eyes at that moment, as if at my words some not entirely vanquished current of the past had for an instant been set in motion. "I loved him too much," she said. "It was so strong-I had to put it away."

I saw then that it was in some sort an obsession, but one of the spirit not of the nerves. There are those who might characterize Mary's rejection of Noel, her acceptance of Craig, as the inconsequent impulse or the neurotic fancy of genius. But such psychology has no place in Mary's world. There is nothing febrile or ill-balanced in her spirit. Mary is utter harmony; and, like the goddess in the legend, I feel now that she elected the experience of wifehood and maternity, rejecting where she loved too much, assuming it in such conditions as could leave that inner shrine free from the encroachment of the fever of earthly love, divining, if at first she did not realize completely, that her destiny or her development, as you choose to call it, demanded that she should reject the thing that drew her too strongly down to the earthly plane. And so she obeyed, even if to some extent unconsciously, the law of her own being.

I carried our conversation a little further then-it was the only one we have ever had on the subject. "But Noel-" I said. "You thought of his side too, of course. Where did he come in?"

She made a little gesture. "He had his message to deliver, and now he has delivered it magnificently, completely."

I understood then that Noel's destiny had been included in her rejection, and indeed his soul had grown too with his enforced renunciation.

You see, in Mary the instinct of possession had become nonexistent. The last thread of that strongest passion of humanity had been severed in her renunciation of Noel. With that act she had enabled herself to love him upon a different plane. That he was and still is nearer to her than any soul on this planet, is one of the few things in this world that I am utterly sure of. I did not understand so well then and I pushed my questions farther.

"And you, your voice, your music-have you never regretted giving up that?"

My music?" she smiled. "Why-I still have it."

"But the career," I ventured, "the complete development? She shook her head. "Those things come in their time. I have given up nothing. Nothing is lost."

It sounded rather Maeterlinckian, and I demanded, somewhat in the manner of the late bishop, "But how-why? What do we know after all, except the here and now?"

Mary's eyes seemed fixed on some point farther than other eyes might see. "We feel certain things deep down," she said. You can explain it as I have said before, by those Eastern beliefs in Karma and reincarnation, of the influence of the loves and hates of other lives upon this. For myself, I but dabble inconclusively in the occult; neither have I a soul to agonize with the higher issues like Mary's. Yet we could suppose the affair of Mary and Noel to be some karmic reflection of their love in other lives, and that Mary, being what is known as a soul high in incarnation, knew that that love must not meet completion on this plane. In any case she put out the consuming flame and took up the candle, and never once-of that I am certain-felt regret.

Sometimes when she pauses in her work I see a look in her eyes as if she were with poor wandering Craig, encompassing him with her tenderness, her pity and her trust. Perhaps he is right and she knows that he will return. She knows something that is the real secret of Mary-that the rest of us do not know.

Noel has wrought his vision of her into art. He does not need our pity. Yes, I was right at the beginning when I said that this is Craig's story. Mary is some expression of the divine essence, as other great influences in the world have been, and that human side of her that had power to tear at the hearts of Noel, of Ralph, of Craig, was left by no chance in her rare and exquisite being. It was perhaps the means to draw them to self-realization, which I suppose is what it means to achieve a soul. But sometimes in the evening when we sit together about the lamp and I look at Mary, so beautiful, so delusively human, my heart aches for poor Craig upon his soul's steep pilgrimage.

THE COWARDICE OF

A

AMERICAN LITERATURE

HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN

POLOGISTS for American literature, since they cannot

claim for it any great heights or depths, are unstinted in their praise of its negative virtues. It is, they assert, clean and decent. It is clean, because of its Anglo-Saxon reticence. But reticence is not an especial Anglo-Saxon attribute; it characterizes all great art. Shakespeare never in his maturer works allowed himself the orgy of voluptuous imagery in Venus and Adonis, yet that poem is almost forgotten, while the few quiet lines in which Viola tells of the passion that preyed on her like a worm i' the bud are among the most quoted passages in Shakespeare. Goethe is reticent in Faust, but where in all literature do we find anything that pierces the marrow of our bones like Gretchen's lament before the image of the Virgin? Even Ibsen with his pitiless searchlight never forgets his dignified reserve, though some of his followers have used his example as an excuse for dabbling in the superficialities of their own prurience.

Reticence, however, does not mean the ignoring of essentials; it is rather a freeing them from disturbing details. A marble by Rodin with its fine planes and masses is reticent. The Laocoön, a mass of writhing muscle, is garrulous. Rembrandt is reticent, when he passes beyond the momentary mood of his model to paint a lifetime in the glance of an eye. Reticence is not puerility. It is a good, virile word, implying in its very origin that something greater is held in reserve. The trouble with many American writers is that, while they parade the veil of reserve, there is nothing behind the veil. It covers emptiness.

The avidity with which Americans read the French, Russian and Scandinavian writers shows that they are thirsting for an art that shall not be unacquainted with life. Yet they cannot entirely slake that thirst through foreign writers. In coming from our own writers to the Russian in particular, we seem to be transported to a region where the passions stalk around naked, and we do not feel at home. It is not so much that we would have the huge, shaggy, brawny creatures slightly draped;

it is rather that the monsters themselves are not of our flesh and blood. The passions and emotions among us take other forms, and we want our own writers to give them bodies that we can recognize.

We have an army of brilliant fiction writers, but they are busy manufacturing a commercial article aptly called mental chewing gum. They have turned their back on truth, till truth has forsaken them. They have worked with one eye on the gallery, till they have forgotten that the gallery-taking that word in the sense of the wider public-wants truth and reality above all things. It listens to those who have a message.

Hawthorne certainly made no bid for popularity, when he wrote The Scarlet Letter. He does not concede an iota to the "prurient curiosity" that is supposed to be the motive impelling people to read stories of illegitimate passion. From first to last he is consistent in his own Puritanic ideal. And what a subtle touch it is to show the effect of Hester's unfaithfulness on her husband's character, transforming him from an ordinary decent citizen into a fiend! Hawthorne himself thought The Scarlet Letter too gloomy to appeal to the multitude. His publisher had so little faith in its selling qualities that he ordered the type to be distributed after the first edition had been printed. The story of its reception is well known. The first edition was exhausted in ten days, and the book had to be set up again. It brought the author letters from perfect strangers who were troubled and appealed to him as to a father confessor. After sixty years it is still considered the greatest American novel ever written, and is, in fact, the only popular book Hawthorne ever produced.

The American nation just now is restlessly seeking the truth that lies between the negation of the old Puritanic ideal and the new worship of the nature forces, between the old ideal of obedience to law at any cost and the new doctrine of individualism. The wide interest roused by the books of those few present-day writers who attempt to deal earnestly with problems of sex shows that the general reader is not afraid of those who cut below the surface, even when the waters that well from the deep are bitter.

American fiction until recently was so moral as to be immoral, because it had no place for truth. It dealt largely and extensively with love, while ignoring the very basis of love. A great change has come over the range of subjects that are considered permissible in literature. Only one decade ago Mrs. Ward was censured for giving us an "immoral" heroine in Lady Rose's Daughter, and the daily papers wrote editorials ponderously setting forth that a heroine did not need to be immoral in order to be interesting. Last year Maurice Hewlett gave us Sanchia of a much deeper dyed impropriety, and no editorials were written. Evidently the watchers on the wall of morality were napping, or perhaps they were becoming accustomed to the attacks and had ceased to regard them seriously.

There have been many novels recently by people who think they can achieve the Ibsenesque merely by having one of their lovers married to some one else. This, however, does not bring us a hair's breadth nearer to an artistic treatment of the psychology of the emotions that centre around sex. The problems that take no account of legitimacy or illegitimacy, but rest on the dualism of human nature, are still, except in a few instances, unsolved and almost untouched. They are the tragedies of those who have followed the lower, till, when the higher shows its face, they have no strength to seek it-of those who are drawn with a part of their nature to that which their other self loathes -of those who have sinned against their own ideals, and of those who, being true to them, have felt themselves growing worse instead of better because of the sacrifice. But all of those things our alleged problem writers walk around as a cat walks around a dish of hot porridge, to use a homely Norwegian proverb.

No one would wish to see a literature like that of the younger Danish school, in which the men are imitation Oswalds and the women wantons. While these books have their place, because they picture a phase of human life artistically, with psychological insight and brilliant technique, they fail to reach the highest in literature, because they are one-sided and distorted. But if some one, seeing life wholly, were to set free with the touch of genius that imprisoned cry-imprisoned, be