blur; but in the one case the fault was the fault of nature; the blur was already there to be photographed; in the other case the fault was your own. It would be an interesting experiment to take a chapter from one of Mr. James's recent books, read it over and over until one were quite sure of having grasped all its subtle suggestions and semi-tones, its implications of things unknown and only vaguely guessed at, and then to sit down to rewrite it, within the same limits of space, on the condition of adding nothing and leaving nothing out. The chances are that the last state of that chapter would be decidedly worse than the first.

In many ways, The Ambassadors will prove to be easier reading than the last three or four volumes by Mr. James have been. To begin with, he has obviously had, aside from the particular set of characters that he undertakes to study, a very definite central thought, a thought which his careful labours upon the biography of the sculptor Storey has naturally kept uppermost in his mind,namely, the influence of Europe, its older culture, its radically different standards, upon the American temperament. Perhaps the best brief definition of The Ambassadors which can be given is, A study of the New England conscience, subjected to the hot-house atmosphere of the Parisian Vie de Bohême. And secondly the characters are chiefly American characters, deliciously, refreshingly American-yet the sort of Americans that you usually have to go to Europe to discover. To give a straightforward analysis of The Ambassadors would be to do violence to Mr. James's literary creed. He himself never gives you straightforward facts, but merely a series of impressions. And these you have to take as he gives them and let them accumulate and sink in, until their ultimate significance gradually dawns upon you. You do not need to wait long for an impression of Mr. Strethers; you get him in the opening page-a tall, thin, overworked man of letters, something better, yet not much better than a hack-writer, who has suddenly had the unexpected boon of a vacation, a private embassy to Paris, which may lengthen out for weeks and months. Strethers is a product of Woolett, Mass., and he is unpleasantly conscious of the fact-he feels that "it

sticks out all over him." He has the New England conscience, but for the time being it is in abeyance. He is as receptive of new impressions as a sensitised plate and he means to enjoy himself, in spite of the burden of his special mission. Gradually it is revealed that he is in Paris in the interest of Mrs. Newsome-imposing, portly, prosperous Mrs. Newsome, the mature widow who is a power not to be ignored in Woolett, Mass. The source of all the trouble is Mrs. Newsome's son "Chad," who for some years has made Paris his home and whose letters during the earlier months were a periodic anxiety, which finally merged in a still greater anxiety, due to the absence of any letters at all. Mr. Strethers is commissioned to go to Paris, to discover if possible all the "unspeakable things" that Chad has supposably been doing, and at all events bring him back, a prodigal but repentant son, to Woolett-after which, it is inferred, the mature charms and ample fortune of Mrs. Newsome will be at Mr. Strether's disposal. Now just what Chad Newsome's life in Paris has been through all these years, and just what there is for Mr. Strethers to investigate, matters very little. What does concern us is to know what Mr. Strethers thinks that he finds out, the series of impressions which he receives. Somehow the atmosphere and traditions of the Latin Quarter, the laughter and the light and the gaiety of Paris gradually filter into Strethers's blood; the men he meets, and more especially the women, are all so different from what he had pictured them from the vantage-ground of far-away provincial Woolett, that his standards of morality undergo a curious and interesting readjustment. And acting according to this new light, he gives Chad some surprising advice, calculated permanently to wreck his own chances of ever filling the offices of the defunct Mr. Newsome. And yet throughout more than five hundred. pages, Mr. Strethers has been wandering in a mental haze. He has not really known the simple basic fact that has kept Chad Newsome all these years in Paris. He has seen Chad and Mme. Vionnet in each other's company day after day; he has talked with them, singly and together, until he thinks there is nothing left for him to know. And yet the sim

ple, elemental truth about them does not dawn upon him until the morning that he wanders alone out to the rural districts beyond Rennes, and there in one. of those idyllic spots dear to artists, sees a rowboat containing a man who held the paddles, and a lady in the stern, with a pink parasol-saw them, recognised them, and suddenly awakened to a knowledge of infinite and undreamed possibilities. A book with all the tantalising vagueness of real life, and one which surely no one other than Henry James could have written.

There is no subtle haze of doubt surrounding the crudities of life in The Masterfolk, by Haldane McFall. He gives us the Bohemia of the Latin Quarter, unvarnished and grim, wine and woman and song side by side with sickness and starvation and suicide. He does not seemingly go in search of what is repellant and unclean and unspeakable, but he does push open the doors with scant ceremony that stand before him; and what he finds hidden behind them he reveals in plain, blunt English. There is little art in Mr. McFall's book-it is too long by fully one-third; it is overcrowded, both with characters and with incidents; and the plot is exasperatingly rambling and formless. Nevertheless there is a rugged strength about the book that is unmistakable. There are a score of people in it who are not only genuine, but whom you feel that you could dearly love if you met them in real life. There are here and there little touches of human nature that go far towards softening the prevailing crudity of the book. And

unquestionably it gives us the life of the artist circle, the life of the "Boul' Mich" with a sympathetic understanding unapproached since the days of Henri Murger-unless indeed we except Du Maurier. Its obvious faults are easily understood; The Masterfolk is the work of a man who has been far more intent upon embodying his whole philosophy of life in a single book than in giving to that book an artistic symmetry.

If there is scant art in Mr. McFall's book, there is art in abundance in Guy Wetmore Carryl's delicious little volume, Zut and Other Parisians. It belongs to the order of literary pâtisserie, the lightest, crispest, most inviting bonne-bouche of fiction that you well could ask, so typi

cally French that it is hard to believe that a genuine Anglo-Saxon could have written it. The best thing yet said about Zut was the remark in a recent interview, that there were times when the volume fairly seemed to shrug its shoulders. From first to last it is pervaded with that spirit of indulgent irony which we are accustomed to associate with the writings of Anatole France. Certainly the initial story might have come straight from the pen of the creator of M. Bergeret. It is a story of jealous rivalry between the proprietress of an épicerie which has seen better days, and the young wife of a prosperous hairdresser who kept the adjoining shop. It is hard enough to see the tide of fortune setting against one, to watch day by day the increasing stream of custom flowing in at the doors of one's hated rival, while one's own custom steadily diminishes. But in this case the last straw is the ingratitude of Zut, Madame's big white Angora cat-capricious, pampered, typically feminine, who finds the dainty furnishings of a model barbershop more to her taste than the ill-smelling atmosphere of stale vegetables. So Zut accordingly enrolls herself in the ranks of the deserters, quite indifferent to the tragedies that may result. "Zut," the author explains in passing, is "a word which means at once everything and nothing." Accordingly it is well chosen as a title for a volume about the race that is preeminent in the art of passing over the serious catastrophes of life with gay laughter, and magnifying trifles into a national tragedy.

A volume which cannot be taken with any special seriousness, and yet which seems to fit in just here, is Albert Carman's story of The Pensionnaires. The life of the typical continental pension is admittedly unlike any other life on earth: the people you meet are unlike any other people; and the only wonder is that they have not been oftener utilised in fiction. Mr. Carman's volume is a rather clever picture of this life, bearing an occasional suggestion of cartoon art; and the background of the story, the atmosphere of Dresden from the enthusiastic tourist's point of view, is full of a suggestion of personal reminiscences that linger pleasantly in the author's thoughts. As for the story itself, there is no marked originality, but it is readable enough. A

young American girl, who has gone to Germany to cultivate her voice, is the despair of her teacher. Physically, she possesses a wonderful vocal instrument; but she sings without soul-her heart has never been awakened. Two men, however, come into her life, a dreamy, visionary Pole, and a stalwart, matter-of-fact Englishman, and under their combined influence she awakens and becomes the wonderful singer that nature intended her to be. But which of these men is to reap the reward for awakening her is at question that takes time to decide; and the ending of the book is disappointingly conventional.

There is too much originality rather than too little in Mrs. L. Silberrad's new story, Petronilla Heroven. From the very first Miss Silberrad has shown a promising degree of individuality. Her situations are unhackeneyed; her characters are refreshingly new; and there is a commendable smell of the soil, an atmosphere of hedgerow and thatched roof, about her pictures of English rural life. And yet a book like this latest one leaves a disheartening impression of tawdry melodrama. To be sure, you do not feel this while you read-to that extent the plot is redeemed by the style. But a brief epitome of the story inevitably reads like a burlesque. Petronilla is the natural child of a farmer's daughter, the first blot upon a good old yeoman family. An orphan, hated by her grandfather, she leads a lonely childhood, ostracised, roaming the fields and woods, and imbibing from other wild and lonely things something of their woodland habits, their stealthy tread and vengeful nature. At seventeen she is a strange, wayward girl over whom the good village folk shake their heads and predict that she will soon follow in her mother's footsteps. And now begins the melodrama. In the forest Petronilla meets a strange man, a crippled, scarred, gnarled piece of humanity, whom she knows simply as the Woodsman, who talks Schopenhauer to her and imbues her with a taste for Carlyle and the French Revolution. There is another man in the story, an incarnation of malice and hatred and revenge; and because he once loved Petronilla's mother, and the latter had disdained him, he follows up the girl with persistent cruelty, hounding her relentlessly, and exercising fiend

ish ingenuity in inventing new methods of injuring her. Between this man and the Woodsman there is a mysterious connection; and every now and then, when Petronilla reaches the limit of endurance, she appeals to the Woodsman, and he promptly sends a blue diamond to the other man. These blue diamonds have mysterious power; they make the other man turn very pale-they reduce him to lamb-like submission. But just why he turns pale, and just what hold these blue diamonds have upon him, is one of the many things that you never find out. Then Petronilla has a pet wolf, a full-grown, full-blooded, white wolf, that follows her everywhere, with steps as stealthy as her own. You know from the first that the wolf is one of Miss Silberrad's most important stage properties; you are sure that he is going to play the rôle of deux ex machina when the final catastrophe comes. And so he does, but he does it in such a tame, innocuous fashion that his wolfhood is quite wasted. A good-sized mastiff would have answered quite as well, and at less sacrifice of probabilities. Unquestionably the story holds your interest to the end, but when you lay it down you realise how thoroughly artificial was the trick of the diamonds and the wolf; you feel as though you had been hypnotised by a few bits of coloured glass as though you had been fooled once too often by the idle cry of "Wolf! Wolf!"

Miss Silberrad's chief fault is that she leaves too many ragged ends to her story, too many mysteries that she either will not or cannot explain. In melodrama. an author has no possible excuse for pleading ignorance, because it is the essence of melodrama that anything may happen, any explanation will be better than none at all. The biggest and most palpable of lies will be acceptable, if only the writer lies with persistent cheerfulness and brazen confidence. A more incredible tale than John Oxenham's Barbe of Grand Bayou has seldom been given to an indulgent public; and yet one cannot help respecting the author for his colossal assurance. Picture a section of the stormy sea-girt Breton coast, a particularly dangerous section, with sunken rocks, and a treacherous whirlpool, through which a deadly tide races at every ebb and flow. Picture a lonely

lighthouse out in the midst of the waves, warning mariners from the cliffs that no boat could live to reach. And then imagine that within the rock of those cliffs there lies, unknown and unsuspected, a vast cavern lit by narrow fissures through which sea gulls can barely make their way; a cavern that a man might reach by falling through a hole, a mere rabbit burrow, in the pasture land above, slipping, clutching, falling along a dark, slanting passage, to be shot suddenly into a black void, and fall endlessly until consciousness leaves him. Imagine such a man awakening to find himself a prisoner in a vast, dim vault, bewildered, unable to account for his presence there. And days slip by, and he keeps life within him with the scant food of sea gull's eggs, the few fish he can catch in the dark pools of the cave. And all day long he can see through a narrow crevice in nature's twelve-foot wall of stone, the distant lighthouse, and at rare intervals can catch a glimpse of a flitting form, the form of the woman he loves, who helps her father tend the light. The story of the man's imprisonment, of how he came to fall into the cavern, and who fell with him, and how he finally came out again, but came alone, is distinctly a good story of its kind. And it does not follow that a reviewer admires its kind, just because he is willing to give it cordial recognition.

Tapestry Novel is the phrase which has been coined for a type of fiction best represented by the works of Maurice Hewlett. It is an apt phrase, and one that grows upon you, the more you think of it. For if the strange, dim figures in old tapestries, the knights and crusaders, the cowled monks and fair ladies that look down at us from fabrics wrought by medieval weavers, could suddenly be kindled with life, if warm red blood could be infused into their veins, beneath the reds and greens and tinselled threads of their trappings, then might their outlook upon life be something after the manner of the Hewlett novel. That Mr. Hewlett would have disciples was a foregone conclusion; that he would have one of such marked talent as that revealed by Mr. Warwick Deeping, comes as a distinct surprise. Uther and Igraine, Mr. Deeping's first novel, is a book which may be conveniently classi

fied as falling midway between The Forest Lovers and Richard-Yea-and-Nay. It has much of the idyllic charm of Mr. Hewlett's earlier story; but it blends with it a good deal of the virile strength and the impetuosity of his later manner. The basis of Mr. Deeping's story is the legend of Uther Pendragon, the fabled father of King Arthur, who, according to the Arthurian cycles, loved one Igraine, wife of Gorlois, and won her by fraud, through the wiles of Merlin, afterwards making her his wife when Gorlois had been slain. Mr. Deeping takes some bold liberties with the old tale; but this will hardly matter, since to those who once fall under the spell of Uther and Igraine, Mr. Deeping's version will henceforth be the only true version, his Uther and his Igraine the only ones who are real. The story opens upon a scene of carnage and destruction. Hordes of barbarian invaders are burning and pillaging Saxon vilages; a convent has been rifled, and the frightened nuns are escaping to the woods, fleeing from death and worse, like a covey of startled quail. Igraine, a novice, alone keeps her head, and sacrifices herself to cover their flight. But she is seized by the invaders, stripped, bound to a tree, and left to her fate. It is thus, in the woods, at night, that Uther of the Dragon comes upon her, looses her bonds, leaves her to resume her nun's grey gown, and then undertakes to see her safely bestowed with her kinsmen at Winchester. Misled by the grey gown, he thinks her, not the novice that she is, but a holy nun, placed by her vows forever beyond his reach. And she, not knowing what manner of man he is, welcomes the protection that his mistake affords, and does not enlighten him. "The Way to Winchester" is the sub-title of the earlier half of the story; one wishes it might have been chosen as the name of the book. For it is on the way to Winchester that the great events of the story have their origin, in the love that is kindled in the hearts of the novice and the knight. And because she knows that she loves him, Igraine decides, as they lie for the last night of their journey, almost within sight of Winchester, that on the morrow she will tell him the truth, that she is no nun. And because he loves her, and is jealous of his knightly honour, he decides as he guards her sleep

throughout that last night, that he must see her no more. And so before dawn of the day when she would have told him the truth he steals softly away and passes out of her life. The idyllic charm of the story is undeniable. There is at times a certain mannerism, a root of affectation approaching preciosity. Yet in the later part of the story, which is full of the din

of battle, there is an impetuous on-rush of action that makes one quite forget any occasional artificiality of style. It is a book strong enough to carry with it a conviction that here is a new writer whose work will count for something definite among the novels of the present decade. Frederic Taber Cooper.

I.

THE WORK OF JOHN S. SARGENT.*

M

UCH has been written of Mr. Sargent's work and much to the purpose, but it seems to have been reserved for a woman to communicate that which is almost incommunicable, in the notes that Mrs. Meynall has prepared as introductory to this fine volume of photogravures published in London and imported by Charles Scribner's Sons, of portraits by Mr. Sargent.

It is an attribute of genius to inspire consideration from many sides; and we think it most important that an artist who is so widely discussed should find a worthy commentator. It may seem rather an inversion of the order of things that this volume should be reviewed, giving precedence to the literary side of the book when the illustrations form really the book itself. But in a sense this again seems proper, for the writer calls her notes introductory, and doubtless, if they are first read, he who then examines the work will be in a frame of mind to better appreciate the riches here displayed. Mrs. Meynall has done nearly all that can be done, outside the esoteric circle of the practised painter to explain the sources of this artist's power-and, again, in that charmed circle of kindred craftsmen few can successfully give expression through the medium of words.

In the last few years, since the revival of interest in portraiture, and there has evidently been such a revival, volumes of importance dealing with one or the *Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons. $30.00

net.

other of the great earlier portraitists have been brought here for our delectation. We doubt, however, if one of quite so great impressiveness from the point of view of book-making has yet been offered to the public.

But before speaking of the physical features, so to say, of the book, we must still go further in expressing our indebtedness to the writer of the introduction. For anything that is to-day conducive to a better understanding of the portrait painter, anything that will indicate the problems he has to face and the qualities of mind required to successfully portray a human being is most welcome. A volume of this kind is well calculated to further such a desirable end; and we regard Mr. Sargent as peculiarly forbal interpreter, and also in working at tunate in possessing so searching a vera period when a fair exposition of his achievements can be so satisfactorily disseminated. The writer in disclaiming partially the rôle of "psychologist" which some have seen fit to give this painter, goes on to say: "He proves himself rather to be observant and vigilant, nay, simple, as a great artist must be. How many and various qualities, mental and physical, meet to prepare that direct and give us matter of surmise; for contemsimple contemplation of the world might plation there is-something more than observation; and something more than perception-insight." The closeness of Mr. Sargent's differentiation of national types is then mentioned: "When Mr. Sargent paints an American-the portrait of Mr. Roosevelt, for example-the eye has the look of America, the national habit is in the figure and head. In like manner, Mr. Sargent paints an English