Recent Fiction

WE should have been obliged to Mr. Bellamy if he had not added to the title of his new story¹ the words A Romance of Immortality. Before one begins the book the announcement is a little unpleasant ; after one has read it one is apt to regard it as fraudulent. In giving an account of a book which misses — and the miss is as good as a mile — of being a great book, we are sufficiently irritated by the trick which the author has played on us to tell his secret beforehand to those who may chance to read this notice before they read the book itself.

Miss Ida Ludington, at the opening of the story, is a gentlewoman living in a New England village. At the age of twenty she was stricken with a disease which robbed her of her beauty, suddenly aged her, and threw her into a hopeless state of regret over her lost youth. She has withdrawn herself from the companionship of a society in which she was once a central figure, and now lives chiefly in the memory of an irrecoverable past. The death of her father leaves her almost without kin, but with sufficient means to consult only her own whims. The accession to a large property shortly after confirms her in a decision which has long filled her imagination. She removes from a village which is rapidly succumbing to the inrush of modern improvements, and takes up her residence on Long Island; but she carries with her exact measurements of the village of her youth, and pleases herself with a complete reconstruction upon her new estate. Not only does she rebuild her own house in fac-simile, but she reproduces the village street, the other houses, the meeting - house, and the school-house.

In this ghostly village she makes her home, and so far as is possible reconstructs in imagination her shattered girlhood. She has had a miniature which represents her before the decay of her beauty painted life-size and hung in the chief place in her house. At this point she receives into her home an orphan child, the legacy of a remote cousin. The boy at once stretches out his hands to the beautiful lady hanging in the picture-frame, and thus wins the love of the lonely woman. He grows up in her society, hears her talk of her lost youth, and every year becomes more devoted in his romantic attachment to the girl in the frame. At last he graduates from college, but before returning to his home he writes to Miss Ludington a philosophical letter, in which he discloses the faith which has taken possession of him. He believes in immortality, but in an immortality of persons who go to make up an individual. Listen to him : —

“ The individual, in its career of seventy years, has not one body, but many, each wholly new. It is a commonplace of physiology that there is not a particle in the body to-day that was in it a few years ago. Shall we say that none of those bodies has a soul except the last, merely because the last decays more suddenly than the others ? . . . Either there is no immortality for us which is intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all the other persons who make up an individual live forever, and one day will meet and be together in God’s eternal present; and when the several souls of an individual are in harmony, no doubt he will perfect their felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more tender and intimate than any earthy union ever dreamed of, constituting a life, one yet manifold, — a harp of many strings, not struck successively as here on earth, but blending in rich accord.”

The practical outcome of this philosophy is that the Ida Ludington of the portrait died during the sickness of her forlorn successor, and now lives in the spiritual life, and will hereafter be known as other souls are known. The faith in this investiture of immortality forbids Paul De Riemer to transfer his devotion to any other woman. This is his love ; this shall remain his love until he meets her after his own death, — which, by the way, does not seem connected in his mind with that fragmentary personality bestowed by him on his love. It is an undivided Paul who is betrothed to her. The confidence with which he broaches this doctrine carries away Miss Ludington, and she becomes a joyful convert to the same belief. Some day she shall see this beauteous creature. Meanwhile she is consoled for her own fading life, puts off her cheerlessness of dress and behavior, and looks upon the world with new delight.

It chances that, when shopping in Brooklyn, Miss Ludington falls in with an old schoolmate, whom she has not seen since her girlhood. She persuades the woman to return with her to her home, and enjoys the amazement with which Mrs. Slater discovers the village which belonged so entirely to her past. The conversation naturally turns upon this new faith of Miss Ludington and Paul, and Mrs. Slater, who has had some half-believing dealings with mediums, suggests, half in earnest and half in raillery, that if their doctrine be correct they may be able to see the materialized spirit of the portrait girl. She mentions a friend who has had successful encounters with a very remarkable medium. Paul seizes upon the notion. He is infatuated with his love, and will run any risk, if by chance he may realize her to himself.

Mrs. Slater disappears from the scene the next day, but in course of time sends the address of the medium, and Paul, whose resolution has not faltered, although Miss Ludington’s has, promptly follows the clue. The two arrange for a séance with Mrs. Legrand, who, with her agent, Dr. Hull, has been exceedingly interested in the problem; and sure enough, the conditions are favorable, and Miss Ludington and Paul do receive a material revelation of the portrait Ida. The medium, however, is exhausted by the singular manifestation of her power and all that is involved in it, and it is some time before she is able to repeat the seance. Paul, meanwhile, after the glimpse he has had, is in an agony of pleasure. His mind dwells upon the great problem, and the question occurs to him, Since the materialization of the spirit is dependent upon the vitality of the medium, what would be the result if, under the intense strain, the medium should actually die after the spirit had been materialized ? Since the will of the medium called up the spirit and sent it back into the spirit world, what if the medium should have no power to remit the spirit?

The question is answered by the fact. The medium does break down under the strain ; and while the others are horrorstricken about the couch of the woman, Paul sees, with a tremor, that the beautiful Ida hovers distractedly about, bewildered and overpowered by the loss of some will, or rather by the faithful presence of a body. Miss Ludington and Paul take her with them to their home, and there she is shown her own portrait, but, more than that, discovers with delight the familiar scenes of her earthly life. She is at home, though still in a maze; but the two, profoundly stirred by this realization of their belief, indoctrinate her with it, and life begins for her anew in subtle joy.

Miss Ludington shows her old books and toys, and they dwell together upon the former life, details of which come readily to the mind of the girl. Paul, meanwhile, is in a state of torture. His love has matured through years of consecration, but what response is there from her ? None at all, apparently. Why should there be ? He is a stranger to her. The secret, however, is soon told, and the girl accepts the lover with a simple straightforwardness. But now certain practical difficulties arise. Who is this maiden ? What name has she, — what right and title before the law ? The questions propound themselves when Miss Ludington is moved to make some provision for her, in case of her own death ; they occur very forcibly when the material interests of marriage are considered. The difficulty of relationship in the intercourse of the two women is set aside for the present by regarding the girl as Miss Ludington’s sister ; but the girl herself shrinks painfully from a determination of the several questions. Indeed, the approach of marriage causes her to manifest a most painful sadness, and her lover surprises her one day in uncontrollable grief. He seeks to comfort her, and is himself smitten with a profound sense of the impossibility of turning the relation which he has held to her into an earthly one. Who is he, that he should dare to wed this soul come back from heaven ! He rises into a state of self-renunciation ; he reveals the thought of his heart, and the girl’s grief is checked. She is mute, and then, as if quieted by his resolve, leaves him.

She leaves him and Miss Ludington in good truth, for that night she disappears. Possibly, in our hurried précis, we have prepared the reader for the inevitable note on the dressing-table, which discloses the art by which these two dreamers have been beguiled. The girl come down from heaven was the daughter of Mrs. Slater. Dr. Hull was her father, Mrs. Legrand her aunt. Mrs. Slater, accidentally thrown in with Miss Ludington, devised the plot, and the four perfected it. Everything worked well up to the point we have reached in our narrative, but now the girl’s better nature supplied the mine which exploded the whole scheme. She was by nature gifted with theatrical power, and she had been carefully trained in the piece by her mother, who provided her with the necessary facts in Miss Ludington’s early life. Mrs. Legrand did not die ; the girl had come down out of a trap-door. The whole thing was a trick played upon two credulous people. But when the girl entered their home and received their lavish love, and when, more than that, her own heart went out to Paul, deception was no longer possible. Her grief had arisen from this cause; her heart was breaking; but when Paul placed her, an arrant cheat, above his reach, her nature could no longer withstand the appeal of her conscience, and she fled.

The end is quickly told. Paul discovers that he loves the flesh and blood which his imagination has invested with a heavenly nature. Her repentance draws him still closer to her. Now he can have her, and he seeks her until he finds her. Miss Ludington and Paul wake from their dream to a more satisfactory reality.

We are perfectly ready to expose ourselves to the charge of fatuous credulity when we admit that we kept along with the author up to the moment of the dénoûment in an unsuspicious frame of mind. Of course we did not believe in the actual materialization of the spirit, any more than we accepted the doctrine of momentary immortality, or, farther back, were misled into believing that any woman could have reproduced a ghostly village on Long Island, within driving distance of Brooklyn, and within calling distance of the reporters of the Brooklyn Union. What we mean is that, accepting the author as a romancer, we delivered ourselves up to him, and found every step a continuation of the last. The whole story as far as the revelation is consistent, and even carries one over the thin ice of a spiritualistic séance. Nay, more, the conception is in a high degree original, and is wrought with extraordinary skill. The author himself seems to believe in his imagination. The whole tone of the narrative is exquisite in its purity and gentle melancholy. Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process had prepared us for good work, but we kept saying to ourselves, This is more than ingenious,— it is beautiful; it is more than fancy, — it is a piece of fine though extravagant imagination. The quaintness of the conceit disappeared before the pathos of the situation. The unreality of scene and persons was forgotten. The light which never was on sea or land was sufficient to give color and warmth and the breath of life to this still village and its inhabitants. Not a false note seems to have been struck. If Mr. Bellamy had carried out the romance in the same scheme, he would have produced an original and lasting piece of art.

He has not done this, He has chosen to throw away a great opportunity. He has begun a statue in marble, and left it upon legs of clay. There is no excuse for this wanton misuse of high power. Hawthorne never would have been guilty of such an outrage, and yet in the earlier part of the story Mr. Bellamy comes nearer to Hawthorne than any writer whom we have. Indeed, the more we look at the matter, the more our indignation gives way to a pity and the sense of personal loss. We thought we were in the hands of a magician, and we find he was only a juggler. In these days when realism holds us in its chains, we look for an escape ; we ask for some strong spiritual imagination, and when we think we are in the shadow of its wings we suddenly drop upon a very disillusionized earth. In truth, we can almost fancy Mr. Bellamy himself sharing our disappointment. Does he not look with some dismay upon the wreck of his imagination ? Did he foresee the end from the beginning, or was he betrayed into a trap and obliged to get out by sleight of hand ? Does he really think that the ethical change in Ida Slater compensates for the loss of a beautiful piece of art?

If any one wishes contrasts in his novel-reading, let him lay down Miss Ludington’s Sister and take up The Crime of Henry Vane.² Here he will find himself untroubled by any glimpses of immortality, whether real or imaginary, but hemmed about by a most merciless world, the exit from which is by the narrow gate of suicide. Henry Vane, upon whom a jury of his friends sit in the first chapter of the book, is as complete a representative of the world with no nonsense about it as Paul De Riemer is not. He is introduced to the reader as “sitting on the perron of a small summer-house in Brittany, poking the pebbles in the driveway with his cane.” He has just been refused by the young Englishwoman to whom he had offered himself in marriage. The author, having started his hero with a supposed misfortune, proceeds to rob him of his sister, who dies; of his trust in his father, who has speculated and lost his property ; then of his father, who dies; and of his mother, who goes insane. A dozen pages or so suffice for these incidents, and Mr. Vane is now stripped and ready for the fray. He is just twenty-one, and very completely his own master. With the coolness and iron will which belongs to heroes of that masterly age, he returns to America, devotes himself for three years to the necessary struggle with fortune, and emerges, still cool, but rich and with his hand on the lever which makes the engine go. Another dozen pages. He is now ready for the great battle of life, his antagonist being a young lady, introduced to the reader as Miss Baby Thomas. Why baby, the reader is never told. Nothing in the description of the young lady, who appears to be full grown in all the arts of feminine warfare, answers to the name. Perhaps there was a subtle suggestion in the pitting of a baby against the ironbound hero. The author, however, does not intend the reader to remember the name ; once only, afterward, does it occur, we think. Miss Thomas now leads the hero a dance through the rest of the book. The incidents are not varied. They belong to the conventional life of young men and women in New York. A walk up Fifth Avenue is taken, or it is not taken. A steamboat ride up the Hudson, with a picnic and a sudden shower; a handkerchief ; a german; a few weeks at a semi-fashionable country resort, — these supply the scenery of the story. Mr. Vane goes suddenly to Europe. He puts an ocean between himself and Miss Thomas, partly to find out his own mind. He spends great ingenuity in trying to find out Miss Thomas’s mind. He works assiduously at his own. He is never quite sure if she is flirting; he is not quite sure if he is himself in earnest. It is a ballet, in which the motions constantly suggest a collision and a narrow escape. Meanwhile, the author, without saying a word in his own person, appeals to the reader like a dumb chorus, beseeching him in pantomime to observe what a terrible encounter this is. The short, sharp sentences, the semi-oaths which escape the hedge of the teeth, the whole air of the book, announce a tragedy. The lady is beautiful, she is winning ; site does not appear to the reader very wicked, but he feels all the while that if the chorus could only speak it would burst out in a torrent of words to show how unutterably cruel the girl is. The man, with his hesitations, with his cowardice, with his playing with love, is the victim of one of the deepest-laid plots ever devised by serpentine woman. So the chorus, in its dumb anguish, manages to hint. Finally, the girl marries another man, who has been seen by the reader scuttling round the corner several times. Then Henry Vane, the long tried, the much enduring, the Job who never cursed his Maker, because he did not believe he had one, but sat down in a nineteenth-century railroad office and conjured all his flocks and herds back again, — this iron-clad hero, with all the coolness of a man who has looked into the volcano of this world and seen that there was nothing in it, blows his brains out. The reader is expected to join the jury and give his verdict. The author apparently withholds his own judgment. What was Henry Vane’s crime? he asks mysteriously; did he commit it? And if he committed it, was he justly punished by himself? The reader may fairly answer, The facts are not all in ; you have not called some of the principal witnesses. Mr. Ten Eyck, for example, could have told an interesting story. Miss Thomas herself was not really on the stand, and if, as we dimly suspect, the author is undertaking to hold fickle woman responsible for all the misery in the world, we can only reply that the world is not made up of young men and women of about the age of twenty-four, and that the jury which sits upon character is not made up of club-men.

The reader of Miss Jewett’s A Country Doctor³ is more inclined to compare it with her previous stories than with other people’s novels. It is always interesting to see how a writer of short stories will handle a novel, and Miss Jewett has made for herself so good a place by her earlier books that one feels a personal interest in the success of her first long flight. We believe emphatically in the wisdom of such ventures. An artist may have a peculiar gift for miniature-painting, but he will paint miniatures all the better for occasionally trying his hand at a life-size picture. It may be said that A Country Doctor is in effect an extended short story ; that is, more room is allowed for the expansion of character, more details are given in the separate scenes, a longer stretch of continuous time is covered, but the theme is as simple and the real action as brief as if the author had undertaken to present a study of life within the compass of an ordinary single - number story. Miss Jewett has an excellent subject in the life of a young girl who is predestined to the career of a country doctor. She has blended with her delineation of this life a delightful sketch of a typical country doctor, and she has introduced other characters, drawn chiefly from the class with which she has already shown herself familiar. She has not set herself a very complex problem. The resolution to study medicine is taken by a girl who has no great opposition to brave. Her guardian supports her in her resolve, her own nature witnesses to its inevitableness, and the world is not brought in to object until the resolve has made good headway into action. The task which Miss Jewett has thus had to accomplish has been the faithful portrayal of a character ripening under favorable conditions, and this task exactly fits her power. In saying this, we do not in the least disparage her work; on the contrary, we assert for her a high quality of literary skill. It is no mean thing to dispense with strong contrasts and to make much of delicate shades. This is what Miss Jewett has done. She has, in the first place, made an interesting book. Then she has made a wise book. One is struck by the serene good sense which characterizes the defense of the girl’s position. She has made, finally, a graceful book. It is much to be in company with such genuine high breeding, such unfailing courtesy. There are touches, moreover, of something higher; quiet passages which glow with a still beauty. How charming, for example, is the little series of pictures illustrating Dr. Leslie’s successive views of the child Nan ! “ He always liked to see her come into church on Sundays, her steps growing quicker and surer as her good grandmother’s became more feeble. The doctor was a lonely man, in spite of his many friends, and he found himself watching for the little brown face that, half-way across the old meeting-house, would turn round to look for him more than once during the service. At first there was only the top of little Nan Prince’s prim best bonnet or hood to be seen, unless it was when she stood up in prayer-time; but soon the bright eyes rose like stars above the horizon of the pew railing ; and next there was the whole wellpoised little head, and the tall child was possessed by a sense of propriety, and only ventured one or two discreet glances at her old friend.”

The development of Nan’s mind is well given. We question only if the author has put with sufficient incisiveness the reactionary period, when the girl seems to have forgotten her intention, and to be waiting for the spirit to move her again. This eddy in her life is true to nature, but we doubt a little if its full meaning is clearly expressed ; for the reader feels a little surprise when Nan begins all over again, as it were. The faint struggle in her nature when love is offered is cleverly given, though one is aware of a certain timidity in the author when presenting this phase. The lover is sketched good-naturedly, but not with very strong lines, and one feels that Nan’s slight stirring of love did not receive a very strong reinforcement from the nature of the man who excited it. The whole passage, however, is in tone with the rest of the book.

A curious comparison might be instituted between this book and Björnson’s The Fisher Maiden, where the heroine, of a much more tumultuous nature, is likewise possessed of a passion for a profession which the world in which she lives frowns upon. Björnson deals with the whole matter in a masculine manner, Miss Jewett in a feminine. Nothing very strange in this, to be sure; but while Björnson, in his vigorous fashion, forgets his story for a while in his desire to preach a doctrine, Miss Jewett maintains her art successfully in the animated scene of the tea-table discussion. We speak of her treatment as feminine, and the merit of it is that the womanliness of the work is of a thoroughly healthy sort. Heaven be praised for a handling of the theme which is absolutely free from hysterics, and regards men and women in a wholesome, honest fashion! The very seriousness with which the author regards her task is a sweet and fragrant seriousness, and one is unconsciously drawn into thinking and speaking of Nan Prince with that affectionate interest which leads Miss Jewett to lay her hand on the girl’s shoulder, as it were, all through the narrative.

It seems that we never shall have done with contrasts. A Country Doctor takes one into the regions of a pure, honest maidenhood, and one is refreshed by contact with life which is strong, unsullied, and bent on high enterprise. The world is wide, and Nan Prince is not the only type of girlhood. We must worry ourselves to the end over Phœbes like the one whose troubled career is drawn out by the author of that volcanic book which flamed away years ago, Rutledge.⁴ Here also one is confronted at the outset with a problem of life, but of a different sort. He finds himself in company with a matron, well poised, of ordered life, a religious nature set in smooth circumstances, when she gets sudden tidings that her only boy, at his studies in another town, has become infatuated with a country girl, has won her heart, lost his own moral balance, and now stands condemned by conscience, but still in a position to escape punishment at the hands of the world in which he lives. We have looked over the shoulders of the mother who reads the letter bringing this news, and we are permitted to attend her midnight vigils and to hear her conversation with the girl’s mother, who has made her way to the house of the man who has done this evil thing. The narrative of this interview is powerfully sketched. It is vivid, true to nature, and thoroughly dramatic. One is prepared by it for anything in the further treatment of the subject.

The question is, What shall be done ? The mother and father put to each other this formidable riddle, and at last they decide to offer the boy an alternative choice: he may either marry Phœbe, bring her home in the spring, take the gardener’s house to live in, and receive two thousand dollars a year from his father as clerk in his office ; or he must cut off all his connections at once and take ship immediately for China, there to enter a mercantile house and remain indefinitely. The mother, whose sense of religious honor has made the former alternative the only possible one to her mind, agrees not to write, or in any way attempt to influence the son.

Barry Crittenden elects to bring his wife home, but he is too proud to vouchsafe a word as to his own feelings, and so the ordeal is to begin. The daughters of the family know nothing more than that Barry has made a misalliance; the mother endures the shameful secret in silence. The problem which thus offers itself is the adjustment of these discordant family elements. This certainly is no mean theme, for it involves the presentation of the girl, of whom the only hint so far is that she is handsome, which was to be expected, and is a high-school graduate, and therefore, we are told, likely to be possessed of superficial culture ; it involves also her endurance of all the tests which the situation naturally offers, and the trial of the young man’s temper. All the signs in the early part of the book point to this as the subject of the story, and despite the disagreeable facts which lie at the basis of the novel the reader is not unwilling to accompany the author in her development of so interesting a plot. He is encouraged to believe that she takes it seriously, by some of the incidents which are introduced. By this we do not mean that the reader is eager for an ethical treatise, but that he recognizes the knottiness of the problem, and feels sure that an author capable of writing the early chapters will untie the knot, and not cut it. Here is an opportunity for character to be busily employed, and a deus ex machina is not essential. The excellent modeling of Mrs. Crittenden prepares the reader for an equally rounded figure in the case of each of the other personages, and the individuality of the several dramatis personœ gives a fine chance for a play of the personal forces.

The reader is encouraged, we say, by the appearance of incidents which give promise of a thorough development of the ethical forces. The little scene where Phœbe goes to the Episcopal church for the first time is one of these scenes, and the reader, calmly laying aside his prejudices or partialities, is quite ready to listen to the influence which this sensation is to have upon the heroine and her character. To his surprise, he has gone down a blind alley ; he is on a road that leads no whither. He is not a bit farther into the real story.

It is all very well to hear how the first meeting between the various persons comes off. The quickness of the heroine to take in the situation and rip up her countrified gown is to be expected, — any novelist, especially if a woman, would have carried us safely through this phase; but the trouble is that nearly all the movements in the story are quite as superficial and external. We say this in full recollection of the central point of the story, — that upon which the plot hinges. Here we have a number of carefully considered characters, each capable of real thought, real suffering, real passion ; and when the test supplied by the author is presented, they all turn into automata. The most threadbare of incidents is used for the crisis. The heroine finds a note, in her husband’s handwriting, which purports to be a passionate love-letter to his old flame. It is really a copy of a part in private theatricals, but blinded by jealousy she snatches her child up, packs her trunk, and flees. Instead of finding the story which the book seemed to promise, one is treated to a cheap piece of sensationalism ; everybody is rendered miserable for the rest of the book, and when the wreck is cleared at the end very few valuables are saved. It is a disappointment indeed to the reader to find himself offered a stone, when his hostess really had a capital loaf in her hand all the time. One of the best touches in the book is where the hero laughs at the discovery of the heroine’s mistake. The reader laughs, too, but for all that he has not been invited to a comedy.

We scarcely need to do more than remind readers of The Atlantic that they can now enjoy A Roman Singer ⁵ over again in the proportions of a book ; but after surveying recent fiction, — not only the books which we have here noted, but others which go to make up the great account, — we settle down to the conviction that for a good, honest story, vigorously told, Mr. Crawford’s is the most satisfactory thing we have had in America this year. Here is the passionate, Romeo-like lover, the northern Juliet, the obdurate father, the hoary villain, the castle with the maiden immured in its tower, the rescue, the marriage, and the unreconciled father — all the stock, well-worn, and acceptable properties of the novel — transmuted into a story of to-day, and presented with the wellrestrained garrulousness of a professor who has a story of his own, which he won’t tell. What more could one ask ? The charm of it is that while it might have been melodrama it is not; that the situations are not impossible, not highly wrought, yet are ingenious and follow in swift succession ; that the romantic element, while fervid, is not blatant; and above all, that the love which is the theme of the book is honest and straightforward. We especially like the form in which Mr. Crawford has cast the story. By putting it into the mouth of Cornelio Grandi, he allows himself to suffuse the whole work with an Italian air. It is true, he now and then forgets himself, and changes from the slightly falsetto tones of Grandi to his natural voice, when he is very much in earnest; but these slips are not obtrusive, and one comes to have a very good acquaintance with the old fellow, and to see him on his way back to Serveti with hearty good will. The use of this form is maintained with tolerable consistency, but we have learned to accept carelessness in it, much as we accept good-naturedly the absurdities of opera. There are not many instances of thorough faithfulness in carrying out the conception of one man telling the story, who is not the principal character, and yet tells it in the first person. Mr. James achieved a greater feat in Roderick Hudson, where Rowland Mallet is the concealed storyteller ; he crippled himself by not even taking advantage of the autobiographic form, while telling nothing which does not come immediately under Mallet’s cognizance. Now Mr. Crawford recollects himself from time to time, and explains how Grandi comes into possession of scenes which take place between two other characters, and sometimes no explanation is necessary ; but there is after all a good deal of action and conversation which suppose the narrator to be merely the all-potent author.

We are disposed to grumble a little at the device by which the fiction of the Wandering Jew redinivus in the person of Benoni is made to crumble at the end. We distrust insane people in novels. They can do anything they want to, and their lawlessness is their destruction as component elements of a piece of art. Why could not Mr. Crawford have allowed Benoni to end as mysteriously as he began ? At least a hint would have been better than so matter of fact an explanation. Hawthorne would have teased the reader, and allowed him to take sides upon the question whether Benoni was the Wandering Jew or not; and Hawthorne would have been right in conserving so capital a figure. For all that, Benoni is a very clever study. He is like one of those photographs over which one claps a hand and says, If you cover up the mouth, that is a capital portrait of So and So ; of the Wandering Jew, let us say, in this case. One of the brightest scenes in the book is where Benoni nearly drives Nino wild by playing incessantly upon one string of his violin.

It may be said of this book — and it is a fine thing to say of any novel — that it really does carry one away, and when one comes back he is none the worse for the adventure.