing through in dark spots, which only serve to emphasise the writer's uncompromising hostility to our civilisation, the power of its