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make it. Come on. Get hold of my belt." Then catching the other's quick upward glance-"where's all that iron I've been hearing about? Thought you wasn't a quitter."

But the mountaineer only dropped his head. "I can't make it," he groaned.

Mell's hand shot out and gripped the old man's shoulder.

"Here!" he cried. "This won't do. Brace up, Jack. You've got to make it. Can't you see that I've been going on my nerve all night? I can't make a half mile, and some of the others may be right behind."

Something like a tingling electric shock stung into the brain of Iron Jack. Slowly he lifted his eyes and let them travel up the lean, wide-spread legs, the narrow hips and waist, the broad, muscular shoulders. His gaze came to rest on the boy's face clear-cut in the white moonlight.

The old man quietly rose, still staring with awe into Mell's blazing eyes. "Yes," he snorted, "you sure look like you was played out. You big faker! Why, you're good for twenty miles."

It was now the boy's turn to stare. "Faker, yourself!" he cried. "Never you mind that," begged Jack. "You hit her on in. I don't need the old mine. I got a little ranch up on Walker Creek. You—

"No, Dad," Mell pleaded. "The mine should be yours. You do need it. You're old. I'm young and strong and I have a good job. Besides, Jack,

you're the kind of man I wish my father had been. I want you to win."

The old man held out his hand. "You're some man, yourself, Kid," he grinned.

And the moon smiled as the two strong men silently gripped each other's hand.

Down Reeka's main street, humanlined with half the county's population, in the gray fog of early morning, two men marched with limping, reeling steps. They seemed to advance together, yet always one or the other was stumbling ahead or staggering back.

At the entrance to the Court House the men turned. Half-way up the steps the smaller man tripped and fell to his knees. His big companion helped him up, and the nearer bystanders heard the two laugh in a dry cackle at the mishap.

Through the wide door-now arm in arm-and up to a long counter they marched. Behind the counter a man waited with a watch in his hand and a pen poised above a big book. Supported by the counter the two men fumbled for an age, then as one man, they each pushed forward a piece of paper.

The man of the watch and pen looked with a puzzled frown from one to the other.

"Which first?" he asked.

"Suit yourself," mumbled the little man. "It don't make no difference. We're going to work the Crazy Ann together."

THE UNSOUGHT GOAL

Kiss out the scars upon my breast,

The fear from out my eyes;

I have found rest

Who only sought a prize.

Kiss out the burning from my brow,

And from my lips the flame;

I have love now

Who only asked for fame.

MARY CAROLYN DAVIES.

U

Imported Literature

By Anna Seaforth

NDOUBTEDLY no other country can boast such a vast production of modern literature as the United States-literature ranging from the shoddiest paperbacked novel to the highest standard magazine-yet it is a curious fact that it is the English writer rather than the American who figures most prominently in the higher class journals of this country. Indeed, one cannot help wondering why the American editor and publisher should have conceived. such a mania for rounding up the big game of the Old World, regardless of whether or not it is wholly suitable to the American palate. If we want to know what our duty is in the present crisis of history we appeal to such men as Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy and others across the water. It is true these men all rank as prophets of greater or less degree, but they are not our prophets-that is a point worthy of consideration.

Likewise, if we want a psychological analysis of the feminine we appeal to Mr. George, who poses as having solved that which has taxed an Englishman's comprehension more than any other man's; for surely none but an Englishman would have so little sense of humor as to attempt to explain the inexplicable.

G. K. Chesterton, intending to pay a high tribute to Bret Harte, says of the latter that he has "humor, "but it is not American humor." Happily, we may return the compliment by saying of Mr. Chesterton himself that he has humor, "but it is not English humor." He has indeed a vein of humor which is not possessed by many contemporary writers of his nationality

a humor which gives him a sympathetic insight into human nature and a whimsical but incisive criticism of those who blunder in their interpretation of it. Thus it has fallen to Mr. Chesterton to give us a singularly apt eulogy of one of our own countrymen of whom he says: "To him we owe the realization of the fact that while modern barbarians of genius like Mr. Henley, and in his weaker moments Mr. Rudyard Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness and crude cynicism and fierce humor of the unlettered classes, the unlettered classes are in reality highly sentimental and religious, and not in the least like the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the most rapacious of all the districts of the earth-the truth that, while it is very rare indeed in the world to find a thoroughly good man, it is rarer still, rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who does not either desire to be one, or imagine that he is one already."

Could any one else have hit the nail on the head more exactly? Here is an Englishman who admits that the failing of some of the most notable English writers of the day is their inability to interpret human nature sympathetically-a faculty possessed to a remarkable degree by all those great English men and women of the Victorian era. True, there are still some sweet singers of domesticity-J. M. Barrie, for instance-who have achieved the art of putting real men, and most of all real women, into their books. In other words, they have made the normal man heroic and transformed the prosaic into the poetic. The glory of Kipling, we suspect,

will one day wane and the poetic ideas of H. G. Wells fall flat through a recognition of the fact that their humanity does not ring true; for whatever the philosophy, the religion or the ethics. we would convey to men, there is but one instrument we can use in the promulgation of our beliefs or our theories-man himself. Kipling fails in this respect because he denies the feminine-not merely woman, whom he treats with genuine Mohammedan contempt-but the feminine attributes in human nature without which, paradoxically speaking, no man can be a real man. True, he observes mankind with wonderful accuracy, but to portray men exactly as they appear to be instead of revealing what they are in substance, is equivalent to giving us a photograph in place of an oil painting-there is a depth, warmth and inner light wanting, and a certain vital truth and intrinsic beauty is obscured through exactness of every detail.

Do we really like Kipling's Tommy? He is vigorous, of course-almost inspiring at times—but have we any real blood connection with him? There is a strong suspicion in our minds that he is not a genuine Anglo-Saxon. There is a void somewhere in him where there ought to be imbedded things which no mere sordidness of life or coarseness of environment could take from him-things which are bred in the bone and sucked into the bloodthey will revive and re-assert themselves somewhere, sometime, in spite of a multitude of incrustations. The English Tommy may wallow in the sunshine and sensuality of India and Egypt and Africa, but it will not make him a Mohammedan, nor will it make the Calvanistic McAndrew a hypocrite, for there is a rigid pillar in the center of his being.

What Chesterton says is true. The ignorant and uncouth man is not necessarily the possessor of a plebeian soul; indeed, the man of the "unlettered classes" is the man who has the most optimistic belief in his own individuality. The feeling that he is a

mere cog in the wheels of some vast machine-a mechanical God in a mechanical universe-is a feeling possessed only by the overly sophisticated man of learning. Kipling attempted to instill this doctrine of force into the Anglo-Saxon peoplethis doctrine of the mechanical God and the nullity of human love and individual strength. Kipling who to-day is saying of Germany that "Allah has decreed that she shall perish by her own act and the consequences of the law that she professes," was the same Kipling who but a few years ago serenaded England with tom-tom and battle slogan-piped to her till she arose. and stepped forth to battle, secure in the faith of her poet-priest that the God of the Hebrew would jusify the sword of the Hebrew. Never before

in the long, noble history of the AngloSaxon race had conquest been lauded for conquest's sake. Throughout all the internal and world-wide strife in which England had taken part these many centuries past her singers had remained true to an ideal; the doctrine of liberty, justice and equality was the greatest bequest of the Anglo-Saxon race to the world; then came this Anglo-Indian and seduced the nation with the religion of Allah.

Compare Robert Service's men in the mining camps of the Yukon with Kipling's Tommies on the South African veldt. Many of them were the same men-adventurers from over the sea-wild and lawless at times, but with kingly souls under their rough exterior; for bravery is always born of an innate gentleness and a reverence for something whispered only to oneself. The Canadian poet felt this -the Anglo-Indian has missed it. One might almost say of Kipling that when he wrote "The Vampire" it was a skit of his own genius, which had proved itself unequal to the task of digging up the roots of human nature; for the woman depicted in this poem is the last human being who could be described as "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair." She is the everlasting Mona Lisa-tragic, mysterious, allur

ing her soul the well of the world's

remorse.

We cannot but regret Kipling's pronounced one-sidedness. We have an inkling here and there-in Mary Gloster and elsewhere-that he could have done even greater things than tohse for which the world has applauded him-that he could have touched certain bedrock principles of human nature which are more permanent than the mountains of Allah; but that vein of Oriental cynicism weakens the whole structure.

Perhaps it is only good taste to pay the highest possible tribute to foreign genius, but surely Mr. Lawrence Gilman oversteps the mark when he says of Mr. H. G. Wells: "It is a curious fact the significance of which we are not prepared to divulge that in England, where there is little interest in ideas, the novel of ideas has yet at times come to so superb a flowering. Only Mr. Wells, only an Englishman, could have given us such a thing as The Research Magnificent-not even the amazing M. Romain Rolland could have accomplished just this blend of largeness and pungency, shrewdness and imagination, breadth and swiftness, actuality and vision. Here is a book at once epical and intense-the book of a dreamer who is also a seer; a dramatist who is also a lyric poet; a philosopher who has walked among men. Here, in short, is a masterpiece -a book that enlarges and exalts the sense of life, that brings back to us the noble saying of Richter: that there will come a time when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams, and find his dreams still there, and that nothing has gone save his sleep."

It must be evident to any one who has read The Research Magnificent that Mr. Gilman has not said as much about this original and somewhat daring book as he has left unsaid. Indeed, we might conclude from the varied criticisms we read of The Research Magnificent that it resembles the Bible somewhat in that we may find much in it that isn't there and overlook a great deal that is there. One of the

remarkable things about this book of Mr. Wells' is that it defeats the very purpose for which the writer apparently produced it. It is true that the author has in choice language, of which he is a master, and with a lively sense of the picturesque and poetic, of which he is also a master, projected a beautiful dream-a dream peculiarly soothing and satisfying to men-having in it a vision of the time when all things will have been accomplished— the things for which men have striven and bled throughout all the past ages.

But Mr. Well's philosophy fails because the man he chose as his messenger fails. We expect great things of Benham when he starts out in the spirit of Sir Galihad, striving, as he says, after the "aristocratic life" and his own "kingship." But does Benham really attain to these things or does he remain a dreamer to the end?-a dreamer whose eyes have been blind to what happily is revealed sooner or later to the average man, namely: that the highest ideals is no far-off vision to be achieved now or "ten thousand years" hence, but is the actual accomplishment of common things with a divine grace. Is it not true of quite the most ordinary youth that he started on his sojourn with "an incurable, an almost innate, persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly," that his strongest desire was to "get something out of his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendor?" But how puerile was this resolve when we consider all that Benham's life amounted to. Mr. Gilman says he succeeded succeeded in conquering "Fear, Indulgence and Jealousy" which "restrict the soul of man." But does a man ever establish his "kingship" by denying the substance of himself which after all is earthly and must ever remain so? Does he attain this by running away from himself and following after far visions? The conquest of a man's lower nature must come before and not after it has defeated his higher nature. "Fear, Indulgence and Jealousy" do not offer a serious problem to be solved, for to

the normal human being they are but a negligible portion of life if they have any part in it at all. Love on the other hand is such an indissoluble part of life that it too raises no query in the mind of the normal man. Love has no relationship to passion, nor can it be identified merely as Sex-it is the driving force behind all the activities of life-it is the stimulus of the man's mind and the woman's soul in mature years; and most of all it is the thing which awakens men and women to a moral consciousness of the meaning of life.

Despite the fact that this book is written by an Englishman "who ought to know," Benham to our unsophisticated Western minds is not an exemplary "aristocrat." Rather does he raise in our minds the question as to whether it is not difficult for those at the extreme ends of society to preserve that innate refinement-"aristocratic mind" with which the normal man is endowed from birth. Benham hates horses, but he makes up his mind to master a horse because the men of his

class are expected "to drive." Does not exhibit the fact that a man with a pedigree is not free to follow the dictates of his conscience or finer nature to the same extent as the man who is under no hereditary obligations to be either a soldier or a sportsman? Can one not imagine a young man whose finer feelings revolt at the cowardice of a fox hunt, and whose sense of the beauty of life is jarred by the broken wing of a phaesant, yet succeeding in stifling that "still small voice" within him because he is expected to do such. things.

In spite of all the social laxity of the New World, her writers, like Bret Harte, have always produced for us the pure gold of human nature; they have never gone off into fallacious theories about any of the fundamental things of life; they have never presumed to preach the doctrine of libertinism in the guise of a new philosophy, nor to tack their own inscriptions on the guideposts of future generations. Such things have always come to us from abroad.

ON RE-READING MERRIMEE'S CARMEN

The mist-white bloom of jessamine that crowned
That dusky gypsy head-years since at rest—
Lives in my memory yet, for on the breast
Of time eternal is its fragrance found.
So, as with wine, I feel my pulses bound
When evening airs are by that scent caressed;
By passions flown, of other years, I'm pressed.
I live 'midst other sights, and pace the ground
Loved by the sons of a more glorious Spain,
Who knew her towered cities and her marts
Resounding to a myriad-footed tread;

Where rang the song of arms, and from the plain,
Gitanna met Hidalgo, throbbing hearts

That lived, and loved, and hated, long since dead!

R. R. GREENWOOD.

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