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one who has experienced all its delights. Boy readers will find it diverting; and boys of yesterday who buy it for their boys of to-day may find reminders of their own lost youth if they turn over its pages before relinquishing it to the younger generation. The story is illustrated by L. J. Bridgman.

Richard L. Metcalfe, author of "Of Such is the Kingdom" and other stories from life, is a Nebraska newspaper man; and the thirty or forty sketches contained in the volume are apparently reprinted from the newspaper in which they first appeared. Many of them are comments upon current happenings. What gives them value and a certain unity is the simple faith, the love for children, and the sympathy with goodness and truth which pervade them. There is no attempt at fine writing; still less is there any mere playing with sentiment. All of the stories are simple and genuine; and some of them have an indefinable though homely charm. The book is published from the Woodruff-Collins Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Professor Kuno Francke's "German Ideals of To-day," is written with the intention of arousing sympathy with German views of education, public life.

literature and art, and in German achievements in criticism, literature, sculpture, and the drama. All but one of the papers contained in it have been published before, and in the exception will be found an exposition of the present state of German literature and a hopeful presage of its future. Those who do not read German will find the volume an excellent guide to some current translations concerning which American criticism has little definite to say. The courteous frankness of the book is noteworthy and should make friends for it, and accomplish its author's intention. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Mr. Basil King's "The Giant's Strength" is concerned entirely with the difficulties besetting a rich man's endeavors to make reparation to the victims on whose ruin his early successes were founded, to win their forgiveness, and to be justified in the eyes of his own children and friends. The vanity and futility of his efforts reveal the true way to him, the way declared by the Master to the young man of great possessions, and he is left to the task of following it while happiness comes to those who have suffered through him. Mr. King's vivid sense of humor, hardly felt in the talk or in the incidents of this story, has preserved him both from hysterical denunciations of the capitalist, and from the presentation of quack remedies for diseases of the body politic, and he treats both the religious problem of repentance and the economic problem of the huge, unmanageable fortune, so gravely, logically and impressively, that he is really instructive. Nevertheless, "The Giant's Strength" is a good love story and to effect such a combination is no small feat. Harper & Brothers.

"If you lose faith in my story," writes Dr. Van Eeden, at the very beginning of "The Quest," "read no further, for then it was not written for you." The cau tion is not necessary, for of the three parts composing the book, the first, although an allegory is concealed beneath its deceptively simple fairy tale, is so thoroughly attractive that few. readers will find themselves able to resist its charm, still less able to forego exploration of the two parts continuing it. The book is a compound of truths, half-truths, paradoxes, heresy, and mysticism, through which the hero, Little Johannes, moves, himself involved in a mist concealing both his age and his stature. This confusion apparently rep resents that riddle of the painful earth of which man always seeks and never finds the solution, before which his soul, be he gray beard or babe whose first conscious thought has but just swam into his vision is but an impalpable, airy, infinitesimal atom, of itself helpless, hopeless, without duration or abiding place. Hither and thither wanders the Little Johannes, following now one and now another guide, good death, dark devil, gnome, happy fairy, mischievous elf, careless children, fascinating woman, man assuming the airs of one superior to religion, or a mysterious laboring man professing to teach a religion transcending Christianity in its present form. Upon one's agreement with the statements of this last guide, hunted to death by the mob, laid by curious science on his last Couch, the dissecting table, depends one's acceptance of the book as an enlightener or as a clever darkener of counsel. Evidently, he speaks the author's last word, and it may content those who know naught better; to others the book will still contain an abundant treasury of fancy, wit, and clever allegory. John W. Luce & Co.

SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XXXV.

No. 3283 June 8, 1907.

CONTENTS.

Vol. CCLIII.

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Peasant Studies in French Fiction.

III.

EDINBURGH REVIEW 579
The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. By G. W. Prothero
NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER
The Enemy's Camp. Chapter XVII. (To be continued)

598

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IX.

X.

A Transformed London

A PAGE OF VERSE

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VII. VIII.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE

The Rights of Subject Races. By Henry W. Nevinson NATION
President Roosevelt and the American People.
Some Orators at Westminster. By Henry W. Lucy

624

630

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SPECTATOR 578

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PEASANT STUDIES IN FRENCH FICTION.*

Arcadian peasants, the porcelain figurines of the eighteenth century, berger and bergère of tinted ivory, in their green-room setting of well-watered meadow and shady woodland; the gentle shepherd with crook and panpipe, the shepherdess with white-fleeced flock and beribboned distaff, "Robin et Marion," breathed their last when modern fiction supplanted the old lyric travesties of village and rural life. Inanimate effigies too far removed from reality even to counterfeit nature, they were swept away like faded paper flowers, and relegated to the dusty indignities of unremembered shelves where the muse dear to one generation of readers is, according to time-honored custom, consigned by the next. Their doom was a foregone conclusion; the root of stability, truth to a living model, was lacking. The aim of the pastoralists had been to present that aspect, and only that aspect, of rusticity which they imagined could be endued with romance or invested withas they conceived of poetry-poetic glamor. Their method was to engraft mental preconceptions of beauty and grace upon "things as they are." They created with adventitious adornings a type whose refinement and charm were an artificial response to an artificial Par George

1 "La Mare au Diable." Sand. Paris, 1851.

2 "Les Paysans." Par H. de Balzac. Paris,

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æstheticism of taste, and their process was based upon the assumption that it is the office of art to superimpose poetry on nature. They left it to their successors to enunciate the converse doctrine: that it is the function of the artist to draw poetry from nature and to elicit from existing actualities the poetry they enclose and emanate. "Dégager l'idéal du réel" became the dictum of the new schoolmen, who in their turn were destined to view the advent of a later creed when a total divorce was effected between the ideal of beauty and the presentment of truth.

Pastoralism died, without hope of resurrection, and for a period the peasant, as a theme in art, lay in abeyance; nor, when after the lapse of years, "on découvrait de nouveau le paysan et le village comme on les avait déjà découverts une fois à la fin du 18ième siècle," was any single feature of the older type rejuvenated. The whole sentiment of pre-Revolution days was revoked; the levity, the wit, lavished on scenes and dialogues drawn from rural life, had vanished; the colored glasses through which peasant and laborer, cottager and villager, were viewed, were broken. The new literary epoch testified to a more vigorous grasp on life and the actualities of life. The peasant's countenance, his gesture, his environment, were delineated from a totally changed standpoint; gaiety, or what bore a somewhat dubious likeness to it. had passed away; the lighthearted loves and ephemeral sorrows of the village-green tradition were supplanted by serious, often by disastrous, passions. The peasant had ceased to be the toy of art, he had become in literature, as in fact, a social, political or philanthropic problem, and his discov

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