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prehended the life and its setting as a whole, quintessentialized it in his own mind, and then allowed his fancy to play when it came to the grouping of detail, and to the depicting of the interplay of emotions whose truth he had himself conceived from general study of the fundamental processes of human nature then he would have produced a work which was fiction, as we intend the word. He was unable to do this and to do it well. He must have "fact," and "fact" he had when writing "It is Never too Late to Mend." He had never been to Australia. But there were books on flora and fauna. He had never seen the conditions of life in Australia. But there were reports and statistics.

Charles Reade has been taken at his word by one well-known critic. It has been asserted that his fact did kill his fiction, and that his fiction was better when written outside the workshop. That is to say, "Griffith Gaunt" is better than "It is Never too Late to Mend," "Christie Johnstone" is better than "The Cloister and the Hearth." It would require a great deal of space to do justice to this view and to examine the exact amount of truth which it contains. The view here expressed is in direct contravention. In spite of the melodramatic character of the types in novels like "It is Never too Late to Mend," "Hard Cash," or "Foul Play"; in spite of the resourceful hero, the terrible villain and his tool, the sweet The Saturday Review.

young girl and the potential courtesan -in spite of all these things we believe that these novels are truer than those of the type of "Griffith Gaunt," where Charles Reade was trying to write with unfettered fancy and from first principles.

All these realistic novels are left behind in their turn by "The Cloister and the Hearth." His modern realistic work is marred by obvious faults of manner. Founded on facts, their intention is true; but this intention finds a violent and theatrical expression which revolts all the finer literary sensibilities. Moreover, the preaching habit grew upon Charles Reade with years. It brought him at last to the point of writing a whole novel in denunciation of tight-lacing, and to the point of meditating another upon the advantages of being ambidextrous. Now, in "The Cloister and the Hearth" there are no didactics; and the crudity of his intenser manner loses its power to wound by being thrown back into the past. It comes through to the reader like a vivd light that has passed through an ancient window of stained glass. It comes through subdued and touched with old-world tints; and it floods a noble building in which it is a delight to walk, a delight made sacred by a feeling that is almost all of it gratitude and something akin to "There shall be great and tremendous and tender things in it."

awe.

THE LACUNAE IN THE GOSPELS.

It is often with a sense of deep sadness that many minds reflect that upon many questions we have no decree of Christ. Even if we set aside all modern developments of ancient difficulties, we are still, they point out, confronted with many open questions, many baf

fling silences. The specious argument that explains away our trouble by declaring dogmatically that the men of the first century did not want to know the things which we want to know has been worked to death. Christ lived in Palestine under an alien rule. A son

of David with all the traditions of patriotism in His blood, and a national literature inspired by the woes and deliverances of His people ringing in His ears, surrounded by the legends and records of a theocratic piety, it is impossible but that questions concerning national rights, rights of conquest, the superiority and inferiority of the various races, the breadth and limits of the power of the State, should have come before His mind. Yet concerning all these things we have no direct teaching. Or, lest we rouse controversy, let us say that equally good Christians have interpreted a few scattered sentences in diametrically opposite senses.

But if we cut out all that can be called public matters, which, in that they are all founded upon the relations of individuals to individuals, may be regarded as subsidiary, or at least derivative, we still find many blank spaces. The preachers tell us, often without explanation, that the life of Christ is a full and perfect example for every man. Sometimes their listeners cannot but reflect that He led a life which in its outward incidents we cannot imitate. No doubt some of His Disciples had wives and homes; but except the household at Bethany, the Evangelists give us no glimpse whatever of any home life, and our Lord says little or nothing about it, though of course His assertion that marriage was inviolable and His devotion to children touch upon the subject. Nevertheless, a whole area of intimate life lacks His particular counsel. With re spect to the position of women, again, though it was a subject which the clash of two civilizations must have brought to men's minds. He says nothing directly. St. Paul filled in this and many like lacunae, admitting naïvely in this latter instance that he doubted whether our Lord would have endorsed his words.

Or take the question of daily work. What an enormous space most men's work fills of necessity in their lives; but how very little Christ said about this fact, though it was doubtless in His mind, and He never suggested any form of worship which would be impossible to men without leisure. He took it for granted that men worked in order to eat. He never speaks of work as a refuge, or as a delight, or as a thing to live for. Our pleasure in art is a thing outside, though not inimical to, the Gospel. It is true that He condemned the man who neglected to use his talents, seeming to regard him as a sinner rather than a fool. How far the present doctrine, to some extent prevalent here and widely spread in America, of "work for work's sake" would have gained His approval we cannot say.

Only once, and that once is recorded by St. John alone, does He make any definition of the nature of God. God is a Spirit, He says, and must be worshipped in spirit. Elsewhere He only sets forth the relation of the Divine Spirit to men, which as He describes it could be understood by a child. Again, if we still consider the question of religion from another aspect, though He taught with authority and with insistence that death is not the end-in fact, to use His own strong expression, that those who love and serve both God and man never "see death❞— He did not tell us what is their mode of life. The Evangelists, in company with all men in their day, looked eagerly for supernatural occurrences, and left out things which seem to us to be of at least equal moment. What would we not give to hear what our Lord said to those whom He did not cure, to the men, for instance, in the city whereof it is said: "He could there do no mighty work"? It is quite certain that Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain were not the only men

He saw die. What did He say to the dying when they asked, "Where am I going?" and to their friends when, coming to Him mourning and heavyladen, they asked, "Where is he gone?" Did He speak in confidence, and was that confidence never betrayed? We cannot explain the silence of the record.

"All things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you," He said. It is useless to ask for more light than is vouchsafed. The Church,

however, was not satisfied. She made haste to fill up these obvious lacunae. There were questions, we are told, which even the Pharisees durst not ask; there were none which the Church dare not answer. Questions of politics presented no difficulty to ecclesiastics. They offered to keep every man's conscience, to make a good Christian and a good citizen by virtue of obedience alone. They defined the nature of the Creator of the universe with as much precision as one would analyze the atmosphere. They knew the glories of heaven, the terrors of hell, and the ransom system of purgatory. They had passports ready for each. What has been the result? The heaven and the earth which they taught of are passing away. The ecclesiastical heaven has ceased to attract or the ecclesiastical hell to affright. The moth and rust of time and the mildew of ridicule have destroyed them. Still, the hope of more abundant life which Christ promised keeps men's reason firm in the face of death and bereavement.

Without minimizing the fact that the firmest believer in the authority of Christ cannot reasonably consider that he walks "by sight," is it not possible that these very lacunae, these aching voids, as they sometimes appear in the The Spectator.

teaching of our Lord, do make the elasticity of the Gospel and fit it for all time? The outward conditions of man's life and the orbit of his reason change with his circumstances and with the generations. The home may be the everlasting foundation of society, but the art of living in it must change. Work takes a different place in the lives of different individuals, ages and classes. One age literally cannot put its mind to the theology which absorbed another. The hope of the hereafter must be expressed in changing imagery. The religion of Christ was clearly not designed to suit scholastic or subjected minds. Christ preached to the ordinary man, and appealed to the eternal authority of his better self. He did not undertake to unravel the whole tangle of human life, or to explain its discordant woes. But He spoke of a Spirit of Comfort who was also a Spirit of Truth, to whose influence He left His friends, sure that even the death which He dreaded was best for them and for Him. "It is expedient for you that I go away," he said; "for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come." He did not ask a man to think out a system, or to accept it whole when some intellectual master upon earth had thought it out for him and stood ready to force it down his throat with threats. He asked men to listen to a voice, which still speaks in the human heart. It is possible to doubt what that voice says; it is sometimes impossible not to do so; it is not possible to silence it. At any moment it may become for the individual, as it became at the bidding of our Lord, distinct, authoritative, and convincing. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," said Christ, and immediately men heard and believed.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Like Mr. Jack London, Mr. Will Lillibridge has chosen to describe the struggle between an American author and the editors and publishers who, standing between him and possible readers, apparently attempt to keep him in obscurity. Resemblance between "Martin Eden" and Mr. Lillibridge's "The Dominant Dollar" ends however with the hero. Mr. Lillibridge chooses to give his young man a friend superhuman in kindness to his fellow man, a friend who struggles for money and its consequent power in order to be able to bestow prosperity and comfort upon blameless, hardworking folk who lack money-making gifts, and the mysterious workings of this man's character give a strong and unusual element of interest, and maintain a pleasant state of uncertainty to the very last page. A. C. McClurg & Co.

Boys whose lessons can be persuaded to remain in their memories only by repeated and reiterated reviews have no difficulty in recollecting all the involutions of a last year's romance of crime and those who this year read Mr. Henry Gardner Hunting's "The Cave of the Bottomless Pool," will have no difficulty in recalling "Witter Whitehead's Own Story," in which its hero first appeared as the captor of a thief. In this tale the thief escapes and Witter's fear of what he may do leads him into deeds of even greater daring, but he performs them in an unreasoning boyish fashion entirely unlike the unnatural behavior of the ordinary boy hero, and much less likely to create a hunger for highly sensational literature in a boy reader. The story itself however cannot be called anything but improbable. Its merit lies in the manner in which the

boy's position in the scheme of life is stated. Henry Holt & Co.

The war between the rising generation and that which it is striving to push from the place of authority is well set forth in Miss Marion Foster Washburne's "The House on the North Shore," in which the heroine is the wife of a man, inheriting a tendency to dipsomania, and is also the mother of a girl and boy to whom she has never taught obedience. Having learned from their comrades and from a certain class of juvenile literature that noisy selfishness is irresistibly attractive, they practice it with much vigor, and their mother, occupied in helping their father to fight his inherited foe, endures them patiently. The children suffer the penalty of their foolishness, but the good qualities inherited from their mother aid them, and in the end the entire family is seen united and happy. The author apparently intends that her book shall be put into the hands of young girls, and those who have been taught decent reticence will not be harmed by it. Adult readers will find that it presents the topic of heredity fairly and instructively, and ingeniously connects it with religion. A. C. McClurg & Co.

It pleases Anne Warner to be whimsical, and to address the preface of "Your Child and Mine" to children only, and to "pretend" not a little about the stories composing the book, but those which are best for the uncles and aunts may be a little hurtful for the children, although those written for the children will be good for the uncles and aunts. The iniquity of calling a child only by absurd nicknames; the foolish cruelty of treating him as if he could be blind and deaf to

the most important things in his world; the wickedness of not remembering his overflowing love, are good subjects for everybody but a child to consider. On the other hand, the volume contains two fairy tales and a description of an old-fashioned school, such as every child should read, and Since a most charming dog story also. all these things are bound in one cover the parent, or the uncles and aunts, must see that the child is not denied his own share and must read the stories to him. The book shows the author at her best, a writer very unlike the creator of amusing but heartless "Susan Clegg." Little, Brown & Co.

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If the real American be brave, courteous, truthful above the average level of men of other races, he is a poor creature compared to the American of fiction, and especially to the American of the Utopian novel. For instance the hero of Mr. Rupert S. Holland's "The Man in Tower" is dearest friend of the exiled son of a banished Altenstein patriot, and beholds the young man's capture by an Altenstein Princess before whose conquering eye-beams he falls, "vanquished almost at sight." Like half of the princesses who appear in Paris and make conquest of a young man with a best friend who is an American, this bud of royalty is betrothed to a more than commonly detestable prince, a prince so hideous that he will not allow any one to see his face. Any American in such circumstances instantly perceives that it is his duty to set aside the betrothal and bring about the marriage of the princess and his friend. Mr. Holland effects this with uncommon grace and in રી manner equally satisfactory to his own republican ideas, and to those of the most earnest royalist. Lippincott Company.

In "They and I" Mr. Jerome J. Jerome applies his humorous gifts to the description of the haps and mishaps of a literary man living with his family in a small cottage in the country, with no nearer rival as celebrity among the rustics that Boss Croker. Their adventures and those of a neighboring family, the head of which is an eccentric person with views as to most things on earth, are written very much in the manner of the American humorous journalist, and are as pleasant drollery as one need desire. It is not exactly droll for Mr. Jerome to write of Providence as "she" although the pronoun certainly supplies that element of unexpectedness which is supposed to be necessary in humorous writing, but it is really droll for him to write of a visitor in Colorado, who, wishing to send a message to his wife in New York, mentally pictured her and his as "sitting in their New England parlor," but it is fate and not genius which has given his book this adornment. Really, it needs none which he has not purposely supplied. It is a pretty domestic story, with a love element suspected of waiting to pair off four attractive youngsters, the instant that the reader closes the book. Dodd Mead & Co.

Mr. Edward S. Martin gives his "The Wayfarer in New York" an introduction in which he strives to indicate the reason for the undeniable charm of the city and to show its potency, and fulfils the task as well as anyone can fulfil it for another. Following the preface comes an extract from the "Log of Robert Juet" taken from "Purchas his Pilgrimes," and describing the first European's view of New York; groups of descriptive fragments taken from books, short stories, serious documents, volumes of poetry, and private correspondence, in short from every available source. The titles

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