BOOKS AND AUTHORSCONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.
BOOKS AND AUTHORS
CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.
CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.
CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. By Thomas Dixon, Jr. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. Price, $1.50.
Bethany: A Story of the Old South. By Thomas E. Watson. D. Appleton & Co., New York. Price, $1.50.
In considering these two books, it is impossible to avoid comparing and contrasting them with each other. Both aim at historical study as well as romantic presentation, and both are conceived from the Southerner’s view-point of the great Civil War. Both writers are famous platform figures, and neither, it may be conceded, is equipped by taste, temperament, or training, for purely literary work. Both Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson have interests more absorbing than the production of artistic fiction, and the novels of neither can fairly be judged by the higher critical standards. One feels in reading the fiction of Mr. Dixon and Mr. Watson that it is but the vehicle of a purpose other than literary, and furthermore, that that purpose must be the presentation of truth. And here it is that the gap between the two authors begins to widen, for Mr. Dixon’s self-conscious rhetoric and platform appeal give the lie even to unimpeachable history, while Mr. Watson’s narration has the very accent of truth in its homely simplicity and utter absence of pose.
“The Clansman” opens upon the political ferment at Washington just before Lincoln’s assassination, and Lincoln, Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens, and other prominent men of that period are depicted in somewhat daring detail of characterization and narration. With the revolution of the national policy which followed Lincoln’s death, the scene is shifted to South Carolina, where the horrors of reconstruction and the heroic work of the Ku Klux Klan are painted in Mr. Dixon’s most highly colored rhetoric. We have no disposition to belittle the tragedy of that period in the South, and there is no doubt that the secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan did save the Southern people from much indignity and degradation, but the manner of Mr. Dixon’s narration has not the dignity of truth, and, however true his individual instances may be, the effect of the story is not that of truth. The note of heroic determination and impressive mystery which dignified the mummery of the Ku Klux Klan into a power to save Southern civilization and protect Southern womanhood, Mr. Dixon misses entirely, and his treatment, like a tawdry bit of gilding, vulgarizes what it touches.
“Mr. Dixon, in literature, has repeated his successes of the pulpit and platform,” his publishers’ note informs us, and it is so far true that he has repeated in his novels the methods of his platform and pulpit successes. But save in the commercial sense, it cannot be said that Mr. Dixon’s work in fiction is a success, and it stands justified only by a prevailing bad taste and his own and his publishers’ pocket-book.
“A Story of the Old South”—we may be pardoned for a slightly tired feeling on reading those words on the title page of “Bethany,” but the first chapter is reassuring in its sturdy presentation of middle class Georgia life, simple, unpretentious, plain, and absolutely uncolored with the grandeur, so familiar in “befo’ the wah” fiction. It is refreshing to read such passages as these:
“We Hortons were a family of middle class farmers. We had never been anything else. We never expected to be anything else. Our condition was good enough for us. We had plenty of land. We had always had it.... Yes; we had prospered; and had always been independent. We were not rich, you understand: just comfortable; with good farms, fat stock, and likely niggers We owed no debts; we had a few hundred of dollars in pocket, ready for an emergency—such as a request for a loan to some friend who might have got into a temporary ‘tight’ by betting on the wrong horse, or by trying to make four queens beat a straight flush....
“So far as we came into touch with the outside world at all, we were indebted to Bethany—a little, one-horse hamlet, where we worshiped and got the mail. Bethany had a granite depot on the Georgia railroad. Bethany had a post office. Bethany had a dry-goods store and two doggeries. Anyone who wished to run a horse race, fight chickens, play poker, or throw ‘chuck-a-luck,’ could do so at Bethany.
“The mansion in which we lived was a very modest affair. It did not, in the least, resemble a Grecian temple which had been sent into exile and which was striving, unsuccessfully, to look at ease among corn-cribs, cow-pens, horse-stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, negro cabins, and worm-fenced cotton fields. It did not perch upon the top of the highest hill for miles around, and browbeat the whole community with its arrogant self-assertion. No; ours was just a plain house and none too large, not built out of bricks brought over from England, but of timbers torn from the heart of the long-leaf Georgia pine.”
In this vein Mr. Watson proceeds to give a picture of the plain Georgian and his environment, which has all the charm of personal reminiscence and the weight of historic truth. One feels in reading these simple annals of the Hortons of Georgia that just so they must have lived and not otherwise, and the last paragraph of the first chapter describes for us the effect of Mr. Watson’s portrayal:
“It all rises before me complete as a picture, vivid as a flash of lightning—a plain, unpretentious, comfortable, happy Southern home of the old regime—and like a castle among the clouds it is gone forever, even while I gaze; just as the republic of our fathers, of which that old home was a typical part, is gone, forever gone.”
In Georgia, perhaps, this sturdy middle class exercised a more potent and pervading influence over social and political life than was the case in other Southern states, and its flavor and quality are reproduced to the life by Mr. Watson. As we read his record we see what was perhaps the most practical realization of the democratic ideal of society which this democracy has yet produced—a community of Anglo-Saxon blood, rugged manhood, gentle womanhood, simple habits and neighborly fraternity. Mr. Watson gives us the picture of this period with no reservation or exaggeration,—its beauties and its blots, its virtues and its vices, its development and its limitation, and throughout his work there is a rare mingling of impartial honesty and the sympathetic touch of close and intimate knowledge and association.
The political agitation of the two years previous to the war in Georgia is reproduced carefully and effectively by Mr. Watson, and the Toombs and Stephens struggle set forth clearly and skilfully. The pen portraits of these great Georgians are sharply and strongly outlined, and may be regarded as of historic interest and importance. A spicy and forcible chapter is that describing a political barbecue at Bethany at which Toombs and Stephens spoke, and of which the festivities were further marked by an eye-gouging affair between two drunken patriots. We see in Mr. Watson’s narrative the various currents of Southern sentiment and their irresistible convergence into the tide of secession, and the Southern attitude is strongly justified as a logical result of the Northern breach of contract in refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave laws. “As to the right of secession,” says Mr. Watson, “no one denied it.... With Adams, Webster, and Calhoun harmonized in favor of secession, it did seem that the principle must be sound.”
The second part of Mr. Watson’s book, and not the more interesting, treats of the war and a rather shadowy love affair, pitched in the key of the sentimental songs of that period, with their faded flowers, mocking-birds, and pathetic partings. The story of the war is told briefly, with no prejudice or passion, from the gallant days of hope and victory to the last sad struggle against the inevitable. There is no swagger of tone, no attempt at glamour in these war pictures, but a faithful and forcible presentation of what that time meant to the common soldier and the South. Indeed, the whole book has a historic value as a truthful study of an interesting period of Southern and national life, and with no pretense of literary art, it has a distinct charm of simple narration and vivid reminiscence.
The Law of the Land.ByEmerson Hough, Author of “The Mississippi Bubble,” etc. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.
There is no lack of excitement in Mr. Hough’s latest novel—intrigue, mystery, villainy, a negro uprising, a Mississippi overflow—these succeed each other rapidly and bewilderingly, and there is “something doing” in every chapter. The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,—“the richest region on the face of the whole earth,” “the heart of the only American part of America”—and the race question in its intensest and most picturesque form is the theme of the book. From a dramatic and artistic standpoint, the theme and the setting are well chosen, and in the description of the negro gathering in the forest at the call of the savage drum and the half-hinted horrors of the revenge of the whites, there is the unmistakable thrill of literary power and skill.
The conventional hero is a railroad claim agent, rather an original role for a Southern hero of romance, and a thoroughly good fellow he is, but the masterpiece of characterization is that of Colonel Calvin Blount of the Big House,—rough, brave, chivalrous, lordly, ruling over his wide acres with the imperious will and open-handed generosity of a feudal baron. His trial for murder in a lynching case is the culminating point of the book, and Eddring’s speech in his defense presents the author’s solution of the race problem in the South. “The law of the land” must be transgressed sometimes in the letter that it may be kept in the spirit, and Colonel Blount is acquitted of the murder which he committed in view of the horrors which negro rule would bring to Southern civilization. There is nothing new or profound in Mr. Hough’s treatment of the race problem, but in presenting it as it exists in the lower South in its most extreme form, he has availed himself of excellent material for dramatic romance. To the average American the life to which Mr. Hough introduces us in “The Law of the Land” will seem as strange and foreign as a glimpse into the jungles of Africa, but it is real, if exceptional, and Mr. Hough’s vivid picture may disturb the academic theories of New England to some extent. Had the author spared us the treatise on the race problem as embodied in Eddring’s defense of Colonel Blount, the novel would have been lightened by so much dead weight of argument and rhetoric. As it is, “The Law of the Land,” leaving out the tinselly plot on which the heroine’s identity and fortune depend, is a good story of dramatic power, picturesque description, and strong characterization.
The Master-Word.A Story of the South To-day. ByL. H. Hammond. The Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.
This, the first novel, of a Southern woman, bears no mark of immaturity, feminine weakness, or sectional prejudice. The style is notably compact and finished, the handling strong and restrained, and the grasp of philosophic breadth and impartiality. Mrs. Hammond is something more than the clever woman who, in such numbers, is pervading the literature of the day—she is clearly a woman who can think closely and deeply, and her literary work has a real solidity of substance and significance. She has given us in “The Master-Word” a strong and original story, direct from her own thought, experience and observation, though it does not prove always humanly convincing or artistically satisfactory.
“The Master-Word” is a problem novel in a double sense, for though the race question is the theme with which it is chiefly concerned, the sex question figures also in a subordinate way. Both problems are solved by the writer with the master-word, Love, not Law—Love that suffers, sacrifices, and conquers, not Law that judges, condemns and punishes. This idea is wrought out with psychical insight and vigorous reasoning, and as a thesis is eminently satisfactory, but the story which is the medium of its illustration does not always ring true, and moreover is weakest at the crucial points.
Margaret, the young wife of Philip Lawton, a prosperous and aristocratic lawyer and farmer of Tennessee, discovers suddenly the fact of her husband’s criminal relations with a mulatto woman and his fatherhood of the latter’s child, a girl about the age of Margaret’s own daughter. She refuses to forgive and their estranged relations continue till he is stricken with pneumonia. At his deathbed the love she thought dead revives, and she forgives, as she realizes that the master-word is Love, not Law. This scene, by the way, is strongly reminiscent of the concluding chapter of “The Mettle of the Pasture,” where the dying husband delivers himself of his stagy and unnatural monologue.
After Philip’s death, Margaret, as a sort of reparation in Philip’s name, conceives the idea of taking his illegitimate negro child, deserted by its mother, under her protection and care, so the little quadroon girl is brought to the Lawton home and placed in charge of Aunt Dilsey, the old mammy, who proclaims it her grandchild. There Viry is reared, playing with the Lawton children, sharing much of their life, but recognized as a “nigger” and treated on that basis. She is sent, as she grows older, to a negro college, where she learns rapidly, and finally comes back to the Lawtons and Aunt Dilsey, dissatisfied and embittered, frankly hating the race with which she is classed, but attached by the strongest affection to Bess Lawton, her half-sister. She becomes a teacher in a negro school, but holds herself aloof from the negroes, and grows more bitter and desperate. Bruce Carleton, the lover of Bess, is the object of her secret passion, and the savage, bestial strain in her make-up comes out in her plan to attract him and hold him in what to him would be a purely sensual tie. Finding out that Bess really loves him, however, she renounces her purpose, and, hopeless of happiness, tries to commit suicide. Then comes the culminating point of the book in the disclosure to Viry by Margaret of the secret of the former’s birth. Margaret lays bare her own suffering and her husband’s sin and makes a powerful appeal to the girl to accept her maimed and burdened life and make it in some measure an atonement and a redemption. Viry’s heart is reached at last, and she, too, bows to the master-word, Love, which means for her a life of service and loneliness. The race line must not be obliterated—this is made plain, and Mrs. Hammond’s argument is notably strong and unhackneyed. Margaret’s reply to Viry, when the latter, “the red blood burning in her face,” throws up to her the existence of three million mulattos as a proof that instinct is not against the union of black and white, is the most convincing and complete answer to that plea that has yet been presented.
It seems to us unfortunate that Mrs. Hammond should have chosen to base her story on an incident at once so repulsive and so untrue as that of Philip Lawton’s criminal connection with the degraded mulatto. For, under the conditions described and set forth by the author, the case of Philip is so absolutely untypical and strikingly exceptional that its use as the foundation stone of so serious a story seems an amazing blunder of judgment, taste and ethics. Then, again, it is hardly conceivable that a woman of Margaret’s training and temperament, would have found her duty in bringing her husband’s negro child into her own household in constant contact with herself and her children. The step seems forced and unnatural in the highest degree, and no less so appears the wife’s disclosure of her husband’s shame after so many years to the quadroon girl. Nature, womanhood, taste, all revolt against such a situation. Reality is sacrificed to theory, and Margaret becomes the author’s creature, not her creation; her spokesman, not a natural woman. Viry, too, is not quite genuine to our perceptions, and can certainly not be regarded as a typical product of her blood and environment. At best her story is an extreme case, put in its most extreme terms.
The phosphate region of Middle Tennessee is the scene of the story, and its peculiar conditions of labor and the twists and turns of local politics are presented with a keen and trenchant touch. The young people of the book are an extremely natural and agreeable set, and the love affair of Bess and Bruce is as fresh and wholesome as the fine country air that pervades the book. Bruce is really a wonder for a woman’s hero, being neither cad nor prig, but merely a straight and likable young fellow with human faults and failings. Aunt Dilsey is at once a photograph, a phonograph, and a sympathetic sketch of the old-time negro mammy.
There is a looseness of construction, a prolixity of trifling incident, at certain portions of the book which at times weaken its interest, and it is evident that purely artistic ideals were not its chief inspiration. Still, when all is said, its merits far outweigh its faults, and it is well worth the serious criticism it will receive. It testifies strongly to the writer’s brain and skill and arouses interest in her future work.
The Secret Woman.ByEden Phillpotts. The Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.
The comparison to Hardy has become a commonplace of any criticism of Mr. Phillpotts’ literary output, and the comparison carries an inevitable distinction and disparagement. The distinction is that Mr. Phillpotts is the one writer worthy to be called a disciple of the Wessex chronicler, and the disparagement is in the differentiation at once apparent in the similarity. Primitive nature, physical and human, is Mr. Phillpotts’ theme as it is Mr. Hardy’s, and the primal passions in rustic life are the elements of both novelists’ tragedy and comedy. But though one man may want and try to make from the same material the same things as wrought by another, it is out of his power to do so, and Mr. Phillpotts’ work lacks the strength and seriousness of Mr. Hardy’s. In the first place, the colorless irony of the older writer, epitomized so perfectly in his title, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” is lacking entirely in Mr. Phillpotts, and the latter’s florid descriptions and psychologic analyses fail of the Hardy effect because of this lack. The personal note of Mr. Hardy, ironic, accentless, incisive, is the salt to his magnificent dish of natural elements, without which their strength and freshness would pall upon the taste. And as a literary artist, too, Mr. Phillpotts falls below his master. Despite the wealth of natural description with which he burdens so heavily his narratives, there is nothing that touches the Hardy landscapes in power and artistic truth. The wonderful and haunting picture of the moor in “The Return of the Native” is Hardy at highwater mark, it is true, but there is nothing in the Phillpotts gallery that can even be compared to it.
“The Secret Woman” is a story of human frailty, passion, crime, and soul struggle, set in the rocks and glades of Dartmoor. An illicit love between a married man and a beautiful and pagan-hearted girl is the basis of the plot, and the murder of the man by his wife in a fit of jealous rage is the first act of the tragedy. A touch worthy of Hardy occurs in the interview between husband and wife just after the latter’s discovery of the man’s unfaithfulness, when a sudden gust of wind and rain drowns the wife’s voice as she offers pardon, thus through the blow of blind fate sealing the husband’s doom. The murder is witnessed by the two sons, but is kept secret, though it divides the brothers and fills the mother’s life with a never-dying repentance. The figure of the murderess, Anne Redvers, and the study of her character and soul development, are the most elaborate and striking work of the book, but it is Salome, “the secret woman,” and her intrigue with the dead man, unknown and unsuspected, that furnish the motive for the drama. In striking contrast are the two women, one dark, stern, conscientious, softening and mellowing through sorrow and repentance into sympathy and forgiveness, the other fair, conscienceless, self-indulgent, swayed but by emotion and passion.
Jesse, one of the sons of the murdered man, loves this girl, his father’s paramour, and she becomes his betrothed, driven to this step by poverty, though she never intends to marry him. This intolerable situation is finally ended by his confession to Salome of his mother’s crime which has darkened his soul, and this is followed by Salome’s reckless disclosure of her love and sin to Anne Redvers, whom she denounces as a murderess. Anne goes to prison gladly, Jesse kills himself, and Salome lives on, constant to her dead lover and incapable of repentance. Truly Mr. Phillpotts has not spared us a possible horror.
We have, of course, the rustic comedy beneath the tragedy—the artless peasants, their quaint talk and ancient superstitions; and the figure of Joseph Westaway, the shiftless, tender-hearted incompetent, bravely and unreasonably optimistic amid crowding misfortunes, is very nearly a masterpiece of portraiture.
In this terrible drama, Mr. Phillpotts offers us in succession the various theories of materialism, Old Testament theology, pagan indifference, and simple, unquestioning faith in a divine power. Each is presented with admirable impartiality, its play upon the story being merely an aid to the desired dramatic effect. At the last, the struggle is between Anne and Salome, and the former who has found peace in Christian faith and atonement, makes her appeal to Salome to seek comfort and salvation by the same road. Finally Salome promises to take the sacrament, but as she kneels at the sacred table, her heart is unchanged—
“A man’s voice suddenly ended the silence and—echoes from a far past—his words fell upon her ear strangely. All solemnity has perished from them. The Commandments tinkled like a child’s little prayer at bedtime.... Light rained down and quenched the candles and touched the petals of exotic flowers. The air of the sanctuary was sweet with them; but Salome’s thoughts harboured in the dust.”
America, Asia and the Pacific.ByWolf von Schierbrand, Ph.D.Henry Holt & Co., New York.
The interest of the ancient and of the mediæval world centered around the Mediterranean. Recall the names of the states that fought for and obtained the trade of that sea and you have the history of civilization. Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Venice, Spain, one after another, played the leading role. With the discovery of the new world the scene shifted to the Atlantic and England shouldered her way to the limelight. Now, it seems, another new world and a richer has been discovered. It happens also to be the oldest world and the last act of the drama is to be played on the Pacific, the widest stage of all. Before the whole world as audience, the nations are contending for the prize—the trade of China. Which one is to get it?
Mr. von Schierbrand contributes to the solution of this question a very entertaining and instructive volume. From his standpoint, which is a most interesting one, the importance of the trade of the Far East to ourselves is not to be overestimated. The wonderful productive energy of the United States makes the need of new markets imperative. Four hundred millions of Chinese can furnish us such markets. Basing our figures on the precedent of Japan, China, if she would, could buy of the world $35,000,000,000 more. Her mineral wealth, still undeveloped, is greater than that of North America.
The author’s masterly marshaling of the means and the methods necessary to increase our commercial opportunities is the feature of his book. The political school to which he belongs and to which an immense majority of Americans belong, if the recent election meant anything, studies, at the same moment, the tonnage of the battleships and the quality of the cotton blouse on the Chinese coolie’s back. It carries us around the immense circle of the Pacific and calls the roll of the powers and principalities of the future—Canada, America, Java, Sumatra, Celebes, Borneo, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Siberia,—and asks which of the nations shall share with us these riches. England’s claim the writer dismisses with few words. England is conservative and decadent. Russia is more dangerous. She aims to absorb all Asia and close the door in the face of the world. The writer has an interesting discussion of the Russo-Japanese war in the course of which he prods the English again for not choking the Russians while they can.
Germany he pronounces our most formidable rival. German industry, frugality, patience and skill have brought her up since 1870, when she was purely an agricultural state, to the front rank in manufactures and in foreign trade. It may be added, parenthetically, that she is making persistent efforts to free herself from the American cotton monopoly.
Turning to the Japanese, the writer mentions a fact whose significance is little appreciated in America. Japan practically monopolizes now the trade in manufactured cotton with China, and, what is still more significant, she gets nearly all her raw cotton from India.
What is the secret purpose of Japan? Nobody knows. Does she see herself supplanting the wornout Manchu dynasty and leading the millions of the East to the mastery of Asia by the strength of her military genius? Will she then shut the doors to the outside world, as, in the sixteenth century, she shut her own? The writer makes light of the so-called Yellow Peril, arguing that Japan does not wish to exploit the latent military strength of China, but aspires to lead her in the path of industrial progress after the Western models upon which Japan has fashioned herself.
Mr von Schierbrand ignores the underlying spiritual differences that separate the Oriental from the European, differences that will always be the cause of hostility, open or veiled, between them. After all it is not so important who is to get the trade of the East but what are the ideals that are finally to prevail there—the Christian ideals or Oriental fatalism. It could be wished that the author felt more interest in such discussions. One is tempted to quote against him his own words in another connection: “Beside the mad passion for gain there is no charm in rest, lettered ease, travel, still less in labor for the general good—charity, education, the state; the ruling passion must rage on, business must be expanded regardless of profit and with eyes closed to impending loss. Instead of making ourselves more homes and more beautiful things and cultured people in them, we cherish the tenement house and the narrow life, and go on piling up and shoving out what we are pleased to call goods, goods, goods.” It is well enough to chasten ourselves with such reflections as we go on with the author to weigh the claim of the United States to the lion’s share in the trade of the Pacific.
The author bases our claim on the strategic advantage which the Panama Canal is to give us, and this part of the book is unquestionably most interesting to the South. The relation of the richest granary in the world, the Mississippi Valley, to the Canal will rid it of the need of railways. The canal will bring New York closer to the west coast of South America than San Francisco, and New Orleans will be seven hundred miles nearer still. The commercial availability of Southern coal and iron will be immensely increased and the harbors of the South will assume an importance long withheld from them as ports of call.
The book as a whole is well written, and the last chapters, which summarize the author’s conclusions, especially so. What he has to say about public opinion and of the force, more universal still, the primary need of the human race of food, which together share the sovereignty of the modern world, is well said and more philosophical by far than is usual with the books of the imperialists.
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The Color Line.ByWilliam Benjamin Smith. McClure, Phillips and Co., New York.
It is always a satisfaction when what has been dumbly felt is put at last into a clear-cut scientific concept. This is what William Benjamin Smith has done for us with his book on the negro problem. The South has always felt that the problem was not one involving philanthropy or the rights of man or any sort of altruism. Those are considerations that have to do with individuals. The negro problem is purely a question of race. As Mr. Bagehot pointed out in his clever book, “Physics and Politics,” the differences existing to-day between the Aryan races and the negro are greater than any causes now acting are capable of creating in present-day men. The laws of heredity are not fully known, but it is certain that the descendants of cultivated parents have an inborn aptitude for civilization due to the structure of their nervous systems. The uncivilized races do not improve; they have not the basis on which to build, but instead have inherited natures twisted into a thousand curious habits, a thousand strange prejudices and a thousand grotesque superstitions. The moment it is admitted that the difference between white and black is the product of evolution the hope of bridging the difference by education is gone. That it must be admitted is the thesis of Mr. Smith’s book, which ought to be read by every man and woman in the country who is open to reason. Once admitted, the conclusion follows swiftly and irresistibly. The duty of the white man to maintain in its purity the germ plasm of the white race justifies the denial of social equality to the black man. This is a duty which no sentimentality can excuse for it is a duty to civilization, to posterity, to the country. Neglect it, and mongrelization follows inevitably. We quote from the book: “It is this immediate jewel of her soul that the South watches with such a dragon eye, that she guards with more than vestal vigilance, with a circle of perpetual fire. The blood thereof is the life thereof; he who would defile it would stab her in her heart of hearts, and she springs to repulse him with the fiercest instinct of self-preservation.”
Mr. Smith has brought to his argument a wealth of learning and research which places his book in the rank of an authority on a much misunderstood question.
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The Pursuit of Phyllis.ByJohn Harword Bacon. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.
Tom Mott, a clever literateur of New York, is ordered to take a rest by his physician, and goes abroad to seek recreation and relaxation. At his London hotel, he finds in his dresser drawer some letters addressed to Miss Phyllis Huntingdon in the handwriting of an old chum, and impelled by a Quixotic impulse, he determines to restore them to their owner in person. From London he proceeds to Paris, thence to Marseilles, through the Mediterranean to Port Said and the Orient, very much in the style of an up-to-date Gabriel and Evangeline affair, always finding at each port that Miss Huntingdon’s departure had antedated his arrival by a few hours. Finally his quest is rewarded at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, where he meets Phyllis, a ruddy-haired, winsome young woman, who is likened successively by the imaginative Mr. Mott to a dish of pink ice cream, a rosy-tipped peony, and the summer girl on a magazine cover. They come back together across the world, ending the trip, after the excitement of a misunderstanding and a quarrel, in orthodox fashion. A lively trifle of globe-trotting and philandering is “The Pursuit of Phyllis,” easy to read, and disarming criticism by its utter lack of seriousness and significance.
Daphne and Her Lad.ByM. J. LagenandCally Ryland. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.
A story told in letters—the brilliant and showy correspondence so much affected in fiction and so rarely indulged in in real life. The writers, too, are newspaper folk, a man and a woman, each editor of a woman’s page, and we mildly wonder how they ever found time to sacrifice so much good “copy” to private correspondence. At first, the exchange of letters is but a journalistic flirtation between two unknown personalities, and it is maintained and continued to the point of intimate self-revelation and ardent lovemaking before the writers meet in the last chapter. The disclosure and denouement of the conclusion come with somewhat of a shock to the unsuspecting reader who has followed the airy persiflage and sentimental outpourings of these industrious letter writers with no thought of such a tragic ending as that on which the curtain falls. It was Stevenson who said that to give a bad ending to a story meant to end happily, or vice versa, was an unpardonable literary crime, and we must hold the authors of “Daphne and Her Lad” guilty of this offense. The story was not framed along the tragic lines which logically or artistically lead to hopeless misery, and the final impression is disturbing and ineffective.
The Millionaire Baby.ByAnna Katherine Green. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.
A startling crime, innumerable clues, the gradual elimination of every reasonable and plausible theory, and the construction of the wildest, most improbable explanation to fit the problem—these are the lines on which the detective stories of Anna Katherine Green are invariably framed, and “The Millionaire Baby” is no exception to the rule. A little girl, heiress to an immense fortune, is kidnapped during a garden fete at her parents’ palatial home on the Hudson, under most unusual circumstances, and the reader is at once lost in a labyrinth of mysterious old men, magnetic ladies, amazing coincidences, and secret chambers. The way out is pointed ultimately by a young detective, and the reader emerges feeling rather “sold.” Despite the writer’s unspeakable rhetoric and crude methods, her stories have a way of getting themselves read, and a large constituency will welcome “The Millionaire Baby.”
Tennessee History Stories.ByT. C. Karns. B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, Va.
The writer belongs to that loyal band of missionaries who are spreading abroad among the children of the nation the knowledge of the importance of the western chain of settlements on the Tennessee and Kentucky frontiers in the history of the United States. The stories he tells of John Sevier, of James Robertson and Daniel Boone, while written for the children, are well worth reading and the book is sure to earn a place in the curriculum of the primary schools.