The Washington herald., 1913-10-12

OF repeated failure, as If the conviction
Of final doom had already begun to pene-
| trate deeply into his manhood"
A few months later this detected young
! man has 100000 at his command.
Paul Brainard reaches this state of af-
fairs partly by good luck and partly by
the existence of an intellectual energy
and physical bravery. with which such
characters as he invariably are endowed
in fiction. His search for the Krutmacht
fortune takes him from New York to
San Francisco, and thence to Paris and
The Hague by way of Mexico. The OBJ
ject of his European journey accom-
plished, he returns to this country, de-
velops mine in Arizona, becomes
known as the Sulphur King. and turns
up in New York to spend a fortune in
the building OF a high-class Peoples
Theater." No reason is given why
Brainard accepted 100000 in trust
for krutZmatcht's' heirs when he had
the entire property in his hands, and
his failure to recognize Melody White,
Krutzmachts daughter. and her family
to recognize him, is one of those devices
by which adventure-fiction writer's pro-
long their plots almost to the breaking
point And Brainards scheme for revo-
lutionizing the theater-going habits of
the New Workers is as unfeasible in Mr..
Herrick's pages as IL invariably is in
actual life.
BENDIsH: By Maurice Hewlett. New York-The
Macmillan Company.
Mr.. Hewlett is not only the master of
the glowing period; he is a writer whose
mind dwells instincuvely in the great,
world where women are personalities and
men forces, where semi-private talk
may settle the destiny of a race. He
loves youth, the meteoric youth that
breasts the future like one struggling in
the teeth Of a wind. All with him is
bright, vivid, fOrCeful, with laundering
sentences that express above all things
power. 1t was so in Richard Yea and
Nay" 1t is so in his tales of the economic
revolution when, behind the fiuttering and
snuff-taking Of the town, the whir of the
loom was calling the masses outside the
pale of wealth and privilege. as before
some new Jericho. In "Bendish." d Sc
quel to Mrs. Lancelot," We get the class
struggle, forcing its way into the war OF
personal ambition and shattering il to
bits again. Again, as in THE Duke Of
Devices the strong man of the novel is
the Iron Duke, who so long withstood the
passing of the first reform bill.
"Bendish" is a novel of transition, its
finest feature the skill with which II
shows the gradual vanishing Of the
eighteenth century atmosphere. Well
done are its duels over the insulted hon
our of wives. its noble love affairs, ad-
vertised after the event by long narrative
poems in which love and the grand
tour" strangely interminGle, Alps and
white bOsoms together fading in a midst
of fashionable gossip. Then there is the
political campaign of appeal TO the peo-
pie; party government led by stump ora
tory and idealizcd by dreams Of the new
Utopias. In the days of "Bendish" poll
tics was the royal game OF men. a game
touched then by women only for their
mems sake. and not for any gain their
own sex might hope to win by it.
In the novel all the men are dreamers,
save the Duke himself. but the women
are as practical as His Grace. The great
dreamer of all is the triumph OF the |
book. Lord Bendish,'' whose badge is |
a peacock in pride. And he is terrible |
to every one OF us, for. as Meredith's !
great eGotist lives in every man that |