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N the publisher's list of Mr. Wells's fifty books a baker's dozen are classified as "fantastic and imaginative romances." As "The Sleeper Wakes," "Men Like Gods," and other Utopian studies are included, I suppose "The Dream" will be tucked into this pigeonhole for future reference. But "ingenious and fanciful" would really fit these works better than "fantastic and imaginative." Instead of free fantasy, we get logical demonstration. And instead of creative imagination, we get smug theory. Never do these tales transcend or richly explore beneath the trim boundaries of the author's didactic intention. To be infinitely brisk and infinitely clever brisker and cleverer than all the other brisk and clever ones of a brisk and clever period does not, after all, constitute genius of a high order.

"The Dream" is simply one more lively Wellsian criticism of the modern world as this man sees it: a world of slavish marriage, and church-bound religion, and property-made war, and social injustice. He frankly uses the old machinery of "Looking Backward." From the vantage-point of two thousand years, we here review the unhappy and undignified earth of the twentieth century, and marvel at its wretchedness.

The perfected humans of "The Dream" greatly resemble the seraphic figures in "Men Like Gods." Little government, less clothing; spontaneous and readjustable love, without jealousy or abandon; a lightsome diet of fruit, nuts, and milk (vin compris, however); so wags the world in the admirable fortieth century A.D. One of the supermen has a dream about himself in a former incarnation as a London cockney. He tells the dream, in great detail, to his semi-angelic companions. It is all about how squalid and interesting a place twentieth-century London was, with its hollow prudery, and the greed of its money-makers, and the hypocrisy of its parsons, and the physical suppressions and jealousies of lovers, and the nasty tie of marriage, and so on. We notice that the seraphic ones sit up; they are highly exhilarated by the tale. Alas! there is no drama in perfection; they are glad enough to get away from the Utopian virtues and serenities,

'The Dream. By H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York. $2.50.

to enjoy the spectacle of a thorough huto enjoy the spectacle of a thorough human mess such as we of the twentieth century are part of. The truth is, Utopian fiction is of no interest except as a background for human action as we know it. What would Mr. Wells write about if we were all Utopians?

"The Spoon River Anthology" is still the best work of imaginative fiction by Edgar Lee Masters. His novels do little more than develop in bulk and detail some such life-story as is suggested in a dozen lines in the "Anthology." "Mirage" carries on the story of "Skeeters Kirby." Like so many heroes of current American fiction (for latest instance, the fellow in Robert Herrick's "Waste"), Skeet Kirby is an ineffectual and pathetic figure. He resents the force of materialism that controls America, but he has no other force to oppose to it.

2 Mirage. By Edgar Lee Masters. Boni & Liveright, New York. $2.50.

He has, merely; a vague desire for beauty, a feeble impulse towards real freedom of action and of the spirit. His resentment is stronger than his vision; so that his net effect is egocentric and negative, not generous or positive. "Mirage," "Waste," "Inner Darkness," "Undertow," "Half Gods"-such are the titles of recent American novels which try to get beneath the surface of our life and, to show us what we are.

Now the value of this testimony is qualified by its source. Serious novelists are a special and limited class. Abnormally sensitive, they are impatient of our normal insensitiveness. Writers of exceptional talent, but lacking the Olympian calm of genius, they can't bear people of less intelligence and æsthetic feeling than their own. They wish to remold the sorry scheme of things, and are angry with the rest of us for sitting tight and taking some joy in life as we find it. They scold us, and sniff at us, and dismiss us with a shrug. Such is the fashion of the minor prophets. What our generation needs, like every generation, is the major prophet or artist with courage and faith enough to believe a

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little even in his neighbors and to turn a great beam of fructifying sympathy upon the paltry but well-meaning creature.

man.

Meanwhile the minor prophets offer us what they have. They work through a sort of progressive discontent and disillusion. To be anti-Victorian was enoughfor a time, then to be anti-Christian in the sense of being against the formalities and abuses of church religion. Now pagan is the great word. Mr. Wells's God is a pagan god. Mr. Masters swears by the Bhagavad Gita. In Chapter VI Skeet Kirby takes ten pages to dispose of the inspiration of the Bible, and also the whole fabric of Christianity. As he sums up, the philosophy of Jesus "is Asiatic and worthless, almost, for the business of life, and immeasurably below the æsthetic reconciliations of the Greeks and the high spirituality of the Hindus. The whole scheme of salvation is absurd." Superior Skeet! His tale as a whole is marked less by high spiritualitythan by the pessimistic acceptance of which Mitford is clearest spokesman: "As animals pass from youth to maturity and then to decrepitude, so this thing called the soul of man burns like a lamp until the oil is low, and then the wick chars and the flame stinks and smokes; and all. this no matter what you do or what you are."

Robert Keable's "Recompense" is a labored sequel to that sensation of yesterday, "Simon Called Peter." The "Author's Note" makes clear his resentment against the reception of the earlier story, especially by the "Religious Press." The book, he says, was "too sincere" for the Religious Press. I doubt this. Granting that the author meant richly, his book was cheap. If the hero had not been a parson, and his emotional qualms religious qualms, the peculiar "piquancy" of its main situation would have been lacking. The blend of sex-cumreligion has always been popular. Mr. Keable makes an unwholesome affair of

Recompense. By Robert Keable. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

it and, otherwise, a dull affair. The war over, Peter, who has unfrocked himself for conscience' sake, tries to be busy and forgotten in South Africa. Julie and he love each other, but he is sure that marriage to her would be a new betrayal of his vague duty to God. After some backing and filling, Peter reads the law to Julie. They part, Peter to become a monk, and Julie to drift into the unlicensed arms of another man. If the reader is able to muster any real belief in or regard for either Peter or Julie, their story may move him. To me, unhappily, they remain merely a pair of uneasy, unlovable, and insignificant puppets. Their author may have had a "sincere" intention of giving them reality and meaning; but the product is none the less claptrap.

The effect of "Half Gods," by Lynn Montross, is vague enough. In the end we know little more of the story-teller's idea or moral than the title has suggested. And this is well. He has tried, with no small measure of success, to let his facts (selected facts, of course) bear their own meaning. On his tiny stage, with the now familiar setting of the provincial town in midland America, he has tried to focus his impression of this restless and rudderless generation. That is a suggestive comment on the young set of Willow Ridge conscientiously putting through its "party." In the midst of their drinking and "necking" and the rest of it, "the fourteen of them, she knew, were aware that the eyes of the press, the pulpit, and the pew were upon them; aware that solemn voices from Maine to California were saying something about them; aware that new writers were beginning new books about them; and aware that in the next day's newspapers nice old ladies of forty-five would be condemning the styles, while modern ministers would say that the 'younger generation,' after all, wasn't bad, only thoughtless. In truth, this awareness made it positively a responsibility to have been born at any time since 1890, and such things as rolled stockings, uncorseted waists, and lipsticks had become the badge of an era."

This narrative, however, is not a satire, but a thoughtful presentment of a society at odds with itself. A world of half gods, in which the girl Frances Leeper gropes uncertainly for happiness without faith in anything, and her father finds a sort of religious satisfaction in his lodge, and the young parson, Frederick Eckert, vibrates miserably between fanatical exaltation and guilty desire. The

'Half Gods. By Lynn Montross. The George H. Doran Company, New York. $2.

THOMAS Y. CROWELL CO. NEW YORK

Church. The sacraments, especially the Maple Sugarand Syrup

mass, are the heart of his faith; and coming to doubt their efficacy he loses all belief. A very different sort of religioner rescues him and sets him upon the path of his real mission. Like most current novels, this book contains some

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