BOOKS

This biography is necessary to a full comprehension of Zola. Few literary

biographies are thus needed. Emile Zola For the most part their diary

Ernest Alfred annals leave untouched the cenVizetelly tral springs from which the

man comes. Zola was the first of the men Latin in moral standards, life and aspiration who have had in the English-speaking world a sweeping popular success. Other great men of later letters in the Europe of Latin civilization, from Belgium south have been read by the few. He was read by the mass.

Wrong in subject, misguided in method, evil in his entire effect on the letters of his day, but honest in purpose and sincere in his desire to better men, he had a prodigious influence. He passes. He was without form and void. The creative spirit gives form. This is its inexorable sign. His biographer, associated with his work for 25 years, his translator, his father, Henry Vizetelly, suffering a term at Holloway jail for publishing Zola's works, reluctantly admits at close, that the man cannot long be read.

The roots of his life and all his spreading years are in this biography, written in part too, to justify a father's memory. Zola's Italian ancestry, a martyr-saint in the collateral line and a religious reformer, soldiers and a skilled engineer, his father, is fully marshaled. The starving years led in the foulest life. of Paris, the reeking sink of iniquity in which his youthful days passed are unflinchingly told. He was 35 before dire want was over and the steps of his success, each volume one are set in an ordered array which materially aids the reader of his novels. Central chapters tell the condemnation of his work and their final acceptance in England.

Letters, Mr. Vizetelly does not use. He does not chase his subject into unfamiliar quarters. He has nothing which all men.

closely associated with Zola would not know. There is a lack of methodical biographical work. But the biographer is minutely familiar with Zola's works. He joins each novel to its time, place and environment. The great Rougon-Macquart series he so describes and analyzes as to make the reading of each easier and more intelligent. The close connection between Zola's work, his life and the period stands clear in those pages; but of the inner life of the man one learns little and less of his personal relations.

The greater glory of Zola when for a season he uttered the world's conscience and recalled France to justice has a brief but lucid summary. The energy which goes to defending his novels might well have made this more vivid. But the story is there. Nor is aught glossed, not even his two illegitimate children, born when he was 50, after he had lived a score of years and was still living with the faithful wife who had shared his privations and by her care of his tempestuous nature, nervous temperament and physical frame, half-ill, had made his ordered work possible.

The Problem

of Monopoly

John Bates
Clark

* * *

Prof. John Bates Clark, successively of Amherst, Johns Hopkins and Columbia, has been for twenty-five years regarded by those who really know one pundit from another in political economy as at once the most sane and original of them all. Usually those of them who are sane are not original, and those who are original are not sane. Professor Clark has written an opinion-forming book on the "Distribution of Wealth," 1899, a short book on the "Control of Trusts," 1902, both rather technical, and now he has put the latter into a short volume, the "Problem of Monopoly." It is lectures delivered to the very remarkable audience which gathers in Cooper Union in the People's Institute. 313803

This ranges in intelligence from young day laborers up. It is dyed with socialism. It has all the prejudices of "labor." These lectures are models for such or any audience-simple, clear, rigorously impartial and unprejudiced, assuming only elementary knowledge in the hearer. Prof. Clark is pessimistic. With very many others, he plainly doubts if the allied powers of political machine and corporate "trust" can be curbed and controlled by democratic institutions. This is to assume that dollars are more dangerous than bayonets. History does not thus record.

The mammoth corporation, Mr. Clark believes, has come to stay. The one aim should be to prevent it from having a monopoly by refusing it special privileges and leaving new competition possible. This must be by preventing inequality in railroad rates and preventing any corporation from ruining a small rival by selling cheaper in one section than in another. Publicity, State supervision, or the restrictions of a corporation act, Mr. Clark does not urge.

He rests the control of monopoly on equal freight rates and uniform prices to all customers. Depressed as is his tone, his work is encouraging, because it outlines a method by which progress is kept possible and the exaction of monopoly made difficult.

The Double Garden

Maurice Maeterlinck

* * *

M. Maeterlinck has the gift of current interpretation. If in the mid-years you If in the mid-years you doubt this try his last volume of essays on the undergraduate home from a vacation. You will find he recognizes this Flemish essayist as saying what he would have liked to say, if he could, which is the special province of the essay, from Montaigne on. This volume is warmed over from the magazines. The vital impulse slackens in it. The charm of manner begins to grow familiar and charm rarely survives the too frequent meal. The immediate utterance is in these pages. You feel, if you are modern, sympathetic and in the habit of making a little private tame zoo of your emotions, on the dog you own, the automobile you cannot manage and the modern drama, as do these essays. The duel-with a rapier, which cannot do too much harm-will, if you are a Frenchmen, appeal to you as it does to

this Walloon of Parisian sympathies in "The Praise of the Sword." So his view of the chrysanthemum, of the old-fashioned flower and the bee are all of that reminiscent, interrogating, introspective quality which deprives us all of the real pulse of feeling and substitutes passionate interest in an emotion for passionate love for the object that awakes the emotion.

ShadowShapes

* * *

The blooming of this sudden short volume of essays is as unexpected as it is inspiring. This little volume is literature. Better literature Wilmer there doubtless is, and essays Worthington Macelree more important; but to take a quiet Pennsylvania town like West Chester and weave out of its daily life, day's work and characters of the day a prose genre picture, graphic, personal and of charm is work of the rarest. Few tasks are more difficult. Not recently have local essays appeared here in which current small town life has been better mirrored.

When only charlatans and dupes, bullies and bullied believed in Mormonism it

Aspects of Mormonism Nels L. Nelson

called for no apologetics. It stood a brute appeal to the carnal on one side and on the other mere delusion. Mormonism has survived this. It is soberly held to-day by those like this author, a professor of English in Brigham Young University, having 32 instructors and 734 students last year. The only "science" about this book is an attempt to make the new etheric waves the basis of an attempted explanation of what Joseph Smith really meant. by some vague transcendental utterances on waves of force. In no true sense of the word "scientific" in his reasoning, Mr. Nelson has laboriously sought to find meaning in the "Book of Mormon." Those who have taken the trouble to read know that this book is a farrago of the Bible, Shakespeare and the transcendentalism which was in the air when it was written. In it Mr. Nelson finds the teaching of development and a religion which is the real Christianity based on a God, male and female, in the image of man, perpetually creating, possibly numerous, and securing the preservation of man and his salvation through the experience of a material existence. This is, in short, a med

it

ley such as more than one Aryan cosmogony and mythology has evolved, expounded with the naive unconsciousness of ignorance. Polygamy is to appear in another volume. In this there is nothing which will be read by any but the professional student of comparative religion.

emy, from Reynolds to Millais.

* * *

This volume has a very fair letter-press, but the real interest to the American Royal Acad reader is that its broad pages give in plentiful reproduction the succession of academic British art for a century. Professional artists in this country care nothing for this art, though the picture-dealers' sales show how much it appeals to the domestic American. Art students in particular scorn with the scorn of the iron and clay of mingled knowledge and ignorance the work of the British school. Yet in the portrait it has a higher averagethough not the greatest names-than any other, and its academic standards, if limited, never wander, as does the last artistic vagary. For price and size, this single volume will teach one's eye more about it than any other. It is a rapid century cinematograph of its progress. Sketches of the history of the Royal Academy by Mr. W. K. West, on its painters, sculptors, engravers and architects by Mr. W. S. Sparrow and the portraits of academicians at the Academy by T. Martin Wood are sound, but have that provincial note which curses British art. Why a great nation, which is world-eyed in all else, should be provincial in its art is a puzzle which haunts the back of your head whenever you see a British picture or statue.

Old Gorgon Graham.

George

Horace Lorimer.

* * *

The humorist has the best hearing and the briefest. In 30 years how many who hit the humor of the day have their prodigious vogue and then go through the ice of an advancing frost without even leaving a hole in it. Of all, in the last 50 years, Mark Twain alone survives. "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son" has in two years gone over the earth. No recent American book is so well worth reading to get the exact flavor of current opinion on current life. Its teaching is exactly what the successful, practical, hustling, achieving American has

From "Old Gorgon Graham." JOLLY OLD BINDER It is off the same loom and out of the same wool. The boy is in business and in love now, doing better and coming nearer his father's view and standard. The letters are mellower, kindly, though frosty, and one American view of women as a faithful domestic convenience, to be wheedled, governed and treated with a frank and entire loyalty, love and service is here, at large, very much at large.

The job in hand is therefore bigger, a few years farther on and more "practi