something that anticipated imposed unities, we might hope the greatest things of him, but we fear that like Mr. Cannan he has betrayed himself. There is the unity of the thing we touch but cannot encompass, whole because it defies analysis, and there is the unity which we conclude after dissection and reorganization of a past occurrence. The latter may, for all that can be said to the contrary, represent a reality. Art does more than this. It cannot in our consciousness be subject to laws, for it continues to be immediate. With the entrance of Rodd, the theoretical Cannan returns to the scene and remains to announce his invariable formula of escape in which Rodd and Clara go away together, this time with a legal insurance of the project, and presumably live ever after in peace and understanding. Clara's resignation of personal ambition to fulfil herself in her devotion to her husband is a somewhat mawkishly suggested return to the Margaret Lawrie tradition. One is inclined to close this book with the feeling that it is a great novel which was never written.
Mendel does not evade itself, as might be said of Mummery. The first book (it is in three books) is a substantial and enduring fragment. The style is simple and gracious and the Jews of Gun Street are so surpassingly beautiful within the harmony of their limitations that it is hard to believe that Mr. Cannan has lately antagonized members of the race by his unsympathetic comment. Mendel's mother and father are as fine as a pair of genre portraits by one of the Dutch masters, and they are immaculately Jewish, satisfied to enjoy only what they may possess but with absolute integrity of possession in that little. The Jews are the only people who have reconciled the vanity of the individual with the arrogance of the Nature which he represents. Too often the Gentile is merely vain where the Jew is self-respecting, for the Jew's contempt for the thing to which he cannot attain is genuine, whereas this is rarely true of the Gentile. It is the triumph and defeat of the Jews that their self-consciousness is racial rather than individual. The virtue and vice of the fairy tale, the virtue and vice of necessity, the Jew makes beautiful with the exalted gauchéries of his religion, but the self-contempt of the Gentile has left him entangled in intricacies of self-righteousness. In spite of the sympathy of the creations in this book, Cannan, as he shows later in The Anatomy of Society, shares the Gentile's fallacious superiority toward a financially successful people. He seems
