laughter, pathos, and tears. He also recalls Trollope in his method of building up a character out of a multitude of facts, William De Morgan, 1839 phry Ward, 1851 minutely observed and recorded. Mrs. Humphry Ward has achieved distinction with her studies of religious, political, and social problems. Her fame began with Robert Elsmere and David Greve, in which she grappled with the largest spiritual questions of the time. Marcella, Sir George Tressady, Eleanor, Diana Mallory, and The Coryston Family, are large and luminous portrayals of character. The splendid figure of Marcella presents the “ new woman" as she may be when her life has had its full logical evolution. Mrs. Ward's novels are strongly-coldly-intellectual; they suggest the investigations of an expert in sociology. They are never lacking in a certain austere excellence, which tends toward monotony, but they are lacking in humor, a defect which places them far below the novels of George Eliot, with which they are most often compared. Joseph J. Locke, A writer of sea stories, Joseph Conrad, has won a worthy fame with his vigorous descriptions of the beauty and the terror of the ocean. Tales of Unrest, Typhoon, and Lord Jim are records of strange adventures that fascinate if they do not convince the reader. Conrad was born a Russian, and learned the English language after he was twenty years old. For twenty years he was a sailor, becoming finally master of his ship. His genius is amphibious, at home on sea and land. But his stories of social unrest and Russian nihilism, like Under Western Eyes, are not strikingly original. He deals best with the titanic forces of nature, contrasted with the pigmy forces of man, as seen in the storm-paths of the ocean. Here he is original, powerful, and without a rival. William J. Locke secured a place in the affections of countless readers with his Beloved Vagabond, published in 1906. In this and other stories he pictures with peculiar warmth and delicacy of feel ing eccentric characters of the Bohemian type, developing and illustrating their odd quirks of character with gentle humor, genial irony, and affectionate tolerance. Herbert G. Wells, 1866 It was the fortune of Herbert G. Wells to be an assistant in the laboratory of the great scientist Huxley. This experience led to the creation of almost a new type of English fiction, the scientific romance, as seen in The Time Machine and In the Days of the Comet. Wells is a student of sociology and ardently interested in the problems of the laboring masses. In The First Men in the Moon, with a suggestion of Swift's grim irony, he satirizes society as it is to-day, and in New Worlds for Old and A Modern Utopia he pictures society as it will be when regulated by science and socialism. The purpose of his books is to promote more generous ideals of life, to commend a society in which the spirit of good-will prevails, instead of the spirit of competitive and selfish profit. Even the most fantastic creations of his imagination, infinitely ingenious and absurd, are stimulating and thought-provoking in the direction of better living. Maurice Hewlett, 1861 Maurice Hewlett is a writer of romantic fiction and master of a rich poetic prose style, shaped by the combined influence of classic, Italian, and French literature. The Little Novels of Italy are so true in their atmosphere as to be almost direct transcripts from life, and are as finished in their art as sketches by Pater. His preference is for historic characters, which he treats with a free imagination and poetic coloring, as in Richard Yea-and-Nay and The Queen's Quair. Hewlett is also a delightful guide among the art treasures of Italy. In Earthwork Out of Tuscany he charmingly succeeds in his purpose to "convey the hawthorn scent of Della Robbia," and "the mellow autumn tones of the life of Florence." Any serious survey of the present conditions of literature must result in an impression of large and varied products in every department, possessing many distinguishing excellences. But one looks in vain for the supreme excellence that sheds its light like a flaming beacon over the whole field. English literature to-day is amazingly rich in talent, but poor in genius. Busy authors innumerable are working with splendid enthusiasm, and with ample knowledge of their art, lacking nothing but inspiration. Like Arnold's Scholar Gypsy, all are eagerly, expectantly "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall." PROGRAM OF WORK THE POETS. WATSON: Wordsworth's Grave; Lachrymæ Musarum; Autumn; In Laleham Churchyard; Ode on May. BRIDGES: Larks; A Robin; Nightingales; Spirits; Winter Nightfall; Poor Withered Rose. GIBSON: The Machine (in Fires); The Furnace and The Night-Shift (in Daily Bread). MASEFIELD: Ships; The West Wind; Sea Fever; The Seekers; Tewksbury Road; Laugh and be Merry; The Word. NOYES: Forty Singing Seamen; The Barrel Organ; Drake, bk. 11; A Coiner of Angels and Raleigh (in Tales of the Mermaid Tavern). BROOKE: Blue Evening; The Hill; Sonnets of 1914: Peace, Safety, The Dead I, II, The Soldier. RusSELL: The Gates of Dreamland; Beauty; The Voice of the Waters. DOBSON: A Garden Idyl; Good - Night, Babette; Tu Quoque; Avice; Arceus Exit (Triolet); When I Saw You Last, Rose (Villanelle); In After Days (Rondeau). GOSSE: Lying in the Grass; Wind of Provence; Greece and England; With a Copy of Herrick; Theocritus; Revelation. LANG: Ballade of Blue China; Ballade of the Book-hunter; Ballade of Literary Fame; Ronsard's Grave; Villanelle. Most of these poems will be found in Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, or Stedman's Victorian Anthology. THE DRAMATISTS. SYNGE: Riders to the Sea; The Playboy of the Western World. YEATS: The Land of Heart's Desire; Cathleen ni Hoolihan; Poems: The Lake Isle of Innesfree; The White Birds; The Hosting of the Sidhe. LADY GREGORY: Spreading the News; The Workhouse Ward; The Gaol Gate. PHILLIPS: Paola and Francesca. SHAW: Arms and the Man; You Never Can Tell. GALSWORTHY: Strife; Joy. BARRIE: What Every Woman Knows. THE NOVELISTS. CONRAD: Typhoon; Lord Jim. BENNETT: The Old Wives' Tale. PHILLPOTTS: Children of the Mist. WELLS: The Time Machine; New Worlds for Old; Kipps. GALSWORTHY: The Man of Property; The Freelands. DE MORGAN: Joseph BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM. Archer's Poets of the Younger Generation; Kennedy's English Literature; Cooper's Some English Story Tellers; Phelps's Essays on Modern Novelists: Hale's Dramatists of Today; Howe's Dramatic Portraits; Huneker's Iconoclasts (Shaw); Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw; Weygandt's Irish Plays and Playwrights; Lady Gregory's Our Irish Theater; Bourgeois's Synge and the Irish Theater; Yeats's Celtic Twilight; Bickley's Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement; Howe's John M. Synge: A Critical Study; Elton's Modern Studies; Figgis's Studies and Appreciations; Masefield's John M. Synge; More's The Drift of Romanticism (Fiona Macleod). |