opportunity would be to them a memorable one and innocently bright with bliss. As an illustration of the pleasing and ample egotism of the athlete, I would quote from a newspaper account of a friendly visit once paid by a famous pugilist to the most famous of all pugilists in our generation. Robert Fitzsimmons had been informed that John L. Sullivan was ill; whereupon he donned "a neat fitting frock coat and a glittering tall hat,” and drove in a carriage to see him. He found him in bed; "the once mighty gladiator had lost all of his oldtime vim and vigor.

"The two great athletes were visibly affected. Sullivan raised himself on his elbow and looked steadily at Fitz for some few seconds. 'How are you, John?' said Fitz when the big fellow showed signs of relaxing his vice-like grip."

John was depressed. "It's Baden Springs, Hot Springs, or some other sulphur bath for me. I never did believe much in medicine. This world is all a "con" any way. Why, they talk about religion and heaven and hell. What do they know about heaven and hell? I think when a guy croaks he just dies and that's all there is to him. They bury some of them, but they won't plant me. When I go,' the big fellow faltered, 'they'll burn me. Nothin' left but your ashes, and each of your friends can have some of you to remember you by. Let them burn you up when you're all in. It's the proper thing.""

Fitzsimmons dissented from this view, and in his warm-hearted, optimistic way set about cheering up his dejected friend. He recalled their exploits and triumphs in the prize ring; and Sullivan was soon in a happier frame of mind. Oddly enough, in this friendly call upon a sick man, Fitzsimmons was accompanied by a newspaper reporter and a photographer, one of those chance occurrences which enrich the world. "Sullivan noticed the camera which the photographer carried and asked what it was for." Unsuspicious and unworldly old man! "He was

told that the newspaper hoped to get a photograph of him and Fitz as they met, but that as he was abed of course such a thing was impossible.

"Impossible! No, I guess not, my boy. If there's any people I like to oblige, it's the newspaper fellows. They will do more good for a man than all the preachers in creation.""

Fitzsimmons acquiesced. And then the great John L. lifted himself to a sitting position and put his legs outside the bed.

"That was the most pathetic incident of the visit. With fatherly care Bob Fitzsimmons placed his great right arm behind Sullivan's broad back and held him comfortably while the latter arranged himself. When everything was apparently ready, Fitz glanced down and noticed that a part of Sullivan's legs were uncovered, and the picture-taking operation had to be postponed until the sympathetic Fitz had wrapped him carefully in the clothes. It was touching."

Of course it was. And if the ingenuous description fails to bring appropriate tears to the reader's eyes, it must at least reveal to him the simple charm of an egotism to which a reporter brings a more stimulating message than a preacher, and a venturesome photographer a more healing medicine than a physician. But transplant that egotism; let it inhabit the soul of a clergyman, and where would be its simple charm?

In Fistiana, a volume belonging to the last century, there is a chapter entitled, "Patriotic and Humane Character of The Boxing Fraternity." It is, no doubt, a tribute well deserved. "To the credit of the professors of boxing they were never 'backward in coming forward' to aid the work of charity, or to answer those appeals to public sympathy which the ravages of war. the visitations of Providence. the distresses of trade and commerce, or the afflictions of private calamity frequently excited." Among the objects.of their generous assistance are mentioned "the starving Irish, the British prisoners

in France, the Portuguese unfortunates, the suffering families of the heroes who had fallen and bled on the plains of Waterloo, the famishing weavers. The generous spirit which warmed the heart of a true British boxer shone forth with its sterling brilliancy; all selfishness was set aside; and no sooner was the standard of charity unfurled than every man who could wield a fist, from the oldest veteran to the youngest practitioner, rushed forward, anxious and ardent to evince the feelings of his soul and to lend his hand in the work of benevolence."

The reader of such a panegyric may indulge a brief regret that they who in youth devote themselves with success to athletics ever turn their attention to other matters. Only by continuing in that simple and healthful occupation may they preserve untarnished the special charm which clings to heroes, the special egotism which is without offense. The President of our country is favorably known under an informal appellation; but even the most genial employment of that name diffuses no such affectionate intimacy and regard as are embraced in the variety of pet terms for a champion, — whether he is “old John,” “John L.,”

and "Sully," or "Bob" and "Fitz." And had these champions taken into any other pursuit the characteristics which have endeared them to the world, the same childlike and blatant egotism, the same sterile spirit of competition, how little human kindliness and popularity would they have enjoyed!

It gratifies some of us to be pessimistic about brawn. The theory pleases us that to be conspicuously strong in youth is to be exposed to a temptation which lesser boys are spared, — a temptation to go through life competing instead of achieving. It is true that some of this competition will result in achievement; it is true that achievement never results except from competition; but it is not debatable that he will go farthest and achieve most whose eye is upon the work alone, who rejoices in the contest only as an incident of work, not as a matter memorable in itself. Only in that spirit does one come through undismayed, eager to press on, indifferent to the complacent backward look. Those men of brawn and sinew at whom we gazed spellbound in our earlier years, perhaps it is harder for them to attain to this spirit than it was for Stevenson.

ALTHOUGH the thing which Mr. Kipling is doing possesses such immediate significance as to hamper any cool judgment upon his measure of success, the place of honor for the year in English fiction seems indisputably to belong to Puck of Pook's Hill.' It may be possible that merely as a piece of abstract literature this group of short stories will not ultimately fill the high position which now appears its due. Contemporary rating can never be infallible. But after all, this is of minor importance, since no tarnishing finger of time, no fading glamour, no change of taste, can alter the fact that in conceiving and carrying out such a plan the author proves his own claim to permanent greatness. With all his glitter (which we once feared might degenerate into glorified journalism), with all his restless flitting from land to land, his experimenting, his weakness for panache, his Sousa moments, so to speak,-looking back upon his career it is now plain that he, the man, has been constantly growing.

The dashing colorist of Under the Deodars, the robust humorist of Soldiers Three, the external observer of Captains Courageous, has been all the while deepening and ripening. The meaning of things seen has laid stronger hold on him, in a special way, if you will, but with the sound specialization of an artist in whom there is developing a lofty purpose. The very singleness of his aim has simplified and refined its expression, and the point by which these stories avoid all the pitfalls of the usual tendency-writing is the absolute sincerity with which he is passing on an ennobling personal expe

1 Puck of Pook's Hill. By RUDYARD KIPLING. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1906.

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rience. An impassioned patriotism has here found its perfect medium of appeal. It is as if, sitting in the meadow under Pook's Hill, the poet himself had fallen beneath the spell of the whole beauty and romance of England. It has gradually crept over him till he has seen all that it means to its remotest inheritors. Reverence, the last quality suggested by the early Kipling,-value for intangible treasure, loyalty to the unfathomable past, all this he makes real, and makes worth while, till you feel as if he had touched the mellow strings of an enchanted harp whose vibrations would softly echo to the farthest limits of the world, binding the whole empire with its strains, as armies are made homogeneous by the force of a great national melody.

Coming "home," Kipling the colonial has fallen in love with England. The emotion which comes to all Americans on first realizing the wonder of her is his, with the fuller sense of present possession. While we respond to a sentiment of the past, to the bond of a common language and literature, he feels the thrill of actual ownership. In "They" he showed how the outward beauty of England had enthralled him. In "Force of Habitation," he chronicled the irresistible encroachment of tradition centuries old. In the present book it seems as if his whole previous life had brought tribute of observation, imagination, and affection (not to speak of learning, since incidentally on the historical side these stories show him a careful student), which he has garnered, as a poet, and given out with the most crystalline simplicity.

Dr. Johnson would have found him highly irrational and old-fashioned, since he is the living contradiction to that philosophy which denies the existence of

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patriotism. Kipling's appeal is no more to the reason than the muffled beat of drum appeals to the intellects of lagging soldiers on a long day's march. Yet that meaningless rhythm is known to hasten stragglers, straighten bent shoulders, and give new movement to the footsore and disheartened.

In the general black pessimism which threatens English literature, where, one after another, clever writers are frantically suggesting feeble panaceas, this one a socialist brotherhood, that one a model town, Mr. Kipling sounds his own note of high courage and belief. And this note has nothing in common with such forced optimism as that of Mr. Chesterton, whose determined cheerfulness too often suggests a small scared boy whistling a gay tune (quite false) to keep up his spirits after dark.

And yet, with all this underlying wealth of meaning, Mr. Kipling only seems to be telling how two nice, imaginative English children were playing at the foot of a meadow on Midsummer's Eve. Dan and Una chance upon an invocation to Puck, who at once appears, and brings back from the past a series of visitors each of whom has had to do with the making of England a young Savon gentleman, a Norman knight, a Roman legionary, a mediæval Jew, a forgotten builder of country churches. With extreme gentleness and poignant sense of beauty, he describes the quiet water course, the grazing cattle, the children's various haunts in wood and open. With the ease of a happy dream, Present merges into Past, and each romantic figure tells the listening children his own particular adventure. There is the imagination of “The Brushwood Boy," of "The Greatest Story in the World," but infinitely fined and controlled, and the style itself has become a wonder of purity.

"Three Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing noise that one could hear all down the meadow; and the noise of the mill at work sounded like bare feet running on

hard ground. A cuckoo sat on a gate post singing his broken June tune, 'Cuckoo-Cuk,' while a busy kingfisher crossed from the mill stream to the brook which ran on the other side of the meadow. Everything else was a sort of thick sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass." It is all as simple and direct as that, so much so that children will read as they read Alice without suspecting more than meets the eye. So hidden and delicate is the intention, that the book has been reviewed merely as a series of fairy tales; so spontaneous that one even wonders if Mr. Kipling himself knows the full extent of his accomplishment.

The originality of this method is all the more grateful at a time when, to borrow Mr. Gelett Burgess's inspired catchword, Socialism has come to be the universal bromide. It is natural enough that masses of remarkably unconvincing novels should be burdened with every form of so-called socialistic remedy. In fact, the demand for panaceas of one kind or another has so influenced English fiction as to occupy a fuil third of the entire year's product, the remaining fractions being divided between religious stories, and novels about people at large. Merely to name a few typical specimens of the first division, in The Great Refusal 1 Maxwell Grey begins with a rather forcible and interesting study of rich fashionable life contrasted with the struggles of the landed gentry to maintain its place, and the misery of the hopeless poor; but the whole ends with a South African Brotherhood as feeble as it is tiresome.

Mr. Whiteing's Ring in the New 2 is clever, readable, not to be taken too seriously. It is less sincere but more witty than the earlier books of Gissing, but deals in a general way with his class of subject, the scramble for bread in London. The best of it lies in an admirable description to use his expression — of

1 The Great Refusal. By MAXWELL GREY. New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1906. 2 Ring in the New. By RICHARD WHITEIng. New York: The Century Company. 1906.

the New Bohemia, the entirely distinct social grade introduced by the working lady with a code of her own as remote from old-fashioned Bohemianism as it is from fashionable rules of behavior.

Here again the ending is a picture of the entire human race lifting itself by its own boot-straps into a state of complete beatitude.

Mr. Wells also wastes his possibilities as a genuine novelist on a comet1 which suffuses England with luminous green vapor, from which every one emerges loving his neighbor better than himself. Philosophers naturally have to offer concrete remedies, but why novelists should so commit themselves must ever remain an irritating mystery. The Utopia resulting from Mr. Wells's "Change" is as uninteresting and unconvincing as any other piece of constructive Socialism. The Socialist storyteller really should content himself with destroying. If the twentieth chapter of Genesis had ended with a sketch of Lot presiding over two model towns, with hot and cold water on every floor, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah would soon have been forgotten. That wise old chronicler fully understood that the romancer's mission is to arouse imagination and generous indignation, and there to stop, since from some basic trait in human nature imagination and enthusiasm do not take fire at the idea of neat rows of hygienic dwellings inhabited by a race of purely rational altru

ists.

The mass of English religious novels, to be candid, owe their importance to the fact of their numbers rather than to the intrinsic value of any one story. But there is significance in the mere fact of Mr. Benson's wit and skill being submerged by a weak and painful mysticism, as in The Angel of Pain, and in The

1 In the Days of the Comet. By H. G. WELLS. New York: The Century Company.

1906.

2 The Angel of Pain. By E. F. BENSON. Philadelphia and London: The J. B. Lippincott Company. 1906.

House of Defense 3 by a pitifully flat and obvious sermon upon Christian Science.

Orthodox churchmanship has also its literary exponents, headed by the immortally absurd "Guy Thorne," who, in the preface to A Lost Cause nestles under the wings of "five or six Bishops," and "innumerable letters from the Clergy." The whole preposterous book, though as exaggerated and over-emphasized as Lady Southdown's famous tracts, has a certain crude air of earnestness. You read with a misgiving. Incredibly comic as the whole is, if by chance the author should be sincere, rather respect any farrago of nonsense than smile at a genuine conviction. When asked to believe that an unorthodox, low church young lady felt a remarkable sensation on touching an unblessed wafer, you give the author the benefit of the doubt; but when two hardened and successful malefactors wither, like Mephisto before Siebel's sword, at a glance from let me quote.

but

"A broad, square man of considerable height, with a stern furrowed face, wearing an apron and gaiters, stood there, with a thunder-cloud of anger upon his face. It was his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury. . . . In the presence of the great spiritual lord who is next to the royal family in the precedence of the realm, the famous scholar, the caustic wit, the utter power and force of intellect, the two champions were dumb." One of his glances, in fact, and their machinations were forever blighted. And so the story ends!

It is a curious tribute to the power of Rome that it continues year in and year out to be a fertile source of inspiration for controversial fiction. Mr. Bagot (a few more converts of his critical calibre might go further to undermine the Pope

8 The House of Defense. By E. F. BENSON. New York and London: The Authors' and Newspapers' Association. 1906.

4 A Lost Cause. By Guy THORNE. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1906.