to think that a lie told with half a heart or a trick resorted to with an anaemic will constitutes a demi-virtue. The crime of the Jews (I myself bear them a grudge for it) is that they refuse to waste time arguing with the sun for its hour of setting, and do in the beginning what every one must in the end unless his defiance reach Christ-like proportions. Those who are afraid to die must live, and it would be a very poor god who deviated his course for mere mortal pleading.
Cannan has given us a praiseworthy and almost reverent translation of Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe, and Cannan's books seem to bear the occasional imprint of his devotion to the French author. Mendel himself has a more satisfying reality than Jean Christophe, who is half the time only a grandiose shadow of the traditional great man of the people, yet the lives of the characters appear to have been conceived under a similar impulse. From being the story of Mendel, the young Jew of unadvantageous beginnings, Cannan's novel digresses to recount the morality masques of Logan, the pseudo—painter, and Oliver, his model, until finally the figure of the Jewish artist which Mr. Cannan has limned so faithfully dissolves in the heat of the author's idealism and we perceive through the shreds of emotional mist a slight inversion of Mr. Cannan's old problem to which he offers again his now, well worn solution. Mendel and Morrison, like René and Cathleen, Clara and Rodd, even Ruth and Trevor in that almost fatal volume, Pink Roses, decide to begin over. To begin over in the approved Cannanonian style is to shed one's past as a snake his skin in the hope that a new being has matured beneath in virginal ignorance of itself, and waits only for the sloughing off of exhausted imperfections to find its way into self-awareness. Mendel, like René, turns from those individuals too passionate to be moulded either to a present or a future tradition and picks for a mate a creature of embryonic perceptions with every potentiality for acquiring those premeditated virtues which might grace a British matron. However, not even Turgenev could refrain from sentimentality in his regard for an untouched being of the opposite sex. Pity carries with it an inference which decries the capacity to harm him who pities, since it is impossible to feel simultaneously fear and pity for the same object. There is a dramatic quality of condescension in one's attitude toward a creature in whom one senses potentialities of which she herself must be unaware until their fulfilment; and as the man cannot think of her without surmises which
