time would have done as much. One cannot guess what he meant to do next; his death left Kitty to work out her own salvation.

There is no flaw in the structure of the story, but there is a lack. It does not touch the springs of emotion; but it rivets attention, and compels admiration for the austere excellence of the workmanship. It is an emotional situation scrutinized by the cold light of

reason.

In "The Grand Inquisitor" Donald Douglas reverses Maugham's formula. His theme is the emotional response induced by certain intellectual concepts. Though the action is externalized, it occurs largely in the realm of imagination. John Graham and Angus Gordon are types susceptible to "the power of the word"; they stand mazed between the two worlds of the ideal and the real. The old lady who found comfort in "that blessed word Mesopotamia" is their reductio ad absurdum; but she is not a fair analogy. Coleridge, wandering in a metaphysical cloud and emitting oracular rhapsodies which charmed his uncomprehending friends, is a better example. Though I cannot share the experience, I admit its validity. A certain order of temperament is required, to enter the magic circle. An appreciator of "The Grand Inquisitor" cited a passage which impressed him profoundly, wherein Angus Gordon "broke through time into eternity". I cannot grasp the image, nor feel the thrill, because I can only think of time as a part of eternity as the wave is a part of the stream. If you're not outside, you can't break in. And the prefaced quotation from Dostoyevsky, the supposition that eternity might prove to be "one little room... black and grimy, with spiders in every corner", gives me no sense of awe or horror or despair; it

strikes upon my ear as a mere confusion of words, like the babbling of delirium. Put it down to poverty of imagination on my part. Demonstrably, the book has power, great power, for those who can attune themselves to its well sustained mood. And it is so original that a review, in the ordinary sense of the word, is quite impossible.

"God of Might", by Elias Tobenkin, is also a spiritual Odyssey, but one in which the hero follows a familiar path. Samuel Waterman fled from the narrow and dangerous limits of a Russian ghetto, and came to America in search of liberty. At first he thought he had found it. The New World received him kindly, seemed to draw no invidious distinction between Jew and Gentile. He prospered, gradually shed the strictness of his orthodox Judaism, took a Christian wife. But he could not escape from the shadow of the ancient hatred which had darkened his childhood. He remained an alien at heart; and his morbid sensitiveness read in every slight or rebuff a threat of the hereditary terror, of ostracism and persecution. Candidly, it appears to me that his trouble was largely due to his own brooding egotism, to an inverted pride. It is a provocative and debatable point. However, Samuel's story is clothed in clear and vigorous English, and presented with the fine restraint which is the outward sign of a humane and tolerant nature.

Satire appeals to a limited audience at best. If it is expended upon a topic of local significance, and is not especially witty, it can scarcely be expected to arouse an international furor. Laurence Housman, in writing "Trimblerigg", may have taken for granted that his dubious hero was an international figure; but no politician is that, though his name may float vaguely and briefly across the frontier. "Jonathan Trim

blerigg" is a very obvious caricature of an ex-premier of Great Britain. His career is narrowed down to the opportunities for climbing, self seeking, and general humbug which an unscrupulous man might find in the ministry of a Nonconformist church. An opportunist to the bone, incapable of sincerity, he is sorely afflicted by an embodied conscience in the form of his sister Davidina. The mocking Davidina sees through all his subterfuges, trips him up at every turn, and brings him crashing to ruin at the end. If it were funny well, then it would be funny. As it is, I found it pretty heavy going.

Elmer Davis offers with "The Keys of the City" an hour or so of carefree entertainment. It poses no problem and points no moral, being just a tale of blameless love with some comedy relief. The easy flow of the narrative slips lightly over the improbabilities inevitable to a complicated plot. The author has refurbished, without apology, half a dozen stock situations; he doesn't even blink at the threadbare business of an eccentric will which binds the hero to certain conditions, and thereby sets the story going. On the first page the hero walks into a strange town penniless and fancy free; in the last chapter he emerges with a fair young bride clinging proudly to his arm and a million dollar inheritance in his pocket. It isn't as sprightly as Mr. Davis's "I'll Show You the Town". Few essays in light fiction are.

"The trouble with this book", my thoughtful volunteer assistant reported on "The Black Cargo" by J. P. Marquand, "is that most of the stirring events take place off stage. The author informs you carefully that someone was shot between the post office and four o'clock, but he doesn't invite you to view the joyful episode with your own eyes." This confirmed my

personal impression. I feared that I might be denying a certain gentleman his due, by failing to register alarm and indignation over the iniquities of Eliphalet Greer and Richard Parton. Two such brimstone-reeking sinners as these these- usurers, blackbirders, pirates, despoilers of widows and orphans ought to make one's flesh creep. And the Nemesis of Greer, when his slave ship drifted into his own respectable New England harbor to betray him as the whited sepulchre he was, should make a stunningly satisfying climax. Unfortunately, there is too much talk about it and about, by way of preparation; it hangs fire tediously. It would have made a pretty good short story.

WITH

ITH "The Best Short Stories of 1924" Edward J. O'Brien rounds out a decade of anthology making. It has been his chief activity. He has not in this period advanced to any eminent critical position. What we owe him is the acknowledgment we pay the pioneer and innovator who has the self confidence to rush forward and be the first to say something, or do something, or get somewhere. If, subsequently, it be found that what he said sticks in the memory, if what he does turns out to be

a success, or if a great many people insist on going where he went first, his fame and fortune are secure, and many kind things will be said of his "vision" and "élan" by shrewd commentators.

Mr. O'Brien was the first to produce a yearbook which presumed to sort, classify, and preserve work which, in his opinion, deserved rescue from the ephemera of our creative effort of each calendar year. The particular medium which interested him was the American short story, and his judgment has had this confirmation, at least, that great numbers of book readers welcome and accept docilely an arbitrary selection of some twenty odd stories from each year's output which are dubbed by one editor "the best”.

Whether this is an austere and elevated search for perfection, or a short cut to culture, and whether Mr. O'Brien's annual volume is an agency for disseminating good ideas, good taste, and a fruitful sort of creative energy rather than the contrary, I do not know. Perhaps the mission suggested is too august for anybody to accomplish between the covers of one book. Certainly it is more than Mr. O'Brien accomplishes, for he partakes of the general frailty of human nature and has his own human peculiarities; perhaps he would say that a few eccentricities, an occasional enthusiastic excursion among the esoterics, are necessary to keep his book to the front better a storm centre in the classrooms than a dead calm in the bookshops.

But I do mean to say that there is a place for such books as Mr. O'Brien's, for the two volumes edited by Richard Eaton, "The Best French Short Stories of 1923-24" and "The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923-24", and for the others of this same type. So long as the publishers and authors will grant reprint privileges and the public will

buy the book, the total effect of a yearbook, great or modest, is toward definition, clarification, and integration.

In the present volume Mr. O'Brien grants the accolade of approval to Morgan Burke, Mildred Cram, Floyd Dell, Charles Caldwell Dobie, Carlos Drake, Charles J. Finger, Zona Gale, Tupper Greenwald, Harry Hervey, Leonard L. Hess, Rupert Hughes, Gouverneur Morris, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Roger Sergel, A. B. Shiffrin, Ruth Suckow, Melvin Van den Bark, Warren L. Van Dine, Glenway Wescott, and Frances Gilchrist Wood, by reprinting one each of their stories published between October 1923 and September 1924. The book also contains, for ambitious young writers who hope to win their way between the sacred covers at some future time, a list of magazines both in the United States and Great Britain which publish short stories. Then there is a section of thumbnail biographies of contemporary short story writers, bibliographies of books and articles upon the short story, an exhaustive index of the stories appearing in magazines during 1924, and other miscellaneous information really too numerous to mention.

It is not a hard task to compile a book of good short stories. Unless you have had the experience of passing the magazines in review for a considerable length of time, you would scarcely suppose there was anything like as much good work being done as there is. But when it comes to selecting the "best"

that is a hard, at best an arbitrary task, and one from which a less resolute man than Mr. O'Brien might well shrink.

What Mr. O'Brien is after is "psychological and imaginative reality", and he finds it in these stories which deal with human nature as it exhibits itself in crucial, climactic moments.

The moments are often sad, or bathed in irony, or even tragic in character, and the mood of the writers seems to imply that here is the real reality, la vraie vérité. This attitude persists because of the fetters which bind the American artist, says Mr. O'Brien a pleasant fancy, and one with which numerous earlier commentators have entertained themselves.

There is something almost eighteenth century about Mr. O'Brien's references to "prisoned emotions", the tyranny of our order, and about his 'fealty to the abstract idea of liberty. Now it seems plain to me that while an excellent case could be made out for the standardization of our material life, there has been a corresponding accretion to the scope and pliancy of our thought and feeling. However, I shall not develop my argument, for possibly the same reason that Mr. O'Brien did not; it is not the main business at present.

The judges of the O. Henry Memorial Award Committee, whose compilation "Prize Stories of 1924" may logically be compared with Mr. O'Brien's, are more certain than the veteran anthologist that we have excellent light or humorous stories. Of the fifteen stories they reprint, four are humorous: "Horse and Horse" by Charles Caldwell Dobie, "The Tie That Binds" by George Pattullo, ""Lijah" by Edgar Valentine Smith, and "One Uses the Handkerchief" by Elinore Cowan Stone. But there is one contrast between the two volumes which is even more striking. Not a single story is duplicated in these two books which cover the same ground for the same purpose! And Charles Caldwell Dobie is the only writer represented in both. Writers other than those already mentioned who are admitted to the O. Henry Prize collection are Inez Haynes

Irwin, whose "The Spring Flight" was given the first prize, Chester T. Crowell, whose "Margaret Blake" won second place, and Frances Newman, Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Connell, Edith R. Mirrielees, Jefferson Mosley, Elsie Singmaster, Raymond S. Spears, Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Harriet Welles.

On the whole I think Mr. O'Brien has chosen more wisely than did the O. Henry Committee. Yet no one but a case hardened classicist would dare lift his voice in these days to say dogmatically that this is intrinsically and irrefragably better than that, and that the personal equation is inconsequential. Suffice it to say that an excellent book could be made out of the stories which were included in neither of these quasiofficial collections. Let us leave this dangerous topic.

Just as I am cognizant of the greater difficulty Richard Eaton faced in assembling "The Best French Short Stories of 1923-24" and "The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923-24", so am I also doubtful about the value of his point of view, which is more than a little pedantic. "The stories", he remarks in a preface, "have been graded on a basis of seventy five per cent for literary value in France and twenty five per cent for conformity with the principles of the American short story." Does it not seem a mistaken idea to suppose that mathematics can be applied to the study and criticism of literature? Who knows who ever did know what a college instructor in composition means when he marks one theme B or 85, and another A or 90?

In the French collection there are stories by Marcel Boulanger, Paul Bourget, Frédéric Boutet, Colette, P. Drieu La Rochelle, Georges Duhamel, Henri Duvernois, Claude Farrère, Paul Geraldy, Pierre Guitet-Vauquelin, J.

Kessel, Jacques Lacrételle, Georges Lechartier, R. H. LeNormand, André Lichtenberger, Pierre MacOrlan, Paul Morand, the Countess of Noailles, Gaston Picard, J. H. Rosny Ainé, J. and J. Tharaud. Some of the stories are in what Mr. Eaton would recognize as the American mode. Others are in the French tradition of the feuilleton, the conte, and the nouvelle, and are admitted because in the opinion of counsel they have merit in France.

Many of the authors represented in "The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923-24" are strangers to the American public, which is interested in Continentals only after they are translated. But of course we know Schnitzler, Capek, Johannes V. Jensen, Pirandello, Her Majesty, Marie, Queen of Rumania, and V. Blasco Ibáñez. Both of Mr. Eaton's books follow the O'Brien pattern closely, and contain such yearbook features as magazine addresses, rolls of honor, and bibliographies.

naive, and decidedly amusing, in his efforts to reflect a sensitive appreciation of such cultural subjects as painting and sculpture. As W. C. Brownell has noted, he seemed to think that sculpture was a matter of marble, and, of course, it had to be something classical. The urbane Autocrat, too, gave little indication of being at all up on such matters. And our purest æsthete, Poe, was seemingly indifferent in this respect. Nowadays, however, one is tempted to fancy that the very considerable audience for the most intelligent novelists of the day is a remarkable society of connoisseurs of the whole field of arts and crafts. Hergesheimer, Van Vechten, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, Elinor Wylie, to mention just these is there any æsthetic erudition too esoteric for them to call upon the reader to savor? The rather diverting idea occurs to one that the elegant author of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" would himself be perhaps a bit stumped by this rampant cosmopolitan sensitivity to the delicate nuances of everything precious, from priceless gems to exotic viands. And

if the reader cannot when he sees it recognize such an obvious thing as a Pont-Aven canvas, or some such thing, how can he get on at all?

Well, in connection with the various praiseworthy educational activities now going which should aid in equipping the popular understanding to follow the strikingly enlightened fiction of the time, is the happy fact that art books designed for the general reader are all in all of a much better character than they were a few years ago. At the moment, it is agreeable to note the appearance of a new series of monographs dealing with modern painters, which, indeed, may be highly recommended "to those who wish quickly to be introduced to the life and work of these