Recent American Fiction

IT is so hard not to think of Mr. Rowland E. Robinson’s three books, Uncle ’ Lisha’s Shop, Sam Lovel’s Camps, and Danvis Folks,¹ as one work that, in referring to them, one feels much the same embarrassment that he would feel in referring to some unentitled novel in three entitled parts. Taking a hint from Anthony Trollope, we propose to call them here, collectively, the Chronicles of Danvis. So to name them has, besides its convenience, the advantage of quite accurately describing their character, and of suggesting, in a word, the reason why it is impossible to think of them apart. Their author’s talent, though real, is limited. Aptitude for construction, readiness and fertility of invention, for example, form no part of his gift as a writer. His chapters, in strictness, are not chapters, but sketches. Readable separately with full enjoyment, they have so little consecutiveness that they might even be shuffled with but little loss of continuity. Almost uniformly, each sketch begins with a description of some aspect of nature, and through much talk of country people reaches its mild climax in some small incident or anecdote. Nevertheless, owing to their always concerning the same lovely locality, a western county of Vermont bordering Lake Champlain, and the same group of simple, genuine country folk, inhabitants of a tiny village in the hills fifty years ago, they are thoroughly homogeneous. They form, not a novel, but a neighborhood chronicle.

However, justifying Mr. Robinson in his choice of the form of fiction rather than the form of the essay which one might wonder he did not adopt, there is revealed in these curiously undramatic Chronicles of Danvis the highest of dramatic gifts, — the gift, namely, of writing dramatically characteristic dialogue, and of drawing real, living persons. There in his little corner of Vermont, rising from the flats and marshes of Lake Champlain through the foothills of the Green Mountains into the long shadow of boldly sculptured Camel’s Hump, to which the French gave the more descriptive name of “ Couchant Lion,舡 Mr. Robinson — by his works we know him — has lived his life, gone a-fishing or a-hunting, or sat a-gossiping with his neighbors in full brotherly sympathy and understanding. From his lifelong observation and study of them have come the triumphant creations of character in his work. His people are not described, or analyzed, or annotated ; we learn to know them as in real life we learn to know our friends, by observing what they do and listening to what they say. As in the drama, character is revealed through action and dialogue. So thorough and so sympathetic is the author’s knowledge of his people, and so skillful is he in giving it form, that they seem wholly alive, wholly objective, wholly free from his control. Villagers who have known and gossiped about each other all their lives seem to each other not more concrete and actual than Uncle ’Lisha and his friends seem to us. And because these simple, honest men are no less admirable and sympathetic than admirably and sympathetically presented, to know them is to love them ; and to love them, if not exactly a liberal education, is a pleasant lesson in democratic feeling and in respect for our rude Yankee ancestry. Not only are these men real ; they are also real Vermonters. Your Vermonter is through and through a Yankee, but he wears his Yankee ways with a difference. This difference the author has known so well how to catch that his people would never be mistaken, though the variation is subtle, for natives of Massachusetts or of Maine. This is the peak of his achievement. It is a wise taxidermist that can preserve a bird alive : Mr. Robinson has the power.

From just such intimate friendship and fellow-feeling have sprung certain of the little classics of literature; such, for example, as Cranford. To that, indeed, in spite of many differences, these Chronicles of Danvis wear an odd resemblance. They are like it in their even greater looseness of structure, and in their far greater delight in people than in events. They are like it preëminently in spirit, for they are humorous without malice, and loving without blindness. They are unlike it more strikingly in that, instead of being feminine and genteel and mildly aristocratic, they are deeply democratic, rustic, and masculine. Here one quality of Mr. Robinson’s work is noted which distinguishes it not merely from Mrs. Gaskell’s book, but from much of the great body of New England dialect stories. This quality is its masculinity. The New England dialect story, taken by and large, has something too much of the atmosphere of Cranford. To recall it in the mass is to evoke a vision of old maids and of old women of both sexes who have about them a general flavor of mild decay, and is to remember that its scene is most often the kitchen or the 舠settin’-room,” that its point of view is mainly that of the women. As a rule, the bright country boy goes to the city, the bright country girl stays where she was born. An odd result is that, of the present generation of New England writers, the men are satirizing the follies of the town, and the women are writing dialect tales of country people. Thus has been brought, about what may be called the feminization of the dialect story. But in the Chronicles of Danvis women are secondary characters. It is not Hulda Purrington, though she is the very queen of curds and cream, or Aunt Jeruslia, though she is a most notable old lady, whom one chiefly remembers, but the inimitable old braggart, Gran’ther Hill, who “ fit to Bennington and Ticonderogue Uncle ’Lislia, the honest shoemaker, who firmly believed that his favorite sport of fishing was balm fit to heal even the wound of a “ disappointment; ” Sam Lovel, the tender-hearted hunter; and the little French Canadian, Antoine, — Ann Twine, as his Yankee neighbors call him, — beside whose tales of personal exploit those of Munchausen pale their ineffectual fires. Hunting, fishing, fighting, “ swapping yarns,” are masculine accomplishments. Even when the writer’s pen strays from recording the feats of the men with gun and rod. — it sticks to them too closely sometimes for the general interest of the pages, —the women are still kept in the background ; for the scene is usually transferred, not to feminine quarters, but to the rustic community’s equivalent for the clubhouse of the city, Uncle ’Lisha’s little shop. And the men are men. In the trousers of the writing-woman’s man there is contained too often more of the new woman than of the old man.

Perhaps it is because of the rich, deep, and pervasive humor which is present on every page, and which should have more emphatic mention here than this mere allusion ; perhaps it is because we feel ourselves in more virile companionship than we do when in the company of the desiccated minor sisterhood into whose hands the New England dialect tale has chiefly fallen ; perhaps, again, it is because of the peculiar sensitiveness to all the beauties of wild nature, with which none of the less sensuous sex can hope so to permeate the written page as can the male writer who is a fisherman, a hunter, and an amateur of the woods and fields : hut certain it is that there is less temptation to compare Mr. Robinson’s work with that of any native writer than with that of the author of The Woodlanders. The doubting Thomas surnamed Hardy is a great novelist; Mr. Robinson is not, and does not pretend to be, a novelist at all, but he certainly approaches the great English writer in his humor, in his masculine skill in drawing rural character, and in the delicate exactness of his appreciations of nature.

The author of these Chronicles of Danvis, by the nature of his gift, if not through the conscious following of a theory, is what, in contemporary literary slang, is known as a realist. Now, the weakness of realism is that it can be followed to no one of its logical extremes without producing what is unreadable. In consequence, realists, at least of the Anglo-Saxon breed, are rather comical compromisers. Mr. Robinson compromises, like the rest, but rises in petty rebellions which lead him now and then to the bold flourish of a detail which might with propriety be left unrecorded. The offenses to the best taste, however, are slight and few, and easy to forgive. Only in the matter of dialect does he make no concessions. Mr. Robinson probably had no deliberate intention of writing for posterity. Still, if given a chance, good work will survive, and there certainly seems no need for burdening it with the hideous phonetic spelling, unpronounceable by any one not acquainted with the dialect represented, which comes from an extreme devotion to scientific accuracy in reporting spoken speech. What will the ignorant make, for example, of “ furzino,” of 舠 leggo,” of “ julluk,” of “ kwut,” or of “ lhud ”? Surely, the proper course, in works not avowedly scientific, is to use only as much of local peculiarity of speech as will give proper dramatic value to the talk of a character, as will not confuse the eye with queer spelling, or render any remark unintelligible without special knowledge. Mr. Robinson’s subtle accuracy in dialect will make his book unwontedly attractive to Vermonters, who will be helped to recall with pleasurable distinctness the speech of their grandfathers and grandmothers, and it will preserve for the gratification of present and future scientific curiosity a racy and interesting variety of the Yankee speech. On the other hand, it quite needlessly restricts the enjoyment of his human and very appealing work to those people to whom the vanishing dialect he writes offers the fewest difficulties, and cuts it off entirely from popular appreciation by the future but not far-distant generations to whom its gnarled idiom will be utterly unknown.

Many writers seem to believe, but it is not quite true, that, in literature, whatever you can do well is worth doing. No one, however, can refuse admiration to any feat, no matter how useless, which is done supremely well. The extraordinary ease and skill with which the dialect in these Chronicles is written must be recognized with praise. As the author’s eye is curiously observing of nature, so is his ear nicely sensitive to minute variations in pronunciation. Of two dialects, that of the rural Vermonter and that of the French Canadian who has learned his English from Yankee neighbors, he is past master. This were achievement enough for most writers, but Mr. Robinson is not content to report in a general way the speech of a people. His fine ear perceives individual variations. Coarser instances of this precise differentiation are the commixture of Yankee dialect with the plain language of the Quakers, and the amusingly grotesque talk of that masculine Mrs. Malaprop, Solon Briggs. But the best example is the speech of Gran’ther Hill, which is full of the slight differences which show him to belong to a still earlier generation. There could hardly be a greater victory won by ear and memory. But, like old Kaspar in the ballad, though we proclaim the victory famous, we feel inclined to reserve our approval.

These Chronicles of Danvis, finally, hold their little lesson for those of us who write. Out of our New England soil, which authors no less often than farmers declare outworn, has sprung a fresh and vigorous work, racy, homely, genuine. It may serve to remind the scurrying band of writers now ranging the globe in search of new literary material that a fresh vision is worth more than a fresh fact or a fresh field. As in the days of ’49, the industrious stay-at-home often has won more prosperity than the roving brother who fares away in search of El Dorado.

If the reader takes his fiction in the order chosen by the reviewer, he could scarcely make a bolder leap than that taken in passing from Danvis Folks to The Golden House.² Mr. Robinson does not introduce even a single summer boarder into his Vermont world; Mr. Warner permits no rustic element to give tartness to the smooth and mellow urbanity of his gilded New York. In the former case we have human nature very close to the soil, and racy with the contact; here we have the same human nature after being passed through the metallic alembic of an inclosed city life. By a double meaning in the title of his novel, Mr. Warner directs the reader’s attention to the unsubstantial fabric built by wealth as contrasted with the enduring structure which steadfast love can erect out of somewhat cheap materials. The book is, in effect, a continuation of the more important story which appeared a few years ago with the title A Little Journey in the World. In that novel Mr. Warner undertook to indicate the slow but steady deterioration of a gracious woman, leaving her simple, refined society in the country to become the wife of a man of lower ideals, who rose to great wealth in the city. He disclosed in a masterly fashion the gradual creeping in of the paralysis of Margaret Henderson’s spiritual faculties, the dying out of that fire on the hearth which was kindled and kept alive in the sweet sobriety of her maidenhood. Before the book closed Margaret had died, and the reader was present, on the last page, at the marriage of Henderson again, this time to Carmen Eschelle, who narrowly escaped being an out-and-out adventuress.

In this second book Mr. Warner shows the Hendersons in the full career of their abounding prosperity, but though they both cut a wide swath in the story, he intends the reader to concentrate his attention on the spiritual life of another pair. This time the woman saves the man, and we witness the gradual deterioration of Jack Delaney under the influence of that portion of New York society which is given over to self-indulgence, until he is ruined financially, and so brought up sharp, after which he passes through a slough of despond and gets upon firm ground, where he earns his living like an honest man, and finds the reward of domestic felicity.

Perhaps the existence of a strong central situation in Mr. Warner’s earlier book makes us determined to find an equally strong one of a similar sort in this ; but if the history of Jack and Edith he not his primary intention, we scarcely know where else to look for the requisite backbone of the story. Not in the pathetic renunciation of Father Damon and Ruth, certainly, nor in the uninspiring comradeship of Henderson and Carmen. Neither can we think Mr. Warner meant to make his picture merely to contrast the light and shade of the two extremes of New York life. No, it seems evident from the use made of the figure of Jack Delaney that it is the life-history of this loose-fibred fellow upon which our attention is to be fixed ; and our complaint is that, though there is much gentle irony, much graceful playfulness, some subacidity of satire, and thus a good share of entertainment in the book, there is not left upon the mind, as in the former story, the impression of a well-modeled figure, growing under the sculptor’s hand. The novelist gets along fairly well until he comes to the crisis. He succeeds in drawing with a number of deft touches the descensus Averni of a good-natured, somewhat limp character, and does it through situations, through conversations, and through contrasts. Then, when he comes to the really serious business of showing what he seems to have set out to do, the rehabilitation of a clever fool of shattered fortune, he resorts feebly to a few pages of description and analysis, with scarce a touch of dramatic action. It is a disappointment for which the author had not prepared us. We knew he could write good essays ; we discovered that, with very slight machinery, he could construct a striking study of character, — one does not readily forget Margaret Henderson ; and so we hoped to see in The Golden House a further advance in that structural representation of life in modern society which offers the best field now for the thoughtful novelist.

It is a pleasure to see Mr. Cable’s name on the title-page of a novel,³ even though we perceive, with a slight pang of disappointment, that the environment of the tale is no longer that which was made so entrancing in Old Creole Days and the Grandissimes. We very soon find, however, that Mr. Cable treats greater Dixie with the same genial wit and candid sympathy which he lavished upon old Louisiana. If we miss something of the optimism and hilarity which pervaded many of his earlier pages, this may simply mean that we are all grown older, or it may be due to the geographical position of Suez. “ In the last year of our civil war,” begins Mr. Cable, and proceeds to one of the freshest and most delightful bits of word-painting in any recent book, — 舠 in the last year of our civil war, Suez was a basking town, with rocky streets and break-neck sidewalks ; its dwellings dozing most months of the twelve among roses and honeysuckles, behind anciently whitewashed, much broken fences, and all the place wrapped in that wide sweetness of apple and acacia scents that comes from whole mobs of dog-fennel. The Pulaski City turnpike entered at the northwest corner, and passed through to the court-house green, with its hollow square of stores and law-offices; two sides of it blackened ruins of fire and war. Under the town’s southeasternmost angle, between yellow banks and overhanging sycamores, the bright green waters of Turkey Creek, rambling round from the north and east, skipped down a gradual stairway of limestone ledges, and glided, alive with sunlight, into that true ‘ Swanee River,’ not of the maps, but which flows forever ‘ far, far away ’ through the numbers of imperishable song. That river’s head of navigation was, and still is, at Suez.”

The fortunes of John March and of Suez are closely identified. The changes wrought in both by the Land Company and the Construction Company, the brief prosperity and the subsequent ruin, — for a full account of these things and all that they implied the curious reader must go to the book itself. Mr. Cable’s plots are apt to be over - complicated. This one is far too much so to admit of any brief abstract. The square in front of the old court-house is perpetually thronged with conspirators, mulattoes, mountaineers, Northern “ promoters,” and Southern irreconcilables. The air is thick with oaths and powder, and, under cover of the same, one intrigue succeeds another with bewildering rapidity. Yet the central figures stand out boldly from this chaotic background. John March, the hero, has two ladyloves. — Fannie Halliday and Barbara Garnet. Barbara’s father is the white villain of the tale, and Cornelius Leggett is his mulatto confederate. No reckless actor in the strange drama of reconstruction in the South has ever been presented in a more masterly manner than this half-breed, with his abrupt alternations of cringing servility and insolent bravado. Both as a politician and as a lover, whether he is looking about for bribes in the House or courting the impish maid Daphne-Jane, whom he playfully entitles his Delijah,” — in every capacity of life, in short, Leggett is constitutionally and shamelessly immoral; while Mr. Garnet, notwithstanding his white skin and thin varnish of civilized manners, is his fitting associate. Neither of the two is really a clever villain. Garnet could never have compassed John’s ruin without the fatuous and gratuitous assistance of his victim ; and a very little practical shrewdness would have sufficed to show him that it was by no means his cue to destroy March, but rather to build up his fortunes and marry him to Barbara. Cable is never at his best, however, in depicting people of supposed brains. How admirably, for instance, in this present book, does he introduce his professedly clever man Ravenel, and how shadowy and incoherent has the character become before we part from him ! We are utterly at a loss to understand what it is the man wants, and a shrewd suspicion visits us that Mr. Cable knows no better than we. And yet what infinite possibilities he seems to possess when he is first presented to us, “ at scant nineteen, a war-veteran, tattered and battered, but with courage unabated, and heart ‘still ready to play out the play ’ ” ! We continue to believe in him through all his early career as editor in Suez. We feel the fascination he exercises over Fannie Halliday, and can quite understand her putting aside John March with his calf love for this more developed suitor. The first false note is struck when we are invited to behold Ravenel volubly drunk upon his weddingday. We cannot credit it. Ravenel, we know, hated words. He must needs have learned by experience, long before that date, just how many glasses he could imbibe without becoming loquacious, and it would have taken a far more exciting event than his own wedding to induce him to overpass that limit. It must be owned that they all drank freely at Suez ; while as for the sudden deaths upon streets and stairways, one wonders that the place was not depopulated. John March gets his own first experience of these epidemic frays in company with his father, and wins his spurs gallantly at Judge March’s side. Cable has never drawn a more lovable character than this of the chivalrous, dreamy, devoted old Southerner ; never painted a sweeter picture than the one where the father and son are introduced, mounted upon the same horse, the boy “ in his eighth year, . . . fast asleep, with his hands clutched in the folds of the judge’s coat, and his short legs and browned feet spread wide behind the saddle ; ” never compassed a keener pathos, not even in the Belles Demoiselles Plantation, than in the scene of the judge’s death. This one character is well worth the book, and there are others here whose acquaintance we are glad to have made. There is many a clear side-light thrown upon the stiff problems, by no means all solved as yet, which beset the destiny of the New South, and there are frequent flashes of Mr. Cable’s own quaint wit. We wish, of course, that he could better defend the good English which is his by right against the inroads of such literary canaille as this : “ Breakfus’ at next stop, seh ! No, seh! It’s yo’ only chaynce till dinneh, seh! Seh? No. seh, not tell one o’clock dis afte’noon, sell! ” And when we read how this man “ whisperously asked,” and that woman 舠 sighed an unresentful envy,” we think we know too well from which 舠 one of our conquerors ” he has borrowed his inspiration.

John March is a tale of the great South ; next in order comes a novel of New York society. It is a ticklish kind of literary adventure, this of the American society novel. It is so costly to put upon the stage, it requires so much luxury and finery of diction, so many clothes, horses, carriages, roses, and viands, that the action of the piece is apt to be encumbered by its accessories, and the main result in the reader’s mind is an oppressive sense of that toujours trop which teased and fatigued M. Paul Bourget amid the summer splendors of Newport. Even so robust a writer as Mr. Marion Crawford, who moves so freely amid European, and especially Italian surroundings, begins to flounder and to stick, to explain, expatiate, and anxiously endeavor to enhance the magnificence of his effects, the moment he has laid his scene in Washington or New York. This palpable struggle to keep up a fine and dignified appearance has often a result exactly the reverse of the one intended. It calls attention, and possibly undue attention, to the inevitable shortcomings of our civilization ; its tentative, imitative, and provisional character ; its absence of fixed standards and ideal forms, or any constant factor whatever except the comparatively brutal one of money; its lack of atmosphere and perspective. The Dolly Dialogues are not very wise, but they are absolutely spontaneous and natural, and they have no need whatever of any mise en scène. Everybody who has had a fair look at a London season, or who has even read — as who has not ? — a certain number of English novels, can supply the conditions of the piece for himself. It is the queer spectacle of the author in person, before the lifted curtain, shaking out the satin draperies and setting straight the wax candles, which interferes most fatally, in the ordinary drama of American 舠 hig-lif,” with the desired impression of ease and distinction.

But the defect in question is more in the subject than in any particular artist, and it is one which time and oncoming fate and the pressure of graver issues and sharper responsibilities are almost certain to cure. Even now we have writers who are doing their best to redeem from its easily besetting sins of frivolity and vulgarity the typical story of American life, and of these the always pleasant and never pretentious author of Margaret Kent and Queen Money is undoubtedly one. Mrs. Ellen Olney Kirk’s last novel. The Story of Lawrence Garthe,⁴ is, in some respects, the ablest which she has written. The hero, with the romantic name, is what Carlyle would have called a very “ melodious ” person ; and his story — the not uncommon one of the man who makes a bitter mistake in early marriage, and takes leave, after some searchings of heart, to disregard his divorced wife’s existence and try his fortune again — is undoubtedly told more indulgently than a man would have told it. Nor can we bring ourselves to care very deeply for Constance, the “ pale,” “ pure,’ “ proud,舡 “ noble ” maiden, who eventually consoles Lawrence for his first blunder, and makes him happier than most men deserve to be. The pair of lovers upon the second plane, Kathleen and Mr. Marchmont, are much more engaging and amusing, and the fulfillment of their wishes is accomplished through a very ingeniously imagined and neatly manipulated bit of intrigue. The really strong point in Mrs. Kirk’s book is the character of the adventuress, who is, of course, the divorced wife of Lawrence Garthe — and several other men. A great novelist once told the present writer that a great lady told him that she considered the social adventuress the hardest character in life to draw, and that he himself alone of living writers had perfectly surmounted the difficulty. But in our humble opinion, Isabella Hernandez, née Brown, if not more brilliantly conceived, is a far more consistent and convincing creature than the other, whose name was Ethelberta. Her qualities, and their complementary defects, are thrown into admirable relief by contrast with those of the grim companion who is Bella’s visible guarantee of respectability during her New York career. This woman, Eugenia Shepard, holds, theoretically, the most “ advanced ” views on all social questions, and is an agitator, with tongue and pen, for the complete legal emancipation of women from the trammels of the past. She is alone in the world, plain in feature and poor in purse, and knows very little of her fair employer’s history, at the time when she accepts the handsome salary offered by Madame Hernandez for her services as duenna. Then, one by one, the scandalous facts come out, and the companion’s first word of horrified remonstrance is met by the cynical retort that the one is only practicing what the other has not hesitated to preach. The situation is altogether original; the revolt of the essentially honest woman from the logical result and visible embodiment of her own theories is described with uncommon power, and the moral is all the more impressive because it is not forced upon the reader. Mrs. Kirk’s dialogue is always good ; simple, easy, animated, and often witty. There is some mild but very fair satire in the chapter on the proceedings of the Fin-de-Siècle Club, and the language in which the story is written is English of the purest, without, so far as we can recollect, a single deviation into either dialect or slang, in all its pages.

The Hon. Peter Sterling ⁵ is also, in some sort, a tale of New York life and manners; but it is much more than this. It is the most serious, comprehensive, and impartial endeavor we have yet seen, to point the way of the disinterested American patriot through the howling wilderness of practical politics; an honorable effort to fathom by help of a many-sided sympathy, and adjudge upon the broadest principles of a true humanity, the conflicting claims of hostile classes, and to lead, with the dogged valor which never knows when it is beaten, the well-nigh forlorn hope of the bedraggled “ American idea.”

Being so excellent a tract, Peter Sterling is, naturally, not a particularly good story. In the first place, it is unconscionably long. Four hundred and twenty closely printed pages in one massive tome are enough to make the reader drop his arms in weariness, and “ sigh for the legions ” of the three-volume novel “ here again. The author displays a thorough familiarity with the construction and workings of every species of political machine ; yet if there be a leisure class in our country. Paul Leicester Ford must certainly belong to it, else he would have discovered some shorter way of conveying the fact that one of his people was an endless talker than by giving us pages upon pages of his vain volubility ; and he could have convinced us that Peter Sterling had to wait a great while for his first paying client, without minutely chronicling the continuous lack of incident in every separate month of this long period of suspense. There is only one part of his hero’s life which the biographer is disposed to slur, but this is the one which possesses the keenest interest of all for the reader who has not yet arrived : it is the interval during which his professional income finally mounted from five hundred dollars a year to fifty thousand, and he extended his visiting area from the slums and saloons of a down-town ward so as to include the happy haunts of the most select old Knickerbocker families.

This, however, is trifling with Peter, who really commands our very sincere respect. After all, there is no glaring improbability about his story. A New Englander by origin, and educated at Harvard, he was also born and bred a “ war ” Democrat, and while loving his country singly from first to last, — or at least to last accounts. — he never deserted his party. He had the opportunity, while in college, to do a signal service to a wealthy New York classmate, of distinguished connections (a service very scurvily repaid in after-years, by the way), and the two continued friends for life, their harmony being only temporarily interrupted by the fact that they both fell in love with the same lady. It was Watts d’Alloi, naturally, and not Peter Sterling, who won her ; but Peter had nerve enough to officiate creditably as best man : after which the happy pair went to Europe for their wedding tour, and remained some twenty years. Peter, meanwhile, abode in cheap lodgings among the Mickies of the “ sixt ” ward, and learned, by experience, how the poor live and how they feel, and, eventually, how to help without still further humiliating them. He also won the loyal confidence of his adopted fellow-citizens, and became their bulwark against the greed of the unscrupulous capitalist, and their spokesman before high courts and in the halls of state legislation. In short, he developed into that rarest of all birds in the land, hitherto, a boss without a blemish, —a brave, magnanimous, incorruptible Bayard of a ward politician.

It is only when Peter falls in love for the second time that his conduct shows traces of human weakness, and he becomes by moments a trifle silly. Yet this also appears natural enough when we reflect that he was by this time a bachelor of forty, and that his inamorata was the daughter of his early flame. Some of the clearest and most telling expositions of the hero’s political creed are provided, like priestly instructions to a postulant, for this dear and docile young creature. To her he advocates universal suffrage, including that of her own sex ; for her behoof he defends the boss and the ballot, and points out forcibly enough how inconsistent with the true scope of our institutions is the lingering notion that the better few ought somehow to control the baser many. There is no doubt a spice of humor in the idea of a gay young débutante courted and won by homilies of this description, but the girl in question was a good and bright as well as a beautiful one, and proved, when the hour of supreme peril came, that she could be brave as well. We will not forestall the reader’s interest in the highly dramatic crisis of the story, when, after so many discussions and digressions, alarums and excursions, it finally culminates in the first dire shock of the irrepressible social conflict. The author is at his best here. The chapter with the sorrowful title Cui Bono is almost terrible in its terseness. The scene in Printing-House Square is only too vividly realized. Ço, donne à penser with a vengeance.

The author of Peter Sterling is perhaps true to nature in foreshadowing an alliance between the highest and the lowest ranks of society in that great impending struggle. It is at the uttermost extremes of the scale, if anywhere, that ideals are cherished. The great mass of obstructive selfishness and inert vulgarity lies between the two, and will have to be surmounted, or surrounded, as the case may be, by what, for want of a better term, we must call more chivalrous influences. A breath of true chivalry lightens the thick city atmosphere of Peter Sterling. The tone and manner of the book are noble. Some few more flaws and inconsistencies of detail may be noted. It is not very easy to comprehend the social position of Peter’s mother : a widow, living on her revenues in a New England village, and following her son’s crusade with ardent sympathy ; able to provide shelter and sustenance for all the relays of sickly little waifs whom Peter sends to recover strength in the pure air of the country; able also, incidentally, to allow her son fifteen hundred dollars a year, until he can support himself by the law, and yet “ not, in any sense, what would be called a lady — by a New Yorker. And how could Watts d’Alloi, “ with two hundred and fifty years of Knickerbocker and Huguenot tradition ” behind him, have been such a cad as calmly to accept, and never in the whole course of the book disclaim the sacrifice of Peter, who leaped headlong into the breach when his friend’s honor was a second time at stake, and became splendide mendax on his behalf ? And how could Miss de Voe — a charming pastel, by the way, a lady as lovely in character as she was lofty in lineage — have talked about her “ escortage,” when she meant the friend who had gone with her to the opera, and the “ shortage ” of her guests at a dinner-party ? And how could all these good people, with all their presumed advantages, have said “ brainy ” and “tony,” and permitted themselves freely to conjugate in all its revolting moods and tenses the terrible verb “ to enthuse ” ? Can it be that, amid all the warfare that appears to await us in the near future, the United States troops will one day have to be called out for the defense of our mother tongue ?

But these, after all, are not matters of the first importance, and our last word about Peter Sterling shall be one of hearty commendation and recommendation for a timely, manly, thoroughbred, and eminently suggestive book.