his heroines. You feel that if Alice only would or could take a chance things would be immeasurably happier.

But it is in this respect perhaps that the book deserves most praise. Mrs. Deland has dared to create an uninteresting heroine, that feat so seldom attempted and accomplished by artists of less calibre than Sarah Orne Jewett and Anne Douglas Sedgewick. The world is full of people who live secluded, determined, unadventurous lives. Only lately, however, have authors dared to write of them. Just as the etchers, led by Pennell, have deserted the sedgy streams for the iron sky scrapers of Manhattan, Mrs. Deland has seen the beauty in this type of life, and has fortunately given it a less sombre treatment than it usually receives. That the story is in her words and style automatically advertises it. Ever since the "Old Chester" books we have looked to Mrs. Deland for gentle and absorbing tales.

"The Promises of Alice" is, if one may venture to so speak without incurring undeserved scorn for it, the ideal gift book. It is short, light, charming, amusing, and best of allsincere.

Katharine Oliver.

AND HERE IS A GENIUS! The Moon and Sixpence. By William W. Somerset Maugham. 314 p. D Doran

To

OO much praise cannot be given to this book of Mr. Maugham's, and no wonder that he did not put it in play form, which of course was patently impossible. It is a remarkable story written around a still more remarkable character and the most caustic critic is defenseless with such odds against him. It is the story of a London stockbroker, Charles Strickland, who has lived for twenty years happily and uneventfully with his wife and two children. At forty he suddenly and inexplicably deserts his family and goes to Paris. When followed up by the narrator of the story, he confesses to a passion for painting, which has become an obsession. From then on we are given intimate pictures of Strickland and his life in Paris, followed later by his savage-like existence on a South Sea Island. In spite of his immoralities, his callousness, his selfishness, and his altogether horrible nature, Mr. Maugham does sift out the craftsmanship of genius and the unflinching purpose of a really great soul.

The book contains the perfection of character work, every portrait is definite, every minor character is complete, every point of view is clear cut and with all the finish of the dramatist, the writer has been audacious to a degree that few would attempt. If one could dare a criticism of such a perfect piece of

work, it would be that Mr. Maugham, as an off stage narrator, in his efforts to get just the right nuances, sometimes fumbles, gets vague and misty and sometimes overloads with too much matter, but these are only minor faults. "The Moon and Sixpence" is splendidly unusual in theme and handling, daring yet very subtle, apparently all characterization, yet with tremendous high lights that give it plot and substance. And all woven about a man whose character was despicable and whose paintings were immortal!

Marjorie Prentiss Campbell.

RE-ENTER THE VILLAIN

Yellowleaf. By Sacha Gregory. 319 p. D Lipp.

J

ACQUES AGHASSY, the villain-hero of "Yellowleaf," has apparently not one virtue to redeem him. His only excuse for being is his genius as a musician, and not even that can palliate the viciousness of his nature. One almost wonders if a man could be so bad-or rather one. would have wondered that before the war! Yet the other characters

in the book are so clearly drawn and so logically related to one another and to the terrible Jacques, who seems to be gathering them all into his web like some huge spider, that there is no taint of artificiality in the story. Rather one feels, as one reads, the tense reality of the struggle that arrays nearly all of the characters of the book against Aghassy, and ends finally in the victory of the brave and resourceful Lady Mary over her ruthless opponent.

One could wish that Lily Dampierre, the widowed daughter-in-law of Lady Mary, were not quite so early-Victorian in her passivity. her lack of color and of brain, but perhaps a very black villain has to have a very white lady. The poignant figure of the story is Jim, the adored son of Lily Dampierre, who is pictured growing up into the wrong kind of manhood under the deliberately acquired influence of his step-father Jacques Aghassy. One can hardly read the slowly accumulated evidence of this terrible perverting of youth without feeling an intense desire to cry out "Stop him! Stop him!" The other people in the book-even Lady Mary-seem so helpless before him that one longs to rush to their aid. How Lady Mary does finally destroy the terrible web that has enmeshed them all is perhaps the most thrilling surprise of the whole book.

Marguerite Fellows.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK writes: "In history Brand Whitlock's book will be the principal as well as the most authoritative and terrible witness against Teutonic barbarism."

A SEARCHING ANALYSIS OF A MAN'S LOVE LIFE

The Story of A Lover. Boni & L.

"Th

HE Story of A Lover" has much of the terrible beauty which sensitive souls feel when they see themselves stripped of self-apologies and placed face to face with the motives, both conscious and sub-conscious, of their actions. So true and searching an analysis of the love life of a man as the anonymous author of "The Story of A Lover" has revealed, has never before been attempted on this side of the Atlantic. It is symptomatic of the deepening emotional life in America which is the result of the idealism which has been engendered by the war. And this profounder respect for the deeper values of life has been manifested in a passionate desire for emotional as well as political freedom. The author of "The Story of A Lover" feels this keenly; and what is more rare, he analyzes his yearning for the free gift of his wife's. love with all its pain and all its glory. Thruout their married life he is continually suffering from the knowledge that his wife is one of those rare personalities who is sufficient unto herself, and whose temperamental needs he is unable to satisfy. Nevertheless, in the interest of the higher love, he is willing, indeed anxious, for her to seek beyond the shelter of their home that spiritual and sensuous completeness which he realizes she can never achieve with him. Such renunciation is the height of tragic beauty.

This truly great and noble book, which has come to America (we are allowed to say) from an Anglo-Saxon of purest American traditions and background, is literature so sincerely and beautifully written that we foresee translations into French, Russian, Swedish and Italian.

J. L.

THE CORPSE IN THE SAFE Paid Out. By J. Percival Bessell. 331 p. D Macaulay

O lose the key of one's safe is at all times matter for annoyance. How much more so when the safe contains the mouldering body of a murdered man! Such is the predicament of the "leading man," one can hardly call him the hero, of J. Percival Bessell's new novel "Paid Out." And yet, tho few of us would fail to anathematize the premeditated murder of an old friend for the sake of a famous jewel, we cannot but feel a certain undercurrent of sympathy for Mr. Henry Murstock in his efforts to escape from the "bloodhounds. of the law.". Not that he is a sympathetic character-far from it. Fundamentally it perhaps resolves itself into a ques

tion of taste. The author has introduced us to Mr. Murdstock, he is an acquaintance of ours, ergo he cannot be hanged. Such things "aren't done."

And so, good citizens that we are, we become accomplices after the fact, tremble whenever the over-curious lay questioning hands on the fatal safe, as we tremble at the knocking at the door in "Macbeth," and rejoice whenever our villain escapes the punishment he so richly deserves..

But the tale is properly moral for all that. None of us, having traveled with our friend, the murderer, over the anxious road of the transgressor would ever be tempted from the strict paths of rectitude-no not for a bucketful of "Great Ahadoos."

THE BOY POINTED PROUDLY TO THE WEIR FROM ISABEL CARLETON IN THE WEST" BY MARGARET ASHMUN

The Macmillan Company

VERY delightful story for small girls is Nina Rhoades' "Nora's Twin Sister" (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard). It is of the "Lord Fauntleroy" type with a little reporter mama, a modern edition of "Dearest" but quite as nice, and two instead of one principal. Any little girl can imagine what fascinating complications will arise when the twins, who have been separated from babyhood because of the adoption of one into a wealthy family, manage to change places. But any little girl will not be able to imagine half of the amusing predicaments of Nora and Kathleen nor to guess just what the end of it all will be.

"The Slipper Point Mystery" (Century) for older girls has an equally well worked out plot. Augusta Huiell Seaman's latest addition to her long list of popular stories for girls, has no boy characters, but it has a cave, an underground passageway, a secret code and all the elements that go to make up an exciting yarn which never verges on the melodramatic or false heroic.

Young people who have been following the career of Margaret Ashmun's Isabel Carleton, will find her and a group of friends this fall in a camp in the mountains of Montana, a proper setting for a lively train of adventures. The boys and girls in "Isabel Carleton In the West" (Macmillan) are now old enough to be making decisions about their life work, decisions which are affected by the entry of America into the war.

One of the season's considerable number of distinctly "boy" books is "The Hilltop Troop" (Houghton Mifflin) by Arthur Stanwood Pier. Boys know that Mr. Pier is capable of making his characters talk "boy," that he can turn the ordinary events of boy life into stirring adventure and that he has no sympathy with the "sissy." The new book, a tale of two rival groups in a small town, is a good scout story with all the above characteristics.

"WHEN I was a Girl in Iceland" (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard), by Holmfridur Arnadottir, adds another to the series of other-land tales told by natives. Iceland, that contradictory country of adjacent snows and hot springs, has many other surprises for young people, if not for their elders. What the story lacks from being told in a tongue foreign to the author it gains in the added confidence in the account of one born and reared in the land which she describes.

For children who love pets or perhaps more as propaganda for those who have not been taught to appreciate animals, Marshall Saunders, author of "Beautiful Joe" has written "Golden Dicky" (Stokes), the story of a canary and his friends. Golden Dicky tells his story in his own words, showing just how a canary feels about his treatment.

Among the nature books "The Tree Book" (Stokes) by Inez N. McFee presents a fund of tree lore in an attractive non-technical style which will commend it to young and older readers. This is a book which should find its way into many a camp kit.

In "Wigwam Wonder Tales" (Scribner) we have nature as it was understood by the Indians of the North West. William Thompson has retold these myths of the giant butterfly, the moon-man, fire and water and others for the pleasure of children.

For the tots the season has brought more of the pretty Sunny Books (Volland) with their charming pictures in color. One of the prettiest is John Gruelle's "Little Sunny. Stories" which he has illustrated delightfully, with the little spirits, elfs and human kiddies of the tales.

BY-PATHS IN PENNSYLVANIA Seeing Pennsylvania. By John T. Faris. 350 p. O Lipp.

HE first requisite for writing an allur

Ting book of travel is to have a fervent

love for the region of which you write. That Dr. Faris has this requisite is shown by the relish with which he quotes the dictum of Agnes Repplier, that "if ever Americansblotted out in their turn as they have blotted out the Red men-are destined to live on reservations as the Indians live now, may Pennsylvania be the allotted territory!"

But it is not enough to have confidence in your subject; you must also possess the verbal magic of passing on the contagion to your reader. And in these pages, with easy wizardry, the author has persuaded us that whatever is true of the rest of heaven and earth, there are at least in Pennsylvania an infinite number of things not dreamed of in our philosophy. In short, he is a most agreeable traveling companion, and an uncommonly well informed one. He knows the by

paths and the remote nooks and corners, where natural scenic beauty has not yet been elbowed out by a too utilitarian civilization. And if your artistic eye begins to tire, he is ever ready with an historic anecdote, or a line of verse, to bridge over the interval until a turn in the road reveals a new point of interest.

A certain percentage of human beings are born nomads; we never quite outgrow the roaming instinct. And when wars and dangers and soaring costs make the old established Meccas doubly remote, the natural wish arises, "Would that some kindly magician might bring new and undiscovered countries to our very doorstep!" This is what Dr. Faris has quite literally done. He has rubbed Aladdin's lamp, and presto! familiar, prosaic Pennsylvania glows with the alluring color of a thousand and one possibilities. In all seriousness, the native nomad owes him gratitude for opening new and unguessed realms of such access.

Calvin Winter.

G. B. S. SLAUGHTERS THE INNOCENTS

Heartbreak House. By George Bernard Shaw. Brentano's.

B

ERNARD Shaw's quarrel with his age is. sharper and bitterer than ever since the war. He is a devotee of the naked intellect, and the age in which he lives, like every preceding age, is primarily emotional. His new collection of plays is a protest against the old-fashioned virtues that constitute, for the moralist at least, the very bases of our civilization. "Heartbreak House," the play from which the volume takes its name, is a post mortem study of pre-war life among the cultivated folk of England. He finds that it was a composite of aimless, shiftless, rudderless thinking; clever people with no contacts with society as a whole; love-making as an opiate; and intellectual activity as a relief from ennui. It is his theory that had a few men and women with brains taken a hand in affairs of state instead of leaving such plebeian matters to the hard-riding, hard-hitting country squires and the grocers who are elected to Parliament there would have been no need of war. And he is far from conceding that the war was of any possible benefit. Once it was going, he admits, it had to be fought thru, and even those who found it hard to simulate patriotism, found they had a duty to live up to in that matter. But he seems to charge that the actual heat and burden of the fray fell on those who hated the whole business and said nothing, rather than on the "noisy incapable" who made the empire resound with prosecutions under the Defence of the Realm Act and brass-bands playing the national anthem. In truth, the war still appears to Shaw the crisis in a century-long series of absurdities, a mess which a large number of fools got the world into and out of which a few wise men like himself were obliged to pull us.

Technically "Heartbreak House" is equal to everything but the best of Shaw. But we are certainly beginning to understand his methods almost unflatteringly well. Shaw is a keen and ready philosopher-but, despite the critics, no dramatist. His characters are exaggerations, his situations farcical. When his scene begins to totter he saves himself by some trick from Aristophanes or Molière -by letting four characters talk all at once, by allowing two people to be introduced thrice in succession, or by tripping somebody up in vaudeville fashion. Nevertheless, these are little things, and Shaw is a far-seeing man with an extraordinary message. To judge him by his technique is to misapprehend him.

Marwell Anderson.

AN INTIMATE ASPECT OF ROOSEVELT Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to his Children.

Ed. by Joseph Bucklin Bishop. 240 p. 0

Scrib.

T

HE first thought prompted by these letters is that of having been privileged to draw aside the curtain of an inner sanctuary and for the hour to see an intimate, hidden aspect of one of America's few really great men. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that the future biographer of Theodore Roosevelt could not afford to ignore this volume since he would be missing many precious and luminous side-lights upon a rarely broadminded and big-hearted man.

The second thought, as one goes more deeply into the letters, is a wish that every American father might be taught the wise and simple code of Theodore Roosevelt's attitude as a parent. There has been in the past far too much holding up for approval certain traditional sayings of George Washington, as for example, "Be a good boy, and you cannot fail to be a good man." There are no such smug preachments in the Roosevelt letters. Their dominant note is that of a frank, glad comradeship. Most of the time you might almost assume that they were written by an older brother or fellow playmate. Just once he writes to Kermit a "dreadfully preaching letter," in which the sum total of preachment is a wish that his boys may rather "show true manliness of character than intellectual or prowess."

physical

These letters cover many years, and are written under most unexpected conditions: from camp during the Spanish war; from the Panama Canal zone; during a presidential campaign; at the Jamestown Exposition, -at all sorts of times when one marvels how an overworked and harassed officer or statesman could find the energy to write at all. Yet always these letters are remarkable for their utter exclusion of everything save the common interests of the writer and the recipient of the letter. For Theodore Roosevelt had that rare and priceless gift of remembering what it means to be a child; and of translating himself back for the hour, and understanding and sharing the interests of his own children,-and at the same time extending subtly, yet unmistakably, something of his own inspiring magnetism, his rugged and unswerving philosophy of life, to build their character and make them the better men and women in the coming generation. One would wish for the good of our American citizenship that this volume could be scattered broadcast in every American household containing parents and children.

Frederic Taber Cooper.