tly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly
curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes
to which all young men are heir.

"And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the
sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.

"The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed
rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been
agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of
virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor
was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of
Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of
Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of
the New World.

"His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--meaner conditions,
mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.

"Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom
of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which _makes_ the imperfect
more perfect, creates _better_ than the materials permit, _forces_ real
life actually to assume and _be_ what the passionate desire for sanity and
beauty demands."

There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:--

"'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in
your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness
of her world--the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless,
malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan--are there no
wholesome brains in the world you write about?'"

I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to
produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own attitude toward
his work.

_Eris_ will be published early in 1923, following Mr. Chambers's _The
Talkers_.

=iii=

Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, the son of William
Chambers and Carolyn (Boughton) Chambers. Walter Boughton Chambers, the
architect, is his brother. Robert William Chambers was a student in the
Julien Academy in Paris from 1886 to 1893. He married, on July 12, 1898,
Elsa Vaughn Moler. He first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1889; he was
an illustrator for Life, Truth, Vogue and other magazines. His first book,
_In the Quarter_, was published in 1893; and when, in the same year, a
collection of stor