NOVELS.
MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY.•
THE author of The Virginian needs no introduction to English readers, and although the short stories of which his new volume is made up can hardly be said to represent his ripest or most finished work, their merit is incontestable when judged by standards less exacting than those he has himself set up. Author and critic seldom agree as to the order in which a number of short stories should be arranged. Ought one to put the best first, or work up in a sort of crescendo of excellence ? There can be no doubt as to the method adopted in this case. Happy-Teeth" tells how Scipio Le Moyne managed to discredit the keeper of a rival store with his Indian customers by inducing him to play conjuring tricks before them, in which be makes a terrifying use of his false teeth. The discomfiture of the amateur conjurer in the moment of his triumph is amusing, bat the issues at stake are quite insignificant from the reader's point of view and the denountent mechanical. So, too, there is more artifice than haterest, in the tale of Scipio's successfully holding up the old "hobo" who had robbed him three hours previously. But the impression which we gain of life in the neighbourhood of "the con t mum sly jubilant cow-town of Lively, Wyoming " is decidedly vivacious, and there is an agreeable flavour of Bret Harte about the yarn. "In the Back" is a somewhat extravagant comedy of frontier military life, with a very sound moral ; to wit, that " the mixing of politics with the United States Army does not belong in Nature's plan." All the mischief arose from the appointment of a Secretary of War who tried to wet-nurse the army with milk-and-sugar speeches. Hence the complaint of a raw Southern recruit who had been roughly handled by a peppery officer for a piece of unintentional impertinence • Members of the Family. By Owen Winter. London: Macmillan and Co. Ds.)
By the time his original letter, now swollen to a budget with five official indorsements, came back to him, Leonidas Bateau bad ceased to be a milk-sop, had learned to take the true measure of the Secretary of War, and soon began to nurse the scheme of vengeance against that flabby sentimentalist, which, as a cowboy, he subsequently carried out with immense
success. "Timberline" strikes a graver note, in spite of the grotesqueness of the opening. The strange fascination which drew an innocent accomplice back to the scene of another's crime is finely conveyed, the secret is well kept, and the de- scription of the electrical storm at the Washakie Needles has all the vividness of a personal experience. The crescendo is
maintained, and reaches its climax in " The Gift Horse," a curiously impressive study of honour among thieves, or, to be more precise, the gratitude of a horse-thief. The life that Mr. Wister describes in these stories, as he tells
us in a most interesting preface, is mainly based on his ex- periences as a tenderfoot in the middle "eighties." The soldier of the frontier and the frontier post are gone ; gone,
too, is the cattle range, and the sheep episode is already going or " mixed and diluted with the farm, the truck garden, the poultry yard, the wife, the telephone, the summer boarder, and the gramophone. The nomadic bachelor West is over, the housed, married West is established." Twentieth-century Wyoming knows neither the antelope nor the cowboy. Very interesting, too, are Mr. Winter's autobiographical reminiscences of his literary apprenticeship—how he sought to convert Mr. Sargent to the magic of the cattle country, how he met with generous encouragement from Mr. Howells, Mr. Henry James, and Mr. Kipling, and found inspiration in the paint- ings of Frederic Remington and the stories of Merimee. Finally, on the question of the responsibilities of the " literary artist," Mr. Wister has some sensible remarks
which we offer no excuse for quoting:— "Editors have at times lamented to me that good work isn't dis- tinguished from bad by our multifarious millions. I have the happiness to know the editors to be wrong. Let the subject of a piece of fiction contain a simple, broad appeal, and the better its art, the greater its success ; although the noble army of reader, will not suspect that their pleasure is largely due to the skill Such a book as The Egoist, where the subject is rarefied and corn plea, of course no height of art will render acceptable, save to the rehearsed few. Thanks to certain of our more robust editors, the noble army grows daily more rehearsed, reads "harder" books than it did, accepts plainer speech and wider range of subject than the skittish spinster generation of a while ago. But mart here an underlying principle. The plain speech in Richardson was in his day nothing to start back from ; to-day it it inhibited by a change in our circumambient reticence. The circumambient reticence varies in degree with each race, and almost with every generation of each race. Something like a natural law, it sets the limits for what can be said aloud in grown- up company—and Art is speaking aloud in grown-up company ; it consists no more of the professional secrets of the doctor than it does of the prattle of the nursery. Its business is indeed to take notice of everything in life, but always subject to the circum- ambient reticence. Those gentlemen (and ladies) who utter that gaseous shibboleth about Art for Art (as well cry Beefsteak for Beefsteak) and would have our books and plays be foul because Ben Jonson frequently was and Anatole France frequently is, are out of their reckoning ; and generally they may be suspected not so much of an abstract passion for truth as of a concrete lett* for animalism."
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