r helplessness and sometimes for despair.

With even more doubt as to the exact "classification," I proceed to speak
here and now of L. P. Jacks's book, _The Legends of Smokeover_. Mr. Jacks
is well known as the editor of the Hibbert Journal and a writer of
distinction upon philosophical subjects. I should say his specialty is an
ability to relate philosophical abstractions to practical, everyday
existence. Those familiar with his essays in the Atlantic Monthly will
know what I mean. And is the Smokeover of his new book, then, a place to
go? It is, if you wish to see our modern age and industrial civilisation
expressed in such terms--almost in the terms of fiction--as make its
appraisal relatively easy.

I suppose this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It
brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to
shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our
civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the
book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in
the book's favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset
you are continuously entertained and amused? You can scarcely complain ...
even though at the end, you find you have been instructed. In a world
thickly spotted with Smokeovers, Mr. Jacks's book is a book worth having,
worth reading, worth reading again.

CHAPTER XIII

ALIAS RICHARD DEHAN

=i=

At that, I think I am wrong. I think the title of this chapter ought to be
"Alias Clotilde Graves."

The problems of literary personality are strange. Some time after the Boer
War a woman who had been in newspaper work in London and who had even, at
one time, been on the stage under the necessity of earning her living,
wrote a novel. The novel happened to be an intensive study of the Boer
War, made possible by the fact that the writer was the daughter of a
soldier and had spent her early years in barracks. England at that time
was interested by the subject of this novel. It sold largely and its
author was established by the book.

She was forty-six years old in the year when the book was published. But
this was not the striking thing. William De Morgan produced the first of
his impressive novels at a much more advanced age. The significant thing
was that in publishing her novel, _The Dop Doctor_ (American title: _One_
_Braver Thing_), Clotilde Graves chose the pen name of Richard Dehan,
alth