FICTION.
ABYSS.*
Tnis evolution of the novel in America has been and is being influenced to an extent quite unparalleled elsewhere by the alien elements which for the last seventy or eighty years have been pouring into the national crucible. Some of them have been assimilated, some are in process of assimilation, some again, in the opinion of so well equipped an observer as Mr. Skaggs, whose work on German Con- spiracies in America was recently reviewed in the Spectator, are non-assimilable and a source of danger to the commonwealth. But setting politics aside, it is clear that some of these elements are becoming vocal in the sense that an increasing number of books is published which reflect the experiences and aspirations of the various nationalities who, while adopting American citizenship, retain, to a greater or less extent, the manners and customs and outlook on life generally of their original European homes. They are not always written by the emigrants and settlers themselves In a previous genera. tion Charles Godfrey Leland, a native of Philadelphia, gave a genial picture of the homely aspects of a certain type of German settler in his famous Hans Breitmann Ballads, while in resent years the fortunes of a group of Lithuanians which formed the basis of The Jungle—a senses tional novel of the Chicago underworld—were described by an American author, Mr. Upton Sinclair, who was born at Baltimore. Mr. Stephen Graham, an Englishman, has written of the Russian settlers in the United States. The Jews, somewhat roughly handled hitherto for the most part by American comics papers, are now beginning to make themselves felt as self-interpreters. The very entertaining play, Potash and Perlmutter, which repeated in London the success already achieved in New York 2 was founded on the sketches, previously issued in book form, in which Mr. Montague Glass had described the chequered partner- ship of two Jew dealers in the clothes trade, and, incidentally, portrayed with equal candour and sympathy many of the dominant characteristics of his race. But there is a wide gulf fixed between the Jew tradesmen of Mr. Glass's stories and the narrator of Mr. Nathan Kussy's trilogy, the first instalment of which lies before us. Potash and Perlmutter have their ups and downs, and their methods of conducting business are not always exactly fastidious, but they are far removed from privation or penury and keep no criminal company. It is in the comedy of a particu- lar sort of commerce, mixed up with the domesticity and an unexpected strain of Quixotry of the Jew, that the interest and attraction of Mr. Glass's stories reside. The Abyss, as its gloomy name foreshadows, introduces us to a wholly different aspect of Jew life in New York.
• TM Abyss. By Nathan Hussy. London Macmillan and Co. [es. net.] It is nothing less than the life-history of a poor Jew boy, born in America, who in infancy loses his father, and on the death of his mother, who has sacrificed her health and strength to clothe and feed him, is cast out into the gutter, drifts into " Hoboland," and after a long association with beggars, tramps, gypsies, thieves, and human de:relicts of all kinds both in and out of the cells, learns from practical experience the painful lesson, " Once a crook, always a crook." The opening chapters, which deal with his childhood in his mother's lifetime, are cheerful and even radiant compared with the sequel They give a remarkable picture of the solidarity of the poor Jews and the strength of their domestic affections. But with the death of the boy's mother we plunge into the squalors and sinister gloom of the underworld of New York. For any illustration of the old proverb of " Honour among thieves " we look in vain. In the community of criminals as here portrayed nothing is more remarkable than the consistent tyranny of the strong, the subtle, and the old over the weak, the feeble, and the young. The story is rich in types of depravity, the ugliest of whom are modern variants on Fagin, keepers of schools of crime, who live on the earnings of their pupils, whom they instruct, corrupt, and savagely mishandle. The narrative is minutely circumstantial, and the dialogue mainly conducted in thieves' slang. There is no lack of incident, and some of the episodes, notably the horrible story of the little girl who is dressed up and passed off as a monkey, will not easily be forgotten. But the romance of crime is entirely absent from these pages. It is hard to imagine any one who would be incited to evil courses by this dismal recital. In fine, it is a far cry from The Abyss to the old-fashioned glorifications of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin, or the modern tales which invest with a halo of idealism the exploits of well-born amateur burglars. It is simply the story of an ingenuous, impressionable waif, with the suppleness and tenacity of his race, who never had a chance, but was trodden into th3 dirt until dirt he became. Incidentally it is a serious indictment of the harsh and undiscriminating methods of the American police. Those who have followed the fortunes of Samuel Gordin to the point at which we part company from him at the close of this volume may perhaps bo tempted to pursue them by the forecast of the sequel which Mr. Nathan Mussy gives on the last page :—
" How I walked in darkness, how I lived amid the dense gloom of the Underworld with outcasts and criminals, how I became acquainted with Chinatown and with the Coney Island of a quarter of a century ago, and the adventures which befell me, will be related in the second book of the trilogy. How I groped for light and found it, how I acquired an education and learned the meaning of love, how I fought the evil forces within my soul, and how I emerged from the Abyss and found the sunlight shining in my heart ; all this will be related in the third book, thus completing the epic of the streets entitled Children of the Abyss' —provided a patient public evince sufficient interest in my story to warrant the recital of my further adventures."
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