back by cowardice or a feeble habit of conformity. What decides matters is something in them, some force or spirit which they both resent and rely upon and cannot go on without. "We belong to each other,' cries Keeling, after his discovery that Norah loves him too, that's all I know. I have you now. You needn't think I shall let you go. You will leave that damned place this evening with me. . . . There is no other way.' . . . Even as he spoke, that silent, inexorable tug, that irresistible tide of character which sweeps up against all counter-streams of impulse which do not flow with it, began to move within him." The stronger tide in her is needed for the final conquest: the point is that for them it is to this conquest that Something, the greater good or the greater happiness, has called them. Victorians? Very well (this storyteller would seem to admit smil ingly): perhaps the world still needs a few of those worthies "in its business."

The Light Above the Cross Roads is a war story upon much the same plane as the recent Comrades of Mary Dillon: a romance tinged with generous feeling not toward the spirit of Prussianism, but toward a Germany which is itself the victim. and the instrument of that spirit. Here, also, pitted in love and war against the British hero, is a noble German of high charm and character. Marcus Janover is the son of an important Anglo-Indian official, who destines him for the diplomatic service, and, rather despising the Eton-and-Oxford method and product, has him educated largely in Germany. There the boy finds a devoted friendship with a young Count Eitel von Verlhof, a youth of the best

German type, though strongly imbued with the German view of a predestined Teutonic supremacy. Janover is half Irish, and grows up to a passionate feeling for Ireland and her wrongs. Almost identified in his consciousness with Ireland is his beautiful cousin Hesper, tied to the reactionary father and the decaying estate that represent one of Ireland's crying problems. Hesper shares

Janover's dream of a freed and happy Erin. So come the troubled years before the war, with their threat of civil conflict in the beloved island, and their apparently hopeless tangle of ideals and allegiances. And then the war itself, which is to smother for a time, if not to extinguish, so many of Britain's smouldering menaces within. Janover has become an attaché of the British Embassy at Berlin. His German training and acquaintance, not least his friendship with Eitel von Verlhof, give him special opportunities for usefulness. On the eve of the war, partly through a circumstance which I feel to be artificial as a determining factor, he is led to leave the Embassy and to become virtually a spy for England in Berlin. Making much of his Irish blood and his unfair treatment at the hands of England, he gets himself accepted as a hireling of the Wilhelmstrasse, discovers the most amazing things, and more than once saves the day for the Allies. Meanwhile, there is his romance with cousin Hesper marooned in her Irish halls. This is complicated in two ways: first by the fact that Eitel has fallen deeply (and chivalrously) in love with her, and second, by Janover's sense of his hopeless unworthiness, as a spy, to be the mate of an honourable maiden. In the end the greater duty forces.

Janover to go his way ruthlessly, even to the point of betraying his always beloved Eitel to certain frustration and actual death. In the end we have the expected glimpse of possible future happiness for Janover and Hesper after he shall have cleansed himself by way of the firing line and, perhaps, "come through" to receive his reward. In style and atmosphere this novel has more distinction than in action or characterisation.

I suspect that Mr. Chambers enjoys having himself held up as an awful example; certainly he enjoys, now and then, a little fling at "highbrow" criticism. "That's the sort, Cleland, if you want to make money!" cries the illustrator Spink in The Restless Sex, having outlined a popular melodrama. "But of course if you don't, well, then, go on and transmute leaden truth with your imagination into the truer metal wrought by art. If there's a story in it, people will excuse the technical excellence; if there isn't, they won't read it. And there you are." Cleland himself (who is the hero of this tale) sees through the polite veneer of literary art into the core of things. "How does it pan out with you?" he inquires of an old schoolmaster of his. "Well," said Grayson, "I write things that are taken by what people call the 'better class' magazines. It doesn't seem to advance me much." "Cheer up. Try a human magazine, and become a best seller," said Cleland, laughing. The theory, on its face, is that if sound and fine work-"transmuting leaden truth," and so on-cannot be cashed in at the highest market fig ure, it does not "advance" anybody much. Of course Mr. Chambers does not believe this. On the whole, I

have come to disagree with the earnest critics (including myself) who have looked upon him as a man deliberately prostituting his talents, to the concoction of sham boudoir-andstudio fiction for the undergraduate and the shop-girl. It is true that he has written two historical romances of solid merits and only slightly tainted with his special perfume-or shall I say perfumery? And it is sure that when he chooses to employ it he has a strong and masculine hand with the short story-as witness his recent book of war tales, Barbarians. But I believe (reluctantly) that when he writes a novel of modern life he is doing his best; that this world of stage lingerie, and rouged motive, and false sentiment and coquettish naked models and the rest, has come to be the world in which his fancy as an author really lives. Perhaps he has subdued his hand to what it worked in, or perhaps that was his natural milieu. Anyhow, there he is, to the honest admiration of a very large number of our fellow-citizens. The Restless Sex is there with him.

And now for a book which I admire unreservedly, and which I really think ought to have its appeal for readers (and critics) of every altitude or elevation of brow. Professor Latimer's Progress contains plenty of cheerful nonsense and great store of cheerful sense. On its whimsical surface, it is a romantic tale of the road, with all the expected accessories of that kind of yarn. In fact, it quite has its responsibilities on its mind, and from time to time produces with a smile of triumph the special attraction that is in orderthe philosophic tinker, or damsel errant, or wayside ruffian called for by this sort of thing. The hero with

equal readiness tries his hand as a movie star, a squire of dames, or a champion of the road (if nearly choking a villain to death may be said to qualify him as such). But all this pleasant folly is merely a vehicle for the main parable, which is of our own time and predicament. The traditional hero of the road is a young gentleman escaping from the dulness of polite or at least civilised life to an existence in which he may count for himself and hew his own way. For that young gentleman the war now offers a ready avenue of escape. Therefore our present hero is a stout, old, retired professor of sixty, to whom the young gentleman's door of escape is closed: to whom, in his helplessness, the war itself is the prison from which his mind must somehow get free. From the beginning he has taken it heavily to heart. How many thousands of Americans of his generation, I wonder, have been, or are, in his case?"He had been hard to live with ever since August 1, 1914, although that was not the reason of his banishment to Sister Harriet's place up-state. He was being sent away for his own good, as far as possible from the war, which from the first day had laid hold of his soul's peace and put it on the rack. Every campaign in the three continents and on and under the seas had been fought simultaneously somewhere in Latimer. His heart was seldom out of the trenches. The war had mobilised him more completely than if it had placed a rifle in his hands and sent him to the

firing line. It had not altered his habits; he was as fond as ever of rich foods, of wine on occasion, of his

afternoon nap, of friendship, of loud and coloured talk, of the buoyant, intellectual, epicurean, big-city existence in which his robust being was at ease after thirty years on a college campus. But the war had shaken the foundations of his daily practice. It would sweep upon him and empty all life of its meaning. The war would descend upon him on bright summer mornings, as he was shaving or lacing his shoes. . . In short, he is in a bad way and must be shaken out of his mood, which is really in part a mood of egotism, by some new adventure. Theoretically he becomes an irresponsible wanderer, with his back to the war and all other unpleasant things. In reality he is on a quest of spiritual peace and mental security; and having yielded himself to that quest, all things work together to lead him gently on his way. The detail of his adventures, physical and spiritual, cannot be given here. They fail to lift him to any peak of absolute vision; but absolute vision is no longer among his desires. Somehow before the end of his whimsical holiday he has won to a quiet mind. He has lost what he calls his "exaggerated egocentrism," discovered that the destiny of the race does not really rest on his shoulders alone, and that all may yet be well with the world even if he cannot get more than a glimpse of how it is to come to pass. The richness of the book lies in the free and ardent and increasingly benignant play of the professor's intelligence and sympathy in dealing with a score of aspects of the modern world, both in peace and at war.

I It is now a dozen years since Madame Nazimova made her first appearance in the English language, in the part of Hedda Gabler. To students who were thoroughly familiar with the play, her impersonation of this character seemed to be based upon a misconception; but it was at least well rendered, and the very novelty of a Hedda conceived as sensuous and languorous, instead of coldly and brilliantly intelligent, resulted in a great deal of unmerited praise from the reviewers. Madame Nazimova had been previously seen, in Russian, as Regina in Ghosts, a part that she has not yet played in English; and her Hedda was soon followed by a rendering of Nora Helmer in A Doll's House. Her Nora-in contradistinction to her Hedda-was satisfactory in all respects, and established her beyond cavil as an Ibsen actress of a very high order. A year later, she played Hilda Wangel to the Master Builder of Mr. Walter Hampden, whose performance of this massive part was monumental in its rugged grandeur, and amazed all commentators on the current situation by scoring a commercial success which kept the theatre crowded week after week with a play that had previously been assumed to soar "over the heads of the public." Two years later Madame Nazimova exhibited a memorable rendering of Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf; and her performance of this character-particularly in the first act-touched the high-water mark of her achievement

as an actress of Ibsen. Yet, since the spring of 1910, Madame Nazimova had not again revisited the glimpses of Broadway with any play of Ibsen's until she was recently persuaded by Mr. Arthur Hopkins to undertake a series of Ibsen "revivals." [The word "revival" is somewhat insulting to the greatest modern dramatist, because it suggests that his plays have been at some time dead, and have needed a miraculous resuscitation; yet, in a theatre which has falsely set a premium on novelty, it has crept into common usage in the vocabulary of comment.]

The present Ibsen season was inaugurated by Mr. Hopkins at the Plymouth Theatre on the evening of March 11th, with the first performance of The Wild Duck that had ever been offered in the English language in New York, though an excellent rendition of this play had been previously given in the German language in January, 1917, with that admirable actor, Herr Rudolf Christians, in the rôle of Hjalmar Ekdal. In this production, Madame Nazimova assumed, for the first time, the minor but delicate and difficult part of the little martyred Hedwig, and acquitted herself with credit. Hedda Gabler was resumed-with less success on April 8th; and A Doll's House-the most popular of all the Ibsen plays was triumphantly repeated on April 29th. At the very outset of the undertaking, Mr. Hopkins and Madame Nazimova had promised the public to set forth subsequent productions of Ghosts, The