Those writers from whom we have come to expect a book or two every year have, in the main, not disappointed us. Mr. Kipling published nothing of any length during 1903, which may mean that we are to have something to look forward to in 1904. From Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy, nothing; but this was not in the nature of a surprise. Mr. Henry James was as usual industrious, and Mrs. Humphry Ward had the success to which she has become accustomed with Lady Rose's Daughter. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle revived his Napoleonic hero, the Brigadier Gerard, and is now in the full swing of a new series of tales about Sherlock Holmes. As to American writers, Mr. F. Marion Crawford brought out his expected novel of Italian life, Mr. James Lane Allen broke the silence of three years with The Mettle of the Pasture, Mr. John Fox, Jr., produced in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, a novel very much out of the ordinary, Mr. Howell's Letters Home elicited much high appreciation, and in The Forest, Mr. Stewart Edward White wrote a book which is far from being merely one of the books of a year. Mr. Davis's The Bar Sinister and Mr. Tarkington's Cherry we read and enjoyed long before they ever appeared in bindings of their own. We agreed with all of our readers that Jack London's The Call of the Wild was a rattling good dog story, and that it was a downright pleasure to be enabled to meet again Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter, and to share the hospitality which he extended to that reprobate Klutchen, even though Colonel Carter's Christmas seemed to lack something of the spontaneity and genuineness of Colonel Carter of Cartersville.

In the list of the best-selling books at the end of THE BOOKMAN for January of last year first place was held by The Virginian-a position which Mr. Wister's popular novel had occupied in every number since August. Mr. Tarkington's The Two Vanrevels was second, twentyfour points behind, and then followed Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, The Blue Flower, The Letters of a Self Made Merchant, and Cecilia in the order named. In the February number The Virginian had dropped to third place,

although having twenty-six more points to its credit than the month before, with Mrs. Wiggs first and The Blue Flower second. In the months of March and April Mr. Frank Norris's The Pit held the lead, being closely followed by Mrs. Wiggs and The Virginian in the first month and by The Virginian and The Letters of a Self Made Merchant in the second. May showed a close competition between Lovey Mary and Lady Rose's Daughter, there being a difference of only seven points in favour of Miss Hegan's book. This order was reversed in both the June and July issues, when Lady Rose's Daughter had 244 and 193 points respectively, as against 215 and 125 points for Lovey Mary. In August Gordon Keith forged far to the front, Lady Rose's Daughter being a poor second, and Lovey Mary being forced down to sixth place. Gordon Keith remained in first place in the September issue, but in October was passed by Mr. Allen's The Mettle of the Pasture which was also the leading book in the November lists. The other best selling books were, in the order named, Gordon Keith, The One Woman, The Call of the Wild, The Grey Cloak, and The Lightning Conductor, for October; and The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, The One Woman, Gordon Keith, The Call of the Wild, and The Main Chance. The order for December was: 1. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. 2. The Call of the Wild. 3. Rebecca. 4. The One Woman. 5. The Adventures of Gerard. 6. The Sherrods.

T

HE young hero of Mr. Howell's Letters Home is so literary that he can dine gloriously at a fifty-cent table d'hôte, where on Fridays he mistakes clam chowder for bouillabaisse and feels like Thackeray when he is eating it. Every one he meets is a "type" and every emotion is "material." When consumed by passion he is not too preoccupied to note how that passion would look in print, and when attacked by the influenza he turns his delirium into "copy" that no magazine would refuse. He is not especially gifted. He has the temperament without the gifts. A genius writes in the overflow of life and seems to forget he is writing, but our hero could never do that. With him the phrase must always come first; his mind is book-bitten and he is doomed to edit his life in advance. Hence he never will altogether live. People of the literary temperament seldom do quite live. They are impeded by a too persistent pen-consciousness which is the spiritual form of writer's cramp, and while others may merely feel they must be making phrases as well as feeling. So by dividing the mind they lower the pulse, and they are always a little below their vital capacity. If it is a love affair, a part of the creature is taking notes and down goes his temperature; if it is an agony he must see to it that it bring forth fruit meet for publication. "I was as miserable," says this Wallace Ardith in Letters Home, "as a guilty wretch can be and be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded mind kept taking notes of the situation and in a hideous way rejoicing in it as material." Mr. Howells meant him for a young man, but he might be as old as Mr. Howells himself. He comes from a town in Iowa but he might as well have been born in Thrums. The essential thing is his ingrained literosity.

We should have liked to see him hanged in the end like Sentimental Tommy, but Mr. Howells seemed rather fond of him. He showed the clemency of introspection. Few authors wish to

hang their Sentimental Tommies after confessing them. Mr. Barrie is the only Brutus among novelists, and you cannot read that book of his without hearing his self-love self-love groan aloud. To the unliterary reader Tommy is merely a vain young man, who might even be a hero if the author would let him alone, but whenever he is most heroic Mr. Barrie is most incredulous. It was a grand deed, to be sure, he will say, but Tommy would never have done it, if there had been no women around; and had there been no public, there would have been no Tommy at all, for he could do nothing for its own sake-not even draw a natural breath-but only for the sake of having it known that Tommy did it. Straight forward inartistic folk can

not make out what all this sarcasm is about, but the literary temperament blushes up to the roots of its hair when it reads it. The book was never adequately reviewed. It was too brutally intimate and indelicately true, too terribly authorish for any other author to deal with frankly and retain his self-esteem, and for any one not an author or an observer of authors to understand. Tommy is practically thrown away on any reader who has not at least a literary temperament in the family.

The trouble with Tommy was simply that he had no private life. Every motive was forked like the devil's tail and he did nothing without reference to a bystander. The eternal bystander is the peculiar gift of the literary temperament. Stevenson's fancy would have peopled a desert isle, not that he might look at them but that they might see Stevenson. Alone under the sky the literary temperament still hopes it may be discovered, and fancies itself discovered when it has given up hope. In the fifth century A.D. Tommy would have been a pillar saint and stood on one leg and let the other rot off, not at all in the fear of the Lord, but in the sense of the crowd below and the high hope that some day there would be a Saint Thomas of Thrums. If there

had been no crowd below, Tommy would have invented one.

The loss of the private life is the chief danger of the literary temperament. Even Shakespeare feared it when he wrote that his nature was subdued to what it worked in like the dyer's hand. "The world is too much with us," said Wordsworth suddenly aware that the public had grown into him and that his soul had no songs without words and that the primrose on the river's brim a four-line stanza was to him and nothing more. Had it not been for that he would have had glimpses, standing on that pleasant lea, that would have made him less forlorn. But writers of this class are in no real danger. The risk is run on the lower plane, where life, like a magazine poem, is written before it is felt and thoughts are tried on like hats to see if they are becoming and the land is only local colour and the sea is made of ink. That is where the Tommies are, among the bestselling heroes of the week, the impersonal ghosts of current literature, each trying to pick out a soul that the reading public would like the look of.

"Now you're looking holy again," said the exasperated Aaron when Tommy was planning some conspicuous nobility and resolving in his mind to look the part and seeing it all in type and hearing the reader's comments on it. The private life of the two Carlyles must have been full of these little calamities, and it certainly was not genius that made the pair so uncomfortable. We all love the illusion of spontaneity and like to believe that the poet's eye doth actually glance from Heaven to earth instead of glancing side

W

wise at the onlooker. It is not pleasant to ascertain that Poe's Raven would not have been written if he had not happened to observe that "Nevermore" would make a musical refrain and "Lenore" rhymed with it and that he brought in the raven only because nothing but a raven would be at all likely to ejaculate "nevermore" at regular intervals, except possibly a parrot, and a parrot would not rhyme with Lenore. Poe's description of his processes set many minor poets working wrong-end-to. Nor do we like to read how Burke generously tinkered poor Crabbe's poem and Johnson lent his heavy hand and Crabbe accepted everything as more likely to beguile the public, forgetting by that time. that he had started out with anything of his own. But while the most gifted sometimes sink to it, the merely clever never rise above it and they leave you wondering whether there is anything in them that the public did not put there. That is why Miss Emily Dickinson exclaimed that she liked a look of agony because she knew it was real and why Kingsley advised everybody to be only good and "let who will be clever," and why Hotspur called poetry the "forced gait of a shuffling nag" and why sometimes after a brilliant literary meeting where authors read their papers our heart goes out to the simple and spontaneous, natural and single-minded cow who never flourishes her tail for our sakes but to remove from her actual haunches an authenticated fly. The literary emotions are so seldom authenticated in the secondary ranges of art. Frank Moore Colby.

OLFVILLE, Days and Nights, illuminated the cowboy more humourously than any other writer has succeeded in doing. The stories were fresh and "out doors," and their new slang amusing and delightful. They have lived beyond the usual book life, nowa

*The Boss, and how he came to rule New York, by Alfred Henry Lewis.-A. S. Barnes & Co.

days, and have deserved their success. In coming to New York from the West, Mr. Lewis seems, in his effort to illuminate Tammany (perhaps unfortunately for the reader) to have dropped his humour, and in The Boss, to have taken up a sterner matter-satire. The book is the autobiography of a Tammany savage. The boss is a Celtic aborigine, with the treachery, the cunning, the taciturnity, the lawlessness, of an Iroquois. If