phasized the point by making an interesting comparison: "In this Mr. Wells differs from his contemporary, Mr. Galsworthy, who leaves the reader under the impression that things are so bad that something ought really to be done about it if anybody only knew how, and Mr. Bennett, who sets you wondering if it ever occurred to him that anything could be done." Some of his solutions, like the heart-searching in exile submitted in Marriage as a cure for conjugal infelicity and the aristocratic socialism prescribed as a remedy for political ills, may be unconvincing, but, at any rate, such as they are, they are offered as solutions.

But that characteristic in Mr. Wells which, in spite of his glaring faults, upholds my faith in him and persuades me to keep on reading him is his sincerity. He is changeable, overconfident, radical, sometimes extravagant, but I am convinced that he is sincere. Perhaps Professor Sherman does not think so, but other distinguished critics do. I infer that even Mr. Mencken does. Mr. William Archer, as I have already pointed out, says it would be foolish to doubt his sincerity. A belief in his thorough intellectual honesty permeates the whole of Mr. Beresford's little book on Mr. Wells. The Folletts allude to his "flaming personal sincerity." But it is the "Victorian Bennett" who offers the most whole-hearted tribute. He says: "Astounding width of observation; a marvelously true perspective; an extraordinary grasp of the real significance of innumerable phenomena utterly diverse; profound emotional power; dazzling verbal skill; these are qualities which Mr. Wells indubitably has. But the qualities which consecrate these other qualities are his priceless and total sincerity, and the splendid human generosity which colours that sincerity. What above all else we want in this island of intellectual dishonesty is someone who will tell us the truth 'and chance it.' H. G. Wells is preeminently that man."

THE PUMP ROOM

In the Pump-room, so admirably adapted for secret discourse and unlimited confidence.

NORTHANGER ABBEY.

THE HOUR OF READING

The merely fortuitous circumstances of reading that set off a book, making it pierce like swords into personal conditions, are often the ones most memorable and influential. Sometimes a book or a passage so jumps with conditions peculiar to the person in the hour of reading that ever afterwards that hour is held as an hour of destiny. A remarkable illustration is recorded by the usually prosaic John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography. He had, he says, arrived at a state of hopeless dejection and spiritual petrifaction. "In vain," he writes, "I sought relief from my favorite books; these memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all the charm; and I became persuaded that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. . . . . I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year." But this extraordinary depression was suddenly, and, it seems, almost providentially, dissipated. "I was reading," continues Mill, "accidentally, Marmontel's Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates to his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to themwould supply the place of all they had lost. A vivid concep

tion of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or a stone.'

In my own life there was a certain time when it seemed to me that The Egoist had been written with the author's eyes boring into me. In this time, the book having come into my hands by accident tortured and lashed me throughout a day of railroad journeying. Only on that train, on that day, could The Egoist have so affected me.

The thousand times told tale of Paolo and Francesca is a striking instance of the destining power of reading, seasonable by accident. "One day," says Dante's Francesca, "for pastime we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him: we were alone and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the color of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he [Paolo] who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling: the book, and he who wrote it was a Galeotto; that day we read in it no farther."

Under any other than the peculiar circumstances given, Marmontel's Mémoires to John Stuart Mill, Meredith's Egoist to me, a romance of King Arthur's Knights to Paolo and Francesca would have been books of pathos, of satire, of tragic passion, and nothing more. Books change in aspect to us, not because of a ripened judgment on our part or a modification of our nature, as we often fondly suppose, but because of a shifted position of view, whether backwards or forwards. The Protean nature of man makes him one day congenial to the roccco romance of the Castle of Otranto and the next hungry for the awful grandeur of the Prometheus of Aeschylus.

Of course, there are some people who "by the dispensing power of the imagination" can make themselves, at any time, contemporaries of any age or character; such people have a powerful objective imagination and are little given to moods.

They do not suffer, like their chameleon brothers, the color of time and place. They are, either happily or unhappily, wanting in sensitiveness. Macaulay, who professed to prefer Henderson's Iceland for breakfast and the "fat little volumes" of the Almanach des Gourmands for dinner, could on his voyage to India, to use his own words, "read with keen and increasing enjoyment, . . . Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English . folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos: . . . . the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Caesar's Commentaries, Bacon de Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon's Rome, Mill's India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi's History of France, and the seven thick volumes of the Biographia Britannica." An omnilegent creature like this requires not, understands not the proprieties of literary settings. Like a library, he is too catholic to seek after distinctions.

Some few books are so universal in their scope that they are for no one time or locality. On the title page of Sir Walter Scott's much worn Bible, I have seen this inscription in his own hand: "It is as it were a river both shallow and deep in which both a lamb may wade and an elephant may swim." And yet, and yet, his "soul cast down within him,' David cries to God: "I will remember thee from the hill Mizar."

J. FRANK DOBIE.

THREE ISSUES OF THE CAMPAIGN

BY THE EDITOR

The American presidential election for 1920 promises to afford little of the excitement usually attendant upon that important event. The platforms adopted by the two great political parties in the early summer are both full of sound and fury touching each other's past record, but signify little in their promises for the future. Most of what the two platforms say concerning taxation, education, civil service, care for veterans and their dependants, and similar topics is pure buncombe and is so accepted by the average voter. In each convention conservatism ruled the making of the platform so as not to disturb "Big Business" unduly, and at the same time not to offend Organized Labor or any other powerful interests beyond the point of safety.

Only on one issue of future policy-the League of Nations -do the platforms show a marked difference. The Wilson administration, naturally, the republicans condemn and the democrats defend with equal degrees of fervor. But President Wilson goes out of office on March 4, 1921, and no one accuses him of naming the democratic nominee to succeed him. Consequently the strength or the weakness of his personality should not be the dominant issue of the campaign, as it properly was in 1916, when Mr. Wilson was a candidate for reelection. Nor has one party dared to oppose the other on either of the great constitutional questions that have stirred the American people within the past two years. Each one indeed tried to outdo the other in its championship of woman suffrage, which both parties so long opposed. That the nineteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution would be ratified before November, leaders of both sides frankly realized, and democrats as well as republicans strove to gain the credit and the votes therefor. On the other hand, both parties ex