A New-Old Tagore Play

Chitra: A Play in One Act, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award.

But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news obliges one, in the case of Chitra, to withhold the amiable dissecting knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the illustration of either the anatomist’s skill or the facts of anatomy. Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.

This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to that earlier strata of Tagore’s life which is to the normal mind so much more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.

As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play Chitra. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.

Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man’s hardness of frame and a man’s directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. “Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me....” Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins:

A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:

And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her transformation.

Arthur Davison Ficke.

An Unorthodox View of Burroughs

Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]

That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word “friendship.” If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of Burroughs, the words “our friend” in the title of their collaboration would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author’s opinion exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and useful before he is understood.

Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his “friends” live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied—but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men’s impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home to his readers.

Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment; Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides. He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust at nearly eighty years of age—he is seventy-seven this month—and I daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if his fellows were leaves.

By virtue of society’s struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs’ world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a modest beneficiary of humanity’s work. In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.

Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of everything that he has published, I never, until I read the autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial contempt—not for the man but for the type—which I have here tried to express.

D. C. W.

Another Masefield Tragedy

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, by John Masefield. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]

Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author’s special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield’s plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far as his contemporaries are concerned.

Masefield’s great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are themselves tragical. Life is full of and inseparable from tragedy. Pompey “saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun. He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds, to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man’s fire.” The old warrior lies awake, thinking. “What are we?” he asks Lucceius, and that actor in a great play replies, “Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an end.” Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the heart of the present and exclaims, “Tragedy!” And of course that is in his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer desperation he endues dust with a “tragic purpose,” but he does not believe so much as he hopes that a “purpose” inheres in that resultant of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of Pompey he says:

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, unlike any Shaw play or even The Tragedy of Nan, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one’s soul.

What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. “Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn’t backed him.” But that tyrant’s lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was “a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom.” Pompey’s dream of freedom—his conviction that power was in too few hands—cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly “a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws.” He declared that “Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power.” But Pompey’s dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the “thought of the world” as of transcendent importance, he asks, “For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?”

History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, “You have done nothing.” The reply—“Wait”—has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, “but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don’t hesitate. They don’t understand a man who hesitates.”

That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.

Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow “To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame.” To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia’s love. “We shall have to put off our marriage,” he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:

Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia’s was the supreme tragedy.

DeWitt C. Wing.

A Net to Snare the Sun

The World Set Free, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]

Do you remember the little verse of Kipling’s in the Just So Stories about the small person who kept so many serving men

There’s something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still wants to know: “Why can’t I catch the sun, and what would happen if I did?”

In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest book, The World Set Free, he goes back to a type of question that interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half sociological that produced In the Days of the Comet, The Time Machine, and When the Sleeper Wakes. But this book is not entirely like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.

What Wells has asked himself this time is: “What would happen if man were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?” He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.

A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind—mankind in the bulk, groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction, coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story, transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the mass of mankind,—a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,—but for the most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal pride.

Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches from the cave man through the “chuckle-headed youth” to the dying professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it to their hand. “Ye auld red thing ...” we say with the chuckle-headed youth, “We’ll have you yet!” And the dying prophet cries for each of us to the setting orb:

Eunice Tietjens.

A $10,000 Novel

Diane of the Green Van, by Leona Dalrymple. [The Reilly and Britton Company, Chicago.]

About the middle of last December Mr. F. K. Reilly sent a telegram to a Miss Leona Dalrymple of Passaic, New Jersey, in which he asked: “May I call upon you Thursday afternoon?” The telegram was the result of the $10,000 prize contest which the Reilly and Britton Company had planned early in the year; and Miss Dalrymple had just been announced as the winner by the three judges—S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and George N. Madison. She knew nothing of this, however, though she thought Mr. Reilly’s telegram must mean an interest in her work; so she replied calmly that she would be pleased to see him on Thursday. Then Mr. Reilly’s eyes begin to twinkle, as he tells the story, for it is rather a joke to set out on a journey with a $10,000 check in your pocket for an unsuspecting young woman. Even when he explained to her and presented the check she remained calm—though she is only twenty-eight years old and this was her first taste of real fame. She told Mr. Reilly that she had another novel which she hoped might interest him—but he took the words out of her mouth by saying that he had come prepared to make a contract for it!

So much for the latest of modern fairy tales. Diane of the Green Van is the prize-winning novel, and, despite our first suspicion of it because of that very fact, it proves to be a good one. Miss Dalrymple loves the outdoors, and her present story of an American girl who goes jaunting in a van in the Florida Everglades was suggested by a newspaper clipping about an adventurous young Englishwoman who managed to break away from conventions once a year and roam the country in a gipsy wagon. Not all “best sellers” have as much real charm as this one. Perhaps its freshness and spontaneity are due to the fact that it had to be written in six weeks for the contest.

Miss Dalrymple has stated that her purpose in writing novels is to “entertain wholesomely through optimism and romance.” Usually that type of purpose is linked up with a sentimentality which means being sweet at the expense of truth. But this author is not that sort: in expressing her dislike of sex stories, for instance, she attributes their shortcomings to treatment, not to material—“since there is absolutely no subject under the sun which may not be treated with perfect good taste in a novel.” She has also stated that in her opinion the modern woman is over-sexed—a popular though altogether wrong-headed view which we mean some time to argue with her in these columns.

Slime and the Breath of Life

The Russian Novel, translated from the French of Le Vicomte E. M. de VogÜe by Colonel H. A. Sawyer. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

Although this book was written in 1886, its treatments of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeneff, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are now first made accessible to the English reader, and will still be worth his attention. In fact one reads them with a growing regret that the author, who died in 1910, did not continue his interpretation of the Russian spirit as the religious and mystic tone of its nihilism gradually faded and left us the bleaker outlook of such men as Gorky. With Tolstoy, however—“probably the greatest demonstrator of life which has arisen since Goethe”—the book closes.

The author treats his subject from the standpoint of a certain formula which he finds to hold throughout the range of that realism which succeeded the romanticism of Pushkin—a romanticism which disappeared in 1840. Thereafter there grew up the great realistic school which gives Russia the leadership of the world in the field of realistic fiction—a leadership due partly to the temperamental standpoint of the Russian, adapted for just the kind of work which the great realistic novel involves, and partly to the importance of the novel as the vehicle of those ideas which the censor barred from every other channel of expression.

In the bible we are told that God made man out of the slime of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. In those words is the secret of the Russian realistic novel. For the realism of his own country the author of this work has little praise. Because, he says, it lacked that human sympathy which saw in man not only the slime of the earth but the breath of life, it is barren.

Dickens, on the other hand, and George Eliot gave to English realism a standpoint which was moulded, nay, impregnated through and through, with the religion of that book to which Mary Evans had renounced formal allegiance—the Protestant bible. In fact, De VogÜe goes so far as to say that some of her writing, for instance “the meeting between Dinah and Lisbeth,” is biblical in the quality of its appeal, and might have been written by the hand that gave us Ruth.

This spirit, but without the Anglo-Saxon hardness, is the spirit of Russian realism. It has all the photographic accuracy, the preocupation with all types of life that distinguishes French realism; but the preoccupation with the divine, the mystical turning away from the things of this world, is also present. The sympathy of Gogol is intensified to painfulness in Dostoevsky and is apotheosized into a new religion of renunciation in Tolstoy.

And because (in contrast to the French) the Russians “disentangled themselves from these excesses, and like the English gave realism a superior beauty moved by the same moral spirit of a compassion cleansed of all impurities and glorified by the spirit of the gospels”—because of this De VogÜe regards Russian realistic literature as the one force that can rejuvenate the literary art of the European nations.

The author writes with the authority of long study and gives us a sufficient basis for what we must now do ourselves—namely, read comtemporary Russian literature and ask ourselves what it tells us; whether or not it tells us that Christian realism is a contradiction in terms.

Llewellyn Jones.

A Drama of the Two Generations

Nowadays: A Contemporaneous Comedy in Three Acts, by George Middleton. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Some little theatre company ought to send eight of its members on tour through all the smaller cities of the country in Nowadays. It would be the most effective way in the world to awaken the people of those slumbering places to the really amazing revolutions in contemporary life—and incidentally in the contemporary theatre. For one thing, it shows how parents and children are gradually bridging the foolish gulf between the generations—the gulf that Shaw has called the degrading objection of youth to age; for another, it reflects the extraordinary renaissance that has come to our theatre since the first visit of the Irish Players.

Mr. Middleton takes a typical small-town family—a father, mother, son, and daughter—and leads them through a domestic crisis that has probably been the sad lot of most modern families. The daughter, like all proper young women, has an ambition: she wants to be a sculptor. The mother understands, having had similar longings before she married a man who made it his business to suppress them. The father refuses to listen to the daughter’s idea, and tells her that if she goes to New York it will be without his help. But she goes; and the play opens with her first visit home. The son, a weakling without ability of any sort except to spend money and sow wild oats, has also left home; but he has managed to live very comfortably because of a monthly allowance from his father. The justice of the situation harks back to the antique theory that even a weak boy has more right to the splendors of the world than a girl of any type.

Diana’s father refuses to think about woman suffrage. “I don’t have to think about something I feel. I tell you, if we had woman suffrage, women would all vote like their husbands.”

“They say it would double the ignorant vote,” answers Diana’s friend, Peter, the journalist, who has encouraged her in rebelling.

“He’s a good-natured old fossil,” Peter says later to Diana. And when the girl insists that she loves her father anyhow, Peter says, “I love radishes, but they don’t agree with me. If he had a new idea he’d die of dropsy.”

The result of Diana’s visit is to produce certain rebellions in her mother, who goes back to New York with her to help make a home of that lonely little flat, and to revive her own early ambitions as a painter. Later the father succumbs to the new order. It is all good “comedy”; also it’s tremendously good thinking. If only it could be read by all the people who misunderstand the surging modern spirit that is riding so bravely through traditions and inheritances.

But Nowadays has another value besides that of its story. It is made of the stuff of the new drama; it fulfills our demand that the theatre shall give us the truth about life in a simple way. However, we shall talk more about this in another issue.

Our Mr. Wrenn and Us

Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]

The poverty of American workaday criticism has rarely shown more threadbare than in the fact that of all the reviews of Our Mr. Wrenn, a first novel by Sinclair Lewis, a new author, not one has mentioned the idea under the book.

They have been good reviews, too, as reviews go. Many have praised the book, have talked around it, described its characters, attempted to classify it—under names so various as Locke, Wells, and Dickens. Yet so expected is the novel that means nothing, and so dead is critical vision, that no one has thought to say “Here is a new American writer. What is in his soul?”

Let me prove the point. “Our Mr. Wrenn” is a mouse-like little clerk in the office of a New York novelty company. He is called “Our Mr. Wrenn” in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is overshadowed by “the job.” He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp’s downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.

Mr. Wrenn is not always “Our.” He becomes his own in the gorgeously illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is “Bill Wrenn” and licks a tough. He meets adventures—Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes him because he’s real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again, falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and “settles down.” All these things the critics have told us.

But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says “Gee!” when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn’t only the little things of the book that twist our smiles.

There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of the world—this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the high places of our own spirits.

Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of that conventionally “happy ending” has escaped the critics. The drab, the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That’s the frightful part of it. It’s very like what appears to happen to everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and forgetting his flags in sunsets.

It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to entertain or to “teach a lesson.”

Gilbert Alden.

Lantern Gleams

Little Essays in Literature and Life, by Richard Burton. [The Century Company, New York.]

Readers of The Bellman will welcome in this permanent form many little lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.

Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning gleam over some political or social morass.

When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us. Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort, and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is discreet on such points.

More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on literature. Under “Books and Men” the author deplores the tendency which characterized Chaucer (“Farewell my books and my devotion”) of drawing an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life. Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.

Illiam Dhone.

About Nietzsche

Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, by Paul Carus. [The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]

Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.

Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest named Zarathustra is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative. He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the matter.

Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus’s work is delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus’s stated or implied world view.

He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him, mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his Confessions of a Young Man. Of more value than that is his consideration of the philosophy of Stirner—mainly because Stirner is not so well known as Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.

One undoubted merit the book has, and that is the industrious collection of personal recollections of Nietzsche and of Nietzsche portraits which Dr. Carus has brought together in its pages. These will give the book a positive value to the Nietzsche enthusiast, while the sight of Dr. Carus’s cool, scholastic temperament trying to drench the burning bush of Nietzsche will at least interest him.

Illiam Dhone.

Feminism and New Music

Anthony the Absolute, by Samuel Merwin. [The Century Company, New York.]

It is interesting to watch the struggles of an essentially chivalrous masculine soul caught in the whirlpool of modern feminism. Samuel Merwin, ever since the old days of A Short Line War and Calumet K., written in collaboration with Henry Kitchell Webster, has held towards women the attitude of the knight errant. Recently, as shown in The Citadel, The Charmed Life of Miss Austin, and even more strongly in this latest book, Anthony the Absolute, he has become a determined feminist. But the attitude has not changed. Formerly his hero laid at the feet of the lady of his choice as much wealth, fame, and position as he could acquire; this latest hero gives her in the same spirit a career and the chance to develop her own personality. Mr. Merwin says: “The man who deliberately stops a woman’s growth—no matter what his traditions; no matter what his fears for her—is doing a monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of all life.” He is still the knight errant. It is still man who permits woman to develop.

None the less it is a very readable tale. The male characters are all clearly and convincingly drawn, not without humor. The lady is a little nebulous, but very charming. Illustrating the absoluteness of Anthony and serving as an introduction to the charming Heloise is an interesting musical theme. The scene is laid in China, where Anthony is studying primitive music, and Heloise is able to sing for him a perfect close-interval scale, in eighth tones instead of the “barbarous” half and whole tones of the piano scale.

Unfortunately Mr. Merwin has permitted himself to be led by the exigencies of a popular magazine, in which the story appeared in serial form, into giving the tale a certain meretricious air of sex allurement which it fundamentally does not possess. On the whole, except in a certain technical facility in handling the situations and sustaining the tension of the plot, Anthony the Absolute is a decided falling below the really splendid standard of excellence which Mr. Merwin set for himself in The Citadel.

Eunice Tietjens.