CHRONICLE AND COMMENT

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T H E WORK OF T H E NATIVE

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Some time ago an organisation, known as -the Home Industry League of California, requested tile San Francisco merchants to display in their windows for one week articles of California makers only. A San Francisco bookseller elaborated the idea by giving his entire establishment to books, paintings, engravings, cards, posters and so forth, of California design. Only the glass in the windows and show cases was not home-made. The exhibition attracted much attention, as it was the first of such a nature ever given west o the Rocky Mountains.

cannot be said to be a popular poet as Tennyson and Longfellow are popular poets. The Quarterly Review wrote about Dickens in the time of his first fame: "We are inclined to predict of works of this style, both in England and France (where the manufacture is flourishing on a very extensive and profligate scale), that an ephemeral popularity will be followed by an early oblivion." This is a very inadequate list. For example, we venture to add Andrew Lang's prophecy to the effect that Rudyard Kipling's work, while having a few discriminating admirers, would never enjoy any general popularity. This was about a year before the fame of the Man from Nowhere had reached every corner of the Seven Seas.

When the news was sent over the world that the city of San Francisco had been destroyed by an Lawrence earthquake, M r . Will Beeseley Irwin, then a reporter on the NeV York Sun, sat down and wrote a description of the San Francisco that he had known and could never know again, that was so vigorous and graphic that it was discussed in every large newspaper office in the country. As a little book it was reprinted under the title The City That Was. The incident is recalled by the narrative of Mr. Lawrence Beeseley, one of the survivors of the Titanic, whose story of the disaster, published by the Associated Press, stood out very vividly. A later and more carefully considered narrative by Mr. Beeseley, entitled The Loss of the SS. Titanic: Its Story and Its Lessons,

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THE BOOKMAN
ago from Cambridge, taking first class honours in the natural Science Tripos. As a writer of short stories Mr. Melville Davisson Post has manifested his ability to achieve atmosThe Title phere and a certain Fits grim terror. W'e have always taken up a tale by him with a feeling that it would prove just a little bit out of the usual. And the result has seldom been disappointing. Assuming that his new book. The Nameless Thing, is a novel, which it purports to be, but is not, we can commend him for a fine sense of literarj' econom}-, and for a certain preposterous kind of ingenuity. The method that he has followed in the construction of this book is substantially the method adopted by the late O. Henry when he put together his stories of Central American life to make Cabbages and Kings. There the comparison ends, for in Cabbages and Kings the end fully justified the means, whereas The Nameless Thing is just one more exhibit in the museum of literar}- curiosities.

LAWRENCE BEESELEY

has just appeared from the press of Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company, In it Mr. Beeseley tells of the voyage of the Titanic, the wreck, the experiences of the survivors, the aftermath of inquiry and the lessons to be drawn from the disaster. Mr. Beeseley was graduated eight years

SOME REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH STORY TELLERS

I I I ROBERT HICHENS

BY FREDERIC TABER COOPER T is almost a score of years since ^Nlr. Robert Hichens first sprang into local notoriety through The Green Carnation, which set all London _ buzzing hotly anent the identity of its bold literar}' and social lampoons. It was just ten years later that he obtained at last an international recognition, with The Garden of Allah, in which for the first time, and perhaps for the last, the inherent bigness of his theme and the titanic majesty of his setting shook him out of his studied pose of aloofness and sardonic cynicism, and raised him to unexpected heights. And almost at the close of a second decade, Mr. Hichens visited America, to find himself, for the passing hour, one of the most widely discussed of modern novelists, with his latest novel giving promise of becoming a "best seller," his earlier triumph. The Garden of Allah, demanding a second recognition in dramatic form, and he himself receiving the doubtful tribute of full-page interviews in the Sunday supplements. Accordingly, Mr. Hichens seems to be one of the contemporary British story-tellers about whom it is distinctly worth while to ask: How much of this popular acclaim is merited

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