A piquant little love-story with an Italian setting is "The Contessa's Sister" by Gardner Teall. It is told in a pleasant, leisurely fashion by the hero, an American of taste, wit and fortune, who possesses himself of a villa on the island of Capri, and settles himself to the enjoyment of local color and cooking with no suspiIcion of the disturbance to be made in his plans by a chance turn of his telescope toward the Contessa's balcony. An opportune letter from home introduces him to the circle from which he had intended to hold aloof, and the path of romance proves not too difficult, though a German baron is found blocking it. An English spinster joins with the baron in providing touches of sprightly comedy, the Caprese servants are delightfully described, and the book is clever, entertaining and satisfactory from beginning to end-a real gem of its kind. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Having already grouped certain of his essays under the whimsical designations "On Nothing" and "On Everything," Mr. H. Belloc now presents a third volume "On Something." The titles are somewhat arbitrary. They might be shifted about without confusion, and the essays "On Something" be described as "On Nothing" or "On Everything." But titles do not matter. They may be accepted as harmless caprices of the author; and no one will quarrel with them so long as each of the three volumes presents twenty or thirty papers,-in the present instance, thirty-on a wide variety of subjects, pervaded by a gentle humor and an unforced sentiment, and making altogether a group of sketches which it is a delight to read, and a still greater delight to read aloud. It is well that public and parlia

mentary activities do not wholly extinguish the literary gift: Augustine Birrell, to be sure, has almost ceased to "birrell" since he took on the cares of state; but Sir James Yoxall, Mr. Malcolm, and Mr. Belloc have not forgotten the claims of their readers. E. P. Dutton & Co.

Molly Elliot Seawell's "The Ladies' Battle" (The Macmillan Co.) is a contribution to the discussion of woman suffrage from the point of view of a woman who not only does not want the ballot but has definite and wellconsidered grounds for her opposition to the grant of it. It is terse and pungent, and thoroughly up to date, for it touches upon an incident so recent as the trouble which the London suffragettes experienced in getting possession of their skating rink, on the occasion of the census strike, April 2d of this year. The two basic reasons which Miss Seawell puts forward against woman suffrage in the United States are, First, that no electorate has ever existed or ever can exist which cannot execute its own laws; and Second, that no voter has ever claimed, or ever can claim, maintenance from another voter. The first of these arguments is familiar, but the second is new, especially in the way in which Miss Seawell presents it. Incidentally, she shows that in some of the suffrage states, women are not only jointly responsible with their husbands for the support of children, but may even be divorced for non-support of their husbands. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with Miss Seawell's conclusions, he will at least not find her book dull: it is the more effective for not being discursive.

Professor Henri Bergson's important work on "Creative Evolution" is presented to American readers in an

authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. (Henry Holt & Co.). While its first appeal is to students of science and philosophy, its clearness of reasoning and statement commends it also to the general reader, provided he be not disinclined to serious thought. Professor Bergson is dissatisfied with all of the categories of thought as applied to the things of life. He finds them all too narrow. "Around our conceptual and logical thought," he says, "is a vague nebulosity made of the very substance out of which has been formed the very nucleus. That we call the intellect. Therein reside powers complementary to the understanding. The theory of knowledge and the theory of life must interact. Together they must solve, by a method more sure, the great problems that philosophy poses." Life he defines as "more than anything else a tendency to act on inert matter." Of consciousness he affirms that it is essentially free; its destiny is not bound up with the destiny of cerebral matter, and it is distinct from the organism which it animates. All organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, evidence a single impulsion. meaning of evolution, as he sums it up in a characteristic paragraph, is this: "All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push: The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army, galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge, able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."

The

periences of a man of thirty-eight, employed since his boyhood in clerical work for a large manufacturing company, who loses his job through pressure from below, and becomes almost desperate at the difficulty of finding another. Convinced that the men who are really achieving independence are the emigrants here, he decides to put himself in their position, to pack up, go down to the dock-but ten miles away-and start from there. His capable, courageous wife is in full sympathy with him, and the smack of adventure appeals to their eleven-yearold boy. Fortunate in having no relatives to oppose their plan, and evading the curiosity of their neighbors, they sell most of their furnishings, and hire a four-room flat in the Italian quarter of the city. Carleton buys a pair of overalls and presents himself at the office of a contractor's agent, and is at once engaged on a subway shovelling job at a dollar and a half a day, remarking philosophically to his wife that he would as soon dig in Massachusetts as in Montana. The freedom from conventional restrictions and obligations which is at once felt by all three, enables them to spend for necessities only, and they begin to put by a little money regularly-a feat which they had never accomplished on thirty dollars a week. Details of domestic expenses, with bills of fare, fill some appetizing pages. Descriptions follow of the opportunities for evening entertainment and education which the city offers to those not too proud to use them. But the main interest of the narrative lies in Carleton's gradual advancement from a day-laborer to a foreman, and finally to a contractor. Its probability will be questioned at points, but the general principles which the writer lays down, in sensible, everyday language, sery as a substantial foundation for his acts. Small, Maynard & Co.

Never before recent years has a work of English literature received such appreciation from a French writer as English readers may accept. We meet the Abbé Dimnet, for example, in his book Les Sœurs Brontë, face to face, and read his reading with level interest and equal respect; not condescending, and with no necessity for nimble change of mental place, with no look askance upon the difference and the difficulty. If it seems too much to say that this had not been possible in former years, let the reader turn to Taine's pages on Charles Dickens. More than an inability in regard to language it was that led Taine, a citizen of a nation capable of some certain forms of humor, to write of Augustus Moddle in Martin Chuzzlewit -our Moddle as a terrible figure of insanity. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac, makes us shudder." says the illustrious French critic.

This untimely solemnity, this literal and all-unfanciful resolve to see a figure of fiction and drama as it were "in the round" (as they say in the drawingschools), to see the back of it and the sides and the perspective, instead of accepting the impression; in a word, this stupid search for the third dimension, must have been due to a mind untrained in any but French, national, local habits of thought and literature. In order to judge English literature well, a French writer must not only know the English language better than Frenchmen were wont to know it, he must know English play as distinct from French, English banter as different from French, the English laugh, the English Falstaff, the English Shallow, Silence, Primrose, Micawber, in short English art. And English artinimitably humorous-does not insist upon the tragedy of the whole fact. It

Miss

takes an odd man in fiction at his facevalue, sees him simply and with a single eye. It deals with "every man in his humor"-even the lunatic in his. Not that we need grant to the French critic that Moddle is insane. Pecksniff's quarry is quite a sane young man. He is odd, he is sufficient, he is absurd. And the same may be said of Dickens's veritable lunatics. What! are we, with Taine apparently, to shudder also at Mr. Dick's delusion, at the amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable-marrows over the wall, at the petrifaction of the intellect that befell Mr. F.'s aunt? If so, away with the art of literature, and let us have these sad cases in the form of a complete and conscientious diagnosis.

M. Dimnet has had a less difficult matter to deal with than was attempted, with so rash a seriousness, by Taine. The later critic has had no humor to apprehend; the work of the Brontës was not humorous but impassioned, and passion speaks the universal tongue, whereas humor laughs and thinks in her own dialect, even when her English is quite pure. But this less difficult task he has done ad

mirably well. He must be in possession of the best traditions of English prose-must indeed be naturalized therein-in order to write with answering dignity of the greatness of Charlotte Brontë's English. Yet, in the biographical part of his work he does well to bring to the forefront his distinctively French judgment. It is a Frenchman and a Catholic, and no Protestant, no Englishman, no Englishwoman, assuredly not Mrs. Gaskell, who can present to us the true Charlotte Brontë in the true Brussels school. (For this purpose we may usefully confound Belgian and French;