cations are as delicate, as broad and as narrow as human nature itself under the stress of love, power, and the sentimental ties of country, class, and family. Mr. Bryson is a new writer with a pliant and polished style, an eye for the surface of life, a mind for its depths, and a great eagerness to fuse the whole into a telling presentation. He is sophisticated in whatever good sense the word has, and to borrow an expression which "The American Mercury" has shyly appropriated for its own urbane contributors-eminently civilized.

Another writer who handles the vital contacts of life with great skill and simplicity is Konrad Bercovici. He is one of the most genuine of the modern romancers. Each of his stories is very like its brothers in being as remote from American readers as the Danube. Each is as simple and elemental as life is complex and dispersive. And there is one other touch of uniformity: all of Mr. Bercovici's stories are excellently written.

The scene of "Millstones" (Pictorial Review, November) is laid "not far from where the river gushes into the Black sea". Two millers compete for the hand of Ephrosi, a fisherman's daughter. As a reflex of their competitive courtship they engage in a business duel. So wise little Ephrosi, hearing much of new millstones and little of love, quietly marries Zancu, a humble shoemaker, and a crippled one at that! This story is a perfect representative of the type. More will be said of Mr. Bercovici's romances later.

The emotions of a person with a limited span of life ahead are perennially interesting to fiction writers. Caroline E. Aber in "Morituri" (Midland, November) draws a close, subjective portrait of a woman for the next few hours after her doctor said, "You have

Within

only six months more to live." strict time limits, and within the bounds of a very short story, the mother herself, her daughter, her son in Paris, her brisk, legal husband, her home, and her whole comfortable social order are evoked with a grace of sentiment so poignant and wistful, so restrained, so actual, that as one reads, the real values of a profound mood emerge, crystal-clear and priceless.

It is like turning from a woodland path into the Boston Post Road on a holiday to take up Edna Ferber's story of lower middle class life in New York City. "Classified" (Cosmopolitan, November) is symptomatic of the democratic impulse which many of our younger writers have given contemporary literature. Neither Miss Ferber nor her heroine, Miss Bobby Comet, "a creature so blond, so slim, so marcelled, so perfumed", would have been possible before 1900. As a matter of fact, the Bobby Comets emerged as a literary type about 1920.

The story has to do with Miss Comet's activities in the classified advertising department of a great metropolitan newspaper, her nocturnal adventures, her scorn for her stogy parents ("They'll never get me that way!''), and her eventual capitulation to love, forty dollars a week, and two rooms on One Hundred and Eighty Sixth Street. Miss Ferber here conveys her own swift, timely version of Things as They Are with unmistakable brilliance. Yet equally unmistakable in her is the war between the reporter and the artist; and it must be admitted that "Classified" hardly gives a clue as to where the victory will ultimately rest.

"The Letter" (Red Book, October) by Bernice Brown is the story of Grover Dahlgren, "a man possessed of every grim, unsparing attribute of success", whose philosophy and emotions

ran at cross purposes. Dahlgren came to love Marion, the quiet wife of honest, ineffectual, dull Walter Pertwee.

There came a moment once when the doctrine of expediency deserted him. Mastered by his emotions, he wrote Marion a love letter. But he was saved from committing himself by an ironic stroke of fate which forestalled the delivery of the letter. So Dahlgren marches on to larger things, triumphant but unhappy, an unmoral opportunist whose sense of values remains permanently entangled. Dahlgren in politics is the prototype of the eminent realtor, Mr. George F. Babbitt, and the Andersonian hero too - a man dimly dissatisfied with the quality of the civilization he supports, but eternally scuttled in his vision by a materialistic philosophy.

The protagonist is again a woman in "Wantin' a Hand" (Century, November) by Lorna Moon. This story is simply a picture of the stream of consciousness of a drunken Scotch washerwoman. With morbid and maudlin imagination she reviews the tragic accident which swept love and idealism and hope and kindliness out of her life. As formless and sketchy as the short story ever becomes, this presentation of a pitiful and defeated human being is, nevertheless, an excellent piece of subjective writing, infinitely artistic and moving.

Elsie Singmaster, too, is a student of womankind. Like Ben Ames Williams, she believes that the use of the same characters and background over and over again in short stories makes them richer. "Little and Unknown" (Ladies' Home Journal, December) is one of Miss Singmaster's best stories of those gentle rural Pennsylvanians, Betsy and Tilly Shindledecker. The tragic end of a young city mother throws a tiny baby into the maidenly home of the Shin

dledeckers. The theme of the maternal craving in maidenly breasts has been accorded far more humor and far less sympathy than it deserves, and Miss Singmaster's quiet narrative of these two strange, gentle, devout, tranquilly competent, sharply individualized women has a depth and charm which have seldom been brought to bear upon the subject, and never with happier consequences.

Two other unusual stories of women are "Legend" (Harper's, November) by Fleta Campbell Springer, and "A Finished Story" (Good Housekeeping, October) by Ben Ames Williams.

Mr. Williams uses the frame of his usual "Fraternity" rural neighborhood. As author-auditor he hears and retells the story of a fragile, unhappy wife in the lumber camps who is rescued from her husband's abuse by her young brother, then recaptured. After she is dragged back to the sordid home, and chastised, the climax comes in the stark words of one of the men of Fraternity: "She did it alone. Fixed it so that Lovack hadn't any more use for her."

Mr. Williams is very skilful at being in, but not of, a story. Unobtrusively, he sees and records. His stories, cast in the homely narrative style of his rough countrymen, often achieve a high representativeness, and a quiet, unstressed beauty which has not, I think, been sufficiently recognized.

Mrs. Springer's story seems - in plot to be a story of crime and mystery. Well, it is that, and a good deal more. The father of "the Klinger girls" was found under incriminating circumstances with a murdered man, a stranger in the community. Klinger swore to his innocence and his daughters supported him, but he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. It was pneumonia that

Old

saved him. He died within a week after the verdict.

But this outline gives nothing of the strange atmosphere of the story, or of its primary interest, which has to do with the Klinger girls. They lived apart from the world. It was known that they were clairvoyant. The neighborhood had had instances of the helpful character of their "sight". It was this sight upon which they based their defense of their father. They had "seen" two men waylay, kill, and rob the stranger before they sent their father to investigate. But this testimony seemed fantastic in the courtroom. The girls could not produce a trace of the men who did the deed, and the case went against them. Mrs. Springer has done a notable piece of work in creating a mood in which the reader will accept these two odd, silent sisters, their strange power, and their unusual relationship to the friendly, bustling farming community in which they lived.

Of all English writers, W. W. Jacobs is the reigning sovereign of the kind of comedy he writes. "Something

for Nothing" (Hearst's International, January) is a delightful introduction, for those who need it, to the garrulous night watchman, Peter Russet, to Ginger Dick and Sam Small. The story in "Hearst's" concerns, of course, these old and well loved heroes. It recounts - - that is, the night watchman recounts - how Sam Small met a man "whose "whose on'y object in life is to do good to 'is fellow creechers", and by what undeserved good fortune Sam's comrades saved him eleven pounds and his watch and chain after they had passed into the experienced hands of the doer of good.

It is only recently, some thirty years after Mr. Jacobs first won a hearing,

that criticism has begun to look upon him with kindliness; but he will not mind; there are hosts of people who admire and love him. Without concern for technical literary problems, they somehow know that Mr. Jacobs is inimitable in his comic dexterity, his management of dialogue and exposition, and in the difficult and delicate artifice which he handles with so great a tact. Mr. Jacobs has created a delightful, bright little English cockney world, and the sooner you enter into it and discover its wharves and pubs the merrier life will be for you.

II

A story which is built upon character and events peculiar to special classes in society, or racial characteristics, or geographical influences, is fairly sure to make an impression, whether because of curiosity, our taste for the picturesque, some special bond of sympathy, or because of the opportunity the story affords for escape from reality.

The romantic note tends to prevail. We want "the facts" far less than has often been supposed, but rather a heightened, simplified, imaginative treatment of them. Mr. Bercovici, for instance, in the story already mentioned, in "The Vineyard" (Good Housekeeping, January) and "The Storm" (Designer, January), displays an unusual gift for lucid and plausible simplification. His concern is only with impetuous young lovers coming together over family opposition, with rustic toil and feast days, with the weight of tribal tradition upon the individual, with the unfolding of the mysteries of the rolling seasons.

The same qualities inhere in the work of Edgar Valentine Smith, even though his scene is American, and his society far from barbaric. Mr. Smith celebrates the old south, and his

"Cameo" (Harper's, December) is a tale of the gallant old gentleman made familiar by the southern school of an earlier day a man steeped in family lore, ordering every act as though the ages (in the form of the portraits of his ancestors) looked down austerely upon him. The old gentleman lived finally to settle the feud between his family and the Tollivers, the ancient foes of his house. And the way he settled it is Mr. Smith's own contribution to one of the distinctive veins of American romance.

A sketch from the life of a different society of the south, the society of the fastnesses of the southern mountains, is Hodge Mathes's "The Linkster" (Everybody's, October). The author himself is the "linkster" Kentuckian of the old Elizabethan word for translator. Called upon by wistful hill women during the war to translate a letter from France, the linkster discovers that the letter is from a young French girl with whom the young son and husband has been playing fast and loose.

How he saved the situation by an innocuous translation, and by what slender chance he escaped discovery in his duplicity, is Mr. Mathes's own story, and one well worthwhile.

Of all the professions, none in current fiction seems to outshine that of the actor. Sometimes the stage is just a background for a story of love and courtship, as in Nels Leroy Jorgensen's "The Clown Who Forgot to be Funny" (American Magazine, January); sometimes as a variant of the success story, as in Grace Sartwell Mason's "Leave It to Margie" (Red Book, September), in which Margie O'Day by courage, luck, cunning, and sheer ability wins a leading part and a playwright too; and sometimes the movie angle is added, as in "More Stately Mansions" (Red Book, October) by Samuel Merwin, in

which a broken down old minister goes into the movies and disseminates a beneficent and regenerating influence among the disintegrated personalities of the lurid Hollywood studios.

A much fairer story, because it attempts to portray the solidarity of the people of the theatre, their pride in their work, their sense of tradition, is Walter De Leon's "Locke and Keyes" (Hearst's International, December). Here is a picture of the loyalties of the vaudeville artist. These loyalties formed the characters of the hero and heroine. heroine. It guided their lives.

Not

even the fact that at the last moment the girl discovers aristocratic family connections in England, with a corresponding accretion of respectability, dims one's perception of the fact that Mr. De Leon has tried to write sincerely.

But a far neater handling of the same theme is Jesse Lynch Williams's "The Actress and the Lady" (Cosmopolitan, October). A handsome young banker is in love with a beautiful young actress who is a member of an old theatrical family. (Her grandmother never forgets that she has acted with Booth.) The climax comes in the comic dialogue between the young man's mother and Felicia's stately grandmother. Each has the pride of family and profession and position; each thinks the proposed match a mésalliance. The mounting succession of misunderstandings all grow admirably out of the character and ideals of the Shakespearian old lady.

This general subject should not be left without reference to Arnold Bennett's "House to Let" (Red Book, September). Mr. Bennett frequently tosses off a pot boiler between masterpieces, or when he doesn't feel quite up to a little handbook on philosophy. This story, dealing with the adventures

in humility which came to a certain music hall star, seems to me to be one of the pot boilers.

III

I have constructed a little group of stories which bear relation to each other only in "the portrayal of man's developing consciousness of himself among his contacts with life". Yet from the point of view of artistic truth, the common bond is legitimate, and an interesting test of the representativeness of the author's presentation of human character.

Stacy Aumonier has in "Dark Red Roses" (Everybody's, October) written "Othello" without Iago, though the part of Iago might justly be given to David Cardew's imagination, which stole in between him and his lovely wife Denise, and intimated that she had a lover. Step by step Mr. Aumonier builds the fatal structure of fact, assumption, and false logic by which a jealous imagination achieves its horrible chimeras, and the story clings in one's memory as a telling presentation of the theme.

Jealousy, but different in kind, is also the theme of Frank Swinnerton's "Miss Jedburys" (Ladies' Home Journal, October), in which two sisters are cruelly torn apart by the partialities, of a little boy.

The first published story of a new writer, Winifred Sanford, is "The Wreck" (American Mercury, January). While a big freighter goes to pieces on the rocks and living men are turned to hideous chunks of ice by the wintry seas, Miss Sanford studies the mind of Elsie, a sea coast trollop who titters while her lover struggles futilely to rescue the doomed men to one of whom she has but recently granted secret favors. This story has all the hard, cold, metallic brilliance which

Mr. Mencken admires and his contributors imitate; but for all its mordant observation, it shows a complete absence of vivacity or interest in any but an ugly, disagreeable world.

Mr. Galsworthy pictures a male type of equally low grade material in "The Mummy" (Red Book, November). Within the limits of a short story he really compresses a novel the life story of Eugene Daunt who evaded responsibility all his life, who made an art of inertia, who took without giving, and died miserably of gin and starvation.

IV

Among the bachelors of nature now writing should be mentioned Herbert Ravenel Sass and Samuel Scoville, Jr., who steadily make romance and sentiment out of the survival of the fittest. Mr. Sass's "The Bachelors of Devilhead" (Saturday Evening Post, December 6) may be taken as representative. The whole suspense is built upon the hunt the stalking of a loon by a hawk, of a rabbit by a fox, and of the fox by a man. Nature, "red in tooth and claw", is treated in the same spirit in Mr. Sass's "Rusty Roustabout" (Saturday Evening Post, November 7), and in Mr. Scoville's stories, "When Red Rooi Was King" (Collier's, October 4) and "The Death Dodger" (Collier's, January 10).