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does not understand. Beyond all exceptting chance aid, and continuing throughout a writer's life, are innumerable problems which he can solve only by himself, and for himself, but in so far as direction and understanding can be given by teacher to learner, The Forms of Prose Literature seems calculated to give it.

Mary Tracy Earle.

THE REIGN OF LAW

ALL those who have known and loved

the language of waving wheat fields. will delight in the soft minor prelude which Mr. Allen plays upon the hemp fields which furnish the text for his new story, The Reign of Law," What is that uncertain flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green? A fortnight and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp ever rippling." ... "A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with tough fibre-that strength of cables when the big ships are tugged at by the joined fury of wind and ocean."

Against the Kentucky hemp fields as a background, Mr. Allen brings out his characters, the stern pioneers who went there to worship God according to their own light, at the same time making it very dark for those who refused to use their own particular brand of theological candle. The hero of the story is first foreshadowed in the person of his great grandfather, a delectable liberal who built a church" simply to God, and not to any man's opinion of Him." The habit of thinking his own thoughts, and drawing his own conclusions instead of letting some one else draw them for him he trans

THE REIGN OF LAW. By James Lane Allen. Macmillan Co., illustrated, 12mo, $1.50.

mitted to his greatgrandson, David, who is a cousin of John Gray's, with fewer red corpuscles, perhaps, and more of the natural cleavage of sainthood. Fired with fine young zeal, David sets out to study for the ministry; but being at the same time honest and thoughtful, he finds it impossible to clear a way through the jungle of theological briars and underbrush through which he must pass before he can obtain a license to preach. He finally decides that it is better to be honest than orthodox, and meets his pastor in a lingual duel over the conflicting claims of rival church clans. The pastor is effectually vanquished (though he does not know it) by David's extemporised catechism. The dialogue between these two should be read by all quiddling heresy hunters, who are looking for somebody or something to stick pins into. Poor, harried heretics will also find it a chortling bit of literature.

When David has been expelled from the Bible College for his honesty and his doubts, he returns home to be again confronted by the same pathetic incapability of comprehension or appreciation in his parents. Of the tragic truthfulness of this picture of the hopeless relations between David and his parents how many a son and daughter could testify!

But the hero at last reaches the proverbial turning that belongs to the longest. lane. Around the corner of that turning he finds, of course, the heroine, Gabriella, a damsel who is sweet and sound and sensible enough to distinguish between at man of rare mind and character and a parrot to an absurd and irrelevant creed. David's wooing comes late in the story, but is carried on with fine verve, humor and dispatch. To tell whether his wooing prospers would be a weak pampering of somebody's feminine curiosity, but a paragraph will indicate its effect upon the hero and heroine: "He appeared to her

for the first time handsome. He was better looking. When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined singer."

The Reign of Law will especially appeal to three classes: those who love a lover (and that is "all mankind "), those who love nature, and those who are interested in the great drama of religious evolution, with its ever-shifting scenes from the black nights of bigotry, the twilight of tolerance and the full dawn (which is not yet) of perfect liberty. E. B. S.

CHIC

CURRENT FICTION

HICAGO has had a school of fiction of its own since the publication of Mr. Fuller's "Cliff-Dwellers," a school whose products are well worth studying, because they reflect the social and economic tendencies of the West, of which the East knows all too little. A growing discontent with the "existing condition. of things," among the educated poor as well as the working people, is the keynote

THE WEB OF LIFE. By Robert Herrick. Macmillan Co., 12mo, $1.50.

ELISSA. By H. Rider Haggard. Illustrated. Longmans, Green & Co., 12mo, $1.25.

THE SECRET OF THE CRATER. By Duffield Osborne. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 12mo, $1.00.

AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST. By George Bernard Shaw. Brentano's, 12mo, $1.50.

EBEN HOLDEN. By Irving Bacheller. Lothrop Pub. Co., 12mo, $1.50.

DEACON BRADBURY. By Edwin Asa Dix. The Century Co., 12mo, $1.50.

POVERTY KNOB. By Sarah Warner Brooks. A. Wessels, 16mo, $1.25.

of several recent books by Chicago writers, the latest of which, Mr. Robert Herrick's The Web of Life, is facile princeps. It is a social study in the widest sense of the word, and an inquiry into the attitude of the poor towards the rich, and of capital towards labor, but it is also an admirable psychological study, so far as the two women are concerned who play the rôle of the ewig Weibliche in its pages, Mr. Herrick's talent enabling him to combine. a survey of the material interests of our present-day life-the struggle whose goal is financial success, its end often financial failure with the deeper things of life; in other words, his book is literature as well as a social study. The stock exchange and the railway strike led by Debs and crushed by the Federal government furnish the leading incidents of his plot, but he has justly probed more deeply, and brought from below the surface a young physician, who casts in his lot with the masses, and against the classes. This transfer of their allegiance by professional men is notable also, we are told, among the younger Western clergy, who, with educators such as Professor Herron, are the leaders of the so-called Christian socialism, which is making rapid progress in the West. The book is a gloomy one, but an able one as well, a faithful reflection of certain important phases, though not of the whole, of the tendencies of present-day American life.

THE SEA-FARERS. By Mary Gray Morrison. Doubleday, Page & Co., 12mo, $1.50.

GEORGIE. 12mo, $1.00. LAUGHTER OF THE SPHINX. By Albert White Vorse. Illustrated. Drexel Biddle, 12mo, $1.25.

By S. E. Kiser. Small, Maynard & Co.,

WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE. By Christian Reid. Marlier, Callanan & Co., 12mo, $1.50.

EDWARD BARRY. By Louis Becke. Illustrated. L. C. Page & Co., 12mo, $1.50.

THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG. By Mark Twain. Illustrated. Harper & Bros., crown 8vo, $1.75. THE GIRL AT THE HALFWAY HOUSE. By E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co., 12mo, $1.50.

Mr. H. Rider Haggard has built a romance upon the ruins of Zimbabwe, in southern Central Africa, the remains of what is supposed to have been the Ophir of the Bible, and takes us back into the days when Phoenicia was still great, and Israel still rang with the glory of the Wise King. He is not an archæologist nor, in any way a finished literary artist; therefore we find here much incongruity between the methods of thought and expression of his classic Phoenicians and Hebrews, and the traditional dignity which we have come to ascribe to them in action and word. On the other hand, Elissa has a good plot, and a great deal of action, including, of course, considerable fighting. The love interest, too, is well handled. The second tale in the volume, Black Heart and White Heart, is a Zulu idyl of the present day, or, at least, of the days preceding Cetewayo's fall. The deteriorating influence of close intercourse with an inferior race upon the white man is illustrated forcibly in this book. Mr. Haggard is an authority on South African conditions; therefore we must accept his account of cannibalism there. Witchcraft, too, plays a rôle in the episode that ends with the death of the degraded Englishman, who is the foil for the magnificent Zulu warrior, whose heart, not his, is white.

Mr. Haggard takes his readers to the ancient Phoenicians; Mr. Duffield Osborne, in The Secret of the Crater, rediscovers the Englishmen of antiquity upon an island in the Pacific in the first half of the present century. Mr. Osborne has the advantage of Mr. Haggard in ancient lore, obtained, perhaps, in part from Gustave Flaubert, whom we may, indeed, accept as an unimpeachable authority, but the story is the thing with him, and it is a good one. The island is discovered by a ship of the old American navy. One of its lieutenants deserts, be

cause he has fallen in love with the daughter of the Phoenician ruler, and walks straight into a web of intrigue, enmity, and superstition, for the service of Moloch still prevails there, and the high priest is mightier than the head of the State. Human sacrifice, also, has been retained in the pagan ritual, but the offering of maidens is made upon a magnificent scale; they are offered to the god of the crater. We must not divulge more of the plot, which is the greater part of the book. Mr. Osborne has told a story of adventure that in these days of many of its school has the merit of being original and out of the common.

The success of a reprint of Mr. George Bernard Shaw's capital story, "Cashel Byron's Profession," has led its publishers to offer to the public a new edition of another of the gifted Irishman's four novels, An Unsocial Socialist. Here we have Mr. Shaw at his wildest in a reckless farce of social theories, satire and argumenta ad homines, which fails as a tract, for which it was unquestionably intended, because its author, even in those early days, cared more for clever paradoxes than for theories or propaganda. The novel is unlike anything that ever has been written or ever will be an excellent means to pass away a few idle hours, provided one be willing to accept the far-from-pleasant unsocial socialist without inquiry into his nature, and to smother the inevitable conclusion that he was half insane. His attacks upon the merchant prince, who was his father, are forcible enough, however. "Beer," he says somewhere in the book, "is the chloroform that enables the laborer to endure the severe operation of living; that is why we can always assure one another over our wine that the rascal's misery is due to his habit of drinking. We are down on him for it because, if he could bear his life without beer, we should save his beer money-get him for lower

wages. In short, we should be richer and he soberer."

There is not quite enough of Eben Holden in the book that bears his name to justify the bestowal upon him of that honor, but, for all that, Mr. Irving Bacheller has written an interesting sketch of the life of the descendants of the men who, in the last century, began to move westward from Vermont into the Adirondack region. The hardy, strong race of farmers is sketched here as it lived and won its living in the second quarter of this century, an unmistakable note of autobiography running through it all. Mr. Bacheller takes Eben Holden's young ward to New York, introduces him to Horace Greeley, sends him off to the war, makes him the hero of Bull Run, and brings him back to the girl he left be hind him, a daughter of the "North Country." The book has merit as a study of a race of men, and of customs that are rapidly changing under the influence of modern conditions. It deals with externals rather than with analysis of the traits of character it describes, but the picture is none the less easily interpreted.

A far deeper study of the New England character is found in Deacon Bradbury, by Edwin Asa Dix. The episode that gives the author a pretext for his remarkable picture of the old, sound, grim Puritan substratum upon which rests the character of the Vermont farmer and deacon, is somewhat far-fetched, and, indeed, decidedly improbable, but the reader will care little for that. Deacon Bradbury himself is the book-a splendid picture of rugged moral strength and rectitude, but also of conscious merit. This God-fearing man rebels when the hand of misfortune rests upon him; he has not deserved this at the hands of the Supreme Being whom he has served faithfully for many years in matters moral and

material; God has obligations towards him, he feels, because he has ever obeyed his Word. This is the dramatic central idea of the book, followed in all its ramifications towards the heart of the man's nature, handled strongly, consistently, and convincingly. The repressed tenderness of the New England character, more intense, perhaps, for its forbidden expression, is gradually brought to the surface by misfortunes that try the metal of its sternness. Mr. Dix styles his book “A Novel." He should have called it “A Study."

It is an excellent one.

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We are taken still farther East in "Poverty Knob," by Sarah Warner Brooks, a collection of sketches of the Maine coast, and the islands that dot it. Mrs. Brooks -there can be no doubt about the prefix, since her factotum, the fisherman Elkanah, called her Miss Warner in the days when she heard these tales-has had the courage and the wisdom to reserve her best things for the latter part of her book. Three of her stories deal with mysterious dwellers on the islands, and the prevalent local tolerance of neglect of the marriage ceremony; there is a good tale of the wife of a lighthouse keeper, left alone on her rock, with scant supplies, during a two weeks' storm; an episode in lighter vein is "The Tramp from Bar Harbor," whose road leads him into a corner of sunshiny New England life; while, finally, the old superstition that shipwrecked people bring ill-luck to those who rescue and harbor them is proved to be true in the last story of the bundle.

Mary Gray Morrison has made an attempt in her first novel, The Sea-Farers, to blend the New England of the fifties with piracy in the Mediterranean, with only indifferent results. Her plot deserves the respect due to age, for one readily discovers under his new disguise the wild son who runs away from home, falls into bad company, becomes an out

law, returns to extort money from his father, and drags into his reckless existence the daughter of his father's friend. As a whole, the book is unsatisfactory, but it contains passages that are not without merit. The old general, a veteran of the Mexican war, the soul of honor, is a worthy mate for so many of his martial colleagues in English fiction; his son, on the other hand, is an original study and well done. But best of all are the pictures of life among the better classes in New England towns half a century ago, when the old conditions were already changing, though tradition opposed the innovation warningly. The author has not done so well with her material as she should have done; but then, this is her first effort, and one not without promise.

Mr. S. E. Kiser's volume of newspaper sketches, Georgie, should have been called "Georgie's Paw and Maw," for all the youngster with his ingeniously consistent. system of weird phonetic spelling does is to record the doings of his father and his mother's comments thereon. But this is an utterly unimportant detail, for Georgie is really clever in a popular way, dealing with the happenings in the every-day life of the average American, whose existence I would be rather uneventful but for the humor he finds in it, or furnishes for his neighbors. "Paw" nails up shelves that tumble down, paints a porch, puts up an awning, takes his children to the circus for his own amusement, buys a dog, enters politics, goes shopping, discusses the events of the day and the discoveries of science, while "Maw" is quietly amused at his doings and sayings, or provoked by them-it is all so patently the old material of the newspaper humorist, yet Mr. Kiser gives it a decided air of novelty no small task, and one worthy of the appreciation he received when these sketches first appeared in two Western newspapers. He is genuinely amusing from first to last,

and furnishes many an opportunity for a hearty laugh.

A new field in fiction, and a temporary monopoly thereof, is something that many a writer must sigh for in vain. Mr. Albert White Vorse discovered such a field within the larger one of arctic exploration; as one of his characters says, in his bundle of stories of the farthest North, "the public never gets the inside history of an arctic expedition." It is just this inside history that Mr. Vorse tells in Laughter of the Sphinx. The narratives of leaders, who treat of their expeditions as homogeneous bodies, and deal largely with results, ignore the warring individualities that go to make up their following, the jealousies of the scientists, the friction of tempers irritated by monotony, eternal silence and unrelieved darkness. Mr. Vorse deals with these details to the entertainment and instruction of his readers. The Eskimos, too, come in for their share of original comment; to Mr. Vorse they are not subjects for ethnological study and the display of ethnographic erudition, but human beings, with our own emotions, virtues and shortcomings. We need hardly

add that he writes from the fulness of experience, for he was a member of the Peary relief expedition. These tales originally appeared in the pages of some of our leading periodicals; they can be recommended, in their permanent form, to those in search of something entirely new in fiction, based upon interesting and uncommon facts.

The love of money is certainly the root of all evil in Christian Reid's Weighed in the Balance, but it leaves untouched the heiress herself, who restores the balance by being Quixotically conscientious in the interest of another heir, and unamenable to legal reason. The tale is a long one, without great pretense, but well told and ingeniously planned; and if it does not lead us ad astra, it at least takes us to a

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