idealist in "Moon-Calf" eliminated all these impossible partners of a "delicate comradeship," light and gracious, generous and self-respecting. The Moon-Calf began to discover that he had put one or two things into his ideal which could not exist together—that, for example, an ideal comradeship could not in this world be at the same time "irresponsible" and "generous." He was on the brink of discovering marriage as Mr. G. K. Chesterton discovered Christianity, as a thing designed to meet his special need.
Mr. Dell's weakness as a writer of fiction and also as a feminist seems at the present moment due to a kind of indolence or apathy or lack of courage in the use of the realistic imagination. I regretfully recognize that he has encountered some dissuasive lions in the way of becoming a thoroughly honest historian of Bohemia. Perhaps being constrained to withdraw the hard truth of "Janet March" has influenced his decline into the soft mush of "This Mad Ideal."
As his readers and his censors gradually accustom themselves to the hard edges of fact, it is to be hoped that they will allow him to broaden the moral basis of his fiction by an adequate disclosure of the relation of his dream world to its environment. I am not sure that Mr. Dell really desired to tell us any more than he did about, for example, the physiology and psychology of the two adolescents sleeping together in the woods; about the psychology of the girls who resort to "criminal operations"; about the future of the two adventurous girls who get drunk in a roadhouse—one of them on the eve of her marriage—or about the psychology of the girl who drowns herself. Perhaps a more realistic development at a number of points where one feels that Mr. Dell simply "isn't there"
