is literally the man in the street, and an accurate barometer of what an Englishman would call "lower class sentiment." I have in mind an exceptionally eloquent member of this ancient profession, who gave me a shine and a very candid personal opinion of the American people, all for tuppence. Every now and then he would leave off polishing for a moment, and look up, sidewise, from his kneeling posture. Mind you," he would say, "you arsked me. I ain't a-arguin' against you individu'lly. It's President Wilson 'oo's to blime. That's my private opinicn. Am I right?" His parting thrust, delivered with good-humored but none the less real sarcasm, was an admirable summing up of his view. "You Yanks ain't 'arf a plucky lot," he said. "W'en you goin' to send the 'Uns another strong note?"

At the very rock bottom of the social scale-although with my crude notions about art I am reluctant so to regard him-is the pavement artist, who sits cross-legged as of old beside his lurid chromos in crayon. His subjects keep fairly well abreast of the times. There are fewer landscapes in these days and more portraits. In his gallery one sees all the popular heroes and all the popular scapegoats, and among the latter is our poor Uncle Samuel, a ghastly caricature, with a sadly bedraggled eagle, impotently screaming, "Too proud to fight !" perched on his finger.

With the results of our investigations carefully noted down, I might go on at great length citing instance after instance, quoting opinion after opinion, in this attempt to show with what regard we are held in England. I have carefully avoided the words Briton and British, for we have made no inquiries in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. These would but amplify, after the same fashion, the ones already given. The great majority of think

ing Englishmen, those who read our reviews and books, study our politics, watch our progress, have, doubtless, a great deal of sympathy for us. They agree in saying that they are not at all sure that England would have done other than we have done. And yet they pay us the compliment of adding that they expected better things of America than they would expect of their own land. Is this anxiety for our moral welfare wholly vicarious? Our fellow-countrymen will be skeptical. At times we ourselves have misgivings. There is this to be said, however Englishmen who take this attitude think that they are sincere in it. They are trying to be fair, but there is no doubting their bitter disappointment because of our strict neutrality policy.

As for the rest of the nation, they think of us with mingled feelings of arrogance and contempt. The might of vast new armies and the prowess of an unconquerable navy enable them to make comparisons wholly favorable to England. It is for this reason, rather than for any real or fancied lack of moral courage on our part, that our prestige has waned with the workaday Englishman. He believes more firmly than ever that "my father can lick your father." If "your father" is not belligerently inclined, so much the worse for him. The fact that he is but a timid onlooker at the ringside is an indication that he is a ninny and a milksop with no red blood in his veins.

What is the sum of the matter? The English people like us as individuals, but as a nation we are despised by some, ridiculed by others, and pitied by all. Whatever may be the reasons for their beliefs, in the eyes of all Englishmen Columbia is now a very tarnished gem of the ocean, and it will be long before she shines again with the old luster.

A

T Bourges, a sleepy French provincial capital well to the south of Paris, a captain of the French General Staff reported at the local headquarters.

This happened two years ago-late in August, 1914.

The captain from the General Staff fell in with a group of officers at Bourges who were ignorant of the exact course of events to the north of them. Their sole source of information was the official communiqués; and in those days things were happening fast.

The captain from headquarters gloomily acquainted his comrades with the situation as he saw it. In dark colors he painted a picture of the battle of Charleroi, of France invaded, of the lack of heavy artillery and of reserve munitions, of the army of the Republic in full retreat, of Paris menaced. Consternation grew as the captain went on. Hope faded. Till

"What about the great General Headquarters?" asked one of the disheartened officers at Bourges.

"At the end of their rope."

Another silence, then

"And what does the boss say?" some one inquired.

"Joffre ?" asked the captain of the General Staff. Opening and shutting his eyes, raising his arms towards heaven in a gesture of total abandonment, the captain spoke in a frightened voice, as if he were uttering words of madness:

Joffre? That man still believes that we'll win out !"

That was two years ago. The exact date of the conversation was August 26, 1914.

To-day some of the American correspondents in Paris are whispering among themselves that Joffre is a fallen idol; that almost as Poincaré's great popularity suffered when the Government moved from Paris to Bordeaux before the Battle of the Marne, so the cult of Joffre has gradually faded till now it is but the shadow of an enthusiasm.

Perhaps. It is true that I have seen the Generalissimo's engraved portrait, neatly framed in black, offered for two francs at one of the bookstalls that line the left bank of the Seine. Yes, perhaps Joffre's popularity is not so intense as it was six months ago. That, too, is possible.

But France does not forget that Joffre, the iron man of the Catalan foothills of the Pyrenees, the man of phlegm and perseverance, has been what with less justification Kitchener was called in the early days of the great war whose issue he has not lived to see foreshadowed.

Joffre-organizer of victory!

Joffre, who believed victory was coming, even on August 26, two years since.

Joffre, the general who for two weeks led an army in retreat, and so maintained the morale of that army that it turned its defeat into the victory he had believed in—a miracle of strategy and of the spirit!

France is still grateful to Joffre, but she accepts him to-day as a natural, a historical fact a fact no more to be marveled at or to get excited about than the swiftness of the Rhône or the snow on the Alps.

Tourists marvel at the river scenery, at the mountain peaks; not so the men and women who work in the vineyards by the riverside and in the mountain hay-fields.

We foreigners marvel at the force of France's army, at the defense of Verdun during more than six months (a war in itself a longer and more costly war than that of 1870), at the devoted service of French womanhood, at the heroism of an entire people put to all human tests.

But France accepts these facts as facts; she takes no great credit to herself.

When you look at France, at the French army, which is the French nation, you see Joffre as a kind of presiding spirit. When you see Joffre thus, you realize in his simple strength the eternal vigor and power of resistance which never expressed themselves in the French boulevard theater or the French novel for export, but which were always as French as, or rather more French than, these things.

The portrait of Joffre may be bought on the Quai Malaquais for less than forty cents; but there are many portraits of Joffre in France, and no one, after all, has need of his portrait.

It is only men who have passed or men who have not yet arrived whose portraits we have need of.

And Joffre, like France, is eternal. Paris, August 26, 1916.

N

OT many years ago it was widely rumored that a young instructor at Yale was talking on literature to listening football, baseball, and rowing experts and making them forget the games for the time being. This rumor was discredited until it was learned that the subject of these talks was fiction. This made the report credible, but raised the question whether novels were proper subjects for college instruction. In his "Advance of the English Novel," Professor William Lyon Phelps dispels the incredulity and puts the doubters out of court. From the dry-asdust point of view his discussions are worse than interesting; they are actually entertaining; much more entertaining than many of the stories he writes about. The style is far removed from the academic; it is informal and familiar talk; it occasionally drops into newspaperisms. But it is well-seasoned talk, full of good sense, wholesome feeling for moral values, and sound judgment. deals frankly with the popular novelists. Dr. Phelps's appraisals are not based on the re- ports of sales, either great or small. He is impressed by "Ethan Frome," not by "The House of Mirth;" a line about "The Eyes of the World," which has " run away with the market," as they say in Wall Street, would have been sufficient; its omission is significant, but it would have added to the gayety of a somber autumn.

If there are those who think that the novel is a form of frivolity with a dash of immorality, Mr. Phelps's discussion will convict them of sin against light. He gives even a seasoned lover of fiction a new sense of the greatness and dignity of the novel in the literature of the world; its uncovering of the deeps of human nature; its disclosure of the heights to which men and women have climbed and the fathomless abysses into which they have fallen; its range of tragic experience and its sparkling and infinitely varied comedy; the vitality of its art; its immense significance as a history of the human spirit. Mr. Phelps does not set out to teach a philosophy of fiction; he lets fiction reveal itself in an account of English and American novels, delightfully unhackneyed, outspoken, and as humanly interesting as 1 The Advance of the English Novel. By William Lyon Phelps. Doad, Mead & Co., New York. $1.35.

life itself; an admirable corrective of the ignorance, bad taste, and credulity which make hosts of good people the victims of stories manufactured for the trade, and a sound introduction to the novels of this or any other season.

Mr. Phelps defines a high-class novel as "a good story well told "-perhaps as adequate a brief definition as can be made. Novels are as various as men, and most of them are neither very good nor very bad; few of them strike the perfect balance of substance and form.

Dr. Holmes said that the young doctors know the rules and the old doctors know the exceptions, and the veteran novel reader recalis few novels in which plot and style are perfectly mated. He will read and re-read "The Three Musketeers" for its flash of swords and its rush of adventure and movement, and he will read and re-read "Pride and Prejudice" for its "still, small" style and the charming skill of its characterization.

Here, by way of illustration, is Miss Grace King's "The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard," in which the incidents are few, but the supreme adventure of life is reflected in one of those moments which bring into view a great and tragic change and are charged with character. Miss King has been from the beginning an artist of delicate and vital skill; her studies of character have both graphic interest and distinction, and her work has the atmospheric quality which is the special gift of the artist. The future historian who wishes to recall the romance of old New Orleans will read "Mcnsieur Motte," "Tales of Time and Place," "Balcony Stories," and find delight and the stuff of which history is made in the same place. The stories told and heard on the balconies in the leisure of the semi-tropical night preserve the "form and pressure" of a social life deeply influenced by French ideals and manners, in a style full of individual distinction. In "The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard" the fortunes of a family ruined in estate by the Civil War, but enriched in courage, elevation, loyalty to ideals, endeavoring to build on new foundations in a city wrecked in home and business but invigorated by a gallant courage, are described with a frankness which is saved

The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard. By Grace King. Henry Holt & Co., New York. $1.40.

from hard realism by the illumination of qualities of spirit beyond the reach of poverty and care. The story of ruined hopes and wrecked ideals would be profoundly depressing if it were not told with exquisite tenderness and reverence; without spiritual insight it would have had the hardness and bleakness of pessimism; reported in its inward as well as its outward aspects, it is a romance of the spirit.

1

Miss King recalls the charm of an old social order in the moment of adjustment to new conditions; Mrs. Deland dramatizes, in the character of a young girl, the changes which are involved in what is called feminism. "The Rising Tide" is a graphic study of a movement astir throughout the world and full of possibilities of good and evil. Frederica Payton is set in striking contrast to her surroundings; she lives in an ample house furnished in antiquated taste on a street once fashionable but now gone utterly to seed; she is the daughter of a father of a type which in the lurid imaginations of some radical feminists is supposed to be representatively masculine, and of a mother who is what the wicked modernists would call "utterly MidVictorian, a woman to whom what people would say is of supreme importance and whose rule of life is to copy her grandmother; and she is the sister of an imbecile who perpetuates the memory of his father's vices.

Against this repressing background and the suffocating atmosphere in which it is enveloped "Fred" is in revolt, and revolt to her vigorous temperament and alert, independent mind means outspoken antagonism and definite action. She is not only in revolt; she is in arms. She defies the conventions; she smokes, like many women, not because she likes it but because it outrages the conventions, she says "damn when the occasion demands emphasis, she uses slang freely, she goes into the real estate business and defies the customary restraints in dealing with men. She has a fine,

honest nature, but her taste is execrable; she indulges in all manner of banalities under the impression that she is asserting her freedom. She goes through many exciting experiences, and her tragedy lies in the fact that her relatives condemn her out of hand instead of trying to understand her, and that she does not understand herself. She is thoroughly sound and good, but a little intoxicated. Mrs. Deland always takes her art seriously, but she

The Rising Tide. By Margaret Deland. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $1.35.

521

is always an artist, and "The Rising Tide " is a very interesting story, not in any sense a disguised tract. It abounds in wit, in those quick strokes which bring out character, in insight into the complexities of human nature. Mrs. Deland's extraordinary sanity is shown. in this story, as in all her stories, by the sureness of her touch in the most delicate situations. She knows that human relations are deeper than legal contracts, and that to disregard the instincts is to violate the sanctity of the soul itself. Her art has enabled her to write about an agitating question without sacrificing dramatic interest, her intelligence has opened her eyes to the immense significance of what is called feminism, her clear sense of values old and new and her humor have enabled her to separate the wheat of real advance from the chaff of eccentricity.

Mr. Hewlett has written the most uncompromising romances of our time-stories which elude the conditions of time and place and escape into a world of their own. He is as free of the moralities as some of the most modern novelists, but he does not pretend, as they do, to make realistic reports of an actual, existing society. In "Love and Lucy" he is still a romanticist, but in a different sense; he writes about people who belong to what the English call the " upper middle class," a class assumed to be out of the range of romance. An able, clear-headed, cool-hearted barrister, whose monocle has a deadly frigidity, has married an unawakened. girl, and they have lived together in amiable amity until the approach of middle life. Then, with the startling suddenness of an earthquake, the wife is kissed in a dim drawing-room by some one who comes up behind her. The kiss has no element of routine in it, but it does have the element of mystery. The wife thinks the husband has broken through his chilling reserve and finds her own nature answering with a little glow of passion. The kiss is repeated several times under different conditions, but it becomes clear that the husband is not the lover; a man of the type familiar to Mr. Hewlett's readers has appeared on the scene. As the story develops the husband discovers the charm of his wife through the eyes of this man, and becomes not only a husband but a lover. In the end a conventional marriage develops into a very happy romance, there is a catastrophe but no tragedy, no law is broken, and love comes into its own.

'Love and Lucy. By Maurice Hewlett. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $1.35.

Not many people nowadays save their old letters, it is to be feared, for the prevalence of the typewriter has robbed the majority of letters of their individuality, and busy writers now like to clear out their correspondence files every year or two. This fact makes additionally interesting the announcement that many family letters of Dr. Lyman Beecher and his famous children, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, have recently been collected by Lyman Beecher's great-granddaughter, Annie Beecher Scoville, of Stamford, Connecticut. These faded memorials of the past are to be embodied by her in a lecture to be called "A Story of Pioneer Life Told in Family Letters." It will deal largely with the life of the days when Ohio and Indiana were still on the frontier.

The Morris Plan for making loans to small borrowers, which has been described as the helping hand, incorporated," recently held its second Convention. Twenty-eight new companies operating the Morris Plan have been formed within the past year, making fifty-three altogether now in existence. The companies have made loans aggregating $22,000,000 to 172,500 borrowers. Many stories of rescues from loan-sharks were told at the Convention. One workman who had been paying $19 a month for interest alone to loan-sharks got free from them through the Morris Plan and is now paying up both principal and interest in fiftytwo installments at $3 a week.

A writer of rejected manuscripts tells in the Contributors' Club of the "Atlantic Monthly " some of the reasons for his lack of success. Ten years ago his manuscripts were returned because they did not "quite compel acceptance;" a little later they "lacked ginger;" then editors wanted" a little more pep, please;" then his contributions did not have the "punch;" and now the long-suffering writer gets his offerings back with the comment," Excellent of their kind, but we prefer stories with more 'kick'!" His letter to the Contributors' Club seems to have had all the desirable elements which his earlier efforts lacked, for it was published! There was a time, says 66 Shipping Illustrated," when it was the ambition of wealthy travelers with leisure at their disposal to make the long and difficult journey up the Yangtze Gorges in China. It was then a feat to be remembered. Now the construction of specially built steamers for this perilous navigation has made the trip safe and feasible. Eight of these steamers are at present successfully making the run through these wonderful gorges.

Even on the other side the problem of how to get attention at a popular restaurant exists, as the following amusing dialogue from "London Opinion" indicates: " Diner-That man at the round table gets much better food and

attention than I do. I shall complain to the manager. Where is he?' Waiter- He's the man at the round table, sir.'"

Discoursing on "Methods of Putting" in the "Golfers' Magazine," Harry Vardon tells of an eccentric player who holed several long putts with his driver. "Look here," said his opponent, a man steeped in the traditions of St. Andrew's, "do you use that thing for short putts as well?" "Short putts ?" repeated the local eccentric. "Haven't I had a short putt yet? No, of course I haven't. Well, I always take this for short putts "-and, diving to the bottom of his bag, he produced an ordinary household hammer! Vardon once imitated this extremist by having a "rather foolish-looking club" made for himself; it was only a foot long, and he used it in the days when he was "about the worst putter in the world."

Archdeacon Stuck in "Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled pays a feeling tribute to his best dog, Nanook. The dog loved to play a game of "toe-treading" with his master; and whenever Nanook won he "would seize my ankle in his jaws and make me hop around on one foot, to his great delight." He was a wise dog, and knew in advance just where the party would stop for the night, infallibly recognizing a good camping-place and lifting up his voice in delight. Cold meant little to him. Fifty, sixty, seventy below zero, all night long at such temperatures he would sleep contentedly. "He would stand and take any licking you offered and never utter a sound but give a bark of defiance when you were done, and he would bear you no ill will in the world and repeat his offense at the next opportunity."

Nanook learned to open a gate, contrary to orders. One day, says Archdeacon Stuck, when this happened, "I picked up a stick and gave him a few sharp blows with it. Then I said, 'Now, you stay in here; I'll give you a sound thrashing if you do that again!' The moment I loosed his collar the dog went deliberately to the gate, pulled out the wedge with his teeth, lifted the latch and opened the gate, then turned round and said to me, 'Bow-wowWow-wow-wow!? It was so pointed that a passer-by who had paused to see the proceedings said to me, 'Well, you know where you can go to! That's the dog-gonedest dog I ever seen!'"

Nanook's end was pathetic. Mortally hurt by a misguided horse's kick, "Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. When I put my face down to his and said Good-by,' he licked me for the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him best of the bunch."