moral hill-top where the air is pure and wholesome. Death too often cuts the Gordian knot for novelists who have entangled the web of life of their characters beyond unraveling. It is so here; why, we fail to see, for Father Thorne loses thereby a possible convert, the moral awakening of the heiress's worldly wooer being of too recent an origin to outlive long its cause his love for her. Christian Reid is not a new-comer in the field, as his title-page shows. We do not know if we are justified in identifying him with the priest who copyrighted his story. If we are, there must be added to the list of novelists of the Roman Catholic cloth a writer who strives to teach lessons worth learning by Christians of all creeds, while not forgetting that it is the first duty of the calling which with him is but an avocation to entertain his readers, and to hold their interest.

Louis Becke has hitherto not relied solely upon the romantic quality of his material, but enhanced its value by careful, artistic workmanship. It is not so with Edward Barry, South Sea Pearler, which looks very much like a careful first sketch of a novel to be elaborated, but which, even in its present form, is rattling good reading. The strange, adventurous life of the Pacific, its dangers and lawlessness, have been employed by Mr. Becke with good results; his characters are sufficiently interesting to carry on the tale, though merely sketched in on the simple plan of endowing the hero with all the virtues, and the villain with all the vices and crimes of the calendar. That villain is all that can be desired, a polished murderer, pirate and plotter, a gentleman in word and bearing, suave amid the lowbred villains who are his associates. The love affair, without which but few tales of adventure are complete, is " polished off" in an easy-going, practical way, that furnishes no complications, and disposes of

one woman in an acceptable manner to allow of the bestowal of the other on the hero. The book is indifferently written, yet there is undeniable fascination in the development and culmination of its plot.

Mark Twain has gathered together from the pages of different American periodicals the stories, sketches, and more serious papers that have come from his pen in recent years. The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg gives its name to the collection, which includes also the "Private History of the Jumping Frog' Story," and the notable "My Début as a Literary Person." Of most importance, probably, is the paper, "Concerning the Jews," while that "About Play-Acting" may well be read from time to time by those who view with concern the tendencies of our stage. Mark Twain's humor has grown more quiet with the passing of the years, but more subtle as well, more philosophical, with a substratum of wisdom that gives a higher value to the fun. To praise Mark Twain would be little short of impertinence. We accept him in his robust, sturdy maturity, with respect for his point of view, and thankfulness for his never-failing humor. He is among the writers whom America has given to the world, a finished artist whose Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are respectfully recalled to the memory of those zealous literary sportsmen who amuse themselves by hunting for the "Great American Novel."

In "The Story of the Cowboy " Mr. E. Hough wrote down his name indelibly in the list of the historians of the West. He has enlarged his field in his first novel, The Girl at the Halfway House, which is a chronicle of the development of the West after the Civil War, when from North, East and South the hardy survivors of that tremendous trial of the fittest emigrated to the new country, to build homes there and a new empire. The story

is episodical, its four books dealing successively with the "day of war," the "day of the buffalo," the "day of the cattle" and the "day of the plough"; and the day of the vanishing Indian and of transcontinental railroad building is woven through it all. The romance is kept on the second plane, made a minor part of that far greater epic of activity, struggle and triumph which now is a page of our history. Thus we have a series of pictures. from the day when tents were put up and claims staked out to that later one when the conquest of the newer New World was an accomplished fact. The Union soldier, the daughter of the ruined South, the foreigner who fought for the causethese are the individuals accentuated sufficiently among the thronging mass to give a touch of fiction to this chronicle of facts. A. Schade Van Westrum.

MORE LITERARY PIECE-WORK

THEN a writer accomplishes what

WHE

he sets out to accomplish, the critic must call his work successful. If he hedges his stories around by the caution that the reader is to expect essays done into the form of fiction, the reader cannot complain that his expectations have not been realized. This caution Dr. Charles Waldstein throws out in the in

THE SURFACE OF THINGS. By Charles Waldstein. Small, Maynard & Co., 12mo, $1.25.

A WIDOWER AND SOME SPINSTERS. By Maria Louise Pool. Herbert S. Stone Co., 8vo, $1.50.

THE QUEEN'S TWIN AND OTHER STORIES. By Sarah Orne Jewett. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 12mo, $1.25.

THE LOOM OF DESTINY. By Arthur J. Stringer. Small, Maynard & Co., 12mo, $1.25.

MR. JACK HAMLIN'S MEDIATION AND OTHER STORIES. By Bret Harte. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 12mo, $1.25. A NEW DIVINITY AND OTHER STORIES. By "Chola." Longmans, Green & Co., 8vo, $1.00.

THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES. By Charles W. Chesnutt. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 8vo, $1.50.

troduction to his book of three stories, called The Surface of Things. He has turned for a time from essays on art to essays on the ethics of those needs of life which are not adequately recognizedthe craving, for instance, which we all feel to live with refined people. Other novelists have written of the fundamental and ruling interests and passions of life,— love, revenge, ambition. He has elected to write of rudeness and its influence on the offender, of the ostracism from society of three Jewesses because of their nationality, of the use of higher mathematics in the development of a cultured man. The setting in each instance is that of a story. The conversations are long and sometimes in monologue, according to Dr. Waldstein's theory that in real life we do not speak in short, trivial sentences.

As interesting stories, two of these experiments are unsuccessful. The touch is heavy. Theories, not characters, remain in the mind after one lays the book down. "A Homburg Story," on the contrary, has movement and plot, therefore interest. The success of the book lies in the fact that in the end the reader thinks of the problems suggested in exactly the way that the author intended him to think. Whether he cares for the stories or not, he finds himself revolving in his mind the ideas which they contain. The French phrases and the introductory eulogistic lines regarding the author's work might well have been omitted.

There is a certain incongruity between the green and gold cover of Maria Louise Pool's book of posthumous stories, A Widower and Some Spinsters and the picture of her plain, unlovely home in Rockland, Massachusetts. Such stories as hers, too, should be bound in homespun to match the kind of life which she portrayed. That life most of us must take on faith unless we are almost coming to believe that we have experienced it,

through much reading of New England literature upon the subject. But we have guides in that faith. All records of old maids with buried romances, and of their kinsfolk in New England are compared with Miss Jewett's and Miss Wilkins's stories, whether consciously or unconciously. The result of this comparison is a lack in Miss Pool's writings of that intangible something called "style." Probably no competent person could be found bold enough to define style, yet we all feel its presence or its absence. Miss Pool's stories are good in outline, but the outline is bald. Their realism is of the kind that not only allows Matthew Bell to think that he was a fool to have married his two dead wives, but makes him say so to an unsympathetic aunt. A good literary style would have infused a breath of imagination into such a situation, and taken from it the unrelieved hardness of dull thoughts. The method is that of a photographer incapable of putting his own personality into his work.

Miss Pool's stories are likely to illustrate just the kind of dialogue which Dr. Waldstein deplores in books:

"Will you have some tea, Sir Harry?"
"No, thank you, Lady Mary."
And he left the room.

Miss Jewett is one of the few writers who could make something out of nothing. There is a certain flavor about what she writes, which suggests reserve force capable of being drawn upon if she were obliged to write without a plot. In other words, she has the "atmosphere" which Miss Pool lacked. Whether she speaks through the Queen's twin, or through Esther Hight, the Dunnet shepherdess, or through blithe Nora O'Callahan, or through Helena Vernon, of Boston parentage, she gives her creations the proper setting in which to develop their several individualities. This is more than to say

that Miss Jewett is versatile. She is more than versatile: she not only makes each character dramatic, but she makes the reader as well as the characters live in the environment which she describes.

Almost every writer has a period during which, by strenuous exercises in English he prepares himself for the serious business of writing. As a rule, these exercises are imitations of his favorite authors. Sometimes, though rarely, they are the first fruits of an original style of his own, which needs only cultivation to ripen into something really worth while. If the exercises are imitations, the young author is very likely to destroy them when he has evolved a style. evolved a style. If they are original, he may put them into a rejected-manuscript drawer from which they will issue later with increased value as "first writings."

But all young authors do not destroy their English exercises in imitation. Some get them printed in a magazine and then published in book form. This, I should think, has been the history of the stories in The Loom of Destiny, by Arthur J. Stringer. The first sketch, "Premonitions," with its accompanying premonitory verse, gives the keynote of the book. The verse warns the reader that he has read Stevenson. The other stories are preceded by quatrains in Kipling's manner. "Tiddlywinks" and his papa, with deeprooted ideas on the value of discipline, suggest Wee Willie Winkie; Tiddlywinks's mamma is twin sister to the hero's mother in "His Majesty the King." The boy's nickname for his mother-"Heart's Desire"-recalls Lord Fauntleroy. In the story, "The Iron Age," Peggy's mother borrows the expression, "the awkward age," which at present belongs to Mr. Henry James. If we could forget that Mr. Stringer has read his Kipling too earnestly, we cannot overlook the fact that these stories of children, meant for grown-ups, are full of false psychology of

children, which grown-ups cannot accept.

After thirty years Bret Harte is writing just as well as he wrote when "The Luck of Roaring Camp" was printed in the first number of The Overland Monthly. Such a record is an unusual one. It is not in America alone that his last book, Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation, will be read with avidity. He is the most widely read American author in Europe. It matters not that he is still describing the early days of Californian. immigration, and that conditions prevalent then are now of historical interest only. Neither does it matter that we have heard of this immigration for over thirty years. What we care about-what we read Bret Harte for, is the human interest in his books. He has a grasp of facts, a knowledge of life, and a virility of treatment which show the hand of the master. Jack Hamlin is still himself, audacious, seif-possessed. He is not afraid to face the devil-so the devil be a gentleman. And Mr. Harte's women are still fascinating. None are so alluring as Sally Dows, but a second best story by Bret Harte is better than the best from most other writers.

If the anonymous person who calls himself"Chola" had confined his attention to the few incidents of contemporary history which he describes in A New Divinity and Other Stories, and had continued to "keep to himself" the stories which set forth these incidents, the world would not have been the loser. Good material for stories of southern India does not furnish sufficient excuse for stories from one who has not the gift for story-telling. How much better to describe India conversationally in a series of letters or essays, than to attempt a form of expression in which cattle are made to "pick up a precarious auxiliary sustenance from the grass of the field!"

No one can read the stories in The

Wife of His Youth, by Charles W. Chesnutt, without feeling that the greatest problem which faces the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century is the problem of the negro. The humor and pathos of negro life have given place to the tragedy of it. The education of the negro brings with it a train of complications which will require all the wisdom of our best statesmen to deal with adequately.

Mr. Booker Washington is helping to solve one side of the problem by industrial education. But what is to become of the negro whose training is professional, and whose mental ability is of the kind to admit him to the society of cultivated white men of his profession? What is to be his social position? If he has not the missionary spirit to make him work in the South among his people, where in the North can he receive social recognition? Even in that home of abolitionists, Boston, he is a social outcast, and professionally his position is anomalous. If he is a lawyer, his own people do not employ him. They want a white lawyer. White people are not his clients, because he is a negro.

Mr. Chesnutt has worked beyond the humor and pathos of his first book, "The Conjure Woman," into more than a suggestion of the tragedy underlying the present life of the negro. He writes for the most part of life in the early fifties and shortly after the war, before negro education presented the difficulties which now force consideration. His stories still contain humor and pathos. But in two of them, "Her Virginia Mammy" and "The Sheriff's Children," we are brought face to face with the stern fact that a negro of pure blood is a comparative rarity. The familiar suggestion to ship our negro population (of ten millions, by the way) to tropical lands, means nothing more nor less than transportation of the very flesh and blood of some of us. There

lies the tragedy. We must make atonement not only for slavery, but for dishonor.

It remains to be seen how much Berea College in Kentucky can accomplish by its teaching that character alone counts, and that education of negroes side by side with whites may bring about social equality and brotherly love.

The next step in the literature of this problem is a consideration of the question as it now stands, either in a series of stories, or in a novel. Can Mr. Chesnutt write such a novel, or must it be written by one who is a mere spectator and student of the struggle?

Carolyn Shipman.

RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR ALGERNON WEST

То

write memoirs is the serious occupation of old age, to read them, if they are as well written as in this instance, is the pleasure of youth. The occupation is dangerous, for in the frank revelation of the actions, thoughts and impressions of a long life personality is apt to appear with startling distinctness, and it is easy to read between the lines and see what manner of man it is who writes.

Sir Algernon may look back upon his performance with satisfaction, for he unconsciously reveals himself as a thoroughgoing English gentleman. Albeit he was the intimate friend of the greatest of the liberal politicians of England, he is an aristocrat, to use his own phrase, au bout des ongles, and his life has been passed within the highest circles of society. The array of titles in his pages is somewhat bewildering. A hasty count shows that out of perhaps eleven hundred names in the index, more than half of them bear a wonder-compelling prefix, and of the re

mainder, a large portion are distinguished in some form or other.

Sir Algernon's point of view is sufficiently indicated by his remarks upon the "unconscious insolence of wealth, which is possessed by many successful millionaires," by the awe with which he contemplates the Czar, because he was so personally great that he could go to war to-morrow if he liked of his own motion. On page 277 he comments on the English habit as follows:

"It was necessary to choose a leader, and it lay between Mr. Forster and Lord Hartington; naturally the House of Commons preferred the Duke's son. Lord Granville told me very truly, that while the House of Lords sank in the estimation of the country, the love of the iudividual lord increased in proportion."

If that statement be true, Sir Algernon is not out of sympathy with his country

men.

The throne, as being the fount and source of nobility should be held, according to our democratic ideas, in greater reverence than the ordinary members of the peerage. The ordinary Republican receives a shock when he reads this anecdote:

"In June of that year there was a great review in Hyde Park by the Queen, who remarked as they passed what a stuffy smell there was. 'Esprit de corps, ma'am,' replied Lord Palmerston, who was standing by her."

The story is saved by the French. It is singular how much wickedness and vulgarity is made acceptable by a very little French; but aside from that, it is unsatisfactory, for one instinctively desires to know what the Queen said and did when the remarkable statement was made to her. Perhaps being English, she did not catch the point until the review was over. Of a different class is the following little anecdote:

"On one baking hot day the Chairman's private secretary came into the board-room with his coat off. Montgomery was much shocked, and as the