haunting sense of music that pervades it, even for one who has not heard the opera. For the theme is trite enough, - the friend who, when sent as a messenger, speaks for himself, -nor is there any of that worming about in the consciousness of the characters by which many a modern novelist prolongs a hackneyed subject. As for the situations, the climax alone interests. Æthelwold has betrayed Eadgar, his king, by falsely reporting as unlovely the daughter of the Thane of Devon, whom Eadgar has sent him to woo, and has himself wedded the fair Elfrida. Presently the king descends on Devon in friendly visit, and light Elfrida, instead of disguising her beauty as she had promised, appears in all her radiance before him. Then comes an unexpected turn, for the first thought of the king is simply that he is thwarted in his life's work, 'building England,' if his best friend, who is her most trusted son, can so prove unworthy. Æthelwold stabs himself. King Eadgar and the rest turn in scorn from the woman, and the play ends in dignity and tragic grief, with solemn keening for Æthelwold. It is a moving finale.

For the rest, what matter if the theme be trite? Poetry makes all things new, and here it accomplishes the ancient miracle. The opening song of the harper, with its swinging lines, archaic, fierce, elegiac, is as successful as Tennyson's 'Brunanburgh.' Cædmon himself might well sing in Eadgar's hall, nor need it trouble us that Miss Millay slightly overdoes her alliteration. The details are well in keeping, even to briefest lyrical phrase ('Up, sun! Stir in thy straw!'), the gnomic sayings a pleasure to the student. No wonder that already college classes in Old English are given the refreshing exercise of analyzing the language of the play. The skillful technique, moreover, is perfectly controlled by the spirit, which is the true spirit of that old forefather life, so precious an element in the eternal past that we really inhabit.

It is piquant to have this wild and stark existence shown through a woman's mind. Never did dainty feminine touch more exquisitely indicate gross manners than in the opening scene of deep drinking and coarse jesting. What a pity that the opera omits the jokes! An effective glimpse of Dunstan suggests the thin veneer of Christianity over Paganism. The tenacious continuity of Anglo-Saxon life is finely hinted in the marching song, with its memories of the Romans:

Cæsar, thy day is done, Whiles ours is but begun.

The best passage in the first act, the pledging of Æthelwold and Eadgar, is true to ancient custom. The fitful moon shining through dank November fogs in Act II is good setting for an idyll of old England, and Elfrida's incantation catches the tone of all magic spells that have drifted down to us. A moon in a mist is the eeriest sight earth offers, and we understand why the lovers mistake each the other for a creature

of vision; but the weird quality hardly fades when they are revealed as mortal man and maid. Yet it slips naturally into the homeliness of Act III, where married Elfrida, bent on domestic cares and very ill-natured, begs her husband not to make love to her in the morning, when her mind is 'full of thimbles and churns.' From this point, the developing tragedy is nobly and simply wrought, in the true spirit of old saga.

The verse is admirably rhythmed, though the recitative might at times grow monotonous or even a little jerky if it did not insist on singing itself to the inward ear. It breaks naturally here and there into delightful lyric. On the whole, here is a beautiful thing, which satisfies our sophisticated twentieth-century hunger for the primitive, artificially presented, and delicately lifts the stark life of our forbears into the purest atmosphere of romance.

VIDA D. SCUDDER

Forever Free, A Novel of Abraham Lincoln, by Honoré Willsie Morrow. New York: William Morrow & Co. 1927. 12mo. viii+402 pp. $2.50.

THE professional biographer is apt to rebel against the historical novel. After he has taken unlimited pains to disentangle fact from fiction, it is exasperating to have an artist come along and deliberately, purposely, mingle fiction with fact, so that neither reader nor critic can have any sure knowledge upon what sort of ground he is treading. Yet this protest is unreasonable, at least in what regards the treatment of character. For with the biographer, as with the artist, such treatment must be in the end largely a matter of divination and creation. The novelist must take life as a basis, exactly as the biographer does, and with both the final presentment of character is a synthetic process, personal, individual, succeeding or failing as the mysterious element of genius enters into it.

The dramatic basis of Mrs. Morrow's story is not of a very original or distinguished quality. A Southern female spy gets into the White House, with the object of discovering, betraying, and finally wrecking the President's plans. As was to be expected and predicted, she falls in love with him, and her own plans are wrecked instead. This sort of melodrama was popular thirty years ago, but it is now, fortunately, for the most part confined to the movies. Mrs. Morrow's strength is not in action, however, but in character. She fills her pages with familiar names and figures, who move and speak with sufficient lifelikeness, and every American who has been educated in the public schools feels so much at home with Seward and Stanton and McClellan and Burnside, not to speak of the great President, that to walk about among them and hear them talk and argue and quarrel is like an afternoon on Main Street. Among these various figures Mrs. Morrow's greatest success is with Mrs. Lincoln. Having dealt with her

myself at some length, in the rather vain endeavor to make her human and lovable, I appreciate fully that in these pages she is both, and some skill was required to accomplish this.

Yet somehow all these figures, even Mrs. Lincoln, and still more that strange, shadowy, elusive personage of Lincoln himself, fail to seize me, to touch me, to hold me, and I ask myself, in some perplexity, why it is. Mrs. Morrow's research has been vast. She has explored an immense amount of material, and explored it wisely and fruitfully. But the characters do not quite live. I think there is first a deficiency of the profoundest insight. The author does not probe deep enough into human motive or human passion. And even more marked is the defect of style. To make characters live in literature, you have got to have the great literary touch: nothing else will do it. The curious thing is that style and human insight are so intimately bound up together. What makes Shakespeare's characters live is the interpretation of the human soul with the supreme magic of words. When the poor, flighty, trivial, wayward Beatrice of Middleton's Changeling cries out, 'I am the deed's creature,' she makes herself immortal, or her creator makes her so. It is perhaps setting a high standard to require that the historical novelist should possess these gifts. Yet it seems to me that nothing less will really justify his intrusion into the domain of history. What professed scholar has ever done for English history what Shakespeare has?

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

An American Saga, by Carl Christian Jensen. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 1927. 8vo. viii +219 pp. $2.50.

LOVE of life is reputed to be one of the most inveterate properties of the race. Yet as one reflects on the lives of most men, the phrase must seem a singular irony. We show the love of life when, driven to some desperate corner, we fight like rats to wring some few hours more of it from unwilling fate. How often do we show it by abundant and happy living, rich in experience which we consciously enjoy as it passes and on which we afterward think with satisfaction and approval? Here is a life story in which existence is wonderful and exuberant as it flows and scarcely less exuberant in memory when it has passed; in which every episode is avidly seized and lived with a concentrated energy of mind and body, lest some drop of its precious liquor should escape down the throat untasted, or some moment that might have yielded its pungent feeling lapse in dull oblivion. And what episodes they

are!

Measured in units of ordinary Christian existence, Carl Jensen has lived the lives of a thousand men. He has been a boy, born in Denmark, surrounded by grotesque peasant and sailor figures whose shapes are like the faces of

gnomes on his pages. He has run away to sea, stoked ships, made his way to New York, worked as longshoreman in days whose cruelty and brute danger are renewed as he tells of them. From speaking an illiterate and inarticulate jargon of English, he has struggled through the second childhood of the immigrant untutored in his new land to an education whose first steps made him a mathematician and electrician, and whose progress took him through a Middle-Western college and finds him an established sociologist to-day. But before attaining these dignities he adopted the profession of fanaticism for a time, and peddled an uncouth volume called Doomsday Book, not to mention ornamental religious mottoes, through farming and lumbering outlands where his intrepid appetite for life found or made fruitful soil. With these religious mottoes one of his most engaging and characteristic anecdotes is connected:

'During a hailstorm late one night we found shelter at another bachelor's cabin. Hail like hens' eggs had crushed his crop. I showed the frowning host my set of sacred mottoes. When his eye fell on one, "GOD BLESS OUR HOME," his fist fell upon it heavy and he roared: "Have you a 'GOD DAMN OUR HOME'?" He put me up for the night. In the morning he bought "THOUGH HE SLAY ME, YET WILL I TRUST IN HIM.""

The period of fanaticism and Doomsday peddling melted and took flight as the sun of the sciences rose upon the immigrant's view. The study of psychology bore fruit in sociological work in the underworld of New York and in the

prison camps of the South, work which has furnished pages of pity and grim astonishment to this book. Throughout his adventures, Mr. Jensen's course was never solitary. His own consciousness, his childlike delight in examining and applauding the dramas it enacted for him, owe half their force to his lively sense of the world of other men. His chapters are crowded with figures the sailors of his childhood, his friends and helpers in New York, the criminals and outcasts of his labors in social reform. Loveliest of all these figures is Margaret, the childwife whom he helped through the trapdoor opening under the table of his garret room in the first days of their secret marriage, and who accompanies him in a courageous and whimsical comradeship through his career in the MiddleWestern college.

For the mass of mankind, life sinks into habit; the senses grow dull from lack of poetic exercise ⚫ and, instead of reporting the glories of the visible and palpable world, report only the expected signs for the guidance of an inert personality in its familiar acts. But there are men, favorably unbalanced by an excess of vitality, to whom the sense of existence is an appetite, and the mere beating of the pulse a godlike prerogative. Such a man is Carl Jensen. His adventures are gloriously self-conscious; he carries himself in the centre of them all; his organs of perception never

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