this may seem, regarding it casually, as ridiculously minute, but the results show how valuable it really was. "Zelda Dameron" is one of the most uniquely, at the same time artistically, illustrated books of the season. The most striking and appre

Mr. Cahan's literary career began with contributions to a Socialist newspaper and an East Side magazine which he himself edited. In 1895 Mr. William Dean Howells displayed an interest in some of his short stories and encouraged him to continue in the writing of fiction. His first novel, "Yekl," published in both America and England, was the result of this advice, and was followed by "The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories," issued two years later. Nearly everything that Mr. Cahan has written has been translated by Mrs. Cahan into Russian, and many of his stories have appeared in Russian magazines.

MEREDITH NICHOLSON

Author of "Zelda Dameron "

ciable thing about the pictures is that they harmonize so perfectly with the text. It is in this particular that most illustrators, even many of the best, fail.

Mr. Cahan's Russian Novel

* * *

A new novel to be issued by A. S. Barnes & Co. very shortly is "The White Terror and the Red," a story of Revolutionary Russia by Mr. A. Cahan, a leader among the New York Russian Revolutionists. Mr. Cahan is a native of Russia, having been born in the province of Wilna and at an early age began his association with the Nihilists. Some time after the assassination of Alexander II he was arrested upon suspicion, and the expectation was that he would be sent to Siberia, but he escaped, obtained a false passport, and in the summer of 1882 arrived in New York.

Rider Haggard's Varied

Mr. Henry Rider Haggard is a man. of many, varied interests. Having long stood high in the esteem of his (the British) government, he has lately been commissioned Interests to visit the United States to investigate the condition of the poor and to study the methods in use for their relief. Mr. Haggard has written on this subject in his "Rural England" and "The Farmer's Year." In an agricultural way, the popular English novelist is also something of an expert, and his latest book is on the subject of gardening.

In several of his more recent novels Mr. Haggard has employed the results of study along psychological lines, and in "Stella Fregelius" the spiritual element is unusually strong. But Mr. Haggard is at his best when he writes the historical romance. "The Brethren," which was the last of his books of this class, attained a high degree of excellence, and is significant for its interesting force. pearance of the first installment of "Ayesha," a sequel to "She" in the "Popular Magazine" gives promise of another volume equally acceptable.

The ap

Mr. Haggard is now forty-eight years of age, and finds pleasurable recreation in gardening, shooting and cycling, while

T

Revival

he is at the same time a devotee of the clubs-being a member of the Athenæum, Savile, Sports and Authors'.

Death of General Wallace

* * *

The announcement of the death of General Lew Wallace on February 15 was received with sincere sorrow, although the precarious state of his health had prepared his wide circle of friends for the inevitable. Few authors have enjoyed so large a popularity, and the many thousands of readers who have loved and admired him as the author of "Ben-Hur" and "The Prince of India" will no doubt join in lamenting the sad event of his death.

General Wallace was seventy-eight years old, and had been ill for many months. His career was a long and a notable one, the services that he rendered as a soldier and in the diplomatic ranks were such as became a man of his sturdy patriotism, and his earnest desire to make himself useful to the utmost. In the literary world his death is a distinct loss; while his loss as a man of genial, winning personality and as a gentleman of the older school, of which too few, unhappily, are left to us, is a matter for regret throughout America.

The Color Line

Professor Smith holds a chair in Tulane University. He approaches the subject from the Southern standpoint. He asserts and argues for the William Ben- extreme view of the perpetual jamin Smith inferiority of the negro, the denial of opportunity, and the more or less deliberate determination so to arrange social matters that he will gradually disappear through the tendency, apparent in the last decade, of his death rate to exceed his birth rate. The volume, "The Color Line" (McClure, Philips & Co.) is a pitiless grouping of the facts against the negro, sociological and anthropologic. Its weakness is in his attempt to answer Professor Franz Boas in his address on "Human Faculty as Determined by Race" in 1894. He misses, as most such books do, the real issue, which is not whether the negro is to-day inferior to the white, but whether this inferiority is due to tropical conditions which will gradually disappear, first under a temperate climate and next through the introduction of the civilization of the temperate zone in the tropics, or whether the inferiority is of a character which no training and no development can remove. Professor Boas's whole argument is not that the backward races are equal to the white, but that the difference is due to removable causes. This theory opens the door of hope. Professor Smith closes it. This issue does not alter the value of a work which uncompromisingly marshals the inferiority of the negro, the proofs that his position is due to descent rather than environment, Weissmann rather than Darwin, the conclusion that since no training will change these inherent qualities as the life of society becomes more severe and more complex the backward races will be at a constantly growing disadvantage. It is well, even when done with bitterness, that the facts which are claimed to establish this view should be marshaled with precision and presented without mercy.

Unless these things are clearly known there is a constant danger that sentiment will take the place of science in a problem whose real basis is one of improving the breed, not by intermixture, but by internal development.

Theodore Watts

Dunton

James

Douglas

The "Athenæum" has no equal. For 70 years it has been right on every new man that appeared and every old man that went off. Its little circulation of 20,000 or so is more authoritative than any other literary weekly published in the English language. In science, in scholarship, particularly in Oriental scholarship, it makes many mistakes, but in an issue of pure letters from the day when it first alighted on the work of Shelley, Keats and Tennyson to its discovery of Stephen Phillips, it has scarcely ever been wrong. For 30 years Mr. Theodore Watts Dunton has been its leading critic, to all intents and purposes its editor. His work is a body. of such sound criticism upon verse as has not elsewhere appeared in English. He has written an ambitious and rather empty novel, which will be remembered because, with a somewhat flagrant disregard of the reserves of friendship, he put Rossetti in it. He has written sonnets much admired by the poets whose poetry he had praised. In short, in his own field he is unrivaled. In other fields he halts. He has reached the age (his birthday is carefully left out of "Who's Who") in the sloping fifties when a man begins to be the unchallenged hero of the next generation. Mr. James Douglas, a north of Ireland man, in "Theodore Watts Dunton" (John Lane) has written what the French would call an eloge, what in English might be termed an appreciation of this critic. He, too, leaves out the important biographical fact as to when Mr. Watts Dunton was born, but he has gathered out of inter

views with Mr. Watts Dunton, his relations with Rossetti, his contact with Browning, Stevenson, Lowell, Allen, Tennyson, and others a volume which will take its place in the literary history of the last 30 years, however deficient it may be as a critical biography. Its overpraise is often fulsome.

Henry Sidgwick was for thirty years, ending in 1899, the most penetrating of Essays and English moral teachers. For Addresses good or for evil, for success or Henry for failure, he refused to Sidgwick permit the new system of ethics which he had adopted to retain either reminiscence or sympathy of the spiritual creed which he had abandoned. He was put to it when his system of ethics was first published to find his sanction. All his life he was perpetually eddying, seeking some substitute. for the spiritual life and finding none. He remained candid, always accepting and always ready to accept the conclusion that every system of ethics without a categorical imperative is a balancing of past effects and future results. When an agreeable young woman asked him what he thought of her smoking a cigarette, he said, as he walked with her in the gardens of a Cambridge college, in a stutter habitual to him: "My p-p-principles are for it, but my p-p-prejudices are against it." It is in this spirit that he wrote the articles and discourses now published by his wife in "Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses" (Macmillan and Co.). They open with the early essay in 1866, when he was still a Fellow of Trinity, in which he unconsciously reviewed the "Ecce Homo" of his preceptor, John Seeley. It is full of subtle analysis of that attempt to justify the moral teaching of the New Testament on a literary basis when it ceases to have a spiritual foundation. It is almost the first of published utterances which recognized the share of Stoicism in the foundation of Christianity. A year later he analyzed Matthew Arnold, and pointed out what is undoubtedly true, the fashion in which his literary training had unfitted him for the scientific view. A combination of ethics and sociology interested him in Bentham,

led him to sketch the limits of economic science, to analyse the lessons of socialism and point out the relation of ethics to sociology. These essays are a fair summary in engaging form of the ethical creed of a man who felt that on nothing could one be certain except truthfulness, research, and the open mind, who stood for the advance so resolutely that he turned his back on whatever light the past might give. Even in criticizing Shakespeare, on which he has two essays in this volume-on Macbeth and on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus -he sees even Shakespeare in the light of the balanced probabilities of ethics. Such a book is not inspiring, but it is uncommonly clarifying.

An Act in a Back Water

E. F. Benson

There are Dutch pictures whose charm rests on the skill with which the subtle gradations and familiar lights of familiar rooms have been interpreted rather than imitated. Mr. Benson, who flared like a Roman candle in "Dodo," has instead in "An Act in a Back Water" (D. Appleton & Co.) sought the methods of the Dutch painter. Backwater, as everyone who has shared the delights of the best water pleasure ground in the world, the Thames, knows, is a dear, quiet, smooth stretch behind some long-tongued island which babbles and is still, in which one rests under drooping willows or sees the vast cliff of Cliveden mirrored while one punts. Mr. Benson's Backwater is a cathedral town. His relief is that ignoble attitude toward those above which is both the poison and the cement of English social life. The canon and his wife, the two maiden ladies, the bumptious middle class man of military aspirations and a tenuous link with the peerage through three or four marriages as far removed as the opposite ends of an eighteen-hole course, the two or three women of birth (one of whom, of course, falls in love with a man just to one side, who have all the better social virtues of the story)—are not these all recorded in the chronicles of "Barset Towers" and a hundred more? Mr. Benson has marshaled and staged them once more, done it neatly, with kindly dexterity and an occasional hom

iletic saying, which recalls the fact that, having an archbishop for his father, he has the preacher's instincts. It is a nice novel, the sort of thing which leaves a good taste in your mouth, but has no special flavor, and is just one more in the lengthening list of novels one can read, instead of that brief list of novels one must read.

The Secret Woman

Eden

*

When a man spreads scenery in every chapter, his characters talk in dialect, and in the lucid intervals of comment he says of the fact that a woman of forty has discovered Phillpotts that a husband of forty loves someone younger, that "the act followed its Dedalian progress from generation to generation" the practiced novel reader knows what he is about. The awful course of love is that father and son have loved and the elder has won the same woman. There is a knot of tragedy here worth any man's untying, set in the solemn scenery of Dartmoor. All passes to the appointed end of these things with the step of every dance in life when fate holds the flute of love. The modern reader loves scenery in the novel and on the stage, and in the novel as on the stage much cost of time, of space, and of expensive effort goes to providing the setting. It is a bad sign in either place. Passion needs no draping, and when people are hungry for tree and moor and mount they have an appetite less keen for the final human thing. The mother kills the

man.

She passes to life imprisonment. There are other loves happier, as is the way of the world, but the broken love makes always the larger sound and fills the larger space in the imaginings of men. If Mr. Phillpotts in "The Secret Woman" (Macmillan and Co.) has used a vain and outworn machinery and setting in dialect and outer space, it is none the less true that he has filled the old stage with throbbing passion. His facts are of to-day's novel. His telling is of Black and Blackmore, this thirty year agone. He has caught, as the new writer always does, the level feeling of the current generation, which has come to feel and to know, that civilize and teach in church as one may, when night falls men and women are still as in their earlier prime. The odd thing is

that while we are better in life than our fathers (taking society as a whole), our novels hold that which would have halted the early Victorians.

Sir Richard Wallace

* * *

Sir Richard Wallace was thought by many and those of the best information to be the author of "The Englishman in Paris," so perfectly did his life fit Van Dam's clever compilation. He was the son of that Marquis of Hertford who was the original of Thackeray's Marquis of Stein. For reasons into which it is unnecessary to enter he lived in Paris rather than in London. He shared the life of the second empire as no other man did. He gathered a collection unrivaled among the world's private collections of the nineteenth century. Giving part to the city of Paris, he bequeathed the rest to the British nation. His taste, inherited by his father, turned first and chiefly to the French art of the eighteenth century, beyond any other expressive of luxuriance and refinement redeemed by an easy technical skill. He added to this the vertu of the period. There were, besides, enough of every school of art in Europe to make great collection. The attribution is not always certain, but the picture is felicitously good. He was early in the French art of the last century, but has followed along the line of the romantic school in its early stages of Descamps and the ment whom the second empire honored, Couture, Gerome and Meissonier; arms and armor as no man ever had before. With the text by A. L. Baldry, a French critic, plentiful processed photographs, the outline of the collection has been presented in a single volume, "The Wallace Collection" (Goupil & Co.). It fills the idea with a perpetual succession and suggestion of the more riotous art which began with the Renaissance and culminated in the last century.

* * *

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