THE flood of spring fiction,1 like other spring floods, has been formidable in proportion to the length and severity of the winter; but the river in which we stagger will at least not ignite.

Out of a score or more of smartly attired volumes the most important among the native American products is the Deliverance, by Miss Ellen Glasgow, and even this is hardly up to the high level of the author's previous work. It is neither as broad and sane, nor as masterly in its grasp of complex and chaotic social conditions, as the Voice of the People; nor has it all the solemn unity and concentrated pathos of the Battle Ground. Nevertheless, it is a searching and a striking book; and, like its predecessors, it is especially interesting for the strong light it sheds on what, after a lapse of forty years, is only now beginning dimly to be perceived as one of the most momentous consequences to our whole country of the war of secession, the death, namely, and by violence, or, at least, the mortal hurt, of a comparatively ripe white civilization in the Southern United States.

The scene of the Deliverance is laid in Virginia. The time is about twenty years after the close of the civil war.

1 The Deliverance. By ELLEN GLASGOW. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1904.

Henderson. By ROSE E YOUNG. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1904. An Evans of Suffolk. By ANNA FARQUHAR. Boston: L. C. Page & Co. 1904.

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. London and New York: The Macmillan Co. 1904.

Violett: a Chronicle. By the BARONESS VON HUTTEN. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1904.

The Day before Yesterday. By SARA ANDREW SHAFFER. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1904.

The pitiful relics of the proud old race which had reigned for generations at Blake Hall, going their ways of careless magnificence, and adored, in the main, by the ever increasing swarms of their childish dependents, are now reduced to dire penury, and living a life of grinding toil, on the produce of a small fragment of the ancestral tobacco fields, in the house which was once the overseer's; while the overseer, Bill Fletcher, a hoary reprobate, who had stolen, bit by bit, all that was left of the Blake possessions after the fall of the Confederacy, is installed in their place at the Hall.

The hero of the tale is Christopher Blake, the youngest child of the fallen family, and the intrigue turns upon the conflict in his warped mind between a steadfast purpose of revenge upon the usurper and his love for the usurper's granddaughter. The details of the story are necessarily painful. The father of the Blake children had fallen early in the war. The mother, blind, paralyzed, and with memory much impaired, but stately and overbearing still, is actually kept in ignorance, through the pious mendacity of her children and one or two devoted old servants, of the fact that they are no longer living at the Hall, and even

Kwaidan. By LAFCADIO HEARN. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1904. Cap'n Eri. By JOSEPH C. LINCOLN. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1904. Mrs. M'Lerie. By J. J. BELL. New York: The Century Co. 1904.

Running the River. By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1904.

Said the Fisherman. By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904.

The Great Adventurer. By ROBERT SHACKLE-
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

FORD. 1904.

horribly

that the Southern Confederacy is no more. If this deluded lady, and her brother,a ruined Confederate officer, maimed and mutilated, but of an exceeding sweet and gallant spirit, and, on the other hand, the coarse monster installed at Blake Hall, seem collectively a trifle overdrawn, it cannot be said that either is an impossible, or even an improbable figure while that is indeed a keen observer, and a skilled artist as well, who can thus draw the hero of the Deliverance as he first appeared to Fletcher's lawyer, when the latter came to Christopher as the bearer of a peculiarly insulting proposition:

"He perceived, at once, a certain coarseness of finish which, despite the deep-seated veneration for an idle ancestry, is found most often in the descendants of a long line of generous livers. A moment later, he weighed the keen gray flash of the eyes, beneath the thick fair hair, the coating of dust and sweat over the high-bred curve from brow to nose, and the fullness of the jaw, which bore, with a suggestion of sheer brutality, upon the general impression of a fine, racial type. Taken from the mouth up, the face might have passed as a pure, fleshly copy of the antique ideal; seen downward, it became almost repelling in its massive power."

The plan of reprisals over which Christopher Blake brooded throughout his growing years was a ruthless, not to say a revolting one. How he achieved his grim purpose, and then, when suddenly awakened to a sense of its moral enormity, what he voluntarily underwent by way of expiation, may best be read in the book itself. The title of the tale foreshadows a hopeful conclusion, and we gladly accept its augury. Nevertheless, it is, as I have said, the haunting thought of a civilization untimely slain, which the Deliverance, no less than the Battle Ground, leaves uppermost in our minds.

a blossom of time, long prepared, and slowly perfected. A revolution tears the flower from its delicate stem, and grinds it into the dust. The revolution may have been, by all historic law, a righteous one; the flower not worth, upon the whole, the lavish cost, to humanity, of its culture. The doomed order may have served its purpose, and deserved its fate. That is not now the point; but simply the fact that something fair must needs perish even in a so-called holy war, - which it will take uncounted years of peace to recreate.

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One of the most memorable passages in that very stimulating and instructive book, Trevelyan's History of the American Revolution, is that in which the author turns aside from his lively narrative of the sequence of events in 1776, to describe the modest affluence and quiet beauty which had, by that time, come to characterize a good many of the rural homes in New York and New Jersey, so soon to be laid waste by the hireling troops of his most sapient Majesty George III. The Whig historian paints a wistful and beguiling picture of what the mere outward aspect of life on the Atlantic seaboard might have been by this time if the American Revolution had never taken place. It is the race-ideal of the English home: "All things in order stored. A haunt of ancient peace," - a vision of mild manners, healthful growth, moderate standards, and mellow surroundings. He can hardly be consoled for those lost amenities, and neither, for the moment, can I. Yet even there, — in what used, in those far days, to be called the Middle States, and though that favored region was, and remained until the long conflict was over, a chief theatre of military operations, the decivilizing consequences, to a young community, of seven years of war were hardly as marked as in the North, where manufactures were completely paralyzed, and exhausted men had to wring their scant living out of a harder soil and under less

kindly skies. I myself can perfectly remember, as a child, hearing very old people describe the harrowing poverty, and profound depression among the farming population of New England, of the years immediately following the war of Independence. The men of the Revolution had indeed won, while the men of the Confederacy had lost; but there are moments in the history, both of individuals and nations, when victory, if less galling, seems almost more barren and disappointing than defeat. And so we come back to Miss Glasgow, and her Southerners of the old social order, and the good things which undeniably passed away with them.

One of the best of these I take to have been the most beautiful use of our mother tongue, in every-day speech, that America has yet known. From father to son, for generations, the well-born Virginian or Marylander went to William and Mary College, as a matter of course, and lightly forgot, in his after life of landed proprietor and sportsman, a good deal of what he learned there; but seldom the trick of that sub-scholarly English, easy, racy, and felicitous, which was so much more excellent than the speaker himself knew. The wives and daughters of these men used their language instinctively, but with a touch of added refinement, which enhanced its charm. Happily there are localities and there are clans in which the tradition of that pure speech and the soft intonations that accompanied it yet live, and many a fondly guarded chest of old letters ad Familiares to attest the truth of what I say. When a Southerner of the ancient type stood up, of fell purpose, to make a speech, or sat down to write a book, he frequently became stilted and self-conscious; but his unstudied utterance was both noble and simple; and most admirable of all in that it was unstudied. The unconscious use of grammatical niceties is one of the most infallible marks of race. I have known a

white-haired Tuscan woman, bearing the suggestive name of Massima, who went out charring at two lire a day, and who gracefully apologized for pointing out to her employer that the latter had used. an expression which was not Dantesque. And a very dear old Parisienne — who had herself come down to taking pensionnaires for practice in French, said once to me: "Ma belle-mère était toute grande dame. She used the past subjunctive without thinking." Now the best of us in New England, and especially in Boston, can use with precision our equivalent of the past subjunctive; but I fear we seldom do it without a lurking consciousness of literary merit, and a modest anticipation of applause.

There is, however, great danger that what we typify by the past subjunctive may soon become more completely a thing of the past among us than even its name implies; and one of its worst foes is the lavish, not to say shameless, employment in print of that rude, shapeless, inchoate utterance which can be represented to the eye only by bad spelling and worse grammar, and which has no legitimate claim whatsoever to the honorable name of dialect. Even Miss Glasgow's pages are disfigured by too much of what that fine purist, Theodore Winthrop, used to call "black babble." But her own English is very nearly impeccable, which is more than can be said for the unquestionably clever author of Henderson, or the unterrified author of An Evans of Suffolk.

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Yet it is hardly fair to bracket these two books, for Henderson is a great deal the better performance of the two, and a decided advance upon its predecessor, Sally of Missouri. The author can indeed use that as a qualifying adverb, make the nicest of her people preface their most serious remarks by some such simian aggregation of consonants as "mh-hm," and write nonsense, in her own person, about "the dying day, trailing off in a shining halation," and the "sud

den break " in a woman's "plastic strength." Nevertheless, her tale is tersely and dramatically told. The young surgeon who figures as its hero is an uncommonly fine fellow, who passionately does his professional best to save the husband of the woman whom he loves; and may be said to deserve, in a general way, and under the code prevailing in fiction, that a big oak tree, uprooted by a Missouri hurricane, should fall upon the patient he has loyally healed, in the last chapter of the book but one.

Miss Young, it appears, has herself been a medical student, and a brilliant

one.

"There's only one little mistake in that whole thing!" was the admiring comment of a successful surgeon on the strong chapter entitled the Life on the Table, which first appeared, I think, in this magazine. But let her make her next story a little less pathological. A romance ought not to reek of chloroform.

Miss Anna Farquhar, having previously tried her hand at social satire in Her Boston Experiences, and Her Washington Experiences, returns to the attack of the former city in An Evans of Suffolk, but can hardly be said to have effected a serious breach in its venerable defenses. This book is clever too, — in a vain, jaunty, trivial sort of way, with a cleverness that might be better employed. We can hardly be expected seriously to believe that a respectable Bostonian, returning to his native town after a long sojourn in Paris, and being gravely reminded by somebody's maiden aunt that her ancestors commanded his at the battle of Bunker Hill, is so prostrated by amusement at the idea as to drop upon the main stairway of a Beacon Street house, in the midst of an evening reception, and laugh until a lady's maid has to be summoned to replace his missing buttons! As a bit of burlesque, upon the other hand, this incident fails to amuse. It would appear that, after all, and for whatever reason, the ways of old Boston are not easy to

burlesque. Surely there is, even yet, and though we live, as one may say, after the deluge, a character and a cachet about society there, as marked as in that of the old-time South; yet I cannot at this moment recall a single really good Boston novel. The Bostonians of Mr. Henry James was written a long while ago; and though the author had, as a matter of course, full knowledge of his theme, and could never have committed those violations of probability and sins against good taste into which most of his followers have fallen, his purpose was a little too obviously and exclusively one of persiflage. The Rev. Bolton King, in Let Not Man Put Asunder, caught a better likeness, but was not quite fair, upon the whole, to the morals of the Puritan city; while Alice Brown, in her able and thoughtful story of Margaret Warrener, did not pretend to go outside the circumscribed limits of Boston's rather colorless Bohemia. The true comedy — and it should be in the fullest sense of the term high comedy of the three hills, and the westward flats, and the reclaimed fens, is yet to be written.

The Anglo-Germans are also here,bearing what the department stores call their "Easter gifts." The tricksy but ever fascinating Elizabeth, who, though still reveling in the joy of a semi-transparent incognita, takes unquestioned precedence both by social and literary law, is at her best and brightest in the new book, —a narrative of the adventures, comic and sad, that befell her in the Baltic island of Rügen. She would seem to have discharged, once for all, — in that rather caustic tale, the Benefactress, all her accumulated spleen against the petty ways of the German female, and the oppressive ways of the German official, and she now offers herself most amiably to be the reader's guide upon an entirely novel kind of summer tour. Her temper is, for the moment, perfectly sunny; her wit spontaneous, unflagging, irresistible. Under

the spell of her careless and yet graphic word-painting, we behold great breadths of dancing waves and the solemn glory of ancient beech woods; we see acres of salt meadow all silvery with plumed cotton-grass, and fairly scent the exhilarating breeze that blows across them. And then, the attendants who minister to my lady's whims, and the few other tourists whom she meets upon her eccentric way, Cousin Charlotte, the feministe, and her ineffable spouse; Mrs. Harvey-Brown, the bishop's lady from England, with her simple-minded son "Brosy," how demurely, how inimitably, with what infectious and yet not unkindly gayety all these are depicted! "Why Brosy?' I took courage to inquire.

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Well, but why should n't they, if they want to?'

"But, dear Frau X., it is so foolish. East sea? Of what is it the east? One is always east of something, but one does n't talk about it! The name has no meaning whatever. Now Baltic exactly describes it.'"

On another occasion, when Mrs. Harvey-Brown sniffs insolence in a waiter, she inquires of the long-suffering Ambrose whether he does not think they had better "tell him who father is ;" and this parochial use of the word father

Not for the first time since the auspicious beginning of our acquaintance with Elizabeth do we catch, amid her Teutonic accessories and her studied Anglican allusions, the strangely familiar gleam of an echter Americanism. "Besides," observes the inimitable Charlotte, when explaining how she, too, happened to be in remote Rügen, "I was run down." He who can tell us why she did not say "pulled down will prove, by the same token, that he knows what Rameses knows."

In Violett, by the Baroness von Hutten (Violett is a boy's name, with a presumable accent on the final syllable), we have a pathetic and original donnée, and much of the peculiar grace of narration which characterized Our Lady of the Beeches. The new book is a musical novel, and not exempt from the touch of morbid sentimentalism which no musical novel wholly escapes. But the professional people, in particular, who figure in its pages, are drawn with a vigor and verisimilitude which argue personal acquaintance; the rather cruel Bohemia where they play their parts is invested with no false glamour; and the tragic end of the sad little story is too inevitable and too simply told to appear melodramatic.