soul of a dreamer; but he smothers it, for a reason. which appears to him good.

The reason is his father, a veteran of the Civil War, useless now and idle, a boastful old relic"Windy" McPherson. It is, in short, because his father is an incompetent idealist, who allows his wife to take in washing to support the family while he brags in the streets about the glories of his soldier days, that Sam in hurt boyish pride smothers his own idealism. Ashamed and angry, he cries: "You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson." And he becomes the man of the family, hard-headed, practical, cold, and a little cruel, even as a boy. He is going to be successful.

He is successful. Halfway through the book we find the son of "Windy" McPherson rising rapidly in an arms-manufacturing company in Chicago. "I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business. men talk," he writes to his sweetheart. "They are full of sentiment and ideals which are not true. Having a thing to sell, they always say it is the best, although it may be third-rate. I do not object to that. What I do object to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third-rate thing is a first-rate thing, until the hope becomes a belief. . . . I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses swords with me in a

business deal and I come out of the affair with the money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign that I am the keener man."

His philosophy is put to the test when at the height of his career it becomes necessary for him to turn against his father-in-law, through whose assistance he has achieved control of the company. He acts sensibly, and votes to throw the useless old The old man does not act so sensibly; he broods over it and shoots himself.

man out.

That, naturally, does not improve Sam's relations with the old man's daughter, his wife. But the marriage was already moribund, without that. Sam had believed in his marriage-deeply; yet somehow it failed to be all that he wished. Here certainly his philosophy failed him. He could not master happiness. He is, in fact, though he does not as yet realize it, a failure in life. But he grinds ahead.

Only one does not quite lose sight, in the hard and successful business man, of the wondering, puzzled, listening boy of Caxton, trying to get at the meaning of life. He still tries to be the man he had determined to be-the man he thought it best to be. When the news of his father-in-law's suicide comes to him, his comment is: "The old fool." A just comment, according to his philosophy. . . . But that same day he realizes that life has become meaningless to him. Whereupon he walks out of his office and disappears from the world.

It was either that or-worse. When one's philosophy of life has broken down, one must find a new one or go insane. So, severing without a word every tie that binds him to the world, he walks out of Chicago, down a country road, seeking the truth -his truth.

Things happen to him: such things as might happen to a millionaire-or anybody else who did such a rash thing as to go in search of the truth. Once, curiously enough, he tries to find it in the Socialist Party; but he and the Party, I regret to say, do not hit it off.

What he finds, after what adventures, I will leave you to discover. After all, the story is not the most important thing. Nor, to me, is the important thing the emotional power and the rich humour of the book, nor its intimate truth to American life, nor the passion and splendour of its literary quality. The thing which captures me and will not let me go is the profound sincerity, the note of serious, baffled, tragic questioning which I hear above its laughter and tears. It is, all through, an asking of the question which American literature has hardly as yet begun to ask: "What for?"

The old facile answers are unsatisfying: the facile new ones not less so. Perhaps there is no answer. But we must ask. And the writer who puts that question in intimate and vivid terms of the lives of men and women, completely, fearlessly, candidly, is

such an interpreter of American life as we have need of.

For it is that spirit of profound and unresting questioning which has made Russian literature what it is. "Why? why? why?" echoes insistently through all their pages-Turgeniev and Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Chekhov, Artzibashev and Gorky. It echoes, too, in this book, like a great bell pealing its tremendous question to the unanswering sky, and awaking dangerously within one's self something that one has carefully laid to sleep-perhaps one's soul, who knows?

1916

XIV. "Casuals of the Sea"

F

ICTION is accustomed to deal with people who are either the masters or the victims of life. But ordinary people do not fall into either category-which is one reason why most fiction, even of the best, is false. Few of us, except in romantic day-dreams, are masters of our fate; but most of us do, now and then, buck up and refuse to let circumstances thwart us in their accustomed way. We are none of us without our little triumphs. But it takes an unusual novelist to make a first-rate story, without exaggeration or sentimental heroizing-or, what is still less to the point, pity— out of such lives.

William McFee, however, appears to be such a writer; for in "Casuals of the Sea," he has made one of the most interesting books I have read in years out of the lives of two ordinary people, without finding it necessary to invest them with any false glamour. They are a brother and a sister, who, like many brothers and sisters, are not in the least alike. The girl has that curious kind of hardness which, when it is native and ingrained, deals successfully with circumstances that would overwhelm peo