1916 THE NOVEL AND A FEW NOVELS 615 rule of respondeat superior," which enables him to make the company pay for its employee's default. Left to pursue his legal remedy against the motorman or engineer, the passenger would be likely to elect to come in under the statutory plan. For injured persons prompt and sure compensation without wait, worry, or waste; for companies relief from the expense of investigators and lawyers and from the burden of fraud; for the public a decrease of the great cost of maintaining the courts and the clearing of the courts for the expeditious handling of other cases—these are results which may reasonably be hoped for from the extension to railway cases of the pregnant insurance idea. T FEW NOVELS THE NOVEL HE special quality of English fiction in this tremendous crisis, as The Outlook has already noted, is its freshness. Such a story as "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" bears witness to the awakening of a nation and is charged with the spiritual energy liberated by a supreme experience; but Mr. Marriott's" Davenport " has until the close the air of leisure which is friendly to careful writing. This story, already commented upon, will delight those readers who do not run as they read. It is a study in psychology in which art obliterates all suggestion of the laboratory; there is a marked absence of stock characters, and one has the pleasant sensation of being with people who are not only decent but unusually interesting, with conversational gifts not often found even in the highest circles" of fiction's society. 2 The transition from drawing-rooms and studios to the deck of the wind-jammer in Mr. Snaith's "The Sailor" is so abrupt as to be startling, but the standards of literary skill are not changed; as a piece of writing "The Sailor" would be an unusual story in any season. In Broke of Covenden " Mr. Snaith drew the portrait of a proud, unbending man whom circumstances could crush, Davenport. By Charles Marriott. The John Lane Company, New York. $1.35. The Sailor. By J. C. Snaith. D. Appleton & Co., New York. $1.50. but could not change; in "Araminta" he gave us a delightful romance with the dew of youth on it; in this latest novel he has achieved a triumph of construction and of for which puts him in the front rank of contemporary novelists. Joseph Jefferson said that Mrs. Siddons's genius was most strikingly shown in her ability to make good women dramatically interesting; she had no need of the adventitious aid of the strong contrasts of crime, of the high lights o broken laws; Mr. Snaith has created a man of vigorous impulses, without a touch of moral consciousness, whose childhood is submerged in poverty and cruelty, who goes through six years of brutal sea life, starts his career on land in dense ignorance of the things which a man must know to live, who is buffeted and beaten almost into insensibility by unrelenting hardship, and who is the victim of a merciless woman of the worst type, but who survives and triumphs—a man with no aid from love or care, or the help of decent conditions, or the sustaining power of faith, with a dogged decency of nature that carries him through vileness and misery with a determination to "keep on keeping on." "The Sailor" is full of incident and adventure by land and sea, told with the frankness of Mr. London but without the strong repulsion which the brutalities of "The Sea Wolf " awakens. It is more than a tale of adven ture; it is a tale of the greatest of adventures -the adventure of life-told in elementary terms, with a kind of "Robinson Cru minuteness of detail, but penetrated by a glow from a central integrity of nature. The Sailor is as innocent as Parsifal and as unassailable; no temptation touches him because nothing within him responds to its appeal. His struggle with conditions is the elementary fight of a man to free himself from bondage to the accidents of life, to secure room and air and light for the free expression of his nature. The moral vigor of such a career has the tonic of fierce manhood in it, but it is as free from didacticism as "Robinson Crusoe." Mr. Locke goes on writing modern fairy stories as if England were at leisure; and this is well both as a sign of vitality and because in such a time men sorely need the refreshment which the imagination has brought to every generation. "The Wonderful Year" is a pleasant tale of that pleasant country in which good manners and good inns make travel recreation. The real hero of the tale is not the clean-hearted young Englishman who revolts against the drudgery of teaching examination-French in a provincial English town and goes to Paris in pursuit of fortune, but Fortinbras, Marchand de Bonheur, one of Mr. Locke's happiest and most original creations; an unconventional magician in shabby clothes but of winning manners, of ruined fortunes and tireless kindness. In Paris the youth with the dreary background meets a girl who has escaped from a background as dreary and is a half-starved art student; and to these two, desperate in fortune and nearly bankrupt in hope, comes the "dealer in happiness," and sets them off on a bicycle tour to Brantome and the Hôtel des Grottes. The adventure has the slimmest financial foundation, but they are young and France is fair, and life is still an inviting possibility. The innkeeper and the people of the little town are sketched slightly, but with a vitality that makes the France of to-dayan organized power of sacrifice-a new nation to those who had judged the France of yesterday by its temperament rather than by its character. The actors in this story stand out so clearly that one is almost persuaded that "The Wonderful Year" is a novel and not a fairy e, but the American girl with her millions The Wonderful Year. By William J. Locke. The in Lane Company, New York. $1.35. and Egyptian episode sublimate the reality, so to speak, while the war gives a touch of seriousness to the ending. Mr. Locke's novels, however lacking in probability, stabilize happiness by making it the result of kindness rather than of conditions, and further the diffusion of happiness by making the Pharisee love the publican, to quote the happy phrase of a distinguished American essayist. Mr. Powys has read Russian fiction not wisely but too well, for the pessimism of the Russian does not express the depression of the English nature; it is the product of a different soil, history, and temperament. In Gorky's most tragic novels there is a sense of fate; in "Rodmoor "1 the characters could have been decently happy if they had used a little common sense. No romanticist ever selected his materials more arbitrarily than has the author of this tale, very appropriately dedicated to "the spirit of Emily Brontë." The scene is a little village in the fens on the east coast of England; mists of the kind that suggest melancholy and disease always rest on the landscape, the sound of the sea sets everybody's nerves on edge, the lover makes everybody unhappy in his brief vacation from two asylums for the insane, the two women who love him are driven to the very verge of madness by him, and the story ends in a dramatic coup by which the woman who is not to marry him gets him out of the asylum onto the river, floats him to the sea, and when he dies in the excitement of the escape binds herself to his body, launches him, and floats off to death on the North Sea; meantime there has been a coldblooded seduction, a suicide, a murderous assault, and a series of senseless miseries, and the end of it all is a bleak and meaningless futility. The novel is a dreary waste of a high order of ability. Miss Lagerlöf's story of Swedish peasant life, The Emperor of Portugalia," is also a tragedy, but is full of tender human feeling. Ruffluck Croft comes to life emotionally when his child is laid in his arms; she grows into a sweet girl, and his inarticulate soul goes out to her and is bound up in her. In time the pretty child, grown into charming womanhood, goes to the city to earn the money to save the cottage from sale; the money comes just in time to save the house, but no word Rodmoor. By J. C. Powys. G. Arnold Shaw, New York. $1.50. 2 The Emperor of Portugulia. By Selma Lagerlöt. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York. $1.50. MEXICO AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH The Rev. H. C. Schuyler (Outlook, October 4, page 287) is mistaken when he states that Carranza and the Constitutionalists wish to take away, and are taking away, from Catholics property and the right to possess property. About ninety-nine per cent of the Mexican p.ople are Catholics, but by the adoption of the Constitution of 1857, after a long and bloody war, all church property was confiscated by the Government, and convents or monastic orders prohibited under penalties. Religious orders in defiance of the Constitution of 1857 existed by sufferance in Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, owing, doubtless, in part to the fact that the Dictator's wife was a most devoted Catholic. Carranza and the Constitutionalists," whatever may be their sentiments in regard to it, are simply enforcing the provisions of the Constitution as they found it, unchanged, after almost threescore years. It is possible that they are enforcing the law with unwonted zeal because it is an open secret that the clerical party in Mexico has always been in sympathy with the conservative political element, or, in other words, with the Cientificos. Piedras Negras, Mexico. ARTURO DIX TEMPLE. THE CUBIC MEASUREMENT OF THE WORLD'S GOLD SUPPLY Mr. C. H. Tallmadge, of Buffalo, New York, has pointed out a serious error in the article headed: "If England Suspends Gold Payments," written by me for The Outlook of October 25. In that article I stated that, "Figuring at 25.8 grains to the dollar and 4,900 grains to the cubic inch, eight billion dollars of gold would be contained in a sixty-foot cube." I confess with mortification that I made a miscalculation. A sixty-foot cube of gold would contain about seventy billion gold dollars weighing 25.8 grains each. The world's present supply of coin and bar gold, estimated at about eight billion dollars, would be contained in a twenty-nine-foot cube. The exact calculation is as follows: A gold dollar contains 25.8 grains of gold, Troy weight. A cubic inch of gold contains about 4,900 grains, or $190. There are 1,728 cubic inches to a cubic foot.A cubic foot of gold would therefore contain $328,320 worth of the metal. A twenty-nine foot cube contains 24,389 cubic feet, multiplied by $328,320 makes $8,007,396,480, which is about the equivalent of the world's estimated supply of gold coin and bars at present. I am more than glad to make the correction, although it is not important except as emphasizing the infinitesimally small basis upon which the world's credit structure is superimposed. In his kindly letter calling attention to my mistake, Mr. Tallmadge quotes the following epigram which he attributes to Justice Brandeis, and of the truth of which I am more than ever convinced: "Arithmetic is the first of the sciences and the Mother of Safety." New York City. THEODORE H. PRICE. My THE PRODUCER AND the DISTRIBUTER As Mr. Thistleton in his article on Neighbor's Cherries, and Some Problems" (The Outlook for September 27, 1916) says that he does not know why the retail grocery stores are here, I would like to inform him that they are here because there are very few people in the United States who do not either directly or indirectly require their services. He thinks that because milk is distributed regularly and promptly other farm produce could be. Efficient distribution requires a uniform supply and demand, while with farm produce surplus and shortage follow each other frequently. The demand is also very irregular. The system used in the distribution of milk will therefore not work with other farm produce. In regard to daily express trains for shipment of farm produce, if the existing express companies could be guaranteed five or ten car-loads a day to be delivered at central points they could handle the business more cheaply than could be done by the fantastic, imaginary system proposed by Mr. Thistleton. It is doubtless true that if peo ple would mail their orders the day before the goods were required prices would be reduced twenty-five per cent. It is also true that if they would carry their goods home another important reduction in prices could be made. *** BY THE WAY the new system green will replace white in indi- mean Mary Shelley, wife of the poet, wrote many letters to Leigh Hunt and his wife; and some of these letters, hitherto unpublished, appear in the November "North American Review." In one of them the delight of the poet and his wife in their life in Rome is thus pictured: "We pass our days in viewing the divinest statues in the world. . . . It is a scene of perpetual enchantment to live in this thrice holy city. The other night we visited the Pantheon by moonlight and saw the lovely sight of the moon appearing through the round aperture above and lighting the columns of the Rotunda with its rays. My letter would never be at an end if I were to tell a millionth part of the delights of Rome." In "Some Notes on Marriage," by W. L. George, in the "Atlantic Monthly," the witty author mentions a few "things to be done" in One is: order to make marriage successful. "Once a day say to a wife, 'I love you;'-to a husband, 'How strong you are!' If the latter remark is ridiculous, say,' How lever you are!' for everybody believes that." Another injunction is: "Do not open each other's letters. . . And try not to look liberal if you don't even glance at the address or the post-mark." Constantinople even in war time is "the epicure's most golden cornucopia," in the view of a contributor to " Harper's Monthly "who writes about the restaurants of that famous city under the heading "The Adventure of the Many Dishes." No sweets in Europe can compare with the Turkish, he says. As for puddings, "makelibi, a firm, white pudding said to be made of the pulverized white meat of fowl delectably sweetened, gets a curious hold on "Ous koumri" is described as the stranger." "surely one of the finest fish in the world." One gets the impression, however, that most Turkish dishes contain too much sugar to prove agreeable to the average Western palate. "The editor of the London Academy,'" says a correspondent of "The Writer," "is one of a large class of correctors of other people's English who use a microscope by preference to the naked eye. The process leads to curious absurdities. He says: Perfect to us has always meant perfect. A thing can no more be almost perfect than it can be almost infinite." The editor's critic, on the other hand, believes that "almost perfect" has more frequent warrant than "perfect," for the latter is purely an ideal, while we frequently see things that are "almost perfect." The Ohio Agricultural College offers this fall a new course which will cover only the five months of cold weather, thus enabling the farmer or his sons to take advantage of the opportunity of expert instruction during a period when they can best be spared from the farm. There are no entrance requirements, it is stated, except farm experience. Osage orange wood has been found to contain valuable materials for manufacturing dyes, and it is said that at the present time over $1,000.000 worth of these dyes are being manufactured in this country annually. Large quantities of this wood are produced in Oklahoma. Mrs. William W. Hubbell, who died a few days ago, was one of the few Americans who remembered the visit of Lafeyette to this country in 1824. As a small child, she was held above the crowd to see the famous Frenchman as he passed through the streets of Charleston, She was also South Carolina, in that year. notable as the widow of the inventor of the time fuse for explosive shells; this fuse is said to have been first used at the battle of Antietam during the Civil War. A picture published in The Outlook of October 18 purported to be that of a train of prize Jersey cattle sent from Waterloo, Iowa, to the East. The picture was actually one of the Twentieth Century Limited, though labeled "The Flying Jerseys." The New York "Tribune "reproduces this picture alongside of one of the Twentieth Century Limited train, and makes itself happy with comic cuts showing Jersey cows getting brushed off, tucked away in berths, and manicured after the manner of the legitimate passengers of limited expresses. The American Jersey Cattle Club, which sent out the mislabeled photographs, explains that although the photograph was not that of the train in question (since that was not at the time made up) it fairly represented a fancy-cattle train. The genuine cattle train consisted of eight Arms Palace cars for the cattle, two Pullman sleeping cars for the cattle owners, two baggage cars, a business car, and a diner. As the cattle therefore not only were in a train composed in part of Pullman cars but actually traveled in palace cars, the "Tribune's " artist only slightly exaggerated the attention that was paid them. If any of the cows saw their pictures in the "Tribune," they doubtless felt that, as the faithful servitors of man, they were only getting their due in the happy scenes depicted. THE MAN WHO SWEPT CALIFORNIA A PERSONAL SKETCH OF HIRAM W. JOHNSON THE CHAIN GROCERY STORE BY THEODORE H. PRICE A SOCIALISTIC DESPOT IN YUCATAN STAFF CORRESPONDENT OF THE OUTLOOK FOR COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS SEE WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1916 PRICE: TEN CENTS A COPY THREE DOLLARS A YEAR 381 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK |