MODERN TENDENCIES IN MONTHLY

The sailor-hero of Mr. Wright McCormack's story in the April Monthly bears in one particular a grotesque resemblance to Byron's Don Juan when that perpetual lover was sent to sea. In the midst of a lament for the beloved from whom he was separated, Don Juan, usually not at a loss for words, was struck dumb.

"He felt that chilling heaviness of heart, Or rather stomach, which, alas! attends

Beyond the best apothecary's art,

The loss of love, the treachery of friends . . . .

No doubt he would have been much more pathetic

But the sea acted as a strong emetic."

Mr. McCormack's Tobin lacks so good an excuse for taciturnity. He is kept in-articulate on principle. Poor Tobin could not have adequately shown his feelings in real life; and, Mr. McCormack apparently argues, we ought therefore not to expect to find them described in a work of literature. This is realism of a sort, but a very poor sort. It is certainly not the realism of Mr. Thomas Hardy, who would be as deeply buried in oblivion as Robert Bloomfield if his characters were as inexpressive as Tobin. It is the realism of the camera and the phonograph: It records external phenomena of action and of speech (Mr. McCormack's use of dialect is accurate); but it ends where literature should begin. It tells us nothing of the human mind and heart; it has no revealing power.

A few signs of the same dangerous tendency toward merely materialistic realism appear in Mr. H. F. Brock's one-act play, "The Bank Account." Its conclusion might well have been made more poignant and powerful without violating truth to life, for even a being mentally so starved as its chief character would express himself more fully upon the defeat of all his hopes. On the whole, however, the piece is skillful and affecting. Its theme is a timely one, and recalls the candid words in which Mrs. Andrew W. White last year condemned "the neglect of the great body of women to study or practice economy, or to teach it to their daughters." The follies and crimes of men having of late been amply exposed, it now appears to be the turn of their better halves. Mr. Brock,--like Mr. Eugene Walters in "Fine Feathers," recently performed in Boston,--writes the tragedy of a wife's prodigality and deceitfulness. But Mr. Brock has excelled the professional author, who could not resist the temptation of ruining a good subject by melodramatic treatment. the action of "The Bank Account" is never forced; its characterization, especially of the spendthrift Lottie, is firm and clear; and its dialogue is an extraordinarily faithful rendering of the language of the "three decker" apartment house. The play will be appreciated by anyone who can sympathize with the sorrows of ordinary life as portrayed in a frank but not cynical tragedy.

Mr. A. Calvert Smith's "The Theme of the Christmas Story," is ingenious in idea but clumsy in execution. Mr. Smith has never done anything quite so good as his story of the Missing Link. That conception is much too fertile to be exhausted in one episode. It affords a rich opportunity for satirizing the speculations of scientists; and what man of letters does not love to bait a scientist, especially when the latter blunders into the realm of imagination? Let therefore the Missing Link's dinosaur sneeze again, and project his master into new adventures!