a priest, and Morna, Ian's wife. In a brief prelude, we see the three as children, steeped in the lore of the Idyls of the King, and playing, now, that they are Percival and Galahad, and again that they are Arthur and Launcelot and Guinevere. But even in these childhood years it is plain that James, the future. priest, loves Morna solely in a mystical, idealised way, and that she and Ian have already dimly recognised that they were born for each other and the rest of the world does not count. With the opening chapter the story has leaped forward a score of years. Father McIvor is interrupted in his morning prayers by the shocking, incredible news that Morna, after fourteen years of marriage, has eloped with an Italian painter, and that Ian, without even attempting to overtake the couple, without a thought of primitive violence or noble forgiveness, is taking steps to obtain a divorce. The poor priest, torn in his tenderest affections, makes futile attempts to check his brother's hasty act. He cannot believe that Morna, the mystic love of his boyhood, the ideal wife, the perfect woman, could have deliberately left his brother for a stranger, a chance painter whom she had known but a few weeks. He cannot, he will not, credit such a horror. But, none the less, the law follows its course, the suit for divorce is undefended, and the decree granted on the bare evidence of the letter left by Morna at the time of her flight. Years pass, Ian remarries, choosing his bride this time for her youth, her indifference and her wealth. He asks no love and he has none to give, but his pride of family demands the restoration of the ancient estate, and an heir to inherit it. But when he brings his bride home to the old dwelling, where every room and passage is haunted by memories of Morna, a doubt as to his first wife's guilt assails him, returns persistently like a haunting nightmare, until at last he knows, in defiance of all logic, that she is innocent-and the knowledge of this slowly but surely kills him. It is the priest, James, who undertakes to visit the Continent and track down the

Her

missing Morna. He finds her easily enough in the remote little Italian town, where she is living alone and friendless. And in few words she gives her explanation. She had idolised Ian always; the idea that he might be false to her or she to him was too hideous a thought ever to have occurred; and then, without warning, she made the discovery that during his one and only long absence from her, at the time of the Boer war, he had had a vulgar intrigue with some common woman in South Africa. first thought was to escape, life with Ian seeming impossible, now that she knew he had failed her. The Italian artist was nothing to her, and never could be. But he was a kind friend and he helped her to make her escape alone, after seeing her on board the channel steamer. Her purposely ambiguous letter to Ian served its purpose, and broke the bonds which she thought unbearable. And then had come revulsion, and day by day she had waited, hoping against hope that he would see through the circumstantial evidence against her, recognise his own fault and seek her out. Then, as she tells the priest, came the news of Ian's remarriage, and she knew hope was at an end. And the priest has nothing to say except that there is now indeed no hope, excepting the slim chance of reaching Ian's bedside in time to bid farewell. And so the sustained tragic note of the volume merges into a final dirge. Sentimental readers will no doubt shed tears, and devout church members will agree with the authors' suggestion that the hero and heroine were the direct cause of their troubles because they were avowed agnostics, instead of professed Christians. But let us look at the story once again from a different angle; let us put this question: If a woman of proud birth and high ideals, a woman passionately in love with her husband, single-minded in her devotion, suddenly learns that just once in fourteen years of marriage he transgressed his vows, because of the temporary overthrow of moral standards begotten by the license of war, is it likely that she will conceal her own grievance,

brand herself publicly with undeserved shame, drag a proud old name in the dirt, and rob herself of the last vestige of a chance for reconciliation? And the answer, of course, is, "Emphatically no, the thing is inconceivable! To act that way, she must be not a woman, but a sort of Frankenstein monster, having nothing in common with the tender, passionate, and quite lovable Morna of the present

story.

"HIS OFFICIAL FIANCÉE"

If a man should chance to have some adequate and convincing reason for temporarily finding it necessary to pose be-, fore the eyes of the world as engaged to be married; and if, furthermore, he should succeed in persuading one of the stenographers on his office staff to consent to play the rôle of the prospective bride, it is easy to imagine that some curious and diverting situations might result. If, in addition to this, we should assume that the man in question, although at heart the kindest sort of person, whose mother and sisters adore him, naturally has the business instinct to such an extent that he has little leisure to pay attention to young women, it is obvious that unless he wishes to betray his subterfuge his education as to the opposite sex will have to make substantial progress. It is just this sort of dilemma that gives its special zest to His Official Fiancée, by Berta Ruck, who in private life is Mrs. Oliver Onions. Until the day when Mr. Waters, head of the Near Oriental Shipping Company and familiarly known to the staff as "Our Governor," makes his amazing proposal to Monica Trant, he had certainly never thought of her as other than a piece of the office machinery-an unusually efficient piece, but, none the less, a machine, and one easily set in motion by his formulaic beginning, "Now, Miss Trant- But the outward exigencies of the new situation, the necessity of a formal announcement to the office staff, of luncheons and dinners tête-à-tête, of the purchase of an engagement ring, one and

all stir new emotions, new thoughts that, on the whole, are not wholly unpleasant. What Waters himself thinks about it all we learn indirectly, for the narrative is given in the first person by the "official fiancée" herself. To her the equivocal situation is not without embarrassment, which grows steadily keener from the day when conventions require that she shall visit Waters' family. The mother and sisters are so genuinely pleased with the prospective bride, so cordial and affectionate, the home so hospitable, the whole atmosphere so much. that which Monica's early days had known that there is an element of cruelty in the knowledge that it is all a passing masquerade, a brief taste of forbidden fruit. But what Monica Trant does not reckon with is the possibility that even. the most absorbed business man may find a piquancy in a pretty face and a dainty, wide-awake personality if once his eyes are opened and that is precisely what happens to Our Governor. And, as the perspicuous reader of course foresees, the whole problem is very simply solved by an amendment to the original contract which changes the official betrothal into an actual one, an arrangement which is really of no concern to any but the parties to the transaction. All of which is thoroughly enjoyable. The one weak spot is the motive for the whole subterfuge; the nature of it need not here be disclosed, but, frankly, it strikes one as a rather slender peg upon which to hang so venturesome an enterprise.

"THE LONE Star Ranger"

The Lone Star Ranger, by Zane Grey, has at least one distinction: as a story of the Western Bad Man, the "gunshooter" by inheritance and choice, it breaks all records in the number of murders the hero has to his credit, the narrowness of his escapes and the amount of lead which he eventually carries in his crippled body. And, furthermore, it suddenly takes this outlaw with a price upon his head, and not only saves him from the noose, but actually gives him a

chance to become one of the most important and esteemed citizens in the whole State of Texas. What is more, it does this without in the least insulting our credulity. But beyond these concessions the reviewer cannot honestly go. The plot rambles, there are incidents and characters which are introduced with no apparent purpose and which disappear as futilely as they came. The women arè especially ineffective; they are not real women, but merely the wild guesses of a man who obviously does not understand the sex.

"MRS. MARTIN'S MAN"

Mrs. Martin's Man, by St. John G. Ervine, is a story of Irish life among the lower middle class in a small town not many miles from Belfast. The details are often sordid and unclean, the characters frail and sinful, the whole atmosphere grey and leaden as November rain-clouds. And yet, out of this forbidding material, the author has wrought a work of art that may well be envied, strong and masterful in its bold brushstrokes, yet showing an almost feminine intuition in the human lights and shadows. Even the exact points of departure and arrival are unerringly

chosen. When we first meet Martha Martin she has been supposably a widow for upward of sixteen years; and yet she has broken her established habit and has left her prosperous hardware shop in the early afternoon, in order to go to the railway station and meet the long truant husband, whose letter announcing his arrival had come that morning like the traditional bolt out of the blue. As she As she makes her way to the station she reviews the vanished years; and, listening to her thoughts, we read a grim, poignant, wretched tragedy. Her marriage from the start was a disaster; Martin, a common sailor, was looked upon by her father as a degradation which the Mahaffys could not accept; SO he promptly disinherited his oldest daughter, leaving her share to his son and younger daughter, Esther. James Martin, shiftless, dissipated, ne'er-do-well,

soon wearied of life ashore, and for the first few years disappeared periodically, leaving a sum of money behind, sometimes much, sometimes little, yet never enough to last until his return. In time Esther, the younger sister, came to share Martha's poverty and loneliness; and presently, when James once again unexpectedly returned, Esther's fresher, younger beauty was the one thing for which he had eyes, and the inevitable and sordid tragedy was enacted under the very roof that sheltered the outraged wife. Then Esther, in her turn, lost her novelty; and presently Martin, possibly from some dormant sense of shame, or it may be surfeited with the breed of the Mahaffys, root and branch, brutally told his wife that he was tired of her, tired of Esther, and was leaving, never to return. Looking back from the vantageground of sixteen years, Martha Martin to-day wondered whether she had acted wisely. She had never told that she was deserted; she had never even let Esther know that James had tired of her too. And so Esther had waited, through all these dragging years, dreaming her futile dream, racked sometimes by conscience for her betrayal of her sister, yet knowing, or thinking that she knew, that if James returned she should take up her romance where it had been broken off. Then had come the rumour of James's death at sea, then silence for long years. Such is the situation at the hour of James's expected return. To rehearse further the actual consequences of his arrival, a broken, coarsened, prematurely aged man, with the furtive cringing born of years in prison, would be to rob the reader of the best that the story promises. The characters, one and all, are living portraits, strong and unmistakable as the gnarled old features of certain unforgettable Rembrandts. But the one masterpiece which overtops all the others soaringly is the tremendous, inimitable character of Mrs. Martin herself. As an example of stoic acceptance, of wise forbearance, of calm recognition that the wreckage of her home and domestic peace could not be remedied by

making bad worse, that Esther's frailty and James's flagrant betrayal could not be blotted out by denouncing the husband or openly shaming the sister, make her a new type in literature, a unique, splendid spartan figure. She deserves, we tell ourselves, to win out in the end; and win out she does, triumphantly,

completely, beyond question. And yet, in winning, she remains a lonely, disappointed woman, aged before her time, and with nothing to soothe the ache of miserable, bygone years. A gloomy, rather depressing book, yet one that makes the true artist frankly envious.

I

HENRY HOLT'S "ON THE COSMIC RELATIONS"*

MR. HOLT's book is far and away the most detailed survey of "occult" phenomena that has appeared since the publication twelve years ago of the late F. W. H. Myers's Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. Like that magnum opus it is a warmly sympathetic survey, and it similarly aims at a definite and comprehensive explanation of the multitudinous facts and alleged facts with which it deals. It also is characterised, as is Myers's work, by highly poetic qualities and by the consistent maintenance of an attitude which may perhaps be best described as one of "scientific mysticism." But here the points of resemblance cease.

In style the two books-except in spots -are as wide apart as the poles. Myers, a classical scholar of the first order, wrote with a polish and finish almost Gallican in its charm. The power of Mr. Holt's style lies in its rugged simplicity. If he feels it necessary to coin some most appalling words for purposes of classification, he more than atones by the directness and intimacy, of his diction. He does not disdain the use of slang, he perpetually takes the reader into his confidence, and he imparts to his pages an unusual piquancy by a humour that is a strange intermixture of the sardonic and

*On the Cosmic Relations. By Henry Holt. Two Volumes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

the genial. And, writing in a fashion notably dissimilar from that of Myers, the conclusions at which he arrives contrast strikingly with those Myers reached.

Possibly it would be more accurate to say that they go far beyond Myers's findings. Studying the perplexing phenomena of sleep, hypnotism, hysteria, genius, apparitions, hauntings and spiritistic mediumship, Myers, as is well known, ended by believing that the survival of the soul, after the death of the body, had been definitely proved, particularly through the trance utterances of Mrs. Piper and other "intermediaries" between this world and the next. He also worked out, as a necessary theory to account for such phenomena as the achievements of genius, the solution of problems in sleep, and "thought transference" between living minds, his famous hypothesis of the subliminal self, according to which the self of ordinary, everyday awareness is only part of a larger self, "revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so formed as to afford it full manifestation."

Mr. Holt, surveying the same evidence and the additional evidence accumulated by the Society for Psychical Research since Myers's death, is by no means so confident as was Myers that "spirit survival" has been positively proved by the phenomena of trance mediumship. He himself believes firmly in survival, but on inferential rather than evidential grounds. On the other hand, he insists that

Myers's "subliminal self" hypothesis and the allied but less "mystical" theory of "the subconscious" adopted by most psychologists, are absolutely meaningless as employed by Myers and the psychologists. In his opinion:

As far as yet used the phrase [subliminal self] seems to me something to look wise over, and use as a scrap-basket for anything you don't understand, and want to have folks (perhaps including yourself) think you do.

But, Mr. Holt immediately goes on, there is a way by which the terms "subliminal self" and "the subconscious" may acquire a true explanatory value. That is by postulating the existence of a Collective Self, a Cosmic Mind, which includes every individual self as the ocean includes its drops, a Self which possesses powers transcending time and space, and which intermittently manifests through individual selves, particularly when they are in what psychologists call a "dissociated" state-as in sleep, trance, reverie. Or, to put it in his own words, he would advance

the hypothesis, as yet very vague and paradoxical, that although the individual soul is contained within the pretty definite limits of its individuality, yet, within these limits it is a portion—a sort of bay, if you please-of the cosmic soul, and is subject to occasional influxes or tides from the cosmic soul in the shape of all sorts of inspirations (which turns the fluid metaphor of a tide into a gaseous one), not only those of music, poetry, hypothesis, eloquence, etc., but of all sorts of dreams and visions, normal or hypnotic and "possessions" of all degrees, from heteromatic writing up to entire apparent substitution or at least predominance of a soul that, like the minor inspirations or possessions, has drifted in from the cosmic aggregate.

Now, as Mr. Holt cheerfully admits -indeed, explicitly points out-this theory is not a new one.

Almost every

thoughtful student of things psychical, including Myers himself, has felt impelled toward it as perhaps the only possible explanation of sundry exceptionally baffling

phenomena. But, with scarcely an exception, those who have thought of it have been content, in Mr. Holt's incisive phrase, to pick it up and admire it, and then put it in their pockets. What he has done, on the contrary, in his nearly a thousand pages of citation, quotation, and discussion, is to apply it systematiIcally to the solution of the problems of psychical research, and to the solution of some problems of everyday life.

How account for the achievements of the man of genius? By the superiority of the inflow of the Cosmic Mind into his individual mind, answers the veteran New York publisher-author. Whence come dreams? From the Cosmic Mind. What is Telepathy? A process whereby the Cosmic Mind is tapped. And the trance utterances which purport to come from those who have gone beyond? Mr. Holt makes reply, They come as dreams do, from the Cosmic Mind; they are themselves dreams, impressed upon the medium's consciousness, perhaps by her sitters, perhaps by discarnate personalities, as alleged.

But is not all this wild guessing? Most candidly Mr. Holt admits that it is guessing, but he denies that it is "wild":

This is not sheer guesswork built up on a jumble of words which in themselves are but professions of ignorance: it is a tentative interpretation of facts, which we have got to interpret somehow, or resign the right and responsibility to use our intellects. It may be all wrong, but doesn't it seem to be in a direction where truth may ultimately appear more clearly?

A good many readers will be inclined to answer this question in the affirmative, even while recognising that not a few of the "facts" which Mr, Holt seeks to interpret still lack general recognition as being facts, and that he again and again invokes the Cosmic Mind hypothesis to explain facts such as ordinary dreamswhich are susceptible of a much simpler explanation. explanation. Oddly enough, on the other hand, he pays comparatively little attention to the phenomena-clairvoyant