SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
motto in this oohs an does not neessssrilj pre:lois s:sSsszunst rerisw.I The Mysterious Stranger. By Mark Twain. (Harper and Brothers. is. 6d. net.)—This posthumous story is a version of the Faust legend, as told by a sixteenth-century Austrian boy who, with his companions, meets the handsome young Satan in the woods. The Devil's feats, narrated with. the practised ease of a veteran writer, make a readable story. But the curious feature of the book is Satan's philosophizing. He convinces his young friends that every action, however insignificant, has an endless chain of unavoidable consequences, so that omniscience alone can decide between any two courses. At the close he discloses as his grand secret the doctrine of subjective metaphysics that " nothing exists save empty space —and you ! " and that he himself is but the villager's dream. This hopeless theory, it has been pointed out, accounts for much in the dohs-sod mentality of the modern German. It is curious that Mark .Twain, writing of course long before the war, should have represented the theory as the working principle of Satan.
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