ume is a little book in great space. Had it been half the length it would have been twice as valuable.

It

A book more tantalising than Charles Reade as I Knew Him is not often produced. It is written throughout in the first person, and, as much of it is dialogue, it is often difficult, and sometimes well-nigh impossible, to know whether a statement emanates from Reade or Mr. Coleman. The arrangement of the book adds to the reader's bewilderment. opens with a "Prologue-Thirty-five Years Ago," descriptive of the first meeting of Reade and Mr. Coleman in the former's house in Bolton Row. Then comes "A Retrospect of Half a Century," related by Reade to the chronicler; and this is followed by the "Random Recollections of Twenty Years" of Mr. Coleman. The volume, indeed, is more than a biography of Reade; it is also an autobiography of the biographer. To a certain extent this adds to the interest; but, to a far greater degree, it makes confusion worse confounded.

Much that Mr. Coleman has to say is valuable, but to find these passages is like seeking a needle in a bundle of hay. Mr. Coleman lacks the gift of compressionthat first essential of the biographerand he has not the slightest idea of selection. For example, he is at great pains to make clear the true history of the composition of "Masks and Faces"; but instead of a straightforward connected statement based on the authorities he has collected, he gives the authorities— Reade's own account, and Arnold Taylor's (the brother of Tom Taylor, Reade's collaborateur in this play), and an extract from The Bancrofts On and Off the Stage and leaves the reader to weigh the evidence and to draw his own conclusions. Nothing could be more fair, of course; but when this sort of thing occurs more than once, one is apt to regard the book as little more than material for a memoir.

Mr. Coleman, as actor and theatrical manager, naturally enough, is interested in Reade's contributions to the stage, and his reminiscences are almost exclusively concerned with the author as playwright. Yet a book about Charles Reade, which practically ignores his novels, and has but one or two passing references to The Cloister and the Hearth, may at least

claim to rank as a curiosity of literature. It is Hamlet with the part of the Prince of Denmark left out. It is, however, due to Mr. Coleman to mention that he states in his prefatory note that the reader who expects an erudite disquisition on Reade's literary achievements is doomed to disappointment. But there is a vast difference between erudite disquisition and neglect. When dealing with Reade's plays, moreover, he ventures on dogmatic utterances, which even the most daring critic would hesitate to deliver. Masks and Faces, he says, has "become a classic, doubtless destined to endure so long as the language in which it is written exists." What, then, is left to remark of Two Loves and a Life, which Mr. Coleman declares is "the best, the very best play ever written by Taylor and Reade"?

Reade either adapted, translated, or (nearly always) wrote in collaboration no less than thirty-five plays, of which twenty-five have been staged. Of these, Nance Öldfield, a version of Tiradaté; Drink, an adaptation of L'Assommoir; and Masks and Faces, written with Tom Taylor, still hold the boards to-day. Drink is a horrible, realistic drama, without any artistic signification; but Nance Oldfield is delightful, and Masks and Faces is a charming comedy. ing comedy. Yet it is doing Reade's reputation ill-service to speak of him as a great dramatist. Though the theatre always attracted him, and he devoted to play-writing much of his time, he never mastered its technique, and he has not enriched the literature of the drama with a single piece written by himself.

Mr. Coleman throws an interesting light on the condition of the English stage fifty years ago. Prices for dramatic works had ruled high in Garrick's time, when Johnson received £315 for the sixnights' run of Irene, Goldsmith £900 for She Stoops to Conquer, and the now forgotten Holcroft obtained £900 for The Follies of a Night, a translation of Beaumarchais's Figaro. Then the pecuniary value of plays, at least so far as the author was concerned, steadily decreased. Lytton, one of the most popular writers of his day, received only two hundred guineas for The Lady of Lyons; Tom Taylor was given but £150 for The Ticket-of-Leave Man, while Taylor and Reade between them were paid £100 for Two Lives and a Love, and £150 for

Masks and Faces. It remained for Dion Boucicault to inaugurate the royalty system, which has resulted in making independent for life the writer of a successful play. The temporary fall in prices may, perhaps, be traced to the fact that most dramatic authors of that day "conveyed" pieces from the French, without remunerating the owner, or even acknowledging their indebtedness. In this respect Reade was a notorious offender. He was present at the first performance of Scribe and Lagouve's Bataille des Dames, and was delighted with the comedy. "No British brigands were present, so it occurred to me to play the brigand myself," he said; and he obtained a copy of the play, and returned to London, when he immediately set to work on the adaptation. He never even thought to pay the authors, or to ask their permission. Circumstances alter cases, and Reade saw this matter in a different light when unauthorised dramatisations of It is Never too Late to Mend were staged. Then it was "pirates," "plunderers," "nefarious transactions," and lawsuits.

It is not as a dramatist, but as a novelist, that Reade's name will be handed down to posterity. Yet of the seventeen stories he wrote, only about half-a-dozen are read or even remembered to-day, and most of these will sooner or later be forgotten. But The Cloister and the Hearth is immortal.

Peg Woffington, which is Masks and Faces turned into a novel, shows on every page its dramatic origin, and the air of exaggeration which pervades it, though acceptable on the stage, where everything requires to be emphasised, takes from it most of the daintiness that should be its principal quality. Christie Johnston is far better in every way. The story is slight to a degree, but the life of the Newhaven fisherfolk is drawn with the hand of a master. The humour is often forced and boisterous, the humour of the playwright anxious to create laughter at any cost; but some of the characters are real flesh and blood. Christie-lion-hearted girl!-lives in these pages, and the narrow-minded Mrs. Gatty and her snobbish, ungrateful son Charles. The whole is admirable, but there is one scene in the book so magnificent that once read it can never be forgotten. It is when Lord Ipsden visits old Jess Rutherford, and she

"My

pours out her troubles to him. troubles, laddie? The sun wad set, and rise, and set again, ere I could tell ye a' the trouble I hae come through. Oh! ye needna vex yourself for an auld wife's tears; tears are a blessin', lad, I shall assure ye. Mony's the time I hae prayed for them, and couldna hae them. Sit ye doon! sit ye doon! I'll no let ye gang fra my door till I hae thankit ye -but gie me time, gie me time. I canna greet al' the days of the week." Then she thanks him for his charity and blesses him as one who has the power and the right to bless or curse. The words roll forth, eloquent and musical, from this old peasant woman as from some grand old Hebrew prophet. A thousand good wishes she utters, until at the end she eclipses herself: "An' oh, my boenny, boenny lad, may ye be wi' the rich upon the airth a' your days-and wi' the puir in the warld to come!" There is nothing finer in literature than this scene, nothing more noble or more pathetic. It is the high-water mark of Reade's genius, and Reade at his best has been excelled by few.

It is Never too Late to Mend was written to expose the cruelty of the prison system then in vogue. This book, perhaps the most popular of all Reade's writings, has no claim to be regarded as literature. The author was carried away by his feelings when he was writing this horrible narrative, but while that is sufficient excuse for the man, it cannot be held to exculpate the artist. Hard Cash and Foul Play were also novels written with a purpose: the former to expose the opportunities for fraud so long as private lunatic asylums were not properly supervised; the latter to show how unseaworthy ships were sent to sea and deliberately scuttled for the sake of the insurance money. These, with Griffith Gaunt, a tale with an unusually unpleasant plot, are the best, as well as the most widely known, of Reade's novels. They are well written and admirably constructed. As a rule, the interest is well sustained; the characters are carefully drawn, and there are some delightful scenes, such as the island episode in Foul Play. They rank far above the work of the every-day writer of fiction, and could only have been composed by a well-informed, largehearted man. They would have made.

the reputation of a lesser writer; but they are entirely eclipsed by their author's masterpiece. Compared with The Cloister and the Hearth, all Reade's other books are as dross is to gold. Concerning the great historical romance, Mr. Coleman recalls an interesting fact showing how it was nearly strangled at birth: "When originally brought out [1851] under the name of A Good Fight in Once a Week, its publication was suspended in consequence of the editor's tampering with the 'copy,' an indignity which the author resented by breaking off further relations, and abruptly and unsatisfactorily winding up the story. Ultimately, however, it saw the light in a complete form under its present well-known title." The editor of the periodical was subsequently confined in a lunatic asylum, whereupon Reade made one of his characteristic remarks. "Poor fellah!" he said. "Poor fellah! I'm sorry for him. Of course, I'm bound to be sorry for him as a Christian, but what else could be expected from a fellah who presumed to tamper with my copy?" Lewis Melville.

III.

JOHN FOX, JR.'S, "THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME."

T

HERE are breezes from the Southland, stirring the meadows of "The Blue Grass," moaning through the gorges of the mountains, and they are all abreath with life in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. John Fox, Jr., has done a notable thing in this charming story-a romance in its keenly sustained interest, a novel in its palpitant humanity; and, though the smile may rise to many lips at the heralding of more American historical romance, even he who smiles must in reason admit that his smile is, in a critical sense, illogical.

The wave of popular taste for books of this class was, perhaps, first ruffled from the deep by interest in the societies of patriotic genealogy. It was first fed by romances of Colonial and Revolutionary times, of varying merit and demerit, but, for the most part, of enthusiastic

"The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come." John Fox. Jr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50.

reception, and, then, gathering volumeor, if you please, many volumes-it rolled down, a devouring billow of ink, to the period of the Civil War. Naturally enough a craving that drank so deeply and often, so indiscriminatingly was soon more than satisfied and turned at last with disgust from its debauch to scoff at all tales of the kind it had indulged in so intemperately. But because many people happen to have taken too much bad wine is poor reason for a taster to turn up his nose at the best, and, strong in this reflection, I am the more emboldened to praise even now a story of the great Rebellion-a romance with Morgan and his men filling the background and with the inevitable Grant present indeed, but, be it said, most tactfully unobtrusive.

The story, after all, is the thing in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and you are soon absorbed in the characters of its fiction, their lives, their fortunes, their hearts-for they have hearts with good red blood flowing through them— long before Mr. Fox begins to involve the spirit of the storm and to add to his plot the interest of national (or State) enthusiasm and historic passion. If anything, I am inclined to think the story droops a little under these influences; not appreciably, perhaps, for he has used his reasoning very judiciously, and it is doubtless a necessity of his motive, the terrible rending of heart-strings in the harrowed Commonwealth, when Kentucky sent her sons to North and South that they might return again and tear at each other's throats till the homestead soil ran red with their blood. It is a strong motive, a gruesome motive, and, difficult as it now seems to comprehend such bitterness, it is the truth of history. Still, there are elements of weakness in this vial from which the author seeks to draw strength; elements which even his talent has not quite succeeded in eliminating, very probably because they cannot be altogether eliminated.

When one has read a good book, well written, and well knit, has thrilled over an altogether absorbing story and felt with its characters, it is a somewhat ungracious duty to sit down and quiet one's blood and consider in coldly critical wise just why the book is not exactly "great." That duty brings me again to the inher

ent difficulty of writing "great" fiction when motive and plot have birth in a history which still stirs personal and, perhaps, partisan chords in the hearts of both author and reader. There is the ever-present demand upon the former for a fineness of taste that may be said to be superhuman, and which, even were it exercised, must affect discriminating readers differently; there is the constant temptation to reënforce interest, pathos and dramatic power-yes, and salability, by touches that from the standpoint of the best canons of literary art ring untrue, and, when pressed too deeply by inartistic and sordid imitators become baldly meretricious. It is not, bear in mind, the canon that seeks to govern the feeling, but the feeling that has shaped the canon; a rather vague sensation, if you please; but whenever some hero of such fiction meets Washington with his bearing of calm majesty or the taciturn Grant with his inevitable cigar, surely we are all conscious enough of a shrinking from the fictitious words we know are trembling on the great man's lips, and the more so, be it said, with the latter than the former because he is nearer to our intelligences if not so near to our hearts. Often the words, when they come, are shallow claptrap, but even if they be conceived in closest character and most accurate taste, there is just a little feeling that they are of the nature of claptrap all the same, and the mind is conscious of a sense of embarrassment, as if some liberty were taken with the character of a friend. Why this is an offense against literary art should be as clear as that it is an offense against good taste, if we can once realize that perfect art implies a combination of all the finenesses of taste and feeling that bear directly or remotely upon the artist's creation, and that to be perfect there must be never so much as the suspicion of a jarring note. This matter of historical characters is but a phase of the question. The same principle will be found to apply to a less degree in one way and to a greater in another, in the portrayal of historic incidents around which personal or partisan sentiments still cluster.

And now I do not say all this to arraign the author of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come of such offenses, save, perhaps, in a degree that is inseparable

from his essayal: I say it only to explain why I do not call this delightful story a "Great American Novel"; why, contrary to the motive of many critics, I cannot conceive that any American historical romance, writ while feelings its motive evoked are still alive, can ever justly receive that much bandied mead of praise. Possibly it may find a realisation in some tale of Colonial times before the shadow of the Revolution aroused anti-English antipathies that have not yet died out; perhaps the plot will be found in some neglected episode involving forgotten men and deeds and questions, but to me it seems that aspirants must look toward the story of American life pure and simple, in which enters no national, political or militant social issues. whose insight, sense of truth, and power of expression can, without invoking the least of the gods, endow such a tale with real and living interest, he who can call forth tears and laughter with never the suspicion of an onion in his pocket or a sly dig at the reader's ribs; for him we wait in all reverence, while we gratefully solace the lagging hours with such pleasing, well-conceived, and well-written stories as The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.

IV.

Duffield Osborne.

He

JACK LONDON, "THE CALL OF THE WILD."*

T

O some of us the pleasure of reading Mr. Jack London's The Call of the Wild will be marred by a slight feeling of regret for which the book itself is in no way responsible. It is a regret which comes of comparison and of wondering why so much of the good writing being done to-day by the new and promising men among American authors deals with the remote and undeveloped corners of the world, the hard trails through virgin forests and over Arctic ice and snows, and not more about the lives of the men and women of conventional habits and surroundings. For it is to the men and women who shall tell us the vital and dramatic stories of what superficially seems to be the commonplace

"The Call of the Wild." By Jack London. New York: The Macmillan Company.

that we must look for the foundations of a sturdier and more lasting national literature. As for The Call of the Wild, it may be summed up simply by saying that it is far and away the best book that Mr. Jack London has ever written.

In this book there are much the same scenes and atmosphere that were found fin Children of the Frost and The Sons of the Wolf. You get the same "feel of the North," you realise the bitter sting of the cold and the stretch of the endless miles

of Arctic snow. But there is lacking much of the vagueness which tended to mar the earlier books. For Buck, the son of the Saint Bernard and the Scotch Shepherd dog, Mr. London has invested with a humanity which he has failed to give to most of his men. Buck originally lived at a great house in "the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley" and might have ended his days there comfortably, ruling complacently over the great demesne, had not men, groping in the Arctic darkness, found a yellow metal. Thousands rushed into the Northland and heavy dogs with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost, were needed, so Buck was stolen and shipped away to be brutally broken and to trudge. along pulling the sledges and to rise to the mastership of the pack over the body of his beaten foe. At the very beginning of his travels, smarting under the indignity of being kidnapped, wild with wrath. at being bound by ropes and hurried. about from place to place, Buck met the terrible man in the red sweater, the man with the club, and learned the lesson which he never forgot. Then there followed the long trip to the North, the record run over the snow and ice with François and Perrault, the FrenchCanadian and the French-Canadian halfbreed, and the terrific battle for supremacy with Spitz through which Buck won the mastership. Then there were other journeys and other friends, until Buck found the man whom he recognized as the real master and to whom he gave all the love of his strong heart. But John Thornton met death at the hands of the Yeehats, and Buck, cut off forever from his love of man, heard the call of the wild and responded to it, throwing in his lot with the wolves. And there ends the story of Buck. "The years were not many when the Yeehats noted a change in the

breed of timber-wolves; for some were seen with splashes of brown on head and muzzle, with a rift of white centring down the chest. But more remarkable than this, the Yeehats tell of a Ghost Dog that runs at the head of the pack. They are afraid of this Ghost Dog, for it has cunning greater than they, stealing from their camps in the fierce winters, robbing their traps, slaying their dogs, and defying their bravest hunters." The Call of the Wild is one of the two best dog stories which have been written in this country in recent years. The other, of course, is Mr. Richard Harding Davis's The Bar Sinister. Personally, the present reviewer prefers The Bar Sinister.

Arthur Bartlett Maurice.

V.

GWENDOLEN OVERTON'S "ANNE

I'

CARMEL.

IN much of the American and English fiction of the present day touching upon the so-called sex question, there is an apparent fearlessness which quickly disappears before the voice of Public Opinion. Anne Carmel belongs to this type of fiction; so do The Right of Way and Lady Rose's Miss Overton created a Daughter. strong and thoroughly fearless woman in Anne Carmel; and after she created her she seemed to grow afraid of her. She did not dare let her go her own way.

Anne Carmel was the only sister of a French Canadian priest, who, when the story opens, had been for eight years the curé of the parish of St. Hilaire. Anne and her brother are very near and dear to each other, but Anne is beginning to long for her woman's birthright. And Paul Tetrault did not know that this was at the moment when he should have asked Anne to marry him. He had let go his last chance, "but he was no more aware of that than are most of us at the moment of making the errors of omission which leave, forever after in our lives, a space that cannot be filled."

Just at the psychological moment Anne meets a young Englishman, Harnett

"Anne Carmel." By Gwendolen Overton. New York: The Macmillan Company.