RAG-TIME HISTORY.*
THANKLESS as is the pait of Canute rebuking the waves, it is time to raise a protest, however vain, against the endless, multiplication to-day of memoirs and semi-scandalous studies of notorious periods which show the appalling measure of our literary decline. If there is any way of debauching the intellect more profoundly and .more infallibly than by the reading of inferior novels, this host of third-rate histories supplies it. The centrifugal triviality of their inexhaustible anecdotes ends by rendering all concentration impossible, since breadth.. perspective, and judgment are sacrificed witlurat a qualm to the flickering animation of rag-time and the cinema. What. makes the mischief really serious is the self-righteous Satis- faction engendered in the votaries of this particular form of reading, who beguile themselves with the illusion that it. represents a meritorious -intellectual exercise, in contrast to. the doubtful relaxation of the novel, which as a rule they "don't read." So long as this unwarranted nimbus is ca4. about these gilded dustbins of history—for their price is as. pompous as their pretensions—so long may we despair of- producing .a vigorous contemporary literature.
Colonel ,Haggard's latest volume, however, unquestionably,. though it falls within the offending category, is at least free- from the vice of pretentiousness, and the possession of this relatively rare quality constitutes its worthiest claim to gentle- treatment at. the hands of the reviewer. Told in the most. colloquial and slipshod language, not scorning even the short cuts of slang, the compilation does not profess to challenge a more exacting tribunal than the appreciation of the "general reader. Of caviare there is not a trace. It might be added with no less truth that there is equally little of Louis XI. Only here and there in the narrative, for all its mass of anecdote, does the author reveal a genuine glimpse of that astute bourgeois statesman who did so much for France before he became a legendary figure of cruelty and emitting, Possibly Colonel Haggard, who by this time must know hi% public, has thought it wiser to be guided by the fable of th# showman and the real pig.
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