there is no easy distinction of Cannan the artist from Cannan the adjuster of difficulties, yet in both books one feels that the defects which would become frank virtues in an inventor or a diplomatist have here in the end insidiously usurped the magnificent humility of the creator and made him puerily self-explanatory. Mummery might be called, with slight injustice, Cannan's interpretation of George Moore. As Moore in Evelyn Innes, the author has hypnotized himself with a clever conception and elucidates it with the vague yet undeterred certainty of the entranced speaker. Evelyn Innes exists as something locked in the author's emotions, without beginning and without end. Cannan, on the other hand, in recounting his artistic project has allowed most of its life to escape him. No single moment of the book is realized entirely, held in the heart an instant as in a chalice of pain. The moments slip away with no attempt on his part to grasp them and no indication that he is aware that they are irrevocably gone. Without effort and without loss of breath he explains to us the types of persons he would depict and the situation in which he has chosen to exhibit their character. His facility in drawing the plan has apparently blinded him to the fact that he never put it into execution. We believe in Charles Mann and Clara Day as people who have existed whom we should like to have known, but no occasion is offered us in which to gratify the curiosity which innuendo has aroused. Clara is a diagram of a charming human creature whose sex enriches her intellectuality without enslaving her through her emotions. Charles Mann and Lord Butcher are delightful variations on the conventional conception of the masculine artist. Sir Henry's shortcomings are depicted with that affectionate tolerance which one feels for the weak man whose vulnerability is potentially at one's disposal. When the world without reacts on a man to reveal him to himself and he does not turn from the fulness of the revelation, we have the great artist in the making. Charles Mann is the voluptuary who regulates the conditions of his acceptance of life. Such men attempt to arrange their experience to produce a series of modulated shocks which they hasten to interpret with pen or brush and ask us to accept the balance of their equation as a summing up of life. Of course there is Rodd, Mr. Cannan's real artist, who thinks of humanity as a unity, "an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons, nations, groups, and combinations seemed to him irrelevant." If Rodd had gone back to
