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 veniences"—in which two delicately attuned comrades of opposite sexes shall sit them down and, first having told the stories of their lives, i. e., their previous love affairs, shall recite poetry to one another; talk a little about art; perhaps write a poem or two and a one-act play about what happened to the children after the Pied Piper led them into the hill, and then, certainly, exchange many, many kisses of happy and irresponsible comradeship.

Money-making is not a serious consideration to any of these Babes in the Wood; though they are all pretty consistent atheists, they still cling to the thought that "the Lord will provide" something from the delicatessen shop in the next block. Artistic "creation" is not a consuming passion to them, but rather a recreation after many, many kisses begin to pall. Marriage is an incident, avoidable or unavoidable—to be considered as, at the best, an expedient and a convenience. Children are incidents, not ultimate objects, and they are to be accepted only when desired. For them the consummation and the fragrant flower of life is just the simple personal relationship of two people who, in the consciousness that they are, for the moment, sufficient one for the other, have run a finger of fire around themselves and their "secret garden" and shut the universe out.

Let us have a description of the quality of this ideal relationship from an "anonymous author" quoted in "Janet March":

I seek happy companionship in which what is vulgarly called passion shall have a dancing quality, long since banished from the definition of that word; let me say, rather, I seek playful and joyous friendships

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 in which no intimacy is withheld; relationships based upon a mood which is best set forth in the old mythologies—the serene indifference of gods and goddesses and the careless ecstasy of fauns and nymphs; generous comradeships of the moment; inconsiderate of the dull responsibilities of workaday life, existing for their own sake, without foolish, elaborate pretenses and without tremendous consequences, free equally of the burden of hope and fear.

Through "Moon-Calf" and "The Briary Bush," Felix Fay seeks the nymph, the dream-girl. Through "Janet March" and "This Mad Ideal" Janet and then Judith seek the faun, the dream-boy. Thus both the masculine and the feminine sides of the relationship should receive equal illumination. I gravely doubt whether they do.

"Janet March" strikes me as a very able attempt to make a girl out of Felix Fay. She is as like Felix Fay as two peas, except that her adventures begin in a modern and comfortable and liberal home, and except that she appears to have very little artistic talent. She has no clear purpose other than to be "free," and to be herself. Mr. Dell, however, does confer upon her some physiological experiences which are sexually distinctive. And he places her in the various situations which a contemporary young woman may enter if she sets out in search of a career and self-realization with Mr. Dell's ideals in her head. Some aspects of her rather formless yearnings and some important phases of her predicaments he discusses with a kind of intimate sympathy and understanding which are still excessively rare. "Janet March" seems to me, on the whole, an informative and valuable history of feminine adventures on the coast of Bohemia.

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 In "This Mad Ideal," however, I find no advance in the development of the theme, and a marked falling off in the artistic resources. Judith is merely an excessively attenuated sketch of Felix Fay. Her rebellion and the first steps in her adventure are presented with a sophomoric thinness, and with only an occasional glimpse of the "tendrils of imagination" reaching into empty space.

If Mr. Dell is to hold our attention as historian of experiments on the Bohemian coast, it is clear that he should not waste another book in proving to us merely that girls and boys have a pathetic hunger for happiness; that they rebel against a conventional society which objects to their entering where they conceive happiness to be, and that, consequently, they go seeking in Bohemia for "companionships at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting."

We know all that well enough. He has communi-, cated to us the shape of his ideal, and we acknowledge that it has a certain attraction on paper. But in order to develop his theme he must proceed to a far more realistic account than he has yet given us of the collision of his dream with reality. In his first three novels there were a good many interesting conclusions presented or implied: for example, the Moon-Calf discovered to his own complete satisfaction that he was merely a silly ass to go looking for his kind of intoxication in alcohol, or for his species of dream-girls among factory hands and shopgirls and casual neurotic schoolgirls hunting boys by the pheasant cage in the park, and drunken girls in roadhouses, and prostitutes, and hectic maudlin girls in the piggery of drunken Bohemian parties. One by one, the dreaming

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 idealist in "Moon-Calf" eliminated all these impossible partners of a "delicate comradeship," light and gracious, generous and self-respecting. The Moon-Calf began to discover that he had put one or two things into his ideal which could not exist together—that, for example, an ideal comradeship could not in this world be at the same time "irresponsible" and "generous." He was on the brink of discovering marriage as Mr. G. K. Chesterton discovered Christianity, as a thing designed to meet his special need.

Mr. Dell's weakness as a writer of fiction and also as a feminist seems at the present moment due to a kind of indolence or apathy or lack of courage in the use of the realistic imagination. I regretfully recognize that he has encountered some dissuasive lions in the way of becoming a thoroughly honest historian of Bohemia. Perhaps being constrained to withdraw the hard truth of "Janet March" has influenced his decline into the soft mush of "This Mad Ideal."

As his readers and his censors gradually accustom themselves to the hard edges of fact, it is to be hoped that they will allow him to broaden the moral basis of his fiction by an adequate disclosure of the relation of his dream world to its environment. I am not sure that Mr. Dell really desired to tell us any more than he did about, for example, the physiology and psychology of the two adolescents sleeping together in the woods; about the psychology of the girls who resort to "criminal operations"; about the future of the two adventurous girls who get drunk in a roadhouse—one of them on the eve of her marriage—or about the psychology of the girl who drowns herself. Perhaps a more realistic development at a number of points where one feels that Mr. Dell simply "isn't there"

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 would mar the "light and gracious" air which should surround these delicate, irresponsible comradeships. But so far as the interests of actual Babes in the Wood are concerned—those Babes in whose interest censorship is supposed to be instituted—clearly the danger to be apprehended is not from reality but from the illusion of intoxicating dreams.

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O ADULT who interests himself in the shapes which the mind of our time is taking can afford to pass by Ben Hecht and his works. They are not appropriate reading for children or unsettled old maids.

To speak briefly of the man: Born in New York City in 1893, son of Joseph Hecht and Sarah Swernofsky Hecht, he was educated in the High School of Racine, Wis., and at the age of seventeen began to be a journalist in Chicago. He has read voraciously in the literature of the nineteenth century. In 1921 he published "Erik Dorn," the most arresting novel of the year by reason of its style and the psychological characteristics of his hero. In the following year he produced "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," a collection of brilliant sketches contributed to "The Chicago Daily News"; and "Gargoyles," a somewhat Dreiserian piece of fiction dealing in mordant style with the hypocrisies of newspapers, politicians, courts and vice commissions. In the next two years he poured out short stories, a comedy, a detective story, "The Florentine Dagger"; edited and wrote with Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim "The Chicago Literary Times," an explosive pink and green journal of ill-smelling petards; and, in addition to all this, he has produced "Fantazius Mallare," an extraordinarily

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 shocking fantasy, illustrated with rare distinction and sympathy by Wallace Smith, and "withdrawn," Mr. Harry Hansen tells us, "at the request of the Federal government"; the sequel, "The Kingdom of Evil," and "Humpty Dumpty." Succinctly interpreting the facts before us, one may say that here is a high-strung, excitable mind which has got its shape under the pressures of journalism and contemporary civilization and literature in Chicago.

What is the shape of this mind? Mr. Hecht's friends are acquainted with an eager, friendly young "genius," who fascinates and astonishes them. Mr. Henry Justin Smith, of "The Daily News," tells us in his preface to "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," that there are several genial aspects "which appear rarely, if at all, in his novels; the whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings; Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the forgotten, the forlorn." Mr. Harry Hansen, almost unique among the Chicago "school" in writing always like a man who has at some period of his life tasted the milk of human kindness—Mr. Harry Hansen in his remarkably sympathetic and illuminating study of personalities in the Chicago group, "Midwest Portraits," speaks with enthusiasm of Mr. Hecht's ability as a reporter, his imaginative energy, his "faculty for making a drab world seem gorgeous and full of color," his "infatuation with the primal energies of the American people, and with the material results and symbols of that energy—buildings, streets, houses, fire-escapes, chimneys, bridges, railroad trains." Mr. Hansen cor-

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 roborates also my intuition that Mr. Hecht is to a notable extent a "product" of his environment by this statement from his author's lips: "I consider myself thoroughly American; my ideas are the result of living in Chicago alone."

But all this is pretty superficial. There are plenty of bright reporters and verbal artists in the world who like big buildings and little children and are kind to dogs and old people. Mr. Hecht interests us because his is a definite type of mind. Mr. Hansen gives us Mr. Hecht's own description of his type, written immediately after the suppression of "Fantazius Mallare," as follows:

I don't undertake to go beyond this in saying to what extent Mr. Hecht's principal books are autobi-

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 ographical—to a very great extent, I surmise. In dramatic imagination, the imagination which penetrates and lives within other types of personality than one's own, Mr. Hecht is as deficient as Byron. Hitherto he comprehends and sympathizes thoroughly with only one type of mind, and that is the type described by him in the preceding paragraph as his own. The shape of this mind, as I conceive it, is due primarily to three pressures, of which I will describe the operation in a little more detail.

From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has, so to speak, sat at the center of Chicago journalism, a city in which, one would like to hope, journalism is more exclusively concerned with accidents, frauds, and crimes than in any other city in the world. He has sat there for thirteen years, a high-strung, excitable receiving organism, while day after day for 4,745 days there have streamed in upon him from all over the city reports of all the fires and boiler explosions and automobile collisions; all the installment company sharks, and oil promotion companies, and bank defalcations, and City Hall intrigues; and all the raping and lynching and love-nesting and bootlegging and highway robbery committed in one of the great paradises of stick-up men. After excessive subjection to this sort of stimuli one becomes quite incapable of the normal human reaction to it; one ceases to individualize and discriminate; one develops a kind of self-protective callousness and reacts to the moving atrocities as merely good stories or poor stories, "old stuff" or "sob stuff." If in addition to being a journalist one is also a poet, one generalizes all the accidents into one colossal accident, all the frauds into one colossal fraud, all the crimes into one colossal crime;

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 and one sets these gigantic shapes in motion in a kind of vast "blurred procession," upon which, pretending that it is humanity, one looks down with colossal contempt.

From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has been gulping modern literature voraciously, with a sure instinct leading him to the authors who dispense the strongest vodka. He is himself described as a cool, sarcastic intelligence; but clearly he loves to stimulate that cool, sarcastic intelligence by cultivating the society of minds acquainted with strange dreams, delirium, anarchy, nihilism. Mr. Hansen gives an excellent account of his reading and his successive literary infatuations. When he first met Mr. Hecht he was reading Burton's "Arabian Nights," the next day it was Gautier—in translation, then Dostoievsky, Huysmans, Anatole France, Arthur Symons, George Moore, Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman. Andreyev, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Machen, etc. In his latest novel, "Humpty Dumpty," there are two or three pages in which the hero, sorting his library onto the shelves, gives a summary comment upon modern authors, indicating how swiftly Mr. Hecht runs beyond his old masters. For example: Nietzsche is now "like an old Spanish cannon." Pater is "a good teething ring for embryonic stylists." "Mencken will last as long as the bookcase at least. He's a noisy guest." D. H. Lawrence's work is "an amateur blue print of sexual impulses poorly remembered." "Three psychoanalysis books are enough for any library. To hell with Sigmund. I begin to dislike him anyway. He's corrupted immorality." "We'll spotlight 'Ulysses' in the center here. The first herculean effort to disorganize the

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 Wells, Walpole, Galsworthy, Hall Caine school of hammock fictioneers."

There appears to be nothing in Mr. Hecht which reacts to the "dissolving" tendency of his reading with a fresh impulse of organization. Everything in him welcomes dissolution and seconds it. Consequently his reading supplements the effect of his journalistic occupation; it intensifies in him his sense that he is a spectator of a vast meaningless pageant. He does not find in literature any sobering body of classical experience or any human conclusions, because he does not seek them. He seeks only secrets of stylistic expressiveness, stimulus for his fantasy and assistance in getting his mind beyond good and evil. As soor as he has read an author he tosses him aside like the skin of a sucked orange, like a bottle from which the intoxicant has been drained. James Joyce he reverences still as a master of the moment, merely because James Joyce has pushed on beyond him and beyond almost all other writers of the hour in expressing intellectual chaos.

Finally, in enumerating the pressures which have shaped Mr. Hecht we must remember that from the age of seventeen to thirty he has lived in a city which, though it says nothing to the heart, though it impresses almost every casual visitor as devoid of charm for the finer sensibilities, though its showy pretense of concern for the arts is still vain with the ostentation of merchant princes and the pathetic fumblings of amateurs, yet somehow conveys to almost every visitor a stunning sense of enormous brutal, unscrupulous power in its gigantic arms and legs and in the huge, heavy pulsing of animal life through its turgid arteries. Chicago, to the imagination which broods on cities, is a soulless Titan, impressing no civilized being by what she has

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 done; awaking only a dim wonder what she might do if she possessed a mind and a heart. In such a city an impressionable young journalist can easily live for thirteen years and still believe that a Titan is a far more august being than a civilized man. Chicago has imposed her amorphous titanism upon Mr. Hecht; when he tries to think of God he conceives of some amorphous lustful energy about as tall as the Chicago Tribune Building.

In "Fantazius Mallare" and "The Kingdom of Evil," Mr. Hecht paints the logical conclusion of tendencies which he has remorselessly observed in his own mind; he projects upon the screen of his imagination his own type of mind swollen to gigantic proportions by the disease incipient in it; he paints the elephantiasis of evil. Beneath the grandiose phrases and images of an occasionally impressive symbolism, one can trace readily enough the excitable, imaginative journalist, in whom excessive journalism and undigested modern literature have produced an atrophy of the normal emotional faculties, aspiring toward a super-humanity through the repudiation of all normal human sentiments and the untrammeled expansion of curiosity and libidinous desire. Mr. Hecht himself appears to have little sense of the necessity of the laws and conventions which more or less govern human society. The ordinary mortal, tolerably comfortable, moderately law-abiding, appears to his inflamed imagination, haunted by Crucifixion imagery, as a pitiable, contemptible, horribly agonizing wretch, self-nailed on a cross and writhing under a self-imposed crown of thorns. Fantazius Mallare, by selling his soul to the devil, and entering the kingdom of evil, aspires to become a free spirit; and in theory

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 yet seeming always to see the same, are somewhat monotonous, yet with the distant hills in the east, the wood, the water and the undulating ground, combine to form a picture or rather a panorama, which is nearly always beautiful and possesses exquisite ‘bits.’

Still this is not the route to be chosen by the lover of scenery. To the road or rather track from Imaichi to Wakamatsu must be accorded the palm in this respect. The bold mountains, wooded from the peak to the torrent at their base, with almost tropical exuberance of foliage, trees growing out of a few inches of earth, plants seemingly springing from the very boulders, the dashing water and the varied tints give a fresh picture every mile, and every picture a gem.

From Fukushima the traveller to Yonezawa turns off to the north-west to cross the central range by the pass of Itaya over a ridge of the Adzuma mountain. The pass in about 2,500 feet above the sea. The first 2$1⁄2$ ri are over level road to a village called Niwasaka, and from there the climbing commences. First up a mountain 1,500 feet above Niwasaka to the village of Su-momo-daira, then down again to the borders of a torrent at the point where it divides into two streams, that almost encircle the mountain and flow out past Fukushima; then up an ascent densely wooded, and down again to the same torrent immediately under Itaya. The climbing so far is all unnecessary: it would be easy to trace a level road, that with all its windings would not measure more than the present one; and it would be easier still to establish water communication. The banks of the gorge, at the bottom of which the stream passes, rise perpendicularly to a considerable height before commencing to slope upwards to the mountain-tops, so that there would be no difficulty in throwing a dam across a narrow part of each stream just before its issue to the plain, and raising the water, of which there is abundance, to any desired height between the stone walls that nature has provided for it. Crossing this torrent, a zigzag ascent leads to the village of Itaya enclosed by a thick belt of pine trees. Grassy slopes

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 should transcend human limitations and enjoy a god-like expansion of experience. But Mr. Hecht is, I believe, an honest explorer and reporter of this realm of consciousness. As a matter of fact, his Fantazius attains no experience. He attains no freedom. He becomes the beaten and bleeding slave of an amorphous demoniacal deity, which he recognizes as the horrible enlargement of his own lusts. He has left man in his "maggotism," to find the superman only a magnified maggot.

"Humpty Dumpty" is not a fantasy, but a striking psychological novel. It is "Erik Dorn" done over again, and better done. That means, essentially, that Mr. Hecht, with greater mastery of expression, with sharper psychological scrutiny, and with unabated passion for telling the truth, has given us once more a brilliant picture of his own type of mind and of his mind's adventures with other minds, messed up in bodies which interest him only so long as they excite his mind. The hero of this book, Kent Savaron, is a novelist who has read what Mr. Hecht has read and has reacted to his reading as Mr. Hecht has reacted. He conceives himself to be a superior emancipated intellect, belonging to a little group outside their age, who look upon the procession of humanity as a foolish pageant which concerns them only for amusement and derision. Ordinary mortals he regards with ineffable contempt as swine in sties. When he has to deal with them, he loathes them to the point of murderous hatred; he wants to kill them, thinking that is all they are fit for. Whether by love or hate, he is uncertain, he is attracted to Stella. He marries her as a step in an egotistical debate with himself, and partly for the savage pleasure that he feels in cutting

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 her out of her bourgeois family. Gradually he makes her over in his own image, till she becomes also a hard egotistical lust for experience with no end beyond itself. The men she mingles with, like the women he mingles with, lose all individuality; become bits of the mob flesh tossed into the caldron of a libidinous egotism. Savaron accurately concludes that he has suffered from "a sort of insanity which concealed itself in an intellectual honesty toward life." For him, the end is suicide. It is a very terrible book, brilliantly written, enriched with poetic vision and original wit, and psychologically, I believe, perfectly sound.

There are two interesting ways of testing the soundness of Mr. Hecht's horrible psychological realism. One way is relatively comfortable, and it may even conduce to smugness. It is to take the report of "The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb," and to study the traits of the two brilliant, well-to-do young college men, who thought they were supermen and beyond good and evil, particularly Leopold, who was an expert ornithologist and knew half a dozen difficult languages and was graduated from college with Phi Beta Kappa rank. Study the traits of these two young supermen who had lost the faculty of appropriate emotional reaction to experience, who looked at the human pageant, including their own trial, as detached intellectual spectators, and who killed a fourteen-year-old boy "for fun"; and you will find there, recorded by alienists and psychiatrists, every prominent feature of the type of mind described by Mr. Hecht in "Erik Dorn" and "Humpty Dumpty." The other way of testing Mr. Hecht's psychological veracity is more painful. It is this: Whenever he tells

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 you something incredibly atrocious about the mind of Kent Savaron, remove the rosy glasses with which you habitually perform your own introspections, and looking with straight, uncolored eye beams into the deeper recesses of your own "inner consciousness," ask yourself flatly whether you don't find the outlines of that atrocity there—and tell no man what you find.

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HE fighting edge of romance is always reality. It is the cut and thrust of an active will amid the material circumstances of present life. Ellen Glasgow is bent on romance with blood in it; therefore she uses the fighting edge. Northern critics haven't known quite how to take her. She disappoints their settled expectations. What they expect of Southern writers is a rapt contemplation of the embossed and beribboned antique sword hilt of romance. She gives them the edge.

By all means read "Barren Ground," if you are interested in American fiction, if you are interested in American life, if you wish the latest development of a great thesis, if you wish ripe comment on the common lot by one of the most intelligent and richly endowed novelists of our time in America.

Right! There is nothing essentially unreal about the farmer's life anywhere.

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 Obviously what the writer of that paragraph wishes to have us believe is that Ellen Glasgow is in the strictly contemporaneous larger movement of American fiction. Not the little whirl and eddy of merely fashionable writers who prove their superiority and their "sophistication" by being sick of everything, but that movement which records with stark honesty the adventures of upgirt, courageous young Americans of the middling sort, wrestling with the dark angel of their destiny and murmuring between clenched teeth: "I will not let thee go till thou bless me."

Right again. "Barren Ground" is an expression of the realest thing in American life. It is an expression of the indomitable fighting spirit, the will to live, the desire to be free, the passion for progress and mastery, the determination to bite through to some faint sweetness in the fruit of life, though the fruit be only an osage orange. This is a cluster of fighting virtues which every one fit to speak of the sturdier American stock knows are in hot, eager tumult beneath the cynical and insouciant manners of the hour.

Symbols. In 1920, a writer who immensely accelerated this realistic movement began a well known novel with these words: "On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. . . . She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth."

Ellen Glasgow begins "Barren Ground" at almost the same point and on almost the same note. She

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 begins thus: "A girl in an orange-colored shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she watched there without moving, her attitude in its stillness gave an impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life."

When I read that paragraph I said: "A cordial and gallant gesture! Ellen Glasgow in Richmond, Virginia, waves a handkerchief to Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Center, Minnesota. These girls, Mr. Lewis's Carol and Miss Glasgow's Dorinda, will not be Northern and Southern much longer. Regret it if you must, they are coming together in a common spirit. They are types of that sincerity and fearlessness which Ellen Glasgow declares mark the American democratic ideal, as grace and radiance marked the ideal of the old Virginian aristocracy."

For the moment, I am conniving at the benignant purpose of the publicity writer who tells us that with "Barren Ground" realism "at the last" crosses the Potomac. Waiving the question, for the moment, whether realism, at this crossing, is going south or going north, I heartily applaud the recognition of Miss Glasgow as a significant leader of contemporary realism. It is absurd to think of her as essentially a writer for the South, wholesomely irritant as she doubtless is to Southern slackness and ancestor-worship. It is high time that novel readers from Maine to California should become aware that she treats provincial life from a national point of view; that is, without sentimentality, without sectional prejudice or softness, with sympathy, understanding, passion and poetic insight, yet critically and with a surgical use of satire—in the spirit of the hour.

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 But with what a deeply reminiscent smile Miss Glasgow must view the statement that in 1925 realism crossed the Potomac. With what amusement she must regard my apparent derivation of her Dorinda's tune from the tune of Mr. Lewis's Carol. Miss Glasgow is only a young woman of fifty. She has the keenest interest in young people who are "running toward life." But so far as her main literary ideas are concerned, I suppose she has not been influenced by Mr. Lewis much more than General Robert E. Lee was influenced by General Pershing. She was a realist when some of our popular exponents of realism were in the cradle. She preceded into the field Mrs. Wharton, who is twelve years older, and Mr. Dreiser, who is three years older. Her first novel, "The Descendant," was published in 1897, and there have been fifteen since. Her democratic fighting realism is already incarnate in the little red-haired hero of "The Voice of the People," 1900. Realism crossed the Potomac twenty-five years ago, going north!

Presently I hope we shall have a collected edition of Miss Glasgow's work, not monumental, for filling proud, idle, decorative bookshelves, but an edition supple and gracious to the hand, for reading—something in the style, perhaps, of those affable blue leather volumes in which her publishers used to give us Joseph Conrad. For this edition I would humbly petition the author to attempt a revision looking toward a twenty per cent. reduction in bulk, out of a tender regard for the brevity of man's life and the artistic satisfaction of going through some passages of it swiftly—indicating rather than exhausting their interest. But, revised or unrevised, I should welcome such an edition, and whenever any Anglomaniac challenged me to

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 name one living American novelist to compare with any one of the first twenty in his English list I should point to this edition and ask him if he had read Ellen Glasgow.

Publishers, booksellers, and readers race along from season to season after the book of the week—so do reviewers. A contemporary novelist soon becomes inaccessible in his entirety. Whether his earlier books are on the way to oblivion or whether he is in purgatory on the way to becoming a standard author and a classic, one can only determine after research in the old bookshops. I have managed to assemble, and read, first editions of seven or eight of Miss Glasgow's sixteen books, including the badly named "The Voice of the People," of which the first half is extraordinarily delicious; "The Deliverance," 1904, a story of rising and falling families with an admirable piece of characterization in Maria; "The Wheel of Life," 1906, a study of several types of men in New York and their ideals, with one flame-like woman; "The Miller of Old Church," 1911, specially rich in humor; "Virginia," 1918, a striking account of the insufficiency of the sweet self-sacrificing Southern wife; "Life and Gabriella," 1916, a study of the woman who finds a fairly satisfactory second-best in business success; "One Man in His Time," 1922, a portrait of a Governor of Virginia who is a self-made man.

Every so often the critics start up a discussion as to what constitutes abiding value in a novel. Mr. Swinnerton, Mr. A. B. Walkley and sundry other controversialists were waging such a discussion last summer. At the point where I looked in upon it opinion tended strongly to the orthodox conclusion that a novel may lack almost all the virtues and yet live by

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 its characters. Some one, I think Mr. Walkley, dissented, maintaining rather that a novel lives by its characteristics—by the sum of all the qualities which the author puts into it.

That amounts, perhaps, to saying that a novel lives by, or on, the character of its author. If that appears true of a single novel, it appears more strikingly true when one reflects upon the entire work of a novelist after one is familiar with it, and his books have run together and made a little world in one's mind. For my part, at any rate, I seldom step into the world of Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, of Thackeray or Thomas Hardy or Conrad, looking for any one in particular. I revisit these scenes because I like the weather, sunlit or stormy, because I relish a certain feeling in the air, which I know, when I analyze it, is the pervasive effect of the writer's personality.

For several days now I have been living happily in Ellen Glasgow's world. I attempt to take my satisfaction to pieces, and I find myself cataloging her abundant powers. I like her clear sense of the elemental things in human life and her sense of the profound interdependence of man and nature. She delights by her talent for presenting the wonder and bloom of Virginian gardens and. Go where you will in her Southern world, there is perfume in the sunlit air, hyacinths and the scent of wild grapes and microphylla roses; there are the budding sycamore and the foam of dogwood and red bud; sparrows rustle among the Virginia creepers, thrushes sing, bluebirds and red-winged blackbirds flicker over the pastures; sunsets glow behind dark pines; there is the sound of water flowing.

Of her humor one could write a chapter. Her

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 humbler characters—negroes and rustic ancient white folks, religious and irreligious—abound in sage observations and comparisons, earthy, droll, bitter or wise, between what the Baptist minister teaches them on Sunday and what they learn when they go outside the church door. The rural humorists in "The Miller of Old Church" could hold their own against any peasant group you may mention in the works of Thomas Hardy. As for wit of the more intellectual order, ironical wit, critical wit, epigrammatic wit, brilliantly serving in characterization and commentary, it plays incessantly through her books. It is a constant aspect of her thought. She conceives life as a brave comedy. I incline to think her the wittiest of living American novelists, and I am not surprised to learn that her favorite authors are Voltaire and Fielding.

Her range of successful characters is wide. It includes all sorts of colored people, poor whites, middling whites and old Southern gentry; poor people going up and rich people coming down; farmers, millers, shopkeepers, artists, poets, lawyers, judges, politicians; children and octogenarians; sane and insane. She has a very lively sense of the power of the family, of the social group and caste, of the community, of the generation. At the same time she feels with intense sympathy the elemental needs and hungers and the ideal motives which animate individual men and women, and make them, for their hour of crowded life, flame out against the commonplace.

In all her novels one is aware of an attendant keenly observant ethical spirit. Her morality is her own, tolerant of nature, intolerant of cant and humbug, but her consciousness is as unmistakably ethical as that of George Eliot. She likes to see the wheel come full

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 circle. She builds her stories with a view to showing Time bringing in revenges.

Her style is firm, lucid, and if I were not afraid of giving offense, I should add, it has a masculine rhythm. It has wit and beauty. At its best it has a proud and impressive reserve, and goes over depths with the tension and moving stillness of deep rivers.

I have enumerated some of the talents and characteristics of Ellen Glasgow which have impressed me in reading these novels. As I turn away from the "specimens" of her qualities, which I have collected but have not space to exhibit, I ask myself wherein the abiding value of her work lies; what is the nature of the pervasive presence in her world which has rewarded me for entering it. And the reply which comes first to my lips is this: her wisdom, the breadth and justice of her vision.

But I have scarcely uttered that characterization when I recognize that, after all my enumeration of qualities, I have failed to bring out the really distinguishing marks of her individuality. I have said nothing of her daimonic element, her iconoclasm, her affectionate derision of the old South, her tireless satire upon the self-immolating old-fashioned female with faded roses in her cheeks and dying violets in her eyes, her merciless incessant mockery at the ancient egotistical pretensions of the male sex, and, deeper than all, underlying all, the realistic drive of her nature toward the discovery of ends which shall make life for men and women, but especially for women, somehow not wholly unworthy of the brief candle which lights them into the long darkness.

Ellen Glasgow is passionate. With all the passionateness of her soul she hates lies, and she hates

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 failure. If her realism has not been as popular as the romances of some of our practising novelists it is because she is modern with a vengeance. She is a feminist with a vengeance. If you review her novels you find that for the last twenty-five years she has been steadily insisting that the average woman is a failure, and that the average woman's life is founded on a lie, a vital illusion, namely, that the sexual attraction which draws her to her man in the mating season is enough, is her supreme and sufficient affair with life. With all her humor, with all her wit and wisdom, and with all her passion, she asserts and reasserts that this is not enough. In one form of words or another, through novel after novel, runs this refrain: "There ought to be something more permanent than love for one to live by." Through novel after novel, with an insistence most abasing to masculine conceit, she exhibits the evanescence of sexual passion, exhibits women of all sorts who are quite disillusioned about love, exhibits men in the humiliating and bewildering attitude of loving without return, and loving when they are loved no more.

One doesn't get all of Ellen Glasgow's qualities at their highest in "Barren Ground." It is more somber than most of the others, less relieved by wit. It is insistently grim; and it has, I think, needless longueurs in its last hundred pages. Still it remains an excellent example of her talent, and it contains a powerful development of her central thesis.

Dorinda running toward life is embraced by it, seductively, treacherously. The terror and pathos of her disillusion are developed in pages of memorable beauty. Elsewhere Miss Glasgow has mockingly painted old maids of the Victorian mold who have sat

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 forty years in an upper chamber pallidly worshiping their penitence and their memory of betrayal. Dorinda has the blood of Scotch-Irish ancestors in her veins. She packs up her wedding clothes. She packs away her dreams. With her young sense unimpaired that life is "precious and indescribably sad and lovely," she stiffens her soft lip and fights for a life which shall be independent of the admiration of men, fights for a successful life, as men rate success, and wins it—incidentally acquiring a husband whom she treats as a superior hired man. As her hands are very full with the management of her three large farms and dairy, he is quite useful to her.

Men who are realistic enough to admit that they could live without their wives but not without their work are likely to see in Dorinda a fine sort of heroine. Others will say: "But what did she get out of it—with her cows and her married hired man?" And I think Miss Glasgow would reply: "Romance! The fighting edge. She saved her soul, as modern women understand the soul. She made herself a character. She learned that in the end 'nothing lasts but courage.

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OSE MACAULAY is one of the wittiest writers going. But she makes me as uncomfortable as a patch of nettles, and very anxious about the future of mankind. I sit here uneasily studying her photograph. I conjecture that she herself has described it under the name of Katherine Varick in "Potterism": "frosty blue eyes, a pale square-jawed, slightly cynical face, a first in Natural Science, and a chemical research fellowship." I blench under the rapier points of those eyes, so piercing, so ironically mocking, so candid, so caustic, so pitiless.

Is that the way a woman's eyes should rest upon this wounded, weary world? What did Byron say about soft eyes looking love to eyes that spake again in the same soft dialect? Or is that "old stuff" Have we had rather too many soft eyes healing the wounds our own folly has made?

At any rate, this face knows too much! It knows everything that I know—which is pardonable; and a great deal besides—which is dangerous and disturbing. In seeing through me and all around me, I suppose she is like every well-informed woman that I have met in the last twenty years. I have never imagined that superior women were dull. But she differs from others in making no concealment of her scathing insight. Ever since I can remember I have adored, under the name of "feminine tact," women's readiness

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 and ability to lie imperturbably in order to spare other people's feelings, particularly the feelings of their husbands and other male dependents. But Rose Macaulay rejects "tact." Her intelligence has no reservations. She looks at me without gloves. To the brutal frankness which is English she adds a hard, realistic thrust which is feminine—the special characteristic, it seems, of the full-fledged feminine Intellectual.

Once started on logical courses, women, I surmise, run through them faster than men. Consider the mad speed with which Rose Macaulay has run through the bright hopes of the feminist program. Her course was slowly prepared and her lamp was trimmed by such poor, old, patient plodders as Samuel Butler, G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Forty years it took these fumbling iconoclasts to get the Victorian candelabra thoroughly junked and the clean cinder path laid out for the Ann Veronicas of the present age. With "Potterism," 1920, Rose Macaulay caught up what for brevity we may call the Wellsian torch, and in four short years she burned it out and tossed us the charred wick in "Told by an Idiot."

If she had refrained from the race, who knows?—perhaps dear old Mr. Wells with his rich resources of erotic sentiment and his vast social hopefulness might have kept his beloved young people "forward-looking" for another ten years. As it is, Mr. Wells is collecting his works, and closing the great epoch of social expectation, while Rose Macaulay cynically explains to the now tittering young people that before they can get around to reform the world they themselves will be old, and then, of course, it will be useless to try to do anything about it.

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 With a presentiment that she has now pretty well exhausted the satirical vein, I have been "Potterism," 1920. It is a breezy book, and with "Dangerous Ages" contains nearly everything of hers that fans the smoldering ashes of my sanguine years. It is dedicated, a bit pedantically, to "the unsentimental precisians in thought, who have, on this confused, inaccurate and emotional planet, no fit habitation." People who hankered to be "unsentimental precisians" were not so few as one feared. In 1921 "Potterism" had run through thirty-five editions.

Just what was it in this first book that cried "come hither" to so many readers? The gospel of Wells, the ideas of Wells, with the rose color rubbed off, the sentiment squeezed out. The Anti-Potterite League for the Investigation of Fact, for the destruction of cant, the slapdash, the second-rate, pomposity, mush, shellacked propriety and every hollow, plausible form of words employed to mask and blur the hard, sharp edges of actuality. Youth was there, shameless, fearless, uncompromising youth, truculently showing up the base compliances of parents. Above all, young women were there, with Cambridge honors, scientifically trained, tempered, edged, going into the world fully prepared to compete with their brothers, and bent on getting some of the important jobs, and demonstrating that "woman's work" is a disgusting Potterism.

"Dangerous Ages," which followed hard upon "Potterism" in 1921, is the only book of Rose Macaulay's which wrings the heart, or, indeed, much recognizes the existence of that organ. It is my impression that no dozen novels of my time have given me so much authentic information about womankind as this one.

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 There are girls of twenty here, clean, fine and candid, who have read Freud and Ellis and don't wish to marry, but, open-eyed, to take the risks of a free companionship, in a "keen, jolly, adventuring business, an ardent thing, full of gallant dreams and endeavors." There are women of thirty who write—experienced, brilliant, gay, with a cynical twist, with no religious illusions, yet "with a queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness." There are women of forty-three, with satisfactory husbands and promising young children—women turning, at forty-three, to the medical career interrupted twenty years before, turning back to the career, in horror of the threatening vacancy of the rest of life. There are grandmothers and great-grandmothers who have ceased to rebel at their wrinkles, and who stave off the ennui of age by reading Russian fiction and consulting the psychoanalyst.

Pathos broods over them all. For they are all hungry for some more adequate self-expression than they are ever likely to attain. They are bitten with a desire to leave behind in the world some record more permanent, more personal, less undistinguished than—merely children! They are so sick of this self-sacrificial song! They want to live their own lives—for a little while, before they descend into the eternal nothingness. There is a hard core of egotism in them—just as there is in every man who sticks to his career. But one likes these girls and these women, so deliberately clean and fine and slim and taut; and one pities them, too. The intellectual life? Not many of them, one fears, want it, as men of their class want it

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 as the first indispensable life choice. And a career chosen on any other basis is bitter with relinquishment.

In "Dangerous Ages" as it appears to me, Rose Macaulay let herself go as in none of her other books. She is more or less in love with all these women who are trying to make something satisfactory out of the little interval which is theirs before the swiftly shifting bright dance of the earth shall know them no more. Consequently she has here for once revealed her poignant emotional as well as her pungent intellectual qualities, and she has expressed intensely and adequately the consciousness of existence which her persons feel within themselves—the courage and verve with which they take up life's gauntlet.

If you scrutinize the story, however, you see that she has few illusions about the capacity of her sex to live the "life of reason." Her perception is lucid that the great majority of her sisters, struggling for "emancipation," are inextricably in the grip of the life-force, the passionate admiration of men remains still the secret ultimate object of their heart's desire and at a pinch they will fight for it with the crude ferocity of savages.

She has seen through them.

From the first, therefore, she has been anxious to make known that she is by no means committed to the positions in which her dramatis persone are found. In "Potterism," for example, she gave us a long epigraph from Evelyn Underhill on that "disinterestedness" of the artist which enables him to see things "for their own sakes." The point of view at which she philosophized upon the pangs of the feminine heart at the ages of twenty, thirty, forty, sixty and eighty is indicated by this epigraph in "Dangerous Ages":

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 "Reflecting how, at the best, human life on this minute and perishing planet is a mere episode and as brief as a dream."

She has, however, a personal register in one of the characters in "Dangerous Ages." In the final chapter we are told that Pamela has the "key" to the door against which various of the other women bruise their eager hands. The key is not an important job, not a career, nor yet a man, but a philosophic attitude—an attitude of blithe philosophic despair. I will quote a passage which makes a close link between this book and "Told By An Idiot" and "Orphan Island": "Pamela, going about her work, keen, debonair and detached, ironic, cool and quiet, responsive to life and yet a thought disdainful of it, lightly holding and easily renouncing, the world's lover, yet not its servant, her foot at times carelessly on its neck to prove her power over it—Pamela said blandly to grandmama, when the old lady commented one day on her admirable composure, 'Life is so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?

One sees at a glance that Rose Macaulay has flung aside the torch with which Mr. Wells started the Ann Veronicas of 1909 marching toward the earthly kingdom of "God, the Invisible King." She has reverted to a mood nearer the "blithe paganism" of George Moore and Oscar Wilde and old Samuel Butler, with his seductive maxim: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done."

In 1923 she blithely expressed her political disillusion in "A Mystery at Geneva"—not a satire, she assures us in a prefatory note; no, not a satire, but a

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 simple straightforward "mystery story" about an imaginary League of Nations Assembly which somehow dissolves without much result in a subterranean banquet chamber.

In 1924 she chose as epigraphs for "Told By An Idiot" the walking shadow passage from "Macbeth" and a sentence of Paul Morand's to the effect that "history, like an idiot, mechanically repeats itself." If there was to be laughter at the expense of the feminine Intellectuals Rose Macaulay proposed to herself the pleasure of being the first to laugh!

"Told By An Idiot" is saturated with the pitiless, disintegrating, depressing irony of one who conceives that she has seen through "the illusion of progress." "Why so hot, little man, little woman?" she seems to inquire, with a frosty detachment which I find extraordinarily exasperating. "What we are doing and planning and hoping so hotly, with such an elate sense of its novelty, is very old stuff, my children. Come, peep in here at my little puppet show. Here you shall see the generations pass, one by one—Victorian, Fin-de-siècle, Edwardian and Georgian. Mark them well and four times you shall see history mimic the vain spectacle of your anxious progress from the cradle to the grave, with all your empty mouthings and ineffectual gestures. Come, let us amuse ourselves. As the whirligig of dead time spins past us I will mention for you all of the score or so of odd little 'interests' which constituted life and its zest for each of our little marionettes, as, for examples, the untimely death of the Duke of Clarence, the alarming increase of female bicyclists and the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, 'Ta-ra-ra-ra-boomdeay.

I should like to call "Told By An Idiot" a heart

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 breaking tale, but if I did that its author would turn her cool, frosty intelligence in my direction and inquire exactly what physiological change I conceived to take place when I spoke of the rupture of that organ. Let us say nothing of the heart. "Told By An Idiot" is a satire of great wit and even of erudition, but I find it horribly depressing, because it systematically belittles life and denies the possibility of progress.

Fancy becoming so superior to mundane events that in a chronicle of forty years you can tuck such an event as the World War into a couple of pages. On a scale of that sort the individual dwindles to a pin point, and births, marriages and deaths become of infinitesimal consequence. I ask, whose is this sublime point of view? Where does the observer sit who whiffs all our human affairs into the air like a puff of cigarette smoke? No longer, certainly, at the point of view of the artist, according to Evelyn Underhill's definition, for she no longer is making any effort to see people "for their own sakes." She is no longer expressing the consciousness of existence which her persons feel within themselves.

I search again for Rose Macaulay's "register," and I find it in Miss Garden, a wholly disillusioned feminist—"a little cynical, a little blasé, very well dressed, intensely civilized, exquisitely poised, delicately, cleanly fair. She would soon be thirty-nine, and looked just that, neither more nor less." Miss Garden gambles very intelligently at Monte Carlo; she inquires how the wars are going—"the most noticeable wars at the moment were those between America and Spain and between Great Britain and the Sudanese"; she visits the picture galleries and the theaters; she spends

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 some hours in the shops buying a clear jade elephant and a dull jade lump that swings on a platinum chain, a tortoise shell cigarette case, some Irish lace, ivory opera glasses and considering the purchase of a Poltalloch terrier. She understands that to be a little in love is fun and adds a zest, but one must be careful not to be perturbed by it. She philosophizes thus:

"Funny, hustling, strutting, vain, eager little creatures that we are, so clever and so excited about the business of living, so absorbed and intent about it all, so proud of our achievements, so tragically deploring our disasters, so prone to talk about the wreckage of civilization, as if it mattered much, as if civilization had not been wrecked and wrecked all down human history and it all came to the same thing in the end. Nevertheless, thought Rome, we are really rather wonderful little spurts of life."

In "Orphan Island" I find this yawning bright-eyed satire far less of an affliction—on the contrary, decidedly exhilarating, I suppose because it is directed at the Victorians, and I am gradually beginning to see the necessity of proving the Victorians ridiculous in order to fortify my own sense of progress.

According to the ingenious scheme of this antilltopia, a kind-hearted evangelical lady, Miss Charlotte Smith, undertaking to conduct some fifty miscellaneous orphans from East London to San Francisco, is wrecked on a coral island, with all the culture of an early Victorian evangelical spinster safe in her head. Seventy years later a scientific and sociological party set out from Cambridge to discover and rescue the survivors, if any.

It transpires that the survivors of the castaways number something like a thousand, and they haven't

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 the faintest desire to be rescued. The island population is divided into two classes, the descendants of the orphans, the working class, and the descendants of Charlotte Smith by the ship's doctor, who are capitalists and land owners. Charlotte herself, aged ninety-eight, and generally tipsy on cocoanut wine, is the recognized source of religion, government and morals. Through the decay of her memory she has almost lost the distinction between herself and Queen Victoria. The society to which she gives the tone is perfectly smug and thoroughly hypocritical. It talks prohibition, chastity, etc., and it does just as it pleases.

For a time I had an awful suspicion that Orphan Island was meant for the United States, but I read an article by Robert L. Duffus in the February "Century" on the progress we have made in the last twenty-five years and decided that my surmise was absurd.

Clearly "Orphan Island" is a picture of Victorian England, and how as intelligent a woman as Rose Macaulay can fail to regain her faith in progress after painting it is past my comprehension. As for myself, I find that my faith and hope and charity are all restored to me when I let my imagination dwell for an hour or so with that tippling, pedantic bigot, Charlotte Smith, and then turn swiftly to the description of Neville's forty-third birthday in "Dangerous Ages."

I see that adorable woman, mother of two grown children, waked from her dream-broken sleep at sunrise of a summer dawn, "roused by the multitudinous silver calling of a world full of birds." She cups her tanned face in her sunburnt hands and, looking out of sleepy violet eyes, she shivers and says, "Another year gone and nothing done yet." She decides to change all that. She hops out of bed, spreads two

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 chunks of bread with marmalade, trots across the lawn in her pajamas and down through the wood to the broad swirling pool in the stream. There she strips, has her swim, eats her bread, "resumes" her pajamas, swarms up the smooth trunk of a beech tree to a limb in the sun and sits there, whistling.

If that doesn't represent progress I give it up.

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R. WELLS now meets his public in a handsome autographed edition, limited to a thousand and fifty copies for the United States, on an excellent paper and in beautiful and legible type. He is no longer a journalist.

On the brink of his sixtieth birthday he and I have been rereading his works. We have found some defects in them, but we have been charmed by them, and, on the whole, we have been tremendously impressed by them. We have felt with fresh force the central drive and ardor which have been animating his labors these thirty years. We see the great masses of his work arranging themselves in intelligible order as the broad and towering features of an architectural design, imaginative and splendid. In the illuminating introduction to the Atlantic Edition, he interprets his works with good humor, with candor and with many flashes of shrewd critical insight. He establishes points of view from which one can take in his main intention and his total effect.

Mr. Wells's main intention developed against the background of that mid-Victorian England which is described with extraordinary gusto in one of his best and most realistic novels, "Tono-Bungay." Mid-Victorian society, as the young Wells envisaged it,

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 gazing from somewhere not far from its lower stratum, was a substance in which he seemed to be fixed like a fly at the bottom of a pan of cold mutton tallow. He looked up at Bladesover Hall, where the Olympians sat looking down on the vicarage people, who looked down on the doctor, who looked down on the "vet," who looked down on the tenantry, who looked down on the butler and the housekeeper, and so by immutable degrees one descended from housekeeper to village shopkeeper, to head keeper, to cook, to publican, to second keeper, to blacksmith, to first footman, etc.

After a fist fight with the son of one of the Olympians the low born hero is banished to a stuffy, sniffing religious lower middle class family which on Sundays "met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in dingy colors that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honor, all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting torments."

If you wish a sympathetic understanding of Mr. Wells's main intention you must first allow the asphyxiating atmosphere of this greasy, malodorous world to enter your lungs. That it may do so, and that you may recognize how easily Mr. Wells might have established a reputation as a "devastating" realist if he had not passionately loathed this reality and deliberately turned away from it, I will quote one other passage descriptive of that beautiful thing which conservatives call "the established order."

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Having passed from the stratified Bladesover Hall world to evangelical hymn-singing society, George Ponderevo then enters the tradesman's world of his uncle, a small English Babbitt, who wishes he were in America, "where things hum," and with him he enters the field of unscrupulous business, which is the main theme of the book.

Now, I am, of course, aware that the short and easy way to describe Mr. Wells's main intention, and at the same stroke to destroy him, is to say that in reaction from this mid-Victorian background he developed "the Messiah complex." But what does that really mean? Elijah III developed a Messiah complex. How does the "complex" of H. G. Wells differ from that of Elijah III? Perhaps we need not go into that. Perhaps we need only characterize briefly any one of Mr. Wells's heroes—for they are all of the same spiritual family. Suppose we stick to George Ponderevo and take his description of the spirit that

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 was in him when, revolting against the aspects of the established order in which he had passed his youth, he came up to London:

Instead, then, of attempting to destroy Mr. Wells by saying that he developed the "Messiah complex," let us say this: He developed a loathing for a society as fixed and as unappetizing as cold mutton tallow. He thought it unendurable, and with that thought came a strong conviction that it is not necessary to endure it. It could be changed. In this age of astounding industrial and scientific progress the instruments were at hand for producing swiftly enormous and epoch-making changes in the political, social and personal life of all mankind. It was undeniable.

What stood in the way? What made the processes of beneficent change so slow? The vast inertia of humanity, its vast ignorance, its vast fear, its vast indolence, the well-nigh impossible task of clearing a free and open place for adventurous men to go forward amid the intricate labyrinths of old crooked customary ways. Not the means but the will to use the means was lacking. It was not that fine ends were impossible, but that the mass of men had not yet conceived of them. And so in Mr. Wells the vague

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 adolescent yearning for something finer than cold mutton tallow ripened into his life's main intention, which has been to kindle the imagination, to magnify, glorify and energize the will and reason of man, and to persuade our generation that the human will and reason are the legitimate successors to a creative and governing Providence.

Mr. Wells began his literary career with the publication of a series of fantastic romances, such as "The Time Machine," showing a "chronic" aeroplane in which one could visit the year 2000; "The Island of Doctor Moreau," in which a surgeon with infinitely cruel and protracted operations transforms the lower animals into the shape of men; "The Invisible Man," a study in applied chemistry; "The War of the Worlds," in which the planet Mars bombards Southern England with canisters full of super-scientists who march on London with heat-rays and gas attack, decisively anticipating the Germans; "When the Sleeper Wakes," a new Rip Van Winkle; "The First Men in the Moon," "The Sea Lady," in which a mermaid vamps a most eligible young man, who is already engaged to a suitable young mortal; "The Food of the Gods," more applied chemistry, directed to making people grow forty feet tall.

I am not sure that most of us when these romances first appeared saw anything in them but exciting yarns, "fairy tales of science," the mere exuberance of Mr. Wells's imagination. I notice, for example, that Mr. J. D. Beresford, one of Mr. Wells's innumerable disciples in fiction, classes "The Island of Dr. Moreau" among the "essays in pure fancy," though he notes that some absurd reviewers imagined it to be a defense of vivisection. Mr. Beresford's little book

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 on Wells was published in 1915. In my own recent rereading of the tales I have been much struck by their purposefulness with reference to Mr. Wells's main intention. They are all essays toward a new point of view, essays toward seeing things differently, essays toward liberating the mind and the imagination from the nightmare of our present life and plunging them into another sort of nightmare! They are the religious myths and heroic fables and allegories in the new scriptures which Mr. Wells has been writing for our generation. Boys and girls will read them for their surface meaning as they read Gulliver, but persons of my generation may return to them and find a fresh fascination in regarding them as the meaningful grandiose "poetry" of the leader of the English intelligentsia.

I am supported in this notion by Mr. Wells's prefatory note in the Atlantic Edition on "The Island of Dr. Moreau." It originated, he tells us, as an imaginative response to the pitiful downfall and scandalous trial of a man of genius—presumably Oscar Wilde—which took place in 1895. It was written, he says, "just to give the utmost vividness to that conception of men as hewn and confused and tormented beasts." He calls it a "theological grotesque." Unless one so regards it it is quite too horrible to read. If one thinks of Dr. Moreau as a man cutting up living beasts and reshaping them, it is unendurable. But if one thinks of Dr. Moreau as God cutting up living men and reshaping them, then it is quite what we are accustomed to, and causes no gooseflesh. But if one takes a step further and thinks of Dr. Moreau as Mr. Wells, exploring the plasticity of men and states, attempting to

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 cut up living men and reshape them into something better than the existing race, then one has a really stunning symbol of Mr. Wells's actual life effort as a radical mind of his generation; and in the lapse of Dr. Moreau's semi-human beings back to bestiality—well, consider the time still bleeding in memory when for some years the effort of every patriotic man, woman and child in the greater part of the civilized world was bent on homicide.

"When the reader comes to read the writings upon history in this collection," says Mr. Wells, "he will find the same idea of man as a re-shaped animal no longer in flaming caricature, but as a weighed and settled conviction." See "The Outline of History."

One might go through these "fantastic tales" and show how burdened they are with Mr. Wells's moral meanings, now clearly enough legible in the light of his main intention. For example, the attack of the Martians in "The War of the Worlds"—it is really a magnificent fable which ought, if it ever sinks in, to do something to persuade Mark Twain's "damned human race" that they can't afford to risk cutting one another's throats, like a lot of Mexican bandits, but had better get together and concert measures of defense against the invisible, inscrutable, known and unknown foes which threaten the extinction of humanity.

"The Food of the Gods" is an heroic allegory about the world's superior men and women, men and women whose intellectual stature exceeds that of the average man as the height of these forty-foot giants exceeds the human pygmies at their feet. These giants are benevolent creatures of great strength, long vision, creative passion. They would like to do good turns

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 Hfor the little people—make crooked ways straight and rough places plain, but the little people fear them, hedge them, pen them in, forbid their union and finally shoot them—in a sincere conviction that there isn't any place for big people in the world.

In "The Sea Lady" Mr. Wells gives one of his earliest pictures of that dream-woman which all the young men in his sociall novels go seeking so vainly through the world. She is really quite—a lovely and delicious creature, this woman whom Mr. Wells has created out of "infinite yearning." She is free, free and easy. She sings to the heart of man like the Lorelei. And if you desire to know why many people wish that Mr. Wells were Dr. Moreau or the King of the World or God the Invisible King—in his more sanguine moments I think it indubitable that he has identified himself with all three—it is because, if Mr. Wells had Eternal Femininity in his hands to reshape to the heart's desire, he would make it over in some such shape as this:

And with a flick of her mermaid's tail she slips down into the depths of the sea, leaving the hero to

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 the sort of woman that many of us get on with, well enough, so long as we believe there is no other sort.

I have been describing Mr. Wells's imagination, moving with perfect freedom in the group of his works which he calls "fantastic romances." The relation between the romances and the novels of social life might be suggested by comparing Dr. Moreau with Stratton in "Passionate Friends," with Trafford in "Marriage," with Capes in "Ann Veronica," with the narrator in "The New Machiavelli," with Mr. Britling,—best of all, perhaps, with Benham in "The Research Magnificent."

As a novelist Mr. Wells believes in an adequate "register." He has, I think, endowed each one of his heroes with most of the interests, virtues, and aspirations uppermost in his own mind at the time of composition. They are men of wide embrace, these heroes. Their stream of consciousness customarily includes science, sociology, politics, and education, all subtly implicated with the pursuit of some freer, happier intercourse between the sexes. Each hero has a clear sense that there is something fine in him, "finer than the world and craving fine responses," and he explains this to a heroine, who, being a possessive "female" creature, doesn't more than half understand why he has to cart her off to Labrador or exile himself in Africa in order to understand what she and the world are about. But each hero incarnates what I have described as Mr. Wells's main intention: his desire to glorify, magnify, and energize the will and the reason as rulers and creators of a new world order, a new social order, new forms and qualities of personal relations.

The specific ideas which they have are discussed

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 at length in "A Modern Utopia," "New Worlds for Old," "First and Last Things," "God the Invisible King," etc. Their proposals for reconstruction have included from time to time most of the forms of social tyranny contemplated by the Socialists. But their spontaneous impulses, like those of Mr. Wells himself, are romantic and egotistic, as he has acknowledged. The instinctive aspiration of each is to be an aristocrat, a prince, an autocrat, or, as Benham in his megalomania puts it, an "uncrowned king of the world," or a kind of mortal God. Benham, as I have said, may be compared with Dr. Moreau because his research is into the plasticity of human nature: he is trying to make himself over in accordance with an ideal, which obliges him to cut out of his nature three of the most elemental and deep-seated passions: fear, desire, and jealousy.

What does Mr. Wells actually think to-day about the possibility of making men like gods by the excision of jealousy, desire, fear? You may find what he thought from week to week throughout 1924 by reading the fifty-five articles in "A Year of Prophesying." If you will turn to the fifty-fourth article, entitled "The Creative Passion," you will come upon this brief statement of his present attitude:

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 bring one to the summit of the pass, from which there is a rapid descent through a picturesque glen to Ôsawa, 3$1⁄2$ ri from the town of Yonezawa. The whole distance from Fukushima is 12 ri, the 6 ri in the centre being difficult climbing. The road is an excellent specimen of military engineering in the olden time,—it succeeds in rendering travelling as difficult as may be without making it absolutely impossible.

The plain of Yonezawa, about 12 ri long and varying in breadth from 5 to 17 ri, is perfectly flat, and the lofty mountains by which it is hemmed in appear in the distance to rise perpendicularly from its sides. From the centre of the plain no break whatever is visible through this mountain wall, but on the north a tortuous gorge with only a moderate ascent communicates with the plain of Yamagata, and on the north-west is the outlet of the Matsu kawa, a large river that rises from Adzuma yama in the south-east, flows past the town, traverses the whole extent of the plain, forces its way thoughthrough [sic] the mountains and eventually reaches the Sea of Japan at Sakata. Just before leaving the plain it becomes navigable for small boats, but the upper part is too shallow and irregular. No attempt is made to guide or confine the water; and nearly every year the floods carry away all the bridges. The chief summits of the surrounding mountains are Adzuma, Kabuto yama, so called from its resemblance to a helmet, Iide san, and Asahi yama. The famous mountain Gas-san in Mogami may he seen in very clear weather breaking through the northern horizon. It is stated that the snow never quite disappears from Iide san, and the phrase “Iide san no yuri wa kiyetara” is used as the local equivalent for the Greek Kalends.

The plain thus enclosed does not all belong to the Okitama Ken, a portion called Yashire Go on the right bank of the Matsu kawa was taken from the late daimiô after the war, and is now included in the Yamagata Ken. The whole plain forms the Okitama Kôri, the southern division of Uzen, and is about midway between the Pacific and the Sea of Japan, the town of Yonezawa being

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 The French sage who has recently died, Anatole France, whom, as the head of French letters, Mr. Wells, as the spokesman of the English-speaking world, salutes in one of these articles—Anatole France, after a measurably comprehensive survey of humanity, turned away smiling, and said:

There are always, aren't there, plenty of men who see the indispensability of Satan and who mock the heat of those who attempt to dislodge him?

I suppose few men now living have striven more comprehensively than Mr. Wells to understand the whole meaning of the world and the world's needs, and to put fine meanings and purposes into the world where he saw none. He has grown sage with disillusions, and has relinquished many projects and withdrawn from many experiments. He turns more and more, as all wise men do, from the expectation of reforming nations to the hope of educating a few individuals. But to leave Satan sitting "alone" there, after the death of the last man, upon the débris of extinct worlds?—no, he can never assent to that! Opposite him Something Else will be sitting, with unsheathed sword, breathing for a moment in the pause of the eternal combat.

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 You are no realist, Mr. Wells. Unlike Mr. Hardy and Joseph Conrad, you have small respect for Chance, and you minimize Necessity, those great powers in the real world. But you have been a brave mythmaker and a heartening poet to the Intellectuals of your time. You have turned an entire generation of novelists and readers from contemplating the fatal forces of heredity and environment and instinct to considering the god-like power of an intelligent will to control instinct, environment and heredity. And I am going to turn upon you your own fine valediction to Oswald in your "Joan and Peter," for I think it sums up your virtue and your valor and that air of being awake and radiant which you have communicated to the more delightful young people of our day:

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T is generally understood, without argument or illustration, that after the late war our morale, using the word in its most comprehensive sense, was "shot to pieces. "The task of gathering up the fragments and putting them together again has been undertaken by all sorts of people with various degrees of success or failure. The reconstructors have encountered some opposition from the small group of anarchical minds who really prefer their morale in pieces, and still more opposition from the large body of malcontented minds who would rather have morale remain shattered than see it reconstructed on the antebellum model.

Temperamental reactionaries react and are at peace. Some rest in the capacious old bosoms of Academic Orthodoxy, some in Business as Usual, some in Fundamentalism, some in the Ku-Klux Klan. But among the younger sort who have tasted the uncharted freedom of recent years there is a manifest disposition to say: "Yes, we, too, are a little weary of roaming like homeless winds. We, too, recognize in ourselves what you call the elementary human craving to be formed. But rather than submit to be shaped by such molds as you offer us we will shamelessly incur the reproach of aimlessness, futility and shapelessness."

The problem is to raise a flag from which every

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 one that you wish to attract—every one with Ram Dass's endowment of "fire in his belly"—does not turn away in disgust. If you mark your flag with "Prohibition," "Inhibition," "Restriction," "Conventions," "Frein Vital" or "Inner Check" there is danger that it will rally only, or mainly, those merely gap-filling persons who could not be blasted out of their sterile conventionality with dynamite. From all youths, dear to the gods, in whose blood the spring flames, "wintry negativity," as William James called it, meets with negation. The only point of view to which they can possibly be persuaded to repair is one which promises them some positive object for their expansive and creative energies; some better, more expeditious, route to a felicity of which they have already tasted the sweetness; some glory so unmistakable that the difficulty of compassing it will not seem altogether "not worth while. "To the sense of young people, a day passed in positive achievement is better than a thousand years of renunciation, and a small artist who will show them how to paint grasshoppers perfectly is a far more welcome counselor than a great prophet who dissuades them from taking a city.

In recognition of this fact, there emerge, or reemerge, in France enthusiastic cults, like that of M. Motherlant, for the athletic life; and M. André Beaunier gives eleven pages of the "Revue des Deux Mondes" (August 1, 1924) to extolling a moralist, meet for our times, M. Eugène Marsan, an author whose most significant work is a little manual for the man of fashion (l'homme élégant), entitled "The Walking Sticks of M. Paul Bourget."

What is all this about? Well, the moment you reflect upon your own walking stick you see that in the

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 click, click, click of that bit of crabtree or malacca there is something which introduces into your formless slouch the tension of art, time in ordered intervals, the sweep and seduction of rhythm. Yes, that, perhaps; but morality, too, in a meticulous solicitude about canes and cravats?

The reviver of "elegance" replies:

"There are no questions but social questions." It is an utterance of Gambetta's, applauded many years ago by Mr. Brownell, the critic among us who looks most searchingly into every question that he considers. Following this hint, I have been sketching the general social considerations which, I conceive, may have stimulated Mr. Brownell to compose his latest and timely book —a book savory with wit, of remorseless penetration, packed with wisdom and informed throughout by that nobility of feeling which is quite the rarest note in contemporary literature. In some respects "The Genius of Style" is Mr. Brownell's most beautiful book—high praise, because each of its major predecessors has been quite the best thing of its kind hitherto produced in America.

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 Looking into the field of literature with eyes instructed by lifelong study of the "principle of beauty" in painting, sculpture, architecture, letters and social life, Mr. Brownell has marked, in common with less instructed observers, the growing tendency of authors to appear au naturel "to leave off agony, leave off style"; and he regards this tendency as essentially barbaric. As M. Marsan raises the little pennant of "elegance," so Mr. Brownell raises, on a far loftier standard, the flag of "style" as a positive objective which, clearly explained and persuasively commended, may conceivably enlist the loyalties of an age which acknowledges few. Quoting a Persian poet, he says: "The lion on the flag is but a painted lion, but in the wind it moves and marches." It marches in the chiding wind of current doctrine.

Style, what is it? In "The Nation" of October 8, 1924, you will find, in the resonant and only slightly ungrammatical language of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, a sharp, clean-cut answer, which I will cite because it expresses adequately, I believe, the idea of style entertained by a large number of our younger writers—perhaps by most of our "movement" writers who give time to the entertainment of such ideas. According to Mr. Bodenheim, the literary creator is "a dangerous, persuasive and unfair liar." Well, that is candid, at any rate. We see what he means. We know the type. "The literary creator," he continues, "must look upon creation as the egotistic, unscrupulous branding of himself upon human beings and episodes whose essence is a thousand confused faces, neither of them [sic] one whit more plausible than the other. He enters a distraught, elusively vicious and crisscrossed realm—life—and changes it to the

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 world in which, directly or by reference, he would like to live, or to the ruins by means of which his ego brings distinctness to its dream of solitary disdain."

"The egotistic unscrupulous branding of himself" upon his subject matter. We have seen the operation of that passion in the caricatures of Hogarth, in the novels of Laurence Sterne, in the "Sartor" of Carlyle; also, to take only two or three salient recent examples, in the strange "Rahab" of Mr. Waldo Frank, in Mr. Hecht's "Erik Dorn," and in the "Crazy Man" of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is interesting work—work of undeniable power, of a sort. The author's name is in every line like an obvious cryptogram, "branded" there. Mr. Middleton Murry thinks that this is a questionable stylistic ideal; that, in the long run, this remorseless insistence on one's idiosyncrasy becomes insufferably tedious. But Mr. Brownell, clearing the way for re-definition, tells us that this is not style, properly so called, but manner or mannerism, often violently embraced in the misconception that "style is the man himself"—a misconception largely responsible for the vogue of stylistic nudity and the exploitation of undisciplined impulse.

The celebrated phrase—"style is the man himself," casually dropped by Buffon near the close of his discourse on his admission to the Academy, Mr. Brownell has no difficulty in showing has been wrested from its context—like the "simple, sensuous and passionate," now erroneously but almost universally accepted as Milton's recipe for poetry. It does not represent Buffon's conception of style, but is almost antithetical to it. Style, according to the French Academician, is not the man himself, is not a spirit of personal self

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 assertion. It is rather a kind of human imitation of the celestial order and motion, informing the whole work as the spirit of God informs creation. It is a spirit which pre-establishes harmony in the movement of one's ideas by reference to a thoroughly preconceived design. Indeed, in the body of his discourse, Buffon declares it to be "nothing but the order and movement which one puts into one's thought." In its essence, therefore, it is almost as little personal as the mathematical element in music. A sound style isn't a rigid thing; it isn't a thing to prescribe and impose from without; it isn't a thing to fear as repressive of personality. It is just the order and movement of one's own thoughts when they are going right.

Mr. Brownell is susceptible to the charms of perfection. Whenever he contemplates them, in matter or in idea, his own style takes wings; and this, he declares with contagious ardor, is the high reward of those who, in letters, seek not their own idiosyncrasy but that moving order which is "art's and heaven's first law."

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 When we depart from the "great tradition," when we abandon in our own souls the arduous pursuit of the ideal perfection, when we seek only in a "dream of solitary disdain" to affirm and "brand" upon our work the uniqueness of our own essence, then we are likely to flatter ourselves that we are becoming "original" and are manifesting "genius." Mr. Brownell, after some comparison of current specimens of "originality" with the classifications of recent scientific investigators, warns us that this unique disdainful ego, in which we exhibit such overweening pride, is likely to slip rather ignominiously into some large category of psychopathology, group complexes, or mob-psychology. It isn't so terribly difficult to be queer. We are born that way.

The difficult thing is to be normal. We have to achieve normality. It is quite a different thing from "normalcy," which is merely some one's old coat. Normality bears to normalcy about the same relation that the living and perfect body of an athlete bears to an old coat. The way to be the most original man is to seek to be the most normal man; it is the most difficult path, and therefore the path least followed, least likely to be hit upon by chance. It is the path demanding the upgirt loin, the unsleeping heart, and eyes fixed upon the beauty which dwells among the rocks, high above the reek and stench of our self-seeking oblations. Self-denial as an end in itself? No. Self-denial as a means to begin the ascent of those heights "where Orpheus and where Homer are"; self-denial as the first step toward the level of workmanship that resists time and toward the level of feeling which rewards the work:

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In an effort to convey, or at least to suggest, the singular fire and potency of Mr. Brownell's special virtue, his enkindling passion for the ideal in art, letters and life, I have left no space to comment upon his fruitful, many-sided development of his theme, which he has enriched from an extensive field under perfect cultivation. I particularly regret the necessity of abridgment, because Mr. Brownell has here given full and most stimulating development to that aspect of his subject which the high intellectuality of his talent has hitherto led him to postpone, or to underemphasize, in behalf of the more abstract, structural elements of style. I refer to his illuminating discussion of "poetic prose," to his finely eloquent justification of emotion and, above all, to his plea for the cultivation by our own writers of the too long neglected poetic resources of prose speech. Those who are familiar with Mr. Brownell's previous books—as every one who cares for our distinguished criticism is—will doubtless regard this salient as the point at which he has most signally advanced his flag of leadership. It gives a curious relief to a reviewer to know

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 that all Mr. Brownell's admirers will understand why no review can give any adequate notion of the artistic tension and fullness of his treatment: "No man ever spake more neatly, more weightily or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered."

When a man of letters of Mr. Brownell's eminent talent spends a lifetime in an inflexible pursuit of perfection, it is not strange, yet it is singularly inspiring, to consider how fittingly the fine things which have been said of other men may be applied to him. As, for instance, with reference to his social consciousness, this tribute of Pater's to the Greek master of all those who seek to think straight and feel nobly: "It is life itself, action and character, he professes to color; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all, into its energetic or impassioned acts." And this tribute of Joubert's to the same master:

Yes, Mr. Brownell belongs to the Academy, to the true sons of that Academy which met under the plane trees outside the city wall and asked the gods that haunted the spot, not in vain, for "beauty in the inner man."

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N his stories and plays, to which I shall merely allude, Chekhov presents the Russian people drunk and sober, mad and sane, in squalor and in wealth; and one may like them or not, these Russian people, according to one's national affinities. In his letters, on the other hand, Chekhov presents himself with his family and friends, and, in the second volume, with the talented actress who for his last three years became his wife. He presents freely and abundantly the rich spontaneous personality which it was a matter of principle with him to exclude from his works. And I defy any intelligent reader to resist the fascination of his high spirits, his delicious humor, his artistic alertness, his critical penetration, his steady good sense, and his sensitiveness to the ideas of his time. Popularization of the letters should create for him a much better informed public than he has yet had in this country. He is worth wide attention, and, in a sense, he deserves the sort of attention given to a contemporary writer who is still unfolding himself, and who has, therefore, still fresh sources of stimulation in store for us.

Had not God put a bacillus in Chekhov which terminated the career of his body in 1904 he might be alive to-day and, according to Metchnikovian standards, yet

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 in the prime of life—only sixty-five last January. Even with the handicap of bodily death he is much in the literary movement as an example, as an influence, as a theorist. Yet he adequately arrived on the scene only within the last ten years. Except for a few stories and two or three plays—"The Sea-Gull" was translated by Isabel Hapgood in 1905, and "The Cherry Orchard" by Mr. Mandell, 1908, in the "Yale Courant"—his main circulation here begins sharply in 1915 and 1916, with the revived interest in the Russians occasioned by the World War.

Behind the Chekhov revival in England—from which our own is obviously imported—one sees, beside those experienced "Russians" R. E. C. Long and the Garnetts, the influence of S. S. Koteliansky and a series of significant literary collaborators of the younger set: Gilbert Cannan, Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and her husband, Mr. Middleton Murry. The Russian seed has fallen on fertile English ground.

Gilbert Cannan assisted Mr. Koteliansky in translating "The House With the Mezzanine and Other Stories," 1917; and I seem to scent Chekhov in Mr. Cannan's own "Stucco House," 1918. Virginia Woolf goes into ecstasies of admiration over Chekhov and "the Russian point of view" in her collection of essays, "The Common Reader." And the lecturer in Russian literature at King's College, University of London, Prince Mirsky, in his admirably lucid brief survey, "Modern Russian Literature," 1925, declares that "the late Katherine Mansfield was probably the most faithful and at the same times the most original of his (Chekhov's) disciples."

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 William Gerhardi, who has lately fluttered our dovecotes with "Futility" and "Polyglots," novels touched with Chekhovian humor in the presence of big wigs and embroidered uniforms. As a critic Mr. Gerhardi has linked himself with the group by declaring his discipleship to Middleton Murry. And in 1923 he published an extensive and intelligent study of Chekhov's art and his character, inspired, I suppose, by the letters and enriched certainly by many pertinent extracts from them. By no means incidentally he shoves Chekhov into the critical arena and eagerly backs him for genuine-artistic modernity against Henry James and his militant champion, Mr. Ford Maddox Ford, on the one hand, and, on the other, against Dostoievsky and his alleged successor in psychological profundity, Mr. James Joyce.

I have no intention of thrusting myself among these glittering blades. In general I think Chekhov's English friends have taken hold of him and presented him wisely as a fine, conscientious artist whose realism is far more subtle, suggestive and truly profound than that of more flamboyant novelists who have invaded us since the Japanese War. Andreyev and Gorky, for example. Perhaps in the excess of appreciation they push his claims a little harder than he himself would have approved against the looming figures of Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoievsky.

Chekhov did a marvelous thing: he carried fine art into the newspaper and kept it there as long as he was alive. He picked up the newspaper reporter's "human interest story" and treated it with the fine scrupulosity of a great artist working on the perfection of a sonnet. He wrote innumerable little stories with a touch which made them classical, and the cumulative

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