conditions. The Liberals he thought the true Conservatives. He wished to have the bishops retained in the House of Lords as a relic of the old Saxon witan and a protest against the modern idea of heredity. In a characteristic essay

on

"Alter Orbis," reprinted in the fourth series of his essays, he opposed a Channel tun• nel, not on military grounds, but from a fear that it might lessen the insular character of Britain, "the greatest fact in British history." Exact scholarship, political insight, a terse and vigorous style, and a vivid power of realizing the past and making it live for his readers, place Mr. Freeman with Bishop Stubbs and Mr. Gardiner in the front rank of recent English historians. His death was a real loss to historical scholarship, and Lord Salisbury showed scant respect to his memory and to the cause of sound learning in appointing as his successor at Oxford one who is conspicuously deficient in the truthfulness and accuracy which were Mr. Freeman's strongest characteristics. CHARLES H. HASKINS.

RECENT BOOKS OF FICTION.*

"Calmire" is certainly a remarkable book, although not primarily remarkable as a work of fiction. Of its seven hundred and forty-two pages, the odd forty-two would be amply sufficient for all the story that is given us, and the

*CALMIRE. New York: Macmillan & Co.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY. By W. D. Howells. New York: Harper & Brothers.

MARIONETTES. By Julien Gordon. New York: Cassell Publishing Company.

A MEMBER OF THE THIRD HOUSE. By Hamlin Garland. Chicago F. J. Schulte & Co.

THE CHEVALIER OF PENSIERI-VANI. By Henry B. Fuller. New York: The Century Company.

COLONEL STARBOTTLE'S CLIENT, and Some Other People. By Bret Harte. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

THE GOVERNOR, and Other Stories. By George A. Hibbard. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

A CAPILLARY CRIME, and Other Stories. By F. D. Millet. New York: Harper & Brothers.

VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS. By Richard Harding Davis. New York: Harper & Brothers.

DON FINIMONDONE: Calabrian Sketches. By Elizabeth Cavazza. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co.

THE NAULAHKA: A Story of West and East. By Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier. New York: Macmillan & Co.

THE WRECKER. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

THE MISFORTUNES OE ELPHIN, MAID MARIAN, CROTCHET CASTLE, GRYLL GRANGE. By Thomas Love Peacock. In five volumes. New York: Macmillan & Co.

THE DOWNFALL. By Emile Zola. Translated by E. P. Robins. New York: Cassell Publishing Company.

other seven hundred are devoted to philosophical and religious discussion. We deem it only fair to warn the reader of this fact at the outset, but it would be unfair not to state also that the discussion is so fascinating that it absorbs the attention quite as fully as do the dramatic features of the narative. After all, one is tempted to ask, since a work of fiction is necessarily made up largely of the conversations of its characters, why should they not be permitted now and then to converse upon serious subjects? The chief characters of the book are the two Calmires, uncle and nephew, and Miss Nina Wahring, who, with her mother, is spending the summer at the country house of the Calmires, somewhere on the Hudson. The two Calmires embody, each in his own way, the advanced philosophical thought of the modern world, while Miss Nina, to begin with, represents the conventional ideas of the average young person who has never reflected seriously about anything. Under the combined influence of admiration for the uncle and a more tender feeling for the nephew, her mind becomes sympathetically attuned to the new world of ideas. to which she is introduced by their companionship, and, since at bottom she has an earnest and receptive nature, there follows for her the usual enlargement of horizon and revolution of thought, although the broader view to which she attains still keeps the emotional tinge due to her sex. Of course, the elder Calmire, in whom the author evidently speaks for himself, has things beautifully his own way, and the intellect of the young woman is plastic as wax in his hands. The reader who is after a story and nothing else will at once call Calmire a prig and impatiently put the book aside. But we have warned such readers that the book is not meant for them in any case. The author, whoever he may be (and his strikingly individual manner compels to conjecture), is a man who has thought long and well upon the deepest subjects of inquiry, who has realized the absurdity of many or any "systems," who has safely weathered the period of indignant and passionate revolt (here illustrated by the impetuous nephew), and who has gained at last the most peaceful and rock-protected of ethical havens. He seems to be a practised writer, yet one wholly unpractised in the form that he has here chosen as a medium of expression. But he must have had much practise in the difficult art of elucidating abstruse matters, for his success in this particular is very marked. He commands resources of apposite illustration and metaphor which make his expo

sitions simply brilliant, while at the same time they are as far as possible from being stilted and otherwise unnatural. "Calmire" is distinctly a helpful book; that is, for those who want to be helped. The author does not shrink from envisagement of the sternest problems of the universe, nor is he turned to stone by their Gorgonian gaze. Those who are not strong enough to look nature in the face, but, Perseus-like, view her only as reflected in the mirror of their childish creeds, will do well to avoid such books. And yet, for those who can comprehend it, the work offers a faith as far transcending that of our childhood as the wide world itself transcends the nursery. And it is not a faith that quarrels needlessly about terms, for it recognizes to the full whatever inspiration the dogma may conceal. The lesson of the book is all summed up in such a passage as the following: Well, really, dear, I believe the great secret of calm is the realization of the pettiness of all that can disturb our lives, in contrast with the immensity that includes them."

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Is that another name for faith in God?" she asked.
Faith in God is one of the names for it."

"The Quality of Mercy" hardly needs to be strained to permit our welcome of the novel to which Mr. Howells has given this apt Shakespearean title. The author has so long sojourned in the strange tents of those realists who conceive themselves impelled by duty to exercise their art upon the most uninteresting or even repulsive material obtainable, that we feared to have lost forever the old Mr. Howells of 66 Indian Summer" and "A Woman's Reason." But the Mr. Howells of old, the Mr. Howells who knew how to tell in artistic manner a story of real human interest, has come back to us again, and has brought with him from his artistic aberrations a shrewder humor and a more deeply spiritualized insight than he took away. There is abundant analysis in his new work, probably more than there ought to be, but it no longer impresses us as being mainly introduced for its own sake; it is consistently applied, for the most part, to the development of a distinct and desirable psychological type. A man like the defaulter Northwick, though narrow his range and imperfect his sympathies, is presumably possessed of something in the nature of a soul, and this is what, with admirable success, Mr. Howells has set himself to discover. He even reconciles us to Hatboro, which community, since its life was shadowed forth in "Annie Kilburn," has stood as the symbol or embodiment of all that is

dull and devoid of interest. It seems that even in Hatboro there may be lives whose inner aspects are worth scrutinizing, and we may take heart of grace once more to believe that no aggregation of human beings is without its possible appeal to the universal sympathy with which literature is concerned. There is in this new book all that is best of Mr. Howells; and all that is worst, or nearly all, is conspicuously lacking. In its ethical proportions and envisagement of life, it is as true as "A Hazard of New Fortunes" is false. Finally, its minor types of character are carefully worked out and generally kept within their limits. A hundred pages at a time are not given, for example, to the humors of village gossip or to the trials of flat-hunting in a great city. When the work of Mr. Howells shall have been duly threshed by time, this work, at least, will not be left with the chaff.

The admirable qualities of style and characterization evinced by Mrs. Cruger's novels have a distinct value of their own, however trivial the incidents and artificial the world that she describes. That world, of course, is not the real world of human life and passion at all, but a world of a very narrow and hothouse sort, although to its exotic dwellers it doubtless makes up the sum of essential human existence. "Marionettes" is at least as good as anything that the author has heretofore done, perhaps it is a trifle better. It has occasional faults of style, and occasional pages of essay-writing that had been better omitted, but its figures are incisively outlined, and its ethical tone (bearing in mind the relative nature of ethics) is all that could be expected under the conditions.

If Mr. Hamlin Garland continues to produce works as strong as "A Member of the Third House," he will make himself a distinct literary force. In this book he keeps his economic vagaries well in the background, and surrenders to the white-hot passion of indignation at the corruption of American legislatures. His expression taking the form of a compactly knit and strikingly dramatic narrative, he holds the attention almost breathless, and leaves the reader no opportunity to reflect upon his faults of style. His story is of a young man who, with steadfast devotion to principle, puts aside all considerations of self-interest in a singlehanded struggle with the powers of evil as represented by an unscrupulous corporation, an infamous lobby, and a venal state legislature. Mr. Garland does not pause to woo the literary

graces, and his strongest pages are but slightly adapted transcripts of what may be seen and heard to-day in any political barroom or lobbyist's den in any great city or state capital. The proceedings of his investigating committee are grimly real, and might be paralleled almost word for word in many a public record. He is terribly in earnest, and his earnestness is contagious. Such books are social forces rather than stories; they do but masquerade in the novelist's disguise, and the sun itself shines on the mirror which they hold up to nature.

"The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani" has been reissued in an improved form, improved considerably by a new chapter and a revised text of the old ones, and more than considerably improved by its new typography, its charming chapter initials, and its tasteful binding. Perhaps the best tribute to its excellence is furnished by the fact that its forbidding first appearance could not wholly disguise its charm, and that so many competent critics penetrated the disguise to discover the real literary instinct at the heart of it. Those who contrived to read the book under the old conditions will need no urging to re-read it in a form that offers no offense to any sense.

Volumes of short stories in the usual summer variety occupy a conspicuous place in this season's fiction. The doyen of our short story tellers, Mr. Bret Harte, certainly deserves to be mentioned first. There are nine stories in his latest collection; three or four of them trifles, the others almost novelettes. They deal in the accustomed surprises, and have the unvarying quality of interest. "Colonel Starbottle's Client" is probably the best, unless we give that distinction to "The Postmistress of Laurel Run." In "The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School," the writer handles a favorite theme in so novel a manner that he may be forgiven for taking it up again.

Mr. Hibbard's stories offer as complete a contrast as possible to Mr. Harte's. The latter skims lightly over the period of action; the former concentrates his attention upon the "psychological moment" of the action, and makes us retrospectively acquainted with what goes before. There is little choice between these six stories, except that the first three are more elaborate in their analysis. For intensity of force, "As the Sparks Fly Upward" is probably the most admirable, but this adjective fits "The Governor " and " A Deedless Drama " almost equally well. Mr. Hibbard's style has a straightforward simplicity that makes his

work very attractive. Such sobriety of diction is not too common a virtue with our younger writers.

Mr. Millet's stories, also six in number, are more or less about artists, but they are comparatively free from the professional jargon into which artists so frequently fall when they abandon the brush for the pen. In a preface placed at the end of the volume (if the bull be permissible), the writer lets us into some of the secrets of his literary workshop; in other words, he tells of the actual experiences that suggested the stories. This is particularly interesting, for they are related with a minuteness of detail that gives them a marked air of probability, and one is naturally tempted to ask what may be their basis in actual fact. Aside from their artistic associations, their dominant note is one of mystery, or, rather, of uncanniness, which is especially noticeable in "A Faded Scapular" and "The Fourth Waits." The latter is about a black poodle, who seems to exercise a baleful influence over the destiny of a group of four artist friends, marked out for destruction one after another by this canine fiend. The "fourth who "waits" is naturally the survivor, who lives to tell the story. On the whole, Mr. Millet gives evidence of a very pretty talent for the art in which Poe was a master.

The stories in Mr. Davis's volume are shorter than those before mentioned-there are no less than fifteen of them-but they are full of meat. As the title suggests, they are mainly about our old friend Van Bibber, whose experiments in economy, amateur philanthropy, and other pursuits, never fail to prove diverting to himself and to us. Some of the stories are the merest sketches, but they are of the best in the book. Within their limits, it would be difficult to match "The Hungry Man Was Fed" and "Mr. Travers's First Hunt." Mr. Kipling is the only other writer who can compress so much incident, humor, and general interest into so small a space. Mr. Davis seems in a fair way to make the streets of New York his own domain. This volume is a distinct advance beyond the point reached in "Gallegher," and compels the most careful attention from its readers.

In Mrs. Cavazza's "Calabrian Sketches" we have a very remarkable example of insight into the modes of Italian peasant life on the part of one herself Italian only in her married Her simple villagers, with the little interests that constitute their world, and their homely proverbial sayings, possess an extraor

name.

dinary vitality, and their presentation is artistic in a very high sense. The stories of "Don Finimondone" (so called from his dismal predictions of future and final disaster) and of "A Calabrian Penelope " have a quiet and pathetic charm that make them the best of the half dozen included. "Princess Humming-Bird" alone is not a peasant tale; its characters are aristocratic Neapolitans and an American girl, thus bringing it into the class of international tales, for the American girl comes, sees, and at once conquors, not only an interesting scion of the nobility, but all of his relatives as well. It is as charming a story as the others, only in a different way.

“The Naulahka" is as preposterous a tale as has often been told, but Mr. Kipling's vivid depiction of the East Indian native, and (we assume) Mr. Balester's characterization of his own fellow countryman in the far West, triumphantly bear up the burden of the story until near the end, when it breaks down with its own weight. In other words, the story is carried on until its authors were evidently unable to straighten out its tangled threads, and so took the heroic course of breaking them off. We shall probably never learn whether the three C.'s came to Topaz, or how Tarvin got out of his scrape with the jewel-loving wife of the railway president. The American part of the story is a rather weak imitation of Mr. Bret Harte, and the reader is glad when the scene is permanently transferred to Gokral Sectarun. The Naulahka, it should be mentioned, is a necklace of gems, which makes the moonstone of Mr. Wilkie Collins's imagination insignificant in comparison. Tarvin's object is to get possession of this treasure, and, after a series of surprising adventures, he is successful. Then, to the consternation of the reader, he tamely relinquishes the prize. What is left in the reader's mind, aside from his recollection of the story, is a deepened sense of the immense difference between the oriental and the western mind. This has been Mr. Kipling's message (as far as he has had such a thing) in most of his work, and he has presented it with a force quite beyond the reach of the mere essayist or historian.

No misplaced ethical scruples on the part of the authors prevent them from allowing the characters of "The Wreckers" to act out their parts according to their several natures. They would not have returned an ill-gotten Naulahka,

not they! Mr. Stevenson (for his collaborator can be hardly more than a figure-head)

has written a story of the most exciting description without being deserted by the style that would bear up any kind of a story that he might choose to write. It is very long, but a good story cannot be too long. Of this one we are bound to say that it has one or two wearisome digressions; so intent must a reader be upon the development of the main plot that he is impatient of side-issues that would otherwise fascinate. There is all the latitude of scene that could be desired: Paris, Edinburgh, San Francisco and the South Sea Islands dissolve bewilderingly one into another. The plot is tremendously involved, but things get straightened out at last, and the strains upon credulity are few. Most of the characters have hopelessly muddled standards of right and wrong; the author is wise enough to know that the fault is Nature's, not his. A story with no ulterior purpose whatever, we are inclined to call "The Wrecker" the best of the season.

The new edition of Peacock's novels, so judiciously edited by Dr. Richard Garnett, is now complete. In "The Misfortunes of Elphin," the author found a rich mine of material in the Mabinogion and other lore of old-time Wales, and created a distinct character of the Falstaffian type in the person of Seithenyn ap Saidi, whose drinking feats excite to such admiration. A selection of the Welsh triads provides the story with chapter-headings, and Welsh lyrics, original or imitated, enliven its pages. Of this book, Dr. Garnett says: "Its position among the author's novels is unique; in the charm of romantic incident it surpasses them all; the humor, though less exuberant than where the writer is more thoroughly at home, is still plenteous and Peacockian." Readers of "Maid Marian" will perhaps dissent from the opinion that any other of the novels can surpass this one in "the charm of romantic incident." The fact that its incidents are the more familiar does not really lessen their charm, and certainly their variety is sufficiently great. Dr. Garnett is at some pains to establish the fact that "Maid Marian was written, although not published, a full year before the appearance of "Ivanhoe." The similarity of the two works is, of course, slight, and it is not at all a similarity of spirit; but Peacock's invention might suffer some discredit from the fact that his romantic idyl was published three years later than Scott's romantic epic. A far closer resemblance is to be found between "Maid Marian" and "The Foresters," Lord Tennyson's lovely play. Here,

there is similarity of both spirit and incident, and all the more so because in "Maid Marian" Peacock often forgot that he had set out to be first of all a satirist, while in "The Foresters" Lord Tennyson has for once dramatized English history in a less heroic vein than usual. Perhaps we should not say history, after all; for Robin Hood has gone the way of William Tell, but his character and exploits are still a permanent possession of our race, thanks to the three men of genius who have given them literary immortality. "Crotchet Castle," which was published in 1831, is the most genial, and in many ways the most nearly perfect, of Peacock's tales. "It is equally free from the errors of immaturity and the infirmities of senescence," says the editor. With added experience of the world of men, Peacock came to regard the intellectual vagaries of his fellows more indulgently, perhaps because he was growing half-conscious of the fact that he had developed a few hobbies of his own. The volume is provided with a motto aptly suggestive of this fact.

"Le monde est plein de fous, et qui n'en veut pas voir, Doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir."

In the character of the Reverend Doctor Folliott, the author produced a closer study in self-portraiture than is elsewhere to be found in his gallery. Utilitarianism and the new science of political economy are made the object of Peacock's keenest satirical shafts; and Mr. Ruskin, if he has ever read the book, must have taken a sympathetic delight in many of its pages. The volume is particularly noticeable for the flexibility and grace of its dialogue, and for the peculiar excellence of its poetic interludes. Even in the matter of style, the author seems for once to have surpassed himself. The Reverend Doctor Opimian, in Gryll Grange," is really Doctor Folliott under a new name, and embodies anew the author's epicureanism, his literary lore, and his genial conservatism. "Gryll Grange," which, like "Melincourt," is long enough to make two volumes of the new edition, was written in 1859, and was the last of Peacock's novels. Its scene is another of those delightful country houses, abounding in good cheer and good company. As a story it is the slightest of Peacock's seven; but we read these books for something better than their stories. It would be impossible to characterize the book in more fitting terms than those of the editor, who says:

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"The septuagenarian has lost the buoyancy of middle age; his animal spirits no longer effervesce, and

need to be husbanded; he retains the capacity of laughter for himself, but has well-nigh lost his command over the springs of merriment in others. In fine, 'Gryll Grange' is rather amusing than humorous. The years which have incontestably enfeebled the satirist have widened the knowledge and matured the wisdom of the scholar. We still have to do with a classic, but Lucian has given way to Athenæus. Ethically,

indeed, 'Gryll Grange' is an advance upon Peacock's former writings. There is more tenderness, more considerateness, a deeper sense of the underlying pathos of

human life."

We suspect that the moralists who have so long been denouncing the immorality of warfare have found an unexpectedly powerful ally in the novelists who have set themselves to depict warfare in its actual colors. The horror that may be created by the phrases of rhetoric is but feeble and short-lived in comparison with that which accompanies a vivid realization of what battlefields really are. This realization has been given to ours as to no earlier generation, by such works as Tolstoi's "War and Peace," the Baroness von Suttner's "Ground Arms"; and, we may now add, M. Zola's "The Downfall." After all, morality, as has so often been said, is merely the nature of things; let things be shown as they are, and they convey their own lesson; nothing explicit is needed. For once, we are almost disposed to defend and to praise M. Zola's realism. He spares us none of the horrors of his subject; nor in such a case should they be spared. "La Débâcle" is the expressive name that he has given to the cataclysm of 1870, and the tremendous events that led up to and followed upon the fatal day of Sedan are described from the standpoint of the private soldier. We doubt if the conditions of that struggle have ever received a more careful and masterly analysis than M. Zola has here given them. The complete rottenness of that empire of fraud, the utter ineptitude of the sham Emperor, whose career was one long and blood-stained carnival of crime, and the ignorant and insane fatuity with which the French nation rushed to its doom, are most impressively presented in these pages. It was patriotism in a very high sense that dictated this stern record, the patriotism that sees a nation's virtues all the clearer for not being blind to its faults. To those who read history aright, the expiation of that année terrible was a blessing in disguise, for it quickened the sluggish pulse of the nation, and made possible the chastened new France whose resurgence has almost marked a new epoch in the growth of the human spirit.

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE.