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It was pleasant enough in the old city life; but still London could not hold them long, for Mr. McCarthy had made engagements to lecture in America, and they had to return there almost immediately. This visit to the States brought them into the midst of a great excitement, for Mr. McCarthy was one of the negro's friends, and now when he returned there the negro was just emancipated. Mr. McCarthy went down south to Richmond and Charleston and other places, to feel and to see the freedom of the negro.

In " Lady Judith " we have some fruits of the American tour. Even those persons who do not read novels might find an interest in the descriptions of New York and San Francisco, which are so vivid, so full of careful observation, so complete. How far description is in place in a novel is a matter of opinion, but Mr. McCarthy is not one of the essentially dramatic novelists: he does not pass you from one situation into another as if merely by the shifting of a scene; he does not hurry you through three volumes in agonising pursuit of a carefully hidden mystery. He dwells lovingly upon his subjects. In a novel of this quieter order, description, if really good, is acceptable, and the description of Broadway in "Lady Judith" is sufficiently racy to be conscientiously read, even by the "skipping" novel reader. Mr. McCarthy's great belief in America is thus expressed: "Europe is grown old, used up. No young man of rank can do anything useful, or take any high place, who has not seen and studied the republican States of America." Here is a bit of the description of Broadway, which even a born New Yorker may read with some pleasure, for people seldom appreciate the beauties or eccentricities of their own cities: "Broadway is usually one of the brightest and most animated streets in the world. No two houses in all its vast length (and it is as if the Strand intersected London from end to end) are like each other; this side of the street is never like that. A huge building of white marble stands next to one of brown stone, both of the newest and most glaring hues; and then comes a quaint old Dutch-looking house of the days of Stuyvesant, and then again something little better than a shanty. On this side you are reminded now of the Rue de Rivoli; cast your eyes across the street, and you see a scrap of the New Cut or a bit of Wapping. Here a side street runs across which seems borrowed from Liverpool; a few yards on is another which, with its quiet uniform red-brick houses, its double row of trees, its cleanliness and its quaintness, appears to have been transplanted from Delft or Utrecht. Nearly everywhere along the line of Broadway the shop-fronts bristle and glitter with signs, and thrust out huge symbolical devices, and flutter with flags. There are more banners and insignia hung out on Broadway every day than might be seen in the Strand on the occasion of a royal pageant. A Chinese city is not more parti-coloured, bright, eccentric, fantastic in its devices to attract the attention of the

passenger. To the European stranger this most practical and moneygrasping of all streets seems as if it were perpetually playing at a sort of Venetian carnival; a huge frolic, mask, and mummery. Only when the snow begins to come down with its sudden overwhelming power, and hides the heavens in grey and swallows up the street in whiteness, does Broadway cease to be brilliant, glittering, and bizarre.

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'Now, however, the snow has ceased to fall, and it is frozen over and forms a hard, white, gleaming pavement. Snow in London is soon merely a grey and dingy sort of mud; in New York it sparkles for weeks, bright as a sugary crust on a wedding-cake. The air is intensely clear, the sky is as blue as that of the Egean Sea; the sun is brilliant. There is summer in the heavens, and winter on the earth. It is cold, to be sure it ought to be piercingly cold; but somehow the atmosphere is so exhilarating, the sunlight is so radiant, the sky is so glorious in its azure, that one forgets to be chilled, and is delighted with the whole condition of things. The street rattles and rings with the tinkling sleigh-bells; for nothing on wheels, except the staggering little city omnibuses, can now be seen along Broadway. Tiny basketsleighs with one horse, bigger and more pretentious sleighs with two, with three, with four horses, glide along with jingling bells and gay caparisons with silver-embossed housings and gorgeous buffalo robes. The English traveller looking on can hardly believe that this sort of thing means business. It seems like some fantastic piece of Christmas revelry or a scene from a play. Nay, it hardly looks like a living reality of any kind. The radiant sun, the laughing sky above, the hard and gleaming snow beneath, the almost interminable stretch of incongruous. street and the never-ceasing rush of odd, brilliant, picturesque vehicles, become bewildering to him Such, however, is the commonto New Yorkers the common-place-appearance of Broadway in the winter."

"Dear Lady Disdain" contains a piece of description of another kind, but which is worthy of one of the modern American humourists. It is the account of an innocent English youth who, "having utterly failed in London, thought he must be qualified to succeed in New York. His idea was to give lectures and write books-poems especially. He soon found that every second person in America delivers lectures, and that every village has at least three poets-two women and one man." After a lecture delivered at a very little hall, where the "public did not rush in," a chance opens up for him in the shape of a lecturing engagement at a city, which, being only twenty years old, was obliged to be economical, and content itself with some young lecturers mixed in with the stars. So our young friend goes away to the city full of enthusiasm, any very young man who is meditating a lecturing tour in America may as well read " Dear Lady Disdain" to find out something about what

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his experiences will be like. First he will find, if he goes far enough, that he is welcomed as a great English orator; secondly, he will probably find that his lecture is about something which does not interest his audience. "You don't understand our people here," says a friendly adviser to the young lecturer. "In places like this they have forgotten all about the effete aristocracies of Europe and don't care, as they would say, a snap one way or the other. I suppose an English village audience wouldn't care much for a lecture on the dangers of our Third Term system. Half our folks have no other notion attaching to England than the thought that your Queen is an excellent woman and a pattern mother." This is a good piece of writing, showing real political knowledge and insight. "Dear Lady Disdain," which is one of the best known of Mr. McCarthy's novels, is in itself simply a love story; but it is finely flavoured with pictures of American life. The emotions and motives of comparatively ordinary people are well worked out by Mr. McCarthy, and perhaps the most vivid impression left on one's mind by "Dear Lady Disdain" is made by her relations with her father. There is something thrilling in the scene where she at last sees that father, who has always worn a mask of gentle manners and culture, to be what he really is-a passionate, vulgar, selfish man. Indeed, in those emotions and relations between persons who are not in themselves extraordinary, but belong to the same types as the folk of everyday, Mr. IcCarthy shows his possession of that power of portraiture which is especially appreciated in the modern novelist. In "Miss Misanthrope" we have quite a different style. True there is the inevitable love story of all romancists told in much the same manner as the love story of "Dear Lady Disdain or "Lady Judith.” But quite another interest runs through "Miss Misanthrope," which will have led many people, who professedly do not care for love stories, to read it. Mr. McCarthy, having studied the modern "art for art's sake" school from the interior of its circle, has come out and depicted its follies with a satire which is immensely amusing, because it is so quiet and literal. "Nature," says the poet of "Miss Misanthrope "-" Nature is the buxom sweetheart of ploughboy poets. We only affect to admire Nature because people think we can't be good if we don't. No one really cares about great cauliflower suns, and startling contrast of blazing purple and emerald green. There is nothing really beautiful in Nature, except her decay, her rank weeds, and dank grasses, and funereal evening glooms." "We are satisfied," he says, further on, "that the true artist never does have a public or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot. 'That lot!' broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified, that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!' 'My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another. I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only

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men trying to amuse the public. Some of them I am told are positively fond of politics."" Yet this heroic artist, who professes to be superior to the desire for fame-" Vulgarity made immortal" as he calls it-eventually confesses that the absence of a publisher and the want of money are the real reasons which prevent his seeking for it. He very gladly allows the heroine to publish for him, on the condition that he alone dictates the style in which the volume is to appear; the result of which, as regards the cost, is somewhat alarming. But before that he reads the poems aloud before an audience of three; and there are some humorous touches in the description of this ceremony: "His poems belonged to what might be called the literature of disease. In principle, they said to corruption, Thou art my father,' and to the worm, 'Thou art my mother and my sister.' They dealt largely in graves and corpses, and the loves of skeletons and the sweet virtues of sin, and the joys of despair and dyspepsia." This is excellent good; but the feeling of the heroine in listening to these ghastly rhymes contains something better still, for it reveals the reason why this nasty Bandelaire school has no actual life in it. "When she saw the genuine earnestness of the poet her inclination to laugh all died away, and she became filled with pity and pain. Then she tried hard to admire the verses, and could not. At first the conceits and paradoxes were a little startling, and even shocking, and they made one listen. But the mind soon became attuned to them, and settled down and was stirred no more. Once you knew that Mr. Blanchet liked corpses, his peculiarity became of no greater interest than if his liking had been for babies. When it was made clear that what other people called hideousness he called beauty, it did not seem to matter much more than honest Faulconbridge's determination, if a man's name be John, to call him Peter." Here lies the whole thing in a nutshell. When we have accepted the fact that a certain school of poets prefer corpses, skeletons, vampires, death's heads, and all things ghastly to any form of healthy beauty; when we know that they like making love to lepers, and leaping into graves without Hamlet's excuse of a distraught mind; when we have fully taken in the ineffable merits of sensuousness, satiety, sickly sin, and all the rest of it-what then? Why, then, we look to the music and the merits of the verse, getting used, if we can, to the likes and dislikes of the author. And we cannot but feel a sympathy for the unfortunate poet who must henceforth be, to use a phrase of Mr. Higginson's lately applied to a very different class of writers, the victims of their own attitudes. Having declared for vampires, can they decently return to flesh and blood? Mr. McCarthy's depiction is unsparing. He does not restrict himself to poets. There is a composer, called Mellifont, who is producing an opera which "will sound the death-knell of all the existing schools of music. They are all wrong, sir, from first to last, from Mozart

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to Wagner-all wrong, except Mellifont." This great composition is called "The Seven Deadly Sins." It is to be in seven acts," explains the musician's friend and admirer, "and each act is to give an entirely new illustration of a deadly sin, which Mellifont will show to be the only true virtues of mankind. It will make a revolution, I can tell you.' These pictures of an amusing modern form of life make "Miss Misanthrope" one of Mr. McCarthy's most amusing novels. As a novelist, speaking generally, his style is rather narrative than dramatic. He has a touch of sheer romance, which leads him to bring the persons of his plot together in the most unexpected manner-in London, in San Francisco, on the wild prairies. But his power lies in careful study of emotion and motive; and this very gift, of a quieter and less startling order than the dramatic, makes him valuable and interesting as an historian. A man who has accustomed himself to the thoughtful and quiet study of human nature, as well as having a wide experience in politics, is certainly the man who should write a history of our own time. It is perhaps a new view of novel writing to regard it as a preparation for something else; but in such a case as this it is an admirable preparation. For what can be more full of almost romantic-and certainly of dramatic-interest than the history of our own immediate past? Mr. McCarthy is, at all events, finding a reward for an arduous labour; his history is much liked and admired, and has met with considerable success. The two volumes yet to come should be even more full of interest than those already given to the public; they must be more vivid, for they deal with the period which Mr. McCarthy himself has lived through. The satirical gift, the humorous insight, which Mr. McCarthy certainly possesses and hardly seems to have realised, or at all events has not used to any large extent, will be of great service in making clear the lights and shadows of modern political life. When Mr. McCarthy does put on his satirical spectacles, his gaze is so cool and his depiction so literal that it is almost disconcerting. See this keen touch at the unhappy servility of authors:

"Having neither genius nor fortune he was driven to make a way for himself; and he hoped to make his way through society. He was one of the first to see that Bohemianism in literature was 'played out;' that a reaction was setting in; that Belgravianism was to be the next phase through which the literary man was to reach ad astra; and he was one of the very first to assume boldly the new part of Writer in Society. We all know that some years ago many worthy honest fellows, personally averse to all irregularity and excess, model husbands and fathers, who paid their bills steadily, did nevertheless affect to be wild Bohemians and reckless men of genius just because that was the whim of the hour, and it seemed difficult to obtain a recognition in the guild of literature without conforming to its rules. So in later days many a modest and quiet youth, who hardly knows

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