h to
style; the mere wholesaler of words has become, in some sense a
connoisseur, even a voluptuary. The picture of Wilkes-Barre girt in by
her hills is simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and
touches of brilliance. The sombre beauty of the Pennsylvania mountains
is vividly transferred to the page. The towns by the wayside are
differentiated, swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent
sketches of people--a courtly hotelkeeper in some God-forsaken hamlet,
his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil
War veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grown
beaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit
staggered by the awakening of sex; Booth _pere_ and his sinister
politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana towns; policemen,
waitresses, farmers, country characters; Dreiser's own people--the boys
and girls of his youth; his brother Paul, the Indiana Schneckenburger
and Francis Scott Key; his sisters and brothers; his beaten, hopeless,
pious father; his brave and noble mother. The book is dedicated to this
mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a memorial to her, a monument
to affection. Life bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowest
ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch of
fineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and fought
things through. One thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod.... Her son
has not forgotten her. His book is her epitaph. He enters into her
presence with love and with reverence and with something not far from
awe....

As for the rest of the Dreiser compositions, I leave them to your
curiosity.

Sec. 6

Dr. William Lyon Phelps, the Lampson professor of English language and
literature at Yale, opens his chapter on Mark Twain in his "Essays on
Modern Novelists" with a humorous account of the critical imbecility
which pursued Mark in his own country down to his last years. The
favourite national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, at the
least) were wholly blind to the fact that he was a great artist. They
admitted him, somewhat grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown,
but that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, or even of the
fifth rank, was something that, in their insanest moments, never so much
as occurred to them. Phelps cites, in particular, an ass named Professor
Richardson, whose "American Literature," it appears, "is st