He uttered the word "she" with such profound awe that I knew he could mean none other than Mrs. Effie.

Mrs. Ferris Greenslet

In the February issue of THE BOOKMAN there was published a review of The Nightingale, as the work of "Ellenor Stoothoff." That the signature was a pseudonym was perfectly apparent and recently it has been made known that "Ellenor Stoothoff" is Mrs. Ferris Greenslet, the wife of the literary adviser of the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston. Mr. Greenslet himself is an author, among his works being The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and The Life of James Russell Lowell. The story of The Nightingale involved a rather inIt teresting problem. described woman running away from her husband to take a motor trip through Italy, alone, for the purpose of regaining the health that she felt to be essential to the happiness of them both. A number of readers have written to the author questioning the wisdom of the heroine's course. Put Mrs. Greenslet does not think she did wrong. She says:

a

In fact, I think there would be a great many more happy homes and a great many less divorces if, when people get tired and worn out, instead of staying home and getting on each other's nerves, they had initiative enough to go off by themselves and recuperate on the same theory that we send a fussy child to its room to stay there until it can come back and be pleasant. People don't get off by themselves enough. As somebody wrote me, "Your heroine was sensible enough to change an impending tragedy into light comedy." Hilda is a type, anywayan exaggerated type. I simply took the characteristics of modern American women that one hears so much about-restlessness, irresponsibility and desire for change-and raised them to the nth power. For all so many people find The Nightingale only amusing, I really meant in it to show how in my opinion the modern husband must be equipped to hold the kaleidoscopic wife that civilisation has evolved. He must be a phil

osopher (and the training the modern husband receives nowadays fits him admirably for that rôle); he must grant her a very large measure of freedom, both in her ideas and actions; and, above all, he must have an all-embracing and all-sufficient sense of humour.

In his magazine, Mount Tom, Gerald Stanley Lee has been devoting much thought and time and space Gerald to the war, and his new book Stanley upon which he is now at Lee work will reflect something of the great conflict and the relation of America to it. In speaking of the war the other day, Mr. Lee said:

No one has really expressed the experience of a soul struggling with this war, and the sooner we get it expressed and look back and see what has happened to us, the sooner America will be in a position to rise to the crisis and do in the world at last what she was conceived for.

Whether this was a hint as to the nature of the successor to Crowds, or not, he would not say. Some of Mr. Lee's comments in Mount Tom are interesting in connection with the above quotation. For instance, in a recent issue under the heading of "Seven Dumb Nations" he

says:

It is a mistake to suppose that because people do things in a machine civilisation they mean anything by them. The reason all the people are fighting in Europe to-day is that the diplomats-the men whose special business it is to express nations to one another could not express them. The war in Europe is a stupendous breakdown of the European languages. Every nation in Europe to-day is practically a dumb nation. Each has suddenly failed to find words to express itself to express its temperament to the other temperaments so that it will be understood. So they fight.

Why did the nations so suddenly and completely fail to express themselves to one another?

A crisis arose in which they had to express themselves with immense effect in a few hours, or it would be too late.

Any great nation-say, of fifty million people that is so placed or so places itself that it has got to express fifty million people in a few hours or die, finds out in a hurry that the facilities in this present world for expressing fifty million people to three hundred million other people, and getting all the expression in before twelve o'clock that night, are very inadequate.

Naturally, if a nation of fifty million people has got to express itself within one round of the clock, it must find some way of doing it all in one swoop-in the same way that machinery does things.

Everything in modern life done for very large numbers of people in a very short time has to be done by machinery. The only big machine any nation in Europe had provided itself with for the emergency of expressing itself all at once, all in one huge crash in a day, was the army machine.

It is the absence of the Crowd expression and the Crowd machine (of which Mr. Lee had so much to say in Crowds) which he sees here as the trouble with the fighting nations. But apparently these essays point the way to the further development of the Crowd philosophy. in his new book.

Books for the Blind

A note comes to us that Fabre's Life of the Spider is being transcribed into raised type for the blind. Other books that are also being prepared in this way are, we learn, Birmingham's General John Regan, and Tinsley's Practical and Artistic Basketry, among recent publications; and among older well-known books are The Scarlet Letter and Vanity Fair. The New York Public Library Reading Room for the Blind reports that of most interest to the blind are short stories by O. Henry, Conan Doyle and Richard Harding Davis; while among the newer novels, Henry Sydnor Harrison's Queed and V. V.'s Eyes are both in considerable demand. Maeterlinck's Blue Bird and

WHO that read the very first page of The Crock of Gold was not thrilled with a delicious sense of discovery such as occurs at most only once or twice in a decade? And who, reading only half way through, was not thoroughly convinced that he had found one more veritable "little master" of English prose and of English fiction? The Crock of Gold, like The Demi-Gods, which has since appeared to deepen, if anything, the impression of the first work, is primarily a conte philosophique, written by a humourist and a poet. As such it is certainly unique in recent literature. It would, indeed, be rare enough in English at any time. And when, once in a blue moon, a writer, like William Locke, has tried to filch one from the French of a writer like Anatole France, he has straightway supplanted its ripe, if somewhat disreputable, wisdom of a M. Jerôme Coignard, with a sentimental love story. Fancy, if one will, a version of Voltaire's Candide by Mrs. Barclay!

Stephens himself shows traces of the potent Anatolian influence in tales which, too, frequently involve the the adventures of "belovéd vagabonds." Is it, for example, not asking a trifle too much of mere coincidence to account for the apparition in The Demi-Gods, of a whole covey of guardian angels on Irish soil, so soon after a similar visitation imagined by the old master in his Révolte des Anges?

Stephens, as a matter of fact, and for all known to the contrary, might be able to file a very plausible affidavit of priority for at least the germinal idea underlying both their stories. For it certainly appears embryonically in that wild bit of Irish humour entitled "The ThreePenny Piece," which originally formed part of the collection called Here Are

Ladies, and which here recurs as a chapter of the later work.

resem

But quite aside from the question of direct borrowings or literal blances, there is the spirit of Stephens's work. Do we not find some conscious emulation of the author of, let us say, La Chemise, in the turn which he gives to his own irony, his own poetic temper, his own power of psychological analysis? While, in addition, there is his passion for playing with ideas, his mystic naturalism that allows him to weave lovely cosmic myths, and above all, his tenderness for men and women whom he, too, treats, as if they were very weak, very innocent, and very unprotectedespecially against themselves.

Yet to touch upon the last alonethere is in this tenderness little, if any, of the contempt which we often feel lies at the root of the French writer's indulgence. Grim and sardonic his mood may seem in certain of the tales in Here Are Ladies. Yet, on the whole, his is more nearly the spirit of another European writer of far-spreading influence -Dostoevsky, high priest of that pity which wells up in inexhaustible waves from the Russian heart.

Poor Folks. That is the title of Dostoevsky's first novel, written even before he had eaten of the bitter fruits of prison experiences. And is it not of "poor folks," precisely, that Stephens writes with special predilection? In Mary, Mary, his heroine is a charwoman's daughter; and in The DemiGods his people are so poor that their whole life, as the author himself expresses it, is a hunt for food, each meal being a city which must be taken by storm. Moreover, Patsy MacCann is a thief, who could, at a pinch, become a murderer. He actually has so little "moral sensitiveness," that, when his enemy is killed

accidentally in the course of a scrimmage, he can cover up the man's face with a newspaper, quite as a matter of course, before packing him away in a casual roadside grave, then go on about his business without giving a second thought to the late bloody transaction. Yet it is significant to note that four fully certified angels, who stand by all the time without saying a word, do not refuse to shake Patsy's hand, or share his pipe with him, when they come to say good-bye at the "latter end" of their common journey.

But "pity" is perhaps too strong and too much misused a word to describe Stephens's sentiment toward his characters. It is rather a shrewd and humourous understanding of their circumstances-not unmixed, perhaps, with a certain wayward appreciation of this independence. Has there ever in English-if we except Borrow-been such a penetrating, and at the same time, sympathetic analysis, of the point of view of the vagrant, the outcast, the wanderer, for whom the people who live in houses do not count.

MacCann and his daughter scarcely looked on them as human beings, and if he had generalised about them at all, he would have said that there was no difference between these folk and the trees that shaded their dwellings in leafy spray, that they were rooted in their houses, and that they had no idea of life other than the trees might have which snuff forever the same atmosphere and look on the same horizon until they droop again to the clay they lifted from.

"It was with quite other people they communed." These were wandering beggars, tinkers, and ballad-singers, of whom the author gives us glimpses which have the full fine Borrovian flavour.

The same spiritual gymnastic which thus permits him to assume the attitude of the outcast toward society-and one feels in this less a sense of sheer skill than of profound sincerity-enables him also to introduce himself agilely into the

would have the thick end stuck up, and some would have the other end stuck up, and there were always bits of clay sticking to one end or the other. Some would be lying on their sides as though they had slipped quietly to sleep, and some would be standing in a slanting way, as though they were leaning their backs against a wall and couldn't make up their minds what to do next. But, however they looked in the bucket, they all tasted alike, and they all tasted well. They are a companionable

food; they make a pleasant crunching sound when they are bitten, and so, when one is eating carrots, one can listen to the sound of one's eating and make a story from it.

And so the ass's thoughts go all through the pleasant category of things good to eat, with the result of a complete asinine anthology of tempting tastes and textures.

It is the same with inanimate objects, all of which he can endow with a soul, and hence with a psychology, sometimes profoundly poetic, sometimes grotesquely amusing, but always admirably spirited and full of life. Take, for example, the following description of an interior seen through the window which Patsy was about to enter one dark night:

The lighted room was both inviting and terrifying, for it was even more silent than the world outside; the steady globes stared at the window like the eyes of a mad fish, and one could imagine that the room had pricked up invisible ears and was listening toward the window, and one could imagine also that the room would squeak and wail if any person were to come through anywhere but a door and stand in it.

As Patsy still stands looking into the room before mounting the_sill, a man and a woman enter it. The ensuing scene, so strange and intense, though so simple and even ordinary, is an admirable instance of the effective way in which Stephens can create a fantastic atmosphere for his human tragedy.

A realist, there is never in his realism anything of the flat or commonplace. His vision is personal. And this vision, whether it be the result of seeing things more intensely than others, or merely of seeing them from a different angle, becomes visionary, so that we seem not

SO

much to be looking at things, as to be peering into them or through them.

This, too, is a trait of Dostoevsky, as it is also of Maeterlinck, whose early theatre is, indeed, based very largely upon a calculated use of just such effects. And one can think of no higher praise to bestow upon Stephens than to say that there are moments when, in his mingling of pity and comprehension with this transfiguring note of human fantasy, he moves us with the very emotion set stirring most often by the great Russian realist.

IN studying the life of Henri Bergson, the writers of the present book find little of as striking interest as the development itself of the philosopher's own thought. Professor Bergson has lived the quiet and uneventful life of the teacher and research scholar, rising from the position of schoolmaster at Angers to occupy the chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France. Symbolical of his external life is the residence he has selected on the outskirts of Paris.

Its actual situation is peaceful and secluded, within an enclosure containing sev

eral houses, each having its own garden and each occupied by one family. On the wrought-iron gates admitting to the enclosure we read the name Villa Montmorency, a name which applies to the whole settlement. This is occupied for the most part by men of letters. No street-cries are allowed there and no beggars; carriages and motors are warned that they must drive slowly.

Most of the houses are surrounded only by a low fence and can be seen by passersby; but the three-storied house of the philosopher is completely screened by a high paling, and all the windows are closely cur