Red Rock.

MK. PAGE'S Red Rock," destined to become one of the most popular novels of the season, is of quite as much interest from the social and historic points of view as from the literary. It is a story of the South immediately after the war, when the control of affairs was in the hands of the worst products of the slave system, the old overseers, slave drivers, and negroes themselves, together with newcomers from the North, many of them honest and conscientious, and perhaps able men, but more of them mere adventurers. As with all of Mr. Page's stories, "Red Rock" is an exploitation of the virtues of the old Southern aristocracy. And no phase of American life is more attractive than this or more amenable to literary treatment. Nowhere else is to be found that flavor which can come only from wealth, leisure, culture, ease, and chivalric ideas, more characteristic of past centuries than of the nineteenth. Perhaps in no other modern society have chivalric ideas so predominated and the finer sentiments of an aristocracy been so characteristic. And yet it is a striking commentary on the influence of the institution of slavery that no literature, the highest expression of such a society, was ever produced.

While it is not what would be termed a sociological or a historical novel, in the highest sense of the terms it is both. Its social significance lies largely in the fact that it will contribute not a little to a better understanding between the two great sections of our country that have been estranged in sympathies and in ideas.

There is in "Red Rock" little of the pathos, save that of situation, and none of the humor so characteristic of most of Mr. Page's work.

The finest feature of the

story is the delineation of character. The chief criticism on the charming narrative, which so well sustains the interest, is the weakening at the denouement. It suggests too patently the limitations of a story that finds itself under the necessity of disposing of all its important personages in the last brief instalment.

We have purposely chosen to consider the book as a social study rather than as a literary work, for from this latter point of view it is certain to receive ample attention and to achieve the widespread popularity that it deserves.

The illustrations, by B. West Clinedinst, add a distinct additional charm to the story. (Scribner. $1.50.)--Commercial Advertiser.

Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Mr. Froude and Carlyle.

"

MR. DAVID WILSON, in his substantial volume Mr. Froude and Carlyle," has made the endeavor to put into true perspective those facts in Carlyle's life which, in the judgment of his friends and probably of most of his readers, were distorted and thrown out of their true relations in Mr. Froude's very interesting biography. That biography was especially misleading, in the judgment of many well-informed persons, in the light it threw upon the relations of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. It was misleading, also, in that it put undue emphasis on the unsympathetic and harsh side of Carlyle. That the great writer had this side there is no question; but his comments and criticisms can never be understood without remembering the element of exaggeration which, in his speech and sometimes in his writing, was indissolubly connected with the play of his imagination through his humor. Mr. Norton edited the 44 'Reminiscences and seven volumes of Carlyle's correspondence in the hope of bringing Carlyle's traits into more harmonious and true relations. Mr. Wilson has set about the task in a more definite way, and has prepared a substantial volume for the express purpose of setting Mr. Froude straight and of substituting for Froude's Carlyle, Carlyle's Carlyle. He announces that he hopes ultimately to publish a "Life of Thomas Carlyle." (Dodd, Mead & Co. $3.50.)- The Outlook.

Henry James and His Latest Books. MR. JAMES has never used colloquial English with better literary effect than in his latest volumes, entitled "The Two Magics" and "In the Cage." The action in these tales (they are genuine tales) is, of course, the action of mind on mind, of spirit on spirit. Things are brought about through the contact and clash of sensibilities and impulses and desires and passions. Many men discuss the complexities of human nature in exact and formal English, leaving us cold and dull, still not understanding; but Mr. James pursues the exclusive impression till he nails it with a familiar phrase, watches vague intimations of consciousness until they assume coherence and positiveness, then flings a conclusion at you, irresistibly convincing, in the form of an innocent irony or even an apparently unpremeditated flippancy. In a word, he converts into vivid, exquisite, immensely amusing pictures of life stuff that has long been the property of formal and tedious philosophers. The material is inexhaustible, and Mr. James's latest series remind us how easy it is for him to avoid that poverty of motive which sooner or later overtakes authors

who depend chiefly on adventure or remarkable incident.

true.

In the "Two Magics" there are two stories, one illustrating a magic that is supernatural, and the other a magic charmingly natural, of a power that is never disputed. In the first, one sups full of horrors. Whether the story of possession by very evil spirits is probable, is a question for persons without imagination. To others it seems, for the moment, appallingly The gayety and grace of the second tale make an effective contrast. Never has a finer tribute been paid to the surprising charm of the American woman who unaffectedly smacks of her native soil. The situation of "In the Cage" is so ticklish that only the nicest perception of literary effects could save it from collapse into vulgarity or from attenuation to insanity. So far as we are permitted to follow the acute telegraphist (the girl in the cage), a delicate balance is maintained, but speculation hovers about what might happen if, after she has married Mudge, the grocer, the inarticulate Captain Everhard should come (as he almost certainly would) and sit on Mudge's doorstep and murmur irrelevantly, "Only, I say-see here!" (Macmillan. ea., $1.50.)- The Nation.

Poor Human Nature.

THIS is an old-fashioned story. It teils of the true love of a tenor and a prima donna, its unhappy course and happy ending; and it tells it exceedingly well, with quiet confidence and easy straightforwardness.

The tenor is Herr Dahlmann, a village schoolmaster in a German hamlet, with a big, clean soul and an inexorable sense of duty. The prima donna is a young American, Clare Arrowsmith, and together they sing Wagner in the Opera House at Dresden (disguised thinly in this book as Blankenstadt), and thus fan the flame of passion. But Dahlmann, in his simple, school-teaching days, had become engaged to a pretty village girl, and her he feels bound to marry, although nothing but misery can manifestly come of it. Misery does come. Dahlmann does his best to forget the Other, but his wife is jealous and is never contented save with discontent. His voice suffers; he has a severe illness; and at length the flight of one of them is found by the luckless affinities to be the only solution. So far, all is frustration and pitifulness; but then Dahlmann's wife dies, and years after he meets his old love in London, and they are at last united, and the reader is transported with delight.

Upon the characters of Dahlmann and Clare the author has lavished her attention, and they stand four square to the winds. We know them

intimately, and honor them. Among the incidental figures are some excellent studies: the the village pastor, Dahlmann's poor little wife, and certain of the operatic singers. Miss Godfrey has given care to every detail. Her literary skill is also notable. The story is told with grace and delicacy, and no little strength. Miss Godfrey is mistress of a steady narrative flow which is now uncommon in fiction, and her book should delight many a reader tired of less leisurely and concentrated work; many a reader who cares for music; and everyone who has ever sojourned in the capital of Saxony. (Holt. $1.50.)-The Academy.

Sielanka.

FROM Messrs. Little, Brown & Co. we have "Sielanka, a

Forest Picture," and other stories, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, translated by Jeremiah Curtin, who in introducing this brilliant and powerful Polish writer to his countrymen revealed to their astonished attention the existence of a world of passionate emotion and tumultuous action of which

no other Euro

pean novelist

at the grace, the tenderness, the pathos, and the poetry of his stories, of which we have sixteen in this volume, which completes the Library edition of his collected works. (Little, Brown & Co. $2.)-Mail and Express.

Lucifer.

IN an artistically printed and illustrated volume the Continental Publishing Company has brought out an English translation in blank verse by L. C. Van Noppen of the tragedy of

Whether this

ever afforded them a glimpse. world was a faithful reproduction of any analogous world of humanity of which history has preserved the memory, or whether it was a world of excited and exuberant imagination, they did not stop to inquire, nor did they care, for it compelled belief, it was so real, so vital, so magnificent, so tremendous. What its primitive force was they felt in its earliest revelation," With Fire and Sword," and what its soft, seduction and dark distinction, in "Quo Vadis." We do not criticise the magician who holds us with his spells; we submit to him and wonder-wonder at the terrible power in his great historical novels, and wonder

"Lucifer," by Justus van der Vondel. This is the first English version of the drama to which Milton is believed to have been indebted for his conception of "Paradise Lost" and 'Paradise Regained." The translator has

endeavored to

give a literal, and, at the same time, a sympathetic, rendering

of the Dutch classic. For the accuracy of the work we are unable to vouch, but we may doubtless rely on the judgment of Dr. Kalff, professor of Dutch literature in the University of Utrecht, who, in an introduction, says that the version before

us possesses to a high degree the merit of exactitude, while the spirit and character of the original tragedy are felt, understood, and interpreted in a remarkable manner. The translator assures us in his preface that it was not his purpose to exhibit proofs of Vondel's influence on his great English contemporary, but simply to demonstrate the intrinsic value of Vondel's tragedy, considered as a poem and as a national masterpiece. The explanatory matter, however, prefixed to the English version includes a list of over a hundred parallelisms compiled by Mr. George Edmundson in a book now out of print. (Continental Pub. Co. $5.)- The N. Y. Sun.

William Black.

IN William Black we have lost what we could ill spare-a cheerful man who liked the whole world and found it beautiful, a novelist who believed a story should be wholesome and easy to understand. Owing to changes in the conditions of life and to the change also in the interests and emotions of his readers, Black had somewhat lost his hold upon the present generation, but now that there really seems to be a revival of the idealistic and romantic novel, even this more complex generation will realize how conscientiously and artistically the romantic, optimistic novels of William Black were written. Black's specialties were scenery and natural, lovable girls.

To-day when outdoor life has become a creed and when railroads and steamships have enabled almost all cultured readers to see for themselves the scenery of England and Scotland, which Black painted in glowing word-pictures, there cannot be the same thrill of the new and the unknown that his first readers responded to with such

dozen other things; a perhaps not unnatural outcome of all which was that I found myself engaged, at one and the same time, on a translation of Livy, which was to excel in literary accuracy anything the world had ever seen before; on the formation of a complete collection of British flowering plants-the grasses and cryptogams were a trifle beyond me; and on the construction-on paper-of a machine which

acclamation. But the thirty years that have passed since novelists began to describe nature, and during which readers have gone about and verified their pictures, have not increased the number of natural, lovable, loving girls, and it is a melancholy truth that these must be sought for and are found more and more in works of imagination only. Black's novels are a gallery of portraits of charming women.

William Black was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on the 15th of November, 1841, and was therefore at the time of his death, December 10, 1898, only fifty-seven years of age. The few details of his personal life our space permits we take from a short biography of himself which he furnished in 1877 to a London publication :

"I never had any systematized education to speak of, but I managed to pick up a vast array of smatterings-a crude and confused jumble of hydraulics, Latin verbs, vegetable physiology, Czerny's exercises for the piano, and a

should demonstrate the possibility of perpetual motion. But the chiefest of my ambitions was to become a landscape painter, and I labored away for a year or two at the Government School of Art, and presented my friends with the most horrible abominations in watercolor and oil. As an artist I was a complete failure, and so was qualified for becoming in after life-for a time -an art critic.

"I left Glasgow for London in 1864, and very soon became a facile manufacturer of leading articles. In 1866 The Morning Star sent me out as its special correspondent to describe the PrussoAustrian war, my chief qualification for the task being that I knew about enough German to enable me to ask for a railway ticket, and that I had attentively studied the wars of the Jews in the history of Josephus, that being the only secular book which we children were allowed to read of a Sunday evening. My subsequent connection with journalism may be briefly summed up. I was for about a year editor of The London Review, and afterwards, for a short period, of The Examiner. Then for three or four years I was assistant editor of The Daily News. My career as a journalist ended in 1875."

Black's novels, to which he devoted his life, from 1875 to his death, are listed below. "He remained perfectly unspoiled by his success," says his lifelong friend, Justin McCarthy, "and those who can carry their recollections back to the days when A Daughter of Heth' and the Princess of Thule' made their appearance will know what a success that was which lighted up a literary career hitherto compara

tively obscure. He was a thoroughly modest worker; he did his very best, and he did it in his own way; but he was a keen observer of everything, even of his own work, and he was too conscientious an artist to indulge in selfconceit. Some of his literary friends used to say that he had a very easy time of it, for during a great part of his successful years it was his custom to write but two hours a day, and that not by any means on every day in the week. But then Black was working hard at his books before he put a pen to paper. He thought out his scenes and his characters, and their meetings and their talk (he had seldom much of a story to trouble himself with); he thought them out in the streets, in hansom cabs, on the deck of his yacht, in long walks by the sea; and when he sat down to his desk he had only, as he told me himself more than once, to copy out what was already written down in his mind. He was a most charming host; and in his home-Paston House, Brighton-used to welcome gatherings of friends whose only qualification was to be bright and humorous and genial, and, above all things, not to be commonplace."

Black's novels and his biography of Goldsmith are now controlled by Harper & Brothers, who have issued them in several styles. They first appeared before the days of copyright, and many publishers in this country made a fortune out of the author's popularity. We give below the list bearing the Harper imprint: "In Silk Attire ”; “Kilmeny"; "A Daughter of Heth"; "The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton"; "A Princess of Thule"; "Three Feathers"; "Madcap Violet"; "Green Pastures and Piccadilly"; Macleod of Dare"; "Nanciebel"; "Mr. Pisistratus Brown, M.P., in the Highlands"; "The Monarch of Mincing Lane"; "The Maid of Killeena, and the Marriage of Moira Fergus"; "Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart"; "Sunrise"; "White Wings"; "The Beautiful Wretch"; "The Four Macnicols"; "The Pupil of Aurelius"; "Adventures in Thule"; "Yolande ";"Shandon Bells"; "Judith Shakespeare"; "White Heather"; "The Wise Women of Inverness"; "Sabrina Zembra"; "The Strange Adventures of a House-Boat"; In Far Lochaber"; 'The New Prince Fortunatus"; "Donald Ross of Heimra"; " Stand Fast, Craig-Royston !"; "The Magic Ink"; "Wolfenberg"; "The Handsome Humes"; "Highland Cousins"; "The Penance of John Logan, and Two other Tales"; "Briseis"; and "Wild Eelin."

Some of these titles cannot be ignored in any survey of Victorian literature, and upon them the author's fame will ultimately rest.

John Splendid.

THIS is the best work we have seen of the author, Neil Munro, who has proved hereby that the qualities for which "The Lost Pibroch" and his other short stories were remarkable stand him in stead no less when he attempts a finished novel. Characterization, incident, local truth, and a style of his own are the excellent results of his more deliberate endeavors. It is perhaps rather an audacity to make Montrose's wars the topic of his tale after Scott; but while Scott created Dalgetty and set before us as none else could do the political antagonisms of the time in broad stage-coloring, there was room for an attempt to present the feelings and doings of a subordinate actor, and especially those of a veritable Gael fighting for MacCailein Mor against his Highland enemies. The picture of the celebrated statesman can never be likely to draw sympathy, but Gillespie Cruamach as here delineated is a masterly and successful study, and one feels it is a likeness for which history will be the richer. "It is the humor of God Almighty sometimes to put two men in the one skin," says Gordon, the minister, one of the finest characters in the book. So far as I may humbly judge, Argyle is the poor victim of such an economy." The strange mingling of Presbyterian fervor with political selfseeking; the contrast of the instincts of a Highland chief with the scheme of a Lowland politician; above all, the moral and physical weakness of heart, the "dubiety which plays on him like a flute," which made him twice shrink in the crucial moment-the breast of need, as the Gaelic has it-have never been more graphically described. The agony of Argyle's remorse after Inverlochy, when he wrings the truth of his followers' estimate of him out of John Splendid, is a reality which haunts the memory. Iain Aluinn-which is in Saxon John Splendid is a typical Highlander, painted by one who knows the breed. A soldier of fortune in the German wars, like his friend Elrigmore who tells the story, he has returned in time to take part in resisting the Macdonald invasion. But he has no bias to Parliamentarianism and none to Covenanting religion, for he is at heart a Catholic, though he slashes the "Papist dogs." Plausible, and preferring the soft answer to the truth, he is dour at heart and shrewd of judgment, a wily tactician, and as a champion the bravest of the brave. He is capable of love, and yet more capable of chivalrous friendship. His career is rife with adventure. And through it all there is the telling background of Highland scenery, treated with the sympathy of a native. (Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.50.)- The Athenæum.